Brown.
 
 

"And, Jesus, Ben!" said Harry Tugman, emerging at this moment from Uneeda No. 3.  "I thought I'd have a hemorrhage when they pulled the Old Man out of the closet.  After all the stuff he printed about cleaning up the town, too."

"It wouldn't surprise me if Judge Sevier had them raid him," said Ben.

"Why certainly, Ben," said Harry Tugman impatiently, "that's the idea, but Queen Elizabeth was behind it.  You don't think there's anything she doesn't hear about, do you?  So help me Jesus, you never heard a yap out of him for a week.  He was afraid to show his face out of the office."

At the Convent School of Saint Catherine's on Saint Clement's Road, Sister Theresa, the Mother Superior, walked softly through the dormitory lifting the window-shade beside each cot, letting the orchard cherry-apple bloom come gently into the long cool glade of roseleaf sleeping girls.  Their breath expired gently upon their dewy half-opened mouths, light fell rosily upon the pillowed curve of their arms, their slender young sides, and the crisp pink buds of their breasts.  At the other end of the room a fat girl lay squarely on her back, her arms and legs outspread, and snored solidly through blubbering lips.  They had yet an hour of sleep.

From one of the little white tables between the cots Theresa picked up an opened book incautiously left there the night before, read below her gray mustache with the still inward smile of her great-boned face, its title--The Common Law, by Robert W. Chambers?and gripping a pencil in her broad earthstained hand, scrawled briefly in jagged male letters:  "Rubbish, Elizabeth--but see for yourself."  Then, on her soft powerful tread, she went downstairs, and entered her study, where Sister Louise (French), Sister Mary (History), and Sister Bernice (Ancient Languages) were waiting for the morning consultation.  When they had gone, she sat down to her desk and worked for an hour on the manuscript of that book, modestly intended for school children, which has since celebrated her name wherever the noble architecture of prose is valued?the great Biology.

Then the gong rang in the dormitory, she heard the high laughter of young maidens, and rising saw, coming from the plum-tree by the wall, a young nun, Sister Agnes, with blossoms in her arms.

Below, tree-hidden, in the Biltburn bottom, there was a thunder on the rails, a wailing whistle cry.

Beneath the City Hall, in the huge sloping cellar, the market booths were open.  The aproned butchers swung their cleavers down on fresh cold joints, slapping the thick chops on heavy sheets of mottled paper, and tossing them, roughly tied, to the waiting negro delivery-boys.

The self-respecting negro, J. H. Jackson, stood in his square vegetable-stall, attended by his two grave-faced sons, and his
spectacled businesslike daughter.  He was surrounded by wide slanting shelves of fruit and vegetables, smelling of the earth and morning--great crinkled lettuces, fat radishes still clotted damply with black loam, quill-stemmed young onions newly wrenched from gardens, late celery, spring potatoes, and the thin rinded citrous fruits of Florida.

Above him, Sorrell, the fish and oyster man, drew up from the depths of an enamelled ice-packed can dripping ladlefuls of oysters, pouring them into thick cardboard cartons.  Wide-bellied heavy seafish--carp, trout, bass, shad--lay gutted in beds of ice.  Mr. Michael Walter Creech, the butcher, having finished his hearty breakfast of calves' liver, eggs and bacon, hot biscuits and coffee, made a sign to one of the waiting row of negro boys.  The line sprang forward like hounds; he stopped them with a curse and a lifted cleaver.  The fortunate youth who had been chosen then came forward and took the tray, still richly morselled with food and a pot half full of coffee.  As he had to depart at this moment on a delivery, he put it down in the sawdust at the end of the bench and spat copiously upon it in order to protect it from his scavenging comrades.  Then he wheeled off, full of rich laughter and triumphant malice.  Mr. Creech looked at his niggers darkly.

The town had so far forgotten Mr. Creech's own African blood (an eighth on his father's side, old Walter Creech, out of Yellow Jenny) that it was about ready to offer him political preferment; but Mr. Creech himself had not forgotten.  He glanced bitterly at his brother, Jay, who, happily ignorant of hatred, that fanged poison which may taint even a brother's heart, was enthusiastically cleaving spare-ribs on the huge bole of his own table, singing meanwhile in a rich tenor voice the opening bars of "The Little Gray Home In The West":
 

     ". . . there are blue eyes that shine
      Just because they meet mine . . ."
 

Mr. Creech looked venomously at Jay's yellow jowls, the fat throbbing of his jaundiced throat, the crisp singed whorl of his
hair.

By God, he thought in his anguish of spirit, he might be taken for a Mexican.

Jay's golden voice neared its triumph, breaking with delicate restraint, on the last note, into a high sweet falsetto which he maintained for more than twenty seconds.  All of the butchers stopped working, several of them, big strong men with grown-up families dashed a tear out of their eyes.

The great audience was held spellbound.  Not a soul stirred.  Not even a dog or a horse stirred.  As the last sweet note melted away in a gossamer tremolo, a silence profound as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself, betokened the highest triumph the artist is destined to know upon this earth.  Somewhere in the crowd a woman sobbed and collapsed in a faint.  She was immediately carried out by two Boy Scouts who happened to be present, and who administered first aid to her in the rest-room, one of them hastily kindling a crackling fire of pine boughs by striking two flints together, while the other made a tourniquet, and tied several knots in his handkerchief.  Then pandemonium broke loose.  Women tore the jewels from their fingers, ropes of pearls from their necks, chrysanthemums, hyacinths, tulips and daisies from their expensive corsages, while the fashionably-dressed men in the near-by stalls kept up a constant bombardment of tomatoes, lettuces, new potatoes, beef-tallow, pigs' knuckles, fishheads, clams, loin-chops, and pork-sausages.

Among the stalls of the market, the boarding-house keepers of Altamont walked with spying bargain-hunting eyes and inquisitive nose.  They were of various sizes and ages, but they were all stamped with the print of haggling determination and a pugnaciousclosure of the mouth.  They pried in among the fish and vegetables, pinching cabbages, weighing onions, exfoliating lettuce-heads. You've got to keep your eye on people or they'll skin you.  And if you leave things to a lazy shiftless nigger she'll waste more than she cooks.  They looked at one another hardfaced--Mrs. Barrett of the Grosvenor at Mrs. Neville of Glen View; Mrs. Ambler of the Colonial at Miss Mamie Featherstone of Ravencrest; Mrs. Ledbetter of the Belvedere--

"I hear you're full up, Mrs. Coleman," said she inquiringly.

"O, I'm full up all the time," said Mrs. Coleman.  "My people are all permanents, I don't want to fool with transients," she said loftily.

"Well," said Mrs. Ledbetter acidly, "I could fill my house up at any time with lungers who call themselves something else, but I won't have them.  I was saying the other day--"

Mrs. Michalove of Oakwood at Mrs. Jarvis of The Waverly; Mrs. Cowan of Ridgmont at--The city is splendidly equipped to meet the demands of the great and steadily growing crowd of tourists that fill the Mountain Metropolis during the busy months of June, July, and August.  In addition to eight hotels de luxe of the highest quality, there were registered at the Board of Trade in 1911 over 250 private hotels, boarding-houses and sanitariums all catering to the needs of those who come on missions of business, pleasure, or health.

Stop their baggage at the station.

At this moment Number 3, having finished his route, stepped softly on to the slime-scummed porch of the house on Valley Street, rapped gently at the door, and opened it quietly, groping his way through black miasmic air to the bed in which May Corpening lay.  She muttered as if drugged as he touched her, turned toward him, and sleepily awakened, drew him down to her with heavied and sensual caress, yoked under her big coppery arms.  Tom Cline clumped greasily up the steps of his residence on Barlett Street, swinging his tin pail; Ben returned to the paper office with Harry Tugman; and Eugene, in the back room on Woodson Street, waking suddenly to Gant's powerful command from the foot of the stairs, turned his face full into a momentary vision of rose-flushed blue sky and tender blossoms that drifted slowly earthward.
 
 

15
 

The mountains were his masters.  They rimmed in life.  They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death.  They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.  Old haunt-eyed faces glimmered in his memory.  He thought of Swain's cow, St. Louis, death, himself in the cradle.  He was the haunter of himself, trying for a moment to recover what he had been part of. He did not understand change, he did not understand growth.  He stared at his framed baby picture in the parlor, and turned away sick with fear and the effort to touch, retain, grasp himself for only a moment.

And these bodiless phantoms of his life appeared with terrible precision, with all the mad nearness of a vision.  That which was five years gone came within the touch of his hand, and he ceased at that moment to believe in his own existence.  He expected some one to wake him; he would hear Gant's great voice below the laden vines, would gaze sleepily from the porch into the rich low moon, and go obediently to bed.  But still there would be all that he remembered before that and what if--Cause flowed ceaselessly into cause.

He heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his powerful clairvoyance, the wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward back across the phantom years, plucking out of the ghostly shadows a million gleams of light--a little station by the rails at dawn, the road cleft through the pineland seen at twilight, a smoky cabin-light below the trestles, a boy who ran among the bounding calves, a wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth, framed in a door, floury negroes unloading sacks from freight-cars on a shed, the man who drove the Fair Grounds bus at Saint Louis, a cool-lipped lake at dawn.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him.  His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them.  So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirlinglandscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him--the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.  There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move.  It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.  Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge--movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested.  Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool.  Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time.  Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.

His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers.  Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again.  The boy among the calves.  Where later?  Where now?

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming.  Why here?  Why there?  Why now?  Why then?

The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza's inbrooding and Gant's expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance.  Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.
 
 

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern because a London cut-purse went unhung.  Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
 
 

He believed himself thus at the centre of life; he believed the mountains rimmed the heart of the world; he believed that from all the chaos of accident the inevitable event came at the inexorable moment to add to the sum of his life.

Against the hidden other flanks of the immutable hills the world washed like a vast and shadowy sea, alive with the great fish of his imagining.  Variety, in this unvisited world, was unending, but order and purpose certain: there would be no wastage in adventure--courage would be regarded with beauty, talent with success, all merit with its true deserving.  There would be peril, there would be toil, there would be struggle.  But there would not be confusion and waste.  There would not be groping.  For collected Fate would fall, on its chosen moment, like a plum.  There was no disorder in enchantment.
 
 

Spring lay abroad through all the garden of this world.  Beyond the hills the land bayed out to other hills, to golden cities, to rich meadows, to deep forests, to the sea.  Forever and forever.

Beyond the hills were the mines of King Solomon, the toy republics of Central America, and little tinkling fountains in a court; beyond, the moonlit roofs of Bagdad, the little grated blinds of Samarkand, the moonlit camels of Bythinia, the Spanish ranch-house of the Triple Z, and J. B. Montgomery and his lovely daughter stepping from their private car upon a western track; and the castle-haunted crags of Graustark; the fortune-yielding casino of Monte Carlo; and the blue eternal Mediterranean, mother of empires. And instant wealth ticked out upon a tape, and the first stage of the Eiffel Tower where the restaurant was, and Frenchmen setting fire to their whiskers, and a farm in Devon, white cream, brown ale, the winter's chimney merriment, and Lorna Doone; and the hanging gardens of Babylon, and supper in the sunset with the queens, and the slow slide of the barge upon the Nile, or the wise rich bodies of Egyptian women couched on moonlit balustrades, and the thunder of the chariots of great kings, and tomb-treasure sought at midnight, and the wine-rich chateau land of France, and calico warm legs in hay.

Upon a field in Thrace Queen Helen lay, her lovely body dappled in the sun.
 
 

Meanwhile, business had been fairly good.  Eliza's earning power the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses. Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last installment on the house.  It was entirely hers.  The property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000.  In addition she had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty-year $5,000 life insurance policy that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alterations: she had added a large sleeping-porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and extended a hallway, adding three bedrooms, two baths, and a water-closet, on the other.  Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large sun-parlor under the sleeping-porch, knocked out the archway in the dining-room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy.

The construction was after her own plans, and of the cheapest material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at a cost of only $3,000.  The year before she had banked almost $2,000--her bank account was almost $5,000.  In addition, she owned jointly with Gant the shop on the Square, which had thirty feet of frontage, and was valued at $20,000, from which he got $65 a month in rent; $20 from Jannadeau, $25 from the McLean Plumbing Company in the basement, and $20 from the J. N.