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 white race and their own sense of injustice and of outrage among the grave white teeth, the dark, courteous, fatal, speculative alien faces, and had Midgleston to breakfast with me. I had to invite him and then insist. He was on hand at the appointed hour, in the same dirty trousers, but his shirt was now white and whole and ironed, and he had shaved. He accepted the meal without servility, without diffidence, without eagerness. Yet when he raised the handleless bowl I watched his hands tremble so that for a time he could not make junction with his lips. He saw me watching his hands and he looked at my face for the first time and I saw that his eyes were the eyes of an old man. He said, with just a trace of apology for his clumsiness: “I ain’t et nothing to speak of in a day or so.”
“Haven’t eaten in two days?” I said.
“This hot climate. A fellow don’t need so much. Feels better for not eating so much. That was the hardest trouble I had when I first come here. I was always a right hearty eater back home.”
“Oh,” I said. I had meat brought then, he protesting. But he ate the meat, ate all of it. “Just look at me,” he said. “I ain’t et this much breakfast in twenty-five years. But when a fellow gets along, old habits are hard to break. No, sir. Not since I left home have I et this much for breakfast.”
“Do you plan to go back home?” I said.
“I guess not; no. This suits me here. I can live simple here. Not all cluttered up with things. My own boss (I used to be an architect’s draughtsman) all day long. No. I don’t guess I’ll go back.” He looked at me. His face was intent, watchful, like that of a child about to tell something, divulge itself. “You wouldn’t guess where I sleep in a hundred years.”
“No. I don’t expect I could. Where do you sleep?”
“I sleep in that attic over that cantina yonder. The house belongs to the Company, and Mrs. Widrington, Mr. Widrington’s wife, the manager’s wife, she lets me sleep in the attic. It’s high and quiet, except for a few rats. But when in Rome, you got to act like a Roman, I say. Only I wouldn’t name this country Rome; I’d name it Ratville. But that ain’t it.” He watched me. “You’d never guess it in the world.”
“No,” I said. “I’d never guess it.”
He watched me. “It’s my bed.”
“Your bed?”
“I told you you’d never guess it.”
“No,” I said. “I give up now.”
“My bed is a roll of tarred roofing paper.”
“A roll of what?”
“Tarred roofing paper.” His face was bright, peaceful; his voice quiet, full of gleeful quiet. “At night I just unroll it and go to bed and the next a. m. I just roll it back up and lean it in the corner. And then my room is all cleaned up for the day. Ain’t that fine? No sheets, no laundry, no nothing. Just roll up my whole bed like an umbrella and carry it under my arm when I want to move.”
“Oh,” I said. “You have no family, then.”
“Not with me. No.”
“You have a family back home, then?”
He was quite quiet. He did not feign to be occupied with something on the table. Neither did his eyes go blank, though he mused peacefully for a moment. “Yes. I have a wife back home. Likely this climate wouldn’t suit her. She wouldn’t like it here. But she is all right. I always kept my insurance paid up; I carried a right smart more than you would figure a architect’s draughtsman on a seventy-five-dollar salary would keep up. If I told you the amount, you would be surprised. She helped me to save; she is a good woman. So she’s got that. She earned it. And besides, I don’t need money.”
“So you don’t plan to go back home.”
“No,” he said. He watched me; again his expression was that of a child about to tell on itself. “You see, I done something.”
“Oh. I see.”
He talked quietly: “It ain’t what you think. Not what them others—” he jerked his head, a brief embrac
ing gesture—“think. I never stole any money. Like I always told Martha—she is my wife; Mrs. Midgleston—money is too easy to earn to risk the bother of trying to steal it. All you got to do is work. ‘Have we ever suffered for it?’ I said to her. ‘Of course, we don’t live like some. But some is born for one thing and some is born for another thing. And the fellow that is born a tadpole, when he tries to be a salmon all he is going to be is a sucker.’ That’s what I would tell her. And she done her part and we got along right well; if I told you how much life insurance I carried, you would be surprised. No; she ain’t suffered any. Don’t you think that.”
“No,” I said.
“But then I done something. Yes, sir.”
“Did what? Can you tell?”
“Something. Something that ain’t in the lot and plan for mortal human man to do.”
“What was it you did?”
He looked at me. “I ain’t afraid to tell. I ain’t never been afraid to tell. It was just that these folks—” again he jerked his head slightly—“wouldn’t have understood. Wouldn’t have knowed what I was talking about. But you will. You’ll know.” He watched my face. “At one time in my life I was a farn.”
“A farn?”
“Farn. Don’t you remember in the old books where they would drink the red grape wine, how now and then them rich Roman and Greek senators would up and decide to tear up a old grape vineyard or a wood away off somewheres the gods used, and build a summer house to hold their frolics in where the police wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t like it about them married women running around nekkid, and so the woods god named—named—”
“Pan,” I said.
“That’s it. Pan. And he would send them little fellows that was half a goat to scare them out—”
“Oh,” I said. “A faun.”
“That’s it. A farn. That’s what I was once. I was raised religious; I have never used tobacco or liquor; and I don’t think now that I am going to hell. But the Bible says that them little men were myths. But I know they ain’t, and so I have been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to be. Because for one day in my life I was a farn.”
II
IN THE OFFICE where Midgleston was a draughtsman they would discuss the place and Mrs. Van Dyming’s unique designs upon it while they were manufacturing the plans, the blue prints. The tract consisted of a meadow, a southern hillside where grapes grew, and a woodland. “Good land, they said. But wouldn’t anybody live on it.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because things happened on it. They told how a long time ago a New England fellow settled on it and cleaned up the grape vines to market the grapes. Going to make jelly or something. He made a good crop, but when time came to gather them, he couldn’t gather them.”
“Why couldn’t he gather them?”
“Because his leg was broke. He had some goats, and a old ram that he couldn’t keep out of the grape lot. He tried every way he knew, but he couldn’t keep the ram out. And when the man went in to gather the grapes to make jelly, the ram ran over him and knocked him down and broke his leg. So the next spring the New England fellow moved away.
“And they told about another man, a I-talian lived the other side of the woods. He would gather the grapes and make wine out of them, and he built up a good wine trade. After a while his trade got so good that he had more trade than he did wine. So he began to doctor the wine up with water and alcohol, and he was getting rich. At first he used a horse and wagon to bring the grapes home on his private road through the woods, but he got rich and he bought a truck, and he doctored the wine a little more and he got richer and he bought a bigger truck. And one night a storm come up while he was away from home, gathering the grapes, and he didn’t get home that night. The next a. m. his wife found him. That big truck had skidded off the road and turned over and he was dead under it.”
“I don’t see how that reflected on the place,” I said.
“All right. I’m just telling it. The neighbor folks thought different, anyway. But maybe that was because they were not anything but country folks. Anyway, none of them would live on it, and so Mr. Van Dyming bought it cheap. For Mrs. Van Dyming. To play with. Even before we had the plans finished, she would take a special trainload of them down there to look at it, and not even a cabin on the place then, not nothing but the woods and that meadow growed up in grass tall as a man, and that hillside where them grapes grew tangled. But she would stand there, with them other rich Park Avenue folks, showing them how here would be the community house built to look like the Coliseum and the community garage yonder made to look like it was a Acropolis, and how the grape vine would be grubbed up entire and the hillside terraced to make a outdoors theatre where they could act in one another’s plays; and how the meadow would be a lake with one of them Roman barges towed back and forth on it by a gas engine, with mattresses and things for them to lay down on while they et.”
“What did Mr. Van Dyming say about all this?”
“I don’t reckon he said anything. He was married to her, you know. He just says, one time, ‘Now, Mattie—’ and she turns on him, right there in the office, before us all, and says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie.’ ” He was quiet for a time. Then he said: “She wasn’t born on Park Avenue. Nor Westchester neither. She was born in Poughkeepsie. Her name was Lumpkin.
“But you wouldn’t know it, now. When her picture would be in the paper with all them Van Dyming diamonds, it wouldn’t say how Mrs. Carleton Van Dyming used to be Miss Mathilda Lumpkin of Poughkeepsie. No, sir. Even a newspaper wouldn’t dared say that to her. And I reckon Mr. Van Dyming never either, unless he forgot like the day in the office. So she says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ and he hushed and he just stood there—a little man; he looked kind of like me, they said—tapping one of them little highprice cigars on his glove, with his face looking like he had thought about smiling a little and then he decided it wasn’t even any use in that.
“They built the house first. It was right nice; Mr. Van Dyming planned it. I guess maybe he said more than just Mattie that time. And I guess that maybe Mrs. Van Dyming never said, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ that time. Maybe he promised her he wouldn’t interfere with the rest of it. Anyway, the house was right nice. It was on the hill, kind of in the edge of the woods. It was logs. But it wasn’t too much logs. It belonged there, fitted. Logs where logs ought to be, and good city bricks and planks where logs ought not to be. It was there. Belonged there. It was all right. Not to make anybody mad. Can you see what I mean?”
“Yes. I think I can see what you mean.”
“But the rest of it he never interfered with; her and her Acropolises and all.” He looked at me quite intently. “Sometimes I thought.…”
“What? Thought what?”
“I told you him and me were the same size, looked kind of alike.” He watched me. “Like we could have talked, for all of him and his Park Avenue clothes and his banks and his railroads, and me a seventy-five a week draughtsman living in Brooklyn, and not young neither. Like I could have said to him what was in my mind at any time, and he could have said to me what was in his mind at any time, and we would have understood one another. That’s why sometimes I thought.…” He looked at me, intently, not groping exactly. “Sometimes men have more sense than women. They know what to leave be, and women don’t always know that. He don’t need to be religious in the right sense or religious in the wrong sense. Nor religious at all.” He looked at me, intently. After a while he said, in a decisive tone, a tone of decisive irrevocation: “This will seem silly to you.”
“No. Of course not. Of course it won’t.”
He looked at me. Then he looked away. “No. It will just sound silly. Just take up your time.”
“No. I swear it won’t. I want to hear it. I am not a man who believes that people have learned everything.” He watched me. “It has taken a million years to make what is, they tell us,�
� I said. “And a man can be made and worn out and buried in threescore and ten. So how can a man be expected to know even enough to doubt?”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s sure right.”
“What was it you sometimes thought?”
“Sometimes I thought that, if it hadn’t been me, they would have used him. Used Mr. Van Dyming like they used me.”
“They?” We looked at one another, quite sober, quite quiet.
“Yes. The ones that used that ram on that New England fellow, and that storm on that I-talian.”
“Oh. Would have used Mr. Van Dyming in your place, if you had not been there at the time. How did they use you?”
“That’s what I am going to tell. How I was chosen and used. I did not know that I had been chosen. But I was chosen to do something beyond the lot and plan for mortal human man. It was the day that Mr. Carter (he was the boss, the architect) got the hurryup message from Mrs. Van Dyming. I think I told you the house was already built, and there was a big party of them down there where they could watch the workmen building the Coliseums and the Acropolises. So the hurryup call came. She wanted the plans for the theatre, the one that was to be on the hillside where the grapes grew. She was going to build it first, so the company could set and watch them building the Acropolises and Coliseums. She had already begun to grub up the grape vines, and Mr. Carter put the theatre prints in a portfolio and give me the weekend off to take them down there to her.”
“Where was the place?”
“I don’t know. It was in the mountains, the quiet mountains where never many lived. It was a kind of green air, chilly too, and a wind. When it blew through them pines it sounded kind of like a organ, only it didn’t sound tame like a organ. Not tame; that’s how it sounded. But I don’t know where it was. Mr. Carter had the ticket all ready and he said it would be somebody to meet me when the train stopped.
“So I telephoned Martha and I went home to get ready. When I got home, she had my Sunday suit all pressed and my shoes shined. I didn’t see any use in that, since I was just going to take the plans and come back. But Martha said how I had told her it was company there. ‘And you are going to look as nice as any of them,’ she says. ‘For all they are rich and get into the papers. You’re just as good as they are.’ That was the last thing she said when I got on the train, in my Sunday suit, with the portfolio: ‘You’re just as good as they are, even if they do get into the papers.’ And then it started.”
Collected Stories Page 73
