Mr. Michael Walter Creech, the butcher, having finished his hearty breakfast of calves’ liver, eggs and bacon, hot biscuits and coffee, made a sign to one of the waiting row of negro boys. The line sprang forward like hounds; he stopped them with a curse and a lifted cleaver. The fortunate youth who had been chosen then came forward and took the tray, still richly morselled with food and a pot half full of coffee. As he had to depart at this moment on a delivery, he put it down in the sawdust at the end of the bench and spat copiously upon it in order to protect it from his scavenging comrades. Then he wheeled off, full of rich laughter and triumphant malice. Mr. Creech looked at his niggers darkly.
The town had so far forgotten Mr. Creech’s own African blood (an eighth on his father’s side, old Walter Creech, out of Yellow Jenny) that it was about ready to offer him political preferment; but Mr. Creech himself had not forgotten. He glanced bitterly at his brother, Jay, who, happily ignorant of hatred, that fanged poison which may taint even a brother’s heart, was enthusiastically cleaving spareribs on the huge bole of his own table, singing meanwhile in a rich tenor voice the opening bars of “The Little Gray Home in the West”:
“… there are blue eyes that shine
Just because they meet mine …”
Mr. Creech looked venomously at Jay’s yellow jowls, the fat throbbing of his jaundiced throat, the crisp singed whorl of his hair.
By God, he thought in his anguish of spirit, he might be taken for a Mexican.
Jay’s golden voice neared its triumph, breaking with delicate restraint, on the last note, into a high sweet falsetto which he maintained for more than twenty seconds. All of the butchers stopped working, several of them, big strong men with grown-up families dashed a tear out of their eyes.
The great audience was held spellbound. Not a soul stirred. Not even a dog or a horse stirred. As the last sweet note melted away in a gossamer tremolo, a silence profound as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself, betokened the highest triumph the artist is destined to know upon this earth. Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed and collapsed in a faint. She was immediately carried out by two Boy Scouts who happened to be present, and who administered first aid to her in the restroom, one of them hastily kindling a crackling fire of pine boughs by striking two flints together, while the other made a tourniquet, and tied several knots in his handkerchief. Then pandemonium broke loose. Women tore the jewels from their fingers, ropes of pearls from their necks, chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and daisies from their expensive corsages, while the fashionably-dressed men in the nearby stalls kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes, lettuces, new potatoes, beef-tallow, pigs’ knuckles, fish-heads, clams, loin-chops, and pork-sausages.
Among the stalls of the market, the boardinghouse keepers of Altamont walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and inquisitive nose. They were of various sizes and ages, but they were all stamped with the print of haggling determination and a pugnacious closure of the mouth. They pried in among the fish and vegetables, pinching cabbages, weighing onions, exfoliating lettuce-heads. You’ve got to keep your eye on people or they’ll skin you. And if you leave things to a lazy shiftless nigger she’ll waste more than she cooks. They looked at one another hardfaced—Mrs. Barrett of the Grosvenor at Mrs. Neville of Glen View; Mrs. Ambler of the Colonial at Miss Mamie Featherstone of Ravencrest; Mrs. Ledbetter of the Belvedere—
“I hear you’re full up, Mrs. Coleman,” said she inquiringly.
“O, I’m full up all the time,” said Mrs. Coleman. “My people are all permanents, I don’t want to fool with the transients,” she said loftily.
“Well,” said Mrs. Ledbetter acidly, “I could fill my house up at any time with lungers who call themselves something else, but I won’t have them. I was saying the other day—”
Mrs. Michalove of Oakwood at Mrs. Jarvis of The Waverley; Mrs. Cowan of Ridgmont at—
The city is splendidly equipped to meet the demands of the great and steadily growing crowd of tourists that fill the Mountain Metropolis during the busy months of June, July, and August. In addition to eight hotels de luxe of the highest quality, there were registered at the Board of Trade in 1911 over 250 private hotels, boardinghouses and sanitariums all catering to the needs of those who come on missions of business, pleasure, or health.
Stop their baggage at the station.
At this moment Number 3, having finished his route, stepped softly on to the slime-scummed porch of the house on Valley Street, rapped gently at the door, and opened it quietly, groping his way through black miasmic air to the bed in which May Corpening lay. She muttered as if drugged as he touched her, turned toward him, and sleepily awakened, drew him down to her with heavied and sensual caress, yoked under her big coppery arms. Tom Cline clumped greasily up the steps of his residence on Bartlett Street, swinging his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office with Harry Tugman; and Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street, waking suddenly to Gant’s powerful command from the foot of the stairs, turned his face full into a momentary vision of roseflushed blue sky and tender blossoms that drifted slowly earthward.
XV
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Old haunt-eyed faces glimmered in his memory. He thought of Swain’s cow, St. Louis, death, himself in the cradle. He was the haunter of himself, trying for a moment to recover what he had been part of. He did not understand change, he did not
