The two short speeches before the Senator’s had gone well, speeches outlining the method of organization of the Association, and the financial relation of members to the Association. But the Senator’s speech was the big one.

  The Senator was, Mr. Munn decided, a real orator — no ranting and bellowing, but perfect composure or ardent gesture as the moment demanded, and always that flowing, full, compelling voice moving out over the lifted faces. The time was ripe, he had said, for a struggle for the rights of the people of this section. It was against all justice for the price of the staple product of thousands upon thousands of people to be set, not by a competitive process of buying, but by the cold-blooded and malicious agreement of buyers without reference to the commercial worth of the product, to the investment of capital, to the sweat of the brow and the cunning of the hand that had created it, or to the needs of the people.

  In absolute silence, under the blazing sun, the crowd had listened, and were listening, to him. Now, mounting to the close, he was saying that the condition was one that no true man would longer endure. That it was his firm faith that God Himself would no longer endure to witness it. Now was the time for the struggle. The men of Kentucky and Tennessee had never showed themselves weaklings. Let them now show fight, and show that they were true sons of their fathers. Let them support the Association and the Association would give them justice.

  Upon the word ‘justice,’ which seemed to hang in the hot air for a long instant, vibrating powerfully like a plucked cord, the Senator slowly raised his right hand in a gesture that suggested the solemnity of benediction and the incitement of salute. As the hand began, slowly, to descend, the first spatter of applause broke sporadically from the people grouped closest to the platform, coming like the first heavy, individual, tumescent drops exploding upon the dry roof before the storm breaks in full volume. Then the sound, mounting, swept back from the platform, over the whole multitude to the outermost fringe by the fence and on the stables, involving those distant spectators who could scarcely have heard the words, swelling outward like fire leaping through dry brush or waves plunging toward a beach very far off.

  With dignity, the Senator turned and resumed his seat. Even now he did not show the strain of his effort, or lift a hand to wipe his face, from which the perspiration was streaming. His face was perfectly impassive, except for the sharp and unnatural gleam of his eyes.

  Mr. Munn, as the Senator turned to take his seat, saw Doctor Milton, who was chairman, glance covertly at his watch. Then Doctor Milton rose and stood quietly behind the little table while the applause and excitement of the crowd wore itself out. When it was over, Doctor Milton thanked the speaker on behalf of the audience and himself, and said that the Senator had once more appeared as the friend of the people and of their rights. He proceeded to say that he wished to call upon one more speaker for a few words, a man who was well known to many present and who was a representative citizen. Mr. Munn, scarcely attending to what the Doctor said, was suddenly aware that his own name had been spoken. At that sound, so familiar, and, at the moment, so strange, he experienced an enveloping wave of nausea and his bowels seemed to turn coldly within him, as though his body, before his mind could seize the full import of what was being said, had known it all and had, in its own violent language of sensation, interpreted the meaning as best it could for the tardy intelligence.

  Doctor Milton was gesturing toward him. He began slowly and painfully to rise, as though by retarding that habitual act he might avoid the ordeal. He had to get up, there was nothing else he could do. He approached the little table, placing himself behind that frail barrier, while Doctor Milton sat down. A few people near the platform applauded perfunctorily. He saw the expanse of faces before him stretching back toward the distant fence and the grove of oaks. He opened his lips dryly, but no sound came out. He had intended to say, ‘My friends.’ He lifted his gaze from the people. The solitary buzzard, he observed impersonally, had gone, leaving nothing but the empty and intense blue of the sky.

  ‘My friends,’ he managed to begin, wetting his lips. Then he said that he was unprepared to speak, for he had not been warned, hating himself for the worn and sterile phrases that formed on his tongue. While he uttered the words his glance fell upon a man who stood on the ground directly at the edge of the platform. It was a lanky, stooped man of about fifty, wearing faded blue overalls and a straw hat. The man’s red-rimmed, dull eyes were fixed directly upon him. Then, at that instant, he realized with a profound force that that man there was an individual person, not like anybody else in the world. He realized the fact more profoundly than he had ever realized it about his friends or even his wife; and he saw as clearly as in a vision that man sitting with other men before a small blaze of sticks on which something was cooking, in the dark in the open field, just as Captain Todd had said the people had camped the night before.

  ‘My friends,’ he said again hesitatingly, ‘I know that many of you have come a long way. You left your houses and your families and came here, some of you from a long way off, from other counties. Some of you stayed out in the fields last night because the town was full or because you did not have any money. In my mind I can see you there. You came here through the dust and heat’ — and he felt his own voice growing stronger within him and the words coming — ‘because you thought you could get something here to help you.’ He came from behind the table and went to the edge of the platform, what seemed the tremendous emptiness of the crowd, like the emptiness of the sky when one fixes his steady gaze upon its depth, drawing him as though against his will. ‘But there is nothing here to help you. You came here to find hope. But there is no hope here for you. There is nothing here in Bardsville for you. There is no hope in the Association for you.’

  He heard the shuffling of feet on the boards behind him, and a short, nervous cough. ‘There is nothing here,’ he went on, ‘except what you have brought with you from your homes, wherever they are. There is no hope except the hope you bring here. There is nothing here but an idea. And that idea is dead unless you have brought it life by your long trip here. It does not exist unless you give it life by your own hope and loyalty.’

  He could not tell whether they were listening to him, and found that he did not care, for his own voice filled him and he was completely himself. ‘— your own hope and loyalty. That idea will not give you quick comfort. Before it gives you comfort it will give you suffering and privation. And it will not give you anything in payment for your suffering, now or later, unless you give your full loyalty to it. The loyalty you have brought with you here today is everything, it is your only hope.’ Then he told them what he felt each man owed to the others.

  He did not talk long. And afterward he could never remember precisely what he had said, though he remembered in perfect clarity the face of the man in the faded blue overalls who had stood just below the platform and had looked up at him. Though he could not, later, recall the words he had spoken, or even, very certainly, the ideas he had wanted to express, he could remember how the speech had welled up powerfully in him, how still and sharp the distant oak trees had appeared, and how incredibly brilliant and empty had been the sky from which the light poured over the landscape and the innumerable faces.

  When he turned to take his seat, he felt like a somnambulist who is gradually recalled to himself, the rising sound of shouts and applause bringing him back to the reality of the hot, bunting-draped platform and his friends beside him. Mr. Christian was standing in front of him, wringing his hand and slapping him on the back and shouting, ‘By God, Perse, you got the bastards told!’ The Senator and the other men were grouped around him, the Senator smiling and stretching out his hand. Over in front of the little table, Doctor Milton was waving his arms toward the crowd, trying to say something.

  The rally was soon over.

  When Mr. Munn entered his room at the hotel that night, he was very tired. He switched on the light and unpacked his valise, which he found pushed under the bed. Outside, people were singing in the street. He probably wouldn’t be able to get much sleep, for that sort of thing might be going on past midnight. He undressed hurriedly, turned out the light, and got into bed. At least, he could relax.

  As soon as he touched the pillow, the sense of despondency which had been growing, almost unawares, within him for the past several hours engrossed him completely. He was simply tired, he told himself. He tried to force himself into his accustomed state of mind, fixing his attention upon the obligations of the next day. He had to see witnesses all morning to get ready for Bunk Trevelyan’s trial; and ticking their names off in his mind and trying to remember what he knew about them, he was suddenly struck by the thought that he might be, after all, deceived, that Bunk Trevelyan might be guilty, and that he himself was a fool to put his energies into such a case when he’d never get a penny of return. People would laugh at him for a sucker. He hadn’t had to take the case, the court hadn’t assigned him to it. The Trevelyan woman had come to his office with her tale, and he was a sucker.

  The singing in the street seemed to be louder than ever. He tried to ignore the disturbance; then he recognized the tune, which began to run in his own head. They were singing something to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body.’ They were singing, over and over again as they marched up and down the street, that they were going to hang tobacco buyers to a sour apple tree. He supposed that tobacco buyers, who usually ganged around the lobby of the hotel and the saloons, would be pretty scarce tonight. They’d be under cover. Not that anybody would bother them, but they wouldn’t feel exactly popular. The singing moved off down the street to the south.

  He turned on his right side and tried to compose himself. Then, as he struck an habitual posture, with his right arm stretched out and his knee raised a little, he knew that the present unrest was not due to the excitement of the day or doubt about Bunk Trevelyan or the noise in the street, but to the fact that he was alone. Last night, and most nights for over a year now, he had had May beside him. If she were here now, as she had been here in this very bed, her head would be on his outflung right arm. He had not known what was the matter with him, that he was missing May, until his muscles and nerves told him when he struck the posture that was his accustomed one for sleep.

  Now he thought of May, and tried to visualize her alone in the shadowy big bed in his house. She had very blonde hair, and it would be loose on the pillow, on which her head would seem small, like a child’s head. She was a smallish woman, smaller than medium, and when she slept she seemed even smaller, as though the spark of her vitality withdrew deeply inward to secret recesses and let her body shrink a little, but perfectly and smoothly to scale. Once or twice, noticing this, he had thought with a despairing presentiment of loss how small she would look after she was dead. Now he tried to see how she must look sleeping alone in the big bed. She always curled up when she slept, her hands lying loosely together at her chin and her knees drawn up. That made her look even smaller, too. She always went to sleep with her head on his right arm. Always, after he himself had slept for a little while, he would wake and cautiously withdraw his arm. She would never even stir.

  But now he could not sleep. Men moved down the hall outside his door, talking in vague, drunken voices. One of them lurched heavily against the wall, shaking it, and the others laughed. And the singing had begun again in the street, broken now by shouts. Drunk, too, he reckoned. The men in the hall had now gone into the room adjoining his own. They continued their talk and laughter. His irritation gave way to a kind of disgust as his imagination presented to him that adjoining room, lit by a hanging electric bulb, and the almost-realized smell of sour whisky-breath, and the flushed, loose faces of the men who were there. They, too, were singing now. They would have their arms draped about each other’s shoulders with their hot, sweaty faces close together while they sang. They would be like brothers tonight, slapping each other on the back and mixing their stinking breaths in song.

  He rolled over again and tried to cut out the sound by jamming the other pillow against his exposed ear. That helped some. It was then that he noticed the faint perfume. The odor came, he discovered, from the second pillow. Mr. Christian’s daughter must have lain down to rest on his bed while she waited for her father. He wondered if she had taken off her skirt and shirtwaist before she lay down. She had been wearing a linen skirt, a blue linen skirt, he remembered, and linen wrinkled easily. She must have taken it off, for when she had entered the door of the room at Wilson’s restaurant behind her father, her clothes had looked perfectly fresh and unwrinkled. That had made Mr. Christian late. He had said she had to primp. She had had to dress, for she had probably gone to sleep. She had pulled down the shade in the room, cutting out the sunlight, and had taken off her skirt and shirtwaist and had lain down on his bed. She had left that odor on his pillow.

  He got up and went to the window. He could look over the roofs of the two-story buildings across the street. The white moonlight falling on those roofs gave them a clean and frosty and lonely look that was somehow comforting to him. Below him, he could see the people still on the street, not a crowd exactly, but a big number for the time of night. They stood on the curb under the arc lamps or wandered idly up and down, even in the middle of the street. Those who were singing were now just south of the hotel in a ragged group of some thirty or forty. Drunk, he thought. They had come here for a serious purpose, to save themselves, to assure their future, and here they were, drunk and roaming the street at midnight. His disgust mounted, disgust not only for them but for himself, for what he had said that afternoon and for the pure poise and exaltation he had felt as his words came. He had been drunk, too, drunk in a different way, but drunk. He felt cheated and betrayed.

  For a long time, possessed by that feeling, he watched them in their idle and aimless movements. He thought how small and irrelevant they seemed even at the distance of three stories below him. The singers moved farther off, and some of the people left began to walk away, more firmly now, as though they had some purpose and destination. Then it occurred to him that one man was very much like another man. He recalled that that afternoon he had said something about what one man owed to another. One man was very much like another. He was like those men, one of them. Unbidden, warm and pulsing, that exaltation returned to him, more perfect than under the brilliant sun, as now he looked over the white, moon-frosted roofs. Involuntarily, he raised his arm as though to address a great multitude and tell them what he knew to be the truth.

  Chapter two

  IN LATE August Mr. Munn became a member of the board which directed the organization and management of the Association. When a Mr. Morphee resigned because of ill health, the members of the board appointed Mr. Munn to fill the unexpired short term for the Bardsville district; and some four months later he was elected by the members of his district for a full term of two years.

  He was sitting in his office, one afternoon, when they brought the news of his appointment to him. He had been sorting some papers when they came — the Senator, followed by Mr. Sills and Mr. Christian. They had, they said, smiling, a little news for him. He got up, somehow vaguely disturbed despite their smiles, and asked them to have seats. No, they said, they had just dropped in for a minute to give him a little bit of news that might interest him. The expression on his face must have betrayed his almost painful puzzlement and the confusion of his anticipation, for Mr. Christian said: ‘Hell, Senator, go on and tell the boy. Don’t leave him standing up there looking like a fool.’

  ‘My boy,’ the Senator announced, and approached him with an outstretched hand, ‘we have come to tell you that you are a member of the Association board.’ He took Mr. Munn’s hand, which was automatically extended to him, and shook it with the slightly ceremonious air which marked all of his actions. He added, shaking the hand, ‘To complete the unexpired term of Mr. Morphee.’

  The puzzlement and confusion which Mr. Munn had first experienced assumed positive form, crystallizing suddenly into the word ‘No,’ which burst sharply from his lips; and the sound of his own unpremeditated refusal started a surprise in him to match the surprise which he observed on the faces of his friends. Then he added, ‘I haven’t got any business on the board.’ He shook his head doubtfully. ‘I appreciate the fact you all want me on the board with you, and all that — I want you to know that, all right — but I’m not the man for it. I’d better just say no.’

  The surprise had gone now from the Senator’s face, which was again smiling. ‘No, my boy’ — he was shaking his head reprovingly as though at a child — ‘we expected to have to persuade you a little. We expected you would be surprised. But nobody else will be surprised. You may not know it, my boy, but you are a coming man in the community. We need you with us. And a young man. These mossbacks’ — and he waved a patronizing hand at his companions — ‘and the rest of us, we could use a little fresh blood.’

  Mr. Munn still shook his head.

  ‘Now you mustn’t let your modesty,’ the Senator began again, ‘stand in the way of your duty. Your modesty . . .’

  In the end Mr. Munn accepted.

  It had not been modesty that prompted his first, almost uncivil, blurted-out refusal. When the Senator referred to his modesty, he told him that it wasn’t modesty. But he had no language to define for the Senator and Mr. Christian and Mr. Sills what it actually was that made him refuse the place at first. Nor had he been able, standing before them there in the office that day, to define it for himself. If he had been able to give a name to the secret but violent promptings that thrust the ‘No’ to his lips, he might have obeyed them and stood his ground against the courtesy of the Senator, the bullying of Mr. Christian, and the dry, satirical silence of Mr. Sills. Mr. Munn’s common sense, his logic, had conspired with his friends to force his acceptance. Such chances to get along didn’t turn up every day to a young man of thirty. He had better grab it.