Hightower’s house.”
He did not slow, though he swerved and ran around the house and to the street.
The car which had passed him and lost him and then returned was just where it should have been, just where the Player had desired it to be.
It stopped without signal from him and three men got out.
Without a word Grimm turned and ran across the yard and into the house where the old disgraced minister lived alone, and the three men followed, rushing into the hall, pausing, bringing with them into its stale and cloistral dimness something of the savage summer sunlight which they had just left.
It was upon them, of them: its shameless savageness.
Out of it their faces seemed to glare with bodiless suspension as though from haloes as they stooped and raised Hightower, his face bleeding, from the floor where Christmas, running up the hall, his raised and armed and manacled hands full of glare and glitter like lightning bolts, so that he resembled a vengeful and furious god pronouncing a doom, had struck him down.
They held the old man on his feet.
“Which room?” Grimm said, shaking him. “Which room, old man?”
“Gentlemen!” Hightower said.
Then he said: “Men!
Men!” “Which room, old man?” Grimm shouted.
They held Hightower on his feet; in the gloomy hall, after the sunlight, he too with his bald head and his big pale face streaked with blood, was terrible.
“Men!” he cried. “Listen to me.
He was here that night.
He was with me the night of the murder.
I swear to God—”
“Jesus Christ!” Grimm cried, his young voice clear and outraged like that of a young priest. “Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?” He flung the old man aside and ran on.
It was as though he had been merely waiting for the Player to move him again, because with that unfailing certitude he ran straight to the kitchen and into the doorway, already firing, almost before he could have seen the table overturned and standing on its edge across the corner of the room, and the bright and glittering hands of the man who crouched behind it, resting upon the upper edge.
Grimm emptied the automatic’s magazine into the table; later someone covered all five shots with a folded handkerchief.
But the Player was not done yet.
When the others reached the kitchen they saw the table flung aside now and Grimm stooping over the body.
When they approached to see what he was about, they saw that the man was not dead yet, and when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit.
Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife.
“Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,” he said.
But the man on the floor had not moved.
He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth.
For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes.
Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath.
It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.
They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes.
It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.
Again from the town, deadened a little by the walls, the scream of the siren mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing. Chapter 20
NOW the final copper light of afternoon fades; now the street beyond the low maples and the low signboard is prepared and empty, framed by the study window like a stage.
He can remember how when he was young, after he first came to Jefferson from the seminary, how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, like a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting, out of which they would presently come.
Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air.
But he had never told anyone that.
Not even her.
Not even her in the days when they were still the night’s lovers, and shame and division had not come and she knew and had not forgot with division and regret and then despair, why he would sit here at this window and wait for nightfall, for the instant of night.
Not even to her, to woman.
The woman.
Woman (not the seminary, as he had once believed): the Passive and Anonymous whom God had created to be not alone the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach.
He was an only child.
When he was born his father was fifty years old, and his mother had been an invalid for almost twenty years.
He grew up to believe that this was the result of the food which she had had to subsist on during the last year of the Civil War.
Perhaps this was the reason.
His father had owned no slaves, though he was the son of a man who did own slaves at the time.
He could have owned them.
But though born and bred and dwelling in an age and land where to own slaves was less expensive than not to own them, he would neither eat food grown and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed prepared by, a negro slave.
Hence during the war and while he was absent from home, his wife had no garden save what she could make herself or with the infrequent aid of neighbors.