“I mean he just kind of flung out his hand when he was talking, and I happened to kind of turn my face toward him at the same time. He never aimed to hit me because he knowed I would have took him. I told him so. I had the rod in my hand, inside my coat, all the while.
“So after that Gawtrey would come back maybe once a week because I told him I had a good job and I didn’t aim to have to shoot myself out of it for no man except myself maybe. He come once a week. The first time she wouldn’t leave him in. Then one day I am reading the paper (you ought to read a paper now and then. You ought to keep up with the day of the week, at least) and I read where this Yale Allen boy has run off with a show gal and they had fired him off the college for losing his amateur’s standing, I guess. I guess that made him mad, after he had done jumped the college anyways. So I cut it out, and this Burke kid (me and her was all right, too) she puts it on the breakfast tray that A.M. And that afternoon, when Gawtrey happens to come back, she leaves him in, and this Burke kid happens to walk into the room sudden with something—I don’t know what it was—and here is Gawtrey and her like a fade-out in the pitchers.”
“So Blair got his horse,” the chauffeur said.
“What horse?”
“The horse Gawtrey wouldn’t sell him.”
“How could he, when Gawtrey never owned no horse no more than I do, unless it’s maybe some dog still finishing last year’s Selling Plate at Pimlico? Besides, Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”
“Not yet?”
“She don’t like him, see. The first time he come to the house alone she wouldn’t leave him into the front door. And the next time, too, if this Burke kid hadn’t happened to left that piece out of the papers about this college boy on the breakfast tray. And the time after that when he come, she wouldn’t leave him in again; it was like he might have been a horse maybe, or even a dog, because she hated a dog worse than she did a horse even, even if she didn’t have to try to ride on no dog. If it had have been a dog, Blair wouldn’t have never got her to even try to ride on it. So I’d have to go out and steam Callaghan up again until it got to where I wasn’t no more than one of these Russian droshkies or something.”
“A Russian what?”
“One of these fellows that can’t call their own soul. Every time I would leave the house I would have to meet Gawtrey in a dump somewheres and then go to see Callaghan and soap him down, because he is one of these boys with ideas, see?”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Just ideas. Out of the Sunday school paper. About how this wasn’t right because he liked her and felt sorry for her and so he wanted to tell Blair he had been lying and that Gawtrey hadn’t never owned no horse. Because a fellow that won’t take a nickel when it’s throwed right in his face, he ain’t never as big a fool to nobody as he is to the man that can have some sense about religion and keep all these golden rules in the Sunday school paper where they come from. If the Lord didn’t want a man to cut his own grass, why did He put Sunday on Sunday like he did? Tell me that.”
“I guess you’re right,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure I’m right. Jees! I told Callaghan Blair would cut his throat and mine both for a Rockefeller quarter, same as any sensible man, and I ast him if he thought gals had done all give out with Blair’s wife; if she was going to be the last one they made.”
“So he don’t …” the chauffeur said. He ceased; then he said, “Look there.”
The other man looked. Through the gap in the trees, in the center of the segment of visible rice field, they could see a tiny pink-and-black dot. It was almost a mile away; it did not appear to be moving fast.
“What’s that?” the other said. “The fox?”
“It’s Blair,” the chauffeur said. “He’s going fast. I wonder where the others are.” They watched the pink-and-black dot go on and disappear.
“They’ve went back home if they had any sense,” the other said. “So we might as well go back too.”
“I guess so,” the chauffeur said. “So Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”
“Not yet. She don’t like him. She wouldn’t leave him in the house again after that day, and this Burke kid says she come back from a party one night because Gawtrey was there. And if it hadn’t been for me, Gawtrey wouldn’t a got invited down here, because she told Blair that if he come, she wouldn’t come. So I’d have to work on Callaghan again so he would come in once a day and steam Blair up again about the horse to get Gawtrey invited, because Blair was going to make her come.” The chauffeur got out of the car and went around to the crank. The other man lighted a cigarette. “But Blair ain’t got his horse yet. You take a woman with long hair like she’s got, long as she keeps her hair up, it’s all right. But once you catch her with her hair down, it’s just been too bad.”
The chauffeur engaged the crank. Then he paused, stooped, his head turned. “Listen,” he said.
“What?”
“That horn.” The silver sound came again, faint, distant, prolonged.
“What’s that?” the other said. “Do they have to keep soldiers here?”
“It’s the horn they blow,” the chauffeur said. “It means they have caught that fox.”
“Jees!” the other said. “Maybe we will go back to town to-morrow.”
The two men on the mules recrossed the rice field and mounted the ridge into the pines.
“Well,” the youth said, “I reckon he’s satisfied now.”
“You reckon he is?” the other said. He rode a little in front of the youth. He did not turn his head when he spoke.
“He’s run that fox three years,” the youth said. “And now he’s killed it. How come he ain’t satisfied?”
The older man did not look back. He slouched on his gaunt, shabby mule, his overalled legs dangling. He spoke in a tone of lazy and ironical contempt. “I reckon that’s something about gentle-men you won’t never know.”
“Fox is fox, to me,” the youth said. “Can’t eat it. Might as well pizen it and save them horses.”
“Sho,” the other said. “That’s something else about them you won’t never know.”
“About who?”
“Gentle-men.” They mounted the ridge and turned into the faint, sandy road. “Well,” the older man said, “gentle-man or not, I reckon that’s the only fox in Cal-lina that ever got itself killed that-a-way. Maybe that’s the way they kills a fox up north.”
“Then I be durn if I ain’t glad I don’t live up there,” the youth said.
“I reckon so,” the other said. “I done got along pretty well here for some time, myself.”
“I’d like to see it once though,” the youth said.
“I don’t reckon I would,” the other said, “if living there makes a man go to all this trouble to kill a fox.”
They were riding up the ridge, among the pines, the holly bushes, the huckleberries and briers. Suddenly the older man checked his mule, extending his hand backward.
“What?” the youth said. “What is it?”
The pause was hardly a pause; again the older man rode on, though he began to whistle, the tone carrying and clear though not loud, the tune lugubrious and hymnlike; from beyond the bushes which bordered the path just ahead of them there came the snort of a horse. “Who is it?” the youth said. The other said nothing. The two mules went on in single file. Then the youth said quietly, “She’s got her hair down. It looks like the sun on a spring branch.” The mules paced on in the light, whispering soil, their ears bobbing, the two men sitting loose, with dangling, stirrupless feet.
The woman sat the mare, her hair a bright cloud, a copper cascade in the sun, about her shoulders, her arms lifted and her hands busy in it. The man sat the bay horse a short distance away. He was lighting a cigarette. The two mules came up, tireless, shambling, with drooping heads and nodding ears. The youth looked at the woman with a stare at once bold and covert; the older man did not cease his mellow, slow, tuneless whistling; he did not appear
to look at them at all. He appeared to be about to ride past without a sign when the man on the bay spoke to him.
“They caught it, did they?” he said. “We heard the horn.”
“Yaas,” the man in overalls said, in a dry, drawling tone. “Yaas. It got caught. ’Twarn’t nothing else it could do but get caught.”
The youth watched the woman looking at the older man, her hands arrested for an instant in her hair.
“What do you mean?” the man on the bay said.
“He rode it down on that black horse,” the man in overalls said.
“You mean, there were no dogs there?”
“I reckon not,” the other said. “Them dogs never had no black horses to ride.” The two mules had halted; the older man faced the man on the bay a little, his face hidden beneath his shapeless hat. “It crossed the old field and dropped over that ditch-bank and hid, allowing for him to jump the ditch, and then it aimed to double back, I reckon. I reckon it wasn’t scared of the dogs. I reckon it had fooled them so much it wasn’t worried about them. I reckon he was what worried it. I reckon him and it knowed one another after these three years same as you maybe knowed your maw or your wife maybe, only you ain’t never been married none to speak of. Anyway it was on the ditch-bank, and he knowed it was there and he cut straight across the field without giving it no spell to breathe in. I reckon maybe yawl seen him, riding straight across that field like he could see like a hawk and smell like a dog. And the fox was there, where it had done fooled the dogs. But it never had no spell to breathe in, and when it had to run again and dropped over the ditch-bank, it dropped into the briers, I reckon, and it was too tired to get out and run. And he come up and jumped that ditch, just like that fox aimed for him to. Only the fox was still in the briers, and while he was going through the air he looked down and seen the fox and he clumb off the horse while it was jumping and dropped feet first into the briers like the fox done. Maybe it dodged some then; I don’t know. He says it just swirled and jumped at his face and he knocked it down with his fist and trompled it dead with his boot-heels. The dogs hadn’t got there then. But it so happened he never needed them.” He ceased talking and sat for a moment longer, sloven and inert upon the shabby, patient mule, his face shadowed beneath his hat. “Well,” he said, “I reckon I’ll get on. I ain’t had ne’er a bite of breakfast yet. I’ll bid yawl good morning.” He put his mule into motion, the second mule following. He did not look back.
But the youth did. He looked back at the man on the bay horse, the cigarette burning in his hand, the plume of smoke faint and windless in the sunny silence, and at the woman on the chestnut, her arms lifted and her hands busy in her bright, cloudy hair; projecting, trying to project, himself, after the way of the young, toward that remote and inaccessible she, trying to encompass the vain and inarticulate instant of division and despair which, being young, was very like rage: rage at the lost woman, despair of the man in whose shape there walked the tragic and inescapable earth her ruin. “She was crying,” he said, then he began to curse, savagely, without point or subject.
“Come on,” the older man said. He did not look back. “I reckon them hunt breakfast hoe-cakes will be about ready time we get home.”
Pennsylvania Station
THEY SEEMED to bring with them the smell of the snow falling in Seventh Avenue. Or perhaps the other people who had entered before them had done it, bringing it with them in their lungs and exhaling it, filling the arcade with a stale chill like that which might lie unwinded and spent upon the cold plains of infinity itself. In it the bright and serried shop-windows had a fixed and insomniac glare like the eyes of people drugged with coffee, sitting up with a strange corpse.
In the rotunda, where the people appeared as small and intent as ants, the smell and sense of snow still lingered, though high now among the steel girders, spent and vitiated too and filled here with a weary and ceaseless murmuring, like the voices of pilgrims upon the infinite plain, like the voices of all the travelers who had ever passed through in quiring and ceaseless as lost children.
They went on toward the smoking room. It was the old man who looked in the door. “All right,” he said. He looked sixty, though he was probably some age like forty-eight or fifty-two or fifty-eight. He wore a long overcoat with a collar which had once been fur, and a cap with earflaps like the caricature of an up-State farmer. His shoes were not mates. “There ain’t many here yet. It will be some time now.” While they stood there three other men came and looked into the smoking room with that same air not quite diffident and not quite furtive, with faces and garments that seemed to give off that same effluvium of soup kitchens and Salvation Army homes. They entered; the old man led the way toward the rear of the room, among the heavy, solid benches on which still more men of all ages sat in attitudes of thought or repose and looking as transient as scarecrows blown by a departed wind upon a series of rock ledges. The old man chose a bench and sat down, making room for the young man beside him. “I used to think that if you sat somewhere about the middle, he might skip you. But I found out that it don’t make much difference where you sit.”
“Nor where you lie, either,” the young man said. He wore an army overcoat, new, and a pair of yellow army brogans of the sort that can be bought from so-called army stores for a dollar or so. He had not shaved in some time. “And it don’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether you are breathing or not while you are lying there. I wish I had a cigarette. I have got used to not eating but be damned if I don’t hate to get used to not smoking.”
“Sure now,” the old man said. “I wish I had a cigarette to give you. I ain’t used tobacco myself since I went to Florida. That was funny: I hadn’t smoked in ten years, yet as soon as I got back to New York, that was the first thing I thought about. Isn’t that funny?”
“Yes,” the young man said. “Especially if you never had any tobacco when you thought about wanting it again.”
“Wanting it and not having it couldn’t have worried me then,” the old man said. “I was all right then. Until I—” He settled himself. Into his face came that rapt expression of the talkative old, without heat or bewilderment or rancor. “What confused me was I thought all the time that the burying money was all right. As soon as I found out about Danny’s trouble I come right back to New York——”
II
“WHO IS this Danny, anyway?” the young man said.
“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Sister’s boy. There wasn’t any of us left but Sister and Danny and me. Yet I was the weakly one. The one they all thought wouldn’t live. I was give up to die twice before I was fifteen, yet I outlived them all. Outlived all eight of them when Sister died three years ago. That was why I went to Florida to live. Because I thought I couldn’t stand the winters here. Yet I have stood three of them now since Sister died. But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don’t believe he can stand it. Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Which trouble was this?”
“Which?”
“Which trouble was Danny in now?”
“Don’t get me wrong about Danny. He wasn’t bad; just wild, like any young fellow. But not bad.”
“All right,” the young man said. “It wasn’t any trouble then.”
“No. He’s a good boy. He’s in Chicago now. Got a good job now. The lawyer in Jacksonville got it for him right after I come back to New York. I didn’t know he had it until I tried to wire him that Sister was dead. Then I found that he was in Chicago, with a good job. He sent Sister a wreath of flowers that must have cost two hundred dollars. Sent it by air; that cost something, too. He couldn’t come himself because he had just got the job and his boss was out of town and he couldn’t get away. He was a good boy. That was why when that trouble come up about that woman on the floor below that accused him of stealing the clothes off her clothes-line, that I told Sister I would send him the railroad fare to Jacksonville, where I could look after him. Get h
im clean away from them low-life boys around the saloons and such. I come all the way from Florida to see about him. That was how I happened to go with Sister to see Mr. Pinckski, before she ever begun to pay on the coffin. She wanted me to go with her. Because you know how an old woman is. Only she wasn’t old, even if her and me had outlived all the other seven. But you know how an old woman seems to get comfort out of knowing she will be buried right in case there isn’t any of her kin there to ’tend to it. I guess maybe that keeps a lot of them going.”
“And especially with Danny already too busy to see if she was buried at all, himself.”
The old man, his mouth already shaped for further speech, paused and looked at the young man. “What?”
“I say, if getting into the ground at last don’t keep some of them going, I don’t know what it is that does.”
“Oh. Maybe so. That ain’t never worried me. I guess because I was already give up to die twice before I was fifteen. Like now every time a winter gets through, I just say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll declare. Here I am again.’ That was why I went to Florida: because of the winters here. I hadn’t been back until I got Sister’s letter about Danny, and I didn’t stay long then. And if I hadn’t got the letter about Danny, maybe I wouldn’t ever have come back. But I come back, and that was when she took me with her to see Mr. Pinckski before she begun to pay on the coffin, for me to see if it was all right like Mr. Pinckski said. He told her how the insurance companies would charge her interest all the time. He showed us with the pencil and paper how if she paid her money to the insurance companies it would be the same as if she worked six minutes longer every night and give the money for the extra six minutes to the insurance company. But Sister said she wouldn’t mind that, just six minutes, because at three or four o’clock in the morning six minutes wouldn’t——”
“Three or four o’clock in the morning?”
“She scrubbed in them tall buildings down about Wall Street somewhere. Her and some other ladies. They would help one another night about, so they could get done at the same time and come home on the subway together. So Mr. Pinckski showed us with the pencil and paper how if she lived fifteen years longer say for instance Mr. Pinckski said, it would be the same as if she worked three years and eighty-five days without getting any pay for it. Like for three years and eighty-five days she would be working for the insurance companies for nothing. Like instead of living fifteen years, she would actually live only eleven years and two hundred and eight days. Sister stood there for a while, holding her purse under her shawl. Then she said, ‘If I was paying the insurance companies to bury me instead of you, I would have to live three years and eighty-five days more before I could afford to die?’