Siesta, p.23
Siesta, page 23
“I called Mr. Wesley’s house, County 1122, and left word with one of his grandchildren. They said Mr. Wesley had gone out to see about a load of wood. It was November. I remember it was raining too.
“But a couple of hours later Mr. Wesley came in the office. He hung up his rubber coat and Mr. Telfair told him to sit down.
“‘What do you think about the weather, Randolph?’ said Mr. Telfair.
“‘It don’t look so good, Mr. Telfair,’ said Mr. Wesley.
“‘I don’t reckon the roads over in middle Georgia are anything to brag about after all this rain.’
“‘Oh, I reckon you can get through, Mr. Telfair.’
“‘Well, Bill Baker over at Sautee owes me about seven hundred and fifty dollars and I think he ought to pay us something. Do you reckon you could go over there and find him and have a talk with him?’
“‘I don’t know any reason in the world why I couldn’t.’
“‘Do you know that country over there?’
“‘No, sir; but I can find him.’
“‘Well, I think you better do it, Randolph. We ain’ got any security. He might be fixin’ to put his property in his wife’s name—’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘You see him and if he’ll give you six hundred dollars cash money—I reckon you better take it.’
“‘He be standin’ very much in his own light not to accept that. ’Course you know they want the world and a wire fence around it.’
“‘Well, Randolph, suppose you just get in your car and go over there and see what you can do.’
“‘All right, sir,’ Mr. Wesley said, and he put on his rubber coat and went out in the rain.
“Well, Mr. Wesley said it looked like he never would get to Sautee. First one thing came up, then another. He hadn’t gone twenty miles when he got a flat tire. Then, going up that long slick hill outside of Early Branch, he slipped off in the ditch. He had to get a pair of mules to pull him out and by that time it was getting on to night. He spent the night at Early Branch; he said he thought it might break his luck.
“But it didn’t seem to do any good. The next morning it was still raining and about twelve o’clock he had another flat tire. It just looked like everything was going wrong. Then in the middle of the afternoon, just when he was getting in the neighborhood of Sautee, he ran into a funeral. He saw some cars stopped in the road up ahead of him and when he came a little closer he saw it was a funeral. The hearse was standing in the road all right, but the other automobile, the one the family was in, had slid off in the ditch. The widow and her two grown boys and the preacher were standing round in the rain.
“Of course there wasn’t anything to do but pull up and see if he could help. So Mr. Wesley stopped and got out and asked them if there was anything he could do to help them. The car looked like it was stuck in the ditch good and proper.
“Well, Mr. Wesley had a cable in the bottom of his car he had used the day before when he was in the ditch himself, and he told them if they would fasten it on to the front axle he would see if he could pull them out. They did that and he tried, but the road was so slick he couldn’t get any hold; with that extra load his wheels spun around and it looked like he might even get over into the ditch too. All this time it getting darker and night coming on and he not getting any closer to Sautee. Then he got out and told them that if they would all just come get in his car he would ride them on to the cemetery behind the hearse and glad he could do something to help them out.
“At first the widow didn’t want to do it, but they persuaded her and they all got in. The cemetery was about two miles up the big road and he drove along after the hearse through the rain, nobody saying anything but the preacher, who was reading now and then out of the Bible.
“When they got to the cemetery Mr. Wesley helped them get the coffin out and then stayed and helped them lower it in the grave. The rain was slacking off by this time and it was beginning to turn cold. But he stayed on until the service was over and then took the widow and her two boys back to the farm.
“‘Can’t I take you to your home, sir?’ he said to the preacher; it was almost dark by then but he knew he couldn’t do anything in Sautee until tomorrow anyhow. So the preacher got back in.
“As they rode along he said to the preacher, ‘I’m a stranger in this county, I wonder if you could tell me, sir, whereabouts I can find a Mr. Bill Baker. I believe he lives in this general neighborhood—’”
“‘But, brother, you just buried him,’ said the preacher.…”
It was three-thirty when Pavinovsky set out to take Mr. Applewhite to Summerville. Mr. Applewhite was tired but he again brought up the subject of home.
“I have always felt very strongly,” he said, remembering his journal, as they drove swiftly along the empty streets through the tepid daybreak, “that if you want to do anything with your life you must get away from home. But there is another consideration to it: Is it terribly important to do something with your life? Suppose, instead of ‘doing something’ with it, which may be after all a rather childish ideal, you simply entrench your family a little more strongly in an honorable tradition; if, instead of spending your life on yourself, you conserved it and invested it, so to speak, in the good name of your family in the community, what then? Haven’t you done a little better with your time? Haven’t you built—”
He paused for a moment as his eye caught the figures of a man and a woman moving slowly across an open hill of the pale golf course. A fine arrow of sadness shot through him, through the tall ghost of his youth, and was gone.
“Haven’t you,—dear me, where was I?…”
At Mrs. Eubanks’s gate he gave Pavinovsky a quick good night and saw him disappear down the glowing street.
Then he walked pensively through the yard and up to his room. He went to the window and leaned with both hands on the sill, looking out over the town but not seeing it: there had been a light burning in the Wheatons’ hallway.
8. Local Page
Friday, July 31
WARREN CO. BAR
PRESIDENT LAUDS
SOUTHERN WOMAN
The Hon. R. M. Kelly, president of the Warren County Bar Association, in a silver-tongued address of welcome to the members of the State Bar Association yesterday, delivered an inspired panegyric on Southern womanhood. After praising the Southland and its contributions to civilization, Judge Kelly concluded his oration as follows:
“Now what of the ladies? When God made the Southern woman He summoned his angel messengers and He commanded them to go through all the star-strewn vicissitudes of space and gather all there was of beauty, of brightness and sweetness, of enchantment and glamor, and when they returned and laid the golden harvest at His feet He began in their wondering presence the work of fashioning the Southern girl. He wrought with the gold and gleam of the stars, with the changing colors of the rainbow’s hues and the pallid silver of the moon. He wrought with the crimson that swooned in the rose’s ruby heart, and the snow that gleams on the lily’s petal, then, glancing down deep into His own bosom, He took of the love that gleamed there like pearls beneath the sun-kissed waves of a summer sea, and, thrilling this love into the form He had fashioned, all heaven veiled its face, for, lo, He had wrought the Southern girl.”—
COTTON DECLINES
TWENTY POINTS ON
LOCAL EXCHANGE
CONTINUED DRY WEATHER
REDUCES RAVAGES FROM
BOLL WEEVIL—
CHAPTER SIX
1. Isthmus
Saturday, August 1
“I shouldn’t be surprised, Austin,” said Dr. Abercorn, looking up at the fiery little points of the Big Dipper burning steadily in the northwest, “if, in beating your way through your jungle in quest of truth, dead or alive, you found you could shed a faint light in the darkness by considering questions of morals and ethics as if they were human beings, or even animals or plants. There’s no reason to think they’re a law unto themselves; we can’t create anything except in our own image. Grant them, I mean, powers of reproduction and growth and natural death,—being careful to give the power of reproduction its accredited place at the front. You might decide they had evolved into highly complex organisms from very simple ones. They’ve done a lot of reproducing since the foundation of the species, probably not many thousand years before Moses, and it’s sometimes hard now for an intelligent man to trace a question’s genealogy, hard to know who it’s grandparents were. But if you consider that the evolution of these questions is analogous to the evolution of life, you might, by examining a little of what we know about that, make one or two deductions about ’em that would give off a sort of mild phosphorescent illumination,—something about like this starlight, not telling you very much but still maybe keeping you from breaking your neck as quick as the other fellow.
“For instance, these plants and animals and human beings, I figure they make up a kind of archipelago of life, islands of life, kingdoms, animal, vegetable, mineral. You find many things on one island you don’t find on another, but now and then you find a pair of widely-separated islands that have one or two curious things in common,—a little like the pyramids you find in Egypt and Mexico. Such a pyramid might be, say, the elaborate precautions taken in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms against inbreeding.… Of course, in all this, Austin, I am presupposing in you a rather highly-developed ignorance.”
“I’ll try not to disappoint you, sir,” said Austin.
“Well, these little islands may seem at first glance to be just thrown up there casually, as you might think the West Indies just happened to be thrown up there or the Philippines. But if you stand back a little you can see there isn’t much difference between the Isthmus of Panama and the Lesser Antilles; the ocean wouldn’t have to drop but a few feet more to give you an isthmus connecting Florida with Venezuela. The Philippines are a continuation of the China coast and Australia of the Malay Peninsula. And if you stand back these other islands connect up too; you can go practically dry-shod all the way from the human intelligence to a—camelia bush. You can go anywhere.
“Suppose you begin with the very last word in evolution, the most up-to-date thing on the market, the human intelligence. Call it an island, a volcanic island. It is continually in modest eruption, pouring down lava streams both tonic and toxic, though scientists have conducted expeditions to the edge of the crater. There is a good possibility that it will explode some day in a fine intelligent war and blow this end of the archipelago off the map, but anyway,—when you look around you from this pinnacle the closest thing you see is what looks like another island, the human body. It’s a very different sort of place, tough and solid, nothing volcanic about it; it don’t seem to have anything in common with volcanoes. You are looking from what may be called the soul over to the body and you may, at first look, think they don’t connect. But they do; round here on one side is a sort of isthmus: you lie down on your back in a quiet room and relax your muscles. You know how you feel riding in a buggy up a hill, how you try to make yourself light? Well, try to make yourself heavy; begin with your fingers and your hands, then go on to your arms and legs and chest, make everything heavy. You can’t do it at first, but if you try every day for half an hour, after a month or two you’ll be able to do it pretty well. You’ll be able to relax your eyelids and your eyes and your throat. Then one day if you watch yourself you’ll find that when you relaxed all your muscles as far as they would go, you weren’t thinking. There is good reason to believe that every thought sets up a minute muscular response, probably in your throat; and some people maintain that if you could measure this response with an instrument you could translate thought into a graph or even into sound. But anyhow, you don’t think when your muscles are relaxed. There’s got to be a muscular tension.… So here you are, with dry feet, on the other island, on the human body, the vertebrate.
“There’s nothing sleight-of-hand about all this, Austin. The idea is not generally accepted, but I believe it goes in the right direction and I believe if it is disproved sometime it will be because some even stronger connection has been found.
“But here you are now on the biggest piece of land in the archipelago, the vertebrates, and you wander back along the ridge, back along the backbone, back and back, until you finally come to what looks like the jumping-off place, the end of the backbone. This seems to be as far as you can go. The nearest dry land you see is a long way off and they are the animals without any backbone, with the skeleton on the outside, the shell-fish. There may not seem to be, at first, any way of getting across there. But round here at the side is another little isthmus, a creature called the ostracoderm. This little animal, which was once around in great profusion, has the upper part of his body encased in a shell, but his tail has a very delicate cartilaginous backbone inside of it. You can get across the gulf quite easily on him, and the first thing you know you are in the land of the invertebrates, the crustaceans.… Things are getting simpler and simpler all this time and you probably feel pretty good about it.
“You can see from here quite a large piece of land off to one side, the vegetable kingdom, the plants. There doesn’t seem to be any way in the world to get over to the plants. They haven’t any skeleton at all; they don’t seem to have anything in common with the rest of us. But if you look round a little bit you’ll find this sort of instinct against self-pollination, which has a familiar ring to it, and also a curious little thing called a carnivorous plant. It eats meat. If an insect lights on one of its leaves it closes up so quick it can catch it. If you touch it with a pencil it doesn’t do much; you can even put a few grains of sugar on the leaf and it won’t pay any attention to it. But you put a little piece of meat on there and it grabs it.… And there’s also another very curious little thing called a diatom. It’s a sea plant, but it can crawl around on the bottom like a snake. And there are the bacteria, too, which are plants and, so to speak, carnivorous.—You can get across, then, somewhere in here, to the vegetable kingdom, if not absolutely dry-shod, at least your feet aren’t very wet.
“All these things are kin. You can even get over into the mineral kingdom by way of the coal deposits, which you might call vegetable cemeteries. All these things came out of one. There was one cell and it divided in two. Then these two grew up and divided. And after a while the temperature changed and it got more complicated. Then something else changed and it got more and more complicated, until after a while, it got into plants and animals, vertebrates and invertebrates, body and mind. But what I’m getting at is you can go back and forth all round this archipelago with practically dry feet.
“And I think it’s the same way with these ethical organisms like good and evil and the rest of them. The same thing happened to them. They began as mental bacteria or algae and divided, then reproduced by dividing again, and after ten or fifteen thousand years (their existence as an independent kingdom is relatively recent) they come down to us as distinct species. But they go back to one, just like the rest of us. I don’t know what that original moral cell looked like, but if you can convince yourself, Austin, that there was such a cell, that these things are only human and have somewhere a common ancestor, you may, as I say, stir up a sort of starlight in the darkness and be able to find your way along a little more readily than the next man—”
2. Sabbatical
Saturday, August 1
The Reverend Dice Alexander, from his room in the second-best hotel in Yokohama, wrote a letter to his old friend Riley All in Georgetown, Alabama, in which he covered with some detail the following events of his soul-shaking pilgrimage among the heathen.
He and Mr. Wu Fu took the afternoon train from Shanghai to Hang-Chow and he spent three days with the little Chinaman’s family. He would have stayed longer, for he was having a thoroughly agreeable time, but his boat was sailing from Yokohama a week from the following Saturday and he had just time to make it.
Those three days, however, he enjoyed keenly. They were met at the railroad station at the end of the Great Street by two of Mr. Wu Fu’s younger brothers and escorted enthusiastically to the compound. Mr. Wu Fu had apparently written his family in detail of the Jerusalem episode, for his grandfather, an aged man with skin the color of an autumn leaf and a scanty white thread of a beard, sat waiting for them in The Hall of the Formerly Ardent Ones wrapped in voluminous waves of embroidered silk, a hat on the back of his ivory head with a pale green mandarin’s button on the top. He looked as if he had been sitting there for several weeks.
When Dr. Alexander and Mr. Wu Fu came in the old man rose slowly, his hands still tucked away in his silk sleeves, and made Dr. Alexander a profound obeisance.
“Is this your grandpa?” said Dr. Alexander.
Mr. Wu Fu presented him, and they stood in front of the chair while the old man delivered a long speech in a high but solemn tone, looking over their heads with his pink eyes at the back of the room; when he had finished a servant entered bearing a porcelain vase of the Ming dynasty, which he took and presented to Dr. Alexander. After that they sat down in some high carved chairs on each side of the old man’s throne and had some tea. He thought it was very nice of them to give him a vase; he didn’t like vases much and he thought this one was a little gaudy, with its teahouses and flowers and young men and women with shiny black hair dressed in green and blue and red against a white background, but he thought if he could get it home without breaking it he could find something to do with it. Anyhow, it was very nice of them; he told Mr. Wu Fu to tell his grandpa he appreciated it very much. The old man replied, according to Mr. Wu Fu’s translation, that it was just a trifling thing that they offered in abysmal humility to the august light of his countenance. Had he not been a sentimental man, Dr. Alexander would have decided it was hardly worth taking home.
They were just finishing their tea when they were aroused by a brazen racket in the street outside. It was reminiscent, to Dr. Alexander’s increasingly nostalgic brain, of the Georgetown High School Band at one of the first rehearsals of the season. Mr. Wu Fu stood up and requested him to lend the morning sun of his presence at the front of the house.
