To Look and Pass

by Taylor Caldwell

  I had not seen Mrs. Rugby enter the room, but she was called as the next witness. She, too, looked haggard. And somewhat angry and truculent, for all her long, melancholy face and prominent blue eyes. She settled herself fussily; in every gesture was the annoyance of a woman who disliked appearing in defense of someone she detested, but who would nevertheless tell the truth dutifully. The sheriff questioned her. She began a prolonged story full of intimate details of Mrs. Burnett’s illness, and it wasn’t until the sheriff sarcastically assured her that no one suspected her of visiting anyone else but Mrs. Burnett that she halted. She was slow-witted; outraged color did not mount into her pale face until everyone laughed. Urged by the sheriff, she told her story, with long side remarks. Dan had been there with her husband in the study when she had left, somewhere around half-past seven or so. She had seen him; he was smoking that pipe there, and she pointed to the exhibit on the table. How was she sure that was his pipe? Well, she hated tobacco smoking, and she had stared at the pipe pointedly as she stood in the doorway, but he had refused to take the hint. So, she remembered it. She was sure that was the pipe. She had come home at twelve; she remembered that very clearly, for Mrs. Burnett lived on the other side of town, and it was a good twenty minutes away from home, and she had been startled when she had seen a clock in the Burnett house and saw it was after half past eleven. She had come home and heard voices in the study, and when she reached the door Mortimer had asked her to come in to say goodnight to, Dan, and she had refused after telling Mortimer to go to bed. Then she had gone upstairs, and the telephone had rung, and she had heard the news from her son, who had just heard it when he got home. Yes, he could get home in ten minutes. She had run downstairs to tell Mortimer and Dan, and heard her husband just saying goodnight to Dan, and closing the door, and then she heard Dan’s horse going away.

  “Did you see his horse before you went away?” asked the sheriff. The question came as a jolt to me, and I sat up, my senses swimming. We had not thought of the horse! It had been hitched to the post, which was in clear view from the street. I looked at Dan; he was listening to this, as he had been listening to all the testimony, with utter impassivity and calm.

  Mrs. Rugby wrinkled her forehead, and in the momentary silence, I glanced at Mortimer. He had turned ghastly pale, and was leaning forward slightly in his chair. Yes, said Mrs. Rugby at last, she had seen the horse. She had passed the front of the house in going away, and when she returned, she had seen the horse still standing there, blanketed. Was she sure it was the same horse? Yes, she replied firmly, after a moment, she was sure. And she had been very angry, seeing that Dan had kept her husband up, and Mr. Rugby a sick man. I sat back in my chair, shaken; thank God the night had been dark! The shot that might have killed Dan had saved him.

  She went on to say that her husband had run to the door after she had told him the news and had called Dan, and that he had shown her the still-smoking pipe. No, her husband did not smoke. Sam took her over.

  “Was she certain that the voices she had heard in the study were those of Mortimer and Dan?” I thought this a dangerous question, but Sam Walstein was a bold man. I am sure, looking back now, that his shrewdness must have suspected something which he would have designated as not being quite kosher, but his whole career was based on such apparently reckless strokes.

  And masterfully was it proved the adroitness of the mental suggestion that Mortimer had practiced on his wife. In a loud firm voice she declared that she was positive that it was Dan’s voice that she had heard; why, she had known him all his life and couldn’t be mistaken!

  The sheriff had ruffled her, and Sam’s manner was all respect and tenderness. She regarded him with more graciousness. He soothed and flattered her with his eyes.

  “I am sure that you are a very intelligent lady, Mrs. Rugby,” he said softly. “I am sure that your husband would not have had so low an estimate of your intelligence as to try to deceive you, would he?”

  “Indeed not,” said the lady with a toss of her head. “Mortimer had never deceived me, no, indeed. He was as innocent as a little sheep, and knew as little about taking care of himself as a sheep.”

  Then Sam dealt his master stroke, a stroke of pure genius. He leaned towards Mrs. Rugby ingratiatingly, pleadingly.

  “My client, Mrs. Rugby, is in a rather difficult position. I understand that he is not very well liked in his own town. Can’t you tell us all something in his behalf, something to his advantage, about his character?”

  Mrs. Rugby’s pleasant expression vanished; she glared down upon the little lawyer, pursed her wide lips, and tossed her head angrily.

  “No, I can’t! Everything everyone said about him was true. No one liked him. He had done lots of awful things, and no one ever spoke to him. If it hadn’t been for his poor young wife, heavens knows what would have happened.” No, she had nothing good to say about him, and she only wished that she hadn’t been put into a position where she had to tell the truth, that he was with her husband last night. Otherwise, if she hadn’t known him to be there, she would have believed, indeed, that he had killed poor little Beatrice.

  And thus Sam cleverly removed from the jury’s mind any possible doubt that she had lied or been mistaken. Her outright animosity towards Dan, her announced reluctance to appear for him, settled the case. Within a few minutes the jury brought in a verdict of murder “by a person or persons unknown.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The crowded room began to empty. I saw Sam Walstein and Mortimer Rugby beside Dan; Mortimer had his arm around Dan’s shoulder, and the little lawyer’s face was wrinkling grotesquely, and he waved and gesticulated. He must have been saying something humorous, for Dan suddenly laughed loudly, and Mortimer chuckled. None of them looked in my direction. I felt deserted and depressed. Moreover, my fever was at the stage where the air alternately darkened in front of my eyes and then was full of tiny slivers of dazzling light. My sense of illness was becoming acute. I realized I had only a little time. I looked around for Dan and Mortimer again but they had disappeared. I pushed through the excited people in the aisles, but I could not find either of the two men.

  I had an urgent desire to see Dan again immediately. There seemed to be no sense in the desire, no reason in it. But see him I must. I went out into the cold and ashen day. The sun had disappeared, and by the thick massing of the clouds I was sure that snow was coming. The streets of Ripley were wider and had more traffic than South Kenton, and due to the fame of the case and its horrible details, these streets were thronged from curb to curb with buggies, buckboards, and carriages. All sounds merged into a prolonged uproar in my ears. I did not see anyone I knew intimately; everyone from South Kenton had vanished.

  The only thing I can do, I thought, is to go to Dan’s farm. He will return there, of course, and was probably already on the way. Mortimer would most likely be driving him home. If I hurried on my horse I would no doubt overtake them. I mounted and rode away. Every step of the horse made a separate agony in my aching bones. I stopped for a moment at a saloon, and, shivering violently, I drank two or three glasses of whiskey to warm up my chills. The saloon was crowded and everyone was vociferously discussing the inquest. I went out and got on my horse. I had some difficulty in leaving the town due to the crowded streets, but eventually I was on the open road. I circled around to the south, and soon found the road that meandered obscurely over the hills in the direction of Dan’s farm. It was comparatively empty, for I was taking the long route again. I thought it most likely that Mortimer would take that route, but though I rode rapidly I did not sight them, though I expected to over each hill. But the road stretched away, gray and desolate and silent, past lonely farmhouses and copses of bare woods.

  Due to my illness and the whiskey, my mind was at once preternaturally acute and dulled. My thoughts, secret, inner, obscure; had the acuteness, but all awareness of outward things had the dullness. I seemed to have been absorbed into the very center of my brain, and thoughts
that in health and soberness had always been a little vague and unformed suddenly took on sharpness and color and significance. I could hardly endure them; they seemed like a sort of anguish, and I began to wonder if it were not for the best that our senses are a little calloused and numb with familiarity. It would not be possible for a man to live in such a state of acute awareness; it would be like living without a skin, every nerve exposed, every brain center unprotected, quivering with reflexes and assaults. For one moment I actually seemed to see a brain so denuded; every gray and glistening fold was visible to my eye, shivering and shrinking, suffering and defenseless.

  “I wonder if that isn’t the way the soul is, when it is stripped of its protecting flesh,” I said aloud, “attacked on every side by a thousand impressions, every thought and every touch magnified countless times, every vague emotion like a wasp with a red-hot sting.”

  The thought made me feel physically ill. I tried to focus my eyes objectively on the country through which I was passing. But a transparently dim shadow seemed to have fallen over it, through which every object was at once intensely intrusive and immensely distant and formless. For a little while I forgot who I was, where I was, and where I was going, and I’ll never forget the anguish I endured for that brief while as I struggled to recapture my identity and reason.

  The road continued to be empty. Surely some of the people from South Kenton must have come this way, if only to avoid the heavy traffic on the main road. For a few moments I thought I did see a group of horsemen and two or three buggies ahead, but when I looked closer, either because it had been a delusion or the day was becoming too dark, or the road wound too much, I did not see them again.

  Suddenly I thought of Beatrice, and she became the acutest thing in all the world to me. She is not dead, I thought. She is more alive than we are, more mobile, more comprehensive, and more vicious. The whole atmosphere seemed to become charged with her personality; she was the heavy sky, smothering and cold and close; she was the iron earth, rigid with frost; she was the barren stretches of the colorless countryside and the gray smoke of the hills. She imbued everything with desolation and death, with decay and hatred, with emptiness and sterility. She did not seem to speak to me again, but her presence oppressed me, weighed me down with a sense of horror. I rode on, bent double in my saddle, shivering.

  And then I seemed to see Livy’s face, the steadfast eyes, the resolute mouth. I could see the fine white honesty of her, the lack of hypocrisy, the clear courage. She was like a light breaking into darkness, and Beatrice seemed to recede, to be swallowed up, to retreat into fathomless places. The sharpness of my perception faded; everything lost psychic and terrifying significance, became friendly and concrete again, earthy and familiar. I was again only a sick man hurrying home. With the fading of the perception came physical exhaustion.

  I began to wonder about Dan. For the thousandth time I turned the whole matter over in my mind. He had left at nine o’clock; he could, by fast riding, have reached his farm within an hour, murdered his wife, left softly when old Martha had let herself in the back door, and then could have galloped back to town. When nearing the outskirts, at a little after eleven, he could have started back leisurely. He would have known that they would be looking for him, and he could have let them pick him up at a shrewdly calculated time, after midnight. During this time he could have planned his alibi, knowing that old Mortimer would not betray him, knowing that I would keep silent. But, did he do all this? Remembering him, I could hardly believe that he had planned to kill Beatrice without revealing to me some faint sign of what was going on in his mind. Or, perhaps, he had no intention of killing her when he had left us at or a little before nine o’clock, and only formulated his story when the thing was done. But, did he do all this? Was I never to know?

  I knew that if I had been less his friend I still could not have betrayed him. Somehow, the thought that Livy had loved him, might still love him, did not seem important. It was just a sad incident which I could not make real.

  My mind then was preoccupied with the old puzzling wonder as to why Dan was hated so. “Socialist?” It sounded ludicrous to me. I knew more than did anyone else the hatred and disgust in which Dan held the shiftless and the stupid, the improvident and the illiterate. If he had defended a few of these people it was because he could not endure to see suffering. He had an impartial sense of justice. But these things did not account for the active animosity and detestation in which he was held by almost all who knew him. He had never been aggressive, he had never forced himself anywhere, he had always retreated, always shut doors behind him. He had rarely spoken. He had not been manifestly peculiar, obstrusively distinctive. He had not been a great genius, thus arousing envy and scorn. Why, then?

  I still do not know. It was not because of his obscure beginnings, for one of the young men of whom South Kenton was most proud had been the son of a miserable farmer, then Ezra King had taken the lad into his bank to do errand jobs and sweeping. But he had shown application and intelligence and was on the way to becoming manager. South Kenton was democratic in its way.

  And then, perhaps it was that very aloofness, that very impersonal withdrawal, that very indifference to everyone that had set hate barking after Dan. He had lived among us, but not with us. He had been a stranger who had made no effort to learn our language, not from superior contempt, but from utter indifference. Because he really had not seen us. Yes, perhaps that was it. Mankind can endure any affront except not being noticed.

  “Look and pass.” He had looked at us, had seen us only impersonally, had passed and left us. Just as he had looked at life and passed it. It was without color and point and significance to him. Whether he was right or wrong I do not know. Even today it seems a bloodless and alien way to look at life. He probably could not help it. His inner eye could not focus on anything about him; he was preoccupied with the secret and vivid life he lived in himself. Perhaps, I thought suddenly, he was that exposed and quivering brain that I had seemed to see objectively. Perhaps he had woven an artificial covering for it to protect it from the onslaughts of a fanged reality, and through that covering he could neither see nor feel. He was a prisoner in a small house with shuttered windows, but what went on in that house, none of us would ever know.

  The next turn in the road brought me in sight of Dan’s farm. I could see the dark greenness of the line of pines, the little valleys and hollows in the fields, the familiar hills. I spurred up my horse thankfully. Then as I came closer I saw that a group of about twenty men stood in the narrow and rutty roadway that led to Dan’s house. They had hitched their horses to saplings and gateposts. Five or six buggies stood emptily on the bleached grass.

  When the men heard my horse, they surged together in a mass and waited. There was an ominous air about them, a held menace. I could see the smoke of their pipes now, and the whips in their hands. A dull mutter came from them. But evidently they had mistaken me for Dan, for when they recognized me the mutter died down; they spat into the gray dust of the roadway and exchanged glances. I recognized several of them as being members of the lesser townfolk and country folk, but among them were Dave King, Willie Williams, and Jack Rugby. I pulled up my horse.

  “Hello,” I said uncertainly.

  “Hello, Jim,” muttered Jack Rugby with visible and sullen uneasiness. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I can ask the same thing of you,” I replied. My vision became clear with apprehension. “I came to see Dan.”

  “So did we,” said Dave King, and a hoarse and sinister chuckle rose from the other men.

  I got off my horse slowly. “Look here,” I said to my friends, “I hope you fellows aren’t going to make any trouble. Dan’s been freed of any suspicion in this business. I hope you aren’t going to make fools of yourselves. There’s law, you know. Surely none of you are asses enough to think he did that. He wasn’t even around.”

  “That’s the story,” said Jack significantly. “But all of us think there’
s something fishy about the whole business. Why, there’s not been a tramp in these parts for months. No one else could have done it.” He looked at me without friendliness, a stocky and sturdy young man with a red face and a cold and alert blue eye.

  “If you were down in Ripley today, you know the whole story,” I said angrily. “He didn’t do it. I know he didn’t do it. Not that I would blame him if he did. She deserved killing. But, that isn’t the point. Why, Jack, he was with your father. Your mother saw him, heard him. Do you think they are liars?”

  He shrugged. “I shill think there’s something fishy about it.” He surveyed me with contempt. “Don’t get het up, Jim. We aren’t going to hang or even to whip your damn friend. All we’re going to do is to tell him to get out of here, leave the country. We don’t want him around. Of course,” he added casually, “if he doesn’t see things our way we’re going to persuade him.”

  I looked around at the surly and threatening faces of the others in despair. I put my hand on the side of my horse to steady myself.

  “Expect you’d better go along, Jim,” said Willie Williams, not unkindly. He laughed a little. “I’m a lawyer, ain’t I? I’m here to protect the interest of my clients. I’ll not let them get into a hanging matter. But anyway, we’re going to see that Mr. Dan Hendricks leaves these parts, personally. I can even be his lawyer; I’ll offer to close up all his business for him. I guess we can make him see reason.”

  The others burst into loud laughter, and looked at me derisively.

  “There’s law,” I began.

  “Yep, there’s law,” agreed Jack, flicking his leg significantly with his whip.

  I glared at the nondescript men behind my friends. “Say, you, Jack, Dave, Willie, you aren’t going to head this mob, are you?” I pleaded. “Where’s your pride, getting mixed up with them? This—this is anarchy.” My tongue felt thick.