Light In August Part 14

When the deputy called for him at the jail, Brown asked at once where they were going. Visiting, the deputy told him. Brown held back, watching the deputy with his handsome, spuriously bold face. "I don't want to visit n.o.body here. I'm a stranger here."

"You'd be strange anywhere you was at," the deputy said. "Even at home. Come on."

"I'm a American citizen," Brown said. "I reckon I got my rights, even if I don't wear no tin star on my galluses."

"Sho," the deputy said. "That's what I am doing now: helping you get your rights."

Brown's face lighted: it was a flash. "Have they Are they going to pay-"

"That reward? Sho. I'm going to take you to the place myself right now, where if you are going to get any reward, you'll get it."

Brown sobered. But he moved, though he still watched the deputy suspiciously. "This here is a funny way to go about it," he said. "Keeping me shut up in jail while them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tries to beat me out of it."

"I reckon the b.a.s.t.a.r.d ain't been whelped yet that can beat you at anything," the deputy said. "Come on. They're waiting on us."

They emerged from the jail. In the sunlight Brown blinked, looking this way and that, then he jerked his head up, looking back over his shoulder with that horselike movement. The car was waiting at the curb. Brown looked at the car and then at the deputy, quite sober, quite wary. "Where are we going in a car?" he said. "It wasn't too far for me to walk to the courthouse this morning."

"Watt sent the car to help bring back the reward in," the deputy said. "Get in."

Brown grunted. "He's done got mighty particular about my comfort all of a sudden. A car to ride in, and no handcuffs. And. just one durn fellow to keep me from running away."

"I ain't keeping you from running," the deputy said. He used in the act of starting the car. "You want to run now?"

Brown looked at him, glaring, sullen, outraged, suspicious. "I see," he said. "That's his trick. Trick me into running and then collect that thousand dollars himself. How much of it did he promise you?"

"Me? I'm going to get the same as you, to a cent."

For a moment longer Brown glared at the deputy. He cursed, pointless, in a weak, violent way. "Come on," he said. "Let's go if we are going."

They drove out to the scene of the fire and the murder. At steady, almost timed intervals Brown jerked his head up and back with that movement of a free mule running in front of a car in a narrow road. "What are we going out here for?"

"To get your reward," the deputy said.

"Where am I going to get it?"

"In that cabin yonder. It's waiting for you there."

Brown looked about, at the blackened embers which had once been a house, at the blank cabin in which he had lived for four months sitting weathered and quiet in the sunlight. His face was quite grave, quite alert. "There's something funny about this. If Kennedy thinks he can tromple on my rights, just because he wears a durn little tin star ..."

"Get on," the deputy said. "If you don't like the reward, I'll be waiting to take you back to jail any time you want. Just any time you want." He pushed Brown on, opening the cabin door and pus.h.i.+ng him into it and closing the door behind him and sitting on the step.

Brown heard the door close behind him. He was still moving forward. Then, in the midst of one of those quick, jerking, allembracing looks, as if his eyes could not wait to take in the room, he stopped dead still. Lena on the cot watched the white scar beside his mouth vanish completely, as if the ebb of blood behind it had s.n.a.t.c.hed the scar in pa.s.sing like a rag from a clothesline. She did not speak at all. She just lay there, propped on the pillows, watching him with her sober eyes in which there was nothing at all-joy, surprise, reproach, love-while over his face pa.s.sed shock, astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror, each one mocking in turn at the telltale little white scar, while ceaselessly here and there about the empty room went his harried and desperate eyes. She watched him herd them by will, like two terrified beasts, and drive them up to meet her own. "Well, well," he said. "Well, well, well. It's Lena." She watched him, holding his eyes up to hers like two beasts about to break, as if he knew that when they broke this time he would never catch them, turn them again, and that he himself would be lost. She could almost watch his mind casting this way and that, ceaseless, harried, terrified, seeking words which his voice, his tongue, could speak. "If it ain't Lena. Yes, sir. So you got my message. Soon as I got here I sent you a message last month as soon as I got settled down and I thought it had got lost-It was a fellow I didn't know what his name was but he said he would take He didn't look reliable but I had to trust him but I thought when I gave him the ten dollars for you to travel on that he ..." His voice died somewhere behind his desperate eyes. Yet still she could watch his mind darting and darting as without pity, without anything at all, she watched him with her grave, unwinking, unbearable gaze, watched him fumble and flee and tack until at last all that remained in him of pride, of what sorry pride the desire for justification was, fled from him and left him naked. Then for the first time she spoke. Her voice was quiet, unruffled, cool.

"Come over here," she said. "Come on. I ain't going to let him bite you." When he moved he approached on tiptoe. She saw that, though she was now no longer watching him. She knew that just as she knew that he was now standing with a kind of clumsy and diffident awe above her and the sleeping child. But she knew that it was not at and because of the child. She knew that in that sense he had not even seen the child She could still see, feel, his mind darting and darting. He is going to make out like he was not afraid she thought. He will have no more shame than to lie about being afraid, just as he had no more shame than to be afraid because he lied.

"Well, well," he said. "So there it is, sho enough."

"Yes," she said. "Will you set down?" The chair which Hightower had drawn up was still beside the cot. He had already remarked it. She had it all ready for me he thought. Again he cursed, soundless, badgered, furious. Them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds But his face was quite smooth when he sat down.

"Yes, sir. Here we are again. Same as I had planned it. I would have had it all fixed up ready for you, only I have been so busy lately. Which reminds me-" Again he made that abrupt, mulelike, backlooking movement of the head. She was not looking at him. She said "There is a preacher here. That has already come to see me."

"That's fine," he said. His voice was loud, hearty. Yet the heartiness, like the timbre, seemed to be as impermanent as the sound of the words, vanis.h.i.+ng, leaving nothing, not even a definitely stated thought in the ear or the belief. "That's just fine. Soon as I get caught up with all this business-" He jerked his arm in a gesture vague, embracing, looking at her. His face was smooth and blank. His eyes were bland, alert, secret, yet behind them there lurked still that quality harried and desperate. But she was not looking at him.

"What kind of work are you doing now? At the planing mill?"

He watched her. "No. I quit that." His eyes watched her. It was as though they were not his eyes, had no relation to the rest of him, what he did and what he said. "Slaving like a durn n.i.g.g.e.r ten hours a day. I got something on the string now that means money. Not no little piddling fifteen cents a hour. And when I get it, soon as I get a few little details cleared up, then you and me will ..." Hard, intent, secret, the eyes watched her, her lowered face in profile. Again she heard that faint, abrupt sound as he jerked his head up and back. "And that reminds me-"

She had not moved. She said: "When will it be, Lucas?" Then she could hear, feel, utter stillness, utter silence.

"When will what be?"

"You know. Like you said. Back home. It was all right for just me. I never minded. But it's different now. I reckon I got a right to worry now."

"Oh, that," he said. "That. Don't you worry about that. Just let me get this here business cleaned up and get my hands on that money. It's mine by right. There can't nere a b.a.s.t.a.r.d one of them-" He stopped. His voice had begun to rise, as though he had forgot where he was and had been thinking aloud. He lowered it; he said: "You just leave it to me. Don't you worry none. I ain't never give you no reason yet to worry, have I? Tell me that."

"No. I never worried. I knowed I could depend on you."

"Sho you knowed it. And these here b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-these here-" He had risen from the chair. "Which reminds me-"

She neither looked up nor spoke while he stood above her with those eyes harried, desperate, and importunate. It was as if she held him there and that she knew it. And that she released him by her own will, deliberately.

"I reckon you are right busy now, then."

"For a fact, I am. With all I got to bother me, and them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-" She was looking at him now. She watched him as he looked at the window in the rear wall. Then he looked back at the closed door behind him. Then he looked at her, at her grave face which had either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge. He lowered his voice. "I got enemies here. Folks that don't want me to get what I done earned. So I am going to-" Again it was as though she held him, forcing him to trying him with, that final lie at which even his sorry dregs of pride revolted; held him neither with rods nor cords but with something against which his lying blew trivial as leaves or trash. But she said nothing at all. She just watched him as he went on' tiptoe to the window and opened it without a sound. Then he looked at her. Perhaps he thought that he was safe then, that he could get out the window before she could touch him with a physical hand. Or perhaps it was some sorry tagend of shame, as a while ago it had been pride. Because he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit. His voice was not much louder than a whisper: "It's a man outside. In front, waiting for me." Then he was gone, through the window, without, a sound, in a single motion almost like a long snake. From beyond the window she heard a single faint sound as he began to run. Then only did she move, and then but to sigh once, profoundly.

"Now I got to get up again," she said, aloud.

When Brown emerges from the woods, onto the railroad right-of-way, he is panting. It is not with fatigue, though the distance which he has covered in the last twenty minutes is almost two miles and the going was not smooth. Rather, it is the snarling and malevolent breathing of a fleeing animal: while he stands looking both ways along the empty track his face, his expression, is that of an animal fleeing alone, desiring no fellowaid, clinging to its solitary dependence upon its own muscles alone and which, in the pause to renew breath, hates every tree and gra.s.sblade in sight as if it were a live enemy, hates the very earth it rests upon and the very air it needs to renew breathing.

He has struck the railroad within a few hundred yards of the point at which he aimed. This is the crest of a grade where the northbound freights slow to a terrific and crawling gait of almost less than that of a walking man. A short distance ahead of him the twin bright threads appear to, have been cut short off as though with scissors.

For a while he stands just within the screen of woods beside the right-of-way, still hidden. He stands like a man in brooding and desperate calculation, as if he sought in his mind for some last desperate cast in a game already lost. After standing for a moment longer in an att.i.tude of listening, he turns and runs again, through the woods and paralleling the track. He seems to know exactly where he is going; he comes presently upon a path and follows it, still running, and emerges into a clearing in which a negro cabin sits. He approaches the front, walking now. On the porch an old negro woman is sitting, smoking a pipe, her head wrapped in a white cloth. Brown is not running, but he is breathing fast, heavily. He quiets it to speak. "Hi, Aunty," he says, "who's here?"

The old negress removes the pipe. "Ise here. Who wanter know?"

"I got to send a message back to town. In a hurry." He holds his breathing down to talk. "I'll pay. Ain't there somebody here that can take it?"

"If it's all that rush, you better tend to it yourself."

"I'll pay, I tell you!" he says. He speaks with a kind of raging patience, holding his voice, his breathing, down. "A dollar, if he just goes quick enough. Ain't there somebody here that wants to make a dollar? Some of the boys?"

The old woman smokes, watching him. With an aged an inscrutable midnight face she seems to contemplate him with a detachment almost G.o.dlike but not at all benign. "A dollar cash?"

He makes a gesture indescribable, of hurry and leashed rage and something like despair. He is about to turn away when the negress speaks again. "Ain't n.o.body here but me and the two little uns. I reckon they'd be too little for you."

Brown turns back. "How little? I just want somebody that can take a note to the sheriff in a hurry and-"

"The sheriff? Then you come to the wrong place. I ain't ghy have none of mine monkeying around no sheriff. I done had one n.i.g.g.e.r that thought he knowed a sheriff well enough to go and visit with him. He ain't never come back, neither. You look somewhere else."

But Brown is already moving away. He does not run at once. He has not yet thought about running again; for the moment he cannot think at all. His rage and impotence is now almost ecstatic. He seems to muse now upon a sort of timeless and beautiful infallibility in his unpredictable frustrations. As though somehow the very fact that he should be so consistently supplied with them elevates him somehow above the petty human hopes and desires which they abrogate and negative. Hence the negress has to shout twice at him before he hears and turns. She has said nothing, she has not moved: she merely shouted. She says, "Here one will take it for you."

Standing beside the porch now, materialised apparently from thin air, is a negro who may be either a grown imbecile or a hulking youth. His face is black, still, also quite inscrutable. They stand looking at one another. Or rather, Brown looks at the negro. He. cannot tell if the negro is looking at him or not. And that too seems somehow right and fine and in keeping: that his final hope and resort should be a beast that does not appear to have enough ratiocinative power to find the town, let alone any given individual in it Again Brown makes an indescribable gesture. He is almost running now, back toward the porch, pawing at his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "I want you to take a note to town and bring me back an answer," he says. "Can you do it?" But he does not listen for a reply. He has taken from his s.h.i.+rt a sc.r.a.p of soiled paper and a chewed pencil stub, and bending over the edge of the porch, he writes, laborious and hurried, while the negress watches him: Mr. Wat Kenedy Dear sir please give barer My reward Money for captain Murder Xmas rapp it up in Paper 4 given it toe barer yrs truly He does not, sign it, He s.n.a.t.c.hes it up, glaring at it, while the negress watches him. He glares at the dingy and innocent paper, at the labored and hurried pencilling in which he had succeeded for an instant in snaring his whole soul and life too. Then he claps it down and writes not Sined but All rigt You no who and folds it and gives it to the negro. "Take it to the sheriff. Not to n.o.body else. You reckon you can find him?"

"If the sheriff don't find him first," the old negress says. "Give it to him. He'll find him, if he is above ground. Git your dollar and go on, boy."

The negro had started away. He stops. He just stands there, saying nothing, looking at nothing. On the porch the negress sits, smoking, looking down at the white man's weak, wolflike face: a face handsome, plausible, but drawn now by a fatigue more than physical, into a spent and vulpine mask. "I thought you was in a hurry," she says.

"Yes," Brown says. He takes a coin from his pocket. "Here. And if you bring me back the answer to that inside of an hour, I'll give you five more like it."

"Git on, n.i.g.g.e.r," the woman says. "You ain't got all day. You want the answer brought back here?"

For a moment longer Brown looks at her. Then again caution, shame, all flees from him. "No. Not here. Bring it to the top of the grade yonder. Walk up the track until I call to you. I'll be watching you all the time too. Don't you forget that. Do you hear?"

"You needn't to worry," the negress says. "He'll git there with it and git back with the answer, if don't nothing stop him. Git on, boy."

The negro goes on. But something does stop him, before he has gone a half mile. It is another white man, leading a mule.

"Where?" Byron says. "Where did you see him?"

"Just now. Up yon at de house." The white man goes on, leading the mule. The negro looks after him. He did not show the white man the note because the white man did not ask to see it. Perhaps the reason the white man did not ask to see the note was that the white man did not know that he had a note; perhaps the negro is thinking this, because for a while his face mirrors something terrific and subterraneous. Then it clears. He shouts. The white man turns, halting. "He ain't dar now," the negro shouts. "He say he gwine up ter de railroad grade to wait."

"Much obliged," the white man says. The negro goes on.

Brown returned to the track. He was not running now. He was saying to himself, 'He won't do it. He can't do it. I know he can't find him, can't get it, bring it back. He called no names, thought no names. It seemed to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen-the negro, the sheriff, the money, all-unpredictable and without reason moved here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent, must follow. He was for the time being even beyond despair as he turned from the rails and entered the underbrush near the crest of the grade. He moved now without haste, gauging his distance as though there were nothing else in the world or in his life at least, save that. He chose his place and sat down, hidden from the track but where he himself could see it.

'Only I know he won't do it,' he thinks. 'I don't even expect it. If I was to see him coming back with the money in his hand, I would not believe it. It wouldn't be for me. I would know that. I would know that it was a mistake. I would say to him 'You go on. You are looking for somebody else beside me. You ain't looking for Lucas Burch. No, sir, Lucas Burch don't deserve that money, that reward. He never done nothing to get it. No, sir.' He begins to laugh, squatting, motionless, his spent face bent, laughing. 'Yes, sir. All Lucas Burch wanted was justice. Just justice. Not that he told, them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds the murderer's name and where to find him only they wouldn't try. They never tried because they would have had to give Lucas Burch the money. Justice.' Then he says aloud, in a harsh, tearful voice: "Justice. That was all. Just my rights. And them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with their little tin stars, all sworn everyone of them on oath, to protect a American citizen." He says it harshly, almost crying with rage and despair and fatigue: "I be dog if it ain't enough to make a man turn downright bowlsheyvick." Thus he hears no sound at all until Byron speaks directly behind him: "Get up onto your feet."

It does not last long. Byron knew that it was not going to. But he did not hesitate. He just crept up until he could see the other, where he stopped, looking at the crouching and unwarned figure. 'You're bigger than me,' Byron thought. 'But I don't care. You've had every other advantage of me. And I don't care about that neither. You've done throwed away twice inside of nine months what I ain't had in thirty-five years. And now I'm going to get the h.e.l.l beat out of me and I don't care about that, neither.'

It does not last long. Brown, whirling, takes advantage of his astonishment even. He did not believe that any man, catching his enemy sitting, would give him a chance to get on his feet, even if the enemy were not the larger of the two. He would not have done it himself. And the fact that the smaller man did do it when he would not have, was worse than insult: it was ridicule. So he fought with even a more savage fury than he would have if Byron had sprung upon his back without warning: with the blind and desperate valor of a starved and cornered rat he fought.

It lasted less than two minutes. Then Byron was lying quietly among the broken and trampled undergrowth, bleeding quietly about the face, hearing the underbrush cras.h.i.+ng on, ceasing, fading into silence. Then he is alone. He feels no particular pain now, but better than that, he feels no haste, no urgency, to do anything or go anywhere. He just lies bleeding and quiet, knowing that after a while will be time enough to reenter the world and time.

He does not, even wonder where Brown has gone. He does not have to think about Brown now. Again his mind is filled with still shapes like discarded and fragmentary toys of childhood piled indiscriminate and gathering quiet dust in a forgotten closet-Brown. Lena Grove. Hightower. Byron Bunch-all like small objects which had never been alive, which he had played with in childhood and then broken and forgot. He is lying so when he hears the train whistle for a crossing a half mile away.

This rouses him; this is the world and time too. He sits up, slowly, tentatively. 'Anyway, I ain't broke anything,' he thinks. 'I mean, he ain't broke anything that belongs to me.' It is getting late: it is time now, with distance, moving, in it. 'Yes. I'll have to be moving. I'll have to get on so I can find me something else to meddle with.' The train is coming nearer. Already the stroke of the engine has shortened and become heavier as it begins to feel the grade; presently he can see the smoke. He seeks in his pocket for a handkerchief. He has none, so he tears the tail from his s.h.i.+rt and dabs at his face gingerly, listening to the short, blasting reports of the locomotive exhaust just over the grade. He moves to the edge of the undergrowth, where he can see the track. The engine is in sight now, almost headon to him beneath the s.p.a.ced, heavy blasts of black smoke. It has an effect of terrific nomotion. Yet it does move, creeping terrifically up and over the crest of the grade. Standing now in the fringe of bushes he watches the engine approach and pa.s.s him, laboring, crawling, with the rapt and boylike absorption (and perhaps yearning) of his country raising. It pa.s.ses; his eye moves on, watching the cars as they in turn crawl up and over the crest, when for the second time that afternoon he sees a man materialise apparently out of air, in the act of running.

Even then he does not realise what Brown is about. He has progressed too far into peace and solitude to wonder. He just stands there and watches Brown run to the train, stooping, fleeing, and grasp the iron ladder at the end of a car and leap upward and vanish from sight as though sucked into a vacuum. The train is beginning to increase its speed; he watches the approach of the car where Brown vanished. It pa.s.ses; clinging to the rear of it, between it and the next car, Brown stands, his face leaned out and watching the bushes. They see one another at the same moment: the two faces, the mild, nondescript, b.l.o.o.d.y one and the lean, harried, desperate one contorted now in a soundless shouting above the noise of the train, pa.s.sing one another as though on opposite orbits and with an effect as of phantoms or apparitions. Still Byron is not thinking. "Great G.o.d in the mountain," he says, with childlike and almost ecstatic astonishment; "he sho knows how to jump a train. He's sho done that before." He is not thinking at all. It is as though the moving wall of dingy cars were a d.y.k.e beyond which the world, time, hope unbelievable and certainty incontrovertible, waited, giving him yet a little more of peace. Anyway, when the last car pa.s.ses, moving fast now, the world rushes down on him like a flood, a tidal wave.

It is too huge and fast for distance and time; hence no path to be retraced, leading the mule for a good way before he remembers to get on it and ride. It is as though he has already and long since outstripped himself, already waiting at the cabin until he can catch up and enter. And then I will stand there and I will ... He tries it again: Then I will stand there and I will ... But he can get no further than that. He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town. It is about six o'clock. He does not give up, however. Even if I can't seem to get any further than that: when I will open the door and come in and stand there. And then I will. Look at her. Look as her. Look at her The voice speaks again: "-excitement, I reckon."

"What?" Byron says. The wagon has halted. He is right beside it, the mule stopped too. On the wagon seat the man speaks again, in his flat, complaining voice: "Durn the luck. Just when I had to get started for home. I'm already late."

"Excitement?" Byron says. "What excitement?"

The man is looking at him. "From your face, a man would say you had been in some excitement yourself."

"I fell down," Byron says. "What excitement in town this evening?"

"I thought maybe you hadn't heard. About an hour ago. That n.i.g.g.e.r, Christmas. They killed him."

Chapter 19.

About the suppertables on that Monday night, what the town wondered was not so much how Christmas had escaped but why when free, he had taken refuge in the place which he did, where he must have known he would be certainly run to earth, and why when that occurred he neither surrendered nor resisted. It was as though he had set out and made his plans to pa.s.sively commit suicide.

There were many reasons, opinions, as to why he had fled to Hightower's house at the last. "Like to like," the easy, the immediate, ones said, remembering the old tales about the minister. Some believed it to have been sheer chance; others said that the man had shown wisdom, since he would not have been suspected of being in the minister's house at all if someone had not seen him run across the back yard and run into the kitchen.

Gavin Stevens though had a different theory. He is the District Attorney, a Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa: a tall, loosejointed man with a constant cob pipe, with an untidy mop of irongray hair, wearing always loose and un pressed dark gray clothes. His family is old in Jefferson; his ancestors owned slaves there and his grandfather knew (and also hated, and publicly congratulated Colonel Sartoris when they died) Miss Burden's grandfather and brother. He has an easy quiet way with country people, with the voters and the juries; he can be seen now and then squatting among the overalls on the porches of country stores for a whole summer afternoon, talking to them in their own idiom about nothing at all.

On this Monday night there descended from the nine o'clock southbound train a college professor from the neighboring State University, a schoolmate of Stevens' at Harvard, come to spend a few days of the vacation with his friend. When he descended from the train he saw his friend at once. He believed that Stevens had come down to meet him until he saw that Stevens was engaged with a queerlooking old couple whom he was putting on the train. Looking at them, the professor saw a little, dirty old man with a short goat's beard who seemed to be in a state like catalepsy, and an old woman who must have been his wife-a dumpy creature with a face like dough beneath a nodding and soiled white plume, shapeless in a silk dress of an outmoded shape and in color regal and moribund. For an instant the professor paused in a sort of astonished interest, watching Stevens putting into the woman's hand, as into the hand of a child, two railroad tickets; moving again and approaching and still unseen by his friend, he overheard Stevens' final words as the flagman helped the old people into the vestibule: "Yes, yes," Stevens was saying, in a tone soothing and recapitulant; "he'll be on the train tomorrow morning. I'll see to it. All you'll have to do is to arrange for the funeral, the cemetery. You take Granddad on home and put him to bed. I'll see that the boy is on the train in the morning."

Then the train began to move and Stevens turned and saw the professor. He began the story as they rode to town and finished it as they sat on the veranda of Stevens' home, and there recapitulated. "I think I know why it was, why he ran into Hightower's house for refuge at the last. I think it was his grandmother. She had just been with him in his cell when they took him back to the courthouse again; she and the grandfather-that little crazed old man who wanted to lynch him, who came up here from Mottstown for that purpose. I don't think that the old lady had any hope of saving him when she came, any actual hope. I believe that all she wanted was that he die 'decent,' as she put it. Decently hung by a Force, a principle; not burned or hacked or dragged dead by a Thing. I think she came here just to watch that old man, lest he be the straw that started the hurricane, because she did not dare let him out of her sight. Not that she doubted that Christmas was her grandchild, you understand. She just didn't hope. Didn't know how to begin to hope. I imagine that after thirty years the machinery for hoping requires more than twenty-four hours to get started, to get into motion again.

"But I believe that, having got started physically by the tide of the old man's insanity and conviction, before she knew it she had been swept away too. So they came here. They got here on the early train, about three o'clock Sunday morning. She made no attempt to see Christmas. Perhaps she was watching the old man. But I don't think so. I don't think that the hoping machine had got started then, either. I don't think that it ever did start until that baby was born out there this morning, born right in her face, you might say; a boy too. And she had never seen the mother before, and the father at all, and that grandson whom she had never seen as a man; so to her those thirty years just were not. Obliterated when that child cried. No longer existed.

"It was all coming down on her too fast. There was too much reality that her hands and eyes could not deny, and too much that must be taken for granted that her hands and eyes could not prove; too much of the inexplicable that hands and eyes were asked too suddenly to accept and believe without proof. After the thirty years it must have been like a person in solitary blundering suddenly into a room full of strange people all talking at once and she casting desperately about for anything that would hold sanity together by choosing some logical course of action which would be within her limitations, which she could have some a.s.surance of being able to perform. Until that baby was born and she found some means by which she could stand alone, as it were, she had been like an effigy with a mechanical voice being hauled about on a cart by that fellow Bunch and made to speak when he gave the signal, as when he took her last night to tell her story to Doctor Hightower.

"And she was still groping, you see. She was still trying to find something which that mind which had apparently not run very much in thirty years, could believe in, admit to be actual, real. And I think that she found it there, at Hightower's, for the first time: someone to whom she could tell it, who would listen to her. Very likely that was the first time she had ever told it. And very likely she learned it herself then for the first time, actually saw it whole and real at the same time with Hightower. So I don't think it is so strange that for the time she got not only the child but his parentage as well mixed up, since in that cabin those thirty years did not exist-the child and its father whom she had. never seen, and her grandson whom she had not seen since he was a baby like the other, and whose father likewise to her had never existed, all confused. And that, when hope did begin to move in her, she should have turned at once, with that sublime and boundless faith of her kind in those who are the voluntary slaves and the sworn bondsmen of prayer, to the minister.

"That's what she was telling Christmas in the jail today, when the old man, watching his chance, had slipped away from her and she followed him to town and found him on the street corner again, mad as a hatter and completely hoa.r.s.e, preaching lynching, telling the people how he had grandfathered the devil's sp.a.w.n and had kept it in trust for this day. Or perhaps she was on her way to see him in the this when she left the cabin. Anyway she left the old man alone as soon as she saw that his audience was more interested than moved, and went on to the sheriff. He had just got back from dinner and for a while he could not understand what she wanted. She must have sounded quite crazy to him, with that story of hers, in that hopelessly respectable Sunday dress, planning a jailbreak. But he let her go to the jail, with a deputy. And there, in the cell with him, I believe she told him about Hightower, that Hightower could save him, was going to save him.

"But of course I don't know what she told him. I don't believe that any man could reconstruct that scene. I don't think that she knew herself, planned at all what she would say, because it had already been written and worded for her on the night when she bore his mother, and that was now so long ago that she had learned it beyond all forgetting and then forgot the words. Perhaps that's why he believed her at once, without question. I mean, because she did not worry about what to say, about plausibility or the possibility of incredulity on his part: that somewhere, somehow, in the shape or presence or whatever of that old outcast minister was a sanctuary which would be inviolable not only to officers and mobs, but to the very irrevocable past; to whatever crimes had molded and shaped him and left him at last high and dry in a barred cell with the shape of an incipient executioner everywhere he looked.

"And he believed her. I think that is what gave him not the courage so much as the pa.s.sive patience to endure and recognise and accept the one opportunity which he had to break in the middle of that crowded square, manacled, and run. But there was too much running with him, stride for stride with him. Not pursuers: but himself: years, acts, deeds omitted and committed, keeping pace with him, stride for stride, breath for breath, thud for thud of the heart, using a single heart. It was not alone all those thirty years which she did not know, but all those successions of thirty years before that which had put that stain either on his white blood or his black blood, whichever you will, and which killed him. But he must have run with believing for a while; anyway, with hope. But his blood would not be quiet, let him save it. It would not be either one or the other and let his body save itself. Because the black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which s.n.a.t.c.hed up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had been defying it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand."

In the town on that day lived a young man named Percy Grimm. He was about twenty-five and a captain in the State national guard. He had been born in the town and had lived there all his life save for the periods of the summer encampments. He was too young to have been in the European War, though it was not until 1921 or '22 that he realised that he would never forgive his parents for that fact. His father, a hardware merchant, did not understand this. He thought that the boy was just lazy and in a fair way to become perfectly worthless, when in reality the boy was suffering the terrible tragedy of having been born not alone too late but not late enough to have escaped first hand knowledge of the lost time when he should have been a man instead of a child. And now, with the hysteria pa.s.sed away and the ones who had been loudest in the hysteria and even the ones, the heroes who had suffered and served, beginning to look at one another a little askance, he had no one to tell it, to open his heart to. In fact, his first serious fight was with an exsoldier who made some remark to the effect that if he had to do it again, he would fight this time on the German side and against France. At once Grimm took him up. "Against America too?" he said.

"If America's fool enough to help France out again," the soldier said. Grimm struck him at once; he was smaller than the soldier, still in his teens. The result was foregone; even Grimm doubtless knew that. But he took his punishment until even the soldier begged the bystanders to hold the boy back. And he wore the scars of that battle as proudly as he was later to wear the uniform itself for which he had blindly fought.

It was the new civilian-military act which saved him. He was like a man who had been for a long time in a swamp, in the dark. It was as though he not only could see no path ahead of him, he knew that there was none. Then suddenly his life opened definite and clear. The wasted years in which he had shown no ability in school, in which he had been known as lazy, recalcitrant, without ambition, were behind him, forgotten. He could now see his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed now of ever again having to think or decide, the burden which he now a.s.sumed and carried as bright and weightless and martial as his insignatory bra.s.s: a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life. On each national holiday that had any martial flavor whatever he dressed in his captain's uniform and came down town. And those who saw him remembered him again on the day of the fight with the exsoldier as, glittering, with his marksman's badge (he was a fine shot) and his bars, grave, erect, he walked among the civilians with about him an air half belligerent and half the selfconscious pride of a boy.

He was not a member of the American Legion, but that was his parents' fault and not his. But when Christmas was fetched back from Mottstown on that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, he had already been to the commander of the local Post. His idea, his words, were quite simple and direct. "We got to preserve order," he said "We must let the law take its course. The law, the nation. It is the right of no civilian to sentence a man to death. And we, the soldiers in Jefferson, are the ones to see to that."

"How do you know that anybody is planning anything different?" the legion commander said. "Have you heard any talk?"

"I don't know. I haven't listened." He didn't lie. It was as though he did not attach enough importance to what might or might not have been said by the civilian citizens to lie about it. "That's not the question. It's whether or not we, as soldiers, that have worn the uniform, are going to be the first to state where we stand. To show these people right off just where the government of the country stands on such things. That there won't be any need for them even to talk." His plan was quite simple. It was to form the legion Post into a platoon, with himself in command vide his active commission. "But if they don't want me to command, that's all right too. I'll be second, if they say. Or a sergeant or a corporal." And he meant it. It was not vain glory that he wanted. He was too sincere. So sincere, so humorless, that the legion commander withheld the flippant refusal he was about to make.

"I still don't think that there is any need of it. And if there was, we would all have to act as civilians. I couldn't use the Post like that. After all, we are not soldiers now. I don't think I would, if I could."

Grimm looked at him, without anger, but rather as if he were some kind of bug. "Yet you wore the uniform once," he said, with a kind of patience. He said: "I suppose you won't use your authority to keep me from talking to them, will you? As individuals?"

"No. I haven't any authority to do that, anyway. But just as individuals, mind. You mustn't use my name at all." Then Grimm gave him a shot on his own account. "I am not likely to do that," he said. Then he was gone. That was Sat.u.r.day, about four o'clock. For the rest of that afternoon he circulated about the stores and offices where the legion members worked, so that by nightfall he had enough of them also worked up to his own pitch to compose a fair platoon. He was indefatigable, restrained yet forceful; there was something about him irresistible and prophetlike. Yet the recruits were with the commander in one thing: the official designation of the legion must be kept out of it-whereupon and without deliberate intent, he had gained his original end: he was now in command. He got them all together just before suppertime and divided them into squads and appointed officers and a staff; the younger ones, the ones who had not gone to France, taking proper fire by now. He addressed them, briefly, coldly: "... order ... course of justice ... let the people see that we have worn the uniform of the United States ... And one thing more." For the moment now he had descended to familiarity: the regimental commander who knows his men by their first names. "I'll leave this to you fellows. I'll do what you say. I thought it might be a good thing if I wear my uniform until this business is settled. So they can see that "Uncle Sam is present in more than spirit."