They left town at once.
Luke drove savagely going out of town. He kept his big clumsy hands gripped hard upon the rim of the steering wheel, his brow knit and furrowed by its ridge of wrinkles, his face taut and drawn from the tension of his nerves. From time to time he would thrust his clumsy fingers strongly through his flashing mass of hair, laugh a wild jeering “whah-whah” of rage and exasperation, and then say in a voice so packed with sneering bitterness and contempt that it was hard to keep from laughing at him:
“S— t! Resisting an officer in the p-p-p-p-performance of his duties! Now ain’t that nice?” he said in a voice of mincing refinement and daintiness. “W-w-w-wy the nice neat nigger-Baptist God-damned sons of bitches!” he snarled. “The cheap grafting South Car’lina bastards! D-d-d-d-disorderly conduct! S— t!” he snarled with a savage, dainty, mincing bitterness that was somehow wildly and explosively funny.
Meanwhile they were speeding along through quiet streets that even in the night-time had the worn and faded dustiness of autumn, past withered lawns, by frame-houses which had the same faded dusty look, and under trees on which the dry leaves hung and fluttered: the mournful, worn, weary feeling told of departed summer, evoked sadly the memory of a savage heat, and the sorrowful ghosts and omens of the autumn were everywhere about them. October was there with its strange, brooding presences of sorrow and delight — its sense of something lost and vanished, gone for ever, its still impending prescience of something grand and wild to come. Above them the ragged cloudy sky had cleared: it was a night of blazing and magnificent stars, set in the limitless velvet substance of the sky, burning with faint brilliance and without light over the immense, mysterious, and mournful-looking earth.
Twice, going out of town, his brother stopped, and both times with a kind of sudden indecisive after-thought. Once, when they had passed a little corner drug-store, he jammed the brakes on suddenly, bringing the car to such an abrupt and jolting halt that Eugene was flung forward violently against the wind-screen. He turned to him with a nervous and distracted air of indecision, saying:
“Do you f-f-f-fink you could go a dope?” (this was the word in common use for Coca Cola) “W-w-w-would you like a drink?” he said, with a comical thrusting movement of the head, a wild look in his eyes, a restless and stammering indecision and earnestness. The boy told him no, and after a worried and restless look of his flickering grey eyes, in the direction of the drug-store, he thrust his large flat foot into the clutch and started the car in motion again, with the same violent and jarring movement as when he had halted.
Again, on the very outposts of the town, where there was nothing but the dusty road, a few cheap frame-houses, sparely, flimsily, and carelessly built upon the breast of an immense and formless land, which seemed indifferent to them and with which they seemed to have no union, and with nothing but the road, the stars and the huge mysteries of the earth before them, his brother had halted with another jarring jolt, when they had flashed past a filling station where, so read a sign, soft drinks and barbecued sandwiches were for sale.
“How about a b-b-b-barbecued sandwich?” he demanded, looking at Eugene with a wild and glaring suddenness. “C-c-c-could you go one? Huh?”— he said, almost barking at him, with a comical thrusting movement of the head. But even before the boy could answer, and he saw the sullen and exasperated scowl upon his face, he thrust his fingers wildly through his hair, burst into a wild rich “whah-whah” of crazy laughter — a laughter that was all the more strange and astonishing because even as he laughed the taut and drawn tension of his face and nerves, and the frenzied unrest of his eyes, were terribly apparent — and then started the car in motion again with a jarring, grinding and convulsive jolt. And Luke could not have said why he had halted at these last two outposts of the town — the drug-store and the filling station — but certainly the impulse that had made him halt had little to do with food or drink, for neither of them was hungry, and they had no need or desire for further nourishment.
But the impulse which had made his brother halt belonged to all the dissonance and frenzied unrest of his whole life, and by thousands of actions such as this, the course and pattern of his life were shaped. And finally, his brother had halted because those two small flares of light — pitiful and shabby as they were — had wakened in him a memory of the vast darkness of the huge and lonely earth before them, and because he gave himself into this dark regretfully and with some misgiving of his soul.
For his spirit was afraid of solitude and darkness and, like all men in this land, his soul was drawn by the small hard blaze of incandescence — even by those barren bulbous clusters of hard light upon the wintry midnight pavements of a little town — which somehow pitifully and terribly suggest the fear and loneliness in men’s souls, the small hard assurances of manufactured light which they have gathered as some beacon of comfort and security against a dark too vast and terrible, an earth too savage in its rudeness, space, and emptiness, for the spirit and the strength of men.
And now his brother and he were given to this earth, this dark, this loneliness again. And as they rushed on into the darkness, held, save for the throbbing motor of the little car, in the immutable silence of the earth and darkness, the flickering headlights of the car would suddenly pierce into the huge surrounding mystery of night, lunging for an instant the flashing finger of their light upon some fugitive and secret presence in the vault of night, where all the million lives of men were held. Sometimes the flashing light would blaze upon the boarding of a little house at the bend of the road, and then the house would flash behind and be engulfed in darkness.
Sometimes it would reveal the brown and dusty stubble of the cotton-fields, a stretch of ragged pine, a lonely little wooden church, a shack, a cabin, the swift and sinuous forking of another road that spoked into their own, flashed past, and curved away — was gone for ever — leaving an instant and intolerable pain and memory — a searing recognition and discovery — a road once seen but never followed and now for ever lost with all its promises of a life that they had never known or explored, of faces they had never seen.
And again, out of this huge and mournful earth, out of the limitless mystery of this continent of night, the lights upon his brother’s car would for an instant pick out faces, shapes, and people, and they, too, would blaze there for a moment in their vision with an intolerable and lonely briefness, and then be lost for ever — and in that moment of instant parting and farewell was written the history of man’s destiny — his brother’s life, and that of all men living on the earth around him.
Once their lights picked out the figure of a country negro: his weary plodding figure loomed up for an instant dustily — a mournful image of bowed back, shapeless garments stained with red field earth, and clumsy brogans coated with the red dust of the road, plodding along against a terrific and desolate landscape of brown cotton-fields, clay, and lonely pine, as much a part of it as the earth he walked upon, fixed instantly into it in a vision of labour, sorrow, and destiny, that was eternal.
And again they passed by negroes coming from a country church, and for a moment saw their white eyes and their black and mournful faces staring towards the light, and lost these, too, for ever, and passed into a little town and out again, and saw far-off, and at its edges, a pollen of bright light above a little travelling carnival, and heard the sad wheeling music of the carousal, the mixed and woven clamour of the barker’s cries, the shouts, the people’s voices, and all far-faint and lost and mournful as a dream; and then the earth again — the two back wheels, clay-caked and rattling, of an ancient buggy, the lifting hooves of an old bone-yard nag, that slowly turned away from the road’s centre to make way for them, the slow, staring, stupid looks of wonder and astonishment of a young country fellow and his girl as they went by them — and finally, always and for ever, nothing but the earth — that mournful, desolate, and lonely earth of cotton-fields, and raw red clay and lonely pine, wheeling past for ever in rude and formless undulations, immemorable, everlasting, and terrific, above which the great stars blazed their imperturbable and inscrutable messages of deathless calm.
And as they rushed ahead into the dark, he thought of the hundreds of times his brother had hurled himself along this road at night alone, going furiously from nowhere into nowhere, rushing ahead with starlight shining on his knit brows and his drawn face, with nothing but the lonely, mournful, and desolate red clay earth about him, the immense, the merciless emptiness and calm of the imperturbable skies above him. And he wondered if there was anywhere on earth a goal for all his frenzy and unrest, some final dwelling-place of certitude and love for all his wandering, or if he must hurl furiously along in darkness beneath these stars for ever — lost, unassuaged, and driven — until the immense and mournful earth should take him once again.
The ride back up into the hills with Luke was cold, dark, bleak, and desolate — the very painting of his own sick soul. Black night had come when they had reached the mountains. The stars were out, and around them the great bulk of the hills was barren, bleak, and wintry-looking, and there was the distant roaring of demented winds upon the hills, the lonely preludes of grim winter among the barren trees. Already, it seemed, the same landscape which only a day or two before had flamed with all the blazing colours of October, and with the enchantment which his hope and joy had given it, had been sorrowfully transformed by the mournful desolation of coming winter. The earth was no longer beautiful and friendly: it had become a waste, a desert, and a prison bleak and bare.
During the ride up the mountain into Old Catawba the two brothers spoke seldom to each other. Luke, who had made that dark journey up into the hills a thousand times — for whom, in fact, this ceaseless hurtling along dark roads had become the very pattern of the unrest and fury that lashed his own life on for ever — drove hard and raggedly, communicating perfectly to the machine he drove the tension and dissonance of his own tormented spirit. This wordless instrument of steel and brass and leather seemed, in fact, to start, halt, jolt, stammer, and lunge fiercely onward as if it had a brain and spirit of its own that was in anguished sympathy with the tortured nerves that governed it. His brother drove, bent forward tensely, his large clumsy hands gripped hard and nervously upon the steering-wheel, as he peered out upon the ribbon of road before him, which bent and twisted in a bewildering serpentine that curved constantly upward along the slopes and flanks of the dark mountain-side. The boy sat cold and numb and sick at heart, hands thrust in pockets, his hat pulled low across his eyes, his overcoat turned up around his neck. He glanced at his brother once or twice. He could see his face drawn and taut and furrowed in the dim light, but when he tried to speak to him he could not. The sense of ruin, shame, and failure which filled his spirit seemed so abysmal and complete that there was nothing left to say. And he faced the meeting with his mother and his sister with a sick heart of dread.
Once going up the mountain-side his brother stopped, jamming his huge flat foot so rudely on the brake that the car halted with a jarring shuddering thud. They had just passed a road of unpaved clay which led off from the mountain road towards the right, and towards a farmhouse and a light or two which were clearly visible.
Now, looking nervously and uncertainly toward this house, Luke muttered, almost to himself, thrusting his hand through his hair with a distracted movement as he spoke: “Wy-wy-wy-I fink we could g-g-g-get a drink in here wy — if you’d like one. Wy-wy-I know the old fellow who lives there . . . he’s a moonshiner — wy-wy-I fink — would you like to stop?” he said abruptly and then, getting no answer from the younger one, he gave another worried and uncertain look in the direction of the house, thrust his fingers through his hair, and muttered to himself: “W-w-w-well, perhaps you’re right — maybe it’s j-j-j-just as well if we g-g-g-get home wy-wy-wy-I guess that Mama will be waiting up for us.”
When they reached town the hour was late, the streets had a wintry, barren, and deserted look, and the lights burned dim: from time to time another motor car would flash by them speedily, but they saw few people. As they drove across the Square it seemed almost to have been frozen in a cataleptic silence, the bulbous clusters of the street lamps around the Square burned with a hard and barren radiance — a ghastly mocking of life, of metropolitan gaiety, in a desert scene from which all life had by some pestilence or catastrophe of nature been extinguished. The fountain in the Square pulsed with a cold breezeless jet, and behind the greasy windows of a luncheon room he could see a man in a dim light seated on a stool and drinking coffee, and the swart muscular Greek leaned over the counter, his furrowed inch of brow painfully bent upon the columns of a newspaper.
As they turned into the street where stood his mother’s house, and sloped swiftly down the hill toward home, his brother, in a tone that tried in vain to be matter of fact and to conceal the concern and pain which his own generous spirit felt because of the feeling of defeat, failure, and desperation which was now legible in every word and gesture of the younger one, began to speak to him in a nervous, almost pleading voice:
“N-n-now I fink,” he began, thrusting his big hand through his hair — “I— wy I fink when we get home wy — I just wouldn’t say anything to Mama about — wy-wy about that trouble — wy — that we had in Blackstone — wy — at all!” he blurted out. “Wy — f-f-f-frankly, I mean it!” he continued earnestly, as he brought the car to a jolting halt before the house. “Wy-wy — if I were in your p-p-place, Gene — wy I’d just forget it. . . . It’s all over now — and it would only worry M-m-m-mama if you t-t-told her about it — Wy-wy — the whole f’ing’s over now . . . those — wy — those cheap nigger-Baptist South Car’lina sons of bitches — wy-wy — just saw the chance of m-m-making a martyr of you — so I’d j-j-just forget about it — It’s all over now — Wy-wy — f-f-f-forget it!” he cried earnestly. “I— I— wy I wouldn’t fink about it again!”
But the younger one, seeing the light that burned warmly behind the drawn shades of the parlour, set his sick heart and his grim face desperately towards the light, shook his head silently, and then walked grimly towards the house.
He found his mother and his sister seated together in the parlour before the fire. In another moment, almost before their first startled words of greeting were out of their mouths, he was blurting out the story of his drunkenness, arrest, and imprisonment. As he went on, he could see his mother’s face, white, serious, eagerly curious, fixed upon him, and her powerful, deliberate, and curiously flexible mouth which she pursed constantly, darting her eyes at him from time to time with the quick, startled attentiveness of an animal or a bird, as she said sharply: “Hah? . . . What say? . . . The police, you say? . . . Jail? . . . Who was with you — hah? Emmet Blake? . . . Weaver? . . . How much did they fine you — hah?”
Meanwhile his sister sat listening quietly, with an absent yet intent look in her eyes, stroking her large cleft chin in a reflective manner with her big hand, smiling a little, and saying from time to time:
“Ah-hah? . . . And what did Blake say then? . . . What did you say to the nigger when you saw him in the cell? . . . Ah-hah. . . . They didn’t abuse you, did they? . . . Did they hurt you when they hit you? . . . Ah-hah. . . . And what did Luke say when he saw you looking through the bars?” She snickered hoarsely, and then, taking him by the hand, turned to her mother and in a kindly yet derisive tone said:
“Here’s your Harvard boy. . . . What do you think of your baby now?” And seeing the gloomy and miserable look upon his face, she laughed her high, husky, and derisive falsetto, prodding him in the ribs with her big finger, saying: “K-k-k-k! . . . This is our Harvard boy! . . . Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi! . . . Here’s your baby son, Miss Eliza!” Then, releasing his hand and turning to her mother, she said in a good-natured tone, in which yet a kind of melancholy satisfaction was evident: “Well, you see, don’t you? . . . It just goes to show you, doesn’t it? . . . I knew it all the time. . . . It just goes to show that we’re all the same beneath the skin. . . . We’re all alike. . . . We all like the stuff . . . with all his book education and going off to Harvard, he’s no different from Papa, when you come down to it,” she concluded with a note of sombre brooding satisfaction in her voice.
“Wy-wy-wy —” he could see Luke teetering nervously from one huge flat foot to another, thrusting his huge hand distractedly through his flashing hair as he attempted to stammer out an earnest and excited defence and justification for his disgrace:
“Wy-wy-wy I don’t believe that Gene was drunk at all!” he stammered. “Wy I fink wy — that he j-j-j-just had the bad luck to wy to f-f-f-fall in with that gang when they were drinking and and and — wy I f’ink those wy those B-B-B-B-Blackstone bastards just saw a chance wy of collecting a wy a little graft and and and wy j-j-just made Gene the goat. Wy f-f-f-frankly I don’t believe he was drunk at all. . . . Wy I doubt it very much,” he said, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “F-f-f-frankly, I do.”
“I was drunk!” the boy muttered sullenly and miserably. “Drunker than any of them. . . . I was the worst of the lot.”
“You see, don’t you?” his sister said again to her mother in a weary, kindly, yet triumphant tone. “You see what happens, don’t you? . . . I’ve known it. . . . I’ve known it all the time,” she said with sombre satisfaction. “ . . . No, sir,” she shook her head with a movement of emphatic conviction, as if someone had disputed her argument, “you can’t change them! . . . You can’t change the leopard’s spots. . . . Murder will out. . . . You can’t tell me!” she cried again, shaking her head in a movement of denial. “Blood is thicker than water. But you see, don’t you?” she said again with this curiously kindly yet triumphant satisfaction; and then added illogically: “This is what comes of going to Harvard.”
And his mother, who had been following this broken and almost incoherent discourse of his brother and sister with the quick, startled darting and attentive glances of an animal or a bird, now said nothing. Instead she just stood looking at him, her broad worn hands held at the waist for a moment in a loose strong clasp, her face white and stern, and her mouth pursed in a strong pucker of reproach. For a moment it seemed that she would speak, but suddenly her worn brown eyes were hot with tears, she shook her head at him in a strong, convulsive and almost imperceptible tremor of grief and disappointment, and turning quickly with a rapid awkward movement of her short figure, she went out of the room as fast as she could, slamming the door behind her.
When she had gone there was silence for a minute, save for the gaseous flare and crumble of the coal-fire in the grate and the stertorous, nervous and uneasy labour of Luke’s breath. Then his sister turned to him and looking at him with eyes which had grown dead and lustreless, and in a tone that was full of the sombre and weary resignation that was now frequent when she spoke, she said: “Well, forget about it. She’ll get over it. . . . You will, too. . . . It’s done now, and it can’t be helped . . . So forget it. . . . I know, I know,” she said with a sombre, weary, and fatal resignation as she shook her head. “We all have these great dreams and big ambitions when we’re twenty. . . . I know. . . . I had them, too. . . . Don’t break your heart about it, Gene. . . . Life’s not worth it. . . . So forget it. . . . Just forget about it. . . . You’ll forget,” she muttered, “like I did.”
Later that night, when his sister had departed for her home and his brother had gone to bed, he sat with his mother in the parlour looking at the fire. Blundering, stumbling incoherently, he tried desperately to reassure her, to tell her of his resolution to expiate his crime, to retrieve his failure, somehow to justify her in the faith and support she had given him. He spoke wildly, foolishly, desperately, of a dozen plans in progress, promising everything, swearing anything, and sure of nothing. He told her he was ready to go to work at once, to do any work that he could find — like a drowning man he clutched wildly at a dozen straws — he would get a job on the paper as a reporter; he would teach school; there were great sums of money to be made from advertising, he had a friend in that profession, he was sure he would succeed there; he felt sure that Professor Hatcher could get him placed at some small college teaching drama and play-writing courses; someone had told him he could find employment editing the little magazine or “house organ” of a department store in the city; a friend at college had secured employment as librarian of an ocean liner; another made large sums of money selling floor-mops and brushes to the housewives of the Middle West — he blurted out the foolish and futile projects feverishly, clutching at straw after straw, and halted abruptly, baffled by her silence and by the sudden sickening realization that he no longer had a straw to clutch at — how foolish, futile, feeble all these projects were!
As for his mother, she sat staring straight into the fire and made no answer. Then, for a long time, he sat there melancholy, saying nothing, while the woman looked straight ahead, hands clasped across her waist, looking into the fire with a fixed stare of her white face and puckered mouth. At length she spoke:
. . . “I have brought them all into the world,” she said quietly, “and seen them all grow up . . . and some are dead now . . . and some have done nothing with their lives. . . . You were the youngest, and the last . . . my only hope. . . . Oh, to see them all, all go the same way . . . to hope and pray year after year that there would be one of them who would not fail — and now!” her voice rose strongly, and she shook her head with the old convulsive tremor, “to think that you — the one on whom my hope was set — the one who has had the education and the opportunity that the others never had — should go the way that the others went. . . . It’s too bad to bear!” she cried, and suddenly burst into tears. “Too much to ask of me!” she whispered huskily, and suddenly drew the sleeve of the old frayed sweater across her weak wet eyes, with the pathetic gesture of a child — a gesture that tore him with a rending anguish of pity, shame and inexpiable regret. “Too hard . . . too hard,” she whispered. “Surely there’s a curse of God upon us if after all the pain and sorrow all are lost.”
And he sat there sick with shame, self-loathing and despair, unable to reply. And then he heard again the remote demented howling of the wind, the creaking of bare boughs, the vast dark prowling of the beast of night about his mother’s house. And again he heard, as he had heard a thousand times in childhood, far, faint, and broken by the wind, the wailing whistle of a distant train. It brought to him, as it had brought to him so many times, the old immortal promises of flight and darkness, the golden promises of morning, new lands and a shining city. And to his sick and desperate soul the cry of the great train now came with a sterner and more desperate hope than he had ever known as a boy. Suddenly he knew that now there was one road, and only one before him — flight from this defeat and failure which his life had come to, redemption by stern labour and grim loneliness, the stern challenge, the sharp peril and the grand reward — the magic and undying image of the city. And suddenly he knew that he would go.
The night before he went away he went out and prowled restlessly about the streets of the town until the hour was very late. A letter from a friend had informed them that there was hope of a teaching appointment at one of the city universities, later, when the spring term began. Meanwhile, a swift exchange of telegrams had promised him temporary employment in New York, soliciting funds from alumni of his university for a memorial building. And uncertain, specious, and disheartening as this employment seemed to him, he had eagerly seized the offer when it came. He was leaving home the next day.
Now, sick of soul and driven by the unquiet heart, the furious unrest, he prowled the barren night-time streets of his native town. The Square was bleak and lifeless and deserted, with its hard glare of lights: along the main street of the town a few belated citizens hurried past from time to time, faces and voices he remembered from his childhood, driven by like ghosts. Everything he saw and touched was strange and familiar as a dream — a life which he had known utterly and which now vanished from his grasp whenever he approached it — his for ever, buried in his blood and memory, never to be made his own again.
When he returned home it was after midnight and his mother’s old gaunt house was dark. He went quietly up the steps and into the broad front hall, closing the heavy door quietly behind him. For a minute he stood there in that living dark, the ancient and breathing darkness of that old house which seemed to speak to him with all the thousand voices of its vanished lives — with all the shapes and presences of things and people he had known, who had been there, and who had passed or vanished, or had died.
Then quietly he groped his way along the dark old hall and towards the kitchen and the little room beyond in which his mother slept.
When he got to the kitchen the room was dark save for the soft flare and crumble of the fading ashes in the old coal range. But the kitchen was still warm, with a curious and recent currency of warmth and silence, as if it were still filled with his mother’s life and as if she had just been there.
He turned on the light and for a minute stood looking at the familiar old table with its sheathing of ragged battered zinc, and at the ironing board with its great stack of freshly ironed and neatly folded linen; and he knew that she had worked there late.
Suddenly, a desperate urge, an overmastering desire to see her, speak to her, awoke in him. He thought that if he could only see her now he could reveal himself to her, explain the purpose of his failure, the certainty of his success. He was sure that now, if ever, he could speak to her and say the things he had always wished to say but never said — speak the unspeakable, find a tongue for the unspoken language, make her understand his life, his purpose, and his heart’s desire, as he had never done before. And filled with this wild hope, this impossible conviction, he strode towards the closed door of her little room to arouse her.
Then, abruptly, he paused. Upon an old cupboard, in a glass half-filled with water, he saw, as he had seen a thousand times, grinning at him with a prognathous, a strangely human bleakness, the false teeth she had put there when she went to bed. And suddenly he knew he could not speak to her. For grotesque, ugly, and absurd as they were, those grinning teeth evolved for him, somehow, as nothing else on earth could do, the whole image of his mother’s life of grief and toil and labour — the intolerable memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And he knew then that he could not speak, that there was nothing he could say to her.
He rapped gently at the door and in a moment heard her voice, quick, sharp, and startled, roused from sleep, saying: “Hah? . . . what say? . . . who’s there?”
He answered: in a moment she opened the door and stood there, her face startled, curiously small and white and sunken, somehow like a child’s. When he spoke to her she answered incoherently: and then she smiled in an apologetic and embarrassed manner, and covered her mouth shyly with one hand, while she extended her other for the glass that held her teeth. He turned his head away: when he looked again her face had taken on its familiar contour, and she was saying in her usual tone: “Hah? . . . What is it, son?”
“Nothing, Mama,” he said awkwardly. “I— I didn’t know you were asleep . . . I— I— just came in to say good night, Mama.”
“Good night, son,” she said, and turned her white cheek up to him. He kissed it briefly.
“Now go and get some sleep,” she said. “It’s late and you’ve all your packing to do yet when you get up tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “ . . . I guess you’re right. . . . Well, good night.” And he kissed her again.
“Good night,” she said. “Turn out the lights, won’t you, before you go to bed.”
And as he turned the kitchen light out he heard her door close quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old house was all around him as he went down the hall. And a thousand voices — his father’s, his brothers’, and of the child that he himself had been, and all the lives and voices of the hundred others, the lost, the vanished people — were whispering to him as he went down the old dark hall there in his mother’s house. And the remote demented wind was howling in the barren trees, as he had heard it do so many times in childhood, and far off, far-faint and broken by the wind he heard the wailing cry of the great train, bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and darkness, new lands, and a shining city. And there was something wild and dark and secret in him that he could never utter. The strange and bitter miracle of life had filled him and he could not speak, and all he knew was that he was leaving home for ever, that the world, the future of dark time and of man’s destiny lay before him, and that he would never live here in his mother’s house again.