Part 10

He pondered. A hero—what was a hero—what made the difference between a hero and himself, anyway? He remembered tales the gypsies had told him about their greatest men when he had been in the old land of his birth. They told a story of a lad who fought and fought, and finding himself unequal to the task of killing his rival, flung himself off a mountain.

What would be the use of that—he would die, and then he might as well not have lived. He thought of all the great people he had read of, or had heard of, or had known. There was Jean the blacksmith, who had lost an eye saving his child from a horse. If he lost an eye Addie would not like him.

Napoleon—there was a well-known man; he had done so many things, it seemed, for which people framed him in white enamel and hung him upon their bedroom walls; but chiefly he had been renowned for his killing. Rugo thought about that awhile and came to the illuminating conclusion that all heroes were men who killed or were killed.

Well, the last was impossible; if he was killed he might just as well have starved in the country and not have laid eyes on Addie. Therefore, he must kill—but what—but whom?

Of course, he might save something or somebody, but they would have to be in danger first, and there might not be any danger for days and days, and he was tired of waiting.

Presently he laid his work aside, lowered the shade, and, lying face down on his bed, he tried to think it all out clearly.

Presently he got a vivid picture of killing in his mind. He sat up and put his hands two or three times over his face. It was damp. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the carpet. His mind wandered. He thought of the ducks he had longed to stroke, of the gentle, feeding cows, of the fresh, clean air—then he thought again of Addie and of what he must do. He tried to picture himself killing someone. He put his two hands together and looked at them—there, that was the way. Then he smiled. His hands, set as they were, could not have choked anything larger than a thrush. He widened them, but he separated them instantly and rubbed them down his legs, breathing heavily. What a terrible business a hero’s was! He thought of the throbbing that must stop beneath such hands as his. He got up, shaking his shoulders from side to side as if his back hurt him. He pulled up the shade.

The butcher’s windows opposite attracted his attention. Two gas lights were burning there vividly. Rugo could see flanks of beef laid out in pans, little ruddy pools collecting about them like insertion. Fowl hung by the necks and several hams lured the passer-by as they swung softly this way and that.

He opened his door hesitatingly and shutting it carefully stepped out into the roadway.

He crossed over and leaned his head against the glass. He looked in very close now, and he could see the film that shrouded the dead eyes of the fowl and the hares. Slabs of liver laid out in heaps, flanked by cuts of tripe, drew his attention.

A strange sensation had hold of him in the pit of his stomach. It seemed to him that he was turning pale. He raised his hand to his beard and tugged at it.

Two or three red hairs separated and came out. He held them up between him and the light. Then he darted in the back door of the shop.

Presently he emerged carrying a box. With the furtive and hurried step of a man who is being observed he crossed the street. He opened the door of his own little shop and, locking it quickly, he put the box in the corner and turned down the light.

It was very dark and he stumbled. A little reflection came from the meat shop window and touched the rims of his cardboards, and his pattern book full of the funny strutting gentlemen. His heart was beating horribly against his side. He began to question himself and stopped. He could never do it unless he made his mind a resolute thing. He clenched his teeth, blinking his eyes as he did so. He began to shiver.

Presently he threw himself on the ground in the corner near the box, his arms over his head, his face flat upon the dust and grime of the boards. He must do it quickly—but he couldn’t do it.

His mind began to wander again. He thought of the road, red and yellow with the dying leaves of Autumn, of the great swaying shadows and the sunlight breaking in between in little jagged spots like flowers. He remembered the mosquitoes, and he got to his knees and let his hands hang down at his sides.

The Summer had always been so pretty; the rains left the fields so bright and sudden when they came into view over the top of the hill. The ploughing had been good, he had really enjoyed that after all, only then he had not known just how much he did enjoy it. What a pity that he had not known what a good thing it all was then.

Something moved beside him, breathing softly. He uttered a sharp cry and the same thing moved back, hitting a board, and was again silent.

He bent forward, thrust his two hands out, closed them—tighter, tighter and tighter. A faint cry, a little jerking to and fro—that was all.

He stood up and turned the light on. He looked at his hands. Then backing away from the corner, never letting his eyes rest there, he plunged his hands up to the elbows in a pail of water. He threw a cupful of it inside his shirt at the neck. He opened the door. Addie was there.

She came in softly, gently, insinuatingly. She could see by his face that something very horrible and necessary had been done. She saw by his face how it had hurt, by his hands what it must have cost him.

She came close to him. “What have you done, Rugo?” she said.

“I—I have killed,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“What—where?” She moved toward the centre of the room and then looked into the corner.

“That?” she began to laugh.

“Take it or leave it,” he said suddenly in a loud and penetrating voice.

She stooped and lifted it up—a small grey rabbit.

She laid it down again. She placed her arm about him.

“Come quickly,” she said. “Comb your hair.”

She pushed him into the street. She was afraid of him, for there was something strange and hard in his mouth and he walked putting each foot down very flat and steady.

“Where are you going? What are you going to do?” He did not seem to know that she was there, clinging to him, her arm about his waist. He had forgotten her. He looked up into the air, sniffing it and smiling.

“Come,” she said, “we are going to have your boots shined.”

THE FLOWERING CORPSE

So still she lies in this closed place apart, Her feet grown fragile for the ghostly tryst; Her pulse no longer striking in her wrist, Nor does its echo wander through her heart.

Over the body and the quiet head Like stately ferns above an austere tomb, Soft hairs blow; and beneath her armpits bloom The drowsy passion flowers of the dead.

A BOY ASKS A QUESTION OF A LADY

The days had been very warm and quick. It was Fall now and everything was drawing to a close. It had been a bad, but somehow pleasant, year. A great number of people had been disillusioned and were not seen hurrying from one place to another, as is customary with those of undisturbed habit. They went slowly, and it was said that Winter with its snow and frost would be most welcome.

Carmen la Tosca was in the habit of riding at a swift gallop down the lane and into the copse beyond. She leaned ever so little in her saddle as she went under the boughs. The plume of her hat bent and swung smartly back into place as she rounded the curve.

Her horse was a clear cascade of white. The shining forelock, the soft descending plane of the frontal bone melted into a taut nostril. And where Carmen la Tosca broke the living line of its back with her own, the spine flowed beneath her as deftly as water, and quivered into massive alert haunches, which in turn socketed in velvet, a foaming length of tail.

Carmen la Tosca rode well. She let more than usual of her pelvis drop into the saddle. Upon the reins she kept gloved hands in a grip that was consciously lacking in direction.

Carmen la Tosca was an actress. She had played in “Fife and Fiddle” and “Drums of the King.”

She took parts suggesting a love of danger and intrigue. She was always handsomely gloved and shod, and her dresses were widely copied.

She had been in stock, and in the beginning had sung in opera; she had been the Queen in “Aïda” and she had played a boy’s part in vaudeville. Now she was resting.

She was not the kind of woman who usually came to this quiet country town, snuggled, as they say, among the foothills. The boy who kept the general store said she was “stunning.” Little children ran backward ahead of her, crying provokingly, “Red lips, red lips!” But no one really knew her.

She had appeared in the Spring of the year with a man-servant and a maid. For two days she had been seen at the windows hanging curtains. When they were all hung no one saw her for some time. Then she bought a white horse and rode it. And after that she always rode on the white horse, though she had six or seven others before the Fall came. Usually she rode alone. Now and again a gentleman, with a birth-mark twisting his face into an unwilling irony, rode beside her. There was a goat path in the underbrush and here two boys sometimes came and lay and talked of her and waited for her to pass, riding that smart way on the white mare. These boys were Brandt and Bailey Wilson, a farmer’s sons. Sometimes couples, going berrying by the mountain road, came near enough to hear her laughing behind the casement.

Sometimes she walked, descending the hill carefully, avoiding the melon plants, talking brightly to a young man, but paying little attention to the effect of her words, not through vanity, but simply through lack of interest in the effect itself.

There was a great deal of gossip about her of course. She did not court mystery, but it was all about her.

People said that she was not exactly beautiful, neither was she ugly. Her face held the elements of both in perfect control. She was brutally chic.

A lean, tall woman of the village, who had come from London, said Carmen la Tosca’s back was like the Queen’s. This was probably an exaggeration.

Carmen la Tosca breakfasted in bed and late. She dusted her arms with talc and she languidly settled into a light lace peignoir. She had tea and rolls, and the bed stood between two unvarnished cherry-wood ovals, in which were imprisoned two engravings of officials of the Tower of London, in its bloodiest hour.

The double windows faced the orchard. She turned her back to the orchard and its falling apples, and read St. Francis, or the morning paper which was, by the time she received it, a day or two old.

The room was bare and grey and rustic. And in this Carmen la Tosca and her bed made a strange contrast. She liked to think of it unless she had other things on her mind. If the morning was chilly she had a quilted jacket, and if it was raining she had the shades raised that she might watch the rain falling a long way.

Early in the morning the boy chose it had been raining, but about eleven it had stopped and the sun was trying to come out. Carmen la Tosca could smell how wet everything was.

The boy was Brandt Wilson, fourteen; he had done rather well at the high school of the nearest large town. He was short and his head was large and his face already a little prematurely softened by melancholy. He was splashed with mud and his red tie stuck out ridiculously at the top of a vest that was too large for his small, shyly muscular chest.

He stood before her on the rug, his hat in his hand.

Carmen la Tosca, with a single movement, rolled over in bed.

“Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“I am Brandt Wilson. I came through the window. It was very easy.”

“Well,” she said. “What is it?”

The child hesitated, and with a look of distress, managed to say:

“I have a brother.”

Carmen la Tosca pushed away the paper and regarded him with amusement, and a little amazement.

“He is two years older than I am—and there’s something I don’t understand—and you know everything.”

“Who said so?”

“The neighbours, my father, my mother, my sister, the schoolmaster, the postman——”

“That will do.”

“You are a woman of the world.” The childish sound of his voice became terribly apparent.

“My brother is where no one understands—My sister said, ‘I don’t like Bailey any more, he has lost that cunning little light in his eyes’—and I said, ‘It’s still there when you give him something he likes, and he is untying it, with his head bent down——’”

“How do you come to think of all this?”

“Once the sun was shining and we had been lying out on the bank with our arms under our heads and then he said—he confessed”—the child faltered, then looking at her directly and fixedly, said, “Bailey cried when he knew it was over——”

“What was over?”

“I asked him, and he answered, ‘I am a man now.’ Shall I cry, too, when I know that? What is it all about?”

Carmen la Tosca rose on her elbow and looked at him with suffused eyes as if she had been crying, but it was all an illusion.

“How many of you are there?”

“Three. A married brother.”

“And how old is he?”

“Twenty-four. He cried once, too, but differently, about his sweetheart. She died, you know, and when they told him he said, crying out, ‘I could have saved her.’ We asked him how, but he would not tell us, but he told mother; he said, ‘I would have said I love you.’ Is there such a power?”

Carmen la Tosca lay on her back, her hands beside her.

“That was innocence. We are all waiting for the day when people shall learn of our innocence, all over again,” she said brightly.

“And is that suffering?”

“Yes, a special kind, for everyone,” she said gravely. “But not a personal torment. You are not to believe in that. Suffering is all alike, yours, mine, everybody’s. All these distinctions and what people say about them is nonsense. Suffering is all the same everywhere for everyone.” She suddenly rose up in bed and said, softly, “Now you do not want to talk to me any more?”

He moved his fingers on the foot-board of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said hastily, covered with confusion. “It’s my indolence that does it.”

“What?” he asked timidly.

“Embarrasses you.”

“It’s all right.”

“Now see here,” she continued. “Do you ever think of animals?”

“Why?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I notice them——”

“Capital!” she cried, clapping her hands; “that’s what I wanted to know. Well then, what would all this, you and I and your great trouble, mean to them?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your questions, my answers? Nothing.”

He coloured, and looked down. “What does it mean?” he repeated, and as he said it he could not remember what he had come for, or what he had said, and while she was answering he tried desperately to re-establish himself.

He said, “And you do not know what I must go through before I feel like Bailey?”

“A little evil day by day, that makes everything grow.”

“Yes, that is what I wanted to know,” he said, breathlessly.

“Listen then, it’s all that makes the difference between a gentleman and a fool. Never do evil to good people, they always forgive it, and that is nasty.”

“But what about all these things that people talk of and I do not understand?”

“The simple story, simply told by simple people—that in the end is all you will listen to.”

“And I’m not to try to make anything out of all this?”

“No,” she said, “nothing at all, leave it alone.”

“And not to try to understand what made him cry?”

“Just as it is. The calf is born, she lies in the sun; she waits for the end. That is dignity.”

“But sometimes I’m unhappy.”

“In the end you will know you know nothing. That will be the death of you.”

Brandt stood still, though she had taken up her paper.

“Just that?”

“Come here,” she said, and he came, quickly. She put her hand out with a gentle laugh and touched him. “There, that’s all.”

He went away then.

FIRST COMMUNION

The mortal fruit upon the bough Hangs above the nuptial bed. The cat-bird in the tree returns The forfeit of his mutual vow.

The hard, untimely apple of The branch that feeds on watered rain Takes the place upon her lips Of her late lamented love.

Many hands together press Shaped within a static prayer Recall to one the chorister Docile in his sexless dress.

The temperate winds reclaim the iced Remorseless vapours of the snow. The only pattern in the mind Is the cross behind the Christ.

FINIS

For you, for me? Why then the striking hour, The wind among the curtains, and the tread Of some late gardener pulling at the flower They’ll lay between our hearts when we are dead.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.