You Can't Go Home Again/Book I

◄  Thomas Wolfe

You Can't Go Home Again BOOK 1. - THE NATIVE'S RETURN written by Thomas Wolfe

BOOK II - THE WORLD THAT JACK BUILT  ►

The Sun Dial Press 1942 (pages 3-146)

1. The Drunken Beggar on Horseback

It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day towards the end of April in the year of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York. His eye took in the towering mass of the new hospital at the end of the block, its upper floors set back in terraces, the soaring walls salmon coloured in the evening light. This side of the hospital, and directly opposite, was the lower structure of the annexe, where the nurses and the waitresses lived. In the rest of the block half a dozen old brick houses, squeezed together in a solid row, leaned wearily against each other and showed their backsides to him.

The air was strangely quiet. All the noises of the city were muted here into a distant hum, so unceasing that it seemed to belong to silence. Suddenly, through the open windows at the front of the house came the raucous splutter of a truck starting up at the loading platform of the warehouse across the street. The heavy motor warmed up with a full-throated roar, then there was a grinding clash of gears, and George felt the old house tremble under him as the truck swung out into the street and thundered off. The noise receded, grew fainter, then faded into the general hum, and all was quiet as before.

As George leaned looking out of his back window a nameless happiness welled within, him and he shouted over to the waitresses in the hospital annexe, who were ironing out as usual their two pairs of drawers and their flimsy little dresses. He heard, as from a great distance, the faint shouts of children playing in the streets, and, near at hand, the low voices of the people in the houses. He watched the cool, steep shadows, and saw how the evening light was moving in the little squares of yards, each of which had in it something intimate, familiar, and revealing—a patch of earth in which a pretty woman had been setting out flowers, working earnestly for hours and wearing a big straw hat and canvas gloves; a little plot of new-sown grass, solemnly watered every evening by a man with a square red face and a bald head; a little shed or playhouse or workshop for some business man’s spare-time hobby; or a gay-painted table, some easy lounging chairs, and a huge bright-striped garden parasol to cover it, and a good-looking girl who had been sitting there all afternoon reading, with a coat thrown over her shoulders and a tall drink at her side.

Through some enchantment of the quiet and the westering light and the smell of April in the air, it seemed to George that he knew these people all around him. He loved this old house on Twelfth Street, its red brick walls, its rooms of noble height and spaciousness, its old dark woods and floors that creaked; and in the magic of the moment it seemed to be enriched and given a profound and lonely dignity by all the human beings it had sheltered in its ninety years. The house became like a living presence. Every object seemed to have an animate vitality of its own—walls, rooms, chairs, tables, even a half-wet bath towel hanging from the shower ring above the tub, a coat thrown down upon a chair, and his papers, manuscripts, and books scattered about the room in wild confusion.

The simple joy he felt at being once more a part of such familiar things also contained an element of strangeness and unreality. With a sharp stab of wonder he reminded himself, as he had done a hundred times in the last few weeks, that he had really come home again—home to America, home to Manhattan’s swarming rock, and home again to love; and his happiness was faintly edged with guilt when he remembered that less than a year before he had gone abroad in anger and despair, seeking to escape what now he had returned to.

In his bitter resolution of that spring a year ago, he had wanted most of all to get away from the woman he loved. Esther Jack was much older than he, married and living with her husband and grown daughter. But she had given George her love, and given it so deeply, so exclusively, that he had come to feel himself caught as in a trap. It was from that that he had wanted to escape—that and the shameful memory of their savage quarrels, and a growing madness in himself which had increased in violence as she had tried to hold him. So he had finally left her and fled to Europe. He had gone away to forget her, only to find that he could not; he had done nothing but think of her all the time. The memory of her rosy, jolly face, her essential goodness, her sure and certain talent, and all the hours that they had spent together returned to torture him with new desire and longing for her.

Thus, fleeing from a love that still pursued him, he had become a wanderer in strange countries. He had travelled through England, France, and Germany, had seen countless new sights and people, and—cursing, whoring, drinking, brawling his way across the continent—had had his head bashed in, some teeth knocked out, and his nose broken in a beer-hall fight. And then, in the solitude of convalescence in a Munich hospital, lying in bed upon his back with his ruined face turned upwards towards the ceiling, he had had nothing else to do but think. There, at last, he had learned a little sense. There his madness had gone out of him, and for the first time in many years he had felt at peace within himself.

For he had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out—through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. As he lay there in the hospital he had gone back over his life, and, bit by bit, had extracted from it some of the hard lessons of experience. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. All together, they wove into a kind of leading thread, trailing backwards through his past, and out into the future. And he thought that now, perhaps, he could begin to shape his life to mastery, for he felt a sense of new direction deep within him, but whither it would take him he could not say.

And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, by making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that-in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realised that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought be had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.

Most of the trouble he had brought upon himself, he saw, had come from leaping down the throat of things. Very well, he would look before he leaped hereafter. The trick was to get his reason and his emotions pulling together in double harness, instead of letting them fly off in opposite directions, tearing him apart between them. He would try to give his head command and see what happened: then if head said, “Leap!”—he’d leap with all his heart.

And that was where Esther came in, for he had really not meant to come back to her. His head had told him it was better to let their affair end as it had ended. But no sooner had he arrived in New York than his heart told him to call her up—and he had done it. Then they had met again, and after that things followed their own course.

So here he was, back with Esther—the one thing he had once been sure would never happen. Yes, and very happy to be back. That was the queerest part of it. It seemed, perversely, that he ought to be unhappy to be doing what his reason had told him not to do. But he was not. And that was why, as he leaned there musing on his window-sill while the last light faded and the April night came on, a subtle worm was gnawing at his conscience and he wondered darkly at how great a lag there was between his thinking and his actions.

He was twenty-eight years old now, and wise enough to know that there are sometimes reasons of which the reason knows nothing, and that the emotional pattern of one’s life, formed and set by years of living, is not to be discarded quite as easily as one may throw away a battered hat or worn-out shoe. Well, he was not the first man to be caught on the horns of this dilemma. Had not even the philosophers themselves been similarly caught? Yes—and then written sage words about it:

“A foolish consistency,” Emerson had said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

And great Goethe, accepting the inevitable truth that human growth does not proceed in a straight line to its goal, had compared the development and progress of mankind to the reelings of a drunken beggar on horseback.

What was important, perhaps, was not that the beggar was drunk and reeling, but that he was mounted on his horse, and, however unsteadily, was going somewhere.

This thought was comforting to George, and he pondered it for some time, yet it did not altogether remove the edge of guilt that faintly tinged his contentment. There was still a possible flaw in the argument: His inconsistency in coming back-to Esther—was it wise or foolish?…Must the beggar on horseback for ever reel?

Esther awoke as quick and sudden as a bird. She lay upon her back and stared up at the ceiling straight and wide. This was her body and her flesh, she was alive and ready in a moment.

She thought at once of George. Their reunion had been a joyous re-discovery of love, and all things were made new again. They had taken up the broken fragments of their life and joined them together with all the intensity and beauty that they had known in the best days before he went away. The madness that bad nearly wrecked them both had now gone out of him entirely. He was’still full of his, unpredictable moods and fancies, but she had not seen a trace of the old black fury that used to make him lash about and beat his knuckles bloody against the wall. Since he returned he had seemed quieter, surer, in better control of himself, and in everything he did he acted as if he wanted to show her that he loved her. She had never known such perfect happiness. Life was good.

Outside, on Park Avenue, the people had begun to move along the pavements once more, the streets of the city began to fill and thicken. Upon the table by her bed the little dock ticked eagerly its pulse of time as if it hurried forward for ever like a child towards some imagined joy, and a clock struck slowly in the house with a measured, solemn chime. The morning sun steeped each object in her room with casual light, and in her heart she said, “It is now.”

Nora brought coffee and hot rolls, and Esther read the paper. She read the gossip of the theatre, and she read the names of the cast that had been engaged for the new German play that the Community Guild was going to do in the autumn, and she read that “Miss Esther Jack has been engaged to design the show”. She laughed because they called her “Miss”, and because she could see the horrified look on his face when he read it, and because she remembered his expression when the little tailor thought she was his wife, and because it gave her so much pleasure to see her name in the paper—“Miss Esther Jack, whose work has won her recognition as one of the foremost modern designers.”

She was feeling gay and happy and pleased with herself, so she put the paper in her bag, together with some other clippings she had saved, and took them with her when she went down-town to Twelfth Street for her daily visit to George. She handed them to him, and sat opposite to watch his face as he read them. She remembered all the things they had written about her work:

“…subtle, searching, and hushed, with a wry and rueful humour of its own…”

“…made these old eyes shine by its deft, sure touch of whimsey as nothing else in this prodigal season of dramatic husks has done…”

“…the gay insouciance of her unmannered settings, touched with those qualities which we have come to expect in all her ardent services to that sometimes too ungrateful jade, the drama…”

“…the excellent fooling that is implicit in these droll sets, elvishly sly, mocking, and, need we add or make apology for adding, expert?…”

She could hardly keep from laughing at the scornful twist of his mouth and the mocking tone of his comment as he bit off the phrases.

“’Elvishly sly!’Now isn’t that too God-damned delightful!” he said with mincing precision. “’Made these old eyes shine!’Why, the quaint little bastard!…’That sometimes too ungrateful jade!’Oh, deary me, now!…’And need we add—!’I am swooning, sweetheart: pass the garlic!”

He threw the papers on the floor with an air of disgust and turned to her with a look of mock sternness that crinkled the corners of his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “do I get fed, or must I starve here while you wallow in this bilge?”

She could control herself no longer and shrieked with glee. “I didn’t do it!” she gasped. “I didn’t write it! I can’t help it if they write like that! Isn’t it awful?”

“Yes, and you hate it, don’t you?” he said. “You lap it up! You arc sitting there licking your lips over it now, gloating on it, and on my hunger! Don’t you know, woman, that I haven’t had a bite to eat all day? Do I get fed, or not? Will you put your deft whimsey in a steak?”

“Yes,” she said. “Would you like a steak?”

“Will you make these old eyes shine with a chop and a delicate dressing of young onions?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

He came over and put his arms about her, his eyes searching hers in a look of love and hunger. “Will you make me one of your causes that is subtle, searching, and hushed?”

“Yes,” she said. “Whatever you like, I will make it for you.”

“Why will you make it for me?” he asked.

It was like a ritual that both of them knew, and they fastened upon each word and answer because they were so eager to hear it from each other.

“Because I love you. Because I want to feed you and to love you.”

“Will it be good?” he said.

“It will be so good that there will be no words to tell its goodness,” she said. “It will be good because I am so good and beautiful, and because I can do everything better than any other woman you will ever know, and because I love you with all my heart and soul, and want to be a part of you.”

“Will this great love get into the food you cook for me?”

“It will be in every morsel that you eat. It will feed your hunger as you’ve never been fed before. It will be like a living miracle, and will make you better and richer as long as you live. You will never forget it. It will be a glory and a triumph.”

“Then this will be such food as no one ever ate before,” he said. “Yes,” she said.-“It will be.”

And it was so. There was never anything like it in the world before. April had come back again.

So now they were together. But things were not quite the same between them as they had once been. Even on the surface they were different. No longer now for them was there a single tenement and dwelling place. From the first day of his return he had flatly refused to go back to the house on Waverly Place which the two of them had previously shared for work and love and living. Instead, he had taken these two large rooms on Twelfth Street, which occupied the whole second floor of the house and could be made into one enormous room by opening the sliding doors between them. There was also a tiny kitchen, just big enough to turn around in. The whole arrangement suited George perfectly because it gave him both space and privacy. Here Esther could come and go as she liked; here they could be alone together whenever they wished; here they could feed at the heart of love.

The most important thing about it, however, was that this was his place, not theirs, and that fact re-established their relations on a different level. Henceforth he was determined not to let his life and love be one. She had her world of the theatre and of her rich friends which he did not want to belong to, and he had his world of writing which he would have to manage alone. He would keep love a thing apart, and safeguard to himself the mastery of his life, his separate soul, his own integrity.

Would she accept this compromise? Would she take his love, but leave him free to live his life and do his work? That was the way he told her it must be, and she said yes, she understood. But could she do it? Was it in a woman’s nature to be content with all that a man could give her, and not for ever want what was not his to give? Already there were little portents that made him begin to doubt it.

One morning when she came to see him and was telling him with spirit and great good humour about a little comedy she had witnessed in the street, suddenly she stopped short in the middle of it, a cloud passed over her face, her eyes became troubled, and she turned to him and said:

“You do love me, don’t you, George?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. You know I do.”

“Will you never leave me again?” she asked, a little breathless. “Will you go on loving me for ever?”

Her abrupt change of mood and her easy assumption that he or any human being could honestly pledge himself to anyone or anything for ever struck him as ludicrous, and he laughed.

She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Don’t laugh, George,” she said. “I need to know. Tell me. Will you go on loving me for ever?”

Her seriousness, and the impossibility of giving her an answer annoyed him now, and he rose from his chair, stared down blankly at her for a moment, and then began pacing back and forth across the room. He paused once or twice and turned to her as if to speak, but, finding it hard to say what he wanted to say, he resumed his nervous pacing.

Esther followed him with her eyes; their expression betraying her mixed feelings, in which amusement and exasperation were giving way to alarm.

“What have I done now?” she thought. “God, was there ever anybody like him! You never can tell what he’ll do! All I did was ask him a simple question and he acts like this! Still, it’s better than the way he used to act. He used to blow up and call me vile names. Now he just stews in his own juice and I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Look at him—pacing like a wild animal in a cage, like a temperamental and introspective monkey!”

As a matter of fact, in moments of excitement George did look rather like a monkey. Barrel-chested, with broad, heavy shoulders, he walked with a slight stoop, letting his arms swing loosely, and they were so long that they dangled almost to the knees, the big hands and spatulate fingers curving deeply in like paws. His head, set down solidly upon a short neck, was carried somewhat forward with a thrusting movement, so that his whole figure had a prowling and half-crouching posture. He looked even shorter than he was, for, although he was an inch or two above the middle height, around five feet nine or ten, his legs were not quite proportionate to the upper part of his body. Moreover, his features were small—somewhat pug-nosed, the eyes set very deep in beneath heavy brows, the forehead rather low, the hair beginning not far above the brows. And when he was agitated or interested in something, he had the trick of peering upward with a kind of packed attentiveness, and this, together with his general posture, the head thrust forward, the body prowling downwards, gave him a distinctly simian appearance. It was easy to see why some of his friends called him Monk.

Esther watched him a minute or two, feeling disappointed and hurt that he had not answered her. He stopped by the front window and stood looking out, and she went over to him and quietly put her arm through his. She saw the vein swell in his temple, and knew there was no use in speaking.

Outside, the little Jewish tailors were coming from the office of their union next door and were standing in the street. They were pale, dirty, and greasy, and very much alive. They shouted and gesticulated at one another, they stroked each other gently on the cheek in mounting fury, saying tenderly in a throttled voice: “Nah! Nah! Nah!” Then, still smiling in their rage, they began to slap each other gently in the face with itching finger-tips. At length they screamed and dealt each other stinging slaps. Others cursed and shouted, some laughed, and a few said nothing, but stood darkly, sombrely apart, feeding upon their entrails.

Then the young Irish cops charged in among them. There was something bought and corrupt about their look. They had brutal and brainless faces, full of pride. Their jaws were loose and coarse, they chewed gum constantly as they shoved and thrust their way along, and they kept saying:

“Break it up, now! Break it up! All right! Keep movin’!”

The motors roared by like projectiles, and people were passing along the pavement. There were the faces George and Esther had never seen before, and there were the faces they had always seen, everywhere: always different, they never changed; they welled up from the sourceless springs of life with unending fecundity, with limitless variety, with incessant movement, and with the monotony of everlasting repetition. There were the three girl-friends who pass along the streets of life for ever. One had a cruel and sensual face, she wore glasses, and her mouth was hard and vulgar. Another had the great nose and the little bony features of a rat. The face of the third was full and loose, jeering with fat rouged lips and oily volutes of the nostrils. And when they laughed, there was no warmth or joy in the sound: high, shrill, ugly, and hysterical, their laughter only asked the earth to notice them.

In the street the children played. They were dark and strong and violent, aping talk and toughness from their elders. They leaped on one another and hurled the weakest to the pavement. The policemen herded the noisy little tailors along before them, and they went away. The sky was blue and young and vital, there were no clouds in it; the trees were budding into leaf; the sunlight fell into the street, upon all the people there, with an innocent and fearless life.

Esther glanced at George and saw his face grow twisted as he looked. He wanted to say to her that we are all savage, foolish, violent, and mistaken; that, full of our fear and confusion, we walk in ignorance upon the living and beautiful earth, breathing young, vital air and bathing in the light of morning, seeing it not because of the murder in our hearts.

But he did not say these things. Wearily he turned away from the window.

“There’s for ever,” he said. “There’s your for ever.”

2. Fame’s First Wooing

In spite of the colourings of guilt that often tinged his brighter moods, George was happier than he had ever been. There can be no doubt about that. He exulted in the fact. The old madness had gone out of him, and for long stretches at a time he was now buoyed up by the glorious belief—not by any means a new one with him, though it was much stronger now than it had ever been before—that he was at last in triumphant control of his destiny. From his early childhood, when he was living like an orphan with his Joyner relatives back in Libya Hill, he had dreamed that one day he would go to New York and there find love and fame and fortune. For several years New York had been the place that he called home, and love was his already; and now he felt, with the assurance of deep conviction, that the time for fame and fortune was at hand.

Anyone is happy who confidently awaits the fulfilment of his highest dreams, and in that way George Was happy. And, like most of us when things are going well, he took the credit wholly to himself. It was not chance or luck or any blind confluence of events that had produced the change in his spirits: his contentment and sense of mastery were the reward of his own singular and peculiar merit, and no more than his just due. Nevertheless fortune had played a central part in his transformation. A most incredible thing had happened.

He had been back in New York only a few days when Lulu Scudder, the literary agent, telephoned him in great excitement. The publishing house of James Rodney & Co. was interested in his manuscript, and Foxhall Edwards, the distinguished editor of this great house, wanted to talk to him about it. Of course, you couldn’t tell about these things, but it was always a good idea to strike while the iron was hot. Could he go over right away to see Edwards?

As he made his way uptown George told himself that it was silly to be excited, that probably nothing would come of it. Hadn’t one publisher already turned the book down, saying that it was no novel? That publisher had even written—-and the words of his rejection had seared themselves in. George’s brain—“The novel form is not adapted to such talents, as you have.” And it was still the same manuscript. Not a line of it had been changed, not a word cut, in spite of hints from Esther and Miss Scudder that it was too long for any publisher to handle. He had stubbornly refused to alter it, insisting that it would have to be printed as it was or not at all. And he had left the manuscript with Miss Scudder and gone away to Europe, convinced that her efforts to find a publisher would prove futile.

All the time he was abroad it had nauseated him to think of his manuscript, of the years of work and sleepless nights, he had put into it, and of the high hopes that bad sustained him through it; and he had tried, not to think of it, convinced now that it was no good, that he himself was no good, and that all his hot ambitions and his dreams of fame were the vapourings of a shoddy aesthete without talent. In this, he told himself, he was just like most of the other piddling instructors at the School for Utility Cultures, from which he had fled, and to which he would return to resume his classes in English composition when his leave of absence expired. They talked for ever about the great books they were writing, or were going to write, because, like him, they needed so desperately to find some avenue of escape from the dreary round of teaching, reading themes, grading papers, and trying to strike a spark in minds that had no flint in them. He had stayed in Europe almost nine months, and no word had come from Miss Scudder, so he had felt confirmed in all his darkest forebodings.

But now she said the Rodney people were interested. Well, they had taken their time about it. And what did “interested” mean? Very likely they would tell him they had detected in the book some slight traces of a talent which, with careful nursing, could be schooled to produce, in time, a publishable book. He had heard that publishers sometimes had a weather eye for this sort of thing and that they would often string an aspiring author along for years, giving him just the necessary degree, of encouragement to keep him from abandoning hope altogether and to make him think that they had faith in his great future if only he would go on writing book after rejected book until he “found himself”. Well, he’d show them that he was not their fool! Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash would he betray his disappointment, and he would commit himself to nothing!

If the traffic policeman on the corner noticed a strange young man in front of the office of James Rodney & Co. that morning, he would never have guessed at the core of firm resolution with which this young man had tried to steel himself for the interview that lay before him. If the policeman saw him at all, he probably observed him with misgiving, wondering whether he ought not to intervene to prevent the commission of a felony, or at any rate whether he ought not to speak to the young man and hold him in conversation until the ambulance could arrive and take him to Bellevue for observation.

For, as the young man approached the building at a rapid, loping stride, a stern scowl upon his face and his lips set in a grim line, he had hardly crossed the street and set his foot upon the kerb before the publisher’s building when his step faltered, he stopped and looked about him as if not knowing what to do, and then, in evident confusion, forced himself to go on.’But now his movements were uncertain; as if his legs obeyed his will with great reluctance. He lunged ahead, then stopped, then lunged again and made for the door, only to halt again in a paroxysm of indecision as he came up to it. He stood there facing the door for a moment, clenching and unclenching his hands, then looked about him quickly, suspiciously, as though he expected to find somebody watching him. At last, with a slight shudder of resolution, he thrust his hands deep into his pockets, turned deliberately, and walked on past the door.

And now he moved slowly, the line of his mouth set grimmer than before, and his head was carried stiffly forward from the shoulders as if he were trying to hold himself to the course he had decided upon by focusing on some distant object straight before him. But all the while, as he went along before the entrance and the show windows filled with books which flanked it on both sides, he peered sharply out of the corner of his eye like a spy who had to find out what was going on inside the building without letting the passers-by observe his interest. He walked to the end of the block and turned about and then came back, and again as he passed in front of the publishing house he kept his face fixed straight ahead and looked stealthily out of the corner of his eye. For fifteen or twenty minutes he repeated this strange manœuvred, and each time as he approached the door he-would hesitate and half turn as if about to enter, and then abruptly go on as before.

Finally, as he came abreast of the entrance for perhaps the fiftieth time, he quickened his stride and seized the door-knob—but at once, as though it had given him an electric shock, he snatched his hand away and backed off, and stood on the kerb looking up at the house of James Rodney & Co. For several minutes more he stood there, shifting uneasily on his feet and watching all the upper windows as for a sign. Then, suddenly, his jaw muscles tightened, he stuck out his under lip in desperate resolve, and he bolted across the pavement, hurled himself against the door, and disappeared inside.

An hour later, if the policeman was still on duty at the corner, he was no doubt as puzzled and mystified as before by the young man’s behaviour as he emerged from the building. He came out slowly, walking mechanically, a dazed look on his face, and in one of his hands, which dangled loosely at his sides, he held a crumpled slip of yellow paper. He emerged from the office of James Rodney & Co. like a man walking in a trance. With the slow and thoughtless movements of an automaton, he turned his steps uptown, and, still with the rapt and dazed look upon his face, he headed north and disappeared into the crowd..

It was, late afternoon and the shadows were slanting swiftly eastwards when George Webber came to his senses somewhere in the wilds of the upper Bronx. How he got there he never knew. All he could remember was that suddenly he felt hungry and stopped and looked about him and realized where he was. His dazed look gave way to one of amazement and incredulity, and his mouth began W stretch in a broad grin. In his hand he still held the rectangular slip of crisp yellow paper, and slowly he smoothed out the wrinkles and examined it carefully.

It was a cheque for five hundred dollars. His book bad been accepted, and this was an advance against his royalties.

So he was happier than he had ever been in all his life. Fame, at last, was knocking at his door and wooing him with her sweet blandishments, and he lived in a kind of glorious delirium. The next weeks and months were filled with the excitement of the impending event. The book would not be published till the autumn, but meanwhile there was much work to do. Foxhall Edwards had made some suggestions for cutting and revising the manuscript, and, although George at first objected, he surprised himself in the end by agreeing with Edwards, and he undertook to do what Edwards wanted.

George had called his novel, Home to Our Mountains, and in it he had packed everything he knew about his home town in Old Catawba and the people there. He had distilled every line of it out of his own experience of life. And, now that the issue was decided, he sometimes trembled when he thought that it would be only a matter of months before the whole world knew what he had written. He loathed the thought of giving pain to anyone, and that he might do so had never occurred to him till now. But now it was out of his hands, and he began to feel uneasy. Of course it was fiction, but it was made as all honest fiction must be, from the stuff of human life. Some people might recognize themselves, and be offended, and then what would he do? Would he have to go around in smoked glasses and false whiskers? He comforted himself with the hope that his characterisations were not so true as, in another mood, he liked to think they, were, and he thought that perhaps no one would notice anything.

Rodney’s Magazine, too, had become interested in the young author and was going to publish a story, a chapter from the book, in their next number. This news added immensely to his excitement. He was eager to see his name in print, and in the happy interval of expectancy he felt like a kind of universal Don Juan, for he literally loved everybody—his fellow instructors at the school, his drab students, the little shopkeepers in all the stores, even the nameless hordes that thronged the streets. Rodney’s, of course, was the greatest and the finest publishing house in all the world, and Foxhall Edwards was the greatest editor and the finest man that ever was. George had liked him instinctively from the first, and now, like an old and intimate friend, he was calling him Fox. George knew that Fox believed in him, and the editor’s faith and confidence, coming as it had come, at a time when George had given up all hope, restored his self-respect and charged him with energy for new work.

Already his next novel was begun and was beginning to take shape within him. He would soon have to get it out of him. He dreaded the prospect of buckling down in earnest to write it, for he knew the agony of it. It was like demoniacal possession, driving him with an alien force much greater than his own. While the fury of creation was upon him, it meant sixty cigarettes a day, twenty cups of coffee, meals snatched anyhow and anywhere and at whatever time of day or night he happened to remember he was hungry. It meant sleeplessness, and miles of walking to bring on the physical fatigue without which he could not sleep, then nightmares, nerves, and exhaustion in the morning. As he said to Fox:

“There are better ways to write a book, but this, God help me, is mine, and you’ll have to learn to put up with it.”

When Rodney’s Magazine came out with the story, George fully expected convulsions of the earth, falling meteors, suspension of traffic in the streets, and a general strike. But nothing happened. A few of his friends mentioned it, but that was all. For several days he felt let down, but then his common sense reassured him that people couldn’t really tell much about a new author from a short piece in a magazine. The book would show them who he was and what he could do. It would be different then. He could afford to wait a little longer for the fame which he was certain would soon be his.

It was not until later, after the first excitement had worn off and George had become accustomed to the novelty of being an author whose book was actually going to be published, that he began to learn a little about the unknown world of publishing and the people who inhabit it—and not till then did he begin to understand and appreciate the teal quality of Fox Edwards. And it was through Otto Hauser—so much like Fox in his essential integrity, so sharply contrasted to him in other respects—that George got his first real insight into the character of his editor.

Hausa Was a reader at Rodney’s, and probably the best publisher’s reader in America. He might have been a publisher’s editor—a rare and good one—had he been driven forward by ambition, enthusiasm, daring, tenacious resolution, and that eagerness to seek and find the best which a great editor must have. But Hauser was content to spend his days reading ridiculous manuscripts written by ridiculous people on all sorts of ridiculous subjects “The Breast Stroke,” “Rock Gardens for Everybody,” “The Life and Times of Lydia Pinkham,” “The New Age of Plenty”—and once in a while something that had the fire of passion, the spark of genius, the glow of truth.

Otto Hauser lived in a tiny apartment near First Avenue, and he invited George to drop in one evening. George went, and they spent the evening talking. After that he returned again and again because he liked Otto, and also because he was puzzled by the contradictions of his qualities, especially by something aloof, impersonal, and withdrawing in his nature which seemed so out of place beside the clear and positive elements in his character.

Otto did all the housekeeping himself. He had tried having cleaning women in from time to time, but eventually he had dispensed entirely with their services.’They were not clean and tidy enough to suit him, and their casual and haphazard disarrangements of objects that had been placed exactly where he wanted them annoyed his order-loving soul. He hated clutter. He had only a few books—a shelf or two—most of them the latest publications of the house of Rodney, and a few volumes sent him by other publishers. Usually he gave his books away as soon as he finished reading them because he hated clutter, and books made clutter. Sometimes he wondered if he didn’t hate books, too. Certainly he didn’t like to have many of them around: the sight of them irritated him.

George found him a curious enigma. Otto Hauser was possessed of remarkable gifts, yet he was almost wholly lacking in those qualities which cause a man to “get on” in the world. In fact, he didn’t want to “get on”. He had a horror of “getting on”, of going any further than he bad already gone. He wanted to be a publisher’s reader, and nothing more. At James Rodney & Co. he did the work they put into his hands. He did punctiliously what he was required to do. He gave his word, when he was asked to give it, with the complete integrity of his quiet soul, the unerring rightness of his judgment, the utter finality of his Germanic spirit. But beyond that he would not go.

When one of the editors at Rodney’s, of whom there were several besides Foxhall Edwards, asked Hauser for his opinion, the ensuing conversation would go something like this:

“You have read the manuscript?”

“Yes,” said Hauser, “I have read it.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was without merit.”

“Then you do not recommend its publication?”

“No, I do not think it is worth publishing.”

Or:

“Did you read that manuscript?”

“Yes,” Hauser would say. “I read it.”

“Well, what did you think of it? (Confound it, can’t the fellow say what he thinks without having to be asked all the timer)”

“I think it is a work of genius.”

Incredulously: “You do!”

“I do, yes. To my mind there is no question about it.”

“But look here, Hauser—” excitedly—“if what you say is true, this boy—the fellow who wrote it—why, he’s just a kid—no one ever heard of him before—comes from somewhere out West—Nebraska, Iowa, one of those places—never been anywhere, apparently—if what you say is true, we’ve made a discovery!”

“I suppose you have. Yes. The book is a work of genius.”

“But—(Damn it all, what’s wrong with the man anyway? Here he makes a discovery like this—an astounding statement of this sort—and shows no more enthusiasm than if he were discussing a cabbage head!)—but, see here, then! You—you mean there’s something wrong with it?”

“No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I think it is a magnificent piece of writing.”

“But—(Good Lord, the fellow is a queer fish!)—but you mean to say that—that perhaps it’s not suitable for publication in its present form?”

“No. I think it’s eminently publishable.”

“But it’s overwritten, isn’t it?”

“It is overwritten. Yes.”

“I thought so, too,” said the editor shrewdly. “Of course, the fellow shows he knows very little about writing. He doesn’t know how he does it, he repeats himself continually, he is childish and exuberant and extravagant, and he does ten times too much of everything.. We have a hundred other writers who know more about writing than he does.”

“I suppose we have, yes,” Hauser agreed. “Nevertheless, he is a man of genius, and they are not. His, book is a work of genius, and theirs are not.”

“Then you think we ought to publish him?”

“I think so, yes.”

“But—(Ah, here’s the catch, maybe—the thing he’s holding back on!)—but you think this is all he has to say?—that he’s written himself out in this one book?—that he’ll never be able to write another?”

“No. I think nothing of the sort. I can’t say, of course. They may kill him, as they often do——”

“(God, what a gloomy Gus the fellow is!)”

“—but on the basis of this book, I should say there’s no danger of his running dry. He should have fifty books in him.”

“But—(Good Lord! What is the catch?)—but then you mean you don’t think it’s time for such a book as this in America yet?”

“No, I don’t mean that. I think it is time.”

“Why?”

“Because it has happened. Iris always time when it happens.”

“But some of our best critics say it’s not time.”

“I know they do. However, they are wrong. It is simply not their time, that’s all.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, their time is critic’s time. The book is creator’s time. The two times are not the same.”

“You think, then, that the critics are behind the time?”

“They are behind creator’s time, yes.”

“Then they may not see this book as the work of genius which you say it is. Do you think they will?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps not. However, it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter! Why, what do you mean?”

“I mean that the thing is good, and cannot be destroyed. Therefore it doesn’t matter what anyone says.”

“Then—Good Lord, Hauser!—if what you say is true, we’ve made a great discovery!”

“I think you have. Yes.”

“But—but—is that all you have to say?”

“I think so, yes. What else is there to say?”

Baffled: “Nothing—only, I should think you would be excited about it!” Then, completely defeated and resigned: “Oh, all right! All right, Hauser! Thanks very much!”

The people at Rodney’s couldn’t understand it. They didn’t know what to make of it. Finally, they had given up trying, all except Fox Edwards—and Fox would never give up trying to understand anything. Fox still came by Hauser’s office—his little cell—and looked in on him. Fox’s old grey hat would be pushed back on his head, for he never took it off when he worked, and there would be a look of troubled wonder in his sea-pale eyes as he bent over and stooped and craned and stared at Hauser, as if he were regarding for the first time some fantastic monster from the marine jungles of the ocean. Then he would turn and walk away, hands hanging to his coat lapels, and in his eyes there would be a look of utter astonishment.

Fox couldn’t understand it yet. As for Hauser himself, he had no answers, nothing to tell them.

It was not until George Webber had become well acquainted with both men that be began to penetrate the mystery. Foxhall Edwards and Otto Hauser—to know them both, to see them working in the same office, each in his own way, was to understand them both as perhaps neither could have been understood completely by himself. Each man, by being what he was, revealed to George the secret springs of character which had made the two of them so much alike—and so utterly different.

There may have been a time when an intense and steady flame had been alive in the quiet depths of Otto Hauser’s spirit. But that was before he knew what it was like to be a great editor. Now he had seen it for himself, and he wanted none of it. For ten years he had watched Fox Edwards, and he well knew what was needed: the pure flame living in the midst of darkness; the constant, quiet, and relentless effort of the will to accomplish what the pure flame burned for, what the spirit knew; the unspoken agony of that constant effort as it fought to win through to its clear purpose and somehow to subdue the world’s blind and brutal force of ignorance, hostility, prejudice, and intolerance which were opposed to it—the fools of age, the fools of prudery, the fools of genteelness, fogyism, and nice-Nellyism, the fools of bigotry, Philistinism, jealousy, and envy, and, worst of all, the utter, sheer damn fools of nature!

Oh, to burn so, so to be consumed, exhausted, spent by the passion of this constant flame! And for what? For what? And why? Because some obscure kid from Tennessee, some tenant farmer’s son from Georgia, or some country doctor’s boy in North Dakota—untitled, unpedigreed, unhallowed by fools’standards—had been touched with genius, and so had striven to give a tongue to the high passion of his loneliness, to wrest from his locked spirit his soul’s language and a portion of the tongue of his unuttered brothers, to find a channel in the blind immensity of this harsh land for the pent tides of his creation, and to make, perhaps, in this howling wilderness of life some carving and some dwelling of his own—all this before the world’s fool-bigotry, fool-ignorance, fool-cowardice, fool-faddism, fool-mockery, fool-stylism, and fool-hatred for anyone who was not corrupted, beaten, and a fool had either quenched the hot, burning passion with ridicule, contempt, denial, and oblivion, or else corrupted the strong will with the pollutions of fool-success. It was for this that such as Fox must burn and suffer—to keep that flame’of agony alive in the spirit of some inspired and stricken boy until the world of fools had taken it into their custody, and betrayed it!

Otto Hauser had seen it all.

And in the end what was the reward for such a one as Fox? To achieve the lonely and unhoped-for victories one by one, and to see the very fools who had denied them acclaim them as their own. To lapse again to search, to silence, and to waiting while fools greedily pocketed as their own the coin of one man’s spirit, proudly hailed as their discovery the treasure of another’s exploration, loudly celebrated their own vision as they took unto themselves the fulfilment of another’s prophecy. Ah, the heart must break at last—the heart of Fox, as well as the heart of genius, the lost boy; the frail, small heart of man must falter, stop at last from beating; but the heart of folly would beat on for ever.

So Otto Hauser would have none of it. He would grow hot over nothing. He would try to see the truth for himself, and let it go at that.

This was Otto Hauser as George came to know him. In the confidence of friendship Otto held up a mirror to his own soul, affording a clear, unposed reflection of his quiet, unassuming, and baffling integrity; but in the same mirror he also revealed, without quite being aware of it, the stronger and more shining image of Fox Edwards.

George knew how fortunate he was to have as his editor a man like Fox. And as time went on, and his respect and admiration for the older man warmed to deep affection, he realized that Fox had become for him much more than editor and friend. Little by little it seemed to George that he had found in Fox the father he had lost and had long been looking for. And so it was that Fox became a second father to him—the father of his spirit.

3. The Microscopic Gentleman from Japan

In the old house where George lived that year Mr. Katamoto occupied the ground floor just below him, and in a little while they got to know each other very well. It might be said that their friendship began in mystification and went on to a state of security and staunch understanding.

Not that Mr. Katamoto ever forgave George when he erred. He was always instantly ready to inform him that he had taken a false step again (the word is used advisedly), but he was so infinitely patient, so unflaggingly hopeful of George’s improvement, so unfailingly good-natured and courteous, that no one could possibly have been angry or failed to try to mend his ways. What saved the situation was Katamoto’s gleeful, childlike sense of humour. He was one of those microscopic gentlemen from Japan, scarcely five feet tall, thin and very wiry in his build, and George’s barrel chest, broad shoulders, long, dangling arms, and large feet seemed to inspire his comic risibilities from the beginning. The first time they met, as they were just passing each other in the hall, Katamoto began to giggle when he saw George coming; and as they came abreast, the little man flashed a great expanse of gleaming teeth, wagged a finger roguishly, and said:

“Tramp-ling! Tramp-ling!”

For several days, whenever they passed each other in the hall, this same performance was repeated. George thought the words were very mysterious, and at first could not fathom their recondite meaning or understand why the sound of them was enough to set Katamoto off in a paroxysm of mirth. And yet when he would utter them and George would look at him in a surprised, inquiring kind of way, Katamoto would bend double with convulsive laughter and would stamp at the floor like a child with a tiny foot, shrieking hysterically! “Yis—yis—yis! You are tramp-ling!”—after which he would flee away.

George inferred that these mysterious references to “tramp-ling” which always set Katamoto off in such a fit of laughter had something to do with the bigness of his feet, for Katamoto would look at them quickly and slyly as he passed, and then giggle. However, a fuller explanation was soon provided. Katamoto came upstairs one afternoon and knocked at George’s door. When it was opened, he giggled and flashed his teeth and looked somewhat embarrassed.. After a moment, with evident hesitancy, he grinned painfully and said:

“If you ple-e-eze, sir! Will you—have some tea—with me—yis?” He spoke the words very slowly, with a deliberate formality, after which he flashed a quick, eager, and ingratiating smile.

George told him he would be glad to, and got his coat and started downstairs with him. Katamoto padded swiftly on ahead, his little feet shod in felt slippers that made no sound. Half-way down the stairs, as if the noise of George’s heavy tread had touched his funny-bone again, Katamoto stopped quickly, turned and pointed at George’s feet, and giggled coyly: “Tramp-ling! You are trampling!” Then he turned and fairly fled away down the stairs and down the hall, shrieking like a gleeful child. He waited at the door to usher his guest in, introduced him to the slender, agile little Japanese girl who seemed to stay there all the time, and finally brought George back into his studio and served him tea.

It was an amazing place. Katamoto bad redecorated the fine old rooms and fitted them up according to the whims of his curious taste. The big back room was very crowded, intricate, and partitioned off into several small compartments with beautiful Japanese screens. He had also constructed a flight of stairs and a balcony that extended around three sides of the room, and on this balcony George could see a couch. The room was crowded with tiny chairs and tables, and there was an opulent-looking sofa and cushions. There were a great many small carved objects and bric-à-brac, and a strong smell of incense.

The centre of the room, however, had been left entirely bare save for a big strip of spattered canvas and an enormous plaster figure. George gathered that he did a thriving business turning out sculptures for expensive speak-easies, or immense fifteen-foot statues of native politicians which were to decorate public squares in little towns, or in the state capitals of Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming. Where and how he had learned this curious profession George never found out, but he had mastered it with true Japanese fidelity, and so well that his products were apparently in greater demand than those of American sculptors. In spite of his small size and fragile build, the man was a dynamo of energy and could perform the labours of a Titan. God knows how he did it—where he found the strength.

George asked a question about the big plaster cast in the centre of the room, and Katamoto took him over and showed it to him, remarking as he pointed to the creature’s huge feet:

“He is—like you!…He is tramp-ling!…Yis!…He is tramp-ling!”

Then he took George up the stairs on to the balcony, which George dutifully admired.

“Yis?—You like?” He smiled at George eagerly, a little doubtfully, then pointed at his couch and said: “I sleep here!” Then he pointed to the ceiling, which was so low that George had to stoop. “You sleep there?” said Katamoto eagerly.

George nodded.

Katamoto went on again with a quick smile, but with embarrassed hesitancy and a painful difficulty in his tone that had not been there before:

“I here,” he said, pointing, “you there—yis?”

He looked at George almost pleadingly, a little desperately—and suddenly George began to catch on.

“Oh! You mean I am right above you—” Katamoto nodded with instant relief—“and sometimes when I stay up late you hear me?”

“Yis! Yis!” He kept nodding his head vigorously. “Sometimes—” he smiled a little painfully—“sometimes—you will be tramp-ling!” He shook his finger at George with coy reproof and giggled.

“I’m awfully sorry,” George said. “Of course, I didn’t know you slept so near—so near the ceiling. When I work late I pace the floor. It’s a bad habit. I’ll do what I can to stop it.”

“Oh, no-o!” he cried, genuinely distressed. “I not want—how you say it?—change your life!…If you ple-e-ese, sir! Just little thing—not wear shoes at night!” He pointed at his own small felt-shod feet and smiled up at George hopefully. “You like slippers yis?” And he smiled persuasively again.

After that, of course, George wore slippers. But sometimes he would forget, and the next morning Katamoto would be rapping at his door again. He was never angry, he was always patient and good-humoured, he was always beautifully courteous—but he would always call George to account. “You were tramp-ling!” he would cry. “Last night—again—tramp-ling!” And George would tell him he was sorry and would try not to do it again, and Katamoto would go away giggling, pausing to turn and wag his finger roguishly and call out once more, “Tramp-ling!”—after which he would flee downstairs, shrieking with laughter.

They were good friends.

In the months that followed, again and again George would come in the house to find the hall below full of sweating, panting movers, over whom Katamoto, covered from head to foot with clots and lumps of plaster, would hover prayerfully and with a fearful, pleading grin lest they mar his work, twisting his small hands together convulsively, aiding the work along by slight shudders, quick darts of breathless terror, writhing and shrinking movements of the body, and saying all the while with an elaborate, strained, and beseeching courtesy:

“Now, if—you—gentleman—a little!…You…yis—yis—yis-s!” with a convulsive grin. “Oh-h-h! Yis—yis-s! If you ple-e-ese, sir!…If you would down—a little—yis-s!—yis-s!—yis-s!” he hissed softly with that prayerful and pleading grin.

And the movers would carry out of the house and stow into their van the enormous piecemeal fragments of some North Dakota Pericles, whose size was so great that one wondered how this dapper, fragile little man could possibly have fashioned such a leviathan.

Then the movers would depart, and for a space Mr. Katamoto would loaf and invite his soul. He would come out in the backyard with his girl, the slender, agile little Japanese—who looked as, if she had some Italian blood in her as well—and for hours at a time they would play at handball. Mr. Katamoto would knock the ball up against the projecting brick wall of the house next door, and every time he scored a point he would scream with laughter, clapping his small hands together, bending over weakly and pressing his hand against his stomach, and staggering about with delight and merriment. Choking with laughter, he would cry out in a high, delirious voice as rapidly as he could:

“Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis! Yis, yis, yis!”

Then he would catch sight of George looking at him from the window, and this would set him off again, for he would wag his finger and fairly scream:

“You were tramp-ling!…Yis, yis, yis!…Last night—again tramp-ling!”

This would reduce him to such a paroxysm of mirth that he would stagger across the court and lean against the wall, all caved in, holding his narrow stomach and shrieking faintly.

It was now the full height of steaming summer, and one day early in August George came home to find the movers in the house again. This time it was obvious that a work of more than usual magnitude was in transit. Mr. Katamoto, spattered with plaster, was of course hovering about in the hall, grinning nervously and fluttering prayerfully around the husky truckmen. As George came in, two of the men were backing slowly down the hall, carrying between them an immense head, monstrously jowled and set in an expression of farseeing statesmanship. A moment later three more men backed out of the studio, panting and cursing as they grunted painfully around the flowing fragment of a long frock coat and the vested splendour of a bulging belly. The first pair had now gone back in the studio, and when they came out again they were staggering beneath the trousered shank of a mighty leg and a booted Atlantean hoof, and as they passed, one of the other men, now returning for more of the statesman’s parts, pressed himself against the wall to let them by and said:

“Jesus! If the son-of-a-bitch stepped on you with that foot, he wouldn’t leave a grease spot, would he, Joe?”

The last piece of all was an immense fragment of the Solon’s arm and fist, with one huge forefinger pointed upwards in an attitude of solemn objurgation and avowal.

That figure was Katamoto’s masterpiece; and George felt as he saw it pass that the enormous upraised finger was the summit of his art and the consummation of his life: Certainly it was the apple of his eye. George had never seen him before in such a state of extreme agitation. He fairly prayed above the sweating men: It was obvious that the coarse indelicacy of their touch made him shudder. The grin was frozen on his face in an expression of congealed terror. He writhed, he wriggled, he wrung his little hands, he crooned to them. And if anything had happened to that fat, pointed finger, George felt sure that he would have dropped dead on the spot.

At length, however, they got everything stowed away in their big van without mishap and drove off with their Ozymandias, leaving Mr. Katamoto, frail, haggard, and utterly exhausted, looking at the kerb. He came back into the house and saw George standing there and smiled wanly at him.

“Tramp-ling,” he said feebly, and shook his finger, and for the first time there was no mirth or energy in him.

George had never seen him tired before. It had never occurred to him that he could get tired. The little man had always been so full of inexhaustible life. And now, somehow, George felt an unaccountable sadness to see him so weary and so strangely grey. Katamoto was silent for a moment, and then he lifted his face and said, almost tonelessly, yet with a shade of wistful eagerness:

“You see statue—yis?”

“Yes, Kato, I saw it.”

“And you like?”

“Yes, very much.”

“And—” he giggled a little and made a shaking movement with his hands—“you see foot?”

“Yes.”

“I sink,” he said, “he will be tramp-ling—yis?”—and he made laughing sound.

“He ought to,” George said, “with a hoof like that. It’s almost as big as mine,” he added, as an afterthought.

Katamoto seemed delighted with this observation, for he laughed shrilly and said: “Yis! Yis!”—nodding his head emphatically. He was silent for another moment, then hesitantly, but with an eagerness that he could not conceal, he said:

“And you see finger?”

“Yes, Kato.”

“And you like?”—quickly, earnestly.

“Very much.”

“Big finger—yis?”—with a note of rising triumph in his “Very big, Kato.”

“And pointing—yis?” he said ecstatically, grinning from ear to ear and pointing his own small finger heavenward.

“Yes, pointing.”

He sighed contentedly. “Well, zen,” he said, with the appeased’air of a child, “I’m glad you like.”

For a week or so after that George did not see Katamoto again or even think of him. This was the vacation period at the School for Utility Cultures, and George was devoting every minute of his time, day and, night, to a fury of new writing. Then one afternoon; a long passage completed and the almost illegible pages of his swift scrawl tossed in a careless heap upon the floor, he sat relaxed, looking out of his back window, and suddenly he thought of Katamoto again. He remembered that he had not seen him recently, and it seemed strange that he had not even heard the familiar thud of the little ball against the wall outside or the sound of his high, shrill laughter. This realisation, with its sense of loss, so troubled him that he went downstairs immediately and pressed Katamoto’s bell.

There was no answer. All was silent. He waited, and no one came. Then he went down to the basement and found the janitor and spoke to him. He said that Mr. Katamoto had been ill, No, it was not serious, he thought, but the doctor had advised a rest, a brief period of relaxation from his exhausting labours, and had sent him for care and observation to the near-by hospital.

George meant to go to see him, but he was busy with his writing and kept putting it off. Then one morning, some ten days later, coming back home after breakfast in a restaurant, he found a moving van backed up before the house. Katamoto’s door was open, and when he looked inside the moving people had already stripped the apartment almost bare. In the centre of the once fantastic room, now empty, where Katamoto had performed his prodigies of work, stood a young Japanese, an acquaintance of the sculptor, whom George had seen there several times before. He was supervising the removal of the last furnishings.

The young Japanese looked up quickly, politely, with a toothy grin of frozen courtesy as George came in. He did not speak until George asked him how Mr. Katamoto was. And then, with the same toothy, frozen grin upon his face, the same impenetrable courtesy, he said that Mr. Katamoto was dead.

George was shocked, and stood there for a moment, knowing there was nothing more to say, and yet feeling somehow, as people always feel on these occasions, that there was something that, he ought to say. He looked at the young Japanese and started to speak, and found himself looking into the inscrutable, polite, untelling eyes of Asia.

So he said nothing more. He just thanked the young man and went out.

4. Some Things Will Never Change

Out of his front windows George could see nothing except the sombre bulk of the warehouse across the street. It was an old building, with a bleak and ugly front of rusty, indurated brown and a harsh webbing of fire-escapes, and across the whole width of the facade stretched a battered wooden sign on which, in faded letters, one could make out the name—“The Security Distributing Corp.” George did not know what a distributing corporation was, but every day since he had come into this street to live, enormous motor-vans had driven up before this dingy building and had backed snugly against the worn plankings of the loading platform, which ended with a sharp, sheared emptiness four feet above the pavement. The drivers and their helpers would leap from their seats, and instantly the quiet depths of the old building would burst into a furious energy of work, and the air would be filled with harsh cries:

“Back it up, deh! Back it up! Cuh-mahn! Cuh-mahn! Givvus a hand, youse guys! Hey-y! You!”

They looked at one another with hard faces of smiling derision, quietly saying “Jesus!” out of the corners of their mouths. Surly, they stood upon their rights, defending truculently the narrow frontier of their duty:

“Wadda I care where it goes! Dat’s yoeh look-out! Wat t’hell’s it got to do wit me?”

They worked with speed and power and splendid aptness, furiously, unamiably, with high, exacerbated voices, spurred and goaded by their harsh unrest.

The city was their stony-hearted mother, and from her breast they had drawn a bitter nurture. Born to brick and asphalt, to crowded tenements and swarming streets, stunned into sleep as children beneath the sudden slamming racket of the elevated trains, taught to fight, to menace, and to struggle in a world of savage violence and incessant din, they had had the city’s qualities stamped into their flesh and movements, distilled through all their tissues, etched with the city’s acid into their tongue and brain and vision. Their faces were tough and seamed, the skin thick, dry, without a hue of freshness or of colour. Their pulse beat with the furious rhythm of the city’s stroke: ready in an instant with a curse, metallic clangours sounded from their twisted lips, and their hearts were filled with a dark, immense, and secret pride.

Their souls were like the asphalt visages of city streets. Each day the violent colours of a thousand new sensations swept across them, and each day all sound and sight and fury were erased from their unyielding surfaces. Ten thousand furious days had passed about them, and they had no memory. They lived like creatures born full-grown into present time, shedding the whole accumulation of the past with every breath, and all their lives were written in the passing of each actual moment.

And they were sure and certain, for ever wrong, but always confident. They had no hesitation, they confessed no ignorance or error, and they knew no doubts. They began each morning with a gibe, a shout, an oath of hard impatience, eager for the tumult of the day. At noon they sat strongly in their seats and, through fumes of oil and hot machinery, addressed their curses to the public at the tricks and strategies of cunning rivals, the tyranny of the police, the stupidity of pedestrians, and the errors of less skilful men than they. Each day they faced the perils of the streets with hearts as calm as if they were alone upon a country road. Each day, with minds untroubled, they embarked upon adventures from which the bravest men bred in the wilderness would have recoiled in terror and desolation.

In the raw days of early spring they had worn shirts of thick black wool and leather jackets, but now, in summer, their arms were naked, tattooed, brown, and lean with the play of whipcord muscles. The power and precision with which they worked stirred in George a deep emotion of respect, and also touched him with humility. For whenever he saw it, his own life, with its conflicting desires, its uncertain projects and designs, its labours begun in hope and so often ended in incompletion, by comparison with the lives of these men who, had learned to use their strength and talents perfectly, seemed faltering, blind, and baffled.

At night, too, five times a week, the mighty vans would line up at the kerb in an immense and waiting caravan. They were covered now with great tarpaulins, small green lamps were burning on each side, and the drivers, their faces faintly lit with the glowing points of cigarettes, would be talking quietly in the shadows of their huge machines. Once George had asked one of the drivers the destination of these nightly journeys, and the man had told him that they went to Philadelphia, and would return again by morning.

The sight of these great vans at night, sombre, silent, yet alive with powerful expectancy as their drivers waited for the word to start, gave George a sense of mystery and joy. These men were part of that great company who love the night, and he felt a bond of union with them. For he had always loved the night more dearly than the day, and the energies of his life had risen to their greatest strength in the secret and exultant heart of darkness.

He knew the joys and labours of such men as these. He could see the shadowy procession of their vans lumbering through the sleeping towns, and feel the darkness, the cool fragrance of the country, on his face. He could see the drivers hunched behind the wheels, their senses all alert in the lilac dark, their eyes fixed hard upon the road to curtain off the loneliness of the land at night. And he knew the places where they stopped to eat, the little all-night lunch-rooms warm with greasy light, now empty save for the dozing authority of the aproned Greek behind the counter, and now filled with the heavy shuffle of the drivers’feet, the hard and casual intrusions of their voices.

They came in, flung themselves upon the row of stools, and gave their orders. And as they waited, their hunger drawn into sharp focus by the male smells of boiling coffee, frying eggs and onions, and sizzling hamburgers, they took the pungent, priceless, and uncostly solace of a cigarette, lit between cupped hand and strong-seamed mouth, drawn deep and then exhaled in slow fumes from the nostrils. They poured great gobs and gluts of thick tomato ketchup on their hamburgers, tore with blackened fingers at the slabs of fragrant bread, and ate with jungle lust, thrusting at plate and cup with quick and savage gulpings.

Oh, he was with them, of them, for them, blood brother of their joy and hunger to the last hard swallow, the last deep, ease of sated bellies, the last slow coil of blue expiring from their grateful lungs. Their lives seemed glorious to him in the magic dark of summer. They swept cleanly through the night into the first light and bird song of the morning, into the morning of new joy upon the earth; and as he thought of this it seemed to him that the secret, wild, and lonely heart of man was young and living in the darkness, and could never die.

Before him, all that summer of 1929, in the broad window of the warehouse, a man sat at a desk and looked out into the street, in a posture that never changed. George saw him there whenever he glanced across, yet he never saw him do anything but look out of the window with a fixed, abstracted stare. At first the man had been such an unobtrusive part of his surroundings that he had seemed to fade into’them, and had gone almost unnoticed. Then Esther, having observed him there, pointed to him one day and said merrily:

“There’s our friend in the Distributing Corp again! What do you suppose he distributes? I’ve never seen him do anything! Have you noticed him—hah?” she cried eagerly. “God! It’s the strangest thing I ever saw!” She laughed richly, made a shrug of bewildered protest, and, after a moment, said with serious wonder: “Isn’t it queer? What do you suppose a man like that can do? What do you suppose he’s thinking of?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” George said indifferently. “Of nothing, I suppose.”

Then they forgot the man and turned to talk of other things, yet from that moment the man’s singular presence was pricked out in George’s mind and he began to watch him with hypnotic fascination, puzzled by the mystery of his immobility and his stare.

And after that, as soon as Esther came in every day, she would glance across the street and cry out in a jolly voice which had in it the note of affectionate satisfaction and assurance that people have when they see some familiar and expected object:

“Well, I see our old friend, The Distributing Corp, is still looking out of his window! I wonder what he’s thinking of to-day.”

She would turn away, laughing. Then, for a moment, with her childlike fascination for words and rhythms, she gravely meditated their strange beat, silently framing and pronouncing with her lips a series of meaningless sounds—“Corp-Borp-Forp-Dorp-Torp”—and at length singing out in a gleeful chant, and with an air of triumphant discovery:

“The Distributing Corp, the Distributing Corp,

He sits all day and he does no Worp!”

George protested that her rhyme made no sense, but she threw back her encrimsoned face and screamed with laughter.

But after a while they stopped laughing about the man. For, obscure as his employment seemed, incredible and comical as his indolence had been when they first noticed it, there came to be something impressive, immense, and formidable in the quality of that fixed stare. Day by day, a thronging traffic of life and business passed before him in the street; day by day, the great vans came, the drivers, handlers, and packers swarmed before his eyes, filling, the air with their oaths and cries, irritably intent upon their labour but the man in the window never looked at them, never gave any, sign that he heard them, never seemed to be aware of their existence—he just sat there and looked out, his eyes fixed in an abstracted stare.

In the course of George Webber’s life, many things of no great importance in themselves had become deeply embedded in his memory, stuck there like burs in a scottie’s tail; and always they were little things which, in an instant of clear perception, had riven his heart with some poignant flash of meaning. Thus he remembered, and would remember for ever, the sight of Esther’s radiant, earnest face when, unexpectedly one night, he caught sight of it as it flamed and’vanished in a crowd of grey, faceless faces in Times Square. So, too, he remembered two deaf mutes he had seen talking on their fingers in a subway train; and a ringing peal of children’s laughter in a desolate street at sunset; and the waitresses in their dingy little rooms across the backyard, washing, ironing, and rewashing day after day the few adornments of their shabby finery, in endless preparations for a visitor who never came.

And now, to his store of treasured trivia was added the memory of this man’s face—thick, white, expressionless, set in its stolid and sorrowful stare. Immutable, calm, impassive, it became for him the symbol of a kind of permanence in the rush and sweep of chaos in the city, where all things come and go and pass and are so soon forgotten. For, day after day, as he watched the man and tried to penetrate his mystery, at last it seemed to him that he had found the answer.

And after that, in later years, whenever he remembered the man’s face, the time was fixed at the end of a day in late summer. Without-violence or heat, the last rays of the sun fell on the warm brick of the building and painted it with a sad, unearthly light. In the window the man sat, always looking out. He never wavered in his gaze, his eyes were calm and sorrowful, and on his face was legible the exile of an imprisoned spirit.

That man’s face became for him the face of. Darkness and of Time. It never spoke, and yet it had a voice—a voice that seemed to have the whole earth in it. It was the voice of evening and of night, and in it were the blended tongues of all those men who have passed through the heat and fury of the day, and who now lean quietly upon the sills of evening. In it was the whole vast hush and weariness that comes upon the city at the hour of dusk, when the chaos of another day is ended, and when everything—streets, buildings, and eight million people—breathe slowly, with a tired and sorrowful joy. And in that single tongueless voice was the knowledge of all their tongues.

“Child, child,” it said, "have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul—but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them—but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way—but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savoured all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

"We have outlived the shift and glitter of so many fashions, we have seen so many things that come and go, so many words forgotten, so many flames that flared and were destroyed; yet we know now we are strangers whose footfalls have not left a print upon the endless streets of life. We shall not go into the dark again, nor suffer madness, nor admit despair: we have built a wall about us now. We shall not hear the docks of time strike out on foreign air, nor wake at morning in some alien land to think of home: our wandering is over, and our hunger fed. 0 brother, son, and comrade, because we have lived so long and seen so much, we are content to make our own a few things now, letting millions pass.

"Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.

"The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air—these things will never change.

"The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbours, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry—these things will always be the same.

"All things belonging to the earth will never change—the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth—all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth—these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts for ever. Only the earth endures, but it endures for ever.

“The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, for ever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”

5. The Hidden Terror

Hand looked at the yellow envelope curiously and turned it over and over in his hand. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness and suppressed excitement to see his name through the transparent front. He was not used to receiving telegrams. Instinctively he delayed opening it because he dreaded what it might contain. Some forgotten incident in his childhood made him associate telegrams with bad news. Who could have sent it? And what could it be about? Well, open it, you fool, and find out!

He ripped off the flap and took out the message. He read it quickly, first glancing at the signature. It was from his Uncle Mark Joyner:

“YOUR AUNT MAW DIED LAST NIGHT STOP FUNERAL THURSDAY IN LIBYA HILL STOP COME HOME IF YOU CAN.”

That was all. No explanation of what she had died of. Old age, most likely. Nothing else could have killed her. She hadn’t been sick or’they would have let him know before this.

The news shook him profoundly. But it was not grief he felt so much as a deep sense of loss, almost impersonal in its quality—a sense of loss and unbelief such as one might feel to discover suddenly that some great force’in nature had ceased to operate. He couldn’t take it in. Ever since his mother had died when he was only eight years old, Aunt Maw had been the most solid and permanent fixture in his boy’s universe. She was a spinster, the older sister of his mother and of his Uncle Mark, and she had taken charge of him and brought him up with all the inflexible zeal of her puritanical nature. She had done her best to make a Joyner of him and a credit to the narrow, provincial, mountain clan to which she belonged.-In this she had failed, and his defection from the ways of Joyner righteousness had caused her deep pain. He had known this for a long time; but now he realised, too, more clearly than he had, ever done before, that she had never faltered in her duty to him as she saw it. As he thought about her life the felt an inexpressible pity for her, and a surge of tenderness and affection almost choked him.

As far back as he could remember, Aunt Maw had seemed to him an ageless crone, as old as God. He could still hear her voice—that croaking monotone which had gone on and on in endless stories of her past, peopling his childhood world with the whole host of Joyners dead and buried in the hills of Zebulon in ancient days before the Civil War. And almost every tale she had told him was a chronicle of sickness, death, and sorrow. She had known about all the Joyners for the last hundred years, and whether they had died of consumption, typhoid fever, pneumonia, meningitis, or pellagra, and she had relived each incident in their lives with an air of croaking relish. From her he had got a picture of his mountain kinsmen that was constantly dark with the terrors of misery and sudden death, a picture made ghostly at frequent intervals by supernatural revelations. The Joyners, so she thought, had been endowed with occult powers by the Almighty, and weft for ever popping up on country roads and speaking to people as they passed, only to have it turn out later that they had been fifty miles away at the time. They were for ever hearing voices and receiving premonitions. If a neighbour died suddenly, the Joyners would flock from miles around’to sit up with the corpse, and in the flickering light of pine logs on the hearth they would talk unceasingly through the night, their droning voices punctuated by the crumbling of the ash as they told how they had received intimations of the impending death a week before it happened.

This was the image of the Joyner world which Aunt Maw’s tireless memories had built up in the mind and spirit of the boy. And he had felt somehow that although other men would live their day and die, the Joyners were a race apart, not subject to this law. They fed on death and were triumphant over it, and the Joyners would go on for ever. But now Aunt Maw the oldest and most death-triumphant Joyner of them all, was dead…

The funeral was to be on Thursday. This was Tuesday. If he took the train to-day, he would arrive to-morrow. He knew that all the Joyners from the hills of Zebulon County in Old Catawba would be gathering even now to hold their tribal rites of death and sorrow, and if he got there so soon he would not be able to escape the horror of their brooding talk. It would be better to wait a day and turn up just before the funeral.

It was now early September. The new term at the School for Utility Cultures would not begin until after the middle of the month, George had not been back to Libya Hill in several years, and he thought he might remain a week or so to see the town again. But he dreaded the prospect of staying with his Joyner relatives, especially at a time like this. Then he remembered Randy Shepperton, who lived next door. Mr. and Mrs. Shepperton were both dead now, and the older girl had married and moved away. Randy had a good job in the town and lived on in the family place with his sister Margaret, who kept house for him. Perhaps they could put him up. They would understand his feelings. So he sent a telegram to Randy, asking for his hospitality, and telling what train he would arrive on.

By the next afternoon, when George went to Pennsylvania Station to catch his train, he had recovered from the first shock of Aunt Maw’s death. The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one’s life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, “Well, where do I go from here?” So it was with George. The prospect of the funeral filled him with dread, but that was still a day off; meanwhile he had a long train ride ahead of him, and he pushed his sombre feelings into the background and allowed himself to savour freely the eager excitement which any journey by train always gave him.

The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great; slant beams of mottled light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men. They contributed to it as drops of rain contribute to a river that draws its flood and movement majestically from great depths, out of purple hills at evening.

Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railway station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.

Each man and woman was full of his own journey. He had one way’to go, one end to reach, through all the shifting complexities of the crowd. For each it was his journey, and he cared nothing about the journeys of the others. Here, as George waited, was a traveller who was afraid that he would miss his train. He was excited, his movements were feverish and abrupt, he shouted to his porter, he went to the window to buy his ticket, he had to wait in line, he fairly pranced with nervousness and kept looking at the clock. Then his wife came quickly towards him over the polished floor. When she was still some distance off, she shouted:

“Have you got the tickets? We haven’t much time! We’ll miss the train!”

“Don’t I know it?” he shouted back in an annoyed tone. “I’m doing the best I can!”’Then he added bitterly and loudly: “We may make it if this man in front of me ever gets done buying his ticket!”

The man in front turned on him menacingly. “Now wait a minute, wait a minute!” he said. “You’re not the only one who has to make a train, you know! I was here before you were! You’ll have to wait your tarn like everybody else!”

A quarrel now developed between them. The other travellers who were waiting for their tickets grew angry and began to mutter. The ticket agent drummed impatiently on his window and peered out at them with a sour visage. Finally some young tough down the line called out in tones of whining irritation:

“Aw, take it outside f’Chris’sake! Give the rest of us a chance! You guys are holdin’up the line!”

At last the man got his tickets and rushed towards his porter, hot and excited. The negro waited suave and smiling, full of easy reassurance:

“You folks don’t need to hurry now. You got lotsa time to make that train. It ain’t goin’away without you.”

Who were these travellers for whom time lay coiled in delicate twists of blue steel wire in each man’s pocket? Here were a few of them: a homesick nigger going back to Georgia; a rich young man from an estate on the Hudson who was going to visit his mother in Washington; a district superintendent, and three of his agents, of a farm machinery company, who had been attending a convention of district leaders in the city; the president of a bank in an Old Catawba town which was tottering on the edge of ruin, who had come desperately, accompanied by two local politicians, to petition New York bankers for a loan; a Greek with tan shoes, a cardboard valise; a swarthy face, and eyes glittering with mistrust, who had peered in through the ticket seller’s window, saying: “How mucha you want to go to Pittsburgh, eh?”; an effeminate young man from one of the city universities who was going to make his weekly lecture on the arts of the theatre to a dub of ladies in Trenton, New Jersey; a lady poetess from a town in Indiana who had been to New York for her yearly spree of “bohemianism”; a prize-fighter and his manager on their way to a fight in St. Louis; some Princeton boys just back from a summer in Europe, on their way home for a short visit before returning to college; a private soldier in the United States army, with the cheap, tough, and slovenly appearance of a private soldier in the United States army; the president of a state university in the Middle West who had just made an eloquent appeal for funds to the New York alumni; a young married couple from Mississippi, with everything new—new clothes, new baggage—and a shy, hostile, and bewildered look; two little Filipinos, brown as berries and with the delicate bones of birds, dressed with the foppish perfection of manikins; women from the suburban towns of New Jersey who had come to the city to shop; women and girls from small towns in the South and West, who had come for holidays, sprees, or visits; the managers and agents of clothing stores in little towns all over the country who had come to the city to buy new styles and fashions; New Yorkers of a certain class, flashily dressed, sensual, and with a high, hard finish, knowing and assured, on their way to vacations in Atlantic City; jaded, faded, bedraggled women, scolding and jerking viciously at the puny arms of dirty children; swarthy, scowling, and dominant-looking Italian men with their dark, greasy, and flabby-looking women, sullen but submissive both to lust and beatings; and smartly-dressed American women, obedient to neither bed nor whip, who had assertive, harsh voices, bold glances, and the good figures but not the living curves, either of body or of spirit, of love, lust, tenderness, or any female fullness of the earth whatever.

There were all sorts and conditions of men and travellers: poor people with the hard, sterile faces of all New Jerseys of the flesh and spirit; shabby and beaten-looking devils with cheap suitcases containing a tie, a collar, and a shirt, who had a look of having dropped for ever off of passing trains into the dirty cinders of new towns and the hope of some new fortune; the shabby floaters and drifters of the nation; suave, wealthy, and experienced people who had been too far, too often, on too many costly trains and ships, and who never looked out of windows any more; old men and women from the country on first visits to their children in the city, who looked about them constantly and suspiciously with the quick eyes of birds and animals, alert, mistrustful, and afraid. There were people who saw everything, and people who saw nothing; people who were weary, sullen, sour, and people who laughed, shouted, and were exultant with the thrill of the voyage; people who thrust and jostled, and people who stood quietly and watched and waited; people with amused, superior looks, and people who glared and bristled pugnaciously. Young, old, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, Americans—they were all there in the station, their infinitely varied destinies suddenly harmonised and given a moment of intense and sombre meaning as they were gathered into the murmurous, all-taking unity of time.

George had a berth in car K19. It was not really different in any respect from any other pullman car, yet for George it had a very special quality and meaning. For every day K19 bound together two points upon the continent—the great city and the small town of Libya Hill where he had been born, eight hundred miles away. It left New York at one-thirty-five each afternoon, and it arrived in Libya Hill at eleven-twenty the next morning.

The moment he entered the pullman he was transported instantly from the vast allness of general humanity in the station into the familiar geography of his home town. One might have been away for years and never have seen’an old familiar face; one might have wandered to the far ends of the earth; one might have got with child a mandrake root, or heard mermaids singing, or known the words and music of what songs the Sirens sang; one might have lived and worked alone for ages in the canyons of Manhattan until the very memory of home was lost and far as in a dream: yet the moment that he entered K19 it all came back again, his feet touched earth, and he was home.

It was uncanny. And what was most wonderful and mysterious about it was that one could come here to this appointed meeting each day at thirty-five minutes after one o’clock, one could come here through the humming traffic of the city to the gigantic portals of the mighty station, one could walk through the concourse for ever swarming with its bustle of arrival and departure, one could traverse the great expanses of the station, peopled with Everybody and haunted by the voice of time—and then, down those steep stairs, there in the tunnel’s depth, underneath this hive-like universe of life, waiting in its proper place, no whit different outwardly from all its other grimy brethren, was K19.

The beaming porter took his bag with a cheerful greeting: “Yes, suh, Mistah Webbah! Glad to see you, suh! Comin’down to see de folks?”

And as they made their way down the green aisle to his seat, George told him that he was going home to his aunt’s funeral. Instantly the negro’s smile was blotted out, and his face took on an expression of deep solemnity and respect.

“I’se sorry to hear dat, Mistah Webbah,” he said, shaking his head. “Yes, suh, I’se pow’ful sorry to hear you say dat.”

Even before these words, were out of mind, another voice from the seat behind was raised in greeting, and George did not have to turn to know who it was. It was Sol Isaacs, of The Toggery, and George knew that he had been up to the city on a buying trip, a pilgrimage that he made four times a year. Somehow the knowledge of this commercial punctuality warmed the young man’s heart, as did the friendly beak-nosed face, the gaudy shirt, the bright neck-tie, and the dapper smartness of the light grey suit—for Sol was what is known as “a snappy dresser”.

George looked around him now to see if there were any others that he knew. Yes, there was the tall, spare, brittle, sandy-complexioned figure of the banker, Jarvis Riggs, and on the seat opposite, engaged in conversation with him, were two other local dignitaries. He recognized the round-featured, weak amiability of the Mayor, Baxter Kennedy; and, sprawled beside him, his long, heavy shanks thrust out into the aisle, the bald crown of his head with its tonsured fringe of black hair thrown back against the top of the seat, his loose-jowled face hanging heavy as he talked, was the large, well-oiled beefiness of Pa on Flack, who manipulated the politics of Libya Hill and was called “Parson” because he never missed a prayer-meeting at the Campbellite Church. They were talking earnestly and loudly, and George could overhear fragments of their conversation:

“Market Street—oh, give me Market Street any day!”

“Gay Rudd is asking two thousand a front foot for his. He’ll get it, too. I wouldn’t take a cent less than twenty-five, and I’m not selling anyway.”

“You mark my word, she’ll go to three before another year is out! And that’s not Al! That’s only the beginning!”

Could this be Libya Hill that they were talking about? It didn’t sound at all like the sleepy little mountain town he had known all his life. He rose from his seat and went over to the group.

“Why, hello, Webber! Hello, son!” Parson Flack screwed up his face into something that was meant for an ingratiating smile and showed his big yellow teeth. “Glad to see you. How are you, son?”

George shook hands all round and stood beside them a moment.

“We heard you speaking to the porter when you came in,” said the Mayor, with a look of solemn commiseration on his weak face. “Sorry, son. We didn’t know about it. We’ve been away a week. Happen suddenly?…Yes, yes, of course. Well, your aunt was pretty old. Got to expect that sort of thing at her time of life. She was a good woman, a good woman. Sorry, son, that such a sad occasion brings you home.”

There was a short silence after this, as if the others wished it understood that the Mayor had voiced their sentiments, too. Then, this mark of respect to the dead being accomplished, Jarvis Riggs spoke up heartily:

“You ought to stay around a while, Webber. You wouldn’t know the town. Things are booming down our way. Why, only the other day Mack Judson paid three hundred thousand for the Draper Block. The building is a dump, of course—what he paid for was the land. That’s five thousand a foot. Pretty good for Libya Hill, eh? The Reeves estate has bought up all the land on Parker Street below Parker Hill. They’re going to build the whole thing up with business property. That’s the way it is all over town. Within a few years Libya Hill is going to be the largest and most beautiful city in the state. You mark my words.”

“Yes,” agreed Parson Flack, nodding his head ponderously, knowingly, “and I hear they’ve been trying to buy your uncle’s property on South Main Street, there at the corner of the Square. A syndicate wants to tear down the hardware store and put up a big hotel. Your uncle wouldn’t sell. He’s smart.”

George returned to his seat feeling confused and bewildered. He was going back home for the first time in several years, and he wanted to see the town as he remembered it. Evidently he would find it considerably changed. But what was this that was happening to it? He couldn’t make it out. It disturbed him vaguely, as one is always disturbed and shaken by the sudden realisation of Time’s changes in something that one has known all one’s life.

The train had hurtled like a projectile through its tube beneath the Hudson River to emerge in the dazzling sunlight of a September afternoon, and now it was racing across the flat desolation of the Jersey meadows. George sat by the window and saw the smouldering dumps, the bogs, the blackened factories slide past, and felt that one of the most wonderful things in the world is the experience of being on a train. It is so different from watching a train go by. To anyone outside, a speeding train is a thunderbolt of driving rods, a hot hiss of steam, a blurred flash of coaches, a wall of movement and of noise, a shriek, a wail, and then just emptiness and absence, with a feeling of “There goes everybody!” without knowing who anybody is. And all of a sudden the watcher feels the vastness and loneliness of America, and the nothingness of all those little lives burled past upon the immensity of the continent. But if one is inside the train, everything is different. The train itself is a miracle of man’s handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction. One feels the brakes go on when the train is coming to a river, and one knows that the old gloved hand of cunning is at the throttle. One’s own sense of manhood and of mastery is heightened by being on a train. And all the other people, how real they are! One sees the fat black porter with his ivory teeth and the great swollen gland on the back of his neck, and one warms with friendship for him. One looks at all the pretty girls with a sharpened eye and an awakened pulse. One observes all the other passengers with lively interest, and feels that he has known them for ever. In the morning most of them will be gone out of his life; some will drop out silently at night through the dark, drugged snoring of the sleepers; but now all are caught upon the wing and held for a moment in the peculiar intimacy of this pullman-car which has become their common home for a night.

Two travelling salesmen have struck up a chance acquaintance in the smoking-room, entering immediately the vast confraternity of their trade, and in a moment they are laying out the continent as familiarly as if it were their own backyard. They tell about running into So-and-So in St. Paul last July, and——

“Who do you suppose I met coming out of Brown’s Hotel in Denver just a week ago?”

“You don’t mean it! I haven’t seen old Joe in years!”

“And Jim Withers—they’ve transferred him to the Atlanta office!”

“Going to New Orleans?”

“No, I’ll make it this trip. I was there in May.”

With such talk as this one grows instantly familiar. One enters naturally into the lives of all these people, caught here for just a night and hurtled down together across the continent at sixty miles an hour, and one becomes a member of the whole huge family of the earth.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.

At the far end of the car a man stood up and started back down the aisle towards the washroom. He walked with a slight limp and leaned upon a cane, and with his free hand he held on to the backs of the seats to brace himself against the lurching of the train. As he came abreast of George, who sat there gazing out the window, the man stopped abruptly. A strong, good-natured voice, warm, easy, bantering, unafraid, unchanged—exactly as it was when it was fourteen years of age—broke like a flood of living light upon his consciousness:

“Well I’ll be dogged! Hi, there, Monkus! Where you goin’?”

At the sound of the old jesting nickname George looked up quickly. It was Nebraska Crane. The square, freckled, sunburned visage had the same humorous friendliness it had always had, and the tar-black Cherokee eyes looked out with the same straight, deadly fearlessness. The big brown paw came out and they clasped each other firmly. And, instantly, it was like coming home to a strong and friendly place. In another moment they were seated together, talking with the familiarity of people whom no gulf of years and distance could alter or separate.

George had seen Nebraska Crane only once in all the years since he himself had first left Libya Hill and gone away to college. But he had not lost sight of him. Nobody had lost sight of Nebraska Crane. That wiry, fearless little figure of the Cherokee boy who used to comedown the hill on Locust Street with the bat slung over his shoulder and the well-oiled fielder’s mitt protruding from his hip-pocket had been prophetic of a greater destiny, for Nebraska had become a professional baseball player, he had crashed into the big leagues, and his name had been emblazoned in the papers every day.

The newspapers had had a lot to do with his seeing Nebraska that other time. It was in August 1925, just after George had returned to New York from his first trip abroad. That very night, in fact, a little before midnight, as he was seated in a Childs Restaurant with smoking wheatcakes, coffee, and an ink-fresh copy of next morning’s Herald-Tribune before him, the headline jumped out at him: “Crane Slams Another Homer”. He read the account of the game eagerly, and felt a strong desire to see Nebraska again and to get back in his blood once more the honest tang of America. Acting on a sudden impulse, he decided to call him up. Sure enough, his name was in the book, with an address way up in the Bronx. He gave the number and waited. A man’s voice answered the phone, but at first he didn’t recognise it.

“Hello!…Hello!…Is Mr. Crane there?…Is that you, Bras?”

“Hello.” Nebraska’s voice was hesitant, slow, a little hostile, touched with the caution and suspicion of mountain people when speaking to a stranger. “Who is that?…Who?…Is that you, Monk?”—suddenly and quickly, as he recognised who it was. “Well I’ll be dogged!” he cried. His tone was delighted, astounded, warm with friendly greeting now, and had the somewhat high and faintly howling quality that mountain people’s voices often have when they are talking to someone over the telephone: the tone was full, sonorous, countrified, and a little puzzled, as if he were yelling to someone on an adjoining mountain peak on a gusty day in autumn when the wind was thrashing through the trees. “Where’d you come from? How the hell are you, boy?” he yelled before George could answer. “Where you been all this time, anyway?”

“I’ve been in Europe. I just got back this morning.”

“Well I’ll be dogged!”—still astounded, delighted, full of howling friendliness. “When am I gonna see you? How about comin’to the game to-morrow? I’ll fix you up. And say,” he went on rapidly, “if you can stick aroun’after the game, I’ll take you home to meet the wife and kid. How about it?”

So it was agreed. George went to the game and saw Nebraska knock another home run, but he remembered best what happened afterwards. When the player had had his shower and had dressed, the two friends left the ball park, and as they went out a crowd of young boys who had been waiting at the gate rushed upon them. They were those dark-faced, dark-eyed, dark-haired little urchins who spring up like dragon seed from the grim pavements of New York, but in whose tough little faces and raucous voices there still remains, curiously, the innocence and faith of children everywhere.

“It’s Bras!” the children cried. “Hi, Bras! Hey, Bras!” In a moment they were pressing round him in a swarming horde, deafening the ears with their shrill cries, begging, shouting, tugging at his sleeves, doing everything they could to attract his attention, holding dirty little scraps of paper towards him, stubs of pencils, battered little note-books, asking him to sign his autograph.

He behaved with the spontaneous warmth and kindliness of his character. He scrawled his name out rapidly on a dozen grimy bits of paper, skilfully working his way along through the yelling, pushing, jumping group, and all the time keeping up a rapid fire of banter, badinage, and good-natured reproof:

“All right—give it here, then!…Why don’t you fellahs pick on somebody else once in a while?…Say, boy!” he said suddenly, turning to look down at one unfortunate child, and pointing an accusing finger at him—“What you doin’aroun’here again, to-day? I signed my name fer you at least a dozen times!”

“No sir, Misteh Crane!” the urchin earnestly replied. “Honest—not me!”

“Ain’t that right?” Nebraska said, appealing to the other children. “Don’t this boy keep comin’back here every day?”

They grinned, delighted at the chagrin of their fellow petitioner. “Dat’s right, Misteh Crane! Dat guy’s got a whole book wit’nuttin’but yoeh name in it!”

“Ah-h!” the victim cried, and turned upon his betrayers bitterly. “What youse guys tryin’to do—get wise or somep’n? Honest, Misteh Crane!”—he looked up earnestly again at Nebraska—“Don’t believe’em! I jest want yoeh ottygraph! Please, Misteh Crane, it’ll only take a minute!”

For a moment more Nebraska stood looking down at the child with an expression of mock sternness; at last he took the outstretched note-book, rapidly scratched his name across a page, and handed it back. And as he did so, he put his big paw on the urchin’s head and gave it a clumsy pat; then, gently and playfully, he shoved it from him, and walked off down the street.

The apartment where Nebraska lived was like a hundred thousand others in the Bronx. The ugly yellow brick building had a false front, with meaningless little turrets at the corners of the roof, and a general air of spurious luxury about it. The rooms were rather small and cramped, and were made even more so by the heavy, over-stuffed Grand Rapids furniture. The walls of the living-room, painted a mottled, rusty cream, were bare except for a couple of sentimental coloured prints, while the place of honour over the mantel was reserved for an enlarged and garishly tinted photograph of Nebraska’s little son at the age of two, looking straight and solemnly out at all comers from a gilded oval frame.

Myrtle, Nebraska’s wife, was small and plump, and pretty in a doll-like way. Her corn-silk hair was frizzled in a halo about her face, and her chubby features were heavily accented by rouge and lipstick. But she was simple and natural in her talk and bearing, and George liked her at once. She welcomed him with a warm and friendly smile and said she had heard a lot about him.

They all sat down. The child, who was three or four years old by this time, and who had been shy, holding on to his mother’s dress and peeping out from behind her, now ran across the room to his father and began climbing all over him. Nebraska and Myrtle asked George a lot of questions about himself, what he had been doing, where he had been, and especially what countries he had visited in Europe. They seemed to think of Europe as a place so far away that anyone who had actually been there was touched with an unbelievable aura of strangeness and romance.

“Whereall did you go over there, anyway?” asked Nebraska.

“Oh, everywhere, Bras,” George said—“France, England, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Italy—all over the place.”

“Well I’ll be dogged!”—in frank astonishment. “You sure do git aroun’, don’t you?”

“Not the way you do, Bras. You’re travelling most of the time.”

“Who—me? Oh, hell, I don’t git anywhere—just the same ole places. Chicago, St. Looie, Philly—I seen’em all so often I could find my way blindfolded!” He waved them aside with a gesture of his hand. Then, suddenly, he looked at George as though he were just seeing him for the first time, and he reached over and slapped him on the knee and exclaimed: “Well I’ll be dogged! Hot+ you doin’, anyway, Monkus?”

“Oh, can’t complain. How about you? But I don’t need to ask that. I’ve been reading all about you in the papers.”

“Yes, Monkus,” he said. “I been havin’a good year. But, boy!”—he shook his head suddenly and grinned—“Do the ole dogs feel it!” He was silent a moment, then he went on quietly:

“I been up here since 1919—that’s seven years, and it’s a long time in this game. Not many of’em stay much longer. When you been shaggin’flies as long as that you may lose count, but you don’t need to count—your legs’ll tell you.”

“But, good Lord, Bras, you’re all right! Why, the way you got around out there to-day you looked like a colt!”

“Yeah,” Nebraska said, “maybe I looked like a colt, but I felt like a plough horse.” He fell silent again, then he tapped his friend gently on the knee with his brown hand and said abruptly: “No, Monkus. When you been in this business as long as I have, you know it.”

“Oh, come on, Bras, quit your kidding!” said George, remembering that the player was only two years older than himself. “You’re still a young man. Why, you’re only twenty-seven!”

“Sure, sure,” Nebraska answered quietly. “But it’s like I say. You cain’t stay in this business much longer than I have. Of course, Cobb an’Speaker an’a few like that—they was up here a long time. But eight years is about the average, an’I been here seven already. So if I can hang on a few years more, I won’t have no kick to make…Hell!” he said in a moment, with the old hearty ring in his voice, “I ain’t got no kick to make, no-way. If I got my release to-morrow, I’d still feel I done all right…Ain’t that so, Buzz?” he cried genially to the child, who had settled down on his knee, at the same time seizing the boy and cradling him comfortably in his strong arm. “Ole Bras has done all right, ain’t he?”

“That’s the way me an’Bras feel about it,” remarked Myrtle, who during this conversation had been rocking back and forth, placidly ruminating on a wad of gum. “Along there last year it looked once or twice as if Bras might git traded. He said to me one day before the game,’Well, ole lady, if I don’t git some hits to-day somethin’tells me you an’me is goin’to take a trip.’So I says,’Trip where?’An’he says,’I don’t know, but they’re goin’to sell me down the river if I don’t git goin’, an’somethin’tells me it’s now or never!’So I just looks at him,” continued Myrtle placidly, “an’I says,’Well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to come to-day or not?’You know, gener’ly, Bras won’t let me come when he ain’t hittin’—he says it’s bad luck. But he just looks at me a minute, an’I can see him sort of studyin’it over, an’all of a sudden he makes up his mind an’says,’Yes, come on if you want to; I couldn’t have no more bad luck than I been havin’, no-way, an’maybe it’s come time fer things to change, so you come on.’Well, I went—an’I don’t know whether I brought him luck or not, but somethin’did,” said Myrtle, rocking in her chair complacently.

“Dogged if she didn’t!” Nebraska chuckled. “I got three hits out of four times up that day, an’two of’em was home runs!”

“Yeah,” Myrtle agreed, “an’that Philadelphia fast-ball thrower was throwin’'em, too.”

“He sure was!” said Nebraska.

“I know,” went on Myrtle, chewing placidly, “because I heard some of the boys say later that it was like he was throwin’'em up there from out of the bleachers, with all them men in shirt-sleeves right behind him, an’the boys said half the time they couldn’t even see the ball. But Bras must of saw it—or been lucky—because he hit two home runs off of him, an’that pitcher didn’t like it, either. The second one Bras got, he went stompin’an’tearin’around out there like a wild bull. He sure did look mad,” said Myrtle in her customary placid tone.

“Maddest man I ever seen!” Nebraska cried delightedly. “I thought he was goin’to dig a hole plumb through to China…But that’s the way it was. She’s right about it. That was the day I got goin’. I know one of the boys said to me later,’Bras,’he says,’we all thought you was goin’to take a ride, but you sure dug in, didn’t you?’That’s the way it is in this game. I seen Babe Ruth go fer weeks when he couldn’t hit a balloon, an’all of a sudden he lams into it. Seems like he just cain’t miss from then on.”

All this had happened four years ago. Now the two friends had met again, and were seated side by side in the speeding train, talking and catching up on one another. When George explained the reason for his going home, Nebraska turned to him with open-mouthed astonishment, genuine concern written in the frown upon his brown and homely face.

“Well, what d’you know about that!” he said. “I sure am sorry, Monk.” He was silent while he thought about it, and embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Then, after a moment: “Gee!”—he shook his head—“your aunt was one swell cook! I never will fergit it! Remember how she used to feed us kids—every danged one of us in the whole neighbourhood?” He paused, then grinned up shyly at his friend: “I sure wish I had a fistful of them good ole cookies of hers right this minute!”

Nebraska’s right ankle was taped and bandaged; a heavy cane rested between his knees. George asked him what had happened.

“I pulled a tendon,” Nebraska said, “an’got laid off. So I thought I might as well run down an’see the folks. Myrtle, she couldn’t come—the kid’s got to git ready fer school.”

“How are they?” George asked.

“Oh, fine, fine. All wool an’a yard wide, both of’em!” He was silent for a moment, then he looked at his friend with a tolerant Cherokee grin and said: “But I’m crackin’up, Monkus. Guess I cain’t stan’the gaff much more.”

Nebraska was only thirty-one now, and George was incredulous. Nebraska smiled good-naturedly again:

“That’s an ole man in baseball, Monk. I went up when I was twenty-one. I been aroun’a long time.”

The quiet resignation of the player touched his friend with sadness. It was hard and painful for him to face the fact that this strong and fearless creature, who had stood in his life always for courage and for victory, should now be speaking with such ready acceptance of defeat.

“But, Bras,” he protested, “you’ve been hitting just as well this season as you ever did! I’ve read about you in the papers, and the reporters have all said the same thing.”

“Oh, I can still hit’em,” Nebraska quietly agreed. “It ain’t the hittin’that bothers me. That’s the last thing you lose, anyway. Leastways, it’s goin’to be that way with me, an’I talked to other fellahs who said it was that way with them.” After a pause he went on in a low tone: “If this ole leg heals up in time, I’ll go on back an’git in the game again an’finish out the season. An’if I’m lucky, maybe they’ll keep me on a couple more years, because they know I can still hit. But, hell,” he added quietly, “they know I’m through. They already got me all tied up with string.”

As Nebraska talked, George saw that the Cherokee in him was the same now as it had been when he was a boy. His cheerful fatalism had always been the source of his great strength and courage. That was why he had never been afraid of anything, not even death. But, seeing the look of regret on George’s face, Nebraska smiled again and went on lightly:

“That’s the way it is, Monk. You’re good up there as long as you’re good. After that they sell you down the river. Hell, I ain’t kickin’. I been lucky. I had ten years of it already, an’that’s more than most. An’I been in three World’s Serious. If I can hold on fer another year or two—if they don’t let me go or trade me—I think maybe we’ll be in again. Me an’Myrtle has figgered it all out. I had to help her people some, an’I bought a farm fer Mama an’the Ole Man—that’s where they always wanted to be. An’I got three hundred acres of my own in Zebulon—all paid fer, too!—an’if I git a good price this year fer my tobacco, I Stan’to clear two thousand dollars. So if I can git two years more in the League an’one more good World’s Serious, why”—he turned his square face towards his friend and grinned his brown and freckled grin, just as he used to as a boy—“we’ll be all set.”

“And—you mean you’ll be satisfied?”

“Huh? Satisfied?” Nebraska turned to him with a puzzled look. “How do you mean?”

“I mean after all you’ve seen and done, Bras—the big cities and the crowds, and all the people shouting—and the newspapers, and the headlines, and the World’s Series—and—and—the first of March, and St. Petersburg, and meeting all the fellows again, and spring training——”

Nebraska groaned.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Spring trainin’.”

“You mean you don’t like it?”

“Like it! Them first three weeks is just plain hell. It ain’t bad when you’re a kid. You don’t put on much weight durin’the winter, an’when you come down in the spring it only takes a few days to loosen up an’git the kinks out. In two weeks’time you’re loose as ashes. But wait till you been aroun’as long as I have!” He laughed loudly and shook his head. “Boy! The first time you go after a grounder you can hear your joints creak. After a while you begin to limber up—you work into it an’git the soreness out of your muscles. By the time the season starts, along in April, you feel pretty good. By May you’re goin’like a house a-fire, an’you tell yourself you’re good as you ever was. You’re still goin’strong along in June. An’then you hit July, an’you git them double-headers in St. Looie! Boy, oh boy!” Again he shook his head and laughed, baring big square teeth. “Monkus,” he said quietly, turning to his companion, and now his face was serious and he had his black Indian look—“you ever been in St. Looie in July?”

“No.”

“All right, then,” he said very softly and scornfully. “An’you ain’t played ball there in July. You come up to bat with sweat bustin’from your ears. You step up an’look out there to where the pitcher ought to be, an’you see four of him. The crowd in the bleachers is out there roastin’in their shirt-sleeves, an’when the pitcher throws the ball it just comes from nowheres—it comes right out of all them shirt-sleeves in the bleachers. It’s on top of you before you know it. Well, anyway, you dig in an’git a toe-hold, take your cut, an’maybe you connect. You straighten out a fast one. It’s good fer two bases if you hustle. In the old days you could’ve made it standin’up. But now—boy!” He shook his head slowly. “You cain’t tell me nothin’about that ball park in St. Looie in July! They got it all growed out in grass in April, but after July first”—he gave a short laugh—“hell!—it’s paved with concrete! An’when you git to first, them dogs is sayin’,’Boy, let’s stay here!’But you gotta keep on goin’—you know the manager is watchin’you—you’re gonna ketch hell if you don’t take that extra base, it may mean the game. An’the boys up in the press-box, they got their eyes glued on you, too—they’ve begun to say old Crane is playin’on a dime—an’you’re thinkin’about next year an’maybe gittin’in another Serious—an’you hope to God you don’t git traded to St. Looie. So you take it on the lam, you slide into second like the Twentieth Century comin’into the Chicago yards—an’when you git up an’feel yourself all over to see if any of your parts is missin’, you gotta listen to one of that second baseman’s wisecracks:’What’s the hurry, Bras? Afraid you’ll be late fer the Veterans’Reunion?’”

“I begin to see what you mean, all right,” said George.

“See what I mean? Why, say! One day this season I ast one of the boys what month it was, an’when he told me it was just the middle of July, I says to him:’July, hell! If it ain’t September I’ll eat your hat!’'Go ahead, then,’he says,’an’eat it, because it ain’t September, Bras—it’s July.’'Well,’I says,’they must be havin’sixty days a month this year—it’s the longest damn July I ever felt!’An’lemme tell you, I didn’t miss it fer, either—I’ll be dogged if I did! When you git old in this business, it may be only July, but you think it’s September.” He was silent for a moment. “But they’ll keep you in there, gener’ly, as long as you can hit. If you can smack that ole apple, they’ll send you out there if they’ve got to use glue to keep you from fallin’apart. So maybe I’ll git in another year or two if I’m lucky. So long’s I can hit’em, maybe they’ll keep sendin’me out there till all the other players has to grunt every time ole Bras goes after a ground ball!” He laughed. “I ain’t that bad yet, but soon’s I am, I’m through.”

“You won’t mind it, then, when you have to quit?”

He didn’t answer at once. He sat there looking out the window at the factory-blighted landscape of New Jersey. Then he laughed a little wearily:

“Boy, this may be a ride on the train to you, but to me—say!—I covered this stretch so often that I can tell you what telephone post we’re passin’without even lookin’out the window. Why, hell yes!”—he laughed loudly now, in the old infectious way—“I used to have’em numbered—now I got’em named!”

“And you think you can get used to spending all your time out on the farm in Zebulon?”

“Git used to it?” In Nebraska’s voice there was now the same note of scornful protest that it had when he was a boy, and for a moment he turned and looked at his friend with an expression of astonished disgust. “Why, what are you talkin’about? That’s the greatest life in the world!”

“And your father? How is he, Bras?”

The player grinned and shook his head: “Oh, the Ole Man’s happy as a possum. He’s doin’what he wanted to do all his life.”

“And is he well?”

“If he felt any better he’d have to go to bed. Strong as a bull,” said Nebraska proudly. “He could wrastle a bear right now an’bite his nose off! Why, hell yes!” the player went on with an air of conviction—“he could take any two men I know to-day an’throw’em over his shoulder!”

“Bras, do you remember when you and I were kids and your father was on the police force, how he used to wrestle all those professionals that came to town? There were some good ones, too!”

“You’re damn right there was!” said the player, nodding his head. “Tom Anderson, who used to be South Atlantic champion, an’that fellah Petersen—do you remember him?”

“Sure. They called him the Bone-Crushing Swede—he used to come there all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s him. He used to wrastle all over the country—he was way up there, one of the best in the business. The Ole Man wrastled him three times, an’throwed him once, too!”

“And that big fellow they called the Strangler Turk——”

“Yeah, an’he was good, too! Only he wasn’t no Turk—he only called hisself one. The Ole Man told me he was some kind of Polack or Bohunk from the steel mills out in Pennsylvania, an’that’s how he got so strong.”

“And the Jersey Giant——”

“Yeah——”

“And Cyclone Finnegan——”

“Yeah——”

“And Bull Dakota—and Texas Jim Ryan—and the Masked Marvel? Do you remember the Masked Marvel?”

“Yeah—only there was a whole lot of them—guys cruisin’all over the country callin’theirselves the Masked Marvel. The Ole Man wrastled two of’em. Only the real Masked Marvel never came to town. The Ole Man told me there was a real Masked Marvel, but he-was too damn good, I guess, to come to Libya Hill.”

“Do you remember the night, Bras, up at the old City Auditorium, when your father was wrestling one of these Masked Marvels, and we were there in the front row rooting for him, and he got a strangle hold on this fellow with the mask, and the mask came off—and the fellow wasn’t the Masked Marvel at all, but only that Greek who used to work all night at the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents down by the depot?”

“Yeah—haw-haw!” Nebraska threw back his head and laughed loudly. “I’d clean fergot that damn Greek, but that’s who it was! The whole crowd hollered frame-up an’tried to git their money back—I’ll swear, Monk! I’m glad to see you!” He put his big brown hand on his companion’s knee. “It don’t seem no time, does it? It all comes back!”

“Yes, Bras”—for a moment George looked out at the flashing landscape with a feeling of sadness and wonder in his heart—“it all comes back.”

George sat by the window and watched the stifled land stroke past him. It was unseasonably hot for September, there had been no rain for weeks, and all afternoon the contours of the eastern seaboard faded away into the weary hazes of the heat. The soil was parched and dusty, and under a glazed and burning sky coarse yellow grasses and the withered stalks of weeds simmered and flashed beside the tracks. The whole continent seemed to be gasping for its breath. In the hot green depths of the train a powder of fine cinders beat in through the meshes of the screens, and during the pauses at stations the little fans at both ends of the car hummed monotonously, with a sound that seemed to be the voice of the heat itself. During these intervals when the train stood still, enormous engines steamed slowly by on adjacent tracks, or stood panting, passive as great cats, and their engineers wiped wads of blackened waste across their grimy faces, while the passengers fanned feebly with sheaves of languid paper or sat in soaked and sweltering dejection.

For a long time George sat alone beside his window. His eyes took in every detail of the changing scene, but his thoughts were turned inward, absorbed in recollections which his meeting with Nebraska Crane had brought alive again. The great train pounded down across New Jersey, across Pennsylvania, across the tip of Delaware, and into Maryland. The unfolding panorama of the land was itself like a sequence on the scroll of time. George felt lost and a little sick. His talk with his boyhood friend had driven him back across the years. The changes in Nebraska and his quiet acceptance of defeat had added an undertone of sadness to the vague, uneasy sense of foreboding which he had got from his conversation with the banker, the politician, and the Mayor.

At Baltimore, when the train slowed to a stop in the gloom beneath the station, he caught a-momentary glimpse of a face on the platform as it slid past his window. All that he could see was a blur of thin, white features and a sunken mouth, but at the corners of the mouth he thought he also caught the shadow of a smile—faint, evil, ghostly—and at sight of it a sudden and unreasoning terror seized him. Could that be Judge Rumford Bland?

As the train started up again and passed through the tunnel on the other side of the city, a blind man appeared at the rear of the car. The other people were talking, reading, or dozing, and the blind man came in so quietly that none of them noticed him enter. He took the first seat at the end and sat down. When the train emerged into the waning sunlight of this September day, George looked round and saw him sitting there. He just sat quietly, gripping a heavy walnut walking-stick with a frail hand, the sightless eyes fixed in vacancy, the thin and sunken face listening with that terrible intent stillness that only the blind know, and around the mouth hovered that faint suggestion of a smile, which, hardly perceptible though it was, had in it a kind of terrible vitality and the mercurial attractiveness of a ruined angel. It was Judge Rumford Bland!

George had not seen him in fifteen years. At that time he was not blind, but already his eyes were beginning to fail. George remembered him as he was then, and remembered, too, how the sight of the man, frequently to be seen prowling the empty streets of the night when all other life was sleeping and the town was dead, had struck a nameless terror into his boy’s heart. Even then, before blindness had come upon him, some nocturnal urge had made him seek deserted pavements beneath the blank and sterile corner lights, past windows that were always dark, past doors that were for ever locked.

He came from an old and distinguished family, and, like all his male ancestors for one hundred years or more, he had been trained in the profession of the law. For a single term he had been a police-court magistrate, and from then on was known as “Judge” Bland. But he had fallen grievously from the high estate his family held. During the period of George Webber’s boyhood he still professed to be a lawyer. He had a shabby office in a disreputable old building which he owned, and his name was on the door as an attorney, but his living was earned by other and more devious means. Indeed, his legal skill and knowledge had been used more for the purpose of circumventing the law and defeating justice than in maintaining them. Practically all his “business” was derived from the negro population of the town, and of this business the principal item was usury.

On the Square, in his ramshackle two-storey building of rusty brick, was “the store”. It was a second-hand furniture store, and it occupied the ground floor and basement of the building. It was, of course, nothing but a blind for his illegal transactions with the negroes. A hasty and appalled inspection of the mountainous heap of ill-smelling junk which it contained would have been enough to convince one that if the owner had to depend on the sale of his stock he would have to close his doors within a month. It was incredible. In the dirty window was a pool table, taken as brutal tribute from some negro billiard parlour. But what a pool table! Surely it had not a fellow in all the relics in the land. Its surface was full of lumps and dents and ridges. Not a pocket remained without a hole in the bottom big enough to drop a baseball through. The green cloth-covering had worn through or become unfixed in a dozen places. The edges of the table and the cloth itself were seared and burnt with the marks of innumerable cigarettes. Yet this dilapidated object was by all odds the most grandiose adornment of the whole store.

As one peered back into the gloom of the interior he became aware of the most fantastic collection of nigger junk that was ever brought together in one place. On the street floor as well as in the basement it was piled up to the ceiling, and all jumbled together as if some gigantic steam-shovel had opened its jaws and dumped everything just as it was. There were broken-down rocking-chairs, bureaus with cracked mirrors and no bottoms in the drawers, tables with one, two, or three of their legs missing, rusty old kitchen stoves with burnt-out grates and elbows of sooty pipe, blackened frying pans encased in the grease of years, flat irons, chipped plates and bowls and pitchers, washtubs, chamber-pots, and a thousand other objects, all worn out, cracked, and broken.

What, then, was the purpose of this store, since it was filled with objects of so little value that even the poorest negroes could get slight use from them? The purpose, and the way Judge Rumford Bland used it, was quite simple:

A negro in trouble, in immediate need of money to pay a police-court fine, a doctor’s bill, or some urgent debt, would come to see Judge Bland. Sometimes he needed as little as five or ten dollars, occasionally as much as fifty dollars, but usually it was less than that. Judge Bland would then demand to know what security he had. The negro, of course, had none, save perhaps a few personal possessions and some wretched little furniture—a bed, a chair, a table, a kitchen stove. Judge Bland would send his collector, bulldog, and chief lieutenant—a ferret-faced man named Clyde Beals—to inspect these miserable possessions, and if he thought the junk important enough to its owner to justify the loan, he would advance the money, extracting from it, however, the first instalment of his interest.

From this point on, the game was plainly and flagrantly usurious. The interest was payable weekly, every Saturday night. On a ten-dollar loan Judge Bland extracted interest of fifty cents a week; on a twenty-dollar loan, interest of a dollar a week; and so on. That is why the amount of the loans was rarely as much as fifty dollars. Not only were the contents of most negro shacks less than that, but to pay two dollars and a half in weekly interest was beyond the capacity of most negroes, whose wage, if they were men, might not be more than five or six dollars a week, and if they were women—cooks or house-servants in the town—might be only three or four dollars. Enough had to be left them for a bare existence or it was no game. The purpose and skill of the game came in lending the negro a sum of money somewhat greater than his weekly wage and his consequent ability to pay back, but also a sum whose weekly interest was within the range of his small income.

Judge Bland had on his books the names of negroes who had paid him fifty cents or a dollar a week over a period of years, on an original loan of ten or twenty dollars. Many of these poor and ignorant people were unable to comprehend what had happened to them. They could only feel mournfully, dumbly, with the slave-like submissiveness of their whole training and conditioning, that at some time in the distant past they had got their money, spent it, and had their fling, and that now they must pay perpetual tribute for that privilege. Such men and women as these would come to that dim-lit place of filth and misery on Saturday night, and there the Judge himself, black-frocked, white-shirted, beneath one dingy, fly-specked bulb, would hold his private court:

“What’s wrong, Carrie? You’re two weeks behind in your payments. Is fifty cents all you got this week?”

“It doan seem lak it was three weeks. Musta slipped up somewheres in my countin’.”

“You didn’t slip up. It’s three weeks. You owe a dollar fifty. Is this all you got?”

With sullen apology: “Yassuh.”

“When will you have the rest of it?”

“Dey’s a fellah who say he gonna give me——”

“Never mind about that. Are you going to keep up your payments after this or not?”

“Dat’s whut Ah wuz sayin’. Jus’as soon as Monday come, an’dat fellah——”

Harshly: “Who you working for now?”

“Doctah Hollandah——”

“You cooking for him?”

Sullenly, with unfathomable negro mournfulness: “Yassuh.”

“How much is he paying you?”

“Three dollahs.”

“And you mean you can’t keep up? You can’t pay fifty cents a week?”

Still sullen, dark, and mournful, as doubtful and confused as jungle depths of Africa: “Doan know…Seem lak a long time since Ah started payin’up——”

Harshly, cold as poison, quick as a striking snake: “You’ve never started paying up. You’ve paid nothing. You’re only paying interest, and behind in that.”

And still doubtfully, in black confusion, fumbling and fingering and bringing forth at last a wad of greasy little receipts from the battered purse: “Doan know, seem lak Ah got enough of dese to’ve paid dat ten dollahs up long ago. How much longer does Ah have to keep on payin’?”

“Till you’ve got ten dollars…All right, Carrie: here’s your receipt. You bring that extra dollar in next week.”

Others, a little more intelligent than Carrie, would comprehend more dearly what had happened to them, but would continue to pay because they were unable to get together at one time enough money to release them from their bondage. A few would have energy and power enough to save their pennies until at last they were able to buy back their freedom. Still others, after paying week by week and month by month, would just give up in despair and would pay no more. Then, of course, Clyde Beals was on them like a vulture. He nagged, he wheedled, and he threatened; and if, finally, he saw that he could get no more money from them, he took their household furniture. Hence the chaotic pile of malodorous junk which filled the shop.

Why, it may be asked, in a practice that was so flagrantly, nakedly, and unashamedly usurious as this, did Judge Rumford Bland not come into collision with the law? Did the police not know from what sources, and in what ways, his income was derived?

They knew perfectly. The very store in which this miserable business was carried on was within twenty yards of the City Hall, and within fifty feet of the side entrance to the town calaboose, up whose stone steps many of these same negroes had time and again been hauled and mauled and hurled into a cell. The practice, criminal though it was, was a common one, winked at by the local authorities, and but one of many similar practices by which unscrupulous white men all over the South feathered their own nests at the expense of an oppressed and ignorant people. The fact that such usury was practised chiefly against “a bunch of niggers” to a large degree condoned and pardoned it in the eyes of the law.

Moreover, Judge Rumford Bland knew that the people with whom he dealt would not inform on him. He knew that the negro stood in awe of the complex mystery of the law, of which he understood little or nothing, or in terror of its brutal force. The law for him was largely a matter of the police, and the police was a white man in a uniform, who had the power and authority to arrest him, to beat him with his fist or with a club, to shoot him with a gun, and to lock him up in a small, dark cell. It was not likely, therefore, that any negro would take his troubles to the police. He was not aware that he had any rights as a citizen, and that Judge Rumford Bland had violated those rights; or, if he was aware of rights, however vaguely, he was not likely to ask for their protection by a group of men at whose hands he had known only assault, arrest, and imprisonment.

Above the shambles of the nigger junk, upon the second floor, were Judge Bland’s offices. A wooden stairway, worn by the tread of clay-booted time, and a hand-rail, loose as an old tooth, smooth, besweated by the touch of many a black palm, led up to a dark hallway. Here, in Stygian gloom, one heard the punctual monotone of a single and regularly repeated small drop of water dripping somewhere in the rear, and caught the overpowering smell of the tin urinal. Opening off of this hall-way was the glazed glass of the office door, which bore the legend in black paint, partly flaked off:

RUMFORD BLAND

ATTORNEY AT LAW

Within, the front room was furnished with such lumber as lawyers use. The floor was bare, there were two roll-top desks, black with age, two bookcases with glass doors, filled with battered volumes of old pigskin brown, a spittoon, brass-bodied and capacious, swimming with tobacco juice, a couple of ancient swivel chairs, and a few other nondescript straight-backed chairs for visitors to sit and creak in. On the walls were several faded diplomas—Pine Rock College, Bachelor of Arts; The University of Old Catawba, Doctor of Laws; and a certificate of The Old Catawba Bar Association. Behind was another room with nothing in it but some more bookcases full of heavy tomes in musty calf bindings, a few chairs, and against the wall a plush sofa—the room, it was whispered, “where Bland took his women”. Out front, in the windows that looked on the Square, their glass unwashed and specked with the ghosts of flies that died when Gettysburg was young, were two old, frayed, mottled-yellow window shades, themselves as old as Garfield, and still faintly marked with the distinguished names of “Kennedy and Bland”. The Kennedy of that old law firm had been the father of Baxter Kennedy, the Mayor, and his partner, old General Bland, had been Rumford’s father. Both bad been dead for years, but no one had bothered to change the lettering.

Such were the premises of Judge Rumford Bland as George Webber remembered them. Judge Rumford Bland—“bondsman”, “furniture dealer”, usurious lender to the blacks. Judge Rumford Bland—son of a brigadier of infantry, C.S.A., member of the bar, wearer of immaculate white and broadcloth black.

What had happened to this man that had so corrupted and perverted his life from its true and honourable direction? No one knew. There was no question that he possessed remarkable gifts. In his boyhood George had heard the more reputable attorneys of the town admit that few of them would have been Judge Bland’s match in skill and ability had he chosen to use his talents in an honest way.

But he was stained with evil. There was something genuinely old and corrupt at the sources of his life and spirit. It had got into his blood, his bone, his flesh. It was palpable in the touch of his thin, frail hand when he greeted you, it was present in the deadly weariness of his tone of voice, in the dead-white texture of his emaciated face, in his lank and lustreless auburn hair, and, most of all, in his sunken mouth, around which there hovered constantly the ghost of a smile. It could only be called the ghost of a smile, and yet, really, it was no smile at all. It was, if anything, only a shadow at the corners of the mouth. When one looked closely, it was gone. But one knew that it was always there—lewd, evil, mocking, horribly corrupt, and suggesting a limitless vitality akin to the humour of death, which welled up from some secret spring in his dark soul.

In his early manhood Judge Bland had married a beautiful but dissolute woman, whom he shortly divorced. The utter cynicism that marked his attitude towards women was perhaps partly traceable to this source. Ever since his divorce he had lived alone with his mother, a stately, white-haired lady to whom he rendered at all times a faithful, solicitous, exquisitely kind and gentle duty. Some people suspected that this filial devotion was tinged with irony and contemptuous resignation, but certainly the old lady herself had no cause to think so. She occupied a pleasant old house, surrounded with every comfort, and if she ever guessed by what dark means her luxuries had been assured, she never spoke of it to her son. As for women generally, Judge Bland divided them brutally into two groups—the mothers and the prostitutes—and, aside from the single exception in his own home, his sole interest was in the second division.

He had begun to go blind several years before George left Libya Hill, and the thin, white face, with its shadowy smile, had been given a sinister enhancement by the dark spectacles which he then wore. He was under treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and made trips there at intervals of six weeks, but his vision was growing steadily worse, and the doctors had already told him that his condition was practically hopeless. The malady that was destroying his sight had been brought on by a loathsome disease which he thought had been checked long since, and which he frankly admitted had been engendered in his eyes.

In spite of all these sinister and revolting facts of character, of spirit, and of person, Judge Bland, astonishing as it may seem, had always been an enormously attractive figure. Everyone who met him knew at once that the man was bad. No, “bad” is not the word for it. Everyone knew that he was evil—genuinely, unfathomably evil—and evil of this sort has a grandeur about it not unlike the grandeur of supreme goodness. And indeed, there was goodness in him that had never altogether died. In his single term upon the bench as a police-court magistrate, it was universally agreed that Judge Bland had been fair and wise in his disposal of swift justice. Whatever it was that had made this fact possible—and no one pretended to understand it—the aura of it still clung to him. And it was for just this reason that people who met him were instantly, even if they fought against it, captivated, drawn close to him, somehow made to like him. At the very moment that they met him, and felt the force of death and evil working in him, they also felt—oh, call it the phantom, the radiance, the lost soul, of an enormous virtue. And with the recognition of that quality came the sudden stab of overwhelming regret, the feeling of “What a loss! What a shame!” And yet no one could say why.

As the early dusk of approaching autumn settled swiftly down, the train sped southward towards Virginia. George sat by the window watching the dark shapes of trees flash by, and thought back over all that he had ever known about Judge Rumford Bland. The loathing and terror and mysterious attraction which the man had always had for him were now so great that he felt he could not sit alone there any longer. Midway in the car the other people from Libya Hill had gathered together in a noisy huddle. Jarvis Riggs, Mayor Kennedy, and Sol Isaacs were sitting down or sprawling on the arms of the seats, and Parson Flack was standing in the aisle, leaning over earnestly as he talked, with arms outstretched on the backs of the two seats that enclosed the group. In the centre of this huddle, the focus of all their attention, was Nebraska Crane. They had caught him as he went by, and now they had him cornered.

George rose and went over to join them, and as he did so he glanced again in the direction of Judge Bland. He was dressed with old-fashioned fastidiousness, just as he had always dressed, in loose-fitting garments of plain and heavy black, a starched white shirt, a low collar and a black string neck-tie, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat which he had not removed. Beneath the brim of the hat his once auburn hair was now a dead, and lifeless white. This and the sightless eyes were the only changes in him. Otherwise he looked just as he had looked fifteen years ago. He had not stirred since he came in. Ha sat upright, leaning a little forward on his cane, his blindly staring eyes fixed before him, his white and sunken face held in an attitude of intense, listening stillness.

As George joined the group in the middle of the car, they were excitedly discussing property values—all of them, that is, except Nebraska Crane. Parson Flack would bend over earnestly, showing his big teeth in a smile and tell about some recent deal, and what a certain piece of land had sold for—“Right out there on Charles Street, not far from where you used to live, Bras!” To each of these new marvels the player’s response was the same:

“Well I’ll be dogged!” he said, astounded. “What d’you know about that!”

The banker now leaned forward and tapped Nebraska confidentially on the knee. He talked to him persuasively, in friendly wise, urging him to invest his savings in the real estate speculations of the town. He brought up all his heaviest artillery of logic and mathematics, drawing forth his pencil and note-book to figure out just how much a given sum of money could be increased if it was shrewdly invested now in this or that piece of property, and then sold when the time was right.

“You can’t go wrong!” said Jarvis Riggs, a little feverishly. “The town is bound to grow. Why, Libya Hill is only at the beginning of its development. You bring your money back home, my boy, and let it go to work for you! You’ll see!”

This went on for some time. But in the face of all their urgings Nebraska remained his characteristic self. He was respectful and good-natured, but a little dubious, and fundamentally stubborn.

“I already got me a farm out in Zebulon,” he said, and, grinning—“It’s paid fer, too! When I git through playin’baseball, I’m comin’back an’settle down out there an’farm it. It’s three hundred acres of the purtiest bottom land you ever seen. That’s all I want. I couldn’t use no more.”

As Nebraska talked to them in his simple, homely way, he spoke as a man of the earth for whom the future opened up serenely, an independent, stubborn man who knew what he wanted, a man who was firmly rooted, established, secure against calamity and want. He was completely detached from the fever of the times—from the fever of the boom-mad town as well as from the larger fever of the nation. The others talked incessantly about land, but George saw that Nebraska Crane was the only one who still conceived of the land as a place on which to live, and of living on the land as a way of life.

At last Nebraska detached himself from the group and said he was going back to take a smoke. George started to follow him. As he passed down the aisle behind his friend and came abreast of the last seat, suddenly a quiet, toneless voice said:

“Good evening, Webber.”

He stopped and spun round. The blind man was seated there before him. He had almost forgotten about him. The blind man had not moved as he spoke. He was still leaning a little forward on his cane, his thin, white face held straight before him as if he were still listening for something. George felt now, as he had always felt, the strange fascination in that evil shadow of a smile that hovered about the corners of the blind man’s mouth. He paused, then said:

“Judge Bland.”

“Sit down, son.” And like a child under the spell of the Pied Piper, he sat down. “Let the dead bury their dead. Come sit among the blind.”

The words were uttered tonelessly, yet their cruel and lifeless contempt penetrated nakedly throughout the car. The other men stopped talking and turned as if they had received an electric shock. George did not know what to say; in the embarrassment of the moment he blurted out:

“I—I—there are a lot of people on the train from home. I—I’ve been talking to them—Mayor Kennedy, and——”

The blind man, never moving, in his terrible toneless voice that carried to all ears, broke in:

“Yes, I know. As eminent a set of sons-of-bitches as were ever gathered together in the narrow confines of a single pullman-car.”

The whole car listened in an appalled silence. The group in the middle looked at one another with fear in their eyes, and in a moment they began’talking feverishly again.

“I hear you were in France again last year,” the voice now said. “And did you find the French whores any different from the homegrown variety?”

The naked words, with their toneless evil, pierced through the car like a flash of sheer terror. All conversation stopped. Everyone was stunned, frozen into immobility.

“You’ll find there’s not much difference,” Judge Bland observed calmly and in the same tone. “Syphilis makes the whole world kin. And if you want to lose your eyesight, you can do it in this great democracy as well as anywhere on earth.”

The whole car was as quiet as death. In another moment the stunned faces turned towards one another, and the men began to talk in furtive whispers.

Through all of this the expression on that white and sunken face had never altered, and the shadow of that ghostly smile still lingered around the mouth. But now, low and casually, he said to the young man:

“How are you, son? I’m glad to see you.” And in that simple phrase, spoken by the blind man, there was the suggestion of a devilish humour, although his expression did not change a bit.

“You—you’ve been in Baltimore, Judge Bland?”

“Yes, I still come up to Hopkins now and then. It does no good, of course. You see, son,” the tone was low and friendly now, “I’ve gone completely blind since I last saw you.”

“I didn’t know. But you don’t mean that you——”

“Oh, utterly! Utterly!” replied Judge Bland, and all at once he threw his sightless face up and laughed with sardonic glee, displaying blackened rims of teeth, as if the joke was too good to be kept. “My dear boy, I assure you that I am utterly blind. I can no longer distinguish one of our most prominent local bastards two feet off—Now, Jarvis!” he suddenly cried out in a chiding voice in the direction of the unfortunate Riggs, who had loudly resumed his discussion of property values—“you know that’s not true! Why, man, I can tell by the look in your eyes that you’re lying!” And again he lifted his face and was shaken by devilish, quiet laughter. “Excuse the interruption, son,” he went on. “I believe the subject of our discourse was bastardy. Why, can you believe it?”—he leaned forward again his long fingers playing gently on the polished ridges of his stick—“where bastardy is concerned, I find I can no longer trust my eyes at all. I rely exclusively on the sense of smell. And”—for the first time his face was sunken deliberately in weariness and disgust—“it is enough. A sense of smell is all you need.” Abruptly changing now, he said: “How are the folks?”

“Why—Aunt Maw’s dead. I—I’m going home to the funeral.”

“Dead, is she?”

That was all he said. None of the usual civilities, no expression of polite regret, just that and nothing more. Then, after a moment:

“So you’re going down to bury her.” It was a statement, and he said it reflectively, as though meditating upon it; then—“And do you think you can go home again?”

George was a little startled and puzzled: “Why—I don’t understand. How do you mean, Judge Bland?”

There was another flare of that secret, evil laughter. “I mean, do you think you can really go home again?” Then, sharp, cold, peremptory—“Now answer me! Do you think you can?”

“Why—why yes! Why—” the young man was desperate, almost frightened now, and, earnestly, beseechingly, he said—“why look here, Judge Bland—I haven’t done anything—honestly I haven’t!”

Again the low, demonic laughter: “You’re sure?”

Frantic now with the old terror which the man had always inspired in him as a boy: “Why—why of course I’m sure! Look here, Judge Bland—in the name of God, what have I done?” He thought desperately of a dozen wild, fantastic things, feeling a sickening and overwhelming consciousness of guilt, without knowing why. He thought: “Has he heard about my book? Does he know I wrote about the town? Is that what he means?”

The blind man cackled thinly to himself, enjoying with evil tenderness his little cat’s play with the young man: “The guilty fleeth where no man pursueth. Is that it, son?”

Frankly distracted: “Why—why—I’m not guilty!” Angrily: “Why damn it, I’m not guilty of anything!” Passionately, excitedly: “I can hold up my head with any man! I can look the whole damn world in the eye! I make no apologies to——”

He stopped short, seeing the evil ghost-shadow of a smile at the corners of the blind man’s mouth. “That disease!” he thought—“the thing that ruined his eyes—maybe—maybe—why, yes—the man is crazy!” Then he spoke, slowly, simply:

“Judge Bland.” He rose from the seat. “Good-bye, Judge Bland.” The smile still played about the blind man’s mouth, but he answered with a new note of kindness in his voice:

“Good-bye, son.” There was a barely perceptible pause. “But don’t forget I tried to warn you.”

George walked quickly away with thudding heart and trembling limbs. What had Judge Bland meant when he asked, “Do you think you can go home again?” And what had been the meaning of that evil, silent, mocking laughter? What had he heard? What did he know? And these others—did they know, too?

He soon learned that his fear and panic in the blind man’s presence were shared by all the people in the car. Even the passengers who had, never seen Judge Bland before had heard his naked, brutal words, and they were now horrified by the sight of him. As for the rest, the men from Libya Hill, this feeling was greatly enhanced, sharpened by all that they knew of him. He had pursued his life among them with insolent shamelessness. Though he still masked in all the outward aspects of respectability, he was in total disrepute, and yet he met the opinion of the town with such cold and poisonous contempt that everyone held him in a kind of terrified respect. As for Parson Flack, Jarvis Riggs, and Mayor Kennedy, they were afraid of him because his blind eyes saw straight through them. His sudden appearance in the car, where none had expected to meet him, had aroused in all of them a sense of stark, underlying terror.

As George went into the washroom suddenly, be came upon the Mayor cleaning his false teeth in the basin. The man’s plump face, which George had always known in the guise of cheerful, hearty amiability, was all caved in. Hearing a sound behind him, the Mayor turned upon the newcomer. For a moment there was nothing but nameless fright in his weak brown eyes. He mumbled frantically, incoherently, holding his false teeth in his trembling fingers. Like a man who did not know what he was doing, he brandished them in a grotesque yet terrible gesture indicative of—God knows what!—but despair and terror were both in it. Then he put the teeth into his mouth again, smiled feebly, and muttered apologetically, with some counterfeit of his usual geniality:

“Ho, ho!—well, son! You caught me that time, all right! A man can’t talk without his teeth!”

The same thing was now apparent everywhere. George saw it in the look of an eye, the movement of a hand, the give-away expression of a face in repose. The merchant, Sol Isaacs, took him aside and whispered:

“Have you heard what they’re saying about the bank?” He looked around quickly and checked himself, as if afraid of the furtive sound of his own voice. “Oh, everything’s O.K.! Sure it is! They just went a little too fast there for a while! Things are rather quiet right now—but they’ll pick up!”

Among all of them there was the same kind of talk that George had heard before. “It’s worth all of that,” they told each other eagerly. “It’ll bring twice as much in a year’s time.” They caught him by the lapel in the most friendly and hearty fashion and said he ought to settle down in Libya Hill and stay for good—“Greatest place on earth, you know!” They made their usual assured pronouncements upon finance, banking, market trends, and property values. But George sensed now that down below all this was just utter, naked, frantic terror—the terror of men who know that they are ruined and are afraid to admit it, even to themselves.

It was after midnight, and the great train was rushing south across Virginia in the moonlight. The people in the little towns lay in their beds and heard the mournful whistle, then the sudden roar as the train went through, and they turned over restlessly and dreamed of fair and distant cities.

In K19 most of the passengers had retired to their berths. Nebraska Crane had turned in early, but George was still up, and so, too, were the banker, the Mayor, and the political boss. Crass, world-weary, unimaginative fellows that they were, they were nevertheless too excited by something of the small boy in them that had never died to go to bed at their usual hour aboard a train, and were now drawn together for companionship in the smoke-fogged washroom. Behind the green curtains the complex of male voices rose and fell in talk as they told their endless washroom stories. Quietly, furtively, with sly delight, they began to recall unsavoury anecdotes remembered from the open and shameless life of Judge Rumford Bland, and at the end of each recital there would be a choking burst of strong laughter.

When the laughter and the slapping of thighs subsided, Parson Flack leaned forward again, eager to tell another. In a voice that was subdued, confidential, almost conspiratorial, he began:

“And do you remember the time that he——?”

Swiftly the curtain was drawn aside, all heads jerked up, and Judge Bland entered.

“Now, Parson”—said he in a chiding voice—“remember what?” Before the blind, cold stare of that emaciated face the seated men were silent. Something stronger than fear was in their eyes.

“Remember what?” he said again, a trifle harshly. He stood before them erect and fragile, both hands balanced on the head of the cane which he held anchored to the floor in front of him. He turned to Jarvis Riggs: “Remember when you established what you boasted was’the fastest-growing bank in all the state’—and weren’t too particular what it grew on?” He turned back to Parson Flack: “Remember when one of’the boys’, as you like to call them—you always look out for’the boys’, don’t you, Parson?—remember when one of’the boys’borrowed money from’the fastest-growing bank’to buy two hundred acres on that hill across the river?”—he turned to the Mayor—“and sold the land to the town for a new cemetery?…Though why,” he turned his face to Parson Flack again, “the dead should have to go so far to bury their dead I do not know!”

He paused impressively, like a country lawyer getting ready to launch his peroration to a jury.

“Remember what?”—the voice rose suddenly, high and sharp. “Do I remember, Parson, how you’ve run the town through all these years? Do I remember what a good thing you’ve made of politics? You’ve never aspired to public office, have you, Parson? Oh, no—you’re much too modest. But you know how to pick the public-spirited citizens who do aspire, and whose great hearts pant with eagerness to serve their fellow men! Ah, yes. It’s a very nice little private business, isn’t it, Parson? And all’the boys’are stockholders and get their cut of the profits—is that the way of it, Parson?…Remember what?” he cried again. “Do I remember now the broken fragments of a town that waits and fears and schemes to put off the day of its impending ruin? Why, Parson, yes—I can remember all these things. And yet I had no part in them, for, after all, I am a humble man. Oh”—with a deprecating nod—“ a little nigger squeezing here and there, a little income out of Niggertown, a few illegal lendings, a comfortable practice in small usury—yet my wants were few, my tastes were very simple. I was always satisfied with, say, a modest five per cent a week. So I am not in the big money, Parson. I remember many things, but I see now I have spent my substance, wasted all my talents in riotous living—while pious Puritans have virtuously betrayed their town and given their whole-souled services to the ruin of their fellow men.”

Again there was an ominous pause, and when he went on his voice was low, almost casual in its toneless irony:

“I am afraid I have been at best a giddy fellow, Parson, and that my old age will be spent in memories of trivial things—of various merry widows who came to town, of poker chips, racehorses, cards, and rattling dice, of bourbon, Scotch, and rye—all the forms of hellishness that saintly fellows, Parson, who go to prayer-meeting every week, know nothing of. So I suppose I’ll warm my old age with the memories of my own sinfulness—and be buried at last, like all good men and true, among more public benefactors in the town’s expensive graveyard on the hill…But I also remember other things, Parson. So can you. And maybe in my humble sphere I, too, have served a purpose—of being the wild oat of more worthy citizens.”

They sat in utter silence, their frightened, guilty eyes all riveted upon his face, and each man felt as if those cold, unseeing eyes had looked straight through him. For a moment more Judge Bland just stood there, and, slowly, without a change of muscle in the blankness of his face, the ghostly smile began to hover like a shadow at the corners of his sunken mouth.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. He turned, and with his walking-stick he caught and held the curtain to one side. “I’ll be seeing you.”

All through the night George lay in his dark berth and watched the old earth of Virginia as it stroked past him in the dream-haunted silence of the moon. Field and hill and gulch and stream and wood again, the everlasting earth, the huge illimitable earth of America, kept stroking past him in the steep silence of the moon.

All through the ghostly stillness of the land, the train made on for ever its tremendous noise, fused of a thousand sounds, and they called back to him forgotten memories: old songs, old faces, old memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know and live and feel, and never find a language for—the legend of dark time, the sad brevity of their days, the unknowable but haunting miracle of life itself. He heard again, as he had heard throughout his childhood, the pounding wheel, the tolling bell, the whistle-wail, and he remembered how these sounds, coming to him from the river’s edge in the little town of his boyhood, had always evoked for him their tongueless prophecy of wild and secret joy, their glorious promises of new lands, morning, and a shining city. But now the lonely cry of the great train was speaking to him with an equal strangeness of return. For he was going home again.

The undertone of terror with which he had gone to bed, the sadness of the foreshadowed changes in the town, the sombre prospect of the funeral to-morrow, all combined to make him dread his homecoming, which so many times in the years since he had been away he had looked forward to some day with hope and exultation. It was all so different from what he thought it would be. He was still only an obscure instructor at one of the universities in the city, his book was not yet published, he was not by any standard which his native town could know—“successful”, “a success”. And as he thought of it, he realised that, almost more than anything, he feared the sharp, appraising eye, the worldly judgments, of that little town.

He thought of all his years away from home, the years of wandering in many lands and cities. He remembered how many times he had thought of home with such an intensity of passion that he could close his eyes and see the scheme of every street, and every house upon each street, and the faces of the people, as well as recall the countless things that they had said and the densely-woven fabric of all their histories. To-morrow he would see it all again, and he almost wished he had not come. It would have been easy to plead the excuse of work and other duty. And it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place.

But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.

The train rushed onward through the moonlit land.

6. The Home-coming

When he looked from the windows of the train next morning the hills were there. They towered immense and magical into the blue weather, and suddenly the coolness was there, the winy sparkle of the air, and the shining brightness. Above him loomed huge shapes, the dense massed green of the wilderness, the cloven cuts’and gulches of the mountain passes, the dizzy steepness, with the sudden drops below. He could see the little huts stuck to the edge of bank and hollow, toy-small, far below him in the gorges. The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of something refound that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.

At last the train came sweeping down the long sloping bend into the station, But even before it had come to a full halt George had been watching out of the windows and had seen Randy Shepperton and his sister Margaret waiting for him on the platform. Randy, tall and athletic-looking, was teetering restlessly from one foot to another as his glance went back and forth along the windows of the train in search of him. Margaret’s strong, big-boned figure was planted solidly, her hands clasped loosely across her waist, and her eyes were darting from car to car with swift intensity. And as George swung down from the steps of the pullman and, valise in hand, strode towards the platform across the rock ballast of the roadbed and the gleaming rails, he knew instantly, with that intuitive feeling of strangeness and recognition; just what they would say to him at the moment of their meeting.

Now they had seen him. He saw Margaret speak excitedly to her brother and motion towards his approaching figure. And now Randy was coming on the run, his broad hand extended in a gesture of welcome, his rich tenor shouting greetings as he came:

“How are you, boy?” he shouted. “Put it there!” he cried heartily as he came up, and vigorously wrung him by the hand. “Glad to see you, Monk!”

Still shouting greetings, he reached over and attempted to take the valise. The inevitable argument, vehement, good-natured, and protesting, began immediately, and in another moment Randy was in triumphant possession and the two were walking together towards the platform, Randy saying scornfully all the time in answer to the other’s protests:

“Oh, for God’s sake, forget about it! I’ll let you do as much for me when I come up to the Big Town to visit you!…Here’s Margaret!” he said as they reached the platform. “I know she’ll be glad to see you!”

She was waiting for him with a broad smile on her homely face. They had grown up together as next-door neighbours, and were almost like brother and sister. As a matter of fact, when George had been ten and Margaret twelve, they had had one of those idyllic romances of childhood in which each pledged eternal devotion to the other and took it for granted that they would marry when they grew up. But the years had changed all that. He had gone away, and she had taken charge of Randy when her parents died; she now kept house for him, and had never married. As he saw her standing there with the warm smile on her face, and with something vaguely spinsterish in her look in spite of her large, full-breasted figure and her general air of hearty good nature, he felt a sudden stirring of pity and old affection for her.

“Hello, Margaret!” he said, somewhat thickly and excitedly. “How are you, Margaret?”

They shook hands, and he planted a clumsy kiss on her face. Then, blushing with pleasure, she stepped back a pace and regarded him with the half bantering expression she had used so often as a child.

“Well, well, well!” she said. “You haven’t changed much, George! A little stouter, maybe, but I reckon I’d have known you!”

They spoke now quietly about Aunt Maw and about the funeral, saying the strained and awkward things that people always say when they talk of death. Then, this duty done, there was a little pause before they resumed their natural selves once more.

The two men looked at each other and grinned. When they had been boys together Randy had seemed to George more like Mercutio than anybody he had ever known. He had had a small, lean head, well shaped, set closely with blond hair; he had been quick as a flash, light, wiry, active, with a wonderful natural grace in everything he did; his mind and spirit had been cleat, exuberant, incisive, tempered like a fine Toledo blade. In college, too, he had been the same: he had not only done well in his classes, but had distinguished himself as a swimmer and as quarter-back on the football team.

But now something caught in George’s throat as he looked at him and saw what time had done. Randy’s lean, thin face was deeply furrowed, and the years had left a grey deposit at his temples. His hair was thinning back on both sides of the forehead, and there were little webbings of fine wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. It saddened George and somehow made him feel a bit ashamed to see how old and worn he looked. But the thing he noticed most was the expression in Randy’s eyes. Where they had once been clear and had looked out on the world with a sharp and level gaze, they were now troubled, and haunted by some deep preoccupation which he could not quite shake off even in the manifest joy he felt at seeing his old friend again.

While they stood there, Jarvis Riggs, Parson Flack, and the Mayor came slowly down the platform talking earnestly to one of the leading real estate operators of the town, who had come down to meet them. Randy saw them and, still grinning, he winked at George and prodded him in the ribs.

“Oh, you’ll get it now!” he cried in his old extravagant way. “At all hours, from daybreak to three o’clock in the morning—no holds barred! They’ll be waiting for you when you get there!” he chortled.

“Who?” said George.

“Haw-w!” Randy laughed. “Why, I’ll bet they’re all lined up there on the front porch right now, in a reception committee to greet you and to cut your throat, every damned mountain grill of a real estate man in town! Old Horse-face Barnes, Skin-’em-alive Mack Judson, Skunk-eye Tim Wagner, The Demon. Promoter, and Old Squeeze-your-heart’s-blood Simms, The Widder and Orphan Man from Arkansas—they’re all there!” he said gloatingly. “She told them you’re a prospect, and they’re waiting for you! It’s your turn now!” he yelled. “She told them that you’re on the way, and they’re drawing lots right now to see which one gets your shirt and which one takes the pants and B.V.D.s! Haw-w!”—and he poked his friend in the ribs again.

“They’ll get nothing out of me,” George said, laughing, "for I haven’t got it to begin with.

“That doesn’t matter!” Randy yelled. “If you’ve got an extra collar button, they’ll take that as the first instalment, and then—haw-w! they’ll collect your cuff-links, socks, and your suspenders in easy payments as the years roll on!”

He stood there laughing at the astounded look on his friend’s face. Then, seeing his sister’s reproving eye, he suddenly prodded her in the ribs, at which she shrieked in a vexed manner and slapped at his hand.

“I’ll vow, Randy!” she cried fretfully. “What on earth’s the matter with you? Why, you act like a regular idiot! I’ll vow you do!”

“Haw-w!” he yelled again. Then, more soberly, but still grinning: “I guess we’ll have to sleep you out over the garage, Monk, old boy. Dave Merrit’s in town, and he’s got the spare room.” There was a slight note of deference in his voice as he mentioned Merrit’s name, but he went on lightly: “Or if you like—haw-w!—there’s a nice room at Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper’s, and she’d be glad to have you!”

George looked rather uncomfortable at the mention of Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper. She was a worthy lady and he remembered her well, but he didn’t want to stay at her boarding-house. Margaret saw his expression and laughed:

“Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! You see what you’re in for, don’t you? The prodigal comes home and we give him his choice of Mrs. Hopper or the garage! Now is that life or not?”

“I don’t mind a bit,” protested George. “I think the garage is swell. And besides”—they all grinned at each other again with the affection of people who know each other so well that they are long past knowledge—“if I get to helling around at night, I won’t feel that I’m disturbing you when I come in…But who is Mr. Merrit, anyway?”

“Why,” Randy answered, and now he had an air of measuring his words with thoughtful deliberation, “he—he’s the Company’s man—my boss, you know. He travels around to all the branches to check up and see that everything’s O.K. He’s a fine fellow. You’ll like him,” said Randy seriously. “We’ve told him all about you and he wants to meet you.”

“And we knew you wouldn’t mind,” Margaret said. “You know, it’s business, he’s with the Company, and of course it’s good policy to be as nice to him as we can.” But then, because such designing was really alien to her hospitable and whole-hearted spirit, she added: “Mr. Merrit is all right. I like him. We’re glad to have him, anyway.”

“Dave’s a fine fellow,” Randy repeated. “And I know he wants to see you…Well,” he said, and the preoccupied look was in his eyes again, “if we’re all ready, let’s get going. I’m due back at the office now. Merrit’s there, of course. Suppose I run you out to the house and drop you, then I’ll see you later.”

This was agreed upon. Randy grinned once more—a little nervously, George thought—and picked up the valise and started rapidly across the station platform towards his car, which was parked at the kerb.

At the funeral that afternoon the little frame house which old Lafayette Joyner—Aunt Maw’s father, and George Webber’s grandfather—had built with his own hands years ago looked just as it had always looked when George had lived there as a boy. Nothing about it had been changed. Yet it seemed smaller, meaner, more shabby than he remembered it. It was set some distance back from the street, between the Shepperton house on one side and the big brick house in which his Uncle Mark Joyner lived on the other. The street was lined with cars, many of them old and decrepit and covered with the red clay of the hills. In the yard in front of the house many men stood solemnly knotted in little groups, talking quietly, their bare heads and stiff Sunday clothes of austere black giving them an air of self-conscious shyness and restraint.

Inside, the little rooms were jammed with people, and the hush of death was on the gathering, broken now and then by muffled coughs and by stifled sobs and sniffles. Many of them were Joyners, who for three days had been coming in from the hills—old men and women with the marks of toil and pain upon their faces, cousins, in-laws, distant relatives of Aunt Maw. George had never seen some of them before, but they all bore the seal of the Joyner clan upon them, the look of haunting sorrow and something about the thin line of the lips that proclaimed their grim triumph in the presence of death.

In the tiny front room, where on wintry nights Aunt Maw had always sat by the light of a kerosene lamp before a flickering fire, telling the boy her endless stories of death and sorrow, she now lay in her black coffin, the top and front of which were open to display as much of her as possible to the general view. And instantly, as George entered, he knew that one of her main obsessions in life had been victorious over death. A spinster and a virgin all her years, she had always had a horrible fear that, somehow, some day, some man would see her body. As she grew older her thoughts had been more and more preoccupied with death, and with her morbid shame lest someone see her in the state of nature after she was dead. For this reason she had a horror of undertakers, and had made her brother, Mark, and his wife, Mag, solemnly promise that no man would see her unclothed corpse, that her laying out would be done by women, and, above all else, that she was not to be embalmed. By now she had been dead three days—three days of long hot sun and sultriness—and it seemed to George a grim but fitting ending that the last memory he would have of that little house, which in his childhood had been so filled with the stench of death-in-life, should now be the stench of death itself.

Mark Joyner shook hands cordially with his nephew and said he was glad he had been able to come down. His manner was simple, dignified, and reserved, eloquently expressive of quiet grief, for he had always been genuinely fond of his older sister. But Mag, his wife, who for fifty years had carried on a nagging, internecine warfare with Aunt Maw, had appointed herself chief mourner and was obviously enjoying the role. During the interminable service, when the Baptist minister in his twanging, nasal voice recited his long eulogy and went back over the events of Aunt Maw’s life, Mag would break forth now and then in fits of loud weeping and would ostentatiously throw back her heavy black veil and swab vigorously with her handkerchief at her red and swollen eyes.

The minister, with the unconscious callousness of self-righteousness, rehearsed again the story of the family scandal. He told how George Webber’s father had abandoned his wife, Amelia Joyner, to live in open shame with another woman, and how Amelia had shortly, afterwards “ died of a broken heart”. He told how “Brother Mark Joyner and his God-fearing wife, Sister Maggie Joyner,” had been filled with righteous wrath and had gone to court and wrested the motherless boy from the sinful keeping of his father; and how “this good woman who now lies dead before us” had taken charge of her sister’s son and brought him up in a Christian home. And he said be was glad to see that the young man who had been the recipient of this dutiful charity had come home again to pay his last debt of gratitude at the bier of the one to whom he owed so much.

Throughout all this Mag continued to choke and sputter with histrionic sorrow, and George sat there biting his lips, his eyes fixed on the floor, perspiration streaming from him, his jaws clenched hard, his face purple with shame and anger and nausea.

The afternoon wore on, and at last the service was over. People began to issue from the house, and the procession formed for the long, slow ride to the cemetery. With immense relief George escaped from the immediate family group and went over to Margaret Shepperton, and the two of them took possession of one of the limousines that had been hired for the occasion.

Just as the car was about to drive off and take its place in the line, a woman opened the door and got in with them. She was Mrs. Delia Flood, an old friend of Aunt Maw’s. George had known her all his life.

“Why, hello there, young man,” she said to George as she climbed in and sat down beside him “This would’ve been a proud day for your Aunt Maw if she could’ve known you’d come all the way back home to be here at her funeral. She thought the world of you, boy.” She nodded absent-mindedly to Margaret. “I saw you had an empty place here, so I said,’It’s a pity to let it go to waste. Hop right in,’I said.’Don’t stand on ceremony. It might as well be you,’I said,’as the next fellow.’”

Mrs. Delia Flood was a childless widow well past middle age, short, sturdy, and physically stolid, with jet black hair and small, piercing brown eyes, and a tongue that was never still. She would fasten upon anyone she could catch and corner, and would talk on and on in a steady monotone that had neither beginning nor end. She was a woman of property, and her favourite topic of conversation was real estate. In fact, long before the present era of speculation and sky-rocketing prices, she had had a mania for buying and selling land, and was a shrewd judge of values. With some sixth sense she had always known what direction the development of the growing town was likely to take, and when things happened as she predicted, it was usually found that she had bought up choice sites which she was able to sell for much more than she had paid for them. She lived simply and frugally, but she was generally believed to be well off.

For a little while Mrs. Flood sat in contemplative silence. But as the procession moved off and slowly made its way through the streets of the town, she began to glance sharply out of the windows on both sides, and before long, without any preliminary, she launched forth in a commentary on the history of every piece of property they passed. It was constant, panoramic, and exhaustive. She talked incessantly, gesturing briefly and casually with her hand, only pausing from time to time to nod deliberately to herself in a movement of strong affirmation.

“You see, don’t you?” she said, nodding to herself with conviction, tranquilly indifferent whether they listened or not so long as the puppets of an audience were before her. “You see what they’re goin’to do here, don’t you? Why, Fred Barnes, Roy Simms, and Mack Judson—all that crowd—why, yes—here!—say!”—she cried, frowning meditatively—“wasn’t I reading it? Didn’t it all come out in the paper—why, here, you know, a week or two ago—how they proposed to tear down that whole block of buildings there and were goin’to put up the finest garage in this part of the country? Oh, it will take up the whole block, you know, with a fine eight-storey building over it, and storage space upstairs for more cars, and doctors’offices—why, yes!—they’ re even thinkin’of puttin’in a roof garden and a big restaurant on top. The whole thing will cost’em over half a million dollars before they’re done with it—oh, paid two thousand dollars a foot for every inch of it!” she cried. “But pshaw! Why those are Main Street prices—you can get business property up in the centre of town for that! I could’ve told’em—but hm!”—with a scornful little tremor of the head—“they didn’t want it anywhere but here—no, sir! They’ll be lucky if they get out with their skins!”

George and Margaret offered no comment, but Mrs. Flood appeared not to notice, and as the procession crossed the bridge and turned into Preston Avenue she went on:

“See that house and lot over there! I paid twenty-five thousand for it two years ago, and now it’s worth fifty thousand if it’s worth a penny. Yes, and I’ll get it, too. But pshaw! See here!”—she shook her head emphatically. “They couldn’t pull a trick like that on me! I saw what he was up to! Yes! Didn’t Mack Judson come to me? Didn’t he try to trade with me? Oh, here along, you know, the first part of last April,” she said impatiently, with a dismissing gesture of her hand, as if all this must be perfectly clear to everyone. “All that crowd that’s in with him—they were behind him—I could see it plain as day. Says:’I'll tell you what I’ll do. We know you’re a good trader, we respect your judgment, and we want you in,’he says,’and just to have you with us, why, I’ll trade you three fine lots I own up there on Pinecrest Road in Ridgewood for that house and lot of yours on Preston Avenue.’Says:’You won’t have to put up a cent. Just to get you in with us I’ll make you an even swap!’'Well,’I said,’that’s mighty fine of you, Mack, and I appreciate the compliment. If you want that house and lot on Preston Avenue,’I said,’why, I reckon I can let you have it. You know my price,’I said.’It’s fifty thousand. What are those lots in Ridgewood worth?’—came right out and asked him, you know.’Why,’he says,’it’s hard to say. I don’t know just exactly what they are worth,’he says.’The property up there is goin’up all the time.’I looked him straight in the eye and said to him:’Well, Mack, I know what those lots are worth, and they’re not worth what you paid for’em. The town’s movin’the other way. So if you want my house and lot,’I said,’just bring me the cash and you can have it. But I won’t swap with you.’That’s exactly what I told him, and of course that was the end of it. He’s never mentioned it again. Oh, yes, I saw what he was up to, all right.”

Nearing the cemetery, the line of cars passed a place where an unpaved clay road went upwards among fields towards some lonely pines. The dirt road, at the point where it joined the main highway, was flanked by two portalled shapes of hewn granite blocks set there like markers of a splendid city yet unbuilt which would rise grandly from the hills that swept back into the green wilderness from the river. But now this ornate entrance and a large billboard planted in the field were the only evidences of what was yet to be. Mrs. Flood saw the sign.

“Hah? What’s that?” she cried out in a sharply startled tone. “What does it say there?”

They all craned their necks to see it as they passed, and George read aloud the legend on the sign:

RIVERCREST

DEDICATED TO ALL THE PEOPLE

OF THIS SECTION AND TO THE GLORY

OF THE GREATER CITY THEY WILL BUILD

Mrs. Flood took in the words with obvious satisfaction. “Ah-hah!” she said, nodding her head slowly, with deliberate agreement. “That’s just exactly it!”

Margaret nudged George and whispered in his ear:

“Dedicated!” she muttered scornfully—then, with mincing refinement: “Now ain’t that nice? Dedicated to cutting your throat and bleeding you white of every nickel that you’ve got!”

They were now entering the cemetery, and the procession wound slowly in along a circling road and at length came to a halt near the rounded crest of the hill below the Joyner burial plot. At one corner of the plot a tall locust tree was growing, and beneath its shade all the Joyners had been buried. There was the family monument—a square, massive chunk of grey, metallic granite, brilliantly burnished, with “JOYNER” in raised letters upon its shining surface. On the ends were inscriptions for old Lafayette and his wife, with their names and dates; and, grouped about them, in parallel rows set on the gentle slope, were the graves of Lafayette’s children. All these had smaller individual monuments, and on each of these, below the name and dates of birth and death, was some little elegiac poem carved in a Bowing script.

At one side of the burial plot the new-dug grave gaped darkly in the raw earth, and beside it was a mound of loose yellow clay. Ranged above it on the hill were several rows of folding chairs. Towards these the people, who were now getting out of the cars, began to move.

Mark and Mag and various other Joyners took the front rows, and George and Margaret, with Mrs. Flood still close beside them, found chairs at the back. Other people—friends, distant relatives, and mere acquaintances—stood in groups behind.

The lot looked out across a mile or two of deep, dense green, the wooded slopes and hollows that receded towards the winding river, and straight across beyond the river was the central business part of town. The spires and buildings, the old ones as well as some splendid new ones—hotels, office buildings, garages, churches, and the scaffolding and concrete of new construction which exploded from the familiar design with glittering violence—were plainly visible. It was a fine view.

While the people took their places and waited for the pallbearers to perform their last slow and heavy service up the final ascent of the hill, Mrs. Flood sat with her hands folded in her lap and gazed out over the town. Then she began shaking her head thoughtfully, her lips pursed in deprecation and regret, and in a low voice, as if she were talking to herself, she said:

“Hm! Hm! Hm! Too bad, too bad, too bad!”

“What’s that, Mrs. Flood?” Margaret leaned over and whispered. “What’s too bad?”

“Why, that they should ever have chosen such a place as this for the cemetery,” she said regretfully. She had lowered her voice to a stage whisper, and those round her could hear everything she said. “Why, as I told Frank Candler just the other day, they’ve gone and deliberately given away the two best building sites in town to the niggers and the dead people! That’s just exactly what they’ve done! I’ve always said as much—that the two finest building sites in town for natural beauty are Niggertown and Highview Cemetery. I could’ve told’em that long years ago—they should’ve known it themselves if any of’em could have seen an inch beyond his nose—that some day the town would grow up and this would be valuable property! Why, why on earth! When they were lookin’for a cemetery site—why on earth didn’t they think of findin’one up there on Buxton Hill, say, where you get a beautiful view, and where land is not so valuable? But this!” she whispered loudly. “This, by rights, is building property! People could have fine homes here! And as for the niggers, I’ve always said that they’d have been better off if they’d been put down there on those old flats in the depot section. Now it’s too late, of course—nothin’can be done—but it was certainly a serious mistake!” she whispered, and shook her head. “I’ve always known it!”

“Well, I guess you’re right,” Margaret whispered in reply. “I never thought of it before, but I guess you’re right.” And she nudged George with her elbow.

The pallbearers had set the coffin in its place, and the minister now began to read the brief and movingly solemn commitment service. Slowly the coffin was lowered in its grave. And as the black lid disappeared from sight George felt such a stab of wordless pain and grief as he had never known. But he knew even as he felt it that it wasn’t sorrow for Aunt Maw. It was an aching pity for himself and for all men living, and in it was the knowledge of the briefness of man’s days, and the smallness of his life, and the certain dark that comes too swiftly and that has no end. And he felt, too, more personally, now with Aunt Maw gone and no one left in all his family who was close to him, that one whole cycle of time had closed for him. He thought of the future opening blankly up before him, and for a moment he had an acute sense of terror and despair like that of a lost child, for he felt now that the last tie that had bound him to, his native earth was severed, and he saw himself as a creature homeless, uprooted, and alone, with no door to enter, no place to call his own, in all the vast desolation of the planet.

The people had now begun to move away and to walk back slowly towards their cars. The Joyners, however, kept their seats until the last spadeful of earth was heaped and patted into place. Then they arose, their duty done. Some of them just stood there now, talking quietly in their drawling voices, while others sauntered among the tombstones, bending over to read the inscriptions and straightening up to recall and tell each other some forgotten incident in the life of some forgotten Joyner. At last they, too, began to drift away.

George did not want to go back with them and be forced to hear the shreds of Aunt Maw’s life torn apart and pieced together again, so he linked his arm through Margaret’s and led her over the brow of the hill to the other side. For a little while they stood in the slanting light, silent, their faces to the west, and watched the great ball of the sun sink down behind the rim of distant mountains. And the majestic beauty of the spectacle, together with the woman’s quiet presence there beside him, brought calm and peace to the young man’s troubled spirit.

When they came back, the cemetery appeared to be deserted. But as they approached the Joyner plot they saw that Mrs. Delia Flood was still waiting for them. They had forgotten her, and realised now that she could not go without them, for there was only one car on the gravelled roadway below and the hired chauffeur was slumped behind his wheel, asleep. In the fast-failing light Mrs. Flood was wandering among the graves, stopping now and then to stoop and peer closely at an inscription on a stone. Then she would stand there meditatively and look out across the town, where the first lights were already beginning to wink on. She turned to them casually when they came up, as though she had taken no notice of their absence, and spoke to them in her curious fragmentary way, plucking the words right out of the middle of her thoughts.

“Why, to think,” she said reflectively, “that he would go and move her! To think that any man could be so hard-hearted! Oh!” she shuddered with a brief convulsive pucker of revulsion. “It makes my blood run cold to think of it—and everybody told him so!—they told him so at the time—to think he would have no more mercy in him than to go and move her from the place where she lay buried!”

“Who was that, Mrs. Flood?” George said absently. “Move who?”

“Why, Amelia, of course—your mother, child!” she said impatiently, and gestured briefly towards the weather-rusted stone.

He bent forward and read again the familiar inscription:

Amelia Webber, née Joyner

and below her dates the carved verse:

Still is the voice we knew so well,

Vanished the face we love,

Flown her spirit pure to dwell

With angels up above.

Ours is the sorrow, ours the pain,

And ours the joy alone

To clasp her in our arms again

In Heaven, by God’s throne.

“That’s the thing that started all this movin’!” Mrs. Flood was saying. “Nobody’d ever have thought of comin’here if it hadn’t been for Amelia! And here,” she cried fretfully, “the woman had been dead and in her grave more than a year when he gets this notion in his head he’s got to move her—and you couldn’t reason with him! Why, your uncle, Mark Joyner—that’s who it was! You couldn’t argue with him!” she cried with vehement surprise. “Why, yes, of course! It was back there at the time they were havin’all that trouble with your father, child. He’d left Amelia and gone to live with that other woman—but I will say this for him!” and she nodded her head with determination. “When Amelia died, John Webber did the decent thing and buried her himself—claimed her as his wife and buried her! He’d bought a plot in the old cemetery, and that’s where he put her. But then, more than a year afterwards—you know, child—when Mark Joyner had that trouble with your father about who was to bring you up—yes, and took it to the courts and won!—why, that’s when it was that Mark took it in his head to move Amelia. Said he wouldn’t let a sister of his lie in Webber earth! He already had this plot, of course, way over here on this hill where nobody’d ever thought of goin’. It was just a little private buryin’ground, then—a few families used it, that was all.”

She paused and looked out thoughtfully over the town, then after a moment she went on:

“Your Aunt Maw, she tried to talk to Mark about it, but it was like talkin’to a stone wall. She told me all about it at the time. But no, sir!” she shook her head with a movement of strong decision. “He’d made up his mind and he wouldn’t budge from it an inch!’But see here, Mark,’she said.’The thing’s not right! Amelia ought to stay where she’s buried!’She didn’t like the looks of it, you know.’Even the dead have got their rights,’she said.’Where the tree falls, there let it lie!’—that’s what she told him. But no! He wouldn’t listen—you couldn’t talk to him. He says:’I'll move her if it’s the last thing I ever live to do! I’ll move her if I have to dig her up myself and carry the coffin on my back all the way to the top of that hill across the river! That’s where she’s goin’,’he says,’and you needn’t argue any more!’Well, your Aunt Maw saw then that he had his mind made up and that it wouldn’ t do any good to talk to him about it. But oh! an awful mistake! an awful mistake!” she muttered, shaking her head slowly. “All that movin’and expense for nothin’! If he felt that way, he should’ve brought her over here in the first place, when she died! But I guess it was the lawsuit and all the bad blood it stirred up that made him feel that way,” she now said tranquilly…“And that’s the reason all these other people are buried here”—she made a sweeping gesture with her arm—“that’s what started it, all right! Why, of course! When the old cemetery got filled up and they had to look round for a new site—why, one of those fellows in Parson Flack’s gang at City Hall, he remembered the rumpus about Amelia and thought of all these empty acres way out here beside the old buryin’ground. He found he could buy’em cheap, and that’s what he did. That’s exactly how it was,” she said. “But I’ve always regretted it. I was against it from the start.”

She fell silent again, and stood looking with solemn-eyed memory at the weather-rusted stone.

“Well, as I say, then,” she went on calmly, “when your Aunt Maw saw he had his mind made up and that there was no use to try to change him—well, she went out to the old cemetery the day they moved her, and she asked me to go with her, you know. Oh, it was one of those raw, windy days you get in March! The very kind of day Amelia died on. And old Mrs. Wrenn and Amy Williamson—they had both been good friends of Amelia’s—of course they went along, too. And, of course, when we got there, they were curious—they wanted to have a look, you know,” she said calmly, mentioning this grisly desire with no surprise whatever. “And they tried to get me to look at it, too. Your Aunt Maw got so sick that Mark had to take her home in the carriage, but I stood my ground.’No,’I said,’you go on and satisfy your curiosity if that’s what you want to do, but I won’t look at it!’I said,’I'd rather remember her the way she was.’Well, sir, they went ahead and did it then. They got old Prove—you know, he was that old nigger man that worked for Mark—they got him to open up the coffin, and I turned my back and walked away a little piece until they got through lookin’,” she said tranquilly. “And pretty soon I heard’em comin’. Well, I turned round and looked at’em, and let me tell you somethin’,” she said gravely, “their faces were a study! Oh, they turned pale and they trembled!’Well, are you satisfied?’I said.’Did you find what you were lookin’for?’'Oh-h! says old Mrs. Wrenn, pale as a ghost, shakin’and wringin’her hands, you know.’Oh, Delia!’she says,’it was awful! I’m sorry that I looked!’she says.’Ah-ha!’I said.’What did I tell you? You see, don’t you?’And she says:’Oh-h, it was all gone!—all gone!—all rotted away to nothin’so you couldn’t recognise her! The face was all gone until you could see the teeth! And the nails had all grown out long! But Delia!’she says,’the hair!—the hair! Oh, I tell you what;’she says,’the hair was beautiful! It had grown out until it covered everything—the finest head of hair I ever saw on anyone! But the rest of it—oh, I’m sorry that I looked!’she says.’Well, I thought so! I thought so!’I said.’I knew you’d be sorry, so I wouldn’t look!’…But that’s the way it was, all right,” she concluded with the quiet satisfaction of omniscience.

Through this recital George and Margaret had stood transfixed, a look of horror on their faces, but Mrs. Flood did not notice them. She stood now looking down at Amelia’s tombstone, her lips puckered thoughtfully, and after a little while she said:

“I don’t know when I’ve thought of Amelia and John Webber—both of’em dead and in their graves through all these years. She lies here, and he’s all alone in his own lot over there on the other side of town, and that old trouble that they had seems very far away. You know,” she said, looking up and speaking with a tone of deep conviction, “I believe that they have joined each other and are reconciled and happy. I believe I’ll meet them some day in a Higher Sphere, along with all my other friends—all happy, and all leading a new life.”

She was silent for a moment, and then, with a movement of strong decision, she turned away and looked out towards the town, where the lights were now burning hard and bright and steady in the dusk.

“Come, now!” she cried briskly and cheerfully. “It’s time we were goin’home! It’s gettin’dark!”

The three of them walked in silence down the slope towards the waiting car. As they came up to it and were about to get in, Mrs. Flood stopped and laid her hand on George’s shoulder in a warm and easy gesture.

“Young man,” she said, “I’ve been a long time livin’on this earth, and as the fellow says, the world do move! You’ve got your life ahead of you, and lots to learn and many things to do—but let me tell you somethin’, boy!” and all at once she looked at him in a straight and deadly fashion. “Go out and see the world and get your fill of wanderin’,” she cried, “and then come back and tell me if you’ve found a better place than home! I’ve seen great changes in my time, and I’ll see more before I die. There are great things yet in store for us—great progress, great inventions—it will all come true. Perhaps I’ll not live to see it, but you will! We’ve got a fine town here, and fine people to make it go—and we’re not done yet. I’ve seen it all grow up out of a country village—and some day we will have a great city here.”

She waited an instant as if she expected him to answer and corroborate her judgment, and when he merely nodded to show that he had heard her, she took it for agreement and went on:

“Your Aunt Maw always hoped that you’d come home again. And you will!” she said. “There’s no better or more beautiful place on earth than in these mountains—and some day you’ll come home again to stay.”

7. Boom Town

During the week that followed Aunt Maw’s funeral George renewed his acquaintance with his home town, and it was a disconcerting experience. The sleepy little mountain village in which he had grown up—for it had been hardly more than that then—was now changed almost beyond recognition. The very streets that he had known so well, and had remembered through the years in their familiar aspect of early-afternoon emptiness and drowsy lethargy, were now foaming with life, crowded with expensive traffic, filled with new faces he had never seen before. Occasionally he saw somebody that he knew, and in the strangeness of it all they seemed to him like lights shining in the darkness of a lonely coast.

But what he noticed chiefly—and once he observed it he began watching for it, and it was always there—was the look on the people’s faces. It puzzled him, and frightened him, and when he tried to find a word to describe it, the only thing he could think of was—madness. The nervous, excited glitter in the eyes seemed to belong to nothing else but madness. The faces of natives and strangers alike appeared to be animated by some secret and unholy glee. And their bodies, as they darted, dodged, and thrust their way along, seemed to have a kind of leaping energy as if some powerful drug was driving them on. They gave him the impression of an entire population that was drunk—drunk with an intoxication which never made them weary, dead, or sodden, and which never wore of, but which incited them constantly to new efforts of leaping and thrusting exuberance.

The people he had known all his life cried out to him along the streets, seizing his hand and shaking it, and saying: “Hi, there, boy! Glad to see you home again! Going to be with us for a while now? Good! I’ll be seeing you! I’ve got to go on now—got to meet a fellow down the street to sign some papers! Good to see you, boy!” Then, having uttered this tempestuous greeting without a pause and without the loss of a stride, pulling and dragging him along with them’as they wrung his hand, they vanished.

On all sides he heard talk, talk, talk—terrific and incessant. And the tumult of voices was united in variations of a single chorus—speculation and real estate. People were gathered in earnestly chattering groups before the drug-stores, before the post office, before the Court House and the City Hall. They hurried along the pavements talking together with passionate absorption, bestowing half-abstracted nods of greeting from time to time on passing acquaintances.

The real estate men were everywhere. Their motors and buses roared through the streets of the town and out into the country, carrying crowds of prospective clients. One could see them on the porches of houses unfolding blueprints and prospectuses as they shouted enticements and promises of sudden wealth into the ears of deaf old women. Everyone was fair game for them—the lame, the halt, and the blind, Civil War veterans or their decrepit pensioned widows, as well as high school boys and girls, negro truck drivers, soda jerkers, elevator boys, and bootblacks.

Everyone bought real estate; and everyone was “a real estate man” either in name or practice. The barbers, the lawyers, the grocers, the butchers, the builders, the clothiers—all were engaged now in this single interest and obsession. And there seemed to be only one rule, universal and infallible—to buy, always to buy, to pay whatever price was asked, and to sell again within two days at any price one chose to fix. It was fantastic. Along all the streets in town the ownership of the land was constantly changing; and when the supply of streets was exhausted, new streets were feverishly created in the surrounding wilderness; and even before these streets were paved or a house had been built upon them, the land was being sold, and then resold, by the acre, by the lot, by the foot, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A spirit of drunken waste and wild destructiveness was everywhere apparent. The fairest places in the town were being mutilated at untold cost. In the centre of town there had been a beautiful green opulent with rich lawns and lordly trees, with beds of flowers and banks of honeysuckle, and on top of it there had been an immense, rambling, old wooden hotel. From its windows one could look out upon the vast panorama of mountain ranges in the smoky distance.

George could remember its wide porches and comfortable rockers, its innumerable eaves and gables, its labyrinth of wings and corridors, its great parlours and their thick red carpets, and the lobby with its old red leather chairs, hollowed and shaped by the backs of men, and its smell of tobacco and its iced tinkle of tall drinks. It had a splendid dining-room filled with laughter and quiet voices, where expert negroes in white jackets bent and scraped and chuckled over the jokes of the rich men from the North as with prayerful grace they served them delicious foods out of old silver dishes. George could remember, too, the smiles and the tender beauty of the rich men’s wives and daughters. As a boy he had been touched with the unutterable mystery of all these things, for these wealthy travellers had come great distances and had somehow brought with them an evocation of the whole golden and unvisited world, with its fabulous cities and its promise of glory, fame, and love.

It had been one of the pleasantest places in the town, but now it was gone. An army of men and shovels had advanced upon this beautiful green hill and had levelled it down to an ugly flat of clay, and had paved it with a desolate horror of white concrete, and had built stores and garages and office buildings and parking spaces—all raw and new—and were now putting up a new hotel beneath the very spot where the old one had stood. It was to be a structure of sixteen storeys, of steel and concrete and pressed brick. It was being stamped out of the same mould, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels, that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country. And, to give a sumptuous—if spurious—distinction to its patterned uniformity, it was to be called The Libya-Ritz.

One day George ran into Sam Pennock, a boyhood friend and a classmate at Pine Rock College. Sam came down the busy street swiftly at his anxious, lunging stride, and immediately, without a word of greeting, he broke hoarsely into the abrupt and fragmentary manner of speaking that had always been characteristic of him, but that now seemed more feverish than ever:

“When did you get here?…How long are you going to stay?…What do you think of the way things look here?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he demanded with brusque, challenging, and almost impatient scornfulness: “Well, what do you intend to do—be a two-thousand-dollar-a-year school-teacher all your life?”

The contemptuous tone, with its implication of superiority—an implication he had noticed before in the attitude of these people, big with their inflated sense of wealth and achievement—stung George to retort sharply:

“There are worse things than teaching school! Being a paper millionaire is one of them! As for the two thousand dollars a year, you really get it, Sam! It’s not real estate money, it’s money you can spend. You can buy a ham sandwich with it.”

Sam laughed. “You’re right!” he said. “I don’t blame you. It’s the truth!” He began to shake his head slowly. “Lord, Lord!” he said. “They’ve all gone clean out of their heads here…Never saw anything like it in my life…Why, they’re all crazy-as a loon!” he exclaimed. “You can’t talk to them…You can’t reason with them…They won’t listen to you…They’re getting prices for property here that you couldn’t get’in New York.”

“Are they getting it?”

“Well,” he said, with a falsetto laugh, “they get the first five hundred dollars…You pay the next five hundred thousand on time.”

“How much time?”

“God!” he said. “I don’t know…All you want, I reckon…For ever!…It doesn’t matter…You sell it next day for a million.”

“On time?”

“That’s it!” he cried, laughing. “You make half a million just like that.”

“On time?”

“You’ve got it!” said Sam. “On time…God! Crazy, crazy, crazy,” he kept laughing and shaking his head. “That’s the way they make it.”

“Are you making it, too?”

At once his manner became feverishly earnest: “Why, it’s the damnedest thing you ever heard of!” he said. “I’m raking it in hand over fist!…Made three hundred thousand dollars in the last two months…Why, it’s the truth!…Made a trade yesterday and turned round and sold the lot again not two hours later…Fifty thousand dollars just like that!” he snapped his fingers. “Does your uncle want to sell that house on Locust Street where your Aunt Maw lived?…Have you talked to him about it?…Would he consider an offer?”

“I suppose so, if he gets enough.”

“How much does be want?” he demanded impatiently. “Would he take a hundred thousand?”

“Could you get it for him?”

“I could get it within twenty-four hours,” he said. “I know a man who’d snap it up in five minutes…I tell you what I’ll do, Monk, if you persuade him to sell—I’ll split the commission with you…I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

“All right, Sam, it’s a go. Could you let me have fifty cents on account?”

“Do you think he’ll sell?” he asked eagerly.

“Really, I don’t know, but I doubt it. That place was my grandfather’s. It’s been in the family a long time. I imagine he’ll want to keep it.”

“Keep it! What’s the sense in keeping it?…Now’s the time when things are at the peak. He’ll never get a better offer!”

“I know, but he’s expecting to strike oil out in the backyard any time now,” said George with a laugh.

At this moment there was a disturbance among the tides of traffic in the street. A magnificent car detached itself from the stream of humbler vehicles and moved in swiftly to the kerb, where it came to a smooth stop—a glitter of nickel, glass, and burnished steel. From it a gaudily attired creature stepped down to the pavement with an air of princely indolence, tucked a light Malacca cane carelessly under its right armpit, and slowly and fastidiously withdrew from its nicotined fingers a pair of lemon-coloured gloves, at the same time saying to the liveried chauffeur:

“You may go, James. Call for me again in hal-luf an houah!” The creature’s face was thin and sunken. Its complexion was a deathly sallow—all except the nose, which was bulbous and glowed a brilliant red, showing an intricate network of enlarged purple veins. Its toothless jaws were equipped with such an enormous set of glittering false teeth that the lips could not cover them, and they grinned at the world with the prognathous bleakness of a skeleton. The whole figure, although heavy and shambling, had the tottering appearance which suggested a stupendous debauchery. It moved forward with its false, bleak grin, leaning heavily upon the stick, and suddenly George recognised that native ruin which had been known to him since childhood as Tim Wagner.

J. Timothy Wagner—the “J” was a recent and completely arbitrary addition of his own, appropriated, no doubt, to fit his ideas of personal grandeur, and to match the eminent position in the town’s affairs to which he had belatedly risen—was the black sheep of one of the old, established families in the community. At the time George Webber was a boy, Tim Wagner had been for so long the product of complete disillusion that there was no longer any vestige of respect attached to him.

He had been pre-eminently the town sot. His title to this office was unquestioned. In this capacity he was even held in a kind of affection. His exploits were notorious, the subjects of a hundred stories. One night, for example, the loafers in McCormack’s pharmacy had seen Tim swallow something and then shudder convulsively. This process was repeated several times, until the curiosity of the loafers was aroused. They began to observe him furtively but closely, and in a few minutes Tim thrust out his hand slyly, fumbled round in the gold-fish bowl, and withdrew his hand with a wriggling little shape between his fingers. Then the quick swallow and the convulsive shudder were repeated.

He had inherited two fortunes before his twenty-fifth year and had run through them both. Hilarious stories were told of Tim’s celebrated pleasure tour upon the inheritance of the second fortune. He had chartered a private car, stocked it plentifully with liquor, and selected as his travelling companions the most notorious sots, vagabonds, and tramps the community could furnish. The debauch had lasted eight months. This party of itinerant bacchuses had made a tour of the entire country. They had exploded their empty flasks against the ramparts of the Rocky Mountains, tossed their empty kegs into San Francisco Bay, strewn the plains with their beer bottles. At last the party had achieved a condition of exhausted satiety in the nation’s capital, where Tim, with what was left of his inheritance, had engaged an entire floor at one of the leading hotels. Then, one by one, the exhausted wanderers had drifted back to town, bringing tales of bacchanalian orgies that had not been equalled since the days of the Roman emperors, and leaving Tim finally in solitary possession of the wreckage of empty suites.

From that time on he had slipped rapidly into a state of perpetual sottishness. Even then, however, he had retained the traces of an attractive and engaging personality. Everyone had had a tolerant and unspoken affection for him. Save for the harm he did himself, Tim was an inoffensive and good-natured creature.

His figure on the streets of the town at night had been a familiar one. From sunset on, he might be found almost anywhere. It was easy to tell what progressive state of intoxication he had reached simply by observing his method of locomotion. No one ever saw him stagger. He did not weave drunkenly along the pavement. Rather, when he approached the saturation point, he walked very straight, very rapidly, but with funny little short steps. As he walked he kept his face partly lowered, glancing quickly and comically from side to side, with little possumlike looks. If he approached complete paralysis, he just stood quietly and leaned against something—a lamppost or a door-way or the side of a building or the front of the drugstore. Here he would remain for hours in a state of solemn immobility, broken only by an occasional belch. His face, already grown thin and flabby-jowled, with its flaming beacon of a nose, would at these times be composed in an expression of drunken gravity, and his whole condition would be characterised by a remarkable alertness, perceptiveness, and control. He rarely degenerated into complete collapse. Almost always he could respond instantly and briskly to a word of greeting.

Even the police had had a benevolent regard for him, and they had exercised a friendly guardianship over him. Through long experience and observation, every policeman on the force was thoroughly acquainted with Tim’s symptoms. They could tell at a glance just what degree of intoxication he had reached, and if they thought he had crossed the final border line and that his collapse in door-way or gutter was imminent, they would take charge of him, speaking to him kindly, but with a stern warning:

“Tim, if you’re on the streets again to-night, we’re going to lock you up. Now you go on home and go to bed.”

To this Tim would nod briskly, with instant and amiable agreement: “Yes, sir, yes, sir. Just what I was going to do, Captain Crane, when you spoke to me. Going home right this minute. Yes, sir.”

With these words he would start off briskly across the street, his legs making their little fast, short steps and his eyes darting comically from side to side, until he had vanished round the corner. Within ten or fifteen minutes, however, he might be seen again, easing his way along cautiously in the dark shadow of a building, creeping up to the corner, and peeking round with a sly look on his face to see if any of the watchdogs of the law were in sight.

As time went on and his life lapsed more and more into total vagabondage, one of his wealthy aunts, in the hope that some employment might partially retrieve him, had given him the use of a vacant lot behind some buildings in the business section of the town, a short half-block from Main Street. The motor-car had now come in sufficient numbers to make parking laws important, and Tim was allowed by his aunt to use this lot as parking space for cars and to keep the money thus obtained. In this employment he succeeded far better than anyone expected. He had little to do except stay on the premises, and this was not difficult for him so long as he was plentifully supplied with corn whisky.

During this period of his life some canvassers at a local election, had looked for Tim to enrol him in the interest of their candidate, but they had been unable to find out where he lived. He had not; lived, of course, with any member of his family for years, and investigation failed to disclose that he had a room anywhere. The question then began to go round: “Where does Tim Wagner live? Where does he sleep?” No one could find out. And Tim’s own answers, when pressed for information, were slyly evasive.

One day, however, the answer came to light. The motor-car had come, and come so thoroughly that people were even getting buried by motor-car. The day of the horse-drawn hearse had passed for ever. Accordingly, one of the local undertaking firms had told Tim he could have their old horse-drawn hearse if he would only take it off their premises. Tim had accepted the macabre gift and had parked the hearse in his lot. One day when Tim was absent the canvassers came back again, still persistent in their efforts to learn his address so they could enrol him. They noticed the old hearse, and, seeing that its raven curtains were so closely drawn that the interior was hidden from view, they decided to investigate. Cautiously they opened the doors of the hearse. A cot was inside. There was even a chair. It was completely furnished as a small but adequate bedroom.

So at last his secret had been found out. Henceforth all the town knew where he lived.

That was Tim Wagner as George had known him fifteen years ago. Since then he had been so constantly steeped in alcohol that his progressive disintegration had been marked, and he had lately adopted the fantastic trappings of a clown of royalty. Everyone knew all about him, and yet—the fact was incredible!—Tim Wagner had now become the supreme embodiment of the town’s extravagant folly. For, as gamblers will stake a fortune on some moment’s whimsey of belief, thrusting their money into a stranger’s hand and bidding him to play with it because the colour of his hair is lucky, or as racetrack men will rub the hump upon a cripple’s back to bring them luck, so the people of the town now listened prayerfully to every word Tim Wagner uttered. They sought his opinion in all their speculations, and acted instantly on this suggestions. He had become—in what way and for what reason no one knew—the high priest and prophet of this insanity of waste.

They knew that he was diseased and broken, that his wits were always addled now with alcohol, but they used him as men once used divining rods. They deferred to him as Russian peasants once deferred to the village idiot. They now believed with an absolute and unquestioning faith that some power of intuition in him made all his judgments infallible.

It was this creature who had just alighted at the kerb a little beyond George Webber and Sam Pennock, full of drunken majesty and bleary-eyed foppishness. Sam turned to him with a movement of feverish eagerness, saying to George abruptly:

“Wait a minute! I’ve got to speak to Tim Wagner about something! Wait till I come back!”

George watched the scene with amazement. Tim Wagner, still drawing the gloves off of his fingers with an expression of bored casualness, walked slowly over towards the entrance of McCormack’s drug-store—no longer were his steps short and quick, for he leaned heavily on his cane—while Sam, in an attitude of obsequious entreaty, kept at his elbow, bending his tall form towards him and hoarsely pouring out a torrent of questions:

“…Property in West Libya…Seventy-five thousand dollars…Option expires to-morrow at noon…Joe Ingram has the piece above mine…Won’t sell…Holding for hundred fifty…Mine’s the best location…But Fred Bynum says too far from main road…What do you think, Tim?…Is it worth it?”

During the course of this torrential appeal Tim Wagner did not even turn to look at his petitioner. He gave no evidence whatever that he heard what Sam was saying. Instead, he stopped, thrust his gloves into his pocket, cast, his eyes round slyly in a series of quick glances, and suddenly began to root into himself violently with a clutching hand. Then he straightened up like a man just coming out of a trance, and seemed to become aware for the first time that Sam was waiting.

“What’s that? What did you say, Sam?” he said rapidly. “How much did they offer you for it? Don’t sell, don’t sell!” he said suddenly and with great emphasis. “Now’s the time to buy, not to sell. The trend is upwards. Buy! Buy! Don’t take it. Don’t sell. That’s my advice!”

“I’m not selling, Tim,” Sam cried excitedly. “I’m thinking of buying.”

“Oh—yes, yes, yes!” Tim muttered rapidly. “I see, I see.” He turned now for the first time and fixed his eyes upon his questioner. “Where did you say it was?” he demanded sharply. “Deepwood? Good! Good! Can’t go wrong! Buy! Buy!”

He started to walk away into the drug-store, and the lounging idlers moved aside deferentially to let him pass. Sam rushed after him frantically and caught him by the arm, shouting:

“No, no, Tim! It’s not Deepwood! It’s the other way…I’ve been telling you…It’s West Libya!”

“What’s that?” Tim cried sharply. “West Libya? Why didn’t you say so? That’s different. Buy! Buy! Can’t go wrong! Whole town’s moving in that direction. Values double out there in six months. How much do they want?”

“Seventy-five thousand,” Sam panted. “Option expires tomorrow…Five yeas to pay it up.”

“Buy! Buy!” Tim barked, and walked off into the drug-store.

Sam strode back towards George, his eyes blazing with excitement.

“Did you hear him? Did you hear what he said?” he demanded hoarsely. “You heard him, didn’t you?…Best damned judge of real estate that ever lived…Never known to make a mistake!…’Buy! Buy! Will double in value in six months!’…You were standing right here”—he said hoarsely and accusingly, glaring at George—“you heard what he said, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I heard him.”

Sam glanced wildly about him, passed his hand nervously through his hair several times, and then said, sighing heavily and shaking his head in wonder:

“Seventy-five thousand dollars’profit in one deal!…Never heard anything like it in my…life! Lord, Lord!” he cried. “What are we coming to?”

Somehow the news had got round that George had written a book and that it would soon be published. The editor of the local paper heard of it and sent a reporter to interview him, and printed a story about it.

“So you’ve written a book?” said the reporter. “What kind of a book is it? What’s it about?”

“Why—I—I hardly know how to tell you,” George stammered. “It—it’s a novel——”

“A Southern novel? Anything to do with this part of the country?”

“Well—yes—that is—it’s about the South, all right—about an Old Catawba family—but——”

LOCAL BOY WRITES ROMANCE OF THE OLD SOUTH

George Webber, son of the late John Webber and nephew of Mark Joyner, local hardware merchant, has written a novel with a Libya Hill background which the New York house of James Rodney & Co. will publish this autumn.

When interviewed last night, the young author stated that his book was a romance of the Old South, centring about the history of a distinguished antebellum family of this region. The people of Libya Hill and environs will await the publication of the book with special interest, not only because many of them will remember the author, who was born and brought up here, but also because that stirring period of Old Catawba’s past has never before been accorded its rightful place of honour in the annals of Southern literature.

“We understand you have travelled a great deal since you left home. Been to Europe several times?”

“Yes, I have.”

“In your opinion, how does this section of the country compare with other places you have seen?”

“Why—why—er—why good!…I mean, fine! That is——”

LOCAL PARADISE COMPARES FAVOURABLY

In answer to the reporter’s question as to how this part of the country compared to other places he had seen, the former Libya man declared:

"There is no place I have ever visited—and my travels have taken me to England, Germany, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, to say nothing of the south of France, the Italian Riviera, and the Swiss Alps—which can compare in beauty with the setting of my native town.

“We have here,” he said enthusiastically, “a veritable Paradise of Nature. Air, climate, scenery, water, natural beauty, all conspire to make this section the most ideal place in the whole world to live.”

“Did you ever think of coming back here to live?”

“Well—yes—I have thought of it—but—you see——”

WILL SETTLE AND BUILD HERE

When questioned as to his future plans, the author said:

"For years, my dearest hope and chief ambition has been that one day I should be able to come back here to live. One who has ever known the magic of these hills cannot forget them. I hope, therefore, that the time is not far distant when I may return for good.

“Here, I feel, as nowhere else,” the author continued wistfully, "that I will be able to and the inspiration that I must have to do my work. Scenically, climatically, geographically, and in every other way, the logical spot for a modern renaissance is right here among these hills. There is no reason why, in ten years’time, this community should not be a great artistic colony, drawing to it the great artists, the music and the beauty lovers, of the whole world, as Salzburg does now. The Rhododendron Festival is already a step in the right direction.

“It shall be a part of my purpose from now on,” the earnest young author added, “to do everything in my power to further this great cause, and to urge all my writing and artistic friends to settle hereto make Libya Hill the place it ought to be—The Athens of America.”

“Do you intend to write another book?”

“Yes—that is—I hope so. In fact—”

“Would you care to say anything about it?”

“Well—I don’t know—it’s pretty hard to say——”

“Come on, son, don’t be bashful. We’re all your home folks here…Now, take Longfellow. There was a great writer! You know what a young fellow with your ability ought to do? He ought to come back here and do for this section what Longfellow did for New England…”

PLANS NATIVE SAGA

When pressed for details about the literary work he hopes to do hereafter, the author became quite explicit:

“I want to return here,” he said, “and commemorate the life, history, and development of Western Catawba in a series of poetic legends comparable to those with which the poet Longfellow commemorated the life of the Acadians and the folklore of the New England countryside. What I have in mind is a trilogy that will begin with the early settlement of the region by the first pioneers, among them my own forebears, and will trace the steady progress of Libya Hill from its founding and the coming of the railroad right down to its present international prominence and the proud place it occupies to-day as’The Gem City of the Hills’.”

George writhed and swore when he read the article. There was hardly an accurate statement in it. He felt angry and sheepish and guilty all at the same time.

He sat down and wrote a scathing letter to the paper, but when he had finished he tore it up. After all, what good would it do? The reporter had spun his story out of nothing more substantial than his victim’s friendly tones and gestures, a few words and phrases which he had blurted out in his confusion, and, above all, his reticence to talk about his work; yet the fellow had obviously been so steeped in the booster spirit that he had been able to concoct this elaborate fantasy—probably without quite knowing that it was a fantasy.

Then, too, he reflected, people would take an emphatic denial of the statements that had been attributed to him as evidence that he was a sorehead, full of conceit about his book. You couldn’t undo the effect of a thing like this with a simple negative. If he gave the lie to all that gush, everybody would say he was attacking the town and turning against those who had nurtured him. Better let bad enough alone.

So he did nothing about it. And after that, strangely enough, it seemed to George that the attitude of people changed towards him. Not that they had been unfriendly before. It was only that he now felt they approved of him. This in itself gave him a quiet sense of accomplishment, as if the stamp of business confirmation had been put upon him.

Like all Americans, George had been amorous of material success, so it made him happy now to know that the people of his home town believed he had got it, or at any rate was at last on the highroad to it. One thing about the whole affair was most fortunate. The publisher who had accepted his book had an old and much respected name; people knew the name, and would meet him on the street and wring his hand and say:

“So your book is going to be published by James Rodney & Co.?”

That simple question, asked with advance knowledge of the fact, had a wonderful sound. It had a ring, not only of congratulation that his book was being published, but also of implication that the distinguished house of Rodney had been fortunate to secure it. That was the way it sounded, and it was probably also the way it was meant. He had the feeling, therefore, that in the eyes of his own people he had “arrived”. He was no longer a queer young fellow who had consumed his substance in the deluded hope that he was—oh, loaded word!—“a writer”. He was a writer. He was not only a writer, but a writer who was about to be published, and by the ancient and honourable James Rodney & Co.

There is something good in the way people welcome success, or anything—no matter what—that is stamped with the markings of success. It is not an ugly thing, really. People love success because to most of them it means happiness, and, whatever form it takes, it is the image of what they, in their hearts, would like to be. This is more true in America than anywhere else. People put this label on the image of their heart’s desire because they have never had an image of another kind of happiness. So, essentially, this love of success is not a bad thing, but a good thing. It calls forth a general and noble response, even though the response may also be mixed with self-interest. People are happy for your happiness because they want so much to be happy themselves. Therefore it’s a good thing. The idea behind it is good, anyhow. The only trouble with it is that the direction is misplaced.

That was the way it seemed to George. He had gone through a long and severe period of probation, and now he was approved. It made him very happy. There is nothing in the world that will take the chip off of one’s shoulder like a feeling of success. The chip was off now, and George didn’t want to fight anybody. For the first time he felt that it was good to be home again.

Not that he did not have his apprehensions. He knew what he had written about the people and the life of his home town. He knew, too, that he had written about them with a nakedness and directness which, up to that time, had been rare in American fiction. He wondered how they would take it. Even when people congratulated him about the book he could not altogether escape a feeling of uneasiness, for he was afraid of what they would say and think after the book came out and they had read it.

These apprehensions took violent possession of him one night in a most vivid and horrible dream. He thought he was running and stumbling over the blasted heath of some foreign land, fleeing in terror from he knew not what. All that he knew was that he was filled with a nameless shame. It was wordless, and as shapeless as a smothering fog, yet his whole mind and soul shrank back in an agony of revulsion and self-contempt. So overwhelming was his sense of loathing and guilt that he coveted the place of murderers on whom the world had visited the fierceness of its wrath. He envied the whole list of those criminals who had reaped the sentence of mankind’s dishonour—the thief, the liar, the trickster, the outlaw, and the traitor—men whose names were anathema and were spoken with a curse, but which were spoken; for he had committed a crime for which there was no name, he was putrescent with a taint for which there was neither comprehension nor cure, he was rotten with a vileness of corruption that placed him equally beyond salvation or vengeance, remote alike from pity, love, and hatred, and unworthy of a curse. Thus he fled across the immeasurable and barren heath beneath a burning sky, an exile in the centre of a planetary vacancy which, like his own shameful self, had no place either among things living or among things dead, and in which there was neither vengeance of lightning nor mercy of burial; for in all that limitless horizon there was no shade or shelter, no curve or bend, no hill or tree or hollow: there was only one vast, naked eye—searing and inscrutable—from which there was no escape, and which bathed his defenceless soul in its fathomless depths of shame.

And then, with bright and sharp intensity, the dream changed, and suddenly he found himself among the scenes and faces he had known long ago. He was a traveller who had returned after many years of wandering to the place he had known in his childhood. The sense of his dreadful but nameless corruption still hung ominously above him as he entered the streets of the town again, and he knew that he had returned to the springs of innocence and health from whence he came, and by which he would be saved.

But as he came into the town he became aware that the knowledge of his guilt was everywhere about him. He saw the men and women he had known in childhood, the boys with whom he had gone to school, the girls he had taken to dances. They were engaged in all their varied activities of life and business, and they showed their friendship towards one another, but when he approached and offered his hand in greeting they looked at him with blank stares, and in their gaze there was no love, hatred, pity, loathing, or any feeling whatsoever. Their faces, which had been full of friendliness and affection when they spoke to one another, went dead; they gave no sign of recognition or of greeting; they answered him briefly in toneless voices, giving him what information he asked, and repulsed every effort he made towards a resumption of old friendship with the annihilation of silence and that blank and level stare. They did not laugh or mock or nudge or whisper when he passed; they only waited and were still, as if they wanted but one thing—that he should depart out of their sight.

He walked on through the old familiar streets, past houses and places that lived again for him as if he had never left them, and by people who grew still and waited until he had gone, and the knowledge of wordless guilt was rooted in his soul. He knew that he was obliterated from their lives more completely than if he had died, and he felt that he was now lost to all men.

Presently he had left the town, and was again upon the blasted heath, and he was fleeing across it beneath the pitiless sky where flamed the naked eye that pierced him with its unutterable weight of shame.

8. The Company

George considered himself lucky to have the little room over the Shepperton garage. He was also glad that his visit had overlapped that of Mr. David Merrit, and that Mr. Merrit had been allowed to enjoy undisturbed the greater comfort of the Shepperton guest room, for Mr. Merrit had filled him with a pleasant glow at their first meeting. He was a ruddy, plump, well-kept man of forty-five or so, always ready with a joke and immensely agreeable, with pockets bulging with savoury cigars which he handed out to people on the slightest provocation. Randy had spoken of him as “the Company’s man,” and, although George did not know what the duties of a “Company’s man” were, Mr. Merrit made them seem very pleasant.

George knew, of course, that Mr. Merrit was Randy’s boss, and he learned that Mr. Merrit was in the habit of coming to town every two or three months. He would arrive like a benevolent, pink-cheeked Santa Claus, making his jolly little jokes, passing out his fat cigars, putting his arm round people’s shoulders, and, in general, making everyone feel good. As he said himself:

“I’ve got to turn up now and then just to see that the boys are behaving themselves, and not taking in any wooden nickels.”

Here he winked at George in such a comical way that all of them had to grin. Then he gave George a big cigar.

His functions seemed to be ambassadorial. He was always taking Randy and the salesmen of the Company out to lunch or dinner, and, save for brief visits to the office, he seemed to spend most of his time inaugurating an era of good feeling and high living. He would go around town and meet everybody, slapping people on the back and calling them by their first names, and for a week after he had left the business men of Libya Hill would still be smoking his cigars. When he came to town he always stayed “out of the house”, and one knew that Margaret would prepare her best meals for him, and that there would be some good drinks. Mr. Merrit supplied the drinks himself, for he always brought along a plentiful store of expensive beverages. George could see at their first meeting that he was the kind of man who exudes an aura of good fellowship, and that was why it was so pleasant to have Mr. Merrit staying in the house.

Mr. Merrit was not only a nice fellow. He was also “with the Company”, and George soon realised that “the Company” was a vital and mysterious force in all their lives. Randy had gone with it as soon as he left college. He had been sent to the main office, up North somewhere, and had been put through a course of training. Then he had come back South and had worked his way up from salesman to district agent—an important member of the sales organisation.

“The Company”, “district agent”, “the sales organisation”—mysterious titles all of them, but most comforting. During the week George was in Libya Hill with Randy and Margaret, Mr. Merrit was usually on hand at meal times, and at night he would sit out on the front porch with them and carry on in his jolly way, joking and laughing and giving them all a good time. Sometimes he would talk shop with Randy, telling stories about the Company and about his own experiences in the organisation, and before long George began to pick up a pretty good idea of what it was all about.

The Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company was a far-flung empire which had a superficial aspect of great complexity, but in its essence it was really beautifully simple. Its heart and soul—indeed, its very life—was its sales organisation.

The entire country was divided into districts, and over each district an agent was appointed. This agent, in turn, employed salesmen to cover the various portions of his district. Each district also had an “office man” to attend to any business that might come up while the agent and his salesmen were away, and a “repair man” whose duty it was to overhaul damaged or broken-down machines. Together, these comprised the agency, and the country was so divided that there was, on the average, an agency for every unit of half a million people in the total population. Thus there were two hundred and sixty or seventy agencies through the nation, and the agents with their salesmen made up a working force of from twelve to fifteen hundred men.

The higher purposes of this industrial empire, which the employees almost never referred to by name, as who should speak of the deity with coarse directness, but always with a just perceptible lowering and huskiness of the voice as “the Company”—these higher purposes were also beautifully simple. They were summed up in the famous utterance of the Great Man himself, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, who invariably repeated it every year as a peroration to his hour-long address before the assembled members of the sales organisation at their national convention. Standing before them at the close of each year’s session, he would sweep his arm in a gesture of magnificent command towards an enormous map of the United States of America that covered the whole wall behind him, and say:

“There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”

What could be simpler and more beautiful than this? What could more eloquently indicate that mighty sweep of the imagination which has been celebrated in the annals of modern business under the name of “vision”? The words had the spacious scope and austere directness that have characterised the utterances of great leaders in every epoch of man’s history. It is Napoleon speaking to his troops in Egypt: “Soldiers, from the summit of yonder pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” It is Captain Perry: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” It is Dewey at Manila Bay: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” It is Grant before Spottsylvania Court House: “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”

So when Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, waved his arm at the wall and said: “There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”—the assembled captains, lieutenants, and privates in the ranks of his sales organisation knew that there were still giants in the earth, and that the age of romance was not dead.

True, there had once been a time when the aspirations of the Company had been more limited. That was when the founder of the institution, the grandfather of Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, had expressed his modest hopes by saying: “I should like to see one of my machines in every store, shop, or business that needs one, and that can afford to pay for one.” But the self-denying restrictions implicit in the founder’s statement had long since become so out of date as to seem utterly mid-Victorian. Mr. David Merrit admitted it himself. Much as he hated to speak ill of any man, and especially the founder of the Company, he had to confess that by the standards of 1929 the old gentleman had lacked vision.

“That’s old stuff now,” said Mr. Merrit, shaking his head and winking at George, as though to take the curse off of his treason to the founder by making a joke of it. “We’ve gone way beyond that!” he exclaimed with pardonable pride. “Why, if we waited nowadays to sell a machine to someone who needs one, we’d get nowhere.” He was nodding now at Randy, and speaking with the seriousness of deep conviction. “We don’t wait until he needs one. If he says he’s getting along all right without one, we make him buy one anyhow. We make him see the need, don’t we, Randy? In other words, we create the need.”

This, as Mr. Merrit went on to explain, was what is known in more technical phrase as “creative salesmanship” or “creating the market”. And this poetic conception was the inspired work of one man—none other than the present head of the Company, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, himself. The idea had come to him in a single blinding flash, born full-blown like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, and Mr. Merrit still remembered the momentous occasion as vividly as if it had been only yesterday. It was at one of the meetings of the assembled parliaments of the Company that Mr. Appleton, soaring in an impassioned flight of oratory, became so intoxicated with the grandeur of his own vision that he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and stood there as one entranced, gazing out dreamily into the unknown vistas of magic Canaan; and when he at last went on again, it was in a voice surcharged with quivering emotion:

“My friends,” he said, “the possibilities of the market, now that we see how to create it, are practically unlimited!” Here he was silent for a moment, and Mr. Merrit said that the Great Man actually paled and seemed to stagger as he tried to speak, and that his voice faltered and sank to an almost inaudible whisper, as if he himself could hardly comprehend the magnitude of his own conception. “My friends”—he muttered thickly, and was seen to clutch the rostrum for support—“my friends—seen properly”—he whispered, and moistened his dry lips—“seen properly—the market we shall create being what it is”—his voice grew stronger, and the clarion words now rang forth—“there is no reason why one of our machines should not be in the possession of every man, woman, and child in the United\ States!” Then came the grand, familiar gesture to the map: “There’s your market, boys! Go out and sell them!”

Henceforth this vision became the stone on which Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, erected the magnificent edifice of the true church and living faith which was called “the Company”. And in the service of this vision Mr. Appleton built up an organisation which worked with the beautiful precision of a locomotive piston. Over the salesman was the agent, and over the agent was the district supervisor, and over the district supervisor was the district manager, and over the district manager was the general manager, and over the general manager was—if not God himself, then the next thing to it, for the agents and salesmen referred to him in tones of proper reverence as “P. S. A.”

Mr. Appleton also invented a special Company Heaven known as the Hundred Club. Its membership was headed by P. S. A., and all the ranks of the sales organisation were eligible, down to the humblest salesman. The Hundred Club was a social order, but it was also a good deal more than that. Each agent and salesman had a “quota”—that is to say, a certain amount of business which was assigned to him as the normal average of his district and capacity. A man’s quota differed from another’s according to the size of his territory, its wealth, and his own experience and ability. One man’s quota would be sixty, another’s eighty, another’s ninety or one hundred, and if he was a district agent, his quota would be higher than that of a mere salesman. Each man, however, no matter how small or how large his quota might be, was eligible for membership in the Hundred Club, the only restriction being that he must average one hundred per cent of his quota. If he averaged more—if he got, say, one hundred and twenty per cent of his quota—there were appropriate honours and rewards, not only social but financial as well. One could be either high up or low down in the Hundred Club, for it had almost as many degrees of merit as the Masonic order.

The unit of the quota system was “the point”, and a point was forty dollars’worth of business. So if a salesman had a quota of eighty, this meant that he had to sell the products of the Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company to the amount of at least $3200 every month, or almost $40, 000 a year. The rewards were high. A salesman’s commission was from fifteen to twenty per cent of his sales; an agent’s from, twenty to twenty-five per cent. Beyond this there were bonuses to be earned by achieving or surpassing his quota. Thus it was possible for an ordinary salesman in an average district to earn from $6, 000 to $8, 000 a year, while an agent could earn from $12, 000 to $15, 000, and even more if his district was an exceptionally good one.

So much for the rewards of Mr. Appleton’s Heaven. But what would Heaven be if there were no Hell? So Mr. Appleton was forced by the logic of the situation to invent a Hell, too. Once a man’s quota was fixed at any given point, the Company never reduced it. Moreover, if a salesman’s quota was eighty points and he achieved it during the year, he must be prepared at the beginning of the new year to find that his quota had been increased to ninety points. One had to go onwards and upwards constantly, and the race was to the swift.

While it was quite true that membership in the Hundred Club was not compulsory, it was also true that Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, was a theologian who, like Calvin, knew how to combine free will and predestination. If one did not belong to the Hundred Club, the time was not far distant when one would not belong to Mr. Appleton. Not to belong to it was, for agent or salesman, the equivalent of living on the other side of the railroad tracks. If one failed of admission to the Company Heaven, or if one dropped out, his fellows would begin to ask guardedly: “Where’s Joe Klutz these days?” The answers would be vague, and in the course of time Joe Klutz would be spoken of no more. He would fade into oblivion. He was “no longer with the Company”.

Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, never had but the one revelation—the one which Mr. Merrit so movingly described—but that was enough, and he never let its glories and allurements grow dim. Four times a year, at the beginning of each quarter, he would call his general manager before him and say: “What’s the matter, Elmer? You’re not getting the business! The market is there! You know what you can do about it—or else…!” Thereupon the general manager would summon the district managers one by one and repeat to them the words and manner of P. S. A., and the district managers would reenact the scene before each of the district supervisors, who would duplicate it to the agents, who would pass it on to the salesmen, who, since they had no one below them, would “get out and hustle—or else!” This was called “keeping up the morale of the organisation.”

As Mr. David Merrit sat on the front porch and told of his many experiences with the Company, his words conveyed to George Webber a great deal more than he actually said. For his talk went on and on in its vein of mellow reminiscence, and Mr. Merrit made his little jokes and puffed contentedly at one of his own cigars, and everything he said carried an overtone of “What a fine and wonderful thing it is to be connected with the Company!”

He told, for example, about the splendid occasion every year when all the members of the Hundred Club were brought together for what was known as “The Week of Play”. This was a magnificent annual outing conducted “at the Company’s expense”. The meeting place might be in Philadelphia or Washington, or in the tropic opulence of Los Angeles or Miami, or it might be on board a chartered ship—one of the small but luxurious twenty-thousand-tonners that ply the transatlantic routes—bound to Bermuda or Havana. Wherever it was, the Hundred Club was given a free sweep. If the journey was by sea, the ship was theirs—for a week. All the liquor in the world was theirs, if they could drink it—and Bermuda’s coral isles, or the unlicensed privilege of gay Havana. For that one week everything on earth that money could buy was at the command of the members of the Hundred Club, everything was done on the grand scale, and the Company—the immortal, paternal, and great-hearted Company—“paid for everything”.

But as Mr. Merrit painted his glowing picture of the fun they had on these occasions, George Webber saw quite another image. It was an image of twelve or fifteen hundred men—for on these pilgrimages, by general consent, women (or, at any rate, wives) were debarred—twelve or fifteen hundred men, Americans, most of them in their middle years, exhausted, overwrought, their nerves frayed down and stretched to the breaking point, met from all quarters of the continent “at the Company’s expense” for one brief, wild, gaudy week of riot. And George thought grimly what this tragic spectacle of business men at play meant in terms of the entire scheme of things and the plan of life that had produced it. He began to understand, too, the changes which time had brought about in Randy.

The last day of his week in Libya Hill, George had gone to the station to buy his return ticket and he stopped in at Randy’s office a little before one o’clock to go home to lunch with him. The outer salesroom, with its shining stock of scales and computing machines imposingly arrayed on walnut pedestals, was deserted, so he sat down to wait. On one wall hung a gigantic coloured poster. “August Was the Best Month in Federal History,” it read. “Make September a Better One! The Market’s There, Mr. Agent. The Rest Is Up to You!”

Behind the salesroom was a little partitioned Space which served Randy as an office. As George waited, gradually he became aware of mysterious sounds emanating from beyond the partition. First there was the rustle of heavy paper, as if the pages of a ledger were being turned, and occasionally there would be a quick murmur of hushed voices, confidential, ominous, interspersed with grunts and half-suppressed exclamations. Then all at once there were two loud bangs, as of a large ledger being slammed shut and thrown upon a desk or table, and after a moment’s silence the voices rose louder, distinct, plainly audible. Instantly he recognised Randy’s voice—low, grave, hesitant, and deeply troubled. The other voice he had never heard before.

But as he listened to that voice he began to tremble and grow white about the lips. For its very tone was a foul insult to human life, an ugly sneer whipped across the face of decent humanity, and as he realised that that voice, these words, were being used against his friend, he had a sudden blind feeling of murder in his heart. And what was so perplexing and so troubling was that this devil’s voice had in it as well a curiously familiar note, as of someone he had known.

Then it came to him in a flash—it was Merrit speaking! The owner of that voice, incredible as it seemed, was none other than that plump, well-kept, jolly-looking man who had always been so full of hearty cheerfulness and good spirits every time he had seen him.

Now, behind that little partition of glazed glass and varnished wood, this man’s voice had suddenly become fiendish. It was inconceivable, and as George listened he grew sick, as one does in some awful nightmare when he visions someone he knows doing some perverse and abominable act. But what was most dreadful of all was Randy’s voice, humble, low, submissive, modestly entreating. Merrit’s voice would cut across the air like a gob of rasping phlegm, and then Randy’s voice—gentle, hesitant, deeply troubled—would come in from time to time in answer.

“Well, what’s the matter? Don’t you want the job?”

“Why—why, yes, you know I do, Dave—haw-w”—and Randy’s voice lifted a little in a troubled and protesting laugh.

“What’s the matter that you’re not getting the business?” “Why—haw-w!”—again the little laugh, embarrassed and troubled—“I thought I was——”

“Well, you’re not!” that rasping voice cut in like a knife. “This district ought to deliver thirty per cent more business than you’re getting from it, and the Company is going to have it, too—or else! You deliver or you go right out on your can! See? The Company doesn’t give a damn about you! It’s after the business! You’ve been around a long time, but you don’t mean a damn bit more to the Company than anybody else! And you know what’s happened to a lot of other guys who got to feeling they were too big for their job—don’t you?”

“Why—why, yes, Dave—but—haw-w!” the little laugh again“—but—honestly, I never thought——”

“We don’t give a damn what you never thought!” the brutal voice ripped in. “I’ve given you fair warning now! You get the business or out you go!”

The glazed glass door burst open violently and Merrit came striding out of the little partitioned office. When he saw George, he looked startled. Then he was instantly transformed. His plump and ruddy face became wreathed in smiles, and he cried out in a hearty tone:

“Well, well, well Look who’s here! If it’s not the old boy himself!”

Randy had followed him out, and Merrit now turned and winked humorously at him, in the manner of a man who is carrying on a little bantering byplay:

“Randy,” he said, “I believe George gets better looking from day to day. Has he broken any hearts yet?”

Randy tried to smile, grey-faced and haggardly.

“I bet you’re burning them up in the Big Town,” said Merrit, turning back to George. “And, say, I read that piece in the paper about your book. Great stuff, son! We’re all proud of you!”

He gave George a hearty slap on the back and turned away with an air of jaunty readiness, picked up his hat, and said cheerfully:

“Well, what d’ya say, folks? What about one of Margaret’s famous meals, out at the old homestead? Well, you can’t hurt my feelings. I’m ready if you are. Let’s go!”

And, smiling, ruddy, plump, cheerful, a perverted picture of amiable good will to all the world, he sauntered through the door. For a moment the two old friends just stood there looking at each other, white and haggard, with a bewildered expression in their eyes. In Randy’s eyes there was also a look of shame. With that instinct for loyalty which was one of the roots of his soul, he said:

“Dave’s a good fellow…You—you see, he’s got to do these things…He—he’s with the Company.”

George didn’t say anything. For as Randy spoke, and George remembered all that Merrit had told him about the Company, a terrific picture flashed through his, mind. It was a picture he had seen in a gallery somewhere, portraying a long line of men stretching from the Great Pyramid to the very portals of great Pharaoh’s house, and great Pharaoh stood with a thonged whip in his hand and applied it unmercifully to the bare back and shoulders of the man in front of him, who was great Pharaoh’s chief overseer, and in the hand of the overseer was a whip of many tails which he unstintedly applied to the quivering back of the wretch before him, who was the chief overseer’s chief lieutenant, and in the lieutenant’s hand a whip of rawhide which he laid vigourously on the quailing body of his head sergeant, and in the sergeant’s hand a wicked flail with which he belaboured a whole company of groaning corporals, and in the hands of every corporal a knotted lash with which to whack a whole regiment of slaves, who pulled and hauled and bore burdens and toiled and sweated and built the towering structure of the pyramid.

So George didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He had just found out something about life that he had not known before.

9. The City of Lost Men

Late that afternoon George asked Margaret to go with him to the cemetery, so she borrowed Randy’s car and drove him out. On the way they stopped at a florist’s and bought some chrysanthemums, which George placed on Aunt Maw’s grave. There had been a heavy rain during the week and the new-made mound had sunk an inch or two, leaving a jagged crack round its edges.

As he laid the flowers on the damp, raw earth, suddenly it struck him as strange that he should be doing it. He was not a sentimental person, and for a moment it puzzled him that he should be making this gesture. He hadn’t planned to do it. He had simply seen the florist’s window as they drove along and, without thinking, had stopped and got the flowers, and now there they were.

Then he realised why he had done it—and why he had wanted to come back to the cemetery at all. This visit to Libya Hill, which he had dreamed about so many times as his home-coming, and which had not turned out in any way as he had thought it would be, was really his leave-taking, his farewell. The last tie that had bound him to his native earth was severed, and he was going out from here to make a life for himself as each man must—alone.

And now, once again, the dusk was falling in this place, and in the valley below the lights were beginning to come on in the town. With Margaret at his side, he stood there and looked down upon it, and she seemed to understand his feelings, for she was quiet and said nothing. Then, in a low voice, George began to speak to her. He needed to tell someone all that he had thought and felt during his week at borne. Randy was not available, and Margaret was the only one left to whom he could talk. She listened without interruption as he spoke about his book and his hopes for it, telling her as well as he could what kind of book it was, and how much he feared that the town would not like it. She pressed his arm reassuringly, and the gesture was more eloquent than any words could be.

He did not say anything about Randy and Merrit. There was no need to alarm her unduly, no sense in robbing her of that security which is so fundamental to a woman’s peace and happiness. Sufficient unto the day…

But he spoke at length about the town itself, telling her all that he had seen of its speculative madness, and how it had impressed him. What did the future hold for that place and its people? They were always talking of the better life that lay ahead of them and of the greater city they would build, but to George it seemed that in all such talk there was evidence of a strange and savage hunger that drove them on, and that there was a desperate quality in it, as though what they really hungered for was ruin and death. It seemed to him that they were ruined, and that even when they laughed and shouted and smote each other on the back, the knowledge of their ruin was in them.

They had squandered fabulous sums in meaningless streets and bridges. They had torn down ancient buildings and erected new ones large enough to take care of a city of half a million people. They had levelled hills and bored through mountains, making magnificent tunnels paved with double roadways and glittering with shining tiles—tunnels which leaped out on the other side into Arcadian wilderness. They had flung away the earnings of a lifetime, and mortgaged those of a generation to come. They had ruined their city, and in doing so had ruined themselves, their children, and their children’s children.

Already the town had passed from their possession. They no longer owned it. It was mortgaged under a debt of fifty million dollars, owned by bonding companies in the North. The very streets they walked on had been sold beneath their feet. They signed their names to papers calling for the payment of fabulous sums, and resold their land the next day to other madmen who signed away their lives with the same careless magnificence. On paper, their profits were enormous, but their “boom” was already over and they would not see it. They were staggering beneath obligations to pay which none of them could meet—and still they bought.

And when they had exhausted all their possibilities of ruin and extravagance that the town could offer, they had rushed out into the wilderness, into the lyrical immensities of wild earth where there was land enough for all men living, and they had staked off little plots and wedges in the hills as one might try to stake a picket fence out in the middle of the ocean. They had given fancy names to all these foolish enterprises—“Wild Boulders”—“Shady Acres”—“Eagle’s Crest”. They had set prices on these sites of forest, field, and tangled undergrowth that might have bought a mountain, and made charts and drawings showing populous communities of shops, houses, streets, roads, and clubs in regions where there was no road, no street, no house, and which could not be reached in any way save by a band of resolute pioneers armed with axes. These places were to be transformed into idyllic colonies for artists and writers and critics; and there were colonies as well for preachers, doctors, actors, dancers, golf players, and retired locomotive engineers. There were colonies for everyone, and, what is more, they sold the lots—to one another!

But under all this flash and play of great endeavour, the paucity of their designs and the starved meagreness of their lives were already apparent. The better life which they talked about resolved itself into a few sterile and baffled gestures. All they really did for themselves was to build uglier and more expensive homes, and buy new cars, and join a country club. And they did all this with a frenzied haste, because— it seemed to George—they were looking for food to feed their hunger and had not found it.

As he stood upon the hill and looked out on the scene that spread below him in the gathering darkness, with its pattern of lights to mark the streets and the creeping pin-pricks of the thronging traffic, he remembered the barren night-time streets of the town he had known so well in his boyhood. Their dreary and unpeopled desolation had burned its acid print upon his memory. Bare and deserted by ten o’clock at night, those streets had been an aching monotony, a weariness of hard lights and empty pavements, a frozen torpor broken only occasionally by the footfalls of some prowler—some desperate, famished, lonely man who hoped past hope and past belief for some haven of comfort, warmth, and love there in the wilderness, for the sudden opening of a magic door into some secret, rich, and more abundant life. There had been many such, but they had never found what they were searching for. They had been dying in the darkness—without a goal, a certain purpose, or a door.

And that, it seemed to George, was the way the thing had come. That was the way it had happened. Yes, it was there—on many a night long past and wearily accomplished, in ten thousand little towns and in ten million barren streets where all the passion, hope, and hunger of the famished men beat like a great pulse through the fields of darkness—it was there and nowhere else that all this madness had been brewed.

As he remembered the bleak, deserted streets of night which he had known here fifteen years before, he thought again of Judge Rumford Bland, whose solitary figure ranging restlessly through the sleeping town had been so familiar to him and had struck such terror in his heart. Perhaps he was the key to this whole tragedy. Perhaps Rumford Bland had sought his life in darkness not because of something evil in him—though certainly there was evil there—but because of something good that had not died. Something in the man had always fought against the dullness of provincial life, against is predudice, its caution, its smugness, its sterility, and its lack of joy. He had looked for something better in the night, for a place of warmth and fellowship, a moment of dark mystery, the thrill of imminent and unknown adventure, the excitement of the hunt, pursuit, perhaps the capture, and then the fulfilment of desire. Was it possible that in the blind man whose whole life had become such a miracle of open shamelessness, there had once been a warmth and an energy that had sought for an enhancement of the town’s cold values, and for a joy and a beauty that were not there, but that lived in himself alone? Could that be what had wrecked him? Was he one of the lost men—lost, really, only because the town itself was lost, because his gifts had been rejected, his energies unused, the shoulder of his strength finding no work to bend to—because what he had had to give of hope, intelligence, curiosity, and warmth had found no place there, and so were lost?

Yes, the same thing that explained the plight the town had come to might also explain Judge Rumford Bland. What was it he had said on the train: “Do you think you can’go home again?” And: “Don’t forget I tried to warn you.” Was this, then, what he had meant? If so, George understood him now.

Around them in the cemetery as George thought these things and spoke of them, the air brooded with a lazy, drowsy warmth. There was the last evening cry of robins, and the thrumming bullet noises in undergrowth and leaf, and broken sounds from far away—a voice in the wind, a boy’s shout, the barking of a dog, the tinkle of a cowbell. There was the fragrance of intoxicating odours—the resinous smell of pine, and the smells of grass and warm sweet clover. All this was just as it had always been. But the town of his childhood, with its quiet streets and the old houses which had been almost obscured below the leafy spread of trees, was changed past recognition, scarred now with hard patches of bright concrete and raw dumps of new construction. It looked like a battlefield, cratered and shell torn with savage explosions of brick, cement, and harsh new stucco-And in the interspaces only the embowered remnants of the old and pleasant town remained—timid, retreating, overwhelmed—to remind one of the liquid leather shuffle in the quiet streets at noon when the men came home to lunch, and of laughter and low voices in the leafy rustle of the night. For this was lost!

An old and tragic light was shining faintly on the time-enchanted hills. George thought of Mrs. Delia Flood, and what she had said of Aunt Maw’s hope that some day he’d come home again to stay.. And as he stood there with Margaret quietly by his side the old and tragic light of fading day shone faintly on their faces, and all at once it seemed to him that they were fixed there like a prophecy with the hills and river all round them, and that there was something lost, intolerable, foretold and come to pass, something like old time and destiny—some magic that he could not say.

Down by the river’s edge, in darkness now, he heard the bell, the whistle, and the pounding wheel of the night express coming into town, there to pause for half an hour and then resume its northward journey. It swept away from them, leaving the lonely thunder of its echoes in the hills and the flame-flare of its open firebox for a moment, and then just heavy wheels and rumbling cars as the great train pounded on the rails across the river—and, finally, nothing but the silence it had left behind. Then, farther off and almost lost in the traffic of the town, he heard again and for the last time its wailing cry, and it brought to him once more, as it had done for ever in his childhood, its wild and secret exultation, its pain of going, and its triumphant promise of morning, new lands, and a shining city. And something in his heart was saying, like a demon’s whisper that spoke of flight and darkness: “Soon! Soon! Soon!”

Then they got in the car and drove rapidly away from the great hill of the dead, the woman towards the certitude of lights, the people, and the town; the man towards the train, the city, and the unknown future.