A fist smacked into his mouth. The light caught his face as he was jolted back, but I hardly needed its revelation to confirm my recognition of Colonel Tolliburr's voice. The Confederate agents had brass knuckles and blackjacks, Colonel Tolliburr had a swordcane which he unsheathed with a glinting flourish. The Grand Army men flashed knives; no one seemed to be using air pistols or spring-powered guns.
Both sides were intent on keeping the clash as quiet and inconspicuous as possible; no one shouted with anger or screamed in pain. This muffled intensity made the struggle more gruesome; the contenders fought their natural impulses as well as each other. I heard the impact of blows, the grunts of effort, the choked-back cries, the scraping of shoes on pavement, and the thud of falls. One of the defenders fell, and two of the attackers, before the two remaining Southrons gave up the battle and attempted escape.
With united impulse they started for the minibile, evidently realized they wouldn't have time to get up power, and began running down the street. Their moment of indecision did for them. As the four Grand Army men closed in I saw the Confederates raise their arms in the traditional gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.
I crept noiselessly down on the off side of the van and hastened quietly away in the protection of the shadows.
IX. BARBARA
For the next few days reading was pure pretense. I used the opened book to mask my privacy while I trembled not so much with fear as with horror. I had been brought up in a harsh enough world, and murder was no novelty in New York; I had seen slain men before, but this was the first time I had been confronted with naked, merciless savagery. Though I believed Sprovis would have had no qualms about dispatching an inconvenient witness if I had stayed on the van, I had no particular fear for my own safety, for my knowledge of what had happened became less dangerous daily. The terror of the deed itself, however, remained constant.
I was not concerned solely with revulsion. Inquisitiveness looked out under loathing to make me wonder what lay behind the night's events. What had really happened, and what did it all mean?
From scraps of conversation accidentally heard or deliberately eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction and remembered fragments, I reconstructed the picture which made the background. Its borders reached a long way from Astor Place.
For years the world had been waiting, half in dread, half in resignation, for war to break out between the world's two great powers, the German Union and the Confederate States. Some expected the point of explosion would be the Confederacy's ally, the British Empire; most anticipated at least part of the war would be fought in the United States.
The scheme of the Grand Army, or of that part of it which included Tyss, was apparently a far-fetched and fantastic attempt to circumvent the probable course of history. The counterfeiting was an aspect of this attempt which was nothing less than trying to force the war to start, not through the Confederacy's ally, but through the German Union's—the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts of the spurious currency circulated by emissaries posing as Confederate agents, the Grand Army hoped to embroil the Confederacy with Spain and possibly preserve the neutrality of the United States. It was an ingenuous idea evolved, I see now, by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of world politics.
If I ever had any sentimental notions about the Army, they vanished now. Tyss's mechanism may not have been purposefully designed to palliate, but it made it easy to justify actions like Sprovis's. I had no such convenient way of numbing my conscience. But even as I brooded over the weakness and cowardice which made me an accomplice, I looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I would leave the bookstore for his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act should be to tell him everything. And then that dream was exploded just as it was about to be realized.
I do not know who it was that broke into the consulate or for what reason, and was surprised in the act, shooting and wounding Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak for the weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not have gotten in touch with me, and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he was both an accredited diplomat and a black man.
I did not know who shot him. It was most unlikely to be anyone connected with the Grand Army, but I did not know. I could not know. He
The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was the least of my despair. It seemed to me I was caught by the inexorable, choiceless circumstance in which Tyss so firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I could escape neither my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further guilt. I could not change destiny.
Was all this merely the self-torture of any introverted young man? Possibly. I only know that for a long time, long as one in his early twenties measures time, I lost all interest in life, even dallying with thoughts of suicide. I put books aside distastefully or, which was worse, indifferently.
I must have done my work around the store; certainly I recall no comments from Tyss about it. Neither can I remember anything to distinguish the succession of days. Obviously I ate and slept; there were undoubtedly long hours free from utter hopelessness. The details of those months have simply vanished.
Nor can I say precisely when it was my despair began to lift. I know that one day—it was cold and the snow was deep on the ground, deep enough to keep the minibiles off the streets and cause the horsecars trouble—I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick visible puffs, and my glance was not apathetic. When I returned to the bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart's
Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer the same Hodge Backmaker. For the first time I was determined to do what I wanted instead of waiting and hoping events would somehow turn out right for me. Somehow I was going to free myself from the bookstore and all its frustrations and evils.
This resolution was reinforced by the discovery that I was exhausting the volumes around me. The books I sought now were rare and ever more difficult to find. Innocent of knowledge about academic life I imagined them ready to hand in any college library.
Nor was I any longer satisfied with the printed word alone. My friendship with Enfandin had shown me how fruitful a personal, face-to-face relationship between teacher and student could be, and it seemed to me such ties could develop into ones between fellow scholars, a mutual, uncompetitive pursuit of knowledge.
Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original sources: unpublished manuscripts of participants or onlookers, old diaries and letters, wills or account books, which might shade a meaning or subtly change the interpretation of old, forgotten actions.
My problems could be solved ideally by an instructorship at some college, but how was this to be achieved without the patronage of a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no credentials worth a second's consideration. Though the immigration bars kept out graduates of foreign universities, no college in the United States would accept a self- taught young man who had not only little Latin and less Greek, but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at all. For a long time I considered possible ways and means, both drab and dramatic; at last, more in a spirit of whimsical absurdity than sober hope, I wrote out a letter of application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined myself to possess, assaying the extent of my learning with a generosity only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining the work I projected for my future. With much care and many revisions I set this composition in type. It was undoubtedly a foolish gesture, but not having access to so costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal this by penning the letters by hand, I resorted to this transparent device.
Tyss picked up one of the copies I struck off and glanced over it. His expression was critical. “Is it too bad?” I asked despondently.
“You should have used more leading. And lined it up and justified the lines and eliminated hyphens. Setting type can never be done mechanically or half heartedly—that's why no one yet has been able to invent a practical typesetting machine. I'm afraid you'll never make a passable printer, Hodgins.”
He was concerned only with typesetting, uninterested in the outcome. Or satisfied, since it was predetermined, that comment was superfluous.
