ALL the elements that were to combine in a more violent chemistry had been present, it later seemed upon looking back, that Christmas at the Senator’s house. None was lacking, but their combination at that time appeared so natural, so calm, so innocent, so stable, that only the slow attrition of time might be believed to threaten it. If Mr. Munn, remembering the occasion of his speech at the first rally and looking about the pleasant, firelit room, had been struck for a moment with the force of accident and change and the thought of the solitariness of the snowy night outside, it had been only for a moment. Later, he was to curse his blindness, his stupidity, and his vanity. The signs of the future had been there in all his experiences of that time, but he had lacked the key, the clue to the code, and had seen only the ignorant surface. Or those events of the future had appeared at that time like icebergs which are seen riding on the blue and placid horizon, patches of white cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which, with seven eighths of their enormous, steel-hard, ram-like bulk submerged, may be moving unpredictably toward a fatal conjunction. And more than once or twice, in a moment of self-accusation or in the grip of an impersonal fatalism, such as the loser feels when the cards of the last hand begin to fall under the glaring, green- shaded light, he was to demand of himself: If I couldn’t know myself, how could I know any of the rest of them? Or anything? Certainly he had not known himself, he would decide; if indeed the self of that time could claim any continuator in the self that was to look backward and speculate, and torture the question. Then, thinking that the self he remembered, and perhaps remembered but imperfectly, and the later self were nothing more than superimposed exposures on the same film of a camera, he felt that all of his actions had been as unaimed and meaningless as the blows of a blind man who strikes out at the undefined sounds which penetrate his private darkness.
Certainly, he was to decide, he had not known Senator Tolliver. He had not sensed for a moment the desperation that lurked beneath his urbanity, his gestures of consideration and kindness, the assured and commanding glance of his gray eyes. And, not knowing, he had been the dupe in the game which the Senator was playing with the cunning of his long experience of men and their weaknesses and with the desperation of his own immediate need. When the game had been begun, Mr. Munn could never guess. Perhaps the Senator had started in the fullest sincerity; or had started one game only to find himself involved in another, not the will then but the hand, not the hand but the instrument. That did not matter, Mr. Munn was to tell himself bitterly — the question of intention — for the Senator was one of those men whose day-to-day behavior, whose most casual gesture or familiar word, was like the campaign of a good general in that it made him able to strike in this direction or that, at need. But, in any case, he himself had been the Senator’s dupe, his lackey-boy. He had been taken in. When the Senator said jump, he had jumped. And he had not been alone.
In early spring the Alta Company, Dismukes and Brothers Tobacco Company, two smaller companies, the Morton and the Regal, and a group of independent buyers made offers within one week. The offers exhibited some variations, a fraction of a cent more for prime leaf in one than in another, a fraction less for seconds, but the more closely the offers were investigated, especially in the light of the poundages on which they were based, the more superficial the variations appeared. ‘I feel inclined to believe,’ Mr. Sills said when he presented the offers to the board, ‘that these offers represent an agreement among the concerns and individuals in question. I believe they got together on it and figured it out so the prices would work out about the same. Of course, that by itself doesn’t mean the offers oughtn’t to be accepted. That just occurred to me.’
‘It occurred to me a long time before you even started reading any offers,’ Mr. Christian muttered, as though to himself. He was lounging back in his chair, his booted legs stuck straight out under the table and his black felt on the green baize before him. Red-clay mud clung to his boots, for he had just ridden in from his place; and the hat made a dark ring of spreading moisture on the faded color of the baize. It was still raining, the water sluicing oilily down the gray panes of the windows that overlooked the alley back of the bank building.
‘Ten dollars a hundred,’ Mr. Peacham remarked meditatively. ‘I’ve sure God seen the time I wished I could get that for my leaf. Last year, now.’
‘Me, too,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘but this ain’t last year.’
‘Before the discussion starts ——’ Mr. Sills began.
‘What!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed with a ponderous sarcasm, ‘you mean there’s gonna be some discussion of that figure?’
‘Before the discussion starts, I might remind the gentlemen here that what would have been an advantageous price to a private grower in the past is not necessarily an advantageous price under the present circumstances. We’ve got a considerable investment in warehousing right now. There’s the interest on that investment to be considered. And the interest on sums outstanding as advances to growers whose condition made financial assistance imperative. And the costs of handling the tobacco. In calculating what would be a fair return to the individual grower we must take into consideration the Association demand to defray these necessary expenses. I can give you the precise amount’ — he began to shuffle through the stacks of papers before him, his colorless eyes peering through his spectacles — ‘that should be called for per thousand pounds. And as you gentlemen know, you have to add to that amount the percentage on the gross price for the Association sinking fund.’ He continued to shuffle the papers, very deliberately and with his lips moving as though he were reading to himself, and his eyes blinking slowly behind his spectacles.
‘We’ve got those figures down to rock bottom,’ Mr. Peacham said. ‘I know that all right. But I wish we could shave off a little more, some way. The antis are always saying the whole principle just isn’t economic. Now take that editorial last week in the Messenger. They say we run the price of tobacco up by tacking on a lot of items and the farmer never sees that money. And that we hurt business and hurt the community.’
‘All those arguments have been satisfactorily answered, I believe.’ It was Senator Tolliver talking. He was holding an unlit cigar in his hand, rolling it delicately between his fingers. ‘In the papers and on the platforms. We know it is an economically justifiable method. And all reasonable men whose interest hasn’t blinded them ——’
‘Such a calf ain’t been dropped yet,’ Mr. Christian said.
‘— they all see that. Even the companies themselves will probably come to accept the situation with good grace. They will save a good deal of money by being able to deal directly with a responsible organization such as the Association. It will no longer be necessary for them to run from one individual grower to another. In the end they will save more than the Association expense and per cent. They will come to see the advantages, I am sure.’ He kept rolling the cigar, slowly and delicately, between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. Now and then as he spoke — and he spoke with a slight air of constraint, of abstraction — he would glance at the pile of documents in front of Mr. Sills. Mr. Sills had, apparently, found his paper now, for he coughed sharply and catarrhally.
‘And I am sure,’ the Senator continued, ‘they will bow to the inevitable and accept the position of the Association. I interpret these offers as a token of a new, a more reasonable attitude toward our organization.’
‘I’ve located the figures on Association costs,’ Mr. Sills said, and coughed again, dryly, matter-of-factly, this time. ‘Based on the thousand pounds. Of course, next year, if we increase the poundage in the Association warehouses, we automatically reduce the costs per thousand pounds. But they are not exorbitant now. I just thought I’d go over these figures another time before we discussed the new offers.’ Mr. Sills coughed once more, now apologetically.
In his dry, monotonous voice, Mr. Sills was reading his list of figures.
Even after the offers had been read, and the chairman had asked for an expression of sentiment, Mr. Munn did not sense a fundamental difference between this meeting and meetings of the past; or even when the Senator, after Mr. Christian had slammed the table and said ‘Hell, no,’ and the others had indecisively dropped into silence, began to speak in a calm, restrained voice, the very falling cadences of which carried an impression of tolerance and finality. He had, he said, foreseen this moment, and had tried to prepare his mind for it, the moment when they would discover a division of policy in the board. But that would not impair their harmony of purpose, he was sure. He said that the time had come to sell, that now was the time to forget the past and to think of the future. They had won a victory. No one could deny that. And next year a greater victory. And to reach an agreement with the companies would do much to relieve the tension which had resulted in those irresponsible acts of violence in Hunter County which had so embarrassed the Association. He felt it his duty, as a citizen and as a member of the Association board, to vote for an immediate acceptance of the several offers.
‘There is one more thing,’ Mr. Peacham said, breaking in almost before Senator Tolliver had ceased, ‘and that’s the fact that we’ve got to sell soon, anyway. If we are left with any substantial amount of this season’s crop in the warehouses, we’re ruined, and no doubt about that. We know we’re close to the edge now. We can’t borrow much more for carrying. We’ve got to get money for our people. That means selling. I’ve been thinking about this ——’
‘Wait!’ Mr. Christian pushed his chair back a little with a rasping sound. ‘I’ll sink five thousand personally in a holding fund. Till we get every God-damned penny on our published price schedule. I can raise that much, and I’ll turn that in on a note of hand to the treasurer, and not a note for ninety days, either, but till the tobacco’s sold. I reckon there’s others can do the same thing, all right. Here in this room, and other members of the Association. And on these pissy-ant offers’ — he lowered his head a little, his neck reddening and thickened with the motion, and swung his glance around the table — ‘I’ll vote no.’
Then the clamor of voices broke out suddenly, and the voice of Mr. Morse, the chairman, saying, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’
In the end it was voted to reject the offers. Mr. Munn voted for acceptance, with the Senator, Mr. Peacham, Mr. Burden, and Mr. Dicey Short. The chairman broke the tie, going to rejection. In the gray light from the rain-sluicing windows, the Senator’s face appeared gray, too, and when Mr. Morse cast his deciding vote, the face seemed suddenly loose, as though the inner structure had failed that kept the lips so firmly together and maintained the fine arch of the cheek. He stopped rolling the long, pale cigar between his fingers and laid it on the green baize before him. His motion was very deliberate. The covering leaf of the cigar was frayed and cracked now. It wouldn’t be any good.
Just as the meeting was breaking up, when some of the men were already moving toward the door, Mr. Christian said: ‘Hey! wait a minute. I just want to say, any time you start raising subscription money to tide the Association over, that five thousand is still good. At least,’ he added, grinning heavily, and pointing toward the floor, ‘if those bastards downstairs there in the bank will give me another mortgage on my place.’
No one made any answer to Mr. Christian’s words.
Standing near the door, Mr. Munn watched the Senator detach himself from the group of men who remained and start to leave. The Senator looked more like himself now, but still grayish and strained, as though from loss of sleep. As he turned to go, Mr. Christian barred his way. With the back of his hand, Mr. Christian tapped him solidly on the chest, and said, ‘Well, Ed, no hard feelings, huh?’
‘No, Bill,’ the Senator answered.
Mr. Christian took a sharp look at his face. ‘Fine,’ he said, and stepped aside.
The Senator walked slowly to the door. He hesitated a moment beside Mr. Munn, and then reached out to touch him on the shoulder. ‘Well, boy,’ he said in a low voice, ‘we did the best we could.’ Without waiting for a reply, he passed quickly out of the door and down the dark stairs.
At the next meeting Senator Tolliver did not appear. The last members to enter the long, dingy room looked inquiringly at the Senator’s accustomed chair, empty now, and then at the faces of the men already assembled. ‘I reckon he’s late this morning,’ Mr. Dicey Short remarked.
Mr. Sills had been staring at a long beam of sunlight that fell athwart the floor beside the table. The motes that flickered brightly in it had held all his attention, apparently; but at Mr. Dicey Short’s remark he turned slowly to the group, readjusted his spectacles, through which his colorless eyes peered distantly, and said: ‘No, not late. Not coming is my guess.’
‘Not coming?’ Captain Todd demanded with a sudden and unaccustomed sharpness.
‘Not now, and not later,’ Mr. Sills replied, and fumbled in his coat pocket to produce a long envelope, ‘if this is what I think it is.’ He turned it carefully in his hands, while every man there leaned forward a little, except Captain Todd, and fixed his eyes upon the object. ‘I got it this morning,’ Mr. Sills said. ‘Not in the mail. A nigger man was standing down here at the door of the bank, and he gave it to me when I came in. The envelope says it’s to be opened at the meeting this morning.’ The small sound of the tearing of the paper began, and was finished; then Mr. Sills coughed once, lightly and inwardly, while he glanced at the enclosed sheet.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s it.’ And he began to read in his flat, toneless voice, stopping once or twice to clear his throat and to press his spectacles more precisely into place on the bridge of his thin, putty-colored nose:
Members of the Board of Directors, The Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco — and he coughed.
Gentlemen: The conviction has been forcibly borne in upon me that my views concerning the policy of the Association are not in harmony with those of the majority of the members of the Board of Directors, even though it is my firm belief that the policy I have supported is the one of reason and peace and would be endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the actual members of the Association itself. Therefore, under these circumstances, I feel that it is my sad duty to resign from the Board of Directors of the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco, although it is with the deepest regret that I sever my connection with the esteemed gentlemen with whom it has been my privilege and honor to serve.
Very respectfully,
EDMUND TOLLIVER
Mr. Sills finished the reading, folded the sheet with a precise motion of his fingers, laid it on the table before him, and, as though to abjure responsibility, turned his head to resume his inspection of the drifting motes in the ray of sunlight. There was absolute silence in the room for some fifteen seconds. Then Mr. Christian, half-rising from his chair, leaned forward across the table and thrust out his hand toward Mr. Sills and commanded, ‘Lemme see that letter.’
Mr. Sills swung his expressionless face toward Mr. Christian, then handed him the letter. Mr. Christian spread out the sheet, crackling the paper. He stared at it, and his lips moved slowly as though he could read only with difficulty. The others watched him intently. Then he flung it on the table and remarked, with an abstracted and deliberate air, ‘Well, I’ll be God-damned.’
The voices at the table rose clamorously.
‘What I can’t see is’ — and Mr. Christian swung about on his heel and glared at them all — ‘is why he got out. Unless it’s a rule or ruin proposition with him. But you can’t tell me’ — and he shook his great red fist indiscriminately at the table — ‘he just got his little feelings hurt. Not in harmony, my Blessed Redeemer! Don’t try to tell me they used to wash behind his ears and blow his little nose for him and give him his sugar-tit every morning up there in the Senate. Harmony, my God! And he never resigned from the Senate, nor anything else before — not him!’
Captain Todd approached Mr. Christian, saying, ‘Now, man, be fair to the Senator. You can’t be sure ——’
‘Sure? Sure! My God!’
‘A man’s got to go his own gait, Bill. You know that. Let Tolliver. His lights ain’t your lights, nor my lights, but let him act according to his lights.’
Mr. Christian was standing before him, his head still thrust out, the blood still beating in his neck, and his stare fixed on the Captain’s face. Slowly he nodded his head, saying: ‘All right, all right. His own gait.’ He walked back to his chair and sat down. While the others talked, he read the letter again, that same laborious intentness again on his face.
‘But it’s bad, and no doubt about it,’ the Captain was declaring, ‘coming at this time. The loss of his prestige will hurt. No doubt about it. And to select a new man to finish out his term. It’s a bad time. But it’s up to us.’
Mr. Christian raised his eyes from the paper, and said somewhat restrainedly: ‘Listen to this, what he says: “. . . even though it is my firm belief that the policy I have supported is the one of reason and peace and would be endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the actual members of the Association itself.” ’ He let his glance move down the table, face by face, and come to rest at last upon Captain Todd. ‘Do you believe he’s right?’ he demanded.
‘If I did, I’d have supported him,’ the Captain replied quietly.
‘Do you think he thinks that is right?’
‘I don’t know,’ the Captain said. ‘He’s written it.’
‘What made him write that down?’ And Mr. Christian tapped the very sentence with his thick forefinger.
‘Every man has to go his own gait,’ the Captain answered.
As Mr. Christian read that sentence aloud, it struck Mr. Munn’s mind, as it had not before, with a force that seemed to graze off tangentially, and lead to a confused darkness of speculations. Mr. Christian was right, it was the key of the letter. It was not like the rest of the letter. It really didn’t belong in the letter, at least not when stated that way. Especially that about the overwhelming majority. It didn’t belong. Not in this letter to them. Then the thought slipped from his mind, to return, but only casually, just before he fell asleep that night, and then again, sharply and fully, the next morning when he sat at breakfast in the hotel dining-room and saw that very sentence in the newspaper.
There was a big story about the resignation, and the letter was printed in full in the body of the story. It was a Nashville paper. He rose hurriedly from his chair and went into the lobby to get the local paper and the Edgerton Messenger. In both the letter was reprinted in full. The Bardsville Ledger carried, in addition, an editorial under the heading ‘Does Association Betray Farmers’ Interest?’ It began: ‘When a man who has served the people of his section so long and ably as has Senator Edmund Tolliver feels it necessary to resign from the organization he has helped to create, because he feels it is betraying its trust and is leading the community into paths of disorder against the will of the majority, then it is time for all thinking men to stop and reconsider the whole situation.’ It was the same sentence, the very same, transparently re-dressed. All right, Mr. Munn thought, out in the open, the belly-dragging dog. He crushed the paper between his hands, gulped the last of his coffee, which was cold now, and went back into the lobby.
He telephoned Mr. Sills. When Mr. Sills answered the call, he said: ‘I want to talk to you bad, Mr. Sills, but I don’t want every old woman out your pike hanging on the line listening. Are you going to be in town today? It may be important.’
Mr. Sills was coming to town. ‘Right away,’ he replied.
He hurried up to his office, and tried to work until Mr. Sills appeared. But it was little use. The page of the book would blur before his eyes. He thought of the Senator’s words, ‘Well, boy, we did the best we could,’ and of his back as he had seen it that day disappearing down the dark stairs. He slammed his book shut and began to pace about his office. He sent the girl who did his letters and typing out to buy him some matches, even though he had a dozen in his pocket. While she was gone he got the bottle out of his desk and took two moderate drinks. Then, incongruously, while he tried to penetrate to the nature of the Senator’s motives, he thought of May, how sometimes when he looked at her most intently, into the very depth of her eyes, she seemed to be withdrawing from him, fading, almost imperceptibly but surely, into an impersonal and ambiguous distance.
When he heard steps in the outer room, he rushed to the door, and flung it open. At the sight of Mr. Sills, the impatience and curiosity that had been consuming him suddenly were chilled.
‘Well, sir?’ Mr. Sills demanded in his flat voice.
‘Did you’ — and Mr. Munn hesitated that last second as one who poises on the brink, not because of failure in decision but because the mechanism of the body registered, as it were, a last blind protest — ‘did you provide any newspaper, or individual, with a copy of Senator Tolliver’s letter of resignation?’
He knew what the answer would be; he had known all the time. It came like an echo of his knowledge. ‘No, I didn’t,’ Mr. Sills said.
Mr. Munn handed the papers to him and indicated the reports and the editorial. Mr. Sills read them slowly, and with no show of emotion. When he had finished, he raised his eyes to Mr. Munn, and remarked, ‘Well?’
‘My God!’ Mr. Munn exclaimed. ‘In every one. The Louisville paper isn’t here yet, but I bet it’s in there too. He sent copies out, to every paper. That’s why he wrote that letter that way. He wrote it to do the most harm to us all.’
‘Well,’ Mr. Sills said.
‘But why? What’s he up to?’ Mr. Munn swung on his heel and strode across the office, then swung back toward Mr. Sills with his bony, dark face thrust forward. ‘I don’t see; I don’t know what to think.’
‘It’ll all come out soon enough. Time. Time will bring it out.’ Mr. Sills’ eyes blinked unhurriedly behind his spectacles.
It was almost a month before Mr. Munn was to know even the next step in the process. More than once during that period he had the impulse to go to Monclair and see Senator Tolliver and ask him what his motives were. How could a man behave as he had done? But he had no right, he would conclude. In the end, he scarcely knew Senator Tolliver. The illusion of old intimacy and trust was something which the Senator had created with the touch of his hand on the shoulder and the modulation of his voice. There was no reason to feel, as he did nevertheless feel, that the Senator had betrayed him, personally. But despite his reasoning, that sense of a personal betrayal was his first reaction when, late one afternoon, Mr. Sills telephoned to say that Senator Tolliver and the Dismukes and Brothers Tobacco Company were jointly suing the Association to recover the crop which the Senator had committed to the Association. That night the Nashville papers carried news of the filing of the suit; and the next day in the Bardsville Ledger Senator Tolliver gave out the statement that his conscience would no longer permit him to be party, even passively, to the policies of an organization that had become an enemy of law and order and individual integrity.
‘There hasn’t been any trouble lately, not at all,’ Mr. Munn asserted when Mr. Christian thrust the paper with the statement under his eyes; ‘not in over a month. Not since Sullins’ crop was burned. And they’ll probably catch whoever did that.’
‘No,’ Mr. Christian said shortly, ‘there ain’t been much trouble, but Edmund Tolliver is shore God getting ready to cause a whole lot of trouble. Bad trouble,’ and he stared probingly into Mr. Munn’s face.
‘Trouble,’ Mr. Munn repeated. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean there’s a lot of men don’t take things lying down. You can’t blame ’em. Fire with fire.’
Mr. Munn looked somberly away, out the window toward the sidewalk, which was empty of all life except for an old negro man sitting on the curb. ‘It’ll wreck us,’ he declared. ‘That’s what we’ve tried to stop. The companies want trouble. I’ll bet half the trouble over in Hunter County was started by blackguards who got paid to start it. You never can tell. It’s the best way to kill the Association. The companies want trouble.’
‘And by God!’ Mr. Christian said, ‘they may get their bellyful.’
As he rode home that afternoon he turned the question over and over in his mind. Did the Senator want power? He assumed that that was the objective. Power. But if Senator Tolliver, who had helped to create the Association, had remained on the board, and the Association had succeeded, then he would have been in a position of power. The Association people would have been behind him, and a good solid farm vote in the section went a long way toward electing a man to anything. But now he was out to break what he had made. To destroy what you create — that was power, the fullest manifestation. Maybe that was it, he thought. The last vanity.
May was in the side garden, as she had been that afternoon months before, when he had ridden his mare to a lather to get home to tell May that he was to be on the board. But the season was different now. It had been almost fall then, the zinnias dry and rusty, the maple leaves pocked and faded and hanging motionless on the boughs or lying sparsely on the overgrown gravel of the walk, one here, one there. She had been standing there, as she was accustomed to do in the fall, among the ruins of the garden which she had forgotten all summer. He had moved swiftly toward her then, the grass over the gravel carpeting his tread, and had tried to seize on and understand the very essence of her aloneness as she stood there unaware of his approach.
Now, as then, he moved swiftly toward her, his steps muffled, and his attention poised for the moment when she would turn to discover him. She was kneeling beside the walk. She wore no hat, and her hair was disheveled and slipping from its heavy coils. The pale light that washed through the budding trees accented delicately the yellow of her hair.
He was almost upon her before she lifted her head.
‘Hello,’ he said, and stretched out his hand to help her to her feet. She dropped the trowel with which she had been digging in the flower bed, and stood up to kiss him. ‘Oh, Perse,’ she told him, ‘I’m getting ready to plant some nasturtiums. Along the walk here. Don’t you think that would be nice?’
‘Yes,’ he answered. Her gaze went back to the little patch of black earth and mold which she had turned up from under the cover of last year’s leaves.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘Tolliver is suing the Association. For his tobacco.’
‘Oh, Perse, can he do that?’
‘He’s doing it,’ he commented. He noticed that she was still looking at the patch of ground. ‘If he wins, it’s all up with us. That’s all.’
At that she looked at him, and her face assumed an expression of concern. ‘But he won’t,’ she predicted. ‘You all will win, won’t you, Perse?’
‘Maybe not. You can’t ever tell, and the Dismukes people are suing jointly. You see, he’s trying to sell his crop to them. Probably we won’t win.’ He had not previously considered the possibility that the Association would lose such a suit. He had not been worried about that particular thing. The damage, the worst damage, was being done in other ways. And even now he had not settled the probabilities in his own mind. But he was saying it, saying that the Association would probably lose. And saying it because he wanted, as he discovered at that moment with a cold sense of satisfaction, to deepen that look of concern on her face, to frighten her, to make her aware of the evil and the instability in the world, to make her suffer. Then, with that discovery, he took a stronger relish even as he ended: ‘Yes, it’s very likely we’ll lose. Then you’ll feel the pinch.’ He enjoyed the moment, postponing consideration of the event, and of the judgment which, he knew, he would later bring to bear bitterly against himself.
‘I’m sorry, Perse,’ she said, and laid her hand on his arm. ‘But don’t worry, Perse, don’t worry so much.’
He stared at her face for an instant, as though he drew a nourishment from the distress which was so obvious upon it. Then he asked: ‘And why shouldn’t I worry? Tell me that.’
‘Oh, Perse, don’t be that way,’ she pleaded, and clung to his arm, drawing it against her side. He made no reply, looking away from her, at the young grass over the gravel of the walk.
‘I never did like him,’ she said after a minute meditatively. ‘Not a bit. I tried, but I never could.’
‘You never said anything,’ he observed.
‘No’ — and she hesitated — ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. And you liked him so much and thought so much of him, and looked up to him the way you did. I didn’t want to say anything, when you felt that way. But I never liked him, I don’t know why.’
‘It’s easy for you to say that now,’ he said bitterly, still not looking at her.
‘No, it’s been for a long time. Maybe it was something that day at his house. The way his sister always acted when he was around, the way she never took her eyes off him in a way that made you creepy.’
‘You imagined it,’ he said. He was irritated with her story. He did not want to hear it.
‘No, and that night when she took me upstairs, I happened to glance at that little picture at the head of the stairs — maybe you saw it, a picture of a woman — and she stopped and held the light close up, and said, “That was his wife.” Then she turned around and looked at him — he was standing in the hall down there, just getting ready to go back to the living-room. She looked at him that way, then she said, “She was an angel.” It made you believe that old story about them, about her.’
‘About him driving her to being a dope fiend?’ he demanded. ‘Killing herself with morphine? That’s scandalmongering. She was rich and he got her money, when she died. That made the gossip.’
‘I never liked him from the moment I laid eyes on him,’ she declared.
He drew his arm from her clasp. ‘He’ll ruin us all,’ he said. He looked directly into her face. ‘You and me, too,’ he added, ‘he’ll ruin us.’
‘Don’t worry so, Perse,’ she begged, reaching for his arm again. ‘It’ll all be all right. It’s bound to ——’
‘Nothing’s bound to,’ he said.
‘You mustn’t worry; just try to forget it now.’ She drew him, trying to lead him a step or two down the path, pulling his arm, and reluctantly he followed. ‘I’m going to make another bed here,’ she announced, ‘for some nasturtiums. And cosmos over there.’ She gestured toward the open space beyond which stood the weathered, soft-toned brick wall of the house. ‘And marigolds, they’ll be nice against the house. And around that old stump there’ — she pointed to a thick stump, black with rot, which stood in the middle of a patch of pale, newly springing grass — ‘there is a good place for pansies. The ground ought to be rich there.’ She took a step toward the old stump, and quickly knelt and dug her fingers into the soft, crumbly earth. Then, with her face lighted by pleasure, she looked upward, over her shoulder, at him.
She rose and came back to him, holding her stained hands toward him and still smiling. They began to move toward the house. ‘But I’ll need somebody to help me,’ she was saying, ‘a man to spade up and all. You’ll let a man come up soon, won’t you, Perse? The next day or two, before ——’
He stopped still in the middle of the walk, and looked her in the face. ‘No,’ he answered, and heard his own words coming with that impersonal and measured decision, ‘you know every hand on the place is busy right now. It’s a rush season, and I can’t spare one. Not one. You’ve lived on a farm all your life, you ought to know that much.’ He watched the expression of her face change from pleasure to surprise, then from pain to bewilderment; and then he continued: ‘Besides, you don’t really want to have a garden. After a few weeks you never look at it. I’ve noticed that, as long as I’ve known you. It’s just something you do, and then you don’t even take the trouble to direct somebody about keeping it in condition in the summer. Why do you want to start a garden? It’s very unreasonable, you know, under the circumstances. You being the way you are. About things.’
She had taken a step away from him, but with her face still toward him. She turned, very suddenly, and began to walk away, down the path. Impersonally, he noticed the light falling palely over her and the way her shoulders moved and hunched together a little. She was trying to suppress a sob, he knew.
His first impulse was to rush after her. But he did not. He stood in the middle of the path, staring after her. Then he looked down at the spot where, before his arrival, she had been digging. There lay the old, rusty trowel, which she had grasped with her small and inadequate fingers. Not four square feet of the soil was turned up, and that had merely been pecked at with the useless instrument. As he looked, a sadness overcame him, more than sadness, a despair that seemed to well from some profound truth that he had never before suspected, and that even now was veiled from his view.
Mr. Munn had gone down with Captain Todd to the Association warehouse in Bardsville one afternoon a couple of weeks later to inspect an extension that was almost completed, when Mr. Christian came to tell him the whole truth about Senator Tolliver.
‘There’s some chance those sheds’ll never be filled,’ the Captain had commented gravely as they left the new section and went back into the pungent gloom of the main warehouse. ‘But even if we could have broken the contract for the new building, to do it would’ve just been a way of saying we were half-licked already.’
‘It’s hard,’ Mr. Munn had said, standing there in the middle of the floor under the high, shadowy rafters and beams. ‘It’s hard to know what to do. Where to strike.’
‘Win the suit. That’s first.’
‘That’s just one thing. If everything could just be brought together at one time, one place, just so you could fight it and have it over’ — he had raised his right fist slowly — ‘so you could get at it, all at once.’ He had brought his fist hard into the palm of his left hand with a solid, smacking sound: ‘Like that.’
Captain Todd had peered at him in the dim light, and answered: ‘No, Perse. No way in the world. Never a time in a man’s life when everything is like that, so you can just lift up your hand, and win or lose and settle everything. Almost that way, maybe once or twice in a man’s life. But never so you can settle everything. It’s too much to ask.’
Mr. Munn had thought of Captain Todd lying out that night with his men at the ford, waiting for the next rush; and then, looking at the Captain’s quiet face, he had wondered how much had seemed to come together that night, how much had seemed to be settling itself there for good and all, with almost a single blow. ‘Maybe not,’ Mr. Munn had slowly replied.
Mr. Christian found them there. As he approached, they could guess, even in the gloom, the rigidity of controlled fury in his stiff-legged stride and in the heavy hunch of his shoulders. He came directly to them and stopped directly in front of them. His jaws were clamped shut as though by an effort of will he kept himself from speech. When he did allow himself to speak, his voice was harsh and measured.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘they got at Tolliver.’
‘Sure, they did,’ Mr. Munn replied. ‘Dismukes.’
‘Naw, naw’ — Mr. Christian spoke as though with impatience at stupidity. ‘Long before that. They got at him, because he’s broke. Broke, and owes money.’
Captain Todd whistled softly through his teeth, and lifted his hand to touch his beard.
‘Yeah, broke! The bank in Morgansville holds a mortgage for fifteen thousand and something, and God knows how much he owes to the Mercantile National in Louisville. The mortgage in Morgansville was coming due, and they began putting the screws on him. The tobacco people are thick as thieves with the Mercantile National, and the big boys up at the Mercantile just pass on the word to Morgansville.’ He spoke with a sharp expulsion of breath at every word, as though he would spit the words out of his great yellow teeth, from which the lips drew back; but he spoke with a strained and artificial deliberation. ‘And he was to see that the Association sold out, took up all those offers. That was the first thing. No telling what was next on the ticket. But we didn’t sell, and so they decided to play it the other way. The way they are.’
‘How do you know?’ the Captain demanded. ‘Do you know for a fact?’
‘For a fact! By God, a fact! There’s a man over in Morgansville named Pottle, works in the bank. And he married a cousin of Sills and he owes Sills money and favors, and he’s been picking up stuff. So Sills got to putting the screws on him, and now he’s scared to death he’ll lose his job, and he will if he don’t keep on playing ball. The egg-sucking dog!’ Mr. Christian spat viciously, then put his booted foot over the spot and ground his heel.
‘Can you believe this fellow?’ the Captain asked.
‘Hell, I wouldn’t trust the bastard as far as I can fling a Jersey bull by the tail. Not if he’s playing it his way. But, by God, he’s so yellow you can scare the pee outer him with a couple of unkind words. And we worked on him last night, Sills and me’ — he leered with a deep satisfaction — ‘and by God, I mean to say we worked on him. When he got in his buggy long about one o’clock this morning to drive back to town from Sills’ place, he was pale as a man with a three-weeks spell of summer complaint. By God, he was cleaned out.’
‘You never can tell,’ the Captain said slowly, ‘what’s in a man’s mind. You never can.’
‘Hell, no, and him coming to my house all this winter, and sitting there talking to me and looking me in the eye, and talking pretty, and saying, “Now, Bill, now, Bill” — and knowing all the time how it was with him. Knowing how it was. How he was gonna sell us out, one way or another. Knowing it and just feeling it grow inside him. Sitting there and feeling it grow inside him like a tumor or something. And looking a man straight in the eye. By God ——’ He stopped breathlessly, the quality of his accustomed violence coming back to him and his face reddening, while he waved his arms. Then he swung toward Mr. Munn, and said, ‘And you, Perse, you swallowing him hook, line, and sinker, by God, he was taking you in, you voting right along with him.’
‘I know,’ Mr. Munn said gloomily.
‘Trying to take us all in,’ Mr. Christian continued, ‘giving a party up there in that big house a dope fiend’s money built, and patting us on the back and pouring out the likker. By God, it makes a man want to puke. What does he think I am? Is a man a hog to come to his holler because he slopped him? I ask you now, am I a whore to unbutton just because I see a five-dollar bill? Hell, no! and it’s all the same whether it’s in a feather bed or behind the barn. Whether he’s rich or poor, it don’t matter to me. And there’s hams in my smokehouse better’n the bastard ever put on his table, and flour in the flour barrel, and whisky on the shelf, and no woman I drove dope-crazy built my house. Hell, no, my folks built it, and ain’t a joist slipped yet, nor a rafter sagged.’
‘Good-bye,’ the Captain said, and put out his hand. ‘I think I’ll go out home.’
They shook hands with him. His face, Mr. Munn noticed, even in the dim light, was pale and drawn. As he walked away toward the bright square of the doorway, his figure seemed to have lost some of its erectness, and his step seemed less firm. Mr. Munn nodded after him, saying, ‘This’ll hurt him. He thought something of Tolliver.’
‘Yeah,’ Mr. Christian grunted. He was studying Mr. Munn’s face. Then he asked, ‘Well, what are you gonna do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘I know what to do.’
‘What?’ Mr. Munn demanded.
‘Naw,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘naw. Not today.’ He suddenly stepped directly in front of Mr. Munn, and seized him by the shoulder, and stared into his face. ‘You come out to my house tomorrow night. And I’ll tell you. You come and spend the night.’
Mr. Munn nodded slowly, abstractedly.