There was no more in the journal. There was only the letter to Gilbert, written in the strange hand, dictated by Cass after he had gown to weak to write. "Remember me, but without grief. If one of us is lucky, it is I …"
Atlanta fell. In the last confusion, the grave of Cass Mastern was not marked. Someone at the hospital, a certain Albert Calloway, kept Cass's papers and the ring he had carried on the cord around his neck, and much later, after the war in fact, sent them to Gilbert Mastern with a courteous note. Gilbert preserved the journal, the letters from Cass, the picture of Cass, and the ring on the cord, and after Gilbert's death, the heir finally sent the packet to Jack Burden, the student of history. So they came to rest on the little pine table in Jack Burden's bedroom in the slatternly apartment which he occupied with the two other graduate students, the unlucky, industrious, and alcoholic one, and the lucky, idle, and alcoholic one.
Jack Burden lived with the Mastern papers for a year and a half. He wanted to know all the facts of the world in which Cass and Gilbert Mastern had lived, and he did many of the facts. And he felt that he knew Gilbert Mastern Gilbert Mastern had kept no journal, but Jack Burden felt that he knew him, the man with the head like the block of bare granite, who had lived through one world into another and had been at home in both. But the day came when Jack Burden sat down at the pine table and realized that he did not know Cass Mastern. He did not have to know Cass Mastern to get the degree; he only had to know the facts about Cass Mastern's world. But without knowing Cass Mastern, he could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern's world. Not that Jack Burden said that to himself. He simply sat there at the pine table, night after night, staring at the photograph, and writing nothing, Then he would get up to get a drink of water, and would stand in the dark kitchen, holding and old jelly glass in his hand, waiting for the water to run cold from the tap.
I have said that Jack Burden could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern's world because he did not know Cass Mastern. Jack Burden did not say definitely to himself why he did not know Cass Mastern. But I (who am what Jack Burden became) look back now, years later, and try to say why.
Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but spring out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. You happy foot or you gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.
But how could Jack Burden, being what it he was, understand that? He could read the words written many years before in the lonely plantation house after Cass Mastern had freed his slaves or in the lawyer's room in Jackson, Mississippi, or by candlelight in the hotel room in Vicksburg after the conversation with Jefferson Davis or by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrus rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men. Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.
Or perhaps, he laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him.
In any case, he laid aside the journal and entered upon one of the periods of the Great Sleep. He would come home in the evening, and because he knew that he could not work he would go to bed immediately. He would sleep twelve hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours, feeling himself, while asleep, plunge deeper and deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water feeling for something which may be there and which would glitter if there were any light in the depth, but there isn't any light. Then in the morning he would lie in bed, not wanting anything, not even hungry, hearing the small sounds of the world sneaking and seeping back into the room, under the door, through the glass, through the cracks in the wall, through the very pores of the wood and plaster. Then he would think: _If I don't get up I can't go back to bed__. And he would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
Then one morning he went out into that world and did not come back to the room and the pine table. The black books, in which the journal was written, the ring, the photograph, the packet of letters were left there, beside the thick stack of manuscript, the complete works of Jack Burden, which was already beginning to curl at the edges under the paperweight.
Some weeks later, the landlady of the apartment sent him a big parcel, collect, containing the stuff he had left on the little pine table. The parcel, unopened, traveled around with him from furnished room to furnished room, to the apartment where he lived for a while with his beautiful wife Lois until the time came when he just walked out the door and didn't come back; to the other furnished rooms and hotel rooms, a big squarish parcel with the brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name _Mr. Jack Burden__ fading slowly.
Chapter Five
That was the end of my first journey into the enchantments of the past, my first job of historical research. It was, as I have indicated, not a success. But the second job was a sensational success. It was the "Case of the Upright Judge" and I had every reason to congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant something.
It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was hat Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), "There is always something."
And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."
The black Cadillac made its humming sound through the night and the tires sang on the slab and the black fields streaked with mist swept by. Sugar-Boy was hunched over the wheel, which looked too big for him, and the Boss sat straight up, up there in the front seat. I could see the black mass of his head against the tunnel of light down which we raced. Then I dozed off.
It was the stopping of the car that woke me up. I realized that we were back at the Stark place. I crawled out of the car. The Boss was already out, standing in the yard, just inside the gate in the starlight; Sugar-Boy was locking the car doors.
When I went into the yard, the Boss said, "Sugar-Boy is going to sleep on the couch downstairs, but there's a cot made up for you upstairs, second door on the left at the head of the stairs. Your better get some shut-eye, for tomorrow you start digging for what the Judge dropped."
"It will be a long dig," I said.
"Look here," he said, "if you don't want to do it you don't have to. I can always pay somebody else. Or do you want a raise?"
"No, I don't want a raise," I said.
"I am raising you a hundred a month, whether you want it or not."
"Give it to the church," I said. "If I wanted money, I could think of easier ways to make it than the way I make with you."
"So you work for me because you love me," the Boss said.
"I don't know why I work for you, but it's not because I love you. And not for money."
"No," he said, standing there in the dark, "you don't know why you work for me. But I know," he said, and laughed.
Sugar-Boy came into the yard, said good night, and went into the house.
"Why?" I asked.
"Boy," he said, "you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things."
"That's a hell of a fine explanation."
"It's not an explanation," he said, and laughed again. "There ain't any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see 'em."
"I'm not smart enough," I said.
"You're smart enough to dig up whatever it is on the Judge."
"There may not be anything."
"Nuts," he said. "Go to bed."
"Aren't you coming to bed?"
"No," he said, and I left him walking across the yard in the dark, with his head bowed a little, and his hands clasped behind him, walking casually as though he had come out to stroll through the park on Sunday afternoon. But it was not afternoon: it was 3:15 A.M.
I lay on the cot upstairs, but I didn't go right to sleep. I thought about Judge Irwin. About the way he had looked at me that very night from his tall old head, the way the yellow eyes had glittered and the lip curled over the strong old yellow teeth as he said, "I'm dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?" But that didn't last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn't an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board. But that didn't last, and the face leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, I'll make a duck hunter out of you yet." And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out and demand, "Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?" But the face only smile, and I went to sleep. Before I could say anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.
Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat, to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in the rose, to find the deceased fly among the raising in the rice pudding.
I found it.
But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you find it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an opportunity to use my technique.
I took the first step the next afternoon while I sat in a beer parlor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles. I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: "For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?"
I answered: "Ambition, love, fear, money."
I asked: "Is the Judge ambitious?"
I answered: No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to thing he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn't care what other people think."
I asked: "What about love?"
I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings[u41], but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything on anybody it isn't long before everybody knows it.
I asked: "Is the Judge a man to scare easy?"
I answered: "He does not scare easy."
That left money.
So I asked: "Does the Judge love money?"
"All the money the Judge wants is just enough money the make the Judge happy."
I asked: "Was there ever a time when the Judge didn't have enough money to make the Judge happy?" But naturally that wouldn't be chicken feed.
I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my mind. I did not know the answer. Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense, rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopping talking because I had come into the room and was not supposed to know what they were talking about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about? I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze of the Gulf later. If we were lucky.
I got a taxi finally, and said, "Corner South Fifth and Saint-Etienne Street," and fell back on the leather to listen to the tires hiss through the wetness like something frying in a skillet. I was riding to the answer about the Judge. If the man who had the answer would tell me.
The man was the man who had been the Judge's close friend for many a year, his other self, his Damon, his Jonathan, his brother. That man was the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney. He would know.
I stood on the pavement, in front of the Mexican restaurant, where the juke box made the jellylike air palpitate, and paid my taxi and turned to look up at the third floor of the building which vibrated around the juke box. The signs were still up there, hung by wire from the little iron balcony, nailed to the wall, wooden boards painted different colors, some white, some red, some black, some green, with lettering in contrasted colors. A big sign hanging from the balcony said: _God is not mocked__. Another sign said: _Now is the Day of Salvation__.
_Yeah__, I said to myself, _he still lives here__. He lived there above a spick restaurant, and nigger children played naked in the next block among starving cats, and nigger women sat on the steps after the sun got low and fanned right slow with palm-leaf fans. I reached for a cigarette as I prepared to enter the doorway of the stairs, but found I had none. So I went into the restaurant, where the juke box was grinding to a halt.
To the old woman who stood behind the beer bar squatly like a leg and whose eyebrows were very thorny and white against the brown Mexican skin and black _rebozo__, I said, "_Cigarrillos?__"
"_Que tipo?__" she asked.
"Lucky," I said, and as she laid them before me, I pointed upward, and asked, "The old man, is he upstairs?" But she looked blank, so I said, "_Esta arriba el viejo?__" And felt pleased with myself for getting it off.
"_Quien sabe?__" she replied. "_Viene y va__."
So he came and went. Upon the Lord's business.
The a voice said in tolerable English, from the shadows at the end of the bar, "The old man has gone out."
"Thank you," I replied to the old man, a Mexican, who was propped there in a chair. I turned back to the old woman, and said, "Give me a beer," and pointed to the spigot.
While I drank the beer I looked up above the counter and saw another one of the signs, painted on a big slab of plywood, or something of the sort, hanging from a nail. The background of the sign was bright red, there were blue scrolls of flowers in relief in the upper corner, the lettering was in black, high-lighted in white. It said: _Repent ye; for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Matt., iii,2.__
I pointed to the sign. "_De el?__ I asked. "The old man's huh?"
"_Si, seٌor__," the old woman said. Then added irrelevantly, "_Es como un santito__."
"He may be a saint," I agreed, "but he is also nuts."
"Nutz?"
She said nothing to that, and I continued with the beer until the old Mexican at the end of the bar suddenly said, "Look, here comes the old one!"
Turning, I saw the black-clothed figure through the dingy glass of the door; then the door pushed open and he entered, older than I remember, the white patches of hair hanging damply from under the old Panama hat, the steel-rimmed spectacles dangerously loose on the nose and the pale eyes behind, the shoulders stooped and drawn together as though pulled by the obscene, disjunctive, careful weight of the belly, as though it were the heavy tray, or satchel, worn by some hawker on a street corner. The black coat did not button across the belly.
He stood there, blinking gravely to me, apparently not recognizing me, for he had come from the last sunshine into the dimness of the restaurant.
"Good evening, _seٌor__," the old Mexican said to the Scholarly Attorney.
"_Buenas tardes__," the woman said.
The Scholarly Attorney took off his Panama and turned to the woman, and bowed slightly, with a motion of the head which stirred suddenly in my mind the picture of the long room in the white house by the sea, the picture of a man, the same but different, younger, the hair not gray, in that room. "Good evening," he said to the woman, and then turning to the old Mexican, repeated, "Good evening, sir."
The old Mexican pointed at me, and said, "He waits."
At that the Scholarly Attorney first, I believe, really observed me. But he did not recognize me, blinking at me in the dimness. Certainly he had no reason to expect to find me there.
"Hello," I said, "don't you know me?"
"Yes," he said, and continued to peer at me. He offered me his hand, and I took it, It was clammy in my grasp.
"Let's get out of here," I said.
"Do you want the bread?" the old Mexican asked.
The Scholarly Attorney turned to him. "Yes, thank you. If it is convenient."
The Mexican rose, went to the end of the counter, and took a largish brown paper bag full of something, and handed it to the other.
"Thank you," the Scholarly Attorney said, "thank you very much, sir."
"_De nada__," the Mexican said, bowing.
"I wish you a good evening," the Scholarly Attorney said, and bowed to the man, then to the woman, with an inclination of the head which again twitched the old recollection in me of the room in the white house by the sea.
Then I followed him out of the restaurant, into the street. Across the street lay the little park of trampled brown grass, now glistening with moisture, where the bums sat on benches and the pigeons cooed softly like an easy conscience and defecated in delicate little lime-white pinches on the cement around the fountain. I looked at the pigeons, then at the bulged-open bag, which, I observed, was full of bread crusts. "Are you going to feed the pigeons?" I asked.
"No, it is for George," he said, moving toward the doorway that led above.
"You keeping a dog?"
"No," he said, and led the way into the vestibule, and up the wooden stairs.
"What is George, then? A parrot?"
"No," he said, wheezily, for the steps were steep, "George is an unfortunate."
That meant, I remembered, a bum. An unfortunate is a bum who is fortunate enough to get his foot inside a softy's door and stay there. If he gets a good berth he is promoted from bum to unfortunate. The Scholarly Attorney had, on several occasions before, taken in unfortunates. One unfortunate had popped the organist down at the mission where the Scholarly Attorney operated. Another unfortunate had lifted his watch and Phi Beta Kappa key.
So George was another unfortunate. I looked at the bread, and said, "Well, he must be pretty unfortunate if that's what he's got to eat.
"He eats some of it," the Scholarly Attorney said, "but that is almost accidental. He uses it in his work. But some of it slips down, I am sure, and that is why he is never hungry. Except for sweets," he added.
"How in God's name does he use bread crusts in his work and the bread crusts slip down his throat?"
"Do not take the name of the Lord in vain," he said. And added, "George's work, it's very clever. And artistic. You will see."
I saw. We got to the top of the second flight, turned in the narrow hall under cracked skylight, and entered a door. There was what I took to be George, in one corner of the big, sparsely furnished room, sitting tailor-fashion on a piece of old blanket, with a couple of big mixing bowls in front of him., and a big piece of plywood about two feet by four lying on the floor by him.
George looked up when we came in and said, "I ain't got any more bread."
"Here it is," the Scholarly Attorney said, and took the brown bag to him.
George emptied the crusts into one of the bowls, then stuck a piece into his mouth and began to chew, soberly and purposively. He was a fair-sized, muscular man, with a hell of a strong-looking neck, and the tendons [u42] in his neck worked and pulled slickly while he chewed. He had yellow hair, almost gone, and a smooth, flat face with blue eyes. While he chewed he just looked straight ahead at a spot cross the room.
"What does he do that for?" I asked.
"He's making an angel."
"Well," I said. And just then George leaned forward over one of the bowls and let the thoroughly masticated bread drop from his mouth into the bowl. The he put another crust into his mouth.
"There is one he has finished," the Scholarly Attorney said, and pointed at another corner of the room, where another piece of plywood was propped up. I went to examine it. At one end, the figure of an angel, with wings and flowing drapery, had been executed in bas-relief in what looked like putty. "That one is just drying," the Scholarly Attorney said. "When it gets good and dry, he'll color it. Then he'll shellac it. Then the board will be painted and a motto put on it."
"Very pretty," I said.
"He makes statues of angels, too. See," and he went to a kitchen safe, and opened it, to expose a shelf of dishes and pots and another with an array of gaudy angels.
I examined the angels. While I did so, the Scholarly Attorney took a can of soup, a loaf of bread, and some soft butter out of the safe, put them on the table in the center of the room, and lighted one of the burners on the two-burner plate in the corner. "Will you join me in my supper?" he asked.
"No, thanks," I said, and continued to stare at the angels.
"He sometimes sells them on the street," he said, pouring out his soup into a stewpan, "but he can't bear to sell the best ones."
"Are these the best ones?" I asked.
"Yes," the Scholarly Attorney replied. And added, "They are pretty good, aren't they?"
I said, "Yes," for there wasn't anything else to say. Then' looking at the artist, asked, "Doesn't he make anything but angels? What about Kewpie dolls and bulldogs?"
"He makes angels. Because of what happened."
"What happened?"
"His wife," the Scholarly Attorney said, stirring the soup in the stewpan. "On account of her he makes angels. They were in a circus, you know."
"No, I didn't know."
"Yes, they were what you call aerialists. She did the angel act. She had large white wings, George said."
"White wings," George said through the bread, but it was a sound like _wite whungs__, and he fluttered his big hands like wings, and smiled.
"She fell down a long way with white wings which fluttered as though she were flying," the Scholarly Attorney continued, explaining patiently.
And one day the rope broke," I affirmed.
"Something went wrong with the apparatus. It affected George very deeply."
"How about the way it affected her?"
The old man ignored my wit, and said, "He got so he could not perform his act."
"What was his act?"
"He was the man who got hanged."
"Oh," I said, and looked at George. That accounted for the big neck, no doubt. Then, "Did the apparatus go wrong with him and choke him or something?"
"No," the Scholarly Attorney said, "the whole matter simply grew distasteful to him."
"Distasteful?" I said.
"Yes, distasteful. Matter came to such a pass that he could not perform happily in his chosen profession. He dreamed of falling every time he went to sleep. And he would wet his bed like a child."
"Falling, falling," George said through the bread, with a sound like _fawing, fawing__, but still smiled brightly in the midst of the chewing.
"One day when he got up on his platform with the loop around his neck, he could not jump. In fact, he could not move at all. He sank down on the platform and crouched there weeping. They had to remove him bodily, and bring him down," the Scholarly Attorney said. "Then for some time he was completely paralyzed."
"It sound," I said, "like that hanging act must have got pretty distasteful to him. As you so quaintly put it."
"He was completely paralyzed," he repeated, ignoring my wit. "Through no physical cause–if–" he pause–"anything ever comes to pass from a physical cause. For the physical world, though it exists and it existence cannot be denied without blasphemy, is never cause, it is only result, only symptom, it is the clay under the thumb of the potter and we–" He stopped, the gleam which has started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which lifted to gesticulate sank. He leaned above the gas plate and stirred the soup. He resumed, "The trouble was here," and he laid a finger to his own forehead. "It was his spirit. Spirit is always cause–I tell you–" He stopped, shook his head, and peered at me before he said sadly, "But you do not understand."
"I reckon not," I agreed "He recovered from the paralysis," he said. "But George is not exactly a well man. He cannot bear high places. He will not look out the window. He covers his eyes with his hands when I lead him downstairs to go on the street to sell his artistic work. So I take him down only rarely now. He will not sit on a chair or sleep in a bed. He must always be on the floor. He does not like to stand. His legs simply collapse and he begins to cry. It is fortunate he has always had his artistic bent. It helps him to take his mind off thing. And he prays a good deal. I taught him to pray. That helps. I get up and pray and he says the prayers after me. When he wakes at night with the dreams and cannot sleep."
"Does he still wet the bed?" I asked.
"Sometimes," the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.
I looked at George. He was weeping silently, the tears running down his smooth, flat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a beat on the bread. "Look at him," I said.
The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. "Stupid, stupid," he muttered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional flake or two of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, "stupid of me to be talking that way with him listening. Stupid–I'm an old man and I forget–" and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a spoon, and went to George. "Look, look," he said, leaning, with a spoon of soup thrust toward George's face, "good, it's good soup–soup–take some soup."
But the tears continued to flow out of George's eyes, and he didn't open his mouth. But the jaws weren't working on the bread now. They were just shut tight.
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