Theory of Slavery | Hamilton

II

I daresay it was nothing but rebellious courtesy (with a tang of habit, perhaps) that prompted me, a very spoiled person as we all are, to muffle my private need for revenge in the decorous silence of the house. Before arrest I enjoyed doing housework merely because I didn't care to comply with the requests of my father, which I considered unjust. I had been brought up "in a genteel, almost aristocratic family" and had not been meant for sweeping floors. Yet, labor for me has always been the deliverance from another feeling, darker and more bitter, which I could not myself have defined at times. This did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the supply closet for something better than a ragless broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out into the parlor and ran up the stairs. The marble staircase had a runner down the center, dusty red. Like a carpet for royalty, it showed His Excellency the way. What a title. 

Two in the afternoon. The large square corridor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of bentwood chairs placed decorously along the walls, with a crystal luster in the middle, was sleeping, and in the quiet everything seemed unwantedly pensive. Only the chopping of meat for tomorrow's dinner could be heard from the kitchen downstairs, and otherwise it was dreadfully silent. Outside the dull, windless day dawned gray, and because all the window curtains were lowered, darkness soon descended and in it I was standing alone, armed with something that might have been a pistol or might have been a dustpan. I pushed aside curtains that were like vines, and felt over innumerable feet of dark walls for electric light switches. Hamilton's house seemed like an enormous labyrinth; once I even stumbled upon the keys of a ghostly piano, and realized that I must have come across some sort of music room. The dim light shone through the curtains melancholically and almost mysteriously. Mutely the varied surfaces presented themselves: the dusk-rose velvet of the drawn drapes, the hush of the tufted rug on the floor, with its faded floral pattern. The grand piano glimmered dully with its black, bent, glossy side. Does Hamilton play?

I opened the window, and, leaning on the sill, stared meditatively into the distance. The lowland peninsula view at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition, all because of those giant pine trees around the house which were likely imported from upstate. But gradually the figures of those out-of-place giants became stranger and stranger to the eye, the closer I inspected them. In the lecture halls of my university in Buffalo I had felt the same superimposed quality of a bought and borrowed century of trees; I had always felt like a flea rather than a prospective lawyer, unstayed by the irony of the gigantic pines in the school backyard. Now, beyond the trees, beyond the toy roofs of our neighbors, there was a low dove-gray horizon, with threatening storm clouds inscribed remotely into the misty sky above it. Somewhere far away, behind the gloomy veil of fog and rain, all the lights were already going on in New-York. Somewhere.

I stood motionless in front of the window, listening to the wind. It sounded like the murmur of a million voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of emotion; like a reminder of gay, exciting things that happened a while since. Within this vapor of blended melodies one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the rumbling of the trolley, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement behind the giant fence of the trees. And then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was the absence of my own voice from that concord.

The wind lashed furiously into the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like scarlet flags. It was time to go. I closed the window, adjusted the curtains, and arranged my apron. Then I headed to the staircase, but stopped as I was passing Hamilton's office: he was talking on the telephone which happened to be plugged opposite his door across the corridor. I wanted to hear what he was saying, but the door was open only just enough to allow the cord to pass through, and I couldn't stop by to listen without outing myself. Hamilton was like one of those blind pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. His web was spread all over the house as he listened from his den like God from Heaven. I stepped over the chord and pressed on.