He smoked the cigarette down without once touching it with his hand. He snapped it too toward the door. Unlike the match, it did not vanish in midnight. He watched it twinkle end over end through the door. He lay back on the cot, his hands behind his head, as a man lies who does not expect to sleep, thinking I have been in bed now since ten o"clock and I have not gone to sleep. I do not know what time it is but it is later than midnight and I have not yet been asleep "It"s because she started praying over me," he said. He spoke aloud, his voice sudden and loud in the dark room, above Brown"s drunken snoring. "That"s it. Because she started praying over me."
He rose from the cot. His bare feet made no sound. He stood in the darkness, in his underclothes. On the other cot Brown snored. For a moment Christmas stood, his head turned toward the sound. Then he went on toward the door. In his underclothes and barefoot he left the cabin. It was a little lighter outdoors. Overhead the slow constellations wheeled, the stars of which he had been aware for thirty years and not one of which had any name to him or meant anything at all by shape or brightness or position. Ahead, rising from out a close ma.s.s of trees, he could see one chimney and one gable of the house. The house itself was invisible and dark. No light shown and no sound came from it when he approached and stood beneath the window of the room where she slept, thinking If she is asleep too. If she is asleep The doors were never locked, and it used to be that at whatever hour between dark and dawn that the desire took him, he would enter the house and go to her bedroom and take his sure way through the darkness to her bed. Sometimes she would be awake and waiting and she would speak his name. At others he would waken her with his hard brutal hand and sometimes take her as hard and as brutally before she was good awake.
That was two years ago, two years behind them now, thinking Perhaps that is where outrage lies. Perhaps I believe that I have been tricked, fooled. That she lied to me about her age, about what happens to women at a certain age He said, aloud, solitary, in the darkness beneath the dark window: "She ought not to started praying over me. She would have been all right if she hadn"t started praying over me. It was not her fault that she got too old to be any good any more. But she ought to have had better sense than to pray over me." He began to curse her. He stood beneath the dark window, cursing her with slow and calculated obscenity. He was not looking at the window. In the less than halflight he appeared to be watching his body, seeming to watch it turning slow and lascivious in a whispering of gutter filth like a drowned corpse in a thick still black pool of more than water. He touched himself with his flat hands, hard, drawing his hands hard up his abdomen and chest inside his undergarment. It was held together by a single b.u.t.ton at the top. Once he had owned garments with intact b.u.t.tons. A woman had sewed them on. That was for a time, during a time. Then the time pa.s.sed. After that he would purloin his own garments from the family wash before she could get to them and replace the missing b.u.t.tons. When she foiled him he set himself deliberately to learn and remember which b.u.t.tons were missing and had been restored. With his pocket knife and with the cold and bloodless deliberation of a surgeon he would cut off the b.u.t.tons which she had just replaced.
His right hand slid fast and smooth as the knife blade had ever done, up the opening in the garment. Edgewise it struck the remaining b.u.t.ton a light, swift blow. The dark air breathed upon him, breathed smoothly as the garment slipped down his legs, the cool mouth of darkness, the soft cool tongue. Moving again, he could feel the dark air like water; he could feel the dew under his feet as he had never felt dew before. He pa.s.sed through the broken gate and stopped beside the road. The August weeds were thightall. Upon the leaves and stalks dust of a month of pa.s.sing wagons lay. The road ran before him. It was a little paler than the darkness of trees and earth. In one direction town lay. In the other the road rose to a hill. After a time a light began to grow beyond the hill, defining it. Then he could hear the car. He did not move. He stood with his hands on his hips, naked, thighdeep in the dusty weeds, while the car came over the hill and approached, the lights full upon him. He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a Kodak print emerging from the liquid. He looked straight into the headlights as it shot past. From it a woman"s shrill voice flew back, shrieking. "White b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" he shouted. "That"s not the first of your b.i.t.c.hes that ever saw ..." But the car was gone. There was no one to hear, to listen. It was gone, sucking its dust and its light with it and behind it, sucking with it the white woman"s fading cry. He was cold now. It was as though he had merely come there to be present at a finality, and the finality had now occurred and he was free again. He returned to the house. Beneath the dark window he paused and hunted and found his undergarment and put it on. There was no remaining b.u.t.ton at all now and he had to hold it together as he returned to the cabin. Already he could hear Brown snoring. He stood for a while at the door, motionless and silent, listening to the long, harsh, uneven suspirations ending each in a choked gurgle. "I must have hurt his nose more than I knew," he thought. "d.a.m.n son of a b.i.t.c.h." He entered and went to his cot, preparing to lie down. He was in the act of reclining when he stopped, halted, halfreclining. Perhaps the thought of himself lying there until daylight, with the drunken man snoring in the darkness and the intervals filled with the myriad voices, was more than he could bear. Because he sat up and fumbled quietly beneath his cot and found his shoes and slipped them on and took from the cot the single half cotton blanket which composed his bedding, and left the cabin. About three hundred yards away the stable stood. It was falling down and there had not been a horse in it in thirty years, yet it was toward the stable that he went. He was walking quite fast. He was thinking now, aloud now, "Why in h.e.l.l do I want to smell horses?" Then he said, fumbling: "It"s because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man."
He slept less than two hours. When he waked dawn was just beginning. Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer.
He felt quite rested, as if he had slept an unbroken eight hours. It was the unexpected sleep, since he had not expected to sleep at all. With his feet again in the unlaced shoes and the folded blanket beneath his arm he descended the perpendicular ladder, feeling for the rotting and invisible rungs with his feet, lowering himself from rung to rung in onehanded swoops. He emerged into the gray and yellow of dawn, the clean chill, breathing it deep.
The cabin now stood sharp against the increasing east, and the clump of trees also within which the house was hidden save for the single chimney. The dew was heavy in the tall gra.s.s. His shoes were wet at once. The leather was cold to his feet; against his bare legs the wet gra.s.s blades were like strokes of limber icicles. Brown had stopped snoring. When Christmas entered he could see Brown by the light from the eastern window. He breathed quietly now. "Sober now," Christmas thought. "Sober and don"t know it. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He looked at Brown. "Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He"ll be mad when he wakes up and finds out that he is sober again. Take him maybe a whole hour to get back drunk again." He put down the blanket and dressed, in the serge trousers, the white shirt a little soiled now, the bow tie. He was smoking. Nailed to the wall was a shard of mirror. In the fragment he watched his dim face as he knotted the tie. The stiff hat hung on a nail. He did not take it down. He took instead a cloth cap from another nail, and from the floor beneath his cot a magazine of that type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols. From beneath the pillow on his cot he took his razor and a brush and a stick of shaving soap and put them into his pocket.
When he left the cabin it was quite light. The birds were in full chorus. This time he turned his back on the house. He went on past the stable and entered the pasture beyond it. His shoes and his trouser legs were soon sopping with gray dew. He paused and rolled his trousers gingerly to his knees and went on. At the end of the pasture woods began. The dew was not so heavy here, and he rolled his trousers down again. After a while he came to a small valley in which a spring rose. He put down the magazine and gathered twigs and dried brush and made a fire and sat, his back against a tree and his feet to the blaze. Presently his wet shoes began to steam. Then he could feel the heat moving up his legs, and then all of a sudden he opened his eyes and saw the high sun and that the fire had burned completely out, and he knew that he had been asleep. "d.a.m.ned if I haven"t," he thought. "d.a.m.ned if I haven"t slept again."
He had slept more than two hours this time, because the sun was shining down upon the spring itself, glinting and glancing upon the ceaseless water. He rose, stretching his cramped and stiffened back, waking his tingling muscles. From his pocket he took the razor, the brush, the soap. Kneeling beside the spring he shaved, using the water"s surface for gla.s.s, stropping the long bright razor on his shoe.
He concealed the shaving things and the magazine in a clump of bushes and put on the tie again. When he left the spring he bore now well away from the house. When he reached the road he was a half mile beyond the house. A short distance further on stood a small store with a gasoline pump before it. He entered the store and a woman sold him crackers and a tin of potted meat. He returned to the spring, the dead fire.
He ate his breakfast with his back against the tree, reading the magazine while he ate. He had previously read but one story; he began now upon the second one, reading the magazine straight through as though it were a novel. Now and then he would look up from the page, chewing, into the sunshot leaves which arched the ditch. "Maybe I have already done it," he thought. "Maybe it is no longer now waiting to be done." It seemed to him that he could see the yellow day opening peacefully on before him, like a corridor, an arras, into a still chiaroscuro without urgency. It seemed to him that as he sat there the yellow day contemplated him drowsily, like a p.r.o.ne and somnolent yellow cat. Then he read again. He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not look up then. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny s.p.a.ce, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking All I wanted was peace, thinking, "She ought not to started praying over me."
When he reached the last story he stopped reading and counted the remaining pages. Then he looked at the sun and read again. He read now like a man walking along a street might count the cracks in the pavement, to the last and final page, the last and final word. Then he rose and struck a match to the magazine and prodded it patiently until it was consumed. With the shaving things in his pocket he went on down the ditch.
After a while it broadened: a smooth, sandblanched floor between steep shelving walls choked, flank and crest, with brier and brush. Over it trees still arched, and in a small cove in one flank a ma.s.s of dead brush lay, filling the cove. He began to drag the brush to one side, clearing the cove and exposing a short handled shovel. With the shovel he began to dig in the sand which the brush had concealed, exhuming one by one six metal tins with screw tops. He did not unscrew the caps. He laid the tins on their sides and with the sharp edge of the shovel he pierced them, the sand beneath them darkening as the whiskey spurted and poured, the sunny solitude, the air, becoming redolent with alcohol. He emptied them thoroughly, unhurried, his face completely cold, masklike almost. When they were all empty he tumbled them back into the hole and buried them roughly and dragged the brush back. and hid the shovel again. The brush hid the stain but it could not hide the scent, the smell. He looked at the sun again. It was now afternoon.
At seven o"clock that evening he was in town, in a restaurant on a side street, eating his supper, sitting on a backless stool at a frictionsmooth wooden counter, eating.
At nine o"clock he was standing outside the barbershop, looking through the window at the man whom he had taken for a partner. He stood quite still, with his hands in his trousers and cigarette smoke drifting across his still face and the cloth cap worn, like the stiff hat, at that angle at once swaggering and baleful. So cold, so baleful he stood there that Brown inside the shop, among the lights, the air heavy with lotion and hot soap, gesticulant, thickvoiced, in the soiled redbarred trousers and the soiled colored shirt, looked up in midvoice and with his drunken eyes looked into the eyes of the man beyond the gla.s.s. So still and baleful that a negro youth shuffling up the street whistling saw Christmas" profile and ceased whistling and edged away and slid past behind him, turning, looking back over his shoulder. But Christmas was moving himself now. It was as if he had just paused there for Brown to look at him.
He went on, not fast, away from the square. The street, a quiet one at all times, was deserted at this hour. It led down through the negro section, Freedman Town, to the station. At seven o"clock he would have pa.s.sed people, white and black, going toward the square and the picture show; at half past nine they would have been going back home. But the picture show had not turned out yet, and he now had the street to himself. He went on, pa.s.sing still between the homes of white people, from street lamp to street lamp, the heavy shadows of oak and maple leaves sliding like sc.r.a.ps of black velvet across his white shirt. Nothing can look quite as lonely as a big man going along an empty street. Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.
Then he found himself. Without his being aware the street had begun to slope and before he knew it he was in Freedman Town, surrounded by the summer smell and the summer voices of invisible negroes. They seemed to enclose him like bodiless voices murmuring, talking, laughing, in a language not his. As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further s.p.a.ced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one.
He was standing still now, breathing quite hard, glaring this way and that. About him the cabins were shaped blackly out of blackness by the faint, sultry glow of kerosene lamps. On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of negro women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female. He began to run, glaring, his teeth glaring, his inbreath cold on his dry teeth and lips, toward the next street lamp. Beneath it a narrow and rutted lane turned and mounted to the parallel street, out of the black hollow. He turned into it running and plunged up the sharp ascent, his heart hammering, and into the higher street. He stopped here, panting, glaring, his heart thudding as if it could not or would not yet believe that the air now was the cold hard air of white people.
Then he became cool. The negro smell, the negro voices, were behind and below him now. To his left lay the square, the cl.u.s.tered lights: low bright birds in stillwinged and tremulous suspension. To the right the street lamps marched on, s.p.a.ced, intermittent with bitten and unstirring branches. He went on, slowly again, his back toward the square, pa.s.sing again between the houses of white people. There were people on these porches too, and in chairs upon the lawns; but he could walk quiet here. Now and then he could see them: heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmerited shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white above the trivial cards. "That"s all I wanted," he thought. "That don"t seem like a whole lot to ask."
This street in turn began to slope. But it sloped safely. His steady white shirt and pacing dark legs died among long shadows bulging square and huge against the August stars: a cotton warehouse, a horizontal and cylindrical tank like the torso of a beheaded mastodon, a line of freight cars. He crossed the tracks, the rails coming momentarily into twin green glints from a switch lamp, glinting away again. Beyond the tracks woods began. But he found the path unerringly. It mounted, among the trees, the lights of the town now beginning to come into view again across the valley where the railroad ran. But he did not look back until he reached the crest of the hill. Then he could see the town, the glare, the individual lights where streets radiated from the square. He could see the street down which he had come, and the other street, the one which had almost betrayed him; and further away and at right angles, the far bright rampart of the town itself, and in the angle between the black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips. No light came from it, from here no breath, no odor. It just lay there, black, impenetrable, in its garland of Augusttremulous lights. It might have been the original quarry, abyss itself.
His way was sure, despite the trees, the darkness. He never once lost the path which he could not even see. The woods continued for a mile. He emerged into a road, with dust under his feet. He could see now, the vague spreading world, the horizon. Here and there faint windows glowed. But most of the cabins were dark. Nevertheless his blood began again, talking and talking. He walked fast, in time to it; he seemed to be aware that the group were negroes before he could have seen or heard them at all, before they even came in sight vaguely against the defunctive dust. There were five or six of them, in a straggling body yet vaguely paired; again there reached him, above the noise of his own blood, the rich murmur of womenvoices. He was walking directly toward them, walking fast. They had seen him and they gave to one side of the road, the voices ceasing. He too changed direction, crossing toward them as if he intended to walk them down. In a single movement and as though at a spoken command the women faded back and were going around him, giving him a wide berth. One of the men followed them as if he were driving them before him, looking over his shoulder as he pa.s.sed. The other two men had halted in the road, facing Christmas. Christmas had stopped also. Neither seemed to be moving, yet they approached, looming, like two shadows drifting up. He could smell negro; he could smell cheap cloth and sweat. The head of the negro, higher than his own, seemed to stoop, out of, the sky, against the sky. "It"s a white man," he said, without turning his head, quietly. "What you want, whitefolks? You looking for somebody?" The voice was not threatful. Neither was it servile.
"Come on away from there, Jupe," the one who had followed the women said.
"Who you looking for, cap"m?" the negro said.
"Jupe," one of the women said, her voice a little high. "You come on, now."
For a moment longer the two heads, the light and the dark, seemed to hang suspended in the darkness, breathing upon one another. Then the negro"s head seemed to float away; a cool wind blew from somewhere. Christmas, turning slowly, watching them dissolve and fade again into the pale road, found that he had the razor in his hand. It was not open. It was not from fear. "b.i.t.c.hes" he said, quite loud. "Sons of b.i.t.c.hes!"
The wind blew dark and cool; the dust even through his shoes was cool. "What in h.e.l.l is the matter with me?" he thought. He put the razor back into his pocket and stopped and lit a cigarette. He had to moisten his lips several times to hold the cigarette. In the light of the match he could watch his own hands shake. "All this trouble," he thought. "All this d.a.m.n trouble," he said aloud, walking again. He looked up at the stars, the sky. "It must be near ten now," he thought; and then almost with the thought he heard the clock on the courthouse two miles away. Slow, measured, dear the ten strokes came. He counted them, stopped again in the lonely and empty road. "Ten o"clock," he thought. "I heard ten strike last night too. And eleven. And twelve. But I didn"t hear one. Maybe the wind had changed."
When he heard eleven strike tonight he was sitting with his back against a tree inside the broken gate, while behind him again the house was dark and hidden in its s.h.a.ggy grove. He was not thinking Maybe she is not asleep either tonight He was not thinking at all now; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun now either. He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike twelve. Then he rose and moved toward the house. He didn"t go fast. He didn"t think even then, Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me.
Chapter 6.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick s...o...b..eakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a gra.s.sless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
In the quiet and empty corridor, during the quiet hour of early afternoon, he was like a shadow, small even for five years, sober and quiet as a shadow. Another in the corridor could not have said just when and where he vanished, into what door, what room. But there was no one else in the corridor at this hour. He knew that. He had been doing this for almost a year, ever since the day when he discovered by accident the toothpaste which the diet.i.tian used.
Once in the room, he went directly on his bare and silent feet to the washstand and found the tube. He was watching the pink worm coil smooth and cool and slow onto his parchmentcolored finger when he heard footsteps in the corridor and then voices just beyond the door. Perhaps he recognised the diet.i.tian"s voice. Anyway, he did not wait to see if they were going to pa.s.s the door or not. With the tube in his hand and still silent as a shadow on his bare feet he crossed the room and slipped beneath a cloth curtain which screened off one corner of the room. Here he squatted, among delicate shoes and suspended soft womangarments. Crouching, he heard the diet.i.tian and her companion enter the room.
The diet.i.tian was nothing to him yet, save a mechanical adjunct to eating, food, the diningroom, the ceremony of eating at the wooden forms, coming now and then into his vision without impacting at all except as something of pleasing a.s.sociation and pleasing in herself to look at-young, a little fullbodied, smooth, pink-and-white, making his mind think of the diningroom, making his mouth think of something sweet and sticky to eat, and also pink-colored and surrept.i.tious. On that first day when he discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there, who had never heard of toothpaste either; as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature and he would find it. He knew the voice of her companion also: It was that of a young interne from the county hospital who was a.s.sistant to the parochial doctor, he too a familiar figure about the house and also not yet an enemy.
He was safe now, behind the curtain. When they went away, he would replace the toothpaste and also leave. So he squatted behind the curtain, hearing without listening to it the woman"s tense whispering voice: "No! No! Not here. Not now. They"ll catch us. Somebody will-No, Charley! Please!" The man"s words he could not understand at all. The voice was lowered too. It had a ruthless sound, as the voices of all men did to him yet, since he was too young yet to escape from the world of women for that brief respite before he escaped back into it to remain until the hour of his death. He heard other sounds which he did know: a scuffing as of feet, the turn, of the key in the door. "No, Charley! Charley, please! Please, Charley!" the woman"s whisper said. He heard other sounds, rustlings, whisperings, not voices. He was not listening; he was just waiting, thinking without particular interest or attention that it was a strange hour to be going to bed. Again the woman"s fainting whisper came through the thin curtain: "I"m scared! Hurry! Hurry!"
He squatted among the soft womansmelling garments and the shoes. He saw by feel alone now the ruined, once cylindrical tube. By taste and not seeing he contemplated the cool invisible worm as it coiled onto his finger and smeared sharp, automatonlike and sweet, into his mouth. By ordinary he would have taken a single mouthful and then replaced the tube and left the room. Even at five, he knew that he must not take more than that. Perhaps it was the animal warning him that more would make him sick; perhaps the human being warning him that if he took more than that, she would miss it. This was the first time he had taken more. By now, hiding and waiting, he had taken a good deal more. By feel he could see the diminishing tube. He began to sweat. Then he found that he had been sweating for some time, that for some time now he had been doing nothing else but sweating. He was not hearing anything at all now. Very likely he would not have heard a gunshot beyond the curtain. He seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of paste into his mouth which his stomach did not want. Sure enough, it refused to go down. Motionless now, utterly contemplative, he seemed to stoop above himself like a chemist in his laboratory, waiting. He didn"t have to wait long. At once the paste which he had already swallowed lifted inside him, trying to get back out, into the air where it was cool. It was no longer sweet. In the rife, pinkwomansmelling, obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pinkfoamed, listening to his insides, waiting with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him. Then it happened. He said to himself with complete and pa.s.sive surrender: "Well, here I am."
When the curtain fled back he did not look up. When hands dragged him violently out of his vomit he did not resist. He hung from the hands, limp, looking with slackjawed and gla.s.sy idiocy into a face no longer smooth pink-and-white, surrounded now by wild and dishevelled hair whose smooth bands once made him think of candy. "You little rat!" the thin, furious voice hissed; "you little rat! Spying on me! You little n.i.g.g.e.r b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"
The diet.i.tian was twenty-seven-old enough to have to take a few amorous risks but still young enough to attach a great deal of importance not so much to love, but to being caught at it. She was also stupid enough to believe that a child of five not only could deduce the truth from what he had heard, but that he would want to tell it as an adult would. So when during the following two days she could seem to look nowhere and be nowhere without finding the child watching her with the profound and intent interrogation of an animal, she foisted upon him more of the attributes of an adult: she believed that he not only intended to tell, but that he deferred doing it deliberately in order to make her suffer more. It never occurred to her that he believed that he was the one who had been taken in sin and was being tortured with punishment deferred and that he was putting himself in her way in order to get it over with, get his whipping and strike the balance and write it off.
By the second day she was well nigh desperate. She did not sleep at night. She lay most of the night now tense, teeth and hands clenched, panting with fury and terror and worst of all, regret: that blind fury to turn back time just for an hour, a second. This was to the exclusion of even love during the time. The young doctor was now even less than the child, merely an instrument of her disaster and not even that of her salvation. She could not have said which she hated most. She could not even say when she was asleep and when she was awake. Because always against her eyelids or upon her retinae was that still, grave, inescapable, parchmentcolored face watching her.
On the third day she came out of the coma state, the waking sleep through which during the hours of light and faces she carried her own face like an aching mask in a fixed grimace of dissimulation that dared not flag. On the third day she acted. She had no trouble finding him. It was in the corridor, the empty corridor during the quiet hour after dinner. He was there, doing nothing at all. Perhaps he had followed her. No one else could have said if he were waiting there or not. But she found him without surprise and he heard and turned and saw her without surprise: the two faces, the one no longer smooth pink-and-white, the other grave, sobereyed, perfectly empty of everything except waiting. "Now I"ll get it over with," he thought.
"Listen," she said. Then she stopped, looking at him. It was as though she could not think what to say next. The child waited, still, motionless. Slowly and gradually the muscles of his backside were becoming flat and rigid and tense as boards. "Are you going to tell?" she said.
He didn"t answer. He believed that anyone should have known that the last thing in the world he would do would be to tell about the toothpaste, the vomit. He was not looking at her face. He was watching her hands, waiting. One of them was clenched inside her skirt pocket. Through, the cloth he could see that it was clenched hard. He had never been struck with a fist. Yet neither had he ever waited three days to be punished. When he saw the hand emerge from the pocket he believed that she was about to strike him. But she did not; the hand just opened beneath his eyes. Upon it lay a silver dollar. Her voice was thin, urgent, whispering, though the corridor was empty about them. "You can buy a lot with this. A whole dollar." He had never seen a dollar before, though he knew what it was. He looked at it. He wanted it as he would have wanted the bright cap from a beer bottle. But he did not believe that she would give it to him, because he would not give it to her if it were his. He didn"t know what she wanted him to do. He was waiting to get whipped and then be released. Her voice went on, urgent, tense, fast: "A whole dollar. See? How much you could buy. Some to eat every day for a week. And next month maybe I"ll give you another one."
He did not move nor speak. He might have been carven, a large toy: small, still, round headed and round eyed, in overalls. He was still with astonishment, shock, outrage. Looking at the dollar, he seemed to see ranked tubes of toothpaste like corded wood, endless and terrifying; his whole being coiled in a rich and pa.s.sionate revulsion. "I don"t want no more," he said. "I don"t never want no more," he thought.
Then he didn"t dare even look at her face. He could feel her, hear her, her long shuddering breath. Now it"s coming, he thought in a flashing instant. But she didn"t even shake him. She just held him, hard, not shaking him, as if her hand too didn"t know what it wanted to do next. Her face was so near that he could feel her breath on his cheek. He didn"t need to look up to know what her face looked like now. "Tell!" she said. "Tell, then! You little n.i.g.g.e.r b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You n.i.g.g.e.r b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"
That was the third day. On the fourth day she became quite calmly and completely mad. She no longer planned at all. Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.
She was quite calm now. She had escaped for the moment from even urgency. It was as though now she had time to look about and plan. Looking about the scene her glance, her mind, her thought, went full and straight and instantaneous to the janitor sitting in the door of the furnace room. There was no ratiocination in it, no design. She just seemed to look outside herself for one moment like a pa.s.senger in a car, and saw without any surprise at all that small, dirty man sitting in a splint chair in a sootgrimed doorway, reading through steelrimmed spectacles from a book upon his knees-a figure, almost a fixture, of which she had been aware for five years now without once having actually looked at him. She would not have recognised his face on the street. She would have pa.s.sed him without knowing him, even though he was a man. Her life now seemed straight and simple as a corridor with him sitting at the end of it. She went to him at once, already in motion upon the dingy path before she was aware that she had started.
He was sitting in his splint chair in the doorway, the open book upon his knees. When she approached she saw that it was the Bible. But she just noticed this, as she might have noticed a fly upon his leg. "You hate him too," she said "You"ve been watching him too. I"ve seen you. Don"t say you don"t." He looked up at her face, the spectacles propped now above his brows. He was not an old man. In his present occupation he was an incongruity. He was a hard man, in his prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circ.u.mstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of forty-five into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixty-five. "You know," she said. "You knew before the other children started calling him n.i.g.g.e.r. You came out here at the same time. You weren"t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder. Tell me." The janitor"s face was round, a little flabby, quite dirty, with a dirty stubble. His eyes were quite clear, quite gray, quite cold. They were quite mad too. But the woman did not notice that. Or perhaps they did not look mad to her. So they faced one another in the coalgrimed doorway, mad eyes looking into mad eyes, mad voice talking to mad voice as calm and quiet and terse as two conspirators. "I"ve watched you for five years." She believed that she was telling the truth. "Sitting here in this very chair, watching him. You never sit here except when the children are outdoors. But as soon as they come out, you bring this chair here to the door and sit in it where you can watch them. Watching him and hearing the other children calling him n.i.g.g.e.r. That"s what you are doing. I know. You came here just to do that, to watch him and hate him. You were here ready when he came. Maybe you brought him and left him on the step yonder yourself. But anyway you know. And I"ve got to know. When he tells I will be fired. And Charley may-will-Tell me. Tell me, now."
"Ah," the janitor said. "I knowed he would be there to catch you when G.o.d"s time came. I knowed. I know who set him there, a sign and a d.a.m.nation for b.i.t.c.hery."
"Yes. He was right behind the curtain. As close as you are. You tell me, now. I"ve seen your eyes when you look at him. Watched you. For five years."
"I know," he said. "I know evil. Ain"t I made evil to get up and walk G.o.d"s world? A walking pollution in G.o.d"s own face I made it. Out of the mouths of little children He never concealed it. You have heard them. I never told them to say it, to call him in his rightful nature, by the name of his d.a.m.nation. I never told them. They knowed. They was told, but it wasn"t by me. I just waited, on His own good time, when He would see fitten to reveal it to His living world. And it"s come now. This is the sign, wrote again in womansinning and b.i.t.c.hery."
"Yes. But what must I do? Tell me."
"Wait. Like I waited. Five years I waited for the Lord to move and show His will. And He done it. You wait too. When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the say-so."
"Yes. The say-so." They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.
"The madam. When He is ready, He will reveal it to her."
"You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away? Yes. But I can"t wait."
"No more can you hurry the Lord G.o.d. Ain"t I waited five years?"
She began to beat her hands lightly together. "But don"t you see? This may be the Lord"s way. For you to tell me. Because you know. Maybe it"s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam." Her mad eyes were quite calm, her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.
"You"ll wait, the same as I waited," he said. "You have felt the weight of the Lord"s remorseful hand for maybe three days. I have lived under it for five years, watching and waiting for His own good time, because my sin is greater than your sin." Though he was looking directly at her face he did not seem to see her at all, his eyes did not. They looked like they were blind, wide open, icecold, fanatical. "To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering ain"t no more than a handful of rotten dirt. I done bore mine five years; who are you to hurry Almighty G.o.d with your little womanfilth?"
She turned, at once. "Well. You don"t have to tell me. I know, anyway. I"ve known it all the time that he"s part n.i.g.g.e.r." She returned to the house. She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically. "All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it. He won"t tell her, back me up." She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning. She had just thought of something else. She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry. "They"ll send him to the n.i.g.g.e.r orphanage," she thought "Of course. They will have to."
She did not even go to the matron at once. She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself pa.s.sing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting. It was as though she followed herself to see where she was going. In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation. She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed. The shades were drawn and she lay still, in the more than halfdark, on her back. Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth. After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again. Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man. "All I need do is to make the madam believe," she thought. And then she thought, He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans.
That was in the afternoon. At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door. She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it. She didn"t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to. "I"m undressing!" she said in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was. He didn"t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap. "You can"t come in here!" she cried, hardly louder than a whisper. "Don"t you know they ..." Her voice was panting, fainting, and desperate. He did not answer. She tried to halt and hold the slow inward crawling of the door. "Let me get some clothes on, and I"ll come out there. Will you do that?" She spoke in that fainting whisper, her tone light, inconsequential, like that of one speaking to an unpredictable child or a maniac: soothing, cajoling: "You wait, now. Do you hear? Will you wait, now?" He did not answer. The slow and irresistible crawling of the door did not cease. Leaning against it, wearing nothing save her undergarment, she was like a puppet in some burlesque of rapine and despair. Leaning, downlooking, immobile, she appeared to be in deepest thought, as if the puppet in the midst of the scene had gone astray within itself. Then she turned, releasing the door, and sprang back to the bed, whipping up without looking at it a garment and whirling to face the door, clutching the garment at her breast, huddling. He had already entered; apparently he had been watching her and waiting during the whole blind interval of fumbling and interminable haste.
He still wore the overalls and he now wore his hat. He did not remove it. Again his cold mad gray eyes did not seem to see her, to look at her at all. "If the Lord Himself come into the room of one of you," he said, "you would believe He come in b.i.t.c.hery." He said, "Have you told her?"
The woman sat on the bed. She seemed to sink slowly back upon it, clutching the garment, watching him, her face blanched. "Told her?"
"What will she do with him?"
"Do?" She watched him: those bright, still eyes that seemed not to look at her so much as to envelop her. Her mouth hung open like the mouth of an idiot.
"Where will they send him to?" She didn"t answer. "Don"t lie to me, to the Lord G.o.d. They"ll send him to the one for n.i.g.g.e.rs." Her mouth closed; it was as if she had discovered at last what he was talking about. "Ay, I"ve thought it out. They"ll send him to the one for n.i.g.g.e.r children." She didn"t answer, but she was watching him now, her eyes still a little fearful but secret too, calculating. Now he was looking at her.; his eyes seemed to contract upon her shape and being. "Answer me, Jezebel!" he shouted.
"Shhhhhhhhh!" she said. "Yes. They"ll have to. When they find ..."
"Ah," he said. His gaze faded; the eyes released her and enveloped her again. Looking at them, she seemed to see herself as less than nothing in them, trivial as a twig floating upon a pool. Then his eyes became almost human. He began to look about the womanroom as if he had never seen one before: the close room, warm, littered, womanpinksmelling. "Womanfilth," he said. "Before the face of G.o.d." He turned and went out. After a while the woman rose. She stood for a time, clutching the garment, motionless, idiotic, staring at the empty door as if she could not think what to tell herself to do. Then she ran. She sprang to the door, flinging herself upon it, crashing it to and locking it, leaning against it, panting, clutching the turned key in both hands.
At breakfast time the next morning the janitor and the child were missing. No trace of them could be found. The police were notified at once. A side door was found to be unlocked, to which the janitor had a key.
"It"s because he knows," the diet.i.tian told the matron.
"Knows what?"
"That that child, that Christmas boy, is a n.i.g.g.e.r."
"A what?" the matron said. Backthrust in her chair, she glared at the younger woman. "A ne-I don"t believe it!" she cried. "I don"t believe it!"
"You don"t have to believe it," the other said. "But he knows it. He stole him away because of it."
The matron was past fifty, flabby faced, with weak, kind, frustrated eyes. "I don"t believe it!" she said. But on the third day she sent for the diet.i.tian. She looked as if she had not slept in some time. The diet.i.tian, on the contrary, was quite fresh, quite serene. She was still unshaken when the matron told her the news, that the man and the child had been found. "At Little Rock," the matron said. "He tried to put the child into an orphanage there. They thought he was crazy and held him until the police came." She looked at the younger woman. "You told me ... The other day you said ... How did you know about this?"
The diet.i.tian did not look away. "I didn"t. I had no idea at all. Of course I knew it didn"t mean anything when the other children called him n.i.g.g.e.r-"
"n.i.g.g.e.r?" the matron said. "The other children?"
"They have been calling him n.i.g.g.e.r for years. Sometimes I think that children have a way of knowing things that grown people of your and my age don"t see. Children, and old people like him, like that old man. That"s why he always sat in the door yonder while they were playing in the yard: watching that child. Maybe he found it out from hearing the other children call him n.i.g.g.e.r. But he might have known beforehand. If you remember, they came here about the same time. He hadn"t been working here hardly a month before the night-that Christmas, don"t you remember-when Ch-they found the baby on the doorstep?" She spoke smoothly, watching the baffled, shrinking eyes of the older woman full upon her own as though she could not remove them. The diet.i.tian"s eyes were bland and innocent. "And so the other day we were talking and he was trying to tell me something about the child. It was something he wanted to tell me, tell somebody, and finally he lost his nerve maybe and wouldn"t tell it, and so I left him. I wasn"t thinking about it at all. It had gone completely out of my mind when-" Her voice ceased. She gazed at the matron while into her face there came an expression of enlightenment, sudden comprehension; none could have said if it were simulated or not. "Why, that"s why it ... Why, I see it all, now. What happened just the day before they were gone, missing. I was in the corridor, going to my room; it was the same day I happened to be talking to him and he refused to tell me whatever it was he started to tell, when all of a sudden he came up and stopped me; I thought then it was funny because I had never before seen him inside the house. And he said-he sounded crazy, he looked crazy. I was scared, too scared to move, with him blocking the corridor-he said, "Have you told her yet?" and I said, "Told who? Told who what?" and then I realised he meant you; if I had told you that he had tried to tell me something about the child. But I didn"t know what he meant for me to tell you and I wanted to scream and then he said, "What will she do if she finds it out?" and I didn"t know what to say or how to get away from him and then he said, "You don"t have to tell me. I know what she will do. She will send him to the one for n.i.g.g.e.rs." "
"For negroes?"
"I don"t see how we failed to see it as long as we did. You can look at his face now, his eyes and hair. Of course it"s terrible. But that"s where he will have to go, I suppose."
Behind her gla.s.ses the weak, troubled eyes of the matron had a harried, jellied look, as if she were trying to force them to something beyond their physical cohesiveness. "But why did he want to take the child away?"
"Well, if you want to know what I think, I think he is crazy. If you could have seen him in the corridor that ni-day like I did. Of course it"s bad for the child to have to go to the n.i.g.g.e.r home, after this, after growing up with white people. It"s not his fault what he is. But it"s not our fault, either-" She ceased, watching the matron. Behind the gla.s.ses the older woman"s eyes were still harried, weak, hopeless; her mouth was trembling as she shaped speech with it. Her words were hopeless too, but they were decisive enough, determined enough.
"We must place him. We must place him at once. What applications have we? If you will hand me the file ..."
When the child wakened, he was being carried. It was pitchdark and cold; he was being carried down stairs by someone who moved with silent and infinite care. Pressed between him and one of the arms which supported him was a wad which he knew to be his clothes. He made no outcry, no sound. He knew where he was by the smell, the air, of the back stairway which led down to the side door from the room in which his bed had been one among forty others since he could remember. He knew also by smell that the person who carried him was a man. But he made no sound, lying as still and as lax as while he had been asleep, riding high in the invisible arms, moving, descending slowly toward the side door which gave onto the playground.
He didn"t know who was carrying him. He didn"t bother about it because he believed that he knew where he was going. Or why, that is. He didn"t bother about where either, yet. It went back two years, to when he was three years old. One day there was missing from among them a girl of twelve named Alice. He had liked her, enough to let her mother him a little; perhaps because of it. And so to him she was as mature, almost as large in size, as the adult women who ordered his eating and washing and sleeping, with the difference that she was not and never would be his enemy. One night she waked him. She was telling him goodbye but he did not know it. He was sleepy and a little annoyed, never full awake, suffering her because she had always tried to be good to him. He didn"t know that she was crying because he did not know that grown people cried, and by the time he learned that, memory had forgotten her. He went back into sleep while still suffering her, and the next morning she was gone. Vanished, no trace of her left, not even a garment, the very bed in which she had slept already occupied by a new boy. He never did know where she went to. That day he listened while a few of "the older girls who had helped her prepare to leave in that same hushed, secret sibilance in which a half dozen young girls help prepare the seventh one for marriage told, still batebreathed, about the new dress, the new shoes, the carriage which had fetched her away. He knew then that she had gone for good, had pa.s.sed beyond the iron gates in the steel fence. He seemed to see her then, grown heroic at the instant of vanishment beyond the clashedto gates, fading without diminution of size into something nameless and splendid, like a sunset. It was more than a year before he knew that she had not been the first and would not be the last. That there had been more than Alice to vanish beyond the clashedto gates, in a new dress or new overalls, with a small neat bundle less large sometimes than a s...o...b..x. He believed that that was what was happening to him now. He believed that he knew now how they had all managed to depart without leaving any trace behind them. He believed that they had been carried out, as he was being, in the dead of night.
Now he could feel the door. It was quite near now; he knew to the exact number how many more invisible steps remained to which in turn the man who carried him would lower himself with that infinite and silent care. Against his cheek he could feel the man"s quiet, fast, warm breathing; beneath him he could feel the tense and rigid arms, the wadded lump which he knew was his clothing caught up by feel in the dark. The man stopped. As he stooped the child"s feet swung down and touched the floor, his toes curling away from the ironcold planks. The man spoke, for the first time. "Stand up," he said. Then the child knew who he was.
He recognised the man at once, without surprise. The surprise would have been the matron"s if she had known how well he did know the man. He did not know the man"s name and in the three years since he had been a sentient creature they had not spoken a hundred words. But the man was a more definite person than anyone else in his life, not excepting the girl Alice. Even at three years of age the child knew that there was something between them that did not need to be spoken. He knew that he was never on the playground for instant that the man was not watching him from the chair in the furnace room door, and that the man was watching him with a profound and unflagging attention. If the child had been older he would perhaps have thought, He hates me and fears me. So much so that he cannot let me out of his sight. With more vocabulary but no more age he might have thought, That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time. He accepted it. So he was not surprised when he found who it was who had taken him, sleeping, from his bed and carried him downstairs; as, standing beside the door in the cold pitch dark while the man helped him put on his clothes, he might have thought,He hates me enough even to try to prevent something that is about to happen to me coming to pa.s.s.
He dressed obediently, shivering, as swiftly as he could, the two of them fumbling at the small garments, getting them on him somehow. "Your shoes," the man said, in that dying whisper. "Here." The child sat on the cold floor, putting on the shoes. The man was not touching him now, but the child could hear, feel, that the man was stooped too, engaged in something. "He"s putting on his shoes too," he thought. The man touched him again, groping, lifting him to his feet. His shoes were not laced. He had not learned to do that by himself yet. He did not tell the man that he had not laced them. He made no sound at all. He just stood there and then a bigger garment enveloped him completely-by its smell he knew that it belonged to the man-and then he was lifted again. The door opened, inyawned. The fresh cold air rushed in, and light from the lamps along the street; he could see the lights and the blank factory walls and the tall unsmoking chimneys against the stars. Against the street light the steel fence was like a parade of starved soldiers. As they crossed the empty playground his dangling feet swung rhythmically to the man"s striding, the unlaced shoes flapping about his ankles. They reached the iron gates and pa.s.sed through.
They did not have to wait long for the streetcar. If he had been older he would have remarked how well the man had timed himself. But he didn"t wonder or notice. He just stood on the corner beside the man, in the unlaced shoes, enveloped to the heels in the man"s coat, his eyes round and wide, his small face still, awake. The car came up, the row of windows, jarring to a stop and humming while they entered. It was almost empty, since the hour was past two o"clock. Now the man noticed the unlaced shoes and laced them, the child watching, quite still on the seat, his legs thrust straight out before him. The station was a long distance away, and he had ridden, on a streetcar before, so when they reached the station he was asleep. When he waked it was daylight and they had been on the train for some time. He had never ridden on a train before, but no one could have told it. He sat quite still, as in the streetcar, completely enveloped in the man"s coat save for his outthrust legs and his head, watching the country-hills and trees and cows and such-that he had never seen before flowing past. When the man saw that he was awake he produced food from a piece of newspaper. It was bread, with ham between. "Here," the man said. He took the food and ate, looking out the window.
He said no word, he had shown no surprise, not even when on the third day the policemen came and got him and the man. The place where they now were was no different from the one which they had left in the night-the same children, with different names; the same grown people, with different smells: he could see no more reason why he should not have stayed there than why he should ever have left the first one. But he was not surprised when they came and told him again to get up and dress, neglecting to tell him why or where he was going now. Perhaps he knew that he was going back; perhaps with his child"s clairvoyance he had known all the while what the man had not: that it would not, could not, last. On the train again he saw the same hills, the same trees, the same cows, but from another side, another direction. The policeman gave him food. It was bread, with ham between, though it did not come out of a sc.r.a.p of newspaper. He noticed that, but he said nothing, perhaps thought nothing.
Then he was home again. Perhaps he expected to be punished upon his return, for what, what crime exactly, he did not expect to know, since he had already learned that, though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too. He had already forgot the toothpaste affair. He was now avoiding the diet.i.tian just as, a month ago, he had been putting himself in her way. He was so busy avoiding her that he had long since forgot the reason for it; soon he had forgotten the trip too, since he was never to know that there was any connection between them. Now and then he thought of it, hazily and vaguely. But that was only when he would look toward the door to the furnace room and remember the man who used to sit there and watch him and who was now gone, completely, without leaving any trace, not even the splint chair in the doorway, after the fashion of all who departed from there. Where he may have gone to also the child did not even think or even wonder.
One evening they came to the schoolroom and got him. It was two weeks before Christmas. Two of the young women-the diet.i.tian was not one-took him to the bathroom and washed him and combed his damp hair and dressed him in clean overalls and fetched him to the matron"s office. In the office sat a man, a stranger. And he looked at the man and he knew before the matron even spoke. Perhaps memory knowing, knowing beginning to remember; perhaps even desire, since five is still too young to have learned enough despair to hope. Perhaps he remembered suddenly the train ride and the food, since even memory did not go much further back than that. "Joseph," the matron said, "how would you like to go and live with some nice people in the country?"
He stood there, his ears and face red and burning with harsh soap and harsh towelling, in the stir new overalls, listening to the stranger. He had looked once and saw a thickish man with a close brown beard and hair cut close though not recently. Hair and beard both had a hard, vigorous quality, unsilvered, as though the pigmentation were impervious to the forty and more years which the face revealed. The eyes were lightcolored, cold. He wore a suit of hard, decent black. On his knee rested a black hat held in a blunt clean hand shut, even on the soft felt of the hat, into a fist. Across his vest ran a heavy silver watch chain. His thick black shoes were planted side by side; they had been polished by hand. Even the child of five years, looking at him, knew that he did not use tobacco himself and would not tolerate it in others. But he did not look at the man because of his eyes.
He could feel the man looking at him though, with a stare cold and intent and yet not deliberately harsh. It was the same stare with which he might have examined a horse or a second hand plow, convinced beforehand that he would see flaws, convinced beforehand that he would buy. His voice was deliberate, infrequent, ponderous; the voice of a man who demanded that he be listened to not so much with attention but in silence. "And you either cannot or will not tell me anything more about his parentage."
The matron did not look at him. Behind her gla.s.ses her eyes apparently had jellied, for the time at least. She said immediately, almost a little too immediately: "We make no effort to ascertain their parentage. As I told you before, he was left on the doorstep here on Christmas eve will be five years this two weeks. If the child"s parentage is important to you, you had better not adopt one at all."
"I would not mean just that," the stranger said. His tone now was a little placative. He contrived at once to apologise without surrendering one jot of his conviction. "I would have thought to talk with Miss Atkins (this was the diet.i.tian"s name) since it was with her I have been in correspondence."
Again the matron"s voice was cold and immediate, speaking almost before his had ceased: "I can perhaps give you as much information about this or any other of our children as Miss Atkins can, since her official connection here is only with the diningroom and kitchen. It just happened that in this case she was kind enough to act as secretary in our correspondence with you."
"It"s no matter," the stranger said. "It"s no matter. I had just thought ..."
"Just thought what? We force no one to take our children, nor do we force the children to go against their wishes, if their reasons are sound ones. That is a matter for the two parties to settle between themselves. We only advise."