Читать книгу The Web and the Rock - Thomas Wolfe - Страница 5

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Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, one afternoon in May, George Webber was lying stretched out in the grass before his uncle’s house in Old Catawba.

Isn’t Old Catawba a wonderful name? People up North or out West or in other parts of the world don’t know much about it, and they don’t speak about it often. But really when you know the place and think about it more and more its name is wonderful.

Old Catawba is much better than South Carolina. It is more North, and “North” is a much more wonderful word than “South,” as anyone with any ear for words will know. The reason why “South” seems such a wonderful word is because we had the word “North” to begin with: if there had been no “North,” then the word “South” and all its connotations would not seem so wonderful. Old Catawba is distinguished by its “Northness,” and South Carolina by its “Southness.” And the “Northness” of Old Catawba is better than the “Southness” of South Carolina. Old Catawba has the slants of evening and the mountain cool. You feel lonely in Old Catawba, but it is not the loneliness of South Carolina. In Old Catawba, the hill boy helps his father building fences and hears a soft Spring howling in the wind, and sees the wind snake through the bending waves of the coarse grasses of the mountain pastures. And far away he hears the whistle’s cry wailed back, far-flung and faint along some mountain valley, as a great train rushes towards the cities of the East. And the heart of the hill boy will know joy because he knows, all world-remote, lonely as he is, that some day he will meet the world and know those cities too.

But in South Carolina the loneliness is not like this. They do not have the mountain cool. They have dusty, sand-clay roads, great mournful cotton fields, with pine wood borders and the nigger shacks, and something haunting, soft, and lonely in the air. These people are really lost. They cannot get away from South Carolina, and if they get away they are no good. They drawl beautifully. There is the most wonderful warmth, affection, heartiness in their approach and greeting, but the people are afraid. Their eyes are desperately afraid, filled with a kind of tortured and envenomed terror of the old, stricken, wounded “Southness” of cruelty and lust. Sometimes their women have the honey skins, they are like gold and longing. They are filled with the most luscious and seductive sweetness, tenderness, and gentle mercy. But the men are stricken. They get fat about the bellies, or they have a starved, stricken leanness in the loins. They are soft-voiced and drawling, but their eyes will go about and go again with fear, with terror and suspicion. They drawl softly in front of the drug store, they palaver softly to the girls when the girls drive up, they go up and down the streets of blistered, sun-wide, clay-dust little towns in their shirt-sleeves, and they are full of hearty, red-faced greetings.

They cry: “How are y’, Jim? Is it hot enough fer you?”

And Jim will say, with a brisk shake of the head: “Hotter’n what Sherman said war was, ain’t it, Ed?”

And the street will roar with hearty, red-faced laughter: “By God! That’s a good ’un. Damned if ole Jim didn’t have it about right too!”—but the eyes keep going back and forth, and fear, suspicion, hatred, and mistrust, and something stricken in the South long, long ago, is there among them.

And after a day before the drug stores or around the empty fountain in the Courthouse Square, they go out to lynch a nigger. They kill him, and they kill him hard. They get in cars at night and put the nigger in between them, they go down the dusty roads until they find the place that they are going to, and before they get there, they jab little knives into the nigger, not a long way, not the whole way in, but just a little way. And they laugh to see him squirm. When they get out at the place where they are going to, the place the nigger sat in is a pool of blood. Perhaps it makes the boy who is driving the car sick at his stomach, but the older people laugh. Then they take the nigger through the rough field stubble of a piece of land and hang him to a tree. But before they hang him they saw off his thick nose and his fat nigger lips with a rusty knife. And they laugh about it. Then they castrate him. And at the end they hang him.

This is the way things are in South Carolina; it is not the way things are in Old Catawba. Old Catawba is much better. Although such things may happen in Old Catawba, they do not belong to the temper and character of the people there. There is a mountain cool in Old Catawba and the slants of evening. The hill men kill in the mountain meadows—they kill about a fence, a dog, the dispute of a boundary line. They kill in drunkenness or in the red smear of the murder lust. But they do not saw off niggers’ noses. There is not the look of fear and cruelty in their eyes that the people in South Carolina have.

Old Catawba is a place inhabited by humble people. There is no Charleston in Old Catawba, and not so many people pretending to be what they are not. Charleston produced nothing, and yet it pretended to so much. Now their pretense is reduced to pretending that they amounted to so much formerly. And they really amounted to very little. This is the curse of South Carolina and its “Southness”—of always pretending you used to be so much, even though you are not now. Old Catawba does not have this to contend with. It has no Charleston and it does not have to pretend. They are small, plain people.

So Old Catawba is better because it is more “North.” Even as a child, George Webber realized that in a general way it was better to be more North than South. If you get too North, it gets no good. Everything gets frozen and dried up. But if you get too South, it is no good either, and it also gets rotten. If you get too North, it gets rotten, but in a cold, dry way. If you get too South, it gets rotten not in a dry way—which if you’re going to get rotten is the best way to get rotten—but in a horrible, stagnant, swampy, stenchlike, humid sort of way that is also filled with obscene whisperings and ropy laughter.

Old Catawba is just right. They are not going to set the world on fire down there, neither do they intend to. They make all the mistakes that people can make. They elect the cheapest sort of scoundrel to the highest offices they are able to confer. They have Rotary Clubs and chain gangs and Babbitts and all the rest of it. But they are not bad.

They are not certain, not sure, in Old Catawba. Nothing is certain or sure down there. The towns don’t look like New England towns. They don’t have the lovely white houses, the elm green streets, the sure, sweet magic of young May, the certainty and purpose of it all. It is not like that. First there are about two hundred miles of a coastal plain. This is a mournful flat-land, wooded with pine barrens. Then there are two hundred miles or thereabouts of Piedmont. This is rolling, rugged, you can’t remember it the way that you remember the lavish, sweet, and wonderful farm lands of the Pennsylvania Dutch with their great red barns which dominate the land. You don’t remember Old Catawba in this way. No; field and fold and gulch and hill and hollow, rough meadow land, bunched coarsely with wrench grass, and pine land borderings, clay bank and gulch and cut and all the trees there are, the locusts, chestnuts, maples, oaks, the pines, the willows, and the sycamores, all grown up together, all smashed-down tangles, and across in a sweet wilderness, all choked between with dogwood, laurel, and the rhododendron, dead leaves from last October and the needles of the pine—this is one of the ways that Old Catawba looks in May. And then out of the Piedmont westward you will hit the mountains. You don’t hit them squarely, they just come to you. Field and fold and hill and hollow, clay bank and cut and gulch and rough swell and convolution of the earth unutterable, and presently the hills are there.

A certain unknown, unsuspected sharpness thrills you. Is it not there? You do not know, for it cannot be proved. And yet the shifting engines switch along the tracks, you see the weed growth by the track-side, the leak-grey painting of a toolshed hut, the bleak, unforgettable, marvelous yellow of a station of the Southern Railway. The huge black snout of a mountain engine comes shifting down the track to take you up behind, and suddenly you know the hills are there. The heavy coaches ride up past mountain pastures, a rail fence, a clay road, the rock-bright clamors of a mountain water. You feel upon your neck the hot, the thrilling, the immensely intimate, the strange and most familiar breath of the terrific locomotive. And suddenly the hills are there. You go twisting up the grades and snake round curves with grinding screech. How near, how homely, how common and how strange, how utterly familiar—the great bulk of the Blue Ridge bears imminent upon you and compels you. You can put your hand out of the slow, toiling train and touch it. And all life is near, as common as your breath, as strange as time.

The towns aren’t much to look at. There is no lovely, certain thing the way there is in New England. There are just plain houses, nigger shacks, front porches, most of the current bungalow and country-club atrocities, a Public Square, some old buildings that say “The Weaver Block, 1882,” some new ones for Ford agencies, cars parked around the Square.

Down in the East, in Old Catawba, they have some smack of ancientry. The East got settled first and there are a few old towns down there, the remnants of plantations, a few fine old houses, a lot of niggers, tobacco, turpentine, pine woods, and the mournful flatlands of the coastal plain. The people in the East used to think they were better than the people in the West because they had been there a little longer. But they were not really better. In the West, where the mountains sweep around them, the people have utterly common, familiar, plain, Scotch-Irish faces, and names like Weaver, Wilson, Gudger, Joyner, Alexander, and Patton. The West is really better than the East. They went to war in the West, and yet they didn’t want to go to war. They didn’t have anything to go to war about: they were a plain and common people and they had no slaves. And yet they will always go to war if Leaders tell them to—they are made to serve. They think long and earnestly, debatingly; they are conservative; they vote the right way, and they go to war when big people tell them to. The West is really a region of good small people, a Scotch-Irish place, and that, too, is undefined, save that it doesn’t drawl so much, works harder, doesn’t loaf so much, and shoots a little straighter when it has to. It is really just one of the common places of the earth, a million or two people with nothing very extraordinary about them. If there had been anything extraordinary about them, it would have come out in their houses, as it came out in the lovely white houses of New England; or it would have come out in their barns, as it came out in the great red barns of the Pennsylvania Dutch. They are just common, plain, and homely—but almost everything of America is in them.

George Webber must have known all these things twenty-five years ago as he lay on the grass one afternoon before his uncle’s house. He really knew the way things were. People sometimes pretend they don’t know the way things are, but they really do. George lay in the grass and pulled some grass blades and looked upon them contentedly and chewed upon them. And he knew the way the grass blades were. He dug bare toes into the grass and thought of it. He knew the way it felt. Among the green grass, he saw patches of old brown, and he knew the way that was too. He put out his hand and felt the maple tree. He saw the way it came out of the earth, the grass grew right around it, he felt the bark and got its rough, coarse feeling. He pressed hard with his fingers, a little rough piece of the bark came off; he knew the way that was too. The wind kept howling faintly the way it does in May. All the young leaves of the maple tree were turned back, straining in the wind. He heard the sound it made, it touched him with some sadness, then the wind went and came again.

He turned and saw his uncle’s house, its bright red brick, its hard, new, cement columns, everything about it raw and ugly; and beside it, set farther back, the old house his grandfather had built, the clapboard structure, the porch, the gables, the bay windows, the color of the paint. It was all accidental, like a million other things in America. George Webber saw it, and he knew that this was the way things were. He watched the sunlight come and go, across backyards with all their tangle of familiar things; he saw the hills against the eastern side of town, sweet green, a little mottled, so common, homely, and familiar, and, when remembered later, wonderful, the way things are.

George Webber had good eyes, a sound body, he was twelve years old. He had a wonderful nose, a marvelous sense of smell, nothing fooled him. He lay there in the grass before his uncle’s house, thinking: “This is the way things are. Here is the grass, so green and coarse, so sweet and delicate, but with some brown rubble in it. There are the houses all along the street, the concrete blocks of walls, somehow so dreary, ugly, yet familiar, the slate roofs and the shingles, the lawns, the hedges and the gables, the backyards with their accidental structures of so many little and familiar things as hen houses, barns. All common and familiar as my breath, all accidental as the strings of blind chance, yet all somehow fore-ordered as a destiny: the way they are, because they are the way they are!”

There was a certain stitch of afternoon while the boy waited. Bird chirrupings and maple leaves, pervading quietness, boards hammered from afar, and a bumbling hum. The day was drowsed with quietness and defunctive turnip greens at three o’clock, and Carlton Leathergood’s tall, pock-marked, yellow nigger was coming up the street. The big dog trotted with him, breathing like a locomotive, the big dog Storm, that knocked you down with friendliness. Tongue rolling, heavy as a man, the great head swaying side to side, puffing with joy continually, the dog came on, and with him came the pock-marked nigger, Simpson Simms. Tall, lean, grinning cheerfully, full of dignity and reverence, the nigger was coming up the street the way he always did at three o’clock. He smiled and raised his hand to George with a courtly greeting. He called him “Mister” Webber as he always did; the greeting was gracious and respectful, and soon forgotten as it is and should be in the good, kind minds of niggers and of idiots, and yet it filled the boy somehow with warmth and joy.

“Good day dar, Mistah Webbah. How’s Mistah Webbah today?”

The big dog swayed and panted like an engine, his great tongue lolling out; he came on with great head down and with the great black brisket and his shoulders working.

Something happened suddenly, filling that quiet street with instant menace, injecting terror in the calm pulse of the boy. Around the corner of the Potterham house across the street came Potterham’s bulldog. He saw the mastiff, paused; his forelegs widened stockily, his grim-jowled face seemed to sink right down between the shoulder blades, his lips bared back along his long-fanged tusks, and from his baleful red-shot eyes fierce lightning shone. A low snarl rattled in the folds of his thick throat, the mastiff swung his ponderous head back and growled, the bull came on, halted, leaning forward on his widened legs, filled with hell-fire, solid with fight.

And Carlton Leathergood’s pock-marked yellow negro man winked at the boy and shook his head with cheerful confidence, saying:

“He ain’t goin’ to mix up wid my dawg, Mistah Webbah! ... No, sah! ... He knows bettah dan dat! ... Yes, sah!” cried Leathergood’s nigger with unbounded confidence. “He knows too well fo’ dat!”

The pock-marked nigger was mistaken! Something happened like a flash: there was a sudden snarl, a black thunderbolt shot through the air, the shine of murderous fanged teeth. Before the mastiff knew what had happened to him, the little bull was in and had his fierce teeth buried, sunk, gripped with the lock of death, in the great throat of the larger dog.

What happened after that was hard to follow. For a moment the great dog stood stock-still with an eloquence of stunned surprise and bewildered consternation that was more than human; then a savage roar burst out upon the quiet air, filling the street with its gigantic anger. The mastiff swung his great head savagely, the little bull went flying through the air but hung on with embedded teeth; great drops of the bright arterial blood went flying everywhere across the pavement, and still the bull held on. The end came like a lightning stroke. The great head flashed over through the air and down: the bull, no longer dog now—just a wad of black—smacked to the pavement with a sickening crunch.

From Potterham’s house a screen door slammed, and fourteen-year-old Augustus Potterham, with his wild red hair aflame, came out upon the run. Up the street, paunch-bellied, stiff-legged, and slouchy-uniformed, bound for town and three o’clock, Mr. Matthews, the policeman, pounded heavily. But Leathergood’s nigger was already there, tugging furiously at the leather collar around the mastiff’s neck, and uttering imprecations.

But it was all too late. The little dog was dead the moment that he struck the pavement—back broken, most of his bones broken, too; in Mr. Matthews’ words, “He never knowed what hit him.” And the big dog came away quietly enough, now that the thing was done: beneath the negro’s wrenching tug upon his neck, he swung back slowly, panting, throat dripping blood in a slow rain, bedewing the street beneath him with the bright red flakes.

Suddenly, like a miracle, the quiet street was full of people. They came from all directions, from everywhere: they pressed around in an excited circle, all trying to talk at once, each with his own story, everyone debating, explaining, giving his own version. In Potterham’s house, the screen door slammed again, and Mr. Potterham came running out at his funny little bandy-legged stride, his little red apple-cheeks aglow with anger, indignation, and excitement, his funny, chirping little voice heard plainly over all the softer, deeper, heavier, more Southern tones. No longer the great gentleman now, no longer the noble descendant of the Dukes of Potterham, no longer the blood-cousin of belted lords and earls, the possible claimant of enormous titles and estates in Gloucestershire when the present reigning head should die—but Cockney Potterham now, little Potterham minus all his aitches, little Potterham the dealer in nigger real estate and the owner of the nigger shacks, indomitable little Potterham forgetting all his grammar in the heat and anger of the moment:

“ ’Ere now! Wot did I tell you? I always said ’is bloody dog would make trouble! ’Ere! Look at ’im now! The girt bleedin’, blinkin’ thing! Big as a helefant, ’e is! Wot chance ’ud a dog like mine ’ave against a brute like that! ’E ought to be put out of the way—that’s wot! You mark my words—you let that brute run loose, an’ there won’t be a dog left in town—that’s wot!”

And Leathergood’s big pock-marked nigger, still clutching to the mastiff’s collar as he talks, and pleading with the policeman almost tearfully:

“Fo’ de Lawd, Mistah Matthews, my dawg didn’t do nuffin! No, sah! He don’t bothah nobody—my dawg don’t! He wa’nt even noticin’ dat othah dawg—you ask anybody!—ask Mistah Webbah heah!”—suddenly appealing to the boy with pleading entreaty—“Ain’t dat right, Mistah Webbah? You saw de whole thing yo’se’f, didn’t you? You tell Mistah Matthews how it was! Me an’ my dawg was comin’ up de street, a-tendin’ to ouah business, I jus’ tu’ned my haid to say good-day to Mistah Webbah heah, when heah comes dis othah dawg aroun’ de house, jus’ a-puffin’ an’ a-snawtin’, an’ befo’ I could say Jack Robinson he jumps all ovah my dawg an’ grabs him by de throat—you ask Mistah Webbah if dat ain’t de way it happened.”

And so it goes, everyone debating, arguing, agreeing, and denying, giving his own version and his own opinion; and Mr. Matthews asking questions and writing things down in a book; and poor Augustus Potterham blubbering like a baby, holding his dead little bulldog in his arms, his homely, freckled face contorted piteously, and dropping scalding tears upon his little dead dog; and the big mastiff panting, dripping blood upon the ground and looking curious, detached from the whole thing, and a little bored; and presently the excitement subsiding, people going away; Mr. Matthews telling the negro to appear in court; Augustus Potterham going away into the house blubbering, with the little bulldog in his arms; Mr. Potterham behind him, still chirping loudly and excitedly; and the dejected, pock-marked nigger and his tremendous dog going away up the street, the big dog dropping big blood-flakes on the pavement as he goes. And finally, silence as before, the quiet street again, the rustling of young maple leaves in the light wind, the brooding imminence of three o’clock, a few bright blood-flakes on the pavement, and all else the way that it had always been, and George Webber as before stretched out upon the grass beneath the tree there in his uncle’s yard, chin cupped in hands, adrift on time’s great dream, and thinking:

“Great God, this is the way things are, I see and know this is the way things are, I understand this is the way things are: and, Great God! Great God! this being just the way things are, how strange, and plain, and savage, sweet and cruel, lovely, terrible, and mysterious, and how unmistakable and familiar all things are!”

Three o’clock!

“Child, child!—Where are you, child?”

So did he always know Aunt Maw was there!

“Son, son!—Where are you son?”

Too far for finding and too near to seek!

“Boy, boy!—Where is that boy?”

Where you, at any rate, or any other of the apron-skirted kind, can never come.

“You can’t take your eye off him a minute....”

Keep eye on, then; it will do no good.

“The moment that your back is turned, he’s up and gone....”

And out and off and far away from you—no matter if your back is turned or not!

“I can never find him when I need him....”

Need me no needs, sweet dame; when I need you, you shall be so informed!

“But he can eat, all right.... He’s Johnny-on-the-spot when it is time to eat....”

And, pray, what is there so remarkable in that? Of course he eats—more power to his eating, too. Was Hercules a daffodil; did Adam toy with water cress; did Falstaff wax fat eating lettuces; was Dr. Johnson surfeited on shredded wheat; or Chaucer on a handful of parched corn? No! What is more, were campaigns fought and waged on empty bellies; was Kublai Khan a vegetarian; did Washington have prunes for breakfast, radishes for lunch; was John L. Sullivan the slave of Holland Rusk, or President Taft the easy prey of lady fingers? No! More—who drove the traffic of swift-thronging noon, perched high above the hauling rumps of horses; who sat above the pistoned wheels of furious day; who hurled a ribbon of steel rails into the West; who dug, drove through gulches, bored through tunnels; whose old gloved hands were gripped on the throttles; who bore the hammer, and who dealt the stroke?—did such of these grow faint with longing when they thought of the full gluttony of peanut-butter and ginger snaps? And finally, the men who came back from the town at twelve o’clock, their solid liquid tramp of leather on the streets of noon, the men of labor, sweat, and business coming down the street—his uncle, Mr. Potterham, Mr. Shepperton, Mr. Crane—were fence gates opened, screen doors slammed, and was there droning torpor and the full feeding silence of assuagement and repose—if these men had come to take a cup of coffee and a nap?

“He can eat, all right! ... He’s always here when it is time to eat!”

It was to listen to such stuff as this that great men lived and suffered, and great heroes bled! It was for this that Ajax battled, and Achilles died; it was for this that Homer sang and suffered—and Troy fell! It was for this that Artaxerxes led great armies, it was for this that Caesar took his legions over Gaul; for this that Ulysses had braved strange seas, encompassed perils of remote and magic coasts, survived the Cyclops and Charybdis, and surmounted all the famed enchantments of Circean time—to listen to such damned and dismal stuff as this—the astonishing discovery by a woman that men eat!

Peace, woman, to your bicker—hold your prosy tongue! Get back into the world you know, and do the work for which you were intended; you intrude—go back, go back to all your kitchen scourings, your pots and pans, your plates and cups and saucers, your clothes and rags and soaps and sudsy water; go back, go back and leave us; we are fed and we are pleasantly distended, great thoughts possess us; drowsy dreams; we would lie alone and contemplate our navel—it is afternoon!

“Boy, boy!—Where has he got to now! ... Oh, I could see him lookin’ round.... I saw him edgin’ towards the door! ... Aha, I thought, he thinks he’s very smart ... but I knew exactly what he planned to do ... to slip out and to get away before I caught him ... and just because he was afraid I had a little work for him to do!”

A little work! Aye, there’s the rub—if only it were not always just a little work we had to do! If only in their minds there ever were a moment of supreme occasion or sublime event! If only it were not always just a little thing they have in mind, a little work we had to do! If only there were something, just a spark of joy to lift the heart, a spark of magic to fire the spirit, a spark of understanding of the thing we want to do, a grain of feeling, or an atom of imagination! But always it is just a little work, a little thing we have to do!

Is it the little labor that she asks that we begrudge? Is it the little effort which it would require that we abhor? Is it the little help she asks for that we ungenerously withhold, a hate of work, a fear of sweat, a spirit of mean giving? No! It is not this at all. It is that women in the early afternoon are dull, and dully ask dull things of us; it is that women in, the afternoon are dull, and ask us always for a little thing, and do not understand!

It is that at this hour of day we do not want them near us—we would be alone. They smell of kitchen steam and drabness at this time of day: the depressing moistures of defunctive greens, left-over cabbage, lukewarm boilings, and the dinner scraps. An atmosphere of sudsy water now pervades them; their hands drip rinsings and their lives are grey.

These people do not know it, out of mercy we have never told them; but their lives lack interest at three o’clock—we do not want them, they must let us be.

They have some knowledge for the morning, some for afternoon, more for sunset, much for night; but at three o’clock they bore us, they must leave us be! They do not understand the thousand lights and weathers of the day as we; light is just light to them, and morning morning, and noon noon. They do not know the thing that comes and goes—the way light changes, and the way things shift; they do not know how brightness changes in the sun, and how man’s spirit changes like a flick of light. Oh, they do not know, they cannot understand, the life of life, the joy of joy, the grief of grief unutterable, the eternity of living in a moment, the thing that changes as light changes, as swift and passing as a swallow’s flight; they do not know the thing that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of Spring, the sharp and tongueless cry!

They do not understand the joy and horror of the day as we can feel it; they do not understand the thing we dread at this hour of the afternoon.

To them the light is light, the brief hour passing; their soaps-suds spirits do not contemplate the horror of hot light in afternoon. They do not understand our loathing of hot gardens, the way our spirits dull and sicken at hot light. They do not know how hope forsakes us, how joy flies away, when we look at the mottled torpor of hot light on the hydrangeas, the broad-leaved dullness of hot dock-weeds growing by the barn. They do not know the horror of old rusty cans filled into gaps of rubbish underneath the fence; the loathing of the mottled, hot, and torpid light upon a row of scraggly corn; the hopeless depth of torpid, dull depression which the sight of hot coarse grasses in the sun can rouse to a numb wakefulness of horror in our souls at three o’clock.

It is a kind of torpid stagnancy of life, it is a hopelessness of hope, a dull, numb lifelessness of life! It is like looking at a pool of stagnant water in the dull torpor of the light of three o’clock. It is like being where no green is, where no cool is, where there is no song of unseen birds, where there is no sound of cool and secret waters, no sound of rock-bright, foaming waters; like being where no gold and green and sudden magic is, to be called out to do little things at three o’clock.

Ah, Christ, could we make speech say what no speech utters, could we make tongue speak what no tongue says! Could we enlighten their enkitchened lives with a revealing utterance, then they would never send us out to do a little thing at three o’clock.

We are a kind that hate clay banks in afternoon, the look of cinders, grimy surfaces, old blistered clapboard houses, the train yards and the coaches broiling on the tracks. We loathe the sight of concrete walls, the fly-speckled windows of the Greek, the strawberry horror of the row of lukewarm soda-pop. At this hour of the day we sicken at the Greek’s hot window, at his greasy frying plate that fries and oozes with a loathsome sweat in the full torpor of the sun. We hate the row of greasy frankfurters that sweat and ooze there on the torpid plate, the loathsome pans all oozing with a stew of greasy onions, mashed potatoes, and hamburger steaks. We loathe the Greek’s swart features in the light of three o’clock, the yellowed pock-marked pores that sweat in the hot light. We hate the light that shines on motor cars at three o’clock, we hate white plaster surfaces, new stucco houses, and most open places where there are no trees.

We must have coolness, dankness, darkness; we need gladed green and gold and rock-bright running waters at the hour of three o’clock. We must go down into the coolness of a concrete cellar. We like dark shade, and cool, dark smells, and cool, dark, secret places, at the hour of three o’clock. We like cool, strong smells with some cool staleness at that hour. Man smells are good at three o’clock. We like to remember the smells of all things that were in our father’s room: the dank, cool pungency of the plug of apple tobacco on the mantelpiece, bit into at one end, and stuck with a bright red flag; the smell of the old mantelpiece, the wooden clock, the old calf bindings of a few old books; the smell of the rocking chair, the rug, the walnut bureau, and the cool, dark smell of clothing in the closet.

At this hour of the day we like the smell of old unopened rooms, old packing cases, tar, and the smell of the grape vines on the cool side of the house. If we go out, we want to go out in green shade and gladed coolnesses, to lie down on our bellies underneath the maple trees and work our toes down into the thick green grass. If we have to go to town we want to go to places like our uncle’s hardware store, where we can smell the cool, dark cleanliness of nails, hammers, saws, tools, T-squares, implements of all sorts; or to a saddle shop where we can get the smell of leather; or to our father’s brick and lumber yard where we can get the smells of putty, glass, and clean white pine, the smell of the mule-teams, and the lumber sheds. It is also good to go into the cool glade of the drug store at this hour, to hear the cool, swift slatting of the wooden fans, and to smell the citrus pungency of lemons, limes, and oranges, the sharp and clean excitements of unknown medicines.

The smell of a street car at this hour of day is also good—a dynamic smell of motors, wood work, rattan seats, worn brass, and steel-bright flanges. It is a smell of drowsy, warm excitement, and a nameless beating of the heart; it speaks of going somewhere. If we go anywhere at this hour of day, it is good to go to the baseball game and smell the grandstand, the old wooden bleachers, the green turf of the playing field, the horsehide of the ball, the gloves, the mitts, the clean resilience of the ash-wood bats, the smells of men in shirt-sleeves, and the sweating players.

And if there is work to do at three o’clock—if we must rouse ourselves from somnolent repose, and from the green-gold drowsy magic of our meditations—for God’s sake give us something real to do. Give us great labors, but vouchsafe to us as well the promise of a great accomplishment, the thrill of peril, the hope of high and spirited adventure. For God’s sake don’t destroy the heart and hope and life and will, the brave and dreaming soul of man, with the common, dull, soul-sickening, mean transactions of these little things!

Don’t break our heart, our hope, our ecstasy, don’t shatter irrevocably some brave adventure of the spirit, or some brooding dream, by sending us on errands which any stupid girl, or nigger wench, or soulless underling of life could just as well accomplish. Don’t break man’s heart, man’s life, man’s song, the soaring vision of his dream with—“Here, boy, trot around the corner for a loaf of bread,”—or “Here, boy; the telephone company has just called up—you’ll have to trot around there ...“—Oh, for God’s sake, and my sake, please don’t say ‘trot around’—”... and pay the bill before they cut us off!”

Or, fretful-wise, be-flusteredlike, all of a twitter, scattered and demoralized, fuming and stewing, complaining, whining, railing against the universe because of things undone you should have done yourself, because of errors you have made yourself, because of debts unpaid you should have paid on time, because of things forgotten you should have remembered—fretting, complaining, galloping off in all directions, unable to get your thoughts together, unable even to call a child by his proper name—as here:

“Ed, John, Bob—pshaw, boy! George, I mean! ...”

Well, then for God’s sake, mean it!

“Why, pshaw!—to think that that fool nigger—I could wring her neck when I think of it—well, as I say now....”

Then, in God’s name, say it!

“... why, you know ...”

No! I do not know!

“... here I was dependin’ on her—here she told me she would come—and all the work to be done—and here she’s sneaked out on me after dinner—and I’m left here in the lurch.”

Yes, of course you are; because you failed to pay the poor wench on Saturday night the three dollars which is her princely emolument for fourteen hours a day of sweaty drudgery seven days a week; because “it slipped your mind,” because you couldn’t bear to let it go in one gigantic lump—could you?—because you thought you’d hang on to the good green smell of money just a little longer, didn’t you?—let it sweat away in your stocking and smell good just a little longer—didn’t you?—break the poor brute’s heart on Saturday night just when she had her mind all set on fried fish, gin, and f——g, just because you wanted to hold on to three wadded, soiled, and rumpled greenbacks just a little longer—dole it out to her a dollar at a time—tonight a dollar, Wednesday night a dollar, Friday night the same ... and so are left here strapped and stranded and forlorn, where my father would have paid and paid at once, and kept his nigger and his nigger’s loyalty. And all because you are a woman, with a woman’s niggard smallness about money, a woman’s niggard dealing towards her servants, a woman’s selfishness, her small humanity of feeling for the dumb, the suffering, and afflicted soul of man—and so will fret and fume and fidget now, all flustered and undone, to call me forth with:

“Here, boy!—Pshaw, now!—To think that she would play a trick like this!—Why as I say, now—child! child!—I don’t know what I shall do—I’m left here all alone—you’ll have to trot right down and see if you can find someone at once.”

Aye! to call me forth from coolness, and the gladed sweetness of cool grass to sweat my way through Niggertown in the dreary torpor of the afternoon; to sweat my way up and down that grassless, treeless horror of baked clay; to draw my breath in stench and sourness, breathe in the funky nigger stench, sour wash-pots and branch-sewage, nigger privies and the sour shambles of the nigger shacks; to scar my sight and soul with little snot-nosed nigger children fouled with dung, and so bowed out with rickets that their little legs look like twin sausages of fat, soft rubber; so to hunt, and knock at shack-door, so to wheedle, persuade, and cajole, in order to find some other sullen wench to come and sweat her fourteen hours a day for seven days a week—and for three dollars!

Or again, perhaps it will be: “Pshaw, boy!—Why to think that he would play me such a trick!—Why, I forgot to put the sign out—but I thought he knew I needed twenty pounds!—If he’d only asked!—but here he drove right by with not so much as by-your-leave, and here there’s not a speck of ice in the refrigerator—and ice cream and iced tea to make for supper.—You’ll have to trot right down to the icehouse and get me a good ten-cent chunk.”

Yes! A good ten-cent chunk tied with a twist of galling twine, that cuts like a razor down into my sweaty palm; that wets my trouser’s leg from thigh to buttock; that bangs and rubs and slips and cuts and freezes against my miserable knees until the flesh is worn raw; that trickles freezing drops down my bare and aching legs, that takes all joy from living, that makes me curse my life and all the circumstances of my birth—and all because you failed to “put the sign out,” all because you failed to think of twenty pounds of ice!

Or is it a thimble, or a box of needles, or a spool of thread that you need now! Is it for such as this that I must “trot around” some place for baking powder, salt or sugar, or a pound of butter, or a package of tea!

For God’s sake thimble me no thimbles and spool me no spools! If I must go on errands send me out upon man’s work, with man’s dispatch, as my father used to do! Send me out with one of his niggers upon a wagon load of fragrant pine, monarch above the rumps of two grey mules! Send me for a wagon load of sand down by the river, where I can smell the sultry yellow of the stream, and shout and holler to the boys in swimming! Send me to town to my father’s brick and lumber yard, the Square, the sparkling traffic of bright afternoon. Send me for something in the City Market, the smell of fish and oysters, the green, cool growth of vegetables; the cold refrigeration of hung beeves, the butchers cleaving and sawing in straw hats and gouted aprons. Send me out to life and business and the glades of afternoon; for God’s sake, do not torture me with spools of thread, or with the sunbaked clay and shambling rickets of black Niggertown!

“Son, son! ... Where has that fool boy got to! ... Why, as I say now, boy, you’ll have to trot right down to....”

With baleful, brooding vision he looked towards the house. Say me no says, sweet dame; trot me no trots. The hour is three o’clock, and I would be alone.

So thinking, feeling, saying, he rolled over on his belly, out of sight, on the “good” side of the tree, dug bare, luxurious toes in cool, green grass, and, chin a-cup in his supporting hands, regarded his small universe of three o’clock.

“A little child, a limber elf”—twelve years of age, and going on for thirteen next October. So, midway in May now, midway to thirteen, with a whole world to think of. Not large or heavy for his age, but strong and heavy in the shoulders, arms absurdly long, big hands, legs thin, bowed out a little, long, flat feet; small face and features quick with life, the eyes deep-set, their look both quick and still; low brow, wide, stick-out ears, a shock of close-cropped hair, a large head that hangs forward and projects almost too heavily for the short, thin neck—not much to look at, someone’s ugly duckling, just a boy.

And yet—could climb trees like a monkey, spring like a cat; could jump and catch the maple limb four feet above his head—the bark was already worn smooth and slick by his big hands; could be up the tree like a flash; could go places no one else could go; could climb anything, grab hold of anything, dig his toes in anything; could scale the side of a cliff if he had to, could almost climb a sheet of glass; could pick up things with his toes, and hold them, too; could walk on his hands, bend back and touch the ground, stick his head between his legs, or wrap his legs around his neck; could make a hoop out of his body and roll over like a hoop, do hand-springs and cut flips—jump, climb, and leap as no other boy in town could do. He is a grotesque-looking little creature, yet unformed and unmatured, in his make-up something between a spider and an ape (the boys, of course, call him “Monk”)—and yet with an eye that sees and holds, an ear that hears and can remember, a nose that smells out unsuspected pungencies, a spirit swift and mercurial as a flash of light, now soaring like a rocket, wild with ecstasy, outstripping storm and flight itself in the aerial joy of skyey buoyancy; now plunged in nameless, utter, black, unfathomable dejection; now bedded cool in the reposeful grass beneath the maple tree, remote from time and brooding on his world of three o’clock; now catlike on his feet—the soaring rocket of a sudden joy—then catlike spring and catch upon the lowest limb, then like a monkey up the tree, and like a monkey down, now rolling like a furious hoop across the yard—at last, upon his belly in cool grass again, and bedded deep in somnolent repose at three o’clock.

Now, with chin cupped in his hands and broodingly aware, he meditates the little world before him, the world of one small, modest street, the neighbors, and his uncle’s house. For the most part, it is the pleasant world of humble people and small, humble houses, most of them worn, shabby, so familiar: the yards, the porches, swings, and railings, and the rocking chairs; the maple trees, the chestnuts and the oaks; the way a gate leans open, half ajar, the way the grass grows, and the way the flowers are planted; the fences, hedges, bushes, and the honeysuckle vines; the alleyways and all the homely and familiar backyard world of chicken houses, stables, barns, and orchards, and each one with its own familiar hobby, the Potterham’s neat back-garden, Nebraska Crane’s pigeon houses—the whole, small, well-used world of good, small people.

He sees the near line of eastern hills, with light upon it, the sweet familiarity of massed green. His thought soars westward with a vision of far distances and splendid ranges; his heart turns west with thoughts of unknown men and places and of wandering; but ever his heart turns home to this his own world, to what he knows and likes the best. It is—he feels and senses this obscurely—the place of common man, his father’s kind of people. Except for his uncle’s raw, new house, the sight of which is a desolation to him, it is the place of the homely, simple houses, and the old, ordinary streets, where the bricklayers, plasterers, and masons, the lumber dealers and the stonecutters, the plumbers, hardware merchants, butchers, grocers, and the old, common, native families of the mountains—his mother’s people—make their home.

It is the place of the Springtime orchards, the loamy, dew-wet morning gardens, the peach, cherry, apple blossoms, drifting to the ground at morning in the month of April, the pungent, fragrant, maddening savor of the breakfast smells. It is the place of roses, lilies, and nasturtiums, the vine-covered porches of the houses, the strange, delicious smell of the ripening grapes in August, and the voices—near, strange, haunting, lonely, most familiar—of the people sitting on their porches in the Summer darkness, the voices of the lost people in the darkness as they say goodnight. Then boys will hear a screen door slam, the earth grow silent with the vast and brooding ululation of the night, and finally the approach, the grinding screech, the brief halt, the receding loneliness and absence of the last street car going around the corner on the hill, and will wait there in the darkness filled with strangeness, thinking, “I was born here, there’s my father, this is I!”

It is the world of the sun-warm, time-far clucking of the sensual hens in the forenoon strangeness of the spell of time, and the coarse, sweet coolness of Crane’s cow along the alleyway; and it is the place of the ice-tongs ringing in the streets, the ice saw droning through the dripping blocks, the sweating negroes, and the pungent, musty, and exotic odors of the grocery wagons, the grocery box piled high with new provisions. It is the place of the forenoon housewives with their shapeless gingham dresses, bare legs, slippers, turbaned heads, bare, bony, labor-toughened hands and arms and elbows, and the fresh, clean, humid smell of houses airing in the morning. It is the place of the heavy midday dinners, the smells of roasts of beef, corn on the cob, the deep-hued savor of the big string beans, cooking morning long into the sweet amity and unction of the fat-streaked pork; and above it all is the clean, hungry, humid smell and the steaming freshness of the turnip greens at noon.

It is the world of magic April and October; world of the first green and the smell of blossoms; world of the bedded oak leaves and the smell of smoke in Autumn, and men in shirt-sleeves working in their yards in red waning light of old October as boys pass by them going home from school. It is the world of the Summer nights, world of the dream-strange nights of August, the great moons and the tolling bells; world of the Winter nights, the howling winds, and the fire-full chimney throats—world of the ash of time and silence while the piled coals flare and crumble, world of the waiting, waiting, waiting—for the world of joy, the longed-for face, the hoped-for step, the unbelieved-in magic of the Spring again.

It is the world of warmth, nearness, certitude, the walls of home! It is the world of the plain faces, and the sounding belly laughter; world of the people who are not too good or fine or proud or precious for the world’s coarse uses; world of the sons who are as their fathers were before them, and are compacted of man’s base, common, stinking clay of fury, blood, and sweat and agony—and must rise or fall out of the world from which they came, sink or swim, survive or perish, live, die, conquer, find alone their way, be baffled, beaten, grow furious, drunken, desperate, mad, lie smashed and battered in the stews, find a door, a dwelling place of warmth and love and strong security, or be driven famished, unassuaged, and furious through the world until they die!

Last of all, it is the world of the true friends, the fine, strong boys who can smack a ball and climb a tree, and are always on the lookout for the thrill and menace of adventure. They are the brave, free, joyful, hope-inspiring fellows who are not too nice and dainty and who have no sneers. Their names are such wonderful, open-sounding names as John, Jim, Robert, Joe, and Tom. Their names are William, Henry, George, Ben, Edward, Lee, Hugh, Richard, Arthur, Jack! Their names are the names of the straight eye and the calm and level glance, names of the thrown ball, the crack of the bat, the driven hit; names of wild, jubilant, and secret darkness, brooding, prowling, wild, exultant night, the wailing whistle and the great wheels pounding at the river’s edge.

They are the names of hope, the names of love, friendship, confidence, and courage, the names of life that will prevail and will not be beaten by the names of desolation, the hopeless, sneering, death-loving, and life-hating names of old scornmaker’s pride—the hateful and accursed names that the boys who live in the western part of town possess.

Finally, they are the rich, unusual names, the strange, yet homely, sturdy names—the names of George Josiah Webber and Nebraska Crane.

Nebraska Crane was walking down the street upon the other side. He was bare-headed, his shock of Indian coarse black hair standing out, his shirt was opened at his strong, lean neck, his square brown face was tanned and flushed with recent effort. From the big pocket of his pants the thick black fingers of a fielder’s mitt protruded, and upon his shoulder he was carrying a well-worn ash-wood bat, of which the handle was wound round tight with tape. He came marching along at his strong and even stride, his bat upon his shoulder, as steady and as unperturbed as a soldier, and, as he passed, he turned his fearless face upon the boy across the street—looked at him with his black-eyed Indian look, and, without raising his voice, said quietly in a tone instinct with quiet friendliness:

“Hi, Monk!”

And the boy who lay there in the grass, his face supported in his hands, responded without moving, in the same toneless, friendly way:

“Hello, Bras.”

Nebraska Crane marched on down the street, turned into the alley by his house, marched down it, turned the corner of his house, and so was lost from sight.

And the boy who lay on his belly in the grass continued to look out quietly from the supporting prop of his cupped hands. But a feeling of certitude and comfort, of warmth and confidence and quiet joy, had filled his heart, as it always did when Nebraska Crane passed his house at three o’clock.

The boy lay on his belly in the young and tender grass. Jerry Alsop, aged sixteen, fat and priestly, his belly buttoned in blue serge, went down along the other side of the street. He was a grave and quiet little figure, well liked by the other boys, but he was always on the outer fringes of their life, always on the sidelines of their games, always an observer of their universe—a fat and quiet visitant, well-spoken, pleasant-voiced, compactly buttoned in the blue serge that he always wore.... There had been one night of awful searching, one hour when all the torment and the anguish in that small, fat life had flared out in desperation. He had run away from home, and they had found him six hours later on the river road, down by the muddy little river, beside the place where all the other boys went to swim, the one hole deep enough to drown. His mother came and took him by the hand; he turned and looked at her, and then the two fell sobbing in each other’s arms.... For all the rest, he had been a quiet and studious boy, well thought of in the town. Jerry’s father was a dry goods merchant, and the family was comfortably off in a modest way. Jerry had a good mind, a prodigious memory for what he read, all things in books came smoothly to him. He would finish high school next year....

Jerry Alsop passed on down the street.

Suddenly, the Webber boy heard voices in the street. He turned his head and looked, but even before he turned his head his ear had told him, a cold, dry tightening of his heart, an acrid dryness on his lips, a cold, dry loathing in his blood, had told him who they were.

Four boys were coming down the street in raffish guise; advancing scattered and disorderly, now scampering sideways, chasing, tussling in lewd horseplay with each other, smacking each other with wet towels across the buttocks (they had just come from swimming in Jim Rheinhardt’s cow pond in the Cove), filling the quiet street with the intrusions of their raucous voices, taking the sun and joy and singing from the day.

They slammed yard-gates and vaulted fences; they dodged round trees, ducked warily behind telephone poles, chased each other back and forth, gripped briefly, struggling strenuously, showed off to each other, making raucous noises, uttering mirthless gibes. One chased another around a tree, was deftly tripped, fell sprawling to the roar of their derision, rose red and angry in the face, trying mirthlessly to smile, hurled his wet, wadded towel at the one who tripped him—missed and was derided, picked his towel up, and to save his ugly face and turn derision from him cried out—“Pee-e-nuts!”—loudly passing Pennock’s house.

The boy surveyed them with cold loathing—this was wit!

They filled that pleasant street with raucous gibes, and they took hope and peace and brightness from the day. They were unwholesome roisterers, they did not move ahead in comradeship, but scampered lewdly, raggedly around, as raucous, hoarse, and mirthless as a gob of phlegm; there was no warmth, no joy or hope or pleasantness in them; they filled the pleasant street with brutal insolence. They came from the west side of town, he knew them instinctively for what they were—the creatures of a joyless insolence, the bearers of the hated names.

Thus Sidney Purtle, a tall, lean fellow, aged fifteen, and everything about him pale—pale eyes, pale features, pale lank hair, pale eyebrows and a long, pale nose, pale lips and mouth carved always in a pale and ugly sneer, pale hands, pale hair upon his face, pale freckles, and a pale, sneering, and envenomed soul:

“Georgeous the Porgeous!” A pale sneer, a palely sneering laugh; and as he spoke the words he smacked outward with his wet and loathsome rag of towel. The boy ducked it and arose.

Carl Hooton stood surveying him—a brutal, stocky figure, brutal legs outspread, red-skinned, red-handed, and red-eyed, red-eyebrowed, and an inch of brutal brow beneath the flaming thatch of coarse red hair:

“Well, as I live and breathe,” he sneered (the others smirked appreciation of this flaming wit), “it’s little Jocko the Webber, ain’t it?”

“Jockus the Cockus,” said Sid Purtle softly, horribly—and smacked the wet towel briefly at the boy’s bare leg.

“Jockus the Cockus—hell!” said Carl Hooton with a sneer, and for a moment more looked at the boy with brutal and derisory contempt. “Son, you ain’t nothin’,” he went on with heavy emphasis, now turning to address his fellows—“Why that little monk-faced squirrel’s—they ain’t even dropped yet.”

Loud appreciative laughter followed on this sally; the boy stood there flushed, resentful, staring at them, saying nothing. Sid Purtle moved closer to him, his pale eyes narrowed ominously to slits.

“Is that right, Monkus?” he said, with a hateful and confiding quietness. A burble of unwholesome laughter played briefly in his throat, but he summoned sober features, and said quietly, with menacing demand: “Is that right, or not? Have they fallen yet?”

“Sid, Sid,” whispered Harry Nast, plucking at his companion’s sleeve; a snicker of furtive mirth crossed his rat-sharp features. “Let’s find out how well he’s hung.”

They laughed, and Sidney Purtle said:

“Are you hung well, Monkus?” Turning to his comrades, he said gravely, “Shall we find out how much he’s got, boys?”

And suddenly alive with eagerness and mirthful cruelty, they all pressed closer in around the boy, with secret, unclean laughter, saying:

“Yes, yes—come on, let’s do it! Let’s find out how much he’s got!”

“Young Monkus,” said Sid Purtle gravely, putting a restraining hand upon his victim’s arm, “much as it pains us all, we’re goin’ to examine you.”

“Let go of me!” The boy wrenched free, turned, whirled, backed up against the tree; the pack pressed closer, leering faces thrusting forward, pale, hateful eyes smeared with the slime of all their foul and secret jubilation. His breath was coming hoarsely, and he said: “I told you to let go of me!”

“Young Monkus,” said Sid Purtle gravely, in a tone of quiet reproof, wherein the dogs of an obscene and jeering mirth were faintly howling—“Young Monkus, we’re surprised at you! We had expected you to behave like a little gentleman—to take your medicine like a little man.... Boys!”

He turned, addressing copemates in a tone of solemn admonition, grave surprise: “It seems the little Monkus is trying to get hard with us. Do you think we should take steps?”

“Yes, yes,” the others eagerly replied, and pressed still closer round the tree.

And for a moment there was an evil, jubilantly attentive silence as they looked at him, naught but the dry, hard pounding of his heart, his quick, hard breathing, as they looked at him. Then Victor Munson moved forward slowly, his thick, short hand extended, the heavy volutes of his proud, swart nostrils swelling with scorn. And his voice, low-toned and sneering, cajoling with a hateful mockery, came closer to him coaxingly, and said:

“Come, Monkus! Come little Monkus! Lie down and take your medicine, little Monk! ... Here Jocko! Come Jocko! Here Jocko! Come Jocko!—Come and get your peanuts—Jock, Jock, Jock!”

Then while they joined in hateful laughter, Victor Munson moved forward again, the swart, stub fingers, warted on the back, closed down upon the boy’s left arm; and suddenly he drew in his breath in blind, blank horror and in bitter agony, he knew that he must die and never draw his shameful breath in quietude and peace, or have a moment’s hope of heartful ease again; something blurred and darkened in blind eyes—he wrenched free from the swart, stub fingers, and he struck.

The blind blow landed in the thick, swart neck and sent it gurgling backwards. Sharp hatred crossed his vision now, and so enlightened it; he licked his lips and tasted bitterness, and, sobbing in his throat, he started towards the hated face. His arms were pinioned from behind. Sid Purtle had him, the hateful voice was saying with a menacing and now really baleful quietude:

“Now, wait a minute! Wait a minute, boys! ... We were just playin’ with him, weren’t we, and he started to get hard with us! ... Ain’t that right?”

“That’s right, Sid. That’s the way it was, all right!”

“We thought he was a man, but he turns out to be just a little sorehead, don’t he? We were just kiddin’ him along, and he has to go and get sore about it. You couldn’t take it like a man, could you?” said Sidney Purtle, quietly and ominously into the ear of his prisoner; at the same time he shook the boy a little—“You’re just a little cry-baby, ain’t you? You’re just a coward, who has to hit a fellow when he ain’t lookin’?”

“You turn loose of me,” the captive panted, “I’ll show you who’s the cry-baby! I’ll show you if I have to hit him when he isn’t looking!”

“Is that so, son?” said Victor Munson, breathing hard.

“Yes, that’s so, son!” the other answered bitterly.

“Who says it’s so, son?”

“I say it’s so, son!”

“Well, you don’t need to go gettin’ on your head about it!”

“I’m not the one who’s getting on his head about it; you are!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that’s so!”

There was a pause of labored breathing and contorted lips; the acrid taste of loathing and the poisonous constrictions of brute fear, a sense of dizziness about the head, a kind of hollow numbness in the stomach pit, knee sockets gone a trifle watery; all of the gold of just a while ago gone now, all of the singing and the green; no color now, a poisonous whiteness in the very quality of light, a kind of poisonous intensity of focus everywhere; the two antagonists’ faces suddenly keen, eyes sharp with eager cruelty, pack-appetites awakened, murder-sharp now, lusts aware.

“You’d better not be gettin’ big about it,” said Victor Munson slowly, breathing heavily, “or somebody’ll smack you down!”

“You know anyone who’s going to do it?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, I’m not sayin’. It’s none of your business.”

“It’s none of your business either!”

“Maybe,” said Victor Munson, breathing swarthily, and edging forward an inch or so—“Maybe I’ll make it some of my business!”

“You’re not the only one who can make it your business!”

“You know of anyone who wants to make it anything?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”

“Do you say that you do?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I don’t back down from saying it.”

“Boys, boys,” said Sidney Purtle, quietly, mockingly. “You’re gettin’ hard with each other. You’re usin’ harsh language to each other. The first thing you know you’ll be gettin’ into trouble with each other—about Christmas time,” he jeered quietly.

“If he wants to make anything out of it,” said Victor Munson bitterly, “he knows what he can do.”

“You know what you can do, too!”

“Boys, boys,” jeered Sidney Purtle softly.

“Fight! Fight!” said Harry Nast, and snickered furtively. “When is the big fight gonna begin?”

“Hell!” said Carl Hooton coarsely, “they don’t want to fight. They’re both so scared already they’re ready to —— in their pants. Do you want to fight, Munson?” he said softly, brutally, coming close and menacing behind the other boy.

“If he wants to make something out of it—” the Munson boy began again.

“Well, then, make it!” cried Carl Hooton, with a brutal laugh, and at the same moment gave the Munson boy a violent shove that sent him hurtling forward against the pinioned form of his antagonist. Sid Purtle sent his captive hurtling forward at the Munson boy; in a second more, they were crouching toe to toe, and circling round each other. Sid Purtle’s voice could be heard saying quietly:

“If they want to fight it out, leave ’em alone! Stand back and give ’em room!”

“Wait a minute!”

The words were spoken almost tonelessly, but they carried in them such a weight of quiet and inflexible command that instantly all the boys stopped and turned with startled surprise, to see where they came from.

Nebraska Crane, his bat upon his shoulder, was advancing towards them from across the street. He came on steadily, neither quickening nor changing his stride, his face expressionless, his black Indian gaze fixed steadily upon them.

“Wait a minute!” he repeated as he came up.

“What’s the matter?” Sidney Purtle answered, with a semblance of surprise.

“You leave Monk alone,” Nebraska Crane replied.

“What’ve we done?” Sid Purtle said, with a fine show of innocence.

“I saw you,” said Nebraska with toneless stubbornness, “all four of you ganged up on him; now leave him be.”

“Leave him be?” Sid Purtle now protested.

“You heard me!”

Carl Hooton, more brutal and courageous and less cautious than Sid Purtle, now broke in truculently:

“What’s it to you? What business is it of yours what we do?”

“I make it my business,” Nebraska answered calmly. “Monk,” he went on, “you come over here with me.”

Carl Hooton stepped before the Webber boy and said:

“What right have you to tell us what to do?”

“Get out of the way,” Nebraska said.

“Who’s gonna make me?” said Carl Hooton, edging forward belligerently.

“Carl, Carl—come on,” said Sid Purtle in a low, warning tone. “Don’t pay any attention to him. If he wants to get on his head about it, leave him be.”

There were low, warning murmurs from the other boys.

“The rest of you can back down if you like,” Carl Hooton answered, “but I’m not takin’ any backwash from him. Just because his old man is a policeman, he thinks he’s hard. Well, I can get hard, too, if he gets hard with me.”

“You heard what I told you!” Nebraska said. “Get out of the way!”

“You go to hell!” Carl Hooton answered. “I’ll do as I damn please!”

Nebraska Crane swung solidly from the shoulders with his baseball bat and knocked the red-haired fellow sprawling. It was a crushing blow, so toneless, steady, and impassive in its deliberation that the boys turned white with horror, confronted now with a murderous savagery of purpose they had not bargained for. It was obvious to all of them that the blow might have killed Carl Hooton had it landed on his head; it was equally and horribly evident that it would not have mattered to Nebraska Crane if he had killed Carl Hooton. His black eyes shone like agate in his head, the Cherokee in him had been awakened, he was set to kill. As it was, the blow had landed with the sickening thud of ash-wood on man’s living flesh, upon Carl Hooton’s arm; the arm was numb from wrist to shoulder, and three frightened boys were now picking up the fourth, stunned, befuddled, badly frightened, not knowing whether a single bone had been left unbroken in his body, whether he was permanently maimed, or whether he would live to walk again.

“Carl—Carl—are you hurt bad? How’s your arm?” said Sidney Purtle.

“I think it’s broken,” groaned that worthy, clutching the injured member with his other hand.

“You—you—you hit him with your bat,” Sid Purtle whispered. “You—you had no right to do that.”

“His arm may be broken,” Harry Nast said, in an awed tone.

“I meant to break it,” Nebraska said calmly. “He’s lucky that I didn’t break his God-damn head.”

They looked at him with horrified astonishment, with a kind or fascinated awe.

“You—you could be arrested for doing that!” Sid Purtle blurted out. “You might have killed him!”

“Wouldn’t have cared if I had!” Nebraska said firmly. “He ought to be killed! Meant to kill him!”

Their eyes were fixed on him in a stare wide with horror. He returned their look in Indian-wise, and moved forward a step, still holding his bat firm and ready at his shoulder.

“And I’ll tell you this—and you can tell the rest of ’em when you get back to your side of town. Tell ’em I’m ready to brain the first West Side —— who comes here looking for trouble. And if any of you ever bother Monk again, I’ll come right over there and climb your frame,” Nebraska Crane asserted. “I’ll come right over there and beat you to death.... Now you clear out! We don’t want you on our street no longer! You get out of here!”

He advanced upon them slowly, his hard black eyes fixed firmly on them, his hands gripped ready on his bat. The frightened boys fell back, supporting their injured comrade, and, muttering furtively among themselves, limped hastily away down the street. At the corner they turned, and Sid Purtle put his hands up to his mouth and, with a sudden access of defiance, yelled back loudly:

“We’ll get even with you yet! Wait till we get you over on our side of town!”

Nebraska Crane did not reply. He continued to stare steadily towards them with his Indian eyes, and in a moment more they turned and limped away around the corner and were lost from sight.

When they had gone, Nebraska took his bat off his shoulder, leaned gracefully on it, and, turning towards the white-faced boy, surveyed him for a moment with a calm and friendly look. His square brown face, splotched large with freckles, opened in a wide and homely smile; he grinned amiably and said:

“What’s the trouble, Monkus? Were they about to get you down?”

“You—you—why, Nebraska!” the other boy now whispered—“you might have killed him with that bat.”

“Why,” Nebraska answered amiably, “what if I had?”

“Wuh—wuh—wouldn’t you care?” young Webber whispered, awestruck, his eyes still with wonder, horror, fascinated disbelief.

“Why, not a bit of it!” Nebraska heartily declared. “Good riddance to bad rubbish if I had killed him! Never liked that red-head of his’n, anyway, and don’t like none of that crowd he runs with—that whole West Side gang! I’ve got no use for none of ’em, Monkus—never did have!”

“B-but, Bras,” the other stammered, “wouldn’t you be afraid?”

“Afraid? Afraid of what?”

“Why, why—that you might have killed him.”

“Why, that’s nothin’ to be afraid of!” said Nebraska. “Anyone’s likely to get killed, Monk. You’re likely to have to kill someone almost any time! Why, look at my old man? He’s been killin’ people all his life—ever since he’s been on the police force, anyway! I reckon he’s killed more people than he could remember—he counted up to seventeen one time, an’ then he told me that there was one or two others he’d clean lost track of! Yes!” Nebraska continued triumphantly, “and there was one or two before he joined the force that no one ever knowed of—I reckon that was way back there when he was just a boy, so long ago he’s plumb lost track of it! Why my old man had to kill a nigger here along—oh, just a week or so ago—and he never turned a hair! Came home to supper, an’ took off his coat, hung up his gun and cartridge belt, washed his hands and set down at the table, and had got halfway through his supper before he even thought of it. Says to my maw, all of a sudden, says—‘Oh, yes! I clean forgot to tell you! I had to shoot a nigger today!’ ‘That so?’ my maw says. ‘Is there any other news?’ So they went on talkin’ about first one thing and then another, and in five minutes’ time I’ll bet you both of them had forgotten clean about it! ... Pshaw, Monk!” Nebraska Crane concluded heartily, “you oughtn’t even to bother about things like that. Anyone’s liable to have to kill someone. That happens every day!”

“Y-y-y-yes, Bras,” Young Webber faltered—“b-b-but what if anything should happen to you?”

“Happen?” cried Nebraska, and looked at his young friend with frank surprise. “Why what’s goin’ to happen to you, Monk?”

“W-w-why—I was thinking that sometimes you might be the one who gets killed yourself!”

“Oh!” Nebraska said, with a nod of understanding, after a moment’s puzzled cogitation. “That’s what you mean! Why, yes, Monk, that does sometimes happen! But,” he earnestly continued, “it’s got no right to happen! You ought not to let it happen! If it happens it’s your own fault!”

“L-l-let! Fault! How do you mean, Bras?”

“Why,” Nebraska said patiently, but with just a shade of resignation, “I mean it won’t happen to you if you’re careful.”

“C-c-careful? How do you mean careful, Bras?”

“Why, Monk,” Nebraska now spoke with a gruff, though kind, impatience, “I mean if you’re careful not to let yourself be killed! Look at my old man, now!” he proceeded with triumphant logic—“Here he’s been killin’ people in one way or ’nother goin’ on to thirty years now—leastways way before both you an’ me was born! An’ he’s never been killed his-self one time!” he triumphantly concluded. “And why? Why, Monk, because my old man always took good care to kill the other feller before the other feller could kill him. As long as you do that, you’ll be all right.”

“Y-y-yes, Bras. But if you g-g-get yourself in trouble?”

“Trouble?” said Nebraska, staring blankly. “Why what trouble is there to get into? If you kill the other feller before he kills you, he’s the one who gets in trouble. You’re all right; I thought anyone could see that much!”

“Y-y-yes, Bras. I do see that. But I was thinking about getting arrested ... and being locked up ... and having to go to jail—that kind of trouble.”

“Oh, that kind of trouble!” Nebraska said a little blankly, and considered the question for a moment. “Well, Monk, if you get arrested, you get arrested—and that’s all there is to that! Why, pshaw, boy—anyone can get arrested; that’s likely to happen to anybody. My old man’s been arrestin’ people all his life. I reckon he wouldn’t have any notion how many people he’s arrested and locked up! ... Why yes, and he’s even been arrested and locked up a few times himself, but he never let that bother him a bit.”

“F-f-for what, Bras? What did he get arrested for?”

“Oh—for killin’ people, an’ doin’ things like that! You know how it is, Monk. Sometimes the relatives or neighbors, or the wives and children of people that he killed would raise a rumpus—say he didn’t have no right to kill ’em—some such stuff as that! But it always come out all right—it always does!” cried Nebraska earnestly. “And why? Why because, like the old man says, this is America, an’ we’re a free country—an’ if someone gets in your way an’ bothers you, you have to kill him—an’ that’s all there is to it! ... If you have to go to court an’ stand trial, you go to court an’ stand trial. Of course, it’s a lot of trouble an’ takes up your time—but then the jury lets you off, an’ that’s all there is to it! ... I know my old man always says that this is the only country in the world where the poor man has a chance! In Europe he wouldn’t have the chance a snowball has in hell! And why? Why because, as my old man says, in Europe the laws are all made for the rich, a poor man never can get justice there—what justice there is is all for the kings an’ dukes an’ lords an’ ladies, an’ such people as that. But a poor man—why, Monk,” Nebraska said impressively, “if a poor man in Europe went an’ killed a man, almost anything might happen to him—that’s just how rotten an’ corrupt the whole thing is over there. You ask my old man about it sometime! He’ll tell you! ... But, pshaw, boy!” he now continued, with a resumption of his former friendly and good-humored casualness, “you got nothing in the world to worry about! If any of that West Side gang comes back an’ tries to bother you, you let me know, and I’ll take care of ’em! If we’ve got to kill someone, we’ll have to kill someone—but you oughtn’t even to let it worry you! ... And now, so long, Monk! You let me know if anything turns up and I’ll take care of it!”

“Th-thanks, Bras! I sure appreciate ...”

“Pshaw, boy! Forget about it! We got to stick together on our side of town. We’re neighbors! You’d do the same for me, I knew that!”

“Y-yes, I would, Bras. Well, good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Monk. I’ll be seein’ you ’fore long.”

And quiet, steady, unperturbed, moving along at even steps, his calm, brave face and Indian eyes fixed forward, his baseball bat held firmly on his shoulder, the Cherokee boy moved off, turned right into his alley, and was lost from sight.

Nebraska Crane was the best boy in the town, but Sid Purtle was poor white trash and a mountain grill. If Sid Purtle had been any good, his people never would have named him Sid. George Webber’s uncle had said that they were nothing but mountain grills no matter if they did live out upon Montgomery Avenue on the West Side of town; that’s all that they had been to start with, that’s what he called them, and that’s what they were, all right. Sid! That was a fine name, now! A rotten, dirty, sneering, treacherous, snot-nosed, blear-eyed, bitch of a name! Other rotten sneering names were Guy, Clarence, Roy, Harry, Victor, Carl, and Floyd.

Boys who had these names were never any good—a thin-lipped, sneer-mouthed, freckled, blear-eyed set of hair-faced louts, who had unpleasant knuckly hands, and a dry, evil, juiceless kind of skin. There was always something jeering, ugly, unwholesome, smug, complacent, and triumphant about these people. Without knowing why, he always wanted to smash them in the face, and not only hated everything about them, but he hated the “very ground they walked on,” the houses they lived in, the streets on which they lived, the part of town they came from, together with their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, and close companions.

He felt that they were not only foully different from the people that he liked in all the qualities that make for warmth, joy, happiness, affection, friendship, and the green-gold magic of enchanted weather—he felt there was also in them a physical difference, so foul and hateful that they might be creatures of another species. In blood, bone, brains, white-haired, juiceless-looking flesh, in sinew, joint, and tissue, in the very spittle of their mouths—which would be a vilely ropy, glutinously murky stuff of the very quality of their blear eyes and their sneering lips—as well as in all the delicate combining nerves, veins, jellies, cements, and fibrous webs that go to knit that marvelous tenement, that whole integument of life that is a human body, these people whose very names he hated would be found to be made of a vile, base, incalculably evil stuff. It was a substance that was as different from the glorious stuff of which the people that he liked were made as a foul excrement of fecal matter from the health and relish of sound, wholesome, life-begetting food. It was a substance not only of the mind and spirit but of the very texture of the body, so that it seemed they had been begot from acid and envenomed loins, and nurtured all their lives on nameless and abominable rations. He could not have eaten of the food their mothers cooked for them without choking and retching at each mouthful, feeling that he was swallowing some filth or foulness with every bite he took.

And yet, they seemed to score an evil and unfathomable triumph everywhere he met them. It was a triumph of death over life; of sneering mockery and ridicule over gaiety, warmth, and friendly ease; of wretchedness, pain, and misery over all the powerful music of joy; of the bad, sterile, and envenomed life over the good life of hope, happiness, and the glorious belief and certitude of love.

They were the dwellers in accursed streets, the very bricks of which you hated so you had to fight your way along each grim step of the hated pavement. They were the walkers underneath accursed skies, who evilly rejoiced in the broad, wet, wintry lights of waning March, and in all the cruel, houseless, hopeless, viscous, soul-engulfing lights and weathers of misery, weariness, and desolation.

They were the people that you never met in all the green-gold magic of enchanted weather. They were the accursed race who never came to you in places where strong joy was—in sorceries of gladed green by broken, rock-cold waters starred by the poignant and intolerable enchantments of the dandelions. No! They were the bathers in the humid, shadeless waters where the soul sank down. They came to no encircled pools of greenery; the brave shout was not in them, and they sang no songs.

In a thousand barren and desolate places, a thousand lights and weathers of the soul’s grey horror, in the brutal, weary heat of August in raw concrete places, or across rude paths of gluey clay beneath the desolate wintry reds of waning Sunday afternoons in March, they moved forever with the triumphant immunity of their evil lives. They breathed without weariness, agony, or despair of soul an accursed air from which your own life recoiled with a shuddering revulsion; they sneered at you forever while you drowned.

They were the vultures of the world, who swoop forever over stricken fields, and, with an evil and unfailing prescience of woe, they always come upon you at your life’s worst hour. If your bowels were wretched, queasy, sick, and diarrheic; if your limbs were feverish, feeble, watery, and sick; your skin, dry, loose, and itchy; your stomach retching with disgusting nausea, your eyes running, your nose leaking snottily, and your guts stuffed full of the thick, grey, viscous misery of a cold—then, certain as death and daylight they would be there, gloating on your wretchedness with the evil and triumphant superiority of their sneering faces.

Similarly, if the grey and humid skies of desolation pressed down upon your spirit; if the broad, wet lights of shame were eating nakedly into your unhoused, unwalled, unprotected flesh; if the nameless and intolerable fear—huge, soft, grey, and shapeless—was pressing at you from the immense and planetary vacancy of timeless skies; if grey horror drowned you, and every sinew, power, exultant strength and soaring music of your life, together with the powerful, delicate, and uncountable fabric of the nerves lay snarled, palsied, and unedged, leaving you stricken, wrecked, impotent, and shuddering in the hideous shipwreck of your energies: then they, they—Sid, Carl, Guy, Harry, Floyd, Clarence, Victor, Roy, that damned, vile, sneering horde of evil-loving, pain-devouring, life-destroying names—would be there certain as a curse, to dip their dripping beaks into your heart, to feed triumphant on your sorrow while you strangled like a mad dog in your wretchedness, and died!

And oh! to die so, drown so, choke and strangle, bleed so wretchedly to death—and die! die! die! in horror and in misery, untended and unfriended by these ghouls of death! Oh, death could be triumphant—death in battle, death in love, death in friendship and in peril, could be glorious if it were proud death, gaunt death, lean, lonely, tender, loving, and heroic death, who bent to touch his chosen son with mercy, love, and pity, and put the seal of honor on him when he died!

Yes, death could be triumphant! Death could come sublimely if it came when the great people of the living names were with you. Heroic fellowship of friendship, joy, and love, their names were John, George, William, Oliver, and Jack; their names were Henry, Richard, Thomas, James, and Hugh; their names were Edward, Joseph, Andrew, Emerson, and Mark! Their names were George Josiah Webber and Nebraska Crane!

The proud, plain music of their names itself was anthem for their glorious lives, and spoke triumphantly to him of the warmth, the joy, the certitude and faith of that heroic brotherhood. It spoke to him of great deeds done and mighty works accomplished, of glorious death in battle, and a triumph over death himself if only they were there to see him greet him when he came. Then might he say to them, with an exultant cry: “Oh brothers, friends, and comrades, dear rivals with me in the fellowship of glorious deeds, how dearly I have loved my life with you! How I have been your friendly rival and your equal in all things! How proudly and sublimely have I lived!—Now see how proudly and sublimely I can die!”

To die so, in this fellowship of life, would be glory, joy, and triumphant death for any man! But to die wretchedly and miserably, unfed, famished, unassuaged; to die with queasy guts and running bowels, a dry skin, feeble limbs, a nauseous and constricted heart; to die with rheumy eyes, and reddened, running nostrils; to die defeated, hopeless, unfulfilled, your talents wasted, your powers misused, unstruck, palsied, come to naught—the thought of it was not to be endured, and he swore that death itself would die before he came to it.

To die there like a dull, defeated slave in that ghoulish death-triumphant audience of Sid, Roy, Harry, Victor, Carl, and Guy!—to die defeated with those sneering visages of scornmaker’s pride upon you, yielding to that obscene company of death-in-life its foul, final victory—oh, it was intolerable, intolerable! Horror and hatred gripped him when he thought of it, and he swore that he would make his life prevail, beat them with the weapons of certitude, nail their grisly hides upon the wall with the shining and incontrovertible nails of joy and magic, make their sneering mouths eat crow, and put the victorious foot of life upon the proud, bowed neck of scorn and misery forever.

Nebraska Crane was a fellow that he liked. That was a queer name, sure enough, but there was also something good about it. It was a square, thick, muscular, brawny, browned and freckled, wholesome kind of name, plain as an old shoe and afraid of nothing, and yet it had some strangeness in it, too. And that was the kind of boy Nebraska Crane was.

Nebraska’s father had been a policeman, was now a captain on the force; he came from back in Zebulon County; he had some Cherokee in him. Mr. Crane knew everything; there was nothing that he could not do. If the sun came out the fourteenth day of March, he could tell you what it meant, and whether the sun would shine in April. If it rained or snowed or hailed or stormed three weeks before Easter, he could prophesy the weather Easter Sunday. He could look at the sky and tell you what was coming; if an early frost was on its way to kill the peach trees, he could tell you it was on its way and when it would arrive; there was no storm, no sudden shift in weather that he could not “feel in his bones” before it came. He had a thousand signs and symptoms for foretelling things like these—the look of the moon or the look of a cloud, the feel of the air or the direction of the wind, the appearance of the earliest bird, the half-appearance of the first blade of grass. He could feel storm coming, and could smell the thunder. It all amounted to a kind of great sixth sense out of nature, an almost supernatural intuition. In addition to—or as a consequence of—all these things, Mr. Crane raised the finest vegetables of anyone in town—the largest, perfectest tomatoes, the biggest potatoes, the finest peas and greens and onions, the most luscious strawberries, the most beautiful flowers.

He was, as may be seen, a figure of some importance in the community, not only as a captain of police, but as a sort of local prophet. The newspaper was constantly interviewing him about all kinds of things—changes in weather, prospects for a cold Winter, a hot Summer, or a killing frost, a state of drought, or an excess of rain. He always had an answer ready, and he rarely failed.

Finally—and this, of course, made his person memorably heroic to the boys—he had at one time in his life been a professional wrestler (a good one too; at one time, it was said, “the champion of the South”), and although he was now approaching fifty, he occasionally consented to appear in local contests, and give an exhibition of his prowess. There had been one thrilling Winter, just a year or two before, when Mr. Crane, during the course of a season, had met a whole series of sinister antagonists—Masked Marvels, Hidden Menaces, Terrible Turks, Mighty Swedes, Demon Dummies, and all the rest of them.

George Webber remembered all of them; Nebraska had always taken him on passes which his father gave him. The thought of the very approach of these evenings was enough to put the younger boy into a fever of anticipation, a frenzy of apprehension, an agonized unrest. He could not understand how Mr. Crane or Nebraska could face one of these occasions, with all of its terrible moments of conflict, victory or defeat, injury or mutilation, broken bones or fractured ligaments, with no more perturbation than they would show when sitting down to eat their evening meal.

And yet it was true! These people—son and father both—seemed to have come straight from the heart of immutable and unperturbed nature. Warmth they had, staunch friendliness, and the capacity for savage passion, ruthless murder. But they had no more terror than a mountain. Nerve they had, steel nerve; but as for the cold anguish of the aching and constricted pulse, the dry, hard ache and tightness of the throat, the hollow numbness of the stomach pit, the dizzy lightness of the head, the feeling of an unreal buoyancy before the moment of attack—they seemed to know no more about these things than if they had been made of oak!

Time after time on days when Mr. Crane was due to wrestle at the City Auditorium, the boy had watched him pass the house. Time after time he had searched the policeman’s square-cut face for signs of anguish or tension to see if the strange, hard features showed any sign of strain, if the square, hard jaw was grimly clenched, the hard eyes worried, if there were any signs of fear, disorder, apprehension in his step, his look, his tone, his movement, or his greeting. There was none. The policeman never varied by a jot. A powerful, somewhat shambling figure of a man, a little under six feet tall, with a thick neck, coarsely seamed and weathered with deep scorings, long arms, big hands, gorilla-like shoulders, and a kind of shambling walk, a little baggy at the knees—a figure of an immense but rather worn power—he passed by in his somewhat slouchy uniform, seamed down the trouser-legs with stripes of gold, turned in at his house and mounted the front porch steps, with no more excitement than he would show on any other day of the week. And yet the male population of the whole town would be buzzing with excited speculation on the outcome of the match, and the hearts of boys would thud with apprehensive expectation at the very thought of it.

Later on, when dark had come, a half-hour or so before the time scheduled for the match, Mr. Crane would leave his house, bearing underneath his arm a bundle wrapped up in a newspaper, which contained his old wrestling trunks and shoes; and with the same deliberate, even, bag-kneed stride, turn his steps in the direction of the town and the City Auditorium—and, Great God! his approaching and now terribly imminent encounter with the Bone-Crushing Swede, the Masked Marvel, or the Strangler Turk!

A few minutes later Nebraska would come by Monk’s house and whistle piercingly; the Webber boy would rush out of the house and down the steps still gulping scalding coffee down his aching throat—and then the two of them would be off on their way to town!

What nights they were—the nights of smoke-smell, stillness, and the far-off barking of a dog, a fire of oak leaves at the corner, and the leaping fire-dance of the boys around it—great nights of the approaching contest of the wrestlers, the nights of frost and menace, joy and terror—and October!

Oh, how each step of the way to town was pounded out beneath the rhythm of the pounding heart! How tight the throat, how dry the mouth and lips! How could Nebraska walk on so steadily, and look so cool! Arrived before the Auditorium, and the press of people, the calcium glare of hard white lights, the excited babble of the voices. Then the inside, seats down front in the big, draughty, thrilling-looking place, the great curtain with “Asbestos” written on it, horseplay and loud-mouthed banter in the crowd, the shouts of raucous boys, catcalls at length, foot-stamping, imperative hand-clapping, the bare and thrilling anatomy of the roped-in square. At last the handlers, timekeepers, and referees; and last of all—the principals!

Oh, the thrill of it! The anguish and the joy of it—the terror and the threat of it—the dry-skinned, hot-eyed, fever-pounding pulse of it, the nerve-tight, bursting agony of it! In God’s name, how could flesh endure it! And yet—there they were, the fatal, fated, soon-to-be-at-bitter-arm’s-length two of them—and Mr. Crane as loose as ashes, as cold as a potato, patient as a dray-horse, and as excited as a bale of hay!

But in the other corner—hah, now! hisses, jeers, and catcalls for the likes of you!—the Masked Marvel sits and waits, in all the menaceful address and threat of villainous disguisement. Over his bullet head and squat gorilla-neck a kind of sinister sack of coarse black cloth has been pulled and laced and tied! It is a horrible black mask with baleful eye-slits through which the beady little eyes seem to glitter as hard and wicked as a rattlesnake’s; the imprint of his flat and brutal features shows behind it, and yet all so weirdly, ominously concealed that he looks more like a hangman than anything else. He looks like some black-masked and evil-hooded thing that does the grim and secret bidding of the Inquisition or the Medici; he looks like him who came in darkness to the Tower for the two young princes; he looks like the Klu Klux Klan; he looks like Jack Ketch with a hood on; he looks like the guillotine where Sidney Carton was the twenty-third; he looks like the Red Death, Robespierre, and The Terror!

As he sits there, bent forward brutishly, his thick, short fingers haired upon the back, an old bathrobe thrown round his brutal shoulders, the crowd hoots him, and the small boys jeer! And yet there is alarmed apprehension in their very hoots and jeers, uneasy whisperings and speculations:

“Good God!” one man is saying in an awed and lowered tone, “look at that neck on him—it’s like a bull!”

“For God’s sake, take a look at those shoulders!” says another, “look at his arms! His wrists are thick as most men’s legs! Look at those arms, Dick; they could choke a bear!”

Or, an awed whisper: “Damn! It looks as if John Crane is in for it!”

All eyes now turn uneasily to Mr. Crane. He sits there in his corner quietly, and a kind of old, worn, patient look is on him. He blinks and squints unconcernedly into the hard glare of the light above the ring, he rubs his big hand reflectively over the bald top of his head, scratches the side of his coarse, seamed neck. Someone shouts a greeting to him from the audience: he looks around with an air of slight surprise, surveys the crowd with eyes as calm and hard as agate, locates the person who has called to him, waves in brief greeting, then leans forward patiently on his knees again.

The referee crawls through the ropes upon the mat, converses learnedly across the ropes but too intimately for hearing with Dr. Ned Revere, compares notes with him, looks very wise and serious, at length calls the two gladiators, attended by their handlers, bucket carriers, towel swingers, seconds, and sponge throwers, to the center of the mat, admonishes them most earnestly, sends them to their corners—and the bout begins.

The two men go back to their corners, throw their battered bathrobes off their shoulders, limber up a time or two against the ropes, a bell clangs, they turn and face each other and come out.

They come out slowly, arms bear-wise, half extended, the paws outward, circling, crouching, crafty as two cats. Mr. Crane in wrestler’s garb is even looser and more shambling than in uniform; everything about him sags a little, seems to slope downward with a kind of worn, immensely patient, slightly weary power. The big shoulders slope, the great chest muscles sag and slope, the legs sag at the knees, the old full-length wrestler’s trunks are wrinkled and also sag a little; there are big, worn knee-pads for the work down on the mat, and they also have a worn and baggy, kangaroolike look.

Mr. Crane shuffles cautiously about, but the Masked Marvel shifts and circles rapidly; he prances back and forth upon his bulging legs that seem to be made of rubber; he crouches and looks deadly, he feints and leaps in for a hold, which Mr. Crane evades with a shuffling ease. The crowd cheers wildly! The Masked Marvel dives and misses, falls sprawling. Mr. Crane falls on him, gets a hammerlock; the Masked Marvel bridges with his stocky body, squirms out of it, locks Mr. Crane’s thick neck with viselike power; the big policeman flings his body backward, gets out of it, is thrown to the corner of the ring. The two men come to grips again—the house is mad!

Oh, the thrill of it! The fear and menace of it, the fierce, pulse-pounding joy and terror of it! The two-hour-long grunting, panting, sweating, wheezing, groaning length of it! The exultant jubilation of it when Mr. Crane came out on top; the dull, dead, hopeless misery when Mr. Crane was on the bottom! And above all the inhuman mystery, secrecy, and the sinister disguisement of it all!

What did it matter that the Terrible Turk was really just a muscular Assyrian from New Bedford, Massachusetts? What did it matter if the Demon Dummy was really a young helper in the roundhouse of the Southern Railway Company? What did it matter if all this sinister array of Bone-Crushing Swedes, Horrible Huns, Desperate Dagoes, and Gorilla Gobs were for the most part derived from the ranks of able-bodied plasterers from Knoxville, Tennessee, robust bakers from Hoboken, ex-house-painters from Hamtramck, Michigan, and retired cow-hands from Wyoming? Finally, what did it matter that this baleful-eyed executioner of a Masked Marvel was really only the young Greek who worked behind the counter at the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents down by the railway depot? What did it matter that this fact was proved one night when the terrible black hood was torn off? It was a shock, of course, to realize that the Bone-Crushing Menace, the very sight of whom struck stark terror to the heart, was just a rather harmless and good-natured Greek who cooked hamburger sandwiches for railway hands. But when all was said and done, the thrill, the threat, the danger were the same!

To a boy of twelve they were mysteries, they were Marvels, they were Menaces and Terrors—and the man who dared to meet them was a hero. The man who met them without a flicker of the eye was a man of steel. The man who shambled out and came to grips with them—and heaved and tugged, escaped their toils, or grunted in their clutches for two hours—that man was a man of oak, afraid of nothing, and as enduring as a mountain. That man did not know what fear was—and his son was like him in all ways, and the best and bravest boy in town!

Nebraska Crane and his family were recent-comers to this part of town. Formerly, he had lived out in “the Doubleday Section”; perhaps this was one reason why he had no fear.

Doubleday was a part of the town where fellows named Reese and Dock and Ira lived. These were ugly names; the fellows carried knives in their pockets, had deadly, skull-smashing fights with rocks, and grew up to be hoboes, pool-room loafers, pimps and bullies living off a whore. They were big, loutish, hulking bruisers with bleared features, a loose, blurred smile, and yellowed fingers in which they constantly held the moist fag-end of a cigarette, putting it to their lips from time to time to draw in on it deeply with a hard, twisted mouth and lidded eyes, a general air of hardened and unclean debauchery as they flipped the cigarette away into the gutter. Then they would let the smoke trickle slowly, moistly from their nostrils—as if the great spongy bellows of the lungs was now stained humidly with its yellow taint—and then speak out of the sides of their mouths in hard, low, knowing tones of bored sophistication to their impressed companions.

These were the fellows who grew up and wore cheap-looking, flashy clothes, bright yellow, box-toed shoes, and loud-striped shirts, suggesting somehow an unwholesome blending of gaudy finery and bodily filth. At night and on Sunday afternoons, they hung around the corners of disreputable back streets, prowled furtively about in the dead hours of the night past all the cheap clothing stores, pawn shops, greasy little white-and-negro lunchrooms (with a partition down the middle), the pool-rooms, the dingy little whore-hotels—the adepts of South Main Street, the denizens of the whole, grimy, furtive underworld of a small town’s nighttime life.

They were the bruisers, brawlers, cutters, slashers, stabbers, shooters of a small town’s life; they were the pool-room thugs, the runners of blind tigers, the brothel guardians, the kept and pampered bullies of the whores. They were the tough town drivers with the thick red necks and leather leggings, and on Sunday, after a week of brawls, dives, stews, the stale, foul air of nighttime evil in the furtive places, they could be seen racing along the river road, out for a bawdy picnic with their whore. On Sunday afternoon they would drive along as brazen as you please beside the sensual, warm, and entrail-stirring smell, the fresh, half-rotten taint and slowness of the little river, that got in your bowels, heavy, numb, and secret, with a rending lust each time you smelled it. Then they would stop at length beside the road, get out, and take their woman up the hill into the bushes for an afternoon of dalliance underneath the laurel leaves, embedded in the thick green secrecies of a Southern growth that was itself as spermy, humid, hairy with desire, as the white flesh and heavy carnal nakedness of the whore.

These were the boys from Doubleday—the boys named Reese and Dock and Ira—the worst boys in the school. They were always older than the other boys, stayed in the same class several years, never passed their work, grinned with a loutish, jeering grin whenever the teachers upbraided them for indolence, stayed out for days at a time and were finally brought in by the truant officer, got into fist fights with the principal when he tried to whip them, and sometimes hit him in the eye, and at length were given up in despair, kicked out in disgrace when they were big brutes of sixteen or seventeen years, having never got beyond the fourth grade.

These were the boys who taught the foul words to the little boys, told about going to the whore houses, jeered at those who had not gone and said you could not call yourself a man until you had gone and “got yourself a little.” Further, Reese McMurdie, who was sixteen, as big and strong as a man, and the worst boy in the school, said you couldn’t call yourself a man until you’d caught a dose. He said he’d had his first one when he was fourteen years old, boasted that he’d had it several times since then, and said it was no worse than a bad cold. Reese McMurdie had a scar that turned your flesh sick when you looked at it; it ran the whole way from the right-hand corner of his mouth to the corner of his ear. He had got it in a knife-fight with another boy.

Ira Dingley was almost as bad as Reese. He was fifteen, not so big and heavy as the other boy, but built as solid as a bullock. He had a red, small, brutal kind of face, packed with energy and evil, and one little red eye that went glowering malignantly and truculently around at the whole world. He was blind in his other eye and wore a black shade over it.

One time, when there had been the great, jubilant shout of “Fight! Fight!” from the playing field at recess, and the boys had come running from all directions, Monk Webber had seen Ira Dingley and Reese McMurdie facing each other in the circle, edging closer truculently with fists clenched, until someone behind Reese had given him a hard shove that sent him hurtling into Ira. Ira was sent flying back into the crowd, but when he came out again, he came out slowly, crouched, his little red eye fixed and mad with hate, and this time he had the knife-blade open, naked, ready in his hand.

Reese, who had been smiling after he was pushed, with a foul, loose smile of jeering innocence, now smiled no more. He edged cautiously away and back as Ira came on, his hard eyes fixed upon his enemy, his thick hand fumbling in his trousers for the knife. And while he fumbled for his knife, he edged back slowly, talking with a sudden, quiet, murderous intensity that froze the heart:

“All right, you son-of-a-bitch!” he said, “Wait till I git my knife out!” Suddenly, the knife was out and open; it was an evil six-inch blade that opened on a spring. “If that’s what you want, I’ll cut your God-damned head off!”

And now all of the boys in the crowd were stunned, frightened, hypnotized by the murderous fascination of those two shining blades from which they could not take their eyes, and by the sight of the two boys, their faces white, contorted, mad with fear, despair, and hate, as they circled continuously around. The strong terror of their heavy breathing filled the air with menace, and communicated to the hearts of all the boys such a sense of horror, fascination, and frozen disbelief that they were unwilling to continue, afraid to intervene, and yet unable to move or wrench themselves away from the sudden, fatal, and murderous reality of the fight.

Then as the two boys came close together, Nebraska Crane suddenly stepped in, thrust them apart with a powerful movement, and at the same time said with a good-natured laugh, and in a rough, friendly, utterly natural tone of voice that instantly conquered everyone, restored all the boys to their senses and brought breath and strength back to the light of day again:

“You boys cut it out,” he said. “If you want to fight, fight fair with your fists.”

“What’s it to you?” said Reese menacingly, edging in again with his knife held ready in his hand. “What right you got to come buttin’ in? Who told you it was any business of yours?” All the time he kept edging closer with his knife held ready.

“No one told me,” said Nebraska, in a voice that had lost all of its good nature and that was now as hard and unyielding in its quality as his tar-black eyes, which he held fixed, steady as a rifle, as his foe came on. “Do you want to make anything out of it?” he said.

Reese looked back at him for a moment, then his eyes shifted, and he sidled off and half withdrew, still waiting, unwilling to depart, muttering threats. In a moment the boys broke up in groups, dispersed, the enemies sidled uneasily away, each with his partisans, and the threatened fight was over. Nebraska Crane was the bravest boy in school. He was afraid of nothing.

Ira, Dock, and Reese! These were savage, foul, and bloody names, and yet there was a menaceful wild promise in them, too. World of the “mountain grills,” the poor whites, the nameless, buried, hopeless atoms of the wilderness, their lives yet had a lawless, sinful freedom of their own. Their names evoked the wretched, scabrous world of slum-town rickets whence they came; a painful, haunting, anguished memory of the half-familiar, never-to-be-forgotten, white-trash universe of Stumptown, Pigtail Alley, Doubleday, Depot Street, and that foul shamble of a settlement called, for God knows what ironic reason, Strawberry Hill—that sprawled its labyrinthine confusion of unpaved, unnamed, miry streets and alleys and rickety shacks and houses along the scarred, clay-barren flanks of the hills that sloped down towards the railway district in the western part of town.

It was a place that Monk had seen only a few times in his whole life, but that always, then and forever, as long as he lived, would haunt him with the horrible strangeness and familiarity of a nightmare. For although that world of rickets was a part of his home town, it was a part so unfamiliar to all the life he knew the best that when he saw it first, he came upon it with a sense of grotesque discovery, and after he had gone from it he could hardly believe that it was there, and would think of it years later with a sense of pain and anguish, saying:

“Here is the town, and here the streets, and here the people—and all, save that, familiar as my father’s face; all, save that, so near that we could touch it with our hand. All of it was ours in its remotest patterns—all save that, save that! How could we have lived there with it and beside it, and have known it so little? Was it really there?”

Yes, it was there—strangely, horribly there, never-to-be-forgotten, never wholly to be remembered or believed, haunting the soul forever with the foul naturalness of a loathsome dream. It was there, immutably, unbelievably there, and what was most strange and terrible about it was that he recognized it instantly—that world of Ira, Dock, and Reese—the first time that he saw it as a child; and even as his heart and bowels sickened with their nauseous disbelief of recognition, he knew it, lived it, breathed it utterly to the last remotest degradation of its horror.

And for that reason he hated it. For that reason, nausea, fear, disgust, and horror overwhelmed the natural sense of pity which that wretched life evoked. It haunted him the moment that he saw it with a sense of buried memory, loathsome rediscovery; and it seemed to him that, so far from being different from these people, he was of them, body and brain and blood to the last atom of his life, and had escaped from them only by some unwarranted miracle of chance, some hideous insecurity of fortune that might return him into the brutish filth and misery and ignorance and hopelessness of that lost world with the same crude fickleness by which he had escaped.

No birds sang in that barren world. Beneath its skies of weary desolation the cry of all-exultant joy, the powerful, swelling anthem of youth, certitude, and victory burst from no man’s heart, rose with a wild and uncontrollable shout from no man’s throat. In Summer the heat beat down upon that baked and barren hill, upon the wretched streets, and on all the dusty, shadeless roads and alleys of the slum, and there was no pity in the merciless revelations of the sun. It shone with a huge and brutal impassivity upon the hard red dirt and dust, on shack and hut and rotting tenement.

It shone with the same impartial cruelty on mangy, scabby, nameless dogs, and on a thousand mangy, scabby nameless little children—hideous little scarecrows with tow hair, their skinny little bodies unrecognizably scurfed with filth and scarred with running sores, staring at one forever with gaunt, empty eyes as they grubbed in the baked dusty, beaten, grassless dirt before some dreary shack, or scrabbled wretchedly about, eaten by swarming flies, in the sun-stench of a little lean-to porch, the very planks of which were as dry, hard, baked, and wretched-looking as the beaten earth in which they merged.

And the sun shone also on the slattern women of the district, revealing them in all their foul unloveliness, their loathsome and inexplicable fecundities—the Lonies, Lizzies, Lotties, Lenas of the district, the Sals, the Molls, the Millies and Bernices—as well as on all their wretched little progeny of Iras, Docks, and Reeses, their Asas, Jeters, Greeleys, Zebs, and Roys. They stood there at the edge of a ramshackle porch, tall and gaunt and slatternly, while their grimy little tow-haired brats scrabbled wretchedly around the edges of their filthy, lop-edged skirts. They stood there, those foul, unlovely women, with their gaunt, staring faces, sunken eyes, toothless jaws, and corrupt, discolored mouths, rilled at the edges with a thin brown line of snuff.

They stood there like some hopeless, loveless, wretched drudge of nature, bearing about them constantly the unbroken progressions of their loathsome fertility. In their arms they held their latest, youngest, wretched little child, swaddled in filthy rags, and staring forth at one with its blue, drowned eyes, its peaked and grimy little face, its nostrils and its upper lip gummed thickly with two ropes of snot. And in their pregnant bellies, which they proposed from their gaunt, unlovely figures like some dropsical ripeness foully fructifying in the sun, they carried the last and most revolting evidence of the germinal sequence of maternity, which thus was odiously revealed in every stage of its disgusting continuity—from sagging breast to swollen womb and thence to the grimy litter of their filth-bespattered brats that crawled and scrabbled round their foul skirts on the porch. The idiot proliferations of blind nature which these wretched rakes and hags and harridans of women so nakedly and brutally revealed as they stood there stupidly proposing their foul, swollen bellies in the merciless and shameful light of the hot sun filled Monk with such a feeling of choking and wordless fury, loathing, and disgust that every natural emotion of pity and sorrow was drowned out below the powerful flood tide of revulsion, and his antagonism to the women and their wretched children was scarcely to be distinguished from blind hatred.

For pity, more than any other feeling, is a “learned” emotion; a child will have it least of all. Pity comes from the infinite accumulations of man’s memory, from the anguish, pain, and suffering of life, from the full deposit of experience, from the forgotten faces, the lost men, and from the million strange and haunting visages of time. Pity comes upon the nick of time and stabs us like a knife. Its face is thin and dark and burning, and it has come before we know it, gone before we can grasp or capture it; it leaves a shrewd, deep wound, but a bitter, subtle one, and it always comes most keenly from a little thing.

It comes without a herald or a cause we can determine at some moment of our lives when we are far and lost from all the scenes that pity comes from; and how, why, where it comes we cannot say. But suddenly in the city—in the great and million-footed city—pity comes to us at evening when the dust and fury of another city day is over, and we lean upon the sills of evening in an ancient life. Then pity comes to us; we will remember children’s voices of long ago, the free, full shout of sudden, gleeful laughter from a child that we once knew, full of exulting innocence, the songs that we sang on Summer porches long ago, a note of pride in our mother’s voice and her grave, worn eyes of innocence as she boasted of a little thing, the simple words that a woman we once loved had said in some forgotten moment when she left us for another day.

Then pity is there, is there at once with its dark face and sudden knife, to stab us with an anguish that we cannot utter, to rend us with its agony of intolerable and wordless regret, to haunt us with the briefness of our days, and to tear our hearts with anguish and wild sorrow. And for what? For what? For all we want that never may be captured, for all we thirst for that never may be found. For love that must grow old and be forever dying, for all the bone, brain, passion, marrow, sinew of our lives, our hearts, our youth, that must grow old and bowed and barren, wearied out!

And oh! for beauty, that wild, strange song of magic, aching beauty, the intolerable, unutterable, ungraspable glory, power, and beauty of this world, this earth, this life, that is, and is everywhere around us, that we have seen and known at ten thousand moments of our lives, that has broken our hearts, maddened our brains, and torn the sinews of our lives asunder as we have lashed and driven savagely down the kaleidoscopic fury of the years in quest of it, unresting in our frenzied hope that some day we shall find it, hold it, fix it, make it ours forever—and that now haunts us strangely, sorrowfully, with its wild song and aching ecstasy as we lean upon the sills of evening in the city. We feel the sorrow and the hush of evening in the city, the voices, quiet, casual, lonely, of the people, far cries and broken sounds, and smell the sea, the harbor, and the huge, slow breathing of deserted docks, and know that there are ships there! And beauty swells like a wild song in our heart, beauty bursting like a great grape in our throat, beauty aching, rending, wordless, and unutterable, beauty in us, all around us, never to be captured—and we know that we are dying as the river flows! Oh, then will pity come, strange, sudden pity with its shrewd knife and the asp of time to stab us with a thousand wordless, lost, forgotten, little things!

And how, where, why it came we cannot say, but we feel pity now for all men who have ever lived upon the earth, and it is night, now, night, and the great stars are flashing in the lilac dark, the great stars are flashing on a hundred million men across America, and it is night, now, night, and we are living, hoping, fearing, loving, dying in the darkness, while the great stars shine upon us as they have shone on all men dead and living on this earth, on all men yet unborn, and yet to live who will come after us!

Yet, when Monk looked at these foul, pregnant hags in slum-town’s gulch and hill and hollow, he could feel no pity, but only loathing, sickness of the flesh, disgust and nameless fear and dread and horror, so overwhelming in their tidal flood that he looked upon the filth and misery of these people with a shuddering revulsion and hated them because of it. For joy, faith, hope, every swelling certitude of glory, love, and triumph youth can know went dead and sick and rotten in that foul place. In the casual, filthy, and incessant littering of these ever-pregnant hags was evident not a love for life, but a contempt and carelessness for it so vile and criminal that it spawned its brood of rickety, scabby, mangy, foredoomed brats as indifferently as a bitch might drop its litter, and with a murderous nonchalance and bestial passivity that made man less than dung and instantly destroyed every proud illusion of the priceless value, dignity, and sanctity of his individual life.

How had man been begotten? Why, they had got him between brutish snores at some random waking of their lust in the midwatches of the night! They had got him in a dirty corner back behind a door in the hideous unprivacy of these rickety wooden houses, begotten him standing in a fearful secrecy between apprehensive whisperings to make haste, lest some of the children hear! They had got him in some bestial sudden wakening of lust and hunger while turnip greens boiled with their humid fragrance on the stove! He had been begotten in some casual and forgotten moment which they had snatched out of their lives of filth, poverty, weariness, and labor, even as a beast will tear at chunks of meat; begotten in the crude, sudden, straddling gripe of a half-rape on the impulsion of a casual opportunity of lust; begotten instantly as they were flung back rudely on the edge of an untidy bed in the red waning light of some forgotten Saturday when work was done, the week’s wages given, the week’s brief breathing space of rest, repose, and brutal dalliance come! He had been begotten without love, without beauty, tenderness, magic, or any nobleness of spirit, by the idiot, blind hunger of a lust so vile that it knew no loathing for filth, stench, foulness, haggish ugliness, and asked for nothing better than a bag of guts in which to empty out the accumulations of its brutish energies.

The thought of it was not to be endured, and suddenly the boy cranes his neck, he grips his throat hard with his fingers, he squirms like something caught in a steel trap, a bestial grimace contracts his features—it is like drowning, drowning, not to be endured. The congress of their foul and bloody names—the loathsome company of these Iras, Docks and Reeses, the Jeters, Zebs and Greeleys of these poor-white slums—return to torment memory now with the white sear of horrible and instant recognition. Why? Because these people are the mountain people. These people are the poor-white litter of the hills. These people—Oh! it is intolerable, but true—these people came out of his mother’s world, her life! He hears lost voices in the mountains long ago! They return to him from depths of sourceless memory, from places he has never viewed, from scenes that he has never visited—the whole deposit of inheritance, the lives and voices of lost people in the hills a hundred years ago.

They were a sharp-distinguished and strong-fibered people of his mother’s stock, a race eccentric, powerful, thoughtful, honest, energetic—much better than this brutish and degraded kind. They were a race that lived upon the mountain slopes and river bottoms of old wild and rugged Zebulon; a kind that mined for mica in the hills, and hewed for tan-bark on the mountains; a kind that lived along a brawling mountain stream, and tilled the good land of the bottoms. It was a kind apart from these, hard-bitten in its pride, and hard-assured in its complacence, scornful in its own superiority, conceited, individual, strongly marked—but kinsman of this kind, as well.

He hears lost voices of his kinsmen in the mountains one hundred years before—and all as sad, faint, and remote as far-faint voices in a valley, all passing sad as a cloud shadow passing in the wilderness, all lonely, lost, and sad as strange, lost time. All hill-remote and lonely they come to him—the complacent, drawling voices of the death-triumphant Joyners long ago!

The vision changes, and again he sees the scar and squalor of the white-trash slum, the hill-man’s rickets come to town—and it is night; there is a shrew’s cry from the inner depth and darkness of some nameless house, lit only by the greasy, murky, and uneven light of a single lamp. It comes from scream and shout and curse, from drunken cry and stamping boot, from rancid flesh, fat pork, and rotting cabbage, and from his memory of a foul, sallow slut, gap-toothed, gaunt and shapeless as a pole—who stands there at the border of the rotting porch, her wisp of lank, unwashed hair screwed to a knot upon her head, proposing her pregnant belly for the fourteenth time.

Drowning! Drowning! Not to be endured! The abominable memory shrivels, shrinks, and withers up his heart in the cold constriction of its fear and loathing. The boy clutches at his throat, cranes with a livid face at the edges of his collar, draws one hand sharply up, and lifts his foot as if he has received a sudden, agonizing blow upon the kidneys. Less than his mother’s stock he knows, far less in sense, mind, will, energy, and character—they yet have come from the same wilderness, the same darkness, the same nature from which his mother’s people came—and their mark is on him, never to be changed—their taint is in him, never to be drawn out. Bone of their bone, blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh, by however various and remote a web, he is of them, they are in him, he is theirs—has seen, known, felt, and has distilled into his blood every wild passion, criminal desire, and rending lust they have known. And the blood of the murdered men, the rivers of blood of the murdered men which has soaked down quietly in the wilderness, which has soaked quietly away with all its million mute and secret tongues into the stern, the beautiful, the unyielding substance of the everlasting earth, is his, has stained his life, his flesh, his spirit, and is on his head as well as theirs!

And suddenly, like a man who is drowning and feels a rock beneath his feet; like a man lost, dying, freezing, famished, almost spent in the dark and howling desolation of the strange wilderness, who sees a light, comes suddenly upon a place of shelter, warmth, salvation, the boy’s spirit turns and seizes on the image of his father. The image of his father’s life, that image of decent order, gaunt cleanliness and dispatch, the image of warmth, abundance, passionate energy and joy, returns to the boy now with all that is beautiful and right in it, to save him, to heal him instantly, to restore him from the horror and abomination of that memory in which his spirit for a moment drowned.

And at the moment that he sees the huge salvation of his father’s figure, he also sees his father’s house, his life, the whole world that he has made and shaped with his own single power, his unique color, his one soul. And instantly he sees as well his father’s country, the land from which his father came, the beautiful, rich country which the boy has never seen with his own eyes, but which he has visited ten thousand times with his heart, his mind, his spirit, and man’s ancient, buried, and inherited memory, until that country is as much a part of him as if he had been born there. It is the unknown land which all of us have known and have longed to find in youth. It is the undiscovered complement of all that we have seen and known, the lost half of our dark heart, the secret hunger, need, and magic working in our blood; and though we have not seen it, we recognize it instantly as the land we know the minute that we come to it.

And now, like an image of certitude, peace, joy, security, and abundance to restore his life out of the filth and shambles of that other vision, he sees his father’s land. He sees the great red barns, the tidy houses, the thrift, the comfort, and the loveliness, the velvet pastures, meadows, fields, and orchards, the red-bronze soil, the nobly-swelling earth of southern Pennsylvania. And at the moment that he sees it, his spirit comes out of the brutal wilderness, his heart is whole and sound and full of hope again. There are new lands.

And at the same moment he sees the image of the brave companionship of Nebraska Crane. What is there to fear? What is there to fear on earth if Nebraska Crane is there? Nebraska stands there in his life like the image of that heroic integrity in life which cannot be touched or conquered, which is outside a man, and to which his own life must be united if he will be saved. So what is there to fear as long as Nebraska Crane—the free, the frank, the friendly, the fierce, the secret, and the unafraid—is there to show him with his life where he can go? What boys who live out on the West Side, for all their manners, customs, looks, and ways, for all their names and cunning stratagems, can he fear, as long as Nebraska Crane is there with him?

No—though they stood there massed against him in the whole concert of their hateful qualities, all the Sidneys, Roys, Carls, Victors, Guys, and Harrys of the earth—though he had to meet them on their own earth of red waning March and Sunday afternoons, what nameless and accursed horror can quench utterly the fearless light, the dark integrity of that fierce and lonely flame? He could breathe in their poisonous and lifeless air, stand houseless, naked, unprepared beneath their desolate skies—he could yet endure, meet them, beat them, carry the victorious power of his own world in his own life, and make exultant joy, all-conquering certitude, triumphant sense, and lusty love prevail forever above the wretchedness and scornful doubt of their own life-denying lives—if only Nebraska Crane were there to see him do it!

So the old wild joy of three o’clock has risen in his heart again—wordless, tongueless as a savage cry, with all its passion, pain, and ecstasy—and he sees the world, the East, the West, the lands and cities of the earth in triumph, for Nebraska Crane is there!

George Webber and Nebraska Crane! The splendid names flash in the sun, soar to the westward, wing together over the roof of the whole world, together back again, are there!

George Webber! George Josiah and Josiah George! Josiah George Nebraska Webber and Crane George!

“My name is George Josiah Webber!” cried the boy, and sprang erect.

“GEORGE JOSIAH WEBBER!”

The great name flashed then through the shining air; flashed, too, the great name to the flashing of the leaves; all of the maple leaves a-spangle with the proud flash of the great, proud name!

“GEORGE JOSIAH WEBBER!”

cried the boy again; and all the gold-proud afternoon was ringing with the sound; flashed, too, the aspen leaves, and flashed the honeysuckle hedge a-tremble; flashed, too, and bent each blade of velvet grass.

“My name is George Josiah Webber!”

Flashed the proud name to the brazen pounding of the courthouse bell; flashed, too, and rose and struck upon the ponderous, solemn strokes of three!

“ONE! ... TWO! ... THREE!”

And then upon the stroke the black boys came:

“Hi, Paul! ... Hey, Paul! ... How are you, Paul?” the black boys cried and flashed before him.

“My name is George Josiah Webber!” cried the boy.

Solemnly, in perfect line, the black boys wheeled, swept round platoon-wise, faultless in formation, and with spin-humming wheels rode slowly back in lines of eight, squads-righted perfectly, and, halting on their wheels in perfect order, with grave inquiry greeted him:

“How’s ole Paul today?”

“My name,” the boy said firmly, “is not Paul! My name is George!”

“Oh, no, it’s not, Paul!” cried the black boys, grinning amiably. “Yo’ name is Paul!”

It was a harmless mockery, some unknown and unknowledgeable jest, some secret, playful banter of their nigger soul. God knows what they meant by it. They could not have said themselves what made them call him by this name, but Paul he was to them, and every day at three o’clock, before the markets opened up again, the black boys came and flashed before him—called him “Paul.”

And he contended stubbornly, would not give in, always insisted that his name was George, and somehow—God knows how!—the unyielding argument filled his heart with warmth, and delighted the black boys, too.

Each day at three o’clock he knew that they would come and call him “Paul,” each day at three o’clock he waited for them, with warmth, with joy, with longing and affection, with a strange sense of ecstasy and magic, with fear they might not come. But each day at three o’clock, hard on the market’s opening and the booming of the courthouse bell, the black boys came and flashed before him.

He knew that they would come. He knew they could not fail him. He knew that he delighted them, that they adored the look of him—the long-armed, big-handed, and flat-footed look of him. He knew that all his words and movements—his leaps and springs, his argument and stern insistence on his proper name—gave them an innocent and enormous pleasure. He knew, in short, that there was nothing but warm liking in their banter when they called him “Paul.”

Each day, therefore, he waited on their coming—and they always came! They could not have failed him, they would have come if all hell had divided them. A little before three o’clock, each day of the week except Sundays, the black boys roused themselves from their siesta in the warm sun round the walls of the City Market, saying:

“It’s time to go and see ole Paul!”

They roused themselves out of the pleasant reek of cod-heads rotting in the sun, decaying cabbage leaves and rotten oranges; they roused themselves from drowsy places in the sun, delicious apathy, from the depth and dark of all their African somnolence—and said:

“We got to go now! Ole Paul is waitin’ for us! Stay with us, footses; we is on ouah way!”

And what a way it was! Oh, what a splendid, soaring, flashing, winglike way! They came like streaks of ebon lightning; they came like ravens with a swallow-swoop; they came like shot out of a gun, and like a thunderbolt; they came like demons—but they came!

He heard them coming from afar, he heard them racing down the street, he heard the furious thrum of all their flashing wheels, and then they flashed before him, they were there! They shot past, eight abreast, bent over, pedaling like black demons; they shot past on their flashing wheels, the fibrous market baskets rattling lightly; and as they flashed before him, they cried “Paul!”

Then, wheeling solemnly in squadrons, they rode slowly, gravely back, and wheeled and faced him, steady and moveless on their wheels, and said, “Hi, Paul! ... How’s ole Paul today!”

Then the parade began. They did amazing things, performed astounding evolutions on their wheels; they flashed by in fours, and then by twos; they did squads-right, retreated or advanced in echelon, swooped past in single file like soaring birds, rode like demons soaring in the wind.

Then madness seized them, and desire for individual excellence, a lust for championship, wild inventiveness, whimsical caprice. They shouted with rich nigger laughter, howled derisory comments at their fellows, strove to outdo one another—to win applause and approbation—all for Paul! They swooped down the street with lightlike swiftness and a bullet speed; they swooped down in terrific spirals, snaking from one side to the other, missing curbs by hair-line fractions of an inch; they shot past, stooping like a cowboy from the saddle, and snatching up their ragged caps as they shot past. They shouted out to one another things like these:

“Outa my way, ole Liver Lips! I got somethin’ dat I got to show to Paul!”

“Hey, Paul—look at ole Slewfoot ride dat wheel!”

“Move ovah deh, M’lasses! Let ole Paul look at someone who can ride!”

“Get outa my way, Big Niggah, ’fo’ I rides all ovah you! I’m goin’ to show Paul somethin’ dat he nevah saw befo’!—How’s dis one, Paul?”

And so they soared and swooped and flashed, their rich black voices calling back to him, their warm good voices bubbling with black laughter, crying, “Paul!”

And then they were off like furies riding for town and the reopening of the markets, and their rich, warm voices howled back to him with affectionate farewell:

“Good-bye, Paul!”

“So long, Paul.”

“We’ll be seein’ you, Paul!”

“My name,” he shouted after them, “is George Josiah Webber!”

Flashed and rose the splendid name as proud and shining as the day.

And answered faintly, warm with pleasant mockery, upon the wind:

“Yo’ name is Paul! Paul! Paul!”

And coming faintly, sadly, haunting as a dream:

“—is Paul! Paul! Paul!”