|MAY I see Hicks?”
The stout, bearded jailor nearly-filled the doorway. He puffed his short
pipe deliberately, and stared at Aidee. The smoke floated up and around
the gas jet over his head.
“Ain't you the Preacher?”
“So they call me.”
The jailor stepped back, either in surprise or consent. Aidee walked
into the opening and passed on. The jailor followed him.
“Where is his cell?”
“Spiritual consolation! That's it. That's the word,” said the jailor
thoughtfully. “Some folks has the gift of it. Oils a chap up, don't it,
so he'll slip out'n his corpse, like he was greased. Well, there's
som'p'n in it. But I seen in the _Press_ this mornin'--say, you ain't
goin' to instigate him again?”
Aidee laughed, and said:
“They have to be lively.”
“That's right, Preacher. Folks say a thing, but what they got in their
heads is the thing they don't say, ain't it?”
“You're a philosopher.”
“Oh, I do a pile of thinkin',” said the jailor complacently.
He mounted slowly to the upper corridor, knocked at a door, and unlocked
it.
“Hicks, gentleman to see you.”
Hicks looked up, blinking and shading his eyes.
The jailor locked the door noisily behind Aidee, and walked away. At the
end of the corridor he stopped and listened, and heard the murmur of low
voices. He sat down and tipped his chair against the wall and meditated.
“Spiritual consolation! That's the word.”
Alcott leaned his back against the wall, and stared at Allen, who ran to
his side and grasped his arm and whispered, “Don't you yell out!” while
Sweeney was locking the door noisily. Sweeney's steps receded in the
corridor.
“What do you come here for? Keep quiet!”
“Lolly!”
“Who told you it was me?”
He pulled him over to the table. They sat down and gripped hands across
and looked dumbly at each other. Allen broke down first. He dropped his
head on the table and gave soft, dry sobs.
“Lolly, boy!”
“Did he tell you it was me?”
“Who?”
“Hennion!”
“Nobody told me it was you.”
“You came to see Hicks!”
He looked up suddenly with an impish grin. “Hey! I know! You wanted to
ask me what I shot Wood for? That's what they all want to know.”
It was the same twisted smile that Alcott knew so well, two-thirds on
one side of his face, the same shy, freakish look in the eyes as of
a cornered animal. They used to laugh at home over Lolly's queer
smile--Lolly the original, the unexpected, the sudden and fierce in
his small resentments, yet how passionately loving, and how lovable
and clever! They used to think so at home. Here he was, then, with his
twisted smile, and hot, black eyes and jerking, vivid speech. His thin,
straggling beard had changed his looks. He had aged fast in the six
years. Alcott thought he would hardly have recognised him at a little
distance. So--why, Hicks!--Carroll said Hicks used to drink down
Alcott's own speeches like brandy! Hicks had killed Wood!
“What else have you been up to, Lolly? That's the worst job yet.”
The eyes of each regarded the other's hungrily. Allen chattered on in a
low, excited voice.
“Old Al, I love you so! Forgive me seventy times seven. Hey! I heard
every speech you made, pretty near. What do you think? Say! What'll they
do to me?” he whispered, turning to the window. “I wished I could get
out. Say, Al, when you were in Nevada at Beekman's, where do you suppose
I was? Over the divide at Secor's Lode, Number Two, and you came near
spotting me once! I ain't a fool, anyway. I dodged you neat. I lived on
the east side with Jimmy Shays. Say, he's a fool. I can sole two shoes
to his one. But sometimes I don't remember, Al. I tried to remember how
Mummy looked, and I couldn't. But I used to remember. But, Al, what'd
you come for? Say, I cleared the track of Wood all right. Say, they'd
never have caught me, if I'd got away then. They were too many. I kept
out of your way all right. I wasn't going to mess you again, and that
suited me all right, that way. I pegged shoes along with old Shays.
Damn greasy Irishman, there, Coglan. I'll knife him some day. No! No! I
won't, Al! Forgive me seventy times. I got something in me that burns me
up. I ain't going to last long. Let 'em kill me. God, I was proud of you!
I used to go home like dynamite, and collar old Shays, and yell, 'Down
with 'em! Where's justice?' 'Wha's matter?' says Shays. 'Where is
't?' and goes hunting for justice at the bottom of a jug of forty-rod
whiskey. Oh, Al! Al! Ain't we a sad story, you and I?”
He broke down again, chattering, sobbing with soft, small sobs, and hid
his face on the table. The gas jet leaped and fell, feebly, fitfully.
The noises of the city, the roll of wheels and clang of street-car
gongs, came in through the barred window.
“I was running myself, too, Al, and that made me feel better. I been
happy sometimes.”
“Aren't you glad to see me, Lolly?”
“Yes. But you ain't going to hold me down. Now, say, Al,” he pleaded,
“don't you give it away! Folks'd be down on you. I ain't like I used to
be. I'm proud of you, now. I ain't going to mess you any more, but I've
done something myself, ain't I? Done for myself too, ain't I?”
“I've got to think this out. That was all wrong, boy. That old man,
Wood, had a right to his life.”
“He had _no_ right!”
Allen was on his feet, two fingers shaking in the air.
“Quiet, Lolly! Sweeney's in the corridor. I'm not blaming you. Why
didn't you come to me? I'd have let you live as you liked. I'm going
away to think it out. Never mind. I say, drop it, Lolly! We'll sled
together again. I've said it, and you can quit talking.”
Allen clung to his hand.
“You're coming again, Al.”
He felt Alcott's old mastery gripping him again, the same thing that
had always been to him the foundation of his existence, and yet always
intolerable and smothering. Not being able to live without Alcott,
nor yet with him, the four years in Port Argent had seemed a clever
solution--not with Alcott, nor yet without him; free of his smothering
control, but seeing his face and hearing his voice.
He rattled on half hysterically, while Alcott gripped his hand across
the table, and said little.
Gradually the picture took shape in Alcott's mind, and his mental image
of the last four years changed form and line of the new demand. He saw
Allen going home nights from the Assembly Hall, with his light, jerky
step, exulting, hugging himself gleefully. How he had hated Al's
enemies! How he had longed to kill Carroll for sneering at Al in choppy
paragraphs! How he had hated Marve Wood, whom Al called a “disease”! How
he had lurked in the shadow under the gallery of the Assembly Hall! How
he had pegged shoes and poured his excitement, in vivid language, into
the ears of the east-side loafers in the shoe-shop! How flitted back
and forth over the Maple Street bridge, where the drays and trolley cars
jangled, where the Muscadine flowed, muddy and muttering, below!
“You've been in Port Argent all this time!” Alcott said at last. “I
wouldn't have talked that way if I'd known you were there.”
“Say! You'd have been afraid? No! Why, you ain't afraid of anything,
Al!”
“I was always afraid of you.”
“What for? You're coming again, Al!”
“You don't think I'm going to let you alone now!”
“I ain't going to mess you over again! No!” he whispered, twisting his
fingers.
Alcott knitted his black brows and held his hand over the nervous
fingers.
“Drop it, Lolly!”
“What you going to do? You're coming again?” His voice was thin and
plaintive.
“Yes.”
“How soon?”
“To-morrow. I've got to think it over. I can't stay now, Lolly.”
He rose and went to the door and rattled it. Sweeney's steps came slowly
down the corridor. Allen sat still while the jailor opened the door.
“I'll see you again, then, Mr. Hicks.”
Allen looked up suddenly with an impish grin.
“Pretty cool, ain't he?” said Sweeney presently. “I didn't hear
much noise. Now, when Mr. Hennion came here--look here, I told Mr.
Hennion--why, you look at it, now! There ought to be a new jail.”
“I see. Not very creditable.”
“Why, no.” Sweeney argued in an injured tone. “Look at it!”
“I want to bring Hicks a book or two. May I?”
“Why, I guess so.”
Aidee went home, hurrying, not knowing why he hurried. His hands felt
cold, his head hot and dizzy. He longed to hide and not see the faces on
the street, faces which all judged that Lolly should die.
“Brotherhood of man!” He had a brother, one whom the rest of the
brotherhood wanted to hang, a small man, with a queer smile and
wriggling fingers, sitting under the dim gas jet.
Even in his familiar rooms he could not think or sleep. He saw before
him days upon days, courts and lawyers, preparations for the trial, the
long doubt, and what then? Only a black pit full of things intolerable,
not to be looked at. Yet it stood there stolidly, in front.
The Assembly? He would rather have Wood than the Assembly to help him
here, or Hennion, or Secor. But neither Hennion nor Secor would help
him here. They were men of the crowd in the street, who all preferred to
hang Lolly.
At daybreak he rose, dressed, and went out. It was Friday morning. The
air was fresh and damp. He looked at the Assembly building opposite, and
fancied himself speaking from the familiar wide platform within, saying:
“I am the brother of Hicks, the murderer, in your jail--I who lied to
you, calling you my brethren, protesting one universal bond, who have
but one brother and one bond of blood,--to you who are my enemies. His
name is Allen Aidee, and your name is Legion.”
People called him abrupt and sensational. It would be a relief to speak
so, sharp and harsh, like the breaking of a window glass with one's fist
in a stifling room.
He thought of the scores of times he had looked on the crowd of faces
from the platform there, and he tried now to put into each picture
one more item, namely, Allen sitting far back in the shadow under the
gallery. When he had put this item in, it covered up the rest of the
picture.
Probably Allen used to go across the river by following the side streets
over to Maple Street, and so to the bridge. Alcott left Seton Avenue and
walked toward Maple Street through that still sleeping section of the
city. On Maple Street, the trolley cars were beginning to run, milk
waggons clattered over the rough pavement.
“Poor boy!”
Lolly claimed to have been happy during those four years. After all, the
arrangement he had made was characteristic, the very kind of thing he
would be apt to do. Alcott wondered why he had never suspected that
Allen was lurking near him.
Down Maple Street, then, Allen's regular road must have lain. How often
he must have gone over the bridge, his nerves twitching and his head
blazing with Alcott's last words! Here was the hurrying muddy river,
running high now with the spring floods, mad, headlong, and unclean. Not
an inch beyond its surface could one see. A drowned body might float,
and if an inch of water covered it, no man would know.
Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which
I tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional,
unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this
muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream,
and the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all
interpretations of itself, in course of time.
In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one
side of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river,
on the other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with
shops in most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each.
Already Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy
with cars and hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river
factories began to blow.
The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a
street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He
stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot,
and bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through
the narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his
head on the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he
hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly.
One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots,
cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil
wells.
“Lolly! Lolly!”
Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the
ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard,
iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was
justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a
clamour and cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even
balance? There was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth? It was revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must
know that uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that
was justice.
Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy
stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must
have him!”
All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed
suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go
away. It seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue
Assembly, and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and
stone, and the iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple
thing. Their stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the
city.
The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove
from without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds
flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights
where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new
leaves were growing.