To Look and Pass Page 9

  How tranquil were the evenings of my youth!

  So fair, so clear, so radiantly pure.

  Remembering his poor life, harried from without and from within, bewildered and shabby and broken, it seems to me that that poem was the saddest and most pathetic he ever wrote. Only those two lines he had written, and then had stopped abruptly, either because he could not and dared not go on, or because even he had seen that there was nothing more to write than that. They were complete.

  I remembered them that summer. I had read them several years ago, and I think I was the only one who remembered them. But I repeated them to myself several times from June to September of that year. They seemed to me to be filled with everything I thought, with almost every emotion I had. Everything had taken upon itself a clarity and purity, like crystal forms pulsing with some inward color, drawing this color from radiant air and running it through itself, in the manner of the new signs they have nowadays: hollow glass tubes in which flow bright-colored gases. It seemed to me that I hardly met an unfriendly face, and that there was little ugliness in anything. I felt that the future was imminently exciting and tremendous, full of approaching tumult and splendor. Things were in the coming such as had never before been on earth. I suppose that was just youth. I have talked to many young people in my lifetime, and at first I was surprised and sadly amused that they all thought so, that they alone were singled out from life for some magnificent destiny. It seemed horrible to me at first that they later settled down on little farms or in some mean little profession or calling in the small towns, and let the thunderous wheels roll over them, unheeding. Surely such prescience must have reality out there in space; surely no emotion or thought of any man but has its substance in a deeper reality. Why, then, do the dreams of youth dry up like springs in a desert, and the sands of miserable details absorb the bright and living drops? That, it seems, is the saddest thing of all in a very sad world.

  Life quickened for me that summer. I enjoyed everything. Nothing, during the first two months, caused me any distress. I liked my friends and my town; both seemed to me to be the very finest in the world.

  I even felt sorry for Beatrice Faire. I thought there was something gallant in her assumed pleasure in Amelia Burnett’s marriage to Jack Rugby. She attended the wedding, all white muslin and primrose ribbons and radiant hair, and though she had few partners she danced exquisitely with those who asked for a dance. She danced with me, also. It seemed to me that I did not have a flesh-and-blood woman in my arms as we moved over the platform under the dark trees, and the music wailed and swayed as the paper lanterns swayed in the night wind. I almost liked her.

  Most completely happy in my memory are the days I spent with Livy Bingham. We wheeled over the rutty country roads, the sun warm on our heads and shoulders; we dismounted to lean against fences and look at the rich fields of wheat and corn and rye. We climbed hills for the view, and then sat in silence, weaving grass between our fingers. It was an enchanted country into which I had wandered, and I wondered vaguely how it was that I had never been there before. I had a feeling that this country was suspended magically in space somewhere, and that earnest seeking could find it at any time. I amused myself by making mental notes of it, noticing familiar landmarks, so that I would surely find it at any time in a future that might be dark or uncertain.

  One day I tried to tell Livy something about it, with a certain half-ashamed assumption of amusement. She looked at me gravely and straightly as I fumbled with words, but I knew that she understood. It seemed strange to me that she sighed after I had done speaking, and she looked dimly off to the hills across the valley. On a frightened impulse I took her hand; it lay in mine quiet yet without vitality. My fright increased at this.

  “Livy,” I said, “before I came home this summer I thought, I’ll ask Livy. I’ll ask her to wait for me. Livy, will you wait for me?”

  To my consternation she did not speak to me for a moment, nor turn her head to me. It appeared to me for a moment that everything splintered into dark fragments, like opaque glass, and that if she did not answer me as I wanted to be answered there would never be anything else in the world but unbearable pain. Then she turned to me and the sun suddenly broke out dazzlingly.

  “We’re both young, yet,” she said gently, smiling. “I guess we can wait awhile. But, don’t ask me about it again, Jim, dear, until next year?”

  She still smiled. There was something determinedly fixed about her smile, but I was partially content. Of course, I said, I understood about her father. I was about to add that he was an old man, however, and could not be expected to live much longer, but fortunately I caught myself in time. She must have guessed what I had just luckily suppressed, for she laughed heartily. She was never one to have false sentimentalities.

  I tried to be content, to feel that everything was all right as we went home. I talked about the future, our future, with confidence and hope. She listened, and nodded. I tried to make myself believe that she was interested, and then was irritated at an abstraction she could not conceal. When I pressed her for more enthusiasm, she suddenly exclaimed: “Jim, please, let’s not talk about it just now! You may have forgotten me by next year. Let us wait and see.” She did not look at me directly, but I saw that the corners of her eyes were wet. I was instantly contrite; I knew she had a hard life with her father and his everlasting grim platitudes. So I merely reached over and pressed her hand. I had to be satisfied, and in the manner of youth I read into her every word and gesture what I wished to read.

  I was hysterically happy during the next week or two. My parents guessed what had happened, and they were indulgently pleased. But I did not talk to them. I was not a boy such as the novelists write of: subtle and obscure and darkly unhappy and misunderstood by grosser parents. I thought my parents rather fine, above the ordinary, and I was content with their ways of life and most of their ideas. However, there had never been any particular meeting place where I could talk to them. I suppose this is the way with most parents and their children. Still, none of us were conscious of any loss of warmth.

  And so it was that I at first felt only annoyance when Dan Hendricks broke into the clear placidity and sunniness of life with a loud explosion. I had come, in a measure, to accept Dan’s ostracism from our snobbish little group. I was never one to question very vigorously decisions of this group, and though some of its staid pettinesses sometimes annoyed me and some of its prim little conventions irked me, I had a calm acceptance of most of its rules and regulations and ways of living. They say most young men are socialists—or worse—at some time in their lives, but I never felt any burning desire to reorganize a society that seemed to me well enough, and though I had felt all my life that something was very wrong in our group’s treatment of Dan Hendricks I had come to accept that treatment as something natural and not to be protested against too much. A Dan Hendricks accepted into our tight little society would have seemed incongruous to me, and a little unnatural and unappropriate. Too, I derived a sort of guilty pleasure in my association with him in the face of my friends’ disapproval. It was my one fling, my one kicking up of the heels, my one flaunting before an institution I in my heart of hearts believed right and correct.

  The explosion occurred in this way. There lived, on one of the more wretched and poverty-stricken farms in the township a certain farmer, Wally Lewis. The whole family of this man was shiftless, dirty, idle, and impudent. However, they had one virtue: they were not spongers like others of their kind. They had a kind of insolent and hardy independence, a swaggering contempt for the niceties of South Kenton. Wally Lewis was reputed to be an atheist and anarchist, and his shocking sayings and acts furnished delightful conversation. At one time Wally, a middle-aged, gaunt individual, dirty and unkempt and with tobacco-stained whiskers, had stood in filthy overalls before the church on Sunday, shouting and reviling the worshippers therein. It was the Sabbath day, and so hotheaded young men were forcibly restrained by sympathetic parents and brothers
from leaving the church and horsewhipping the blasphemer.

  Wally farmed desultorily. He never sold any of his crops, for he raised just sufficient to keep his family alive. How he paid his taxes no one seemed to know exactly, though it was rumored that he made and sold illegal liquor, for which purchasers were not lacking among the young bloods of South Kenton. Ed Ford, proprietor of the American House and Bar, was his bitterest enemy, for Wally cut into his profits. Wally and his family of slatternly wife and three sluttish daughters lived in a ramshackle old farmhouse in the midst of unbelievable squalor. I only saw the man and his family a few times, but they seemed content and self-sufficient. This content and self-sufficiency provoked South Kenton more than did their shiftlessness and poverty.

  The three daughters would not have been bad-looking if they had ever taken baths or combed their hair. The youngest, Connie, was even quite pretty. She had a mass of light brown hair, closely curled and shining, and bright brown eyes full of curiosity and smiles. She was a little creature, but beautifully formed, quick, and alert. Occasionally we would see her driving into town in the broken-down family buckboard hitched to a half-starved horse. She would sit on the open seat, coquettishly eying all young men, a ribbon perkily tied in the masses of her hair, a broad smile on her dark and not-too-clean face. The other two girls were sullen and sodden, and rarely came to town. Connie Lewis was her father’s favorite; he would often stop in Dan’s store to buy her a ribbon or a pair of white cotton stockings or a few yards of gingham. He never bought anything for his wife, whom it was rumored he beat unmercifully, nor did he ever seem to notice his other daughters.

  It came as no surprise to South Kenton when it was learned that Connie was “in trouble.” There was much ribald conversation as to who was responsible. We would hilariously accuse each other of nocturnal rendezvous with the unwashed Connie, and uproariously bear witness against each other. But the older folk were not so amused. Within a short time the town was up in arms. There was talk of driving the whole family out of the country, but as they had always paid their taxes, and the land was their own, nothing could be done. The girl was “bad,” no doubt, but she was not a criminal. Protest meetings were held, but nothing was done about it. Young girls were forbidden to mention the Lewises.

  Had Wally Lewis been the ordinary shiftless farmer we would have known nothing about it, or cared less. Since he was not in the public eye, he would have passed unnoticed in his trouble. But he had been such an agitator and a cinder in the eye of South Kenton that the affair became tremendously important and affronting. Nothing he could do could ever pass without comment.

  Connie’s condition was not known until about three weeks before her child was born. She had kept discreetly away from South Kenton, but someone had seen her in her father’s cabbage patch while driving by, and by nightfall everyone in town knew about it. Two days later, a committee composed of my father, Mayor Burnett, Tom Williams and Bill Crawford called on Wally Lewis and suggested that Connie be sent away, as she was a disgrace to the township. Wally, I heard, came rushing from his decayed house bearing a shotgun of ancient pattern, and had threatened to “blow ’em all to hell!” They had left more quickly than they had come, and called an indignant meeting in the town hall.

  Soon it was whispered that Wally himself was the father of Connie’s child. Nothing was too low to be imputed to him. Anyone with Wally’s flagrant ideas and guilty of his lawless and insulting acts was likely to do anything. I had not seen him for several years, myself, but I remembered his face, lean and sunburned and fiery and insolent. I remembered his eyes, too, burning and full of an odd intelligence and ferocity. I did not believe him guilty of any such shameful thing, but I kept silent when I heard the accusations. I had no wish to align myself with anyone so reprehensible.

  The younger folk set out to do something, more out of herd deviltry, I think, than any shocked sensibilities.

  Looking over past experiences, I am sure that most mob violences and hysterias and brutalities are not due to outraged virtue or true anger, but are merely a release of fundamental human traits: cruelty, bestiality and animal lust. These releases take place, I have observed, when mobs are pretty sure that the law is deliberately looking the other way, and that there is a certain sanction in public opinion, however furtive. But mobs are the most hypocritical masses in the world; they like to believe, and do believe, that they are activated by only the most virtuous motives and indignations.

  At any event, Connie had hardly emerged from childbirth when Wally’s farmhouse mysteriously burst into flame one midnight. Though all the young fellows loudly proclaimed innocence and lack of all knowledge, it was reliably reported, (“someone said”) that Lew himself carried his sick daughter and her child into the barn and made her as comfortable as possible. The other two girls had fled in their nightwear to the barn, but Mrs. Lewis, who had been bedridden for the past month due to the last beating received from her husband, was not able to escape and was burned to death in her bed. It was said, reluctantly, that Wally had tried to save her, though there was dissenting opinion. I do not see how he could have saved her as the house, being weather-dried and a mass of falling timber, had gone up like a match box.

  For a day or two even South Kenton’s most rabid Lewis-haters were shocked and disturbed, and there was a half-hearted attempt to find out the arsonists. But it was finally announced that no one could have been to blame, the house being what it was, and the family being what it was. However, no help was offered Wally Lewis, no assistance for the young mother and her three-day-old child. Some said it was good for her, that she was only a piece of cattle anyways, and would not mind the straw and filth of the barn, and the broken roof. Public opinion again became indignant. It got over its nervousness when Mr. Bingham angrily reported that he had been driven away by Wally Lewis when he had gone out to the farm with an offer to officiate at the burial of Mrs. Lewis’ charred remains.

  A week after the fire Wally Lewis came to town. He walked down Main Street on a Saturday afternoon when the town was crowded with farmers and loungers and shoppers. I happened to be going to Dan’s store, but was halted at the corner by a curious phenomenon. The street was full of noise, and the movement of horses and buggies. But when Wally appeared, the whole street became deathly silent. The wave of silence ran before Wally. His path was like the devastating path of a cyclone, leaving stillness and ominous calm behind and around it. Everyone fell immobile, seeing the attitude Wally had at that precise moment. The street was full of eyes and breath and terrible silence.

  But Wally looked straight ahead. He walked without haste or hesitation. His overalls hung on his lank figure; his shaggy hair stuck out under his broken old hat. His face had a frozen calm in it, for all its redness. His expression was rigid. He might have been a dead man walking except for his terrible eyes, fixed and flaming and distended. His mouth, under the yellow-stained reddish mustache, was like a slash in his face. He did not seem to see anyone. I wish I could forget that face and that expression, but I cannot. I can see him yet, the sunlight falling hotly upon him, and then shadow, as he emerged from under trees and awnings, and then went under them.

  He walked up the wooden stairs of Dan’s store, and so complete was the silence that the whole street heard the dull thud of his muddy boots on those stairs. He disappeared within. Instantly, at least twenty men tiptoed to the doorway and peered within, I among them. I wanted to enter, but could not, though I cursed myself. The sidewalk behind those twenty men became thick with congested traffic; everyone waited.

  There was only one customer in the store, though the other stores were swarming with customers. And that customer was Sarah Faire, shirtwaisted and cool and gentle as always, though there were whitish streaks in her bright hair and her figure had thickened. She had been purchasing supplies, evidently, for she was putting parcels in the basket on her arm. The store was dim, but her startled expression and suddenly pale face seemed to become very vivid as she looked at Wally Lew
is.

  Dan waited in silence. Everyone waited in silence. Wally cleared his throat; the sound was clearly audible out in the street. He spat; he spoke, but his voice was so hoarse that at first he could not make himself understood.

  “Dan,” he said, “I can’t pay you—yet. I don’t know when I can pay you. But Connie’s sick, and needs some things. Will you trust me?”

  We all waited breathlessly for the reply. Of course, Dan would refuse. Several of the men shouldered forward to protect Dan, and uphold him in whatever he would say. Then Dan spoke softly.

  “Yes, Wally. Anything. Take whatever you want. And pay me when you can. And if you can’t, forget it.” He did not look towards the doorway, dark with bodies and threatening faces. But at his words a deep growl spread from the men in the doorway to others in the street, and the air about them seemed to become hot and choked.

  Wally tried to speak again, but could not. He made queer sounds in his throat. He bent his head, and I saw his raw fists clench on the counter as though he were making a superhuman effort to control himself. Then, to our vast amazement Sarah spoke, gently, steadily, clearly, and laid her hand on the man’s arm.

  “Is Connie sick, Wally? I was a nurse once. Have you your buckboard with you? No? Then, I’ll walk out to your place with you. I’ve had a child, and I know what to do for them.”

  We were dumbfounded at this, but even when Sarah continued to speak softly and consolingly to the stricken man there was no sound. As for Dan, he quickly laid on the counter butter, eggs, a slab of bacon, medicines, gingham, blankets, potatoes, and other things, until there was a huge pile between him and Wally Lewis. He found a burlap sack, and pushed the mass into it with speed and dexterity. The three of them seemed utterly unconscious of the mob at the door.