Chapter II: Part 2

An inconceivably long time. The medical holdback was the least of my distaste, though it had played a large part in the discussions at home. My mother had heard that cadavers for dissection were shipped to foreign medical schools like so much cargo. She was shocked not so much at the thought of the scientific use of her dead body as at its disposal outside the United States.

“Yes,” I said. “A long time away. So I wouldnt be a slave for life; just thirty or forty years. Till I wasnt any good to anyone, including myself.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. “Youre a gloomy gus, Hodge. Taint’s bad’s that. Indenting’s pretty strictly regulated. That’s the idea anyway. I aint saying the big companies don’t get away with a lot. You can’t be made to work over sixty hours a week. Ten hours a day. With twelve hundred dollars you could get all the education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to account by making enough to buy yourself free.”

I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I’d been over the ground often enough. It was true the amount, a not improbable one, would see me through college. But Pondible’s notion of turning my “learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy. Perhaps in the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued—I knew my own “impracticality” well enough by now—was bound to yield few material benefits in the backward United States, which existed as a nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the great powers. I’d be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some kind of living as a freeman; I could hardly hope to earn enough to buy back an indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting sixty hours a week.

“It wouldnt work,” I said despondently.

Pondible nodded, as though this were the conclusion he had expected me to come to. “Well then,” he said, “there’s the gangs.”

I looked my horror.

He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. What’s right? What the strongest country or the strongest man says it is. The government says gangs are wrong, but the government aint strong enough to stop them. And maybe they don’t do as much killing as people think. Only when somebody works against them—just like the government. Sure they have to be paid off, but it’s just like taxes. If you leave the parsons’ sermons out of it there’s no difference joining the gangs than the army—if we had one—or the Confederate Legion—”

“They tried to recruit me yesterday. Are they always so....”

“Bold?” For the first time Pondible looked angry and I thought the scar on his forehead turned whiter. “Yes, damn them. The Legion must be half United States citizens. When they have to put down a disturbance or run some little cockroach country they send off the Confederate Legion—made up of men who ought to be the backbone of an army of our own.”

“But the police—don’t they ever try to stop them?”

“What’d I tell you about right being what the strongest country says it is? Sure we got laws against recruiting into a foreign army. So we squawk. And what have we got to back it up with? So the Confederate Legion goes right on recruiting the men who have to beg for a square meal in their own country. Well, the government is pretty near as bad off when it comes to the gangs. Best it can do is pick off some of the little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six states, and every so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes in a lifetime.”

I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet ... if this were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an elaborate blind? It seemed hardly worth it.

“A dividend,” I said, “or a rope.”

“Most gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Aint one been hung I can think of the last five-six years. But I see youve no stomach for it. Tell me, Hodge—you Whig or Populist?”

The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why ... Populist, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Oh ... I don’t know....” I thought of some of the discussions that used to go on among the men around the smithy. “The Whigs’ ‘Property, Protection, Permanent Population’ —what does it mean to me?” “Tell you, boy, means this: Property for the Confederates who own factories here and don’t want to pay taxes. Protection for foreign capital to come in and buy or hire. Permanent Population—cheap native labor. Build up a prosperous employing class.”

“Yes, I know. I can’t see how it helps. Ive heard Whigs at home say the money’s bound to seep down from above, but it seems awfully roundabout. And not very efficient.”

He reached over and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “That’s my boy,” he said. “They can’t fool you.”

I wasnt entirely pleased by his commendation. “And protection means paying more for things than theyre worth.”

“Taint only that, Hodge, it’s a damn lie as well. Whigs never even tried protection when they was in. Didnt dast. Knew the other countries wouldnt let them.”

“As for ‘permanent population’ ... well, those who can’t make a living are going to go on emigrating to prosperous countries. Permanent population means dwindling population if it means anything.”

“Ah,” he said. “You got a head on your shoulders, Hodge. Youre all right; books won’t hurt you. But what about emigrating? Yourself, I mean?”

I shook my head.

He nodded, chewing on a soggy corner of his mustache. “Don’t want to leave the old ship, huh?”

I don’t suppose I would have put it exactly that way, or even fully formulated the thought. I was willing to exchange the familiar for the unknown—up to a certain point. The thought of giving up the country in which I’d been born was repugnant. Call it loyalty, or a sense of having ties with the past, or just stubbornness. “Something like that,” I said.

“Well now, let’s see what weve got.” He stuck up a dirty and slightly tremulous hand, turning down a finger as he stated each point. “One, patriot; two, Populist; three, don’t like indenting; four, prosperity’s got to come from the poor upward, not the rich down.” He hesitated, holding his thumb. “You heard of the Grand Army?”

“Who hasnt? Not much difference between them and the regular gangs.”

“Now what makes you say that?”

“Why ... everybody knows it”

“Do, huh? Maybe they know it all wrong. Look here now—and remember about the Confederate Legion riding over the laws of the United States—what would you think ought to be done about foreigners from the strong countries who come here and walk all over us? Or the Whigs who do their dirty work for them?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not murder, certainly.”

“Murder,” he repeated. “That’s a word, Hodge. Means what you want it to mean. Wasnt murder back during the War when Union soldiers was trying to keep the country from being split up. Taint murder today when somebody’s hung for rape or counterfeiting. Anyhow the Grand Army don’t go in for murder.”

I said nothing.

“Oh, accidents happen; wouldnt deny it. Maybe they get a little rougher than they intend with Whig traitors or Confederate agents, but you can’t make bacon out of a live hog. Point is the Grand Army’s the only thing in the country that even tries to restore it to what it once was. What was fought for in the War.”

I don’t know whether it was the thought of Grandfather Backmaker or the unassuaged guilt for the miserable figure I had cut only three days back that made me ask, “And do they want to give the Negroes equality?”

He drew back sharply, shock showing clearly on his face. “Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? By—” He bent forward, looking at me searchingly. “No, I can see you aint. Just some notions youll outgrow. You just don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadnt been for the Abolitionists.”

Would we? I’d heard it said often enough; it would have been presumptuous to doubt it.

“The darkies are better off among their own,” he said; “they never should have been here in the first place; black and white can’t mix. Leave ideas like that alone, Hodge; there’s plenty and enough to be done. Chase the foreigners out, teach their flunkies a lesson, build the country up again.”

“Are you trying to get me to join the Grand Army?”

Pondible finished his beer. “Won’t answer that one, boy. Let’s say I just want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and some of that education youre so fired up about. Come along.”

_4._ _TYSS_

He took me to a bookseller’s and stationery store on Astor Place with a printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner, Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged.

I know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or to be piled towerwise on the floor. I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper and bottles of printers’ ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets, broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines, penpoints, ledgers and daybooks, rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical, invincible disorder, the synonymous dogeared volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type seemed fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air and immediately settling back on precisely the same spots.

Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the heedless eye of youth that I saw no signs of that aging. Like Pondible and, as I learned, so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard. His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store or printing press. You did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate. You might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized, stoopshouldered, slovenly printer, had it not been for those eyes which seemed in perpetual conflict with his other features.

“Robbed and bludgeoned, ay?” he said with a curious disrespect for sequence after Pondible had explained me to him. “Dog eats dog, and the survivors survive. Backmaker, ay? Is that an American name?”

So far as I knew, I said, it was.

“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”

“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”

“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the waste-product of the human mind.”

“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.

“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn; there’s nothing I can do about it As well here as another place.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love, hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”

I considered this statement reflectively.

“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre free to go.”

And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Tyss knew books, not merely as a bookman knows them—binding, size, edition, value—but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. (I remember a long discourse on heraldry, filled with terms like “paley-bendy” or, “fusils conjoined in fess, gules” and “sable demi-lions.” He regarded such erudition, indeed any erudition, contemptuously. When I asked why he had bothered to pick it up, his retort was, “Why have you bothered to pick up calluses, Hodgins?”)

As a printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting up a neat page; he sometimes spent hours laying out some trivia, which could have interested only its author, until he struck a proof which satisfied him. He wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestoes, composing directly from the font, running off a single proof which he read—always expressionlessly—and immediately destroyed before pieing the type.

I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had a couch hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning before it was time to open he sent me across town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of beef—twelve on Saturdays, for the market, unlike the bookstore, was closed Sundays. It was always the same cut, heart of ox or cow, dressed by the butcher in thin strips. After I had been with him long enough to tire of the fare, but not long enough to realize the obstinacy of his nature, I begged him to let me substitute pork or mutton, or at least some other part of the beef, like brains or tripe which were even cheaper. He always answered, “The heart, Hodgins. Purchase the heart; it is the vital food.”

While I was on my errand he would buy three loaves of yesterday’s bread, still tolerably fresh; when I returned he took a long two-pronged fork, our only utensil, for the establishment was innocent of either cutlery or dishes, and spearing a strip of heart held it over the gas flame of a light standard until it was sooted and toasted rather than broiled. We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.

“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”

“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? I mean, doesnt it refer to the grain of wheat which is ‘killed’ by the harvester and buried by the sower?”

“You think the gods were modelled on John Barleycorn and not John Barleycorn on them—to conceal their fate? I fear you have a higher opinion of mankind than is warranted, Hodgins.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by gods.”

“Embodiments or personifications of human aspirations. The good, the true, the beautiful—with winged feet or bull’s body.”

“How about ... oh, Chronos? Or Satan?”

He licked his fingers of the meat juices, obviously pleased. “Satan. An excellent example. Epitome of man’s futile longing to upset and defy the divine plan—I use the word ‘divine’ derisively, Hodgins—; who does not admire and reverence Lucifer in his heart? Well, having made a god out of the devil we eat him daily in a two-fold sense: by swallowing the myth of his enmity (a truer friend there never was), and by digesting his great precepts of pride and curiosity and strength. And you see for yourself how he finds interesting thoughts for idle minds to speculate on. Let’s get to work.”

He expected me to work, but he was far from a hard or inconsiderate master. In 1938-44, when the country was being ground deeper into colonialism, there were few employers so lenient. I read much, generally when I pleased, and despite his jeers at learning in the abstract he encouraged me, even going to the length, if a particular book was not to be found in his considerable stock, of letting me get it from one of his competitors, to be written up against his account.

Nor was he scrupulous about the time I took on his errands. I continued to ramble and sight-see the city much as though I had nothing else to do. And if, from time to time, I discovered there were girls in New York who didnt look too unkindly on a tall youth even though he still carried some of the rustic air of Wappinger Falls, he never questioned why the walk of half a mile took me a couple of hours.

True, he kept to his original promise never to pay me wages, but he often handed me coins for pocketmoney, evidently satisfied I wasnt stealing, and he replaced my makeshift wardrobe with worn but decent clothing.

He had not exaggerated the possibilities of the books surrounding me. His brief warning, “—you can learn nothing,” was lost on me. I suppose a different temperament might have become surfeited with paper and print; I can only say I wasnt. I nibbled, tasted, gobbled books. After the store was shut I hooked a student lamp to the nearest gasjet by means of a long tube, and lying on my pallet with a dozen volumes handy, I read till I was no longer able to keep my eyes open or understand the words. Often I woke in the morning to find the light still burning and my fingers holding the pages open.

I think one of the first books to influence me strongly was the monumental _Causes of American Decline and Decay_ by the always popular expatriate historian, Henry Adams. I was particularly impressed by the famous passage in which he reproves the “stay-at-home” Bostonian essayists, William and Henry James, for their quixotic sacrifice and espousal of a long-lost cause. History, said Sir Henry, who had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by William V, history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral roots.

Possibly the learned expatriate was right, but my instinctive sympathies lay with the Jameses, in spite of the fact that I had not found their books enjoyable. This was due at least partly to the fact that the small editions were badly printed and marred, at least so foreign critics claimed, by an excessive use of Yankee colloquialisms, consciously employed to demonstrate patriotism and disdain of imported elegance. For some reason, obscure to me then, I did not mention Adams to Tyss, though I usually turned to him with each of my fresh discoveries. When he came upon me with an open book he would glance at the running title over my shoulder and begin talking, either of the particular work or of its topic. What he had to say gave me an insight I might otherwise have missed, and turned me to other writers, other aspects. He respected no authority simply because it was acclaimed or established; he prodded me to examine every statement, every hypothesis no matter how commonly accepted.

Early in my employment I was attracted to a large framed parchment he kept hanging, slightly askew and highly attractive to dust, over his typecase. It was simply but beautifully printed in 16 point Baskerville; I knew without being told that he had set it himself:

_The Body of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
Like the Cover of an Old Book
Stripped of Its Lettering and Gilding
Lies Here
Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For it will, As he Believed,
Come Forth Again
In a new and Better Edition
Revised & Corrected
By
The Author._

When he caught me admiring it Tyss laughed. “Felicitous, isnt it, Hodgins? But a lie, a perverse and probably hypocritical lie. There is no Author; the book of life is simply a mess of pied type, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There is no plan, no synopsis to be filled in with pious hopes or sanctimonious actions. There is nothing but a vast emptiness in the universe.”

“The other day you told me we admired the devil for rebelling against a plan.”

He grinned. “So you expect consistency instead of truth from me, Hodgins. There is no plan, authored by a Mind; it is this no-plan against which Lucifer fought. But there is a plan too, a mindless plan, which accounts for all our acts.”

I had been reading an obscure Irish theologian, a Protestant curate of some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his sermons himself, named George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself as to counter his argument.

“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”

“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of choice?”

“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.”

“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”

“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”

“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didnt select the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”

Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”

He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”

“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”

“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.

I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was false I didnt doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more terrifying.

There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones. Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at all.

The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the _True American_, came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large type warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him; his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.

Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about assurance of delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we handled.

I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside from the very first conversation with Pondible, no attempt was made to persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for he explained obliquely.

“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts, and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”

“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times? Ive certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their memoirs.”

“You are confusing the after-effect of action with nonaction, the dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”

I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.

“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to the spectator the man of action is faintly absurd. A born observer would find the earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the formation of skeleton companies, the appointment of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to become a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.”

“You think I’m the spectator type, Mr Tyss?”

“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be deceptive at first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained fleshiness of the mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but they subordinate to more subtle indicators. No question but that Chief Jung would put you down as an observer.”

If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying personalities as though they were zoological specimens could relieve me of having to refuse pointblank to join the Grand Army I was content. While this hardly alleviated my disturbance at being, no matter how remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder I compromised with my conscience by trying to believe I might after all be mistaken in thinking I was being used. There were times when I felt I ought boldly to declare myself and leave the store but when I faced the prospect of having to find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the imperative necessity of books, I lacked the courage.

Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.

_5._ _OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS_

A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s answer to defeat.

It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others. The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual raising of the standard of living since employers could hire more hands, and indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle away.

This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the Whigs.

The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title, with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an arsonist.

I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I too had campaign fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.

Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This year both office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train; Lewis was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free. Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.

One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.

The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on, I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as well leave altogether.

“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the Populist tradition?”

“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.

She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”

She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,” I said; “unless youre enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the streetcar. For my clumsiness.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”

“Why ... to hear the speakers.”

“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”

“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A stupid amusement.”

“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually havent much money.”

“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt vote for Populists.”

“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”

She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to become better off yourself.”

“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”

“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you step on their feet?”

“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings, but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”

Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a family of wealthy Whigs who owned a handsome modern castiron and concrete house near the Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the apt word “curious” in characterizing herself but it was, as I soon found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored only what she thought might be useful or which impressed her as foolish. She was interested in the nature of anything fashionable or popular or much talked of, the idea of being concerned with anything even vaguely abstract struck her as preposterous.

She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity, but calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security through indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me, even when I contrasted my “free” condition with her bound one. Certainly she seemed to have minimum restriction on her time; soon after our introduction at the rally she was meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square where we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking briskly when the autumn weather chilled our blood.

I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps tolerance would be a better word—was due to any strong attraction exerted by me. If anything she was, I think, slightly repelled by my physical presence, which carried to her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and contrasted with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers and their friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered slightly; then, closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her again.

She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she led me quietly to her room in the big house on my transparent plea that the outdoors was now too cold even for conversation. I was no accomplished seducer, but even in my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her mind I was to succeed.

That her complaisance was not the result of passion was soon obvious; there was not so much a failure on my part to arouse her as a refusal on hers to be aroused beyond an inescapable degree. Even as she permitted our intimacy she remained as virginal, aloof and critical as before.

“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking and writing and thinking about nothing else.”

“Tirzah dear—”

“And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think of you as any more dear than I did an hour ago. If people must indulge in this sort of thing, and I suppose they must since it’s been going on for a long time, I think it could be conducted with more dignity.”

As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen; curiosity alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my pathetic search for knowledge. “What good is your learning ever going to do you? It’ll never get you a penny.”

I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose it doesnt?” I argued lazily; “There are other things besides money.”

She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.”

“And what do people who can get it say?”

“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered earnestly. “That it will buy all the other things.”

“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted, “but you have to get it first.”

“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract payment.”

“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”

She looked at me wonderingly. “Havent you ever thought about serious things? Only books and politics and all that? How could I get opportunities without indenting? I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut above the Backmakers; well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs Smythe.”

“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”

“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want to live like a lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles, to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or Vienna. You can love the poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the rich and the Whigs.”

“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you have your indenting money and can buy back your freedom any moment you want it, how does this help you get rich?”

“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested, every cent. People who come to this house give me tips; not just money, though there’s enough of that to add a bit to my original capital, but tips on what to buy and sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of course I may marry a rich man sooner.”

“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,” I remonstrated.

“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, youve been telling me I’m cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded profitably.”

“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what we’re doing here at this moment. I’d have thought you’d have picked a more profitable lover.”

She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If you had, you would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly prude.”

An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance, anyone who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house would have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face to face with Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her.

Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past, I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences; how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then.

Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them, but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools.

Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”

From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate House and Senate.

Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation, enacted largely because of pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil rights. Yet while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration, the Confederacy encouraged it, making the newcomers subjects like the Latin-Americans who made up so much of the Southron population after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate States on July Fourth 1864.

The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate agents; the Whigs retorted that the Populists were visionaries and demagogues who tolerated if they did not actually encourage the activities of the Grand Army. The Populists replied by pointing to their platform which denounced illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible and their associates had been ever since the campaign started.

On election night Tyss closed the store and we walked the few blocks to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store where a big screen showed the returns between tinugraphs puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the presidency four years later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah and Oregon went for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one other states plumped for Dewey.

Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful air. When I asked him what satisfaction he could find in so overwhelming a defeat he smiled and said, “What defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the Populists to win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn nothing day by day.”

“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”

“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration which presents a fixed target to a Populist one wavering all over the place.”

Of course it should have occurred to me that Tyss and Tirzah would wind up on the same side. It was a measure of my innocence that it never had.

_6._ _ENFANDIN_

Tirzah’s question, “What good is your learning ever going to do you?” bothered me from time to time. Not that I was burdened by any vast amount of knowledge, but presumably I would get more—and then what? It was true I expected no rewards from reading except the pleasure it gave me, but the future, to use a topheavy word, could not be entirely disregarded. I could not see myself spending a lifetime in the bookstore. I was grateful to Tyss, despite his disdain of this emotion, for the opportunities he had given me, but not grateful enough to reconcile myself to becoming another Tyss, especially one without his vitalizing involvement with the Grand Army.

Other courses were neither numerous nor inviting. To follow Tirzah’s own example might have seemed feasible if one ignored the vast differences of situation and character, to say nothing of those between a hulking youth and a pretty girl. I could hardly hope to find a wealthy family who would buy my services, put me to congenial tasks, and look with tolerance on my efforts to advance myself right out of their employment. Even if such a chance existed I could not have utilized it as she did; I should undoubtedly confuse one stock with another or neglect to buy what I was told until too late, winding up with lottery tickets and losing the stubs.

My helpless uncertainty only added to my disadvantage with her. I had no hope her coolness would change to either ardor or affection. At any moment she might decide her curiosity was satisfied and find the awkwardness, inconveniences, and what must have been to her the sordidness of the affair too great.

We were a strange pair of young lovers. When we talked we argued opposing views or spoke sedately of things not near our hearts. When we walked together in the streets or fled the gaslit pavements for the moon over Reservoir Square we neither held hands nor kissed impulsively. Because prudence forbade the slightest physical contact save in utmost privacy there were no innocent touchings or accidental brushing of hands against hips or arms against arms, and our secret embraces were guilty simply because they were secret.

Often I dreamed of a miraculous change, either in circumstances or in her attitude, to dissolve the walls between us; beneath the hope was only expectation of an abrupt and final break. Yet when it came at last, after more than a year, it was not the result, as I had agonizedly anticipated, of some successful speculation or an offer of marriage, but of natural and normal actions of my own.

Among the customers to whom I frequently delivered parcels of books was a Monsieur René Enfandin who lived on Eighth Street, not far from Fifth Avenue. M Enfandin was Consul for the Republic of Haiti; the house he occupied was distinguished from otherwise equally drab neighbors by a large red and blue escutcheon over the doorway. He did not use the entire dwelling himself, reserving only the parlor floor for the office of the consulate and living quarters; the rest was let to other tenants.

Tyss’s anti-foreign bias caused him to jeer at Enfandin behind his back and embark on discourses which proved by anthropometry and frequent references to Lombroso and Chief Jung that Negroes were incapable of self-government. I noticed however that he treated the consul no differently, either in politeness or honesty, from his other patrons, and by this time I knew Tyss well enough to attribute this courtesy not to the self-interest of a tradesman but to that compassion which he suppressed so sternly under the contradictions of his nature.

For a long time I paid little attention to Enfandin, beyond noting the wide range of interests revealed by the books he bought. I sensed that, like myself, he was inclined to shyness. He had an arrangement whereby he turned back most of his purchases for credit on others. I saw that if he hadnt, his library would have soon dispossessed him; as it was, books covered all the space not taken by the paraphernalia of his office and bedroom with the exception of a bit of bare wall on which hung a large crucifix. He seemed always to have a volume in his large, dark brown hand, politely closed over his thumb or open for eager sampling.

Enfandin was tall and strong-featured, notable in any company. In the United States where a black man was, more than anything else, a reminder of the disastrous war and Mr Lincoln’s proclamation, he was the permanent target of rowdy boys and adult hoodlums. Even the diplomatic immunity of his post was poor protection, for it was believed, not without justification, that Haiti, the only American republic south of the Mason-Dixon line to preserve its independence, was disrupting the official if sporadically executed policy of deporting Negroes to Africa by encouraging their emigration to its own shores or, what was even more annoying, assisting them to flee to the unconquered Indians of Idaho or Montana.

Beyond a “Good morning” or “Thank you” I doubt if we exchanged a hundred words until the time I saw a copy of Randolph Bourne’s _Fragment_ among his selections. “That’s not what you think it is,” I exclaimed brashly; “it’s a novel.”

He looked at me gravely. “You also admire Bourne?”

“Oh yes.” I felt a trifle foolish, not only for having thrust my advice upon him, but for the inadequacy of my comment on a writer who had so many pertinent things to say and had been persecuted for saying them. I was conscious too of Tyss’s opinion: How could a cripple like Bourne speak to whole and healthy men?

“But you do not approve of fiction, is that so?” Enfandin had no discernible accent but often his English was uncolloquial and sometimes it was overly careful and stiff.

I thought of the adventure tales I had once swallowed so breathlessly. “Well ... it does seem to be a sort of a waste of time.”

He nodded. “Time, yes.... We waste it or save it or use it—one would almost think we mastered it instead of the other way around. Yet are all novels really a waste of the precious dimension? Perhaps you underestimate the value of invention.”

“No,” I said; “but what value has the invention of happenings that never happened, or characters who never existed?”

“Who is to say what never happened? It is a matter of definition.”

“All right,” I said; “suppose the characters exist in the author’s mind, like the events; where does the value of the invention come in?”

“Where the value of any invention comes in,” he answered. “In its purpose or use. A wheel spinning aimlessly is worth nothing; the same wheel on a cart or a pulley changes destiny.”

“You can’t learn anything from fairy tales,” I persisted stubbornly.

He smiled. “Maybe you havent read the right fairy tales.”

I soon discovered in him a quick and penetrating sympathy which was at times almost telepathic. He listened to my callow opinions patiently, offering observations of his own without diffidence and without didacticism. The understanding and encouragement I did not expect or want from Tyss he gave me generously. To him, as I never could to Tirzah, I talked of my hopes and dreams; he listened patiently and did not seem to think them foolish or impossible of accomplishment. I do not minimize what Tyss did for me by saying that without Enfandin I would have taken much less profit from the books my employer gave me access to.