But for months afterwards, even when he was wrapped up, body and soul, in the business of the Association and knew, without any regrets, that more and more the Association was claiming, not only his energies and interest, but also that inner substance of his being which was peculiarly himself, he still speculated upon the meaning of his impulses that afternoon in his office. He knew that modesty had had nothing to do with the matter, or fear concerning his own capacity. What those men could do, he could do. Even though elusive, it had been something more fundamental to his nature than modesty, he admitted even after he was at ease in his new condition, for it had moved him powerfully that afternoon. He was bound in candor to admit that fact, remembering how, after he had accepted and the men were gone, he had felt unmanned and ashamed, as though an unsuspected weakness had betrayed him. It was as though steel had snapped at the point where the crystal had secretly formed, or the bough at the point of hidden rot. He had felt the impulse to rush down into the street to catch them and tell them he wouldn’t do it, tell them he had changed his mind.

  He did not follow the men, but almost immediately after he had resisted his impulse to do so, he hurried to the livery stable back of the hotel and told the negro boy to saddle his mare. While waiting, he paced up and down the dusty alley between the stable and the hotel. The boy took forever. When, at last, the boy led the mare out, Mr. Munn, without a word, swung to the saddle and rode off. By the time he reached the edge of town and could see before him the expanse of white, dusty road stretching westward, his impatience was consuming him. It was a hot afternoon, the sun still high enough to have force, and no air in motion. On each side of the white road lay fields of tobacco, still uncut, the rows of plants running perfectly back from the road until they lost themselves in the undifferentiated mass of deep, rich green which was the body of the field. The great tropical-looping leaves of the plants near the road, however, were powdered with the white dust that had been raised by wheels and hoofs to settle there. He rode too fast, and knew he was riding too fast, and cursed himself for a fool even as he leaned forward a little, relishing the supple and powerful thrust of the mare’s hoofs upon the dusty road. He wanted to get home. He wanted to see May.

  He found her in the side garden. He had not even bothered to go into the house, for without thought he was certain she would be here. He had ridden into the barn lot, where an old negro man, regarding the mare’s condition, exclaimed, ‘Lord God, Mister Perse, you ain’t gone and wind-broke her!’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn said shortly, and swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to the negro. ‘Take care of her,’ he ordered, and started to walk rapidly across the lot toward the wide and heavily shaded lawn. He walked directly across the lawn, and around the house to the side garden.

  May, apparently, did not hear his coming when he turned the corner of the house and walked toward her, for grass had long ago crept over and padded the gravel of the path; and so he saw her in the posture and stillness that must belong to her when she was alone. He thought, during the instant or two before she was aware of his presence, that that was the way she looked when she was alone, for it had become a habit of his mind to try to picture her as she must be in solitude, or to seize on such glimpses as this, as though these images could give him a clue to what she truly was in herself, in her essence. For he felt that when he was with her she was not herself, not wholly; his presence, or the presence of anyone, must, like a single drop of some stain, tincture the crystal liquid that was absolutely herself. She is alone, he thought, and moved rapidly toward her, knowing that the instant she turned and raised her eyes she would not be purely herself but would be colored by him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and approached and kissed her

  ‘You’re early, aren’t you?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I wanted to come home and tell you something.’ He felt convinced, as the words left his mouth, of his own stupidity. He had not come home for that. He had come home, putting his mare in a lather, not because he wanted to tell her that he was a member of the board, but because her words or expression, or even her mere presence, might help explain himself to himself. Obscurely, he felt that he might discover from her something about the meaning of the nameless impulse that had first prompted him to blurt out his refusal to the Senator. The conviction of weakness and shame which he had experienced after the men left was still fresh to him, and she might banish it for good, or, failing that, give him some hint whereby he could realize and master his own nature.

  ‘Senator Tolliver,’ he began, ‘and Mr. Christian and Mr. Sills came by this afternoon. They came to tell me I’m on the Association board.’

  He watched the look of pleasure form on her face. ‘Why, Perse,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s wonderful!’

  When, ordinarily, some word or action of his could provoke that look on her face, he experienced his own greatest satisfaction. If he brought her some gift from town, or propped up a vine for her that she would forget in less than half an hour, or unexpectedly leaned over to kiss her, that look would come to her face, as now, the lips very slightly parted and the blue eyes a little wider than usual and shining.

  But the look was fading from her face.

  ‘Why, Perse,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter? Did anything else happen, something bad?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, thinking, yes, he supposed he was.

  ‘But you looked at me so funny.’

  ‘Did I?’ he asked, having intended his question to be light and jocular, but catching in his own tone a hint of something else, a hardness. He corrected his inflection, repeating, ‘Did I?’

  ‘I thought something might be the matter.’

  ‘Nothing is,’ he said. And nothing was, perhaps. At least, nothing that he had been able to put into words. He had stood staring at her while the pleasure showed on her face, and had tried to find a way to tell her what had happened to him that afternoon. There was no way. She had been pleased, pleased for him, of course; but that fact in itself meant only that she took the same view of him as the Senator and the others took. That he would be pleased to get on the board. Just that. He shouldn’t be disappointed, he told himself, that she could not name for him the impulse which he himself had been unable to name. It was not her fault. Or disappointed that her presence now, and the expression of her face, failed to give him the clue to understanding. Her smile had touched him as clearly and simply, and in fact as impersonally, as the sunlight falling over an entire landscape. If that was not enough, it wasn’t her fault.

  He told her he had to go back to the stable and see about the mare.

  It was not anger at her, or disappointment, that forced him to go. He had felt no anger, and the disappointment had been dissipated even as he stood before her. He simply wanted to be alone. He saw that the mare was rubbed down, and in her stall. He wandered about the stable, inspecting the stalls, here arranging a piece of gear that had been too carelessly hung up, there straightening a coil of line on its peg. The mare began to move restlessly in her stall, but he paid no attention to her. It was getting dark inside the stable. Shortly before supper-time he returned to the house. Whatever fleeting disappointment he had felt in his wife was forgotten that night, for when he took her in his arms the conviction came back to him that here he had found his substantial happiness.

  And in the succeeding months, if he did occasionally speculate about the events of that afternoon in his office, he was moved by a spirit of objective and honest inquiry into his own nature, and not by distress. For the new activities more and more engrossed him, and he lived in a state of excitement that precluded the question of happiness or unhappiness. All fall he traveled much around the section.

  Buying was slowed down, and what tobacco the companies could pick up from farmers outside the Association was coming higher. Even most of the farmers outside who could afford to were holding on, playing safe, waiting to see how the cat would jump. ‘I reckon I’ll just hold on a mite longer if I kin git me something to eat for my folks,’ they would tell him. But when he said that now was the time to sign, that the Association would see its members through, they would say, ‘Naw, I ain’t signing nothing.’ And their long, grave faces would stiffen as they shook their heads. ‘You’ve signed mortgages,’ he would tell them bitterly, ‘you’ve signed away your land all right.’ They would shake their heads, saying: ‘I’ve signed mortgages, God’s plenty of ’em, but I ain’t signing this. I never was one to let any man tell me what I could do. I don’t aim to have any man tell me when I can sell my crop.’

  When one of those men with whom he talked face to face at the small meetings around the section did sign, Mr. Munn would regard the process with a cold avidity, his eyes never leaving the red, strong-knuckled fingers that guided the pen until he saw the last stroke completed. Each name, it always seemed in retrospect, involved himself peculiarly, representing something of himself to himself; and almost always, upon witnessing the act of signing, he experienced the grip of an absolute, throbless pleasure in which he seemed poised out of himself and, as it were, out of time. Then the man who had signed would slowly lay down the pen, and look up.

  He attended dozens of such meetings. People would come together, on a good afternoon, in front of a country store or in the clearing before some little white church at a crossroads. He would glance restlessly about him, at the calm blue of the sky, the dust-covered growth along the fencerow by the road, the trees hung with the colored leaves. Then, getting up on the steps of the church, he would look at the people who had come together to hear him. Then, when the people grew quiet, he would lean toward them earnestly, and speak.

  In late November he attended a meeting in the Rose Creek section. It had been raining for three days before the meeting, and he had to ride a borrowed horse seven miles north of Morris Crossing through mud that sucked about the fetlocks at every step. The meeting was to be in the evening, at a schoolhouse near the creek. The rain left off in the afternoon, but the sky did not clear. While he rode down the muddy road, under the sky that seemed to sag sodden above him, he ate the sandwiches he had put in his pocket. The dry crumbs stuck in his throat. He saw no one on the road.

  Just as the last gray twilight went out, he discovered the schoolhouse. Only some eighteen or twenty men were there, huddling about the stove, in which a fire had just been made. The single room was lighted by two oil lamps; the pale yellow flames under smoky glass seemed themselves to be stiffened and faded by the chill. The men silently made a place for Mr. Munn at the stove, and he introduced himself. Each of the men, repeating his name as though it were a lesson to be learned by rote, took his hand and shook it. In silence, then, they stood about the stove while the fire caught and the steam began to ascend from their drying clothes. When the room got warmer, the men scattered among the desks, looking somewhat embarrassed to be seen in those cramped seats that reminded them of the period of childhood and dependence.

  Shortly after Mr. Munn had taken his position by the table, where the two lamps sat, and had begun to talk to the men, the rain started again. It beat steadily on the roof, its insistent sound mingling with the sound of his voice, and he had the feeling that it was beating upon his very mind, flattening out the thoughts he would speak as rain flattens out grain, dulling him, conquering him, and those other men, into a kind of immemorial passivity and acceptance. The faces of the men seemed to say that to him, to speak to him louder than his words to them. But the four thin walls and the roof held out the rain. It was almost a mystery, a mystery whose profoundness drew him as he stood there, that he and those men should be together in that little cubicle of comforting warmth and light while the rain and darkness and wind prevailed over the land outside.

  After he finished talking, nobody signed. The men gathered again about the stove, in which the fire was dying now, to wait for the rain to stop so that they could go home and go to bed. Mr. Munn ceased to urge them. He sensed that it was useless. He was fighting in himself a conviction of futility, a presentiment of despair. He told himself that he was behaving like a child, that this was nothing, that he only dreaded the long ride back to Morris Crossing through the wet. He tried to fall into ordinary conversation with the men, but his words were forced and came false to his own ears. The men were not talking to each other much. Each one seemed silently engrossed in the process of the life that was hidden deeply within himself, that bore no relation to anything beyond himself, not even, it seemed, to his own feet set solidly on the plank floor or his own heavy hands that hung inert by his sides. Occasionally one of the men would say, ‘It ain’t letting up none to speak of,’ and another would agree. Or one would go to a window to try to peer out, his own black shadow blotting out the reflection of the lamp flames and the faint, silvery glint the water made streaming down the pane.

  By ten o’clock the rain had stopped. All the men went out to the shed to get their horses. Most of them started directly off, the hoofs of their horses making a slow, plopping sound in the mud. But one of them asked Mr. Munn to hold his horse while he went back inside to put the fire out and close up the schoolhouse. The others who had lingered said good night and rode away. Through the window Mr. Munn could see the man moving before the stove. He saw him bend over one of the lamps and blow it out. Then the man approached the other lamp and bent over it, his face sharp and intent as though in prayer. Suddenly the light was out, and the window blank blackness, blacker than the night.

  The man locked the door and came to take the reins from Mr. Munn’s hand. He mounted his horse, then drew alongside Mr. Munn. He thrust out his hand, which Mr. Munn took. He could not make out the man’s face.

  ‘I’m glad you come,’ the man told him, ‘and hit wet and all.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘and good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ the man replied, and turned away.

  As Mr. Munn rode through the darkness, the constant undertone of the swollen creek filled his consciousness. His eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now, or the overcast of cloud was becoming lighter, for he could make out the line of the road ahead of him for a little way between the tall growths that bordered it. Then, for a while, he could not hear the rushing water any more. The road, he decided, must bend some distance from the creek here. He thought of the men, by this time asleep, alone or with their wives; the walls and roofs of their houses would conceal them and protect them. But the awareness of the fact of their comfort and his own wakeful isolation gave him no envy. Nor did the apparent failure of his effort that night disturb him now. It had gone black out for him, as suddenly and as irrelevantly as the man’s face above the lamp the instant the flame was extinguished. He might feel differently tomorrow, as he had felt differently in the past. At what moment could a man trust his feelings, his convictions? At what point define the true and unmoved center of his being, the focus of his obligations? He could not say. And who could say? But for the present the comfort of the night and isolation wrapped him like a blanket.

  During the fall the meetings of the board occurred often. And always they were characterized by a half-suppressed spirit of jubilation, of triumph, even when the most serious issues rose for discussion. Captain Todd alone seemed to guard himself from the prevailing temper, sitting quietly with his grave smile, his fingers drumming soundlessly on the green baize of the table, while the excitement moved around him. It infected the Senator, so that his gestures became abrupt and his eyes gleamed unnaturally; and Mr. Christian, sometimes in the middle of a discussion, would rise and tramp the floor with his heavy, booted stride, and wave his arms, and exclaim, ‘By God, we got ’em!’ And the other men, each in his way, exhibited the same excitement and the same confidence. Mr. Munn could feel it the moment he entered their presence. He wondered once or twice how Captain Todd managed to hold himself aloof from it when it charged the very atmosphere of the dingy room above the bank where they met. Once Mr. Christian, stopping in the middle of his stride with a sentence unfinished and his arm halted in mid-air, turned suddenly on the Captain as though he had just discovered a rebuke in the older man’s detachment, and inquired, ‘By God, Captain, don’t you ever get heated up over anything?’

  ‘I reckon I’ve been known to,’ the Captain said. ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Not by me,’ Mr. Christian asserted.

  The Captain shook his head a little, smiling. ‘We thought we had the Yankees licked in ’sixty-two,’ he remarked, ‘but it didn’t seem to turn out that way. You better take it easy, Bill.’

  ‘This’ll be different,’ Mr. Christian affirmed. ‘We got ’em by the short hairs!’

  ‘Bill,’ the Captain said soberly, ‘just because they’re paying three dollars a hundred more’n they paid last year, it don’t mean a thing.’

  ‘They just paid me four dollars and a half a hundred for prime leaf last year’ — and Mr. Christian took two plunging strides — ‘the bastards!’

  ‘Whatever they pay more’n that now, they’re just paying to bust the Association. They figure they’re putting that money in the bank, Bill.’ The Captain took out his pipe, tamped it, and with an excess of care lighted it. ‘Every good price they pay outside the Association they figure will make somebody inside dissatisfied, wondering if maybe he hadn’t better be outside grabbing his while the grabbing is good.’

  Mr. Christian stood stock-still in the middle of the floor with his thick arms crooked and his hands almost together before his chest, the fingers spread and curved as though grasping an invisible object. ‘Just let me get my hands on any two-timing bastard that sells one leaf outside after he’s signed,’ he said slowly and distinctly, his lips drawing back a little to show the strong, yellow teeth, ‘and I’ll ——’ He jerked his hands apart with a quick, twisting motion.