There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such.
But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women?
Tell me that, Byron.”
They speak quietly, without heat, giving pause to weigh one another’s words, as two men already impregnable, each in his own conviction will.
“I reckon you are right,” Byron says. “Anyway, it ain’t for me to say that you are wrong.
And I don’t reckon it’s for you to say that I am wrong, even if I am.”
“No,” Hightower says.
“Even if I am,” Byron says. “So I reckon I’ll say good night.” He says, quietly: “It’s a good long walk out there.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “I used to walk it myself, now and then.
It must be about three miles.”
“Two miles,” Byron says. “Well.” He turns.
Hightower does not move.
Byron shifts the parcels which he has not put down. “I’ll say good night,” he says, moving toward the door. “I reckon I’ll see you, sometime soon.”
“Yes,” Hightower says. “Is there anything I can do?
Anything you need? bedclothes and such?”
“I’m obliged.
I reckon she has a plenty.
There was some already there.
I’m obliged.”
“And you will let me know?
If anything comes up.
If the child— Have you arranged for a doctor?”
“I’ll get that attended to.”
“But have you seen one yet?
Have you engaged one?”
“I aim to see to all that.
And I’ll let you know.”
Then he is gone.
From the window again Hightower watches him pass and go on up the street, toward the edge of town and his two mile walk, carrying his paperwrapped packages of food.
He passed from sight walking erect and at a good gait; such a gait as an old man already gone to flesh and short wind, an old man who has already spent too much time sitting down, could not have kept up with.
And Hightower leans there in the window, in the August heat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives—that smell of people who no longer live in life: that odor of overplump desiccation and stale linen as though a precursor of the tomb—listening to the feet which he seems to hear still long after he knows that he cannot, thinking,
‘God bless him, God help him’; thinking To be young.
To be young.
There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world He is thinking quietly:
‘I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.’
Then he hears the feet no longer.
He hears now only the myriad and interminable insects, leaning in the window, breathing the hot still rich maculate smell of the earth, thinking of how when he was young, a youth, he had loved darkness, of walking or sitting alone among trees at night.
Then the ground, the bark of trees, became actual, savage, filled with, evocative of, strange and baleful half delights and half terrors.
He was afraid of it.
He feared; he loved in being afraid.
Then one day while at the seminary he realised that he was no longer afraid.
It was as though a door had shut somewhere.
He was no longer afraid of darkness.
He just hated it; he would flee from it, to walls, to artificial light.
‘Yes,’ he thinks. ‘I should never have let myself get out of the habit of prayer.’
He turns from the window.
One wall of the study is lined with books.
He pauses before them, seeking, until he finds the one which he wants.
It is Tennyson.
It is dogeared.