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<body>
<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67652 ***</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="transnote">
<h3> Transcriber’s Notes</h3>
<p>Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation
remains unchanged. Note in particular that the apostrophe is very
rarely used to indicate abbreviation.</p>
<p>The cover was prepared by the transcriber and is placed in the public
domain.</p>
</div>
<p class="half-title">Bring<br />
the<br />
Jubilee</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="half-title">By Ward Moore</p>
</div>
<p class="center">_<i>Breathe the Air Again</i><br />
<i>Greener Than You Think</i><br />
<i>Bring the Jubilee</i></p>
<p class="spaced"><small>This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by FARRAR, STRAUS &
YOUNG, INC. The low price of $2.00 is made possible by large printings
of combined editions</small>.</p>
<div class="chap"></div>
<table class="standard" summary="">
<tr>
<td class= "tdl_br"> </td>
<td class="tdl"><h1>Bring<br />the<br />Jubilee</h1>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class= "tdl_br"><span class="large">WARD<br />MOORE</span></td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class="spaced nind"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, Inc.</span><br />
<span style="margin-left: 1em;">NEW YORK</span></p>
<p class="center small">Copyright 1952 Fantasy House, Inc.<br />
Copyright 1953 Ward Moore<br />
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U. S. A.<br />
Library of Congress catalog card number: 53-10417</p>
<p class="center small">BACK COVER MAP: BETTMANN ARCHIVE</p>
<p class="center spaced"><i>For<br />
TONY BOUCHER and MICK McCOMAS<br />
who liked this story</i></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent2"><small>What he will he does, and does so much</small></div>
<div class="verse indent2"><small>That proof is call’d impossibility</small></div>
<div class="verse indent10">—<small><i>Troilus and Cressida</i></small></div>
</div></div></div>
<hr class="small" />
<p><small>It is always the puzzle of the nature of time that brings our thoughts
to a standstill. And if time is so fundamental that an understanding
of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in
all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between
determination and free will.</small></p>
<p class="right">—<small><i>The Mysterious Universe</i> by James Jeans</small></p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="Contents">Contents</h2>
</div>
<table class="standard" summary="">
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C1">I</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Life in the Twenty-Six States</i></td>
<td class="tdl">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C2">II</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Of Decisions, Minibiles, and Tinugraphs</i></td>
<td class="tdl">12</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C3">III</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>A Member of the Grand Army</i></td>
<td class="tdl">22</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C4">IV</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Tyss</i></td>
<td class="tdl">32</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C5">V</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Of Whigs and Populists</i></td>
<td class="tdl">42</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C6">VI</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Enfandin</i></td>
<td class="tdl">50</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C7">VII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Of Confederate Agents in 1942</i></td>
<td class="tdl">61</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C8">VIII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>In Violent Times</i></td>
<td class="tdl">71</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C9">IX</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Barbara</i></td>
<td class="tdl">76</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C10">X</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>The Holdup</i></td>
<td class="tdl">86</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C11">XI</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Of Haggershaven</i></td>
<td class="tdl">95</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C12">XII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>More of Haggershaven</i></td>
<td class="tdl">106</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C13">XIII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Time</i></td>
<td class="tdl">116</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C14">XIV</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Midbin’s Experiment</i></td>
<td class="tdl">124</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C15">XV</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Good Years</i></td>
<td class="tdl">132</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C16">XVI</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Of Varied Subjects</i></td>
<td class="tdl">142</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C17">XVII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>HX-1</i></td>
<td class="tdl">156</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C18">XVIII</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>The Woman Tempted Me</i></td>
<td class="tdl">166</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C19">XIX</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Gettysburg</i></td>
<td class="tdl">175</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C20">XX</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>Bring the Jubilee</i></td>
<td class="tdl">181</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#C21">XXI</a></td>
<td class="tdl"><i>For the Time Being</i></td>
<td class="tdl">191</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C1"><i>1. LIFE IN THE TWENTY-SIX STATES</i></h2>
</div>
<p>Although I am writing this in the year 1877,
I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses
are error—let me explain:</p>
<p>I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the
early 1930’s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand
what a peculiarly frustrate and disinherited world
was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was
through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which
hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.</p>
<p>Granpa Hodgins after whom I was named, perhaps a
little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker,
had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence.
Like so many young men he had put on a shapeless blue
uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised and headstrong—or
martyred—Mr Lincoln. Depending on which
of my lives’ viewpoints you take.</p>
<p>Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia
after the fall of Washington to General Lee’s victorious
Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six
months before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgment
of the independence of the Confederate
States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa
came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow
veterans, tried to remake his life in a different and increasingly
hopeless world.</p>
<p>On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even
generous disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both
sides—for different reasons—remembered the mutiny of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
the Unreconstructed Federals in the Armies of the Cumberland
and the Tennessee who, despite defeat at Chattanooga,
could not forget Vicksburg or Port Hudson and
fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South
could easily have carved the country up to suit its most
fiery patriots, even to the point of detaching the West and
making a protectorate of it. Instead the chivalrous Southrons
contented themselves with drawing the new boundary
along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware
and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle
of western Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was
naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the disputed
territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old
Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for obvious
defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.</p>
<p>But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of
the war on the beaten North and this was what crippled
Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar
inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham
Administration, became dizzying in the time
of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of
1873 and ’74. It was only after the election of President
Butler by the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and
drastic deflation following that money and property became
stable, but by this time all normal values were destroyed.
Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly
in gold. Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him
just never seemed to get back on their feet.</p>
<p>How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920’s and
’30s, my mother and father talking bitterly of how the War
had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then
fairly recent Emperors’ War of 1914-16, but of the War
of Southron Independence which still, nearly seventy years
later, blighted what was left of the United States.</p>
<p>Nor were they unique or peculiar in this. Men who
slouched in the smithy while Father shod their horses, or
gathered every month around the postoffice waiting for the
notice of the winning lottery numbers to be put up, as often
cursed the Confederates or discussed what might have
been if Meade had been a better general or Lee a worse<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
one, as they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork
auxiliaries to make pedaling uphill easier, or the latest
scandal about the French Emperor, Napoleon VI.</p>
<p>I tried to imagine what it must have been like in Granpa
Hodgins’ day, to visualize the lost past—that strange bright
era when, if it could be believed, folk like ourselves and
our neighbors had owned their farms outright and didnt
pay rent to the bank or give half the crop to a landlord. I
searched the wiggling crayon lines that composed Granpa
Hodgins’ face for some sign that set him apart from his
descendants.</p>
<p>“But what did he <i>do</i> to lose the farm?” I used to ask my
mother.</p>
<p>“Do? Didnt do anything. Couldnt help himself. Go
along now and do your chores; Ive a terrible batch of work
to get out.”</p>
<p>How could Granpa’s not doing anything result so disastrously?
I could not understand this any more than I could
the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job
for wages which would support himself and a family, before
the system of indenture became so common that practically
the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself
to a company.</p>
<p>Indenting I understood all right, for there was a mill in
Wappinger Falls which wove a shoddy cloth very different
from the goods my mother produced on her handloom.
Mother, even in her late forties, could have indented there
for a good price, and she admitted that the work would
be easier than weaving homespun to compete with their
product. But, as she used to say with an obstinate shake
of her head, “Free I was born and free I’ll die.”</p>
<p>In Granpa Hodgins’ day, if one could believe the folktales
or family legends, men and women married young
and had large families; there might have been five generations
between him and me instead of two. And many
uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages
and only children were the rule.</p>
<p>If it hadnt been for the War—This was the basic theme
stated with variations suited to the particular circumstance.
If it hadnt been for the War the most energetic young men<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
and women would not turn to emigration; visiting foreigners
would not come as to a slum; and the great powers
would think twice before sending troops to restore order
every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadnt
been for the War the detestable buyer from Boston—detestable
to my mother, but rather fascinating to me with
his brightly colored vest and smell of soap and hair tonic—would
not have come regularly to offer her a miserable price
for her weaving.</p>
<p>“Foreigner!” she would always exclaim after he left;
“sending good cloth out of the country.”</p>
<p>Once my father ventured, “He’s only doing what he’s
paid for.”</p>
<p>“Trust a Backmaker to stand up for foreigners. Like
father, like son; suppose you’d let the whole thieving crew
in if you had your way.”</p>
<p>So was first hinted the scandal of Grandfather Backmaker.
No enlarged portrait of him hung anywhere, much
less over the mantel. I got the impression my father’s father
had been not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character
in his own right, a man who kept on believing in the
things for which Granpa Hodgins fought after they were
proved wrong. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather
Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal
rights for Negroes or protesting the mass lynchings so popular
in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment accorded
these non-citizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I
remember where I heard he had been run out of several
places before finally settling in Wappinger Falls or that
all his life people had muttered darkly at his back, “Dirty
Abolitionist!”—a very deep imprecation indeed. I only
know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek,
hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated
by my mother who never let him forget that a
Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.</p>
<p>I must have been a sore trial to her for I showed no
sign of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed
herself and which surely kept us all—though precariously—free.
For one thing I was remarkably unhandy and awk<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>ward,
of little use in the hundred necessary chores around
our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at
her command to do something about fixing the loose
weatherboards on the east side without mashing my thumb
or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe the
kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and
leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at
a tremendous rate for I was strong and had endurance, but
work requiring manual dexterity baffled me. I fumbled in
harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to the cart
for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping
him on the farm or in his smithy I’m afraid my efforts
drove that mild man nearest to a temper he ever came. He
would lay the reins on the plowhorse’s back or his hammer
down on the anvil and say mournfully:</p>
<p>“Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. Youre
only in my way here.”</p>
<p>On only one score did I come near pleasing Mother: I
learned to read and write early, and exhibited some proficiency.
But even here there was a flaw; she looked upon
literacy as something which distinguished Hodginses and
McCormicks from the ruck who had to make their mark,
as an accomplishment which might somehow and unspecifiedly
lead away from poverty. I found reading an end in
itself, which probably reminded her of my father’s laxity
or Grandfather Backmaker’s subversion.</p>
<p>“Make something of yourself, Hodge,” she admonished
me often. “You can’t change the world”—an obvious allusion
to Grandfather Backmaker—“but you can do something
with it as it is if you try hard enough. There’s always
some way out.”</p>
<p>Yet she did not approve of the postoffice lottery, on
which so many pinned their hopes of escape from poverty
or indenture. In this she and my father were agreed; both
believed in hard work rather than chance.</p>
<p>Still, chance could help even the steadiest toiler. I remember
the time a minibile—one of the small, trackless
locomotives—broke down not a quarter of a mile from
Father’s smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable
opportunity. Minibiles, like any other luxury, were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
rare in the United States though they were common
enough in prosperous countries like the German Union
or the Confederacy. We had to rely for our transportation
on the never-failing horse or on the railroads, wornout and
broken down as they were. For decades the great issue in
Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental
line, though British America had one and the Confederate
States seven. (Sailing balloons, economical and fairly common,
were still looked upon with some suspicion.) Only
a rare millionaire with connections in Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore
or Leesburg could afford to indulge in a
costly and complicated minibile requiring a trained driver
to bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only an
extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced
streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn,
where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires could at worst find
traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the morasses
or washboard roads which were the only highways north
of the Harlem River.</p>
<p>When one did, the jolting, jouncing and shaking inevitably
broke or disconnected one of the delicate parts in its
complex mechanism. Then the only recourse—apart from
telegraphing back to the city if the traveler broke down
near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith. Smiths
rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but
with the broken part before them they could fabricate a
passable duplicate and, unless the machine had suffered
severe damage, put it back in place. It was customary for
such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time taken
away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting—or just absently
chewing on an oatstraw—by demanding exorbitant remuneration,
amounting to perhaps twenty-five or thirty
cents an hour, thus avenging his rural poverty and self-sufficiency
upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the
urban excursionist.</p>
<p>Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said,
during the fall of 1933, when I was twelve. The driver had
made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile
marooned and fuming in the enclosed passenger seat.
A hasty visit convinced Father, who could repair a clock<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>
or broken rake with equal dexterity, that his only course
was to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat
and straighten a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver,
the owner, and Father all repeated the name of the part
often enough, but so inept have I been with “practical”
things all my life that I couldnt recall it ten minutes, much
less thirty years later.)</p>
<p>“Hodge, run and get the mare and ride over to
Jones’s. Don’t try to saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr
Jones to kindly lend me his team.”</p>
<p>“I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back
with the team in twenty minutes,” added the owner of the
minibile, sticking his head out of the window.</p>
<p>I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has
given me a distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I
moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole
shining silver quarter, a day’s full wage for the boy who
could find odd jobs, half the day’s pay of a grown man
who wasnt indented or worked extra hours—all for myself,
to spend as I wished!</p>
<p>I ran all the way back to the barn, led Bessie out by her
halter and jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream
growing and deepening each moment. With my
quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to
take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the
shops there I could find some yards of figured cotton for
Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but
rarely bought for himself, or an unimagined something for
Mary McCutcheon, some three years older than I, with
whom it had so recently become disturbing as well as imperative
to wrestle—in secret of course so as not to show
oneself unmanly in sporting with a weak girl instead of
another boy.</p>
<p>It never even occurred to me, as it would have to most,
to invest in an eighth of a lottery ticket. Not only were my
parents sternly against this popular gamble, but I myself
felt a strangely puritanical aversion to meddling with my
fortune.</p>
<p>Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman’s Book
and Clock Store. Here I could not afford one of the latest<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
English or Confederate books—even the novels I disdained
cost fifty cents in their original and thirty in the pirated
United States’ edition—but what treasures there were in
the twelve-and-a-half cent reprints and the dime classics!</p>
<p>With Bessie’s legs moving steadily beneath me I pored
over in my imagination Mr Newman’s entire stock, which
I knew by heart from examinations lulled by the steady
ticking of his other, and no doubt more salable, merchandise.
My quarter would buy two reprints, but I would read
them in as many evenings and be no better off than before
until their memory faded and I could read them again.
Better to invest in paperbacked adventure stories giving
sharp, breathless pictures of life in the West or rekindling
the glories of the War. True, they were written almost entirely
by Confederate authors and I was, perhaps thanks
to Granpa Hodgins and my mother, a devout partisan of
the lost cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But
patriotism couldnt steel me against the excitement of the
Confederate paperbacks; literature simply ignored the
boundary stretching to the Pacific.</p>
<p>I had finally determined to invest all my twenty-five
cents, not in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the
same in secondhand or shopworn condition, when I suddenly
realized that I had been riding Bessie for some considerable
time. I looked around, rather dazed by the abrupt
translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of
Newman’s store to the bright countryside, to find with dismay
that Bessie hadnt taken me to the Jones farm after
all but on some private tour of her own in the opposite
direction.</p>
<p>I’m afraid this little anecdote is pointless—it was momentarily
pointed enough for me that evening, for in addition
to the loss of the promised quarter I received a thorough
whacking with a willow switch from my mother after
my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental
duty—except perhaps that it shows how in pursuing the
dream I could lose the reality.</p>
<p>My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most
important part, was no passing phase. Other boys in their
early teens dreamed of going to the wilds of Dakotah,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>
Montana or Wyoming, indenting to a company run by a
young and beautiful woman—this was also a favorite paperback
theme—discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or
emigrating to Australia or the South African Republic. Or
else they faced the reality of indenture, carrying on the
family farm, or petty trade. I only wanted to be allowed
to read.</p>
<p>I knew this ambition, if that is the proper word, to be
outrageous and unheard of. It was also practically impossible.
The school at Wappinger Falls, a survival from the
days of compulsory attendance and an object of doubt in
the eyes of the taxpayers, taught as little as possible as
quickly as possible. Parents needed the help of their children
to survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory
hope of buying free of indenture. Both my mother and my
teachers looked askance at my longing to persist past an
age when my contemporaries were making themselves
economically useful.</p>
<p>Nor, even supposing I had the fees, could the shabby,
fusty Academy at Poughkeepsie—originally designed for
the education of the well-to-do—provide what I wanted.
Not that I was clear at all as to just what this was; I
only knew that commercial arithmetic, surveying, or any
of the other subjects taught there, were not the answer
to my desires.</p>
<p>There was certainly no money for any college. Our position
had grown slowly worse; my father talked of selling
the smithy and indenting. My dreams of Harvard or Yale
were as idle as Father’s of making a good crop and getting
out of debt. Nor did I know then, as I was to find out
later, that the colleges were increasingly provincialized and
decayed, contrasting painfully with the flourishing universities
of the Confederacy and Europe. The average man
asked what the United States needed colleges for anyway;
those who attended them only learned discontent and to
question time-honored institutions. Constant scrutiny of
the faculties, summary firing of all instructors suspected
of abnormal ideas, did not seem to improve the situation
or raise the standards of teaching.</p>
<p>My mother, now that I was getting beyond the switching<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>
age, lectured me firmly and at length on idleness and self-indulgence.
“It’s a hard world, Hodge, and no one’s going
to give you anything you don’t earn. Your father’s an easy-going
man; too easy-going for his own good, but he always
knows where his duty lies.”</p>
<p>“Yes, maam,” I responded politely, not quite seeing
what she was driving at.</p>
<p>“Hard, honest work—that’s the only thing. Not hoping
or wishing or thinking miracles will happen to you. Work
hard and keep yourself free. Don’t depend on circumstances
or other people, and don’t blame them for your
own shortcomings. Be your own man. That’s the only way
you’ll ever be where you want to.”
She spoke of responsibility and duty as though they
were measurable quantities, but the gentler parts of such
equations, the factors of affection and pity, were never
mentioned. I don’t want to give the impression that ours
was a particularly puritanical family; I know our neighbors
had of necessity much the same grim outlook. But I felt
guiltily vulnerable, not merely on the score of wanting
more schooling, but because of something else which
would have shocked my mother beyond forgiveness.</p>
<p>My early tussles with Mary McCutcheon had the natural
consequences, but she had found me a too-youthful partner
and had taken her interests elsewhere. For my part I
now turned to Agnes Jones, a suddenly alluring young
woman grown from the skinny kid I’d always brushed
away. Agnes sympathized with my aspirations and encouraged
me most pleasantly. However her specific plans for
my future were limited to marrying her and helping her
father on his farm, which seemed no great advance over
what I could look forward to at home.</p>
<p>And there I was certainly no asset; I ate three hearty
meals a day and occupied a bed. I was conscious of the
looks and smiles which followed me. A great lout of seventeen,
too lazy to do a stroke of work, always wandering
around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose
stuck in a book. Too bad; and the Backmakers such industrious
folks too. I could feel what the shock of my be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>havior
with Agnes added to my idleness would be to my
mother.</p>
<p>Yet I was neither depraved nor very different from the
other youths of Wappinger Falls, who not only took their
pleasures where they found them, but often more forcibly
than persuasively. I did not analyze it fully or clearly, but
I was at least to some extent aware of the essentially loveless
atmosphere around me. The rigid convention of late
marriages bred an exaggerated respect for chastity which
had two sides: sisters’ and daughters’ honor was sternly
avenged with no protest from society, and undiscovered
seduction produced that much more gratification. But both
retribution and venery were somewhat mechanical; they
were the expected rather than the inescapable passions.
Revivalists—and we country people had a vast fondness
for those itinerants who came periodically to castigate us
for our sins—denounced our laxity and pointed to the
virtues of our grandparents and greatgrandparents. We
accepted their advice with such modifications as suited us,
which was not at all what they intended.</p>
<p>And this was how I took my mother’s admonition to be
my own man. What debts I owed her and my father
seemed best discharged by relieving them of the burden of
my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to reverse
the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation
on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it
did to them. Toward Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.</p>
<p>A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed
my three most cherished books in my good white cotton
shirt, and having bade a most romantic goodbye to Agnes,
one which would certainly have consummated her hopes
had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and
set out for New York.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C2"><i>2.</i> <i>OF DECISIONS, MINIBILES,
AND TINUGRAPHS</i></h2>
</div>
<p>I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles
in four days, allowing time to swap work for food, supposing
I found farmers or housewives agreeable to the
exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep outdoors, and
the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any
bathing I might want to do.</p>
<p>The dangers of the trip were part of the pattern of life
in the United States in 1938. I didnt particularly fear being
robbed by a roving gang for I was sure organized predators
would disdain so obviously unprofitable a prey, and individual
thieves I felt I could take care of, but I was not
anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the three
police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was
more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with
a work-card on his person and a company behind him. A
freeman was fair game for the constables, state troopers,
or revenuers to recruit, after a perfunctory trial, into one
of the chain gangs upon whom the roads, canals and other
public works were dependent.</p>
<p>Some wondered why the roads were so bad in spite of
all this apparent surplus of labor and were dubious of the
explanation that surfacing was expensive and it was impossible
to maintain unsurfaced highways in good condition.
Only the hint that prisoners had been seen working
around the estates of the great Whig families or had been
lent to some enterprise operated by foreign capital brought
knowing nods.</p>
<p>At seventeen possible disasters are not brooded over.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
I resolved to be wary, and then dismissed thoughts of police,
gangs and all unpleasantness. The future was mine to
make as my mother had insisted, and I was taking the first
steps in shaping it.</p>
<p>I started off briskly, passing at first through villages long
familiar; then, getting beyond the territory I had known
all my life, I slowed down often enough to gaze at something
new and strange, or to wander into wood or pasture
for wild strawberries or early blueberries. I covered less
ground than I had intended by the time I found a farmhouse,
after inquiring at several others, where the woman
was willing to give me supper and even let me sleep in the
barn in return for splitting a sizable stack of logs into
kindling and milking two cows.</p>
<p>Exercise and hot food must have counteracted the excitement
of the day, for I fell asleep immediately and didnt
waken till quite a while after sunup. It was another warm,
fine morning; soon the post road led, not between shabby
villages and towns or struggling farms, but past the stone
or brick walls of opulent estates. Now and then I caught
a glimpse between old, well-tended trees of magnificent
houses either a century old or built to resemble those dating
from that prosperous time. I could not but share the
general dislike for the wealthy Whigs who owned these
places, their riches contrasting with the common poverty
and deriving from exploitation of the United States as a
colony, but I could not help enjoying the beauty of their
surroundings.</p>
<p>The highway was better traveled here also; I passed
other walkers, quite a few wagons, a carriage or two, several
peddlers and a number of ladies and gentlemen on
horseback. This was the first time I’d seen women riding
astride, a practice shocking to the sensitivities of Wappinger
Falls which also condemned the fashion, imported
from the Chinese Empire by way of England, of feminine
trousers. Having learned that women were bipedal, both
customs seemed sensible to me.</p>
<p>I had the post road to myself for some miles between
turns when I heard a commotion beyond the stone wall to
my left. This was followed by an angry shout and shrill<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
words impossible to distinguish. My progress halted, I instinctively
shifted my bundle to my left hand as though to
leave my right free for defence, but against what I had no
idea.</p>
<p>The shouts came closer; a boy of about my own age
scrambled frantically over the wall, dislodging some of
the smaller lichen-covered rocks on top and sending them
rolling into the ditch. He looked at me, startled, then
paused for a long instant at the road’s edge, undecided
which way to run.</p>
<p>He was barefoot and wore a jute sack as a shirt, with
holes cut for his arms, and ragged cotton pants. His face
was little browner than my own had often been at the end
of a summer’s work under a burning sun.</p>
<p>He came to the end of indecision and started across the
highway, legs pumping high, head turned watchfully. A
splendid tawny stallion cleared the wall in a soaring jump,
his rider bellowing, “There you are, you damned black
coon!”</p>
<p>He rode straight for the fugitive, quirt upraised, lips
thickened and eyes rolling in rage. The victim dodged and
turned; in no more doubt than I that the horseman meant
to ride him down. He darted by me, so close I heard the
labored rasp of breathing.</p>
<p>The rider swerved, and he too twisted around me as
though I were the post at the far turn of a racecourse. Reflexively
I put out my hand to grab at the reins and stop
the assault. Indeed, my fingers actually touched the leather
and grasped it for a fraction of a second before they fell
away.</p>
<p>Then I was alone in the road again as both pursued and
pursuer vaulted back over the fence. The whole scene of
anger and terror could not have lasted two minutes; I
strained my ears to hear the shouts coming from farther
and farther away. Quiet fell again; a squirrel flirted his
tail and sped down one tree trunk and up another. The
episode might never have happened.</p>
<p>I shifted my bundle back and began walking again—less
briskly now. My legs felt heavy and there was an involuntary
twitch in the muscles of my arm.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
<p>Why hadnt I held on to the rein and delayed the hunter,
at least long enough to give his quarry a fair start? What
had made me draw back? It had not been fear, at least in
the usual sense, for I knew I wasnt timorous of the horseman.
I was sure I could have dragged him down if he had
taken his quirt to me.</p>
<p>Yet I had been afraid. Afraid of interfering, of meddling
in affairs which were no concern of mine, of risking action
on quick judgment. I had been immobilized by the fear of
asserting my sympathies, my presumptions, against events.</p>
<p>Walking slowly down the road I experienced deep
shame. I might, I could have saved someone from hurt; I
had perhaps had the power for a brief instant to change
the course of a whole life. I had been guilty of a cowardice
far worse than mere fear for my skin. I could have wept
with mortification—done anything, in fact, but turn back
and try to rectify my failure.</p>
<p>The rest of the day was gloomy as I alternately taunted
and feebly excused myself. The fugitive might have been
a trespasser or a servant; his fault might have been slowness,
rudeness, theft or attempted murder. Whatever it
was, any retaliation the white man chose could be inflicted
with impunity. He would not be punished or even tried
for it. Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration
to Africa, voluntary or forced; those who went westward
to join the unconquered Sioux or Nez Perce were
looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didnt embark
for Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had
the fare or not, deserved anything that happened to him in
the United States.</p>
<p>It was because I held, somewhat vaguely, a stubborn refusal
to accept this conventional view, a refusal never precisely
reasoned and little more, perhaps, than romantic
rebellion against my mother in favor of my disreputable
Grandfather Backmaker, that I suffered. I couldnt excuse
my failure on the grounds that action would have been
considered outrageous. It would not have been considered
outrageous by me.</p>
<p>I pushed self-contempt at my passivity aside as best I
could and strove to recapture the mood of yesterday, suc<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>ceeding
to some extent as the memory of the scene came
back less insistently. I even tried pretending the episode
had perhaps not been quite as serious as it seemed, or that
the pursued had somehow in the end evaded the pursuer.
I could not make what had happened not happen; the best
I could do was minimize my culpability.</p>
<p>That night I slept a little way from the road and in
the morning started off at dawn. Although I was now little
more than twenty miles from the metropolis the character
of the country had hardly changed. Perhaps the farms were
smaller and closer together, their juxtaposition to the estates
more incongruous. But traffic was continual now,
with no empty stretches on the roads, and the small towns
had horse-drawn cars running on iron tracks embedded in
the cobbles.</p>
<p>It was late afternoon when I crossed Spuyten Duyvil
Creek to Manhattan. Between me and the city now lay a
wilderness of squatters’ shacks made of old boards, barrel-staves
and other discarded rubbish. Lean goats and mangy
cats nosed through rubble heaps of broken glass and earthenware
demijohns. Mounds of garbage lay beside aimless
creeks struggling blindly for the rivers. As clearly as though
it had been proclaimed on signposts this was an area of
outcasts and fugitives, of men and women ignored and
tolerated by the law so long as they kept within the confines
of their horrible slum.</p>
<p>Strange and repugnant as the place was, I hesitated to
keep on going and arrive in the city at nightfall, but it
seemed unlikely there was a place to sleep among the
shacks. Once away from the order and sobriety of the post
road one could be lost in the squalid maze; undefined
threats of vaguely dreadful fates seemed to rise from it
like vapors.</p>
<p>Then the fading light revealed the anomaly of a venerable
mansion set far back from the highway, with grounds as
yet unusurped by the encroaching stews. The house was
in ruins; the surrounding gardens lost in brush and weeds.
Evidently a watchman or caretaker guarded its forlorn
dignity or had very recently abandoned it; I could not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
imagine its remaining long without being entirely overrun
otherwise.</p>
<p>It was almost fully dark as I made my way cautiously
toward the remains of an old summerhouse. Its roof was
fallen in and it was densely enclosed by ancient rosebushes
whose thorns, I thought, when they pricked my
fingers as I struggled through them, ought to give warning
of any intruder. For weatherworthiness this shelter had
little advantage over the hovels, yet somehow the fact that
it had survived seemed to make it a more secure retreat.</p>
<p>I stretched out on the dank boards and slept fitfully, disturbed
by dreams that the old mansion was filled with
people from a past time who begged me to save them
from the slumdwellers and their house from being further
ravaged. Brokenly I protested I was helpless—in true
dream manner I then became helpless, unable to move—that
I could not interfere with what had to happen; they
moaned and wrung their hands and faded away. Still, I
slept, and in the morning the cramps in my muscles and
the aches in my bones disappeared in the excitement of the
remaining miles to the city.</p>
<p>And how suddenly it grew up around me, not as though
it was a fixed collection of buildings which I approached,
but as if I stood still while the wood and stone, iron and
brick, sprang into being all about.</p>
<p>New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million,
having grown very slowly since the close of the War
of Southron Independence. Together with the half million
in the city of Brooklyn this represented by far the largest
concentration of people in the United States, though of
course it could not compare with the great Confederate
centers of Washington, now including Baltimore and Alexandria,
St Louis, or Leesburg (once Mexico City).</p>
<p>The change from the country and the dreadful slums
through which I had passed was startling. Cable-cars
whizzed northward as far as Fifty-ninth Street on the west
side and all the way to Eighty-seventh on the east, while
horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation
every few blocks. Express steam trains ran through bridged<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
cuts on Madison Avenue, an engineering achievement of
which New Yorkers were vastly proud.</p>
<p>Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as
flies, darting ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing
vans, carts or wagons. Prancing trotters drew
private carriages, buggies, broughams, victorias, hansoms,
dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen nor
horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional
minibiles chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over
cobblestones or asphalt.</p>
<p>Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed
overhead, crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting
upward into offices and flats or downward to stores, a reminder
that no urban family with pretensions to gentility
would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor,
that every child learned the Morse code before he could
read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly
their own; they perched and swung, quarreled and scolded
on them, leaving only to satisfy their voracity upon the
steaming mounds of horsedung below.</p>
<p>The country boy who had never seen anything more
metropolitan than Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed.
Buildings of eight or ten storeys were common,
and there were many of fourteen or fifteen, serviced by
pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention
which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in
Washington and Leesburg.</p>
<p>Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air,
guided and controlled as skillfully as old-time sailing vessels.
These were not entirely novel to me; I had seen
more of them than I had minibiles, but never so many as
here. In a single hour, gawking upward, I counted seven,
admiring how nicely calculated their courses were, for they
seldom came so low as to endanger lives beneath by having
to throw out sandbags in order to rise. That they could
so maneuver over buildings of greatly uneven height
showed this to be the air age indeed.</p>
<p>Most exciting of all was the great number of people who
walked, rode, or merely stood around on the streets. It
seemed hardly believable so many humans could crowd<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded, touts wheedled,
peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted.
Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies
shopped, drunks staggered. For long moments I paused,
standing stock still, not thinking of going on, merely watching
the spectacle.</p>
<p>How far I walked, how many different parts of the city
I explored that day, I have no idea. I felt I had hardly
begun to fondle the sharp edge of wonder when it was
twilight and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by telegraph
sparks, gleamed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever
had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my
eyes had not been blind to the dirt and decay—became in
an instant magically enchanting, softened and shadowed
into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air with a
relish I had never known in the country and felt I was inhaling
some elixir for the spirit.</p>
<p>But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for a seventeen-year-old,
especially one who is beginning to be hungry
and tired. I was desperately anxious to hoard the three
precious dollars in my pocket, for I had little idea how to
go about replacing them, once they were spent. I could not
do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the first
gaslit bakery, buying, after some consideration, a penny
loaf, and walked on through the entrancing streets, munching
at it and feeling like an historical character.</p>
<p>Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by
porters with long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting,
each heralded with a boldly lettered broadside or
dashingly drawn cartoon advertising the amusement to be
found within. I was tempted to see for myself this magical
entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave
the illusion of motion, but the lowest admission price was
five cents. Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized
in the incredible phonotos—tinugraphs ingeniously
combined with a sound-producing machine operated by
compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to
move but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen
cents for an hour’s spectacle.</p>
<p>By this time I ached with tiredness; the insignificant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
bundle of shirt and books had become a burden. I was
pressed by the question of where to sleep and began thinking
more kindly than I would have believed possible of
last night’s slum. I didnt connect my need with the glass
transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the
unpainted letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL, for my
mind was hazily fixed on some urban version of the inn
at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie Commercial
House.</p>
<p>I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred
impressions of still newer marvels, so that I am not entirely
sure whether it was one or a succession of girls who
offered delights for a quarter. I know I was solicited by
crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly
in defiance of United States law, and an incredible number
of beggars accosted me.</p>
<p>At last I thought of asking directions. But without realizing
it I had wandered from the thronged wooden or
granite sidewalks of the brightly lit avenues into an unpeopled,
darkened area where the buildings were low and
frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a
kerosene lamp in windows far apart were uncontested by
any streetlights.</p>
<p>All day my ears had been pressed by the clop of hooves,
the rattling of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the
empty street was unnaturally still. The suddenly looming
figure of another walker seemed the luckiest of chances.</p>
<p>“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s
the nearest inn, or anywhere I can get a bed for the night
cheap?”</p>
<p>I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money
you got?”</p>
<p>“Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap
lodging.”
“OK, Reuben. Come along.”</p>
<p>“Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea
how to get there.”</p>
<p>He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”</p>
<p>Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip be
steered me along. For the first time I began to feel alarm.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
However, before I could attempt to shrug free he had
shoved me into the mouth of an alley, discernible only
because its absolute blackness contrasted with the relative
darkness of the street.</p>
<p>“Wait—” I began.</p>
<p>“In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep youve had in
a long time. And cheap—it’s free.”
I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no
longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, a
terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded
the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C3"><i>3.</i> <i>A MEMBER OF THE GRAND ARMY</i></h2>
</div>
<p>I was recalled to consciousness by a smell.
More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes
and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I
groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skullbones.
Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping
odors around me.</p>
<p>The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew
there was an outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The
ground I lay on, where it was not stony, was damp with
the water of endless dishwashings and launderings. The
noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many
families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley
or near it. In addition there was the smell of death, not
the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy
who has helped butcher a bull-calf or hog knows, but the
unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh. Besides
all this there was the spoor of humanity.</p>
<p>A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the
second time. A hard surface was pressing painful knobs
into my exposed skin. I looked and felt around me.</p>
<p>The knobs were the scattered cobbles of a fetid alley;
not a foot away was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent;
beyond him a drunk retched and groaned. A
trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately over the
moldy earth between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes
were gone, so was the bundle with my books. There was
no use searching my pocket for the three dollars. I knew I
was lucky the robber had left me my pants and my life.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span></p>
<p>A middleaged man, at least he looked middleaged to
my youthful eye, regarded me speculatively over the head
of the drunk. A pale, elliptical scar interrupted the wrinkles
on his forehead, its upper point making a permanent part
in his thin hair. Tiny red veins marked his nose; his eyes
were bloodshot.</p>
<p>“Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh boy?”</p>
<p>I nodded—and then was sorry for the motion.</p>
<p>“Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which
I assume. Come to the same end as me, stinking drunk.
Only I still got my shirt. Couldnt hock it no matter how
thirsty I got.”</p>
<p>I groaned.</p>
<p>“Where yuh from boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts
miss you?”
“Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s
Hodge Backmaker.”</p>
<p>“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. I’m George
Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off.”</p>
<p>I hadnt an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying
to understand made my head worse.</p>
<p>“Took everything, I suppose? Havent a nickel left to
help a hangover?”</p>
<p>“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.</p>
<p>He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching
the lump over my ear with my fingertips.</p>
<p>“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix
mine.”
“But ... can I go through the streets like this?”</p>
<p>“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”</p>
<p>He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk,
who murmured unintelligibly. With the other he removed
the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited
no protest from the victim. He then performed the still
more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and
shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection
of rags not fit to clean a manurespreader. The
jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the
ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless
fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p>
<p>“It’s stealing,” I protested.</p>
<p>“Right. Put them on and let’s get out of here.”</p>
<p>The short walk to the river was through streets lacking
the glamour of those of the day before. The tenements
were smokestreaked, with steps between the parting bricks
where mortar had fallen out; great hunks of wall were kept
in place only by the support of equally crazy ones abutting.
The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible’s
to this neighborhood, though his would have marked
him tramp and vagrant in Wappinger Falls.</p>
<p>The Hudson too was soiled, with an oily scum and
debris, so that I hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt,
much less my aching head. But urged on by Pondible I
climbed down the slimy stones between two docks and
pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing
water.</p>
<p>“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance
than accuracy. “Now for mine.”</p>
<p>The sun was hot and the shirt dried on my back as we
walked away from the river, the jacket over my arm. Now
that my mind was clearing my despair grew rapidly; for a
moment I wished I had waded farther into the Hudson
and drowned.</p>
<p>Admitting any plans I’d had were nebulous and impractical,
they had yet been plans of a kind, something
in which I could put, or force, my hopes. My appearance
had been presentable, I had the means to keep myself fed
and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything
was changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out
of existence and I had nothing to look forward to, nothing
on which to exert my energies and dreams. To go back to
Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not simply to
dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but
because I knew how relieved my mother and father must
have been to be freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing
to expect in the city except starvation or a life of petty
crime.</p>
<p>Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive
place, gaslit even this early, with a steam piano tinkling
the popular, mournful tune, <i>Mormon Girl</i>:</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">There’s a girl in the state of Deseret</div>
<div class="verse indent0">I love and I’m trying to for-get.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Forget her for my tired feet’s sake</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Don’t wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean</div>
<div class="verse indent0">I’d return my Mormon girl’s devotion.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">But the tracks stop short in Ioway....</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>I couldnt remember the next line. Something about Injuns
say.</p>
<p>“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk
for my chum here.”</p>
<p>The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of
him with a wet, dirty rag. “Got any jack?”</p>
<p>“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”</p>
<p>The bartender’s uninterrupted industry said clearly,
then drink tomorrow.</p>
<p>“Listen,” argued Pondible; “I’m tapering off. You know
me. Ive spent plenty of money here.”</p>
<p>The bartender shrugged. “I don’t own the place; anything
goes over the bar has to be rung up on the cash
register.”</p>
<p>“Youre lucky to have a job that pays wages.”</p>
<p>“Times I’m not so sure. Why don’t you indent?”</p>
<p>Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a
company pay for a wornout old carcass? A hundred dollars
at the top. Then a release in a couple of years with a
med holdback so I’d have to report every week somewhere.
No, friend, Ive come through this long a free man—in a
manner of speaking—and I’ll stick it out. Let’s have that
shot; you can see for yourself I’m tapering off. Youll get
your jack tomorrow.”
I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal
was less surly and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a
glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of
buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit
was rarely extended on any scale, large or small. The inflation,
though sixty years in the past, had left indelible
impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was
not only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
could be paid for while, or even after, they were being
used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulating
paper money instead of silver or gold.</p>
<p>I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible
had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the
saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar
moral notions, my new acquaintance seemed to
have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.</p>
<p>He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of
light beer which he sipped slowly. “That’s the trick of it,
Hodge. Avoid the second shot. If you can.” He sipped
again. “Now what?”</p>
<p>“What?” I repeated.</p>
<p>“Now what are you going to do? What’s your aim in
life anyway?”</p>
<p>“None—now. I ... wanted to learn. To study.”
He frowned. “Out of books?”</p>
<p>“How else?”</p>
<p>“Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries.”</p>
<p>“There might be more written here if more people had
time to learn.”</p>
<p>Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the
back of his hand. “Might and mightnt. Oh, some of my
best friends are book-readers, don’t get me wrong, boy.”</p>
<p>“I’d thought,” I burst out, “I’d thought to try Columbia
College. To offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of
work for tuition.”
“Hmm. I doubt it would have worked.”</p>
<p>“Anyway I can’t go now, looking like this.”</p>
<p>“Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers.”</p>
<p>“‘We?’”</p>
<p>He did not explain. “Well, you could always take the
advice our friend here gave me and indent. A young
healthy lad like you could get yourself a thousand or
twelve hundred dollars—”
“Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life.”</p>
<p>“Oh, indenting aint slavery. It’s better. And worse. For
one thing the company buys you won’t hold you after you
arent worth your keep. Not that long, on account of book<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>keeping;
they lose when they break even. So they cancel
your indenture without a cent payment. Course theyll
take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your
corpse, but that’s a long time away for you.”</p>
<p>An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was
the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part
in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that
cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical
schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much
at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at
its disposal outside the United States.</p>
<p>“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldnt be a
slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasnt any
good to anyone, including myself.”</p>
<p>He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer.
“Youre a gloomy gus, Hodge. Taint’s bad’s that. Indenting’s
pretty strictly regulated. That’s the idea anyway. I
aint saying the big companies don’t get away with a lot.
You can’t be made to work over sixty hours a week. Ten
hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get
all the education you want in your spare time and then
turn your learning to account by making enough to buy
yourself free.”</p>
<p>I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness
knows I’d been over the ground often enough. It was
true the amount, a not improbable one, would see me
through college. But Pondible’s notion of turning my
“learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in
the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge
was rewarded with wealth, or at least a comfortable living,
but any study I pursued—I knew my own “impracticality”
well enough by now—was bound to yield few material
benefits in the backward United States, which existed as
a nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries
of the great powers. I’d be lucky to struggle through
school and eke out some kind of living as a freeman; I
could hardly hope to earn enough to buy back an indenture
on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty hours
a week.</p>
<p>“It wouldnt work,” I said despondently.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
<p>Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion
he had expected me to come to. “Well then,” he said,
“there’s the gangs.”</p>
<p>I looked my horror.</p>
<p>He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. What’s
right? What the strongest country or the strongest man
says it is. The government says gangs are wrong, but the
government aint strong enough to stop them. And maybe
they don’t do as much killing as people think. Only when
somebody works against them—just like the government.
Sure they have to be paid off, but it’s just like taxes. If you
leave the parsons’ sermons out of it there’s no difference
joining the gangs than the army—if we had one—or the
Confederate Legion—”
“They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always
so....”</p>
<p>“Bold?” For the first time Pondible looked angry and I
thought the scar on his forehead turned whiter. “Yes,
damn them. The Legion must be half United States citizens.
When they have to put down a disturbance or run
some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate
Legion—made up of men who ought to be the backbone
of an army of our own.”
“But the police—don’t they ever try to stop them?”
“What’d I tell you about right being what the strongest
country says it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into
a foreign army. So we squawk. And what have we got to
back it up with? So the Confederate Legion goes right on
recruiting the men who have to beg for a square meal in
their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as
bad off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick
off some of the little ones and forget about the big ones.
Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live
high, high as anybody in the twenty-six states, and every
so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes
in a lifetime.”
I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And
yet ... if this were so why had he wheedled credit from
the barkeep? Was it simply an elaborate blind? It seemed
hardly worth it.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span></p>
<p>“A dividend,” I said, “or a rope.”</p>
<p>“Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Aint
one been hung I can think of the last five-six years. But I
see youve no stomach for it. Tell me, Hodge—you Whig
or Populist?”
The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why
... Populist, I guess.”</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of
the discussions that used to go on among the men around
the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property, Protection, Permanent
Population’ —what does it mean to me?”
“Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates
who own factories here and don’t want to pay taxes.
Protection for foreign capital to come in and buy or hire.
Permanent Population—cheap native labor. Build up a
prosperous employing class.”
“Yes, I know. I can’t see how it helps. Ive heard Whigs
at home say the money’s bound to seep down from above,
but it seems awfully roundabout. And not very efficient.”</p>
<p>He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder.
“That’s my boy,” he said. “They can’t fool you.”</p>
<p>I wasnt entirely pleased by his commendation. “And
protection means paying more for things than theyre
worth.”</p>
<p>“Taint only that, Hodge, it’s a damn lie as well. Whigs
never even tried protection when they was in. Didnt dast.
Knew the other countries wouldnt let them.”</p>
<p>“As for ‘permanent population’ ... well, those who
can’t make a living are going to go on emigrating to prosperous
countries. Permanent population means dwindling
population if it means anything.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” he said. “You got a head on your shoulders,
Hodge. Youre all right; books won’t hurt you. But what
about emigrating? Yourself, I mean?”</p>
<p>I shook my head.</p>
<p>He nodded, chewing on a soggy corner of his mustache.
“Don’t want to leave the old ship, huh?”</p>
<p>I don’t suppose I would have put it exactly that way, or
even fully formulated the thought. I was willing to ex<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>change
the familiar for the unknown—up to a certain
point. The thought of giving up the country in which I’d
been born was repugnant. Call it loyalty, or a sense of
having ties with the past, or just stubbornness. “Something
like that,” I said.</p>
<p>“Well now, let’s see what weve got.” He stuck up a dirty
and slightly tremulous hand, turning down a finger as he
stated each point. “One, patriot; two, Populist; three, don’t
like indenting; four, prosperity’s got to come from the poor
upward, not the rich down.” He hesitated, holding his
thumb. “You heard of the Grand Army?”</p>
<p>“Who hasnt? Not much difference between them and
the regular gangs.”</p>
<p>“Now what makes you say that?”</p>
<p>“Why ... everybody knows it”</p>
<p>“Do, huh? Maybe they know it all wrong. Look here
now—and remember about the Confederate Legion riding
over the laws of the United States—what would you
think ought to be done about foreigners from the strong
countries who come here and walk all over us? Or the
Whigs who do their dirty work for them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not murder, certainly.”</p>
<p>“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means
what you want it to mean. Wasnt murder back during the
War when Union soldiers was trying to keep the country
from being split up. Taint murder today when somebody’s
hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army
don’t go in for murder.”</p>
<p>I said nothing.</p>
<p>“Oh, accidents happen; wouldnt deny it. Maybe they
get a little rougher than they intend with Whig traitors or
Confederate agents, but you can’t make bacon out of a
live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only thing in the
country that even tries to restore it to what it once was.
What was fought for in the War.”</p>
<p>I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather
Backmaker or the unassuaged guilt for the miserable
figure I had cut only three days back that made me ask,
“And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”</p>
<p>He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
face. “Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent
forward, looking at me searchingly. “No, I can see you
aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just don’t understand.
We might have won that war if it hadnt been for
the Abolitionists.”</p>
<p>Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would
have been presumptuous to doubt it.</p>
<p>“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said;
“they never should have been here in the first place; black
and white can’t mix. Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge;
there’s plenty and enough to be done. Chase the foreigners
out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build the country up
again.”</p>
<p>“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”</p>
<p>Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy.
Let’s say I just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three
meals a day, and some of that education youre so fired up
about. Come along.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C4"><i>4.</i> <i>TYSS</i></h2>
</div>
<p>He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store
on Astor Place with a printshop in the basement and the
man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger
Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither
the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have
changed or aged.</p>
<p>I know books were sold and others bought to take their
places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor.
I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of
printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets,
broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons
for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and
daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of
indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible
disorder, the synonymous dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable
stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed
for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which
responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the
air and immediately settling back on precisely the same
spots.</p>
<p>Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge
it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that
aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members
of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely
trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across
his forehead were many fine lines which always held some
of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not
dwell long on either beard or wrinkles however; what held
you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate.
You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not
been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict
with his other features.</p>
<p>“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious
disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me
to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker,
ay? Is that an American name?”</p>
<p>So far as I knew, I said, it was.</p>
<p>“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to
learn. Why?”</p>
<p>“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an
answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because
there’s nothing else so important.”</p>
<p>“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory.
Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no
degrees involved. Books are the waste-product of the human
mind.”</p>
<p>“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.</p>
<p>“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve
of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn
you are going to learn; there’s nothing I can do about it
As well here as another place.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, sir.”</p>
<p>“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended
to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or
even think of him except as Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins,
is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to
the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love,
hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”</p>
<p>I considered this statement reflectively.</p>
<p>“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you,
teach you to set type and give you the run of the books.
I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must
You can learn as much here in four months as in a college
in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you
want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the
work I think needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre
free to go.”
And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a
statement can be called an agreement, was made within<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six
years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was
employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my
friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and
the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but
it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those
qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested
his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this
detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near
him. But I am getting ahead of my story.</p>
<p>Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding,
size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He
seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable
subject, many of them quite useless in practical application.
(I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with
terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess,
gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition,
indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked
why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why
have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)</p>
<p>As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not
concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes
spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have
interested only its author, until he struck a proof which
satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry,
essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running
off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and
immediately destroyed before pieing the type.</p>
<p>I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters
during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious,
downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it
was time to open he sent me across town on the horse-cars
to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef—twelve
on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore,
was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of
ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I
had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not
long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged
him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some
other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase
the heart; it is the vital food.”</p>
<p>While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of
yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he
took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the
establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and
spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a
light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than
broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a
hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other
we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for
breakfast, dinner, and supper.</p>
<p>“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed
me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would
relish another’s ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or
hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at
heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”</p>
<p>“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? I mean, doesnt
it refer to the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester
and buried by the sower?”</p>
<p>“You think the gods were modelled on John Barleycorn
and not John Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate?
I fear you have a higher opinion of mankind than is warranted,
Hodgins.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”</p>
<p>“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations.
The good, the true, the beautiful—with winged feet
or bull’s body.”
“How about ... oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”</p>
<p>He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously
pleased. “Satan. An excellent example. Epitome of man’s
futile longing to upset and defy the divine plan—I use the
word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does not admire
and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a
god out of the devil we eat him daily in a two-fold sense:
by swallowing the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there
never was), and by digesting his great precepts of pride
and curiosity and strength. And you see for yourself how
he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds to speculate
on. Let’s get to work.”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or
inconsiderate master. In 1938-44, when the country was
being ground deeper into colonialism, there were few employers
so lenient. I read much, generally when I pleased,
and despite his jeers at learning in the abstract he encouraged
me, even going to the length, if a particular book was
not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get
it from one of his competitors, to be written up against
his account.</p>
<p>Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his
errands. I continued to ramble and sight-see the city much
as though I had nothing else to do. And if, from time to
time, I discovered there were girls in New York who didnt
look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still carried
some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never
questioned why the walk of half a mile took me a couple
of hours.</p>
<p>True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me
wages, but he often handed me coins for pocketmoney,
evidently satisfied I wasnt stealing, and he replaced my
makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent clothing.</p>
<p>He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books
surrounding me. His brief warning, “—you can learn
nothing,” was lost on me. I suppose a different temperament
might have become surfeited with paper and print; I
can only say I wasnt. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled books.
After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the
nearest gasjet by means of a long tube, and lying on my
pallet with a dozen volumes handy, I read till I was no
longer able to keep my eyes open or understand the words.
Often I woke in the morning to find the light still burning
and my fingers holding the pages open.</p>
<p>I think one of the first books to influence me strongly
was the monumental <i>Causes of American Decline and
Decay</i> by the always popular expatriate historian, Henry
Adams. I was particularly impressed by the famous passage
in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian essayists,
William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice
and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry,
who had renounced his United States citizenship and been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
knighted by William V, history is never directed or diverted
by well-intentioned individuals; it is the product of
forces with geographical, not moral roots.</p>
<p>Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive
sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the
fact that I had not found their books enjoyable. This was
due at least partly to the fact that the small editions were
badly printed and marred, at least so foreign critics
claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms,
consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain
of imported elegance. For some reason, obscure to
me then, I did not mention Adams to Tyss, though I usually
turned to him with each of my fresh discoveries. When
he came upon me with an open book he would glance at
the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either
of the particular work or of its topic. What he had to say
gave me an insight I might otherwise have missed, and
turned me to other writers, other aspects. He respected no
authority simply because it was acclaimed or established;
he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis
no matter how commonly accepted.</p>
<p>Early in my employment I was attracted to a large
framed parchment he kept hanging, slightly askew and
highly attractive to dust, over his typecase. It was simply
but beautifully printed in 16 point Baskerville; I knew
without being told that he had set it himself:</p>
<p>
<i>The Body of<br />
Benjamin Franklin<br />
Printer<br />
Like the Cover of an Old Book<br />
Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding<br />
Lies Here<br />
Food for Worms.<br />
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost<br />
For it will, As he Believed,<br />
Come Forth Again<br />
In a new and Better Edition<br />
Revised & Corrected<br />
By<br />
The Author.</i><br />
</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
<p>When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous,
isnt it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably
hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is
simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no
synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious
actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the
universe.”</p>
<p>“The other day you told me we admired the devil for
rebelling against a plan.”</p>
<p>He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth
from me, Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind;
it is this no-plan against which Lucifer fought. But there
is a plan too, a mindless plan, which accounts for all our
acts.”</p>
<p>I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant
curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he
had been forced to publish his sermons himself, named
George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful
style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself
as to counter his argument.</p>
<p>“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its
eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and
know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think;
he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to
external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”</p>
<p>“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal
minimum of choice?”</p>
<p>“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what
we do because someone else has done what he did; he did
it because still another someone did what he did. Every
action is the rigid result of another action.”</p>
<p>“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected.
“And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for
that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist
again.”</p>
<p>“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,”
he said witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most
despised words in his vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile.
Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
own level, I could say that time is a convention and that
all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension
I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight
line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume
that time isnt curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can
you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why
arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”</p>
<p>“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat
the identical lines over and over and over for infinity?
There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable,
never-ending hell.”</p>
<p>He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout
emotional apologetics at me is part of what you call the
script, Hodgins. You didnt select the words nor speak them
voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I
said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”</p>
<p>Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack.
“You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”</p>
<p>He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because
automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I
am a prisoner of stimuli.”</p>
<p>“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member
of the Grand Army when no one can change what’s
predestined.”</p>
<p>“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses
just as much as actions. I can no more help engaging
myself in the underground than I can help breathing,
or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing,
they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything
is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.</p>
<p>I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be
sold for wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable;
every attack was discounted by the very nature
of the thesis. That it was false I didnt doubt; its impregnability
made its falseness still more terrifying.</p>
<p>There were fully as many imaginary discussions with
Tyss as real ones. Yet even in these disembodied arguments
I could gain no advantage. Why do you look back
on the War of Southron Independence with regret for what<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked
him mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself,
was no answer at all.</p>
<p>The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of
contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was
devoted was a violent organization of violent men. He himself
was an advocate and implement of violence—one
illegal paper, the <i>True American</i>, came from his press and
I often saw crumpled proofs of large type warnings to “Get
Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG
YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant
to him; his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates
rose from commiseration for the condition into
which they had plunged the country.</p>
<p>Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance
to each other, bearded or not, came to the store on
Grand Army business, and I was sure many of the errands
I was sent on advanced or were supposed to advance the
Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an
X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about
assurance of delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the
sort of merchandise we handled.</p>
<p>I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued,
that aside from the very first conversation with Pondible,
no attempt was made to persuade me into the organization.
Tyss must have perceived this, for he explained
obliquely.</p>
<p>“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator
type. One acts, and the other is acted upon. One changes
events, the other observes them. Of course,” he went on
hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical rubbish. When I say
the formative type changes events I merely mean he reacts
to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator
reacts to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions
being inevitable and inescapable. Naturally, events are
never changed.”</p>
<p>“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at
other times? Ive certainly heard of men of action who have
sat down to write their memoirs.”</p>
<p>“You are confusing the after-effect of action with non<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>action,
the dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has
been tossed with the still surface of one which has never
been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the two types are completely
distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police chief, Carl
Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of Lombroso,
showing how the formative type can always be detected.”</p>
<p>I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had
never read Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.</p>
<p>“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to
the spectator the man of action is faintly absurd. A born
observer would find the earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the
formation of skeleton companies, the appointment
of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to become
a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.”
“You think I’m the spectator type, Mr Tyss?”</p>
<p>“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be
deceptive at first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained
fleshiness of the mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but
they subordinate to more subtle indicators. No question
but that Chief Jung would put you down as an observer.”</p>
<p>If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying
personalities as though they were zoological specimens
could relieve me of having to refuse pointblank to join
the Grand Army I was content. While this hardly alleviated
my disturbance at being, no matter how remotely,
accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder I compromised
with my conscience by trying to believe I might after
all be mistaken in thinking I was being used. There were
times when I felt I ought boldly to declare myself and
leave the store but when I faced the prospect of having to
find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the imperative
necessity of books, I lacked the courage.</p>
<p>Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions
to make.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C5"><i>5.</i> <i>OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS</i></h2>
</div>
<p>A country defeated in a bitter war and
divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and
suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For
generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied
with the past and dreaming of a miraculous
change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history.
The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy
and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat.</p>
<p>It was not the only answer; the two major political
parties had others. The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the
country and its economy into actual world conditions, to
subordinate it wholly and openly to the great manufacturing
nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital and
foreign protection. The immediate result would be more
prosperity for the propertied classes; they contended this
would mean a gradual raising of the standard of living
since employers could hire more hands, and indenture,
faced by competition with wages, would dwindle away.</p>
<p>This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted
when they were out of office, should create industries, forbid
indenting, buy up the indentures of skilled workers and
offer high enough pay to create new markets, and defy the
world by building a new army and navy. That they never
put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of
the Whigs.</p>
<p>The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the
office were really a prize to be sought rather than a practically
empty title, with all real power now held by the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
Majority Leader of the House and his cabinet of Committee
Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading contenders
for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled;
the Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was
being held was fired by an arsonist.</p>
<p>I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I
too had campaign fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was
perhaps the ugliest candidate ever offered, with a hairless,
skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig nominee, had a certain
handsomeness, which might have been an asset if the persistent
advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their
way.</p>
<p>Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago,
concentrating their appearances in New York and
New England and leaving the campaign in the sparsely
settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This year both
office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest number
of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train;
Lewis was featured in a series of short phonotos
which were shown free. Dewey spoke several times daily
to small groups; Lewis specialized in enormous weekly
rallies followed by torchlight parades.</p>
<p>One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square
early in September; outgoing President George Norris
spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist
to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. Tyss indulgently
gave me permission to leave the store a couple of
hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get
a place from which to see and hear all that was going on.
Though he characterized all elections as meaningless exercises
devised to befuddle, he had been active in this one in
some mysterious and secretive way.</p>
<p>The square was already well filled when I arrived, with
the more acrobatic members of the audience perched on
the statues of LaFayette and Washington. Calliopes played
patriotic airs, and a compressed air machine shot up puffs
of smoke which momentarily spelled out the candidate’s
name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going
on, I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking
I might just as well leave altogether.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span></p>
<p>“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part
of the Populist tradition?”</p>
<p>“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”</p>
<p>We were close enough to a light standard for me to see
she was young and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to
be found at a political meeting, few of which ever counted
much of a feminine audience.</p>
<p>She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded
grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about
the mob.”</p>
<p>She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented
mouth and pale hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s
not much to see from here,” I said; “unless youre enthusiastic
enough to be satisfied with a bare look at the important
people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the streetcar.
For my clumsiness.”</p>
<p>She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself.
But if you feel you owe me something for trampling me,
maybe you’ll explain why anyone comes to these ridiculous
gatherings.”</p>
<p>“Why ... to hear the speakers.”</p>
<p>“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”</p>
<p>“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”</p>
<p>“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something
like that. A stupid amusement.”</p>
<p>“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists
usually havent much money.”</p>
<p>“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more
useful things to do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt
vote for Populists.”</p>
<p>“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be
rich as Whigs.”</p>
<p>She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing.
“It’s easy enough to be envious of those who are better off;
it’s a lot harder to become better off yourself.”</p>
<p>“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”</p>
<p>“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their
names when you step on their feet?”</p>
<p>“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that
have lovely ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
deny Populist leanings, but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”</p>
<p>Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a
family of wealthy Whigs who owned a handsome modern
castiron and concrete house near the Reservoir at Forty-second
Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the apt word
“curious” in characterizing herself but it was, as I soon
found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored
only what she thought might be useful or which impressed
her as foolish. She was interested in the nature of anything
fashionable or popular or much talked of, the idea of being
concerned with anything even vaguely abstract struck her
as preposterous.</p>
<p>She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity,
but calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security
through indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me,
even when I contrasted my “free” condition with her bound
one. Certainly she seemed to have minimum restriction on
her time; soon after our introduction at the rally she was
meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square
where we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking
briskly when the autumn weather chilled our blood.</p>
<p>I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps
tolerance would be a better word—was due to any strong
attraction exerted by me. If anything she was, I think,
slightly repelled by my physical presence, which carried to
her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and contrasted
with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers
and their friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered
slightly; then, closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her
again.</p>
<p>She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she
led me quietly to her room in the big house on my transparent
plea that the outdoors was now too cold even for
conversation. I was no accomplished seducer, but even in
my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her
mind I was to succeed.</p>
<p>That her complaisance was not the result of passion was
soon obvious; there was not so much a failure on my part
to arouse her as a refusal on hers to be aroused beyond an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
inescapable degree. Even as she permitted our intimacy
she remained as virginal, aloof and critical as before.</p>
<p>“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking
and writing and thinking about nothing else.”</p>
<p>“Tirzah dear—”
“And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think
of you as any more dear than I did an hour ago. If people
must indulge in this sort of thing, and I suppose they must
since it’s been going on for a long time, I think it could be
conducted with more dignity.”</p>
<p>As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen;
curiosity alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my
pathetic search for knowledge. “What good is your learning
ever going to do you? It’ll never get you a penny.”</p>
<p>I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose
it doesnt?” I argued lazily; “There are other things
besides money.”</p>
<p>She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always
say.”</p>
<p>“And what do people who can get it say?”</p>
<p>“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered
earnestly. “That it will buy all the other things.”</p>
<p>“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted,
“but you have to get it first.”</p>
<p>“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract
payment.”</p>
<p>“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”</p>
<p>She looked at me wonderingly. “Havent you ever
thought about serious things? Only books and politics and
all that? How could I get opportunities without indenting?
I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut above the Backmakers;
well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess
and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to
Mrs Smythe.”</p>
<p>“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”</p>
<p>“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want
to live like a lady, to have a good house with servants and
carriages and minibiles, to travel to civilized countries,
with a place in Paris or Rome or Vienna. You can love the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the rich and the
Whigs.”</p>
<p>“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you
have your indenting money and can buy back your freedom
any moment you want it, how does this help you get
rich?”</p>
<p>“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested,
every cent. People who come to this house give me
tips; not just money, though there’s enough of that to add
a bit to my original capital, but tips on what to buy and
sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of course
I may marry a rich man sooner.”</p>
<p>“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,”
I remonstrated.</p>
<p>“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, youve been telling
me I’m cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded
profitably.”</p>
<p>“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what
we’re doing here at this moment. I’d have thought you’d
have picked a more profitable lover.”</p>
<p>She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If
you had, you would have seen I could hardly encourage
any of the men from the class into which I intend to marry.
Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the faintest whisper
about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would
be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house
but a chilly prude.”</p>
<p>An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly
jealous at the thought of men who might have been in my
place if they had been as anonymous, as inconsequential
as I. But this writhing jealousy was little more painful than
my frustration at having been made a convenience, a trial
experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance, anyone
who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house
would have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come
face to face with Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her.</p>
<p>Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that
vanished past, I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the
girl Tirzah and the boy Hodge. How gravely we took our
moral and political differences; how lightly the flying<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
moments of union. We said and did all the wrong things, all
the things which fostered the antagonism between us and
none of the things which might have softened our youthful
self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and
Lewis, Whig versus Populist, materialist against idealist,
reality opposing principle. It all seems so futile now; it all
appeared so vital then.</p>
<p>Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all
foreigners in the United States, we regarded the Confederates
in particular as the cause of all our misfortunes.
We not only blamed and feared them, but looked upon
them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made response
every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron
tools.</p>
<p>Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I
was sure the victors in the War of Southron Independence
had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among
them was their second president. Yet I also knew that immediately
after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated individuals
became increasingly powerful in the new nation.
As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”</p>
<p>From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years
later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly
strong and imperialistic congress. He had opposed
the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy,
undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the
conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However
he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes
to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions
by the Confederate House and Senate.</p>
<p>Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had
fought for independence died, the ideals he symbolized
faded. Negro emancipation, enacted largely because of
pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed itself as a device
for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its obligations.
The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without
franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil
rights. Yet while the old Union first restricted and then
abolished immigration, the Confederacy encouraged it,
making the newcomers subjects like the Latin-Americans<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
who made up so much of the Southron population after
the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship
to posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate
States on July Fourth 1864.</p>
<p>The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate
agents; the Whigs retorted that the Populists were visionaries
and demagogues who tolerated if they did not actually
encourage the activities of the Grand Army. The Populists
replied by pointing to their platform which denounced
illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too
impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible and
their associates had been ever since the campaign started.</p>
<p>On election night Tyss closed the store and we walked
the few blocks to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store
where a big screen showed the returns between tinugraphs
puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the first it was apparent
the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to
Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned
to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson
defeated President Thomas R Marshall back in 1920
and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before Smith gained the
great popularity which gave him the presidency four years
later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah and Oregon
went for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one
other states plumped for Dewey.</p>
<p>Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful
air. When I asked him what satisfaction he could find
in so overwhelming a defeat he smiled and said, “What
defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the Populists to
win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world
peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn
nothing day by day.”</p>
<p>“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”</p>
<p>“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration
which presents a fixed target to a Populist one wavering all
over the place.”</p>
<p>Of course it should have occurred to me that Tyss and
Tirzah would wind up on the same side. It was a measure
of my innocence that it never had.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C6"><i>6.</i> <i>ENFANDIN</i></h2>
</div>
<p>Tirzah’s question, “What good is your learning
ever going to do you?” bothered me from time to time. Not
that I was burdened by any vast amount of knowledge, but
presumably I would get more—and then what? It was true
I expected no rewards from reading except the pleasure it
gave me, but the future, to use a topheavy word, could not
be entirely disregarded. I could not see myself spending a
lifetime in the bookstore. I was grateful to Tyss, despite his
disdain of this emotion, for the opportunities he had given
me, but not grateful enough to reconcile myself to becoming
another Tyss, especially one without his vitalizing involvement
with the Grand Army.</p>
<p>Other courses were neither numerous nor inviting. To
follow Tirzah’s own example might have seemed feasible
if one ignored the vast differences of situation and character,
to say nothing of those between a hulking youth and
a pretty girl. I could hardly hope to find a wealthy family
who would buy my services, put me to congenial tasks, and
look with tolerance on my efforts to advance myself right
out of their employment. Even if such a chance existed I
could not have utilized it as she did; I should undoubtedly
confuse one stock with another or neglect to buy what I
was told until too late, winding up with lottery tickets and
losing the stubs.</p>
<p>My helpless uncertainty only added to my disadvantage
with her. I had no hope her coolness would change to
either ardor or affection. At any moment she might decide
her curiosity was satisfied and find the awkwardness,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
inconveniences, and what must have been to her the sordidness
of the affair too great.</p>
<p>We were a strange pair of young lovers. When we talked
we argued opposing views or spoke sedately of things not
near our hearts. When we walked together in the streets
or fled the gaslit pavements for the moon over Reservoir
Square we neither held hands nor kissed impulsively. Because
prudence forbade the slightest physical contact save
in utmost privacy there were no innocent touchings or
accidental brushing of hands against hips or arms against
arms, and our secret embraces were guilty simply because
they were secret.</p>
<p>Often I dreamed of a miraculous change, either in circumstances
or in her attitude, to dissolve the walls between
us; beneath the hope was only expectation of an abrupt
and final break. Yet when it came at last, after more than
a year, it was not the result, as I had agonizedly anticipated,
of some successful speculation or an offer of marriage, but
of natural and normal actions of my own.</p>
<p>Among the customers to whom I frequently delivered
parcels of books was a Monsieur René Enfandin who lived
on Eighth Street, not far from Fifth Avenue. M Enfandin
was Consul for the Republic of Haiti; the house he occupied
was distinguished from otherwise equally drab neighbors
by a large red and blue escutcheon over the doorway.
He did not use the entire dwelling himself, reserving only
the parlor floor for the office of the consulate and living
quarters; the rest was let to other tenants.</p>
<p>Tyss’s anti-foreign bias caused him to jeer at Enfandin
behind his back and embark on discourses which proved
by anthropometry and frequent references to Lombroso
and Chief Jung that Negroes were incapable of self-government.
I noticed however that he treated the consul no
differently, either in politeness or honesty, from his other
patrons, and by this time I knew Tyss well enough to attribute
this courtesy not to the self-interest of a tradesman
but to that compassion which he suppressed so sternly
under the contradictions of his nature.</p>
<p>For a long time I paid little attention to Enfandin, beyond
noting the wide range of interests revealed by the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>
books he bought. I sensed that, like myself, he was inclined
to shyness. He had an arrangement whereby he turned
back most of his purchases for credit on others. I saw that
if he hadnt, his library would have soon dispossessed him;
as it was, books covered all the space not taken by the paraphernalia
of his office and bedroom with the exception of
a bit of bare wall on which hung a large crucifix. He seemed
always to have a volume in his large, dark brown hand,
politely closed over his thumb or open for eager sampling.</p>
<p>Enfandin was tall and strong-featured, notable in any
company. In the United States where a black man was,
more than anything else, a reminder of the disastrous war
and Mr Lincoln’s proclamation, he was the permanent target
of rowdy boys and adult hoodlums. Even the diplomatic
immunity of his post was poor protection, for it was
believed, not without justification, that Haiti, the only
American republic south of the Mason-Dixon line to preserve
its independence, was disrupting the official if sporadically
executed policy of deporting Negroes to Africa
by encouraging their emigration to its own shores or, what
was even more annoying, assisting them to flee to the unconquered
Indians of Idaho or Montana.</p>
<p>Beyond a “Good morning” or “Thank you” I doubt if
we exchanged a hundred words until the time I saw a copy
of Randolph Bourne’s <i>Fragment</i> among his selections.
“That’s not what you think it is,” I exclaimed brashly; “it’s
a novel.”</p>
<p>He looked at me gravely. “You also admire Bourne?”</p>
<p>“Oh yes.” I felt a trifle foolish, not only for having thrust
my advice upon him, but for the inadequacy of my comment
on a writer who had so many pertinent things to say
and had been persecuted for saying them. I was conscious
too of Tyss’s opinion: How could a cripple like Bourne
speak to whole and healthy men?</p>
<p>“But you do not approve of fiction, is that so?” Enfandin
had no discernible accent but often his English was uncolloquial
and sometimes it was overly careful and stiff.</p>
<p>I thought of the adventure tales I had once swallowed
so breathlessly. “Well ... it does seem to be a sort of a
waste of time.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span></p>
<p>He nodded. “Time, yes.... We waste it or save it or
use it—one would almost think we mastered it instead of
the other way around. Yet are all novels really a waste of
the precious dimension? Perhaps you underestimate the
value of invention.”
“No,” I said; “but what value has the invention of happenings
that never happened, or characters who never
existed?”</p>
<p>“Who is to say what never happened? It is a matter of
definition.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I said; “suppose the characters exist in the
author’s mind, like the events; where does the value of the
invention come in?”</p>
<p>“Where the value of any invention comes in,” he answered.
“In its purpose or use. A wheel spinning aimlessly
is worth nothing; the same wheel on a cart or a pulley
changes destiny.”</p>
<p>“You can’t learn anything from fairy tales,” I persisted
stubbornly.</p>
<p>He smiled. “Maybe you havent read the right fairy
tales.”</p>
<p>I soon discovered in him a quick and penetrating sympathy
which was at times almost telepathic. He listened to
my callow opinions patiently, offering observations of his
own without diffidence and without didacticism. The understanding
and encouragement I did not expect or want
from Tyss he gave me generously. To him, as I never could
to Tirzah, I talked of my hopes and dreams; he listened
patiently and did not seem to think them foolish or impossible
of accomplishment. I do not minimize what Tyss
did for me by saying that without Enfandin I would have
taken much less profit from the books my employer gave
me access to.</p>
<p>I was drawn to him more and more; I’m not sure why
he interested himself in me, unless there was a reason in
the remark he made once: “Ay, we are alike, you and I.
The books, always the books. And for themselves, not to
become rich or famous like sensible people. Are we not
foolish? But it is a pleasant folly and a sometimes blameless
vice.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span></p>
<p>I wanted anxiously to speak of Tirzah, not only because
it is an urgent necessity for lovers to mention the name at
least of their beloved a hundred times a day or more, but
in the nebulous hope he could somehow give me an answer
to her as well as to her question. I approached the topic in
a number of different ways; each time our conversation
moved on without my having told him about her.</p>
<p>Often, after I had delivered an armful of books to the
consulate and we had talked of a wide range of things—for,
unlike me, he had no self-consciousness about what interested
him, whether others might consider it trivial or
not—he would walk back to the bookstore with me, leaving
a note on his door. The promise that he would be “Back
in 10 minutes” was, I’m afraid, seldom fulfilled, for he
became so deeply engrossed that he was unaware of time.</p>
<p>The occasion which was to be so important to me sprang
from a discussion of non-resistance to evil, a subject on
which he had much to say. We were just passing Wanamaker
& Stewarts and he had just triumphantly reviewed
the amazing decision of the Japanese Shogun to abolish all
police forces, when I became conscious that someone was
staring fixedly at me.</p>
<p>A minibile, highslung and obviously custom-built, moved
slowly down the street. Its brass brightwork, bumpers like
two enormous tackheads, hub rims like delicate eyelets in
the center of the great spokes, rococo lamps, rain gutters
and door handles, was dazzling. In the jump-seat, facing a
lady of majestic demeanor, was Tirzah. Her head was
turned ostentatiously away from us.</p>
<p>Enfandin halted as I did. “Ah,” he murmured; “you
know the ladies?”</p>
<p>“The girl. The lady is her employer.”</p>
<p>“I caught only a glimpse of the face, but it is a pretty
one.”</p>
<p>“Yes. Oh yes....” I wanted desperately to say more, to
thank him as though Tirzah’s looks were somehow to my
credit, to praise her and at the same time call her cruel and
hardhearted. “Oh yes....”</p>
<p>“She is perhaps a particular friend?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span></p>
<p>I nodded. “Very particular.” We walked on in silence.</p>
<p>“That is nice. But she is perhaps a little unhappy over
your prospects?”</p>
<p>“How did you know?”</p>
<p>“It was not too hard to infer. You have been concealed
from the mistress; the young lady is impressed by wealth;
you are the idealistic one who is not.”</p>
<p>At last I was able to talk. I explained her indenture, her
ambitious plans, and how I expected her to end everything
between us at any moment. “And there’s nothing I can do
about it,” I finished bitterly.</p>
<p>“That is right, Hodge. There is nothing you can do
about it because—You will forgive me if I speak plainly,
brutally even?”
“Go ahead. Tirzah—” what a joy it was just to say the
name “—Tirzah has told me often enough how unrealistic
I am.”
“That was not what I meant. I would say there is nothing
you can do about it because there is nothing you wish
to do about it.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean? I’d do anything I could....”</p>
<p>“Would you? Give up books, for instance?”</p>
<p>“Why should I? What good would that do?”</p>
<p>“I do not say you should or that it would do good. I
only try to show that the young lady, charming and important
as she is, is not the most magnetic or important
thing in your life. Romantic love is a curious byproduct of
west European feudalism that Africans and Asiatics can
only criticize gingerly. You shake your head with obstinacy;
you do not believe me. Good, then I have not hurt you.”</p>
<p>“I can’t see that youve helped me much, either.”</p>
<p>“Ay! What did you expect from the black man of Haiti?
Miracles?”</p>
<p>“Nothing less will do any good I’m afraid. Now I suppose
youll tell me I’ll get over it in time; that it’s just an
adolescent languishing anyway.”</p>
<p>He looked at me reproachfully. “No, Hodge. I hope I
should never be the one to think suffering is tied to age
or time. As for getting over it, why, we all get over every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>thing
in the end, but no matter how desirable absolute
peace is, few of us are willing to give up experience prematurely.”</p>
<p>Later, I compared what Enfandin told me with what
Tyss might have said. Did the responsibility of holding
Tirzah lie with me and not with both of us, or with fate
or chance? Or were events so circumscribed by inevitabilities
that even to think of struggling with them was foolish?</p>
<p>I also asked myself if I had been too proud, too hypersensitive.
I had tried to make her see my viewpoint by
arguing, by fighting hers; might it not be possible, without
giving up essentials, to approach her more gently? To divert
her, not from her ambitions, but from her contempt for
mine?</p>
<p>Full of resolves, I left the store after eight; eager walking
brought me to our meeting place in Reservoir Square
early, but the nearby churchbells had hardly sounded the
quarter hour when she said, “Hodge.”</p>
<p>Her unusual promptness was a good omen; I was filled
with warm optimism. “Tirzah, I saw you this afternoon—”
“Did you? I thought you were so busy with Sambo you
would never look up.”</p>
<p>“Why do you call him that? Do you think—”
“Oh for Heavens sake, don’t start making speeches at
me. I call him Sambo because it sounds nicer than Rastus.”</p>
<p>All my resolutions about trying to see her point of view!
“I call him M’sieu Enfandin because that’s his name.”</p>
<p>“Have you no pride? No, I suppose you havent. Just some
strange manners. Well, I can put up with your eccentricities,
but other people wouldnt understand. What do you
think Mrs Smythe would say?”</p>
<p>“Never having met the lady, I havent the faintest idea.”</p>
<p>“I have, and I agree with her. Would you like me to be
chummy with a naked cannibal with a ring in his nose?”</p>
<p>“But Enfandin doesnt wear a ring in his nose, and you
must have seen he was fully dressed. Maybe he eats missionaries
in secret, but that couldnt offend Mrs Smythe
since appearances would be saved.”</p>
<p>“I’m serious, Hodge.”</p>
<p>“So am I. Enfandin is my only friend.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
<p>“You may be above appearances and considerations of
decency but I’m not. If you ever appear in public with him
again you can stop coming here. Because I won’t have
anything more to do with you.”</p>
<p>“But Tirzah ...” I began helplessly, overwhelmed by
the impossibility of coping with the irrelevancies and inconsistencies
of her stand. “But Tirzah....”</p>
<p>“No,” she said firmly; “you’ll simply have to grow up,
Hodge, and stop such childish exhibitions. Only friend indeed!
Why I suppose if he appeared here right this minute,
you’d talk to him.”</p>
<p>“Well naturally. You’d hardly expect me to—”
“But I do. That’s exactly what I’d expect. You to act
like a civilized man.”</p>
<p>I wasnt angry. I couldnt be angry with her. “If that’s
civilization then I guess I don’t want to be civilized.”</p>
<p>I detected astonishment in her voice. “You mean, actually
mean, you intend to keep on acting this way?”</p>
<p>Grandfather Backmaker must have been a stubborn
man; I had my mother’s word I possessed no Hodgins
traits. “Tirzah, what would you think of me if I turned on
my only friend, the only thoroughly kind and understanding
friend Ive ever had, just because Mrs Smythe has
different notions of propriety than I have?”</p>
<p>“I’d think you were beginning to understand things at
last.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry, Tirzah.”</p>
<p>“I mean it, Hodge, you know. I’ll never see you again.”</p>
<p>“If you’d only listen to my side—”
“You mean if I would only become a crank like you.
But I don’t want to be a crank or a martyr. I don’t want
to change the world. I’m normal.”</p>
<p>“Tirzah—”
“Goodbye, Hodge.”</p>
<p>She walked away. I had the irrational feeling that if I
called after her she might come back. Or at least stand
still and wait to hear what I had to say. I kept my mouth
obstinately closed; Enfandin had been right, the responsibility
was mine. There were things I would not give up.</p>
<p>My heroic mood must have lasted fully fifteen minutes.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
Then I hurried through the little park and across the
street to the Smythe house. There were lights in the upper
floors, but the basement, as always, was dark. I dared not
knock or ring the bell; her admonitions were too firmly
impressed on my mind. Instead, in a turmoil of emotions,
I paced the flagged sidewalk until the suspicious eye of a
patrolman was attracted; then I fled cravenly.</p>
<p>I couldnt wait for the next day to write a long, chaotic
letter begging her to let me talk to her, just to talk to her,
for an hour, ten minutes, a minute. I offered to indent, to
emigrate, to make a fortune by some inspired means if only
she would hear me. I recalled moments together, I told her
I loved her, said I would die without her. Having covered
several pages with these sentiments I began all over and
repeated them. It was dawn when I posted the letter in the
pneumatic mail.</p>
<p>Sleepless and tormented, I was of little use to Tyss next
day. Would she telegraph? If she answered by pneumatic
post her letter might be delivered in the afternoon. Or
would she come to the bookstore?</p>
<p>The second day I sent off two more letters and went up
to Reservoir Square on the chance she might appear. I
watched the house as though my concentration would force
her to emerge. On the third day my letters came back,
unopened.</p>
<p>There is some catchphrase or other about the elasticity
of youth. It is true it was only weeks before my misery
abated, and weeks more before I was heart-whole again.
But those weeks were long.</p>
<p>The subject of Tirzah did not come up again between
Enfandi and me. He must have sensed I had lost her, perhaps
he even guessed his connection with the break, but
he was too tactful to mention it and I was too sore.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the episode precipitated some maturity
in me, or if, as a result of grief and anger I tried to turn
my mind away from the easy emotions and shield myself
against further hurt. At any rate, whether there was a logical
connection or not, it is from this period that I date my
resolve to center my reading on history. Somewhat diffidently
I spoke of this to him.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span></p>
<p>“History? But certainly, Hodge. It is a noble study. But
what is history? How is it written? How is it read? Is it a
dispassionate chronicle of events scientifically determined
and set down in the precise measure of their importance?
Is this ever possible? Or is it the transmutation of the ordinary
into the celebrated? Or the cunning distortion which
gives a clearer picture than accurate blueprints?”</p>
<p>“It seems to me facts are primary and interpretations
come after,” I answered. “If we can find out the facts we
can form our individual opinions on them.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps. Perhaps. But take what is for me the central
fact of all history.” He pointed to the crucifix. “As a
Catholic the facts are plain to me; I believe what is written
in the Gospels to be literally true: that the Son of Man
died for me on that cross. But what were the facts for a
contemporary Roman statesman? That an obscure local
agitator threatened the stability of an uneasy province and
was promptly executed in the approved Roman fashion as
a warning to others. And for a contemporary fellow-countryman?
That no such person existed. You think these facts
are mutually exclusive? Yet you know no two people see
exactly the same thing; too many honest witnesses have
contradicted each other. Even the Gospels must be reconciled.”</p>
<p>“You are saying that truth is relative.”</p>
<p>“Am I? Then I shall have my tongue examined, or my
head. Because I mean to say no such thing. Truth is absolute
and for all time. But one man cannot envisage all of
truth; the best he can do is see a single aspect of it whole.
That is why I say to you, be a skeptic, Hodge. Always be
the skeptic.”</p>
<p>“Ay?” I was finding the admonition a little difficult to
harmonize with his previous confession of faith.</p>
<p>“For the believer skepticism is essential. How else is he
to know false gods from true except by doubting both? One
of the most pernicious of folk-sayings is, ‘I could scarcely
believe my eyes?’ Why should you believe your eyes? You
were given eyes to see with, not to believe with. Believe
your mind, your intuition, your reason, your feelings if you
like—but not your eyes unaided by any of these inter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>preters.
Your eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination,
as easily as the actual scenery. Your eyes will tell you
nothing exists but matter—”
“Not my eyes only, but my boss.”</p>
<p>“Ay? What are you saying?” For all his amiability Enfandin
enjoyed interruption in mid-discourse no more
than any other teacher. But in a moment his irritation
vanished and he listened to my description of Tyss’s mechanistic
creed.</p>
<p>“God have mercy on his soul,” he muttered at last. “Poor
creature. He has liberated himself from the superstitions
of religion in order to fall into superstition so abject no
Christian can conceive it. Imagine to yourself—” he began
to pace the floor “—time is circular, man is automaton, we
are doomed to repeat the same gestures over and over, forever.
Oh I say to you, Hodge, this is monstrous. The poor
man. The poor man.”
I nodded. “Yes. But what is the answer? Limitless space?
Limitless time? They are almost as horrifying, because they
are inconceivable and awful.”</p>
<p>“And why should the inconceivable and awful be horrifying?
Is our small human understanding the ultimate
measuring stick and guide? But of course this is not the
answer. The answer is that all—time, space, matter—all
is illusion. All but the good God Himself. Nothing is real
but Him. We are creatures of His fancy, figments of His
imagination....”
“Then where does free will come in?”</p>
<p>“As a gift, naturally. Or supernaturally. How else? The
greatest gift and the greatest responsibility.”</p>
<p>I can’t say I was entirely satisfied with his exposition,
though it was certainly more to my taste than Tyss’s. I returned
to the conversation at intervals, both in my thoughts
and when I saw him, but in the end I suppose all I really
accepted was his admonition to be skeptical, which I doubt
I always applied the way he meant me to.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C7"><i>7.</i> <i>OF CONFEDERATE AGENTS
IN 1942</i></h2>
</div>
<p>To anyone but the mooncalf I still was in the year
of my majority it would have long since occurred with considerable
force that Enfandin ought to be told of Tyss’s
connection with the Negro-hating, anti-foreign Grand
Army. And the thought once entertained, no matter how
belatedly, would have been immediately translated into
warning. For me it became a dilemma.</p>
<p>If I exposed Tyss to Enfandin I would certainly be basely
ungrateful to the man who had saved me from destitution
and given me the opportunity I wanted so much. Membership
in the Grand Army was a crime, even though the laws
were laxly enforced, and I could hardly expect an official
receiving the hospitality of the United States to conceal
knowledge of a felony against his host, especially when the
Grand Army was what it was. Yet if I kept silent I would
be less than a friend.</p>
<p>If I spoke I would be an informer; if I didnt, a hypocrite
and worse. The fact that neither man, for totally different
reasons, would condemn me whichever course I took increased
rather than diminished my perplexity. I procrastinated,
which meant I was actually protecting Tyss, and
that this was against my sympathies increased my feeling
of guilt.</p>
<p>At this juncture a series of events involved me still
deeper with the Grand Army and further complicated my
relationship to both Tyss and Enfandin. It began the day
a customer called himself to my attention with a selfconscious
clearing of his throat.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
<p>“Yes sir. Can I help you?”</p>
<p>He was a fat little man with palpably false teeth, and
hair hanging down behind over his collar. However the
sum of his appearance was in no way ludicrous; rather he
gave the impression of ease and authority, and an assurance
so strong there was no necessity to buttress it.</p>
<p>“Why, I was looking for—” he began, and then scrutinized
me sharply. “Say, aint you the young fella I saw
walking with a Nigra? Big black buck?”</p>
<p>Seemingly everyone had been fascinated by the spectacle
of two people of slightly different shades of color in company
with each other. I felt myself reddening. “There’s no
law against it, is there?”</p>
<p>He made a gargling noise which I judged was laughter.
“Wouldnt know about your damyankee laws, boy. For myself
I’d say there’s no harm in it, no harm in it at all. Always
did like to be around Nigras myself. But then I was rared
among em. Most damyankees seem to think Nigras aint
fitten company. Only goes to show how narrerminded and
bigoted you folks can be. Present company excepted.”</p>
<p>“M’sieu Enfandin is consul of the Republic of Haiti,” I
said; “he’s a scholar and a gentleman.” As soon as the
words were out I was bitterly sorry for their condescension
and patronage. I felt ashamed, as if I had betrayed him by
offering credentials to justify my friendship and implying
it took special qualities to overcome the handicap of his
color.</p>
<p>“A mussoo, huh? Furrin and educated Nigra? Well,
guess theyre all right.” His tone, still hearty, was slightly
dubious. “Ben working here long?”</p>
<p>“Nearly four years.”</p>
<p>“Kind of dull, aint it?”</p>
<p>“Oh no—I like to read, and there are plenty of books
around here.”
He frowned. “Should think a hefty young fella’d find
more interesting things. Youre indented, of course? No?
Well then youre a mighty lucky fella. In a way, in a way.
Naturally youll be short on cash, ay? Unless you draw a
lucky number in the lottery.”</p>
<p>I told him I’d never bought a lottery ticket.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span></p>
<p>He slapped his leg as though I’d just repeated a very
good joke. “Aint that the pattrun,” he exclaimed; “aint that
the pattrun! Necessity makes em have a lottery; Puritanism
keeps em from buying tickets. Aint that the pattrun!” He
gargled the humor of it for some time, while his eyes moved
restlessly around the dim interior of the store. “And what
do you read, ay? Sermons? Books on witches?”</p>
<p>I admitted I’d dipped into both, and then, perhaps trying
to impress him, explained my ambitions.</p>
<p>“Going to be a professional historian, hey? Little out of
my line, but I don’t suppose they’s many of em up North
here.”</p>
<p>“Not unless you count a handful of college instructors
who dabble in it”</p>
<p>He shook his head. “Young fella with your aims could
do better down South, I’d think.”</p>
<p>“Oh yes; some of the most interesting research is going
on right now in Leesburg, Washington-Baltimore and the
University of Lima. You are a Confederate yourself, sir?”</p>
<p>“Southron, yes sir, I am that and mighty proud of it.
Now look a-here, boy: I’ll lay all my cards on the table,
face up. Youre a free man and you aint getting any pay
here. Now how’d you like to do a little job for me? They’s
good money in it; and I imagine I’d be able to fix up one
of those deals—what do they call em? scholarships—at the
University of Leesburg, after.”
A scholarship at Leesburg. Where the Department of
History was engaged on a monumental project—nothing
less than a compilation of all known source material on
the War of Southron Independence! It was only with the
strongest effort that I refrained from agreeing blindly.</p>
<p>“It sounds fine, Mr—?”
“Colonel Tolliburr. Jest call me cunnel.”</p>
<p>There wasnt anything remotely military in his bearing.
“It sounds good to me, Colonel. What is the job?”</p>
<p>He clicked his too regular teeth thoughtfully. “Hardly
anything at all, m’boy, hardly anything at all. Just want you
to keep a list for me.”</p>
<p>He seemed to think this a complete explanation. “What
kind of list, Colonel?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span></p>
<p>“Why, list of the people that come in here steady. Especially
the ones don’t seem to buy anything, just talk to your
boss. Names if you know em, but that aint real important,
and a sort of rough description. Like five foot nine, blue
eyes, dark hair, busted nose, scar on right eyebrow. And
so on. Nothing real detailed. And a list of deliveries.”</p>
<p>Was I tempted? I don’t really know. “I’m sorry, Colonel.
I’m afraid I can’t help you.”</p>
<p>“Not even for that scholarship and say, a hundred dollars
in real money?”</p>
<p>I shook my head.</p>
<p>“They’s no harm in it, boy. Likely nothing’ll come of it.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“Two hundred? I’m not talking about yankee slugs, but
good CSA bills, each with a picture of President Jimmy
right slapdash on the middle of it.”</p>
<p>“It’s not a matter of money, Colonel Tolliburr.”</p>
<p>He looked at me shrewdly. “Think it over, boy. No use
being hasty.” He handed me a card. “Any time you change
your mind come and see me or send me a telegram.”</p>
<p>I watched him out of the store. The Grand Army must
be annoying the mighty Confederacy. Tyss ought to know
about the agent’s interest. And I knew I would be unable
to tell him.</p>
<p>“Suppose,” I asked Enfandin the next day, “suppose
one were placed in the position of being an involuntary
assistant in a—to a....”
I was at a loss for words to describe the situation without
being incriminatingly specific. I could not tell him about
Tolliburr and my clear duty to let Tyss know of the
colonel’s espionage without revealing Tyss’s connection
with the Grand Army and thus uncovering my deceit in not
warning Enfandin earlier. Whatever I said or failed to say,
I was somehow culpable.</p>
<p>He waited patiently while I groped, trying to formulate
a question which was no longer a question. “You can’t do
evil that good may come of it,” I burst out at last.</p>
<p>“Quite so. And then?”</p>
<p>“Well.... That might mean eventually giving up all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
action entirely, since we can never be sure even the most
innocent act may not have bad consequences.”</p>
<p>He nodded. “It might. The Manichaeans thought it did;
they believed good and evil balanced and man was created
in the image of Satan. But certainly there is a vast difference
between this inhuman dogma and refusing to do consciously
wicked deeds.”</p>
<p>“Maybe,” I said dubiously.</p>
<p>He looked at me speculatively. “A man is drowning in
the river. I have a rope. If I throw him the rope he may not
only climb to safety but take it from me and use it to garrote
some honest citizen. Shall I therefore let him drown
because I must not do good lest evil come of it?”</p>
<p>“But sometimes they are so mixed up it is impossible to
disentangle them.”</p>
<p>“Impossible? Or very difficult?”</p>
<p>“Um.... I don’t know.”</p>
<p>“Are you not perhaps putting the problem too abstractly?
Is not perhaps your situation—your hypothetical situation—one
of being accessory to wrong rather than facing
an alternative which means personal unhappiness?”
Again I struggled for noncommittal words. He had formulated
my dilemma about the Grand Army so far as it
connected with giving up my place in the bookstore or telling
him of Tyss’s bias. Yet not entirely. And why could I
not let Tyss know of Colonel Tolliburr’s visit, which it
was certainly my duty to do? Was this overscrupulousness
only a means of avoiding any unpleasantness?</p>
<p>“Yes,” I muttered at last.</p>
<p>“It would be very nice if there were no drawbacks ever
attached to the virtuous choice. Then the only ones who
would elect to do wrong would be those of twisted minds,
the perverse, the insane. Who would prefer the devious
course if the straight one were just as easy? No, no, my
dear Hodge; one cannot escape the responsibility for his
choice simply because the other way means inconvenience
or hardships or tribulation.”</p>
<p>“Must we always act, whether we are sure of the outcome
of our action or not?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
<p>“Not acting is also action; can we always be sure of the
outcome of refusing to act?”</p>
<p>Was it pettiness that made me contrast his position as an
official of a small yet fairly secure power, well enough paid
to live comfortably, with mine where a break with Tyss
meant beggary and no further chance of fulfilling the ambition
every day more important to me? <i>Did</i> circumstances
alter cases, and was it easy for Enfandin to talk as he did,
unconfronted with harsh alternatives?</p>
<p>“You know, Hodge,” he said as though changing the
subject, “I am what they call a career man, meaning I have
no money except my salary. This might seem much to you,
but it is really little, particularly since protocol says I must
spend more than necessary. For the honor of my country.
At home I have an establishment to keep up where my
wife and children live—”
I had wondered about his apparent bachelorhood.</p>
<p>“—because to be rudely frank, I do not think they would
be happy or safe in the United States on account of their
color. Besides these expenses I make personal contributions
for the assistance of black men who are—how shall we say
it?—unhappily circumstanced in your country, for I have
found the official allotment is never enough. Now I have
been indiscreet; you know state secrets. Why do I tell you
this? Because, my friend, I should like to help. Alas, I cannot
offer money. But this I can do, if it will not offend
your pride: I suggest you live here—it will be no more
uncomfortable than the arrangements you have described
in the store—and attend one of the colleges of the city. A
medal or an order from the Haitian government judiciously
conferred on an eminent educator—decorations cut so
nicely across color-lines, perhaps because they don’t show
their origin to the uninitiated—should take care of tuition
fees. What do you say?”
What could I say? That I did not deserve his generosity?
The statement would be meaningless, a catchphrase, unless
I explained that I’d not been open with him, and now even
less than before was I able to do this. Or could I say that
bare minutes earlier I had thought enviously and spitefully
of him? Wretched and happy, I mumbled incoherent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
thanks, began a number of sentences and left them unfinished,
lapsed into dazed silence.</p>
<p>But the newly opened prospect cut through my introspection
and scattered my self-reproaches. The future was
too exciting to dwell in any other time; in a moment we
were both sketching rapid plans and supplementing each
other’s designs with revisions of our own. Words tumbled
out; ideas were caught in mid-expression. We decided, we
reconsidered, we returned to the first decisions.</p>
<p>I was to give Tyss two weeks’ notice despite the original
agreement making such nicety superfluous; Enfandin was
to discuss matriculation with a professor he knew. My employer
raised a quizzical eyebrow at my information.</p>
<p>“Ah, Hodgins, you see how neatly the script works out.
Nothing left to chance or choice. If you hadnt been relieved
of your trifling capital by a man of enterprise whose methods
were more successful than subtle you might have
fumbled at the edge of the academic world for four years
and then, having substituted a wad of unrelated facts for
common sense and whatever ability to think you may have
possessed, fumbled for the rest of your life at the edge of
the economic world. You wouldnt have met George Pondible
or gotten here where you could discover your own
mind without adjustment to a professorial iron maiden.”</p>
<p>“I thought it was all arbitrary.”</p>
<p>He gave me a reproachful look. “Arbitrary and predetermined
are not synonymous, Hodgins, nor does either
rule out artistry. Mindless artistry of course, like that of
the snowflake or crystal. And how artistic this development
is! You will go on to become a professor yourself and construct
iron maidens for promising students who might become
your competitors. You will write learned histories,
for you are—havent I said this before?—the spectator type.
The part written for you does not call for you to be a participant,
an instrument for—apparently—influencing
events. Hence it is proper that you report them so future
generations may get the illusion they arent puppets.”
He grinned at me. At another time I would have been
delighted to pounce on the assortment of inconsistencies
he had just offered; at the moment I could think of nothing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
but my failure to mention the Confederate agent’s visit. It
almost seemed his mechanist notions were valid and I was
destined always to be the ungrateful recipient of kindness.</p>
<p>“All right,” he said, swallowing the last of his bread and
half-raw meat; “so long as your sentimentality impels you
to respect obligations I can find work for you. Those boxes
over there go upstairs. Pondible’s bringing a van around for
them this afternoon.”</p>
<p>Ive heard the assumption that working in a bookstore
must be light and pleasant. Many times during the years
with Roger Tyss I had reason to be thankful for my strength
and farm training. The boxes were deceptively small but
so heavy they could only have been solidly packed with
paper. Even with Tyss carrying box for box with me I was
vastly relieved when I had to quit to run an errand.</p>
<p>When I got back he went out to make an offer on someone’s
library. “There are only four left. The last two are
paper-wrapped; didnt have enough boxes.”</p>
<p>It was characteristic of him to leave the lighter packages
for me. I ran up the stairs with one of the two remaining
wooden containers. Returning, I tripped on the lowest step
and sprawled forward. Reflexively I threw out my hands
and landed on one of the paper parcels. The tight-stretched
covering cracked and split under the impact; the contents—neatly
tied rectangular bundles—spilled out.</p>
<p>I had learned enough of the printing trade to recognize
the brightly colored oblongs as lithographs, and I wondered
as I stooped over to gather them up why such a job should
have been given Tyss rather than a shop specializing in this
work. Even under the gaslight the colors were hard and
vigorous.</p>
<p>Then I really looked at the bundle I was holding. ESPAÑA
was enscrolled across the top; below it was the picture
of a man with long nose and jutting underlip, flanked
by two ornate figure fives, and beneath them the legend,
CINCO PESETAS. Spanish Empire banknotes. Bundles
and bundles of them.</p>
<p>I needed neither expert knowledge nor minute scrutiny
to tell me there was a fortune here in counterfeit money.
The purpose in forging Spanish currency I could not see;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
that it was no private undertaking of Tyss’s but an activity
of the Grand Army I was certain. Puzzled and worried, I
rewrapped the bundles of notes into as neat an imitation of
the original package as I could contrive.</p>
<p>The rest of the day I spent casting uneasy glances at the
mound of boxes and watching with apprehension the movement
of anyone toward them. Death was the penalty for
counterfeiting United States coins; I had no idea of the
punishment for doing the same with foreign paper but I
was sure even so minor an accessory as myself would be
in a sad way if some officious customer should stumble
against one of the packages.</p>
<p>Tyss in no way acted like a guilty man, or even one with
an important secret. He seemed unaware of any peril;
doubtless he was daily in similar situations, only chance
and my own lack of observation had prevented my discovering
this earlier.</p>
<p>Nor did he show anxiety when Pondible failed to arrive.
Darkness came and the gaslamps went on in the streets.
The heavy press of traffic outside dwindled, but the incriminating
boxes remained undisturbed near the door. At
last there was the sound of uncertain wheels slowing up
outside and Pondible’s voice admonishing, “Wh-whoa!”</p>
<p>I rushed out just as he was dismounting with slow dignity.
“Who goes?” he asked; “Vance and give a countersign.”</p>
<p>“It’s Hodge,” I said. “Let me help you.”</p>
<p>“Hodge! Old friend; not seen long time!” (He had been
in the store only the day before.) “Terrible sfortune, Hodge.
Dri-driving wagon. Fell off. Fell off wagon I mean. See?”</p>
<p>“Sure, I see. Let me hitch the horse for you. Mr Tyss
is waiting.”</p>
<p>“Avoidable,” he muttered, “nuvoidable, voidable. Fell
off.”</p>
<p>Tyss took him by the arm. “You come with me and rest
awhile. Hodgins, you better start loading up; youll have
to do the delivering now.”</p>
<p>Rebellious refusal formed in my mind. Why should I be
still further involved? He had no right to demand it of me;
in self-protection I was bound to refuse. “Mr Tyss....”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span></p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>Two weeks would see me free of him, but nothing could
wipe out the debt I owed him. “Nothing. Nothing,” I murmured
and picked up one of the boxes.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C8"><i>8.</i> <i>IN VIOLENT TIMES</i></h2>
</div>
<p>He gave me an address on Twenty-Sixth Street.
“Sprovis is the name.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I said as stolidly as I could.</p>
<p>“Let them do the unloading. I see there’s a full feedbag
in the van; that’ll be a good time to give it to the horse.”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“They’ll load up another consignment and drive with you
to the destination. Take the van back to the livery stable.
Here’s money for your supper and carfare back here.”</p>
<p>He thinks of everything, I reflected bitterly. Except that
I don’t want to have anything to do with this.</p>
<p>Driving slackly through the almost empty streets my resentment
continued to rise, drowning, at least partly, my
fear of being for some unfathomable reason stopped by a
police officer and apprehended. Why should I be stopped?
Why should the Grand Army counterfeit pesetas?</p>
<p>The address, which I had trouble finding on the poorly
lit thoroughfare, was one of those four-storey stuccos at
least a century old, showing few signs of recent repair. Mr
Sprovis, who occupied the basement, had one ear distinctly
larger than the other, an anomaly I could not help attributing
to a trick of constantly pulling on the lobe. He, like
the others who came out with him to unload the van, wore
the Grand Army beard.</p>
<p>“I had to come instead of Pon—”
“No names,” he growled. “Hear? No names.”</p>
<p>“All right. I was told you’d unload and load up again.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, yeah.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span></p>
<p>I slipped the strap of the feedbag over the horse’s ear
and started toward Eighth Avenue.</p>
<p>“Hey! Where you going?”</p>
<p>“To get something to eat. Anything wrong with that?”</p>
<p>I felt him peering suspiciously at me. “Guess not. But
don’t keep us waiting, see? We’ll be ready to go in twenty
minutes.”</p>
<p>I did not like Mr Sprovis. In the automatic lunchroom
where the dishes were delivered by a clever clockwork device
as coins were deposited in the right slots, I gorged on
fish and potatoes, but my pleasure at getting away for once
from the unvarying bread and heart was spoiled by the
thought of him. And I was at best no more than half
through with the night’s adventure. What freight Sprovis
and his companions were now loading in the van I had
no idea. Except that it was nothing innocent.</p>
<p>When I turned the corner into Twenty-Sixth Street
again, the shadowy mass of the horse and van was gone
from its place by the curb. Alarmed, I broke into a run and
discovered it turning in the middle of the block. I jumped
and caught hold of the dash, pulling myself aboard. “What’s
the idea?”</p>
<p>A fist caught me in the shoulder, almost knocking me
back into the street. Zigzags of shock ran down my arm,
terminating in numbing pain. Desperately I clung to the
dash.</p>
<p>“Hold it,” someone rumbled; “it’s the punk who came
with. Let him in.”</p>
<p>Another voice, evidently belonging to the man who’d
hit me, admonished, “Want to watch yourself, chum. Not
go jumping like that without warning. I might of stuck a
shiv in your ribs instead of my hand.”</p>
<p>I could only repeat, “What’s the idea of trying to run
off with the van? I’m responsible for it.”</p>
<p>“He’s responsible, see,” mocked another voice from the
body of the van. “Aint polite not to wait on him.”</p>
<p>I was wedged between the driver and my assailant; my
shoulder ached and I was beginning to be really frightened
now my first anger had passed. These were “action” members
of the Grand Army; men who regularly committed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
battery, mayhem, arson, robbery and murder. I had been
both foolhardy and lucky; realizing this it seemed diplomatic
not to try for possession of the reins.</p>
<p>I could hear the breathing and mumbling of others in
back, but it didnt need this to tell me the van was over-loaded.
We turned north on Sixth Avenue; the street lights
showed Sprovis driving. “Gidap, gidap,” he urged, “get
going!”</p>
<p>“That’s a horse,” I protested; “not a locomotive.”</p>
<p>“What do you know?” came from behind; “And we
thought we was on the Erie.”</p>
<p>“He’s tired,” I persisted, “and he’s pulling too much
weight.”</p>
<p>“Shut up,” ordered Sprovis quietly. “Shut up.” The
quietness was not deceptive; it was ominous. I shut up.</p>
<p>Speed was stupid on several counts. For one thing it
called attention to the van at a time when most commercial
vehicles had been stabled for the night and the traffic was
almost entirely carriages, buggies, hacks and minibiles. I
visualized the suspicious crowd which would gather immediately
if our horse dropped from exhaustion. There was
no hope that consciousness of an innocuous cargo made
Sprovis bold; whatever we carried was bound to be as incriminating
as the counterfeit bills.</p>
<p>Disconnected scraps of conversation drifted from
Sprovis’ companions. “I says, ‘Look here, youre making
a nice profit from selling abroad. Either you....’”</p>
<p>“And of course he put it all on a twenty-dollar ticket
even though....”</p>
<p>“‘ ... my taxes,’ he says. ‘You worry about your taxes,’
I says; ‘I’m worried about your contributions.’”</p>
<p>A monotonous chuffing close behind us forced itself into
my consciousness; when we turned eastward in the Forties
I exclaimed, “There’s a minibile following us!”</p>
<p>Even as I spoke the trackless engine pulled alongside
and then darted ahead to pocket us by nosing diagonally
toward the curb. The horse must have been too weak to
shy; he simply stopped short and I heard the curses of the
felled passengers behind me.</p>
<p>“Not the cops anyway!”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span></p>
<p>“Cons for a nickel!”</p>
<p>“Only half a block from—”
“Quick, break out the guns—”
“Not those guns; one bang and we’re through. Air pistols,
if anybody’s got one. Hands or knives. Get them all!”</p>
<p>They piled out swiftly past me; I remained alone on the
seat, an audience of one, properly ensconced. A few blocks
away was the small park where Tirzah used to meet me.
It was not believable that this was happening in one of
New York’s quietest residential districts in the year 1942.</p>
<p>An uneven, distorting light emphasized the abnormal
speed of the incident that followed, making the action seem
jumpy, as though the participants were caught at static
moments, changing their attitudes between flashes of visibility.
The tempo was so swift any possible spectators in
the bordering windows or on the sidewalks wouldnt have
had time to realize what was going on before it was all
over.</p>
<p>Four men from the minibile were met by five from the
van. The odds were not too unequal, for the attackers had
a discipline which Sprovis’ force lacked. Their leader attempted
to parley during one of those seconds of apparent
inaction. “Hay you men—we got nothing against you.
They’s a thousand dollars apiece in it for you—”
A fist smacked into his mouth. The light caught his face
as he was jolted back, but I hardly needed its revelation to
confirm my recognition of Colonel Tolliburr’s voice.</p>
<p>The Confederate agents had brass knuckles and black-jacks,
Colonel Tolliburr had a sword-cane which he unsheathed
with a glinting flourish. The Grand Army men
flashed knives; no one seemed to be using air pistols or
spring-powered guns.</p>
<p>Both sides were intent on keeping the clash as quiet and
inconspicuous as possible; no one shouted with anger or
screamed in pain. This muffled intensity made the struggle
more gruesome; the contenders fought their natural impulses
as well as each other. I heard the impact of blows,
the grunts of effort, the choked-back cries, the scraping of
shoes on pavement and the thud of falls. One of the defenders
fell, and two of the attackers, before the two re<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>maining
Southrons gave up the battle and attempted
escape.</p>
<p>With united impulse they started for the minibile, evidently
realized they wouldnt have time to get up power,
and began running down the street. Their moment of indecision
did for them. As the four Grand Army men closed in
I saw the Confederates raise their arms in the traditional
gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.</p>
<p>I crept noiselessly down on the off-side of the van and
hastened quietly away in the protection of the shadows.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C9"><i>9.</i> <i>BARBARA</i></h2>
</div>
<p>For the next few days reading was pure pretense.
I used the opened book to mask my privacy while I
trembled not so much with fear as with horror. I had been
brought up in a harsh enough world and murder was no
novelty in New York; I had seen slain men before, but this
was the first time I had been confronted with naked, merciless
savagery. Though I believed Sprovis would have had
no qualms about despatching an inconvenient witness if I
had stayed on the van, I had no particular fear for my
own safety, for my knowledge of what had happened became
less dangerous daily. The terror of the deed itself
however remained constant.</p>
<p>I was not concerned solely with revulsion. Inquisitiveness
looked out under loathing to make me wonder what
lay behind the night’s events. What had really happened,
and what did it all mean?</p>
<p>From scraps of conversation accidentally heard or deliberately
eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction
and remembered fragments, I reconstructed the picture
which made the background. Its borders reached a
long way from Astor Place.</p>
<p>For years the world had been waiting, half in dread,
half in resignation, for war to break out between the world’s
two Great Powers, the German Union and the Confederate
States. Some expected the point of explosion would be the
Confederacy’s ally, the British Empire; most anticipated at
least part of the war would be fought in the United States.</p>
<p>The scheme of the Grand Army, or of that part of it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
which included Tyss, was apparently a farfetched and fantastic
attempt to circumvent the probable course of history.
The counterfeiting was an aspect of this attempt which was
nothing less than trying to force the war to start, not
through the Confederacy’s ally, but through the German
Union’s—the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts
of the spurious currency circulated by emissaries posing as
Confederate agents, the Grand Army hoped to embroil the
Confederacy with Spain and possibly preserve the neutrality
of the United States. It was an ingenuous idea evolved,
I see now, by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics
of world politics.</p>
<p>If I ever had any sentimental notions about the Army
they vanished now. Tyss’s mechanism may not have been
purposefully designed to palliate, but it made it easy to
justify actions like Sprovis’. I had no such convenient way
of numbing my conscience. But even as I brooded over the
weakness and cowardice which made me an accomplice, I
looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin
since his offer; in a week I would leave the bookstore for
his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act should be to tell
him everything. And then that dream was exploded just
as it was about to be realized.</p>
<p>I do not know who it was broke into the consulate or
for what reason, and was surprised in the act, shooting and
wounding Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak
for the weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate
or die. He could not have gotten in touch with
me and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard
was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he
was both an accredited diplomat and a black man.</p>
<p>I did not know who shot him. It was most unlikely to be
anyone connected with the Grand Army, but I did not
know. I could not know. He <i>might</i> have been shot by
Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the ultimate chain could
have led back to me, it did lead back to me. If this were
the Manichaeism of which Enfandin had spoken, I could
not help it</p>
<p>The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was
the least of my despair. It seemed to me I was caught by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
the inexorable, choiceless circumstance in which Tyss so
firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I could escape neither
my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further guilt.
I could not change destiny.</p>
<p>Was all this merely the self-torture of any introverted
young man? Possibly. I only know that for a long time, long
as one in his early twenties measures time, I lost all interest
in life, even dallying with thoughts of suicide. I put books
aside distastefully or, which was worse, indifferently.</p>
<p>I must have done my work around the store; certainly I
recall no comments from Tyss about it. Neither can I remember
anything to distinguish the succession of days.
Obviously I ate and slept; there were undoubtedly long
hours free from utter hopelessness. The details of those
months have simply vanished.</p>
<p>Nor can I say precisely when it was my despair began
to lift. I know that one day—it was cold and the snow was
deep on the ground, deep enough to keep the minibiles off
the streets and cause the horse-cars trouble—I saw a girl
walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick visible
puffs, and my glance was not apathetic. When I returned to
the bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart’s
<i>Life of General Pickett</i> and opened it to the place where
I had abandoned it. In a moment I was fully absorbed.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer
the same Hodge Backmaker. For the first time I was determined
to do what I wanted instead of waiting and hoping
events would somehow turn out right for me. Somehow I
was going to free myself from the bookstore and all its
frustrations and evils.</p>
<p>This resolution was reinforced by the discovery that I
was exhausting the volumes around me. The books I
sought now were rare and ever more difficult to find. Innocent
of knowledge about academic life I imagined them
ready to hand in any college library.</p>
<p>Nor was I any longer satisfied with the printed word
alone. My friendship with Enfandin had shown me how
fruitful a personal, face-to-face relationship between
teacher and student could be, and it seemed to me such<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
ties could develop into ones between fellow scholars, a mutual,
uncompetitive pursuit of knowledge.</p>
<p>Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original
sources: unpublished manuscripts of participants or onlookers,
old diaries and letters, wills or accountbooks,
which might shade a meaning or subtly change the interpretation
of old, forgotten actions.</p>
<p>My problems could be solved ideally by an instructorship
at some college, but how was this to be achieved without
the patronage of a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no
credentials worth a second’s consideration. Though the
immigration bars kept out graduates of foreign universities,
no college in the United States would accept a
self-taught young man who had not only little Latin and
less Greek, but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at
all. For a long time I considered possible ways and means,
both drab and dramatic; at last, more in a spirit of whimsical
absurdity than sober hope, I wrote out a letter of
application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined myself
to possess, assaying the extent of my learning with a
generosity only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining
the work I projected for my future. With much care and
many revisions I set this composition in type. It was undoubtedly
a foolish gesture, but not having access to so
costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal
this by penning the letters by hand, I resorted to this transparent
device.</p>
<p>Tyss picked up one of the copies I struck off and glanced
over it. His expression was critical. “Is it too bad?” I asked
despondently.</p>
<p>“You should have used more leading. And lined it up
and justified the lines and eliminated hyphens. Setting type
can never be done mechanically or half-heartedly—that’s
why no one yet has been able to invent a practical typesetting
machine. I’m afraid you’ll never make a passable
printer, Hodgins.”
He was concerned only with typesetting, uninterested
in the outcome. Or satisfied, since it was predetermined,
that comment was superfluous.</p>
<p>Government mails, never efficient and always expensive,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
being one of the favorite victims of holdup men, and pneumatic
post limited to local areas, I dispatched the letters
by Wells, Fargo to a comprehensive list of colleges. I can’t
say I then waited for the replies to flow in, for though I
knew the company’s system of heavily armed guards would
insure delivery of my applications, I had little anticipation
of any answers. As a matter of fact I put it pretty well out
of my mind, dredging it up at rarer intervals, always a trifle
more embarrassed by my presumption.</p>
<p>It was several months later, toward the end of September,
that the telegram came signed Thomas K Haggerwells.
It read, <span class="allsmcap">ACCEPT NO OFFER TILL OUR REPRESENTATIVE
EXPLAINS HAGGERSHAVEN</span>.</p>
<p>I hadnt sent a copy of my letter to York, Pennsylvania,
where the telegram had originated, or anywhere near it. I
knew of no colleges in that vicinity. And I had never heard
of Mr (or Doctor or Professor) Haggerwells. I might have
thought the message a mean joke, except that Tyss’s nature
didnt run to such humor and no one else knew of the letters
except those to whom they were addressed.</p>
<p>I found no reference to Haggershaven in any of the directories
I consulted, which wasnt too surprising considering
the slovenly way these were put together. I decided that
if such a place existed I could only wait patiently until the
“representative,” if there really was one, arrived.</p>
<p>Tyss having left for the day, I swept a little, dusted some,
straightened a few of the books—any serious attempt to
arrange the stock would have been futile—and took up a
recent emendation of Creasy’s <i>Fifteen Decisive Battles</i> by
one Captain Eisenhower.</p>
<p>I was so deep in the good captain’s analysis (he might
have made a respectable strategist himself, given an opportunity)
that I heard no customer enter, sensed no impatient
presence. I was only recalled from my book by a rather
sharp, “Is the proprietor in?”</p>
<p>“No maam,” I answered, reluctantly abandoning the
page. “He’s out for the moment. Can I help you?”</p>
<p>My eyes, accustomed to the store’s poor light, had the
advantage over hers, still adjusting from the sunlit street.
Secure in my audacity, I measured her vital femininity, a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
quality which seemed, if such a thing is possible, impersonal.
There was nothing overtly bold or provocative about
her, though I’m sure my mother would have thinned her
lips at the black silk trousers and the jacket which emphasized
the contour of her breasts. At a time when women
used every device to call attention to their helplessness and
consequently their desirability and the implied need for
men to protect them, she carried an air which seemed to
say, Why yes, I am a woman: not furtively or brazenly or
incidentally but primarily; what are you going to do about
it?</p>
<p>I recognized a sturdy sensuality as I recognized the fact
that she was bareheaded, almost as tall as I, and rather
large-boned; certainly there was nothing related to me
about it. Nor was it connected with surface attributes; she
was not beautiful and still further from being pretty, though
she might have been called handsome in a way. Her hair,
ginger-colored and clubbed low on her neck, waved crisply;
her eyes appeared slate gray. (Later I learned they could
vary from pale gray to blue-green.) The fleshly greediness
was betrayed, if at all, only by the width and set of her
lips, and that insolent expression.</p>
<p>She smiled, and I decided I had been quite wrong in
thinking her tone peremptory. “I’m Barbara Haggerwells.
I’m looking for a Mr Backmaker”—she glanced at a slip
of paper—“a Hodgins M Backmaker who evidently uses
this as an accommodation address.”</p>
<p>“I’m Hodge Backmaker,” I muttered in despair. “I—I
work here.” I was conscious of not having shaved that
morning, that my pants and jacket did not match, that my
shirt was not clean.</p>
<p>I suppose I expected her to say nastily, So I see! or the
usual, It must be fascinating! Instead she said, “I wonder
if youve run across <i>The Properties of X</i> by Whitehead? Ive
been trying to get a copy for a long time.”</p>
<p>“Uh—I.... Is it a mystery story?”
“I’m afraid not. It’s a book on mathematics by a mathematician
very much out of favor. It’s hard to find, I suppose
because the author is bolder than he is tactful.”</p>
<p>So naturally and easily she led me away from my em<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>barrassment
and into talking of books, relieving me of self-consciousness
and some of the mortification in being exposed
at my humble job by the “representative” of the telegram.
I admitted deficient knowledge of mathematics and
ignorance of Mr Whitehead though I maintained, accurately,
that the book was not in stock, while she assured me
that only a specialist would have heard of so obscure a
theoretician. This made me ask, with the awe one feels for
an expert in an alien field, if she were a mathematician, to
which she replied, “Heavens, no. I’m a physicist. But
mathematics is my tool.”</p>
<p>I looked at her with respect. Anyone, I thought, can read
a few books and set himself up as an historian; to be a
physicist means genuine learning. And I doubted she was
much older than I.</p>
<p>She said abruptly, “My father is interested in knowing
something about you.”</p>
<p>I acknowledged this with something between a nod and
a bow. She had been examining and gauging me for the
past half hour. “Your father is Thomas Haggerwells?”</p>
<p>“Haggerwells of Haggershaven,” she confirmed, as
though explaining everything. There was pride in her voice
and a hint of superciliousness.</p>
<p>“I’m dreadfully sorry, Miss Haggerwells, but I’m afraid
I’m as ignorant of Haggershaven as of mathematics.”</p>
<p>“I thought you said you’d been reading history. Odd
youve come upon no reference to the Haven in the records
of the past seventy-five years.”</p>
<p>I shook my head helplessly. “I suppose my reading has
been scattered.” Her look indicated agreement but not
absolution. “Haggershaven is a college?”</p>
<p>“No. Haggershaven is ... Haggershaven.” She resumed
her equanimity, her air of smiling tolerance. “It’s hardly a
college since it has no student body nor faculty. Rather,
both are one at the haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar
or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning.
I mean for its own sake. Not many are acceptable.”</p>
<p>She need hardly have added this; it seemed obvious I
could not be one of the elect, even if I hadnt offended her
by never having heard of Haggershaven. I knew I couldnt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
pass the most lenient of entrance examinations to ordinary
colleges, much less to the dedicated place she represented.</p>
<p>“There arent any formal requirements for fellowship,”
she went on, “beyond the undertaking to work to full capacity,
to pool all knowledge and hold back none from
scholars anywhere, to contribute economically to the Haven
in accordance with decisions of the majority of fellows, and
to vote on questions without consideration of personal gain.
There! That certainly sounds like the stuffiest manifesto
delivered this year.”</p>
<p>“It sounds too good to be true.”</p>
<p>“Oh, it’s true enough.” She moved close and I caught the
scent of her hair and skin. “But there’s another side. The
haven is neither wealthy nor endowed. We have to earn
our living. The fellows draw no stipend; they have food,
clothes, shelter, whatever books and materials they need—no
unessentials. We often have to leave our own individual
work to do manual labor to bring in food or money
for all.”
“Ive read of such communities,” I said enthusiastically.
“I thought they’d all disappeared fifty or sixty years ago.”</p>
<p>“Have you and did you?” she asked contemptuously.
“Youll be surprised to learn that Haggershaven is neither
Owenite nor Fourierist. We are not fanatics nor saviors.
We don’t live in phalansteries, practice group marriage or
vegetarianism. Our organization is expedient, subject to
revision, not doctrinaire. Contribution to the common stock
is voluntary and we are not concerned with each other’s
private lives.”</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon, Miss Haggerwells. I didnt mean to
annoy you.”</p>
<p>“It’s all right. Perhaps I’m touchy; all my life Ive seen
the squinty suspiciousness of the farmers all around, sure
we were up to something immoral, or at least illegal. Youve
no idea what a prickly armor you build around yourself
when you know that every yokel is cackling, ‘There goes
one of them; I bet they ...’ whatever unconventional practice
their imaginations can conceive at the moment. And
the parallel distrust of the respectable schools. Detachedly,
the haven may indeed be a refuge for misfits, but is it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>
necessarily wrong not to fit into the civilization around us?”</p>
<p>“I’m prejudiced. I certainly havent fitted in myself.”</p>
<p>She didnt answer and I felt I had gone too far in daring
an impulsive identification. Awkwardness made me blurt
out further, “Do you ... do you think there’s any chance
Haggershaven would accept me?” Whatever reserve I’d
tried to maintain deserted me; my voice expressed only
childish longing.</p>
<p>“I couldnt say,” she answered primly. “Acceptance or
rejection depends entirely on the vote of the whole fellowship.
All I’m here to offer is train fare. Neither you nor
the haven is bound.”</p>
<p>“I’m perfectly willing to be bound,” I said fervently.</p>
<p>“You may not be so rash after a few weeks.”</p>
<p>I was about to reply when Little Aggie—so called to
distinguish her from Fat Aggie who was in much the same
trade, but more successful—came in. Little Aggie supplemented
her nocturnal earnings around Astor Place by begging
in the same neighborhood during the day.</p>
<p>“Sorry, Aggie,” I said; “Mr Tyss didnt leave anything
for you.”</p>
<p>“Maybe the lady would help a poor working girl down
on her luck,” she suggested, coming close. “My, that’s a
pretty outfit you have. Looks like real silk, too.”</p>
<p>Barbara Haggerwells drew away with anger and loathing
on her face. “No,” she refused sharply. “No, nothing!”
She turned to me. “I must be going. I’ll leave you to entertain
your friend.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I’ll go,” said Little Aggie cheerfully, “no need to
get in an uproar. Bye-bye.”</p>
<p>I was frankly puzzled; the puritanical reaction didnt
seem consistent. I would have expected condescending
amusement, disdainful tolerance or even haughty annoyance,
but not this furious aversion. “I’m sorry Little Aggie
bothered you. She’s really not a wicked character and she
does have a hard time getting along.”</p>
<p>“I’m sure you must enjoy her company immensely. I’m
sorry we can’t offer similar attractions at the haven.”</p>
<p>Apparently she thought my relations with Aggie were
professional. Even so her attitude was odd. I could hardly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
flatter myself she was interested in me as a man, yet her
flare-up seemed to indicate jealousy, a strange kind of jealousy,
perhaps like the sensuality I attributed to her, as
though the mere presence of another woman was an
affront.</p>
<p>“Please don’t go yet. For one thing—” I cast around for
something to hold her till I could restore a more favorable
impression. “—for one thing you havent told me how
Haggershaven happened to get my application.”
She gave me a cold, angry look. “Even though we’re supposed
to be cranks, orthodox educators often turn such
letters over to us. After all, they may want to apply themselves
someday.”</p>
<p>The picture this suddenly presented, of a serene academic
life which was not so serene and secure after all, but
prepared for a way to escape if necessary, was startling
to me. I had taken it for granted that our colleges, even
though they were far inferior to those of other countries,
were stable and sheltered.</p>
<p>When I expressed something of this, she laughed. “Hardly.
The colleges have not only decayed, they have decayed
faster than other institutions. They are mere hollow shells,
ruined ornaments of the past. Instructors spy on each other
to curry favor with the trustees and assure themselves of
reappointment when the faculty is out periodically. Loyalty
is the touchstone, but no one knows any more what the
object of loyalty is supposed to be. Certainly it is no longer
toward learning, for that is the least of their concerns.”</p>
<p>She slowly allowed herself to be coaxed back into her
previous mood, and again we talked of books. And now
I thought there was a new warmth in her voice and glance,
as though she had won some kind of victory, but how or
over whom there was no indication.</p>
<p>When she left I hoped she was not too prejudiced against
me. For myself I readily admitted it would be easy enough
to want her—if one were not afraid of the humiliations it
was in her nature to inflict.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C10"><i>10.</i> <i>THE HOLDUP</i></h2>
</div>
<p>This time I didnt offer Tyss two weeks’ notice.
“Well Hodgins, I made all the appropriate valedictory remarks
on a previous occasion, so I’ll not repeat them, except
to say the precision of the script is extraordinary.”</p>
<p>It seemed to me he was saying in a roundabout way that
everything was for the best. For the first time I saw Tyss
as slightly pathetic rather than sinister; extreme pessimism
and vulgar optimism evidently met, like his circular time.
I smiled indulgently and thanked him sincerely for all his
kindness.</p>
<p>In 1944 almost a hundred years had passed since New
York and eastern Pennsylvania were first linked in a railroad
network, yet I don’t suppose my journey differed
much in speed or comfort from one which might have been
taken by Granpa Hodgins’ father. The steam ferry carried
me across the Hudson to Jersey. I had heard there were
only financial, not technical obstacles to a bridge or tunnel.
If the English and French could burrow under the Channel,
as they had early in the century, and the Japanese
complete their great tube beneath the Korea Strait, it was
hard to see why a lesser work here was dismissed as the
impractical suggestion of dreamers who believed the cost
would be saved in a few years by running trains directly
to Manhattan.</p>
<p>Nor was the ferry the only antique survival on the trip.
The cars were all ancient, obvious discards from Confederate
or British American lines. Flat wheels were common;
the wornout locomotives dragged them protestingly over<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
the wobbly rails and uneven roadbed. First class passengers
sat on napless plush or grease-glazed straw seats; second
class passengers stood in the aisles or on the platforms;
third class rode the roofs—safe enough at the low speed
except for sudden jerks or jolts.</p>
<p>There were so many different lines, each jealous of exclusive
rights of way, that the traveler hardly got used to
his particular car before he had to snatch up his baggage
and hustle for the connecting train, which might be on
the same track or at the same sooty depot, but was more
likely to be a mile away. Even the adjective “connecting”
was often ironical for it was not unusual to find time-tables
arranged so a departure preceded an arrival by minutes,
necessitating a stopover of anywhere from one hour
to twelve.</p>
<p>If anything could have quieted my excitement on the
trip it was the view through the dirt-sprayed windows.
“Fruitless” and “unfulfilled” were the words coming oftenest
to my mind. I had forgotten during the past six years
just how desolate villages and towns could look when their
jerrybuilt structures were sunk in apathetic age without
even the false rejuvenation of newer jerrybuilding. I had
forgotten the mildewed appearance of tenant farmhouses,
the unconvincing attempt to appear businesslike of false-fronted
stores with clutters of hopeless merchandise in their
dim windows, or the inadequate bluff of factories too small
for any satisfactory production.</p>
<p>Once away from New York it was clear how atypical
the city was in its air of activity and usefulness. The countryside
through which the tracks ran, between fields and
pastures or down the center of main streets, should have
been the industrial heart of a country bustling and vigorous.
Instead one saw potentialities denied, projects withered,
poverty and dilapidation.</p>
<p>We crossed the Susquehanna on an old, old stone bridge
that made one think of Meade’s valiant men, bloodily
bandaged many of them, somnambulistically marching
northward, helpless and hopeless after the Confederate triumph
at Gettysburg, their only thought to escape Jeb Stuart’s
pursuing cavalry. Indeed, every square mile now<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
carried on its surface an almost visible weight of historical
memories.</p>
<p>York seemed old, gray and crabbed in the afternoon, but
when I got off the train there I was too agitated with the
prospect of being soon at Haggershaven to take any strong
impression of the town. I inquired the way, and the surly
response confirmed Barbara Haggerwells’ statement of
local animosity. The distance, if my informant was accurate,
was a matter of some ten miles.</p>
<p>I started off down the highway, building and demolishing
daydreams, thinking of Tyss and Tirzah, Enfandin and
Miss Haggerwells, trying to picture her father and the
fellows of the haven and for the thousandth time marshaling
arguments for my acceptance in the face of scornful
scrutiny. The early October sun was setting on the rich
red and yellow leaves of the maples and oaks; I knew the
air would become chilly before long, but exertion kept me
warm. I counted on arriving at the haven in plenty of time
to introduce myself before bedtime.</p>
<p>Less than a mile out of town the highway assumed the
familiar aspect of the roads around Wappinger Falls and
Poughkeepsie: rutted, wavering, with deep, unexpected
holes. The stone or rail fences on either side enclosed
harvested cornfields, the broken stalks a dull brass with
copper-colored pumpkins scattered through them. But the
fences were in poor repair and the oft-mended wooden
covered bridges over the creeks all had signs, DANGEROUS,
Travel At Your Own Risk.</p>
<p>There were few to share the highway with me: a farmer
with an empty wagon, urging his team on and giving me a
churlish glance instead of an invitation to ride; a horseman
on an elegant chestnut picking his course carefully
among the chuckholes, and a few tramps, each bent on his
solitary way, at once defensive and aggressive. The condition
of the bridges accounted for the absence of minibiles.
However, just about twilight a closed carriage, complete
with coachman and footman on the box, rolled haughtily
by, stood for a moment outlined atop the slope up which I
was trudging and then disappeared down the other side.</p>
<p>I paid little attention except—remembering my boyhood<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
and my father’s smithy—to visualize automatically the
coachman pulling back on the reins and the footman thrusting
forward with the brake as they eased the horses downward.
So when I heard first a shout and then feminine
screams my instant conclusion was that the carriage had
overturned on the treacherous downgrade, broken an axle,
or otherwise suffered calamity.</p>
<p>My responsive burst of speed had almost carried me to
the top when I heard the shots. First one, like the barking
of an uncertain dog, followed by a volley, as though the
pack were unleashed.</p>
<p>I ran to the side of the road, close to the field, where I
could see with less chance of being seen. Already the dusk
was playing tricks, distorting the shape of some objects
and momentarily hiding others. It could not however falsify
the scene in the gully below. Four men on horseback covered
the carriage with drawn revolvers; a fifth, pistol also
in hand, had dismounted. His horse, reins hanging down,
was peacefully investigating the roadside weeds.</p>
<p>None of them attempted to stop the terrified rearing of
the carriage team. Only their position, strung across the
road, prevented a runaway. I could not see the footman,
but the coachman, one hand still clutching the reins, was
sprawled backward with his foot caught against the dashboard
and his head hanging down over the wheel.</p>
<p>The door on the far side was swung open. I thought for
a moment the passengers had managed to escape. However
as the unmounted highwayman advanced, waving his
pistol, the other door opened and a man and two women
descended into the roadway. Slowly edging forward I
could now plainly hear the gang’s obscene whistles at sight
of the women.</p>
<p>“Well boys, here’s something to warm up a cold night.
Hang on to them while I see what the mister has in his
pockets.”</p>
<p>The gentleman stepped in front, and with a slight accent
said, “Take the girl by all means. She is but a peasant, a
servant, and may afford you amusement. But the lady is
my wife; I will pay you a good ransom for her and myself.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
I am Don Jaime Escobar y Gallegos, attached to the Spanish
legation.”</p>
<p>One of the men on horseback said, “Well now, that’s real
kind of you, Don High-me. We might have taken you up
on that, was you an American. But we can’t afford no company
of Spanish Marines coming looking for us, so I guess
we’ll have to pass up the ransom and settle for whatever
youve got handy. And Missus Don and the hired girl. Don’t
worry about her being a peasant; we’ll treat her and the
madam exactly the same.”</p>
<p>“Madre de Dios,” screamed the lady. “Mercy!”</p>
<p>“It will be a good ransom,” said the Spaniard, “and I
give you my word my government will not bother you.”</p>
<p>“Sorry, chum,” returned the gangster. “You foreigners
have a nasty habit of interfering with our domestic institutions
and hanging men who make a living this way. Just
can’t trust you.”</p>
<p>The man on foot took a step forward. The nearest rider
swung the maid up before him and another horseman
reached for her mistress. Again she screamed; her husband
brushed the hand aside and put his wife behind him.
At that the gangster raised his pistol and shot twice. The
man and woman dropped to the ground. The maid shrieked
till her captor covered her mouth.</p>
<p>“Now what did you want to do that for? Cutting our
woman supply in half that way?”</p>
<p>“Sorry. Mighty damn sorry. These things always happen
to me.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile another of the gang slid off his horse and
the two went through the dead, stripping them of jewelry
and whatever articles of clothing caught their fancy before
searching the luggage and the coach itself for valuables.
By the time they had finished it was fully dark and
I had crept to within a few feet of them, crouching reasonably
secure and practically invisible while they debated
what to do with the horses. One faction was in favor of
taking them along for spare mounts; the other, arguing
that they were too easily identifiable, for cutting them out
and turning them loose. The second group prevailing, they
at last galloped away.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span></p>
<p>A sudden thrashing in the cornstalks just beyond the
fence startled me into rigidity. Something which might be
human stumbled and crawled toward the carriage, snuffling
and moaning, to throw itself down by the prostrate bodies,
its anguished noises growing more high-pitched and chilling.</p>
<p>I was certain this must be a passenger who had jumped
from the off-side of the carriage at the start of the holdup,
but whether man or woman it was impossible to tell. I
moved forward gingerly, but somehow I must have betrayed
my presence, for the creature, with a terrified groan,
slumped inertly.</p>
<p>My hands told me it was a woman I raised from the
ground and the smell of her was the smell of a young girl.
“Don’t be afraid, Miss,” I tried to reassure her; “I’m a
friend.”</p>
<p>I could hardly leave the girl lying in the road, nor did
I feel equal to carrying her to Haggershaven which I reckoned
must be about six miles further. I tried shaking her,
rubbing her hands, murmuring encouragement, all the
while wishing the moon would come up, feeling somehow it
would be easier to revive her in the moonlight.</p>
<p>“Miss,” I urged, “get up. You can’t stay here—they may
come back.”
Had I reached her? She stirred, whimpering with strange,
muffled sounds. I dragged her to her knees and managed
to get her arm over my shoulder. “Get up,” I repeated.
“Get on your feet.”</p>
<p>She moaned. I pulled her upright and adjusted my hold.
Supporting her around the waist and impeded by my valise,
I began an ungraceful, shuffling march. I could only
guess at how much time had been taken up by the holdup
and how slow our progress would be. It didnt seem likely
we could get to Haggershaven before midnight, an awkward
hour to explain the company of a strange girl. The
possibility of leaving her at a hospitable farmhouse was
remote; no isolated rural family in times like these would
open their door with anything but deep suspicion or a
shotgun blast.</p>
<p>We had made perhaps a mile, a slow and arduous one,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
when the moon rose at last. It was full and bright, and
showed my companion to be even younger than I had
thought. The light fell on masses of curling hair, wildly
disarrayed about a face unnaturally pale and lifeless yet
extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were closed in a sort of
troubled sleep, and she continued to moan, though at less
frequent intervals.</p>
<p>I had just decided to stop for a moment’s rest when we
came upon one of the horses. The clumsily cut traces
trailing behind him had caught on the stump of a broken
sapling. Though still trembling he was over the worst of his
fright; after patting and soothing him I got us onto his
back and we proceeded in more comfortable if still not
too dignified fashion.</p>
<p>It wasnt hard to find Haggershaven; the sideroad to it
was well kept and far smoother than the highway. We
passed between what looked to be freshly plowed fields
and came to a fair sized group of buildings, in some of
which I was pleased to see lighted windows. The girl had
still not spoken; her eyes remained closed and she moaned
occasionally.</p>
<p>Dogs warned of our approach. From a dark doorway a
figure came forward with a rifle under his arm. “Who is it?”</p>
<p>“Hodge Backmaker. Ive got a girl here who was in a
holdup. She’s had a bad shock.”</p>
<p>“All right,” he said, “let me hitch the horse. Then I’ll
help you with the girl. My name’s Dorn. Asa Dorn.”</p>
<p>I slid off and lifted the girl down. “I couldnt leave her
in the road,” I offered in inane apology.</p>
<p>“I’ll water and feed the horse after. Let’s go into the
main kitchen; it’s warm there. Here,” he addressed the girl,
“take my arm.”</p>
<p>She made no response and I half carried her, with Dorn
trying helpfully to share her weight. The building through
which we led her was obviously an old farmhouse, enlarged
and remodelled a number of times. Gaslights of a
strange pattern, brighter than any I’d ever seen, revealed
Asa Dorn as perhaps thirty with very broad shoulders and
very long arms, and a dark, rather melancholy face.
“There’s a gang been operating around here,” he informed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
me; “tried to shake the haven down for a contribution.
That’s why I was on guard with the gun. Must be the
same bunch.”</p>
<p>We bustled our charge into a chair before a big fieldstone
fireplace which gave the large room its look of welcome,
though the even heat came from sets of steampipes under
the windows. “Should we give her some soup? Or tea? Or
shall I get Barbara or one of the other women?”</p>
<p>His fluttering brushed the outside of my mind. Here in
the light I instinctively expected to see some faint color in
the girl’s cheeks or hands, but there was none. She looked
no more than sixteen, perhaps because she was severely
dressed in some school uniform. Her hair, which had
merely been a disordered frame for her face in the moonlight,
now showed itself as deeply black, hanging in thick,
soft curls around her shoulders. Her features, which seemed
made to reflect emotions—full, mobile lips, faintly slanted
eyes, high nostrils—were instead impassive, devoid of vitality,
and this unnatural quiescence was heightened by the
dark eyes, now wide open and expressionless. Her mouth
moved slowly, as though to form words, but nothing came
forth except the faintest of guttural sounds.</p>
<p>“She’s trying to say something.” I leaned forward as
though by sympathetic magic to help the muscles which
seemed to respond with such difficulty.</p>
<p>“Why,” exclaimed Dorn, “she’s ... dumb!”</p>
<p>She looked agonizedly toward him. I patted her arm
helplessly.</p>
<p>“I’ll go get—” he began.</p>
<p>A door opened and Barbara Haggerwells blinked at us.
“I thought I heard someone ride up, Ace. Do you suppose....”
Then she caught sight of the girl. Her face set in
those lines of strange anger I had seen in the bookstore.</p>
<p>“Miss Haggerwells—”
“Barbara—”
Dorn and I spoke together. Either she did not hear us
or we made no impression. She faced me in offended outrage.
“Really, Mr Backmaker, I thought I’d explained there
were no facilities here for this sort of thing.”</p>
<p>“You misunderstand,” I said, “I happened—”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
Dorn broke in. “Barbara, she’s been in a holdup. She’s
dumb....”</p>
<p>Fury made her ugly. “Is that an additional attraction?”</p>
<p>“Miss Haggerwells,” I tried again, “you don’t understand—”
“I think I understand very well. Dumb or not, get the
slut out of here! Get her out right now, I say!”</p>
<p>“Barbara, youre not listening—”
She continued to face me, her back to him. “I should
have remembered you were a ladies’ man, Mr Self-taught
Backmaker. No doubt you imagined Haggershaven to be
some obscene liberty hall. Well, it isnt! You’d be wasting
any further time you spent here. Get out!”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C11"><i>11.</i> <i>OF HAGGERSHAVEN</i></h2>
</div>
<p>I suppose—recalling the inexplicable scene with
Little Aggie—I was less astonished by her frenzy than I
might have been. Besides, her rage and misunderstanding
were anticlimactic after the succession of excitements I had
been through that day. Instead of amazement I felt only
uneasiness and tired annoyance.</p>
<p>Dorn steered Barbara out of the room with a combination
of persuasion and gentle force disguised as solicitous
soothing, leaving the girl and me alone. “Well,” I said,
“well....”</p>
<p>The large eyes regarded me helplessly.</p>
<p>“Well, youve certainly caused me a lot of trouble....”</p>
<p>Dorn returned with two women, one middleaged, the
other slightly younger, who flowed around the girl like
soapy water, effectually sealing her away from all further
masculine blunders, uttering little bubbly clucks and sudsy
comfortings.</p>
<p>“Overwork, Backmaker,” Dorn mumbled. “Barbara’s
been overworking terribly. You mustnt think—”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’m just sorry she couldnt be made to
realize what actually happened.”</p>
<p>“Hypersensitive; things that wouldnt ordinarily ...
it’s overwork. Youve no idea. She wears herself out. Practically
no nerves left.”</p>
<p>His face, pleading for understanding, looked even more
melancholy than before. I felt sorry for him and slightly
superior; at the moment at least I didnt have to apologize
for any female unpredictability. “OK, OK; there doesnt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
seem to be any great harm done. And the girl appears to
be in good hands now.”</p>
<p>“Oh she is,” he answered with evident relief at dropping
the subject of Barbara’s behavior. “I don’t think there’s
anything more we can do for her now; in fact I’d say we’re
only in the way. How about meeting Mr Haggerwells now?”</p>
<p>“Why not?” The last episode had doubtless finished me
for good so far as Barbara was concerned; whatever neutral
report she might have given her father originally could
now be counted on for a damning revision. I might as well
put a nonchalant face on matters before returning to the
world outside Haggershaven.</p>
<p>Thomas Haggerwells, large-boned like his daughter,
with the ginger hair faded, and a florid, handsome complexion,
made me welcome. “Historian ay, Backmaker?
Delighted. Combination of art and science; Clio, most
enigmatic of the muses. The ever-changing past, ay?”</p>
<p>“I’m afraid I’m no historian yet, Mr Haggerwells. I’d
like to be one. If Haggershaven will let me be part of it.”</p>
<p>He patted me on the shoulder. “The fellows will do what
they can, Backmaker; you can trust them.”</p>
<p>“That’s right,” said Dorn cheerfully; “you look strong
as an ox and historians can be kept happy with books and
a few old papers.”</p>
<p>“Ace is our cynic,” explained Mr Haggerwells; “very
useful antidote to some of our soaring spirits.” He looked
absently around and then said abruptly, “Ace, Barbara
is quite upset.”</p>
<p>I thought this extreme understatement, but Dorn merely
nodded. “Misunderstanding, Mr H.”</p>
<p>“So I gathered.” He gave a short, selfconscious laugh.
“In fact that’s all I did gather. She said something about a
woman....”</p>
<p>“Girl, Mr H, just a girl.” He gave a quick outline of
what had happened, glossing over Barbara’s hysterical
welcome.</p>
<p>“I see. Quite an adventure in the best tradition, ay Backmaker?
And the victims killed in cold blood; makes you
wonder about civilization. Savagery all around us.” He
began pacing the flowered carpet. “Naturally we must help<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
the poor creature. Shocking, quite shocking. But how can
I explain to Barbara? She ... she came to me,” he said
half proudly, half apprehensively. “I wouldnt want to fail
her; I hardly know....” He pulled himself together. “Excuse
me, Backmaker. My daughter is high-strung. I fear
I’m allowing concern to interfere with our conversation.”</p>
<p>“Not at all, sir,” I said. “I’m very tired; if you’ll excuse
me....”</p>
<p>“Of course, of course,” he answered gratefully. “Ace
will show you your room. Sleep well—we’ll talk more tomorrow.
And Ace—come back here afterward, will you?”
Barbara Haggerwells had both Dorn and her father well
cowed, I thought as I lay awake. Clearly she could brook
not even the suspicion of rivalry, even when it was entirely
imaginary. It would be rather frightening to be her father,
or—as I suspected Ace might be—her lover, and subject
to her tyrannical dominance.</p>
<p>But it was neither Barbara nor overstimulation from the
full day which caused my insomnia. A torment, successfully
suppressed for hours, invaded me. Connecting the
trip of the Escobars—“attached to the Spanish legation”—with
the counterfeit pesetas was pure fantasy. But what is
logic? I could not argue myself into reasonableness. I could
not quench my feeling of responsibility with ridicule nor
convincingly charge myself with perverse conceit in magnifying
my trivial errands into accountability for all that
flowed from the Grand Army—for much which might have
flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep because
they feel guilty. It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt
which keeps them awake.</p>
<p>Nor could I pride myself on my chivalry in rescuing distressed
maidens. I had only done what was unavoidable,
grudgingly, without warmth or charity. There was no point
in being aggrieved by Barbara’s misinterpretation with its
disastrous consequences to my ambitions. I had not freely
chosen to help; I had no right to resent a catastrophe which
should properly have followed a righteous choice.</p>
<p>At last I slept, only to dream Barbara Haggerwells was
a great fish pursuing me over endless roads on which my
feet bogged in clinging, tenacious mud. Opening my mouth<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
to shout for help was useless; nothing came forth but a
croak which sounded faintly like my mother’s favorite
“Gumption!”</p>
<p>In the clear autumn morning my notions of the night
dwindled, even if they failed to disappear entirely. By the
time I was dressed Ace Dorn showed up; we went to the
kitchen where Ace introduced me to a middleaged man,
Hiro Agati, whose close-cut stiff black hair stood perfectly
and symmetrically erect all over his head.</p>
<p>“Dr Agati’s a chemist,” remarked Ace, “condemned to
be head chef for a while on account of being too good a
cook.”</p>
<p>“Believe that,” said Agati, “and you’ll believe anything.
Truth is they always pick on chemists for hard work.
Physicists like Ace never soil their hands. Well, so long as
you can’t eat with the common folk, what’ll you have, eggs
or eggs?”</p>
<p>Agati was the first Oriental I’d ever seen. The great anti-Chinese
massacres of the 1890’s, which generously included
Japanese and indeed all with any sign of the epicanthic
eyefold, had left few Asians to have descendants in
the United States. I’m afraid I stared at him more than was
polite, but he was evidently used to such rudeness for he
paid no attention.</p>
<p>“They finally got the girl to sleep,” Ace informed me.
“Had to give her opium. No report yet this morning.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” I said lamely, conscious I should have asked after
her without waiting for him to volunteer the news. “Oh.
Do you suppose we’ll find out who she is?”</p>
<p>“Mr H telegraphed the sheriff first thing. It’ll all depend
how interested he is, and that’s not likely to be very.
What’s to drink, Hiro?”</p>
<p>“Imitation tea, made from dried weeds; imitation coffee
made from burnt barley. Which’ll you have?”</p>
<p>I didnt see why he stressed the imitation; genuine tea
and coffee were drunk only by the very rich. Most people
preferred “tea” because it was less obnoxious than the
counterfeit coffee. Perversely, I said, “Coffee please.”</p>
<p>He set a large cup of brown liquid before me which had
a tantalizing fragrance quite different from that given off<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
by the beverage I was used to. I added milk and tasted,
aware he was watching my reaction.</p>
<p>“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is different. I never had anything
like it in my life. It’s wonderful.”</p>
<p>“C eight H ten O two,” said Agati with an elaborate air
of indifference. “Synthetic. Specialty of the house.”</p>
<p>“So chemists are good for something after all,” remarked
Ace.</p>
<p>“Give us a chance,” said Agati; “we could make beef
out of wood and silk out of sand.”</p>
<p>“Youre a physicist like B—like Miss Haggerwells?” I
asked Ace.</p>
<p>“I’m a physicist, but not like Barbara. No one is. She’s
a genius. A great creative genius.”</p>
<p>“Chemists create,” said Agati sourly; “physicists sit
and think about the universe.”</p>
<p>“Like Archimedes,” said Ace.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>How shall I write of Haggershaven as my eyes first saw
it twenty-two years ago? Of the rolling acres of rich plowed
land, interrupted here and there by stone outcroppings
worn smooth and round by time, and trees in woodlots or
standing alone strong and unperturbed? Of the main building,
grown by fits and starts from the original farmhouse
into a great, rambling eccentricity stopping short of monstrosity
only by its complete innocence of pretense? Shall
I describe the two dormitories, severely functional, escaping
harshness because they had not been built by carpenters
and though sturdy enough, betrayed the amateur touch
in every line? Or the cottages and apartments, two, four, at
most six rooms, for the married fellows and their families?
These were scattered all over, some so avid for privacy
that one could pass unknowing within feet of the concealing
trees or shrubbery, others bold in the sunshine on
knolls or in hollows.</p>
<p>I could tell of the small shops, the miniature laboratories,
the inadequate observatory, the heterogeneous assortment
of books which was both less and more than a library, the
dozens of outbuildings. But these things were not the
haven. They were merely the least of its possessions. For<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
Haggershaven was not a material place at all, but a spiritual
freedom. Its limits were only the limits of what its fellows
could do or think or inquire. It was circumscribed only by
the outside world, not by internal rules and taboos, competition
or curriculum.</p>
<p>Most of this I could see for myself, much of it was explained
by Ace. “But how can you afford the time to take
me all around this way?” I asked; “I must be interfering
with your own work.”</p>
<p>He grinned. “This is my period to be guide, counselor
and friend to those whove strayed in here, wittingly or un.
Don’t worry, after youre a fellow youll get told off for all
the jobs, from shoveling manure to gilding weathercocks.”</p>
<p>I sighed. “The chances of my getting to be a fellow are
minus nothing. Especially after last night.”</p>
<p>He didnt pretend to misunderstand. “Barbara’ll come
out of it. She’s not always that way. As her father says,
she’s high-strung, and she’s been working madly. And to
tell the truth,” he went on in a burst of frankness, “she
really doesnt get on too well with other women. She has a
masculine mind.”</p>
<p>I have often noticed that men not strikingly brilliant
themselves attribute masculine minds to intelligent women
on the consoling assumption that feminine minds are normally
inferior. Ace however was manifestly innocent of
any attempt to patronize.</p>
<p>“Anyway,” he concluded, “she has only one vote.”</p>
<p>I didnt know whether to take this as a pledge of support
or mere politeness. “Isnt it wasteful, assigning a chemist
like Dr Agati to kitchen work? Or isnt he a good chemist?”</p>
<p>“Just about the best there is. His artificial tea and coffee
would bring a fortune to the haven if there were a profitable
market; even as it is it’ll bring a good piece of change.
Wasteful? What would you have us do, hire cooks and
servants?”</p>
<p>“Theyre cheap enough.”</p>
<p>“Or frightfully expensive. Specialization, the division of
labor, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and
cents, and not always then. And it’s unquestionably waste<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>ful
in terms of equality. And I don’t think there’s anyone
at the haven who isn’t an egalitarian.”</p>
<p>“But you do specialize and divide labor. Don’t tell me
you swap your physics for Agati’s chemistry.”</p>
<p>“In a way we do. Of course I don’t set up as an experimenter,
any more than he does as a speculator. But there
have been plenty of times Ive worked under his direction
when he needed an assistant who didnt know anything but
had a strong back.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I said; “but I still don’t see why you can’t
hire a cook and some dishwashers.”</p>
<p>“Where would our equality be then? What would happen
to our fellowship?”</p>
<p>Haggershaven’s history, which I got little by little, was
more than a link with the past; it was a possible hint of
what might have been if the War of Southron Independence
had not interrupted the American pattern. Barbara’s
great-great-grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells, had been a
Confederate major from North Carolina who, as conquerors
sometimes do, had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania
countryside. After the war he had put everything—not
much by Southron standards, but a fortune in depreciated,
soon to be repudiated, United States greenbacks—into
the farm which later formed the nucleus of
Haggershaven. Then he married a local girl and transformed
himself into a Northerner.</p>
<p>Until I became too accustomed to notice it anymore I
used to stare at his portrait in the library, picturing in idle
fancy a possible meeting on the battlefield between this
aristocratic gentleman with his curling mustache and daggerlike
imperial and my own plebian Granpa Hodgins.
But the chance of their ever having come face to face was
much more than doubtful; I, who had studied both their
likenesses, was the only link between them.</p>
<p>“Hard looking character, ay?” commented Ace. “This
was painted when he was mellow; imagine him twenty
years earlier. Pistols cocked and Juvenal or Horace or
Seneca in the saddlebags.”</p>
<p>“He was a cavalry officer, then?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know. Don’t think so as a matter of fact. Saddle<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>bags
was just my artistic touch. They say he was a holy
terror; discipline and all that—it sort of goes with a man
on horseback. And the old Roman boys are pure deduction;
he was that type. Patronized several writers and
artists; you know: ‘Drop down to my estate and stay a
while’ and they stayed five or ten years.”
But it was Major Haggerwells’ son who, seeing the deterioration
of Northern colleges, had invited a few restive
scholars to make their home with him. They were free to
pursue their studies under an elastic arrangement which
permitted them to be selfsupporting through work on the
farm.</p>
<p>Thomas Haggerwells’ father had organized the scheme
further, attracting a larger number of schoolmen who contributed
greatly to the material progress of the haven. They
patented inventions, marketless at home, which brought
regular royalties from more industrialized countries. Agronomists
improved the haven’s crops and took in a steady
income from seed. Chemists found ways of utilizing otherwise
wasted byproducts; proceeds from scholarly works—and
one more popular than scholarly—added to the funds.
In his will, Volney Haggerwells left the properties to the
fellowship.</p>
<p>I suppose I expected there would be some uniformity,
some basic type characterizing the fellows. Not that Barbara,
or Ace, or Hiro Agati resembled a stereotype at any
point, any more than I did myself, but then I was not one
of the elect nor likely to be. Even after I had met more than
half of them the notion persisted that there must be some
stamp on them proclaiming what they were.</p>
<p>Yet as I wandered about the haven, alone or with Ace,
the people I met were quite diverse, more so by far than
in the everyday world. There were the ebullient and the
glum, the talkative and the laconic, the bustling and the
slow-moving. Some were part of a family, others lived
ascetically, withdrawn from the pleasures of the flesh.</p>
<p>In the end I realized there was, if not a similarity, a
strong bond. The fellows, conventional or eccentric, passionate
or reserved, were all earnest, purposeful and, despite
individual variations, tenacious. They were, though<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
I hesitate to use so emotional a word, dedicated. The cruel
struggle and suspicion, the frantic endeavor to improve
one’s own financial, social, or political standing by maiming
or destroying someone else intent on the same endeavor
was either unknown or so subdued as to be imperceptible
at the haven. Disagreements and jealousies existed, but
they were different in kind rather than in degree from those
to which I had been accustomed all my life. The pervasive
fears which fostered the latter, the same fears which made
lotteries and indenture frantic gambles to escape the wretchedness
of life, could not circulate in the security of the
haven.</p>
<p>After the scene at my arrival, I didnt see Barbara again
for some ten days. Even then it was but a glimpse, caught
as she hurried in one direction and I sauntered in another.
She threw me a single frigid glance and went on. Later, I
was talking with Mr Haggerwells, who had proved to be
not quite an amateur of history but more than a dabbler,
when, without knocking, she burst into the room.</p>
<p>“Father, I—” Then she caught sight of me. “Sorry. I
didnt know you were entertaining.”</p>
<p>His tone was that of one found in a guilty act. “Come in,
come in, Barbara. Backmaker is after all something of a
protégé of yours. Urania, you know—if one may stretch
the ascription a bit—encouraging Clio.”
“Really, Father!” She was regal. Wounded, scornful, but
majestic. “I’m sure I don’t know enough about self-taught
pundits to sponsor them. It seems too bad they have to
waste your time—”
He flushed. “Please, Barbara. You must, you really
must control....”</p>
<p>Her disapproval became open anger. “Must I? Must I?
And stand by while every pretentious swindler usurps your
attention? Oh, I don’t ask for any special favors as your
daughter; I know too well I have none coming. But I
should think at least the consideration due a fellow of the
haven would prompt ordinary courtesy even where no
natural affection exists!”</p>
<p>“Barbara, please.... Oh, my dear girl, how can
you ...?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span></p>
<p>But she was gone, leaving him distressed and me puzzled.
Not at her lack of restraint but at her accusation that
he lacked a father’s love for her. Nothing was clearer than
his pride in her or his protective, baffled tenderness. It did
not seem possible so willful a misunderstanding could be
maintained.</p>
<p>“You can’t judge Barbara by ordinary standards,” insisted
Ace uncomfortably, when I told him what had happened.</p>
<p>“I’m not judging her by any standards or at all,” I said;
“I just don’t see how anyone could get things so wrong.”</p>
<p>“She.... Her nature needs sympathy. Lots of it. She’s
never had the understanding and encouragement she ought
to have.”</p>
<p>“It looks the other way around to me.”</p>
<p>“That’s because you don’t know the background. She’s
always been lonely. From childhood. Her mother was impatient
of children and never found time for her.”</p>
<p>“How do you know?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Why ... she told me, of course.”</p>
<p>“And you believed her. Without corroborative evidence.
Is that what’s called the scientific attitude?”</p>
<p>He stopped stock-still. “Look here, Backmaker—” a
moment before I had been Hodge to him—“Look here,
Backmaker, I’m damned tired of all the things people say
about Barbara; the jeers and sneers and gossip by people
who just aren’t good enough to breathe the same air with
her, much less have the faintest notion of her mind and
spirit—”
“Come off it, Ace,” I interrupted. “I havent got anything
against Barbara. The shoe is on the other foot. Tell
her I’m all right, will you? Don’t waste time trying to convince
me; I’m just trying to get along.”</p>
<p>It was clear, not only from the slips which evaded Ace’s
guard, but from less restrained remarks by other fellows,
that Barbara’s tortured jealousy was a fixture of her character.
She had created feuds, slandered and reviled fellows
who had been guilty of nothing except trying to interest her
father in some project in which she herself was not concerned.
I learned much more also, much Ace had no desire<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
to convey. But he was a poor hand at concealing anything,
and it was clear he was helplessly subject to her, but without
the usual kindly anesthetic of illusion. I guessed he had
enjoyed her favors, but she evidently didnt bother to hide
the fact that the privilege was not exclusive; perhaps indeed
she insisted on his knowing. I gathered she was a fiercely
moral polyandrist, demanding absolute fidelity without
offering the slightest hope of reciprocal singlemindedness.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C12"><i>12.</i> <i>MORE OF HAGGERSHAVEN</i></h2>
</div>
<p>Among the fellows was an Oliver Midbin, a
student of what he chose to call the new and revolutionary
science of Emotional Pathology. Tall and thin, with an incongruous
little potbelly like an enlarged and far-slipped
adamsapple, he pounced on me as a ready-made and captive
audience for his theories.</p>
<p>“Now this case of pseudo-aphonia—”
“He means the dumb girl,” explained Ace, aside.</p>
<p>“Nonsense. Dumbness is not even the statement of a
symptom, but a very imperfect description. Pseudo-aphonia.
Purely of an emotional nature. Of course if you
take her to some medical quack he’ll convince himself
and you and certainly her that there’s an impairment, or
degeneration, or atrophy of the vocal cords—”
“I’m not the girl’s guardian, Mr Midbin—”
“Doctor. Philosophiae, Göttingen. Trivial matter.”</p>
<p>“Excuse me, Dr Midbin. Anyway, I’m not her guardian
so I’m not taking her anywhere. But, just as a theoretical
question, suppose examination did reveal physical damage?”</p>
<p>He appeared delighted, and rubbed his hands together.
“Oh, it would. I assure you it would. These fellows always
find what theyre looking for. If your disposition is sour
theyll find warts on your duodenum. In a postmortem. In a
postmortem. Whereas Emotional Pathology deals with the
sour disposition and lets the warts, if any, take care of
themselves. Matter is a function of the mind. People are
dumb or blind or deaf for a purpose. Now what purpose
can the girl have for muteness?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span></p>
<p>“No conversation?” I suggested. I didnt doubt Midbin
was an authority, but his manner made flippancy almost
irresistible.</p>
<p>“I shall find out,” he said firmly. “This is bound to be a
simpler maladjustment than Barbara’s—”
“Aw, come on,” protested Ace.</p>
<p>“Nonsense, Dorn; obscurantic nonsense. Reticence is a
necessary ingredient of those medical ethics by which the
quacks conceal incompetence. Mumbo jumbo to keep the
layman from asking annoying questions. Priestly, not scientific
approach. Art and mystery of phlebotomy. Don’t
hold back knowledge; publish it to the world.”</p>
<p>“I think Barbara wouldnt want her private thoughts
published to the world. You have to draw the line somewhere.”</p>
<p>Midbin put his head on one side and looked at Ace as
though he were difficult to see. “Now that’s interesting,
Dorn,” he said; “I wonder what turns a seeker after knowledge
into a censor.”</p>
<p>“Are you going to start exploring my emotional pathology
now?”</p>
<p>“Not interesting enough; not nearly interesting enough.
Diagnosis while you wait; treatment in a few easy instalments.
Barbara now—there’s a really beautiful case. Beautiful
case; years of treatment and little sign of improvement.
Of course she wouldnt want her thoughts known.
Why? Because she’s happy with her hatred for her dead
mother. Shocking to Mrs Grundy; doubly ditto to Mister.
Exaggerated possessiveness toward her father makes her
miserable. Thoughts known, misery ventilated: shame,
condemnation, fie, fie. Her fantasy—”
“Midbin!”</p>
<p>“Her fantasy of going back to childhood (fascinating;
adult employs infantile time-sequence, infantile magic, infantile
hatreds) in order to injure her mother is a sick
notion she cherishes the way a dog licks a wound. But
without analogous therapy. Ventilate it. Ventilate it. Now
this girl’s case is bound to be simpler. Younger if nothing
else. And nice, overt symptoms. Bring her around tomorrow
and we’ll begin.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span></p>
<p>“Me?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Who else? Youre the only one she doesnt seem to
distrust.”</p>
<p>It was annoying to have the girl’s puppylike devotion
observed and commented on. I realized she saw me as the
only connection, however tenuous, with a normal past; I
had assumed she would turn naturally after a few days to
the women who took such open pleasure in fussing over her
affliction. However she merely suffered their attentions; no
matter how I tried to avoid her she sought me out, running
to me with muted cries which should have been touching
but were only painful.</p>
<p>Mr Haggerwells’ telegram to the sheriff’s office at York
had brought the reply that a deputy sheriff would visit the
haven “when time permitted.” He had also telegraphed the
Spanish legation who answered they knew no other Escobars
than Don Jaime and his wife. The girl might be a
servant or a stranger; it was no concern of His Most
Catholic Majesty.</p>
<p>The school uniform made it unlikely she was a servant
but beyond this, little was deducible. She did not respond
to questions in either Spanish or English, and it was impossible
to tell if she understood their meaning, for her
blank expression remained unchanged. When offered pencil
and paper she handled them curiously, then let them
slide to the floor.</p>
<p>I wondered briefly if perhaps her intelligence was slightly
subnormal, but this was met by a firm, even belligerent
denial from Midbin, whose conclusion was confirmed, at
least in my opinion, by her apparently excellent coordination,
her personal neatness and fastidiousness which were
far more delicate than any I’d been accustomed to.</p>
<p>Midbin’s method of treatment smacked of the mystical.
His subjects were supposed to relax on a couch and say
whatever came into their minds. At least this was the clearest
part of the explanation he gave when I rebelliously
escorted the girl to his “office,” a large, bare room decorated
only by some old European calendars by the popular
academician, Picasso. The couch was a cot which Midbin
himself used more conventionally at night.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span></p>
<p>“All right,” I said; “just how are you going to manage?”</p>
<p>“Convince her everything’s all right and I’m not going
to hurt her.”</p>
<p>“Sure,” I agreed. “Sure. Only: how?”</p>
<p>He gave me one of his head-on-shoulder looks and
turned to the girl who waited apathetically, with downcast
eyes. “You lie down,” he suggested.</p>
<p>“Me? I’m not dumb.”</p>
<p>“Pretend you are. Lie down, close your eyes, say the
first thing on your tongue. Without stopping to think about
it.”</p>
<p>“How can I say anything if I’m pretending to be dumb?”
Grudgingly I complied, fancying a faint look of curiosity
passing over the too-placid face. “‘No man bathes twice
in the same stream,’” I muttered.</p>
<p>He made me repeat the performance several times, then
by pantomime urged her to imitate me. It was doubtful if
she understood; in the end we nudged her gently into the
required position. There was no question of relaxation;
she lay there warily, tense and stiff even with her eyes
closed.</p>
<p>The whole business was so manifestly useless and absurd,
to say nothing of being undignified, that I was tempted
to walk out on it. Only ignoble calculation on Midbin’s
voting for my acceptance in the haven kept me there.</p>
<p>Looking at the form stretched out so rigidly, I could not
but admit again that the girl was beautiful. But the admission
was dispassionate; the beauty was abstract and neutral,
the lovely young lines evoked no lust. I felt only vexation
because her plight kept me from the wonders of Haggershaven.</p>
<p>“What good can this possibly do?” I burst out after ten
fruitless minutes. “Youre trying to find out why she can’t
talk and she can’t talk to tell you why she can’t talk.”</p>
<p>“Science explores all methods of approach,” Midbin
answered loftily; “I’m searching for a technique which will
reach her. Bring her back tomorrow.”</p>
<p>I swallowed my annoyance and started out. The girl
jumped up and pressed close to my side. Outdoors the air
was crisp; I felt her suppress a slight shiver. “Now I sup<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>pose
I’ll have to take you where it’s warm or find a wrap
for you,” I scolded irritably. “I don’t know why I have to
be your nursemaid.”</p>
<p>She whimpered very softly and I was remorseful. None
erf this was her fault; my callousness was inexcusable. But
if she could only attach herself to some other protector
and leave me alone....</p>
<p>As one about to be banished I tried to cram everything
into short days. I realized that these autumn weeks, spent
in casual conversation or joining the familiar preparations
for rural winter, were a period of thorough and critical
probation. There was little I could do to sway the decision
beyond the exhibition of an honest willingness to turn to
whatever work needed doing, and to repeat, whenever the
opportunity offered, that Haggershaven was literally a revelation
to me, an island of civilization in the midst of a
chaotic and savage sea. My dream was to make a landfall
there.</p>
<p>Certainly my meager background and scraps of reading
would not persuade the men and women of the haven; I
could only hope they might divine some promise in me.
Against this hope I put Barbara’s enmity, a hostility now
exacerbated by rage at Oliver Midbin for daring to devote
to another, particularly another woman, the attention which
had been her due, and the very technique used for her. I
knew her persistence and I could not doubt she would
move enough of the fellows to insure my rejection.</p>
<p>The gang which had been operating in the vicinity, presumably
the same one I had encountered, moved on. At
least no further crimes were attributed to it. Once they
were gone, Deputy Sheriff Beasley finally found time to
visit Haggershaven in response to the telegram. He had
evidently been there before without attaining much respect
on either side. I got the distinct impression he would have
preferred a more formal examination than the one which
took place in Mr Haggerwells’ study, with fellows drifting
in and out, interrupting the proceedings with comments of
their own.</p>
<p>I think he doubted the girl’s dumbness. He barked his
questions so loudly and brusquely they would have terri<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>fied
a far more securely poised individual. She promptly
went into dry hysterics, whereupon he turned his attention
to me.</p>
<p>I was apprehensive lest his questions explore my life
with Tyss and my connection with the Grand Army, but
apparently mere presence at Haggershaven indicated an
innocence not unrelated to idiocy, at least so far as the
more popular crimes were concerned. My passage of the
York road and all the events leading up to it were outside
his interest; he wanted only a succinct story of the holdup,
reminding me of the late Colonel Tolliburr in his assumption
that the lay eye ought normally to be photographic of
the minutest detail.</p>
<p>He was clearly dissatisfied with my account and left
grumbling that it would be more to the point if bookworms
learned to identify a man properly, instead of logarithms
or trigonometry. I didn’t see exactly how this applied to me,
since I was laudably ignorant of both subjects.</p>
<p>If Officer Beasley was disappointed, Midbin was enchanted.
Of course he had heard my narrative before, but
this was the first time he’d savored its possible impact on
the girl.</p>
<p>“You see, her pseudo-aphonia is neither congenital nor
of long standing. All logic leads to the conclusion that it’s
the result of her terror during the experience. She must
have wanted to scream, it must have been almost impossible
for her not to scream, but for her very life she dared
not. The instinctive, automatic reaction was the one she
could not allow herself. She had to remain mute while she
watched the murders.”</p>
<p>For the first time it seemed possible there was more to
Midbin than his garrulity.</p>
<p>“She crushed back that natural, overwhelming impulse,”
he went on. “She had to; her life depended on it. It was an
enormous effort and the effect on her was in proportion;
she achieved her object too well; when it was safe for her
to speak again she couldnt.”</p>
<p>It all sounded so plausible it was some time before I
thought to ask him why she didnt appear to understand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
what we said, or why she didnt write anything when she
was handed pencil and paper.</p>
<p>“Communication,” he answered. “She had to cut off
communication, and once cut off it’s not easy to restore.
At least that’s one aspect. Another is more tricky. The
holdup happened more than a month ago, but do you suppose
the affected mind reckons so precisely? Is a precise
reckoning possible? Duration may, for all we know, be an
entirely subjective thing. Yesterday for you may be today
for me. We recognize this to some extent when we speak of
hours passing slowly or quickly. The girl may still be undergoing
the agony of repressing her screams; the holdup,
the murders, are not in the past for her, but the present.
They are taking place in a long drawn out instant of time
which may never end during her life. And if this is so, is it
any wonder she is unable to relax, to let down her guard
long enough to realize that the present is present and the
crisis is past?”</p>
<p>He pressed his middle thoughtfully. “Now, if it is possible
to recreate in her mind by stimulus from without
rather than by evocation from within the conditions leading
up to and through the climacteric, she would have a
chance to vent the emotions she was forced to swallow.
She might, I don’t say she would, she might speak again.”</p>
<p>I understood such a process would necessarily be lengthy,
but as time passed I saw no indication he was reaching her
at all, much less that he was getting any results. One of
the Spanish-speaking fellows, a botanist who came and
went from the haven at erratic intervals, translated my
account of our meeting and read parts of it to the recumbent
girl, following Midbin’s excited stage directions and
interpolations. Nothing happened.</p>
<p>Outside the futile duty of coaxing the girl to participate
in Midbin’s sessions I had no obligations except those I
took upon myself or could persuade others to delegate to
me. Hiro Agati declared me hopelessly incompetent to help
him in the kiln he had set up to make “hard glass,” a thick
substance he hoped might take the place of cast iron in
such things as woodstoves, or clay tile in flues. He conceded
I was not entirely useless in the small garden surrounding<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
their cottage where he, Mrs Agati—an architect, much
younger than her husband and extremely diminutive—and
their three children spent their spare time transplanting,
rearranging, or preparing for the following season.</p>
<p>Dr Agati was not only the first American Japanese I
had ever met; his was the first family I had known who
broke the unwritten rule of having only one child. Both he
and Kimi Agati seemed unaware of the stern injunctions
by Whigs and Populists alike that disaster would follow
if the population of the country increased too fast. Fumio
and Eiko didnt care, while Yoshio, at two, was just not
interested.</p>
<p>The Agatis represented for me one more pang at the
thought of banishment from the haven. Since I knew
neither chemistry nor architecture, our conversation had
limits, but this was no drawback to the pleasure I took in
their company. Often, after I was assured I was welcome
there, I sat reading or simply silent while Hiro worked,
the children ran in and out, and Kimi, who was conservative
and didnt care for chairs, sat comfortably on the floor
and sketched or calculated stresses.</p>
<p>Gradually I progressed from the stage where I wanted
decision on my application postponed as long as possible
to one where I was impatient to have it over and done with.
“Why?” asked Hiro. “Suspense is the condition we live in
all our lives.”</p>
<p>“Well, but there are degrees. You know about what you
will be doing next year.”</p>
<p>“Do I? What guarantees have I? The future is happily
veiled. When I was your age I despaired because no one
would accept the indentures of a Japanese. (We are still
called Japanese even though our ancestors migrated at the
time of the abortive attempt to overthrow the Shogunate
and restore the Mikado in 1868.) Suspense instead of certainty
would have been a pleasure.”</p>
<p>“Anyway,” said Kimi practically, “it may be months
before the next meeting.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean? Isnt there a set time for such
business?” Sure there must be, I had never dared ask the
exact date.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span></p>
<p>Hiro shook his head. “Why should there be? The next
time the fellows pass on an appropriation or a project,
we’ll decide whether there’s room for an historian.”</p>
<p>“But ... as Kimi says, it might not be for months.”</p>
<p>“Or it might be tomorrow,” replied Hiro.</p>
<p>“Don’t worry, Hodge,” said Fumio, “Papa will vote for
you, and Mother too.”</p>
<p>Hiro grunted.</p>
<p>When it did come it was anticlimactic. Hiro, Midbin,
and several others with whom I’d scarcely exchanged a
word recommended me, and Barbara simply ignored my
existence. I was a full fellow of Haggershaven, with all the
duties and privileges appertaining. I was also securely at
home for the first time since I left Wappinger Falls more
than six years before. I knew that in all its history few had
ever cut themselves off from the haven, still fewer had ever
been asked to resign.</p>
<p>At a modest celebration in the big kitchen that night,
the haven revealed more of the talents it harbored. Hiro
produced a gallon of liquor he had distilled from sawdust
and called cellusaki. Mr Haggerwells pronounced it
fit for a cultivated palate, following with an impromptu
discourse on drinking through the ages. Midbin sampled
enough of it to imitate Mr. Haggerwells’ lecture and then,
as an inspired afterthought, to demonstrate how Mr Haggerwells
might mimic Midbin’s parody. Ace and three
others sang ballads; even the dumb girl, persuaded to sip a
little of the cellusaki under the disapproving eyes of her
self-appointed guardians, seemed to become faintly animated.
If anyone noted the absence of Barbara Haggerwells,
no one commented on it.</p>
<p>Fall became winter. Surplus timber was hauled in from
the woodlots and the lignin extracted by compressed air, a
method perfected by one of the fellows. Lignin was the fuel
used in our hot water furnaces and provided the gas for
the reflecting jets which magnified a tiny flame into strong
illumination. All of us took part in this work, but just as I
had not been able to help Hiro to his satisfaction in the
laboratory, so here too my ineptness with things mechani<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>cal
soon caused me to be set to more congenial tasks in
the stables.</p>
<p>I did not repine at this, for though I was delighted with
the society of the others, I found it pleasurable to be
alone, to sort out my thoughts, to slow down to the rhythm
of the heavy percherons or enjoy the antics of the two
young foals. The world and time were somewhere shut
outside; I felt contentment so strong as to be beyond satisfaction
or any active emotion.</p>
<p>I was currying a dappled mare one afternoon and reflecting
how the steam-plow used on the great wheat
ranches of British America deprived the farmers not merely
of fertilizer but also of companionship, when Barbara, her
breath still cloudy from the cold outside, came in and stood
behind me. I made an artificial cowlick on the mare’s flank,
then brushed it glossy smooth again.</p>
<p>“Hello,” she said.</p>
<p>“Uh ... hello, Miss Haggerwells.”</p>
<p>“Must you, Hodge?”</p>
<p>I roughed up the mare’s flank once more. “Must I what?
I’m afraid I don’t understand.”</p>
<p>She came close, as close as she had in the bookstore, and
I felt my breath quicken. “I think you do. Why do you
avoid me? And call me ‘Miss Haggerwells’ in that prim
tone? Do I look so old and ugly and forbidding?”</p>
<p>This, I thought, is going to hurt Ace. Poor Ace, befuddled
by a Jezebel; why can’t he attach himself to a nice
quiet girl who won’t tear him in pieces every time she follows
her inclinations?</p>
<p>I smoothed the mare’s side for the last time and put
down the currycomb.</p>
<p>“I think you are the most exciting woman Ive ever met,
Barbara,” I said.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C13"><i>13.</i> <i>TIME</i></h2>
</div>
<p>“Hodge.”</p>
<p>“Barbara?”</p>
<p>“Is it really true youve never written your mother since
you left home?”</p>
<p>“Why should I write her? What could I say? Perhaps if
my first plans had come to something, I might have. But
to tell her I worked for six years for nothing would only
confirm her opinion of my lack of gumption.”</p>
<p>“I wonder if your ambitions in the end don’t amount to
a wish to prove her wrong.”</p>
<p>“Now you sound like Midbin,” I said, but I wasnt annoyed.
I much preferred her present questions to those I’d
heard from her in the past weeks: Do you love me? Are
you sure? Really love, I mean; more than any other
woman? Why?</p>
<p>“Oliver has had accidental flashes of insight.”</p>
<p>“Arent you substituting your own for what you think
might be my motives?”</p>
<p>“My mother hated me,” she stated flatly.</p>
<p>“Well, it isnt a world where love is abundant; substitutes
are cheap and available. But hate—that’s a strong word.
How do you know?”
“I know. What does it matter how? I’m not unfeeling,
like you.”</p>
<p>“Me? Now what have I done?”</p>
<p>“You don’t care about anyone. Not me or anyone else.
You don’t want me; just any woman would do.”</p>
<p>I considered this. “I don’t think so, Barbara—”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
“See! You don’t think so. Youre not sure, and anyway
you wouldnt hurt my feelings needlessly. Why don’t you
be honest and tell the truth. You’d just as soon it was that
streetwalker in New York. Maybe you’d rather. You miss
her, don’t you?”</p>
<p>“Barbara, Ive told you a dozen times I never—”
“And Ive told you a dozen times youre a liar! I don’t
care. I really don’t care.”</p>
<p>“All right.”</p>
<p>“How can you be so phlegmatic? So unfeeling? Nothing
means anything to you. Youre a real, stolid peasant. And
you smell like one too, always reeking of the stable.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” I said mildly; “I’ll try to bathe more often.”</p>
<p>Her taunts and jealous fits, her insistent demands did
not ruffle me. I was too pleased with the wonders of life to
be disturbed. All I’d dreamed Haggershaven could mean
when I was sure I would never be part of it was fulfilled
and more than fulfilled. Haggershaven and Barbara; Eden
and Lilith.</p>
<p>At first it seemed the bookstore years were wasted, but
I soon realized the value of that catholic and serendipitous
reading as a preparation for this time. I was momentarily
disappointed that there was no one at the haven to whom
I could turn for that personal, face-to-face, student-teacher
relationship on which I’d set so great a store, but if there
was no historical scholar among the fellows to tutor me, I
was surrounded by those who had learned the discipline
of study. There was none to discuss the details of the industrial
revolution or the failure of the Ultramontane
Movement in Catholicism and the policies of Popes Adrian
VII, VIII and IX, but all could show me scheme and
method. I began to understand what thorough exploration
of a subject meant as opposed to sciolism, and I threw myself
into my chosen work with furious zest.</p>
<p>I also began to understand the central mystery of historical
theory. When and what and how and where, but the
when is the least. Not chronology but relationship is ultimately
what the historian deals in. The element of time,
so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate
character. That the past is past becomes ever less<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
important. Except for perspective it might as well be the
present or the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel
time. I was not investigating a petrification but a fluid.
Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where
one might learn the why, and assuredly if one grasped the
why he could place the when at will.</p>
<p>During that winter I read philosophy, psychology, archaeology,
anthropology. My energy and appetite were prodigious,
as they needed to be. I saw the field of knowledge,
not knowledge in the abstract, but things I wanted to know,
things I had to know, expanding in front of me with dizzying
speed while I crawled and crept and stumbled over
ground I should have covered years before.</p>
<p>Yet if I had studied more conventionally I would never
have had the Haven or Barbara. Novelists speak lightly of
gusts of passion, but it was nothing less than irresistible
force which drove me to her, day after day. Looking back
on what I had felt for Tirzah Vame with the condescension
twenty-four has toward twenty, I saw my younger self only
as callow, boyish and slightly obtuse. I was embarrassed
by the torments I had suffered.</p>
<p>With Barbara I lived only in the present, shutting out
past and future. This was only partly due to the intensity,
the fierceness of our desire; much came from Barbara’s
own troubled spirit. She herself was so avid, so demanding,
that yesterday and tomorrow were irrelevant to the
insistent moment. The only thing saving me from enslavement
like poor Ace was the belief, correct or incorrect I
am to this day not certain, that to yield the last vestige of
detachment and objectivity would make me helpless, not
just before her, but to accomplish my ever more urgent
ambitions.</p>
<p>Still I know much of my reserve was unnecessary, a
product of fear, not prudence. I denied much I could have
given freely and without harm; my guard protected what
was essentially empty. My fancied advantage over Ace,
based on my having always had an easy, perhaps too easy
way with women, was no advantage at all. I foolishly
thought myself master of the situation because her infidelities,
if such a word can be used where faithfulness is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
explicitly ruled out, did not bother me. I believed I had
grown immensely wise since the time when the prospect of
Tirzah’s rejection had made me miserable. I was wrong;
my sophistication was a lack, not an achievement</p>
<p>Do I need to say that Barbara was no wanton, moved
by light and fickle voluptuousness? The puritanism of our
time, expressing itself in condemnations and denials,
molded her as it molded our civilization. She was driven
by urges deeper and darker than sensuality; her mad jealousies
were provoked by an unappeasable need for constant
reassurance. She had to be dominant, she had to be
courted by more than one man; she had to be told constantly
what she could never truly believe: that she was
uniquely desired.</p>
<p>I wondered that she did not burn herself out, not only
with conflicting passions, but with her fury of work. Sleep
was a weakness she despised, yet she craved far more of it
than she allowed herself; she rationed her hours of unconsciousness
and drove herself relentlessly. Ace’s panegyrics
on her importance as a physicist I discounted, but older
and more objective colleagues spoke of her mathematical
concepts, not merely with respect, but with awe.</p>
<p>She did not discuss her work with me; our intimacy
stopped short of such exchanges. I got the impression she
was seeking the principles of heavier-than-air flight, a
chimera which had long intrigued inventors. It seemed a
pointless pursuit, for it was manifest such levitation could
no more replace our safe, comfortable guided balloons
than minibiles could replace the horse.</p>
<p>Spring made all of us single-minded farmers until the
fields were plowed and sown. No one grudged these days,
for the Haven’s economic life was based first of all on its
land, and we were happy in the work itself. Not until the
most feverish competition with time began to slacken could
we return to our regular activities.</p>
<p>I say “all of us,” but I must except the dumb girl. She
greeted the spring with the nearest approach to cheerfulness
she had displayed; there was a distinct lifting of her
apathy. Unexpectedly she revealed a talent which had survived
the shock to her personality or had been resurrected<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>
like the pussywillows and crocuses by the warm sun. She
was a craftsman with needle and thread. Timidly at first,
but gradually growing bolder, she contrived dresses of
gayer and gayer colors in place of the drab school uniform;
always, on the completion of a new creation, running to
me as though to solicit my approval.</p>
<p>This innocent if embarrassing custom could hardly escape
Barbara’s notice, but her anger was directed at me,
not the girl. My “devotion” was not only absurd, she told
me, it was also conspicuous and degrading. My taste was
inexplicable, running as it did to immature, deranged
cripples.</p>
<p>Naturally when the girl took up the habit of coming to
the edge of the field where I was plowing, waiting gravely
motionless for me to drive the furrow toward her, I anticipated
still further punishment from Barbara’s tongue. The
girl was not to be swayed from her practice; at least I did
not have the heart to speak roughly to her, and so she daily
continued to stand through the long hours watching me
plow, bringing me a lunch at noon and docilely sharing a
small portion of it.</p>
<p>The planting done, Midbin began the use of a new technique,
showing her drawings of successive stages of the
holdup, again nagging and pumping me for details to
sharpen their accuracy. Her reactions pleased him immensely,
for she responded to the first ones with nods and
the throaty sounds we recognized as understanding or
agreement. The scenes of the assault itself, of the shooting
of the coachman, the flight of the footman, and her own
concealment in the cornfield evoked whimpers, while the
brutal depiction of the Escobars’ murder made her cower
and cover her eyes.</p>
<p>I suppose I am not particularly tactful; still I had been
careful not to mention any of this to Barbara. Midbin, however,
after a very gratifying reaction to one of the drawings,
said casually, “Barbara hasnt been here for a long time. I
wish she would come back.”</p>
<p>When I repeated this she stormed at me. “How dare
you discuss me with that ridiculous fool?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span></p>
<p>“Youve got it all wrong. There wasnt any discussion.
Midbin only said—”
“I know what Oliver said. I know his whole silly vocabulary.”</p>
<p>“He only wants to help you.”</p>
<p>“Help me? Help <i>me</i>? What’s wrong with me?”</p>
<p>“Nothing, Barbara. Nothing.”</p>
<p>“Am I dumb or blind or stupid?”</p>
<p>“Please, Barbara.”</p>
<p>“Just unattractive. I know. Ive seen you with that creature.
How you must hate me to flaunt her before everyone!”</p>
<p>“You know I only go with her to Midbin’s because he
insists.”</p>
<p>“What about your little lovers’ meetings in the woodlot
when you were supposed to be plowing? Do you think I
didnt know about them?”</p>
<p>“Barbara, I assure you they were perfectly harmless.
She—”
“Youre a liar. More than that, youre a sneak and a
hypocrite. Yes, and a mean, crawling sycophant as well. I
know you must detest me, but it suits you to suffer me
because of the haven. I’m not blind; youve used me, deliberately
and calculatedly for your own selfish ends.”</p>
<p>Midbin could explain and excuse her outbursts by his
“emotional pathology.” Ace accepted and suffered them
as inescapable, so did her father, but I saw no necessity of
being always subject to her tantrums. I told her so, adding,
not too heatedly I think, “Maybe we shouldn’t see each
other alone after this.”</p>
<p>She stood perfectly immobile and silent, as if I were still
speaking. “All right,” she said at last. “All right; yes ...
yes. Don’t.”</p>
<p>Her apparent calm deceived me completely; I smiled
with relief.</p>
<p>“That’s right, laugh. Why shouldnt you? You have no
feelings, no more than you have an intelligence. You are
an oaf, a clod, a real bumpkin. Standing there with a silly
grin on your face. Oh I hate you! How I hate you!”</p>
<p>She wept, she shrilled, she rushed at me and then turned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
away, crying she hadnt meant it, not a word of it. She cajoled,
begging forgiveness for all she’d said, tearfully promising
to control herself after this, moaning that she needed
me, and finally, when I didnt repulse her, exclaiming it
was her love for me which tormented her so and drove her
to such scenes. It was a wretched, degrading moment, and
not the least of its wretchedness and degradation was that
I recognized the erotic value of her abjection. Detachedly
I might pity, fear or be repelled; at the same time I had to
admit her sudden humility was exciting.</p>
<p>Perhaps this storm changed our relationship for the
better, or at least eased the constraint between us. At any
rate it was after this she began speaking to me of her work,
putting us on a friendlier, less furious plane. I learned now
how completely garbled was my notion of what she was
doing.</p>
<p>“Heavier-than-air flying-machines!” she cried. “How
utterly absurd!”</p>
<p>“All right. I didnt know.”</p>
<p>“My work is theoretical. I’m not a vulgar mechanic.”</p>
<p>“All right, all right.”</p>
<p>“I’m going to show that time and space are aspects of
the same entity.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I said, thinking of something else.</p>
<p>“What is time?”</p>
<p>“Uh?... Dear Barbara, since I don’t know anything
I can slide gracefully out of that one. I couldnt even begin
to define time.”</p>
<p>“Oh, you could probably define it all right—in terms of
itself. I’m not dealing with definitions but concepts.”
“All right, conceive.”</p>
<p>“Hodge, like all stuffy people your levity is ponderous.”</p>
<p>“Excuse me. Go ahead.”</p>
<p>“Time is an aspect.”</p>
<p>“So you mentioned. I once knew a man who said it was
an illusion. And another who said it was a serpent with its
tail in its mouth.”</p>
<p>“Mysticism.” The contempt with which she spoke the
word brought a sudden image of Roger Tyss saying “metaphysics”
with much the same inflection. “Time, matter,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
space and energy are all aspects of the cosmic entity. Interchangeable
aspects. Theoretically it should be possible to
translate matter into terms of energy and space into terms
of time; matter-energy into space-time.”</p>
<p>“It sounds so simple I’m ashamed of myself.”</p>
<p>“To put it so crudely the explanation is misleading: suppose
matter is resolved into its component....”</p>
<p>“Atoms?” I suggested, since she seemed at loss for a
word.</p>
<p>“No, atoms are already too individualized, too separate.
Something more fundamental than atoms. We have no
word because we can’t quite grasp the concept yet. Essence,
perhaps, or the theological ‘spirit.’ If matter....”</p>
<p>“A man?”</p>
<p>“Man, turnip or chemical compound,” she answered impatiently;
“if resolved into its essence it can presumably
be reassembled, another wrong word, at another point of
the time-space fabric.”</p>
<p>“You mean ... like yesterday?”</p>
<p>“No—and yes. What is ‘yesterday’? A thing? An aspect?
An idea? Or a relationship? Oh, words are useless things;
even with mathematical symbols you can hardly.... But
someday I’ll establish it. Or lay the groundwork for my
successors. Or the successors of my successors.”
I nodded. Midbin was at least half right; Barbara was
emotionally sick. For what was this “theory” of hers but
the rationalization of a daydream, the daydream of discovering
a process for reaching back through time to injure
her dead mother and so steal all of her father’s affections?</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C14"><i>14.</i> <i>MIDBIN’S EXPERIMENT</i></h2>
</div>
<p>At the next meeting of the fellows Midbin asked
an appropriation for experimental work and the help of
haven members in the project. Since the extent of both
requests was modest, their granting would ordinarily have
been a formality. But Barbara asked politely if Dr Midbin
wouldnt like to elaborate a little on the purposes of his
experiment.</p>
<p>I knew her manner was a danger signal. Nevertheless
Midbin merely answered goodhumoredly that he proposed
to test a theory of whether an emotionally induced physical
handicap could be cured by recreating in the subject’s mind
the shock which had caused—to use a loose, inaccurate
term—the impediment.</p>
<p>“I thought so. He wants to waste the haven’s money
and time on a little tart he’s having an affair with while
important work is held up for lack of funds.”</p>
<p>One of the women called out, “Oh, Barbara, no,” and
there were exclamations of disapproval. I saw Kimi Agati
look steadfastly down in embarrassment. Mr Haggerwells,
after trying unsuccessfully to hold Barbara’s eye, said, “I
must apologize for my daughter—”
“It’s all right,” interrupted Midbin. “I understand Barbara’s
notions. I’m sure no one here really thinks there is
anything improper between the girl and me. Outside of
this, Barbara’s original question seems quite in order. Quite
in order. Briefly, as most of you know, I’ve been trying to
restore speech to a subject who lost it—again I use an inaccurate
term for convenience—during an afflicting expe<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>rience.
Preliminary explorations indicate good probability
of satisfactory response to my proposed method, which is
simply to employ a kinematic camera like those making
entertainment photinugraphs—”
“He wants to turn the haven into a tinugraph mill with
the fellows as mummers!”</p>
<p>“Only this once, Barbara, only this once. Not regularly;
not as routine.”</p>
<p>At this point her father insisted the request be voted on
without any more discussion. I was tempted to vote with
Barbara, the only dissident, for I foresaw Midbin’s tinugraph
would undoubtedly rely heavily on cooperation from
me, but I didnt have the courage. Instead I merely abstained,
like Midbin himself and Ace.</p>
<p>The first effect of Midbin’s program was to free me from
obligation, for he decided there was no point continuing
the sessions with the dumb girl as before. All his time was
taken up anyway with photography—no one at the haven
had specialized in it—kinematic theory, the art of pantomime,
and the relative merit of different makes of cameras,
all manufactured abroad.</p>
<p>The girl, who had never lost her tenseness and apprehension
during the interviews, nevertheless clung to the habit
of being escorted to Midbin’s workroom. Since it was impossible
to convey to her that the sessions were temporarily
suspended, she appeared regularly, always in a dress with
which she had taken manifest pains, and there was little I
could do but walk her to Midbin’s and back. I was acutely
conscious of the ridiculousness of these parades and expectant
of retribution from Barbara afterward, so I was
to some extent relieved when Midbin finally made his decision
and procured camera and film.</p>
<p>Now I had to set the exact scene where the holdup had
taken place, not an easy thing to do, for one rise looks much
like another at twilight and all look differently in daylight.
Then I had to approximate the original conditions as nearly
as possible. Here Midbin was partially foiled by the limitations
of his medium, being forced to use the camera in
full sunlight instead of at dusk.</p>
<p>I dressed and instructed the actors in their parts, rehears<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span>ing
and directing them throughout. The only immunity I
got was Midbin’s concession that I neednt play the role of
myself, since in my early part of spectator I would be hidden
anyway, and the succor was omitted as irrelevant to
the therapeutic purpose. Midbin himself did nothing but
tend the camera.</p>
<p>Any tinugraph mill would have snorted at our final product
and certainly no tinugraph lyceum would have condescended
to show it. After some hesitation Midbin had decided
not to make a phonoto, feeling the use of sound
would add no value and considerable expense, so the film
didnt even have this feature to recommend it. Fortunately
for whatever involuntary professional pride was involved,
no one was present at the first showing but the girl and me,
Ace to work the magic-lantern, and Midbin.</p>
<p>In the darkened room the pictures on the screen gave—after
the first minutes—such an astonishing illusion that
when one of the horsemen rode toward the camera we all
reflexively shrank back. Despite its amateurishness the tinugraph
seemed an artistic success to us, but it was no triumph
in justifying its existence. The girl reacted no differently
than she had toward the drawings; if anything her
response was less satisfactory. The inarticulate noises ran
the same scale from dismay to terror; nothing new was
added. Nevertheless Midbin, his adamsapple working joyously
up and down, slapped Ace and me on the back, predicting
he’d have her talking like a politician before the
year was out.</p>
<p>I suppose the process was imperceptible; certainly there
was no discernible difference between one showing and the
next. The boring routine continued day after day and so
absolute was Midbin’s confidence that we were not too
astonished after some weeks when, at the moment “Don
Jaime” folded in simulated death, she fainted and remained
unconscious for some time.</p>
<p>After this we expected—at least Ace and I did, Midbin
only rubbed his palms together—that the constraint on her
tongue would be suddenly and entirely lifted. It wasnt, but
a few showings later, at the same crucial point, she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>
screamed. It was a genuine scream, clear and piercing,
bearing small resemblance to the strangling noises we were
accustomed to. Midbin had been vindicated; no mute could
have voiced that full, shrill cry.</p>
<p>Pursuing another of his theories, he soon gave up the
idea of helping her express the words in her mind in Spanish.
Instead he concentrated on teaching her English. His
method was primitive, consisting of pointing solemnly to
objects and repeating their names in an artificial monotone.</p>
<p>“She’ll have an odd way of speaking,” remarked Ace;
“all nouns, singular nouns at that, said with a mouthful of
pebbles. I can just imagine the happy day: ‘Man chair wall
girl floor;’ and you bubbling back, ‘Carpet ceiling earth
grass.’”</p>
<p>“I’ll supply the verbs as needed,” said Midbin; “first
things first.”</p>
<p>She must have been paying at least as much attention to
our conversation as to his instruction for, unexpectedly,
one day she pointed to me and said quite clearly, “Hodge
... Hodge ...”</p>
<p>I was discomposed, but not with the same vexation I
had felt at her habit of seeking me out and following me
around. There was a faint, bashful pleasure, and a feeling
of gratitude for such steadfastness.</p>
<p>She must have had some grounding in English, for while
she utilized the nouns Midbin had supplied, she soon added,
tentatively and questioningly, a verb or adjective here and
there. “I ... walk ...?” Ace’s fear of her acquiring Midbin’s
dead inflection was groundless; her voice was low and
charmingly modulated; we were enchanted listening to her
elementary groping among words.</p>
<p>Conversation or questioning was as yet impossible. Midbin’s,
“What is your name?” brought forth no response
save a puzzled look and a momentary sinking back into
dullness. But several weeks later she touched her breast
and said shyly, “Catalina.”</p>
<p>Her memory then, was not impaired, at least not totally.
There was no way of telling yet what she remembered and
what self-protection had forced her to forget, for direct
questions seldom brought satisfactory answers at this stage.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>
Facts concerning herself she gave out sporadically and
without relation to our curiosity.</p>
<p>Her name was Catalina García; she was the much
younger sister of Doña Maria Escobar, with whom she
lived. So far as she knew she had no other relatives. She
did not want to go back to school; they had taught her to
sew, they had been kind, but she had not been happy there.
Please—we would not send her away from Haggershaven,
would we?</p>
<p>Midbin acted now like a fond parent who was both
proud of his child’s accomplishments and fearful lest she be
not quite ready to leave his solicitous care. He was far from
satisfied at restoring her speech; he probed and searched,
seeking to know what she had thought and felt during the
long months of muteness.</p>
<p>“I do not know, truly I do not know,” she protested toward
the end of one of these examinations. “I would say,
yes; sometimes I knew you were talking to me, or Hodge.”
Here she looked at me steadily for an instant, to make me
feel both remorseful and proud. “But it was like someone
talking a long way off, so I never quite understood, nor was
even sure it was I who was being spoken to. Often—at
least it seemed often, perhaps it was not—often, I tried to
speak, to beg you to tell me if you were real people talking
to me, or just part of a dream. That was very bad, because
when no words came I was more afraid than ever, and when
I was afraid the dream became darker and darker.”
Afterward, looking cool and fresh and strangely assured,
she came upon me while I was cultivating young corn. A
few weeks earlier I would have known she had sought me
out; now it might be an accident.</p>
<p>“But I knew more surely when it was you who spoke,
Hodge,” she said abruptly. “In my dream you were the
most real.” Then she walked tranquilly away.</p>
<p>Barbara, who had studiedly said nothing further about
what Midbin was doing, commented one day, apparently
without rancor, “So Oliver appears to have proved a
theory. How nice for you.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean?” I inquired guardedly; “How is it
nice for me?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span></p>
<p>“Why, you won’t have to chaperone the silly girl all over
any more. She can ask her way around now.”</p>
<p>“Oh yes; that’s right,” I mumbled.</p>
<p>“And we won’t have to quarrel over her any more,” she
concluded.</p>
<p>“Sure,” I said. “That’s right.”</p>
<p>Mr Haggerwells again communicated with the Spanish
diplomats, recalling his original telegram and mentioning
the aloof reply. He was answered in person by an official
who acted as though he himself had composed the disclaiming
response. Perhaps he had, for he made it quite clear
that only devotion to duty made it possible to deal at all
with such savages as inhabited the United States.</p>
<p>He confirmed the existence of one Catalina García and
consulted a photograph, carefully shielded in his hand,
comparing it with the features of our Catalina, at last satisfying
himself they were the same. This formality finished,
he spoke rapidly to Catalina in Spanish. She shook her
head and looked confused. “Tell him I can hardly understand,
Hodge; ask him to speak in English, please.”</p>
<p>The diplomat looked furious. Midbin explained hastily
that the shock which had caused her muteness had not entirely
worn off. Unquestionably she would recover her full
memory in time, but for the present there were still areas
of forgetfulness. Her native language was part of the past,
he went on, happy with a new audience, and the past was
something to be pushed away since it contained the terrible
moment. English on the other hand—”
“I understand,” said the diplomat stiffly, resolutely addressing
none of us. “It is clear. Very well then. The Señorita
García is heir—heiress to an estate. Not a very big one,
I regret to say. A moderate estate.”
“You mean land and houses?” I asked curiously.</p>
<p>“A moderate estate,” he repeated, looking attentively at
his gloved hand. “Some shares of stock, some bonds, some
cash. The details will be available to the señorita.”</p>
<p>“It doesnt matter,” said Catalina timidly.</p>
<p>Having put us all, and particularly me, in our place as
rude and nosey barbarians, he went on more pleasantly,
“According to the records of the embassy, the señorita is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
not yet eighteen. As an orphan living in foreign lands she
is a ward of the Spanish Crown. The señorita will return
with me to Philadelphia where she will be suitably accommodated
until repatriation can be arranged. I feel certain
that in the proper surroundings, hearing her natural tongue,
she will soon regain its use. The—ah—institution may submit
a bill for board and lodging during her stay.”
“Does he mean—take me away from here? For always?” Catalina, who had seemed so mature a moment before,
suddenly acted like a frightened child.</p>
<p>“He only wants to make you comfortable and take you
among your own people,” said Mr Haggerwells. “Perhaps
it is a bit sudden....”</p>
<p>“I can’t. Do not let him take me away. Hodge, Hodge—do
not let him take me away.”
“Señorita, you do not understand—”
“No, no. I won’t. Hodge, Mr Haggerwells, do not let
him!”</p>
<p>“But my dear—”
It was Midbin who cut Mr Haggerwells off. “I cannot
guarantee against a relapse, even a reversion to the pseudo-aphonia
if this emotional tension is maintained. I must
insist that Catalina is not to continue the conversation
now.”</p>
<p>“No one’s going to take you away by force,” I assured
her, finally finding my courage once Midbin had asserted
himself.</p>
<p>The official shrugged, managing to intimate in the gesture
his opinion that the haven was of a very shady character
indeed and had quite possibly engineered the holdup
itself.</p>
<p>“If the señorita genuinely wishes to remain for the present—” a lifted eyebrow loaded the “genuinely” with meaning
“—I have no authority at the moment to inquire into
influences that have persuaded her. No, none at all. Nor
can I remove her by—ah—I will not insist. No. Not at all.”
“That is very understanding of you, sir,” said Mr Haggerwells.
“I’m sure everything will be all right eventually.”</p>
<p>The diplomat bowed stiffly. “Of course the—ah—insti<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>tution
understands it can hope for no further compensation—”
“None has been given or asked for. None will be,” said
Mr Haggerwells in what was, for him, a sharp tone.</p>
<p>The gentleman from the legation bowed. “The señorita
will naturally be visited from time to time by an official.
Without note—notification. She may be removed whenever
His Most Catholic Majesty sees fit. And of course none of
her estate will be released before the eighteenth birthday.
The whole affair is entirely irregular.”
After he left I reproached myself for not asking what
Don Jaime’s mission had been that fateful evening, or at
least for not trying to find out what his function with the
Spanish legation was. Probably he could in no way be connected
with the counterfeiting of the pesetas. By making no
attempt to learn any facts which might have lessened the
old feeling of guilty responsibility I kept it uneasily alive.</p>
<p>These reproaches were pushed aside when Catalina put
her head against my collarbone, sobbing with relief. “There,
there,” I said, “there, there.”</p>
<p>“Uncouth,” reflected Mr Haggerwells. “Compensation
indeed!”</p>
<p>“Dealing with natives,” said Midbin. “Probably courteous
enough to Frenchmen or Afrikanders.”</p>
<p>I patted Catalina’s quivering shoulders. Child or not,
now she was able to talk I had to admit I no longer found
her devotion so tiresome. Though I was definitely uneasy
lest Barbara discover us in this attitude.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C15"><i>15.</i> <i>GOOD YEARS</i></h2>
</div>
<p>And now I come to the period of my life which
stands in such sharp contrast to what had gone before. Was
it really eight years I spent at Haggershaven? The arithmetic
is indisputable: I arrived in 1944 at the age of twenty-three;
I left in 1952 at the age of thirty-one. Indisputable,
but not quite believable; as with the happy countries
which are supposed to have no history I find it hard to go
over those eight years and divide them by remarkable
events. They blended too smoothly, too contentedly into
one another.</p>
<p>Crops were harvested, stored or marketed; the fields
were plowed in the fall and again in the spring and sown
anew. Three of the older fellows died, another became
bedridden. Five new fellows were accepted; two biologists,
a chemist, a poet, a philologist. It was to the last I played
the same part Ace had to me, introducing him to the sanctuary
of the haven, seeing its security and refuge afresh
and deeply thankful for the fortune that had brought me
to it.</p>
<p>There was no question about success in my chosen profession,
not even the expected alternation of achievement
and disappointment. Once started on the road I kept on
going at an even, steady pace. For what would have been
my doctoral thesis I wrote a paper on <i>The Timing of General
Stuart’s Maneuvers During August 1863 in Pennsylvania</i>.
This received flattering comment from scholars as
far away as the Universities of Lima and Cambridge; be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>cause
of it I was offered instructorships at highly respectable
schools.</p>
<p>I could not think of leaving the haven. The world into
which I had been born had never been fully revealed for
what it was until I had escaped from it. Secrecy and ugliness;
greed, fear and callousness; meanness, avarice, cunning,
deceit and self-worship were as close around as the
nearest farmhouses. The idea of returning to that world
and of entering into daily competition with other underpaid,
overdriven drudges striving fruitlessly to apply a
dilute coating of culture to the unresponsive surface of unwilling
students had little attraction.</p>
<p>In those eight years, as I broadened my knowledge I
narrowed my field. Undoubtedly it was presumptuous to
take the War of Southron Independence as my specialty
when there were already so many comprehensive works on
the subject and so many celebrated historians engaged with
this special event. However, my choice was made not out
of self-importance but fascination, and undoubtedly it was
the proximity of the scene which influenced the selection
of my goal, the last thirteen months of the war, from
General Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania to the capitulation
at Reading. I saw the whole vast design: Gettysburg, Lancaster,
the siege of Philadelphia, the disastrous Union
counter-thrust in Tennessee, the evacuation of Washington,
and finally the desperate effort to break out of Lee’s trap
which ended at Reading. I could spend profitable years
filling in the details.</p>
<p>My monographs were published in learned Confederate
and British journals—there were none in the United States—and
I rejoiced when they brought attention, not so much
to me as to Haggershaven. I could contribute only this
notice and my physical labor; on the other hand I asked
little beyond food, clothing and shelter—just books. My
field trips I took on foot, often earning my keep by casual
labor for farmers, paying for access to private collections
of letters or documents by indexing and arranging them.</p>
<p>The time devoted to scholarship did not alone distinguish
those eight years, nor even the security of the haven. I
have spoken of the simple, easy manner in which the Agatis<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>
admitted me to their friendship, but they were not the only
ones with whom there grew ties of affection and understanding.
With very few exceptions the fellows of Haggershaven
quickly learned to shed the suspicion and aloofness,
so necessary a protection elsewhere, and substitute acceptance.
The result was a tranquillity I had never experienced
before, so that I think of those years as set apart, a
golden period, a time of perpetual warm sunshine.</p>
<p>Between Barbara and me the turbulent, ambivalent passion
swept back and forth, the periods of estrangement
seemingly only a generating force to bring us together
again. Hate and love, admiration and distaste, impatience
and pity were present on both sides. Only on hers there was
jealousy as well; perhaps if I had not been indifferent
whenever she chose to respond to some other man she
might not have felt the errant desire so strongly. Perhaps
not; there was a moral urge behind her behavior. She
sneered at women who yielded to such temptations. To her
they were not temptations but just rewards; she did not
yield, she took them as her due.</p>
<p>Sometimes I wondered if her neurosis did not verge on
insanity; I’m sure for her part she must often have stood
off and appraised me as a mistake. I know there were
many times when I wished there would be no more reconciliation
between us.</p>
<p>Yet no amount of thinking could cancel the swift hunger
I felt in her presence or the deep mutual satisfaction of
physical union. Frequently we were lovers for as long as
a month before the inevitable quarrel, followed by varying
periods of coolness. During the weeks of distance I remembered
how she could be tender and gracious as well as
ardent, just as during our intimacy I remembered her
ruthlessness and dominance.</p>
<p>It was not only her temperamental outbursts nor even
her unappeasable craving for love and affection which
thrust us apart. Impediments which, in the beginning, had
appeared inconsequential assumed more importance all the
time. It was increasingly hard for her to leave her work
behind even for moments. She was never allowed to forget,
either by her own insatiable drive or by outside acknowl<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>edgment
that she was already one of the foremost physicists
in the world. She had been granted so many honorary
degrees she no longer traveled to receive them; offers from
foreign governments of well-paid jobs connected with their
munitions industries were common. Articles were written
about her equation of matter, energy, space and time, acclaiming
her as a revolutionary thinker; though she dismissed
them as evaluation of elementary work, they nevertheless
added to her isolation and curtailed her freedom.</p>
<p>Midbin was, in his way, as much under her spell as Ace
or myself. His triumph over Catalina’s dumbness he took
lightly now it was accomplished; stabilizing Barbara’s emotions
was the victory he wanted. She, on her side, had lost
whatever respect she must have had for him in the days
when she had submitted to his treatment. On the very rare
occasions when the whim moved her to listen to his entreaties—usually
relayed through Ace or me—and grant
him time, it seemed to be only for the opportunity of making
fun of his efforts. Patiently he tried new techniques of
exploration and expression.</p>
<p>“But it’s not much use,” he said once, dolefully; “she
doesnt <i>want</i> to be helped.”</p>
<p>“Wanting seemed to have little to do with making Catty
talk,” I pointed out. “Couldnt you....”</p>
<p>“Make a tinugraph of Barbara’s traumatic shock? If I
had the materials there would be no necessity.”</p>
<p>Perhaps there was less malice in her mockery now Catty
was no longer the focus of his theories about emotional
pathology; perhaps she forgave him for her temporary displacement,
but she did not withhold her contempt. “Oliver,
you should have been a woman,” she told him; “you would
have been impossible as a mother, but what a grandmother
you would have made!”</p>
<p>That Catty herself had in her own way as strong a will
as Barbara was demonstrated in her determination to become
part of Haggershaven. Her reaction to the visit of the
Spanish official was translated into an unyielding program.
She had gone resolutely to Thomas Haggerwells, telling him
she knew quite well she had neither the aptitudes nor qualifications
for admission to fellowship, nor did she ask it. All<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>
she wanted was to live in what she regarded as her only
home. She would gladly do any work from washing dishes
to making clothes—anything she was asked. When she
came of age she would turn over whatever money she inherited
to the haven without conditions.</p>
<p>He had patiently pointed out that a Spanish subject was
a citizen of a far wealthier and more powerful nation than
the United States; as an heiress she could enjoy the luxuries
and distractions of Madrid or Havana and eventually make
a suitable marriage. How silly it would be to give up all
these advantages to become an unnoticed, penniless drudge
for a group of cranks near York, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>“He was quite right you know, Catty,” I said when she
told me about the interview.</p>
<p>She shook her head vigorously, so the loose black curls
swirled back and forth. “You think so, Hodge, because you
are a hard, prudent Yankee.”</p>
<p>I opened my eyes rather wide; this was certainly not
the description I would have applied to myself.</p>
<p>“And also because you have Anglo-Saxon chivalry, always
rescuing maidens in distress and thinking they must
sit on a cushion after that and sew a fine seam. Well, I can
sew a fine seam, but sitting on cushions would bore me.
Women are not as delicate as you think, Hodge. Nor as
terrifying.”</p>
<p>Was this last directed toward Barbara? Perhaps Catty
had claws. “There’s a difference,” I said, “between cushion-sitting
and living where books and pictures and music are
not regarded with suspicion.”</p>
<p>“That’s right,” she agreed; “Haggershaven.”</p>
<p>“No, Haggershaven is an anomaly in the United States
and in spite of everything it cannot help but be infected by
the rest of the country. I meant the great, successful nations
who can afford the breathing-spaces for culture.”</p>
<p>“But you do not go to them.”</p>
<p>“No. This is my country.”</p>
<p>“And it will be mine too. After all it was made in the
first place by people willing to give up luxuries. Besides
you are contradicting yourself: if Haggershaven cannot
avoid being infected by what is outside it, neither can<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
any other spot. Part of the world cannot be civilized if another
part is backward.”</p>
<p>There was no doubt her demure expression hid stern
resolution. Whatever else it hid was not so certain. Evidently
Mr Haggerwells realized the quality of her determination
for eventually he proposed to the fellows that she
be allowed to stay and the offer of her money be rejected.
The motion was carried, with only Barbara, who spoke long
and bitterly against it, voting “no.”</p>
<p>In accepting Catty out of charity, the fellows unexpectedly
made an advantageous bargain. Not merely because
she was always eager to help, but for her specific contribution
to the haven’s economy. Before this, clothing the
haven had been a haphazard affair; suits or dresses were
bought with money which would otherwise have been contributed
to the general fund, or if the fellow had no outside
income, by a grant from the same fund. Catty’s artistry with
the needle made a revolution. Not only did she patch and
mend and alter; she designed and made clothes, conveying
some of her enthusiasm to the other women. The haven
was better and more handsomely clad and a great deal of
money was saved. Only Barbara refused to have her silk
trousers and jackets made at home.</p>
<p>It was not entirely easy to adjust to the new Catty, the
busy, efficient, selfreliant creature. Her expressive voice
could be enchanting even when she was speaking nonsense—and
Catty rarely spoke nonsense. I don’t mean she was
priggish or solemn, quite the contrary; her spontaneous
laughter was quick and frequent. But she was essentially
not frivolous; she felt deeply, her loyalties were strong and
enduring.</p>
<p>I missed her former all too open devotion to me. It had
caused embarrassment, impatience, annoyance; now it was
withdrawn I felt deprived and even pettish at its lack. Not
that I had anything to offer in return or considered that any
emotion was called for from me. Though I didnt express it
to myself so openly at the time, what I regretted was the
sensually valuable docility of a beautiful woman. Of course
there was a confusion here: I was regretting what had never
been, for Catty and the nameless dumb girl were different<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>
individuals. Even her always undeniable beauty was
changed and heightened; what I really wanted was for
the Catty of now to act like the Catty of then. And without
any reciprocal gesture from me.</p>
<p>The new Catty no more than the old was disingenuous
or coquettish. She was simply mature, dignified, selfcontained
and just a trifle amusedly aloof. Also she was very
busy. She did not pretend to any interest in other men; at
the same time she had clearly outgrown her childish dependence
on me. She refused any competition with Barbara.
When I sought her out she was there, but she made
no attempt to call me to her.</p>
<p>I was not so unversed that I didnt occasionally suspect
this might be a calculated tactic. But when I recalled the
utter innocence of her look I reflected I would have to have
a very nice conceit of myself indeed to believe the two most
attractive women at Haggershaven were contending for me.</p>
<p>I don’t know precisely when I began to see Catty with a
predatory male eye. Doubtless it was during one of those
times when Barbara and I had quarrelled, and when she
had called attention to Catty by accusing me of dallying
with her. I was essentially as polygamous as Barbara was
polyandrous or Catty monogamous; once the idea had
formed I made no attempt to reject it.</p>
<p>Nor, for a very long time, did I accept it in any way except
academically. There are sensual values also in tantalizing,
and if these values are perverse I can only say I was
still immature in many ways. Additionally there must have
been an element of fear of Catty, the same fear which maintained
a reserve against Barbara. For the time being at
least it seemed much pleasanter to talk lightly and inconsequentially
with her; to laugh and boast of my progress, to
discuss Haggershaven and the world, than to face our elementary
relationship.</p>
<p>My fourth winter at the haven had been an unusually
mild one; spring was early and wet. Kimi Agati who, with
her children, annually gathered quantities of mushrooms
from the woodlots and pastures, claimed this year’s supply
was so large that she needed help, and conscripted Catty
and me. Catty protested she didnt know a mushroom from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>
a toadstool; Kimi immediately gave her a brief but thorough
course in thallophytology. “And Hodge will help you;
he’s a country boy.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I said. “I make no guarantees though; I
havent been a country boy for a long time.”</p>
<p>“I’m not so sure,” said Kimi thoughtfully. “You two take
the small southeast woodlot; Fumio can have the big pasture,
Eiko the small one; Yosh and I will pick in the west
woodlot.”</p>
<p>We carried a picnic lunch and nests of large baskets
which were to be put by the edge of the woodlots when
full; late in the afternoon a cart would pick them up and
bring them in for drying. The air was warm even under
the leafless branches; the damp ground steamed cosily.</p>
<p>“Kimi was certainly right,” I commented. “Theyre thick
as can be.”</p>
<p>“I don’t see....” She stooped gracefully; “Oh, is this
one?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” I said, “And there, and there. Not that white
thing over there though.”</p>
<p>We filled our first baskets without moving more than a
few yards. “At this rate we’ll have them all full by noon.”</p>
<p>“And go back for more?”</p>
<p>“I suppose. Or just wander around.”</p>
<p>“Oh.... Look, Hodge—what’s this?”
“What?”</p>
<p>“This.” She showed me the puffball in her hands, looking
inquiringly up.</p>
<p>I looked down casually; suddenly there was nothing
casual between us any more, nor ever would be again. I
looked down at a woman I wanted desperately, feverishly,
immediately. The shock of desire was a weight on my chest,
expelling the air from my lungs.</p>
<p>“Goodness—is it some rare specimen or something?”
“Puffball,” I managed to say. “No good.”</p>
<p>I hardly spoke, I could hardly speak, as we filled our
second baskets. I was sure the pounding of my heart must
show through my shirt, and several times I thought I saw
her looking curiously at me. “Let’s eat now,” I suggested
hoarsely.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span></p>
<p>I found a pine with low-hanging boughs and tore down
enough to make a dry, soft place to sit while Catty unpacked
our picnic. “Here’s an egg,” she said; “I’m starved.”</p>
<p>We ate; that is, she ate and I pretended to. I was half
dazed, half terrified. I watched her swift motions, the turn
of her head, the clean, sharp way she bit into the food,
and averted my eyes every time her glance crossed mine.</p>
<p>“Well,” she murmured at last; “I suppose we mustnt sit
idle any longer. Come on, lazy; back to work.”</p>
<p>“Catty,” I whispered. “Catty.”</p>
<p>“What is it, Hodge?”</p>
<p>“Wait.”</p>
<p>Obediently she paused. I reached over and took her in
my arms. She looked at me, not startled, but questioning.
Just as my mouth reached hers she moved slightly so that
I kissed her cheek instead of her lips. She did not struggle
but lay passively, with the same questioning expression.</p>
<p>I held her, pressing her against the pine boughs, and
found her mouth. I kissed her eyes and throat and mouth
again. Her eyes stayed open and she did not respond. I undid
the top of her dress and pressed my face between her
breasts.</p>
<p>“Hodge.”</p>
<p>I paid no attention.</p>
<p>“Hodge, wait. Listen to me. If this is what you want
you know I will not try to stop you. But Hodge, be sure. Be
very sure.”</p>
<p>“I want you, Catty.”</p>
<p>“Do you? Really want <i>me</i>, I mean.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know what you mean. I want you.”</p>
<p>But it was already too late; I had made the fatal error
of pausing to listen. Angrily I moved away, picked up my
basket and sullenly began to search for mushrooms again.
My hands still trembled and there was a quiver in my legs.
To complement my mood a cloud drifted across the sun
and the warm woods became chilly.</p>
<p>“Hodge.”</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>“Please don’t be angry. Or ashamed. If you are I shall
be sorry.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span></p>
<p>“I don’t understand.”</p>
<p>She laughed. “Oh my dear Hodge. Isnt that what men
always say to women? And isnt it always true?”</p>
<p>Suddenly the day was no longer spoiled. The tension
melted and we went on picking mushrooms with a new
and fresh innocence.</p>
<p>After this I could no longer keep all thoughts of Catty
out of the intimacy with Barbara; now for the first time
her jealousy had grounds. I felt guilty toward both, not because
I desired both, but because I didnt totally desire
either.</p>
<p>Now, years later, I condemn myself for the lost rapturous
moments; at the time I procrastinated and hesitated as
though I had eternity in which to make decisions. I was,
as Tyss had said, the spectator type, waiting to be acted
upon, waiting for events to push me where they would.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C16"><i>16.</i> <i>OF VARIED SUBJECTS</i></h2>
</div>
<p>“I can’t think of anything more futile,” said Kimi,
“than to be an architect at this time in the United States.”</p>
<p>Her husband grinned. “You forgot to add, ‘of Oriental
extraction.’”</p>
<p>Catty said, “Ive never understood. Of course I don’t remember
too well, but it seems to me Spanish people don’t
have the same racial fanaticism. Certainly the Portuguese,
French and Dutch don’t. Even the English are not quite so
certain of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Only the Americans, in
the United States and the Confederate States too, judge
everything by color.”</p>
<p>“The case of the Confederacy is reasonably simple,” I
said. “There are about fifty million Confederate citizens
and two hundred and fifty million subjects. If white supremacy
wasnt the cornerstone of Southron policy a visitor
couldnt tell the ruling class at a glance. Even as it is he
sometimes has a hard time, what with sunburn. It’s more
complicated here. Remember, we lost a war, the most important
war in our history, which was not unconnected with
skin color.”</p>
<p>“In Japan,” said Hiro, “the lighter colored people, the
Ainu, used to be looked down on. Just as the Christians
were once driven underground at exactly the same time
they themselves drove the Jews underground in Spain and
Portugal.”</p>
<p>“The Jews,” murmured Catty vaguely; “are there still
Jews?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span></p>
<p>“Oh yes,” I said. “Several millions in Uganda-Eretz
which the British made a self-governing dominion back in
1933 under the first Labour cabinet. And numbers most
everywhere else, except in the German Union since the
massacres of 1905-1913.”</p>
<p>“Which were much more thorough than the anti-Oriental
massacres in the United States,” supplied Hiro.</p>
<p>“Much more thorough,” I agreed. “After all, scattered
handfuls of Asians were left alive here.”</p>
<p>“My parents and Kimi’s grandparents among them. How
lucky they were to be American Japanese instead of European
Jews.”</p>
<p>“There are Jews in the United States,” announced Kimi.
“I met one once. She was a theosophist and told me I
ought to learn the wisdom of the East.”</p>
<p>“Very few of them. There were about two hundred thousand
at the close of the War of Southron Independence on
both sides of the border. After the election of 1872, General
Grant’s Order Number Ten, expelling all Jews from
the Department of the Missouri, which had been rescinded
immediately by President Lincoln, was retroactively re-enacted
by President Butler, in spite of the fact that the
United States no longer controlled that territory. Henceforth
Jews were treated like all other colored peoples, Negroes,
Orientals, Indians and South Sea Islanders: as undesirables
to be bribed to leave or to be driven out of the
country.”</p>
<p>“This is very dull stuff,” said Hiro. “Let me tell you
about a hydrogen reaction—”
“No, please,” begged Catty. “Let me listen to Hodge.”</p>
<p>“Good heavens,” exclaimed Kimi, “when do you ever
do anything else? I’d think you’d be tired by now.”</p>
<p>“She will marry him one of these days,” predicted Hiro;
“then the poor fellow will never be allowed to disguise a
lecture as a conversation again.”</p>
<p>Catty blushed, a deep red blush. I laughed to cover some
constraint. Kimi said, “Go-betweens are out of fashion;
youre a century behind times, Hiro. I suppose you think
a woman ought to walk two paces respectfully behind her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span>
husband. Actually, it’s only in the United States women
can’t vote or serve on juries.”</p>
<p>“Except in the state of Deseret,” I reminded her.</p>
<p>“That’s just bait; the Mormons gave us equality because
they were running short of women.”</p>
<p>“Not the way I heard it. The Latter Day Saints have
been the nearest thing to a prosperous group in the country.
Women have been moving there for years, it’s so easy to
get married. All the grumbling about polygamy has come
from men who can’t stand the competition.”</p>
<p>Catty glanced at me, then looked away.</p>
<p>Had she, I wondered afterward, been thinking how Barbara
would have rejected my observation furiously? Or
about that day in the spring? Or about Hiro’s earlier comment?
I thought about it, briefly, myself.</p>
<p>I also thought of how easily Catty fitted in with the
Agatis and contrasted it with the tension everyone would
have felt if Barbara had been there. One could love Barbara,
or hate her or dislike her or even, I supposed, be
indifferent to her; the one thing impossible was to be comfortable
with her.</p>
<p>The final choice (was it final? I don’t know. I shall never
know now) hardened when I had been nearly six years at
Haggershaven. It had been “on” between Barbara and me
for the longest stretch I could recall and I had even begun
to wonder if some paradoxical equilibrium had not been
established which would allow me to be her lover without
vexation and at the same time innocently enjoy a bond with
Catty.</p>
<p>As always when the hostility between us slackened, Barbara
spoke of her work. In spite of such occasional confidences
it was still not her habit to talk of it with me. That
intimacy was obviously reserved for Ace, and I didnt begrudge
him it, for after all he understood what it was all
about and I didnt. This time she was so full of the subject
she could not hold back, even from one who could hardly
distinguish between thermodynamics and kinesthetics.</p>
<p>“Hodge,” she said, gray eyes greenish with excitement,
“I’m not going to write a book.”</p>
<p>“That’s nice,” I answered idly. “New, too. Saves time,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
paper, ink. Sets a different standard; from now on scholars
will be known as ‘Jones, who didnt write <i>The Theory of
Tidal Waves’</i>,‘Smith, unauthor of <i>Gas and Its Properties</i>,’
or ‘Backmaker, non-recorder of <i>Gettysburg And After</i>.’”</p>
<p>“Silly. I only meant it’s become customary to spend a
lifetime formulating principles; then someone else comes
along and puts your principles into practice. It seems more
sensible for me to demonstrate my own conclusions instead
of writing about them.”</p>
<p>“Yes, sure. Youre going to demonstrate ... uh ...?”</p>
<p>“Cosmic entity, of course. What do you think Ive been
talking about?”</p>
<p>I tried to remember what she had said about cosmic entity.
“You mean youre going to try to turn matter into
space or something like that?”</p>
<p>“Something like that. I intend to translate matter-energy
into terms of space-time.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” I said, “equations and symbols and all that.”</p>
<p>“I just said I wasnt going to write a book.”</p>
<p>“But how—” I started up as the impact struck me.
“Youre going to ...” I groped for words. “Youre going
to build a ... an engine which will move through time?”</p>
<p>“Putting it crudely. But close enough for a layman.”</p>
<p>“You once told me your work was theoretical. That you
were no vulgar mechanic.”</p>
<p>“I’ll become one.”</p>
<p>“Barbara, youre crazy! As a philosophical abstraction
this theory of yours is interesting—”
“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused
the yokelry.”</p>
<p>“Barbara, listen to me. Midbin—”
“I havent the faintest interest in Oliver’s stodgy fantasies.”</p>
<p>“He has in yours though, and so have I. Don’t you see,
this determination of yours is based on the fantasy of going
back through time to—uh—injure your mother—”
“Oliver Midbin is a coarse, stupid, insensate lout. He
has taught the dumb to speak, but he’s too much of a fool
to understand anyone of normal intelligence. He has a set<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
of idiotic theories about diseased emotions and he fits all
facts into them even if it means chopping them up to do it
or inventing new ones to piece them out. Injure my mother
indeed! I have no more interest in her than she ever had
in me.”</p>
<p>“Ah, Barbara—”
“‘Ah Barbara,’” she mimicked. “Run along to your
pompous windbag of a Midbin or your oh-so-willing cow-eyed
Spanish doxy—”
“Barbara, I’m talking as a friend. Leave Midbin and
Catty and personalities out of it and just look at it this
way. Don’t you see the difference between promulgating a
theory and trying a practical demonstration which will certainly
appear to the world as going over the borderline into
charlatanism? Like a spiritualist medium or—”
“That’s enough! ‘Charlatan’! You unspeakable guttersnipe.
What do you know of anything beyond the seduction
of cretins? Go back to your trade, you errand boy!”</p>
<p>I seemed to remember that once before an incident had
ended precisely this way. “Barbara—”
Her hand caught me across my mouth. Then she strode
away.</p>
<p>The fellows of Haggershaven were not enthusiastic for
her project. Even as she outlined it to them in more sober
language than she had to me it still sounded outlandish, like
the recurrent idea of a telegraph without wires or a rocket
to the moon. Besides, 1950 was a bad year. The war was
coming closer; at the least, what was left of the independence
of the United States was likely to be extinguished. Our
energies had to be directed toward survival rather than new
and expensive ventures. Still, Barbara Haggerwells was a
famous figure commanding great respect, and she had cost
them little so far, beyond paper and pencils. Reluctantly
the fellows voted an appropriation.</p>
<p>An old barn, not utilized for years, but still sound, was
turned over to Barbara, and Kimi was delighted to plan,
design and supervise the necessary changes. Ace and a
group of the fellows attacked the job vigorously, sawing
and hammering, bolting iron beams together, piping in gas<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>
for reflecting lights to enable them to work at night as well.</p>
<p>I believe I took no more interest than was inescapable
as a fellow of Haggershaven. I had no doubt that the money
and labor were being wasted, and I foresaw a terrible disappointment
for Barbara when she realized the impossibility
of her project. For myself I did not think she would
play any further part of importance in my life.</p>
<p>We had not spoken since the quarrel, nor was there inclination
on either side toward coming together again. I
could not guess at Barbara’s feelings; mine were those of
relief, unmixed with regret. I would not have erased all
there had been between us, but I was satisfied to have it
in the past. The raging desire vanished, gradually replaced
by an affection of sorts; I wanted no more of that tempestuous
passion, instead I felt aloofly protective and understanding.</p>
<p>For at last I was absorbed with Catty. The raw hunger
of the moment when I first realized I wanted her came back
with renewed force, but now other, more diffused feelings
were equally part of my emotion. I knew she could make
me jealous as Barbara could not; at the same time I could
see tranquillity beyond turbulent wanting, a tranquillity
never possible with Barbara.</p>
<p>But my belated realization of what Catty meant to me
was no reaction to Barbara or connected with the breaking
of that tie. The need for Catty was engendered by Catty
alone, and for Catty apart from anything I had ever felt
for another. It was in some ways an entirely new hunger,
as the man’s need transcends the youth’s. I understood now
what her question in the woodlot meant and at last I
could truthfully answer.</p>
<p>She kissed me back, freely and strongly. “I love you,
Hodge,” she said; “I have loved you even through the bad
dream of not being able to speak.”</p>
<p>“When I was so unfeeling.”</p>
<p>“I loved you even when you were impatient; I tried to
make myself prettier for you. You know you have never
said I was pretty.”</p>
<p>“You arent, Catty. Youre extraordinarily beautiful.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span></p>
<p>“I think I would rather be pretty. Beauty sounds forbidding.
Oh, Hodge, if I did not love you so much I would not
have stopped you that day.”</p>
<p>“I’m not sure I understand that.”</p>
<p>“No? Well, it is not necessary now. Sometimes I wondered
if I had been right after all, or if you would think
it was because of Barbara.”</p>
<p>“Wasnt it?”</p>
<p>“No. I was never jealous of her. We Garcías are supposed
to have Morisco blood; perhaps I have the harem
outlook of my dark Muslim ancestors. Would you like me
to be your black concubine?”</p>
<p>“No,” I said. “I’d like you to be my wife. In any colors
you have.”</p>
<p>“Spoken with real gallantry; you will be a courtier yet,
Hodge. But that was a proposal, wasnt it?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” I answered grimly; “if you will consider one from
me. I can’t think of any good reason why you should.”</p>
<p>She put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my
eyes. “I don’t know what reason has to do with it. It is
what I always intended; that was why I blushed so when
Hiro Agati blurted out what everyone could see.”</p>
<p>Later I said, “Catty, can you ever forgive me for the
wasted years? You say you werent jealous of Barbara, but
surely if she and I—that is ... anyway, forgive me.”
“Dear Hodge, there’s nothing to forgive. Love is not a
business transaction, nor a case at law in which justice is
sought, nor a reward for having good qualities. I understand
you, Hodge, better I think than you understand
yourself. You are not satisfied with what is readily obtained,
otherwise you would have been content back in—what is
the name?—Wappinger Falls. I have known this for a long
time and I could, I think—you must excuse my vanity—have
interested you at any moment by pretending fickleness.
Just as I could have held you if I had given in that
day. Besides, I think you will make a better husband for
realizing you could not deal with Barbara.”
I can’t say I entirely enjoyed this speech. I felt, in fact,
rather humiliated, or at least healthily humbled. Which was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>
no doubt what she intended, and as it should be. I never
had the idea she was frail or insipid.</p>
<p>Nor did Catty’s explanation of a harem outlook satisfactorily
account for the sudden friendliness of the two
women after the engagement was announced. That Barbara
should soften so toward a successful rival was incomprehensible
and also disturbing.</p>
<p>Because both were fully occupied they actually spent little
time together, but Catty visited the workshop, as they
called the converted barn, whenever she had the chance
and her real admiration for Barbara grew so that I heard
too often of her genius, courage and imagination. I could
hardly ask Catty to forego society I had so recently found
enchanting nor establish a taboo against mention of a name
I had lately whispered with ardor; still I felt a little foolish,
and not quite as important as I might otherwise have
thought myself.</p>
<p>Not that Catty didnt have proper respect and enthusiasm
for my fortunes. I had completed my notes for <i>Chancellorsville
to the End</i>—that is, I had a mass of clues, guideposts,
keys, ideas, and emphases which would serve as skeleton
for a work which might take years to write—and Catty
was the audience to whom I explained and expounded and
used as a prototype of the reader I might reach. Volume
one was roughly drafted, and we were to be married as
soon as it was finished, shortly after my thirtieth and Catty’s
twenty-fourth birthday. There was little doubt the book
would bring an offer from one of the great Confederate
universities, but Catty was firm for a cottage like the
Agatis’, and I could not conceive of being foolish enough
to leave Haggershaven.</p>
<p>From Catty’s talk I knew Barbara was running into increasing
difficulties now the workshop was complete and
actual construction begun of what was referred to, with
unnecessary crypticism I thought, as HX-1. The impending
war created scarcities, particularly of such materials as
steel and copper, of which latter metal HX-1 seemed inordinately
greedy. I was not surprised when the fellows
apologetically refused Barbara a new appropriation.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span></p>
<p>Next day Catty said, “Hodge, you know the haven
wouldnt take my money.”</p>
<p>“And quite right too. Let the rest of us put in what we
get; we owe it to the haven anyway. But the debt is the
other way round in your case and you should keep your
independence.”</p>
<p>“Hodge, I’m going to give it all to Barbara for her
HX-1.”</p>
<p>“What? Oh, nonsense!”</p>
<p>“Is it any more nonsensical for me to put in money I
didnt do anything to get than for her and Ace to put in
time and knowledge and labor?”</p>
<p>“Yes, because she’s got a crazy idea and Ace has never
been quite sane where she’s concerned. If you go ahead and
do this you’ll be as crazy as they are.”</p>
<p>When Catty laughed I remembered with a pang the long
months when that lovely sound had been strangled by terror
inside her. I also thought with shame of my own
failure; had I appreciated her when her need was greatest
I might have eased the long, painful ordeal of restoring
her voice.</p>
<p>“Perhaps I am crazy. Do you think the haven would
make me a fellow on that basis? Anyway, I believe in
Barbara even if the rest of you don’t. Not that I’m criticizing;
you were right to be cautious. You have more to consider
than demonstration of the truth of a theory which
can’t conceivably have a material value; I don’t have to
take any such long view. Anyway I believe in her. Or perhaps
I feel I owe her something. With my money she can
finish her project. I only tell you this because you may
not want to marry me under the circumstances.”</p>
<p>“You think I’m marrying you for your money?”</p>
<p>She smiled. “Dear Hodge. You are in some ways so
young; I hear the wounded dignity in your voice. No, I
know very well you arent marrying me for money, that it
never occurred to you it might be a good idea. That would
be too practical, too grown up, too un-Hodgelike. I think
you might not want to marry a woman who’d give all her
money away. Especially to Barbara Haggerwells.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span></p>
<p>“Catty, are you doing this absurd thing to get rid of me?
Or to test me?”</p>
<p>This time she again laughed loud. “Now I’m sure you
will marry me after all and turn out to be a puzzled but
amenable husband. You are my true Hodge, who studies
a war because he can’t understand anything simpler or
subtler.”</p>
<p>She wasnt to be dissuaded from the quixotic gesture. I
might not understand subtleties but I was sure I understood
Barbara well enough. Foreseeing her request for more
funds would be turned down, she must have cultivated
Catty deliberately in order to use her. Now she’d gotten
what she wanted I confidently expected her to drop Catty
or revert to her accustomed virulence.</p>
<p>She did neither. If anything the amity grew. Catty’s vocabulary
added words like “magnet,” “coil,” “induction,”
“particle,” “light-year,” “continuum” and many others
either incomprehensible or uninteresting to me. Breathlessly
she described the strange, asymmetric structure taking
shape in the workshop, while my mind was busy with
Ewell’s Corps and parrott guns and the weather chart of
southern Pennsylvania for July, 1863.</p>
<p>The great publishing firm of Ticknor, Harcourt & Knopf
contracted for my book—there was no publisher in the
United States equipped to handle it—and sent me a sizable
advance in Confederate dollars which became even more
sizable converted into our money. I read the proofs of
volume one in a state of semiconsciousness, sent the inevitable
telegram changing a footnote on page 99, and
waited for the infuriating mails to bring me my complimentary
copies. The day after they arrived (with a horrifying
typographical error right in the middle of page 12),
Catty and I were married.</p>
<p>Dear Catty. Dear, dear Catty.</p>
<p>With the approval of the fellows we used part of the
publisher’s advance for a honeymoon. We spent it—that
part of it in which we had time for anything except being
alone together—going over nearby battlefields of the last
year of the War of Southron Independence.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span></p>
<p>It was Catty’s first excursion away from Haggershaven
since the night I brought her there. Looking at the world
outside through her perceptions, at once insulated and
made hypersensitive by her new status, I was shocked
afresh at the harsh indifference, the dull poverty, the fear,
brutality, frenzy and cynicism highlighting the strange resignation
to impending fate which characterized our civilization.
It was not a case of eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow
we die; rather it was, let us live meanly and trust
to luck—tomorrow’s luck is bound to be worse.</p>
<p>We settled down in the autumn of 1951 in a cottage
designed by Kimi and built by the fellows during our absence.
It gave on the Agatis’ cherished garden and we were
both moved by this evidence of love, particularly after
what we had seen and heard on our trip. Mr Haggerwells
made a speech, filled with classical allusions, welcoming
us back as though we had been gone for years; Midbin
looked anxiously into Catty’s face as though to assure himself
I had not, in my new role as husband, treated her so ill
as to bring on a new emotional upset; and the other fellows
made appropriate gestures. Even Barbara stopped by
long enough to comment that the house was ridiculously
small, but she supposed Kimi’s movable partitions helped.</p>
<p>I immediately began working on volume two and Catty
took up her sewing again. She also resumed her visits to
Barbara’s workshop; again I heard detailed accounts of
my former sweetheart’s progress. HX-1 was to be completed
in the late spring, or early summer. I was not surprised
at Barbara’s faith surviving actual construction of
the thing, but that such otherwise level-headed people as
Ace and Catty could envisage breathlessly the miracles
about to happen was beyond me. Ace, even after all these
years, was still bemused—but Catty ...?</p>
<p>Just before the turn of the year I got the following letter:</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>
LEE & WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY<br />
Department of History<br />
</p>
<p>
Leesburg, District of Calhounia, CSA.<br />
December 19, 1951<br />
<br />
Mr. Hodgins M. Backmaker<br />
“Haggershaven”<br />
York,<br />
Pennsylvania, USA.<br />
<br />
<i>Sir</i>:<br />
</p>
<p><i>On page 407 of</i> Chancellorsville to the End, <i>volume
I</i>, Turning Tides, <i>you write, “Chronology and topography—timing
and the use of space—were to be the
decisive factors, rather than population and industry.
Stuart’s detachment, which might have proved disastrous,
turned out extraordinarily fortunate for Lee, as
we shall see in the next volume. Of course the absence
of cavalry might have been decisive if the Round Tops
had not been occupied by the Southrons on July 1....”</i></p>
<p><i>Now, sir, evidently in your forthcoming analysis of
Gettysburg you hold (as I presume most Yankees do)
to the theory of fortuitousness. We Southrons naturally
ascribe the victory to the supreme genius of
General Lee, regarding the factors of time and space
not as forces in themselves but as opportunities for the
display of his talents.</i></p>
<p><i>Needless to say, I hardly expect you to change your
opinions, rooted as they must be in national pride. I
only ask that before you commit them, and the conclusions
shaped by them, to print, you satisfy yourself
as an historian, of their validity in this particular case.
In other words, sir, as one of your readers (and may
I add, one who has enjoyed your work), I should like<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span>
to be assured that you have studied this classic battle
as carefully as you have the engagements described in
volume I.</i></p>
<p>
<i>With earnest wishes for your success,<br />
I remain, sir<br />
Cordially yours,<br />
Jefferson Davis Polk</i><br />
</p>
</div>
<p>This letter from Dr Polk, the foremost historian of our
day, author of the monumental biography, <i>The Great Lee</i>,
produced a crisis in my life. Had the Confederate professor
pointed out flaws in my work, or even reproached me
for undertaking it at all without adequate equipment I
would, I trust, have acknowledged the reproof and continued
to the best of my ability. But this letter was an accolade.
Without condescension Dr Polk admitted me to the
ranks of serious historians, only asking me to consider the
depth of my evaluation.</p>
<p>Truth is, I was not without increasing doubts of my own.
Doubts I had not allowed to rise to the surface of my mind
and disturb my plans. Polk’s letter brought them into the
open.</p>
<p>I had read everything available. I had been over the
ground between the Maryland line, South Mountain, Carlisle
and the haven until I could draw a detail map from
memory. I had turned up diaries, letters and accounts
which had not only never been published, but which were
not known to exist until I hunted them down. I had so
steeped myself in the period I was writing about that sometimes
the two worlds seemed interchangeable and I could
live partly in one, partly in the other.</p>
<p>Yet with all this, I was not sure I had the whole story,
even in the sense of wholeness that historians, knowing
they can never collect every detail, accept. I was not sure
I had the grand scene in perfectly proper perspective. I admitted
to myself the possibility that I had perhaps been
too rash, too precipitate, in undertaking <i>Chancellorsville to
the End</i> so soon. I knew the shadowy sign, the one which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
says in effect, <i>You are ready</i>, had not been given. My
confidence was shaken.</p>
<p>Was the fault in me, in my temperament and character,
rather than in my preparation and use of materials? Was
I drawing back from committing myself, from acting, from
doing? That I had written the first volume was no positive
answer, for it was but the fraction of a whole deed; if I
withdrew now I could still preserve my standing as an
onlooker.</p>
<p>But not to act was itself an action and answered neither
Dr Polk nor myself. Besides, what could I do? The entire
work was contracted for. The second volume was promised
for delivery some eighteen months hence. My notes for it
were complete; this was no question of revising, but of
wholly re-examining, revaluing and probably discarding
them for an entirely new start. It was a job so much bigger
than the original, one so discouraging, I felt I couldnt
face it. It would be corrupt to produce a work lacking absolute
conviction and cowardly to produce none.</p>
<p>Catty responded to my awkward recapitulation in a
way at once heartening and strange. “Hodge,” she said,
“youre changing and developing, and for the better, even
though I love you as you were. Don’t be afraid to put the
book aside for a year—ten years if you have to. You must
do it so it will satisfy yourself; never mind what the publishers
or the public say. But Hodge, you mustnt, in your
anxiety, or your foolish fear of passiveness, you mustnt try
any shortcuts. Promise me that.”
“I don’t know what youre talking about, Catty dear.
There are no shortcuts in writing history.”</p>
<p>She looked at me thoughtfully. “Remember that, Hodge.
Oh, remember it.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C17"><i>17.</i> <i>HX-1</i></h2>
</div>
<p>I could not bring myself to follow the promptings
of my conscience and Catty’s advice, nor could I use my
notes as though Dr Polk’s letter had never come to shatter
my complacency. As a consequence—without deliberately
committing myself to abandon the book—I worked not at
all, thus adding to my feelings of guilt and unworthiness.
The tasks assigned by the fellows for the general welfare
of the haven were not designed to take a major part of my
time, and though I produced all sorts of revolutions in the
stables and barns, I still managed to wander about, fretful
and irritable, keeping Catty from her work, interrupting
the Agatis and Midbin—I could not bring myself to discuss
my problems with him—and generally making myself a
nuisance. Inevitably I found my way into Barbara’s workshop.</p>
<p>She and Ace had done a thorough job on the old barn.
I thought I recognized Kimi’s touch in the structural
changes of the walls, the strong beams and rows of slanted-in
windows which admitted light and shut out glare, but
the rest must have been shaped by Barbara’s needs.</p>
<p>Iron beams held up a catwalk running in a circle about
ten feet overhead. On the catwalk there were at intervals
what appeared to be batteries of telescopes, all pointed
inward and downward at the center of the floor. Just inside
the columns was a continuous ring of clear glass, perhaps
four inches in diameter, fastened to the beams with
glass hooks. Closer inspection proved the ring not to be in
one piece but in sections, ingeniously held together with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
glass couplings. Back from this circle, around the walls,
were various engines, all enclosed except for dial faces and
regulators and all dwarfed by a mammoth one towering in
one corner. From the roof was suspended a large, polished
reflector.</p>
<p>There was no one in the barn and I wandered about,
cautiously avoiding the mysterious apparatus. For a moment
I meditated, basely perhaps, that all this had been
paid for with my wife’s money. Then I berated myself, for
Catty owed all to the haven, as I did. The money might
have been put to better use, but there was no guarantee
it would have been more productive allotted to astronomy
or zoology. During eight years I’d seen many promising
schemes come to nothing.</p>
<p>“Like it, Hodge?”</p>
<p>Barbara had come up, unheard, behind me. This was the
first time we had been alone together since our break, two
years before.</p>
<p>“It looks like a tremendous amount of work,” I evaded.</p>
<p>“It was a tremendous amount of work.” For the first
time I noticed that her cheeks were flushed. She had lost
weight and there were deep hollows beneath her eyes. “This
construction has been the least of it. Now it’s done. Or has
begun. Depending how you look at it.”</p>
<p>“All done?”</p>
<p>She nodded, triumph accenting the strained look on her
face. “First test today.”</p>
<p>“Oh well ... in that case—”
“Don’t go, Hodge. Please. I meant to ask you and Catty
to the more formal trial, but now youre here for the preliminary
I’m glad. Ace and Father and Oliver will be along
in a minute.”</p>
<p>“Midbin?”</p>
<p>The familiar arrogance showed briefly. “I insisted. It’ll
be nice to show him the mind can produce something besides
fantasies and hysterical hallucinations.”</p>
<p>I started to speak, then swallowed my words. The dig
at Catty was insignificant compared with the supreme
confidence, the abnormal assurance prompting invitations
to witness a test which could only reveal the impossibility<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span>
of applying her cherished theories. I felt an overwhelming
pity. “Surely,” I said at last, seeking to make some preparation
for the disillusionment certain to come, “surely you
don’t expect it to work the first time?”</p>
<p>“Why not? There are sure to be adjustments to be
made, allowances for erratic chronology caused by phenomena
like the pull of comets and so forth. There might
even have to be major alterations, though I doubt it. It
may be some time before Ace can set me down at the exact
year, month, day, hour and minute agreed upon. But the
fact of space-time-energy-matter correspondence can just
as well be established this afternoon as next year.”</p>
<p>She was unbelievably at ease for someone whose lifework
was about to be weighed. I have shown more nervousness
discussing a disputed date with the honorary secretary
of a local historical society.</p>
<p>“Sit down,” she invited; “there’s nothing to do or see till
Ace comes. Ive missed you, Hodge.”</p>
<p>I felt this was a dangerous remark, and wished I’d stayed
far away from the workshop. I hooked my leg over a stool—there
were no chairs—and coughed to hide the fact I
was afraid to answer, Ive missed you too; and afraid not to.</p>
<p>“Tell me about your own work, Hodge. Catty says youre
having difficulties.”</p>
<p>I was faintly annoyed with Catty, but whether for confiding
in Barbara at all or specifically for revealing something
unheroic, I didnt stop to consider. At any rate this
annoyance diluted my feeling of disloyalty for conversing
with Barbara at all. Or it may be the old, long-established
bond—I almost wrote, of sympathy, but it was so much
more complex than the word indicates—was reawakened
by proximity and put me in the mood to tell my troubles.
It is even possible I had the altruistic purpose of fortifying
Barbara against inevitable disappointment on a misery-loves-company
basis. Be that as it may, I found myself
pouring out the whole story.</p>
<p>She jumped up and took my hands in hers. Her eyes
were gray and warm. “Hodge! It’s wonderful—don’t you
see?”
“Oh....” I was completely confused. “I ... uh....”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span></p>
<p>“The solution. The answer. The means. Look: now you
can go back, back to the past in your own person. You can
see everything with your own eyes instead of relying on
accounts of what other people said happened.”</p>
<p>“But ... but—”
“You can verify every fact, study every move, every
actor. You can write history as no one ever did before,
for youll be writing as a witness, yet with the perspective
of a different period. Youll be taking the mind of the present,
with its judgment and its knowledge of the patterns,
back to receive the impressions of the past. It almost seems
HX-1 was devised especially for this.”</p>
<p>There was no doubt she believed, that she was really and
unselfishly glad her work could aid mine. I was overcome
by pity, helpless to soften the disillusionment so soon to
come and filled with an irrational hatred of the thing she
had built and which was about to destroy her.</p>
<p>I was saved from having to mask my emotions by the
arrival of her father, Ace, and Midbin. Thomas Haggerwells
began tensely, “Barbara, Ace tells me you intend to
try out this—this machine on yourself. I can’t believe you
would be so foolhardy.”
Midbin didnt wait for her to reply. I thought with something
of a shock, Midbin has gotten old; I never noticed it.
“Listen to me. There’s no point now in saying part of your
mind realizes the impossibility of this demonstration and
that it’s willing for you to annihilate yourself in the attempt
and so escape from conflicts which have no resolution. Although
it’s something you must be at least partly aware of.
But consider objectively the danger involved in meddling
with unknown natural laws—”
Ace Dorn, who looked as strained as they in contrast to
Barbara’s ease, growled, “Let’s go.”</p>
<p>She smiled reassuringly at us. “Please, Father, don’t
worry; there’s no danger. And Oliver....”</p>
<p>Her smile was almost mischievous and very unlike the
Barbara I had known. “Oliver, HX-1 owes more to you
than you will ever know.”</p>
<p>She ducked under the transparent ring and walked to
the center of the floor, glancing up at the reflector, moving<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span>
an inch or two to stand directly beneath it. “The controls
are already adjusted to minus fifty-two years and a hundred
and fifty-three days,” she informed us conversationally.
“Purely arbitrary. One date is good as another, but
January 1, 1900 is an almost automatic choice. I’ll be gone
sixty seconds. Ready, Ace?”</p>
<p>“Ready.” He had been slowly circling the engines, checking
the dials. He took his place before the largest, the
monster in the corner, holding a watch in his hand. “Three
forty-three and ten,” he announced.</p>
<p>Barbara was consulting her own watch. “Three forty-three
and ten,” she confirmed. “Make it at three forty-three
and twenty.”</p>
<p>“OK. Good luck.”</p>
<p>“You might at least try it on an animal first,” burst out
Midbin, as Ace twirled the valve under his hand. The
transparent ring glowed, the metal reflector threw back a
dazzling light. I blinked. When I opened my eyes the light
was gone and the center of the workshop was empty.</p>
<p>No one moved. Ace frowned over his watch. I stared at
the spot where Barbara had stood. I don’t think my mind
was working; I had the feeling my lungs and heart certainly
were not. I was a true spectator, with all faculties save sight
and hearing suspended.</p>
<p>“ ... on an animal first.” Midbin’s voice was querulous.</p>
<p>“Oh, God ...” muttered Thomas Haggerwells.</p>
<p>Ace said casually—too casually, “The return is automatic.
Set beforehand for duration. Thirty more seconds.”</p>
<p>Midbin said, “She is ... this is....” He sat down on a
stool and bent his head almost to his knees.</p>
<p>Mr Haggerwells groaned, “Ace, Ace—you should have
stopped her.”
“Ten seconds,” said Ace firmly.</p>
<p>Still I couldnt think with any clarity. She had stood
there; then she was gone. What ...? Midbin was right: we
had let her go to destruction. Certainly more than a minute
had passed by now.</p>
<p>The ring glowed and the brilliant light was reflected. “It
did, oh, it did!” Barbara cried. “It did!”</p>
<p>She stood perfectly still, overwhelmed. Then she came<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>
out of the circle and kissed Ace, who patted her gently
on the back. I suddenly noticed the pain of holding my
breath and released a tremendous sigh. Barbara kissed her
father and Midbin—who was still shaking his head—and,
after the faintest hesitation, me. Her lips were ice-cold.</p>
<p>The shock of triumph made her voluble. Striding up
and down, she spoke with extraordinary rapidity, without
pause, almost a little drunkenly. In her excitement her
words cluttered her tongue; from time to time she had to
go back and repeat a phrase or sentence to make it intelligible.</p>
<p>When the light flashed, she too involuntarily closed her
eyes. She had felt a strange, terrifying weightlessness, an
awful disembodiment, for which she had been unprepared.
She thought she had not actually been unconscious, even
for an instant, though she had an impression of ceasing to
exist as a unique collection of memories, and of being somehow
dissolved. Then she had opened her eyes.</p>
<p>At first she was shocked to find the barn as it had been
all her life, abandoned and dusty. Then she realized she
had indeed moved through time; the disappearance of the
engines and reflector showed she had gone back to the unremodelled
workshop.</p>
<p>Now she saw the barn was not quite as she had known
it, even in her childhood, for while it was unquestionably
abandoned, it had evidently not long been so. The thick
dust was not so thick as she remembered, the sagging cobwebs
not so dense. Straw was still scattered on the floor;
it had not yet been entirely carried away by mice or inquisitive
birds. Alongside the door hung bits of harness beyond
repair, some broken bridles, and a faded calendar on which
the ink of the numerals 1897 was still bright.</p>
<p>The minute she had allotted this first voyage seemed fantastically
short and incredibly long. All the paradoxes she
had brushed aside as of no immediate concern now confronted
her. Since she had gone back to a time before she
was born, she must have existed as a visitor prior to her
own conception; she could presumably be present during
her own childhood and growth, and by making a second
and third visit, multiply herself as though in facing mirrors,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>
so that an infinite number of Barbara Haggerwells could
occupy a single segment of time.</p>
<p>A hundred other parallel speculations raced through her
mind without interfering with her rapid and insatiable survey
of the commonplace features of the barn, features
which could never really be commonplace to her since they
proved all her speculations so victoriously right.</p>
<p>Suddenly she shivered with the bitter cold and burst into
teeth-chattering laughter. She had made such careful plans
to visit on the First of January—and had never thought
to take along a warm coat.</p>
<p>She looked at her watch; only twenty seconds had
passed. The temptation to defy her agreement with Ace not
to step outside the tiny circle of HX-1’s operating field on
the initial experiment was almost irresistible. She longed
to touch the fabric of the past, to feel the worn boards of
the barn, to handle as well as look. Again her thoughts
whirled with speculation; again the petty moment stretched
and contracted. She spent eternity and instantaneity at
once.</p>
<p>Suppose.... But she had a thousand suppositions and
questions. Was she really herself in the flesh, or in some
mental projection? A pinch would do no good; that might
be projection also. Would she be visible to the people of
the time, or was she a ghost from the future? Oh, there
was so much to learn, so much to encounter!</p>
<p>When the moment of return came, she again experienced
the feeling of dissolution, followed immediately by the
light. When she opened her eyes she was back.</p>
<p>Midbin rubbed his belly and then his thinning hair.
“Hallucination,” he propounded at last; “a logical, consistent
hallucination. Answer to an overriding wish.”</p>
<p>“You mean Barbara was never gone?” asked Ace. “Was
she visible to you—or Mr H or Hodge—during that minute?”
“Illusion,” said Midbin; “group illusion brought on by
suggestion and anxiety.”</p>
<p>“Nonsense,” exclaimed Barbara. “Unless youre accusing
Ace and me of faking youll have to account for what you
just called the logical consistency of it. Your group illusion<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
and my individual hallucination fitting so neatly together.”</p>
<p>Midbin recovered some of his poise. “The two phenomena
are separate, connected only by some sort of emotional
hypnosis. Certainly your daydream of having been back in
1900 is an emotionally induced aberration.”</p>
<p>“And your daydream that I wasn’t here for a minute?”</p>
<p>“The eyes are quickly affected by the feelings. Note
tears, ‘seeing red’ and so forth.”</p>
<p>“Very well, Oliver. The only thing to do is to let you
try HX-1 yourself.”</p>
<p>“Hay, my turn’s supposed to be next,” protested Ace.</p>
<p>“Of course. But no one is going to use it again today.
Tomorrow morning. Bring Catty, Hodge, if she wants to
come, but please don’t say anything to anyone else till
weve made further demonstrations, otherwise we’ll be besieged
by fellows wanting to take short jaunts into popular
years.”</p>
<p>I had little inclination to discuss what had happened
with anyone, even Catty. Not that I shared Midbin’s theory
of nothing material having taken place; I knew I’d not seen
Barbara for sixty seconds and I was convinced her account
of them was accurate. What confused me was the shock to
my preconceptions involved in her proof. If time and space,
matter and energy were the same, as fog and ice and water
are the same, then I—the physical I at least—and Catty,
the world and the universe must be, as Enfandin had insisted,
mere illusion. In that sense Midbin had been right.</p>
<p>I went furtively to the workshop next day without telling
Catty, as though we were all engaged in some dark
necromancy, some sacrilegious rite. Apparently I was the
only one who had spent an anxious night; Mr Haggerwells
looked proud, Barbara looked satisfied, Ace cocky, and
even Midbin, for no understandable reason, benign.</p>
<p>“All here?” inquired Ace. “I’m eager as a fox in a hen-house.
Three minutes in 1885. Why 1885? I don’t know; a
year when nothing much happened, I suppose. Ready,
Barbara?”</p>
<p>He returned to report he had found the barn well occupied
by both cattle and fowl, and been scared stiff of discovery
when the dogs set up a furious barking.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span></p>
<p>“That pretty well settles the question of corporeal
presence,” I remarked.</p>
<p>“Not at all,” said Mr Haggerwells unexpectedly. “Dogs
are notoriously psychic.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” cried Ace, bringing his hands from behind his
back; “look at this. I could hardly have picked it up with
psychic feelers.”</p>
<p>“This” was a newlaid egg, sixty-seven years old. Or was
it? Trips in time are confusing that way.</p>
<p>Barbara was upset, more than I thought warranted. “Oh,
Ace, how could you be so foolish? We darent be anything
but spectators, as unseen as possible.”</p>
<p>“Why? Ive a notion to court my grandmother and wind
up as my own grandfather.”</p>
<p>“Don’t be stupid. The faintest indication of our presence,
the slightest impingement on the past, may change
the whole course of events. We have no way of knowing
what actions have no consequences—if there can be any.
Goodness knows what your idiocy with the egg has done.
It’s absolutely essential not to betray ourselves in any way.
Please remember this in future.”
“You mean, ‘Remember this in past,’ don’t you?”</p>
<p>“Ace, this isnt a joke.”</p>
<p>“It isn’t a wake either. I can’t see the harm in bringing
back tangible proof. Loss of one egg isnt going to send the
prices up for 1885 and cause retroactive inflation. Youre
making a mountain out of a molehill—or an omelette out
of a single egg.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Oliver, I hope you won’t be
so foolish.”</p>
<p>“Since I don’t expect to arrive in, say, 1820, I can safely
promise neither to steal eggs nor court Ace’s female ancestors.”</p>
<p>He was gone for five minutes. The barn had apparently
not yet been built in 1820 and he found himself on a slight
rise in a field of wild hay. The faint snick of scythes, and
voices not too far off, indicated mowers. He dropped to the
ground. His view of the past was restricted to tall grass
and some persistent ants who explored his face and hands<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span>
until the time was up and he returned with broken spears
of ripe hay clinging to his clothes.</p>
<p>“At least that’s what I imagined I saw,” he concluded.</p>
<p>“Did you imagine these?” asked Ace, pointing to the
straws.</p>
<p>“Probably. It’s at least as likely as time-travel.”</p>
<p>“But what about corroboration? Your experience, and
Barbara’s and Ace’s confirm each other. Doesnt that mean
anything?”</p>
<p>“Certainly. Only I’m not prepared to say what. The
mind can do anything; anything at all. Create boils and
cancers. Why not ants and grass? I don’t know. I don’t
know....”</p>
<p>After more fruitless argument, he and I left the workshop.
I was again reminded of Enfandin—Why should I
believe my eyes? I felt though that Midbin was carrying
skepticism beyond rational limits; Barbara’s case was
proved.</p>
<p>“Yes, yes,” he answered when I said this. “Why not?”</p>
<p>I puzzled over his reply. Then he added abruptly, “No
one can help her now.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C18"><i>18.</i> <i>THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME</i></h2>
</div>
<p>Gently, Catty said, “Ive never understood why you
cut yourself off from the past the way you have, Hodge.”</p>
<p>“Ay? What do you mean?”</p>
<p>“Well, youve not communicated with your father or
mother since you left home, fourteen years ago. You say
you had a dear friend in the man from Haiti, yet youve
never tried to find out whether he lived or died.”</p>
<p>“Oh, that way. I thought you meant ... something
different.” By not taking advantage of Barbara’s offer I
certainly was cutting myself off from the past.</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>“Well, I guess more or less everyone at the haven has
done the same thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean.
You for one—”
“But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All
my life is here.”</p>
<p>“Well, so is mine.”</p>
<p>“Ah, dear Hodge; it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”</p>
<p>“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an
atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping,
of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was
in a miracle—usually translated as a winning number in
the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of utterly
loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a
luxury my mother and father couldnt afford.”
“Perhaps not; but you can afford it. Now. And nothing
of what you have said applies to Enfandin.”</p>
<p>I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callous<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span>ness
must be apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered,
had once asked me much the same questions
Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to my own
satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible
for me to take the simple steps to discover what had
happened to my friend? By a tremendous effort I might
have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin
had been wounded, but each day and month between
confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the
past take care of itself,” I muttered.</p>
<p>“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”</p>
<p>“Catty, I can’t.”</p>
<p>The conversation made me nervous and fidgetty. It also
made me remember much I preferred to let fade: the
Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit pesetas.... All the
evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did nothing, literally
nothing, all his life, then he might be free of culpability.
Manichaeism, said Enfandin. No absolution.</p>
<p>My idleness, I knew very well, heightened all these feelings
of degradation. Were I able to continue in the happy,
cocksure way I had gone about my note-gathering and the
writing of volume one, I would have neither the time nor
susceptibility to be plagued by this disquiet. As it was I
seemed to be able to do nothing but act as audience for
what was going on in the workshop.</p>
<p>With childish eagerness Barbara and Ace explored
HX-1’s possibilities for the next two months. They quickly
learned that its range was limited to little more than a century,
though this limit was subject to slight variations.
When they tried to operate beyond this range the translation
simply didnt take place, though the same feeling of
dissolution occurred. When the light faded they were still
in the present. Midbin’s venture into the hayfield had been
a freak, possibly due to peculiar weather conditions at both
ends of the journey. They set 1850 as a safe limit, with an
undefined marginal zone further back which was not to be
hazarded lest conditions change during the journey and
the traveler be lost.</p>
<p>Why this limit existed at all was a matter of dispute between
them, a dispute of which I must admit I understood<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span>
little. Barbara spoke of subjective factors which seemed to
mean that HX-1 worked slightly differently in the case of
each person it transported; Ace of magnetic fields and
power relays, which didnt mean anything to me at all. The
only thing they agreed on was that the barrier was not immutable;
HX-2 or 3 or 20, if they were ever built, would
undoubtedly overcome it.</p>
<p>Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained
closed, probably for similar reasons, whatever they were.
Here again they disputed, Ace holding an HX could be
built for this purpose, Barbara insisting that new equations
would have to be worked out.</p>
<p>They confirmed their tentative theory that time spent in
the past consumed an equal amount of time in the present;
they could not return to a point a minute after departure
when they had been gone for an hour. As near as I could
understand, this was because duration was set in the present.
In order to come back to a time-point not in correspondence
with the period actually spent, another HX,
or at least another set of controls, would have to be taken
into the past. And then they would not work since HX-1
could not penetrate the future.</p>
<p>The most inconvenient circumscription was the inability
of one person to visit the same past moment twice. When
the attempt was made the feeling of dissolution did not
occur, the light went on and off with no effect upon the
would-be traveler standing beneath it. Here Barbara’s
“subjective factor” was triumphant, but why, or how it
worked, they did not know. Nor did they know what would
happen to a traveler who attempted to overlap by being
already on the spot prior to a previous visit; it was too
dangerous to try.</p>
<p>Within these limits they roamed almost at will. Ace
spent a full week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia,
enjoying the enthusiasm and fury of the presidential
campaign. Knowing President Bryan was not only going
to be elected, but would serve three terms, he found it
hard indeed to obey Barbara’s stricture and not cover confident
Whig bets on Major McKinley.</p>
<p>Though both sampled the war years they brought back<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span>
nothing useful to me, no information or viewpoint I
couldnt have got from any of a score of books. Lacking
historians’ interests or training, their tidbits were those of
curious onlookers, not probing chroniclers. It was tantalizing
to know that Barbara had seen Secretary Stanton at
the York depot or that Ace had overheard a farmer say
casually that Southron scouts had stopped at his place the
day before and they had thought neither incident worth
investigating further.</p>
<p>I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with
myself which always ended inconclusively. <i>Why not?</i> I
asked. <i>Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before
has it been possible for an historian to check back at will,
to select a particular moment for personal scrutiny, to
write of the past with the detachment of the present and
the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing specifically what to
look for. Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see
for yourself?</i></p>
<p>Against this I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The
“subjective factor” in HX-1? The superstitious notion that
I might be tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden
to human shortcomings? <i>You mustnt try any shortcuts.
Promise me that, Hodge.</i> Well, Catty was a darling. She was
my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle.
On what grounds did she protest? Woman’s intuition? A
respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didnt Barbara,
who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly
intuition also?</p>
<p>A half-dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction
of my thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift
to another topic. What was the use of upsetting her?
<i>Promise me that, Hodge.</i> But I had not promised. This was
something I had to settle for myself.</p>
<p>What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything
to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some
anthropomorphism to their manifestations and like a savage
fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didnt understand? (But
HX-1 <i>did</i> have subjective factors.) I had never thought of
myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-year<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span>old
professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose
quill.</p>
<p>I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.”
And once I had called him out of my memory I couldnt
escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. <i>Why
are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all
this introspective debate? Don’t you know your choice has
already been made? And that you have acted according to
it an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite
number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing
to worry about. Free will is an illusion; you cannot alter
what you are about to decide under the impression that you
have decided.</i></p>
<p>My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied,
unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy.
I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had
planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment like this.</p>
<p>Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words
I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The
decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, nor by
blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.</p>
<p>And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis,
René Enfandin. <i>Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic.
Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking
Pilate, asking,</i> What is truth? <i>was blind. But you can see
more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a
chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge?
That is the only question.</i></p>
<p>Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and
so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the
problem of telling Catty. I could not shut her out of so important
a move. I told myself I could not bear the thought
of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others
had frequently used HX-1, for my object could not be
accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure
she would be sick with apprehension during the days I
would be gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered,
<i>Promise me, Hodge</i>....</p>
<p>I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d
decided the only way to face my problem was to go to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
Gettysburg and spend three or four days going over the
actual field. Here, I explained unconvincingly, I thought I
might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all
my work and start afresh, or not.</p>
<p>Her faintly oblique eyes were inscrutable. She pretended
to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all,
we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields.</p>
<p>Would it be possible? Two people had never stood under
the reflector together, but surely it would work? I was
tempted, but I could not subject Catty to the risk, however
slight. Besides, how could I explain?</p>
<p>“But Catty, with you there I’d be thinking of you instead
of the problem.”</p>
<p>“Ah, Hodge, have we already been married so long you
must get away from me to think?”</p>
<p>“No matter how long, that time will never come. Perhaps
I’m wrong, Catty. It’s just a feeling I have.”</p>
<p>Her look was tragic with understanding. “You must do
as you think right. Don’t ... don’t be gone too long,
my dear.”</p>
<p>I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes
which bore no mark of any fashion and might pass as current
wear among the poorer classes in any era of the past
hundred years. I put a packet of dried beef in my pocket
and started for the workshop.</p>
<p>As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity,
at all the to-do I’d made over lying to Catty. This
was but the first excursion; I planned others for the months
after Gettysburg. There was no reason why she shouldnt
accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as my conscience
eased and I even congratulated myself on my skill
in not having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I
began to whistle, never a habit of mine, as I made my way
along the path to the workshop.</p>
<p>Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light
of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they always were
when she was exultant. “Well, Hodge?”</p>
<p>“Well, Barbara, I....”</p>
<p>“Have you told Catty?”</p>
<p>“Not exactly. How did you know?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span></p>
<p>“I knew before you did, Hodge. After all, we’re not
strangers. All right. How long do you want to stay?”</p>
<p>“Four days.”</p>
<p>“That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better
try a few sample minutes?”</p>
<p>“Why? Ive seen you and Ace go often enough and heard
your accounts. I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it
down fine enough yet so you can invariably pick the hour
of arrival?”</p>
<p>“Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll
it be?”</p>
<p>“About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want
to come back on the night of July Fourth.”</p>
<p>“Youll have to be more exact than that. For the return,
I mean. The dials are set on seconds.”</p>
<p>“All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”</p>
<p>“Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know about perfect—”
“Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control
clock.” She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece
which had two independent faces side by side. “We had a
couple made like this; the duplicate dials were useful before
we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952
Haggershaven time.”</p>
<p>“Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds,” I said.</p>
<p>“Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won’t be
able to reset the first dial—but for goodness sake remember
to keep it wound—and set the second for ... 11:54,
zero. That means in six minutes youll leave, to arrive at
midnight. Remember to keep that one wound too, for youll
go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever
else happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight—allow
yourself some leeway—by midnight, July Fourth.
I don’t want to have to go wandering around 1863 looking
for you.”
“You won’t. I’ll be here.”</p>
<p>“Five minutes. Now then, food.”</p>
<p>“I have some,” I answered, slapping my pocket.</p>
<p>“Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I
suppose it won’t hurt to drink the water if youre not ob<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span>served,
but avoid their food. One never knows what chain
might be started by the casual theft—or purchase, if you
had enough old coins—of a loaf of bread. The possibilities
are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress on
you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly
change the future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace
doesnt understand, and I tremble every moment he spends
in the past. The most trivial action may begin a series of
disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard.
Make your trip as a ghost.”
“Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee
nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.”</p>
<p>“Four minutes. It’s not a joke, Hodge.”</p>
<p>“Believe me,” I said, “I understand.”</p>
<p>She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head
and began making her round of the engines, adjusting the
dials. I slid under the glass ring as I’d so often seen her do
and stood casually under the reflector. I was not in the
least nervous. I don’t think I was even particularly excited.</p>
<p>“Three minutes,” said Barbara.</p>
<p>I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.</p>
<p>She ducked under the ring and came toward me.
“Hodge....”</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I
kissed her, a little absently. “Clod!”</p>
<p>I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar
signs of anger. “A minute to go, it says here,” I
told her.</p>
<p>She drew away and went back. “All set. Ready?”</p>
<p>“Ready,” I answered cheerfully. “See you midnight,
July Fourth, 1863.”</p>
<p>“Right. Goodbye, Hodge. Glad you didnt tell Catty.”</p>
<p>The expression on her face was the strangest I’d ever
seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it.
Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, entreaty, love,
were all there as her hand moved the switch. I began to
answer something—perhaps to bid her wait—then the
light made me blink and I too experienced the shattering<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span>
feeling of transition. My bones seemed to fly from each
other; every cell in my body exploded to the ends of space.</p>
<p>The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe
all the multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously.
I was sure my veins were drained of blood, my
brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless void, my
thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe
away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for
that tiny fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker,
but part of an <i>I</i> in which the I that was me merged
all identity.</p>
<p>Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my
knees and wrists were watery points of helplessness, but I
was alive and functioning, with my individuality unimpaired.
The light had vanished. I was in darkness save for
faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the barn.
The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the
slow, ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone
back through time.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C19"><i>19.</i> <i>GETTYSBURG</i></h2>
</div>
<p>The barking of the dogs was frenzied, filled with
the hoarse note indicating they had been raising the alarm
for a long time without being heeded. I knew they must
have been baying at the alien smells of soldiers for the
past day, so I was not apprehensive that their scent of me
would bring investigation. How Barbara and Ace had escaped
detection on journeys which didnt coincide with
abnormal events was beyond me; with such an unnerving
racket in prospect I would either have given up the trips
or moved the apparatus.</p>
<p>Strange, I reflected, that the cows and horses were undisturbed.
That no hysterical chicken leaped from the roost
in panic. Only the dogs scented my unnatural presence.
Dogs who, as Mr Haggerwells remarked, are supposed to
sense things beyond the perceptions of man.</p>
<p>Warily I picked my way past the livestock and out of
the barn, fervently hoping the dogs were tied, for I had no
mind to start my adventure by being bitten. Barbara’s
warnings seemed inadequate indeed; one would think she
or Ace might have devised some method of neutralizing
the infernal barking. But of course they could hardly do
so without violating her rule of non-interference.</p>
<p>Once out on the familiar Hanover road every petty feeling
of doubt or disquiet fell away and all the latent excitement
took hold of me. I was gloriously in 1863, half a day
and some thirty miles from the battle of Gettysburg. If
there is a paradise for historians I had achieved it without
the annoyance of dying first. I swung along at a good pace,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span>
thankful I had trained myself for long tramps, so that thirty
miles in less than ten hours was no monstrous feat. The
noise of the dogs died away behind me and I breathed the
night air joyfully.</p>
<p>I had already decided I dared not attempt to steal a ride
on the railroad, even supposing the cars were going
through. As I turned off the Hanover road and took the
direct one to Gettysburg, I knew I would not be able to
keep on it for any length of time. Part of Early’s Confederate
division was moving along it from recently occupied
York; Stuart’s cavalry was all around; trifling skirmishes
were being fought on or near it; Union troops, regulars as
well as the militia called out by Governor Curtin for the
emergency, were behind and ahead of me, marching for
the Monocacy and Cemetery Ridge.</p>
<p>Leaving the highway would hardly slow me down, for
I knew every sideroad, lane, path or shortcut, not only as
they existed in my day, but as they had been in the time
where I was now. I was going to need this knowledge even
more on my return, for on the Fourth of July this road,
like every other, would be glutted with beaten Northern
troops, supplies and wounded left behind, frantically trying
to reorganize as they were harassed by Stuart’s cavalry
and pressed by the victorious men of Hill, Longstreet, and
Ewell. It was with this in mind I had allowed disproportionately
longer for coming back.</p>
<p>I saw my first soldier a few miles further on, a jagged
shadow sitting by the roadside with his boots off, massaging
his feet. I guessed him Northern from his kepi, but this
was not conclusive, for many Southron regiments wore
kepis also. I struck off quietly into the field and skirted
around him. He never looked up.</p>
<p>At dawn I estimated I was halfway, and except for the
sight of that single soldier I might have been taking a nocturnal
stroll through a countryside at peace. I was tired
but certainly not worn out, and I knew I could count on
nervous energy and happy excitement to keep me going
long after my muscles began to protest. Progress would be
slower from now on—Confederate infantry must be just
ahead—even so, I should be at Gettysburg by six or seven.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span></p>
<p>The sudden drumming of hooves brushed me off the
dusty pike and petrified me into rigidity as a troop dressed
in gray and dirty tan galloped by screaming, “Eeeeee-yeeee”
exultantly. The gritty cloud they stirred up settled
slowly; I felt the particles sting my face and eyes. It would
be the sideroads from now on, I determined.</p>
<p>Others had the same impulse; the sideroads were well
populated. Although I knew the movement of every division
and of many regiments, and even had some considerable
idea of the civilian dislocation, the picture around
me was jumbled and turbulent. Farmers, merchants, workers
in overalls rode or tramped eastward; others, identical
in dress and obvious intensity of effort, pushed westward.
I passed carriages and carts with women and children traveling
at various speeds both ways. Squads and companies
of blue-clad troops marched along the roads or through
the fields, trampling the crops, a confused sound of singing,
swearing, or aimless talk hanging above them like a
fog. Spaced by pacific intervals, men in gray or butternut,
otherwise indistinguishable, marched in the same direction.
I decided I could pass unnoticed in the milling crowds.</p>
<p>It is not easy for the historian, ten, fifty or five hundred
years away from an event, to put aside for a moment the
large concepts of currents and forces, or the mechanical
aids of statistics, charts, maps, neat plans and diagrams in
which the migration of men, women and children is indicated
by an arrow, or a brigade of half-terrified, half-heroic
men becomes a neat little rectangle. It is not easy to see
behind source material, to visualize state papers, reports,
letters, diaries as written by men who spent most of their
lives sleeping, eating, yawning, eliminating, squeezing
blackheads, lusting, looking out of windows, or talking
about nothing in general with no one in particular. We are
too impressed with the pattern revealed to us—or which
we think has been revealed to us—to remember that for
the participants history is a haphazard affair, apparently
aimless, produced by human beings whose concern is essentially
with the trivial and irrelevant. The historian is
always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely—or
mistakenly.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span></p>
<p>So to be set down in the midst of crisis, to be at once
involved and apart, is to experience a constant series of
shocks against which there is no anesthetic. The soldiers,
the stragglers, the refugees, the farm boys shouting at
horses, the tophatted gentlemen cursing the teamsters, the
teamsters cursing back; the looters, pimps, gamblers,
whores, nurses and newspapermen were indisputably what
they appeared: vitally important to themselves, of little interest
to anyone else. Yet at the same time they were a
paragraph, a page, a chapter, a whole series of volumes.</p>
<p>I’m sure I was faithful to the spirit if not the letter of
Barbara’s warnings, and that none of the hundreds whom
I passed or who passed me noted my presence, except cursorily.
I, on the other hand, had to repress the constant
temptation to peer into every face for signs which could
not tell me what fortune or misfortune the decision of the
next three days would bring to it.</p>
<p>A few miles from town the crowded disorder became
even worse, for the scouts from Ewell’s Corps, guarding
the Confederate left flank on the York Road, acted like a
cork in a bottle. Because I, unlike the other travelers, knew
this, I cut sharply south to get back on the circuitous Hanover
road I had left shortly after midnight, and crossing
the bridge over Rock Creek, stumbled into Gettysburg.</p>
<p>The two and a half storey brick houses with their purplish
slate roofs were placid and charming in the hot July
sun. A valiant rooster pecked at horsedung in the middle
of the street heedless of the swarming soldiers, any of
whom might take a notion for roast chicken. Privates in
the black hats of the Army of the Potomac, cavalrymen
with wide yellow stripes and cannoneers with red ones
on the seams of their pants, swaggered importantly. Lieutenants
with hands resting gracefully on sword hilts, captains
with arms thrust in unbuttoned tunics, colonels smoking
cigars, all moved back and forth across the street, out
of and into houses and stores, each clearly intent on some
business which would affect the course of the war. Now
and then a general rode his horse through the crowd,
slowly and thoughtfully, oppressed by the cares of rank.
Soldiers spat, leered at an occasional woman, sat dolefully<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span>
on handy stoops, or marched smartly toward an unknown
destination. On the courthouse staff the flag hung doubtfully
in the limp summer air. Every so often there was a
noise like poorly organized thunder.</p>
<p>Imitating the adaptable infantrymen, I found an unoccupied
stoop and sat down after a curious glance at the
house, wondering whether it contained someone whose
letters or diaries I had read. Drawing out my packet of
dried beef, I munched away without taking any of my
attention from the sights and sounds and smells around
me. Only I knew how desperately these soldiers would
fight this afternoon and all day tomorrow. I alone knew
how they would be caught in the inescapable trap on July
Third and finally routed, to begin the last act of the war.
That major, I thought, so proud of his new-won golden
oak leaves, may have an arm or leg shot off vainly defending
Culp’s Hill; that sergeant over there may lie faceless
under an apple tree before nightfall.</p>
<p>Soon these men would be swept away from the illusory
shelter of the houses and out onto the ridges where they
would be pounded into defeat and disaster. There was
nothing for me now in Gettysburg itself, though I could
have spent days absorbing the color and feeling. Already
I had tempted fate by my casual appearance in the heart of
town. At any moment someone might speak to me, to ask
for a light or a direction; an ill-considered word or action
of mine might change, with ever-widening consequences,
the course of the future. I had been foolish enough long
enough; it was time for me to go to the vantage point I had
decided upon and observe without peril of being observed.</p>
<p>I rose and stretched, my bones protesting. But a couple
of miles more would see me clear of all danger of chance
encounter with a too friendly or inquisitive soldier or civilian.
I gave a last look, trying to impress every detail on my
memory, and turned south on the Emmitsburg Road.</p>
<p>This was no haphazard choice. I knew where and when
the crucial, the decisive move upon which all the other
moves depended would take place. While thousands of
men were struggling and dying on other parts of the battleground,
a Confederate advance force, unnoticed, disre<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span>garded,
would occupy the position which would eventually
dominate the scene and win the battle—and the war—for
the South. Heavy with knowledge no one else possessed I
made my way toward a farm on which there was a wheatfield
and a peach orchard.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C20"><i>20.</i> <i>BRING THE JUBILEE</i></h2>
</div>
<p>A great battle in its first stages is as tentative,
uncertain, and indefinite as a courtship just begun. At the
beginning the ground was there for either side to take without
protest; the other felt no surge of possessive jealousy. I
walked unscathed along the Emmitsburg Road; on my left
I knew there were Union forces concealed, on my right the
Southrons maneuvered. In a few hours, to walk between
the lines would mean instant death, but now the declaration
had not been made, the vows had not been finally
exchanged. It was still possible for either party to withdraw;
no furious heat bound the two indissolubly together.
I heard the periodic shell and the whine of a minie bullet;
mere flirtatious gestures so far.</p>
<p>Despite the hot sun the grass was cool and lush. The
shade in the orchard was velvety. From a low branch I
picked a near ripe peach and sucked the wry juice. I
sprawled on the earth and waited. For miles around, men
from Maine and Wisconsin, from Georgia and North Carolina,
assumed the same attitude. But I knew for what I was
waiting; they could only guess.</p>
<p>Some acoustical freak dimmed the noises in the air to
little more than amplification of the normal summer
sounds. Did the ground really tremble faintly, or was I
translating my mental picture of the marching armies, the
great wagon trains, the heavy cannon, the iron-shod horses
into an imagined physical effect? I don’t think I dozed, but
certainly my attention withdrew from the rows of trees
with their scarred and runneled bark, curving branches and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span>
graceful leaves, so that I was taken unaware by the unmistakable
clump and creak of mounted men.</p>
<p>The blue-uniformed cavalry rode slowly through the
peach orchard. They seemed like a group of aimless hunters
returning from the futile pursuit of a fox; they chatted,
shouted at each other, walked their horses abstractedly.
One or two had their sabres out; they rose in their saddles
and cut at the branches overhead in pure, pointless mischief.</p>
<p>Behind them came the infantrymen, sweating and swearing,
more serious. Some few had wounds, others were without
their muskets. Their dark blue tunics were carelessly
unbuttoned, their lighter pants were stained with mud and
dust and grass. They trampled and thrashed around like
men long weary. Quarrels rose among them swiftly and
swiftly petered out. No one could mistake them for anything
but troops in retreat</p>
<p>After they had passed, the orchard was still again, but
the stillness had a different quality from what had gone
before. The leaves did not rustle, no birds chirped, there
were no faint betrayals of the presence of chipmunks or
squirrels. Only if one listened very closely was the dry
noise of insects perceptible. But I heard the guns now.
Clearly and louder. And more continuously—much more
continuously. It was not yet the full roar of battle, but
death was authentic in its low rumble.</p>
<p>Then the Confederates came. Cautiously, but not so cautiously
that one could fail to recognize they represented a
victorious, invading army. Shabby they certainly were, as
they pushed into the orchard, but alert and confident. Only
a minority had uniforms which resembled those prescribed
by regulation and these were torn, grimy and scuffed.
Many of the others wore the semiofficial butternut—crudely
dyed homespun, streaked and muddy brown. Some
had ordinary clothes with military hats and buttons; a few
were dressed in federal blue trousers with gray or butternut
jackets.</p>
<p>Nor were their weapons uniform. There were long rifles,
short carbines, muskets of varying age, and I noticed one
bearded soldier with a ponderous shotgun. But whatever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
their dress or arms, their bearing was the bearing of conquerors.
If I alone on the field that day knew for sure the
outcome of the battle, these Confederate soldiers were
close behind in sensing the future.</p>
<p>The straggling Northerners had passed me by with the
clouded perception of the retreating. These Southrons,
however, were steadfastly attentive to every sight and
sound. Too late I realized the difficulty of remaining unnoticed
by such sharp, experienced eyes. Even as I berated
myself for my stupidity, a great, whiskery fellow in
what must once have been a stylish bottle-green coat
pointed his gun at me.</p>
<p>“Yank here boys!” Then to me, “What you doing here,
fella?”</p>
<p>Three or four came up and surrounded me curiously.
“Funniest lookin damyank I ever did see. Looks like he
just fell out of a bathtub.”</p>
<p>Since I had walked all night on dusty roads I could only
think their standards of cleanliness were not high. And
indeed this was confirmed by the smell coming from them:
the stink of sweat, of clothes long slept in, of unwashed
feet and stale tobacco.</p>
<p>“I’m a noncombatant,” I said foolishly.</p>
<p>“Whazzat?” asked the beard. “Some kind of Baptist?”</p>
<p>“Naw,” corrected one of the others. “It’s a law-word.
Means not all right in the head.”</p>
<p>“Looks all right in the foot though. Let’s see your boots,
Yank. Mine’s sure wore out.”</p>
<p>What terrified me now was not the thought of my boots
being stolen, or of being treated as a prisoner, or even the
remote chance of being shot as a spy. A greater, more indefinite
catastrophe was threatened by my exposure. These
men were the advance company of a regiment due to sweep
through the orchard and the wheatfield, explore that bit of
wild ground known as the Devil’s Den and climb up Little
Round Top closely followed by an entire Confederate brigade.
This was the brigade which held the Round Top for
several hours until artillery was brought up, artillery which
dominated the entire field and gave the South victory at
Gettysburg.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span></p>
<p>There was no allowance for a pause, no matter how
trifling, in the peach orchard, in any of the accounts I’d
read or heard of. The hazard Barbara had warned so insistently
against had happened. I had been discovered, and
the mere discovery had altered the course of history.</p>
<p>I tried to shrug it off. Delay of a few minutes could
hardly make a significant difference. All historians agreed
that the capture of the Round Tops was an inevitability;
the Confederates would have been foolish to overlook
them—in fact it was hardly possible they could, prominent
as they were both on maps and in physical reality—and
they had occupied them hours before the Federals made a
belated attempt to take them. I had been unbelievably
stupid to expose myself, but I had created no repercussions
likely to spread beyond the next few minutes.</p>
<p>“Said let’s see them boots. Aint got all day to wait.”</p>
<p>A tall officer with a pointed imperial and a sandy, faintly
reddish mustache whose curling ends shone waxily came
up, revolver in hand. “What’s going on here?”</p>
<p>“Just a Yank, Capn. Making a little change of footgear.”
The tone was surly, almost insolent.</p>
<p>The galloons on the officer’s sleeve told me the title was
not honorary. “I’m a civilian, Captain,” I protested. “I
realize I have no business here.”</p>
<p>The captain looked at me coldly, with an expression of
disdainful contempt. “Local man?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Not exactly. I’m from York.”</p>
<p>“Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks
up ahead. Jenks, leave the civilian gentleman in full possession
of his boots.”</p>
<p>There was rage behind that sneer, a hateful anger apparently
directed at me for being a civilian, at his men for their
obvious lack of respect, at the battle, the world. I suddenly
realized his face was intimately familiar. Irritatingly, because
I could connect it with no name, place or circumstance.</p>
<p>“How long have you been in this orchard, Mister Civilian-From-York?”</p>
<p>The effort to identify him nagged me, working in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span>
depths of my mind, obtruding even into that top layer
which was concerned with what was going on.</p>
<p>What was going on? <i>Too bad. Thought you could tell
me about the Yanks up ahead. How long have you been in
this orchard?</i></p>
<p>Yanks up ahead? There werent any. There wouldnt be,
for hours.</p>
<p>“I said, ‘How long you been in this orchard?’”</p>
<p>Probably an officer later promoted to rank prominent
enough to have his picture in one of the minor narratives.
Yet I was certain his face was no likeness I’d seen once in a
steel engraving and dismissed. These were features often
encountered....</p>
<p>“Sure like to have them boots. If we aint fightin for
Yankee boots, what the hell we fightin for?”</p>
<p>What could I say? That I’d been in the orchard for half
an hour? The next question was bound to be, Had I seen
Federal troops? Whichever way I answered I would be
betraying my role of spectator.</p>
<p>“Hey Capn—this fella knows something. Lookit the
silly grin!”
Was I smiling? In what? Terror? Perplexity? In the
mere effort of keeping silent, so as to be involved no
further?</p>
<p>“Tell yah—he’s laughin cuz he knows somethin!”
Let them hang me, let them strip me of my boots; from
here on I was dumb as dear Catty had been once.</p>
<p>“Out with it man—youre in a tight spot. Are there Yanks
up ahead?”
The confusion in my mind approached chaos. If I knew
the captain’s eventual rank I could place him. Colonel
Soandso. Brigadier-General Blank. What had happened?
Why had I let myself be discovered? Why had I spoken at
all and made silence so hard now?</p>
<p>“Yanks up ahead—they’s Yanks up ahead!”
“Quiet you! I asked him—he didnt say there were Yanks
ahead.”
“Hay! Damyanks up above. Goin to mow us down!”</p>
<p>“Fella says the bluebellies are layin fur us!”</p>
<p>Had the lie been in my mind, to be telepathically plucked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span>
by the excited soldiers? Was even silence no refuge from
participation?</p>
<p>“Man here spotted the whole Fed artillery up above,
trained on us!”</p>
<p>“Pull back, boys! Pull back!”</p>
<p>I’d read often enough of the epidemic quality of a perfectly
unreasonable notion. A misunderstood word, a baseless
rumor, an impossible report, was often enough to set
a group of armed men—squad or army—into senseless
mob action. Sometimes the infection made for feats of
heroism, sometimes for panic. This was certainly less than
panic, but my nervous, meaningless smile conveyed a message
I had never sent.</p>
<p>“It’s a trap. Pull back boys—let’s get away from these
trees and out where we can see the Yanks!”
The captain whirled on his men. “Here, damn you,” he
shouted furiously, “you all gone crazy? The man said nothing.
There’s no trap!”</p>
<p>The men moved slowly, sullenly away. “I heard him,”
one of them muttered, looking accusingly toward me.</p>
<p>The captain’s shout became a yell. “Come back here!
Back here, I say!”</p>
<p>His raging stride overtook the still irresolute men. He
grabbed the one called Jenks by the shoulder and whirled
him about. Jenks tried to jerk free. There was fear on his
face, and hate. “Leave me go, damn you,” he screamed,
“Leave me go!”</p>
<p>The captain yelled at his men again. Jenks snatched at
the pistol with his left hand; the officer pulled the gun
away. Jenks brought his musket upright against the captain’s
body, the muzzle just under his chin, and pushed—as
though the firearm somehow gave him leverage. They
wrestled briefly, then the musket went off.</p>
<p>The captain’s hat flew upward, and for an instant he
stood, bareheaded, in the private’s embrace. Then he fell.
Jenks wrenched his musket free and disappeared.</p>
<p>When I came out of my shock I walked over to the body.
The face had been blown off. Shreds of human meat dribbled
bloodily on the gray collar and soiled the fashionably
long hair. I had killed a man. Through my interference<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
with the past I had killed a man who had been destined to
longer life and even some measure of fame. I was the
guilty sorcerer’s apprentice.</p>
<p>I stooped down to put my hands inside his coat for
papers which would tell me who he was and satisfy the
curiosity which still basely persisted. It was not shame
which stopped me. Just nausea, and remorse.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>I saw the Battle of Gettysburg. I saw it with all the
unique advantages of a professional historian thoroughly
conversant with the patterns, the movements, the details,
who knows where to look for the coming dramatic moment,
the recorded decisive stroke. I fulfilled the chroniclers’
dream.</p>
<p>It was a nightmare.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>To begin with, I slept. I slept not far from the captain’s
body in the peach orchard. This was not callousness, but
physical and emotional exhaustion. When I went to sleep
the guns were thundering; when I woke they were thundering
louder. It was late afternoon. I thought immediately,
this is the time for the futile Union charge against the
Round Tops.</p>
<p>But the guns were not sounding from there. All the roar
was northward, from the town. I knew how the battle went;
I had studied it for years. Only now it wasn’t happening the
way it was written down in the books.</p>
<p>True, the first day was a Confederate victory. But it was
not the victory we knew. It was just a little different, just a
little short of the triumph recorded. And on the second
day, instead of the Confederates getting astride the Taneytown
Road and into the position from which they tore
Meade’s army to bits from three sides, I witnessed a terrible
encounter in the peach orchard and the wheatfield—places
known to be safely behind the Southron lines.</p>
<p>All my life I’d heard of Pickett’s charge on the third day.
Of how the disorganized Federals were given the final killing
blow in their vitals. Well, I saw Pickett’s charge on the
third day and it was not the same charge in the historic
place. It was a futile attempt to storm superior positions<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span>
(positions, by established fact, in Lee’s hands since July
First) ending in slaughter and defeat.</p>
<p>Defeat for the South, not the North. Meade’s army was
not broken; the Confederates could not scatter and pursue
them now. The Capitulation, if it ever took place, would
come under different circumstances. The independence of
the Confederate States might not be acknowledged for
years. If at all.</p>
<p>All because the North held the Round Tops.</p>
<p>Years more of killing, and possibly further years of
guerrilla warfare. Thousands and thousands of dead, their
blood on my hands. A poisoned continent, an inheritance
of hate. Because of me.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you how I got back to York. If I walked,
it was somnambulistically. Possibly I rode the railroad or
in a farmer’s cart. Part of my mind, a tiny part that kept
coming back to pierce me no matter how often I crushed it
out, remembered those who died, those who would have
lived, but for me. Another part was concerned only with
the longing to get back to my own time, to the haven, to
Catty. A much larger part was simply blank, except for the
awesome, incredible knowledge that the past could be
changed—that the past <i>had</i> been changed.</p>
<p>I must have wound my watch—Barbara’s watch—for it
was ten oclock on the night of July Fourth when I got to
the barn. Ten oclock by 1863 time; the other dial showed
it to be 8:40, that would be twenty of nine in the morning,
1952 time. In two hours I would be home, safe from the
nightmare of happenings that never happened, of guilt for
the deaths of men not supposed to die, of the awful responsibility
of playing destiny. If I could not persuade Barbara
to smash her damnable contrivance I would do so myself.</p>
<p>The dogs barked madly, but I was sure no one heeded.
It was the Fourth of July, and a day of victory and rejoicing
for all Pennsylvanians. I stole into the barn and settled
myself in the exact center, even daring the use of a match,
my last one, to be sure I’d be directly under the reflector
when it materialized.</p>
<p>I could not sleep, though I longed to blot out the horror
and wake in my own time. Detail by detail I went over<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span>
what I had seen, superimposing it like a palimpsest upon
the history I’d always known. Sleep would have kept me
from this wretched compulsion and from questioning my
sanity, but I could not sleep.</p>
<p>I have heard that in moments of overwhelming shock
some irrelevancy, some inconsequential matter persistently
forces itself on the attention. The criminal facing execution
thinks, not of his imminent fate or of his crime, but of
the cigarette stub he left burning in his cell. The bereaved
widow dwells, not on her lost husband, but on tomorrow’s
laundry. So it was with me. Behind that part of my mind
re-living the past three days, a more elementary part
gnawed at the identification of the slain captain.</p>
<p>I knew that face. Particularly did I know that face set in
a sneer, distorted with anger. But I could not remember it
in Confederate uniform. I could not remember it with
sandy mustaches. And yet the sandy, reddish hair, revealed
in that terrible moment when his hat flew off, was as familiar
as part of the face. Oh, I thought, if I could only
place it once and for all and free my mind at least of this
trivial thing.</p>
<p>I wished there were some way I could have seen the
watch, to concentrate on the creeping progress of the
hands and distract myself from the wave after wave of
wretched meditations which flowed over me. But the moonlight
was not strong enough to make the face distinguishable,
much less the figures on the dials. There was no
narcotic.</p>
<p>As one always is at such times I was convinced the appointed
moment had passed unnoticed. Something had
gone wrong. Over and over I had to tell myself that minutes
seem hours in the waiting dark; it might feel like two
or three in the morning to me; it was probably barely
eleven. No use. A minute—or an hour or a second—later
I was again positive midnight had passed.</p>
<p>Finally I began to suffer a monstrous illusion. I began
to think it was getting lighter. That dawn was coming. Of
course I knew it could not be; what I fancied lifting darkness
was only a sick condition of swollen, overtired eyes.
Dawn does not come to Pennsylvania at midnight, and it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span>
was not yet midnight. At midnight I would be back at
Haggershaven, in 1952.</p>
<p>Even when the barn was fully lighted by the rising sun
and I could see the cattle peaceful in their stalls I refused
to believe what I saw. I took out my watch only to find
something had disturbed the works; the hands registered
five oclock. Even when the farmer, milk pails over arm,
started in surprise, exclaiming, “Hay, what you doing
here?”—even then, I did not believe.</p>
<p>Only when, as I opened my mouth to explain to my
involuntary host, did something happen. The puzzle which
had pursued me for three days suddenly solved itself. I
knew why the face of the Southron captain had been so
familiar. Familiar beyond any of the better known warriors
on either side. I had indeed known that face intimately;
seen those features enraged or sneering. The nose,
the mouth, the eyes, the expression were Barbara Haggerwells’.
The man dead in the peach orchard was the man
whose portrait hung in the library of Haggershaven, its
founder, Herbert Haggerwells. Captain Haggerwells—never
to become a major now, or buy this farm. Never to
marry a local girl or beget Barbara’s great grandfather.
Haggershaven had ceased to exist in the future.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="C21"><i>21.</i> <i>FOR THE TIME BEING</i></h2>
</div>
<p>I am writing this, as I said, in 1877. I am a healthy
man of forty-five, no doubt with many years ahead of me.
I might live to be a hundred, except for an illogical feeling
that I must die before 1921. However, eighty-nine should
be enough for anyone. So I have ample time to put my
story down. Still, better to have it down and done with;
should anything happen to me tomorrow it will be on
paper.</p>
<p>For what? As confession and apology? As an inverted
substitute for the merciful amnesia which ought to have
erased my memory as well as my biography? (I have written
to Wappinger Falls; there are no records of any Hodgins
family, or of Backmakers. Does this mean the forces I
set in motion destroyed Private Hodgins as well as Captain
Haggerwells? Or only that the Hodginses and Backmakers
settled elsewhere? In either case I am like Adam—in
this world—a special, parentless creation.) There is no
one close enough to care, or intimate enough to accept my
word in the face of all reason. I have not married in this
time, nor shall I. I write only as old men talk to themselves.</p>
<p>The rest of my personal story is simple. The name of the
farmer who found me in his barn was Thammis; they had
need of a hired hand and I stayed on. I had no desire to go
elsewhere; in fact I could not bear to leave what was—and
will never be—Haggershaven.</p>
<p>In the beginning I used to go to the location of the
Agati’s garden and look across at the spot where I left our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>
cottage and Catty. It was an empty pilgrimage. Now I content
myself with the work which needs doing. I shall stay
here till I die.</p>
<p>Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably
lost, in a future which never existed, which couldnt exist,
once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist
after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of
Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells founded Haggershaven?
Could another Barbara devise a means to reach
that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I
cannot. I simply cannot.</p>
<p>Children know about such things. They close their eyes
and pray, “Please God, make it didnt happen.” Often they
open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does
not shake their faith that many times the prayer is granted.
Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories
they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they <i>know</i> that
a past cannot be expunged? Children know it can.</p>
<p>And once lost, that particular past can never be regained.
Another and another perhaps, but never the same
one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may
be sinuous and inconstant.</p>
<p>That this world is a better place than the one into which
I was born, and promises to grow still better, seems true.
What idealism lay behind the Southron cause triumphed in
the reconciliation of men like Lee; what was brutal never
got the upper hand as it did in my world. The Negro is free;
black legislatures pass advanced laws in South Carolina;
black congressmen comport themselves with dignity in
Washington. The Pacific railroad is built, immigrants pour
in to a welcoming country to make it strong and wealthy;
no one suggests they should be shut out or hindered.</p>
<p>There are rumors of a deal between northern Republicans
and southern Democrats, betraying the victory of the
Civil War—how strange it is still, after fourteen years, to
use this term instead of the familiar War of Southron Independence—in
return for the presidency. If this is true, my
brave new world is not so brave.</p>
<p>It may not be so new either. Prussia has beaten France
and proclaimed a German Empire; is this the start in a dif<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>ferent
way of the German Union? Will 1914 see an Emperors’
War—there is none in France now—leaving Germany
facing ... whom?</p>
<p>Any one of the inventions of my own time would make
me a rich man if I could reproduce them, or cared for
money. With mounting steel production and the tremendous
jump in population, what a success the minible would
be. Or the tinugraph. Or controllable balloons.</p>
<p>The typewriter I have seen. It has developed along different
and clumsier lines; inevitably, I suppose, given initial
divergence. It may mean greater advances; more likely not.
The universal use of gaslight must be far in the future if it
is to come at all; certainly its advent is delayed by all this
talk of inventing electric illumination. If we couldnt put
electricity to work it’s unlikely my new contemporaries will
be able to. Why, they havent even made the telegraph
cheap and convenient.</p>
<p>And something like HX-1? It is inconceivable. Could it
be that in destroying the future in which Haggershaven
existed I have also destroyed the only dimension in which
time travel was possible?</p>
<p>So strangely easily I can write the words, “I destroyed.”</p>
<p>Catty.</p>
<p>But what of Tyss’s philosophy? Is it possible I shall be
condemned to repeat the destruction throughout eternity?
Have I written these lines an infinite number of times before?
Or is the mercy envisaged by Enfandin a reality?
And what of Barbara’s expression as she bade me goodbye?
Could she possibly</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Editorial note by Frederick Winter Thammis: Quite recently,
in the summer of 1953 to be exact, I commissioned
the remodelling of my family home near York, Pennsylvania.
Among the bundles of old books and papers stored
in the attic was a box of personal effects, labelled “H M
Backmaker.” In it was the manuscript concluding with an
unfinished sentence, reproduced above.</p>
<p>My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there
was an old man living on the farm, nominally as a hired
hand, but actually as a pensioner, since he was beyond the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span>
age of useful labor. My father said the children considered
him not quite right in his mind, but very entertaining, for
he often repeated long, disjointed narratives of an impossible
world and an impossible society which they found as
fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old
Hodge talked like an educated man, but this might simply
be the impression of young, uncultivated minds.</p>
<p>Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to
his tales that the old man wrote his fable down, and then
was too shy to submit it for publication. This is the only
reasonable way to account for its existence. Of course he
says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from old, and
disconcertingly, analysis of the paper shows it might have
been written then.</p>
<p>Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker’s
belongings there was a watch of unknown manufacture
and unique design. Housed in a cheap nickel case,
the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision and
delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and
wound.</p>
<p>The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar
quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil
War. I pick this only because it is handy. From W. E.
Woodward’s <i>Years of Madness</i>, p. 202:</p>
<p>“ ... Union troops that night and next morning took a
position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top.... The Confederates
could have occupied this position but they failed
to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="About_Ward_Moore">About Ward Moore</h2>
</div>
<p>On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a
small hill called Little Round Top. One morning in July,
1863, the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not
occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory
in a battle which—in the view of many historians—was
the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years since
Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds
of most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What
if the battle had gone the other way, what if the South had
won the war? Ward Moore—a Northerner himself—has
settled the matter at last in a book that might be called
imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world of
might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail
that, for a few hours, it seems true.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>The author of <i>Bring the Jubilee</i> was born in Madison, New
Jersey, in 1903. “From the age of five,” he writes, “books
have been for me the essential narcotic; as a natural consequence
I detested school. When this detestation did not
bring on psychosomatic illnesses to save me from the hated
classrooms, I was not above malingering or playing hooky—now
a lost art, but one practiced in my generation. Three
weeks short of graduation I quit high school and have not
been inside a school house since, except to vote.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>“My first short story was written at the age of eleven and
was followed by a flood of juvenilia, some little of which was
unfortunately published. Happily, markets and industry died
simultaneously; I wrote only desultorily until my first novel
<i>Breathe the Air Again</i> was published in 1942. This was
acclaimed by Max Eastman in the American Mercury, who
predicted that I would fall heir to ‘the cloak of Upton Sinclair.’
Something went wrong with the tailoring arrangements;
my next novel was <i>Greener Than You Think</i> (Sloane,
1947), a satirical fantasy.”</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>In addition to these two novels, Mr. Moore has published a
number of short stories in such disparate media as Amazing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span>
Stories and Harper’s Bazaar, Fantasy and Science Fiction
and The Reporter, Science Fiction Quarterly and Tomorrow.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>He concludes: “I have been intensely interested in the history
of the Civil War ever since—at the age of six—I came across
a book with nice black woodcuts showing the firing on Fort
Sumter and the burning of Richmond. As an amateur I’ve
read hundreds of dull volumes and a score of fascinating
ones on the Irrepressible Conflict. A novel based on the concept
‘what would have happened if the South had won at
Gettysburg,’ was practically inevitable. <i>Bring the Jubilee</i> is it.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span></p>
<p class="center"><i>The Idea Behind</i><br />
DUAL EDITIONS</p>
<p>An agreement unusual in American publishing has been
made between <span class="smcap">Farrar, Straus</span> and <span class="smcap">Young, Inc.</span>, and <span class="smcap">Ballantine
Books, Inc.</span> We believe that through simultaneous publication
of new titles in paperbound and trade editions it is
possible to secure broader distribution of good books at a considerable
saving to the reader and with substantially greater
royalty income for the author. At a time when costs are consistently
rising, large printings of combined editions make
possible a lower price for the trade editions, while nation-wide
distribution of the paperbound edition makes immediately
available to a great new audience the best in current fiction
and non-fiction.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>The convenient-sized, permanent, hard-cover editions may
be obtained through any bookstore at a saving of approximately
60% of the cost of similar books published in the
regular way. The paperbound original editions (not reprints)
are priced at 35 and 50c and are distributed through 100,000
outlets.</p>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67652 ***</div>
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