Alec had released Holt and stepped aside, but the other man still clung to him. ‘Ain’t nobody gonna do that to me,’ Holt kept on saying, ‘not and get away with it, ain’t nobody.’

  ‘Let him loose,’ Alec ordered.

  The other man stepped back.

  ‘Ain’t nobody,’ Holt repeated.

  ‘You can have me arrested and fined,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘if you think that’ll do you any good.’ He laid a half-dollar on the bar and turned to the bartender: ‘Or you can, if you want to.’

  ‘For all of me’ — the bartender detachedly picked up the coin — ‘you can slap the pee outer him every day next week. But I’d a little rather you did it out in the street.’

  Mr. Munn pushed his way through the swinging doors and stood in the street. He felt a slight nausea mounting. I ought never gone in there, he thought.

  Chapter four

  Two days after Christmas, Senator Tolliver gave a party at his place for the board of directors of the Association. The members were to arrive early in the morning so that a meeting could be held before dinner. ‘We should discuss those matters,’ the Senator pointed out, ‘before our heads are impaired by the fumes.’ Mr. Munn was to bring his wife and stay the night. ‘You must bring your wife,’ the Senator urged, ‘who, I hear, is charming. There will be a few other ladies there, and so she will not be entirely cut off from human companionship while we men are ruining our digestions with our weighty concerns. I trust that you can prevail upon her to come.’ They were to come by train, arriving at nine in the morning on the local that would stop at the crossroads below Monclair, the Senator’s place.

  When they got off the train that morning the sky was an undifferentiated gray from horizon to horizon. It seemed, almost, to be suspended from the low, wooded hills that circled the valley, a slack canopy, not a bold, deep dome. One could not even distinguish, as sometimes on such lowering days, the formless splotch of lighter gray, scarcely luminous, that marks the position of the sun. The cedar woods on the distant ridges looked dead black, like smudges of soot. There was no wind.

  ‘It’s going to snow,’ May said as soon as her husband had swung her clear of the step of the coach and she could raise her glance to the sky.

  ‘It’ll snow, I reckon,’ he agreed.

  The train pulled off between the dun-colored fields, the steam that trailed above the locomotive looking unbelievably white and delicate against the dullness of the sky. For a moment, standing on the hard-trodden red clay beside the tracks, they watched the receding train. Then Mr. Munn turned to look at the negro man who was approaching from the direction of the little dilapidated yellow shed that bore the sign ‘Monclair Crossing.’ The negro man took off his hat, and said, ‘I’se come atter you all.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Munn replied.

  The negro picked up the valise, and led them toward the carriage, which stood beyond the yellow shed.

  ‘Hit’s gonna snow,’ the negro said; ‘yassuh, ’fore Gawd.’

  The train whistled for the cut, far away now to the east. Mr. Munn turned toward the east, toward that almost inaudible sound, but the train was out of sight now; and the track, curving into the distance to find a gap in the low ridges, made those broad, empty fields seem more empty still.

  ‘I wish it had snowed for Christmas,’ May said, as the carriage pulled into the lane. ‘Christmas isn’t really Christmas without snow, and it never seems to snow on Christmas any more.’

  Mr. Munn said nothing, but watched her face as she lifted it pensively again toward the sky.

  ‘Not like when I was little. When it snows now — and it snowed a little bit two Christmases ago — I like to sit by the window with nobody else in the room and look at it coming down outside. It makes me feel the way I did when I was little, when it snowed on Christmas. Everything ought to be different on Christmas — and when I was little I used to wake up long before day and before anybody else woke up, and lie in my bed and wait for the window to get a little light, maybe, and for somebody to get up, and I would be sure that when day did come and I got up, everything, the whole world, would be different. And if there was snow on the ground, everything would be different.’

  Mr. Munn looked at the stooped back of the negro man on the front seat. Then he leaned and put his mouth close to his wife’s ear. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

  She nodded. Then, as though recollecting, she said, ‘You weren’t paying any attention, you’re making fun of me.’

  ‘No,’ he denied.

  They were silent for a while as the carriage moved over the hard ruts of the lane. On each side was a grove of bare trees, with dry underbrush choking the space between the trunks and coming almost up to the first branches. When the lane turned sharply and came out of the grove, so that the view gave again on the open country, they saw the house sitting at the head of a long rise, an enormous house of red brick, with symmetrical wings and white columns, flanked by masses of tall, black cedars. White fences bordered the lane that led up to the house. On the long rise toward the house the few black, leafless trees seemed arbitrary and unnatural, their holes sticking up from the colorless earth. At that distance the house, set against the background of the ridges that defined the horizon, and dominating the slope of the lane and the wide fields and pastures, was blank and lonely and severe.

  ‘There it is,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Yassuh,’ the negro put in, ‘dar hit.’

  The house was not old. The Senator had built it fifteen years before on the site of the old house, which had burned. He always said that he had built it as much like the old one as possible; and he usually added, ‘Only, of course, somewhat larger.’ It was much larger than the old one had been. The central section, though much deeper, did resemble the old house, which had been a ten-room brick farmhouse with a high, white portico. But few people now could remember what the old place had looked like; and people by now had forgotten to say, when remarking on the new house, that Senator Tolliver had built it with his wife’s money, and that she had a lot but it wouldn’t last forever.

  Senator Tolliver did build the house with his wife’s money, for he had little of his own. He came of a good, moderately wealthy family, which had been ruined in the Civil War by the father’s almost fanatical devotion to the Southern cause. Old Mr. Tolliver had outfitted half a company of cavalry, and had strained all of his resources to buy Confederate bonds. He was reported missing after the battle of Franklin. One year after the end of the war, the Tolliver property was lost by foreclosure, and four months later Mrs. Tolliver died of a galloping consumption. For four months she lay on a great tester bed, in a shack that would scarcely shed water, and spat blood daintily into handkerchiefs made out of old clothes or sacking. Toward the end of her illness she would rouse herself from her stupor and, in a careful and monotonous voice, curse her husband, whose selfish madness and willful pride had brought ruin on those nearest and dearest to him. He was dead and rotten somewhere down in Tennessee, and she was glad of it, she said, and she hoped his soul was in eternal hell. She would dwell with orderly and precise detail on the corruption of his body, which she maintained she could see before her — how the flesh had fallen away from his left cheek to expose the place where he had lost three teeth, a place which he in his unholy and ungodly vanity had tried to hide when he smiled; how he lay in a ditch, covered shallowly with a little muck and dead leaves, food for worms; how there was no top to his hollow head, for the ball had taken it off. Just after dark she would prop herself up in the bed and describe the picture, night by night adding in her monotonous and careful voice new details to the familiar horror. She was obscene and eloquent, and the very restraint and monotony of her voice gave a magical, a hypnotic conviction to all she said. Her two children, Edmund, sixteen years old, and Matilda, four years older, would stand beside her bed, rigid and stony-eyed, and listen to her until she fell silent from exhaustion.

  When she had fallen silent, Edmund would look at her and then at the hard and masklike face of his sister, which seemed hacked down to the very bone. Then he would dash from the shack and run aimlessly down the road and across the fields. On nights when the moon was bright and the ground was frozen like iron, or when the steady winter rains beat down and he plunged blindly through mud and slush, he would range the country like a starving wolf. His breath would come in dry gasps, and he would long to be able to weep. As he ran he would think of the sweet, the divine, deliverance and fulfillment of weeping. But he could not weep. Some time before morning, exhausted and sick, he would creep into the shack and fling himself upon his pallet. One night he returned to find the grease-wick lamp burning, and his sister standing in the middle of the floor. Her tall, bony frame cast a shadow toward the tester bed.

  ‘She is dead,’ the sister said, quite evenly.

  ‘Dead,’ he repeated, and was filled at the moment with an immeasurable relief and bliss.

  ‘Yes, and you were not here.’ Then she added quietly, almost as an afterthought, ‘And I shall never forgive you.’

  The day his mother was buried, Edmund Tolliver started to walk the hundred and forty miles to Louisville. He knew that Louisville was the biggest city in the state. He had no money. On his way he worked at odd jobs on the farms and in the towns in order to live. It took him over a month to reach Louisville. His first job was in a slaughter pen, where the stench of blood and the sight of flies swarming on the soaked earth sickened him. At night he would spend hours scrubbing his hands, but a faint pinkish tinge would linger at the base of his nails and under them, and in the very flesh of his palms. At night, after he got into bed, he would usually remember the horrible and hypnotic monologues of his mother. He began to understand the true nature and depth of her hatred.

  By the time Edmund Tolliver was nineteen he was reading law in the office of a Mr. Watson, who had a very good practice and who was an attorney for the Louisville and Nashville Railway. ‘Son,’ Mr. Watson sometimes said to him, ‘there are only two things for a lawyer to do nowadays, get in right with the railroads or get into politics.’ At twenty-four Edmund Tolliver began his independent practice. At twenty-six he married Joan Palmer, the only child of a man named Morton Palmer, who had made a fortune in the war by selling beef and hides to the Federal Government and by speculating in grain. By this time he was, however, a banker. Edmund Tolliver hated him for his success, just as he hated the memory of his own father for his failure. But the hatred was secret, and Edmund Tolliver flattered him, took what business the old man threw his way, and waited for him to die. He died suddenly, of apoplexy, some years before Tolliver had dared to hope for the event.

  Joan Palmer was a frail and sickly woman several years older than her husband. She was not pretty, for chronic ill health had marked her, and a dull, mottled complexion obscured the precise chiseling of her features, but at moments of happiness and excitement she could exhibit a delicate and transparent beauty that hovered insubstantially and then faded, as it were, under the steadiness of the onlooker’s profaning gaze. When Edmund Tolliver asked her to marry him, she was thus transfigured; and at that moment, seeing that unexpected beauty, he forgot what calculations had inspired his suit, and was so deeply moved, as by a revelation, that his sight swam with tears. He was overcome with humility and purifying joy at this gift which a gracious fate had so unexpectedly extended to him. He told Joan Palmer, and told himself, believingly, that no service for her would ever be too great, no care too tender, and that he would do everything in the world to make her happy. Saying nothing, she drew his head down to her bosom and held it there, with her small fingers pressed into the strong, crisp, thick hair of his head, while she stared unseeingly at the profusion of gilt and brocade and white marble and plush over which the crystal chandelier of her father’s parlor spilled its gleams.

  The promises which Edmund Tolliver made that night to her and to himself were truly meant. But her strength was not like his. She was never well. For days at a time she would lie in a darkened room, motionless, staring at the ceiling, or pressing her fingers to her eyes and brow. And as time passed, that gesture became habitual, even when the pain was not present, a small gesture of desperation in the face of all the nameless forces of sorrow and destruction that circled her silently like wolves. Despairingly, sitting alone or when people talked among themselves and did not look at her, she would press her fingers to her eyes, and her vision would become a velvety and bottomless inward well of blackness on the sweet verge of which she seemed to be poised.

  Her strength was not like Edmund Tolliver’s strength and appetite, and her beauty was insubstantial. For several years, whenever he caught, and more rarely as the years went by, that moment of beauty, he would experience again that sense of gratitude and dedication, and sometimes would lay his head on her bosom. But later, when such moments occurred, they would stab him as with a knife; first remorse and pity for her, then pity for himself and an indefinable sense of betrayal and frustration. He would rush out of her presence, without a word. The sharp and full remembrance of the night when he had asked her to marry him and she had drawn down his head, even the clean smell of the cloth of her dress and of her flesh, would possess him. Beneath the cloth of her dress her breast was so small, he had thought, scarcely womanly at all, so suggestive of innocence and frailty, that he had seemed that night to discover a perfect and final truth; and his very soul had stood still within him. Pausing in the hall outside her door, he would remember these things, and strike his right fist heavily into the palm of his left hand, time and time again, with the retarded and mechanical regularity of a pendulum. His anguish was like that of a damned man who has once been granted the clear, cool vision of paradise, or that of a drowning man who sees how clearly, how lovingly the bright sunshine defines all familiar and comfortable objects on the bank where once he has walked.

  After the death of old Morton Palmer, Edmund Tolliver sold his rather modest house and moved from Louisville to the southern part of the state. He did not return to the exact locality where his father had lived. The painful recollections of his early youth forbade that. He did not want to hear every day the names he had heard in his youth, or to see the same crossroads and houses. So he bought a farm in an adjoining county, six hundred acres of good land, well watered and gently rolling, with the blue haze of knobs in the background. His wife’s health was getting steadily worse, and so he brought to keep house for him his older sister Matilda, who, unmarried, had been teaching in the smaller country schools of her section.

  Tolliver put white fences around the pastures of his farm, and built new barns and stables, the barns high and red and the stables low and white like the long fences. He bred blooded cattle and kept blooded horses, and he grew tobacco. He always asked advice of old residents in the section and listened attentively while they gave it. He rode much about the country, talking to the farmers and fishing and hunting with them. Then he went into politics, and was elected to the state senate. When his house burned, he built the new one, and soon afterward, strangers from Louisville and Frankfort and Lexington and Nashville began to come to the new house and drink whisky in the high-ceilinged rooms and walk out to the stables to look at the horses. After Tolliver went to Congress the first time, people from Washington and Baltimore began to come, now and then important people whose names were in the papers. And then Tolliver was elected to the Senate. But he still rode around the country and went fishing and hunting with the farmers and occasionally went to church at the little white weatherboarded Methodist church at Hope Springs. He did not put on airs, and often in his campaign speaking he would say, ‘I tell you I have known the pinch of poverty and the gnawing of the belly, and I have known what it is to get up in the cold dark before sun and go with bare feet out on the frozen ground.’ Gradually people forgot that the new house had been built with his wife’s money. And they forgot about her. She had died very shortly after the house was finished.

  As the carriage drew up the slope toward the house, a few flakes of snow drifted down from the gray sky. They were visible clinging to the stalks of dead weed by the lane.

  ‘Oh, it’s really going to snow!’ May exclaimed.

  Now they could see the wreaths of holly and red ribbons in the windows of the house, and the big one hung on the white door. Smoke stood up from the big chimneys. The house, which from a distance had appeared blank and severe, now seemed to promise, in contrast with the slowly descending snow and the empty fields and the gray sky, and to promise abundantly, everything that could make for happiness and peace — steaming and delicately odorous food, the gleam of firelight on silver, the soft sinking of the foot into the deep-piled rug, the musical clink of glasses.

  ‘How good of you to come,’ Senator Tolliver said, when he took May’s hand and leaned slightly over it as though he might kiss it, if he dared. ‘Mr. Christian has brought his daughter, they’re going to stay all night too, and we’ll try to liven up this dull old house a little tonight with some youth and beauty. And I must say this house gets dull enough some days. But now I’ll turn you over to my sister.’ And indicating the tall, black-clothed woman who came from the room behind him, he went on, ‘Matilda, this is May, the wife of my good friend Percy Munn, I’ve told you so much about.’ He stretched out his hand paternally and laid it on Mr. Munn’s shoulder. ‘The coming boy,’ he declared, and patted Mr. Munn’s shoulder. ‘We’ll have him in Congress yet.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Mr. Munn said, a little embarrassed, but pleased by the words and by the hand on his shoulder. Here in the white-paneled hall, after the sullen sky and the empty land, were warmth and kindliness, the glitter of mirrors, and the sound of fire crackling in a farther room. Even the face of Matilda seemed, as Mr. Munn took her hand, to be less distant and rigid than he had at first believed.