| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Bring the Jubilee
Author: Moore, Ward
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Bring the Jubilee" ***
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation
remains unchanged. Note in particular that the apostrophe is very
rarely used to indicate abbreviation.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
Bring
the
Jubilee
By Ward Moore
_Breathe the Air Again_
_Greener Than You Think_
_Bring the Jubilee_
This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by FARRAR, STRAUS &
YOUNG, INC. The low price of $2.00 is made possible by large printings
of combined editions.
Bring
the
Jubilee
WARD
MOORE
FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, Inc.
NEW YORK
Copyright 1952 Fantasy House, Inc.
Copyright 1953 Ward Moore
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U. S. A.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 53-10417
BACK COVER MAP: BETTMANN ARCHIVE
_For
TONY BOUCHER and MICK McCOMAS
who liked this story_
What he will he does, and does so much
That proof is call’d impossibility
—_Troilus and Cressida_
It is always the puzzle of the nature of time that brings our thoughts
to a standstill. And if time is so fundamental that an understanding
of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in
all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between
determination and free will.
—_The Mysterious Universe_ by James Jeans
Contents
I _Life in the Twenty-Six States_ 1
II _Of Decisions, Minibiles, and Tinugraphs_ 12
III _A Member of the Grand Army_ 22
IV _Tyss_ 32
V _Of Whigs and Populists_ 42
VI _Enfandin_ 50
VII _Of Confederate Agents in 1942_ 61
VIII _In Violent Times_ 71
IX _Barbara_ 76
X _The Holdup_ 86
XI _Of Haggershaven_ 95
XII _More of Haggershaven_ 106
XIII _Time_ 116
XIV _Midbin’s Experiment_ 124
XV _Good Years_ 132
XVI _Of Varied Subjects_ 142
XVII _HX-1_ 156
XVIII _The Woman Tempted Me_ 166
XIX _Gettysburg_ 175
XX _Bring the Jubilee_ 181
XXI _For the Time Being_ 191
_1. LIFE IN THE TWENTY-SIX STATES_
Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.
Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:
I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930’s,
when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly
frustrate and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to
realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which
hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.
Granpa Hodgins after whom I was named, perhaps a little
grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of
the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on
a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised
and headstrong—or martyred—Mr Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives’
viewpoints you take.
Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall
of Washington to General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so
his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and
the acknowledgment of the independence of the Confederate States on
July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger
Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a
different and increasingly hopeless world.
On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous
disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides—for different
reasons—remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals in
the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat
at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg or Port Hudson and fought
bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have
carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the
point of detaching the West and making a protectorate of it. Instead
the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new
boundary along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware
and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western
Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the
Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were
conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for
obvious defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.
But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the
beaten North and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the
loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage
during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time
of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74.
It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in
1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money
and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were
destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold.
Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back
on their feet.
How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920’s and ’30s, my mother
and father talking bitterly of how the War had ruined everything. They
were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperors’ War of 1914-16,
but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly seventy
years later, blighted what was left of the United States.
Nor were they unique or peculiar in this. Men who slouched in the
smithy while Father shod their horses, or gathered every month around
the postoffice waiting for the notice of the winning lottery numbers
to be put up, as often cursed the Confederates or discussed what might
have been if Meade had been a better general or Lee a worse one, as
they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork auxiliaries to make
pedaling uphill easier, or the latest scandal about the French Emperor,
Napoleon VI.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like in Granpa Hodgins’ day,
to visualize the lost past—that strange bright era when, if it could
be believed, folk like ourselves and our neighbors had owned their
farms outright and didnt pay rent to the bank or give half the crop to
a landlord. I searched the wiggling crayon lines that composed Granpa
Hodgins’ face for some sign that set him apart from his descendants.
“But what did he _do_ to lose the farm?” I used to ask my mother.
“Do? Didnt do anything. Couldnt help himself. Go along now and do your
chores; Ive a terrible batch of work to get out.”
How could Granpa’s not doing anything result so disastrously? I could
not understand this any more than I could the bygone time when a man
could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself
and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that
practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a
company.
Indenting I understood all right, for there was a mill in Wappinger
Falls which wove a shoddy cloth very different from the goods my mother
produced on her handloom. Mother, even in her late forties, could have
indented there for a good price, and she admitted that the work would
be easier than weaving homespun to compete with their product. But, as
she used to say with an obstinate shake of her head, “Free I was born
and free I’ll die.”
In Granpa Hodgins’ day, if one could believe the folktales or family
legends, men and women married young and had large families; there
might have been five generations between him and me instead of two. And
many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages
and only children were the rule.
If it hadnt been for the War—This was the basic theme stated with
variations suited to the particular circumstance. If it hadnt been
for the War the most energetic young men and women would not turn
to emigration; visiting foreigners would not come as to a slum; and
the great powers would think twice before sending troops to restore
order every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadnt been
for the War the detestable buyer from Boston—detestable to my mother,
but rather fascinating to me with his brightly colored vest and smell
of soap and hair tonic—would not have come regularly to offer her a
miserable price for her weaving.
“Foreigner!” she would always exclaim after he left; “sending good
cloth out of the country.”
Once my father ventured, “He’s only doing what he’s paid for.”
“Trust a Backmaker to stand up for foreigners. Like father, like son;
suppose you’d let the whole thieving crew in if you had your way.”
So was first hinted the scandal of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged
portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. I got the
impression my father’s father had been not only a foreigner by birth,
but a shady character in his own right, a man who kept on believing
in the things for which Granpa Hodgins fought after they were proved
wrong. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made
speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the mass
lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment
accorded these non-citizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I remember where
I heard he had been run out of several places before finally settling
in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly
at his back, “Dirty Abolitionist!”—a very deep imprecation indeed.
I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek,
hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother
who never let him forget that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens
of Backmakers.
I must have been a sore trial to her for I showed no sign of proper
Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed herself and which surely kept
us all—though precariously—free. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy
and awkward, of little use in the hundred necessary chores around our
dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do
something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without
mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe
the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving
weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate
for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity
baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her
to the cart for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping
him on the farm or in his smithy I’m afraid my efforts drove that mild
man nearest to a temper he ever came. He would lay the reins on the
plowhorse’s back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully:
“Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. Youre only in my way
here.”
On only one score did I come near pleasing Mother: I learned to read
and write early, and exhibited some proficiency. But even here there
was a flaw; she looked upon literacy as something which distinguished
Hodginses and McCormicks from the ruck who had to make their mark, as
an accomplishment which might somehow and unspecifiedly lead away from
poverty. I found reading an end in itself, which probably reminded her
of my father’s laxity or Grandfather Backmaker’s subversion.
“Make something of yourself, Hodge,” she admonished me often.
“You can’t change the world”—an obvious allusion to Grandfather
Backmaker—“but you can do something with it as it is if you try hard
enough. There’s always some way out.”
Yet she did not approve of the postoffice lottery, on which so many
pinned their hopes of escape from poverty or indenture. In this she and
my father were agreed; both believed in hard work rather than chance.
Still, chance could help even the steadiest toiler. I remember the
time a minibile—one of the small, trackless locomotives—broke down
not a quarter of a mile from Father’s smithy. This was a golden,
unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other
luxury, were rare in the United States though they were common enough
in prosperous countries like the German Union or the Confederacy. We
had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the
railroads, wornout and broken down as they were. For decades the great
issue in Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental
line, though British America had one and the Confederate States seven.
(Sailing balloons, economical and fairly common, were still looked
upon with some suspicion.) Only a rare millionaire with connections in
Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore or Leesburg could afford to indulge
in a costly and complicated minibile requiring a trained driver to
bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only an extraordinarily
adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or
its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires
could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the
morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the
Harlem River.
When one did, the jolting, jouncing and shaking inevitably broke or
disconnected one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then
the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the
traveler broke down near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith.
Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with
the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate
and, unless the machine had suffered severe damage, put it back in
place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself
for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting—or just
absently chewing on an oatstraw—by demanding exorbitant remuneration,
amounting to perhaps twenty-five or thirty cents an hour, thus avenging
his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and
helplessness of the urban excursionist.
Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall
of 1933, when I was twelve. The driver had made his way to the smithy,
leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed
passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father, who could repair a
clock or broken rake with equal dexterity, that his only course was
to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat and straighten
a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver, the owner, and Father
all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I
been with “practical” things all my life that I couldnt recall it ten
minutes, much less thirty years later.)
“Hodge, run and get the mare and ride over to Jones’s. Don’t try to
saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr Jones to kindly lend me his team.”
“I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back with the
team in twenty minutes,” added the owner of the minibile, sticking his
head out of the window.
I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has given me a
distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever
had before. A quarter, a whole shining silver quarter, a day’s full
wage for the boy who could find odd jobs, half the day’s pay of a grown
man who wasnt indented or worked extra hours—all for myself, to spend
as I wished!
I ran all the way back to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter and
jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening
each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my
father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops
there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of
cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an
unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, some three years older than
I, with whom it had so recently become disturbing as well as imperative
to wrestle—in secret of course so as not to show oneself unmanly in
sporting with a weak girl instead of another boy.
It never even occurred to me, as it would have to most, to invest in an
eighth of a lottery ticket. Not only were my parents sternly against
this popular gamble, but I myself felt a strangely puritanical aversion
to meddling with my fortune.
Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman’s Book and Clock Store.
Here I could not afford one of the latest English or Confederate
books—even the novels I disdained cost fifty cents in their original
and thirty in the pirated United States’ edition—but what treasures
there were in the twelve-and-a-half cent reprints and the dime classics!
With Bessie’s legs moving steadily beneath me I pored over in my
imagination Mr Newman’s entire stock, which I knew by heart from
examinations lulled by the steady ticking of his other, and no doubt
more salable, merchandise. My quarter would buy two reprints, but I
would read them in as many evenings and be no better off than before
until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better to invest
in paperbacked adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures
of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the War. True, they
were written almost entirely by Confederate authors and I was, perhaps
thanks to Granpa Hodgins and my mother, a devout partisan of the lost
cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism couldnt steel
me against the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature
simply ignored the boundary stretching to the Pacific.
I had finally determined to invest all my twenty-five cents, not
in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the same in secondhand or
shopworn condition, when I suddenly realized that I had been riding
Bessie for some considerable time. I looked around, rather dazed by
the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of
Newman’s store to the bright countryside, to find with dismay that
Bessie hadnt taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some private
tour of her own in the opposite direction.
I’m afraid this little anecdote is pointless—it was momentarily pointed
enough for me that evening, for in addition to the loss of the promised
quarter I received a thorough whacking with a willow switch from my
mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental
duty—except perhaps that it shows how in pursuing the dream I could
lose the reality.
My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most important part,
was no passing phase. Other boys in their early teens dreamed of going
to the wilds of Dakotah, Montana or Wyoming, indenting to a company
run by a young and beautiful woman—this was also a favorite paperback
theme—discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or emigrating to Australia
or the South African Republic. Or else they faced the reality of
indenture, carrying on the family farm, or petty trade. I only wanted
to be allowed to read.
I knew this ambition, if that is the proper word, to be outrageous and
unheard of. It was also practically impossible. The school at Wappinger
Falls, a survival from the days of compulsory attendance and an object
of doubt in the eyes of the taxpayers, taught as little as possible
as quickly as possible. Parents needed the help of their children to
survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory hope of buying
free of indenture. Both my mother and my teachers looked askance at
my longing to persist past an age when my contemporaries were making
themselves economically useful.
Nor, even supposing I had the fees, could the shabby, fusty Academy
at Poughkeepsie—originally designed for the education of the
well-to-do—provide what I wanted. Not that I was clear at all as to
just what this was; I only knew that commercial arithmetic, surveying,
or any of the other subjects taught there, were not the answer to my
desires.
There was certainly no money for any college. Our position had grown
slowly worse; my father talked of selling the smithy and indenting.
My dreams of Harvard or Yale were as idle as Father’s of making a
good crop and getting out of debt. Nor did I know then, as I was to
find out later, that the colleges were increasingly provincialized
and decayed, contrasting painfully with the flourishing universities
of the Confederacy and Europe. The average man asked what the United
States needed colleges for anyway; those who attended them only
learned discontent and to question time-honored institutions. Constant
scrutiny of the faculties, summary firing of all instructors suspected
of abnormal ideas, did not seem to improve the situation or raise the
standards of teaching.
My mother, now that I was getting beyond the switching age, lectured
me firmly and at length on idleness and self-indulgence. “It’s a hard
world, Hodge, and no one’s going to give you anything you don’t earn.
Your father’s an easy-going man; too easy-going for his own good, but
he always knows where his duty lies.”
“Yes, maam,” I responded politely, not quite seeing what she was
driving at.
“Hard, honest work—that’s the only thing. Not hoping or wishing or
thinking miracles will happen to you. Work hard and keep yourself free.
Don’t depend on circumstances or other people, and don’t blame them for
your own shortcomings. Be your own man. That’s the only way you’ll ever
be where you want to.”
She spoke of responsibility and duty as though they were measurable
quantities, but the gentler parts of such equations, the factors of
affection and pity, were never mentioned. I don’t want to give the
impression that ours was a particularly puritanical family; I know
our neighbors had of necessity much the same grim outlook. But I felt
guiltily vulnerable, not merely on the score of wanting more schooling,
but because of something else which would have shocked my mother beyond
forgiveness.
My early tussles with Mary McCutcheon had the natural consequences, but
she had found me a too-youthful partner and had taken her interests
elsewhere. For my part I now turned to Agnes Jones, a suddenly alluring
young woman grown from the skinny kid I’d always brushed away. Agnes
sympathized with my aspirations and encouraged me most pleasantly.
However her specific plans for my future were limited to marrying her
and helping her father on his farm, which seemed no great advance over
what I could look forward to at home.
And there I was certainly no asset; I ate three hearty meals a day and
occupied a bed. I was conscious of the looks and smiles which followed
me. A great lout of seventeen, too lazy to do a stroke of work, always
wandering around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose
stuck in a book. Too bad; and the Backmakers such industrious folks
too. I could feel what the shock of my behavior with Agnes added to my
idleness would be to my mother.
Yet I was neither depraved nor very different from the other youths of
Wappinger Falls, who not only took their pleasures where they found
them, but often more forcibly than persuasively. I did not analyze
it fully or clearly, but I was at least to some extent aware of the
essentially loveless atmosphere around me. The rigid convention
of late marriages bred an exaggerated respect for chastity which
had two sides: sisters’ and daughters’ honor was sternly avenged
with no protest from society, and undiscovered seduction produced
that much more gratification. But both retribution and venery
were somewhat mechanical; they were the expected rather than the
inescapable passions. Revivalists—and we country people had a vast
fondness for those itinerants who came periodically to castigate us
for our sins—denounced our laxity and pointed to the virtues of our
grandparents and greatgrandparents. We accepted their advice with such
modifications as suited us, which was not at all what they intended.
And this was how I took my mother’s admonition to be my own man. What
debts I owed her and my father seemed best discharged by relieving them
of the burden of my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to
reverse the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation
on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it did to them. Toward
Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.
A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed my three most
cherished books in my good white cotton shirt, and having bade a most
romantic goodbye to Agnes, one which would certainly have consummated
her hopes had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and set
out for New York.
_2._ _OF DECISIONS, MINIBILES, AND TINUGRAPHS_
I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles in four days,
allowing time to swap work for food, supposing I found farmers or
housewives agreeable to the exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep
outdoors, and the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any
bathing I might want to do.
The dangers of the trip were part erf the pattern of life in the United
States in 1938. I didnt particularly fear being robbed by a roving
gang for I was sure organized predators would disdain so obviously
unprofitable a prey, and individual thieves I felt I could take care
of, but I was not anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the
three police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was
more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with a work-card
on his person and a company behind him. A freeman was fair game for
the constables, state troopers, or revenuers to recruit, after a
perfunctory trial, into one of the chain gangs upon whom the roads,
canals and other public works were dependent.
Some wondered why the roads were so bad in spite of all this apparent
surplus of labor and were dubious of the explanation that surfacing
was expensive and it was impossible to maintain unsurfaced highways
in good condition. Only the hint that prisoners had been seen working
around the estates of the great Whig families or had been lent to some
enterprise operated by foreign capital brought knowing nods.
At seventeen possible disasters are not brooded over. I resolved
to be wary, and then dismissed thoughts of police, gangs and all
unpleasantness. The future was mine to make as my mother had insisted,
and I was taking the first steps in shaping it.
I started off briskly, passing at first through villages long familiar;
then, getting beyond the territory I had known all my life, I slowed
down often enough to gaze at something new and strange, or to wander
into wood or pasture for wild strawberries or early blueberries.
I covered less ground than I had intended by the time I found a
farmhouse, after inquiring at several others, where the woman was
willing to give me supper and even let me sleep in the barn in return
for splitting a sizable stack of logs into kindling and milking two
cows.
Exercise and hot food must have counteracted the excitement of the
day, for I fell asleep immediately and didnt waken till quite a while
after sunup. It was another warm, fine morning; soon the post road led,
not between shabby villages and towns or struggling farms, but past
the stone or brick walls of opulent estates. Now and then I caught a
glimpse between old, well-tended trees of magnificent houses either
a century old or built to resemble those dating from that prosperous
time. I could not but share the general dislike for the wealthy Whigs
who owned these places, their riches contrasting with the common
poverty and deriving from exploitation of the United States as a
colony, but I could not help enjoying the beauty of their surroundings.
The highway was better traveled here also; I passed other walkers,
quite a few wagons, a carriage or two, several peddlers and a number
of ladies and gentlemen on horseback. This was the first time I’d seen
women riding astride, a practice shocking to the sensitivities of
Wappinger Falls which also condemned the fashion, imported from the
Chinese Empire by way of England, of feminine trousers. Having learned
that women were bipedal, both customs seemed sensible to me.
I had the post road to myself for some miles between turns when I heard
a commotion beyond the stone wall to my left. This was followed by an
angry shout and shrill words impossible to distinguish. My progress
halted, I instinctively shifted my bundle to my left hand as though to
leave my right free for defence, but against what I had no idea.
The shouts came closer; a boy of about my own age scrambled frantically
over the wall, dislodging some of the smaller lichen-covered rocks on
top and sending them rolling into the ditch. He looked at me, startled,
then paused for a long instant at the road’s edge, undecided which way
to run.
He was barefoot and wore a jute sack as a shirt, with holes cut for his
arms, and ragged cotton pants. His face was little browner than my own
had often been at the end of a summer’s work under a burning sun.
He came to the end of indecision and started across the highway, legs
pumping high, head turned watchfully. A splendid tawny stallion cleared
the wall in a soaring jump, his rider bellowing, “There you are, you
damned black coon!”
He rode straight for the fugitive, quirt upraised, lips thickened and
eyes rolling in rage. The victim dodged and turned; in no more doubt
than I that the horseman meant to ride him down. He darted by me, so
close I heard the labored rasp of breathing.
The rider swerved, and he too twisted around me as though I were the
post at the far turn of a racecourse. Reflexively I put out my hand to
grab at the reins and stop the assault. Indeed, my fingers actually
touched the leather and grasped it for a fraction of a second before
they fell away.
Then I was alone in the road again as both pursued and pursuer vaulted
back over the fence. The whole scene of anger and terror could not have
lasted two minutes; I strained my ears to hear the shouts coming from
farther and farther away. Quiet fell again; a squirrel flirted his tail
and sped down one tree trunk and up another. The episode might never
have happened.
I shifted my bundle back and began walking again—less briskly now. My
legs felt heavy and there was an involuntary twitch in the muscles of
my arm.
Why hadnt I held on to the rein and delayed the hunter, at least long
enough to give his quarry a fair start? What had made me draw back?
It had not been fear, at least in the usual sense, for I knew I wasnt
timorous of the horseman. I was sure I could have dragged him down if
he had taken his quirt to me.
Yet I had been afraid. Afraid of interfering, of meddling in affairs
which were no concern of mine, of risking action on quick judgment.
I had been immobilized by the fear of asserting my sympathies, my
presumptions, against events.
Walking slowly down the road I experienced deep shame. I might, I could
have saved someone from hurt; I had perhaps had the power for a brief
instant to change the course of a whole life. I had been guilty of a
cowardice far worse than mere fear for my skin. I could have wept with
mortification—done anything, in fact, but turn back and try to rectify
my failure.
The rest of the day was gloomy as I alternately taunted and feebly
excused myself. The fugitive might have been a trespasser or a servant;
his fault might have been slowness, rudeness, theft or attempted
murder. Whatever it was, any retaliation the white man chose could be
inflicted with impunity. He would not be punished or even tried for it.
Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration to Africa, voluntary
or forced; those who went westward to join the unconquered Sioux or
Nez Perce were looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didnt embark for
Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had the fare or not,
deserved anything that happened to him in the United States.
It was because I held, somewhat vaguely, a stubborn refusal to accept
this conventional view, a refusal never precisely reasoned and little
more, perhaps, than romantic rebellion against my mother in favor of
my disreputable Grandfather Backmaker, that I suffered. I couldnt
excuse my failure on the grounds that action would have been considered
outrageous. It would not have been considered outrageous by me.
I pushed self-contempt at my passivity aside as best I could and strove
to recapture the mood of yesterday, succeeding to some extent as the
memory of the scene came back less insistently. I even tried pretending
the episode had perhaps not been quite as serious as it seemed, or that
the pursued had somehow in the end evaded the pursuer. I could not
make what had happened not happen; the best I could do was minimize my
culpability.
That night I slept a little way from the road and in the morning
started off at dawn. Although I was now little more than twenty miles
from the metropolis the character of the country had hardly changed.
Perhaps the farms were smaller and closer together, their juxtaposition
to the estates more incongruous. But traffic was continual now, with no
empty stretches on the roads, and the small towns had horse-drawn cars
running on iron tracks embedded in the cobbles.
It was late afternoon when I crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek to Manhattan.
Between me and the city now lay a wilderness of squatters’ shacks
made of old boards, barrel-staves and other discarded rubbish. Lean
goats and mangy cats nosed through rubble heaps of broken glass and
earthenware demijohns. Mounds of garbage lay beside aimless creeks
struggling blindly for the rivers. As clearly as though it had been
proclaimed on signposts this was an area of outcasts and fugitives, of
men and women ignored and tolerated by the law so long as they kept
within the confines of their horrible slum.
Strange and repugnant as the place was, I hesitated to keep on going
and arrive in the city at nightfall, but it seemed unlikely there was a
place to sleep among the shacks. Once away from the order and sobriety
of the post road one could be lost in the squalid maze; undefined
threats of vaguely dreadful fates seemed to rise from it like vapors.
Then the fading light revealed the anomaly of a venerable mansion
set far back from the highway, with grounds as yet unusurped by the
encroaching stews. The house was in ruins; the surrounding gardens
lost in brush and weeds. Evidently a watchman or caretaker guarded its
forlorn dignity or had very recently abandoned it; I could not imagine
its remaining long without being entirely overrun otherwise.
It was almost fully dark as I made my way cautiously toward the
remains of an old summerhouse. Its roof was fallen in and it was
densely enclosed by ancient rosebushes whose thorns, I thought, when
they pricked my fingers as I struggled through them, ought to give
warning of any intruder. For weatherworthiness this shelter had little
advantage over the hovels, yet somehow the fact that it had survived
seemed to make it a more secure retreat.
I stretched out on the dank boards and slept fitfully, disturbed by
dreams that the old mansion was filled with people from a past time
who begged me to save them from the slumdwellers and their house from
being further ravaged. Brokenly I protested I was helpless—in true
dream manner I then became helpless, unable to move—that I could not
interfere with what had to happen; they moaned and wrung their hands
and faded away. Still, I slept, and in the morning the cramps in my
muscles and the aches in my bones disappeared in the excitement of the
remaining miles to the city.
And how suddenly it grew up around me, not as though it was a fixed
collection of buildings which I approached, but as if I stood still
while the wood and stone, iron and brick, sprang into being all about.
New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown
very slowly since the close of the War of Southron Independence.
Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented
by far the largest concentration of people in the United States, though
of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers
of Washington, now including Baltimore and Alexandria, St Louis, or
Leesburg (once Mexico City).
The change from the country and the dreadful slums through which I
had passed was startling. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as
Fifty-ninth Street on the west side and all the way to Eighty-seventh
on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown
transportation every few blocks. Express steam trains ran through
bridged cuts on Madison Avenue, an engineering achievement of which
New Yorkers were vastly proud.
Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting
ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts or
wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams,
victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen
nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles
chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.
Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead,
crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices
and flats or downward to stores, a reminder that no urban family with
pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in
the parlor, that every child learned the Morse code before he could
read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own;
they perched and swung, quarreled and scolded on them, leaving only to
satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.
The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than
Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Buildings of eight or ten
storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen,
serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention
which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in Washington and
Leesburg.
Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and
controlled as skillfully as old-time sailing vessels. These were not
entirely novel to me; I had seen more of them than I had minibiles,
but never so many as here. In a single hour, gawking upward, I counted
seven, admiring how nicely calculated their courses were, for they
seldom came so low as to endanger lives beneath by having to throw out
sandbags in order to rise. That they could so maneuver over buildings
of greatly uneven height showed this to be the air age indeed.
Most exciting of all was the great number of people who walked, rode,
or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable
so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded,
touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted.
Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies shopped, drunks
staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not
thinking of going on, merely watching the spectacle.
How far I walked, how many different parts of the city I explored that
day, I have no idea. I felt I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge
of wonder when it was twilight and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by
telegraph sparks, gleamed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever
had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my eyes had not been
blind to the dirt and decay—became in an instant magically enchanting,
softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air
with a relish I had never known in the country and felt I was inhaling
some elixir for the spirit.
But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for a seventeen-year-old,
especially one who is beginning to be hungry and tired. I was
desperately anxious to hoard the three precious dollars in my pocket,
for I had little idea how to go about replacing them, once they were
spent. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the
first gaslit bakery, buying, after some consideration, a penny loaf,
and walked on through the entrancing streets, munching at it and
feeling like an historical character.
Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with
long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded
with a boldly lettered broadside or dashingly drawn cartoon advertising
the amusement to be found within. I was tempted to see for myself this
magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave
the illusion of motion, but the lowest admission price was five cents.
Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible
phonotos—tinugraphs ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine
operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to
move but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an
hour’s spectacle.
By this time I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of shirt
and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where
to sleep and began thinking more kindly than I would have believed
possible of last night’s slum. I didnt connect my need with the glass
transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted
letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL, for my mind was hazily fixed on
some urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie
Commercial House.
I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still
newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was one or a
succession of girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was
solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in
defiance of United States law, and an incredible number of beggars
accosted me.
At last I thought of asking directions. But without realizing it I had
wandered from the thronged wooden or granite sidewalks of the brightly
lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where the buildings were
low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a
kerosene lamp in windows far apart were uncontested by any streetlights.
All day my ears had been pressed by the clop of hooves, the rattling
of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street was
unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker seemed
the luckiest of chances.
“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s the nearest inn,
or anywhere I can get a bed for the night cheap?”
I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money you got?”
“Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap lodging.”
“OK, Reuben. Come along.”
“Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there.”
He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”
Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip be steered me along.
For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could
attempt to shrug free he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley,
discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the
relative darkness of the street.
“Wait—” I began.
“In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep youve had in a long time. And
cheap—it’s free.”
I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held
me. Before I could even begin to think, a terrific blow fell on the
right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the
blackness of insensibility.
_3._ _A MEMBER OF THE GRAND ARMY_
I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony
of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain
of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skullbones.
Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors
around me.
The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an
outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The ground I lay on, where it was not
stony, was damp with the water of endless dishwashings and launderings.
The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families
had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In
addition there was the smell of death, not the sweetish effluvium of
blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or
hog knows, but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh.
Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.
A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A
hard surface was pressing painful knobs into my exposed skin. I looked
and felt around me.
The knobs were the scattered cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away
was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk
retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately
over the moldy earth between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes were
gone, so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my
pocket for the three dollars. I knew I was lucky the robber had left me
my pants and my life.
A middleaged man, at least he looked middleaged to my youthful
eye, regarded me speculatively over the head of the drunk. A pale,
elliptical scar interrupted the wrinkles on his forehead, its upper
point making a permanent part in his thin hair. Tiny red veins marked
his nose; his eyes were bloodshot.
“Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh boy?”
I nodded—and then was sorry for the motion.
“Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which I assume. Come to
the same end as me, stinking drunk. Only I still got my shirt. Couldnt
hock it no matter how thirsty I got.”
I groaned.
“Where yuh from boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts miss you?”
“Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s Hodge Backmaker.”
“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. I’m George Pondible.
Periodic. Just tapering off.”
I hadnt an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand
made my head worse.
“Took everything, I suppose? Havent a nickel left to help a hangover?”
“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.
He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump
over my ear with my fingertips.
“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.”
“But ... can I go through the streets like this?”
“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”
He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured
unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver
betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He
then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of
his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome
collection of rags not fit to clean a manurespreader. The jacket was
torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt
was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with
great gapes in the soles.
“It’s stealing,” I protested.
“Right. Put them on and let’s get out of here.”
The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of
those of the day before. The tenements were smokestreaked, with steps
between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks
of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones
abutting. The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible’s
to this neighborhood, though his would have marked him tramp and
vagrant in Wappinger Falls.
The Hudson too was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I
hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt, much less my aching head.
But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two
docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing
water.
“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy.
“Now for mine.”
The sun was hot and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from
the river, the jacket over my arm. Now that my mind was clearing my
despair grew rapidly; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into
the Hudson and drowned.
Admitting any plans I’d had were nebulous and impractical, they had
yet been plans of a kind, something in which I could put, or force,
my hopes. My appearance had been presentable, I had the means to keep
myself fed and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything was
changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out of existence and I
had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies
and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not
simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but
because I knew how relieved my mother and father must have been to be
freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except
starvation or a life of petty crime.
Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive place, gaslit even
this early, with a steam piano tinkling the popular, mournful tune,
_Mormon Girl_:
There’s a girl in the state of Deseret
I love and I’m trying to for-get.
Forget her for my tired feet’s sake
Don’t wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.
They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean
I’d return my Mormon girl’s devotion.
But the tracks stop short in Ioway....
I couldnt remember the next line. Something about Injuns say.
“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk for my chum
here.”
The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet,
dirty rag. “Got any jack?”
“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”
The bartender’s uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink
tomorrow.
“Listen,” argued Pondible; “I’m tapering off. You know me. Ive spent
plenty of money here.”
The bartender shrugged. “I don’t own the place; anything goes over the
bar has to be rung up on the cash register.”
“Youre lucky to have a job that pays wages.”
“Times I’m not so sure. Why don’t you indent?”
Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a company pay for a
wornout old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a
couple of years with a med holdback so I’d have to report every week
somewhere. No, friend, Ive come through this long a free man—in a
manner of speaking—and I’ll stick it out. Let’s have that shot; you can
see for yourself I’m tapering off. Youll get your jack tomorrow.”
I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly
and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle
for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my
astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large
or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left
indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not
only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid
for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as
was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.
I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered
the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his
unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new
acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.
He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which
he sipped slowly. “That’s the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second
shot. If you can.” He sipped again. “Now what?”
“What?” I repeated.
“Now what are you going to do? What’s your aim in life anyway?”
“None—now. I ... wanted to learn. To study.”
He frowned. “Out of books?”
“How else?”
“Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries.”
“There might be more written here if more people had time to learn.”
Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his
hand. “Might and mightnt. Oh, some of my best friends are book-readers,
don’t get me wrong, boy.”
“I’d thought,” I burst out, “I’d thought to try Columbia College. To
offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition.”
“Hmm. I doubt it would have worked.”
“Anyway I can’t go now, looking like this.”
“Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers.”
“‘We?’ ”
He did not explain. “Well, you could always take the advice our friend
here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get
yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—”
“Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life.”
“Oh, indenting aint slavery. It’s better. And worse. For one thing the
company buys you won’t hold you after you arent worth your keep. Not
that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even.
So they cancel your indenture without a cent payment. Course theyll
take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but
that’s a long time away for you.”
An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my
distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at
home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped
to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so
much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its
disposal outside the United States.
“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldnt be a slave for life;
just thirty or forty years. Till I wasnt any good to anyone, including
myself.”
He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. “Youre a gloomy
gus, Hodge. Taint’s bad’s that. Indenting’s pretty strictly regulated.
That’s the idea anyway. I aint saying the big companies don’t get
away with a lot. You can’t be made to work over sixty hours a week.
Ten hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get all the
education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to
account by making enough to buy yourself free.”
I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I’d
been over the ground often enough. It was true the amount, a not
improbable one, would see me through college. But Pondible’s notion of
turning my “learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in
the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with
wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued—I
knew my own “impracticality” well enough by now—was bound to yield few
material benefits in the backward United States, which existed as a
nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the
great powers. I’d be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some
kind of living as a freeman; I could hardly hope to earn enough to buy
back an indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty
hours a week.
“It wouldnt work,” I said despondently.
Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion he had expected me
to come to. “Well then,” he said, “there’s the gangs.”
I looked my horror.
He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. What’s right? What the
strongest country or the strongest man says it is. The government says
gangs are wrong, but the government aint strong enough to stop them.
And maybe they don’t do as much killing as people think. Only when
somebody works against them—just like the government. Sure they have
to be paid off, but it’s just like taxes. If you leave the parsons’
sermons out of it there’s no difference joining the gangs than the
army—if we had one—or the Confederate Legion—”
“They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always so....”
“Bold?” For the first time Pondible looked angry and I thought the scar
on his forehead turned whiter. “Yes, damn them. The Legion must be half
United States citizens. When they have to put down a disturbance or run
some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate Legion—made
up of men who ought to be the backbone of an army of our own.”
“But the police—don’t they ever try to stop them?”
“What’d I tell you about right being what the strongest country says
it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into a foreign army. So we
squawk. And what have we got to back it up with? So the Confederate
Legion goes right on recruiting the men who have to beg for a square
meal in their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as bad
off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick off some of the
little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never
even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six
states, and every so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes
in a lifetime.”
I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet ... if this
were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an
elaborate blind? It seemed hardly worth it.
“A dividend,” I said, “or a rope.”
“Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Aint one been hung I
can think of the last five-six years. But I see youve no stomach for
it. Tell me, Hodge—you Whig or Populist?”
The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why ... Populist, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of the discussions that
used to go on among the men around the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property,
Protection, Permanent Population’ —what does it mean to me?”
“Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own
factories here and don’t want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign
capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent Population—cheap native
labor. Build up a prosperous employing class.”
“Yes, I know. I can’t see how it helps. Ive heard Whigs at home say the
money’s bound to seep down from above, but it seems awfully roundabout.
And not very efficient.”
He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “That’s my
boy,” he said. “They can’t fool you.”
I wasnt entirely pleased by his commendation. “And protection means
paying more for things than theyre worth.”
“Taint only that, Hodge, it’s a damn lie as well. Whigs never even
tried protection when they was in. Didnt dast. Knew the other countries
wouldnt let them.”
“As for ‘permanent population’ ... well, those who can’t make a living
are going to go on emigrating to prosperous countries. Permanent
population means dwindling population if it means anything.”
“Ah,” he said. “You got a head on your shoulders, Hodge. Youre all
right; books won’t hurt you. But what about emigrating? Yourself, I
mean?”
I shook my head.
He nodded, chewing on a soggy corner of his mustache. “Don’t want to
leave the old ship, huh?”
I don’t suppose I would have put it exactly that way, or even fully
formulated the thought. I was willing to exchange the familiar for the
unknown—up to a certain point. The thought of giving up the country
in which I’d been born was repugnant. Call it loyalty, or a sense of
having ties with the past, or just stubbornness. “Something like that,”
I said.
“Well now, let’s see what weve got.” He stuck up a dirty and slightly
tremulous hand, turning down a finger as he stated each point. “One,
patriot; two, Populist; three, don’t like indenting; four, prosperity’s
got to come from the poor upward, not the rich down.” He hesitated,
holding his thumb. “You heard of the Grand Army?”
“Who hasnt? Not much difference between them and the regular gangs.”
“Now what makes you say that?”
“Why ... everybody knows it”
“Do, huh? Maybe they know it all wrong. Look here now—and remember
about the Confederate Legion riding over the laws of the United
States—what would you think ought to be done about foreigners from the
strong countries who come here and walk all over us? Or the Whigs who
do their dirty work for them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not murder, certainly.”
“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means what you want it
to mean. Wasnt murder back during the War when Union soldiers was
trying to keep the country from being split up. Taint murder today when
somebody’s hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army don’t
go in for murder.”
I said nothing.
“Oh, accidents happen; wouldnt deny it. Maybe they get a little rougher
than they intend with Whig traitors or Confederate agents, but you
can’t make bacon out of a live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only
thing in the country that even tries to restore it to what it once was.
What was fought for in the War.”
I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather Backmaker or the
unassuaged guilt for the miserable figure I had cut only three days
back that made me ask, “And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”
He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the
tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly.
“No, I can see you aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just
don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadnt been for the
Abolitionists.”
Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been
presumptuous to doubt it.
“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never
should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix.
Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be
done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build
the country up again.”
“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”
Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I
just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some
of that education youre so fired up about. Come along.”
_4._ _TYSS_
He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with
a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was
the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left
neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have
changed or aged.
I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the
shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many
rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered
many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes.
Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and
daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber
came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous
dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of
type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust
which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and
immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.
Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the
heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible
and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard.
His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across
his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime
of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard
or wrinkles however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce
and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as
simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not
been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other
features.
“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for
sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the
survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”
So far as I knew, I said, it was.
“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”
“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some
kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”
“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is
ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the
waste-product of the human mind.”
“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.
“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve of either
life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn;
there’s nothing I can do about it As well here as another place.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the
familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as
Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the
giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love,
hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”
I considered this statement reflectively.
“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set
type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can
steal from me if you must You can learn as much here in four months as
in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you
want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think
needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre free to go.”
And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be
called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for
the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger
Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend.
Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him
the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and
attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned.
I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this
detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am
getting ahead of my story.
Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size,
edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and
on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical
application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with
terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and
“sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition,
contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his
retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)
As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely
with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some
trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a
proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry,
essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a
single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately
destroyed before pieing the type.
I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day;
Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed
press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across
town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of
beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was
closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed
by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to
tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his
nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least
some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even
cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart;
it is the vital food.”
While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s
bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long
two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent
of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it
over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted
rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a
hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate
a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and
supper.
“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing
vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient,
putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we
are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”
“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? I mean, doesnt it refer to
the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester and buried by the
sower?”
“You think the gods were modelled on John Barleycorn and not John
Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher
opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”
“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the
true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull’s body.”
“How about ... oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”
He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An
excellent example. Epitome of man’s futile longing to upset and defy
the divine plan—I use the word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does
not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god
out of the devil we eat him daily in a two-fold sense: by swallowing
the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by
digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And
you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds
to speculate on. Let’s get to work.”
He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate
master. In 1938-44, when the country was being ground deeper into
colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much,
generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the
abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular
book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get
it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.
Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his errands. I continued
to ramble and sight-see the city much as though I had nothing else to
do. And if, from time to time, I discovered there were girls in New
York who didnt look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still
carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never questioned
why the walk of half a mile took me a couple of hours.
True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me wages, but he
often handed me coins for pocketmoney, evidently satisfied I wasnt
stealing, and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent
clothing.
He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books surrounding
me. His brief warning, “—you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I
suppose a different temperament might have become surfeited with
paper and print; I can only say I wasnt. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled
books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest
gasjet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet with a dozen
volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open
or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light
still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.
I think one of the first books to influence me strongly was the
monumental _Causes of American Decline and Decay_ by the always popular
expatriate historian, Henry Adams. I was particularly impressed by
the famous passage in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian
essayists, William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice
and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry, who
had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by
William V, history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned
individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral
roots.
Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive
sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the fact that I had not
found their books enjoyable. This was due at least partly to the fact
that the small editions were badly printed and marred, at least so
foreign critics claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms,
consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain of imported
elegance. For some reason, obscure to me then, I did not mention
Adams to Tyss, though I usually turned to him with each of my fresh
discoveries. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at
the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the
particular work or of its topic. What he had to say gave me an insight
I might otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other
aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or
established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis
no matter how commonly accepted.
Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment
he kept hanging, slightly askew and highly attractive to dust, over
his typecase. It was simply but beautifully printed in 16 point
Baskerville; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:
_The Body of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
Like the Cover of an Old Book
Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding
Lies Here
Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For it will, As he Believed,
Come Forth Again
In a new and Better Edition
Revised & Corrected
By
The Author._
When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it,
Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is
no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no
plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious
actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”
“The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a
plan.”
He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me,
Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind; it is this no-plan
against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan too, a mindless plan,
which accounts for all our acts.”
I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant curate of
some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his
sermons himself, named George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his
forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself
as to counter his argument.
“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century
logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and
paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he
responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”
“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of
choice?”
“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because
someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another
someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another
action.”
“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a
beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice
exists once it can exist again.”
“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said
witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his
vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend
Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that
all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask,
What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly
through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you
conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course
not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its
mouth?”
“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical
lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your
cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics
at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didnt select
the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence
by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”
Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in
accordance with your own conviction.”
He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic.
How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”
“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand
Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”
“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much
as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than
I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time
comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually
everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.
I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for
wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every
attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was
false I didnt doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more
terrifying.
There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones.
Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why
do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for
what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him
mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at
all.
The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of
contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was
a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate
and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the _True American_,
came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large type
warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG
YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him;
his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from
commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.
Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each
other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I
was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed
to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an
X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about assurance of
delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we
handled.
I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside
from the very first conversation with Pondible, no attempt was made to
persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for
he explained obliquely.
“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts,
and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes
them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical
rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he
reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts
to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable
and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”
“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times?
Ive certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their
memoirs.”
“You are confusing the after-effect of action with nonaction, the
dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the
still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the
two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police
chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of
Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”
I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read
Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.
“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to the spectator
the man of action is faintly absurd. A born observer would find the
earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the formation of skeleton companies,
the appointment of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to
become a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.”
“You think I’m the spectator type, Mr Tyss?”
“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be deceptive at
first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained fleshiness of the
mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but they subordinate to more
subtle indicators. No question but that Chief Jung would put you down
as an observer.”
If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying
personalities as though they were zoological specimens could relieve me
of having to refuse pointblank to join the Grand Army I was content.
While this hardly alleviated my disturbance at being, no matter how
remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder I compromised with
my conscience by trying to believe I might after all be mistaken in
thinking I was being used. There were times when I felt I ought boldly
to declare myself and leave the store but when I faced the prospect
of having to find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the
imperative necessity of books, I lacked the courage.
Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.
_5._ _OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS_
A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory
loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated
to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has
happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous
change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand
Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s
answer to defeat.
It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others.
The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into
actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the
great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital
and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity
for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual
raising of the standard of living since employers could hire more
hands, and indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle
away.
This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were
out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the
indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new
markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they
never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the
Whigs.
The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were
really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title,
with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and
his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading
contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the
Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an
arsonist.
I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I too had campaign
fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate
ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig
nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if
the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.
Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating
their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign
in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This
year both office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest
number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train; Lewis
was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free.
Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in
enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.
One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in
September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President
Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved
Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple
of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from
which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized
all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been
active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.
The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more
acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette
and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed
air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the
candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on,
I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as
well leave altogether.
“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the
Populist tradition?”
“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young
and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political
meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.
She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded
grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”
She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale
hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,”
I said; “unless youre enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare
look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the
streetcar. For my clumsiness.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel
you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone
comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”
“Why ... to hear the speakers.”
“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”
“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”
“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A
stupid amusement.”
“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually havent
much money.”
“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to
do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt vote for Populists.”
“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”
She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy
enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to
become better off yourself.”
“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”
“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you
step on their feet?”
“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely
ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings,
but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”
Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a family of wealthy
Whigs who owned a handsome modern castiron and concrete house near the
Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the
apt word “curious” in characterizing herself but it was, as I soon
found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored only what
she thought might be useful or which impressed her as foolish. She
was interested in the nature of anything fashionable or popular or
much talked of, the idea of being concerned with anything even vaguely
abstract struck her as preposterous.
She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity, but
calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security through
indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me, even when I contrasted my
“free” condition with her bound one. Certainly she seemed to have
minimum restriction on her time; soon after our introduction at the
rally she was meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square where
we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking briskly when the autumn
weather chilled our blood.
I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps tolerance would
be a better word—was due to any strong attraction exerted by me. If
anything she was, I think, slightly repelled by my physical presence,
which carried to her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and
contrasted with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers and their
friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered slightly; then,
closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her again.
She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she led me quietly
to her room in the big house on my transparent plea that the outdoors
was now too cold even for conversation. I was no accomplished seducer,
but even in my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her mind I
was to succeed.
That her complaisance was not the result of passion was soon obvious;
there was not so much a failure on my part to arouse her as a refusal
on hers to be aroused beyond an inescapable degree. Even as she
permitted our intimacy she remained as virginal, aloof and critical as
before.
“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking and writing
and thinking about nothing else.”
“Tirzah dear—”
“And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think of you as any
more dear than I did an hour ago. If people must indulge in this sort
of thing, and I suppose they must since it’s been going on for a long
time, I think it could be conducted with more dignity.”
As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen; curiosity
alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my pathetic search for
knowledge. “What good is your learning ever going to do you? It’ll
never get you a penny.”
I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose it doesnt?”
I argued lazily; “There are other things besides money.”
She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.”
“And what do people who can get it say?”
“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered earnestly.
“That it will buy all the other things.”
“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted, “but you have to
get it first.”
“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract payment.”
“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”
She looked at me wonderingly. “Havent you ever thought about serious
things? Only books and politics and all that? How could I get
opportunities without indenting? I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut
above the Backmakers; well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess
and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs Smythe.”
“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”
“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want to live like a
lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles,
to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or
Vienna. You can love the poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the
rich and the Whigs.”
“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you have your
indenting money and can buy back your freedom any moment you want it,
how does this help you get rich?”
“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested, every cent.
People who come to this house give me tips; not just money, though
there’s enough of that to add a bit to my original capital, but tips on
what to buy and sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of
course I may marry a rich man sooner.”
“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,” I
remonstrated.
“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, youve been telling me I’m
cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded profitably.”
“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what we’re doing here
at this moment. I’d have thought you’d have picked a more profitable
lover.”
She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If you had, you
would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class
into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the
faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would
be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly
prude.”
An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at
the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been
as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy
was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a
convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance,
anyone who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house would
have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face to face with
Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her.
Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past,
I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the
boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences;
how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the
wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between
us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful
self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus
Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It
all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then.
Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners
in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as
the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them,
but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made
response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools.
Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the
victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest
probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I
also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated
individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John
Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”
From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later,
President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and
imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of
Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order
during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However he
had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue
this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate
House and Senate.
Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for
independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation,
enacted largely because of pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed
itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its
obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without
franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil rights. Yet
while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration,
the Confederacy encouraged it, making the newcomers subjects like
the Latin-Americans who made up so much of the Southron population
after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to
posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate States on July
Fourth 1864.
The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate agents; the Whigs
retorted that the Populists were visionaries and demagogues who
tolerated if they did not actually encourage the activities of the
Grand Army. The Populists replied by pointing to their platform which
denounced illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too
impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible and their associates
had been ever since the campaign started.
On election night Tyss closed the store and we walked the few blocks
to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store where a big screen showed the
returns between tinugraphs puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the
first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to
Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the
Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President
Thomas R Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before
Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the presidency four
years later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah and Oregon went
for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one other states plumped
for Dewey.
Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful air. When I
asked him what satisfaction he could find in so overwhelming a defeat
he smiled and said, “What defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the
Populists to win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world
peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn nothing day by
day.”
“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”
“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration which presents a
fixed target to a Populist one wavering all over the place.”
Of course it should have occurred to me that Tyss and Tirzah would wind
up on the same side. It was a measure of my innocence that it never
had.
_6._ _ENFANDIN_
Tirzah’s question, “What good is your learning ever going to do you?”
bothered me from time to time. Not that I was burdened by any vast
amount of knowledge, but presumably I would get more—and then what?
It was true I expected no rewards from reading except the pleasure
it gave me, but the future, to use a topheavy word, could not be
entirely disregarded. I could not see myself spending a lifetime in the
bookstore. I was grateful to Tyss, despite his disdain of this emotion,
for the opportunities he had given me, but not grateful enough to
reconcile myself to becoming another Tyss, especially one without his
vitalizing involvement with the Grand Army.
Other courses were neither numerous nor inviting. To follow Tirzah’s
own example might have seemed feasible if one ignored the vast
differences of situation and character, to say nothing of those between
a hulking youth and a pretty girl. I could hardly hope to find a
wealthy family who would buy my services, put me to congenial tasks,
and look with tolerance on my efforts to advance myself right out
of their employment. Even if such a chance existed I could not have
utilized it as she did; I should undoubtedly confuse one stock with
another or neglect to buy what I was told until too late, winding up
with lottery tickets and losing the stubs.
My helpless uncertainty only added to my disadvantage with her. I
had no hope her coolness would change to either ardor or affection.
At any moment she might decide her curiosity was satisfied and find
the awkwardness, inconveniences, and what must have been to her the
sordidness of the affair too great.
We were a strange pair of young lovers. When we talked we argued
opposing views or spoke sedately of things not near our hearts.
When we walked together in the streets or fled the gaslit pavements
for the moon over Reservoir Square we neither held hands nor kissed
impulsively. Because prudence forbade the slightest physical contact
save in utmost privacy there were no innocent touchings or accidental
brushing of hands against hips or arms against arms, and our secret
embraces were guilty simply because they were secret.
Often I dreamed of a miraculous change, either in circumstances or
in her attitude, to dissolve the walls between us; beneath the hope
was only expectation of an abrupt and final break. Yet when it came
at last, after more than a year, it was not the result, as I had
agonizedly anticipated, of some successful speculation or an offer of
marriage, but of natural and normal actions of my own.
Among the customers to whom I frequently delivered parcels of books was
a Monsieur René Enfandin who lived on Eighth Street, not far from Fifth
Avenue. M Enfandin was Consul for the Republic of Haiti; the house he
occupied was distinguished from otherwise equally drab neighbors by
a large red and blue escutcheon over the doorway. He did not use the
entire dwelling himself, reserving only the parlor floor for the office
of the consulate and living quarters; the rest was let to other tenants.
Tyss’s anti-foreign bias caused him to jeer at Enfandin behind his back
and embark on discourses which proved by anthropometry and frequent
references to Lombroso and Chief Jung that Negroes were incapable
of self-government. I noticed however that he treated the consul no
differently, either in politeness or honesty, from his other patrons,
and by this time I knew Tyss well enough to attribute this courtesy not
to the self-interest of a tradesman but to that compassion which he
suppressed so sternly under the contradictions of his nature.
For a long time I paid little attention to Enfandin, beyond noting the
wide range of interests revealed by the books he bought. I sensed
that, like myself, he was inclined to shyness. He had an arrangement
whereby he turned back most of his purchases for credit on others. I
saw that if he hadnt, his library would have soon dispossessed him;
as it was, books covered all the space not taken by the paraphernalia
of his office and bedroom with the exception of a bit of bare wall on
which hung a large crucifix. He seemed always to have a volume in his
large, dark brown hand, politely closed over his thumb or open for
eager sampling.
Enfandin was tall and strong-featured, notable in any company. In
the United States where a black man was, more than anything else,
a reminder of the disastrous war and Mr Lincoln’s proclamation, he
was the permanent target of rowdy boys and adult hoodlums. Even the
diplomatic immunity of his post was poor protection, for it was
believed, not without justification, that Haiti, the only American
republic south of the Mason-Dixon line to preserve its independence,
was disrupting the official if sporadically executed policy of
deporting Negroes to Africa by encouraging their emigration to its own
shores or, what was even more annoying, assisting them to flee to the
unconquered Indians of Idaho or Montana.
Beyond a “Good morning” or “Thank you” I doubt if we exchanged a
hundred words until the time I saw a copy of Randolph Bourne’s
_Fragment_ among his selections. “That’s not what you think it is,” I
exclaimed brashly; “it’s a novel.”
He looked at me gravely. “You also admire Bourne?”
“Oh yes.” I felt a trifle foolish, not only for having thrust my advice
upon him, but for the inadequacy of my comment on a writer who had so
many pertinent things to say and had been persecuted for saying them.
I was conscious too of Tyss’s opinion: How could a cripple like Bourne
speak to whole and healthy men?
“But you do not approve of fiction, is that so?” Enfandin had no
discernible accent but often his English was uncolloquial and sometimes
it was overly careful and stiff.
I thought of the adventure tales I had once swallowed so breathlessly.
“Well ... it does seem to be a sort of a waste of time.”
He nodded. “Time, yes.... We waste it or save it or use it—one would
almost think we mastered it instead of the other way around. Yet are
all novels really a waste of the precious dimension? Perhaps you
underestimate the value of invention.”
“No,” I said; “but what value has the invention of happenings that
never happened, or characters who never existed?”
“Who is to say what never happened? It is a matter of definition.”
“All right,” I said; “suppose the characters exist in the author’s
mind, like the events; where does the value of the invention come in?”
“Where the value of any invention comes in,” he answered. “In its
purpose or use. A wheel spinning aimlessly is worth nothing; the same
wheel on a cart or a pulley changes destiny.”
“You can’t learn anything from fairy tales,” I persisted stubbornly.
He smiled. “Maybe you havent read the right fairy tales.”
I soon discovered in him a quick and penetrating sympathy which was at
times almost telepathic. He listened to my callow opinions patiently,
offering observations of his own without diffidence and without
didacticism. The understanding and encouragement I did not expect or
want from Tyss he gave me generously. To him, as I never could to
Tirzah, I talked of my hopes and dreams; he listened patiently and did
not seem to think them foolish or impossible of accomplishment. I do
not minimize what Tyss did for me by saying that without Enfandin I
would have taken much less profit from the books my employer gave me
access to.
I was drawn to him more and more; I’m not sure why he interested
himself in me, unless there was a reason in the remark he made once:
“Ay, we are alike, you and I. The books, always the books. And for
themselves, not to become rich or famous like sensible people. Are
we not foolish? But it is a pleasant folly and a sometimes blameless
vice.”
I wanted anxiously to speak of Tirzah, not only because it is an urgent
necessity for lovers to mention the name at least of their beloved a
hundred times a day or more, but in the nebulous hope he could somehow
give me an answer to her as well as to her question. I approached the
topic in a number of different ways; each time our conversation moved
on without my having told him about her.
Often, after I had delivered an armful of books to the consulate and
we had talked of a wide range of things—for, unlike me, he had no
self-consciousness about what interested him, whether others might
consider it trivial or not—he would walk back to the bookstore with
me, leaving a note on his door. The promise that he would be “Back in
10 minutes” was, I’m afraid, seldom fulfilled, for he became so deeply
engrossed that he was unaware of time.
The occasion which was to be so important to me sprang from a
discussion of non-resistance to evil, a subject on which he had much
to say. We were just passing Wanamaker & Stewarts and he had just
triumphantly reviewed the amazing decision of the Japanese Shogun to
abolish all police forces, when I became conscious that someone was
staring fixedly at me.
A minibile, highslung and obviously custom-built, moved slowly down the
street. Its brass brightwork, bumpers like two enormous tackheads, hub
rims like delicate eyelets in the center of the great spokes, rococo
lamps, rain gutters and door handles, was dazzling. In the jump-seat,
facing a lady of majestic demeanor, was Tirzah. Her head was turned
ostentatiously away from us.
Enfandin halted as I did. “Ah,” he murmured; “you know the ladies?”
“The girl. The lady is her employer.”
“I caught only a glimpse of the face, but it is a pretty one.”
“Yes. Oh yes....” I wanted desperately to say more, to thank him as
though Tirzah’s looks were somehow to my credit, to praise her and at
the same time call her cruel and hardhearted. “Oh yes....”
“She is perhaps a particular friend?”
I nodded. “Very particular.” We walked on in silence.
“That is nice. But she is perhaps a little unhappy over your prospects?”
“How did you know?”
“It was not too hard to infer. You have been concealed from the
mistress; the young lady is impressed by wealth; you are the idealistic
one who is not.”
At last I was able to talk. I explained her indenture, her ambitious
plans, and how I expected her to end everything between us at any
moment. “And there’s nothing I can do about it,” I finished bitterly.
“That is right, Hodge. There is nothing you can do about it because—You
will forgive me if I speak plainly, brutally even?”
“Go ahead. Tirzah—” what a joy it was just to say the name “—Tirzah has
told me often enough how unrealistic I am.”
“That was not what I meant. I would say there is nothing you can do
about it because there is nothing you wish to do about it.”
“What do you mean? I’d do anything I could....”
“Would you? Give up books, for instance?”
“Why should I? What good would that do?”
“I do not say you should or that it would do good. I only try to show
that the young lady, charming and important as she is, is not the most
magnetic or important thing in your life. Romantic love is a curious
byproduct of west European feudalism that Africans and Asiatics can
only criticize gingerly. You shake your head with obstinacy; you do not
believe me. Good, then I have not hurt you.”
“I can’t see that youve helped me much, either.”
“Ay! What did you expect from the black man of Haiti? Miracles?”
“Nothing less will do any good I’m afraid. Now I suppose youll tell
me I’ll get over it in time; that it’s just an adolescent languishing
anyway.”
He looked at me reproachfully. “No, Hodge. I hope I should never be
the one to think suffering is tied to age or time. As for getting
over it, why, we all get over everything in the end, but no matter
how desirable absolute peace is, few of us are willing to give up
experience prematurely.”
Later, I compared what Enfandin told me with what Tyss might have said.
Did the responsibility of holding Tirzah lie with me and not with both
of us, or with fate or chance? Or were events so circumscribed by
inevitabilities that even to think of struggling with them was foolish?
I also asked myself if I had been too proud, too hypersensitive. I had
tried to make her see my viewpoint by arguing, by fighting hers; might
it not be possible, without giving up essentials, to approach her more
gently? To divert her, not from her ambitions, but from her contempt
for mine?
Full of resolves, I left the store after eight; eager walking brought
me to our meeting place in Reservoir Square early, but the nearby
churchbells had hardly sounded the quarter hour when she said, “Hodge.”
Her unusual promptness was a good omen; I was filled with warm
optimism. “Tirzah, I saw you this afternoon—”
“Did you? I thought you were so busy with Sambo you would never look
up.”
“Why do you call him that? Do you think—”
“Oh for Heavens sake, don’t start making speeches at me. I call him
Sambo because it sounds nicer than Rastus.”
All my resolutions about trying to see her point of view! “I call him
M’sieu Enfandin because that’s his name.”
“Have you no pride? No, I suppose you havent. Just some strange
manners. Well, I can put up with your eccentricities, but other people
wouldnt understand. What do you think Mrs Smythe would say?”
“Never having met the lady, I havent the faintest idea.”
“I have, and I agree with her. Would you like me to be chummy with a
naked cannibal with a ring in his nose?”
“But Enfandin doesnt wear a ring in his nose, and you must have seen
he was fully dressed. Maybe he eats missionaries in secret, but that
couldnt offend Mrs Smythe since appearances would be saved.”
“I’m serious, Hodge.”
“So am I. Enfandin is my only friend.”
“You may be above appearances and considerations of decency but I’m
not. If you ever appear in public with him again you can stop coming
here. Because I won’t have anything more to do with you.”
“But Tirzah ...” I began helplessly, overwhelmed by the impossibility
of coping with the irrelevancies and inconsistencies of her stand. “But
Tirzah....”
“No,” she said firmly; “you’ll simply have to grow up, Hodge, and stop
such childish exhibitions. Only friend indeed! Why I suppose if he
appeared here right this minute, you’d talk to him.”
“Well naturally. You’d hardly expect me to—”
“But I do. That’s exactly what I’d expect. You to act like a civilized
man.”
I wasnt angry. I couldnt be angry with her. “If that’s civilization
then I guess I don’t want to be civilized.”
I detected astonishment in her voice. “You mean, actually mean, you
intend to keep on acting this way?”
Grandfather Backmaker must have been a stubborn man; I had my
mother’s word I possessed no Hodgins traits. “Tirzah, what would you
think of me if I turned on my only friend, the only thoroughly kind
and understanding friend Ive ever had, just because Mrs Smythe has
different notions of propriety than I have?”
“I’d think you were beginning to understand things at last.”
“I’m sorry, Tirzah.”
“I mean it, Hodge, you know. I’ll never see you again.”
“If you’d only listen to my side—”
“You mean if I would only become a crank like you. But I don’t want to
be a crank or a martyr. I don’t want to change the world. I’m normal.”
“Tirzah—”
“Goodbye, Hodge.”
She walked away. I had the irrational feeling that if I called after
her she might come back. Or at least stand still and wait to hear what
I had to say. I kept my mouth obstinately closed; Enfandin had been
right, the responsibility was mine. There were things I would not give
up.
My heroic mood must have lasted fully fifteen minutes. Then I hurried
through the little park and across the street to the Smythe house.
There were lights in the upper floors, but the basement, as always,
was dark. I dared not knock or ring the bell; her admonitions were
too firmly impressed on my mind. Instead, in a turmoil of emotions, I
paced the flagged sidewalk until the suspicious eye of a patrolman was
attracted; then I fled cravenly.
I couldnt wait for the next day to write a long, chaotic letter
begging her to let me talk to her, just to talk to her, for an hour,
ten minutes, a minute. I offered to indent, to emigrate, to make a
fortune by some inspired means if only she would hear me. I recalled
moments together, I told her I loved her, said I would die without her.
Having covered several pages with these sentiments I began all over and
repeated them. It was dawn when I posted the letter in the pneumatic
mail.
Sleepless and tormented, I was of little use to Tyss next day. Would
she telegraph? If she answered by pneumatic post her letter might be
delivered in the afternoon. Or would she come to the bookstore?
The second day I sent off two more letters and went up to Reservoir
Square on the chance she might appear. I watched the house as though my
concentration would force her to emerge. On the third day my letters
came back, unopened.
There is some catchphrase or other about the elasticity of youth. It is
true it was only weeks before my misery abated, and weeks more before I
was heart-whole again. But those weeks were long.
The subject of Tirzah did not come up again between Enfandi and me. He
must have sensed I had lost her, perhaps he even guessed his connection
with the break, but he was too tactful to mention it and I was too sore.
I don’t know if the episode precipitated some maturity in me, or if, as
a result of grief and anger I tried to turn my mind away from the easy
emotions and shield myself against further hurt. At any rate, whether
there was a logical connection or not, it is from this period that I
date my resolve to center my reading on history. Somewhat diffidently I
spoke of this to him.
“History? But certainly, Hodge. It is a noble study. But what is
history? How is it written? How is it read? Is it a dispassionate
chronicle of events scientifically determined and set down in the
precise measure of their importance? Is this ever possible? Or is it
the transmutation of the ordinary into the celebrated? Or the cunning
distortion which gives a clearer picture than accurate blueprints?”
“It seems to me facts are primary and interpretations come after,” I
answered. “If we can find out the facts we can form our individual
opinions on them.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps. But take what is for me the central fact of all
history.” He pointed to the crucifix. “As a Catholic the facts are
plain to me; I believe what is written in the Gospels to be literally
true: that the Son of Man died for me on that cross. But what were
the facts for a contemporary Roman statesman? That an obscure local
agitator threatened the stability of an uneasy province and was
promptly executed in the approved Roman fashion as a warning to others.
And for a contemporary fellow-countryman? That no such person existed.
You think these facts are mutually exclusive? Yet you know no two
people see exactly the same thing; too many honest witnesses have
contradicted each other. Even the Gospels must be reconciled.”
“You are saying that truth is relative.”
“Am I? Then I shall have my tongue examined, or my head. Because I mean
to say no such thing. Truth is absolute and for all time. But one man
cannot envisage all of truth; the best he can do is see a single aspect
of it whole. That is why I say to you, be a skeptic, Hodge. Always be
the skeptic.”
“Ay?” I was finding the admonition a little difficult to harmonize with
his previous confession of faith.
“For the believer skepticism is essential. How else is he to know false
gods from true except by doubting both? One of the most pernicious of
folk-sayings is, ‘I could scarcely believe my eyes?’ Why should you
believe your eyes? You were given eyes to see with, not to believe
with. Believe your mind, your intuition, your reason, your feelings if
you like—but not your eyes unaided by any of these interpreters. Your
eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination, as easily as the actual
scenery. Your eyes will tell you nothing exists but matter—”
“Not my eyes only, but my boss.”
“Ay? What are you saying?” For all his amiability Enfandin enjoyed
interruption in mid-discourse no more than any other teacher. But in
a moment his irritation vanished and he listened to my description of
Tyss’s mechanistic creed.
“God have mercy on his soul,” he muttered at last. “Poor creature. He
has liberated himself from the superstitions of religion in order to
fall into superstition so abject no Christian can conceive it. Imagine
to yourself—” he began to pace the floor “—time is circular, man is
automaton, we are doomed to repeat the same gestures over and over,
forever. Oh I say to you, Hodge, this is monstrous. The poor man. The
poor man.”
I nodded. “Yes. But what is the answer? Limitless space? Limitless
time? They are almost as horrifying, because they are inconceivable and
awful.”
“And why should the inconceivable and awful be horrifying? Is our
small human understanding the ultimate measuring stick and guide? But
of course this is not the answer. The answer is that all—time, space,
matter—all is illusion. All but the good God Himself. Nothing is real
but Him. We are creatures of His fancy, figments of His imagination....”
“Then where does free will come in?”
“As a gift, naturally. Or supernaturally. How else? The greatest gift
and the greatest responsibility.”
I can’t say I was entirely satisfied with his exposition, though it was
certainly more to my taste than Tyss’s. I returned to the conversation
at intervals, both in my thoughts and when I saw him, but in the end I
suppose all I really accepted was his admonition to be skeptical, which
I doubt I always applied the way he meant me to.
_7._ _OF CONFEDERATE AGENTS IN 1942_
To anyone but the mooncalf I still was in the year of my majority
it would have long since occurred with considerable force that
Enfandin ought to be told of Tyss’s connection with the Negro-hating,
anti-foreign Grand Army. And the thought once entertained, no matter
how belatedly, would have been immediately translated into warning. For
me it became a dilemma.
If I exposed Tyss to Enfandin I would certainly be basely ungrateful to
the man who had saved me from destitution and given me the opportunity
I wanted so much. Membership in the Grand Army was a crime, even though
the laws were laxly enforced, and I could hardly expect an official
receiving the hospitality of the United States to conceal knowledge of
a felony against his host, especially when the Grand Army was what it
was. Yet if I kept silent I would be less than a friend.
If I spoke I would be an informer; if I didnt, a hypocrite and worse.
The fact that neither man, for totally different reasons, would
condemn me whichever course I took increased rather than diminished my
perplexity. I procrastinated, which meant I was actually protecting
Tyss, and that this was against my sympathies increased my feeling of
guilt.
At this juncture a series of events involved me still deeper with the
Grand Army and further complicated my relationship to both Tyss and
Enfandin. It began the day a customer called himself to my attention
with a selfconscious clearing of his throat.
“Yes sir. Can I help you?”
He was a fat little man with palpably false teeth, and hair hanging
down behind over his collar. However the sum of his appearance was in
no way ludicrous; rather he gave the impression of ease and authority,
and an assurance so strong there was no necessity to buttress it.
“Why, I was looking for—” he began, and then scrutinized me sharply.
“Say, aint you the young fella I saw walking with a Nigra? Big black
buck?”
Seemingly everyone had been fascinated by the spectacle of two people
of slightly different shades of color in company with each other. I
felt myself reddening. “There’s no law against it, is there?”
He made a gargling noise which I judged was laughter. “Wouldnt know
about your damyankee laws, boy. For myself I’d say there’s no harm in
it, no harm in it at all. Always did like to be around Nigras myself.
But then I was rared among em. Most damyankees seem to think Nigras
aint fitten company. Only goes to show how narrerminded and bigoted you
folks can be. Present company excepted.”
“M’sieu Enfandin is consul of the Republic of Haiti,” I said; “he’s a
scholar and a gentleman.” As soon as the words were out I was bitterly
sorry for their condescension and patronage. I felt ashamed, as if I
had betrayed him by offering credentials to justify my friendship and
implying it took special qualities to overcome the handicap of his
color.
“A mussoo, huh? Furrin and educated Nigra? Well, guess theyre all
right.” His tone, still hearty, was slightly dubious. “Ben working here
long?”
“Nearly four years.”
“Kind of dull, aint it?”
“Oh no—I like to read, and there are plenty of books around here.”
He frowned. “Should think a hefty young fella’d find more interesting
things. Youre indented, of course? No? Well then youre a mighty lucky
fella. In a way, in a way. Naturally youll be short on cash, ay? Unless
you draw a lucky number in the lottery.”
I told him I’d never bought a lottery ticket.
He slapped his leg as though I’d just repeated a very good joke. “Aint
that the pattrun,” he exclaimed; “aint that the pattrun! Necessity
makes em have a lottery; Puritanism keeps em from buying tickets. Aint
that the pattrun!” He gargled the humor of it for some time, while his
eyes moved restlessly around the dim interior of the store. “And what
do you read, ay? Sermons? Books on witches?”
I admitted I’d dipped into both, and then, perhaps trying to impress
him, explained my ambitions.
“Going to be a professional historian, hey? Little out of my line, but
I don’t suppose they’s many of em up North here.”
“Not unless you count a handful of college instructors who dabble in it”
He shook his head. “Young fella with your aims could do better down
South, I’d think.”
“Oh yes; some of the most interesting research is going on right now in
Leesburg, Washington-Baltimore and the University of Lima. You are a
Confederate yourself, sir?”
“Southron, yes sir, I am that and mighty proud of it. Now look a-here,
boy: I’ll lay all my cards on the table, face up. Youre a free man and
you aint getting any pay here. Now how’d you like to do a little job
for me? They’s good money in it; and I imagine I’d be able to fix up
one of those deals—what do they call em? scholarships—at the University
of Leesburg, after.”
A scholarship at Leesburg. Where the Department of History was engaged
on a monumental project—nothing less than a compilation of all known
source material on the War of Southron Independence! It was only with
the strongest effort that I refrained from agreeing blindly.
“It sounds fine, Mr—?”
“Colonel Tolliburr. Jest call me cunnel.”
There wasnt anything remotely military in his bearing. “It sounds good
to me, Colonel. What is the job?”
He clicked his too regular teeth thoughtfully. “Hardly anything at all,
m’boy, hardly anything at all. Just want you to keep a list for me.”
He seemed to think this a complete explanation. “What kind of list,
Colonel?”
“Why, list of the people that come in here steady. Especially the ones
don’t seem to buy anything, just talk to your boss. Names if you know
em, but that aint real important, and a sort of rough description.
Like five foot nine, blue eyes, dark hair, busted nose, scar on right
eyebrow. And so on. Nothing real detailed. And a list of deliveries.”
Was I tempted? I don’t really know. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I’m afraid I
can’t help you.”
“Not even for that scholarship and say, a hundred dollars in real
money?”
I shook my head.
“They’s no harm in it, boy. Likely nothing’ll come of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Two hundred? I’m not talking about yankee slugs, but good CSA bills,
each with a picture of President Jimmy right slapdash on the middle of
it.”
“It’s not a matter of money, Colonel Tolliburr.”
He looked at me shrewdly. “Think it over, boy. No use being hasty.” He
handed me a card. “Any time you change your mind come and see me or
send me a telegram.”
I watched him out of the store. The Grand Army must be annoying the
mighty Confederacy. Tyss ought to know about the agent’s interest. And
I knew I would be unable to tell him.
“Suppose,” I asked Enfandin the next day, “suppose one were placed in
the position of being an involuntary assistant in a—to a....”
I was at a loss for words to describe the situation without being
incriminatingly specific. I could not tell him about Tolliburr and
my clear duty to let Tyss know of the colonel’s espionage without
revealing Tyss’s connection with the Grand Army and thus uncovering my
deceit in not warning Enfandin earlier. Whatever I said or failed to
say, I was somehow culpable.
He waited patiently while I groped, trying to formulate a question
which was no longer a question. “You can’t do evil that good may come
of it,” I burst out at last.
“Quite so. And then?”
“Well.... That might mean eventually giving up all action entirely,
since we can never be sure even the most innocent act may not have bad
consequences.”
He nodded. “It might. The Manichaeans thought it did; they believed
good and evil balanced and man was created in the image of Satan. But
certainly there is a vast difference between this inhuman dogma and
refusing to do consciously wicked deeds.”
“Maybe,” I said dubiously.
He looked at me speculatively. “A man is drowning in the river. I have
a rope. If I throw him the rope he may not only climb to safety but
take it from me and use it to garrote some honest citizen. Shall I
therefore let him drown because I must not do good lest evil come of
it?”
“But sometimes they are so mixed up it is impossible to disentangle
them.”
“Impossible? Or very difficult?”
“Um.... I don’t know.”
“Are you not perhaps putting the problem too abstractly? Is not perhaps
your situation—your hypothetical situation—one of being accessory
to wrong rather than facing an alternative which means personal
unhappiness?”
Again I struggled for noncommittal words. He had formulated my dilemma
about the Grand Army so far as it connected with giving up my place in
the bookstore or telling him of Tyss’s bias. Yet not entirely. And why
could I not let Tyss know of Colonel Tolliburr’s visit, which it was
certainly my duty to do? Was this overscrupulousness only a means of
avoiding any unpleasantness?
“Yes,” I muttered at last.
“It would be very nice if there were no drawbacks ever attached to the
virtuous choice. Then the only ones who would elect to do wrong would
be those of twisted minds, the perverse, the insane. Who would prefer
the devious course if the straight one were just as easy? No, no, my
dear Hodge; one cannot escape the responsibility for his choice simply
because the other way means inconvenience or hardships or tribulation.”
“Must we always act, whether we are sure of the outcome of our action
or not?”
“Not acting is also action; can we always be sure of the outcome of
refusing to act?”
Was it pettiness that made me contrast his position as an official of
a small yet fairly secure power, well enough paid to live comfortably,
with mine where a break with Tyss meant beggary and no further chance
of fulfilling the ambition every day more important to me? _Did_
circumstances alter cases, and was it easy for Enfandin to talk as he
did, unconfronted with harsh alternatives?
“You know, Hodge,” he said as though changing the subject, “I am what
they call a career man, meaning I have no money except my salary. This
might seem much to you, but it is really little, particularly since
protocol says I must spend more than necessary. For the honor of my
country. At home I have an establishment to keep up where my wife and
children live—”
I had wondered about his apparent bachelorhood.
“—because to be rudely frank, I do not think they would be happy or
safe in the United States on account of their color. Besides these
expenses I make personal contributions for the assistance of black men
who are—how shall we say it?—unhappily circumstanced in your country,
for I have found the official allotment is never enough. Now I have
been indiscreet; you know state secrets. Why do I tell you this?
Because, my friend, I should like to help. Alas, I cannot offer money.
But this I can do, if it will not offend your pride: I suggest you live
here—it will be no more uncomfortable than the arrangements you have
described in the store—and attend one of the colleges of the city. A
medal or an order from the Haitian government judiciously conferred
on an eminent educator—decorations cut so nicely across color-lines,
perhaps because they don’t show their origin to the uninitiated—should
take care of tuition fees. What do you say?”
What could I say? That I did not deserve his generosity? The statement
would be meaningless, a catchphrase, unless I explained that I’d not
been open with him, and now even less than before was I able to do
this. Or could I say that bare minutes earlier I had thought enviously
and spitefully of him? Wretched and happy, I mumbled incoherent
thanks, began a number of sentences and left them unfinished, lapsed
into dazed silence.
But the newly opened prospect cut through my introspection and
scattered my self-reproaches. The future was too exciting to dwell in
any other time; in a moment we were both sketching rapid plans and
supplementing each other’s designs with revisions of our own. Words
tumbled out; ideas were caught in mid-expression. We decided, we
reconsidered, we returned to the first decisions.
I was to give Tyss two weeks’ notice despite the original agreement
making such nicety superfluous; Enfandin was to discuss matriculation
with a professor he knew. My employer raised a quizzical eyebrow at my
information.
“Ah, Hodgins, you see how neatly the script works out. Nothing left to
chance or choice. If you hadnt been relieved of your trifling capital
by a man of enterprise whose methods were more successful than subtle
you might have fumbled at the edge of the academic world for four years
and then, having substituted a wad of unrelated facts for common sense
and whatever ability to think you may have possessed, fumbled for the
rest of your life at the edge of the economic world. You wouldnt have
met George Pondible or gotten here where you could discover your own
mind without adjustment to a professorial iron maiden.”
“I thought it was all arbitrary.”
He gave me a reproachful look. “Arbitrary and predetermined are not
synonymous, Hodgins, nor does either rule out artistry. Mindless
artistry of course, like that of the snowflake or crystal. And how
artistic this development is! You will go on to become a professor
yourself and construct iron maidens for promising students who might
become your competitors. You will write learned histories, for you
are—havent I said this before?—the spectator type. The part written
for you does not call for you to be a participant, an instrument
for—apparently—influencing events. Hence it is proper that you report
them so future generations may get the illusion they arent puppets.”
He grinned at me. At another time I would have been delighted to pounce
on the assortment of inconsistencies he had just offered; at the moment
I could think of nothing but my failure to mention the Confederate
agent’s visit. It almost seemed his mechanist notions were valid and I
was destined always to be the ungrateful recipient of kindness.
“All right,” he said, swallowing the last of his bread and half-raw
meat; “so long as your sentimentality impels you to respect obligations
I can find work for you. Those boxes over there go upstairs. Pondible’s
bringing a van around for them this afternoon.”
Ive heard the assumption that working in a bookstore must be light and
pleasant. Many times during the years with Roger Tyss I had reason
to be thankful for my strength and farm training. The boxes were
deceptively small but so heavy they could only have been solidly packed
with paper. Even with Tyss carrying box for box with me I was vastly
relieved when I had to quit to run an errand.
When I got back he went out to make an offer on someone’s library.
“There are only four left. The last two are paper-wrapped; didnt have
enough boxes.”
It was characteristic of him to leave the lighter packages for me. I
ran up the stairs with one of the two remaining wooden containers.
Returning, I tripped on the lowest step and sprawled forward.
Reflexively I threw out my hands and landed on one of the paper
parcels. The tight-stretched covering cracked and split under the
impact; the contents—neatly tied rectangular bundles—spilled out.
I had learned enough of the printing trade to recognize the brightly
colored oblongs as lithographs, and I wondered as I stooped over to
gather them up why such a job should have been given Tyss rather than a
shop specializing in this work. Even under the gaslight the colors were
hard and vigorous.
Then I really looked at the bundle I was holding. ESPAÑA was enscrolled
across the top; below it was the picture of a man with long nose and
jutting underlip, flanked by two ornate figure fives, and beneath
them the legend, CINCO PESETAS. Spanish Empire banknotes. Bundles and
bundles of them.
I needed neither expert knowledge nor minute scrutiny to tell me there
was a fortune here in counterfeit money. The purpose in forging Spanish
currency I could not see; that it was no private undertaking of Tyss’s
but an activity of the Grand Army I was certain. Puzzled and worried,
I rewrapped the bundles of notes into as neat an imitation of the
original package as I could contrive.
The rest of the day I spent casting uneasy glances at the mound of
boxes and watching with apprehension the movement of anyone toward
them. Death was the penalty for counterfeiting United States coins; I
had no idea of the punishment for doing the same with foreign paper but
I was sure even so minor an accessory as myself would be in a sad way
if some officious customer should stumble against one of the packages.
Tyss in no way acted like a guilty man, or even one with an important
secret. He seemed unaware of any peril; doubtless he was daily in
similar situations, only chance and my own lack of observation had
prevented my discovering this earlier.
Nor did he show anxiety when Pondible failed to arrive. Darkness came
and the gaslamps went on in the streets. The heavy press of traffic
outside dwindled, but the incriminating boxes remained undisturbed near
the door. At last there was the sound of uncertain wheels slowing up
outside and Pondible’s voice admonishing, “Wh-whoa!”
I rushed out just as he was dismounting with slow dignity. “Who goes?”
he asked; “Vance and give a countersign.”
“It’s Hodge,” I said. “Let me help you.”
“Hodge! Old friend; not seen long time!” (He had been in the store only
the day before.) “Terrible sfortune, Hodge. Dri-driving wagon. Fell
off. Fell off wagon I mean. See?”
“Sure, I see. Let me hitch the horse for you. Mr Tyss is waiting.”
“Avoidable,” he muttered, “nuvoidable, voidable. Fell off.”
Tyss took him by the arm. “You come with me and rest awhile. Hodgins,
you better start loading up; youll have to do the delivering now.”
Rebellious refusal formed in my mind. Why should I be still further
involved? He had no right to demand it of me; in self-protection I was
bound to refuse. “Mr Tyss....”
“Yes?”
Two weeks would see me free of him, but nothing could wipe out the debt
I owed him. “Nothing. Nothing,” I murmured and picked up one of the
boxes.
_8._ _IN VIOLENT TIMES_
He gave me an address on Twenty-Sixth Street. “Sprovis is the name.”
“All right,” I said as stolidly as I could.
“Let them do the unloading. I see there’s a full feedbag in the van;
that’ll be a good time to give it to the horse.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll load up another consignment and drive with you to the
destination. Take the van back to the livery stable. Here’s money for
your supper and carfare back here.”
He thinks of everything, I reflected bitterly. Except that I don’t want
to have anything to do with this.
Driving slackly through the almost empty streets my resentment
continued to rise, drowning, at least partly, my fear of being for some
unfathomable reason stopped by a police officer and apprehended. Why
should I be stopped? Why should the Grand Army counterfeit pesetas?
The address, which I had trouble finding on the poorly lit
thoroughfare, was one of those four-storey stuccos at least a century
old, showing few signs of recent repair. Mr Sprovis, who occupied the
basement, had one ear distinctly larger than the other, an anomaly I
could not help attributing to a trick of constantly pulling on the
lobe. He, like the others who came out with him to unload the van, wore
the Grand Army beard.
“I had to come instead of Pon—”
“No names,” he growled. “Hear? No names.”
“All right. I was told you’d unload and load up again.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I slipped the strap of the feedbag over the horse’s ear and started
toward Eighth Avenue.
“Hey! Where you going?”
“To get something to eat. Anything wrong with that?”
I felt him peering suspiciously at me. “Guess not. But don’t keep us
waiting, see? We’ll be ready to go in twenty minutes.”
I did not like Mr Sprovis. In the automatic lunchroom where the dishes
were delivered by a clever clockwork device as coins were deposited
in the right slots, I gorged on fish and potatoes, but my pleasure at
getting away for once from the unvarying bread and heart was spoiled by
the thought of him. And I was at best no more than half through with
the night’s adventure. What freight Sprovis and his companions were now
loading in the van I had no idea. Except that it was nothing innocent.
When I turned the corner into Twenty-Sixth Street again, the shadowy
mass of the horse and van was gone from its place by the curb. Alarmed,
I broke into a run and discovered it turning in the middle of the
block. I jumped and caught hold of the dash, pulling myself aboard.
“What’s the idea?”
A fist caught me in the shoulder, almost knocking me back into the
street. Zigzags of shock ran down my arm, terminating in numbing pain.
Desperately I clung to the dash.
“Hold it,” someone rumbled; “it’s the punk who came with. Let him in.”
Another voice, evidently belonging to the man who’d hit me, admonished,
“Want to watch yourself, chum. Not go jumping like that without
warning. I might of stuck a shiv in your ribs instead of my hand.”
I could only repeat, “What’s the idea of trying to run off with the
van? I’m responsible for it.”
“He’s responsible, see,” mocked another voice from the body of the van.
“Aint polite not to wait on him.”
I was wedged between the driver and my assailant; my shoulder ached and
I was beginning to be really frightened now my first anger had passed.
These were “action” members of the Grand Army; men who regularly
committed battery, mayhem, arson, robbery and murder. I had been both
foolhardy and lucky; realizing this it seemed diplomatic not to try for
possession of the reins.
I could hear the breathing and mumbling of others in back, but it didnt
need this to tell me the van was over-loaded. We turned north on Sixth
Avenue; the street lights showed Sprovis driving. “Gidap, gidap,” he
urged, “get going!”
“That’s a horse,” I protested; “not a locomotive.”
“What do you know?” came from behind; “And we thought we was on the
Erie.”
“He’s tired,” I persisted, “and he’s pulling too much weight.”
“Shut up,” ordered Sprovis quietly. “Shut up.” The quietness was not
deceptive; it was ominous. I shut up.
Speed was stupid on several counts. For one thing it called attention
to the van at a time when most commercial vehicles had been stabled for
the night and the traffic was almost entirely carriages, buggies, hacks
and minibiles. I visualized the suspicious crowd which would gather
immediately if our horse dropped from exhaustion. There was no hope
that consciousness of an innocuous cargo made Sprovis bold; whatever we
carried was bound to be as incriminating as the counterfeit bills.
Disconnected scraps of conversation drifted from Sprovis’ companions.
“I says, ‘Look here, youre making a nice profit from selling abroad.
Either you....’”
“And of course he put it all on a twenty-dollar ticket even though....”
“‘ ... my taxes,’ he says. ‘You worry about your taxes,’ I says; ‘I’m
worried about your contributions.’”
A monotonous chuffing close behind us forced itself into my
consciousness; when we turned eastward in the Forties I exclaimed,
“There’s a minibile following us!”
Even as I spoke the trackless engine pulled alongside and then darted
ahead to pocket us by nosing diagonally toward the curb. The horse must
have been too weak to shy; he simply stopped short and I heard the
curses of the felled passengers behind me.
“Not the cops anyway!”
“Cons for a nickel!”
“Only half a block from—”
“Quick, break out the guns—”
“Not those guns; one bang and we’re through. Air pistols, if anybody’s
got one. Hands or knives. Get them all!”
They piled out swiftly past me; I remained alone on the seat, an
audience of one, properly ensconced. A few blocks away was the small
park where Tirzah used to meet me. It was not believable that this was
happening in one of New York’s quietest residential districts in the
year 1942.
An uneven, distorting light emphasized the abnormal speed of the
incident that followed, making the action seem jumpy, as though the
participants were caught at static moments, changing their attitudes
between flashes of visibility. The tempo was so swift any possible
spectators in the bordering windows or on the sidewalks wouldnt have
had time to realize what was going on before it was all over.
Four men from the minibile were met by five from the van. The odds were
not too unequal, for the attackers had a discipline which Sprovis’
force lacked. Their leader attempted to parley during one of those
seconds of apparent inaction. “Hay you men—we got nothing against you.
They’s a thousand dollars apiece in it for you—”
A fist smacked into his mouth. The light caught his face as he
was jolted back, but I hardly needed its revelation to confirm my
recognition of Colonel Tolliburr’s voice.
The Confederate agents had brass knuckles and black-jacks, Colonel
Tolliburr had a sword-cane which he unsheathed with a glinting
flourish. The Grand Army men flashed knives; no one seemed to be using
air pistols or spring-powered guns.
Both sides were intent on keeping the clash as quiet and inconspicuous
as possible; no one shouted with anger or screamed in pain. This
muffled intensity made the struggle more gruesome; the contenders
fought their natural impulses as well as each other. I heard the impact
of blows, the grunts of effort, the choked-back cries, the scraping of
shoes on pavement and the thud of falls. One of the defenders fell, and
two of the attackers, before the two remaining Southrons gave up the
battle and attempted escape.
With united impulse they started for the minibile, evidently realized
they wouldnt have time to get up power, and began running down the
street. Their moment of indecision did for them. As the four Grand
Army men closed in I saw the Confederates raise their arms in the
traditional gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.
I crept noiselessly down on the off-side of the van and hastened
quietly away in the protection of the shadows.
_9._ _BARBARA_
For the next few days reading was pure pretense. I used the opened
book to mask my privacy while I trembled not so much with fear as
with horror. I had been brought up in a harsh enough world and murder
was no novelty in New York; I had seen slain men before, but this was
the first time I had been confronted with naked, merciless savagery.
Though I believed Sprovis would have had no qualms about despatching an
inconvenient witness if I had stayed on the van, I had no particular
fear for my own safety, for my knowledge of what had happened became
less dangerous daily. The terror of the deed itself however remained
constant.
I was not concerned solely with revulsion. Inquisitiveness looked out
under loathing to make me wonder what lay behind the night’s events.
What had really happened, and what did it all mean?
From scraps of conversation accidentally heard or deliberately
eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction and remembered
fragments, I reconstructed the picture which made the background. Its
borders reached a long way from Astor Place.
For years the world had been waiting, half in dread, half in
resignation, for war to break out between the world’s two Great Powers,
the German Union and the Confederate States. Some expected the point
of explosion would be the Confederacy’s ally, the British Empire; most
anticipated at least part of the war would be fought in the United
States.
The scheme of the Grand Army, or of that part of it which included
Tyss, was apparently a farfetched and fantastic attempt to circumvent
the probable course of history. The counterfeiting was an aspect of
this attempt which was nothing less than trying to force the war to
start, not through the Confederacy’s ally, but through the German
Union’s—the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts of the spurious
currency circulated by emissaries posing as Confederate agents, the
Grand Army hoped to embroil the Confederacy with Spain and possibly
preserve the neutrality of the United States. It was an ingenuous idea
evolved, I see now, by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of
world politics.
If I ever had any sentimental notions about the Army they vanished now.
Tyss’s mechanism may not have been purposefully designed to palliate,
but it made it easy to justify actions like Sprovis’. I had no such
convenient way of numbing my conscience. But even as I brooded over the
weakness and cowardice which made me an accomplice, I looked forward to
my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I would
leave the bookstore for his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act
should be to tell him everything. And then that dream was exploded just
as it was about to be realized.
I do not know who it was broke into the consulate or for what reason,
and was surprised in the act, shooting and wounding Enfandin so
seriously he was unable to speak for the weeks before he was finally
returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not have gotten in
touch with me and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard
was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he was both an
accredited diplomat and a black man.
I did not know who shot him. It was most unlikely to be anyone
connected with the Grand Army, but I did not know. I could not know.
He _might_ have been shot by Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the
ultimate chain could have led back to me, it did lead back to me. If
this were the Manichaeism of which Enfandin had spoken, I could not
help it
The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was the least of my
despair. It seemed to me I was caught by the inexorable, choiceless
circumstance in which Tyss so firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I
could escape neither my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further
guilt. I could not change destiny.
Was all this merely the self-torture of any introverted young man?
Possibly. I only know that for a long time, long as one in his early
twenties measures time, I lost all interest in life, even dallying with
thoughts of suicide. I put books aside distastefully or, which was
worse, indifferently.
I must have done my work around the store; certainly I recall no
comments from Tyss about it. Neither can I remember anything to
distinguish the succession of days. Obviously I ate and slept; there
were undoubtedly long hours free from utter hopelessness. The details
of those months have simply vanished.
Nor can I say precisely when it was my despair began to lift. I know
that one day—it was cold and the snow was deep on the ground, deep
enough to keep the minibiles off the streets and cause the horse-cars
trouble—I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick
visible puffs, and my glance was not apathetic. When I returned to the
bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart’s _Life of General
Pickett_ and opened it to the place where I had abandoned it. In a
moment I was fully absorbed.
Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer the same Hodge
Backmaker. For the first time I was determined to do what I wanted
instead of waiting and hoping events would somehow turn out right for
me. Somehow I was going to free myself from the bookstore and all its
frustrations and evils.
This resolution was reinforced by the discovery that I was exhausting
the volumes around me. The books I sought now were rare and ever more
difficult to find. Innocent of knowledge about academic life I imagined
them ready to hand in any college library.
Nor was I any longer satisfied with the printed word alone. My
friendship with Enfandin had shown me how fruitful a personal,
face-to-face relationship between teacher and student could be, and
it seemed to me such ties could develop into ones between fellow
scholars, a mutual, uncompetitive pursuit of knowledge.
Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original sources:
unpublished manuscripts of participants or onlookers, old diaries and
letters, wills or accountbooks, which might shade a meaning or subtly
change the interpretation of old, forgotten actions.
My problems could be solved ideally by an instructorship at some
college, but how was this to be achieved without the patronage of
a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no credentials worth a second’s
consideration. Though the immigration bars kept out graduates of
foreign universities, no college in the United States would accept a
self-taught young man who had not only little Latin and less Greek,
but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at all. For a long time I
considered possible ways and means, both drab and dramatic; at last,
more in a spirit of whimsical absurdity than sober hope, I wrote out
a letter of application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined
myself to possess, assaying the extent of my learning with a generosity
only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining the work I projected
for my future. With much care and many revisions I set this composition
in type. It was undoubtedly a foolish gesture, but not having access to
so costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal this by
penning the letters by hand, I resorted to this transparent device.
Tyss picked up one of the copies I struck off and glanced over it. His
expression was critical. “Is it too bad?” I asked despondently.
“You should have used more leading. And lined it up and justified
the lines and eliminated hyphens. Setting type can never be done
mechanically or half-heartedly—that’s why no one yet has been able to
invent a practical typesetting machine. I’m afraid you’ll never make a
passable printer, Hodgins.”
He was concerned only with typesetting, uninterested in the outcome. Or
satisfied, since it was predetermined, that comment was superfluous.
Government mails, never efficient and always expensive, being one of
the favorite victims of holdup men, and pneumatic post limited to local
areas, I dispatched the letters by Wells, Fargo to a comprehensive list
of colleges. I can’t say I then waited for the replies to flow in, for
though I knew the company’s system of heavily armed guards would insure
delivery of my applications, I had little anticipation of any answers.
As a matter of fact I put it pretty well out of my mind, dredging it up
at rarer intervals, always a trifle more embarrassed by my presumption.
It was several months later, toward the end of September, that the
telegram came signed Thomas K Haggerwells. It read, ACCEPT NO OFFER
TILL OUR REPRESENTATIVE EXPLAINS HAGGERSHAVEN.
I hadnt sent a copy of my letter to York, Pennsylvania, where the
telegram had originated, or anywhere near it. I knew of no colleges in
that vicinity. And I had never heard of Mr (or Doctor or Professor)
Haggerwells. I might have thought the message a mean joke, except that
Tyss’s nature didnt run to such humor and no one else knew of the
letters except those to whom they were addressed.
I found no reference to Haggershaven in any of the directories I
consulted, which wasnt too surprising considering the slovenly way
these were put together. I decided that if such a place existed I could
only wait patiently until the “representative,” if there really was
one, arrived.
Tyss having left for the day, I swept a little, dusted some,
straightened a few of the books—any serious attempt to arrange the
stock would have been futile—and took up a recent emendation of
Creasy’s _Fifteen Decisive Battles_ by one Captain Eisenhower.
I was so deep in the good captain’s analysis (he might have made a
respectable strategist himself, given an opportunity) that I heard no
customer enter, sensed no impatient presence. I was only recalled from
my book by a rather sharp, “Is the proprietor in?”
“No maam,” I answered, reluctantly abandoning the page. “He’s out for
the moment. Can I help you?”
My eyes, accustomed to the store’s poor light, had the advantage over
hers, still adjusting from the sunlit street. Secure in my audacity, I
measured her vital femininity, a quality which seemed, if such a thing
is possible, impersonal. There was nothing overtly bold or provocative
about her, though I’m sure my mother would have thinned her lips at the
black silk trousers and the jacket which emphasized the contour of her
breasts. At a time when women used every device to call attention to
their helplessness and consequently their desirability and the implied
need for men to protect them, she carried an air which seemed to say,
Why yes, I am a woman: not furtively or brazenly or incidentally but
primarily; what are you going to do about it?
I recognized a sturdy sensuality as I recognized the fact that she was
bareheaded, almost as tall as I, and rather large-boned; certainly
there was nothing related to me about it. Nor was it connected with
surface attributes; she was not beautiful and still further from being
pretty, though she might have been called handsome in a way. Her hair,
ginger-colored and clubbed low on her neck, waved crisply; her eyes
appeared slate gray. (Later I learned they could vary from pale gray to
blue-green.) The fleshly greediness was betrayed, if at all, only by
the width and set of her lips, and that insolent expression.
She smiled, and I decided I had been quite wrong in thinking her
tone peremptory. “I’m Barbara Haggerwells. I’m looking for a Mr
Backmaker”—she glanced at a slip of paper—“a Hodgins M Backmaker who
evidently uses this as an accommodation address.”
“I’m Hodge Backmaker,” I muttered in despair. “I—I work here.” I was
conscious of not having shaved that morning, that my pants and jacket
did not match, that my shirt was not clean.
I suppose I expected her to say nastily, So I see! or the usual, It
must be fascinating! Instead she said, “I wonder if youve run across
_The Properties of X_ by Whitehead? Ive been trying to get a copy for a
long time.”
“Uh—I.... Is it a mystery story?”
“I’m afraid not. It’s a book on mathematics by a mathematician very
much out of favor. It’s hard to find, I suppose because the author is
bolder than he is tactful.”
So naturally and easily she led me away from my embarrassment and into
talking of books, relieving me of self-consciousness and some of the
mortification in being exposed at my humble job by the “representative”
of the telegram. I admitted deficient knowledge of mathematics and
ignorance of Mr Whitehead though I maintained, accurately, that the
book was not in stock, while she assured me that only a specialist
would have heard of so obscure a theoretician. This made me ask, with
the awe one feels for an expert in an alien field, if she were a
mathematician, to which she replied, “Heavens, no. I’m a physicist. But
mathematics is my tool.”
I looked at her with respect. Anyone, I thought, can read a few books
and set himself up as an historian; to be a physicist means genuine
learning. And I doubted she was much older than I.
She said abruptly, “My father is interested in knowing something about
you.”
I acknowledged this with something between a nod and a bow. She had
been examining and gauging me for the past half hour. “Your father is
Thomas Haggerwells?”
“Haggerwells of Haggershaven,” she confirmed, as though explaining
everything. There was pride in her voice and a hint of superciliousness.
“I’m dreadfully sorry, Miss Haggerwells, but I’m afraid I’m as ignorant
of Haggershaven as of mathematics.”
“I thought you said you’d been reading history. Odd youve come upon no
reference to the Haven in the records of the past seventy-five years.”
I shook my head helplessly. “I suppose my reading has been scattered.”
Her look indicated agreement but not absolution. “Haggershaven is a
college?”
“No. Haggershaven is ... Haggershaven.” She resumed her equanimity,
her air of smiling tolerance. “It’s hardly a college since it has no
student body nor faculty. Rather, both are one at the haven. Anyone
admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to
learning. I mean for its own sake. Not many are acceptable.”
She need hardly have added this; it seemed obvious I could not be
one of the elect, even if I hadnt offended her by never having heard
of Haggershaven. I knew I couldnt pass the most lenient of entrance
examinations to ordinary colleges, much less to the dedicated place she
represented.
“There arent any formal requirements for fellowship,” she went on,
“beyond the undertaking to work to full capacity, to pool all knowledge
and hold back none from scholars anywhere, to contribute economically
to the Haven in accordance with decisions of the majority of fellows,
and to vote on questions without consideration of personal gain. There!
That certainly sounds like the stuffiest manifesto delivered this year.”
“It sounds too good to be true.”
“Oh, it’s true enough.” She moved close and I caught the scent of her
hair and skin. “But there’s another side. The haven is neither wealthy
nor endowed. We have to earn our living. The fellows draw no stipend;
they have food, clothes, shelter, whatever books and materials they
need—no unessentials. We often have to leave our own individual work to
do manual labor to bring in food or money for all.”
“Ive read of such communities,” I said enthusiastically. “I thought
they’d all disappeared fifty or sixty years ago.”
“Have you and did you?” she asked contemptuously. “Youll be surprised
to learn that Haggershaven is neither Owenite nor Fourierist. We are
not fanatics nor saviors. We don’t live in phalansteries, practice
group marriage or vegetarianism. Our organization is expedient, subject
to revision, not doctrinaire. Contribution to the common stock is
voluntary and we are not concerned with each other’s private lives.”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Haggerwells. I didnt mean to annoy you.”
“It’s all right. Perhaps I’m touchy; all my life Ive seen the squinty
suspiciousness of the farmers all around, sure we were up to something
immoral, or at least illegal. Youve no idea what a prickly armor you
build around yourself when you know that every yokel is cackling,
‘There goes one of them; I bet they ...’ whatever unconventional
practice their imaginations can conceive at the moment. And the
parallel distrust of the respectable schools. Detachedly, the haven may
indeed be a refuge for misfits, but is it necessarily wrong not to fit
into the civilization around us?”
“I’m prejudiced. I certainly havent fitted in myself.”
She didnt answer and I felt I had gone too far in daring an impulsive
identification. Awkwardness made me blurt out further, “Do you ... do
you think there’s any chance Haggershaven would accept me?” Whatever
reserve I’d tried to maintain deserted me; my voice expressed only
childish longing.
“I couldnt say,” she answered primly. “Acceptance or rejection depends
entirely on the vote of the whole fellowship. All I’m here to offer is
train fare. Neither you nor the haven is bound.”
“I’m perfectly willing to be bound,” I said fervently.
“You may not be so rash after a few weeks.”
I was about to reply when Little Aggie—so called to distinguish her
from Fat Aggie who was in much the same trade, but more successful—came
in. Little Aggie supplemented her nocturnal earnings around Astor Place
by begging in the same neighborhood during the day.
“Sorry, Aggie,” I said; “Mr Tyss didnt leave anything for you.”
“Maybe the lady would help a poor working girl down on her luck,” she
suggested, coming close. “My, that’s a pretty outfit you have. Looks
like real silk, too.”
Barbara Haggerwells drew away with anger and loathing on her face.
“No,” she refused sharply. “No, nothing!” She turned to me. “I must be
going. I’ll leave you to entertain your friend.”
“Oh, I’ll go,” said Little Aggie cheerfully, “no need to get in an
uproar. Bye-bye.”
I was frankly puzzled; the puritanical reaction didnt seem consistent.
I would have expected condescending amusement, disdainful tolerance
or even haughty annoyance, but not this furious aversion. “I’m sorry
Little Aggie bothered you. She’s really not a wicked character and she
does have a hard time getting along.”
“I’m sure you must enjoy her company immensely. I’m sorry we can’t
offer similar attractions at the haven.”
Apparently she thought my relations with Aggie were professional.
Even so her attitude was odd. I could hardly flatter myself she
was interested in me as a man, yet her flare-up seemed to indicate
jealousy, a strange kind of jealousy, perhaps like the sensuality I
attributed to her, as though the mere presence of another woman was an
affront.
“Please don’t go yet. For one thing—” I cast around for something
to hold her till I could restore a more favorable impression. “—for
one thing you havent told me how Haggershaven happened to get my
application.”
She gave me a cold, angry look. “Even though we’re supposed to be
cranks, orthodox educators often turn such letters over to us. After
all, they may want to apply themselves someday.”
The picture this suddenly presented, of a serene academic life which
was not so serene and secure after all, but prepared for a way to
escape if necessary, was startling to me. I had taken it for granted
that our colleges, even though they were far inferior to those of other
countries, were stable and sheltered.
When I expressed something of this, she laughed. “Hardly. The
colleges have not only decayed, they have decayed faster than other
institutions. They are mere hollow shells, ruined ornaments of the
past. Instructors spy on each other to curry favor with the trustees
and assure themselves of reappointment when the faculty is out
periodically. Loyalty is the touchstone, but no one knows any more what
the object of loyalty is supposed to be. Certainly it is no longer
toward learning, for that is the least of their concerns.”
She slowly allowed herself to be coaxed back into her previous mood,
and again we talked of books. And now I thought there was a new warmth
in her voice and glance, as though she had won some kind of victory,
but how or over whom there was no indication.
When she left I hoped she was not too prejudiced against me. For myself
I readily admitted it would be easy enough to want her—if one were not
afraid of the humiliations it was in her nature to inflict.
_10._ _THE HOLDUP_
This time I didnt offer Tyss two weeks’ notice. “Well Hodgins, I made
all the appropriate valedictory remarks on a previous occasion, so
I’ll not repeat them, except to say the precision of the script is
extraordinary.”
It seemed to me he was saying in a roundabout way that everything was
for the best. For the first time I saw Tyss as slightly pathetic rather
than sinister; extreme pessimism and vulgar optimism evidently met,
like his circular time. I smiled indulgently and thanked him sincerely
for all his kindness.
In 1944 almost a hundred years had passed since New York and eastern
Pennsylvania were first linked in a railroad network, yet I don’t
suppose my journey differed much in speed or comfort from one which
might have been taken by Granpa Hodgins’ father. The steam ferry
carried me across the Hudson to Jersey. I had heard there were only
financial, not technical obstacles to a bridge or tunnel. If the
English and French could burrow under the Channel, as they had early
in the century, and the Japanese complete their great tube beneath the
Korea Strait, it was hard to see why a lesser work here was dismissed
as the impractical suggestion of dreamers who believed the cost would
be saved in a few years by running trains directly to Manhattan.
Nor was the ferry the only antique survival on the trip. The cars were
all ancient, obvious discards from Confederate or British American
lines. Flat wheels were common; the wornout locomotives dragged them
protestingly over the wobbly rails and uneven roadbed. First class
passengers sat on napless plush or grease-glazed straw seats; second
class passengers stood in the aisles or on the platforms; third class
rode the roofs—safe enough at the low speed except for sudden jerks or
jolts.
There were so many different lines, each jealous of exclusive rights
of way, that the traveler hardly got used to his particular car before
he had to snatch up his baggage and hustle for the connecting train,
which might be on the same track or at the same sooty depot, but was
more likely to be a mile away. Even the adjective “connecting” was
often ironical for it was not unusual to find time-tables arranged so a
departure preceded an arrival by minutes, necessitating a stopover of
anywhere from one hour to twelve.
If anything could have quieted my excitement on the trip it was the
view through the dirt-sprayed windows. “Fruitless” and “unfulfilled”
were the words coming oftenest to my mind. I had forgotten during the
past six years just how desolate villages and towns could look when
their jerrybuilt structures were sunk in apathetic age without even
the false rejuvenation of newer jerrybuilding. I had forgotten the
mildewed appearance of tenant farmhouses, the unconvincing attempt to
appear businesslike of false-fronted stores with clutters of hopeless
merchandise in their dim windows, or the inadequate bluff of factories
too small for any satisfactory production.
Once away from New York it was clear how atypical the city was in its
air of activity and usefulness. The countryside through which the
tracks ran, between fields and pastures or down the center of main
streets, should have been the industrial heart of a country bustling
and vigorous. Instead one saw potentialities denied, projects withered,
poverty and dilapidation.
We crossed the Susquehanna on an old, old stone bridge that made
one think of Meade’s valiant men, bloodily bandaged many of them,
somnambulistically marching northward, helpless and hopeless after the
Confederate triumph at Gettysburg, their only thought to escape Jeb
Stuart’s pursuing cavalry. Indeed, every square mile now carried on
its surface an almost visible weight of historical memories.
York seemed old, gray and crabbed in the afternoon, but when I got off
the train there I was too agitated with the prospect of being soon at
Haggershaven to take any strong impression of the town. I inquired the
way, and the surly response confirmed Barbara Haggerwells’ statement
of local animosity. The distance, if my informant was accurate, was a
matter of some ten miles.
I started off down the highway, building and demolishing daydreams,
thinking of Tyss and Tirzah, Enfandin and Miss Haggerwells, trying to
picture her father and the fellows of the haven and for the thousandth
time marshaling arguments for my acceptance in the face of scornful
scrutiny. The early October sun was setting on the rich red and yellow
leaves of the maples and oaks; I knew the air would become chilly
before long, but exertion kept me warm. I counted on arriving at the
haven in plenty of time to introduce myself before bedtime.
Less than a mile out of town the highway assumed the familiar aspect of
the roads around Wappinger Falls and Poughkeepsie: rutted, wavering,
with deep, unexpected holes. The stone or rail fences on either side
enclosed harvested cornfields, the broken stalks a dull brass with
copper-colored pumpkins scattered through them. But the fences were in
poor repair and the oft-mended wooden covered bridges over the creeks
all had signs, DANGEROUS, Travel At Your Own Risk.
There were few to share the highway with me: a farmer with an empty
wagon, urging his team on and giving me a churlish glance instead of
an invitation to ride; a horseman on an elegant chestnut picking his
course carefully among the chuckholes, and a few tramps, each bent on
his solitary way, at once defensive and aggressive. The condition of
the bridges accounted for the absence of minibiles. However, just about
twilight a closed carriage, complete with coachman and footman on the
box, rolled haughtily by, stood for a moment outlined atop the slope up
which I was trudging and then disappeared down the other side.
I paid little attention except—remembering my boyhood and my father’s
smithy—to visualize automatically the coachman pulling back on the
reins and the footman thrusting forward with the brake as they eased
the horses downward. So when I heard first a shout and then feminine
screams my instant conclusion was that the carriage had overturned
on the treacherous downgrade, broken an axle, or otherwise suffered
calamity.
My responsive burst of speed had almost carried me to the top when
I heard the shots. First one, like the barking of an uncertain dog,
followed by a volley, as though the pack were unleashed.
I ran to the side of the road, close to the field, where I could see
with less chance of being seen. Already the dusk was playing tricks,
distorting the shape of some objects and momentarily hiding others. It
could not however falsify the scene in the gully below. Four men on
horseback covered the carriage with drawn revolvers; a fifth, pistol
also in hand, had dismounted. His horse, reins hanging down, was
peacefully investigating the roadside weeds.
None of them attempted to stop the terrified rearing of the carriage
team. Only their position, strung across the road, prevented a runaway.
I could not see the footman, but the coachman, one hand still clutching
the reins, was sprawled backward with his foot caught against the
dashboard and his head hanging down over the wheel.
The door on the far side was swung open. I thought for a moment the
passengers had managed to escape. However as the unmounted highwayman
advanced, waving his pistol, the other door opened and a man and two
women descended into the roadway. Slowly edging forward I could now
plainly hear the gang’s obscene whistles at sight of the women.
“Well boys, here’s something to warm up a cold night. Hang on to them
while I see what the mister has in his pockets.”
The gentleman stepped in front, and with a slight accent said, “Take
the girl by all means. She is but a peasant, a servant, and may afford
you amusement. But the lady is my wife; I will pay you a good ransom
for her and myself. I am Don Jaime Escobar y Gallegos, attached to the
Spanish legation.”
One of the men on horseback said, “Well now, that’s real kind of you,
Don High-me. We might have taken you up on that, was you an American.
But we can’t afford no company of Spanish Marines coming looking for
us, so I guess we’ll have to pass up the ransom and settle for whatever
youve got handy. And Missus Don and the hired girl. Don’t worry about
her being a peasant; we’ll treat her and the madam exactly the same.”
“Madre de Dios,” screamed the lady. “Mercy!”
“It will be a good ransom,” said the Spaniard, “and I give you my word
my government will not bother you.”
“Sorry, chum,” returned the gangster. “You foreigners have a nasty
habit of interfering with our domestic institutions and hanging men who
make a living this way. Just can’t trust you.”
The man on foot took a step forward. The nearest rider swung the maid
up before him and another horseman reached for her mistress. Again she
screamed; her husband brushed the hand aside and put his wife behind
him. At that the gangster raised his pistol and shot twice. The man and
woman dropped to the ground. The maid shrieked till her captor covered
her mouth.
“Now what did you want to do that for? Cutting our woman supply in half
that way?”
“Sorry. Mighty damn sorry. These things always happen to me.”
Meanwhile another of the gang slid off his horse and the two went
through the dead, stripping them of jewelry and whatever articles of
clothing caught their fancy before searching the luggage and the coach
itself for valuables. By the time they had finished it was fully dark
and I had crept to within a few feet of them, crouching reasonably
secure and practically invisible while they debated what to do with the
horses. One faction was in favor of taking them along for spare mounts;
the other, arguing that they were too easily identifiable, for cutting
them out and turning them loose. The second group prevailing, they at
last galloped away.
A sudden thrashing in the cornstalks just beyond the fence startled
me into rigidity. Something which might be human stumbled and crawled
toward the carriage, snuffling and moaning, to throw itself down by the
prostrate bodies, its anguished noises growing more high-pitched and
chilling.
I was certain this must be a passenger who had jumped from the off-side
of the carriage at the start of the holdup, but whether man or woman it
was impossible to tell. I moved forward gingerly, but somehow I must
have betrayed my presence, for the creature, with a terrified groan,
slumped inertly.
My hands told me it was a woman I raised from the ground and the smell
of her was the smell of a young girl. “Don’t be afraid, Miss,” I tried
to reassure her; “I’m a friend.”
I could hardly leave the girl lying in the road, nor did I feel equal
to carrying her to Haggershaven which I reckoned must be about six
miles further. I tried shaking her, rubbing her hands, murmuring
encouragement, all the while wishing the moon would come up, feeling
somehow it would be easier to revive her in the moonlight.
“Miss,” I urged, “get up. You can’t stay here—they may come back.”
Had I reached her? She stirred, whimpering with strange, muffled
sounds. I dragged her to her knees and managed to get her arm over my
shoulder. “Get up,” I repeated. “Get on your feet.”
She moaned. I pulled her upright and adjusted my hold. Supporting her
around the waist and impeded by my valise, I began an ungraceful,
shuffling march. I could only guess at how much time had been taken
up by the holdup and how slow our progress would be. It didnt seem
likely we could get to Haggershaven before midnight, an awkward hour to
explain the company of a strange girl. The possibility of leaving her
at a hospitable farmhouse was remote; no isolated rural family in times
like these would open their door with anything but deep suspicion or a
shotgun blast.
We had made perhaps a mile, a slow and arduous one, when the moon
rose at last. It was full and bright, and showed my companion to be
even younger than I had thought. The light fell on masses of curling
hair, wildly disarrayed about a face unnaturally pale and lifeless yet
extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were closed in a sort of troubled
sleep, and she continued to moan, though at less frequent intervals.
I had just decided to stop for a moment’s rest when we came upon one of
the horses. The clumsily cut traces trailing behind him had caught on
the stump of a broken sapling. Though still trembling he was over the
worst of his fright; after patting and soothing him I got us onto his
back and we proceeded in more comfortable if still not too dignified
fashion.
It wasnt hard to find Haggershaven; the sideroad to it was well kept
and far smoother than the highway. We passed between what looked to be
freshly plowed fields and came to a fair sized group of buildings, in
some of which I was pleased to see lighted windows. The girl had still
not spoken; her eyes remained closed and she moaned occasionally.
Dogs warned of our approach. From a dark doorway a figure came forward
with a rifle under his arm. “Who is it?”
“Hodge Backmaker. Ive got a girl here who was in a holdup. She’s had a
bad shock.”
“All right,” he said, “let me hitch the horse. Then I’ll help you with
the girl. My name’s Dorn. Asa Dorn.”
I slid off and lifted the girl down. “I couldnt leave her in the road,”
I offered in inane apology.
“I’ll water and feed the horse after. Let’s go into the main kitchen;
it’s warm there. Here,” he addressed the girl, “take my arm.”
She made no response and I half carried her, with Dorn trying
helpfully to share her weight. The building through which we led her
was obviously an old farmhouse, enlarged and remodelled a number of
times. Gaslights of a strange pattern, brighter than any I’d ever seen,
revealed Asa Dorn as perhaps thirty with very broad shoulders and very
long arms, and a dark, rather melancholy face. “There’s a gang been
operating around here,” he informed me; “tried to shake the haven down
for a contribution. That’s why I was on guard with the gun. Must be the
same bunch.”
We bustled our charge into a chair before a big fieldstone fireplace
which gave the large room its look of welcome, though the even heat
came from sets of steampipes under the windows. “Should we give her
some soup? Or tea? Or shall I get Barbara or one of the other women?”
His fluttering brushed the outside of my mind. Here in the light I
instinctively expected to see some faint color in the girl’s cheeks
or hands, but there was none. She looked no more than sixteen,
perhaps because she was severely dressed in some school uniform. Her
hair, which had merely been a disordered frame for her face in the
moonlight, now showed itself as deeply black, hanging in thick, soft
curls around her shoulders. Her features, which seemed made to reflect
emotions—full, mobile lips, faintly slanted eyes, high nostrils—were
instead impassive, devoid of vitality, and this unnatural quiescence
was heightened by the dark eyes, now wide open and expressionless. Her
mouth moved slowly, as though to form words, but nothing came forth
except the faintest of guttural sounds.
“She’s trying to say something.” I leaned forward as though by
sympathetic magic to help the muscles which seemed to respond with such
difficulty.
“Why,” exclaimed Dorn, “she’s ... dumb!”
She looked agonizedly toward him. I patted her arm helplessly.
“I’ll go get—” he began.
A door opened and Barbara Haggerwells blinked at us. “I thought I heard
someone ride up, Ace. Do you suppose....” Then she caught sight of the
girl. Her face set in those lines of strange anger I had seen in the
bookstore.
“Miss Haggerwells—”
“Barbara—”
Dorn and I spoke together. Either she did not hear us or we made no
impression. She faced me in offended outrage. “Really, Mr Backmaker, I
thought I’d explained there were no facilities here for this sort of
thing.”
“You misunderstand,” I said, “I happened—”
Dorn broke in. “Barbara, she’s been in a holdup. She’s dumb....”
Fury made her ugly. “Is that an additional attraction?”
“Miss Haggerwells,” I tried again, “you don’t understand—”
“I think I understand very well. Dumb or not, get the slut out of here!
Get her out right now, I say!”
“Barbara, youre not listening—”
She continued to face me, her back to him. “I should have remembered
you were a ladies’ man, Mr Self-taught Backmaker. No doubt you imagined
Haggershaven to be some obscene liberty hall. Well, it isnt! You’d be
wasting any further time you spent here. Get out!”
_11._ _OF HAGGERSHAVEN_
I suppose—recalling the inexplicable scene with Little Aggie—I was
less astonished by her frenzy than I might have been. Besides, her
rage and misunderstanding were anticlimactic after the succession of
excitements I had been through that day. Instead of amazement I felt
only uneasiness and tired annoyance.
Dorn steered Barbara out of the room with a combination of persuasion
and gentle force disguised as solicitous soothing, leaving the girl and
me alone. “Well,” I said, “well....”
The large eyes regarded me helplessly.
“Well, youve certainly caused me a lot of trouble....”
Dorn returned with two women, one middleaged, the other slightly
younger, who flowed around the girl like soapy water, effectually
sealing her away from all further masculine blunders, uttering little
bubbly clucks and sudsy comfortings.
“Overwork, Backmaker,” Dorn mumbled. “Barbara’s been overworking
terribly. You mustnt think—”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’m just sorry she couldnt be made to realize what
actually happened.”
“Hypersensitive; things that wouldnt ordinarily ... it’s overwork.
Youve no idea. She wears herself out. Practically no nerves left.”
His face, pleading for understanding, looked even more melancholy than
before. I felt sorry for him and slightly superior; at the moment at
least I didnt have to apologize for any female unpredictability. “OK,
OK; there doesnt seem to be any great harm done. And the girl appears
to be in good hands now.”
“Oh she is,” he answered with evident relief at dropping the subject of
Barbara’s behavior. “I don’t think there’s anything more we can do for
her now; in fact I’d say we’re only in the way. How about meeting Mr
Haggerwells now?”
“Why not?” The last episode had doubtless finished me for good so far
as Barbara was concerned; whatever neutral report she might have given
her father originally could now be counted on for a damning revision. I
might as well put a nonchalant face on matters before returning to the
world outside Haggershaven.
Thomas Haggerwells, large-boned like his daughter, with the ginger hair
faded, and a florid, handsome complexion, made me welcome. “Historian
ay, Backmaker? Delighted. Combination of art and science; Clio, most
enigmatic of the muses. The ever-changing past, ay?”
“I’m afraid I’m no historian yet, Mr Haggerwells. I’d like to be one.
If Haggershaven will let me be part of it.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “The fellows will do what they can,
Backmaker; you can trust them.”
“That’s right,” said Dorn cheerfully; “you look strong as an ox and
historians can be kept happy with books and a few old papers.”
“Ace is our cynic,” explained Mr Haggerwells; “very useful antidote to
some of our soaring spirits.” He looked absently around and then said
abruptly, “Ace, Barbara is quite upset.”
I thought this extreme understatement, but Dorn merely nodded.
“Misunderstanding, Mr H.”
“So I gathered.” He gave a short, selfconscious laugh. “In fact that’s
all I did gather. She said something about a woman....”
“Girl, Mr H, just a girl.” He gave a quick outline of what had
happened, glossing over Barbara’s hysterical welcome.
“I see. Quite an adventure in the best tradition, ay Backmaker? And
the victims killed in cold blood; makes you wonder about civilization.
Savagery all around us.” He began pacing the flowered carpet.
“Naturally we must help the poor creature. Shocking, quite shocking.
But how can I explain to Barbara? She ... she came to me,” he said
half proudly, half apprehensively. “I wouldnt want to fail her; I
hardly know....” He pulled himself together. “Excuse me, Backmaker. My
daughter is high-strung. I fear I’m allowing concern to interfere with
our conversation.”
“Not at all, sir,” I said. “I’m very tired; if you’ll excuse me....”
“Of course, of course,” he answered gratefully. “Ace will show you
your room. Sleep well—we’ll talk more tomorrow. And Ace—come back here
afterward, will you?”
Barbara Haggerwells had both Dorn and her father well cowed, I thought
as I lay awake. Clearly she could brook not even the suspicion of
rivalry, even when it was entirely imaginary. It would be rather
frightening to be her father, or—as I suspected Ace might be—her lover,
and subject to her tyrannical dominance.
But it was neither Barbara nor overstimulation from the full day which
caused my insomnia. A torment, successfully suppressed for hours,
invaded me. Connecting the trip of the Escobars—“attached to the
Spanish legation”—with the counterfeit pesetas was pure fantasy. But
what is logic? I could not argue myself into reasonableness. I could
not quench my feeling of responsibility with ridicule nor convincingly
charge myself with perverse conceit in magnifying my trivial errands
into accountability for all that flowed from the Grand Army—for much
which might have flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep
because they feel guilty. It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt
which keeps them awake.
Nor could I pride myself on my chivalry in rescuing distressed
maidens. I had only done what was unavoidable, grudgingly, without
warmth or charity. There was no point in being aggrieved by Barbara’s
misinterpretation with its disastrous consequences to my ambitions. I
had not freely chosen to help; I had no right to resent a catastrophe
which should properly have followed a righteous choice.
At last I slept, only to dream Barbara Haggerwells was a great fish
pursuing me over endless roads on which my feet bogged in clinging,
tenacious mud. Opening my mouth to shout for help was useless; nothing
came forth but a croak which sounded faintly like my mother’s favorite
“Gumption!”
In the clear autumn morning my notions of the night dwindled, even
if they failed to disappear entirely. By the time I was dressed Ace
Dorn showed up; we went to the kitchen where Ace introduced me to a
middleaged man, Hiro Agati, whose close-cut stiff black hair stood
perfectly and symmetrically erect all over his head.
“Dr Agati’s a chemist,” remarked Ace, “condemned to be head chef for a
while on account of being too good a cook.”
“Believe that,” said Agati, “and you’ll believe anything. Truth is
they always pick on chemists for hard work. Physicists like Ace never
soil their hands. Well, so long as you can’t eat with the common folk,
what’ll you have, eggs or eggs?”
Agati was the first Oriental I’d ever seen. The great anti-Chinese
massacres of the 1890’s, which generously included Japanese and indeed
all with any sign of the epicanthic eyefold, had left few Asians to
have descendants in the United States. I’m afraid I stared at him more
than was polite, but he was evidently used to such rudeness for he paid
no attention.
“They finally got the girl to sleep,” Ace informed me. “Had to give her
opium. No report yet this morning.”
“Oh,” I said lamely, conscious I should have asked after her without
waiting for him to volunteer the news. “Oh. Do you suppose we’ll find
out who she is?”
“Mr H telegraphed the sheriff first thing. It’ll all depend how
interested he is, and that’s not likely to be very. What’s to drink,
Hiro?”
“Imitation tea, made from dried weeds; imitation coffee made from burnt
barley. Which’ll you have?”
I didnt see why he stressed the imitation; genuine tea and coffee were
drunk only by the very rich. Most people preferred “tea” because it was
less obnoxious than the counterfeit coffee. Perversely, I said, “Coffee
please.”
He set a large cup of brown liquid before me which had a tantalizing
fragrance quite different from that given off by the beverage I was
used to. I added milk and tasted, aware he was watching my reaction.
“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is different. I never had anything like it in
my life. It’s wonderful.”
“C eight H ten O two,” said Agati with an elaborate air of
indifference. “Synthetic. Specialty of the house.”
“So chemists are good for something after all,” remarked Ace.
“Give us a chance,” said Agati; “we could make beef out of wood and
silk out of sand.”
“Youre a physicist like B—like Miss Haggerwells?” I asked Ace.
“I’m a physicist, but not like Barbara. No one is. She’s a genius. A
great creative genius.”
“Chemists create,” said Agati sourly; “physicists sit and think about
the universe.”
“Like Archimedes,” said Ace.
* * * * *
How shall I write of Haggershaven as my eyes first saw it twenty-two
years ago? Of the rolling acres of rich plowed land, interrupted here
and there by stone outcroppings worn smooth and round by time, and
trees in woodlots or standing alone strong and unperturbed? Of the main
building, grown by fits and starts from the original farmhouse into a
great, rambling eccentricity stopping short of monstrosity only by its
complete innocence of pretense? Shall I describe the two dormitories,
severely functional, escaping harshness because they had not been built
by carpenters and though sturdy enough, betrayed the amateur touch in
every line? Or the cottages and apartments, two, four, at most six
rooms, for the married fellows and their families? These were scattered
all over, some so avid for privacy that one could pass unknowing within
feet of the concealing trees or shrubbery, others bold in the sunshine
on knolls or in hollows.
I could tell of the small shops, the miniature laboratories, the
inadequate observatory, the heterogeneous assortment of books which
was both less and more than a library, the dozens of outbuildings. But
these things were not the haven. They were merely the least of its
possessions. For Haggershaven was not a material place at all, but a
spiritual freedom. Its limits were only the limits of what its fellows
could do or think or inquire. It was circumscribed only by the outside
world, not by internal rules and taboos, competition or curriculum.
Most of this I could see for myself, much of it was explained by Ace.
“But how can you afford the time to take me all around this way?” I
asked; “I must be interfering with your own work.”
He grinned. “This is my period to be guide, counselor and friend to
those whove strayed in here, wittingly or un. Don’t worry, after youre
a fellow youll get told off for all the jobs, from shoveling manure to
gilding weathercocks.”
I sighed. “The chances of my getting to be a fellow are minus nothing.
Especially after last night.”
He didnt pretend to misunderstand. “Barbara’ll come out of it. She’s
not always that way. As her father says, she’s high-strung, and she’s
been working madly. And to tell the truth,” he went on in a burst of
frankness, “she really doesnt get on too well with other women. She has
a masculine mind.”
I have often noticed that men not strikingly brilliant themselves
attribute masculine minds to intelligent women on the consoling
assumption that feminine minds are normally inferior. Ace however was
manifestly innocent of any attempt to patronize.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “she has only one vote.”
I didnt know whether to take this as a pledge of support or mere
politeness. “Isnt it wasteful, assigning a chemist like Dr Agati to
kitchen work? Or isnt he a good chemist?”
“Just about the best there is. His artificial tea and coffee would
bring a fortune to the haven if there were a profitable market; even as
it is it’ll bring a good piece of change. Wasteful? What would you have
us do, hire cooks and servants?”
“Theyre cheap enough.”
“Or frightfully expensive. Specialization, the division of labor, is
certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents, and not always
then. And it’s unquestionably wasteful in terms of equality. And I
don’t think there’s anyone at the haven who isn’t an egalitarian.”
“But you do specialize and divide labor. Don’t tell me you swap your
physics for Agati’s chemistry.”
“In a way we do. Of course I don’t set up as an experimenter, any more
than he does as a speculator. But there have been plenty of times Ive
worked under his direction when he needed an assistant who didnt know
anything but had a strong back.”
“All right,” I said; “but I still don’t see why you can’t hire a cook
and some dishwashers.”
“Where would our equality be then? What would happen to our fellowship?”
Haggershaven’s history, which I got little by little, was more than
a link with the past; it was a possible hint of what might have been
if the War of Southron Independence had not interrupted the American
pattern. Barbara’s great-great-grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells,
had been a Confederate major from North Carolina who, as conquerors
sometimes do, had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania
countryside. After the war he had put everything—not much by Southron
standards, but a fortune in depreciated, soon to be repudiated, United
States greenbacks—into the farm which later formed the nucleus of
Haggershaven. Then he married a local girl and transformed himself into
a Northerner.
Until I became too accustomed to notice it anymore I used to stare at
his portrait in the library, picturing in idle fancy a possible meeting
on the battlefield between this aristocratic gentleman with his curling
mustache and daggerlike imperial and my own plebian Granpa Hodgins. But
the chance of their ever having come face to face was much more than
doubtful; I, who had studied both their likenesses, was the only link
between them.
“Hard looking character, ay?” commented Ace. “This was painted when
he was mellow; imagine him twenty years earlier. Pistols cocked and
Juvenal or Horace or Seneca in the saddlebags.”
“He was a cavalry officer, then?”
“I don’t know. Don’t think so as a matter of fact. Saddlebags was just
my artistic touch. They say he was a holy terror; discipline and all
that—it sort of goes with a man on horseback. And the old Roman boys
are pure deduction; he was that type. Patronized several writers and
artists; you know: ‘Drop down to my estate and stay a while’ and they
stayed five or ten years.”
But it was Major Haggerwells’ son who, seeing the deterioration of
Northern colleges, had invited a few restive scholars to make their
home with him. They were free to pursue their studies under an elastic
arrangement which permitted them to be selfsupporting through work on
the farm.
Thomas Haggerwells’ father had organized the scheme further, attracting
a larger number of schoolmen who contributed greatly to the material
progress of the haven. They patented inventions, marketless at home,
which brought regular royalties from more industrialized countries.
Agronomists improved the haven’s crops and took in a steady income from
seed. Chemists found ways of utilizing otherwise wasted byproducts;
proceeds from scholarly works—and one more popular than scholarly—added
to the funds. In his will, Volney Haggerwells left the properties to
the fellowship.
I suppose I expected there would be some uniformity, some basic type
characterizing the fellows. Not that Barbara, or Ace, or Hiro Agati
resembled a stereotype at any point, any more than I did myself, but
then I was not one of the elect nor likely to be. Even after I had met
more than half of them the notion persisted that there must be some
stamp on them proclaiming what they were.
Yet as I wandered about the haven, alone or with Ace, the people I met
were quite diverse, more so by far than in the everyday world. There
were the ebullient and the glum, the talkative and the laconic, the
bustling and the slow-moving. Some were part of a family, others lived
ascetically, withdrawn from the pleasures of the flesh.
In the end I realized there was, if not a similarity, a strong bond.
The fellows, conventional or eccentric, passionate or reserved, were
all earnest, purposeful and, despite individual variations, tenacious.
They were, though I hesitate to use so emotional a word, dedicated.
The cruel struggle and suspicion, the frantic endeavor to improve
one’s own financial, social, or political standing by maiming or
destroying someone else intent on the same endeavor was either unknown
or so subdued as to be imperceptible at the haven. Disagreements and
jealousies existed, but they were different in kind rather than in
degree from those to which I had been accustomed all my life. The
pervasive fears which fostered the latter, the same fears which made
lotteries and indenture frantic gambles to escape the wretchedness of
life, could not circulate in the security of the haven.
After the scene at my arrival, I didnt see Barbara again for some ten
days. Even then it was but a glimpse, caught as she hurried in one
direction and I sauntered in another. She threw me a single frigid
glance and went on. Later, I was talking with Mr Haggerwells, who had
proved to be not quite an amateur of history but more than a dabbler,
when, without knocking, she burst into the room.
“Father, I—” Then she caught sight of me. “Sorry. I didnt know you were
entertaining.”
His tone was that of one found in a guilty act. “Come in, come in,
Barbara. Backmaker is after all something of a protégé of yours.
Urania, you know—if one may stretch the ascription a bit—encouraging
Clio.”
“Really, Father!” She was regal. Wounded, scornful, but majestic. “I’m
sure I don’t know enough about self-taught pundits to sponsor them. It
seems too bad they have to waste your time—”
He flushed. “Please, Barbara. You must, you really must control....”
Her disapproval became open anger. “Must I? Must I? And stand by while
every pretentious swindler usurps your attention? Oh, I don’t ask
for any special favors as your daughter; I know too well I have none
coming. But I should think at least the consideration due a fellow
of the haven would prompt ordinary courtesy even where no natural
affection exists!”
“Barbara, please.... Oh, my dear girl, how can you ...?”
But she was gone, leaving him distressed and me puzzled. Not at her
lack of restraint but at her accusation that he lacked a father’s
love for her. Nothing was clearer than his pride in her or his
protective, baffled tenderness. It did not seem possible so willful a
misunderstanding could be maintained.
“You can’t judge Barbara by ordinary standards,” insisted Ace
uncomfortably, when I told him what had happened.
“I’m not judging her by any standards or at all,” I said; “I just don’t
see how anyone could get things so wrong.”
“She.... Her nature needs sympathy. Lots of it. She’s never had the
understanding and encouragement she ought to have.”
“It looks the other way around to me.”
“That’s because you don’t know the background. She’s always been
lonely. From childhood. Her mother was impatient of children and never
found time for her.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Why ... she told me, of course.”
“And you believed her. Without corroborative evidence. Is that what’s
called the scientific attitude?”
He stopped stock-still. “Look here, Backmaker—” a moment before I had
been Hodge to him—“Look here, Backmaker, I’m damned tired of all the
things people say about Barbara; the jeers and sneers and gossip by
people who just aren’t good enough to breathe the same air with her,
much less have the faintest notion of her mind and spirit—”
“Come off it, Ace,” I interrupted. “I havent got anything against
Barbara. The shoe is on the other foot. Tell her I’m all right, will
you? Don’t waste time trying to convince me; I’m just trying to get
along.”
It was clear, not only from the slips which evaded Ace’s guard, but
from less restrained remarks by other fellows, that Barbara’s tortured
jealousy was a fixture of her character. She had created feuds,
slandered and reviled fellows who had been guilty of nothing except
trying to interest her father in some project in which she herself
was not concerned. I learned much more also, much Ace had no desire
to convey. But he was a poor hand at concealing anything, and it was
clear he was helplessly subject to her, but without the usual kindly
anesthetic of illusion. I guessed he had enjoyed her favors, but she
evidently didnt bother to hide the fact that the privilege was not
exclusive; perhaps indeed she insisted on his knowing. I gathered she
was a fiercely moral polyandrist, demanding absolute fidelity without
offering the slightest hope of reciprocal singlemindedness.
_12._ _MORE OF HAGGERSHAVEN_
Among the fellows was an Oliver Midbin, a student of what he chose to
call the new and revolutionary science of Emotional Pathology. Tall
and thin, with an incongruous little potbelly like an enlarged and
far-slipped adamsapple, he pounced on me as a ready-made and captive
audience for his theories.
“Now this case of pseudo-aphonia—”
“He means the dumb girl,” explained Ace, aside.
“Nonsense. Dumbness is not even the statement of a symptom, but a very
imperfect description. Pseudo-aphonia. Purely of an emotional nature.
Of course if you take her to some medical quack he’ll convince himself
and you and certainly her that there’s an impairment, or degeneration,
or atrophy of the vocal cords—”
“I’m not the girl’s guardian, Mr Midbin—”
“Doctor. Philosophiae, Göttingen. Trivial matter.”
“Excuse me, Dr Midbin. Anyway, I’m not her guardian so I’m not taking
her anywhere. But, just as a theoretical question, suppose examination
did reveal physical damage?”
He appeared delighted, and rubbed his hands together. “Oh, it would. I
assure you it would. These fellows always find what theyre looking for.
If your disposition is sour theyll find warts on your duodenum. In a
postmortem. In a postmortem. Whereas Emotional Pathology deals with the
sour disposition and lets the warts, if any, take care of themselves.
Matter is a function of the mind. People are dumb or blind or deaf for
a purpose. Now what purpose can the girl have for muteness?”
“No conversation?” I suggested. I didnt doubt Midbin was an authority,
but his manner made flippancy almost irresistible.
“I shall find out,” he said firmly. “This is bound to be a simpler
maladjustment than Barbara’s—”
“Aw, come on,” protested Ace.
“Nonsense, Dorn; obscurantic nonsense. Reticence is a necessary
ingredient of those medical ethics by which the quacks conceal
incompetence. Mumbo jumbo to keep the layman from asking annoying
questions. Priestly, not scientific approach. Art and mystery of
phlebotomy. Don’t hold back knowledge; publish it to the world.”
“I think Barbara wouldnt want her private thoughts published to the
world. You have to draw the line somewhere.”
Midbin put his head on one side and looked at Ace as though he were
difficult to see. “Now that’s interesting, Dorn,” he said; “I wonder
what turns a seeker after knowledge into a censor.”
“Are you going to start exploring my emotional pathology now?”
“Not interesting enough; not nearly interesting enough. Diagnosis while
you wait; treatment in a few easy instalments. Barbara now—there’s a
really beautiful case. Beautiful case; years of treatment and little
sign of improvement. Of course she wouldnt want her thoughts known.
Why? Because she’s happy with her hatred for her dead mother. Shocking
to Mrs Grundy; doubly ditto to Mister. Exaggerated possessiveness
toward her father makes her miserable. Thoughts known, misery
ventilated: shame, condemnation, fie, fie. Her fantasy—”
“Midbin!”
“Her fantasy of going back to childhood (fascinating; adult employs
infantile time-sequence, infantile magic, infantile hatreds) in order
to injure her mother is a sick notion she cherishes the way a dog licks
a wound. But without analogous therapy. Ventilate it. Ventilate it. Now
this girl’s case is bound to be simpler. Younger if nothing else. And
nice, overt symptoms. Bring her around tomorrow and we’ll begin.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Who else? Youre the only one she doesnt seem to distrust.”
It was annoying to have the girl’s puppylike devotion observed and
commented on. I realized she saw me as the only connection, however
tenuous, with a normal past; I had assumed she would turn naturally
after a few days to the women who took such open pleasure in fussing
over her affliction. However she merely suffered their attentions; no
matter how I tried to avoid her she sought me out, running to me with
muted cries which should have been touching but were only painful.
Mr Haggerwells’ telegram to the sheriff’s office at York had brought
the reply that a deputy sheriff would visit the haven “when time
permitted.” He had also telegraphed the Spanish legation who answered
they knew no other Escobars than Don Jaime and his wife. The girl might
be a servant or a stranger; it was no concern of His Most Catholic
Majesty.
The school uniform made it unlikely she was a servant but beyond this,
little was deducible. She did not respond to questions in either
Spanish or English, and it was impossible to tell if she understood
their meaning, for her blank expression remained unchanged. When
offered pencil and paper she handled them curiously, then let them
slide to the floor.
I wondered briefly if perhaps her intelligence was slightly subnormal,
but this was met by a firm, even belligerent denial from Midbin, whose
conclusion was confirmed, at least in my opinion, by her apparently
excellent coordination, her personal neatness and fastidiousness which
were far more delicate than any I’d been accustomed to.
Midbin’s method of treatment smacked of the mystical. His subjects
were supposed to relax on a couch and say whatever came into their
minds. At least this was the clearest part of the explanation he gave
when I rebelliously escorted the girl to his “office,” a large, bare
room decorated only by some old European calendars by the popular
academician, Picasso. The couch was a cot which Midbin himself used
more conventionally at night.
“All right,” I said; “just how are you going to manage?”
“Convince her everything’s all right and I’m not going to hurt her.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “Sure. Only: how?”
He gave me one of his head-on-shoulder looks and turned to the girl who
waited apathetically, with downcast eyes. “You lie down,” he suggested.
“Me? I’m not dumb.”
“Pretend you are. Lie down, close your eyes, say the first thing on
your tongue. Without stopping to think about it.”
“How can I say anything if I’m pretending to be dumb?” Grudgingly
I complied, fancying a faint look of curiosity passing over the
too-placid face. “‘No man bathes twice in the same stream,’” I muttered.
He made me repeat the performance several times, then by pantomime
urged her to imitate me. It was doubtful if she understood; in the end
we nudged her gently into the required position. There was no question
of relaxation; she lay there warily, tense and stiff even with her eyes
closed.
The whole business was so manifestly useless and absurd, to say nothing
of being undignified, that I was tempted to walk out on it. Only
ignoble calculation on Midbin’s voting for my acceptance in the haven
kept me there.
Looking at the form stretched out so rigidly, I could not but admit
again that the girl was beautiful. But the admission was dispassionate;
the beauty was abstract and neutral, the lovely young lines evoked no
lust. I felt only vexation because her plight kept me from the wonders
of Haggershaven.
“What good can this possibly do?” I burst out after ten fruitless
minutes. “Youre trying to find out why she can’t talk and she can’t
talk to tell you why she can’t talk.”
“Science explores all methods of approach,” Midbin answered loftily;
“I’m searching for a technique which will reach her. Bring her back
tomorrow.”
I swallowed my annoyance and started out. The girl jumped up and
pressed close to my side. Outdoors the air was crisp; I felt her
suppress a slight shiver. “Now I suppose I’ll have to take you where
it’s warm or find a wrap for you,” I scolded irritably. “I don’t know
why I have to be your nursemaid.”
She whimpered very softly and I was remorseful. None erf this was her
fault; my callousness was inexcusable. But if she could only attach
herself to some other protector and leave me alone....
As one about to be banished I tried to cram everything into short days.
I realized that these autumn weeks, spent in casual conversation or
joining the familiar preparations for rural winter, were a period of
thorough and critical probation. There was little I could do to sway
the decision beyond the exhibition of an honest willingness to turn to
whatever work needed doing, and to repeat, whenever the opportunity
offered, that Haggershaven was literally a revelation to me, an island
of civilization in the midst of a chaotic and savage sea. My dream was
to make a landfall there.
Certainly my meager background and scraps of reading would not persuade
the men and women of the haven; I could only hope they might divine
some promise in me. Against this hope I put Barbara’s enmity, a
hostility now exacerbated by rage at Oliver Midbin for daring to devote
to another, particularly another woman, the attention which had been
her due, and the very technique used for her. I knew her persistence
and I could not doubt she would move enough of the fellows to insure my
rejection.
The gang which had been operating in the vicinity, presumably the
same one I had encountered, moved on. At least no further crimes were
attributed to it. Once they were gone, Deputy Sheriff Beasley finally
found time to visit Haggershaven in response to the telegram. He had
evidently been there before without attaining much respect on either
side. I got the distinct impression he would have preferred a more
formal examination than the one which took place in Mr Haggerwells’
study, with fellows drifting in and out, interrupting the proceedings
with comments of their own.
I think he doubted the girl’s dumbness. He barked his questions so
loudly and brusquely they would have terrified a far more securely
poised individual. She promptly went into dry hysterics, whereupon he
turned his attention to me.
I was apprehensive lest his questions explore my life with Tyss and
my connection with the Grand Army, but apparently mere presence at
Haggershaven indicated an innocence not unrelated to idiocy, at least
so far as the more popular crimes were concerned. My passage of
the York road and all the events leading up to it were outside his
interest; he wanted only a succinct story of the holdup, reminding me
of the late Colonel Tolliburr in his assumption that the lay eye ought
normally to be photographic of the minutest detail.
He was clearly dissatisfied with my account and left grumbling that
it would be more to the point if bookworms learned to identify a man
properly, instead of logarithms or trigonometry. I didn’t see exactly
how this applied to me, since I was laudably ignorant of both subjects.
If Officer Beasley was disappointed, Midbin was enchanted. Of course he
had heard my narrative before, but this was the first time he’d savored
its possible impact on the girl.
“You see, her pseudo-aphonia is neither congenital nor of long
standing. All logic leads to the conclusion that it’s the result of her
terror during the experience. She must have wanted to scream, it must
have been almost impossible for her not to scream, but for her very
life she dared not. The instinctive, automatic reaction was the one she
could not allow herself. She had to remain mute while she watched the
murders.”
For the first time it seemed possible there was more to Midbin than his
garrulity.
“She crushed back that natural, overwhelming impulse,” he went on. “She
had to; her life depended on it. It was an enormous effort and the
effect on her was in proportion; she achieved her object too well; when
it was safe for her to speak again she couldnt.”
It all sounded so plausible it was some time before I thought to ask
him why she didnt appear to understand what we said, or why she didnt
write anything when she was handed pencil and paper.
“Communication,” he answered. “She had to cut off communication, and
once cut off it’s not easy to restore. At least that’s one aspect.
Another is more tricky. The holdup happened more than a month ago, but
do you suppose the affected mind reckons so precisely? Is a precise
reckoning possible? Duration may, for all we know, be an entirely
subjective thing. Yesterday for you may be today for me. We recognize
this to some extent when we speak of hours passing slowly or quickly.
The girl may still be undergoing the agony of repressing her screams;
the holdup, the murders, are not in the past for her, but the present.
They are taking place in a long drawn out instant of time which may
never end during her life. And if this is so, is it any wonder she is
unable to relax, to let down her guard long enough to realize that the
present is present and the crisis is past?”
He pressed his middle thoughtfully. “Now, if it is possible to recreate
in her mind by stimulus from without rather than by evocation from
within the conditions leading up to and through the climacteric, she
would have a chance to vent the emotions she was forced to swallow. She
might, I don’t say she would, she might speak again.”
I understood such a process would necessarily be lengthy, but as time
passed I saw no indication he was reaching her at all, much less that
he was getting any results. One of the Spanish-speaking fellows,
a botanist who came and went from the haven at erratic intervals,
translated my account of our meeting and read parts of it to the
recumbent girl, following Midbin’s excited stage directions and
interpolations. Nothing happened.
Outside the futile duty of coaxing the girl to participate in Midbin’s
sessions I had no obligations except those I took upon myself or could
persuade others to delegate to me. Hiro Agati declared me hopelessly
incompetent to help him in the kiln he had set up to make “hard
glass,” a thick substance he hoped might take the place of cast iron
in such things as woodstoves, or clay tile in flues. He conceded I was
not entirely useless in the small garden surrounding their cottage
where he, Mrs Agati—an architect, much younger than her husband and
extremely diminutive—and their three children spent their spare time
transplanting, rearranging, or preparing for the following season.
Dr Agati was not only the first American Japanese I had ever met; his
was the first family I had known who broke the unwritten rule of having
only one child. Both he and Kimi Agati seemed unaware of the stern
injunctions by Whigs and Populists alike that disaster would follow if
the population of the country increased too fast. Fumio and Eiko didnt
care, while Yoshio, at two, was just not interested.
The Agatis represented for me one more pang at the thought of
banishment from the haven. Since I knew neither chemistry nor
architecture, our conversation had limits, but this was no drawback to
the pleasure I took in their company. Often, after I was assured I was
welcome there, I sat reading or simply silent while Hiro worked, the
children ran in and out, and Kimi, who was conservative and didnt care
for chairs, sat comfortably on the floor and sketched or calculated
stresses.
Gradually I progressed from the stage where I wanted decision on my
application postponed as long as possible to one where I was impatient
to have it over and done with. “Why?” asked Hiro. “Suspense is the
condition we live in all our lives.”
“Well, but there are degrees. You know about what you will be doing
next year.”
“Do I? What guarantees have I? The future is happily veiled. When I
was your age I despaired because no one would accept the indentures of
a Japanese. (We are still called Japanese even though our ancestors
migrated at the time of the abortive attempt to overthrow the Shogunate
and restore the Mikado in 1868.) Suspense instead of certainty would
have been a pleasure.”
“Anyway,” said Kimi practically, “it may be months before the next
meeting.”
“What do you mean? Isnt there a set time for such business?” Sure there
must be, I had never dared ask the exact date.
Hiro shook his head. “Why should there be? The next time the fellows
pass on an appropriation or a project, we’ll decide whether there’s
room for an historian.”
“But ... as Kimi says, it might not be for months.”
“Or it might be tomorrow,” replied Hiro.
“Don’t worry, Hodge,” said Fumio, “Papa will vote for you, and Mother
too.”
Hiro grunted.
When it did come it was anticlimactic. Hiro, Midbin, and several others
with whom I’d scarcely exchanged a word recommended me, and Barbara
simply ignored my existence. I was a full fellow of Haggershaven, with
all the duties and privileges appertaining. I was also securely at home
for the first time since I left Wappinger Falls more than six years
before. I knew that in all its history few had ever cut themselves off
from the haven, still fewer had ever been asked to resign.
At a modest celebration in the big kitchen that night, the haven
revealed more of the talents it harbored. Hiro produced a gallon
of liquor he had distilled from sawdust and called cellusaki. Mr
Haggerwells pronounced it fit for a cultivated palate, following with
an impromptu discourse on drinking through the ages. Midbin sampled
enough of it to imitate Mr. Haggerwells’ lecture and then, as an
inspired afterthought, to demonstrate how Mr Haggerwells might mimic
Midbin’s parody. Ace and three others sang ballads; even the dumb girl,
persuaded to sip a little of the cellusaki under the disapproving eyes
of her self-appointed guardians, seemed to become faintly animated. If
anyone noted the absence of Barbara Haggerwells, no one commented on it.
Fall became winter. Surplus timber was hauled in from the woodlots and
the lignin extracted by compressed air, a method perfected by one of
the fellows. Lignin was the fuel used in our hot water furnaces and
provided the gas for the reflecting jets which magnified a tiny flame
into strong illumination. All of us took part in this work, but just as
I had not been able to help Hiro to his satisfaction in the laboratory,
so here too my ineptness with things mechanical soon caused me to be
set to more congenial tasks in the stables.
I did not repine at this, for though I was delighted with the society
of the others, I found it pleasurable to be alone, to sort out my
thoughts, to slow down to the rhythm of the heavy percherons or enjoy
the antics of the two young foals. The world and time were somewhere
shut outside; I felt contentment so strong as to be beyond satisfaction
or any active emotion.
I was currying a dappled mare one afternoon and reflecting how the
steam-plow used on the great wheat ranches of British America deprived
the farmers not merely of fertilizer but also of companionship, when
Barbara, her breath still cloudy from the cold outside, came in and
stood behind me. I made an artificial cowlick on the mare’s flank, then
brushed it glossy smooth again.
“Hello,” she said.
“Uh ... hello, Miss Haggerwells.”
“Must you, Hodge?”
I roughed up the mare’s flank once more. “Must I what? I’m afraid I
don’t understand.”
She came close, as close as she had in the bookstore, and I felt my
breath quicken. “I think you do. Why do you avoid me? And call me
‘Miss Haggerwells’ in that prim tone? Do I look so old and ugly and
forbidding?”
This, I thought, is going to hurt Ace. Poor Ace, befuddled by a
Jezebel; why can’t he attach himself to a nice quiet girl who won’t
tear him in pieces every time she follows her inclinations?
I smoothed the mare’s side for the last time and put down the currycomb.
“I think you are the most exciting woman Ive ever met, Barbara,” I
said.
_13._ _TIME_
“Hodge.”
“Barbara?”
“Is it really true youve never written your mother since you left home?”
“Why should I write her? What could I say? Perhaps if my first plans
had come to something, I might have. But to tell her I worked for
six years for nothing would only confirm her opinion of my lack of
gumption.”
“I wonder if your ambitions in the end don’t amount to a wish to prove
her wrong.”
“Now you sound like Midbin,” I said, but I wasnt annoyed. I much
preferred her present questions to those I’d heard from her in the past
weeks: Do you love me? Are you sure? Really love, I mean; more than any
other woman? Why?
“Oliver has had accidental flashes of insight.”
“Arent you substituting your own for what you think might be my
motives?”
“My mother hated me,” she stated flatly.
“Well, it isnt a world where love is abundant; substitutes are cheap
and available. But hate—that’s a strong word. How do you know?”
“I know. What does it matter how? I’m not unfeeling, like you.”
“Me? Now what have I done?”
“You don’t care about anyone. Not me or anyone else. You don’t want me;
just any woman would do.”
I considered this. “I don’t think so, Barbara—”
“See! You don’t think so. Youre not sure, and anyway you wouldnt hurt
my feelings needlessly. Why don’t you be honest and tell the truth.
You’d just as soon it was that streetwalker in New York. Maybe you’d
rather. You miss her, don’t you?”
“Barbara, Ive told you a dozen times I never—”
“And Ive told you a dozen times youre a liar! I don’t care. I really
don’t care.”
“All right.”
“How can you be so phlegmatic? So unfeeling? Nothing means anything to
you. Youre a real, stolid peasant. And you smell like one too, always
reeking of the stable.”
“I’m sorry,” I said mildly; “I’ll try to bathe more often.”
Her taunts and jealous fits, her insistent demands did not ruffle me.
I was too pleased with the wonders of life to be disturbed. All I’d
dreamed Haggershaven could mean when I was sure I would never be part
of it was fulfilled and more than fulfilled. Haggershaven and Barbara;
Eden and Lilith.
At first it seemed the bookstore years were wasted, but I soon realized
the value of that catholic and serendipitous reading as a preparation
for this time. I was momentarily disappointed that there was no one
at the haven to whom I could turn for that personal, face-to-face,
student-teacher relationship on which I’d set so great a store, but
if there was no historical scholar among the fellows to tutor me, I
was surrounded by those who had learned the discipline of study. There
was none to discuss the details of the industrial revolution or the
failure of the Ultramontane Movement in Catholicism and the policies of
Popes Adrian VII, VIII and IX, but all could show me scheme and method.
I began to understand what thorough exploration of a subject meant
as opposed to sciolism, and I threw myself into my chosen work with
furious zest.
I also began to understand the central mystery of historical theory.
When and what and how and where, but the when is the least. Not
chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in.
The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly
more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less
important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or
the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel time. I was not
investigating a petrification but a fluid. Were it possible to know
fully the what and how and where one might learn the why, and assuredly
if one grasped the why he could place the when at will.
During that winter I read philosophy, psychology, archaeology,
anthropology. My energy and appetite were prodigious, as they needed to
be. I saw the field of knowledge, not knowledge in the abstract, but
things I wanted to know, things I had to know, expanding in front of me
with dizzying speed while I crawled and crept and stumbled over ground
I should have covered years before.
Yet if I had studied more conventionally I would never have had the
Haven or Barbara. Novelists speak lightly of gusts of passion, but it
was nothing less than irresistible force which drove me to her, day
after day. Looking back on what I had felt for Tirzah Vame with the
condescension twenty-four has toward twenty, I saw my younger self
only as callow, boyish and slightly obtuse. I was embarrassed by the
torments I had suffered.
With Barbara I lived only in the present, shutting out past and future.
This was only partly due to the intensity, the fierceness of our
desire; much came from Barbara’s own troubled spirit. She herself was
so avid, so demanding, that yesterday and tomorrow were irrelevant to
the insistent moment. The only thing saving me from enslavement like
poor Ace was the belief, correct or incorrect I am to this day not
certain, that to yield the last vestige of detachment and objectivity
would make me helpless, not just before her, but to accomplish my ever
more urgent ambitions.
Still I know much of my reserve was unnecessary, a product of fear, not
prudence. I denied much I could have given freely and without harm;
my guard protected what was essentially empty. My fancied advantage
over Ace, based on my having always had an easy, perhaps too easy
way with women, was no advantage at all. I foolishly thought myself
master of the situation because her infidelities, if such a word can
be used where faithfulness is explicitly ruled out, did not bother
me. I believed I had grown immensely wise since the time when the
prospect of Tirzah’s rejection had made me miserable. I was wrong; my
sophistication was a lack, not an achievement
Do I need to say that Barbara was no wanton, moved by light and fickle
voluptuousness? The puritanism of our time, expressing itself in
condemnations and denials, molded her as it molded our civilization.
She was driven by urges deeper and darker than sensuality; her
mad jealousies were provoked by an unappeasable need for constant
reassurance. She had to be dominant, she had to be courted by more
than one man; she had to be told constantly what she could never truly
believe: that she was uniquely desired.
I wondered that she did not burn herself out, not only with conflicting
passions, but with her fury of work. Sleep was a weakness she despised,
yet she craved far more of it than she allowed herself; she rationed
her hours of unconsciousness and drove herself relentlessly. Ace’s
panegyrics on her importance as a physicist I discounted, but older
and more objective colleagues spoke of her mathematical concepts, not
merely with respect, but with awe.
She did not discuss her work with me; our intimacy stopped short of
such exchanges. I got the impression she was seeking the principles of
heavier-than-air flight, a chimera which had long intrigued inventors.
It seemed a pointless pursuit, for it was manifest such levitation
could no more replace our safe, comfortable guided balloons than
minibiles could replace the horse.
Spring made all of us single-minded farmers until the fields were
plowed and sown. No one grudged these days, for the Haven’s economic
life was based first of all on its land, and we were happy in the work
itself. Not until the most feverish competition with time began to
slacken could we return to our regular activities.
I say “all of us,” but I must except the dumb girl. She greeted the
spring with the nearest approach to cheerfulness she had displayed;
there was a distinct lifting of her apathy. Unexpectedly she revealed
a talent which had survived the shock to her personality or had been
resurrected like the pussywillows and crocuses by the warm sun. She
was a craftsman with needle and thread. Timidly at first, but gradually
growing bolder, she contrived dresses of gayer and gayer colors in
place of the drab school uniform; always, on the completion of a new
creation, running to me as though to solicit my approval.
This innocent if embarrassing custom could hardly escape Barbara’s
notice, but her anger was directed at me, not the girl. My “devotion”
was not only absurd, she told me, it was also conspicuous and
degrading. My taste was inexplicable, running as it did to immature,
deranged cripples.
Naturally when the girl took up the habit of coming to the edge of the
field where I was plowing, waiting gravely motionless for me to drive
the furrow toward her, I anticipated still further punishment from
Barbara’s tongue. The girl was not to be swayed from her practice; at
least I did not have the heart to speak roughly to her, and so she
daily continued to stand through the long hours watching me plow,
bringing me a lunch at noon and docilely sharing a small portion of it.
The planting done, Midbin began the use of a new technique, showing
her drawings of successive stages of the holdup, again nagging and
pumping me for details to sharpen their accuracy. Her reactions pleased
him immensely, for she responded to the first ones with nods and the
throaty sounds we recognized as understanding or agreement. The scenes
of the assault itself, of the shooting of the coachman, the flight of
the footman, and her own concealment in the cornfield evoked whimpers,
while the brutal depiction of the Escobars’ murder made her cower and
cover her eyes.
I suppose I am not particularly tactful; still I had been careful
not to mention any of this to Barbara. Midbin, however, after a very
gratifying reaction to one of the drawings, said casually, “Barbara
hasnt been here for a long time. I wish she would come back.”
When I repeated this she stormed at me. “How dare you discuss me with
that ridiculous fool?”
“Youve got it all wrong. There wasnt any discussion. Midbin only said—”
“I know what Oliver said. I know his whole silly vocabulary.”
“He only wants to help you.”
“Help me? Help _me_? What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing, Barbara. Nothing.”
“Am I dumb or blind or stupid?”
“Please, Barbara.”
“Just unattractive. I know. Ive seen you with that creature. How you
must hate me to flaunt her before everyone!”
“You know I only go with her to Midbin’s because he insists.”
“What about your little lovers’ meetings in the woodlot when you were
supposed to be plowing? Do you think I didnt know about them?”
“Barbara, I assure you they were perfectly harmless. She—”
“Youre a liar. More than that, youre a sneak and a hypocrite. Yes, and
a mean, crawling sycophant as well. I know you must detest me, but it
suits you to suffer me because of the haven. I’m not blind; youve used
me, deliberately and calculatedly for your own selfish ends.”
Midbin could explain and excuse her outbursts by his “emotional
pathology.” Ace accepted and suffered them as inescapable, so did her
father, but I saw no necessity of being always subject to her tantrums.
I told her so, adding, not too heatedly I think, “Maybe we shouldn’t
see each other alone after this.”
She stood perfectly immobile and silent, as if I were still speaking.
“All right,” she said at last. “All right; yes ... yes. Don’t.”
Her apparent calm deceived me completely; I smiled with relief.
“That’s right, laugh. Why shouldnt you? You have no feelings, no more
than you have an intelligence. You are an oaf, a clod, a real bumpkin.
Standing there with a silly grin on your face. Oh I hate you! How I
hate you!”
She wept, she shrilled, she rushed at me and then turned away, crying
she hadnt meant it, not a word of it. She cajoled, begging forgiveness
for all she’d said, tearfully promising to control herself after this,
moaning that she needed me, and finally, when I didnt repulse her,
exclaiming it was her love for me which tormented her so and drove her
to such scenes. It was a wretched, degrading moment, and not the least
of its wretchedness and degradation was that I recognized the erotic
value of her abjection. Detachedly I might pity, fear or be repelled;
at the same time I had to admit her sudden humility was exciting.
Perhaps this storm changed our relationship for the better, or at
least eased the constraint between us. At any rate it was after this
she began speaking to me of her work, putting us on a friendlier, less
furious plane. I learned now how completely garbled was my notion of
what she was doing.
“Heavier-than-air flying-machines!” she cried. “How utterly absurd!”
“All right. I didnt know.”
“My work is theoretical. I’m not a vulgar mechanic.”
“All right, all right.”
“I’m going to show that time and space are aspects of the same entity.”
“All right,” I said, thinking of something else.
“What is time?”
“Uh?... Dear Barbara, since I don’t know anything I can slide
gracefully out of that one. I couldnt even begin to define time.”
“Oh, you could probably define it all right—in terms of itself. I’m not
dealing with definitions but concepts.”
“All right, conceive.”
“Hodge, like all stuffy people your levity is ponderous.”
“Excuse me. Go ahead.”
“Time is an aspect.”
“So you mentioned. I once knew a man who said it was an illusion. And
another who said it was a serpent with its tail in its mouth.”
“Mysticism.” The contempt with which she spoke the word brought a
sudden image of Roger Tyss saying “metaphysics” with much the same
inflection. “Time, matter, space and energy are all aspects of the
cosmic entity. Interchangeable aspects. Theoretically it should be
possible to translate matter into terms of energy and space into terms
of time; matter-energy into space-time.”
“It sounds so simple I’m ashamed of myself.”
“To put it so crudely the explanation is misleading: suppose matter is
resolved into its component....”
“Atoms?” I suggested, since she seemed at loss for a word.
“No, atoms are already too individualized, too separate. Something more
fundamental than atoms. We have no word because we can’t quite grasp
the concept yet. Essence, perhaps, or the theological ‘spirit.’ If
matter....”
“A man?”
“Man, turnip or chemical compound,” she answered impatiently; “if
resolved into its essence it can presumably be reassembled, another
wrong word, at another point of the time-space fabric.”
“You mean ... like yesterday?”
“No—and yes. What is ‘yesterday’? A thing? An aspect? An idea? Or a
relationship? Oh, words are useless things; even with mathematical
symbols you can hardly.... But someday I’ll establish it. Or lay the
groundwork for my successors. Or the successors of my successors.”
I nodded. Midbin was at least half right; Barbara was emotionally
sick. For what was this “theory” of hers but the rationalization of
a daydream, the daydream of discovering a process for reaching back
through time to injure her dead mother and so steal all of her father’s
affections?
_14._ _MIDBIN’S EXPERIMENT_
At the next meeting of the fellows Midbin asked an appropriation for
experimental work and the help of haven members in the project. Since
the extent of both requests was modest, their granting would ordinarily
have been a formality. But Barbara asked politely if Dr Midbin wouldnt
like to elaborate a little on the purposes of his experiment.
I knew her manner was a danger signal. Nevertheless Midbin merely
answered goodhumoredly that he proposed to test a theory of whether
an emotionally induced physical handicap could be cured by recreating
in the subject’s mind the shock which had caused—to use a loose,
inaccurate term—the impediment.
“I thought so. He wants to waste the haven’s money and time on a little
tart he’s having an affair with while important work is held up for
lack of funds.”
One of the women called out, “Oh, Barbara, no,” and there were
exclamations of disapproval. I saw Kimi Agati look steadfastly down
in embarrassment. Mr Haggerwells, after trying unsuccessfully to hold
Barbara’s eye, said, “I must apologize for my daughter—”
“It’s all right,” interrupted Midbin. “I understand Barbara’s notions.
I’m sure no one here really thinks there is anything improper between
the girl and me. Outside of this, Barbara’s original question seems
quite in order. Quite in order. Briefly, as most of you know, I’ve
been trying to restore speech to a subject who lost it—again I use
an inaccurate term for convenience—during an afflicting experience.
Preliminary explorations indicate good probability of satisfactory
response to my proposed method, which is simply to employ a kinematic
camera like those making entertainment photinugraphs—”
“He wants to turn the haven into a tinugraph mill with the fellows as
mummers!”
“Only this once, Barbara, only this once. Not regularly; not as
routine.”
At this point her father insisted the request be voted on without
any more discussion. I was tempted to vote with Barbara, the only
dissident, for I foresaw Midbin’s tinugraph would undoubtedly rely
heavily on cooperation from me, but I didnt have the courage. Instead I
merely abstained, like Midbin himself and Ace.
The first effect of Midbin’s program was to free me from obligation,
for he decided there was no point continuing the sessions with the dumb
girl as before. All his time was taken up anyway with photography—no
one at the haven had specialized in it—kinematic theory, the art of
pantomime, and the relative merit of different makes of cameras, all
manufactured abroad.
The girl, who had never lost her tenseness and apprehension during
the interviews, nevertheless clung to the habit of being escorted to
Midbin’s workroom. Since it was impossible to convey to her that the
sessions were temporarily suspended, she appeared regularly, always in
a dress with which she had taken manifest pains, and there was little I
could do but walk her to Midbin’s and back. I was acutely conscious of
the ridiculousness of these parades and expectant of retribution from
Barbara afterward, so I was to some extent relieved when Midbin finally
made his decision and procured camera and film.
Now I had to set the exact scene where the holdup had taken place, not
an easy thing to do, for one rise looks much like another at twilight
and all look differently in daylight. Then I had to approximate the
original conditions as nearly as possible. Here Midbin was partially
foiled by the limitations of his medium, being forced to use the camera
in full sunlight instead of at dusk.
I dressed and instructed the actors in their parts, rehearsing and
directing them throughout. The only immunity I got was Midbin’s
concession that I neednt play the role of myself, since in my early
part of spectator I would be hidden anyway, and the succor was omitted
as irrelevant to the therapeutic purpose. Midbin himself did nothing
but tend the camera.
Any tinugraph mill would have snorted at our final product and
certainly no tinugraph lyceum would have condescended to show it. After
some hesitation Midbin had decided not to make a phonoto, feeling the
use of sound would add no value and considerable expense, so the film
didnt even have this feature to recommend it. Fortunately for whatever
involuntary professional pride was involved, no one was present at the
first showing but the girl and me, Ace to work the magic-lantern, and
Midbin.
In the darkened room the pictures on the screen gave—after the first
minutes—such an astonishing illusion that when one of the horsemen
rode toward the camera we all reflexively shrank back. Despite its
amateurishness the tinugraph seemed an artistic success to us, but
it was no triumph in justifying its existence. The girl reacted no
differently than she had toward the drawings; if anything her response
was less satisfactory. The inarticulate noises ran the same scale from
dismay to terror; nothing new was added. Nevertheless Midbin, his
adamsapple working joyously up and down, slapped Ace and me on the
back, predicting he’d have her talking like a politician before the
year was out.
I suppose the process was imperceptible; certainly there was no
discernible difference between one showing and the next. The boring
routine continued day after day and so absolute was Midbin’s confidence
that we were not too astonished after some weeks when, at the moment
“Don Jaime” folded in simulated death, she fainted and remained
unconscious for some time.
After this we expected—at least Ace and I did, Midbin only rubbed his
palms together—that the constraint on her tongue would be suddenly
and entirely lifted. It wasnt, but a few showings later, at the same
crucial point, she screamed. It was a genuine scream, clear and
piercing, bearing small resemblance to the strangling noises we were
accustomed to. Midbin had been vindicated; no mute could have voiced
that full, shrill cry.
Pursuing another of his theories, he soon gave up the idea of helping
her express the words in her mind in Spanish. Instead he concentrated
on teaching her English. His method was primitive, consisting of
pointing solemnly to objects and repeating their names in an artificial
monotone.
“She’ll have an odd way of speaking,” remarked Ace; “all nouns,
singular nouns at that, said with a mouthful of pebbles. I can just
imagine the happy day: ‘Man chair wall girl floor;’ and you bubbling
back, ‘Carpet ceiling earth grass.’”
“I’ll supply the verbs as needed,” said Midbin; “first things first.”
She must have been paying at least as much attention to our
conversation as to his instruction for, unexpectedly, one day she
pointed to me and said quite clearly, “Hodge ... Hodge ...”
I was discomposed, but not with the same vexation I had felt at her
habit of seeking me out and following me around. There was a faint,
bashful pleasure, and a feeling of gratitude for such steadfastness.
She must have had some grounding in English, for while she utilized
the nouns Midbin had supplied, she soon added, tentatively and
questioningly, a verb or adjective here and there. “I ... walk ...?”
Ace’s fear of her acquiring Midbin’s dead inflection was groundless;
her voice was low and charmingly modulated; we were enchanted listening
to her elementary groping among words.
Conversation or questioning was as yet impossible. Midbin’s, “What
is your name?” brought forth no response save a puzzled look and a
momentary sinking back into dullness. But several weeks later she
touched her breast and said shyly, “Catalina.”
Her memory then, was not impaired, at least not totally. There was no
way of telling yet what she remembered and what self-protection had
forced her to forget, for direct questions seldom brought satisfactory
answers at this stage. Facts concerning herself she gave out
sporadically and without relation to our curiosity.
Her name was Catalina García; she was the much younger sister of Doña
Maria Escobar, with whom she lived. So far as she knew she had no other
relatives. She did not want to go back to school; they had taught her
to sew, they had been kind, but she had not been happy there. Please—we
would not send her away from Haggershaven, would we?
Midbin acted now like a fond parent who was both proud of his child’s
accomplishments and fearful lest she be not quite ready to leave his
solicitous care. He was far from satisfied at restoring her speech;
he probed and searched, seeking to know what she had thought and felt
during the long months of muteness.
“I do not know, truly I do not know,” she protested toward the end of
one of these examinations. “I would say, yes; sometimes I knew you
were talking to me, or Hodge.” Here she looked at me steadily for an
instant, to make me feel both remorseful and proud. “But it was like
someone talking a long way off, so I never quite understood, nor was
even sure it was I who was being spoken to. Often—at least it seemed
often, perhaps it was not—often, I tried to speak, to beg you to tell
me if you were real people talking to me, or just part of a dream. That
was very bad, because when no words came I was more afraid than ever,
and when I was afraid the dream became darker and darker.”
Afterward, looking cool and fresh and strangely assured, she came upon
me while I was cultivating young corn. A few weeks earlier I would have
known she had sought me out; now it might be an accident.
“But I knew more surely when it was you who spoke, Hodge,” she said
abruptly. “In my dream you were the most real.” Then she walked
tranquilly away.
Barbara, who had studiedly said nothing further about what Midbin was
doing, commented one day, apparently without rancor, “So Oliver appears
to have proved a theory. How nice for you.”
“What do you mean?” I inquired guardedly; “How is it nice for me?”
“Why, you won’t have to chaperone the silly girl all over any more. She
can ask her way around now.”
“Oh yes; that’s right,” I mumbled.
“And we won’t have to quarrel over her any more,” she concluded.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s right.”
Mr Haggerwells again communicated with the Spanish diplomats, recalling
his original telegram and mentioning the aloof reply. He was answered
in person by an official who acted as though he himself had composed
the disclaiming response. Perhaps he had, for he made it quite clear
that only devotion to duty made it possible to deal at all with such
savages as inhabited the United States.
He confirmed the existence of one Catalina García and consulted a
photograph, carefully shielded in his hand, comparing it with the
features of our Catalina, at last satisfying himself they were the
same. This formality finished, he spoke rapidly to Catalina in Spanish.
She shook her head and looked confused. “Tell him I can hardly
understand, Hodge; ask him to speak in English, please.”
The diplomat looked furious. Midbin explained hastily that the shock
which had caused her muteness had not entirely worn off. Unquestionably
she would recover her full memory in time, but for the present there
were still areas of forgetfulness. Her native language was part of the
past, he went on, happy with a new audience, and the past was something
to be pushed away since it contained the terrible moment. English on
the other hand—”
“I understand,” said the diplomat stiffly, resolutely addressing
none of us. “It is clear. Very well then. The Señorita García is
heir—heiress to an estate. Not a very big one, I regret to say. A
moderate estate.”
“You mean land and houses?” I asked curiously.
“A moderate estate,” he repeated, looking attentively at his gloved
hand. “Some shares of stock, some bonds, some cash. The details will be
available to the señorita.”
“It doesnt matter,” said Catalina timidly.
Having put us all, and particularly me, in our place as rude and nosey
barbarians, he went on more pleasantly, “According to the records of
the embassy, the señorita is not yet eighteen. As an orphan living in
foreign lands she is a ward of the Spanish Crown. The señorita will
return with me to Philadelphia where she will be suitably accommodated
until repatriation can be arranged. I feel certain that in the proper
surroundings, hearing her natural tongue, she will soon regain its use.
The—ah—institution may submit a bill for board and lodging during her
stay.”
“Does he mean—take me away from here? For always?” Catalina, who had
seemed so mature a moment before, suddenly acted like a frightened
child.
“He only wants to make you comfortable and take you among your own
people,” said Mr Haggerwells. “Perhaps it is a bit sudden....”
“I can’t. Do not let him take me away. Hodge, Hodge—do not let him take
me away.”
“Señorita, you do not understand—”
“No, no. I won’t. Hodge, Mr Haggerwells, do not let him!”
“But my dear—”
It was Midbin who cut Mr Haggerwells off. “I cannot guarantee against
a relapse, even a reversion to the pseudo-aphonia if this emotional
tension is maintained. I must insist that Catalina is not to continue
the conversation now.”
“No one’s going to take you away by force,” I assured her, finally
finding my courage once Midbin had asserted himself.
The official shrugged, managing to intimate in the gesture his opinion
that the haven was of a very shady character indeed and had quite
possibly engineered the holdup itself.
“If the señorita genuinely wishes to remain for the present—” a lifted
eyebrow loaded the “genuinely” with meaning “—I have no authority at
the moment to inquire into influences that have persuaded her. No, none
at all. Nor can I remove her by—ah—I will not insist. No. Not at all.”
“That is very understanding of you, sir,” said Mr Haggerwells. “I’m
sure everything will be all right eventually.”
The diplomat bowed stiffly. “Of course the—ah—institution understands
it can hope for no further compensation—”
“None has been given or asked for. None will be,” said Mr Haggerwells
in what was, for him, a sharp tone.
The gentleman from the legation bowed. “The señorita will naturally be
visited from time to time by an official. Without note—notification.
She may be removed whenever His Most Catholic Majesty sees fit. And
of course none of her estate will be released before the eighteenth
birthday. The whole affair is entirely irregular.”
After he left I reproached myself for not asking what Don Jaime’s
mission had been that fateful evening, or at least for not trying to
find out what his function with the Spanish legation was. Probably he
could in no way be connected with the counterfeiting of the pesetas. By
making no attempt to learn any facts which might have lessened the old
feeling of guilty responsibility I kept it uneasily alive.
These reproaches were pushed aside when Catalina put her head against
my collarbone, sobbing with relief. “There, there,” I said, “there,
there.”
“Uncouth,” reflected Mr Haggerwells. “Compensation indeed!”
“Dealing with natives,” said Midbin. “Probably courteous enough to
Frenchmen or Afrikanders.”
I patted Catalina’s quivering shoulders. Child or not, now she was able
to talk I had to admit I no longer found her devotion so tiresome.
Though I was definitely uneasy lest Barbara discover us in this
attitude.
_15._ _GOOD YEARS_
And now I come to the period of my life which stands in such sharp
contrast to what had gone before. Was it really eight years I spent
at Haggershaven? The arithmetic is indisputable: I arrived in 1944
at the age of twenty-three; I left in 1952 at the age of thirty-one.
Indisputable, but not quite believable; as with the happy countries
which are supposed to have no history I find it hard to go over those
eight years and divide them by remarkable events. They blended too
smoothly, too contentedly into one another.
Crops were harvested, stored or marketed; the fields were plowed in the
fall and again in the spring and sown anew. Three of the older fellows
died, another became bedridden. Five new fellows were accepted; two
biologists, a chemist, a poet, a philologist. It was to the last I
played the same part Ace had to me, introducing him to the sanctuary of
the haven, seeing its security and refuge afresh and deeply thankful
for the fortune that had brought me to it.
There was no question about success in my chosen profession, not even
the expected alternation of achievement and disappointment. Once
started on the road I kept on going at an even, steady pace. For what
would have been my doctoral thesis I wrote a paper on _The Timing
of General Stuart’s Maneuvers During August 1863 in Pennsylvania_.
This received flattering comment from scholars as far away as the
Universities of Lima and Cambridge; because of it I was offered
instructorships at highly respectable schools.
I could not think of leaving the haven. The world into which I had
been born had never been fully revealed for what it was until I had
escaped from it. Secrecy and ugliness; greed, fear and callousness;
meanness, avarice, cunning, deceit and self-worship were as close
around as the nearest farmhouses. The idea of returning to that world
and of entering into daily competition with other underpaid, overdriven
drudges striving fruitlessly to apply a dilute coating of culture to
the unresponsive surface of unwilling students had little attraction.
In those eight years, as I broadened my knowledge I narrowed my
field. Undoubtedly it was presumptuous to take the War of Southron
Independence as my specialty when there were already so many
comprehensive works on the subject and so many celebrated historians
engaged with this special event. However, my choice was made not out of
self-importance but fascination, and undoubtedly it was the proximity
of the scene which influenced the selection of my goal, the last
thirteen months of the war, from General Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania
to the capitulation at Reading. I saw the whole vast design:
Gettysburg, Lancaster, the siege of Philadelphia, the disastrous Union
counter-thrust in Tennessee, the evacuation of Washington, and finally
the desperate effort to break out of Lee’s trap which ended at Reading.
I could spend profitable years filling in the details.
My monographs were published in learned Confederate and British
journals—there were none in the United States—and I rejoiced when
they brought attention, not so much to me as to Haggershaven. I could
contribute only this notice and my physical labor; on the other hand
I asked little beyond food, clothing and shelter—just books. My
field trips I took on foot, often earning my keep by casual labor
for farmers, paying for access to private collections of letters or
documents by indexing and arranging them.
The time devoted to scholarship did not alone distinguish those eight
years, nor even the security of the haven. I have spoken of the simple,
easy manner in which the Agatis admitted me to their friendship, but
they were not the only ones with whom there grew ties of affection and
understanding. With very few exceptions the fellows of Haggershaven
quickly learned to shed the suspicion and aloofness, so necessary a
protection elsewhere, and substitute acceptance. The result was a
tranquillity I had never experienced before, so that I think of those
years as set apart, a golden period, a time of perpetual warm sunshine.
Between Barbara and me the turbulent, ambivalent passion swept back and
forth, the periods of estrangement seemingly only a generating force
to bring us together again. Hate and love, admiration and distaste,
impatience and pity were present on both sides. Only on hers there was
jealousy as well; perhaps if I had not been indifferent whenever she
chose to respond to some other man she might not have felt the errant
desire so strongly. Perhaps not; there was a moral urge behind her
behavior. She sneered at women who yielded to such temptations. To her
they were not temptations but just rewards; she did not yield, she took
them as her due.
Sometimes I wondered if her neurosis did not verge on insanity; I’m
sure for her part she must often have stood off and appraised me as a
mistake. I know there were many times when I wished there would be no
more reconciliation between us.
Yet no amount of thinking could cancel the swift hunger I felt in her
presence or the deep mutual satisfaction of physical union. Frequently
we were lovers for as long as a month before the inevitable quarrel,
followed by varying periods of coolness. During the weeks of distance I
remembered how she could be tender and gracious as well as ardent, just
as during our intimacy I remembered her ruthlessness and dominance.
It was not only her temperamental outbursts nor even her unappeasable
craving for love and affection which thrust us apart. Impediments
which, in the beginning, had appeared inconsequential assumed more
importance all the time. It was increasingly hard for her to leave her
work behind even for moments. She was never allowed to forget, either
by her own insatiable drive or by outside acknowledgment that she
was already one of the foremost physicists in the world. She had been
granted so many honorary degrees she no longer traveled to receive
them; offers from foreign governments of well-paid jobs connected with
their munitions industries were common. Articles were written about
her equation of matter, energy, space and time, acclaiming her as a
revolutionary thinker; though she dismissed them as evaluation of
elementary work, they nevertheless added to her isolation and curtailed
her freedom.
Midbin was, in his way, as much under her spell as Ace or myself.
His triumph over Catalina’s dumbness he took lightly now it was
accomplished; stabilizing Barbara’s emotions was the victory he wanted.
She, on her side, had lost whatever respect she must have had for him
in the days when she had submitted to his treatment. On the very rare
occasions when the whim moved her to listen to his entreaties—usually
relayed through Ace or me—and grant him time, it seemed to be only for
the opportunity of making fun of his efforts. Patiently he tried new
techniques of exploration and expression.
“But it’s not much use,” he said once, dolefully; “she doesnt _want_ to
be helped.”
“Wanting seemed to have little to do with making Catty talk,” I pointed
out. “Couldnt you....”
“Make a tinugraph of Barbara’s traumatic shock? If I had the materials
there would be no necessity.”
Perhaps there was less malice in her mockery now Catty was no longer
the focus of his theories about emotional pathology; perhaps she
forgave him for her temporary displacement, but she did not withhold
her contempt. “Oliver, you should have been a woman,” she told him;
“you would have been impossible as a mother, but what a grandmother you
would have made!”
That Catty herself had in her own way as strong a will as Barbara was
demonstrated in her determination to become part of Haggershaven. Her
reaction to the visit of the Spanish official was translated into an
unyielding program. She had gone resolutely to Thomas Haggerwells,
telling him she knew quite well she had neither the aptitudes nor
qualifications for admission to fellowship, nor did she ask it. All
she wanted was to live in what she regarded as her only home. She would
gladly do any work from washing dishes to making clothes—anything she
was asked. When she came of age she would turn over whatever money she
inherited to the haven without conditions.
He had patiently pointed out that a Spanish subject was a citizen of
a far wealthier and more powerful nation than the United States; as
an heiress she could enjoy the luxuries and distractions of Madrid or
Havana and eventually make a suitable marriage. How silly it would
be to give up all these advantages to become an unnoticed, penniless
drudge for a group of cranks near York, Pennsylvania.
“He was quite right you know, Catty,” I said when she told me about the
interview.
She shook her head vigorously, so the loose black curls swirled back
and forth. “You think so, Hodge, because you are a hard, prudent
Yankee.”
I opened my eyes rather wide; this was certainly not the description I
would have applied to myself.
“And also because you have Anglo-Saxon chivalry, always rescuing
maidens in distress and thinking they must sit on a cushion after
that and sew a fine seam. Well, I can sew a fine seam, but sitting on
cushions would bore me. Women are not as delicate as you think, Hodge.
Nor as terrifying.”
Was this last directed toward Barbara? Perhaps Catty had claws.
“There’s a difference,” I said, “between cushion-sitting and living
where books and pictures and music are not regarded with suspicion.”
“That’s right,” she agreed; “Haggershaven.”
“No, Haggershaven is an anomaly in the United States and in spite of
everything it cannot help but be infected by the rest of the country. I
meant the great, successful nations who can afford the breathing-spaces
for culture.”
“But you do not go to them.”
“No. This is my country.”
“And it will be mine too. After all it was made in the first place
by people willing to give up luxuries. Besides you are contradicting
yourself: if Haggershaven cannot avoid being infected by what is
outside it, neither can any other spot. Part of the world cannot be
civilized if another part is backward.”
There was no doubt her demure expression hid stern resolution. Whatever
else it hid was not so certain. Evidently Mr Haggerwells realized the
quality of her determination for eventually he proposed to the fellows
that she be allowed to stay and the offer of her money be rejected.
The motion was carried, with only Barbara, who spoke long and bitterly
against it, voting “no.”
In accepting Catty out of charity, the fellows unexpectedly made an
advantageous bargain. Not merely because she was always eager to help,
but for her specific contribution to the haven’s economy. Before this,
clothing the haven had been a haphazard affair; suits or dresses were
bought with money which would otherwise have been contributed to the
general fund, or if the fellow had no outside income, by a grant from
the same fund. Catty’s artistry with the needle made a revolution. Not
only did she patch and mend and alter; she designed and made clothes,
conveying some of her enthusiasm to the other women. The haven was
better and more handsomely clad and a great deal of money was saved.
Only Barbara refused to have her silk trousers and jackets made at home.
It was not entirely easy to adjust to the new Catty, the busy,
efficient, selfreliant creature. Her expressive voice could be
enchanting even when she was speaking nonsense—and Catty rarely
spoke nonsense. I don’t mean she was priggish or solemn, quite the
contrary; her spontaneous laughter was quick and frequent. But she was
essentially not frivolous; she felt deeply, her loyalties were strong
and enduring.
I missed her former all too open devotion to me. It had caused
embarrassment, impatience, annoyance; now it was withdrawn I felt
deprived and even pettish at its lack. Not that I had anything to offer
in return or considered that any emotion was called for from me. Though
I didnt express it to myself so openly at the time, what I regretted
was the sensually valuable docility of a beautiful woman. Of course
there was a confusion here: I was regretting what had never been, for
Catty and the nameless dumb girl were different individuals. Even her
always undeniable beauty was changed and heightened; what I really
wanted was for the Catty of now to act like the Catty of then. And
without any reciprocal gesture from me.
The new Catty no more than the old was disingenuous or coquettish. She
was simply mature, dignified, selfcontained and just a trifle amusedly
aloof. Also she was very busy. She did not pretend to any interest
in other men; at the same time she had clearly outgrown her childish
dependence on me. She refused any competition with Barbara. When I
sought her out she was there, but she made no attempt to call me to her.
I was not so unversed that I didnt occasionally suspect this might be
a calculated tactic. But when I recalled the utter innocence of her
look I reflected I would have to have a very nice conceit of myself
indeed to believe the two most attractive women at Haggershaven were
contending for me.
I don’t know precisely when I began to see Catty with a predatory male
eye. Doubtless it was during one of those times when Barbara and I had
quarrelled, and when she had called attention to Catty by accusing me
of dallying with her. I was essentially as polygamous as Barbara was
polyandrous or Catty monogamous; once the idea had formed I made no
attempt to reject it.
Nor, for a very long time, did I accept it in any way except
academically. There are sensual values also in tantalizing, and if
these values are perverse I can only say I was still immature in
many ways. Additionally there must have been an element of fear of
Catty, the same fear which maintained a reserve against Barbara. For
the time being at least it seemed much pleasanter to talk lightly
and inconsequentially with her; to laugh and boast of my progress,
to discuss Haggershaven and the world, than to face our elementary
relationship.
My fourth winter at the haven had been an unusually mild one; spring
was early and wet. Kimi Agati who, with her children, annually gathered
quantities of mushrooms from the woodlots and pastures, claimed this
year’s supply was so large that she needed help, and conscripted
Catty and me. Catty protested she didnt know a mushroom from a
toadstool; Kimi immediately gave her a brief but thorough course in
thallophytology. “And Hodge will help you; he’s a country boy.”
“All right,” I said. “I make no guarantees though; I havent been a
country boy for a long time.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Kimi thoughtfully. “You two take the small
southeast woodlot; Fumio can have the big pasture, Eiko the small one;
Yosh and I will pick in the west woodlot.”
We carried a picnic lunch and nests of large baskets which were to be
put by the edge of the woodlots when full; late in the afternoon a cart
would pick them up and bring them in for drying. The air was warm even
under the leafless branches; the damp ground steamed cosily.
“Kimi was certainly right,” I commented. “Theyre thick as can be.”
“I don’t see....” She stooped gracefully; “Oh, is this one?”
“Yes,” I said, “And there, and there. Not that white thing over there
though.”
We filled our first baskets without moving more than a few yards. “At
this rate we’ll have them all full by noon.”
“And go back for more?”
“I suppose. Or just wander around.”
“Oh.... Look, Hodge—what’s this?”
“What?”
“This.” She showed me the puffball in her hands, looking inquiringly up.
I looked down casually; suddenly there was nothing casual between us
any more, nor ever would be again. I looked down at a woman I wanted
desperately, feverishly, immediately. The shock of desire was a weight
on my chest, expelling the air from my lungs.
“Goodness—is it some rare specimen or something?”
“Puffball,” I managed to say. “No good.”
I hardly spoke, I could hardly speak, as we filled our second baskets.
I was sure the pounding of my heart must show through my shirt, and
several times I thought I saw her looking curiously at me. “Let’s eat
now,” I suggested hoarsely.
I found a pine with low-hanging boughs and tore down enough to make
a dry, soft place to sit while Catty unpacked our picnic. “Here’s an
egg,” she said; “I’m starved.”
We ate; that is, she ate and I pretended to. I was half dazed, half
terrified. I watched her swift motions, the turn of her head, the
clean, sharp way she bit into the food, and averted my eyes every time
her glance crossed mine.
“Well,” she murmured at last; “I suppose we mustnt sit idle any longer.
Come on, lazy; back to work.”
“Catty,” I whispered. “Catty.”
“What is it, Hodge?”
“Wait.”
Obediently she paused. I reached over and took her in my arms. She
looked at me, not startled, but questioning. Just as my mouth reached
hers she moved slightly so that I kissed her cheek instead of her lips.
She did not struggle but lay passively, with the same questioning
expression.
I held her, pressing her against the pine boughs, and found her mouth.
I kissed her eyes and throat and mouth again. Her eyes stayed open and
she did not respond. I undid the top of her dress and pressed my face
between her breasts.
“Hodge.”
I paid no attention.
“Hodge, wait. Listen to me. If this is what you want you know I will
not try to stop you. But Hodge, be sure. Be very sure.”
“I want you, Catty.”
“Do you? Really want _me_, I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I want you.”
But it was already too late; I had made the fatal error of pausing to
listen. Angrily I moved away, picked up my basket and sullenly began
to search for mushrooms again. My hands still trembled and there was a
quiver in my legs. To complement my mood a cloud drifted across the sun
and the warm woods became chilly.
“Hodge.”
“Yes?”
“Please don’t be angry. Or ashamed. If you are I shall be sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
She laughed. “Oh my dear Hodge. Isnt that what men always say to women?
And isnt it always true?”
Suddenly the day was no longer spoiled. The tension melted and we went
on picking mushrooms with a new and fresh innocence.
After this I could no longer keep all thoughts of Catty out of the
intimacy with Barbara; now for the first time her jealousy had grounds.
I felt guilty toward both, not because I desired both, but because I
didnt totally desire either.
Now, years later, I condemn myself for the lost rapturous moments; at
the time I procrastinated and hesitated as though I had eternity in
which to make decisions. I was, as Tyss had said, the spectator type,
waiting to be acted upon, waiting for events to push me where they
would.
_16._ _OF VARIED SUBJECTS_
“I can’t think of anything more futile,” said Kimi, “than to be an
architect at this time in the United States.”
Her husband grinned. “You forgot to add, ‘of Oriental extraction.’”
Catty said, “Ive never understood. Of course I don’t remember too
well, but it seems to me Spanish people don’t have the same racial
fanaticism. Certainly the Portuguese, French and Dutch don’t. Even the
English are not quite so certain of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Only the
Americans, in the United States and the Confederate States too, judge
everything by color.”
“The case of the Confederacy is reasonably simple,” I said. “There are
about fifty million Confederate citizens and two hundred and fifty
million subjects. If white supremacy wasnt the cornerstone of Southron
policy a visitor couldnt tell the ruling class at a glance. Even as
it is he sometimes has a hard time, what with sunburn. It’s more
complicated here. Remember, we lost a war, the most important war in
our history, which was not unconnected with skin color.”
“In Japan,” said Hiro, “the lighter colored people, the Ainu, used to
be looked down on. Just as the Christians were once driven underground
at exactly the same time they themselves drove the Jews underground in
Spain and Portugal.”
“The Jews,” murmured Catty vaguely; “are there still Jews?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Several millions in Uganda-Eretz which the British
made a self-governing dominion back in 1933 under the first Labour
cabinet. And numbers most everywhere else, except in the German Union
since the massacres of 1905-1913.”
“Which were much more thorough than the anti-Oriental massacres in the
United States,” supplied Hiro.
“Much more thorough,” I agreed. “After all, scattered handfuls of
Asians were left alive here.”
“My parents and Kimi’s grandparents among them. How lucky they were to
be American Japanese instead of European Jews.”
“There are Jews in the United States,” announced Kimi. “I met one once.
She was a theosophist and told me I ought to learn the wisdom of the
East.”
“Very few of them. There were about two hundred thousand at the close
of the War of Southron Independence on both sides of the border. After
the election of 1872, General Grant’s Order Number Ten, expelling all
Jews from the Department of the Missouri, which had been rescinded
immediately by President Lincoln, was retroactively re-enacted by
President Butler, in spite of the fact that the United States no longer
controlled that territory. Henceforth Jews were treated like all other
colored peoples, Negroes, Orientals, Indians and South Sea Islanders:
as undesirables to be bribed to leave or to be driven out of the
country.”
“This is very dull stuff,” said Hiro. “Let me tell you about a hydrogen
reaction—”
“No, please,” begged Catty. “Let me listen to Hodge.”
“Good heavens,” exclaimed Kimi, “when do you ever do anything else? I’d
think you’d be tired by now.”
“She will marry him one of these days,” predicted Hiro; “then the poor
fellow will never be allowed to disguise a lecture as a conversation
again.”
Catty blushed, a deep red blush. I laughed to cover some constraint.
Kimi said, “Go-betweens are out of fashion; youre a century behind
times, Hiro. I suppose you think a woman ought to walk two paces
respectfully behind her husband. Actually, it’s only in the United
States women can’t vote or serve on juries.”
“Except in the state of Deseret,” I reminded her.
“That’s just bait; the Mormons gave us equality because they were
running short of women.”
“Not the way I heard it. The Latter Day Saints have been the nearest
thing to a prosperous group in the country. Women have been moving
there for years, it’s so easy to get married. All the grumbling about
polygamy has come from men who can’t stand the competition.”
Catty glanced at me, then looked away.
Had she, I wondered afterward, been thinking how Barbara would have
rejected my observation furiously? Or about that day in the spring? Or
about Hiro’s earlier comment? I thought about it, briefly, myself.
I also thought of how easily Catty fitted in with the Agatis and
contrasted it with the tension everyone would have felt if Barbara had
been there. One could love Barbara, or hate her or dislike her or even,
I supposed, be indifferent to her; the one thing impossible was to be
comfortable with her.
The final choice (was it final? I don’t know. I shall never know now)
hardened when I had been nearly six years at Haggershaven. It had been
“on” between Barbara and me for the longest stretch I could recall and
I had even begun to wonder if some paradoxical equilibrium had not been
established which would allow me to be her lover without vexation and
at the same time innocently enjoy a bond with Catty.
As always when the hostility between us slackened, Barbara spoke of
her work. In spite of such occasional confidences it was still not her
habit to talk of it with me. That intimacy was obviously reserved for
Ace, and I didnt begrudge him it, for after all he understood what it
was all about and I didnt. This time she was so full of the subject she
could not hold back, even from one who could hardly distinguish between
thermodynamics and kinesthetics.
“Hodge,” she said, gray eyes greenish with excitement, “I’m not going
to write a book.”
“That’s nice,” I answered idly. “New, too. Saves time, paper,
ink. Sets a different standard; from now on scholars will be known
as ‘Jones, who didnt write _The Theory of Tidal Waves’_,‘Smith,
unauthor of _Gas and Its Properties_,’ or ‘Backmaker, non-recorder of
_Gettysburg And After_.’”
“Silly. I only meant it’s become customary to spend a lifetime
formulating principles; then someone else comes along and puts your
principles into practice. It seems more sensible for me to demonstrate
my own conclusions instead of writing about them.”
“Yes, sure. Youre going to demonstrate ... uh ...?”
“Cosmic entity, of course. What do you think Ive been talking about?”
I tried to remember what she had said about cosmic entity. “You mean
youre going to try to turn matter into space or something like that?”
“Something like that. I intend to translate matter-energy into terms of
space-time.”
“Oh,” I said, “equations and symbols and all that.”
“I just said I wasnt going to write a book.”
“But how—” I started up as the impact struck me. “Youre going to ...” I
groped for words. “Youre going to build a ... an engine which will move
through time?”
“Putting it crudely. But close enough for a layman.”
“You once told me your work was theoretical. That you were no vulgar
mechanic.”
“I’ll become one.”
“Barbara, youre crazy! As a philosophical abstraction this theory of
yours is interesting—”
“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused the yokelry.”
“Barbara, listen to me. Midbin—”
“I havent the faintest interest in Oliver’s stodgy fantasies.”
“He has in yours though, and so have I. Don’t you see, this
determination of yours is based on the fantasy of going back through
time to—uh—injure your mother—”
“Oliver Midbin is a coarse, stupid, insensate lout. He has taught the
dumb to speak, but he’s too much of a fool to understand anyone of
normal intelligence. He has a set of idiotic theories about diseased
emotions and he fits all facts into them even if it means chopping them
up to do it or inventing new ones to piece them out. Injure my mother
indeed! I have no more interest in her than she ever had in me.”
“Ah, Barbara—”
“‘Ah Barbara,’” she mimicked. “Run along to your pompous windbag of a
Midbin or your oh-so-willing cow-eyed Spanish doxy—”
“Barbara, I’m talking as a friend. Leave Midbin and Catty and
personalities out of it and just look at it this way. Don’t you see
the difference between promulgating a theory and trying a practical
demonstration which will certainly appear to the world as going over
the borderline into charlatanism? Like a spiritualist medium or—”
“That’s enough! ‘Charlatan’! You unspeakable guttersnipe. What do you
know of anything beyond the seduction of cretins? Go back to your
trade, you errand boy!”
I seemed to remember that once before an incident had ended precisely
this way. “Barbara—”
Her hand caught me across my mouth. Then she strode away.
The fellows of Haggershaven were not enthusiastic for her project.
Even as she outlined it to them in more sober language than she had
to me it still sounded outlandish, like the recurrent idea of a
telegraph without wires or a rocket to the moon. Besides, 1950 was a
bad year. The war was coming closer; at the least, what was left of
the independence of the United States was likely to be extinguished.
Our energies had to be directed toward survival rather than new and
expensive ventures. Still, Barbara Haggerwells was a famous figure
commanding great respect, and she had cost them little so far, beyond
paper and pencils. Reluctantly the fellows voted an appropriation.
An old barn, not utilized for years, but still sound, was turned over
to Barbara, and Kimi was delighted to plan, design and supervise the
necessary changes. Ace and a group of the fellows attacked the job
vigorously, sawing and hammering, bolting iron beams together, piping
in gas for reflecting lights to enable them to work at night as well.
I believe I took no more interest than was inescapable as a fellow
of Haggershaven. I had no doubt that the money and labor were being
wasted, and I foresaw a terrible disappointment for Barbara when she
realized the impossibility of her project. For myself I did not think
she would play any further part of importance in my life.
We had not spoken since the quarrel, nor was there inclination on
either side toward coming together again. I could not guess at
Barbara’s feelings; mine were those of relief, unmixed with regret.
I would not have erased all there had been between us, but I was
satisfied to have it in the past. The raging desire vanished, gradually
replaced by an affection of sorts; I wanted no more of that tempestuous
passion, instead I felt aloofly protective and understanding.
For at last I was absorbed with Catty. The raw hunger of the moment
when I first realized I wanted her came back with renewed force, but
now other, more diffused feelings were equally part of my emotion. I
knew she could make me jealous as Barbara could not; at the same time I
could see tranquillity beyond turbulent wanting, a tranquillity never
possible with Barbara.
But my belated realization of what Catty meant to me was no reaction to
Barbara or connected with the breaking of that tie. The need for Catty
was engendered by Catty alone, and for Catty apart from anything I had
ever felt for another. It was in some ways an entirely new hunger,
as the man’s need transcends the youth’s. I understood now what her
question in the woodlot meant and at last I could truthfully answer.
She kissed me back, freely and strongly. “I love you, Hodge,” she said;
“I have loved you even through the bad dream of not being able to
speak.”
“When I was so unfeeling.”
“I loved you even when you were impatient; I tried to make myself
prettier for you. You know you have never said I was pretty.”
“You arent, Catty. Youre extraordinarily beautiful.”
“I think I would rather be pretty. Beauty sounds forbidding. Oh, Hodge,
if I did not love you so much I would not have stopped you that day.”
“I’m not sure I understand that.”
“No? Well, it is not necessary now. Sometimes I wondered if I had been
right after all, or if you would think it was because of Barbara.”
“Wasnt it?”
“No. I was never jealous of her. We Garcías are supposed to have
Morisco blood; perhaps I have the harem outlook of my dark Muslim
ancestors. Would you like me to be your black concubine?”
“No,” I said. “I’d like you to be my wife. In any colors you have.”
“Spoken with real gallantry; you will be a courtier yet, Hodge. But
that was a proposal, wasnt it?”
“Yes,” I answered grimly; “if you will consider one from me. I can’t
think of any good reason why you should.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I don’t
know what reason has to do with it. It is what I always intended; that
was why I blushed so when Hiro Agati blurted out what everyone could
see.”
Later I said, “Catty, can you ever forgive me for the wasted years? You
say you werent jealous of Barbara, but surely if she and I—that is ...
anyway, forgive me.”
“Dear Hodge, there’s nothing to forgive. Love is not a business
transaction, nor a case at law in which justice is sought, nor a reward
for having good qualities. I understand you, Hodge, better I think than
you understand yourself. You are not satisfied with what is readily
obtained, otherwise you would have been content back in—what is the
name?—Wappinger Falls. I have known this for a long time and I could,
I think—you must excuse my vanity—have interested you at any moment by
pretending fickleness. Just as I could have held you if I had given in
that day. Besides, I think you will make a better husband for realizing
you could not deal with Barbara.”
I can’t say I entirely enjoyed this speech. I felt, in fact, rather
humiliated, or at least healthily humbled. Which was no doubt what she
intended, and as it should be. I never had the idea she was frail or
insipid.
Nor did Catty’s explanation of a harem outlook satisfactorily account
for the sudden friendliness of the two women after the engagement was
announced. That Barbara should soften so toward a successful rival was
incomprehensible and also disturbing.
Because both were fully occupied they actually spent little time
together, but Catty visited the workshop, as they called the converted
barn, whenever she had the chance and her real admiration for Barbara
grew so that I heard too often of her genius, courage and imagination.
I could hardly ask Catty to forego society I had so recently found
enchanting nor establish a taboo against mention of a name I had lately
whispered with ardor; still I felt a little foolish, and not quite as
important as I might otherwise have thought myself.
Not that Catty didnt have proper respect and enthusiasm for my
fortunes. I had completed my notes for _Chancellorsville to the
End_—that is, I had a mass of clues, guideposts, keys, ideas, and
emphases which would serve as skeleton for a work which might take
years to write—and Catty was the audience to whom I explained and
expounded and used as a prototype of the reader I might reach. Volume
one was roughly drafted, and we were to be married as soon as it
was finished, shortly after my thirtieth and Catty’s twenty-fourth
birthday. There was little doubt the book would bring an offer from one
of the great Confederate universities, but Catty was firm for a cottage
like the Agatis’, and I could not conceive of being foolish enough to
leave Haggershaven.
From Catty’s talk I knew Barbara was running into increasing
difficulties now the workshop was complete and actual construction
begun of what was referred to, with unnecessary crypticism I thought,
as HX-1. The impending war created scarcities, particularly of
such materials as steel and copper, of which latter metal HX-1
seemed inordinately greedy. I was not surprised when the fellows
apologetically refused Barbara a new appropriation.
Next day Catty said, “Hodge, you know the haven wouldnt take my money.”
“And quite right too. Let the rest of us put in what we get; we owe it
to the haven anyway. But the debt is the other way round in your case
and you should keep your independence.”
“Hodge, I’m going to give it all to Barbara for her HX-1.”
“What? Oh, nonsense!”
“Is it any more nonsensical for me to put in money I didnt do anything
to get than for her and Ace to put in time and knowledge and labor?”
“Yes, because she’s got a crazy idea and Ace has never been quite sane
where she’s concerned. If you go ahead and do this you’ll be as crazy
as they are.”
When Catty laughed I remembered with a pang the long months when that
lovely sound had been strangled by terror inside her. I also thought
with shame of my own failure; had I appreciated her when her need was
greatest I might have eased the long, painful ordeal of restoring her
voice.
“Perhaps I am crazy. Do you think the haven would make me a fellow on
that basis? Anyway, I believe in Barbara even if the rest of you don’t.
Not that I’m criticizing; you were right to be cautious. You have more
to consider than demonstration of the truth of a theory which can’t
conceivably have a material value; I don’t have to take any such long
view. Anyway I believe in her. Or perhaps I feel I owe her something.
With my money she can finish her project. I only tell you this because
you may not want to marry me under the circumstances.”
“You think I’m marrying you for your money?”
She smiled. “Dear Hodge. You are in some ways so young; I hear the
wounded dignity in your voice. No, I know very well you arent marrying
me for money, that it never occurred to you it might be a good idea.
That would be too practical, too grown up, too un-Hodgelike. I think
you might not want to marry a woman who’d give all her money away.
Especially to Barbara Haggerwells.”
“Catty, are you doing this absurd thing to get rid of me? Or to test
me?”
This time she again laughed loud. “Now I’m sure you will marry me after
all and turn out to be a puzzled but amenable husband. You are my true
Hodge, who studies a war because he can’t understand anything simpler
or subtler.”
She wasnt to be dissuaded from the quixotic gesture. I might not
understand subtleties but I was sure I understood Barbara well enough.
Foreseeing her request for more funds would be turned down, she must
have cultivated Catty deliberately in order to use her. Now she’d
gotten what she wanted I confidently expected her to drop Catty or
revert to her accustomed virulence.
She did neither. If anything the amity grew. Catty’s vocabulary added
words like “magnet,” “coil,” “induction,” “particle,” “light-year,”
“continuum” and many others either incomprehensible or uninteresting to
me. Breathlessly she described the strange, asymmetric structure taking
shape in the workshop, while my mind was busy with Ewell’s Corps and
parrott guns and the weather chart of southern Pennsylvania for July,
1863.
The great publishing firm of Ticknor, Harcourt & Knopf contracted for
my book—there was no publisher in the United States equipped to handle
it—and sent me a sizable advance in Confederate dollars which became
even more sizable converted into our money. I read the proofs of volume
one in a state of semiconsciousness, sent the inevitable telegram
changing a footnote on page 99, and waited for the infuriating mails to
bring me my complimentary copies. The day after they arrived (with a
horrifying typographical error right in the middle of page 12), Catty
and I were married.
Dear Catty. Dear, dear Catty.
With the approval of the fellows we used part of the publisher’s
advance for a honeymoon. We spent it—that part of it in which we
had time for anything except being alone together—going over nearby
battlefields of the last year of the War of Southron Independence.
It was Catty’s first excursion away from Haggershaven since the
night I brought her there. Looking at the world outside through
her perceptions, at once insulated and made hypersensitive by her
new status, I was shocked afresh at the harsh indifference, the
dull poverty, the fear, brutality, frenzy and cynicism highlighting
the strange resignation to impending fate which characterized our
civilization. It was not a case of eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow
we die; rather it was, let us live meanly and trust to luck—tomorrow’s
luck is bound to be worse.
We settled down in the autumn of 1951 in a cottage designed by
Kimi and built by the fellows during our absence. It gave on the
Agatis’ cherished garden and we were both moved by this evidence of
love, particularly after what we had seen and heard on our trip. Mr
Haggerwells made a speech, filled with classical allusions, welcoming
us back as though we had been gone for years; Midbin looked anxiously
into Catty’s face as though to assure himself I had not, in my new role
as husband, treated her so ill as to bring on a new emotional upset;
and the other fellows made appropriate gestures. Even Barbara stopped
by long enough to comment that the house was ridiculously small, but
she supposed Kimi’s movable partitions helped.
I immediately began working on volume two and Catty took up her sewing
again. She also resumed her visits to Barbara’s workshop; again I heard
detailed accounts of my former sweetheart’s progress. HX-1 was to be
completed in the late spring, or early summer. I was not surprised at
Barbara’s faith surviving actual construction of the thing, but that
such otherwise level-headed people as Ace and Catty could envisage
breathlessly the miracles about to happen was beyond me. Ace, even
after all these years, was still bemused—but Catty ...?
Just before the turn of the year I got the following letter:
LEE & WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Department of History
Leesburg, District of Calhounia, CSA.
December 19, 1951
Mr. Hodgins M. Backmaker
“Haggershaven”
York,
Pennsylvania, USA.
_Sir_:
_On page 407 of_ Chancellorsville to the End, _volume I_, Turning
Tides, _you write, “Chronology and topography—timing and the use of
space—were to be the decisive factors, rather than population and
industry. Stuart’s detachment, which might have proved disastrous,
turned out extraordinarily fortunate for Lee, as we shall see in the
next volume. Of course the absence of cavalry might have been decisive
if the Round Tops had not been occupied by the Southrons on July
1....”_
_Now, sir, evidently in your forthcoming analysis of Gettysburg you
hold (as I presume most Yankees do) to the theory of fortuitousness.
We Southrons naturally ascribe the victory to the supreme genius of
General Lee, regarding the factors of time and space not as forces in
themselves but as opportunities for the display of his talents._
_Needless to say, I hardly expect you to change your opinions, rooted
as they must be in national pride. I only ask that before you commit
them, and the conclusions shaped by them, to print, you satisfy
yourself as an historian, of their validity in this particular case.
In other words, sir, as one of your readers (and may I add, one who
has enjoyed your work), I should like to be assured that you have
studied this classic battle as carefully as you have the engagements
described in volume I._
_With earnest wishes for your success,
I remain, sir
Cordially yours,
Jefferson Davis Polk_
This letter from Dr Polk, the foremost historian of our day, author
of the monumental biography, _The Great Lee_, produced a crisis in
my life. Had the Confederate professor pointed out flaws in my work,
or even reproached me for undertaking it at all without adequate
equipment I would, I trust, have acknowledged the reproof and continued
to the best of my ability. But this letter was an accolade. Without
condescension Dr Polk admitted me to the ranks of serious historians,
only asking me to consider the depth of my evaluation.
Truth is, I was not without increasing doubts of my own. Doubts I had
not allowed to rise to the surface of my mind and disturb my plans.
Polk’s letter brought them into the open.
I had read everything available. I had been over the ground between the
Maryland line, South Mountain, Carlisle and the haven until I could
draw a detail map from memory. I had turned up diaries, letters and
accounts which had not only never been published, but which were not
known to exist until I hunted them down. I had so steeped myself in
the period I was writing about that sometimes the two worlds seemed
interchangeable and I could live partly in one, partly in the other.
Yet with all this, I was not sure I had the whole story, even in the
sense of wholeness that historians, knowing they can never collect
every detail, accept. I was not sure I had the grand scene in
perfectly proper perspective. I admitted to myself the possibility
that I had perhaps been too rash, too precipitate, in undertaking
_Chancellorsville to the End_ so soon. I knew the shadowy sign, the
one which says in effect, _You are ready_, had not been given. My
confidence was shaken.
Was the fault in me, in my temperament and character, rather than in my
preparation and use of materials? Was I drawing back from committing
myself, from acting, from doing? That I had written the first volume
was no positive answer, for it was but the fraction of a whole deed; if
I withdrew now I could still preserve my standing as an onlooker.
But not to act was itself an action and answered neither Dr Polk nor
myself. Besides, what could I do? The entire work was contracted for.
The second volume was promised for delivery some eighteen months hence.
My notes for it were complete; this was no question of revising, but
of wholly re-examining, revaluing and probably discarding them for an
entirely new start. It was a job so much bigger than the original,
one so discouraging, I felt I couldnt face it. It would be corrupt to
produce a work lacking absolute conviction and cowardly to produce none.
Catty responded to my awkward recapitulation in a way at once
heartening and strange. “Hodge,” she said, “youre changing and
developing, and for the better, even though I love you as you were.
Don’t be afraid to put the book aside for a year—ten years if you have
to. You must do it so it will satisfy yourself; never mind what the
publishers or the public say. But Hodge, you mustnt, in your anxiety,
or your foolish fear of passiveness, you mustnt try any shortcuts.
Promise me that.”
“I don’t know what youre talking about, Catty dear. There are no
shortcuts in writing history.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “Remember that, Hodge. Oh, remember it.”
_17._ _HX-1_
I could not bring myself to follow the promptings of my conscience and
Catty’s advice, nor could I use my notes as though Dr Polk’s letter
had never come to shatter my complacency. As a consequence—without
deliberately committing myself to abandon the book—I worked not at
all, thus adding to my feelings of guilt and unworthiness. The tasks
assigned by the fellows for the general welfare of the haven were
not designed to take a major part of my time, and though I produced
all sorts of revolutions in the stables and barns, I still managed
to wander about, fretful and irritable, keeping Catty from her work,
interrupting the Agatis and Midbin—I could not bring myself to discuss
my problems with him—and generally making myself a nuisance. Inevitably
I found my way into Barbara’s workshop.
She and Ace had done a thorough job on the old barn. I thought I
recognized Kimi’s touch in the structural changes of the walls, the
strong beams and rows of slanted-in windows which admitted light and
shut out glare, but the rest must have been shaped by Barbara’s needs.
Iron beams held up a catwalk running in a circle about ten feet
overhead. On the catwalk there were at intervals what appeared to be
batteries of telescopes, all pointed inward and downward at the center
of the floor. Just inside the columns was a continuous ring of clear
glass, perhaps four inches in diameter, fastened to the beams with
glass hooks. Closer inspection proved the ring not to be in one piece
but in sections, ingeniously held together with glass couplings. Back
from this circle, around the walls, were various engines, all enclosed
except for dial faces and regulators and all dwarfed by a mammoth one
towering in one corner. From the roof was suspended a large, polished
reflector.
There was no one in the barn and I wandered about, cautiously avoiding
the mysterious apparatus. For a moment I meditated, basely perhaps,
that all this had been paid for with my wife’s money. Then I berated
myself, for Catty owed all to the haven, as I did. The money might have
been put to better use, but there was no guarantee it would have been
more productive allotted to astronomy or zoology. During eight years
I’d seen many promising schemes come to nothing.
“Like it, Hodge?”
Barbara had come up, unheard, behind me. This was the first time we had
been alone together since our break, two years before.
“It looks like a tremendous amount of work,” I evaded.
“It was a tremendous amount of work.” For the first time I noticed
that her cheeks were flushed. She had lost weight and there were deep
hollows beneath her eyes. “This construction has been the least of it.
Now it’s done. Or has begun. Depending how you look at it.”
“All done?”
She nodded, triumph accenting the strained look on her face. “First
test today.”
“Oh well ... in that case—”
“Don’t go, Hodge. Please. I meant to ask you and Catty to the more
formal trial, but now youre here for the preliminary I’m glad. Ace and
Father and Oliver will be along in a minute.”
“Midbin?”
The familiar arrogance showed briefly. “I insisted. It’ll be nice
to show him the mind can produce something besides fantasies and
hysterical hallucinations.”
I started to speak, then swallowed my words. The dig at Catty was
insignificant compared with the supreme confidence, the abnormal
assurance prompting invitations to witness a test which could only
reveal the impossibility of applying her cherished theories. I felt
an overwhelming pity. “Surely,” I said at last, seeking to make some
preparation for the disillusionment certain to come, “surely you don’t
expect it to work the first time?”
“Why not? There are sure to be adjustments to be made, allowances
for erratic chronology caused by phenomena like the pull of comets
and so forth. There might even have to be major alterations, though
I doubt it. It may be some time before Ace can set me down at the
exact year, month, day, hour and minute agreed upon. But the fact of
space-time-energy-matter correspondence can just as well be established
this afternoon as next year.”
She was unbelievably at ease for someone whose lifework was about to be
weighed. I have shown more nervousness discussing a disputed date with
the honorary secretary of a local historical society.
“Sit down,” she invited; “there’s nothing to do or see till Ace comes.
Ive missed you, Hodge.”
I felt this was a dangerous remark, and wished I’d stayed far away from
the workshop. I hooked my leg over a stool—there were no chairs—and
coughed to hide the fact I was afraid to answer, Ive missed you too;
and afraid not to.
“Tell me about your own work, Hodge. Catty says youre having
difficulties.”
I was faintly annoyed with Catty, but whether for confiding in Barbara
at all or specifically for revealing something unheroic, I didnt
stop to consider. At any rate this annoyance diluted my feeling of
disloyalty for conversing with Barbara at all. Or it may be the old,
long-established bond—I almost wrote, of sympathy, but it was so much
more complex than the word indicates—was reawakened by proximity
and put me in the mood to tell my troubles. It is even possible I
had the altruistic purpose of fortifying Barbara against inevitable
disappointment on a misery-loves-company basis. Be that as it may, I
found myself pouring out the whole story.
She jumped up and took my hands in hers. Her eyes were gray and warm.
“Hodge! It’s wonderful—don’t you see?”
“Oh....” I was completely confused. “I ... uh....”
“The solution. The answer. The means. Look: now you can go back, back
to the past in your own person. You can see everything with your own
eyes instead of relying on accounts of what other people said happened.”
“But ... but—”
“You can verify every fact, study every move, every actor. You can
write history as no one ever did before, for youll be writing as a
witness, yet with the perspective of a different period. Youll be
taking the mind of the present, with its judgment and its knowledge of
the patterns, back to receive the impressions of the past. It almost
seems HX-1 was devised especially for this.”
There was no doubt she believed, that she was really and unselfishly
glad her work could aid mine. I was overcome by pity, helpless
to soften the disillusionment so soon to come and filled with an
irrational hatred of the thing she had built and which was about to
destroy her.
I was saved from having to mask my emotions by the arrival of her
father, Ace, and Midbin. Thomas Haggerwells began tensely, “Barbara,
Ace tells me you intend to try out this—this machine on yourself. I
can’t believe you would be so foolhardy.”
Midbin didnt wait for her to reply. I thought with something of
a shock, Midbin has gotten old; I never noticed it. “Listen to
me. There’s no point now in saying part of your mind realizes the
impossibility of this demonstration and that it’s willing for you to
annihilate yourself in the attempt and so escape from conflicts which
have no resolution. Although it’s something you must be at least partly
aware of. But consider objectively the danger involved in meddling with
unknown natural laws—”
Ace Dorn, who looked as strained as they in contrast to Barbara’s ease,
growled, “Let’s go.”
She smiled reassuringly at us. “Please, Father, don’t worry; there’s no
danger. And Oliver....”
Her smile was almost mischievous and very unlike the Barbara I had
known. “Oliver, HX-1 owes more to you than you will ever know.”
She ducked under the transparent ring and walked to the center of the
floor, glancing up at the reflector, moving an inch or two to stand
directly beneath it. “The controls are already adjusted to minus
fifty-two years and a hundred and fifty-three days,” she informed us
conversationally. “Purely arbitrary. One date is good as another, but
January 1, 1900 is an almost automatic choice. I’ll be gone sixty
seconds. Ready, Ace?”
“Ready.” He had been slowly circling the engines, checking the dials.
He took his place before the largest, the monster in the corner,
holding a watch in his hand. “Three forty-three and ten,” he announced.
Barbara was consulting her own watch. “Three forty-three and ten,” she
confirmed. “Make it at three forty-three and twenty.”
“OK. Good luck.”
“You might at least try it on an animal first,” burst out Midbin, as
Ace twirled the valve under his hand. The transparent ring glowed, the
metal reflector threw back a dazzling light. I blinked. When I opened
my eyes the light was gone and the center of the workshop was empty.
No one moved. Ace frowned over his watch. I stared at the spot where
Barbara had stood. I don’t think my mind was working; I had the feeling
my lungs and heart certainly were not. I was a true spectator, with all
faculties save sight and hearing suspended.
“ ... on an animal first.” Midbin’s voice was querulous.
“Oh, God ...” muttered Thomas Haggerwells.
Ace said casually—too casually, “The return is automatic. Set
beforehand for duration. Thirty more seconds.”
Midbin said, “She is ... this is....” He sat down on a stool and bent
his head almost to his knees.
Mr Haggerwells groaned, “Ace, Ace—you should have stopped her.”
“Ten seconds,” said Ace firmly.
Still I couldnt think with any clarity. She had stood there; then she
was gone. What ...? Midbin was right: we had let her go to destruction.
Certainly more than a minute had passed by now.
The ring glowed and the brilliant light was reflected. “It did, oh, it
did!” Barbara cried. “It did!”
She stood perfectly still, overwhelmed. Then she came out of the
circle and kissed Ace, who patted her gently on the back. I suddenly
noticed the pain of holding my breath and released a tremendous
sigh. Barbara kissed her father and Midbin—who was still shaking his
head—and, after the faintest hesitation, me. Her lips were ice-cold.
The shock of triumph made her voluble. Striding up and down, she spoke
with extraordinary rapidity, without pause, almost a little drunkenly.
In her excitement her words cluttered her tongue; from time to time she
had to go back and repeat a phrase or sentence to make it intelligible.
When the light flashed, she too involuntarily closed her eyes. She had
felt a strange, terrifying weightlessness, an awful disembodiment,
for which she had been unprepared. She thought she had not actually
been unconscious, even for an instant, though she had an impression
of ceasing to exist as a unique collection of memories, and of being
somehow dissolved. Then she had opened her eyes.
At first she was shocked to find the barn as it had been all her life,
abandoned and dusty. Then she realized she had indeed moved through
time; the disappearance of the engines and reflector showed she had
gone back to the unremodelled workshop.
Now she saw the barn was not quite as she had known it, even in her
childhood, for while it was unquestionably abandoned, it had evidently
not long been so. The thick dust was not so thick as she remembered,
the sagging cobwebs not so dense. Straw was still scattered on the
floor; it had not yet been entirely carried away by mice or inquisitive
birds. Alongside the door hung bits of harness beyond repair, some
broken bridles, and a faded calendar on which the ink of the numerals
1897 was still bright.
The minute she had allotted this first voyage seemed fantastically
short and incredibly long. All the paradoxes she had brushed aside as
of no immediate concern now confronted her. Since she had gone back to
a time before she was born, she must have existed as a visitor prior
to her own conception; she could presumably be present during her own
childhood and growth, and by making a second and third visit, multiply
herself as though in facing mirrors, so that an infinite number of
Barbara Haggerwells could occupy a single segment of time.
A hundred other parallel speculations raced through her mind without
interfering with her rapid and insatiable survey of the commonplace
features of the barn, features which could never really be commonplace
to her since they proved all her speculations so victoriously right.
Suddenly she shivered with the bitter cold and burst into
teeth-chattering laughter. She had made such careful plans to visit on
the First of January—and had never thought to take along a warm coat.
She looked at her watch; only twenty seconds had passed. The temptation
to defy her agreement with Ace not to step outside the tiny circle
of HX-1’s operating field on the initial experiment was almost
irresistible. She longed to touch the fabric of the past, to feel
the worn boards of the barn, to handle as well as look. Again her
thoughts whirled with speculation; again the petty moment stretched and
contracted. She spent eternity and instantaneity at once.
Suppose.... But she had a thousand suppositions and questions. Was she
really herself in the flesh, or in some mental projection? A pinch
would do no good; that might be projection also. Would she be visible
to the people of the time, or was she a ghost from the future? Oh,
there was so much to learn, so much to encounter!
When the moment of return came, she again experienced the feeling of
dissolution, followed immediately by the light. When she opened her
eyes she was back.
Midbin rubbed his belly and then his thinning hair. “Hallucination,” he
propounded at last; “a logical, consistent hallucination. Answer to an
overriding wish.”
“You mean Barbara was never gone?” asked Ace. “Was she visible to
you—or Mr H or Hodge—during that minute?”
“Illusion,” said Midbin; “group illusion brought on by suggestion and
anxiety.”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed Barbara. “Unless youre accusing Ace and me of
faking youll have to account for what you just called the logical
consistency of it. Your group illusion and my individual hallucination
fitting so neatly together.”
Midbin recovered some of his poise. “The two phenomena are separate,
connected only by some sort of emotional hypnosis. Certainly your
daydream of having been back in 1900 is an emotionally induced
aberration.”
“And your daydream that I wasn’t here for a minute?”
“The eyes are quickly affected by the feelings. Note tears, ‘seeing
red’ and so forth.”
“Very well, Oliver. The only thing to do is to let you try HX-1
yourself.”
“Hay, my turn’s supposed to be next,” protested Ace.
“Of course. But no one is going to use it again today. Tomorrow
morning. Bring Catty, Hodge, if she wants to come, but please don’t
say anything to anyone else till weve made further demonstrations,
otherwise we’ll be besieged by fellows wanting to take short jaunts
into popular years.”
I had little inclination to discuss what had happened with anyone, even
Catty. Not that I shared Midbin’s theory of nothing material having
taken place; I knew I’d not seen Barbara for sixty seconds and I was
convinced her account of them was accurate. What confused me was the
shock to my preconceptions involved in her proof. If time and space,
matter and energy were the same, as fog and ice and water are the same,
then I—the physical I at least—and Catty, the world and the universe
must be, as Enfandin had insisted, mere illusion. In that sense Midbin
had been right.
I went furtively to the workshop next day without telling Catty, as
though we were all engaged in some dark necromancy, some sacrilegious
rite. Apparently I was the only one who had spent an anxious night; Mr
Haggerwells looked proud, Barbara looked satisfied, Ace cocky, and even
Midbin, for no understandable reason, benign.
“All here?” inquired Ace. “I’m eager as a fox in a hen-house. Three
minutes in 1885. Why 1885? I don’t know; a year when nothing much
happened, I suppose. Ready, Barbara?”
He returned to report he had found the barn well occupied by both
cattle and fowl, and been scared stiff of discovery when the dogs set
up a furious barking.
“That pretty well settles the question of corporeal presence,” I
remarked.
“Not at all,” said Mr Haggerwells unexpectedly. “Dogs are notoriously
psychic.”
“Ah,” cried Ace, bringing his hands from behind his back; “look at
this. I could hardly have picked it up with psychic feelers.”
“This” was a newlaid egg, sixty-seven years old. Or was it? Trips in
time are confusing that way.
Barbara was upset, more than I thought warranted. “Oh, Ace, how could
you be so foolish? We darent be anything but spectators, as unseen as
possible.”
“Why? Ive a notion to court my grandmother and wind up as my own
grandfather.”
“Don’t be stupid. The faintest indication of our presence, the
slightest impingement on the past, may change the whole course of
events. We have no way of knowing what actions have no consequences—if
there can be any. Goodness knows what your idiocy with the egg has
done. It’s absolutely essential not to betray ourselves in any way.
Please remember this in future.”
“You mean, ‘Remember this in past,’ don’t you?”
“Ace, this isnt a joke.”
“It isn’t a wake either. I can’t see the harm in bringing back tangible
proof. Loss of one egg isnt going to send the prices up for 1885
and cause retroactive inflation. Youre making a mountain out of a
molehill—or an omelette out of a single egg.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Oliver, I hope you won’t be so foolish.”
“Since I don’t expect to arrive in, say, 1820, I can safely promise
neither to steal eggs nor court Ace’s female ancestors.”
He was gone for five minutes. The barn had apparently not yet been
built in 1820 and he found himself on a slight rise in a field of wild
hay. The faint snick of scythes, and voices not too far off, indicated
mowers. He dropped to the ground. His view of the past was restricted
to tall grass and some persistent ants who explored his face and hands
until the time was up and he returned with broken spears of ripe hay
clinging to his clothes.
“At least that’s what I imagined I saw,” he concluded.
“Did you imagine these?” asked Ace, pointing to the straws.
“Probably. It’s at least as likely as time-travel.”
“But what about corroboration? Your experience, and Barbara’s and Ace’s
confirm each other. Doesnt that mean anything?”
“Certainly. Only I’m not prepared to say what. The mind can do
anything; anything at all. Create boils and cancers. Why not ants and
grass? I don’t know. I don’t know....”
After more fruitless argument, he and I left the workshop. I was again
reminded of Enfandin—Why should I believe my eyes? I felt though that
Midbin was carrying skepticism beyond rational limits; Barbara’s case
was proved.
“Yes, yes,” he answered when I said this. “Why not?”
I puzzled over his reply. Then he added abruptly, “No one can help her
now.”
_18._ _THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME_
Gently, Catty said, “Ive never understood why you cut yourself off from
the past the way you have, Hodge.”
“Ay? What do you mean?”
“Well, youve not communicated with your father or mother since you left
home, fourteen years ago. You say you had a dear friend in the man from
Haiti, yet youve never tried to find out whether he lived or died.”
“Oh, that way. I thought you meant ... something different.” By not
taking advantage of Barbara’s offer I certainly was cutting myself off
from the past.
“Yes?”
“Well, I guess more or less everyone at the haven has done the same
thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean. You for one—”
“But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All my life is here.”
“Well, so is mine.”
“Ah, dear Hodge; it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”
“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere
knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only
escape from wretchedness was in a miracle—usually translated as a
winning number in the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of
utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a
luxury my mother and father couldnt afford.”
“Perhaps not; but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have
said applies to Enfandin.”
I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callousness must be
apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered, had once asked me
much the same questions Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to
my own satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible
for me to take the simple steps to discover what had happened to my
friend? By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia
years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month
between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the past take
care of itself,” I muttered.
“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”
“Catty, I can’t.”
The conversation made me nervous and fidgetty. It also made me remember
much I preferred to let fade: the Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit
pesetas.... All the evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did
nothing, literally nothing, all his life, then he might be free of
culpability. Manichaeism, said Enfandin. No absolution.
My idleness, I knew very well, heightened all these feelings of
degradation. Were I able to continue in the happy, cocksure way I
had gone about my note-gathering and the writing of volume one, I
would have neither the time nor susceptibility to be plagued by this
disquiet. As it was I seemed to be able to do nothing but act as
audience for what was going on in the workshop.
With childish eagerness Barbara and Ace explored HX-1’s possibilities
for the next two months. They quickly learned that its range was
limited to little more than a century, though this limit was subject
to slight variations. When they tried to operate beyond this range
the translation simply didnt take place, though the same feeling of
dissolution occurred. When the light faded they were still in the
present. Midbin’s venture into the hayfield had been a freak, possibly
due to peculiar weather conditions at both ends of the journey. They
set 1850 as a safe limit, with an undefined marginal zone further back
which was not to be hazarded lest conditions change during the journey
and the traveler be lost.
Why this limit existed at all was a matter of dispute between them,
a dispute of which I must admit I understood little. Barbara spoke
of subjective factors which seemed to mean that HX-1 worked slightly
differently in the case of each person it transported; Ace of magnetic
fields and power relays, which didnt mean anything to me at all. The
only thing they agreed on was that the barrier was not immutable; HX-2
or 3 or 20, if they were ever built, would undoubtedly overcome it.
Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed, probably
for similar reasons, whatever they were. Here again they disputed, Ace
holding an HX could be built for this purpose, Barbara insisting that
new equations would have to be worked out.
They confirmed their tentative theory that time spent in the past
consumed an equal amount of time in the present; they could not return
to a point a minute after departure when they had been gone for an
hour. As near as I could understand, this was because duration was
set in the present. In order to come back to a time-point not in
correspondence with the period actually spent, another HX, or at least
another set of controls, would have to be taken into the past. And then
they would not work since HX-1 could not penetrate the future.
The most inconvenient circumscription was the inability of one person
to visit the same past moment twice. When the attempt was made the
feeling of dissolution did not occur, the light went on and off with no
effect upon the would-be traveler standing beneath it. Here Barbara’s
“subjective factor” was triumphant, but why, or how it worked, they
did not know. Nor did they know what would happen to a traveler who
attempted to overlap by being already on the spot prior to a previous
visit; it was too dangerous to try.
Within these limits they roamed almost at will. Ace spent a full
week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia, enjoying the
enthusiasm and fury of the presidential campaign. Knowing President
Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms,
he found it hard indeed to obey Barbara’s stricture and not cover
confident Whig bets on Major McKinley.
Though both sampled the war years they brought back nothing useful to
me, no information or viewpoint I couldnt have got from any of a score
of books. Lacking historians’ interests or training, their tidbits were
those of curious onlookers, not probing chroniclers. It was tantalizing
to know that Barbara had seen Secretary Stanton at the York depot or
that Ace had overheard a farmer say casually that Southron scouts
had stopped at his place the day before and they had thought neither
incident worth investigating further.
I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which
always ended inconclusively. _Why not?_ I asked. _Surely this is the
unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for an historian
to check back at will, to select a particular moment for personal
scrutiny, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and
the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing specifically what to look for.
Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?_
Against this I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The “subjective factor”
in HX-1? The superstitious notion that I might be tampering with a
taboo, with matters forbidden to human shortcomings? _You mustnt try
any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge._ Well, Catty was a darling. She
was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. On what
grounds did she protest? Woman’s intuition? A respectable phrase, but
what did it mean? And didnt Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1,
have womanly intuition also?
A half-dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction of my
thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift to another topic. What
was the use of upsetting her? _Promise me that, Hodge._ But I had not
promised. This was something I had to settle for myself.
What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything to do with
the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their
manifestations and like a savage fear the spirit imprisoned in what I
didnt understand? (But HX-1 _did_ have subjective factors.) I had never
thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-yearold
professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill.
I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.” And once
I had called him out of my memory I couldnt escape his familiar,
sardonic, interminable argument. _Why are you fussing yourself,
Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don’t
you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted
according to it an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite
number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing to worry about.
Free will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide
under the impression that you have decided._
My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I
cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of
his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment
like this.
Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed
to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made.
Not by mechanistic forces, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my
own desire.
And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, René Enfandin.
_Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold
fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking,_ What is truth? _was
blind. But you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man
has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge?
That is the only question._
Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the
determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I
could not shut her out of so important a move. I told myself I could
not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite
the fact others had frequently used HX-1, for my object could not be
accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure she would be
sick with apprehension during the days I would be gone. No doubt this
was all true, but I also remembered, _Promise me, Hodge_....
I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided
the only way to face my problem was to go to Gettysburg and spend
three or four days going over the actual field. Here, I explained
unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion
whether to scrap all my work and start afresh, or not.
Her faintly oblique eyes were inscrutable. She pretended to believe me
and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon
on battlefields.
Would it be possible? Two people had never stood under the reflector
together, but surely it would work? I was tempted, but I could not
subject Catty to the risk, however slight. Besides, how could I explain?
“But Catty, with you there I’d be thinking of you instead of the
problem.”
“Ah, Hodge, have we already been married so long you must get away from
me to think?”
“No matter how long, that time will never come. Perhaps I’m wrong,
Catty. It’s just a feeling I have.”
Her look was tragic with understanding. “You must do as you think
right. Don’t ... don’t be gone too long, my dear.”
I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes which bore
no mark of any fashion and might pass as current wear among the poorer
classes in any era of the past hundred years. I put a packet of dried
beef in my pocket and started for the workshop.
As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity, at
all the to-do I’d made over lying to Catty. This was but the first
excursion; I planned others for the months after Gettysburg. There was
no reason why she shouldnt accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as
my conscience eased and I even congratulated myself on my skill in not
having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I began to whistle,
never a habit of mine, as I made my way along the path to the workshop.
Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe;
her eyes were green as they always were when she was exultant. “Well,
Hodge?”
“Well, Barbara, I....”
“Have you told Catty?”
“Not exactly. How did you know?”
“I knew before you did, Hodge. After all, we’re not strangers. All
right. How long do you want to stay?”
“Four days.”
“That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better try a few
sample minutes?”
“Why? Ive seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts.
I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you
can invariably pick the hour of arrival?”
“Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll it be?”
“About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want to come back on
the night of July Fourth.”
“Youll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The
dials are set on seconds.”
“All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”
“Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”
“I don’t know about perfect—”
“Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control clock.” She
handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece which had two independent
faces side by side. “We had a couple made like this; the duplicate
dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One
shows 1952 Haggershaven time.”
“Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds,” I said.
“Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won’t be able to reset the
first dial—but for goodness sake remember to keep it wound—and set the
second for ... 11:54, zero. That means in six minutes youll leave, to
arrive at midnight. Remember to keep that one wound too, for youll
go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever else
happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight—allow yourself some
leeway—by midnight, July Fourth. I don’t want to have to go wandering
around 1863 looking for you.”
“You won’t. I’ll be here.”
“Five minutes. Now then, food.”
“I have some,” I answered, slapping my pocket.
“Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I suppose it
won’t hurt to drink the water if youre not observed, but avoid their
food. One never knows what chain might be started by the casual
theft—or purchase, if you had enough old coins—of a loaf of bread. The
possibilities are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress
on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the
future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace doesnt understand, and I
tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action
may begin a series of disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be
heard. Make your trip as a ghost.”
“Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the
North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.”
“Four minutes. It’s not a joke, Hodge.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I understand.”
She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head and began making
her round of the engines, adjusting the dials. I slid under the
glass ring as I’d so often seen her do and stood casually under the
reflector. I was not in the least nervous. I don’t think I was even
particularly excited.
“Three minutes,” said Barbara.
I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.
She ducked under the ring and came toward me. “Hodge....”
“Yes?”
She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I kissed her, a
little absently. “Clod!”
I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar signs of
anger. “A minute to go, it says here,” I told her.
She drew away and went back. “All set. Ready?”
“Ready,” I answered cheerfully. “See you midnight, July Fourth, 1863.”
“Right. Goodbye, Hodge. Glad you didnt tell Catty.”
The expression on her face was the strangest I’d ever seen her wear. I
could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering,
vindictiveness, entreaty, love, were all there as her hand moved the
switch. I began to answer something—perhaps to bid her wait—then the
light made me blink and I too experienced the shattering feeling of
transition. My bones seemed to fly from each other; every cell in my
body exploded to the ends of space.
The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe all the
multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously. I was sure my veins
were drained of blood, my brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless
void, my thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe
away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for that tiny
fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, but part of an _I_
in which the I that was me merged all identity.
Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my knees and wrists
were watery points of helplessness, but I was alive and functioning,
with my individuality unimpaired. The light had vanished. I was in
darkness save for faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the
barn. The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the slow,
ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone back through time.
_19._ _GETTYSBURG_
The barking of the dogs was frenzied, filled with the hoarse note
indicating they had been raising the alarm for a long time without
being heeded. I knew they must have been baying at the alien smells
of soldiers for the past day, so I was not apprehensive that their
scent of me would bring investigation. How Barbara and Ace had escaped
detection on journeys which didnt coincide with abnormal events was
beyond me; with such an unnerving racket in prospect I would either
have given up the trips or moved the apparatus.
Strange, I reflected, that the cows and horses were undisturbed. That
no hysterical chicken leaped from the roost in panic. Only the dogs
scented my unnatural presence. Dogs who, as Mr Haggerwells remarked,
are supposed to sense things beyond the perceptions of man.
Warily I picked my way past the livestock and out of the barn,
fervently hoping the dogs were tied, for I had no mind to start my
adventure by being bitten. Barbara’s warnings seemed inadequate
indeed; one would think she or Ace might have devised some method of
neutralizing the infernal barking. But of course they could hardly do
so without violating her rule of non-interference.
Once out on the familiar Hanover road every petty feeling of doubt or
disquiet fell away and all the latent excitement took hold of me. I was
gloriously in 1863, half a day and some thirty miles from the battle
of Gettysburg. If there is a paradise for historians I had achieved it
without the annoyance of dying first. I swung along at a good pace,
thankful I had trained myself for long tramps, so that thirty miles in
less than ten hours was no monstrous feat. The noise of the dogs died
away behind me and I breathed the night air joyfully.
I had already decided I dared not attempt to steal a ride on the
railroad, even supposing the cars were going through. As I turned off
the Hanover road and took the direct one to Gettysburg, I knew I would
not be able to keep on it for any length of time. Part of Early’s
Confederate division was moving along it from recently occupied York;
Stuart’s cavalry was all around; trifling skirmishes were being fought
on or near it; Union troops, regulars as well as the militia called
out by Governor Curtin for the emergency, were behind and ahead of me,
marching for the Monocacy and Cemetery Ridge.
Leaving the highway would hardly slow me down, for I knew every
sideroad, lane, path or shortcut, not only as they existed in my day,
but as they had been in the time where I was now. I was going to need
this knowledge even more on my return, for on the Fourth of July this
road, like every other, would be glutted with beaten Northern troops,
supplies and wounded left behind, frantically trying to reorganize as
they were harassed by Stuart’s cavalry and pressed by the victorious
men of Hill, Longstreet, and Ewell. It was with this in mind I had
allowed disproportionately longer for coming back.
I saw my first soldier a few miles further on, a jagged shadow sitting
by the roadside with his boots off, massaging his feet. I guessed him
Northern from his kepi, but this was not conclusive, for many Southron
regiments wore kepis also. I struck off quietly into the field and
skirted around him. He never looked up.
At dawn I estimated I was halfway, and except for the sight of that
single soldier I might have been taking a nocturnal stroll through a
countryside at peace. I was tired but certainly not worn out, and I
knew I could count on nervous energy and happy excitement to keep me
going long after my muscles began to protest. Progress would be slower
from now on—Confederate infantry must be just ahead—even so, I should
be at Gettysburg by six or seven.
The sudden drumming of hooves brushed me off the dusty pike and
petrified me into rigidity as a troop dressed in gray and dirty tan
galloped by screaming, “Eeeeee-yeeee” exultantly. The gritty cloud they
stirred up settled slowly; I felt the particles sting my face and eyes.
It would be the sideroads from now on, I determined.
Others had the same impulse; the sideroads were well populated.
Although I knew the movement of every division and of many regiments,
and even had some considerable idea of the civilian dislocation, the
picture around me was jumbled and turbulent. Farmers, merchants,
workers in overalls rode or tramped eastward; others, identical in
dress and obvious intensity of effort, pushed westward. I passed
carriages and carts with women and children traveling at various
speeds both ways. Squads and companies of blue-clad troops marched
along the roads or through the fields, trampling the crops, a confused
sound of singing, swearing, or aimless talk hanging above them like a
fog. Spaced by pacific intervals, men in gray or butternut, otherwise
indistinguishable, marched in the same direction. I decided I could
pass unnoticed in the milling crowds.
It is not easy for the historian, ten, fifty or five hundred years away
from an event, to put aside for a moment the large concepts of currents
and forces, or the mechanical aids of statistics, charts, maps, neat
plans and diagrams in which the migration of men, women and children is
indicated by an arrow, or a brigade of half-terrified, half-heroic men
becomes a neat little rectangle. It is not easy to see behind source
material, to visualize state papers, reports, letters, diaries as
written by men who spent most of their lives sleeping, eating, yawning,
eliminating, squeezing blackheads, lusting, looking out of windows,
or talking about nothing in general with no one in particular. We are
too impressed with the pattern revealed to us—or which we think has
been revealed to us—to remember that for the participants history is a
haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by human beings whose
concern is essentially with the trivial and irrelevant. The historian
is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely—or mistakenly.
So to be set down in the midst of crisis, to be at once involved and
apart, is to experience a constant series of shocks against which there
is no anesthetic. The soldiers, the stragglers, the refugees, the farm
boys shouting at horses, the tophatted gentlemen cursing the teamsters,
the teamsters cursing back; the looters, pimps, gamblers, whores,
nurses and newspapermen were indisputably what they appeared: vitally
important to themselves, of little interest to anyone else. Yet at the
same time they were a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a whole series of
volumes.
I’m sure I was faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Barbara’s
warnings, and that none of the hundreds whom I passed or who passed
me noted my presence, except cursorily. I, on the other hand, had to
repress the constant temptation to peer into every face for signs which
could not tell me what fortune or misfortune the decision of the next
three days would bring to it.
A few miles from town the crowded disorder became even worse, for the
scouts from Ewell’s Corps, guarding the Confederate left flank on the
York Road, acted like a cork in a bottle. Because I, unlike the other
travelers, knew this, I cut sharply south to get back on the circuitous
Hanover road I had left shortly after midnight, and crossing the bridge
over Rock Creek, stumbled into Gettysburg.
The two and a half storey brick houses with their purplish slate roofs
were placid and charming in the hot July sun. A valiant rooster pecked
at horsedung in the middle of the street heedless of the swarming
soldiers, any of whom might take a notion for roast chicken. Privates
in the black hats of the Army of the Potomac, cavalrymen with wide
yellow stripes and cannoneers with red ones on the seams of their
pants, swaggered importantly. Lieutenants with hands resting gracefully
on sword hilts, captains with arms thrust in unbuttoned tunics,
colonels smoking cigars, all moved back and forth across the street,
out of and into houses and stores, each clearly intent on some business
which would affect the course of the war. Now and then a general
rode his horse through the crowd, slowly and thoughtfully, oppressed
by the cares of rank. Soldiers spat, leered at an occasional woman,
sat dolefully on handy stoops, or marched smartly toward an unknown
destination. On the courthouse staff the flag hung doubtfully in the
limp summer air. Every so often there was a noise like poorly organized
thunder.
Imitating the adaptable infantrymen, I found an unoccupied stoop and
sat down after a curious glance at the house, wondering whether it
contained someone whose letters or diaries I had read. Drawing out
my packet of dried beef, I munched away without taking any of my
attention from the sights and sounds and smells around me. Only I knew
how desperately these soldiers would fight this afternoon and all day
tomorrow. I alone knew how they would be caught in the inescapable trap
on July Third and finally routed, to begin the last act of the war.
That major, I thought, so proud of his new-won golden oak leaves, may
have an arm or leg shot off vainly defending Culp’s Hill; that sergeant
over there may lie faceless under an apple tree before nightfall.
Soon these men would be swept away from the illusory shelter of the
houses and out onto the ridges where they would be pounded into defeat
and disaster. There was nothing for me now in Gettysburg itself, though
I could have spent days absorbing the color and feeling. Already I
had tempted fate by my casual appearance in the heart of town. At any
moment someone might speak to me, to ask for a light or a direction; an
ill-considered word or action of mine might change, with ever-widening
consequences, the course of the future. I had been foolish enough long
enough; it was time for me to go to the vantage point I had decided
upon and observe without peril of being observed.
I rose and stretched, my bones protesting. But a couple of miles
more would see me clear of all danger of chance encounter with a too
friendly or inquisitive soldier or civilian. I gave a last look,
trying to impress every detail on my memory, and turned south on the
Emmitsburg Road.
This was no haphazard choice. I knew where and when the crucial, the
decisive move upon which all the other moves depended would take place.
While thousands of men were struggling and dying on other parts of the
battleground, a Confederate advance force, unnoticed, disregarded,
would occupy the position which would eventually dominate the scene
and win the battle—and the war—for the South. Heavy with knowledge no
one else possessed I made my way toward a farm on which there was a
wheatfield and a peach orchard.
_20._ _BRING THE JUBILEE_
A great battle in its first stages is as tentative, uncertain, and
indefinite as a courtship just begun. At the beginning the ground was
there for either side to take without protest; the other felt no surge
of possessive jealousy. I walked unscathed along the Emmitsburg Road;
on my left I knew there were Union forces concealed, on my right the
Southrons maneuvered. In a few hours, to walk between the lines would
mean instant death, but now the declaration had not been made, the
vows had not been finally exchanged. It was still possible for either
party to withdraw; no furious heat bound the two indissolubly together.
I heard the periodic shell and the whine of a minie bullet; mere
flirtatious gestures so far.
Despite the hot sun the grass was cool and lush. The shade in the
orchard was velvety. From a low branch I picked a near ripe peach and
sucked the wry juice. I sprawled on the earth and waited. For miles
around, men from Maine and Wisconsin, from Georgia and North Carolina,
assumed the same attitude. But I knew for what I was waiting; they
could only guess.
Some acoustical freak dimmed the noises in the air to little more
than amplification of the normal summer sounds. Did the ground really
tremble faintly, or was I translating my mental picture of the marching
armies, the great wagon trains, the heavy cannon, the iron-shod horses
into an imagined physical effect? I don’t think I dozed, but certainly
my attention withdrew from the rows of trees with their scarred and
runneled bark, curving branches and graceful leaves, so that I was
taken unaware by the unmistakable clump and creak of mounted men.
The blue-uniformed cavalry rode slowly through the peach orchard.
They seemed like a group of aimless hunters returning from the futile
pursuit of a fox; they chatted, shouted at each other, walked their
horses abstractedly. One or two had their sabres out; they rose in
their saddles and cut at the branches overhead in pure, pointless
mischief.
Behind them came the infantrymen, sweating and swearing, more serious.
Some few had wounds, others were without their muskets. Their dark blue
tunics were carelessly unbuttoned, their lighter pants were stained
with mud and dust and grass. They trampled and thrashed around like men
long weary. Quarrels rose among them swiftly and swiftly petered out.
No one could mistake them for anything but troops in retreat
After they had passed, the orchard was still again, but the stillness
had a different quality from what had gone before. The leaves did not
rustle, no birds chirped, there were no faint betrayals of the presence
of chipmunks or squirrels. Only if one listened very closely was the
dry noise of insects perceptible. But I heard the guns now. Clearly and
louder. And more continuously—much more continuously. It was not yet
the full roar of battle, but death was authentic in its low rumble.
Then the Confederates came. Cautiously, but not so cautiously that one
could fail to recognize they represented a victorious, invading army.
Shabby they certainly were, as they pushed into the orchard, but alert
and confident. Only a minority had uniforms which resembled those
prescribed by regulation and these were torn, grimy and scuffed. Many
of the others wore the semiofficial butternut—crudely dyed homespun,
streaked and muddy brown. Some had ordinary clothes with military hats
and buttons; a few were dressed in federal blue trousers with gray or
butternut jackets.
Nor were their weapons uniform. There were long rifles, short carbines,
muskets of varying age, and I noticed one bearded soldier with a
ponderous shotgun. But whatever their dress or arms, their bearing was
the bearing of conquerors. If I alone on the field that day knew for
sure the outcome of the battle, these Confederate soldiers were close
behind in sensing the future.
The straggling Northerners had passed me by with the clouded perception
of the retreating. These Southrons, however, were steadfastly attentive
to every sight and sound. Too late I realized the difficulty of
remaining unnoticed by such sharp, experienced eyes. Even as I berated
myself for my stupidity, a great, whiskery fellow in what must once
have been a stylish bottle-green coat pointed his gun at me.
“Yank here boys!” Then to me, “What you doing here, fella?”
Three or four came up and surrounded me curiously. “Funniest lookin
damyank I ever did see. Looks like he just fell out of a bathtub.”
Since I had walked all night on dusty roads I could only think their
standards of cleanliness were not high. And indeed this was confirmed
by the smell coming from them: the stink of sweat, of clothes long
slept in, of unwashed feet and stale tobacco.
“I’m a noncombatant,” I said foolishly.
“Whazzat?” asked the beard. “Some kind of Baptist?”
“Naw,” corrected one of the others. “It’s a law-word. Means not all
right in the head.”
“Looks all right in the foot though. Let’s see your boots, Yank. Mine’s
sure wore out.”
What terrified me now was not the thought of my boots being stolen,
or of being treated as a prisoner, or even the remote chance of being
shot as a spy. A greater, more indefinite catastrophe was threatened by
my exposure. These men were the advance company of a regiment due to
sweep through the orchard and the wheatfield, explore that bit of wild
ground known as the Devil’s Den and climb up Little Round Top closely
followed by an entire Confederate brigade. This was the brigade which
held the Round Top for several hours until artillery was brought up,
artillery which dominated the entire field and gave the South victory
at Gettysburg.
There was no allowance for a pause, no matter how trifling, in the
peach orchard, in any of the accounts I’d read or heard of. The hazard
Barbara had warned so insistently against had happened. I had been
discovered, and the mere discovery had altered the course of history.
I tried to shrug it off. Delay of a few minutes could hardly make a
significant difference. All historians agreed that the capture of the
Round Tops was an inevitability; the Confederates would have been
foolish to overlook them—in fact it was hardly possible they could,
prominent as they were both on maps and in physical reality—and they
had occupied them hours before the Federals made a belated attempt to
take them. I had been unbelievably stupid to expose myself, but I had
created no repercussions likely to spread beyond the next few minutes.
“Said let’s see them boots. Aint got all day to wait.”
A tall officer with a pointed imperial and a sandy, faintly reddish
mustache whose curling ends shone waxily came up, revolver in hand.
“What’s going on here?”
“Just a Yank, Capn. Making a little change of footgear.” The tone was
surly, almost insolent.
The galloons on the officer’s sleeve told me the title was not
honorary. “I’m a civilian, Captain,” I protested. “I realize I have no
business here.”
The captain looked at me coldly, with an expression of disdainful
contempt. “Local man?” he asked.
“Not exactly. I’m from York.”
“Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks up ahead. Jenks,
leave the civilian gentleman in full possession of his boots.”
There was rage behind that sneer, a hateful anger apparently directed
at me for being a civilian, at his men for their obvious lack of
respect, at the battle, the world. I suddenly realized his face was
intimately familiar. Irritatingly, because I could connect it with no
name, place or circumstance.
“How long have you been in this orchard, Mister Civilian-From-York?”
The effort to identify him nagged me, working in the depths of my
mind, obtruding even into that top layer which was concerned with what
was going on.
What was going on? _Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks
up ahead. How long have you been in this orchard?_
Yanks up ahead? There werent any. There wouldnt be, for hours.
“I said, ‘How long you been in this orchard?’”
Probably an officer later promoted to rank prominent enough to have his
picture in one of the minor narratives. Yet I was certain his face was
no likeness I’d seen once in a steel engraving and dismissed. These
were features often encountered....
“Sure like to have them boots. If we aint fightin for Yankee boots,
what the hell we fightin for?”
What could I say? That I’d been in the orchard for half an hour? The
next question was bound to be, Had I seen Federal troops? Whichever way
I answered I would be betraying my role of spectator.
“Hey Capn—this fella knows something. Lookit the silly grin!”
Was I smiling? In what? Terror? Perplexity? In the mere effort of
keeping silent, so as to be involved no further?
“Tell yah—he’s laughin cuz he knows somethin!”
Let them hang me, let them strip me of my boots; from here on I was
dumb as dear Catty had been once.
“Out with it man—youre in a tight spot. Are there Yanks up ahead?”
The confusion in my mind approached chaos. If I knew the captain’s
eventual rank I could place him. Colonel Soandso. Brigadier-General
Blank. What had happened? Why had I let myself be discovered? Why had I
spoken at all and made silence so hard now?
“Yanks up ahead—they’s Yanks up ahead!”
“Quiet you! I asked him—he didnt say there were Yanks ahead.”
“Hay! Damyanks up above. Goin to mow us down!”
“Fella says the bluebellies are layin fur us!”
Had the lie been in my mind, to be telepathically plucked by the
excited soldiers? Was even silence no refuge from participation?
“Man here spotted the whole Fed artillery up above, trained on us!”
“Pull back, boys! Pull back!”
I’d read often enough of the epidemic quality of a perfectly
unreasonable notion. A misunderstood word, a baseless rumor, an
impossible report, was often enough to set a group of armed men—squad
or army—into senseless mob action. Sometimes the infection made for
feats of heroism, sometimes for panic. This was certainly less than
panic, but my nervous, meaningless smile conveyed a message I had never
sent.
“It’s a trap. Pull back boys—let’s get away from these trees and out
where we can see the Yanks!”
The captain whirled on his men. “Here, damn you,” he shouted furiously,
“you all gone crazy? The man said nothing. There’s no trap!”
The men moved slowly, sullenly away. “I heard him,” one of them
muttered, looking accusingly toward me.
The captain’s shout became a yell. “Come back here! Back here, I say!”
His raging stride overtook the still irresolute men. He grabbed the one
called Jenks by the shoulder and whirled him about. Jenks tried to jerk
free. There was fear on his face, and hate. “Leave me go, damn you,” he
screamed, “Leave me go!”
The captain yelled at his men again. Jenks snatched at the pistol with
his left hand; the officer pulled the gun away. Jenks brought his
musket upright against the captain’s body, the muzzle just under his
chin, and pushed—as though the firearm somehow gave him leverage. They
wrestled briefly, then the musket went off.
The captain’s hat flew upward, and for an instant he stood, bareheaded,
in the private’s embrace. Then he fell. Jenks wrenched his musket free
and disappeared.
When I came out of my shock I walked over to the body. The face had
been blown off. Shreds of human meat dribbled bloodily on the gray
collar and soiled the fashionably long hair. I had killed a man.
Through my interference with the past I had killed a man who had been
destined to longer life and even some measure of fame. I was the guilty
sorcerer’s apprentice.
I stooped down to put my hands inside his coat for papers which would
tell me who he was and satisfy the curiosity which still basely
persisted. It was not shame which stopped me. Just nausea, and remorse.
* * * * *
I saw the Battle of Gettysburg. I saw it with all the unique advantages
of a professional historian thoroughly conversant with the patterns,
the movements, the details, who knows where to look for the coming
dramatic moment, the recorded decisive stroke. I fulfilled the
chroniclers’ dream.
It was a nightmare.
* * * * *
To begin with, I slept. I slept not far from the captain’s body in the
peach orchard. This was not callousness, but physical and emotional
exhaustion. When I went to sleep the guns were thundering; when I
woke they were thundering louder. It was late afternoon. I thought
immediately, this is the time for the futile Union charge against the
Round Tops.
But the guns were not sounding from there. All the roar was northward,
from the town. I knew how the battle went; I had studied it for years.
Only now it wasn’t happening the way it was written down in the books.
True, the first day was a Confederate victory. But it was not the
victory we knew. It was just a little different, just a little short
of the triumph recorded. And on the second day, instead of the
Confederates getting astride the Taneytown Road and into the position
from which they tore Meade’s army to bits from three sides, I witnessed
a terrible encounter in the peach orchard and the wheatfield—places
known to be safely behind the Southron lines.
All my life I’d heard of Pickett’s charge on the third day. Of how
the disorganized Federals were given the final killing blow in their
vitals. Well, I saw Pickett’s charge on the third day and it was not
the same charge in the historic place. It was a futile attempt to storm
superior positions (positions, by established fact, in Lee’s hands
since July First) ending in slaughter and defeat.
Defeat for the South, not the North. Meade’s army was not broken; the
Confederates could not scatter and pursue them now. The Capitulation,
if it ever took place, would come under different circumstances. The
independence of the Confederate States might not be acknowledged for
years. If at all.
All because the North held the Round Tops.
Years more of killing, and possibly further years of guerrilla warfare.
Thousands and thousands of dead, their blood on my hands. A poisoned
continent, an inheritance of hate. Because of me.
I cannot tell you how I got back to York. If I walked, it was
somnambulistically. Possibly I rode the railroad or in a farmer’s cart.
Part of my mind, a tiny part that kept coming back to pierce me no
matter how often I crushed it out, remembered those who died, those
who would have lived, but for me. Another part was concerned only with
the longing to get back to my own time, to the haven, to Catty. A
much larger part was simply blank, except for the awesome, incredible
knowledge that the past could be changed—that the past _had_ been
changed.
I must have wound my watch—Barbara’s watch—for it was ten oclock on
the night of July Fourth when I got to the barn. Ten oclock by 1863
time; the other dial showed it to be 8:40, that would be twenty of
nine in the morning, 1952 time. In two hours I would be home, safe
from the nightmare of happenings that never happened, of guilt for
the deaths of men not supposed to die, of the awful responsibility of
playing destiny. If I could not persuade Barbara to smash her damnable
contrivance I would do so myself.
The dogs barked madly, but I was sure no one heeded. It was the Fourth
of July, and a day of victory and rejoicing for all Pennsylvanians. I
stole into the barn and settled myself in the exact center, even daring
the use of a match, my last one, to be sure I’d be directly under the
reflector when it materialized.
I could not sleep, though I longed to blot out the horror and wake
in my own time. Detail by detail I went over what I had seen,
superimposing it like a palimpsest upon the history I’d always known.
Sleep would have kept me from this wretched compulsion and from
questioning my sanity, but I could not sleep.
I have heard that in moments of overwhelming shock some irrelevancy,
some inconsequential matter persistently forces itself on the
attention. The criminal facing execution thinks, not of his imminent
fate or of his crime, but of the cigarette stub he left burning in
his cell. The bereaved widow dwells, not on her lost husband, but on
tomorrow’s laundry. So it was with me. Behind that part of my mind
re-living the past three days, a more elementary part gnawed at the
identification of the slain captain.
I knew that face. Particularly did I know that face set in a sneer,
distorted with anger. But I could not remember it in Confederate
uniform. I could not remember it with sandy mustaches. And yet the
sandy, reddish hair, revealed in that terrible moment when his hat
flew off, was as familiar as part of the face. Oh, I thought, if I
could only place it once and for all and free my mind at least of this
trivial thing.
I wished there were some way I could have seen the watch, to
concentrate on the creeping progress of the hands and distract
myself from the wave after wave of wretched meditations which flowed
over me. But the moonlight was not strong enough to make the face
distinguishable, much less the figures on the dials. There was no
narcotic.
As one always is at such times I was convinced the appointed moment
had passed unnoticed. Something had gone wrong. Over and over I had to
tell myself that minutes seem hours in the waiting dark; it might feel
like two or three in the morning to me; it was probably barely eleven.
No use. A minute—or an hour or a second—later I was again positive
midnight had passed.
Finally I began to suffer a monstrous illusion. I began to think it
was getting lighter. That dawn was coming. Of course I knew it could
not be; what I fancied lifting darkness was only a sick condition
of swollen, overtired eyes. Dawn does not come to Pennsylvania at
midnight, and it was not yet midnight. At midnight I would be back at
Haggershaven, in 1952.
Even when the barn was fully lighted by the rising sun and I could see
the cattle peaceful in their stalls I refused to believe what I saw. I
took out my watch only to find something had disturbed the works; the
hands registered five oclock. Even when the farmer, milk pails over
arm, started in surprise, exclaiming, “Hay, what you doing here?”—even
then, I did not believe.
Only when, as I opened my mouth to explain to my involuntary host,
did something happen. The puzzle which had pursued me for three days
suddenly solved itself. I knew why the face of the Southron captain
had been so familiar. Familiar beyond any of the better known warriors
on either side. I had indeed known that face intimately; seen those
features enraged or sneering. The nose, the mouth, the eyes, the
expression were Barbara Haggerwells’. The man dead in the peach orchard
was the man whose portrait hung in the library of Haggershaven, its
founder, Herbert Haggerwells. Captain Haggerwells—never to become a
major now, or buy this farm. Never to marry a local girl or beget
Barbara’s great grandfather. Haggershaven had ceased to exist in the
future.
_21._ _FOR THE TIME BEING_
I am writing this, as I said, in 1877. I am a healthy man of
forty-five, no doubt with many years ahead of me. I might live to be a
hundred, except for an illogical feeling that I must die before 1921.
However, eighty-nine should be enough for anyone. So I have ample time
to put my story down. Still, better to have it down and done with;
should anything happen to me tomorrow it will be on paper.
For what? As confession and apology? As an inverted substitute for the
merciful amnesia which ought to have erased my memory as well as my
biography? (I have written to Wappinger Falls; there are no records of
any Hodgins family, or of Backmakers. Does this mean the forces I set
in motion destroyed Private Hodgins as well as Captain Haggerwells? Or
only that the Hodginses and Backmakers settled elsewhere? In either
case I am like Adam—in this world—a special, parentless creation.)
There is no one close enough to care, or intimate enough to accept my
word in the face of all reason. I have not married in this time, nor
shall I. I write only as old men talk to themselves.
The rest of my personal story is simple. The name of the farmer who
found me in his barn was Thammis; they had need of a hired hand and I
stayed on. I had no desire to go elsewhere; in fact I could not bear to
leave what was—and will never be—Haggershaven.
In the beginning I used to go to the location of the Agati’s garden and
look across at the spot where I left our cottage and Catty. It was an
empty pilgrimage. Now I content myself with the work which needs doing.
I shall stay here till I die.
Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a
future which never existed, which couldnt exist, once the chain of
causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in
which the South won the battle of Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells
founded Haggershaven? Could another Barbara devise a means to reach
that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot. I
simply cannot.
Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray,
“Please God, make it didnt happen.” Often they open their eyes to find
it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times
the prayer is granted. Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the
memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they _know_ that a
past cannot be expunged? Children know it can.
And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another
and another perhaps, but never the same one. There are no parallel
universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.
That this world is a better place than the one into which I was born,
and promises to grow still better, seems true. What idealism lay behind
the Southron cause triumphed in the reconciliation of men like Lee;
what was brutal never got the upper hand as it did in my world. The
Negro is free; black legislatures pass advanced laws in South Carolina;
black congressmen comport themselves with dignity in Washington. The
Pacific railroad is built, immigrants pour in to a welcoming country to
make it strong and wealthy; no one suggests they should be shut out or
hindered.
There are rumors of a deal between northern Republicans and southern
Democrats, betraying the victory of the Civil War—how strange it is
still, after fourteen years, to use this term instead of the familiar
War of Southron Independence—in return for the presidency. If this is
true, my brave new world is not so brave.
It may not be so new either. Prussia has beaten France and proclaimed
a German Empire; is this the start in a different way of the German
Union? Will 1914 see an Emperors’ War—there is none in France
now—leaving Germany facing ... whom?
Any one of the inventions of my own time would make me a rich man
if I could reproduce them, or cared for money. With mounting steel
production and the tremendous jump in population, what a success the
minible would be. Or the tinugraph. Or controllable balloons.
The typewriter I have seen. It has developed along different and
clumsier lines; inevitably, I suppose, given initial divergence. It may
mean greater advances; more likely not. The universal use of gaslight
must be far in the future if it is to come at all; certainly its advent
is delayed by all this talk of inventing electric illumination. If we
couldnt put electricity to work it’s unlikely my new contemporaries
will be able to. Why, they havent even made the telegraph cheap and
convenient.
And something like HX-1? It is inconceivable. Could it be that in
destroying the future in which Haggershaven existed I have also
destroyed the only dimension in which time travel was possible?
So strangely easily I can write the words, “I destroyed.”
Catty.
But what of Tyss’s philosophy? Is it possible I shall be condemned
to repeat the destruction throughout eternity? Have I written these
lines an infinite number of times before? Or is the mercy envisaged by
Enfandin a reality? And what of Barbara’s expression as she bade me
goodbye? Could she possibly
* * * * *
Editorial note by Frederick Winter Thammis: Quite recently, in the
summer of 1953 to be exact, I commissioned the remodelling of my family
home near York, Pennsylvania. Among the bundles of old books and
papers stored in the attic was a box of personal effects, labelled “H
M Backmaker.” In it was the manuscript concluding with an unfinished
sentence, reproduced above.
My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there was an old
man living on the farm, nominally as a hired hand, but actually as a
pensioner, since he was beyond the age of useful labor. My father
said the children considered him not quite right in his mind, but
very entertaining, for he often repeated long, disjointed narratives
of an impossible world and an impossible society which they found as
fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old Hodge talked
like an educated man, but this might simply be the impression of young,
uncultivated minds.
Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to his tales
that the old man wrote his fable down, and then was too shy to submit
it for publication. This is the only reasonable way to account for its
existence. Of course he says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from
old, and disconcertingly, analysis of the paper shows it might have
been written then.
Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker’s belongings
there was a watch of unknown manufacture and unique design. Housed in a
cheap nickel case, the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision
and delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and wound.
The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations
in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only
because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s _Years of Madness_, p. 202:
“ ... Union troops that night and next morning took a position on
Cemetery Hill and Round Top.... The Confederates could have occupied
this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous
consequences.”
About Ward Moore
On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a small hill
called Little Round Top. One morning in July, 1863, the Confederate
Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a
mistake that cost them victory in a battle which—in the view of many
historians—was the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years
since Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds of
most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What if the battle had
gone the other way, what if the South had won the war? Ward Moore—a
Northerner himself—has settled the matter at last in a book that might
be called imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world
of might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail that, for
a few hours, it seems true.
* * * * *
The author of _Bring the Jubilee_ was born in Madison, New Jersey, in
1903. “From the age of five,” he writes, “books have been for me the
essential narcotic; as a natural consequence I detested school. When
this detestation did not bring on psychosomatic illnesses to save me
from the hated classrooms, I was not above malingering or playing
hooky—now a lost art, but one practiced in my generation. Three weeks
short of graduation I quit high school and have not been inside a
school house since, except to vote.
* * * * *
“My first short story was written at the age of eleven and was followed
by a flood of juvenilia, some little of which was unfortunately
published. Happily, markets and industry died simultaneously; I wrote
only desultorily until my first novel _Breathe the Air Again_ was
published in 1942. This was acclaimed by Max Eastman in the American
Mercury, who predicted that I would fall heir to ‘the cloak of Upton
Sinclair.’ Something went wrong with the tailoring arrangements; my
next novel was _Greener Than You Think_ (Sloane, 1947), a satirical
fantasy.”
* * * * *
In addition to these two novels, Mr. Moore has published a number of
short stories in such disparate media as Amazing Stories and Harper’s
Bazaar, Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Reporter, Science Fiction
Quarterly and Tomorrow.
* * * * *
He concludes: “I have been intensely interested in the history of the
Civil War ever since—at the age of six—I came across a book with nice
black woodcuts showing the firing on Fort Sumter and the burning of
Richmond. As an amateur I’ve read hundreds of dull volumes and a score
of fascinating ones on the Irrepressible Conflict. A novel based on the
concept ‘what would have happened if the South had won at Gettysburg,’
was practically inevitable. _Bring the Jubilee_ is it.”
_The Idea Behind_
DUAL EDITIONS
An agreement unusual in American publishing has been made between
FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, INC., and BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. We believe
that through simultaneous publication of new titles in paperbound and
trade editions it is possible to secure broader distribution of good
books at a considerable saving to the reader and with substantially
greater royalty income for the author. At a time when costs are
consistently rising, large printings of combined editions make possible
a lower price for the trade editions, while nation-wide distribution
of the paperbound edition makes immediately available to a great new
audience the best in current fiction and non-fiction.
* * * * *
The convenient-sized, permanent, hard-cover editions may be obtained
through any bookstore at a saving of approximately 60% of the cost of
similar books published in the regular way. The paperbound original
editions (not reprints) are priced at 35 and 50c and are distributed
through 100,000 outlets.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Bring the Jubilee" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.