THE pale sunshine washed over the wide boards of the floor, on which Mr. Munn’s eyes were fixed. Professor Ball’s voice proceeded: ‘— will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation: He is my God, and I will prepare Him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt Him. The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host ——’ He held the book in his left hand and his right forefinger traced each line as he read it, pausing at the end of a verse, then moving forward again. He did not lift his glance from the page as he read on through the chapter, but now and then he would close his eyes behind the spectacles, and the forefinger would move on, line by line keeping pace with the uttered words, and the voice would become more emphatic, more rapt. ‘— the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away. Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of Thine arm they shall be as still as a stone; till Thy people pass over, O Lord, till the people pass over, which Thou hast purchased.’
While he read, the five women, his daughters, who sat in the tall, unvarnished, ladder-backed chairs facing him, never took their eyes off his face. All of them sat with the same posture, erectly and easily, their busts carried high, their hands clasped gently in the lap. The four boys, pupils at the academy, had their heels hooked over the bottom rungs of the chairs, and their heads already bowed, as though in preparation for the prayer that was to come. Cautiously, they glanced up now and then, while Professor Ball’s voice went on, at the blue sky beyond the windows or at the open door of the dining-room, where the table was already laid. Behind the boys, with Mr. Munn, sat Doctor MacDonald and another man, Doctor MacDonald cocked lankily back in his chair, his brown hands lying on his knees, his face impassive. From under his slightly lowered eyelids, he was regarding his wife. Her back, as she looked up into her father’s face, was not quite turned to Doctor MacDonald. The line of her cheek and the small, sober arch of her brow were visible. A streak of sunlight fell across her chestnut hair, which was drawn smoothly back to a knot on the nape of her neck.
Professor Ball shut the book clumsily with his bandaged hands, pushed his spectacles into a firmer position on his thin nose, and laid the book on the mantelshelf behind him. Creakily, without a word, he sank to his knees, placed the palms of his bandaged hands together before his face, and closed his eyes. The skirt of his long, black coat almost brushed the floor about his knees.
The five women, and the others, got to their knees, and bowed their heads.
‘O Lord,’ the voice of Professor Ball said. It paused; then resumed. ‘O Lord, who art above all things, for all Thy blessings we thank Thee. And ask for Thy blessing, though in our sins we are not worthy. But in our unworthiness, we call out unto Thee. Thou hast shown Thy power and cast the horse and his rider into the sea, O Lord, but desert us not. Thou hast brought us over, O Lord, dryshod, but do not let us linger in the wilderness of Shur. Nor taste the waters of Marah, which are bitter, O Lord, and which now we taste. O Lord, as Thou led out Israel to Elim, lead us now, that we may see the twelve wells of water flowing there, and the three score and ten palm trees. Lead us, O Lord, and smite those who would rise against our face.’ His voice stopped, and the slow, brittle sound of his breathing was audible in the room. Then, quietly, he said: ‘Lord, we thank Thee. Amen.’
He rose, and standing with his hands propped inertly on the high back of a chair, looked away from the people before him, and out the window, where the morning light fell through the bare branches of trees.
The other people began to move about. All of the women except one went into the dining-room. The little boys talked to each other in low voices. Portia Ball, who had lingered behind her sisters, said: ‘Breakfast won’t be ready for about five minutes. I’ll call you all.’ Then she followed the other women into the dining-room, and shut the door.
‘Let’s go outside and get a breath before we eat,’ Doctor MacDonald said to Mr. Munn. Mr. Munn nodded, and followed out into the hall, and to the porch. Doctor MacDonald took out his pipe, packed it, and lighted it. He balanced himself with his toes sticking over the edge of the porch and looked out over the slope toward the academy building. The new smoke, bluish and paling against the sky, was wreathing up from one of the two big chimneys there.
Doctor MacDonald took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘A lot of praying goes on round here,’ he remarked.
Mr. Munn nodded.
‘Yeah,’ Doctor MacDonald went on, ‘that’s a fact. I reckon I’ve worn out a right smart carpet with my knee-caps since I married Cordelia. And me not a churchy man, so to speak. Come down to it’ — he took a drag of the pipe, and slowly, with relish, exhaled the smoke — ‘short of being an infidel, and just damning my soul outer pure and unadulterated cantankerousness, you might say I go as far as the next man in wrapping myself in carnal concerns. I’m not proud of it, but you know how it is; a lot of things, good and bad, comes closer to a man’s hand than praying and reading in the Book, and a man goes his way. And things I’ve seen done, seen with my own eyes, mind you, looked like something a little different from the workings of God’s grace.’
‘I reckon everybody sees something like that,’ Mr. Munn observed, ‘if he lives half his span.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Doctor MacDonald said abstractedly, a hint of impatience in his tone, ‘but the things I’ve seen done. With my own eyes. Before I hit here, and I reckon I’ve seen my share here, too. It looks like those things and getting down on your knees don’t belong in the same world. But take the old Professor, now, he’s been putting me on my knees quite a spell, going on two years now.’ He grinned, looking directly at Mr. Munn. ‘Not that I’m complaining; I had some time to make up in that position. Besides, he’s a man for you now, and I respect his ways.’
‘It’s a comfort to him, I take it,’ Mr. Munn rejoined. ‘Things going like they are must be hitting him pretty hard.’ He paused, then looking off down the slope added glumly, ‘I reckon a man could do with some comfort.’
‘Well, lately the old man’s been asking the Lord for a pretty special brand of comfort. More my variety than you might take his to be,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘It used to be we got the loving-kindness chapters both morning and evening prayers, but lately he’s been asking the Lord to mix in pretty direct and smite the Ammonite. He’s been giving us the blood-letting texts, breakfast and supper. Like this morning, about the horse and his rider.’
Mr. Munn spat off the edge of the porch, and stared at the spot beneath where the splotch of saliva darkened a dried oak leaf. ‘That’d suit me,’ he said, ‘but there’s so God-damned many horses and riders now over at Bardsville, and Morganstown, and all. I’d wear out some carpet with my knees, if I reckoned it’d do any good.’
‘Well, it’s been the hip-and-thigh stuff pretty regular with the Professor for some time now,’ Doctor MacDonald stated. ‘Just the front part of the Book.’
At the sound of the door opening, Mr. Munn turned. Cordelia MacDonald had come out. ‘It’ll be ready in a minute,’ she said, ‘if you aren’t starved to death already.’
‘Starved?’ Doctor MacDonald echoed, and laughed with pleasure, looking at her. ‘Starved is the word for it.’
She approached her husband, and stood beside him, her hand resting lightly on his arm.
Mr. Munn watched the woman’s face as she looked up at her husband, who held his arm about her shoulders and laughed in his pleasure and confidence. That look, surprised on the face of the woman — a woman whom Mr. Munn scarcely knew, whom he had scarcely noticed before, who had always seemed rather plain to him — that look stabbed him now, so that abruptly he turned away.
She was a plain woman, or on the plain side, anyway, he had always thought, when he had noticed her on the streets of Bardsville. Walking down the street there, alone or with one of the sisters, she had never seemed to be the sort of woman people would notice much at all. She and her sisters — they all looked alike in their black or gray dresses buttoned up to the throat with that single row of small, severe buttons — had moved decorously down the street, with their eyes fixed on the pavement a little ahead of them, or into the distance, and people had said, now and then: ‘There go the Ball girls. Old Professor Ball.’ And they told each other: ‘He’s got some book learning, now I tell you, the Scriptures and in the original tongues, too; and Shakespeare, you just name it. He knows it by heart. Shakespeare, now, he named all his girls with names out of Shakespeare’s plays.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Professor Ball had said to Mr. Munn after breakfast that first day he had ever been at the Ball place, ‘I named them all out of Shakespeare’s plays. Every last one of them — Portia, Viola, Cordelia, Perdita, Isabella. Noble names, every last one, names a woman could be proud of. That’s what I told my wife when the first one came; there’s no nobler name than Portia for any female. She wanted to name her Mary Lee. After her own mother. But I pointed out to her all the advantages a girl would have with a name like Portia. Something to live up to. A help in forming a Christian character. She said her mother was a Christian character, and I said, I’m not denying that, she’s as fine a Christian character as has been produced locally in my time, but you can’t expect imperfect Nature working in one small county to compete with the masterpieces of the immortal bard. She said she hadn’t thought of it exactly that way. So we named the infant Portia. And we never regretted it.
‘And all the rest of them, when they came along. Noble names, every last one. The youngest, Isabella, now we almost named her Desdemona, but we decided against it at the last minute. But Desdemona’s a fine name, and many a man’s given his female children worse. But we decided against it. My wife decided me. She was lying there in bed — she never really got up after she had the last one, she just lingered until the Lord saw fit. She was lying there in bed, and I took down the book and read her what Shakespeare had written, trying to make up our minds. Then she pointed something out to me, and I bowed to her perspicacity. She said, now doesn’t the book say that man she ran off and married was colored? I said, yes, in a way, you might say he was, but he was a gentleman with a fine character, even if he did have an overhasty disposition. And he was more sinned against than sinning. But, she said did I think it was right to give our baby the name of a young woman who had been connected with a man who was colored, even if the man wasn’t exactly a negro? I agreed with her. I said we ought to spare even the tenderest sensibility. So we named the baby Isabella.’
When people saw the Ball sisters walking down the street, they said that you couldn’t tell them apart, unless you looked close. But they were different, Mr. Munn decided, very different, despite their deceptive similarities of dress and posture. Portia, the oldest, was already a widow. Her face added to the quietness and gravity of all their faces a sadness, but a sadness disciplined by the will that had marked the firm lines about the mouth; and this sadness was mixed, at moments when she was unaware of eyes upon her, with a faint, though luminous, expectation. She was the most pious of the sisters. She had occasionally said, Doctor MacDonald reported to Mr. Munn, that at the end of her journey all would be consumed in brightness. Meanwhile, she ran the house, directing her sisters in their tasks. She wore a cord of heavy keys at her waistband, the keys of cupboards and pantries and smokehouses. She often sat alone with her father. Viola, who was childless, read a great deal and wrote voluminous letters. Her husband helped on the farm, and she taught the youngest boys in the academy. They were all different — Perdita, Isabella, Cordelia. But, to Mr. Munn, Cordelia especially.
Sometimes Mr. Munn had wondered how a man like Doctor MacDonald had married a woman like Cordelia. Everything about them seemed different. Ordinarily, you would expect to find Doctor MacDonald’s wife a very young, pretty, high-spirited woman, very dark or very blonde, positive anyway, and with a streak of fun. The way Doctor MacDonald cocked a cigar or stuck a pipe between his teeth, the way he sat a horse, the relish he took in things, the dash about him, his grin, all of those things would lead you to expect in his wife something different from Cordelia. She was not very young, thirty, perhaps. She had been getting on toward being an old maid when Doctor MacDonald married her, wrapped up in her household tasks, watching the younger men come to see her sisters Perdita and Isabella, sitting at church with her father and Portia, not with Viola and her husband or with Perdita and Isabella, who would be sitting with a couple of their suitors. And she was quiet and grave, like all the sisters. She was, at first glance certainly, plain, with her dark dresses buttoned up to the neck by that careful and forbidding row of buttons, and her eyes downcast, and her hands folded on her lap. But Doctor MacDonald, whose eyes would wander toward her when she sat apart from him, had married her, and Mr. Munn began, finally, to feel that he understood why. She was precisely the one thing Doctor MacDonald, during those mysterious earlier years — about which he never talked except to give some offhand, isolated anecdote, the years in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Mexico — had not had, and now had easily, complacently, and casually. Her qualities, her gravity, her earnestness, her restraint, her downcast eyes — those were the things best designed to challenge him and, in the end, to engage him. She was somewhat like those small dull, compact apples that in the flush of the harvest are passed over almost with scorn, but late in the winter, when the fine, brightly colored fruit has grown too mealy and insipid, can stir the appetite as though in the darkness of the storage cellar they had managed to keep and augment the ripe, full, winey richness of the last sunshine of the summer.
Doctor MacDonald had married her, and the marriage which had at first seemed to Mr. Munn an incongruity began to seem natural and clear. When Doctor MacDonald would talk, his eyes would wander to fix on Cordelia, or on the door through which she had left the room. And sometimes, though rarely, the coolness of her gravity, her reticences, would fall away, and as she looked at Doctor MacDonald, as that morning on the porch before breakfast, she would, for an instant and in a single glance, be exposed in her secret warmth and fullness and steadfastness. When Mr. Munn detected such a look, he would, as that morning on the porch, feel it as a blow, and would turn away. The impact, the stab, of that look was not the pain of a recollected loss. No, it was pain at something which he had never had. He felt cheated, and impotent, and was filled with envy of the other man, to whom, apparently, it had come so easily.
But though Mr. Munn would turn away from that transitory look on her face, he had quickly learned to search for it, to spy on her and wait for it. It was rare and fleeting, but he knew that it would come, sooner or later. He visited the Ball place when he could get time. The demands on him at his own farm were at their slackest now, and since the house had burned, there was no place for him to sleep there except the gear room, where he had rigged up a cot and an old washstand. Besides, he could no longer put his heart into the work there. It was not the discomfort of the draughty, unceiled gear room and the hard cot, or the sight of the blackened ruins of the brickwork, that distressed him. The very fields, the slow voices of the negroes talking to him about the plant beds or the stock or the fencing, their silences, reproached him and withdrew from him. When he was there he felt that his life had no direction and his efforts no meaning. He began to think that he might sell the place if he could, if a time came when land would be worth anything again. He thought that he might sell the place, and go away. But not until things were over, one way or the other.
He went to the Ball place now, as he had gone to the Christian place before. But there was a difference. At the Christian place he had been caught up into a life there; the small night noises, the distant barking of dogs and the creaking of timbers, the shadowy, white door swinging inward and Lucille Christian standing there, with her finger raised to her lips, her whispered conversation. It had been a restricted, distraught, confused, feverish, and undirected life, but a life which was real, and his own. But at the Ball place, he had no life truly his own; he watched the life of others move soberly, and sympathetically, about him, and beyond him.
But that life at the Christian place was over forever. He knew that. From the moment when he had heard Lucille Christian’s voice on the telephone that morning after the burning of his house, he had known, although he had been unwilling to acknowledge, that it was over. A few days after Mr. Christian’s stroke, he had gone back to see Lucille Christian. They had sat in the dining-room, with a single lamp burning uncertainly on the big table between them, with their shadows, large and possessive and black, on the walls behind them, and had eaten in silence. Once or twice, as by accident, their eyes had met, but uncommunicatively and shortly. They had sat there, still without speaking, after the cook had carried out the dishes and the sound of her activities in the pantry and kitchen had ceased. Finally, looking down at the tablecloth and then off at the shadowy wall beyond her, he had asked her to marry him. When he was free.
‘Oh, Perse, Perse,’ she had cried, ‘why do you have to talk about that? That isn’t important. Now.’
Meeting her eyes fully at last, he had said, ‘It is important.’
‘No.’
‘People have to have something to look forward to,’ he had told her, looking across the pool of light, as across a distance, at that almost unfamiliar face, ‘something to move toward, to hope for. Some direction.’
She had shaken her head, saying: ‘We can’t know anything, now. We can’t do anything. Not anything.’ Then, in the silence, for he had made no reply, still with his eyes fixed on her face across the pool of light, she had said, very quietly and distantly: ‘I don’t feel anything any more. Not anything.’
That night he had slept at the Christian place. He had expected her to come to him. He had watched the door, waiting for the latch to lift stealthily. But it had not moved. He had stood just inside the door, leaning forward with his brow pressed against the slick, cold surface of the painted wood, filled with his angry and despairing desire. Eventually, standing there, he had become aware of a repeated, almost imperceptible sound, a hoarse, dry susurrus, painful and regular. It had seemed to come from beyond the wall to his right. Then, he had identified the sound: it was the sound Mr. Christian made.
At the end of the next week Mr. Munn again went out to the Christian place. That night Lucille Christian came to his room. At the door she stood in the accustomed posture, closing it, with her finger lifted as before. And even at that instant, the gesture, now so ironical and superfluous in the new context, told him more positively than her words had been able to tell him how empty she was, and how arbitrary and automatic and meaningless her actions. But denying that knowledge, he felt for a moment that she was as she had been. But it was only for a moment. She lay in his arms shuddering as though from cold. It was as though the half-playful shivering of those times when she had said, chatteringly, ‘Warm my feet, I’ll catch pneumonia all for you,’ had been a kind of parody, fatuous and grim, of this, the truth.
He tried to comfort her. He told her that he loved her and would love her always. Finally, she succumbed to him.
Then she told him: ‘I tried — I tried, Perse. But it’s no use.’
He said nothing.
‘We can’t be with each other any more. Not for a long time, anyway. Or never.’
‘I love you,’ he said. He thought: love. The word rattled in his head like a pea in a dried pod.
‘It’s not you,’ she answered. ‘It’s me, the way I am.’
‘I love you.’
‘We can’t be with each other,’ she said; ‘it’s too awful, I can’t stand it.’
‘All right,’ he replied. He knew a loathing, suddenly, of himself for the emptiness of the act he had performed: a vicious and shameful pantomime, isolated from all his life before it and from any other life, cut off in time, drained of all meaning, even the blind, fitful meaning of pleasure. He was infected by her emptiness. Or her emptiness had discovered to him his own. She had held it up to him like a mirror, and in her emptiness he had seen his own. ‘All right,’ he said.
The next morning she did not come down to breakfast. He ate scarcely anything, hurried out to the stable and saddled his mare, and rode off.
Three days later he received an answer to the letter which he had written to May. But the answer was not from May. It was from Miss Burnham. It ran:
Percy Munn:
Yours of the 4th inst. received. My niece will not consider giving you a divorce. I do not believe in divorce and neither does my niece and she will not consider giving you one. And I can inform you now that you will not be able to get one yourself, for you have not got any grounds for a divorce because our Heavenly Father knows there was never a purer sweeter more dutiful girl and you have no complaint and you drove her from your house like a dog. Also I can tell you too that my niece is going to have a child. I get on my knees every night and pray our Heavenly Father that this unborn child will never know the kind of creature its father is. I will devote my life to raising this child and nurturing it just as I have devoted my life to raising my niece, and I thank our Heavenly Father that it will have in it some of the blood of General Sam Burnham, for you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes. And I can tell you Percy Munn that you will never speak to this child, you will never lay eyes on it, if I can prevent, so long as there is a breath in my body. So help me God.
Very r’sp’ly yrs,
L. BURNHAM
More and more the room at the hotel became intolerable to him. He would go to bed and close his eyes, but sleep would not come. The walls, the ceiling above him, the floor beneath, seemed to shut him in upon himself, to leave only himself as real, as only the darkness is real when one shuts his eyes. The thought of the other rooms up and down the hall, like this room, and of persons lying within them, sleeping or sleepless and staring, merely validated his own isolation; and validated the isolation of those other persons. The carpet of the room worn by other feet than his, the stained basin into which other hands had been plunged, the bed that had creaked and sagged beneath other bodies, all of those items, and a dozen more, the cold and rigorous and undifferentiating mirror, defined him as separate from those other persons, as locked within himself. Sometimes he would get out of the bed and go to stand at the window to look down, as he had done that night of the first rally. He would stand at the window and his gaze would follow the progress under the pale street-lamps of some unidentified, late walker. Once or twice he felt the impulse to dress and hurry after that unknown person and walk beside him to his destination. For that person would have a destination.
Even though the room had become almost intolerable for him, his practice compelled him to be often in town, and there was no other place for him to stay. He fell into the habit, however, of taking a bottle of whisky up to his room. It helped him to sleep, he thought.
But at the Ball place it was different. The steadiness of the life there, although it was not his life, steadied him. If that spied-on and awaited and rare expression in the eyes of Cordelia when she looked at her husband stabbed him, or if the calm fulfillment on the face of Portia at the moment after her father’s prayer when she rose to her feet disturbed him with its alien secret, those things, nevertheless, sustained him. And there was Professor Ball, who had read, ‘The Lord is my strength and song’; and Doctor MacDonald.
In Bardsville, the guardsmen camped in the little park across from the railroad station. Day after day Mr. Munn had seen them there. And he had seen them in the evening, on the roads at the edge of town, silently sitting their mounts. They were guarding the town, and people were grateful to them for it. People would go down to watch them parade, or to watch them lounging on the grass in their idle moments. The soldiers hung round the drugstores and poolrooms and saloons, making jokes, swaggering a little. And some of the hangers-on would fawn on them, and make jokes too; only a few would stare insolently at them, not speaking. In the early evening soldiers would walk slowly down the streets with girls beside them. Some of the officers went to dinner in the big brick houses where the warehouse managers and the most successful buyers lived, and Mr. Gay, who owned the Merchants’ Bank, and Mayor Alton and Judge Howe. Or the officers helped to drill the men who formed the Home Guard. The town accepted the soldiers; they fell into the life there, scarcely altering the pattern. They were guarding the town. They were saving the town. Their sentinels paced up and down at night or sat their mounts by the roadside. At night they paced up and down alongside the blackened areas where the warehouses had been. In the day workmen were busy on those locations clearing away the débris and digging for foundations. There would be new warehouses.
On good afternoons men would pause on the pavements opposite those blackened areas, leaning against the barriers and peering, men wearing overalls, men with lean, red, rawboned, weathered faces and long mustaches. Or a single rider, booted and black-coated, would draw rein there and stare at the piles of brick and rubbish, at the workmen bent over their occupations, and at the soldiers. Then, such a rider would lift his rein and move slowly off. But those other men would lean at the barriers, singly or in groups, and peer. Sometimes one of them would call to a guard, ‘Sojer, whut you a-doen here?’ Or, ‘Little sojer-boy, you better git home to yore mammy, er she won’t have no little sojer-boy.’
‘Get on off, get on off,’ the guards would say when the watchers came in past the outer barrier. ‘Get on off, you can’t stop here.’
Sullenly, the watchers would withdraw.
Mr. Munn saw the soldiers at their camp. Sometimes he would pause, when he had occasion to go to the depot, and watch them about their affairs over in the little park. Watching them, he once thought of a time when he had been camping with some boys, a long time back, when he was ten or twelve years old. One of the boys, little Bill Christian, he remembered — and thought of that little girl, almost a baby, who would not come clearly to his mind, who now was Lucille Christian, Lucille Christian, who had laid her finger on his lips and said, ‘Hush, hush,’ in the dark, who was out there now, in that house with the sound of that rasping breath in the next room — little Bill Christian had had a tent, and the boys had camped in the tent. Across the park, among their little tents, the soldiers laughed and talked.
Or he saw the soldiers on the street, and looked quickly and curiously at their faces, trying to wrench out a secret, as it were, as he had looked at the faces of those people who had come to his office with their troubles, as he had looked at the face of Bunk Trevelyan’s wife that first day. He looked at the faces of the soldiers; but the faces told him nothing. One day on the street, he met the young lieutenant who had been in charge of the cavalry detail the night his house burned. The lieutenant recognized him, and nodded friendlily. And once Mr. Munn had occasion to go down Front Street, where the warehouses had been. He saw the blackened ruins, the workmen, the guards, and the men leaning against the barrier. That night of the raid, at the moment of the first blast, when the air had reeled, sodden and swollen with sound, he had felt a release, a certainty. That was of that time, not this. Now, in the light of full afternoon, he watched the picks of the workmen rise and fall, and the indifferent guards.
‘The warehouses,’ Doctor MacDonald said, ‘that don’t mean a thing. We want warehouses, don’t we? Don’t we want somebody to buy our tobacco?’ Then he grinned. ‘It’s what goes in them counts. And’ — pausing — ‘what gets paid for what goes in them. I don’t see why the warehouses make people downhearted. Or I do see — they’re blind as bats.’
‘I’m not downhearted,’ Mr. Munn told him, ‘but people are. You can tell.’
‘All we need is to keep up membership in the Association. And in the other. Give them meetings, get ’em together and give ’em something to do, something to think about, nurse ’em along. That’s all we need. Keep that up ——’
‘And money,’ Mr. Munn said gloomily. ‘There isn’t any more advance money, and we haven’t got our price yet, the companies feeling so cocky with their soldiers here, and people need money.’
‘Money,’ Doctor MacDonald replied. ‘Sure. But just enough money to eat. Just that. In a pinch just that, and this is a pinch. A man don’t need much in a pinch. It’ll surprise you, by God. I lived once, six weeks it was, on just a handful of parched corn a day and a jack rabbit or a prairie chicken when I could get one, and me on the move, too. Moving fast,’ he added as though by way of parenthesis, and grinned confidentially. ‘That was down in Mexico.’
‘It’ll take more’n parched corn,’ Mr. Munn declared, ‘and people in debt already.’
‘Yeah, yeah; just let anybody start to crack down on mortgages and throw people off their places. God-a-mighty, when the Professor gets me down on my knee-caps these days all I ask the Lord for is to let those bastards start foreclosing mortgages.’ He stabbed the air with the stem of his unlit pipe, and his eyes narrowed. ‘God-a-mighty, just let them start foreclosing, that’s all we need. That’ll heat people up.’
‘They cracked down on Senator Tolliver,’ Mr. Munn observed. ‘He was living in the office there on his place, and they’ve evicted him. He’s still got some influence, I reckon, and if they’d evict him, they’d evict anybody.’
‘They used him, and they’re through. He’s a second-hand corncob now, I tell you. And nobody gives a damn. Do you?’
‘Do I give a damn?’ Mr. Munn echoed. Then he answered, ‘No, I don’t.’
‘You used to be pretty thick with him, and if you don’t give a damn now, who do you think does?’
‘I don’t,’ Mr. Munn answered shortly. He remembered the Senator standing there on the baggage truck at the depot, afraid of the crowd, cringing before it, suspicious of it and desperate, and his face sallow and sunken in the afternoon light. ‘And nobody does, I reckon,’ he added.
‘Well, for one, I don’t, God knows. And nobody does. That’s why they cracked down on him. But if they turned out some God-forsaken little bastard with forty acres and that not good for sassafras, you’d give a damn, and plenty of people would. If they started that.’
‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said slowly.
‘But they’re too smart,’ Doctor MacDonald went on. ‘They won’t do it, because they’re too smart. Not now. But just let the Association crack, and won’t anybody be a thing but hired hands for the Merchants’ Bank and the Alta Company. What we’ve got to do is keep the Association together. The companies can’t last forever without tobacco. They can’t keep those soldiers here forever. If they build warehouses, they’ve got to put something in them.’
‘We don’t control near half the crop,’ Mr. Munn objected.
‘Well, tobacco comes out of plant beds,’ Doctor MacDonald retorted, ‘don’t it?’
Mr. Munn looked at him. ‘We did it before,’ he said. ‘I reckon we can do it again.’
‘I reckon we can,’ Doctor MacDonald agreed, and grinning, his lips curled back from the long teeth.
Doctor MacDonald was like that. He would give that easy, soft laugh, like a man looking out on things from the confidence of his own inner, secret world. Because he was confident and easy in that inner world, he was easy and confident at whatever he set his hand to in the outer world. He would lift his arm in a slow, half-lazy motion to knock out a pipe or to lay his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and you could see, below the too-short sleeve of his coat, the tendons slip slickly and strongly, like a piston in oil, beneath the brown skin of his wrist, the slowness, somehow, suggesting the potentiality of speed. Or he would swing himself lankily to his saddle, and turning to speak, would gather the reins as in idleness; but the restive horse would become still as a post. A handful of parched corn, he had said. That was what he had had, down in Mexico, and moving fast. But it had not been the handful of parched corn that sustained him, Mr. Munn somehow felt; not that, for he had been sustained by something else, a nourishment within himself.
Doctor MacDonald was right, Mr. Munn admitted to himself. With luck it could be done, it was possible. If people were like Doctor MacDonald. He wondered how much he himself was like Doctor MacDonald. He, he himself, could take a lot, he was sure. He had taken a lot already. The Association, that was what was left. If they could win. If they didn’t win. He did not think beyond that except to think what could there be, for him, beyond that. The Association, that was what he was now, if he was anything. He thought: if I am anything. But Doctor MacDonald — let the Association go to pot, let everything, and Doctor MacDonald would still be himself. You could guess that.
Doctor MacDonald did not change. At the meetings with the captains and commanders, or meetings held for a few bands of the men, meetings held in empty barns or in farmhouses with the windows shuttered and a single lamp turned down low and the men half-listening for a warning from the watchmen down the road and in the woods, Doctor MacDonald could still lean toward them, casually, as he had at first, and talk easily and confidentially. The way he must talk to a woman whose husband was sick, or whose child, Mr. Munn once thought. And the men would gradually relax, and listen to him, and when they spoke their own voices would sound natural again and their postures would lose that impression of a crouching, anticipatory strain. Even after the night when the troops tried to raid a meeting, and would have succeeded except for the watchmen, Doctor MacDonald did not change. Some of the people, Mr. Sills and Mr. Burden, urged him not to have another meeting after that, not until things quieted down. ‘No,’ Doctor MacDonald said, ‘now’s the time,’ in the voice of a man saying it’s time for dinner, or time to lock up for the night. At the next meeting, he knocked out his pipe, and observed: ‘Well, gentlemen, they almost bagged us. And I reckon we all know why.’ Half-amusedly, he looked about him, from face to face. Then he added, as though in afterthought: ‘Somebody let it slip. Somebody just let it slip. All we’ve got to do’ — and he hesitated, and the men looked at each other, almost furtively — ‘is to find out who it was. Because,’ he said gently, ‘he might just let it slip again.’ And he grinned, and stuck his hands into his pockets.
Only once did Mr. Munn see a change in him. It was on a gusty Sunday morning. A man who lived down the pike from the Ball place rode up to the gate, dismounted, and approached the house. Doctor MacDonald, watching him walk up the rise toward the house, said idly, ‘There comes Parsons; wonder what he wants.’ Parsons had come to deliver a message. Mr. Sills had been trying to get the Ball place on the telephone, he said, but the line was down. Coming up, he had seen an old gum tree fallen across the line down the pike a piece. It was so rotten it was ready to come down if you looked hard at it, anyway. But Mr. Sills thought Doctor MacDonald ought to know that a gang of men had taken out a Mr. Elkins over near Bardsville the night before and whipped him with a whip. The men had beat on the door and told Mr. Elkins to come out or they would put dynamite under the house, and he had come on out because he was afraid for his wife and family. They whipped him, then they got the wife and children out and dynamited the house anyway. They just hurt one wing of the house, though, Mr. Parsons said. Nobody knew exactly why they did it.
‘It don’t matter why,’ Doctor MacDonald interrupted, and rose from his chair and strode to the hearth.
‘One of them said it was because Mr. Elkins didn’t fire his nigger tenants,’ Mr. Parsons said, ‘and then again some of them said it was because he wasn’t in the Association. But they was all drinking hard, it looks like, saying one thing and another.’
‘It don’t matter why,’ Doctor MacDonald declared. His long face was pale with the fury that was growing in him. ‘It just matters who. By God, if I just knew who!’
‘Mr. Elkins was an anti-Association man,’ Mr. Parsons observed, as though in placation.
Doctor MacDonald wheeled at him. ‘I don’t care if he was president of the Alta Company; I don’t care if he’s anti or not. They did it without authority. If they’re Association people did it, they did it without authority. If they’re not Association ——’ He paused, his hands clenching and unclenching about the pipe he held.
‘They’re not Association,’ Professor Ball said; ‘they’re not our people.’
The stem of the pipe in Doctor MacDonald’s hands snapped. He flung the thing into the fire, turned on his heel, and went out the door without a word.
Our people, Mr. Munn thought. Then asked, ‘Our people, who are they?’
‘It was that fellow Lew Smullin phoning saved me,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘But by the barest. Yes, sir, there wasn’t a minute to spare. It was getting on toward sundown, but nearer dark than you might expect for the time it was — it’d been raining off and on all day and still overcast, and promising to drizzle — and that was luck, too, I reckon. I’d just got in from making my rounds and was getting dried out in front of the fire, when the telephone rang and Viola answered it and said it was for me. It was that fellow Smullin. He just said, right fast and near a whisper, This is Smullin, Smullin, over at the courthouse, they got a warrant out for you and they’re coming, with soldiers; they been gone quite a spell. Then he hung up, quick, before I really caught on what he was saying. By that time Portia and my wife’d come in, and I told them not to get excited, but the soldiers were coming to arrest me, and I was going to get my horse and get out the back way by the old road they used to get timber out by. You’ll have to hand it to those girls now; they didn’t do any cutting-up. They didn’t say a word. Cordelia went sort of white, and took hold of the back of a chair with one hand. Then she said, All right, I’ll go down to the stable with you while you saddle up.
‘But Portia said no, that wasn’t the thing to do. That they’d be watching the back, if they had any sense. And I said, well, the Lord knows they’ll be watching the front if they’re here, and I’d take my chances. She didn’t answer me, just looked out the window. Then she said to Viola, just like she was telling her to do something round the house — Portia, she’s boss in the house here — she said, Viola, get me the bandage box. Viola let her jaw drop and looked at Portia for a second, and I guess my jaw dropped some too at her asking for the bandage box. But Portia said, Viola, this is no time to delay. And Viola ran off. Then Portia said, Cordelia, you go to the stable, quick, and saddle up papa’s horse. I said no, I’d saddle up and I didn’t want the Professor’s horse, I wanted my own. You know that old gray horse the Professor rides round is so fat it can’t go better’n a walk. But she grabbed my arm, and said to Cordelia, go on, do it. And said to me, pull off your coat, quick. Look here, I said to her, who’s this warrant for, you or me? I’m going to get my horse. Then she said, Take off your coat, Hugh, so we can bandage up your hands. I burst right out laughing. For a fact. Then they just bandaged me up, like the Professor. And they got one of the Professor’s old long, black coats and I put it on — both of us being tall and spare-made — and one of his old black hats that flop down. Then we went down to the stable, where Cordelia had his old gray horse saddled up. Soon as I got on, Portia said, Turn your coat collar up, and hang your head down like papa when he’s riding along thinking, and they can’t see you haven’t got a beard.
‘Well, I met them down the road a piece. Not a long piece, either. About a half-dozen of soldiers, and two or three deputies, I reckon. I just lifted up my hand the way the Professor does when he meets somebody on the road, and prayed the Old Marster’d make those bastards notice the bandages and all. Well, they did. One of the deputies said, Good evening, Professor Ball, and I rode on with my chin dug down in my breastbone so hard it hurt, just like I was the Professor busy thinking.
‘I went on over to the Campbell place and spent the night. They almost busted a hame laughing when they got a good look at me, too. But it was just as well, Portia figured it out. I couldn’t got out that old back road if I’d tried. There was soldiers out there, too. Those soldiers I met on the road wasn’t but half of them, the others coming round on the old road and scattering out back. They’d a-picked me up, sure. You’ll have to hand it to Portia, now. She’s a smart one.’
‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘a smart one.’
‘But I reckon it’s going to be laying low a spell for me,’ Doctor MacDonald said, ‘like I been doing for more’n ten days now. I been spelling round in different people’s houses, the Campbells and Donelsons and Nelsons most, but not a night or two at a place in succession. — Night, did I say night? I been doing most of my sleeping in the daytime, and up half the night tending to my patients. Looks like it comes a spell of wet weather and the roads mire up or a fellow gets in a fix like this or one way or another, and everybody in the damned county goes and gets down sick and wants you to doctor them. Cordelia or some of them gets the calls at the house and they pass them on to me ——’
‘They’ll hook you,’ Mr. Munn said fatalistically, ‘if you aren’t careful. They’ll hook you on a fake call.’
‘Play sick to hook me,’ Doctor MacDonald retorted, ‘and I’ll make somebody sick. I’ll take him apart unless God-a-mighty’s got a new way patented for putting a man’s parts together. I’ll take him apart like a clock.’ He seemed pleased with himself, smiling. Then, soberly, he added: ‘What I can’t figure is why they up all at once and try to get me. They been round here quite a spell now, and they just suddenly up and try to get me.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘They figure they got some evidence now that’ll stand up in a court of law. I don’t know what it is, but that’s it. They think their evidence’ll stand up.’
‘They got next to somebody.’
‘Sure,’ Mr. Munn agreed. ‘Somebody.’
‘They never would’ve known to lay for the boys at Fulton’s plant bed if they hadn’t got next to somebody. And get Turpin and Mosely.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m glad it’s Turpin and Mosely sitting over there in the jail-house, and not me.’
‘They won’t give them bail,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Well, you can be durned sure, then, they wouldn’t give me bail if they got me. But they won’t get me. I don’t like to be indoors so much. Just let me sit round the house a couple of days and I need calomel, damned if I don’t. I’ll just stay outer their way till they get tired and call off the dogs.’
‘If they’ve got evidence, they won’t get tired soon.’
‘Neither will I,’ Doctor MacDonald said cheerfully, ‘long as folks’ll put up with all the visiting round I been doing lately.’
‘They won’t get tired,’ Mr. Munn replied slowly, ‘unless ——’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless the Association’ll play ball. Make a deal.’
‘Which it won’t do,’ Doctor MacDonald said.
‘Unless,’ Mr. Munn remarked quietly, ‘they catch you. Then they’ll try to force a deal by putting the pressure on you. On whoever else they can get. Me, for instance.’
‘They won’t catch me,’ Doctor MacDonald announced. ‘It ain’t in them.’ He lay back at ease, propped on his elbow on the bed, and the smoke curled comfortably up from his pipe. His boots, damp and stained with half-dried mud, stood by the bed. He wriggled his toes in his heavy wool socks, and complacently studied their motion. ‘Another thing I can’t figure,’ he said, ‘is Smullin calling me up and telling me about the warrant. Never saw the man half a dozen times in my life. Never said more’n howdy-do then.’
‘I’ve seen him a lot, being round the courthouse the way I am,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘but I can’t say I know him, exactly. Nobody does. He never says a thing. Just hangs round a bunch of men, on the edge; one of those fellows — you know the kind — they hang round on the edge and never say a thing.’
‘He’s sure a God-forsaken, broken-down-looking old bastard.’
‘He’s that,’ Mr. Munn agreed.
‘Well, I can’t figure out him calling up. You’d figure him sucking along with the gang at the courthouse. And all they want is to keep on warming chairs with their fat asses.’
‘Maybe,’ Mr. Munn said meditatively — ‘maybe he just didn’t want to see you get caught.’
‘Hell,’ Doctor MacDonald exclaimed, ‘he ain’t a farmer, what does he care?’
‘Maybe he just cared,’ Mr. Munn answered. ‘Maybe he’s a damned fool.’
‘Damned fool is right.’ Doctor MacDonald laughed. He flexed his long legs, rumpling the patchwork quilt on which he lay. ‘I reckon he was taking a chance on his job, calling me.’
‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘he was.’ Yes, he thought. All those years dragging his club foot round town, trying to sell a little life insurance or hail insurance or fire insurance to people. Hanging round groups of men at the post office or the depot or on the street corner, trying to get up nerve to say to somebody, ‘I wonder if you’d be interested in some insurance, now I was just wondering ——’ And then stopping, waiting for the man to answer, ‘No.’ And going home at night to the little house at the edge of town. Nobody else had been in that house, not for years, not since his old mother, Mrs. Smullin, died, people said. Going home, and lighting a lamp and pulling down all the shades, and eating something off the kitchen table. Something he’d bought and taken home in a paper sack. All that before getting the job, God knew how, at the courthouse. Now he could sit round there in the afternoons and evenings, listening to the men talk. He didn’t have to try to work himself up to say, ‘I wonder if you’d be interested, I was just wondering ——’ He could just hang round and listen, and not worry. Except for being a damned fool, and making that telephone call.
‘He came mighty near waiting too long; another five minutes and they’d have had me,’ Doctor MacDonald was saying.
‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn rejoined.
‘A miss is as good as a mile, though,’ Doctor MacDonald said.
‘Yes.’
‘I hope he don’t lose his job,’ Doctor MacDonald remarked. Then: ‘He sure didn’t stand to gain anything. The poor old fool.’
Mr. Munn studied him. ‘There’re a lot of fools,’ he observed. ‘You,’ he said slowly, ‘for instance. You’re a fool. What did you stand to gain? All you stood to gain was to have to hide out to keep from jail.’
‘Or the rope,’ Doctor MacDonald answered, ‘if the bastards can play it their way.’
‘We’re all damned fools. A lot of us, anyway.’
‘People are damned fools in different ways. They got different stuff in them.’
‘You can’t figure out Smullin,’ Mr. Munn told him. ‘Well, I can’t figure you out.’
‘Neither can I,’ Doctor MacDonald returned amiably. ‘Been trying for years. But I can’t do it.’ He leaned back comfortably, shoving the pillow.
‘I can’t figure myself out,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘sometimes.’
Doctor MacDonald let the smoke drift easily from his nostrils. He glanced up at the low ceiling, as though in reflection; then about the room, letting his eyes rest upon the steady flame of the lamp on the dresser, and then, casually, upon Mr. Munn’s face. ‘I reckon a man goes his gait,’ he said, and yawned.
They said nothing for a time. Then Doctor MacDonald swung his legs off the bed and rose. He said that he had to go out and see one of his patients, and that he’d be back some before day. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled on his boots. Then he went across to the dresser and peered at himself in the mirror. He ran a comb through his bushy hair, yawned once, and stretched his arms above his head, almost touching the low ceiling, filling the room, making his shadow on the wall behind him look like a big, awkward bird. Then he said, ‘So long,’ and went out the door.
Mr. Munn slept there at the Campbells’. He scarcely woke up when Doctor MacDonald came in. In the morning, Mr. Munn dressed as quietly as possible in order not to wake him. He was sprawled out on his side of the bed, snoring gently, with his long, bony head thrust into the pillow and one big hand grasping the bedpost, as though sleep itself were not a passivity, but was at its secret core, when all the accidents of softness and ease had been stripped away, an act of will and tension.
Mr. Munn managed to get out without waking him. He did not see him again until the night the troops came again to the Ball place for him.
They tried to circle the house and to close in, slowly, on foot; but the dogs scented them. The dogs barked wildly and throatily, rushing away from the house, filling the woods to the west of the house with a distant, hollow clamor, vibrant as in a cave.
‘It don’t sound very encouraging,’ Doctor MacDonald remarked. He leaned forward in his chair, drawing his legs under him, easily but as though in readiness to rise.
Mr. Munn said nothing. He was listening to the dogs. One of them was circling, swinging back.
‘Durn it,’ Doctor MacDonald exclaimed, almost peevishly, ‘can’t they leave a man alone? And this the second night I been home in three weeks.’
The door to the next room swung softly open. Cordelia stood there. Her hand was on the knob, and she did not move. She said nothing. Behind her, seated around a lamp, were the others, with their heads lifted to listen.
‘Maybe it’s not that,’ Mr. Munn suggested. But the barking was closer, and circling.
‘Durn,’ Doctor MacDonald said, and stood upright from the chair in a sudden motion.
The dogs were retreating toward the house. Their barking was furious, deep-throated, incessant.
Professor Ball stood behind Cordelia at the door.
‘Come here,’ Doctor MacDonald commanded, and Cordelia came to him. She laid her hand on his arm.
‘Don’t get excited,’ he told her.
The others crowded into the room.
‘Do those kids know I’m here?’ Doctor MacDonald demanded.
‘No,’ Portia said, ‘they don’t know.’
The dogs were near now.
‘If it is anything, I can’t get out now,’ Doctor MacDonald asserted. ‘They’re all round.’
The others looked at each other, not speaking; except Cordelia, whose eyes were on Doctor MacDonald’s face.
‘I’ll try the loft,’ Doctor MacDonald said.
Professor Ball moved toward the hall door, Portia by his side.
‘No,’ Doctor MacDonald ordered. ‘Sit down. Go sit down like you were.’ They stood and looked at him. ‘Like you were,’ he said sharply. ‘Be talking, or something. I’ll get in the loft and pull the ladder up after me.’ Almost casually, he removed Cordelia’s hand from his sleeve, then turned and was at the hall door in three abrupt, plunging strides.
They heard his feet heavy on the bare boards of the stairs.
‘Where’s Isabella?’ Portia suddenly demanded.
No one answered, each looking questioningly at the others.
Portia started toward the hall door. ‘I’ll get her,’ she said.
‘Sit down,’ Professor Ball directed. ‘It’s too late. Sit down, like he said.’ He laid an arm around Cordelia’s shoulders, then withdrew it. ‘Go sit down,’ he repeated, ‘in yonder.’ He raised his right hand and, clumsily because of the knobby bandages, plucked at his beard.
On the porch, one of the dogs barked frenziedly. There was a pounding at the door.
The women had gone into the next room.
‘Sit down,’ Professor Ball ordered Mr. Munn, and moved toward the hall, slowly.
Mr. Munn let himself down, almost warily, into his chair.
He heard the voices in the hall, Professor Ball saying: ‘Good evening. What can I do for you?’ and another voice: ‘We’ve come for Doctor MacDonald. Where is he?’
He heard Professor Ball’s voice answer: ‘Come in, gentlemen, but I can’t oblige you. He is not here.’
‘That won’t do any good,’ the other voice answered. ‘We had word. He’s here.’
‘He’s not here,’ Professor Ball’s voice repeated.
By an effort of will, painfully, Mr. Munn conquered his impulse to rise from the chair.
‘He can’t get out,’ the voice said. ‘There’s men all round.’
The door from the hall swung fully open and a man in uniform stood there. Other men were behind him.
Looking at the man, Mr. Munn thought: I can stand up now, I can stand up, it’s the natural thing to do now. He stood up and looked at the man.
‘All right,’ the man at the door said back over his shoulder, to Professor Ball, ‘we’ll search the house. If you want it that way, you can have it.’ He stepped into the room. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded of Mr. Munn.
‘My name’s Munn,’ Mr. Munn said, and heard his voice natural and even.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Do you have a warrant for me?’
‘No,’ the man replied.
‘All right, then, it’s none of your concern.’
‘Well, we will have ’fore long’ — a chunky man with a pockmarked face stepped up even with the officer, and nodded toward Mr. Munn. ‘You’re Percy Munn, I know you. You’re one of ’em, too. They’ll be gitten a warrant for you, all right.’
‘I reckon you’re a deputy,’ Mr. Munn said, and looked at the man.
‘Yeah,’ the man admitted.
‘Well,’ Mr. Munn declared judicially, ‘I’m glad to see the deputies they got over here in Hunter County are as big sons-of-bitches as the deputies we got over at Bardsville.’
‘I’ll ——’ The chunky man raised his clenched fist, as though for a blow, and took a step toward Mr. Munn.
‘You better be trying to get what you came for,’ the lieutenant said shortly.
The chunky man lowered his fist. ‘What’s in there?’ he demanded, and nodded toward the closed door across the room.
Mr. Munn did not answer.
‘My daughters are in there,’ Professor Ball, standing at the hall door, told him.
‘Well, I reckon they ain’t turned in yet,’ the deputy said, and crossed to jerk open the door.
The women there, faces raised as though in surprise, were sitting about the lamp, their sewing on their knees.
‘I suppose,’ Mr. Munn remarked to the officer, ‘they have to pay you good money to make you get caught out with that’ — and with a nod he indicated the chunky man. ‘Or,’ Mr. Munn added, ‘do you like it?’
The officer opened his lips as though to speak. Then, after an instant, he asked, ‘What’s out that way?’ And he pointed beyond the room where the women still sat, with their faces raised in question.
‘Bedrooms,’ Professor Ball replied, ‘where some boys sleep. Pupils of mine,’ he added.
The chunky man looked back over his shoulder. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, almost jeeringly, ‘he’s a schoolteacher.’
‘Why don’t you start there?’ the officer demanded. Then to the soldiers in the hall: ‘Allen, Forbes, go with him.’
Two of the soldiers entered the room, lifting their feet in a cautious tread as though on treacherous ice, or as though afraid of smearing the floor with the red mud that was thick on their shoes. One of them, as he passed, glanced apologetically at Mr. Munn.
The officer stood in the middle of the room, waiting. No one spoke. The dogs on the front porch were now barking intermittently.
The deputy and the soldiers came back. Then they searched the back of the house and the rooms across the hall. All the while the officer, saying nothing, stood there with Professor Ball and Mr. Munn.
The deputy returned and stood in the hall door.
‘All right,’ the officer said. ‘Let’s look upstairs.’ He went toward the hall, saying to Professor Ball, ‘You better come, too.’ Then to one of the soldiers, ‘You keep an eye on him.’ With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated Mr. Munn.
The women had entered from the next room. They stood grouped closely together, and looked, as from a painful inquiring distance, at the men.
‘Just a minute,’ Mr. Munn said abruptly.
The officer turned, and looked at him.
Maybe, Mr. Munn thought, maybe. He was conscious of the eyes of the women upon him. He could not see them, but he was aware of them looking, leaning. He thought, If I make a row, maybe they won’t go up, maybe they’ll just take me and go, and they can’t do anything to me, not to me, they haven’t got anything on me.
‘What do you want?’ the officer demanded impatiently.
To Mr. Munn it seemed as though he had just rediscovered the officer standing there, as though he himself had been lost in some great lag of time, and now, suddenly, had risen again into time, like a diver bursting to the surface.
‘Nothing,’ Mr. Munn answered.
The officer went out, and there was a tramping of feet on the stairs.
No, Mr. Munn thought, it wouldn’t have worked, it wouldn’t have done any good. He did not look at the women. The feet moved overhead, scrapingly on the bare floors. He heard the sound of doors being opened, then closed. He wondered if he hadn’t made the row with the officer because he was afraid. A coward. Then he thought, No, it wouldn’t have done any good.
He heard the voices upstairs, suddenly sharp and demanding. Someone was pounding on a door. It was the officer’s voice that was commanding, very loud, ‘Open that door!’
Mr. Munn moved toward the hall, and the soldier blocked his way.
‘It’s Isabella,’ Portia said. ‘It’s Isabella; she won’t let them in.’
‘Get away,’ Mr. Munn ordered the soldier, who held his carbine at the port to block the door. He laid his hand on the carbine.
The soldier’s face, he noticed flickeringly, irrelevantly, was round and unformed, childish. ‘Listen, boy,’ Mr. Munn said, speaking quickly, ‘lay a hand on me and get in trouble. Real trouble. They haven’t got a warrant for me. It’ll be trouble for you. Listen, I’m a lawyer, I know.’
Mr. Munn did not take his hand from the carbine. The boy gave a little ground.
‘Get away,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘All he said was keep an eye on me. Get away.’
He pushed past the soldier and ran up the steps, the soldier following.
The officer stood in front of the locked door of the bedroom at the head of the stairs, the deputy on one side and the two soldiers on the other. One of the soldiers held a lamp, the chimney smutted now because the flame had flared and jerked with the motion of being carried about. The light was wavering and uncertain. Professor Ball stood behind the soldiers.
Mr. Munn stood beside the soldier with the lamp.
‘Open that door,’ the officer ordered, loud. Even in the unsure light Mr. Munn could see that his face was flushing with irritation. As he spoke he truculently thrust his head forward.
‘No,’ the voice from beyond the door said faintly, ‘you can’t come in. Not in my room. You haven’t any right.’
The deputy grinned. Nodding confidentially at the soldier who had come up with Mr. Munn, he remarked: ‘She said no man wasn’t come-en her room, didn’t have the right. I just reckon you ain’t the right man, lieutenant.’
The soldier with the lamp grinned too.
‘Oh, she’s a lady, she is,’ the deputy said mincingly.
‘Shut up,’ the officer commanded. Then, turning to the door: ‘Miss, you oughter let us in. It’s the law. We won’t bother you. Not a bit.’ His voice was wheedling, cajoling, now. ‘We’ll catch him sooner or later. If he’s hiding in there, you won’t do him any good acting this way ——’
Covertly, Mr. Munn glanced down the hall. It was shadowy there, almost dark, but the loft ladder, it was not there. Doctor MacDonald was in the loft. He had taken the ladder up. He was not in the room there, with the girl.
‘— not a bit of good, Miss. Now, Miss, open up, please.’
‘No,’ the girl’s voice replied.
‘All right, all right.’ The officer’s voice was loud again, and harsh. ‘All right, Miss, we’re gonna knock the door down.’
‘I told you I had a shotgun,’ the girl’s voice said.
‘I don’t believe it,’ the officer answered. ‘We’re gonna knock it down.’
‘She’s got a gun all right,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘How do you know?’
‘There was a gun sitting in the corner. I saw it. Right there’ — and Mr. Munn pointed toward the corner beyond the door. ‘It’s gone now.’
‘Listen,’ Professor Ball told the officer, ‘she might shoot somebody. And you’d be responsible. She might do it. She’s the youngest, and headstrong and spoiled, spoiled when she was a child, being the youngest ——’
‘Hell,’ the deputy exclaimed, ‘she ain’t got no gun. She’s bluffen. They’re all bluffen.’ But he sidled away from the door a little.
Bluffing, Mr. Munn thought. She had the gun, all right. But Doctor MacDonald wasn’t in there with her, he was sure of that. Bluffing, yes, she was bluffing. She was trying to bluff them into believing he was in there. She wasn’t thinking beyond that, she was just doing that. What she could.
With his fist, the officer struck the heavy panel of the door.
‘No gentleman,’ Professor Ball complained querulously — ‘no gentleman would go and make a young girl like her shoot somebody.’
‘Listen,’ the officer said, addressing the door, ‘we don’t think you’ve got a gun. You’re bluffing. We’re coming in.’
There was no answer. Then with a small, grating sound, the door swung inward about eight inches. Mr. Munn peered at the aperture.
‘I have, you can see it — but don’t come close.’ Her voice was broken, as though she was crying, or trying to keep from crying.
It was there. Mr. Munn could see in the shadow, not protruding from the room, the muzzle of the shotgun like a small figure eight laid on its side. It was wavering there in the shadow.
‘Now, Miss,’ the officer was saying, ‘just gimme that gun. Just pass it out to me, we aren’t gonna bother you.’ He did not reach out for the gun, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. ‘Come on, Miss, you don’t want to make trouble; come on ——’
The soldier standing closest to the wall, out of range of vision from the interior, leaned slowly toward the door-jamb. The officer drew his feet closer together, the knees flexing a little. ‘Come on, lady, come on, now,’ he kept saying coaxingly.
Mr. Munn saw the soldier lean toward the door-jamb. He saw his hand stealthily rise. ‘Isabella!’ he shouted warningly, ‘watch ——’ But the soldier behind him chunked him heavily in the ribs with the carbine butt so that he fell to one knee, gasping. And at the instant he fell, the hand reached round the door-jamb and swept down to seize the barrel of the shotgun, and the officer plunged sideways, and the roar of the gun filled the hall.
‘I got it,’ the soldier at the door shouted. The shotgun dangled loosely from his grasp.
Downstairs, one of the women screamed.
The officer stepped into the room, his pistol drawn. The soldier with the lamp followed, then the deputy.
Mr. Munn rose slowly to his feet. There, before him on the floor, was the mark where the charge of shot had buried itself in the oak planking.
The women, calling, were coming up the stairs.
The girl was sitting on the floor, her head pressed against the door-jamb and her shoulders shaking with sobs. Professor Ball, on his knees beside her, the skirts of his long black coat almost brushing the floor, as when he knelt to pray, was moving his clumsy bandaged hand over her hair with a mechanical gesture of comfort. He was mumbling something, Mr. Munn could not make out what.
Mr. Munn turned to meet the interrogation and distress on the faces of the women. ‘It’s all right,’ he said.
As Portia moved quickly toward the doorway, the officer came out, the soldier with the lamp behind him. He looked down at the huddled girl. Professor Ball rose, his tall, thin figure weaving crankily. He put out his hand to the wall to brace himself. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he told the officer, his voice croaking and distant.
The officer did not seem to hear him. ‘Miss,’ he said, addressing the girl on the floor, ‘Miss, I sure ——’
The soldier who still held the shotgun set it against the wall, almost surreptitiously.
‘Miss,’ the officer repeated, then stopped.
There was a slight scraping noise down the hall. Mr. Munn turned in time to see, indistinct in the shadow, the long form of Doctor MacDonald hang for an instant from the edge of the loft door before he dropped to the floor.