Where all was festivity and lightness yesterday, today there is solemnity, silence and gloom. This was true of the campus at the university after graduation. Where one day the lawns were alive with throbbing, laughing, happy humanity, the next the place is deserted, students having departed for their homes or summer activities, their parents returned to their homes and the buildings closed.
In the midst of a scene like this an express team drove up to one of the dormitories and with clatter and clutter, the driver, with his helper, bundled trunks and bags into his team. As the last piece of luggage was placed on the team, Professor Armstrong stepped out of the building to pay the driver and get his check.
At that moment Dr. Tansey turned a corner, coming from the gymnasium where he had been winding up his work for the year preparatory to departing also.
"Hello, Armstrong," was his greeting. "Where're you bound? Looks as if," nodding in the direction of the baggage on the team, "you're going on a long journey, as they say." This said with a laugh.
"Yes, it's a long journey. I don't intend to come back. I'm going South where white men are white men and stand by one another," he vowed.
"Oh, bosh, can't you forget that Bennet episode? How some people nurse a grudge! The boy's all right. I know him," Dr. Tansey exclaimed impatiently.
"You're another of those soft hearted sentimentalists. To hell with you," Professor Armstrong exploded.
"Oh, don't be a grouch. Have done with that bosh. He's a man, and a whiter man than you, in many respects. Here, we take them as we find them, white or black."
"Well, I'm off. Got to catch a train.—Good-bye!" Professor Armstrong ended the conversation by offering his hand in farewell.
"Good-bye, old man. Hope you have a pleasant vacation and land somewhere suitable in the fall. If you don't," with a sly teasing wink, you may come back here and learn something. Good-bye.—Oh, by the way," as an after thought. "I may see you this summer. I'm going South shortly myself to study some features of yellow fever contagions and typhoid. I'll be making some experiments and may run into you."
"If you come, let me give you a tip. Leave your northern ideas up here. Don't bring any of your equality theories down there. Our people don't stand for that. We've got our ideas about how to handle the blacks. And we do handle them. We won't have anybody interfering. If you remember that you'll get along, otherwise you won't.—Look me up if you're in my district.—Good-bye."
With that he turned and was off, walking rapidly across the yard toward the street leading to the station. Dr. Tansey, with his characteristic whimsical smile playing about his lips watched the retreating figure.
"Conceited, prejudiced ass! Poor fellow! He won't admit the world moves," he murmured. "He thinks because his skin is white he's supreme and a black man's dirt under his feet, even one with so little colored blood as Bennet.—And the peculiar thing is that there are so many like him. They want their way for themselves and everybody else. They can be brutes, coarse, inhuman animals and yet because they are white they are all right. What bosh! What fallacy! And the funny part of it all is that we,—most of us, let them have their way.—Uphold them in it.—I suppose it's because we dislike bother and fuss. We had one big fuss," he continued his musings, "over the same kind of question and I suppose want to forget about it now. Just the same, they're wrong and we're wrong. We're to blame, too. We've been fed up on a lot of propaganda about white supremacy—the white man's burden and a lot of other rot till we half believe the stuff ourselves. That's what's the matter with us.—I wonder how long that sort of thing will last? I wonder. Well, I'll see some of this race question myself this summer first hand, then I'll know."
Dr. Tansey was still following the departing figure of Professor Armstrong as he soliloquized. He stood still gazing in the direction in which Armstrong had now disappeared after his soliloquy ceased, his mind ruminating on the question. Suddenly his thoughts returned to the present and he whirled and walked away from the college. His mind was indistinctly filled with pictures of atrocities and cruelties of which he had read as practiced in the South.