There Is Confusion/Chapter 29

At first the war presented itself to Peter in a purely personal aspect. It was a long time before he envisaged the struggle as a great stupendous whole. Boyishly egotistic, he saw it simply as the next big moment in the panorama of his life following on his break with Joanna and his puzzling relationship with Maggie. And always he saw it in relation to the things which were happening to him like a series of living pictures against a great impersonal background.

Ignorant of Neal's attack on Maggie he had returned to Philadelphia, completed his work and had gone to Des Moines. He sent his books to his Aunt Susan,—all but one little black testament which bore written on the fly leaf his father's and grandfather's and his father's names. There was another name, too, "Judy Bye." But Peter could not recall this.

"More ancestors," he said to himself, thinking ruefully of Maggie. He could not bear to think of their last talk: even the thought of his forgotten instruments could not induce him to write to her.

In Des Moines he had met Philip. And from that meeting resulted that first indelible picture. He had rushed forward to Philip, his hand outstretched.

"Marshall! Say, fellow, this is really great!"

He could hear his voice ringing even now. And then Philip's contemptuous rejoinder: "I don't shake hands with any such damned light of love."

He thought he must have misunderstood at first. But ​there was the angry scorn in Philip's eyes and there was his hand hanging clenched by his side.

The contemptuous epithet made him flinch. Of course, Philip's bitterness and scorn arose from two sources. Peter had broken off with his sister and had taken up with the one girl in whom he had ever shown any interest.

"But hang it all," Peter said to himself in angry bewilderment. "Why didn't he try for Maggie himself, if he wanted her? But no, first he lets that gambler win her and then he leaves her to me."

Here again ignorance was the cause. Philip did not know of Maggie's divorce until she had become engaged to Peter. Joanna had never told him and he, considering her first marriage as an answer to his rather lackadaisical courtship, had not thought it worth while to make inquiries about her. His own liking for Maggie had taken possession of him so slowly that he had not realized himself until too late what she meant to him.

The result of the encounter was to drive Peter back on himself and to confuse his issues more and more. He did not know which way to turn. More than ever if Philip loved Maggie, he himself wanted to be freed of his obligation. Freedom—htat was what he wanted—from obligations, from prejudice, from too lofty idealism. It seemed to him as though the last two years of his life had been spent in struggling to reconcile ideals. First his efforts to win Joanna and then his need to get away from Maggie. He went through the motions of the long days of drill and preparation, thinking incoherent, unrelated thoughts.

"Poor Maggie, I've got her into this. I can't just chuck her." Responsibility began feebly to awaken within him. "But what does she see in me? Yet she'll die if I leave her. Joanna, you've messed up all our lives. Oh, damn all women! I hope to God I get killed in France!"

​Still in a dream he left Des Moines for Camp Upton and left the camp for overseas. He was a good sailor and therefore was free to devote himself to men who were less fortunate than himself. On an afternoon he came on deck with Harley Alexander. The two had become "buddies" in the camp and now on the trip over the long days of inaction were awakening one of those strange intensive friendships between two people, in which each tries to bare his heart to the utmost before the other. Harley had told Peter about his disastrous courtship of Vera Manning and Peter had reluctantly, inevitably returned the confidence.

"Well," said Harley, "I'll be doggone. I suppose Joanna did use to queen it over you, but what'd you go make a door-mat of yourself for? She gave you what you were biddin' for. But now as far as this Miss Ellersley's concerned—I can't seem to remember her, Peter—she's got no claim on you that I can see. If she's any sense at all she knows that you came to her on sheer impulse. If you don't love her, don't you marry her. You'll regret it all your life if you do. Gee, I'm sick of this boat. Don't you s'pose we're ever really goin' to get into this man's war?"

He lurched suddenly and violently against Peter, who dragged him to the rail where he became horribly and thoroughly seasick. There he remained, spent and helpless. Peter tried to drag him back to a steamer chair, but he was too much in a state of collapse to help himself and too heavy for Peter to drag across the deck. A white officer, a lieutenant whom Peter had noticed infrequently sitting near the door, was standing looking gravely on. He came forward.

"Here, let me help you." Together the two men got Alexander into the chair. He was the type with whom any physical indisposition goes hard. Peter noticed he was shivering.

"Wait, I'll get a rug," he said, starting toward the door. ​Alexander groaned, "Bye, for God's sake don't leave me. I'm as weak as a cat."

"Oh, you'll be all right," Peter called back, and left him with the white lieutenant standing silently by.

Shortly after his return Harley, declaring himself much better, went below to his room. But first he thanked the lieutenant who bowed with his pleasantly grave air. Peter, about to sink into the vacant seat, looked up and caught the intent glance of the white officer who smiled and nodded and came leisurely toward him.

"May I sit beside you a moment?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes," Peter replied shortly. He thought: "I know what you make me think of. Of myself that first day I put on my uniform. Now why?" It was true that while there was no facial resemblance, the two men were built almost exactly alike, tall, with broad shoulders, flat backs and lean thighs. Peter was at first glance the more comely, his head was more shapely and his hair so crisply curling gave him a certain persistent boyishness. The other man, a little older and plainer, had nevertheless a certain whimsical melancholy about his eyes and mouth which attracted Peter.

"I heard your friend call you Bye," he said still pleasantly. Peter nodded briefly. "That's my name, too. Bye, Meriwether Bye. I was wondering where you came from."

Meriwether Bye! Peter felt his face growing hot as he remembered the circumstances in which he had last heard that name. "Dr. Meriwether Bye of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, I suppose."

Meriwether without surprise acknowledged this. "You know of me then. May I ask how?"

"I've always known of you indirectly," Peter told him coldly. "My great-grandfather spent all his life working for yours—for nothing. There was a black Meriwether Bye, my ​father, named after him, though I'm sure," he added with rude inconsequence, "I can't imagine why."

Meriwether looked at him with a sort of gentle understanding. "I've often wondered about those black Byes," he said musingly. "My grandfather, Dr. Meriwether Bye—he's an old, old man now—used to tell me about them. He was very fond of one of them, Isaiah Bye. Isn't it strange that we, the grandsons of those two men, friends way back in those days, should be meeting here on our way to France to fight for our country?"

Something, some aching tiger of resentment and dislike, which always crouched in Peter ready to spring at the approach of a white man, lay down momentarily appeased.

"Friends! Say, that's the first time I ever heard a white man speak that way of the relation between a slave-owner and his slave. You can't guess," he said abruptly, "how I first heard of you." And he told Meriwether of his experience with Mrs. Lea, while the doctor watched him with keen, melancholy eyes.

"I'll wager you were angry, mad clear through and through. You had a right to be. Mrs. Lea," as he pronounced her name his gentle voice grew a little gentler, Peter thought, "didn't realize what she was saying. She's like many another of us, totally unaware of our shame and your merits. I hope this war will teach us something."

He had a nice way with him. "A regular fellow," Peter thought, listening to his quiet, unaffected disquisition on many subjects. He had been literally everywhere, even to Greenland, and had seen all sorts of people. He had a theory that while not all individuals were equal, all races averaged the same. Some men were bound to be superior.

"And the differences between the races are a matter of relativity," he finished. "I confess my own interest in colored people is very keen." He raised a fine hand to disparage ​Peter's slight movement. "Yes, I know you are sick of that and the patronage it implies. But I mean it, Bye, and when you get back home you must go out to Bryn Mawr and see whether or not I have tried to express that interest."

"I should think," Peter looked at him squarely, "all things considered, you or your family would have shown some interest in us black Byes. You are rich men, your family is a powerful one———"

"Was a powerful one," Meriwether interrupted him. He had flushed a little. "I suppose you know that my great-grandfather, Aaron Bye, had ten sons. But only four of them had sons and all of them except my father died in the Civil War. Isn't that some compensation? My own father died when I was very young and I grew up with his father. He was the one who told me about the black Byes and how he when a boy used to play about Philadelphia with Isaiah. 'Proud as Isaiah Bye,' I've heard him say. Bye," said Meriwether earnestly, "I tried my best when I became a man to find if there were any of you left in Philadelphia. It seemed to me a monstrous thing to have our family and our fortune—for my grandfather is still a very rich man—reared on the backs of those other Byes." He struck the table with a vehement hand. "That whole system was barbarous."

"I wish," Peter told him, "I had known you sooner." Just to hear this expression of penitence seemed to ease the long resentment of the years.

"Without those slaves," Meriwether resumed, "Aaron Bye would never have got on his feet. His father was just a poor farmer, a Quaker, running away from England to escape religious persecution. He came over and received a grant of land. But he could have done nothing without labor, and free labor at that. He and a friend bought a wretched slave between them, worked a bit of land, then that old Bye bought out the other man's share of the slave; presently he bought ​a woman. Ah, it's a rotten story." Peter saw melancholy like a veil settle upon his finely drawn features.

"You really feel it? I didn't suppose any white man felt like that. Well, you needn't mind about me or about any of the black Byes," he surprised himself by saying. "After all, it isn't as though we were related. It's just the fortunes of—well, not of war—but of life."

"No," Meriwether returned, "we're not related. Thank God there's none of that unutterable mix-up. I don't think I could have forgiven those Quaker Byes that. But sometimes it seems to me that just because those black Byes and thousands of others like them had no claim, that they had every claim."

After that day they met daily; Meriwether expounding, explaining, unconsciously teaching; Peter listening and absorbing. "I'm surprised," the young white man said, giving Peter a calculating look, "that you were content with being an entertainer."

Peter flushed and explained. It was only a temporary phase in his life. He had been broken-up, crazy. Haltingly he spoke of Joanna and finally of Maggie.

Meriwether thought it a bad business. "Stupid of you not to see that the first girl had your interest at heart. Why, man, by your own account she had brought you out of the butcher-shop to the University. Well, life permits these things." Bit by bit he told Peter of his own love-life. He had loved Mrs. Lea for years even before her marriage when they were boy and girl together, but her hard, uncomprehending attitude toward "lesser peoples" chilled him, really frightened him. He knew he could not live with a woman like that.

To Peter's surprise Meriwether was a fatalist. He had strong premonitions and allowed himself to be guided by them. "From the outset," he told Peter, gravely, "I knew that you meant something to me. That was why I used to watch you ​so closely. I used to wonder and speculate about you. Something in you made me think of myself. It was as though you, all unrelated even racially, represented something which might have been a part of myself, as though you," he said dreamily, "were living actively what I was thinking of passively. I have often tried to picture my life as a colored man. I think if there had been any of that selfish admixture of blood between the white and black Byes and I had heard of it, I'd have gone the United States over but what I'd have found my relatives, and have claimed them, too, before all the world."

One of Meriwether's strange fantasies was that he would never return from the war. "I knew it when I came away from America. And listen, Bye, when I die," Peter marveled at the sureness of that "when," "I want you after you get back home to go to my grandfather and tell him who you are and how you met me. You are to give him this." He took a little case from his pocket in which were the pictures of a man and woman,—old-fashioned pictures.

"Your father," Peter exclaimed involuntarily, "you can see he's a Bye———"

"And my mother," Meriwether finished. He drew a locket suspended on a thin gold chain from around his neck. "And take this to Mrs. Lea. She loves me," he said very simply. "Here, you might just as well take them now." Peter accepted them reluctantly.

He wished he had a picture of Joanna. Death seemed suddenly very near, very possible. He did not care if he died, but he would like Joanna to know that he thought of her. But he had nothing to leave for her. Yes, there was the Testament. He took it from his inside breast-pocket and showed it to Meriwether. Indeed he looked at it closely for the first time himself. The two heads so like yet so different bent over the old faded script. On the top of the page in a ​beautiful clear hand was written Aaron Bye, then underneath in crazy drunken letters, Judy Bye.

"I can't guess who she was," said Peter.

A little below a familiar name appeared, Joshua Bye, and above it, evidently written, in the same hand, Ceazer Bye. But through this entry a firm black line was drawn, drawn with a pen that dug down into the thin paper. After Joshua's name came the names Isaiah and then Meriwether.

"My father," Peter explained, feeling somehow very near to him. "I guess I'd better put my name in, too." He wrote it in his small compact hand. "I wonder who those two were, Judy and Ceazer," he mused, smiling a little at the quaint spelling. "I don't seem ever to have heard of them; I thought we started with Joshua." But Meriwether professed dimly to remember some mention of Judy.

"I'm sure I've heard my grandfather mention her name years ago and Ceazer's, too; he was her husband, seems to me. I suppose Aaron Bye gave them the Testament."

The little incident threw them into a deeper intimacy. Meriwether professed himself to be as interested in and as bewildered at the workings of the color question as Peter himself, though naturally he lacked his new friend's bitterness.

"It is amazing into what confusion slavery threw American life," he said, launched on one of their interminable discussions. "Here America was founded for the sake of liberty and the establishment of an asylum for all who were oppressed. And no land has more actively engaged in the suppression of liberty, or in keeping down those who were already oppressed. So that a white boy raised on all sorts of high falutin idealism finds himself when he grows up completely at sea. I confess, Bye, when I came to realize that all my wealth and all the combination of environment and position which has made life hitherto so beautiful and perfect, were founded quite spe​cifically on the backs of broken, beaten slaves, I got a shock from which I think sometimes I'll never recover. It's robbed me of happiness forever."

"I like to hear you acknowledge your indebtedness," said Peter frankly, "but I don't think you should take on your shoulders the penitence of the whole white nation."

"No, I don't think I should, either," Meriwether returned unexpectedly, "but that sort of extremeness seems to be inherent in the question of color. Either you concern yourself with it violently as the Southerner does and so let slip by all the other important issues of life; or you are indifferent and callous like the average Northerner and grow hardened to all sorts of atrocities; or you steep yourself in it like the sentimentalist—that's my class—and find yourself paralyzed by the vastness of the problem.

He slipped into a familiar mood of melancholy brooding. It was at such a time that he spoke to Peter of his willingness, of his absolute determination to lose his life in the Great War. For this reason he had gone into the ranks instead of the medical corps where he would have been comparatively safe. "Don't think I'm a fanatic, Peter. I see this war as the greatest gesture the world has ever made for Freedom. If I can give up my life in this cause I shall feel that I have paid my debt."