Bring the Jubilee

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged. Note in particular that the apostrophe is very rarely used to indicate abbreviation.

The cover was prepared by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Bring
the
Jubilee

By Ward Moore

_Breathe the Air Again
Greener Than You Think
Bring the Jubilee

This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by FARRAR, STRAUS & YOUNG, INC. The low price of $2.00 is made possible by large printings of combined editions.

FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, Inc.
NEW YORK

Copyright 1952 Fantasy House, Inc.
Copyright 1953 Ward Moore
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the  U. S. A.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 53-10417

BACK COVER MAP: BETTMANN ARCHIVE

For
TONY BOUCHER and MICK McCOMAS
who liked this story

What he will he does, and does so much

That proof is call’d impossibility

—Troilus and Cressida

It is always the puzzle of the nature of time that brings our thoughts to a standstill. And if time is so fundamental that an understanding of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between determination and free will.

—The Mysterious Universe by James Jeans

Contents

1. LIFE IN THE TWENTY-SIX STATES

Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:

I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930’s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrate and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.

Granpa Hodgins after whom I was named, perhaps a little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised and headstrong—or martyred—Mr Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives’ viewpoints you take.

Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall of Washington to General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgment of the independence of the Confederate States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a different and increasingly hopeless world.

On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides—for different reasons—remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals in the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg or Port Hudson and fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the point of detaching the West and making a protectorate of it. Instead the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new boundary along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for obvious defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.

But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the beaten North and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74. It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold. Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back on their feet.

How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920’s and ’30s, my mother and father talking bitterly of how the War had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperors’ War of 1914-16, but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly seventy years later, blighted what was left of the United States.

Nor were they unique or peculiar in this. Men who slouched in the smithy while Father shod their horses, or gathered every month around the postoffice waiting for the notice of the winning lottery numbers to be put up, as often cursed the Confederates or discussed what might have been if Meade had been a better general or Lee a worse one, as they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork auxiliaries to make pedaling uphill easier, or the latest scandal about the French Emperor, Napoleon VI.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like in Granpa Hodgins’ day, to visualize the lost past—that strange bright era when, if it could be believed, folk like ourselves and our neighbors had owned their farms outright and didnt pay rent to the bank or give half the crop to a landlord. I searched the wiggling crayon lines that composed Granpa Hodgins’ face for some sign that set him apart from his descendants.

“But what did he do to lose the farm?” I used to ask my mother.

“Do? Didnt do anything. Couldnt help himself. Go along now and do your chores; Ive a terrible batch of work to get out.”

How could Granpa’s not doing anything result so disastrously? I could not understand this any more than I could the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a company.

Indenting I understood all right, for there was a mill in Wappinger Falls which wove a shoddy cloth very different from the goods my mother produced on her handloom. Mother, even in her late forties, could have indented there for a good price, and she admitted that the work would be easier than weaving homespun to compete with their product. But, as she used to say with an obstinate shake of her head, “Free I was born and free I’ll die.”

In Granpa Hodgins’ day, if one could believe the folktales or family legends, men and women married young and had large families; there might have been five generations between him and me instead of two. And many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages and only children were the rule.

If it hadnt been for the War—This was the basic theme stated with variations suited to the particular circumstance. If it hadnt been for the War the most energetic young men and women would not turn to emigration; visiting foreigners would not come as to a slum; and the great powers would think twice before sending troops to restore order every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadnt been for the War the detestable buyer from Boston—detestable to my mother, but rather fascinating to me with his brightly colored vest and smell of soap and hair tonic—would not have come regularly to offer her a miserable price for her weaving.

“Foreigner!” she would always exclaim after he left; “sending good cloth out of the country.”

Once my father ventured, “He’s only doing what he’s paid for.”

“Trust a Backmaker to stand up for foreigners. Like father, like son; suppose you’d let the whole thieving crew in if you had your way.”

So was first hinted the scandal of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. I got the impression my father’s father had been not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character in his own right, a man who kept on believing in the things for which Granpa Hodgins fought after they were proved wrong. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the mass lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment accorded these non-citizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I remember where I heard he had been run out of several places before finally settling in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly at his back, “Dirty Abolitionist!”—a very deep imprecation indeed. I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek, hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother who never let him forget that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.

I must have been a sore trial to her for I showed no sign of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed herself and which surely kept us all—though precariously—free. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy and awkward, of little use in the hundred necessary chores around our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to the cart for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping him on the farm or in his smithy I’m afraid my efforts drove that mild man nearest to a temper he ever came. He would lay the reins on the plowhorse’s back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully:

“Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. Youre only in my way here.”

On only one score did I come near pleasing Mother: I learned to read and write early, and exhibited some proficiency. But even here there was a flaw; she looked upon literacy as something which distinguished Hodginses and McCormicks from the ruck who had to make their mark, as an accomplishment which might somehow and unspecifiedly lead away from poverty. I found reading an end in itself, which probably reminded her of my father’s laxity or Grandfather Backmaker’s subversion.

“Make something of yourself, Hodge,” she admonished me often. “You can’t change the world”—an obvious allusion to Grandfather Backmaker—“but you can do something with it as it is if you try hard enough. There’s always some way out.”

Yet she did not approve of the postoffice lottery, on which so many pinned their hopes of escape from poverty or indenture. In this she and my father were agreed; both believed in hard work rather than chance.

Still, chance could help even the steadiest toiler. I remember the time a minibile—one of the small, trackless locomotives—broke down not a quarter of a mile from Father’s smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other luxury, were rare in the United States though they were common enough in prosperous countries like the German Union or the Confederacy. We had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the railroads, wornout and broken down as they were. For decades the great issue in Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental line, though British America had one and the Confederate States seven. (Sailing balloons, economical and fairly common, were still looked upon with some suspicion.) Only a rare millionaire with connections in Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore or Leesburg could afford to indulge in a costly and complicated minibile requiring a trained driver to bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the Harlem River.

When one did, the jolting, jouncing and shaking inevitably broke or disconnected one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the traveler broke down near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith. Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate and, unless the machine had suffered severe damage, put it back in place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting—or just absently chewing on an oatstraw—by demanding exorbitant remuneration, amounting to perhaps twenty-five or thirty cents an hour, thus avenging his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the urban excursionist.

Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall of 1933, when I was twelve. The driver had made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father, who could repair a clock or broken rake with equal dexterity, that his only course was to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat and straighten a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver, the owner, and Father all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I been with “practical” things all my life that I couldnt recall it ten minutes, much less thirty years later.)

“Hodge, run and get the mare and ride over to Jones’s. Don’t try to saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr Jones to kindly lend me his team.”

“I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back with the team in twenty minutes,” added the owner of the minibile, sticking his head out of the window.

I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has given me a distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole shining silver quarter, a day’s full wage for the boy who could find odd jobs, half the day’s pay of a grown man who wasnt indented or worked extra hours—all for myself, to spend as I wished!

I ran all the way back to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter and jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, some three years older than I, with whom it had so recently become disturbing as well as imperative to wrestle—in secret of course so as not to show oneself unmanly in sporting with a weak girl instead of another boy.

It never even occurred to me, as it would have to most, to invest in an eighth of a lottery ticket. Not only were my parents sternly against this popular gamble, but I myself felt a strangely puritanical aversion to meddling with my fortune.

Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman’s Book and Clock Store. Here I could not afford one of the latest English or Confederate books—even the novels I disdained cost fifty cents in their original and thirty in the pirated United States’ edition—but what treasures there were in the twelve-and-a-half cent reprints and the dime classics!

With Bessie’s legs moving steadily beneath me I pored over in my imagination Mr Newman’s entire stock, which I knew by heart from examinations lulled by the steady ticking of his other, and no doubt more salable, merchandise. My quarter would buy two reprints, but I would read them in as many evenings and be no better off than before until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better to invest in paperbacked adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the War. True, they were written almost entirely by Confederate authors and I was, perhaps thanks to Granpa Hodgins and my mother, a devout partisan of the lost cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism couldnt steel me against the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature simply ignored the boundary stretching to the Pacific.

I had finally determined to invest all my twenty-five cents, not in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the same in secondhand or shopworn condition, when I suddenly realized that I had been riding Bessie for some considerable time. I looked around, rather dazed by the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of Newman’s store to the bright countryside, to find with dismay that Bessie hadnt taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some private tour of her own in the opposite direction.

I’m afraid this little anecdote is pointless—it was momentarily pointed enough for me that evening, for in addition to the loss of the promised quarter I received a thorough whacking with a willow switch from my mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental duty—except perhaps that it shows how in pursuing the dream I could lose the reality.

My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most important part, was no passing phase. Other boys in their early teens dreamed of going to the wilds of Dakotah, Montana or Wyoming, indenting to a company run by a young and beautiful woman—this was also a favorite paperback theme—discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or emigrating to Australia or the South African Republic. Or else they faced the reality of indenture, carrying on the family farm, or petty trade. I only wanted to be allowed to read.

I knew this ambition, if that is the proper word, to be outrageous and unheard of. It was also practically impossible. The school at Wappinger Falls, a survival from the days of compulsory attendance and an object of doubt in the eyes of the taxpayers, taught as little as possible as quickly as possible. Parents needed the help of their children to survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory hope of buying free of indenture. Both my mother and my teachers looked askance at my longing to persist past an age when my contemporaries were making themselves economically useful.

Nor, even supposing I had the fees, could the shabby, fusty Academy at Poughkeepsie—originally designed for the education of the well-to-do—provide what I wanted. Not that I was clear at all as to just what this was; I only knew that commercial arithmetic, surveying, or any of the other subjects taught there, were not the answer to my desires.

There was certainly no money for any college. Our position had grown slowly worse; my father talked of selling the smithy and indenting. My dreams of Harvard or Yale were as idle as Father’s of making a good crop and getting out of debt. Nor did I know then, as I was to find out later, that the colleges were increasingly provincialized and decayed, contrasting painfully with the flourishing universities of the Confederacy and Europe. The average man asked what the United States needed colleges for anyway; those who attended them only learned discontent and to question time-honored institutions. Constant scrutiny of the faculties, summary firing of all instructors suspected of abnormal ideas, did not seem to improve the situation or raise the standards of teaching.

My mother, now that I was getting beyond the switching age, lectured me firmly and at length on idleness and self-indulgence. “It’s a hard world, Hodge, and no one’s going to give you anything you don’t earn. Your father’s an easy-going man; too easy-going for his own good, but he always knows where his duty lies.”

“Yes, maam,” I responded politely, not quite seeing what she was driving at.

“Hard, honest work—that’s the only thing. Not hoping or wishing or thinking miracles will happen to you. Work hard and keep yourself free. Don’t depend on circumstances or other people, and don’t blame them for your own shortcomings. Be your own man. That’s the only way you’ll ever be where you want to.” She spoke of responsibility and duty as though they were measurable quantities, but the gentler parts of such equations, the factors of affection and pity, were never mentioned. I don’t want to give the impression that ours was a particularly puritanical family; I know our neighbors had of necessity much the same grim outlook. But I felt guiltily vulnerable, not merely on the score of wanting more schooling, but because of something else which would have shocked my mother beyond forgiveness.

My early tussles with Mary McCutcheon had the natural consequences, but she had found me a too-youthful partner and had taken her interests elsewhere. For my part I now turned to Agnes Jones, a suddenly alluring young woman grown from the skinny kid I’d always brushed away. Agnes sympathized with my aspirations and encouraged me most pleasantly. However her specific plans for my future were limited to marrying her and helping her father on his farm, which seemed no great advance over what I could look forward to at home.

And there I was certainly no asset; I ate three hearty meals a day and occupied a bed. I was conscious of the looks and smiles which followed me. A great lout of seventeen, too lazy to do a stroke of work, always wandering around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose stuck in a book. Too bad; and the Backmakers such industrious folks too. I could feel what the shock of my behavior with Agnes added to my idleness would be to my mother.

Yet I was neither depraved nor very different from the other youths of Wappinger Falls, who not only took their pleasures where they found them, but often more forcibly than persuasively. I did not analyze it fully or clearly, but I was at least to some extent aware of the essentially loveless atmosphere around me. The rigid convention of late marriages bred an exaggerated respect for chastity which had two sides: sisters’ and daughters’ honor was sternly avenged with no protest from society, and undiscovered seduction produced that much more gratification. But both retribution and venery were somewhat mechanical; they were the expected rather than the inescapable passions. Revivalists—and we country people had a vast fondness for those itinerants who came periodically to castigate us for our sins—denounced our laxity and pointed to the virtues of our grandparents and greatgrandparents. We accepted their advice with such modifications as suited us, which was not at all what they intended.

And this was how I took my mother’s admonition to be my own man. What debts I owed her and my father seemed best discharged by relieving them of the burden of my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to reverse the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it did to them. Toward Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.

A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton shirt, and having bade a most romantic goodbye to Agnes, one which would certainly have consummated her hopes had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and set out for New York.

2. OF DECISIONS, MINIBILES, AND TINUGRAPHS

I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles in four days, allowing time to swap work for food, supposing I found farmers or housewives agreeable to the exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep outdoors, and the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any bathing I might want to do.

The dangers of the trip were part of the pattern of life in the United States in 1938. I didnt particularly fear being robbed by a roving gang for I was sure organized predators would disdain so obviously unprofitable a prey, and individual thieves I felt I could take care of, but I was not anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the three police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with a work-card on his person and a company behind him. A freeman was fair game for the constables, state troopers, or revenuers to recruit, after a perfunctory trial, into one of the chain gangs upon whom the roads, canals and other public works were dependent.

Some wondered why the roads were so bad in spite of all this apparent surplus of labor and were dubious of the explanation that surfacing was expensive and it was impossible to maintain unsurfaced highways in good condition. Only the hint that prisoners had been seen working around the estates of the great Whig families or had been lent to some enterprise operated by foreign capital brought knowing nods.

At seventeen possible disasters are not brooded over. I resolved to be wary, and then dismissed thoughts of police, gangs and all unpleasantness. The future was mine to make as my mother had insisted, and I was taking the first steps in shaping it.

I started off briskly, passing at first through villages long familiar; then, getting beyond the territory I had known all my life, I slowed down often enough to gaze at something new and strange, or to wander into wood or pasture for wild strawberries or early blueberries. I covered less ground than I had intended by the time I found a farmhouse, after inquiring at several others, where the woman was willing to give me supper and even let me sleep in the barn in return for splitting a sizable stack of logs into kindling and milking two cows.

Exercise and hot food must have counteracted the excitement of the day, for I fell asleep immediately and didnt waken till quite a while after sunup. It was another warm, fine morning; soon the post road led, not between shabby villages and towns or struggling farms, but past the stone or brick walls of opulent estates. Now and then I caught a glimpse between old, well-tended trees of magnificent houses either a century old or built to resemble those dating from that prosperous time. I could not but share the general dislike for the wealthy Whigs who owned these places, their riches contrasting with the common poverty and deriving from exploitation of the United States as a colony, but I could not help enjoying the beauty of their surroundings.

The highway was better traveled here also; I passed other walkers, quite a few wagons, a carriage or two, several peddlers and a number of ladies and gentlemen on horseback. This was the first time I’d seen women riding astride, a practice shocking to the sensitivities of Wappinger Falls which also condemned the fashion, imported from the Chinese Empire by way of England, of feminine trousers. Having learned that women were bipedal, both customs seemed sensible to me.

I had the post road to myself for some miles between turns when I heard a commotion beyond the stone wall to my left. This was followed by an angry shout and shrill words impossible to distinguish. My progress halted, I instinctively shifted my bundle to my left hand as though to leave my right free for defence, but against what I had no idea.

The shouts came closer; a boy of about my own age scrambled frantically over the wall, dislodging some of the smaller lichen-covered rocks on top and sending them rolling into the ditch. He looked at me, startled, then paused for a long instant at the road’s edge, undecided which way to run.

He was barefoot and wore a jute sack as a shirt, with holes cut for his arms, and ragged cotton pants. His face was little browner than my own had often been at the end of a summer’s work under a burning sun.

He came to the end of indecision and started across the highway, legs pumping high, head turned watchfully. A splendid tawny stallion cleared the wall in a soaring jump, his rider bellowing, “There you are, you damned black coon!”

He rode straight for the fugitive, quirt upraised, lips thickened and eyes rolling in rage. The victim dodged and turned; in no more doubt than I that the horseman meant to ride him down. He darted by me, so close I heard the labored rasp of breathing.

The rider swerved, and he too twisted around me as though I were the post at the far turn of a racecourse. Reflexively I put out my hand to grab at the reins and stop the assault. Indeed, my fingers actually touched the leather and grasped it for a fraction of a second before they fell away.

Then I was alone in the road again as both pursued and pursuer vaulted back over the fence. The whole scene of anger and terror could not have lasted two minutes; I strained my ears to hear the shouts coming from farther and farther away. Quiet fell again; a squirrel flirted his tail and sped down one tree trunk and up another. The episode might never have happened.

I shifted my bundle back and began walking again—less briskly now. My legs felt heavy and there was an involuntary twitch in the muscles of my arm.

Why hadnt I held on to the rein and delayed the hunter, at least long enough to give his quarry a fair start? What had made me draw back? It had not been fear, at least in the usual sense, for I knew I wasnt timorous of the horseman. I was sure I could have dragged him down if he had taken his quirt to me.

Yet I had been afraid. Afraid of interfering, of meddling in affairs which were no concern of mine, of risking action on quick judgment. I had been immobilized by the fear of asserting my sympathies, my presumptions, against events.

Walking slowly down the road I experienced deep shame. I might, I could have saved someone from hurt; I had perhaps had the power for a brief instant to change the course of a whole life. I had been guilty of a cowardice far worse than mere fear for my skin. I could have wept with mortification—done anything, in fact, but turn back and try to rectify my failure.

The rest of the day was gloomy as I alternately taunted and feebly excused myself. The fugitive might have been a trespasser or a servant; his fault might have been slowness, rudeness, theft or attempted murder. Whatever it was, any retaliation the white man chose could be inflicted with impunity. He would not be punished or even tried for it. Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration to Africa, voluntary or forced; those who went westward to join the unconquered Sioux or Nez Perce were looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didnt embark for Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had the fare or not, deserved anything that happened to him in the United States.

It was because I held, somewhat vaguely, a stubborn refusal to accept this conventional view, a refusal never precisely reasoned and little more, perhaps, than romantic rebellion against my mother in favor of my disreputable Grandfather Backmaker, that I suffered. I couldnt excuse my failure on the grounds that action would have been considered outrageous. It would not have been considered outrageous by me.

I pushed self-contempt at my passivity aside as best I could and strove to recapture the mood of yesterday, succeeding to some extent as the memory of the scene came back less insistently. I even tried pretending the episode had perhaps not been quite as serious as it seemed, or that the pursued had somehow in the end evaded the pursuer. I could not make what had happened not happen; the best I could do was minimize my culpability.

That night I slept a little way from the road and in the morning started off at dawn. Although I was now little more than twenty miles from the metropolis the character of the country had hardly changed. Perhaps the farms were smaller and closer together, their juxtaposition to the estates more incongruous. But traffic was continual now, with no empty stretches on the roads, and the small towns had horse-drawn cars running on iron tracks embedded in the cobbles.

It was late afternoon when I crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek to Manhattan. Between me and the city now lay a wilderness of squatters’ shacks made of old boards, barrel-staves and other discarded rubbish. Lean goats and mangy cats nosed through rubble heaps of broken glass and earthenware demijohns. Mounds of garbage lay beside aimless creeks struggling blindly for the rivers. As clearly as though it had been proclaimed on signposts this was an area of outcasts and fugitives, of men and women ignored and tolerated by the law so long as they kept within the confines of their horrible slum.

Strange and repugnant as the place was, I hesitated to keep on going and arrive in the city at nightfall, but it seemed unlikely there was a place to sleep among the shacks. Once away from the order and sobriety of the post road one could be lost in the squalid maze; undefined threats of vaguely dreadful fates seemed to rise from it like vapors.

Then the fading light revealed the anomaly of a venerable mansion set far back from the highway, with grounds as yet unusurped by the encroaching stews. The house was in ruins; the surrounding gardens lost in brush and weeds. Evidently a watchman or caretaker guarded its forlorn dignity or had very recently abandoned it; I could not imagine its remaining long without being entirely overrun otherwise.

It was almost fully dark as I made my way cautiously toward the remains of an old summerhouse. Its roof was fallen in and it was densely enclosed by ancient rosebushes whose thorns, I thought, when they pricked my fingers as I struggled through them, ought to give warning of any intruder. For weatherworthiness this shelter had little advantage over the hovels, yet somehow the fact that it had survived seemed to make it a more secure retreat.

I stretched out on the dank boards and slept fitfully, disturbed by dreams that the old mansion was filled with people from a past time who begged me to save them from the slumdwellers and their house from being further ravaged. Brokenly I protested I was helpless—in true dream manner I then became helpless, unable to move—that I could not interfere with what had to happen; they moaned and wrung their hands and faded away. Still, I slept, and in the morning the cramps in my muscles and the aches in my bones disappeared in the excitement of the remaining miles to the city.

And how suddenly it grew up around me, not as though it was a fixed collection of buildings which I approached, but as if I stood still while the wood and stone, iron and brick, sprang into being all about.

New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown very slowly since the close of the War of Southron Independence. Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented by far the largest concentration of people in the United States, though of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers of Washington, now including Baltimore and Alexandria, St Louis, or Leesburg (once Mexico City).

The change from the country and the dreadful slums through which I had passed was startling. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as Fifty-ninth Street on the west side and all the way to Eighty-seventh on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation every few blocks. Express steam trains ran through bridged cuts on Madison Avenue, an engineering achievement of which New Yorkers were vastly proud.

Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts or wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams, victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.

Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead, crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices and flats or downward to stores, a reminder that no urban family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor, that every child learned the Morse code before he could read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own; they perched and swung, quarreled and scolded on them, leaving only to satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.

The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Buildings of eight or ten storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen, serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in Washington and Leesburg.

Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and controlled as skillfully as old-time sailing vessels. These were not entirely novel to me; I had seen more of them than I had minibiles, but never so many as here. In a single hour, gawking upward, I counted seven, admiring how nicely calculated their courses were, for they seldom came so low as to endanger lives beneath by having to throw out sandbags in order to rise. That they could so maneuver over buildings of greatly uneven height showed this to be the air age indeed.

Most exciting of all was the great number of people who walked, rode, or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded, touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted. Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies shopped, drunks staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not thinking of going on, merely watching the spectacle.

How far I walked, how many different parts of the city I explored that day, I have no idea. I felt I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge of wonder when it was twilight and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by telegraph sparks, gleamed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my eyes had not been blind to the dirt and decay—became in an instant magically enchanting, softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air with a relish I had never known in the country and felt I was inhaling some elixir for the spirit.

But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for a seventeen-year-old, especially one who is beginning to be hungry and tired. I was desperately anxious to hoard the three precious dollars in my pocket, for I had little idea how to go about replacing them, once they were spent. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the first gaslit bakery, buying, after some consideration, a penny loaf, and walked on through the entrancing streets, munching at it and feeling like an historical character.

Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded with a boldly lettered broadside or dashingly drawn cartoon advertising the amusement to be found within. I was tempted to see for myself this magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave the illusion of motion, but the lowest admission price was five cents. Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible phonotos—tinugraphs ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to move but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an hour’s spectacle.

By this time I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of shirt and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where to sleep and began thinking more kindly than I would have believed possible of last night’s slum. I didnt connect my need with the glass transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL, for my mind was hazily fixed on some urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie Commercial House.

I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was one or a succession of girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in defiance of United States law, and an incredible number of beggars accosted me.

At last I thought of asking directions. But without realizing it I had wandered from the thronged wooden or granite sidewalks of the brightly lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where the buildings were low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a kerosene lamp in windows far apart were uncontested by any streetlights.

All day my ears had been pressed by the clop of hooves, the rattling of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street was unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker seemed the luckiest of chances.

“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s the nearest inn, or anywhere I can get a bed for the night cheap?”

I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money you got?”

“Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap lodging.” “OK, Reuben. Come along.”

“Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there.”

He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”

Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip be steered me along. For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could attempt to shrug free he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley, discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the relative darkness of the street.

“Wait—” I began.

“In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep youve had in a long time. And cheap—it’s free.” I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, a terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.

3. A MEMBER OF THE GRAND ARMY

I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skullbones. Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors around me.

The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The ground I lay on, where it was not stony, was damp with the water of endless dishwashings and launderings. The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In addition there was the smell of death, not the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or hog knows, but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh. Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.

A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A hard surface was pressing painful knobs into my exposed skin. I looked and felt around me.

The knobs were the scattered cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately over the moldy earth between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes were gone, so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my pocket for the three dollars. I knew I was lucky the robber had left me my pants and my life.

A middleaged man, at least he looked middleaged to my youthful eye, regarded me speculatively over the head of the drunk. A pale, elliptical scar interrupted the wrinkles on his forehead, its upper point making a permanent part in his thin hair. Tiny red veins marked his nose; his eyes were bloodshot.

“Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh boy?”

I nodded—and then was sorry for the motion.

“Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which I assume. Come to the same end as me, stinking drunk. Only I still got my shirt. Couldnt hock it no matter how thirsty I got.”

I groaned.

“Where yuh from boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts miss you?” “Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s Hodge Backmaker.”

“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. I’m George Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off.”

I hadnt an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand made my head worse.

“Took everything, I suppose? Havent a nickel left to help a hangover?”

“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.

He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump over my ear with my fingertips.

“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.” “But ... can I go through the streets like this?”

“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”

He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection of rags not fit to clean a manurespreader. The jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.

“It’s stealing,” I protested.

“Right. Put them on and let’s get out of here.”

The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of those of the day before. The tenements were smokestreaked, with steps between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones abutting. The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible’s to this neighborhood, though his would have marked him tramp and vagrant in Wappinger Falls.

The Hudson too was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt, much less my aching head. But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing water.

“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy. “Now for mine.”

The sun was hot and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from the river, the jacket over my arm. Now that my mind was clearing my despair grew rapidly; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into the Hudson and drowned.

Admitting any plans I’d had were nebulous and impractical, they had yet been plans of a kind, something in which I could put, or force, my hopes. My appearance had been presentable, I had the means to keep myself fed and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything was changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out of existence and I had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but because I knew how relieved my mother and father must have been to be freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except starvation or a life of petty crime.

Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive place, gaslit even this early, with a steam piano tinkling the popular, mournful tune, Mormon Girl:

There’s a girl in the state of Deseret

I love and I’m trying to for-get.

Forget her for my tired feet’s sake

Don’t wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.

They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean

I’d return my Mormon girl’s devotion.

But the tracks stop short in Ioway....

I couldnt remember the next line. Something about Injuns say.

“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk for my chum here.”

The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet, dirty rag. “Got any jack?”

“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”

The bartender’s uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink tomorrow.

“Listen,” argued Pondible; “I’m tapering off. You know me. Ive spent plenty of money here.”

The bartender shrugged. “I don’t own the place; anything goes over the bar has to be rung up on the cash register.”

“Youre lucky to have a job that pays wages.”

“Times I’m not so sure. Why don’t you indent?”

Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a company pay for a wornout old carcass? A hundred dollars at the top. Then a release in a couple of years with a med holdback so I’d have to report every week somewhere. No, friend, Ive come through this long a free man—in a manner of speaking—and I’ll stick it out. Let’s have that shot; you can see for yourself I’m tapering off. Youll get your jack tomorrow.” I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on any scale, large or small. The inflation, though sixty years in the past, had left indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was not only disgraceful, it was dangerous; the notion things could be paid for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulating paper money instead of silver or gold.

I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, my new acquaintance seemed to have a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.

He swallowed his whiskey and called for a quart pot of light beer which he sipped slowly. “That’s the trick of it, Hodge. Avoid the second shot. If you can.” He sipped again. “Now what?”

“What?” I repeated.

“Now what are you going to do? What’s your aim in life anyway?”

“None—now. I ... wanted to learn. To study.” He frowned. “Out of books?”

“How else?”

“Books is mostly written and printed in foreign countries.”

“There might be more written here if more people had time to learn.”

Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his hand. “Might and mightnt. Oh, some of my best friends are book-readers, don’t get me wrong, boy.”

“I’d thought,” I burst out, “I’d thought to try Columbia College. To offer—to beg to be allowed to do any kind of work for tuition.” “Hmm. I doubt it would have worked.”

“Anyway I can’t go now, looking like this.”

“Might be as well. We need fighters, not readers.”

“‘We?’”

He did not explain. “Well, you could always take the advice our friend here gave me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get yourself a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—” “Sure. And be a slave for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, indenting aint slavery. It’s better. And worse. For one thing the company buys you won’t hold you after you arent worth your keep. Not that long, on account of bookkeeping; they lose when they break even. So they cancel your indenture without a cent payment. Course theyll take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but that’s a long time away for you.”

An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its disposal outside the United States.

“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldnt be a slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasnt any good to anyone, including myself.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. “Youre a gloomy gus, Hodge. Taint’s bad’s that. Indenting’s pretty strictly regulated. That’s the idea anyway. I aint saying the big companies don’t get away with a lot. You can’t be made to work over sixty hours a week. Ten hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get all the education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to account by making enough to buy yourself free.”

I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I’d been over the ground often enough. It was true the amount, a not improbable one, would see me through college. But Pondible’s notion of turning my “learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued—I knew my own “impracticality” well enough by now—was bound to yield few material benefits in the backward United States, which existed as a nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the great powers. I’d be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some kind of living as a freeman; I could hardly hope to earn enough to buy back an indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty hours a week.

“It wouldnt work,” I said despondently.

Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion he had expected me to come to. “Well then,” he said, “there’s the gangs.”

I looked my horror.

He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. What’s right? What the strongest country or the strongest man says it is. The government says gangs are wrong, but the government aint strong enough to stop them. And maybe they don’t do as much killing as people think. Only when somebody works against them—just like the government. Sure they have to be paid off, but it’s just like taxes. If you leave the parsons’ sermons out of it there’s no difference joining the gangs than the army—if we had one—or the Confederate Legion—” “They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always so....”

“Bold?” For the first time Pondible looked angry and I thought the scar on his forehead turned whiter. “Yes, damn them. The Legion must be half United States citizens. When they have to put down a disturbance or run some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate Legion—made up of men who ought to be the backbone of an army of our own.” “But the police—don’t they ever try to stop them?” “What’d I tell you about right being what the strongest country says it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into a foreign army. So we squawk. And what have we got to back it up with? So the Confederate Legion goes right on recruiting the men who have to beg for a square meal in their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as bad off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick off some of the little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six states, and every so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes in a lifetime.” I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet ... if this were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an elaborate blind? It seemed hardly worth it.

“A dividend,” I said, “or a rope.”

“Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Aint one been hung I can think of the last five-six years. But I see youve no stomach for it. Tell me, Hodge—you Whig or Populist?” The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why ... Populist, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of the discussions that used to go on among the men around the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property, Protection, Permanent Population’ —what does it mean to me?” “Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own factories here and don’t want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent Population—cheap native labor. Build up a prosperous employing class.” “Yes, I know. I can’t see how it helps. Ive heard Whigs at home say the money’s bound to seep down from above, but it seems awfully roundabout. And not very efficient.”

He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “That’s my boy,” he said. “They can’t fool you.”

I wasnt entirely pleased by his commendation. “And protection means paying more for things than theyre worth.”

“Taint only that, Hodge, it’s a damn lie as well. Whigs never even tried protection when they was in. Didnt dast. Knew the other countries wouldnt let them.”

“As for ‘permanent population’ ... well, those who can’t make a living are going to go on emigrating to prosperous countries. Permanent population means dwindling population if it means anything.”

“Ah,” he said. “You got a head on your shoulders, Hodge. Youre all right; books won’t hurt you. But what about emigrating? Yourself, I mean?”

I shook my head.

He nodded, chewing on a soggy corner of his mustache. “Don’t want to leave the old ship, huh?”

I don’t suppose I would have put it exactly that way, or even fully formulated the thought. I was willing to exchange the familiar for the unknown—up to a certain point. The thought of giving up the country in which I’d been born was repugnant. Call it loyalty, or a sense of having ties with the past, or just stubbornness. “Something like that,” I said.

“Well now, let’s see what weve got.” He stuck up a dirty and slightly tremulous hand, turning down a finger as he stated each point. “One, patriot; two, Populist; three, don’t like indenting; four, prosperity’s got to come from the poor upward, not the rich down.” He hesitated, holding his thumb. “You heard of the Grand Army?”

“Who hasnt? Not much difference between them and the regular gangs.”

“Now what makes you say that?”

“Why ... everybody knows it”

“Do, huh? Maybe they know it all wrong. Look here now—and remember about the Confederate Legion riding over the laws of the United States—what would you think ought to be done about foreigners from the strong countries who come here and walk all over us? Or the Whigs who do their dirty work for them?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Not murder, certainly.”

“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means what you want it to mean. Wasnt murder back during the War when Union soldiers was trying to keep the country from being split up. Taint murder today when somebody’s hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army don’t go in for murder.”

I said nothing.

“Oh, accidents happen; wouldnt deny it. Maybe they get a little rougher than they intend with Whig traitors or Confederate agents, but you can’t make bacon out of a live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only thing in the country that even tries to restore it to what it once was. What was fought for in the War.”

I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather Backmaker or the unassuaged guilt for the miserable figure I had cut only three days back that made me ask, “And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”

He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly. “No, I can see you aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadnt been for the Abolitionists.”

Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been presumptuous to doubt it.

“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix. Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build the country up again.”

“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”

Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some of that education youre so fired up about. Come along.”

4. TYSS

He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged.

I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.

Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other features.

“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”

So far as I knew, I said, it was.

“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”

“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”

“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the waste-product of the human mind.”

“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.

“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn; there’s nothing I can do about it As well here as another place.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love, hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”

I considered this statement reflectively.

“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre free to go.” And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)

As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately destroyed before pieing the type.

I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart; it is the vital food.”

While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.

“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”

“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? I mean, doesnt it refer to the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester and buried by the sower?”

“You think the gods were modelled on John Barleycorn and not John Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.” “I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”

“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull’s body.” “How about ... oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”

He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An excellent example. Epitome of man’s futile longing to upset and defy the divine plan—I use the word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god out of the devil we eat him daily in a two-fold sense: by swallowing the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds to speculate on. Let’s get to work.” He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate master. In 1938-44, when the country was being ground deeper into colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much, generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.

Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his errands. I continued to ramble and sight-see the city much as though I had nothing else to do. And if, from time to time, I discovered there were girls in New York who didnt look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never questioned why the walk of half a mile took me a couple of hours.

True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me wages, but he often handed me coins for pocketmoney, evidently satisfied I wasnt stealing, and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent clothing.

He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books surrounding me. His brief warning, “—you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I suppose a different temperament might have become surfeited with paper and print; I can only say I wasnt. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest gasjet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet with a dozen volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.

I think one of the first books to influence me strongly was the monumental Causes of American Decline and Decay by the always popular expatriate historian, Henry Adams. I was particularly impressed by the famous passage in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian essayists, William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry, who had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by William V, history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral roots.

Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the fact that I had not found their books enjoyable. This was due at least partly to the fact that the small editions were badly printed and marred, at least so foreign critics claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms, consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain of imported elegance. For some reason, obscure to me then, I did not mention Adams to Tyss, though I usually turned to him with each of my fresh discoveries. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the particular work or of its topic. What he had to say gave me an insight I might otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis no matter how commonly accepted.

Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment he kept hanging, slightly askew and highly attractive to dust, over his typecase. It was simply but beautifully printed in 16 point Baskerville; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:

The Body of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
Like the Cover of an Old Book
Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding
Lies Here
Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For it will, As he Believed,
Come Forth Again
In a new and Better Edition
Revised & Corrected
By
The Author.

When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”

“The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a plan.”

He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me, Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind; it is this no-plan against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan too, a mindless plan, which accounts for all our acts.”

I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his sermons himself, named George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself as to counter his argument.

“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”

“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of choice?”

“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.”

“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”

“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”

“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didnt select the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”

Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”

He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”

“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”

“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.

I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was false I didnt doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more terrifying.

There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones. Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at all.

The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the True American, came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large type warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him; his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.

Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about assurance of delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we handled.

I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside from the very first conversation with Pondible, no attempt was made to persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for he explained obliquely.

“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts, and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”

“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times? Ive certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their memoirs.”

“You are confusing the after-effect of action with nonaction, the dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”

I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.

“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to the spectator the man of action is faintly absurd. A born observer would find the earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the formation of skeleton companies, the appointment of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to become a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.” “You think I’m the spectator type, Mr Tyss?”

“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be deceptive at first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained fleshiness of the mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but they subordinate to more subtle indicators. No question but that Chief Jung would put you down as an observer.”

If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying personalities as though they were zoological specimens could relieve me of having to refuse pointblank to join the Grand Army I was content. While this hardly alleviated my disturbance at being, no matter how remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder I compromised with my conscience by trying to believe I might after all be mistaken in thinking I was being used. There were times when I felt I ought boldly to declare myself and leave the store but when I faced the prospect of having to find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the imperative necessity of books, I lacked the courage.

Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.

5. OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS

A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat.

It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others. The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual raising of the standard of living since employers could hire more hands, and indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle away.

This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the Whigs.

The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title, with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an arsonist.

I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I too had campaign fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.

Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This year both office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train; Lewis was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free. Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.

One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.

The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on, I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as well leave altogether.

“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the Populist tradition?”

“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.

She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”

She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,” I said; “unless youre enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the streetcar. For my clumsiness.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”

“Why ... to hear the speakers.”

“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”

“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A stupid amusement.”

“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually havent much money.”

“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt vote for Populists.”

“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”

She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to become better off yourself.”

“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”

“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you step on their feet?”

“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings, but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”