Part 14

AFTER being dead twenty years, he walked out into the sunshine.

It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh.

To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body.

The penitentiary is one of these. David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten heart, he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself,--for hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and industry.

But they had vanished and left no trace, like the flesh of the dead men on the plains, and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.

You can understand, can you not, how a skeleton might wish to get back into its comfortable grave? David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him. Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth--that snug and insignificant planet--looked to David Culross.

“If I go back,” he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills, “they will not take me in.” He was absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams,-dreams which were never prophecies or promises, but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by his crime, and relinquished by his pride.

The men who passed him looked at him with mingled amusement and pity. They knew the “prison look,” and they knew the prison clothes. For though the State gives to its discharged convicts clothes which are like those of other men, it makes a hundred suits from the same sort of cloth. The police know the fabric, and even the citizens recognize it. But, then, were each man dressed in different garb he could not be disguised. Every one knows in what dull school that sidelong glance is learned, that aimless drooping of the shoulders, that rhythmic lifting of the heavy foot.

David Culross wondered if his will were dead. He put it to the test. He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many miserable years. He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at nonchalance, and walked down the street with a step which was meant to be brisk, but which was in fact only uncertain. In his pocket were ten dollars. This much the State equips a man with when it sends him out of its penal halls. It gives him also transportation to any point within reasonable distance that he may desire to reach. Culross had requested a ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait, these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.

There was the office, bare and clean, where the young stoop-shouldered clerks sat writing. In their faces was a strange resemblance, just as there was in the backs of the ledgers, and in the endless bills on the spindles. If one of them laughed, it was not with gayety, but with gratification at the discomfiture of another. None of them ate well. None of them were rested after sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy one-horse cars to and from their work. Sundays they lay in bed very late, and ate more dinner than they could digest. There was a certain fellowship among them,--such fellowship as a band of captives among cannibals might feel, each of them waiting with vital curiosity to see who was the next to be eaten. But of that fellowship that plans in unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicariously, strengthens into friendship and communion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed, such camaraderie would have been disapproved of by the Head Clerk. He would have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he would on an error in the footing of the year's accounts. It was tacitly understood that one reached the proud position of Head Clerk by having no emotions whatever.

Culross did not remember having been born with a pen in his hand, or even with one behind his ear; but certainly from the day he had been let out of knickerbockers his constant companion had been that greatly overestimated article. His father dying at a time that cut short David's school-days, he went out armed with his new knowledge of double-entry, determined to make a fortune and a commercial name. Meantime, he lived in a suite of three rooms on West Madison Street with his mother, who was a good woman, and lived where she did that she might be near her favorite meeting-house. She prayed, and cooked bad dinners, principally composed of dispiriting pastry. Her idea of house-keeping was to keep the shades down, whatever happened; and when David left home in the evening for any purpose of pleasure, she wept. David persuaded himself that he despised amusement, and went to bed each night at half-past nine in a folding bedstead in the front room, and, by becoming absolutely stolid from mere vegetation, imagined that he was almost fit to be a Head Clerk.

Walking down the street now after the twenty years, thinking of these dead but innocent days, this was the picture he saw; and as he reflected upon it, even the despoiled and desolate years just passed seemed richer by contrast.

He reached the station thus dreaming, and found, as he had been told when the warden bade him good-by, that a train was to be at hand directly bound to the city. A few moments later he was on that train. Well back in the shadow, and out of sight of the other passengers, he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the comfortable cushion. He would willingly have looked from the window,--green fields were new and wonderful; drifting clouds a marvel; men, houses, horses, farms, all a revelation,--but those haunting visions were at him again, and would not leave brain or eye free for other things.

But the next scene had warmer tints. It was the interior of a rich room,--crimson and amber fabrics, flowers, the gleam of a statue beyond the drapings; the sound of a tender piano unflinging a familiar melody, and a woman. She was just a part of all the luxury.

He himself, very timid and conscious of his awkwardness, sat near, trying barrenly to get some of his thoughts out of his brain on to his tongue.

“Strange, isn't it,” the woman broke in on her own music, “that we have seen each other so very often and never spoken? I've often thought introductions were ridiculous. Fancy seeing a person year in and year out, and really knowing all about him, and being perfectly acquainted with his name--at least his or her name, you know--and then never speaking! Some one comes along, and says, 'Miss Le Baron, this is Mr. Culross,' just as if one didn't know that all the time! And there you are! You cease to be dumb folks, and fall to talking, and say a lot of things neither of you care about, and after five or six weeks of time and sundry meetings, get down to honestly saying what you mean. I'm so glad we've got through with that first stage, and can say what we think and tell what we really like.”

Then the playing began again,--a harplike intermingling of soft sounds. Zoe Le Baron's hands were very girlish. Everything about her was unformed. Even her mind was so. But all promised a full completion. The voice, the shoulders, the smile, the words, the lips, the arms, the whole mind and body, were rounding to maturity.

“Why do you never come to church in the morning?” asks Miss Le Baron, wheeling around on her piano-stool suddenly. “You are only there at night, with your mother.”

“I go only on her account,” replies David, truthfully. “In the morning I am so tired with the week's work that I rest at home. I ought to go, I know.”

“Yes, you ought,” returns the young woman, gravely. “It doesn't really rest one to lie in bed like that. I've tried it at boarding-school. It was no good whatever.”

“Should you advise me,” asks David, in a confiding tone, “to arise early on Sunday?”

The girl blushes a little. “By all means!” she cries, her eyes twinkling, “and--and come to church. Our morning sermons are really very much better than those in the evening.” And she plays a waltz, and what with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses, a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling of sound. As the painter flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women suddenly realize that each life has its significance,-their own lives no less than the lives of others.

The man sitting there in the shadow in that noisy train saw in his vision how the lad arose and moved, like one under a spell, toward the piano. He felt again the enchantment of the music-ridden quiet, of the perfume, and the presence of the woman.

“Knowing you and speaking with you have not made much difference with me,” he whispers, drunk on the new wine of passion, “for I have loved you since I saw you first. And though it is so sweet to hear you speak, your voice is no more beautiful than I thought it would be. I have loved you a long time, and I want to know--”

The broken man in the shadow remembered how the lad stopped, astonished at his boldness and his fluency, overcome suddenly at the thought of what he was saying. The music stopped with a discord. The girl arose, trembling and scarlet.

“I would not have believed it of you,” she cries, “to take advantage of me like this, when I am alone--and--everything. You know very well that nothing but trouble could come to either of us from your telling me a thing like that.”

He puts his hands up to his face to keep off her anger. He is trembling with confusion.

Then she broke in penitently, trying to pull his hands away from his hot face: “Never mind! I know you didn't mean anything. Be good, do, and don't spoil the lovely times we have together. You know very well father and mother wouldn't let us see each other at all if they--if they thought you were saying anything such as you said just now.”