People are looking at you!
But he did not seem to hear her at all.
His thin, sick face, his eyes, seemed to exude a kind of glow. “That was it.
They didn’t know who fired the shot.
They never did know.
They didn’t try to find out.
It may have been a woman, likely enough the wife of a Confederate soldier.
I like to think so.
It’s fine so.
Any soldier can be killed by the enemy in the heat of battle, by a weapon approved by the arbiters and rulemakers of warfare.
Or by a woman in a bedroom.
But not with a shotgun, a fowling piece, in a henhouse.
And so is it any wonder that this world is peopled principally by the dead?
Surely, when God looks about at their successors, He cannot be loath to share His own with us.”
“Hush!
Shhhhhhhhh!
They are looking at us!”
Then the train was slowing into the town; the dingy purlieus slid vanishing past the window.
He still looked out—a thin, vaguely untidy man with still upon him something yet of the undimmed glow of his calling, his vocation—quietly surrounding and enclosing and guarding his urgent heart, thinking quietly how surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
The train stopped: the slow aisle, still interrupted with, outlooking, then the descent among faces grave, decorous, and judicial: the voices, the murmurs, the broken phrases kindly yet still reserved of judgment, not yet giving and (let us say it) prejudicial.
‘I admitted that’ he thinks. ‘I believe that I accepted it.
But perhaps that was all I did do, God forgive me.’
The earth has almost faded from sight.
It is almost night now.
His bandagedistorted head has no depth, no solidity; immobile, it seems to hang suspended above the twin pale blobs which are his hands lying upon the ledge of the open window.
He leans forward.
Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the soon will presently begin.
When he was younger, when his net was still too fine for waiting, at this moment he would sometimes trick himself and believe that he heard them before he knew that it was time.
‘Perhaps that is all I ever did, have ever done,’ he thinks, thinking of the faces: the faces of old men naturally dubious of his youth and jealous of the church which they were putting into his hands almost as a father surrenders a bride: the faces of old men lined by that sheer accumulation of frustration and doubt which is so often the other side of the picture of hale and respected full years—the side, by the way, which the subject and proprietor of the picture has to look at, cannot escape looking at.
‘They did their part; they played by the rules,’ he thinks. ‘I was the one who failed, who infringed.
Perhaps that is the greatest social sin of all; ay, perhaps moral sin.
Thinking goes quietly, tranquilly, flowing on, falling into shapes quiet, not assertive, not reproachful, not particularly regretful.
He sees himself a shadowy figure among shadows, paradoxical, with a kind of false optimism and egoism believing that he would find in that part of the Church which most blunders, dreamrecovering, among the blind passions and the lifted hands and voices of men, that which he had failed to find in the Church’s cloistered apotheosis upon earth.
It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: that that which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom.
He seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man.
‘And I accepted that,’ he thinks. ‘I acquiesced.
Nay, I did worse: I served it.
I served it by using it to forward my own desire.
I came here where faces full of bafflement and hunger and eagerness waited for me, waiting to believe; I did not see them.
Where hands were raised for what they believed that I would bring them; I did not see them.
I brought with me one trust, perhaps the first trust of man, which I had accepted of my own will before God; I considered that promise and trust of so little worth that I did not know that I had even accepted it.
And if that was all I did for her, what could I have expected? what could I have expected save disgrace and despair and the face of God turned away in very shame?
Perhaps in the moment when I revealed to her not only the depth of my hunger but the fact that never and never would she have any part in the assuaging of it; perhaps at that moment I became her seducer and her murderer, author and instrument of her shame and death.
After all, there must be some things for which God cannot be accused by man and held responsible.
There must be.’
Thinking begins to slow now.
It slows like a wheel beginning to run in sand, the axle, the vehicle, the power which propels it not yet aware.
He seems to watch himself among faces, always among, enclosed and surrounded by, faces, as though he watched himself in his own pulpit, from the rear of the church, or as though he were a fish in a bowl.
And more than that: the faces seem to be mirrors in which he watches himself.