1. As he
sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the
two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was
dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He
began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have
done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he
could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him
best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how
lonely her life
must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life
would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became
a memory--if anyone remembered him.
It was after nine o'clock when he left the shop. The
night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and
walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys
where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in
the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her
hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he
withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? Hefelt his
moral nature falling to pieces.
When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he
halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which
burned
redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and,
at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw
some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with
despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he
had been outcast from life's feast. One human being had seemed to love
him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had
sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate
creatures down by the wall were watching him and
wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast.
He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along
towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of
Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding
through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out
of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the
engine reiterating the syllables of her name.
He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of
the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what
memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die
away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her
voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could
hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened
again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
2. As he came
out
into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett, the only one
among what Janey called his “clever people” with whom he cared to probe
into things a little deeper than the average level of club and
chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of
Winsett’s shabby round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes
turned toward the Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett
proposed a bock at a little German restaurant around the corner.
Archer, who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely
to get there, declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and
Winsett said: “Oh, well, so have I for that matter,
and I’ll be the Industrious Apprentice too.”
They strolled along together, and presently
Winsett said: “Look here, what I’m really after is the name of the dark
lady in that swell box of yours—with the Beauforts, wasn’t she? The one
your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by.”
Archer, he could not have said why, was
slightly annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen
Olenska’s name? And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts’s? It
was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer
remembered, he was a journalist.
“It’s not for an interview, I hope?” he
laughed.
“Well—not for the press; just for myself,”
Winsett rejoined. “The fact is she’s a neighbour of mine—queer quarter
for such a beauty to settle in—and she’s been awfully kind to my little
boy, who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a
nasty cut. She rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his
knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful
that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name.”
A pleasant glow dilated Archer’s heart. There
was nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as
much for a neighbour’s child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to
have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have
dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.
3. The strikers
had announced a parade for Tuesday
morning, but Colonel Nixon had forbidden it, the newspapers said. When
Babbitt drove west from his office at ten that morning he saw a drove
of shabby men heading toward the tangled, dirty district beyond Court
House Square. He hated them, because they were poor, because they made
him feel insecure. “Damn loafers! Wouldn’t be common workmen if they
had
any pep,” he complained. He wondered if there was going to be a riot.
He drove toward the starting-point of the parade, a triangle of limp
and faded grass known as Moore Street Park, and halted his
car.
The park and streets were buzzing with
strikers, young men in blue denim shirts, old men with caps. Through
them, keeping them stirred like a boiling pot, moved the militiamen.
Babbitt could hear the soldiers’ monotonous orders: “Keep moving—move
on, ’bo—keep your feet warm!” Babbitt admired their stolid good temper.
The crowd shouted, “Tin soldiers,” and “Dirty dogs—servants of the
capitalists!” but the militiamen grinned and answered only, “Sure,
that’s right. Keep moving, Billy!”
Babbitt thrilled over the citizen-soldiers,
hated the scoundrels who were obstructing the pleasant ways of
prosperity, admired Colonel Nixon’s striding contempt for the crowd;
and as Captain Clarence Drum, that rather puffing shoe-dealer, came
raging by, Babbitt respectfully clamored, “Great work, Captain! Don’t
let ’em march!” He watched the strikers filing from the park. Many of
them bore posters with “They can’t stop our peacefully walking.” The
militiamen tore away the posters, but the strikers fell in behind their
leaders and straggled off, a thin unimpressive trickle between
steel-glinting lines of soldiers. Babbitt saw with disappointment that
there wasn’t going to be any violence, nothing interesting at all.
4. But Tom's
energy did not last. He began to think of the fun he had planned for
this day, and his sorrows multiplied. Soon the free boys would come
tripping along on all sorts of delicious expeditions, and they would
make a world of fun of him for having to work -- the very thought of it
burnt him like fire. He got out his worldly wealth and examined it --
bits of toys, marbles, and trash; enough to buy an exchange of WORK,
maybe, but not half enough to buy so much as half an hour of pure
freedom. So he returned his straitened means to his pocket, and gave up
the idea of trying to buy the boys. At this dark and hopeless moment an
inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent
inspiration.
He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work.
Ben Rogers hove in sight presently -- the very boy, of all boys, whose
ridicule he had been dreading. Ben's gait was the hop-skip-and-jump --
proof enough that his heart was light and his anticipations high. He
was eating an apple, and giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals,
followed by a deep-toned ding- dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was
personating a steamboat. As he drew near, he slackened speed, took the
middle of the street, leaned far over to star- board and rounded to
ponderously and with laborious pomp and circumstance -- for he was
personating the Big Missouri, and considered himself to be drawing nine
feet of water. He was boat and captain and engine-bells combined, so he
had to imagine himself standing on his own hurricane-deck giving the
orders and executing them:
"Stop her, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling!" The headway ran
almost out, and he drew up slowly toward the sidewalk.
5. Well, three
or
four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been
to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a
little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is
thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that
if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
At first I hated the school, but by and by I
got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey,
and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up. So the
longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of
used to the widow's ways, too, and they warn't so raspy on me. Living
in a house and sleeping in a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but
before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods
sometimes, and so that was a rest to me. I liked the old ways best, but
I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit. The widow
said I was coming along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory. She
said she warn't ashamed of me.
One morning I happened to turn over the
salt-cellar at breakfast. I reached for some of it as quick as I could
to throw over my left shoulder and keep off the bad luck, but Miss
Watson was in ahead of me, and crossed me off. She says, "Take your
hands away, Huckleberry; what a mess you are always making!" The widow
put in a good word for me, but that warn't going to keep off the bad
luck, I knowed that well enough. I started out, after breakfast,
feeling worried and shaky, and wondering where it was going to fall on
me, and what it was going to be. There is ways to keep off some kinds
of bad luck, but this wasn't one of them kind; so I never tried to do
anything, but just poked along low-spirited and on the watch-out.
I went down to the front garden and clumb over
the stile where you go through the high board fence. There was an inch
of new snow on the ground, and I seen somebody's tracks. They had come
up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while, and then went on
around the garden fence. It was funny they hadn't come in, after
standing around so. I couldn't make it out. It was very curious,
somehow. I was going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at
the tracks first. I didn't notice anything at first, but next I did.
There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep
off the devil.