the street toward his home. Already he should have been hearing the lawn mower, and then in the instant of exasperation at Jake, he remarked the line of motor cars before his gate and a sudden haste came upon him. But not so much but what, looking at the vehicle at the head of the line, he cursed again.
“Damn that Pettigrew! I told him, in the presence of witnesses when I signed my will, that I would not be hauled feet first through Jefferson at forty miles an hour. That if he couldn’t find me a decent pair of horses… I am a good mind to come back and haunt him, as Jake would have me do.”
But the haste, the urgency, was upon him. He hurried round to the back door (he remarked that the lawn was freshly and neatly trimmed, as though done that day) and entered. Then he could smell the flowers faintly and hear the voice; he had just time to slip out of his overcoat and pajamas and leave them hanging neatly in the closet, and cross the hall into the odor of cut flowers and the drone of the voice, and slip into his clothes. They had been recently pressed, and his face had been shaved too. Nevertheless they were his own, and he fitted himself to the olden and familiar embrace which no iron could change, with the same lascivious eagerness with which he shaped his limbs to the bedclothes on a winter night.
“Ah!” he said to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “this is best, after all. An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”
Now the light vanished with a mute, faint, decorous hollow sound which drove for a fading instant down upon him the dreadful, macabre smell of slain flowers; at the same time he became aware that the droning voice had ceased. “In my own house too,” he thought, waiting for the smell of the flowers to fade; “yet I did not once think to notice who was speaking, nor when he ceased.” Then he heard or felt the decorous scuffing of feet about him, and he lay in the close dark, his hands folded upon his breast as he slept, as the old sleep, waiting for the moment. It came. He said quietly aloud, quizzical, humorous, peaceful, as he did each night in his bed in his lonely and peaceful room when a last full exhalation had emptied his body of waking and he seemecj for less than an instant to look about him from the portal of sleep, “Gentlemen of the Jury, you may proceed.”
Black Music
I
THIS is about Wilfred Midgleston, fortune’s favorite, chosen of the gods. For fifty-six years, a clotting of the old gutful compulsions and circumscriptions of clocks and bells, he met walking the walking image of a small, snuffy, nondescript man whom neither man nor woman had ever turned to look at twice, in the monotonous shop windows of monotonous hard streets. Then his apotheosis soared glaring, and to him at least not brief, across the unfathomed sky above his lost earth like that of Elijah of old.
I found him in Rincon, which is not large; less large even than one sway-backed tanker looming above the steel docks of the Universal Oil Company and longer than the palm and abode-lined street paved with dust marked by splayed naked feet where the violent shade lies by day and the violent big stars by night.
“He came from the States,” they told me. “Been here twenty-five years. He hasn’t changed at all since the day he arrived, except that the clothes he came in have wore out and he hasn’t learned more than ten words of Spanish.” That was the only way you could tell that he was an old man, that he was getting along: he hadn’t learned to speak hardly a word of the language of the people with whom he had lived twenty-five years and among whom it appeared that he intended to die and be buried. Appeared: he had no job: a mild, hopelessly mild man who looked like a book-keeper in a George Ade fable dressed as a tramp for a Presbyterian social charade in 1890, and quite happy.
Quite happy and quite poor. “He’s either poor, or he’s putting up an awful front. But they can’t touch him now. We told him that a long time ago, when he first come here. We said, ‘Why don’t you go on and spend it, enjoy it? They’ve probably forgot all about it by now.’ Because if I went to the trouble and risk of stealing and then the hardship of having to live the rest of my life in a hole like this, I’d sure enjoy what I went to the trouble to get.”
“Enjoy what?” I said.
“The money. The money he stole and had to come down here. What else do you reckon he would come down here and stay twenty-five years for? just to look at the country?”
“He doesn’t act and look very rich,” I said.
“That’s a fact. But a fellow like that. His face. I don’t guess he’d have judgment enough to steal good. And not judgment enough to keep it, after he got it stole. I guess you are right. I guess all he got out of it was the running away and the blame. While somebody back there where he run from is spending the money and singing loud in the choir twice a week.”
“Is that what happens?” I said.
“You’re damned right it is. Some damn fellow that’s too rich to afford to be caught stealing sets back and leaves a durn fool that never saw twenty-five hundred dollars before in his life at one time, pull his chestnuts for him. Twenty-five hundred seems a hell of a lot when somebody else owns it. But when you have got to pick up overnight and run a thousand miles, paying all your expenses, how long do you think twenty-five hundred will last?”
“How long did it last?” I said.
“Just about two years by God. And then there I…” He stopped. He glared at me, who had paid for the coffee and the bread which rested upon the table between us. He glared at me. “Who do you think you are, anyway? Wm. J. Burns?”
“I don’t think so. I meant no offense. I just was curious to know how long his twenty-five hundred dollars lasted him.”
“Who said he had twenty-five hundred dollars? I was just citing an example. He never had nothing, not even twenty-five hundred cents. Or if he did, he hid it and it’s stayed hid ever since. He come here sponging on us white men, and when we got tired of it he took to sponging on these Spigs. And a white man has got pretty low when he’s got so stingy with his stealings that he will live with Spiggotties before he’ll dig up his own money and live like a white man.”
“Maybe he never stole any money,” I said.
“What’s he doing down here, then?”
“I’m down here.”
“I don’t know you ain’t run, either.”
“That’s so,” I said. “You don’t know.”
“Sure I don’t. Because that’s your business. Every man has got his own private affairs, and no man respects them quicker than I do. But I know that a man, a white man, has got to have durn good reason… Maybe he ain’t got it now. But you can’t tell me a white man would come down here to live and die without no reason.”
“And you consider that stealing money is the only reason?”
He looked at me, with disgust and a little contempt. “Did you bring a nurse with you? Because you ought to have, until you learn enough about human nature to travel alone. Because human nature, I don’t care who he is nor how loud he sings in church, will steal whenever he thinks he can get away with it. If you ain’t learned that yet, you better go back home and stay there where your folks can take care of you.”
But I was watching Midgleston across the street. He was standing beside a clump of naked children playing in the shady dust: a small, snuffy man in a pair of dirty drill trousers which had not been made for him. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to worry him.”
“Oh. Him. He ain’t got sense enough to know he needs to worry about nothing.”
Quite poor and quite happy. His turn to have coffee and bread with me came at last. No: that’s wrong. I at last succeeded in evading his other down-at-heel compatriots like my first informant; men a little soiled and usually unshaven, who were unavoidable in the cantinas and coffee shops, loud, violent, maintaining the superiority of the
