(From _The Saturday Evening Post_)
There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In
one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least
one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower
beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the
other houses on Clay Street were black blockings lifting from the lesser
blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its
windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on
edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest
at Mrs. Otterbuck's boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas,
who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer
he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.
This stranger came along Clay Street one morning and Squire Jonas, who
was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it passed in
review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the
stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying
goes.
"I'm here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company," he
said when they had spoken of this and that, "and you know, when a
chartered accountant gets on a job he's supposed to keep right at it
until he's done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the
last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I've
noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or
a party or something. But I didn't see anybody going in or coming out,
or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious.
Last night--or this morning, rather, I should say--it must have been
close on to half-past two o'clock when I passed by, and there she was,
all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom.
So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick
over there next door?"
"Yes, suh," stated the squire, "I figure you might say there is somebody
sick there. He's been sick a powerful long time too. But it's not his
body that's sick; it's his soul."
"I don't know as I get you, sir," said the other man in a puzzled sort
of way.
"Son," stated the squire, "I reckin you've been hearin' 'em, haven't
you, singin' this here new song that's goin' 'round about, 'I'm Afraid
to Go Home in the Dark'? Well, probably the man who wrote that there
song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just
made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might 'a' had the
case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind
of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you'd be
likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only
afraid to go home in the dark but he's actually feared to stay in the
dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the
killin' all right enough, but seems like he ain't never got over it; and
the sayin' in this town is that he's studied it out that ef ever he gets
in the dark, either by himself or in company, he'll see the face of that
there man he killed. So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."
In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
mysteries and its town eccentrics--its freaks, if one wished to put the
matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.
There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old
Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and
weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been
worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave
no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha'nt.
Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major
Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife
with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him.
But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time,
town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than
a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else
besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow
mortals. He was the town's chief figure of tragedy.
If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over
again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port
or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him,
physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man,
very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray
cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a
man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His
mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so far
back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at a
distance dead lichens.
The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
too, and burned them slowly and stood over the smoldering mass and
inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment. But it remained for
this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the
office of Gafford's wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about
the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:
"Who does this here hornet's nest put you fellers in mind of--this gray
color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin' back and forth
and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now--it's somebody you all
know."
And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he
said:
"Why, ain't it got percisely the same color and the same look about it
as Mr. Dudley Stackpole's face? Why, it's a perfect imitation of him!
That's whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it
bouncin' on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the
flats."
"By gum, if you ain't right!" exclaimed one of the audience. "Say, come
to think about it, I wonder if spendin' all his nights with bright
lights burnin' round him is whut's give that old man that gray color
he's got, the same as this wasp's nest has got it, and all them puckery
lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin' him!
Well, they tell me he's toler'ble well fixed in this world's goods, but
poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn't trade places with him fur any
amount of money. I've got my peace of mind if I ain't got anything else
to speak of. Say, you'd 'a' thought in all these years a man would get
over broodin' over havin' killed another feller, and specially havin'
killed him in fair fight. Let's see, now, whut was the name of the
feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin's? I
actually disremember. I've heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if
I've heard it oncet."
For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured
because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off
of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day
and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very
identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For
this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which
had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley
Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud
and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real
feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and
night-time assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now
briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a
neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its
climatic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the
death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer--and his fashion
of living afterwards--which made warp and woof for the fabric of the
tragedy.
With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in
perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying
details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on
a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid.
One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two
Tatums--Harve and Jess--for an account long overdue, and won judgment in
the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair.
Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence
marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the
Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of
Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other.
By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were
confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.
Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things
came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late '80's when the two
Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of
that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile
away to Stackpole Brothers' gristmill above the big riffle in Cache
Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit
enough--the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two,
but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member
of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on
Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business
and keeping bachelor's hall, as the phrase runs, in the living room of
the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.
Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a
well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but
also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from
trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it,
neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to
hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to
keep the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was
not the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor,
generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow.
So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that
he told any one at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of
firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill
office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he
waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when
single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother's against the
unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger,
both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.
But if Stackpole told no one, some one else told some one. Probably the
messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky
tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else
he would not have loaned his service to such employment in the first
place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.
One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within the
lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
adversaries.
But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
In a canvas-covered wagon--moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
Gravel County--they left their house half an hour or so before the time
set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.
Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to standstill just
beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from under
the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a
revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and
the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve
Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about
the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat catch a boot
heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which
knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely
on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire
once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then--the startled team
having snatched the wagon from before him--saw him advance into the open
toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.
All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw
Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from
his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh
horse spurn Harve Tatum's body aside--the kick broke his right leg, it
turned out--saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though
jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again,
and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back
and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
scream--it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus--and
saw him fall on his face, twitching and wriggling, not thirty feet from
where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
firing.
As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost
a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
had been fired.
On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
frozen stiff.
Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to
harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.
While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator
and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have
failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his
second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was
that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a
target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the
heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might
perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to
his brother, coming at the very moment of the fight's beginning,
unnerved Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second
was not in anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer
chance. The fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it
was strange.
By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this
was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the
time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff's buggy
with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern.
Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he
came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this
lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it
through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was
to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of
facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present,
it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his
hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by
certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county
building to his home in Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently
remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of
deductive reasoning.
Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner's
inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also,
that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that
no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was
conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own
choosing; an effort, which had failed, had been made to take him
unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first
been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he
should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one.
What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all,
the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much
good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had
escaped his just deserts.
Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even
more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here
vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore
mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart
attack which had kept him out of the affair at Cache Creek. The rest of
the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this
Dudley Stackpole already described.
Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he
slept--if he slept at all--in the full-lighted room of a house which was
all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening
the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it
ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one
rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of night
by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout
and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested
that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no
regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that
perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome
of that day's affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For
so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in
his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that
act might have been--why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The
repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all
plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still
flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to
confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came
to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the
dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled
that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow
townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from
the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They
agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he feared
mightily, constantly and unendingly.
That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by
night-time was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see
the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning
or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
look.
There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to their
white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a crude
carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets and
abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and how
privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric lights,
although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for final
touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and oil
lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that though
the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out there
still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house which
harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread which
lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should by
rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with
lights.
The man's abiding obsession--if we may call his besetment thus--changed
in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of
his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He
could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of
the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that
night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's
death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures,
contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale,
and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The
Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living
quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived,
which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds
in the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close
friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather
his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed
confidences.
In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of
reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in
a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked
in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a
woman's. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and
bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone,
a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the
tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House,
facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and
byways; but it was noted that, reaching the outer outskirts, he
invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if
once he set foot past the corporate limits into the open country. Dun
hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men
and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles
ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and
save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor--the wasp's-nest
overcasting of his skin--he still looked to them exactly as he had
looked when he was a much younger man.
It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the
recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and
that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight.
The one was commonplace enough--I mean his appearance--and his conduct,
unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an
unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and
habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from
him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so
indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and
uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every
local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up
of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his
eyes and breathed out from his person.
So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than
thirty, he went his lone unhappy way. He was in the life of the town, to
an extent, but not of it. Always, though it was the daylit life of the
town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional instance a
story was so often repeated that in time it became permanently embalmed
in the unwritten history of the place.
On a summer's afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all
black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great
windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out
of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its
ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on
the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing
in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and
citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted
where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley
Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
midway of the block--or square, to give it its local name--then go
slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted
zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could within the
circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
methods of artificial illumination at his command--with incandescent
bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene wick's
three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
the lights--all of them.
That once was all, though--the only time he found the dark taking him
unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.
With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the _Daily Evening
News_, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
way down the first column and ran as follows:
"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
big-riffle crossing was this way"--it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with
both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but
maybe there's some people still alive back there in that county who can
remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise
both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything
the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late
day I don't aim to drag the name of any one else into this, especially a
woman's name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will
just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving to see Jess
Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will
state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on
living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he
had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as
well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but will state that I used
my best judgment.
"Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare
which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that
it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess
Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be
mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards
by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I
figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed
likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed,
especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work
from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly
as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a
good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came
out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers'
gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o'clock in the
evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to be there and get
everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without
being hurried or rushed.
"The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being
seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a
window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain
when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window
open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three
inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made
me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I
waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn't figure
on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was
up there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at
all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came
the first shot.
"What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the
road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main
Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first
shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust
seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum
jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole
come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting
back at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know
then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.
"Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two
seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round
to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going
on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever
for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums
would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get
into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn't know the
first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while
I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum's breast, I
seen his first shot--Stackpole's I mean--kick up the dust not twenty
feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as
cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.
"So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have
it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted
that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like
he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange
thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned
back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways
before he dropped flat, face down. Somebody else, seeing him do that,
might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with
his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time
to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild
duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a
case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it
when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done
by a man.
"So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little
while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to
worry, and I did not--not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
before I do so.
"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
throw a different-size bullet. But they never thought to do so."
Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"
Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
killed him."
Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of
an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"
Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."
And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style--which was a very dramatic
and moving style indeed--of the circumstances, as recalled by old
residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
cloud from his life.
"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
I'd have this Frenchman Balzac clear off the boards when it came to
describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've been in this
business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
anything that was the beat of this thing.
"Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning
from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.
"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
Bledsoe?'
"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
memories--not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
being always with him, anyway--may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
turned round and came back.
"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly
called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'--he checked himself up,
here--'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
then.'
"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
that you want to say.
"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who's forgotten almost how
'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him, and
I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
into a resurrection."
Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
hard upon a denouement, which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."
Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.
As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires
went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
He was getting old. The good news had come late but not too late. That
day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.
And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he
took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to
put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry
failure, he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the
failure. He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless
and mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as
he came down the porch steps he looked about him, but dully, with sick
and uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely
things.
Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but
still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the
universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a
good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire with a
gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled
by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it
jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be
divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire,
ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most
talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his
faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a
moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his
brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went
scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings
would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and
unbelievable tidings.
Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the
sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew--an
elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry
store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon
the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a
stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole
bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun
on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as
though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless
something, confusedly; he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like
one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his
own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the
narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside
the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a
few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in
this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be
interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound
surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly
off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard
and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr.
Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one
who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.
Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay
Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at
the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to
watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression
showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill.
They stopped, too, when they saw him--stopped short. With one accord
they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman withdrew
to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The
three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their
shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together,
all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It
was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at
this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion--a
suspicion of which plainly he was the object.
For long years Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives
and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not
altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his
gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read
aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He
now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered
mien--cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness--had
thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand
it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had
startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been
expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It
would be different when the _Daily Evening News_ came out. He would go
back home--he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper
people would not avoid him or flee from him. They would be coming into
his house to wish him well, to reëstablish old relations with him. Why,
it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his
own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to
his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he
was away now driven out and gone forever.
He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while
nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie
unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the
front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction
touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had
without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that
she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry,
leaving the spilt fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had
made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying
down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of
his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used
to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
why that would be a different matter altogether. So presently she was
confiding to her spiritual adviser.
Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street was
almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of pedestrian
travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward from work. He
had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.
Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
heard the news. He knew that they had heard it--all of them--knew it by
the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
curiosity.
Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
rôle he for so long had worn?
He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it came
to him, registering emphatically.
As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.
Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
though, things must be different when the minds of people had
readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.
And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
in a silent pæan of thanksgiving.
Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
all those years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
travesty on sleep his sleep had been, first reading until a heavy
physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours
of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of
his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from
the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
worse--the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
night he would sleep--sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
friendly, comforting dark.
Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that
he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.
Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goose-necked
iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
controlled the battery of electric lights round about, and with a
long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.
The pæaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on
his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness--that
blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life--had
come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.
That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.
For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
one thing nor the other.
Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes
a time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and
the mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
victim of his own imagination--he knew it too. The hint of it had that
day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
night-time thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
but one way out of the coil--and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
ringed about by the obscene and indecent circle of his lights which kept
away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was passing.