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 pugnacious closure 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 whirling landscape 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.