“My name’s Hemmick.”
“Glad to know you.” Abercrombie took the hand without rising. “Abercrombie’s mine.”
“I’m mighty glad to know you, Mr. Abercrombie.”
Then for a moment they both hesitated, their two faces assumed oddly similar expressions, their eyebrows drew together, their eyes looked far away. Each was straining to force into activity some minute cell long sealed and forgotten in his brain. Each made a little noise in his throat, looked away, looked back, laughed. Abercrombie spoke first.
“We’ve met.”
“I know,” agreed Hemmick, “but whereabouts? That’s what’s got me. You from New York you say?”
“Yes, but I was born and raised in this town. Lived in this house till I left here when I was about seventeen. As a matter of fact, I remember you—you were a couple of years older.”
Again Hemmick considered.
“Well,” he said vaguely, “I sort of remember, too. I begin to remember—I got your name all right and I guess maybe it was your daddy had this house before I rented it. But all I can recollect about you is, that there was a boy named Abercrombie and he went away.”
In a few moments they were talking easily. It amused them both to have come from the same house—amused Abercrombie especially, for he was a vain man, rather absorbed, that evening, in his own early poverty. Though he was not given to immature impulses he found it necessary somehow to make it clear in a few sentences that five years after he had gone away from the house and the town he had been able to send for his father and mother to join him in New York.
Hemmick listened with that exaggerated attention which men who have not prospered generally render to men who have. He would have continued to listen had Abercrombie become more expansive, for he was beginning faintly to associate him with an Abercrombie who had figured in the newspapers for several years at the head of shipping boards and financial committees. But Abercrombie, after a moment, made the conversation less personal.
“I didn’t realize you had so much heat here, I guess I’ve forgotten a lot in twenty-five years.”
“Why, this is a cool day,” boasted Hemmick, “this is cool. I was just sort of overheated from walking when I came up.”
“It’s too hot,” insisted Abercrombie with a restless movement; then he added abruptly, “I don’t like it here. It means nothing to me—nothing—I’ve wondered if I did, you know, that’s why I came down. And I’ve decided.
“You see,” he continued hesitantly, “up to recently the North was still full of professional Southerners, some real, some by sentiment, but all given to flowery monologues on the beauty of their old family plantations and all jumping up and howling when the band played ‘Dixie.’ You know what I mean,”—he turned to Hemmick,—“it got to be a sort of a national joke. Oh, I was in the game, too, I suppose, I used to stand up and perspire and cheer, and I’ve given young men positions for no particular reason except that they claimed to come from South Carolina or Virginia—” again he broke off and became suddenly abrupt—“but I’m through, I’ve been here six hours and I’m through!”
“Too hot for you?” inquired Hemmick, with mild surprise.
“Yes! I’ve felt the heat and I’ve seen the men—those two or three dozen loafers standing in front of the stores on Jackson Street—in thatched straw hats,”—then he added, with a touch of humor, “they’re what my son calls ‘slash-pocket, belted-back boys.’ Do you know the ones I mean?”
“Jelly-beans,” Hemmick nodded gravely, “we call ’em Jelly-beans. No-account lot of boys all right. They got signs up in front of most of the stores asking ’em not to stand there.”
“They ought to!” asserted Abercrombie, with a touch of irascibility. “That’s my picture of the South now, you know—a skinny, dark-haired young man with a gun on his hip and a stomach full of corn liquor or Dope Dola, leaning up against a drug store waiting for the next lynching.”
Hemmick objected, though with apology in his voice.
“You got to remember, Mr. Abercrombie, that we haven’t had the money down here since the war——”
Abercrombie waved this impatiently aside.
“Oh, I’ve heard all that,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. And I’ve heard the South lambasted till I’m tired of that, too. It’s not taking France and Germany fifty years to get on their feet, and their war made your war look like a little fracas up an alley. And it’s not your fault and it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just that this is too damn hot to be a white man’s country and it always will be. I’d like to see ’em pack two or three of these states full of darkies and drop ’em out of the Union.”
Hemmick nodded, thoughtfully, though without thought. He had never thought; for over twenty years he had seldom ever held opinions, save the opinions of the local press or of some majority made articulate through passion. There was a certain luxury in thinking that he had never been able to afford. When cases were set before him he either accepted them outright, if they were comprehensible to him, or rejected them if they required a modicum of concentration. Yet he was not a stupid man. He was poor and busy and tired and there were no ideas at large in his community, even had he been capable of grasping them. The idea that he did not think would have been equally incomprehensible to him. He was a closed book, half-full of badly printed, uncorrelated trash.
Just now, his reaction to Abercrombie’s assertion was exceedingly simple. Since the remarks proceeded from a man who was a Southerner by birth, who was successful—moreover, who was confident and decisive and persuasive and suave—he was inclined to accept them without suspicion or resentment.
He took one of Abercrombie’s cigars and pulling on it, still with a stern imitation of profundity upon his tired face, watched the color glide out of the sky and the grey veils come down. The little boy and his bicycle, the baby, the nursemaid, the forlorn kitten, all had departed. In the stucco bungalows pianos gave out hot weary notes that inspired the crickets to competitive sound, and squeaky graphophones filled in the intervals with patches of whining ragtime until the impression was created that each living room in the street opened directly out into the darkness.
“What I want to find out,” Abercrombie was saying with a frown, “is why I didn’t have sense enough to know that this was a worthless town. It was entirely an accident that I left here, an utterly blind chance, and as it happened, the very train that took me away was full of luck for me. The man I sat beside gave me my start in life.” His tone became resentful. “But I thought this was all right. I’d have stayed except that I’d gotten into a scrape down at the High School—I got expelled and my daddy told me he didn’t want me at home any more. Why didn’t I know the place wasn’t any good? Why didn’t I see?”
“Well, you’d probably never known anything better?” suggested Hemmick mildly.
“That wasn’t any excuse,” insisted Abercrombie. “If I’d been any good I’d have known. As a matter of fact—as—a—matter—of—fact,” he repeated slowly, “I think that at heart I was the sort of boy who’d have lived and died here happily and never known there was anything better.” He turned to Hemmick with a look almost of distress. “It worries me to think that my—that what’s happened to me can be ascribed to chance. But that’s the sort of boy I think I was. I didn’t start off with the Dick Whittington idea—I started off by accident.”
After this confession, he stared out into the twilight with a dejected expression that Hemmick could not understand. It was impossible for the latter to share any sense of the importance of such a distinction—in fact from a man