‘Good evening,’ the man nearest him said in a low voice.

  ‘Good evening,’ Mr. Munn replied.

  Not another word was spoken, until someone came out on the loading platform from the interior of the mill and in a low voice pronounced the name Jim Talbot. Then the man on the platform asked, more sharply now, ‘Is Jim Talbot here?’

  One of the men on the ground vaulted clumsily onto the platform, and said, ‘I’m Jim Talbot.’

  ‘Come on in,’ the other man directed, and disappeared into the interior of the mill. No light could be seen from the inside. The man named Talbot took a step forward, paused as though to hitch up his belt, and remarked, to no one in particular, ‘Well, here goes.’ Then he followed, gropingly, through the door where the other man had gone.

  After a short while, that other man came out on the platform again, and pronounced another name, Fuqua G. Morris. It was the same man, Mr. Munn decided, for he could tell by the voice.

  The man who answered to the name of Morris vaulted onto the platform, and entered the mill.

  There was no conversation among the men left at the loading platform. Now and then one of them would shift his feet restlessly, scraping the gravel. Once a man asked another for a chew, and the other, without a word, passed it to him; and once a man struck a match for a pipe. The two men nearest him seemed to withdraw from the little sphere of light. Then the man’s hand cupped around the flame, and he touched it to the pipe. It illuminated only his upper face, the heavy curve of the nose, which was bronze-colored in that small light, and the staring, faintly glittering orbs of the eyes under the low hat-brim. Then the man dropped the burning match to the gravel and ground it with his heel. Now and then a man would be summoned, and would enter the mill.

  Once a horseman emerged from the shadow of the trees across the open space, and began to move toward the mill. Mr. Munn knew that that stranger could not see them there, and that the eyes of every man were fixed on that exposed and approaching figure. The stranger rode slowly past, tethered his horse, and came to lounge against the platform. ‘Good evening,’ he said, just as Mr. Munn had done.

  ‘Good evening,’ some man answered. But no one else replied.

  When Mr. Munn heard his own name pronounced from the platform behind him, it came with as much surprise as though he had thought himself entirely alone. And yet, the first several times that man had appeared, Mr. Munn had been sure the summons would be for him. Then, somehow, he had assumed each time that the call would not be. As on the day of the rally when he had uncomprehendingly heard himself introduced to the crowd, now his body stiffened in response to the sound of the name before his mind had accepted the full fact. Then he said, ‘All right,’ and swung himself onto the platform, and followed the man in.

  In the blacker, interior darkness, he followed close to his guide for a few paces. Under his tread he felt the unevenness of the worn boards, which creaked startlingly. Then they must have come to a corner, Mr. Munn thought, for to his left he could see narrow streaks of light apparently outlining a door.

  ‘Just walk through that door there,’ the guide commanded, ‘and stand in the middle of the floor.’

  ‘All right,’ Mr. Munn said, and walked to the door, fumbled at the wooden latch, and entered.

  A beam of light lay widening toward him, and he stood in its center. It came from some kind of lantern with a reflector and a screen that threw the other half of the big room into darkness — to his eyes, pitch darkness. They are over there, he thought. He stood just inside the door, blinking against the light.

  ‘Come closer,’ a voice commanded.

  Mr. Munn tried to identify the voice, but could not. He took three slow steps forward, lifting his head a little so that the light would not fall directly in his eyes. The ceiling of the room was very high. He could make out the rafters above the lighted section. The room had probably been a granary.

  ‘Go to the table,’ the voice said.

  Mr. Munn went to the table, which stood some ten feet away from the lantern and directly in front of it. He touched his fingers to the table-top, and waited. On the table a book lay, a Bible, an ordinary kind of Bible with worn, imitation leather covers. He had seen many a Bible like that, many a one, lying on the table in the family room of a farmhouse, or on the mantelpiece beside a carved wood clock, probably, and a glass vase full of paper spills, and a spectacle case.

  ‘Percy Munn,’ the voice said, ‘you are about to take a most serious step. It is not necessary to impress upon you the gravity of that step. And about to take a most sacred oath. If you are to turn back, now is the time to turn back.’

  Someone coughed twice in the darkness. Mr. Munn turned his head slightly toward that direction.

  ‘You can turn your back now and go out of this room and mount your horse and ride away and never speak one word of your coming here tonight, and no single soul will think the less of your manhood. But now is the time. Look in your heart and mind, and consider.’

  Mr. Munn waited with his eyes raised above the direct rays of the light. There was silence for some thirty or forty seconds.

  ‘Percy Munn,’ the voice then said, ‘are you clear in your mind, and determined?’

  ‘I am,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘You are about to take the oath of membership in the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control. The sole purpose of this organization is to see that a fair price is paid for dark fired tobacco, and it will adopt such means as seem advisable to further that purpose. Are you, Percy Munn, prepared to take the oath?’

  ‘I am,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Place your left hand upon that book.’

  Mr. Munn did so.

  ‘That book, Percy Munn, is the Holy Bible. An oath taken upon it and in God’s name is sacred for all time and eternity. Will you swear upon it?’

  ‘I will,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Raise your right hand and repeat these words,’ and the voice proceeded: ‘I, Percy Munn, knowing the injustice under which our people groan ——’ and it paused for Mr. Munn to repeat the words.

  ‘I, Percy Munn, knowing the injustice under which our people groan ——’ Mr. Munn said slowly and distinctly.

  ‘— and being willing to abide it no longer ——’

  Mr. Munn repeated: ‘— and being willing to abide it no longer ——’

  The voice resumed: ‘— do swear on this holy book and on the name of God our Creator . . . that I will steadfastly support the purpose of the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control — and whatever measures may be deemed advisable for the accomplishment of that purpose — and that I will loyally obey the commands of the truly elected officers superior to me in this organization — and that never, under any circumstances, will I speak one word of this organization or its affairs — to any man or woman not of this organization — not excepting the wife of my bosom. — This I solemnly swear.’

  ‘— This I solemnly swear,’ Mr. Munn concluded. He removed his hand from the book.

  ‘Come forward,’ the voice said, and he walked across the intervening ten feet or so of floor toward the lantern and the voice. He passed beyond the range of the lantern’s rays, was completely blind for an instant before his eyes could accustom themselves to the dark, and then saw the man standing behind the table that supported the lantern, and the other men sitting on benches and boxes beyond. The man behind the lantern shook Mr. Munn’s hand, and said, ‘Well, sir, we’re happy to welcome you in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mr. Munn said. He peered at the man’s face, thinking he had seen it somewhere before, but in that light he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘If you’ll just have a seat, we’ll be proceeding,’ the man said.

  One of the men on the bench just behind the table moved over, and Mr. Munn sat down beside him.

  He watched the other men, one after another, come through the door over there across the wide floor, and stand motionless just inside it until the voice gave the command, and then move slowly forward, blinking at the light. Some of them peered hard at a spot just by the light, straining, apparently, to penetrate the depth of darkness where people were; and others, as Mr. Munn himself had done, lifted their eyes toward the obscurity of the ceiling. The first kind were nervous, and they would wet the lips with the tongue before they began to repeat the words of the oath. Mr. Munn tried to recall whether or not he himself had wet his lips that way. He had not been nervous, he decided. He had really felt nothing, nothing at all, when he stood out there in the middle of the floor in the full beam of the light. That was what surprised him. A man was due to feel something out there, taking the oath. Then he began to think how the taking of the oath changed the relation of all those men to each other there beside him in the dark. The oath had said, God our Creator. He wondered how many of those men believed in God. And then if he himself did. It had been a long time since he had thought of that, he remembered. The man who was, at that moment, taking the oath finished, and at the command, advanced to join the group in the shadow.

  A minute later the door opened, and a man entered, a tall man, and stood there in the full beam of light. The man was Bunk Trevelyan.

  Chapter seven

  IT WAS hard to believe, he would think, sitting at his desk in the office over the drugstore, with his papers spread out on the desk, or a client sitting there before him, and with the comforting and irregular ticking of the girl’s typewriter coming to his ears from the outer room. Many afternoons that spring, when the windows were open to let in the warming air, or when the pavements glistened in the quick sunlight that had followed a flurry of rain and people came out again to walk up and down, idling and calling to each other, he would find it hard to believe that such afternoons did not belong to the spring before, or to the spring before that.

  And once or twice, Mr. Munn got up from his desk and looked at himself in the mirror of the old walnut hatrack by the door. He had not changed since last spring, or the spring before. Or at least, he could tell no difference. When he shaved in the mornings he would regard his face in the mirror, the long, slightly hooked nose, his dark, deep-set eyes, the close-growing, dark hair, and sometimes he would think, well, it doesn’t show a mark of change, not a mark. He himself was the same, and everything was the same, May’s glance and gesture, the way the fields lay outside the window, the very food on the table for breakfast and the smell of coffee. Presently, he would mount his mare and ride off toward town, as before.

  ‘What’s the matter, Perse?’ May had asked him two or three times.

  ‘Matter? Nothing’s the matter,’ he had answered. The first time he answered with an effort at a jocose and affectionate tone. He set his pipe on the mantelshelf, for he was standing there just after dinner with an unlit match in his fingers, and drew her to him with one hand while with the other he touched the mass of hair above her small face. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re just crazy as a little hoot owl. Don’t you know that? A little hoot owl?’ At the very moment of utterance he had been aware that his voice sounded exactly as always when he spoke teasingly to her. Hell, he thought, I sound like a fool.

  ‘But there is, Perse. You know there is. Are you sick?’

  ‘No,’ he said shortly, feeling his nerves stiffen.

  ‘I know there is, Perse.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve changed, Perse, you know you have. You aren’t like you used to be. To me, or in any way. What’s the matter, Perse?’

  By that time he had released her and moved from her a pace or two. With those words she stretched out her hand to him, not strongly, as though to grasp him or command him to her, but with a motion that from the start confessed its own ineffectuality.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, watching her gesture and feeling an unnamable and deep dissatisfaction at it. He turned suddenly and walked across the room and through the hall and out to the porch, permitting the screen door to slam behind him with a flat sound. He walked away across the yard and down the lane leading to the big road. After a while he came back and stood, with his cold pipe between his teeth, in the yard under the leafing sugar trees. He was able to see May seated on the sofa in the living-room, her face averted and the lamplight falling on her hair. Once, long before, at night like this, he had stood under one of the blasted cedars on the Burnham place, where May lived then with her aunt, Miss Lucy Burnham, and he had looked back toward the house. Like tonight, May sat alone then, beyond the window, with the lamplight falling upon her hair. How bravely, it had always seemed to him, her head supported those massy-looking coils, which appeared too heavy for her smallness, too grown-up, almost, for the delicate clarity of the face beneath them. Ordinarily, she carried her head high; as though by a consistent act of will, but an act not quite comprehending its own meaning and purpose, she supported the glowing and weighty coils. But that night at the Burnham place, like tonight, her head drooped, the weight seeming too great and unrelenting.

  What had she promised him, he asked himself tonight, looking across the darkness to the lighted interior of the room where she sat? Happiness, that was it. He had found in her the promise of happiness, happiness as a thing in itself, an entity separate from the past activities of his life. Or rather, he had thought of that happiness, in so far as he had thought at all of its relation to other things, as something concealed, preciously, at the center of his life, like the fruit within the rind, the meat of the nut within the gross and useless outer shell. What was the center of his life, he demanded of himself. He could not say.

  Then he remembered that she had not promised him happiness. That was what he had promised himself, generously, looking at her, walking beside her across the eroded and failing fields of the Burnham place, or sitting in the musty parlor out there, with the clutter of knick-knacks and mirrors around him and the smell of horsehair in his nostrils. She had promised him nothing, or, at least, only herself. He had her, now. But what was she? She was a certain form, certain words to which he was accustomed and which pretended to tell him of some reality within herself. What that was, what she truly was, he did not know.

  Now, looking at her sitting there in the room, framed in the lighted square of the window, he felt as he had felt when, as a child, he had removed a picture-card from the stereopticon apparatus to look at it as it was without the aid of the lenses. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, in winter, when he was a child, he had lain on the floor with the glasses and the stack of picture-cards, each with its duplicate scene. Through the lenses, the card would show a rich, three-dimensional little world, the figures of persons there seeming to stand up, solid and vital in their own right, about to move about their own mysterious businesses. It was a little world with light falling over the objects there and casting shadows, as in the real world, with distances and depths like the real world, and recesses more secret and fascinating. Sometimes, pressing his forehead into the wooden frame until it ached, he had felt that if he could just break through into that little world where everything was motionless but seemed about to move, where everything was living, it seemed, but at the same time frozen in its tiny perfections, he would know the most unutterable bliss. Then, slowly, he would take the frame from his eyes and remove the card from the clamps. He would inspect it: the flat, dull, fading picture printed in duplicate, the frayed, yellow edges of the cardboard. No life would be there, no depth. That card which he held in his hand, then, would be a part of the ordinary world in which he was living. He would look about him at the familiar furniture of the room; at the fire failing now in the grate, perhaps; at the pattern of the carpet on which he lay. There would be the slow, somnolent, saddening sound of water murmuring and chinking in the gutters, or the sound of wind finding the corners of the house and the recesses of the eaves. Soon, they would come and get him and make him eat his supper, even if he wasn’t hungry, and then they would put him to bed. The stereopticon cards would be left stacked in a neat pile on the table in the deserted living-room. That was the way it had been. He had taken the card from behind the lenses, and there was only the flat card which he held in his hand. He looked toward the lighted window, where May was now, and thought of that, and how he had felt when he was a child.

  But she had not changed. She was as she had always been. Whatever change there was — and there was a change, she was right when she accused him — was in him. He knew that. He had known it first that day when he had refused to promise to send a negro up to prepare the flower beds for her. He thought of how she had moved away from him down the path, how her small shoulders had drawn together in the contortion of a silent sob, and how he had stared down at the rusty old trowel beside the patch of inadequately turned loam. He had stared down at the trowel, and had felt that he was suddenly staring at a darkly coiling depth within himself. That moment had been like the moment in there, tonight. He had, in the end, sent a negro up to fix the flower beds on the morning of the day before the night of the taking of the oath, as though the act might have been a kind of atonement offered to her for the step he was about to take, a gesture toward her across a widening distance. She had never mentioned the matter of the garden to him again, not even to thank him.

  She went upstairs very early that night when he watched her from the shadow of the sugar trees, but he waited for the light to go out in the bedroom, and then for a considerable time after.

  A few days later she again asked him, ‘Perse, what’s the matter?’ And feeling his nerves stiffen and the food just swallowed turn to a cold mass in his stomach, he carefully laid down his fork and said in a voice which, despite its control, betrayed the vibration of an inner tension, ‘Nothing.’ She continued to study his face while she pretended to eat and while the negro cook padded in and out of the room. She said nothing else the entire meal. The next morning, after he had told her good-bye at the front door and had taken a couple of steps across the porch, he turned abruptly and came back to her and pressed her to him. She clung to him while the pressure of his grip increased and while he bent over her to hold his lips hard against the mass of hair on top of her head. ‘Oh, Perse, Perse,’ she breathed.