GRAFFY Beale had skulked back from the jail to his old burrow in the
huge traverse. His sense of liberty expressed itself only in the fact
that he was free to lie here in the deep glooms under the earth as if
he were dead. Through the jagged fissure, where once was the door of
the powder-magazine, he had no glimpse of the midsummer world save a
narrow section of the parapet on which the lavished blood had bloomed
so splendidly in trumpet-flowers. To his upward glance they defined
themselves gorgeously against the blue sky, where sometimes a pale
poetic moon swung among them in the full glare of the yellow sunshine.
A bird might flit by; the grasshoppers drowsily droned; lizards basked.
When the sky grew gold, and purple, and faintly green, behind those
swaying red blossoms, he looked up to see the evening star in the amber
haze, and it looked down to see the haggard misery in his mowing face.
Sometimes a moonbeam stole to the fissure, and the mists entered into
fellowship with him, and they inhabited the powder-magazine together.
When they fell to shifting and shimmering, and asserting weird forms
in the dusky dreariness; when a strange tumult sprang up all along the
parapets; when the tramp of marching hosts and the clash of arms shook
the earth; when the whirling wheels of the light artillery went by on
the wind; when all the night broke forth with those strange lipless
shrieks of the dead, with the blare of their bugles, with the roll of
their drums, he shivered and trembled, and turned his grimacing face to
the wall. But the ghosts had done him no harm--and in these days they
seemed nearer akin than the living.
Now that his terrors of the law were over, he had developed in the
reaction a morbid shrinking from the world, and his griefs--they were
many--renewed their power. He said there was no place for him--he
wanted no food, no drink, no home. He would waste out his life, wear it
out, offer it in expiation, here.
Days had passed since he had heard a stir close at hand other than the
flutter of a bird or a rabbit’s leaping rush. Suddenly there sounded,
on the parapet without, hesitating footsteps, heavy panting, the sharp
cracking of brush and weeds, which indicated a struggle with the
brambles. He rose from the ground, tremulous and weak, and, holding
in his hand his wool hat, which had the best of reasons for being
fresh and unfaded by the sun, he stepped out through the fissure. The
light struck full upon his yellow hair, that was as fine and soft as a
woman’s, and gave out a glimmer like burnished gold. As he turned his
head upward there was something ineffably repugnant in his pitiful,
jail-bleached, mowing face. But delighted recognition resounded in the
shrill cry set up suddenly on the parapet--there was a great scuffling
under the blackberry bushes, and a dirty, tattered, tow-headed urchin
came sliding, with an avalanche of dislodged stones, down the steep
interior slope.
“They tole me ter fotch ye!” he piped out tumultuously on a high
key. Then he sat down on the tread of the banquette, placed his
hands on either knee, and drew a long breath. His attention was
abruptly arrested by the sight of the sun-blanched skull of a noble
charger, flung here, perhaps, when upturned by the plough in the
fields without. The boy’s curious eye detected the minie ball still
half embedded in the splintered bone. He glanced over his shoulder,
furtively, fearfully, for the unseen terrors that lurked about the
place. “Whyn’t ye go ’way from hyar, now that ye air out’n jail?” he
demanded impatiently.
Graffy said nothing. He was only wondering vaguely why Pickie Tait
should have sought him here. The boy was called “Pickie” by reason of a
certain deft accomplishment of picking and stealing, sometimes--“Quick
Pickie;” he was the hardiest urchin in the county, and all the juvenile
iniquity perpetrated within five miles was easily traced to his door.
“Waal,” he observed, wiping his hot, dirty face with his tattered
shirt-sleeve, “I ain’t a-goin’ through these hyar harnted forts agin by
myself, ye hear me! Like ter hev been skeered ter death fower or five
times whilst I war a-gittin’ hyar. The folks hev sent fur ye ter kem
an’ play the fiddle at the infair. Las’ night they scoured the country,
mighty nigh, ter git a-holt o’ ye in time ter play the fiddle fur
Jeemes Blake’s weddin’. They rid hyar, an’ they rid thar! Nobody knowed
whar ye be.”
He cocked up his sharp eye reprehensively. Then he rose, went nimbly
to the old powder magazine, and peered in with amicable curiosity.
“Got yer fiddle in thar?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder and
nodding gayly, his broad mouth a-grin.
“Ye-es.” The man flung out the word between his chattering teeth and
his unruly muscles. “The fiddle is thar.”
“I’ll tote it,” said the boy officiously. He treated his red, round
face to another smear from his ragged sleeve. Then he cut a wiry caper,
kicking up a festive heel. “Kem on!” he cried imperiously. “They say
that now ez ye air out’n jail ye hev got ter play the fiddle at the
infair.”
And Graffy followed.
Perhaps it was by way of making her flout at humanity more complete, of
pointing her grim jest, that Nature encased a great gift here--a gift
that should be as useless, as unavailing as a wayside weed. But like
the wayside weed, it throve mightily in sterile conditions where naught
else might grow.
His wild, barbaric melodies came to him as the wind comes; no one
knows how, nor whence. They were a defiance of science, but in their
spontaneous ecstasy they swayed, they thrilled, they held. In the midst
of the infair that night, when their passionate, tumultuous, shivering
chords set all the midnight a-quiver, the strong rapture of his rude
art once more laid hold upon his heart, and it grew warm again. As he
sat on the cabin porch, his unnaturally white cheek pressed to the
instrument, his eyes were fixed sometimes on the stars which seemed
to throb in sympathy with the rhythmic vibrations of the strings,
sometimes on the red interior, where the dancing figures of young men
and girls whirled in a cloud of dust that was idealized into a golden
haze by the soft light of the kerosene lamp. Merry guffaws proceeded
from the elders, ranged against the wall or thronging the cooler porch,
where they smoked and spat profusely through the white and lilac
blossoms of the luxuriant jack-bean, and among the yellow globes of the
gourd vines which climbed to the roof. Once there burst forth from the
violin a strain so rapturous, so poignantly beautiful that its effect
was like that of some impassioned eloquence. A slow, white-haired
codger, the bridegroom’s father, paused in lighting his pipe, and let
the match burn to his fingers, while he stared at the instrument and
the uncouth musician. “Graffy do fairly make that fiddle talk!” he
exclaimed.
When the bow paused, and the reel was finished, and the elders made way
for the over-heated young people to get out into the air and walk in
couples, arm in arm, up and down the dusty turnpike, or flirt and make
love under the apple-trees, or sit--a noisy, hilarious crew--on the
rickety steps, this man, the host, sauntered up to the musician.
“S’prisin’ how ye play, Graffy,” he remarked affably.
Graffy looked down at the violin and twanged the strings. “Toler’ble
well,” he admitted, in his shrill, gasping voice, “cornsiderin’ I never
hed no showin’.”
“Shucks! showin’ ’s nothin’!” said the old man, with that supreme
contempt for science so characteristic of ignorance.
“I hearn tell in town,” said a black-bearded, jeans-clad fellow
lounging against a post close by, “ez Patton--I don’t mean Bob; I
speaks of his brother Jim, the jailer--waal, Jim say ez he air a-tryin’
mighty hard ter put up some sort’n job on ye ter git ye an’ yer fiddle
back thar agin. He say they air all mighty lonesome round them diggin’s
now, sure. He say they all ’low ez ye wouldn’t know it fur the same
place. He say ye kin play all sorts o’ chunes out o’ yer own head. He
say ye kin even play hyme chunes wonderful.”
The musician glanced from one to the other, his pallid, grimacing face
indistinctly seen in the light from within the door. They might not
know if he smiled, but he twanged at the string with the air of a man
who receives a compliment.
“I’d a-reckoned ye’d hev furgot how ter play all them months ez ye war
a-hidin’ out,” said the black-bearded man. “Ye never tetched yer bow
then, I’ll bet, fur enny fool would know yer whank from enny other
man’s sawing, ez fur ez they could hear it.”
Even Graffy’s face, debarred though it seemed of expression, changed
subtly. He took the fiddle and began to turn it about mechanically.
“That was a mighty queer dodge ennyhow, yer hidin’ out,” said the
rough, black-bearded man, whose coarse disregard of the other’s
sensibilities was perhaps unintentional. “Ye ought ter hev lef’ the
thing ter men at fust,” he pursued didactically. “That’s jestice. Ye
_hev_ ter leave sech questions ter men. I can’t understan’ how ye
hed grit enough ter face shot an’ shell in the old war times, an’ now
ye air afeard ter leave things ter men.”
“Whar hev ye been stayin’ sence ye been out--at Tom’s?” asked the host.
“No,” gasped Graffy; “Tom an’ me hev bruk.”
“I hearn,” said the black-bearded man, animatedly retailing the gossip,
“ez how Tom hev never said nare word ter ye sence he was took; they say
he warned Patton ’t warn’t safe ter leave ye an’ him tergether, kase
he’d do ye a damage, sure; they say he hev jes’ gin ye up an’ cast ye
off.”
“Laws-a-massy!” exclaimed the master of the house, upon this dramatic
recital. “I dunno what ails Tom Toole, to sot hisself up ez better’n
Graffy Beale.”
“I s’pose he thinks Graffy fotched all his troubles on him,” said the
black-bearded man dispassionately.
“Ef he hed a mind ter renounce ye he oughter hev done it a-fust,”
declared the old codger. “Then he’d ’a’ been cl’ar o’ blame an’ trouble
too. That’s like Tom Toole--do all he kin fur a-body, an’ grudge it
arterward. But law! we hain’t got time to be a-talkin’ ’bout sech ez
that. The folks air on the floor agin, standin’ up ter dance. They
all look powerful peart, an’ spry, an’ straight, don’t they?” He
admiringly surveyed the two rows of rosy-faced young rustics through
the gleaming haze of dust. “I’m mightily afeard, though, that hell is
a-gapin’ fur ’em.”
“Shucks! They’re young yit,” said the black-bearded man, too leniently
for the “perfessin’ member” and anti-dancing theorist that he was.
“Jes’ fryin’ size, I’m thinkin’,” chuckled the old fellow. “Play
up, Graffy; gin ’em a good chune ter dance ter the devil by. That’s
edzactly whar ye air all bound fur,” he added, raising his voice, as
he leaned through the open door and admonished the young people with a
gesticulatory, skinny forefinger. “Play up, Graffy, an’ let ’em dance
ter the devil.”
So Graffy played up.
The freshness of dawn and dew was in the air when he was tramping
along the turnpike. Only by degrees the fences on either hand detached
themselves from the dense gloom. The sad, gray light made day seem
hardly less drear than darkness. But in the distance a purple mass,
which he knew was Fort Despair, slowly outlined itself against a
faintly roseate suffusion in the east, that was deepening and reddening
all along the horizon. Suddenly it expanded into a myriad of divergent
lines, that shot up into the sky, quivering from red into the purest
gold, then into a dazzling white effulgence that the eye might not
gaze upon. The birds burst into song, the wind rose, and for a mile
throughout the level country he could see the jagged line of the works
take the first benedictory touch of the sun.
Perhaps it was the matutinal purity and peace that rested upon the
land, less like holiness than forgiveness, which revived in him a
yearning to which he thought he had grown callous. He watched for a
long time, from the opposite bank of the river, the smoke stealing
timorously up from Tom Toole’s log-cabin, and when the first wagoner of
the day came down the turnpike and hallooed lustily for the ferryman,
he, too, went to the water’s edge and waited for the boat.
“I’ll be fixed nigher arter this, an’ kin hear folks call,” said the
new ferryman apologetically to the teamster. “Tom Toole gits out ’n his
house terday, an’ I gits in termorrow. Mighty ill-convenient it’s been
fur me at my brother’s place, way down yander round the bend.”
When Graffy had trudged up the steep bank, he paused and laid his hand
on Toole’s door; then he looked back over his shoulder at the cruel old
redoubt, with its flaunting flowers, its darting birds, and the grace
of the sunshine upon it. The memory of all that had come and gone swept
over him tumultuously, and he turned away without a sign.
He vacillated when he was again in the road; he glanced at the house;
he turned toward it; once more he turned away, shaking his head
tremulously and smiting his hands together.
He was sitting, when at last Toole opened the door, on a rock beside
the milestone, mowing and grimacing at the house like an ugly dream.
The burly master of the cabin stood staring, his tawny head unkempt,
his great beard streaming tangled upon his breast, a lowering, dogged,
dangerous look usurping the surprise in his eyes.
But the sight of Toole intensified the longing that had seemed to wear
itself out in the hardships of prison and the loneliness and despair of
the old powder-magazine. Now it asserted its redoubled force.
“Oh, Tom,” quavered Graffy, extending his long, deft fingers that were
unnaturally white, too, “I hev kem hyar ter shake hands with ye afore
ye goes away. Ye hev done too much fur me ter grudge me that. I never
knowed how ’t would end--fur _her_--no more’n ye did. What ye hev
done, an’ tried ter do fur me, air wuth all my life’s work, an’ more,
too,--more, too.”
“Yer life’s work!” cried Toole bitterly. “Yer life’s work air them two
graves what ye hev holped ter fill. When ye gits ter studyin’ ’bout me,
go look at them.”
And he shut the door.