Then the moving cliff down which the captain plunges slopes gradually off and shoots him, uninjured, onto a hard floor, where he lies for a time on his back while across his face the lightward- and air-ward-seeking blast of death and dissolution rushes. He has fetched up against something; it tumbles down upon him lightly, with a muffled clatter as if it had come to pieces.
Then he begins to see the light, the jagged shape of the cavern mouth high overhead, and then the sergeant is bending over him with a pocket torch. “McKie?” the captain says. For reply the sergeant turns the flash upon his own face. “Where’s Mr McKie?” the captain says.
“A’s gone, sir-r,” the sergeant says in a husky whisper. The captain sits up.
“How many are left?”
“Fourteen, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Fourteen. Twelve missing. We’ll have to dig fast.” He gets to his feet. The faint light from above falls coldly upon the heaped avalanche, upon the thirteen helmets and the white bandage of the wounded man huddled about the foot of the cliff. “Where are we?”
For answer the sergeant moves the torch. It streaks laterally into the darkness, along a wall, a tunnel, into yawning blackness, the walls faceted with pale glints of chalk. About the tunnel, sitting or leaning upright against the walls, are skeletons in dark tunics and bagging Zouave trousers, their moldering arms beside them; the captain recognizes them as Senegalese troops of the May fighting of 1915, surprised and killed by gas probably in the attitudes in which they had taken refuge in the chalk caverns. He takes the torch from the sergeant.
“We’ll see if there’s anyone else,” he says. “Have out the trenching tools.” He flashes the light upon the precipice. It rises into gloom, darkness, then into the faint rumor of daylight overhead. With the sergeant behind him he climbs the shifting heap, the earth sighing beneath him and shaling downward. The injured man begins to wail again, “A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” until his voice goes into a high sustained screaming. Someone lays a hand over his mouth. His voice is muffled, then it becomes laughter on a rising note, becomes screaming again, is choked again.
The captain and the sergeant mount as high as they dare, prodding at the earth while the earth shifts beneath them in long hushed sighs. At the foot of the precipice the men huddle, their faces lifted faint, white, and patient into the light. The captain sweeps the torch up and down the cliff. There is nothing, no arm, no hand, in sight. The air is clearing slowly. “We’ll get on,” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant says.
In both directions the cavern fades into darkness, plumbless and profound, filled with the quiet skeletons sitting and leaning against the walls, their arms beside them.
“The cave-in threw us forward,” the captain says.
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Speak out,” the captain says. “It’s but a bit of a cave. If men got into it, we can get out.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“If it threw us forward, the entrance will be yonder.”
“Ay, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
The captain flashes the torch ahead. The men rise and huddle quietly behind him, the wounded man among them. He whimpers. The cavern goes on, un-rolling its glinted walls out of the darkness; the sitting shapes grin quietly into the light as they pass. The air grows heavier; soon they are trotting, gasping, then the air grows lighter and the torch sweeps up another slope of earth, closing the tunnel. The men halt and huddle. The captain mounts the slope. He snaps off the light and crawls slowly along the crest of the slide, where it joins the ceiling of the cavern, sniffing. The light flashes on again. “Two men with trenching tools,” he says.
Two men mount to him. He shows them the fissure through which air seeps in small, steady breaths. They begin to dig, furiously, hurling the dirt back. Presently they are relieved by two others; presently the fissure becomes a tunnel and four men can work at once. The air becomes fresher. They burrow furiously, with whimpering cries like dogs. The wounded man, hearing them perhaps, catching the excitement perhaps, begins to laugh again, meaningless and high. Then the man at the head of the tunnel bursts through. Light rushes in around him like water; he burrows madly; in silhouette they see his wallowing buttocks lunge from sight and a burst of daylight surges in.
The others leave the wounded man and surge up the slope, fighting and snarling at the opening. The sergeant springs after them and beats them away from the opening with a trenching spade, cursing in his hoarse whisper.
“Let them go, Sergeant,” the captain says. The sergeant desists. He stands aside and watches the men scramble into the tunnel. Then he descends, and he and the captain help the wounded man up the slope. At the mouth of the tunnel the wounded man rebels.
“A’m no dead! A’m no dead!” he wails, struggling. By cajolery and force they thrust him, still wailing and struggling, into the tunnel, where he becomes docile again and scuttles through.
“Out with you, Sergeant,” the captain says.
“After you, sir-r,” the sergeant whispers.
“Out wi ye, man!” the captain says. The sergeant enters the tunnel. The captain follows. He emerges onto the outer slope of the avalanche which had closed the cave, at the foot of which the fourteen men are kneeling in a group. On his hands and knees like a beast, the captain breathes, his breath making a hoarse sound. “Soon it will be summer,” he thinks, dragging the air into his lungs faster than he can empty them to respire again. “Soon it will be summer, and the long days.” At the foot of the slope the fourteen men kneel. The one in the center has a Bible in his hand, from which he is intoning monotonously. Above his voice the wounded man’s gibberish rises, meaningless and unemphatic and sustained.
II
RED LEAVES
A ROSE FOR EMILY
A JUSTICE
HAIR
THAT EVENING SUN
DRY SEPTEMBER
RED LEAVES
I
The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. Neat with whitewash, of baked soft brick, the two rows of houses in which lived the slaves belonging to the clan, faced one another across the mild shade of the lane marked and scored with naked feet and with a few homemade toys mute in the dust. There was no sign of life.
“I know what we will find,” the first Indian said.
“What we will not find,” the second said. Although it was noon, the lane was vacant, the doors of the cabins empty and quiet; no cooking smoke rose from any of the chinked and plastered chimneys.
“Yes. It happened like this when the father of him who is now the Man, died.”
“You mean, of him who was the Man.”
“Yao.”
The first Indian’s name was Three Basket. He was perhaps sixty. They were both squat men, a little solid, burgherlike; paunchy, with big heads, big, broad, dust-colored faces of a certain blurred serenity like carved heads on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist. The sun had done it, the violent sun, the violent shade. Their hair looked like sedge grass on burnt-over land. Clamped through one ear Three Basket wore an enameled snuffbox.
“I have said all the time that this is not the good way. In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them who prefer sweating to do.”
“They are like horses and dogs.”
“They are like nothing in this sensible world. Nothing contents them save sweat. They are worse than the white people.”
“It is not as though the Man himself had to find work for them to do.”
“You said it. I do not like slavery. It is not the good way. In the old days, there was the good way. But not now.”
“You do not remember the old way either.”
“I have listened to them who do. And I have tried this way. Man was not made to sweat.”
“That’s so. See what it has done to their flesh.”
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“Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too.”
“You have eaten of it?”
“Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different with me.”
“Yes. They are too valuable to eat now.”
“There is a bitter taste to the flesh which I do not like.”
“They are too valuable to eat, anyway, when the white men will give horses for them.”
They entered the lane. The mute, meager toys—the fetish-shaped objects made of wood and rags and feathers—lay in the dust about the patinaed door-steps, among bones and broken gourd dishes. But there was no sound from any cabin, no face in any door; had not been since yesterday, when Issetibbeha died. But they already knew what they would find.
It was in the central cabin, a house a little larger than the others, where at certain phases of the moon the Negroes would gather to begin their ceremonies before removing after nightfall to the creek bottom, where they kept the drums. In this room they kept the minor accessories, the cryptic ornaments, the ceremonial records which consisted of sticks daubed with red clay in symbols. It had a hearth in the center of the floor, beneath a hole in the roof, with a few cold wood ashes and a suspended iron pot. The window shutters were closed; when the two Indians entered, after the abashless sunlight they could distinguish nothing with the eyes save a movement, shadow, out of which eyeballs rolled, so that the place appeared to be full of Negroes. The two Indians stood in the door.
“Yao,” Basket said. “I said this is not the good way.”
“I dont think I want to be here,” the second said.
“That is black man’s fear which you smell. It does not smell as ours does.”
“I dont think I want to be here.”
“Your fear has an odor too.”
“Maybe it is Issetibbeha which we smell.”
“Yao. He knows. He knows what we will find here. He knew when he died what we should find here today.” Out of the rank twilight of the room the eyes, the smell, of Negroes rolled about them. “I am Three Basket, whom you know,” Basket said into the room. “We are come from the Man. He whom we seek is gone?” The Negroes said nothing. The smell of them, of their bodies, seemed to ebb and flux in the still hot air. They seemed to be musing as one upon something remote, inscrutable. They were like a single octopus. They were like the roots of a huge tree uncovered, the earth broken momentarily upon the writhen, thick, fetid tangle of its lightless and outraged life. “Come,” Basket said. “You know our errand. Is he whom we seek gone?”
“They are thinking something,” the second said. “I do not want to be here.”
“They are knowing something,” Basket said.
“They are hiding him, you think?”
“No. He is gone. He has been gone since last night. It happened like this before, when the grandfather of him who is now the Man died. It took us three days to catch him. For three days Doom lay above the ground, saying ‘I see my horse and my dog. But I do not see my slave. What have you done with him that you will not permit me to lie quiet?’ ”
“They do not like to die.”
“Yao. They cling. It makes trouble for us, always. A people without honor and without decorum. Always a trouble.”
“I do not like it here.”
“Nor do I. But then, they are savages; they cannot be expected to regard usage. That is why I say that this way is a bad way.”
“Yao. They cling. They would even rather work in the sun than to enter the earth with a chief. But he is gone.”
The Negroes had said nothing, made no sound. The white eyeballs rolled, wild, subdued; the smell was rank, violent. “Yes, they fear,” the second said. “What shall we do now?”
“Let us go and talk with the Man.”
“Will Moketubbe listen?”
“What can he do? He will not like to. But he is the Man now.”
“Yao. He is the Man. He can wear the shoes with the red heels all the time now.” They turned and went out. There was no door in the door frame. There were no doors in any of the cabins.
“He did that anyway,” Basket said.
“Behind Issetibbeha’s back. But now they are his shoes, since he is the Man.”
“Yao. Issetibbeha did not like it. I have heard. I know that he said to Moketubbe: ‘When you are the Man, the shoes will be yours. But until then, they are my shoes.’ But now Moketubbe is the Man; he can wear them.”
“Yao,” the second said. “He is the Man now. He used to wear the shoes behind Issetibbeha’s back, and it was not known if Issetibbeha knew this or not. And then Issetibbeha became dead, who was not old, and the shoes are Moketubbe’s, since he is the Man now. What do you think of that?”
“I dont think about it,” Basket said. “Do you?”
“No,” the second said.
“Good,” Basket said. “You are wise.”
II
The house sat on a knoll, surrounded by oak trees. The front of it was one story in height, composed of the deck house of a steamboat which had gone ashore and which Doom, Issetibbeha’s father, had dismantled with his slaves and hauled on cypress rollers twelve miles home overland. It took them five months. His house consisted at the time of one brick wall. He set the steamboat broadside on to the wall, where now the chipped and flaked gliding of the rococo cornices arched in faint splendor above the gilt lettering of the stateroom names above the jalousied doors.
Doom had been born merely a subchief, a Mingo, one of three children on the mother’s side of the family. He made a journey—he was a young man then and New Orleans was a European city—from north Mississippi to New Orleans by keel boat, where he met the Chevalier Sœur Blonde de Vitry, a man whose social position, on its face, was as equivocal as Doom’s own. In New Orleans, among the gamblers and cut-throats of the river front, Doom, under the tutelage of his patron, passed as the chief, the Man, the hereditary owner of that land which belonged to the male side of the family; it was the Chevalier de Vitry who called him du homme, and hence Doom.
They were seen everywhere together—the Indian, the squat man with a bold, inscrutable, underbred face, and the Parisian, the expatriate, the friend, it was said, of Carondelet and the intimate of General Wilkinson. Then they disappeared, the two of them, vanishing from their old equivocal haunts and leaving behind them the legend of the sums which Doom was believed to have won, and some tale about a young woman, daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family, the son and brother of whom sought Doom with a pistol about his old haunts for some time after his disappearance.
Six months later the young woman herself disappeared, boarding the Saint Louis packet, which put in one night at a wood landing on the north Mississippi side, where the woman, accompanied by a Negro maid, got off. Four Indians met her with a horse and wagon, and they traveled for three days, slowly, since she was already big with child, to the plantation, where she found that Doom was now chief. He never told her how he accomplished it, save that his uncle and his cousin had died suddenly. At that time the house consisted of a brick wall built by shiftless slaves, against which was propped a thatched lean-to divided into rooms and littered with bones and refuse, set in the center of ten thousand acres of matchless parklike forest where deer grazed like domestic cattle. Doom and the woman were married there a short time before Issetibbeha was born, by a combination itinerant minister and slave trader who arrived on a mule, to the saddle of which was lashed a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky. After that, Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles, save on the occasions when, entertaining guests, Doom coursed them with dogs.
When Doom died, Issetibbeha, his son, was nineteen. He became proprietor of the land and of the quintupled herd of blacks for which he had no use at all. Though the title of Man rested with him, there was a hierarchy of co
usins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly beneath the golden names above the doors of the steamboat.
“We cannot eat them,” one said.
“Why not?”
“There are too many of them.”
“That’s true,” a third said. “Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man.”
“Perhaps they will be like deer flesh. That cannot hurt you.”
“We might kill a few of them and not eat them,” Issetibbeha said.
They looked at him for a while. “What for?” one said.
“That is true,” a second said. “We cannot do that. They are too valuable; remember all the bother they have caused us, finding things for them to do. We must do as the white men do.”
“How is that?” Issetibbeha said.
“Raise more Negroes by clearing more land to make corn to feed them, then sell them. We will clear the land and plant it with food and raise Negroes and sell them to the white men for money.”
“But what will we do with this money?” a third said.
They thought for a while.
“We will see,” the first said. They squatted, profound, grave.
“It means work,” the third said.
“Let the Negroes do it,” the first said.
“Yao. Let them. To sweat is bad. It is damp. It opens the pores.”
“And then the night air enters.”
“Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating.”
So they cleared the land with the Negroes and planted it in grain. Up to that time the slaves had lived in a huge pen with a lean- to roof over one corner, like a pen for pigs. But now they began to build quarters, cabins, putting the young Negroes in the cabins in pairs to mate; five years later Issetibbeha sold forty head to a Memphis trader, and he took the money and went abroad upon it, his maternal uncle from New Orleans conducting the trip. At that time the Chevalier Sœur Blonde de Vitry was an old man in Paris, in a toupee and a corset and a careful toothless old face fixed in a grimace quizzical and profoundly tragic. He borrowed three hundred dollars from Issetibbeha and in return he introduced him into certain circles; a year later Issetibbeha returned home with a gilt bed, a pair of girandoles by whose light it was said that Pompadour arranged her hair while Louis smirked at his mirrored face across her powdered shoulder, and a pair of slippers with red heels. They were too small for him, since he had not worn shoes at all until he reached New Orleans on his way abroad.