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 it 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 gray 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 of Abercrombie’s position it struck him as unnecessarily trivial. Still, he felt that some manifestation of acquiescence was only polite.
“Well,” he offered, “it’s just that some boys get the bee to get up and go North and some boys don’t. I happened to have the bee to go North. But I didn’t. That’s the difference between you and me.”
Abercrombie turned to him intently.
“You did?” he asked, with unexpected interest. “You wanted to get out?”
“At one time.” At Abercrombie’s eagerness Hemmick began to attach a new importance to the subject. “At one time,” he repeated, as though the singleness of the occasion was a thing he had often mused upon.
“How old were you?”
“Oh—’bout twenty.”
“What put it into your head?”
“Well, let me see—” Hemmick considered. “—I don’t know whether I remember sure enough but it seems to me that when I was down to the University—I was there two years—one of the professors told me that a smart boy ought to go North. He said business wasn’t going to amount to much down here for the next fifty years. And I guessed he was right. My father died about then, so I got a job as runner in the bank here, and I didn’t have much interest in anything except saving up enough money to go North. I was bound I’d go.”
“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?” insisted Abercrombie in an aggrieved tone.
“Well,” Hemmick hesitated. “Well, I right near did but—things didn’t work out and I didn’t get to go. It was a funny sort of business. It all started about the smallest thing you can think of. It all started about a penny.”
“A penny?”
“That’s what did it—one little penny. That’s why I didn’t go ’way from here and all, like I intended.”
“Tell me about it, man!” exclaimed his companion. He looked at his watch impatiently. “I’d like to hear the story.”
Hemmick sat for a moment, distorting his mouth around the cigar.
“Well, to begin with,” he said, at length, “I’m going to ask you if you remember a thing that happened here about twenty-five years ago. A fellow named Hoyt, the cashier of the Cotton National Bank, disappeared one night with about thirty thousand dollars in cash. Say, man, they didn’t talk about anything else down here at the time. The whole town was shaken up about it, and I reckin you can imagine the disturbance it caused down at all the banks and especially at the Cotton National.”
“I remember.”
“Well, they caught him, and they got most of the money back, and by and by the excitement died down, except in the bank where the thing had happened. Down there it seemed as if they’d never get used to it. Mr. Deems, the First Vice-President, who’d always been pretty kind and decent, got to be a changed man. He was
