But that life at the Christian place was over forever. He knew that. From the moment when he had heard Lucille Christian’s voice on the telephone that morning after the burning of his house, he had known, although he had been unwilling to acknowledge, that it was over. A few days after Mr. Christian’s stroke, he had gone back to see Lucille Christian. They had sat in the dining-room, with a single lamp burning uncertainly on the big table between them, with their shadows, large and possessive and black, on the walls behind them, and had eaten in silence. Once or twice, as by accident, their eyes had met, but uncommunicatively and shortly. They had sat there, still without speaking, after the cook had carried out the dishes and the sound of her activities in the pantry and kitchen had ceased. Finally, looking down at the tablecloth and then off at the shadowy wall beyond her, he had asked her to marry him. When he was free.

  ‘Oh, Perse, Perse,’ she had cried, ‘why do you have to talk about that? That isn’t important. Now.’

  Meeting her eyes fully at last, he had said, ‘It is important.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People have to have something to look forward to,’ he had told her, looking across the pool of light, as across a distance, at that almost unfamiliar face, ‘something to move toward, to hope for. Some direction.’

  She had shaken her head, saying: ‘We can’t know anything, now. We can’t do anything. Not anything.’ Then, in the silence, for he had made no reply, still with his eyes fixed on her face across the pool of light, she had said, very quietly and distantly: ‘I don’t feel anything any more. Not anything.’

  That night he had slept at the Christian place. He had expected her to come to him. He had watched the door, waiting for the latch to lift stealthily. But it had not moved. He had stood just inside the door, leaning forward with his brow pressed against the slick, cold surface of the painted wood, filled with his angry and despairing desire. Eventually, standing there, he had become aware of a repeated, almost imperceptible sound, a hoarse, dry susurrus, painful and regular. It had seemed to come from beyond the wall to his right. Then, he had identified the sound: it was the sound Mr. Christian made.

  At the end of the next week Mr. Munn again went out to the Christian place. That night Lucille Christian came to his room. At the door she stood in the accustomed posture, closing it, with her finger lifted as before. And even at that instant, the gesture, now so ironical and superfluous in the new context, told him more positively than her words had been able to tell him how empty she was, and how arbitrary and automatic and meaningless her actions. But denying that knowledge, he felt for a moment that she was as she had been. But it was only for a moment. She lay in his arms shuddering as though from cold. It was as though the half-playful shivering of those times when she had said, chatteringly, ‘Warm my feet, I’ll catch pneumonia all for you,’ had been a kind of parody, fatuous and grim, of this, the truth.

  He tried to comfort her. He told her that he loved her and would love her always. Finally, she succumbed to him.

  Then she told him: ‘I tried — I tried, Perse. But it’s no use.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘We can’t be with each other any more. Not for a long time, anyway. Or never.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. He thought: love. The word rattled in his head like a pea in a dried pod.

  ‘It’s not you,’ she answered. ‘It’s me, the way I am.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘We can’t be with each other,’ she said; ‘it’s too awful, I can’t stand it.’

  ‘All right,’ he replied. He knew a loathing, suddenly, of himself for the emptiness of the act he had performed: a vicious and shameful pantomime, isolated from all his life before it and from any other life, cut off in time, drained of all meaning, even the blind, fitful meaning of pleasure. He was infected by her emptiness. Or her emptiness had discovered to him his own. She had held it up to him like a mirror, and in her emptiness he had seen his own. ‘All right,’ he said.

  The next morning she did not come down to breakfast. He ate scarcely anything, hurried out to the stable and saddled his mare, and rode off.

  Three days later he received an answer to the letter which he had written to May. But the answer was not from May. It was from Miss Burnham. It ran:

  Percy Munn:

  Yours of the 4th inst. received. My niece will not consider giving you a divorce. I do not believe in divorce and neither does my niece and she will not consider giving you one. And I can inform you now that you will not be able to get one yourself, for you have not got any grounds for a divorce because our Heavenly Father knows there was never a purer sweeter more dutiful girl and you have no complaint and you drove her from your house like a dog. Also I can tell you too that my niece is going to have a child. I get on my knees every night and pray our Heavenly Father that this unborn child will never know the kind of creature its father is. I will devote my life to raising this child and nurturing it just as I have devoted my life to raising my niece, and I thank our Heavenly Father that it will have in it some of the blood of General Sam Burnham, for you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes. And I can tell you Percy Munn that you will never speak to this child, you will never lay eyes on it, if I can prevent, so long as there is a breath in my body. So help me God.

  Very r’sp’ly yrs,

  L. BURNHAM

  More and more the room at the hotel became intolerable to him. He would go to bed and close his eyes, but sleep would not come. The walls, the ceiling above him, the floor beneath, seemed to shut him in upon himself, to leave only himself as real, as only the darkness is real when one shuts his eyes. The thought of the other rooms up and down the hall, like this room, and of persons lying within them, sleeping or sleepless and staring, merely validated his own isolation; and validated the isolation of those other persons. The carpet of the room worn by other feet than his, the stained basin into which other hands had been plunged, the bed that had creaked and sagged beneath other bodies, all of those items, and a dozen more, the cold and rigorous and undifferentiating mirror, defined him as separate from those other persons, as locked within himself. Sometimes he would get out of the bed and go to stand at the window to look down, as he had done that night of the first rally. He would stand at the window and his gaze would follow the progress under the pale street-lamps of some unidentified, late walker. Once or twice he felt the impulse to dress and hurry after that unknown person and walk beside him to his destination. For that person would have a destination.

  Even though the room had become almost intolerable for him, his practice compelled him to be often in town, and there was no other place for him to stay. He fell into the habit, however, of taking a bottle of whisky up to his room. It helped him to sleep, he thought.

  But at the Ball place it was different. The steadiness of the life there, although it was not his life, steadied him. If that spied-on and awaited and rare expression in the eyes of Cordelia when she looked at her husband stabbed him, or if the calm fulfillment on the face of Portia at the moment after her father’s prayer when she rose to her feet disturbed him with its alien secret, those things, nevertheless, sustained him. And there was Professor Ball, who had read, ‘The Lord is my strength and song’; and Doctor MacDonald.

  In Bardsville, the guardsmen camped in the little park across from the railroad station. Day after day Mr. Munn had seen them there. And he had seen them in the evening, on the roads at the edge of town, silently sitting their mounts. They were guarding the town, and people were grateful to them for it. People would go down to watch them parade, or to watch them lounging on the grass in their idle moments. The soldiers hung round the drugstores and poolrooms and saloons, making jokes, swaggering a little. And some of the hangers-on would fawn on them, and make jokes too; only a few would stare insolently at them, not speaking. In the early evening soldiers would walk slowly down the streets with girls beside them. Some of the officers went to dinner in the big brick houses where the warehouse managers and the most successful buyers lived, and Mr. Gay, who owned the Merchants’ Bank, and Mayor Alton and Judge Howe. Or the officers helped to drill the men who formed the Home Guard. The town accepted the soldiers; they fell into the life there, scarcely altering the pattern. They were guarding the town. They were saving the town. Their sentinels paced up and down at night or sat their mounts by the roadside. At night they paced up and down alongside the blackened areas where the warehouses had been. In the day workmen were busy on those locations clearing away the débris and digging for foundations. There would be new warehouses.

  On good afternoons men would pause on the pavements opposite those blackened areas, leaning against the barriers and peering, men wearing overalls, men with lean, red, rawboned, weathered faces and long mustaches. Or a single rider, booted and black-coated, would draw rein there and stare at the piles of brick and rubbish, at the workmen bent over their occupations, and at the soldiers. Then, such a rider would lift his rein and move slowly off. But those other men would lean at the barriers, singly or in groups, and peer. Sometimes one of them would call to a guard, ‘Sojer, whut you a-doen here?’ Or, ‘Little sojer-boy, you better git home to yore mammy, er she won’t have no little sojer-boy.’

  ‘Get on off, get on off,’ the guards would say when the watchers came in past the outer barrier. ‘Get on off, you can’t stop here.’

  Sullenly, the watchers would withdraw.

  Mr. Munn saw the soldiers at their camp. Sometimes he would pause, when he had occasion to go to the depot, and watch them about their affairs over in the little park. Watching them, he once thought of a time when he had been camping with some boys, a long time back, when he was ten or twelve years old. One of the boys, little Bill Christian, he remembered — and thought of that little girl, almost a baby, who would not come clearly to his mind, who now was Lucille Christian, Lucille Christian, who had laid her finger on his lips and said, ‘Hush, hush,’ in the dark, who was out there now, in that house with the sound of that rasping breath in the next room — little Bill Christian had had a tent, and the boys had camped in the tent. Across the park, among their little tents, the soldiers laughed and talked.

  Or he saw the soldiers on the street, and looked quickly and curiously at their faces, trying to wrench out a secret, as it were, as he had looked at the faces of those people who had come to his office with their troubles, as he had looked at the face of Bunk Trevelyan’s wife that first day. He looked at the faces of the soldiers; but the faces told him nothing. One day on the street, he met the young lieutenant who had been in charge of the cavalry detail the night his house burned. The lieutenant recognized him, and nodded friendlily. And once Mr. Munn had occasion to go down Front Street, where the warehouses had been. He saw the blackened ruins, the workmen, the guards, and the men leaning against the barrier. That night of the raid, at the moment of the first blast, when the air had reeled, sodden and swollen with sound, he had felt a release, a certainty. That was of that time, not this. Now, in the light of full afternoon, he watched the picks of the workmen rise and fall, and the indifferent guards.

  ‘The warehouses,’ Doctor MacDonald said, ‘that don’t mean a thing. We want warehouses, don’t we? Don’t we want somebody to buy our tobacco?’ Then he grinned. ‘It’s what goes in them counts. And’ — pausing — ‘what gets paid for what goes in them. I don’t see why the warehouses make people downhearted. Or I do see — they’re blind as bats.’

  ‘I’m not downhearted,’ Mr. Munn told him, ‘but people are. You can tell.’

  ‘All we need is to keep up membership in the Association. And in the other. Give them meetings, get ’em together and give ’em something to do, something to think about, nurse ’em along. That’s all we need. Keep that up ——’

  ‘And money,’ Mr. Munn said gloomily. ‘There isn’t any more advance money, and we haven’t got our price yet, the companies feeling so cocky with their soldiers here, and people need money.’

  ‘Money,’ Doctor MacDonald replied. ‘Sure. But just enough money to eat. Just that. In a pinch just that, and this is a pinch. A man don’t need much in a pinch. It’ll surprise you, by God. I lived once, six weeks it was, on just a handful of parched corn a day and a jack rabbit or a prairie chicken when I could get one, and me on the move, too. Moving fast,’ he added as though by way of parenthesis, and grinned confidentially. ‘That was down in Mexico.’

  ‘It’ll take more’n parched corn,’ Mr. Munn declared, ‘and people in debt already.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah; just let anybody start to crack down on mortgages and throw people off their places. God-a-mighty, when the Professor gets me down on my knee-caps these days all I ask the Lord for is to let those bastards start foreclosing mortgages.’ He stabbed the air with the stem of his unlit pipe, and his eyes narrowed. ‘God-a-mighty, just let them start foreclosing, that’s all we need. That’ll heat people up.’

  ‘They cracked down on Senator Tolliver,’ Mr. Munn observed. ‘He was living in the office there on his place, and they’ve evicted him. He’s still got some influence, I reckon, and if they’d evict him, they’d evict anybody.’

  ‘They used him, and they’re through. He’s a second-hand corncob now, I tell you. And nobody gives a damn. Do you?’

  ‘Do I give a damn?’ Mr. Munn echoed. Then he answered, ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You used to be pretty thick with him, and if you don’t give a damn now, who do you think does?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Mr. Munn answered shortly. He remembered the Senator standing there on the baggage truck at the depot, afraid of the crowd, cringing before it, suspicious of it and desperate, and his face sallow and sunken in the afternoon light. ‘And nobody does, I reckon,’ he added.

  ‘Well, for one, I don’t, God knows. And nobody does. That’s why they cracked down on him. But if they turned out some God-forsaken little bastard with forty acres and that not good for sassafras, you’d give a damn, and plenty of people would. If they started that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said slowly.

  ‘But they’re too smart,’ Doctor MacDonald went on. ‘They won’t do it, because they’re too smart. Not now. But just let the Association crack, and won’t anybody be a thing but hired hands for the Merchants’ Bank and the Alta Company. What we’ve got to do is keep the Association together. The companies can’t last forever without tobacco. They can’t keep those soldiers here forever. If they build warehouses, they’ve got to put something in them.’

  ‘We don’t control near half the crop,’ Mr. Munn objected.

  ‘Well, tobacco comes out of plant beds,’ Doctor MacDonald retorted, ‘don’t it?’

  Mr. Munn looked at him. ‘We did it before,’ he said. ‘I reckon we can do it again.’

  ‘I reckon we can,’ Doctor MacDonald agreed, and grinning, his lips curled back from the long teeth.

  Doctor MacDonald was like that. He would give that easy, soft laugh, like a man looking out on things from the confidence of his own inner, secret world. Because he was confident and easy in that inner world, he was easy and confident at whatever he set his hand to in the outer world. He would lift his arm in a slow, half-lazy motion to knock out a pipe or to lay his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and you could see, below the too-short sleeve of his coat, the tendons slip slickly and strongly, like a piston in oil, beneath the brown skin of his wrist, the slowness, somehow, suggesting the potentiality of speed. Or he would swing himself lankily to his saddle, and turning to speak, would gather the reins as in idleness; but the restive horse would become still as a post. A handful of parched corn, he had said. That was what he had had, down in Mexico, and moving fast. But it had not been the handful of parched corn that sustained him, Mr. Munn somehow felt; not that, for he had been sustained by something else, a nourishment within himself.

  Doctor MacDonald was right, Mr. Munn admitted to himself. With luck it could be done, it was possible. If people were like Doctor MacDonald. He wondered how much he himself was like Doctor MacDonald. He, he himself, could take a lot, he was sure. He had taken a lot already. The Association, that was what was left. If they could win. If they didn’t win. He did not think beyond that except to think what could there be, for him, beyond that. The Association, that was what he was now, if he was anything. He thought: if I am anything. But Doctor MacDonald — let the Association go to pot, let everything, and Doctor MacDonald would still be himself. You could guess that.

  Doctor MacDonald did not change. At the meetings with the captains and commanders, or meetings held for a few bands of the men, meetings held in empty barns or in farmhouses with the windows shuttered and a single lamp turned down low and the men half-listening for a warning from the watchmen down the road and in the woods, Doctor MacDonald could still lean toward them, casually, as he had at first, and talk easily and confidentially. The way he must talk to a woman whose husband was sick, or whose child, Mr. Munn once thought. And the men would gradually relax, and listen to him, and when they spoke their own voices would sound natural again and their postures would lose that impression of a crouching, anticipatory strain. Even after the night when the troops tried to raid a meeting, and would have succeeded except for the watchmen, Doctor MacDonald did not change. Some of the people, Mr. Sills and Mr. Burden, urged him not to have another meeting after that, not until things quieted down. ‘No,’ Doctor MacDonald said, ‘now’s the time,’ in the voice of a man saying it’s time for dinner, or time to lock up for the night. At the next meeting, he knocked out his pipe, and observed: ‘Well, gentlemen, they almost bagged us. And I reckon we all know why.’ Half-amusedly, he looked about him, from face to face. Then he added, as though in afterthought: ‘Somebody let it slip. Somebody just let it slip. All we’ve got to do’ — and he hesitated, and the men looked at each other, almost furtively — ‘is to find out who it was. Because,’ he said gently, ‘he might just let it slip again.’ And he grinned, and stuck his hands into his pockets.