The Web and the Rock Page 16

  "That's mine," the hero said, and turned briefly to the side and spat tobacco juice into the slush. "That's where I got him. Hell, after that he didn't know what hit him. The son-of-a-bitch was dead before he hit the ground. We all shot him full of holes then. The whole crowd came and let him have it. But that first shot of mine was the one that got him. But, boy!" he paused a moment, shook his head, and spat again. "We sure did fill him full of lead. Why, hell yes," he declared positively, with a decisive movement of his head, "we counted up to 287. We must have put 300 holes in him."

  And Nebraska, fearless, blunt, outspoken, as he always was, turned abruptly, put two fingers to his lips and spat between them, widely and contemptuously.

  "Yeah--we!" he grunted. "We killed a big one! We--we killed a b'ar, we did!... Come on, boys," he said gruffly, "let's be on our way!"

  And, fearless and unshaken, untouched by any terror or any doubt, he moved away. And two white-faced, nauseated boys went with him.

  A day or two went by before anyone could go into Dick's room again. Monk went in with Randy and his father. The little room was spotless, bare, and tidy as it had always been. Nothing had been changed or touched. But even the very bare austerity of that little room now seemed terribly alive with the presence of its recent black tenant.

  It was Dick's room. They all knew that. And somehow they all knew that no one else could ever live there again.

  Mr. Shepperton went over to the table, picked up Dick's old Bible that still lay there, open and face downward, held it up to the light and looked at it, at the place that Dick had marked when he last read in it.

  And in a moment, without speaking to them, he began to read in a quiet voice: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me...."

  Then Mr. Shepperton closed the book and put it down upon the table, the place where Dick had left it. And they went out the door, he locked it, and they went back into that room no more, forever.

  The years passed, and all of them were given unto time. They went their ways. But often they would turn and come again, these faces and these voices of the past, and burn there in George Webber's memory again, upon the muted and immortal geography of time.

  And all would come again--the shout of the young voices, the hard thud of the kicked ball, and Dick moving, moving steadily, Dick moving, moving silently, a storm-white world and silence, and some thing moving, moving in the night. Then he would hear the furious bell, the crowd a-clamor and the baying of the dogs, and feel the shadow coming that would never disappear. Then he would see again the little room, the table and the book. And the pastoral holiness of that old psalm came back to him, and his heart would wonder with perplexity and doubt.

  For he had heard another song since then, and one that Dick, he knew, had never heard and would not have understood, but one whose phrases and whose imagery, it seemed to him, would suit Dick better: Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could shape thy fearful symmery?

  * * *

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  What the hammer? What the chain? No one ever knew. It was a mystery and a wonder. It was unexplained. There were a dozen stories, a hundred clues and rumors; all came to nothing in the end. Some said that Dick had come from Texas, others that his home had been in Georgia. Some said it was true that he had been enlisted in the army, but that he had killed a man while there and served a term at Leaven worth. Some said he had served in the army and had received an honorable discharge, but had later killed a man and had served a term in the state prison in Louisiana. Others said that he had been an army man but that he had "gone crazy," that he had served a period in an asylum when it was found that he was insane, that he had escaped from this asylum, that he had escaped from prison, that he was a fugitive from justice at the time he came to them.

  But all these stories came to nothing. Nothing was ever proved.

  Nothing was ever found out. Men debated and discussed these things a thousand times--who and what he had been, what he had done, where he had come from--and all of it came to nothing. No one knew the answer.

  He came from darkness. He came out of the heart of darkness, from the dark heart of the secret and undiscovered South. He came by night, just as he passed by night. He was night's child and partner, a token of the wonder and the mystery, the other side of man's dark soul, his nighttime partner, and his nighttime foal, a symbol of those things that pass by darkness and that still remain, of something still and waiting in the night that comes and passes and that will abide, a symbol of man's evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother, and a mortal enemy, an unknown demon--our loving friend, our mortal enemy, two worlds together--a tiger and a child.

  9

  Home from the Mountain

  THE WINTER WHEN HE WAS FIFTEEN YEARS OF AGE, ON SUNDAYS AND IN the afternoons after school, George would go for long walks with his uncle on the mountains above the town and in the coves and valleys on the other side. There had always been a quality of madness in his uncle, and his years of living bound to Mag had sharpened it, intensified it, built it up and held it to the point of passion and demonic fury where at times he shook and trembled with the frenzy of it and had to get away, out of that house, to calm his tortured soul. And when this happened to Mark Joyner, he hated all his life and everything about it, and sought the desolation of the mountains. There, in bleak and wintry winds, he found as nowhere else on earth some strange and powerful catharsis.

  These expeditions wrought upon the spirit of the boy the emotions of loneliness, desolation, and wild joy with a strong and focal congruence of desire, a blazing intensity of sensual image, he had never known before. Then as never before, he saw the great world beyond the wintry hills of home, and felt the huge, bitter conflict of those twin antagonists, those powers discrete that wage perpetual warfare in the lives of all men living--wandering forever and the earth again.

  Wild, wordless, and unutterable, but absolutely congruent in his sense of their irreconcilable and inexplicable coherence, his spirit was torn as it had never been before by the strange and bitter unity of that savage conflict, that tormenting oneness of those dual and contending powers of home and hunger, absence and return. The great plantation of the earth called him forth forever with an intolerable longing of desire to explore its infinite mystery and promise of glory, power, and triumph, and the love of women, its magic wealth and joy of new lands, rivers, plains, and mountains, its crowning glory of the shining city. And he felt the strong, calm joy of evening for doors and fences, a light, a window, and a certain faith, the body and the embrace of a single and unwearied love.

  The mountains in the Wintertime had a stern and demonic quality of savage joy that was, in its own way, as strangely, wildly haunting as all of the magic and the gold of April. In Spring, or in the time enchanted spell and drowse of full, deep Summer, there was always something far and lonely, haunting with ecstasy and sorrow, desolation and the intolerable, numb exultancy of some huge, impending happiness. It was a cow bell, drowsy, far and broken in a gust of wind, as it came to him faintly from the far depth and distance of a mountain valley; the receding whistle-wail of a departing train, as it rushed eastward, seaward, towards the city, through some green mountain valley of the South; or a cloud shadow passing on the massed green of the wilderness, and the animate stillness, the thousand sudden, thrum ming, drumming, stitching, unse
en little voices in the lyric mystery of tangled undergrowth about him.

  His uncle and he would go toiling up the mountain side, sometimes striding over rutted, clay-caked, and frost-hardened roads, sometimes beating their way downhill, with as bold and wild a joy as wilderness explorers ever knew, smashing their way through the dry and brittle undergrowth of barren Winter, hearing the dry report of bough and twig beneath their feet, the masty spring and crackle of brown ancient leaves, and brown pine needles, the elastic, bedded compost of a hun dred buried and forgotten Winters.

  Meanwhile, all about them, the great trees of the mountain side, at once ruggedly familiar and strangely, hauntingly austere, rose grim and barren, as stern and wild and lonely as the savage winds that warred forever, with a remote, demented howling, in their stormy, tossed, and leafless branches.

  And above them the stormy wintry skies--sometimes a savage sky of wild, torn grey that came so low its scudding fringes whipped like rags of smoke around the mountain tops; sometimes an implacable, fierce sky of wintry grey; sometimes a sky of rags and tatters of wild, wintry light, westering into slashed stripes of rugged red and incredible wild gold at the gateways of the sun--bent over them forever with that same savage and unutterable pain and sorrow, that ecstasy of wild desire, that grief of desolation, that spirit of exultant joy, that was as gleeful, mad, fierce, lonely, and enchanted with its stormy and unbodied promises of flight, its mad swoopings through the dark over the whole vast sleeping wintriness of earth, as that stormy and maniacal wind, which seemed, in fact, to be the very spirit of the joy, the sorrow, and the wild desire he felt.

  That wind would rush upon them suddenly as they toiled up rocky trails, or smashed through wintry growth, or strode along the hardened, rutted roads, or came out on the lonely, treeless bareness of a mountain top. And that wind would rush upon him with its own wild life and fill him with its spirit. As he gulped it down into his aching lungs, his whole life seemed to soar, to swoop, to yell with the demonic power, flight, and invincible caprice of the wind's huge well until he no longer was nothing but a boy of fifteen, the nephew of a hardware merchant in a little town, one of the nameless little atoms of this huge, swarming earth whose most modest dream would have seemed ridiculous to older people had he dared to speak of it.

  No. Under the immense intoxication of that great, demented wind, he would become instantly triumphant to all this damning and over whelming evidence of fact, age, prospect, and position. He was a child of fifteen no longer. He was the overlord of this great earth, and he looked down from the mountain top upon his native town, a conqueror. Not from the limits of a little, wintry town, lost in remote and lonely hills from the great heart, the time-enchanted drone and distant murmur of the shining city of this earth, but from the very peak and center of this world he looked forth on his domains with the joy of certitude and victory, and he knew that everything on earth that he desired was his.

  Saddled in power upon the wild back of that maniacal force, not less wild, willful, and all-conquering than the steed that carried him, he would hold the kingdoms of the earth in fee, inhabit the world at his caprice, swoop in the darkness over mountains, rivers, plains, and cities, look under roofs, past walls and doors, into a million rooms, and know all things at once, and lie in darkness in some lonely and forgotten place with a woman, lavish, wild, and secret as the earth.

  The whole earth, its fairest fame of praise, its dearest treasure of a great success, its joy of travel, all its magic of strange lands, the relish of unknown, tempting foods, its highest happiness of adventure and love--would all be his: flight, storm, wandering, the great sea and all its traffic of proud ships, and the great plantation of the earth, together with the certitude and comfort of return--fence, door, wall, and roof, the single face and dwelling-place of love.

  But suddenly these wild, demonic dreams would fade, for he would hear his uncle's voice again, and see the gaunt fury of his bony figure, his blazing eye, the passionate and husky anathema of his trembling voice, as, standing there upon that mountain top and gazing down upon the little city of his youth, Mark Joyner spoke of all the things that tortured him. Sometimes it was his life with Mag, his young man's hopes of comfort, love, and quiet peace that now had come to nought but bitterness and hate. Again his mind went groping back to older, deeper-buried sorrows. And on this day as they stood there, his mind went back, and, turning now to George and to the wind that howled there in his face, he suddenly brought forth and hurled down from that mountain top the acid of an ancient rancor, denouncing now the memory of old Fate, his father. He told his hatred and his loathing of his father's life, the deathless misery of his own youth, which lived for him again in all its anguish even after fifty years had passed.

  "As each one of my unhappy brothers and sisters was born," he declared in a voice so husky and tremulous with his passionate resentment that it struck terror to the boy's heart, "I cursed him--cursed the day that God had given him life! And still they came!" he whispered, eyes ablaze and furious, in a voice that almost faltered to a sob. "Year after year they came with the blind proliferation of his criminal desire -into a house where there was scarcely roof enough to shelter us- in a vile, ramshackle shamble of a place," he snarled, "where the oldest of us slept three in a bed, and where the youngest, weakest, and most helpless of us all was lucky if he had a pallet of rotten straw that he could call his own! When we awoke at morning our famished guts were aching!--aching!" he howled, "with the damnable gnawing itch of hunger!--My dear child, my dear, dear child!" he exclaimed, in a transition of sudden and terrifying gentleness--"May that, of all life's miseries, be a pang you never have to suffer!--And we lay down at night always unsatisfied--oh always! always! always!" he cried with an impatient gesture of his hand--"to struggle for repose like restless animals--crammed with distressful bread--swollen with fatback and boiled herbs out of the fields, while your honored grandfather--the Major!... The Major!" he now sneered, and suddenly he contorted his gaunt face in a grotesque grimace and laughed with a sneering, deliberated, forced mirth.

  "Now, my boy," he went on presently in a more tranquil tone of patronizing tolerance, "you have no doubt often heard your good Aunt Maw speak with the irrational and incondite exuberance of her sex," he continued, smacking his lips together audibly with an air of relish as he pronounced these formidable words--"of that paragon of all the moral virtues--her noble sire, the Major!" Here he paused to laugh sneeringly again. "And perhaps, boylike, you have conceived in your imagination a picture of that distinguished gentleman that is somewhat more romantic than the facts will stand!... Well, my boy," he went on deliberately, with the birdlike turn of his head as he looked at the boy, "lest your fancy be seduced somewhat by illusions of aristocratic grandeur, I will tell you a few facts about that noble man.

  ... He was the self-appointed Major of a regiment of backwoods volunteers, of whom no more be said than that they were, if possible, less literate than he!... You are descended, it is true," he went on with his calm, precise deliberation, "from a warlike stock--but none of them, my dear child, were Brigadiers--no, not even Majors" he sneered, "for the highest genuine rank I ever heard of them attaining was the rank of corporal--and that proud dignity was the office of the Major's pious brother--I refer, of course, my boy, to your great uncle, Rance Joyner!...

  "Rance! Rance!"--here he contorted his face again--"Gods! What a name! No wonder he smote fear and trembling to the Yankee heart!

  ... The sight of him was certainly enough to make them stand stock still at the height of an attack! And the smell of him would surely be enough to strike awe and wonder in the hearts of mortal men--I refer, of course," he said sardonically, "to the average run of base humanity, since, as you well know, neither your grandfather nor his brother, Holy Rance, nor any other Joyner that I know," he jeered, "could be compared to mortal men. We admit that much ourselves. For all of us, my boy, were not so much conceived like other men as willed here by an act of God, created by a visitation of t
he Holy Ghost, trailing clouds of glory as we came," he sneered, "and surely you must have discovered by this time that it is our unique privilege to act as prophets, messengers, and agents of the deity here on earth--to demonstrate God's ways to man--to reveal the inmost workings of His providence and all the mysterious secrets of the universe to other men who have not been so sanctified by destiny as we....

  "But be that as it may," he went on, with one of his sudden and astonishing changes from howling fury to tolerant and tranquil admissiveness, "I believe there was no question of your holy great-uncle's valor. Yes, sir!" he continued, "I have heard them say that he could kill at fifty or five hundred yards, and always wing his bullet with a gospel text to make it holy!... Why, my dear child," the boy's uncle cried, "there was as virtuous a ruffian as ever split a skull! He blew their brains out with a smile of saintly charity, and sang hosannas over them as they expired! He sanctified the act of murder, and assured them as they weltered in their blood that he had come to them as an angel of mercy bearing to them the gifts of immortal life and everlasting happiness in exchange for the vile brevity of their earthly lives, which he had taken from them with such sweet philanthropy. He shot them through the heart and promised them all the blessings of the Day of Armageddon with so soft a tongue that they fairly wept for joy and kissed the hand of their redeemer as they died!...

  "Yes," he went on tranquilly, "there is no question of your great uncle's valor--or his piety--but still, my boy, his station was a lowly one--he never reached a higher rank than corporal! And there were others, too, who fought well and bravely in that war--but they, too, were obscure men! Your great-uncle John, a boy of twenty-two, was killed in battle on the bloody field of Shiloh.... And there are many others of your kinsmen, who fought, died, bled, were wounded, perished, or survived in that great war--but none of them, my dear child, was a Major!... There was only one Major!" he bitterly remarked.