Earth Angel (From "The Karate Kid Part II")
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Life Could Be a Dream
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The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms. She will grow young again. Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny stems. They will fall bursted on the loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound of thеir dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throatеd plum-dropping bird-notes.
The harsh hill-earth has moistly thawed and softened, rich soaking rain falls, fresh-bladed tender grass like soft hair growing sparsely streaks the land.
My brother Ben's face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man's scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long pointed nose. Thus women, looking, feel a well of tenderness for his pointed, bumpy, always scowling face: his hair shines like that of a young boy—it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.
Into the April night-and-morning streets goes Ben. The night is brightly pricked with cool and tender stars. The orchard stirs leafily in the short fresh wind. Ben prowls softly out of the sleeping house. His thin bright face is dark within the orchard. There is a smell of nicotine and shoe leather under the young blossoms. His pigeon-toed tan shoes ring musically up the empty streets. Lazily slaps the water in the fountain on the Square; all the firemen are asleep—but Big Bill Merrick, the brave cop, hog-jowled and red, leans swinishly over mince-pie and coffee in Uneeda Lunch. The warm good ink-smell beats in rich waves into the street: a whistling train howls off into the springtime South.
By the cool orchards in the dark the paper-carriers go. The copper legs of negresses in their dark dens stir. The creek brawls cleanly.
A new one, Number 6, heard boys speak of Foxy:
"Who's Foxy," asked Number 6.
"Foxy's a bastard, Number 6. Don't let him catch you."
"The bastard caught me three times last week. In the Greek's every time. Why can't they let us eat?"
Number 3 thought of Friday morning—he had the Niggertown route.
"How many—3?"
"One hundred and sixty-two."
"How many Dead Heads you got, son?" said Mr. Randall cynically. "Do you ever try to collect from them?" he added, thumbing through the book.
"He takes it out in Poon-Tang," said Foxy, grinning. "A week's subscription free for a dose."
"What you got to say about it?" asked Number 3 belligerently. "You've been knocking down on them for six years."
"Jazz 'em all if you like," said Randall, "but get the money. Ben, I want you to go round with him Saturday."
Ben laughed silently and cynically into the air:
"Oh, my God!" he said. "Do you expect me to check up on the little thug? He's been knocking down on you for the last six months."
"All right! All right!" said Randall, annoyed. "That's what I want you to find out."
"Oh, for God's sake, Randall," said Ben contemptuously, "he's got niggers on that book who've been dead for five years. That's what you get for keeping every little crook that comes along."
"If you don't get a move on, 3, I'll give your route to another boy," said Randall.
"Hell, get another boy. I don't care," said Number 3, toughly.
"Oh, for God's sake! Listen to this, won't you?" said Ben, laughing thinly and nodding to his angel, indicating Number 3 with a scowling jerk of his head.
"Yes, listen to this, won't you! That's what I said," Number 3 answered pugnaciously.
"All right, little boy. Run on and deliver your papers now, before you get hurt," said Ben, turning his scowl quietly upon him and looking at him blackly for a moment. "Ah, you little crook," he said with profound loathing, "I have a kid brother who's worth six like you."
Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents.
Gant slept heavily, rattling the loose window-sash with deep rasping snores; with short explosive thunders, ripping the lilac night, 36 began to climb Saluda. She bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared seriously down into the milky boiling creek, and waited. She slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up, like a straining mule, into the dark. Content, he leaned far out the cab and looked: the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails. He ate a thick sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily staining it under his big black fingers. There was a smell of dogwood and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world. The cars clanked humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily in the hot yellow light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen at the switch.
Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully, Tom, goggle-eyed, looked carefully down at him. They had never spoken. Then in silence he turned and took the milk-bottle, half full of cold coffee, that his fireman offered him. He washed his food down with the large easy gurgling swallows of a bishop.
At 18 Valley Street, the red shack-porch, slime-scummed with a greasy salve of yellow negroid mud, quaked rottenly. Number 3's square-folded ink-fresh paper struck flat against the door, falling on its edge stiffly to the porch like a block of light wood. Within, May Corpening stirred nakedly, muttering as if doped and moving her heavy copper legs, in the fetid bed-warmth, with the slow noise of silk.
Harry Tugman lit a Camel, drawing the smoke deep into his powerful ink-stained lungs as he watched the press run down. His bare arms were heavy-muscled as his presses. He dropped comfortably into his pliant creaking chair and tilted back, casually scanning the warm pungent sheet. Luxurious smoke steamed slowly from his nostrils. He cast the sheet away.
"Christ!" he said. "What a make-up!"
Ben came downstairs, moody, scowling, and humped over toward the ice-box.
"For God's sake, Mac," he called out irritably to the Make-up Man, as he scowled under the lifted lid, "don't you ever keep anything except root-beer and sour milk?"
"What do you want, for Christ's sake?"
"I'd like to get a Coca-Cola once in a while. You know," he said bitingly, "Old Man Candler down in Atlanta is still making it."
Harry Tugman cast his cigarette away.
"They haven't got the news up here yet, Ben," said he. "You'll have to wait till the excitement over Lee's surrender has died down. Come on," he said abruptly, getting up, "let's go over to the Greasy Spoon."
He thrust his big head down into the deep well of the sink, letting the lukewarm water sluice refreshingly over his broad neck and blue-white sallow night-time face, strong, tough, and humorous. He soaped his hands with thick slathering suds, his muscles twisting slowly like big snakes. He sang in his powerful quartette baritone:
"Beware! Beware! Beware!
Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep,
So beware! Bee-ware!"
Comfortably they rested in the warm completed exhaustion of the quiet press-room: upstairs the offices, bathed in green-yellow light, sprawled like men relaxed after work. The boys had gone to their routes. The place seemed to breathe slowly and wearily. The dawn-sweet air washed coolly over their faces. The sky was faintly pearled at the horizon.
Strangely, in sharp broken fragments, life awoke in the lilac darkness. Clop-clopping slowly on the ringing street, Number Six, Mrs. Goulderbilt's powerful brown mare, drew inevitably on the bottle-clinking cream-yellow wagon, racked to the top with creamy extra-heavy high-priced milk. The driver was a fresh-skinned young countryman, richly odorous with the smell of fresh sweat and milk. Eight miles, through the starlit dewy fields and forests of Biltburn, under the high brick English lodgegate, they had come into the town.
At the Pisgah Hotel, opposite the station, the last door clicked softly; the stealthy footfalls of the night ceased; Miss Bernice Redmond gave the negro porter eight one-dollar bills and went definitely to bed with the request that she be not disturbed until one o'clock; a shifting engine slatted noisily about in the yard; past the Biltburn crossing Tom Cline whistled with even, mournful respirations. By this time Number 3 had delivered 142 of his papers: he had only to ascend the rickety wooden stairs of the Eagle Crescent bank to finish the eight houses of the Crescent. He looked anxiously across the hill-and-dale-sprawled negro settlement to the eastern rim: behind Birdseye Gap the sky was pearl-grey—the stars looked drowned. Not much time left, he thought. He had a blond meaty face, pale-coloured and covered thickly with young blond hair. His jaw was long and fleshy: it sloped backward. He ran his tongue along his full cracked underlip.
A 1910 model, four-cylinder, seven-passenger Hudson, with mounting steady roar, shot drunkenly out from the station curbing, lurched into the level negro-sleeping stretch of South End Avenue, where the firemen had their tournaments, and zipped townward doing almost fifty. The station quietly stirred in its sleep: there were faint reverberating noises under the empty sheds; brisk hammer-taps upon car wheels, metallic heel-clicks in the tiled waiting-room. Sleepily a negress slopped water on the tiles, with languid sullen movement pushing a grey sopping rag around the floor.
It was now five-thirty. Ben had gone out of the house into the orchard at three twenty-five. In another forty minutes Gant would waken, dress, and build the morning fires.
"Ben," said Harry Tugman, as they walked out of the relaxed office, "if Jimmy Dean comes messing around my press-room again they can get some one else to print their lousy sheet. What the hell! I can get a job on the Atlanta Constitution whenever I want it."
"Did he come down to-night?" asked Ben.
"Yes," said Harry Tugman, "and he got out again. I told him to take his little tail upstairs."
"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ben. "What did he say?"
"He said, 'I'm the editor! I'm the editor of this paper!' 'I don't give a good goddam,' I said, 'if you're the President's snotrag. If you want any paper to-day keep out of the press-room.' And believe me, he went!"
In cool blue-pearl darkness they rounded the end of the Post Office and cut diagonally across the street to Uneeda Lunch No. 3. It was a small beanery, twelve feet wide, wedged in between an optician's and a Greek shoe parlour.
Within, Dr. Hugh McGuire sat on a stool patiently impaling kidney beans, one at a time, upon the prongs of his fork. A strong odour of corn whisky soaked the air about him. His thick skilful butcher's hands, hairy on the backs, gripped the fork numbly. His heavy-jowled face was blotted by large brown patches. He turned round and stared owlishly as Ben entered, fixing the wavering glare of his bulbous red eyes finally upon him.
"Hello, son," he said in his barking kindly voice, "what can I do for you?"
"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben laughing contemptuously, and jerking his head toward Tugman. "Listen to this, won't you?"
They sat down at the lower end. At this moment Horse Hines, the undertaker, entered, producing, although he was not a thin man, the effect of a skeleton clad in a black frock coat. His long lantern mouth split horsily in a professional smile displaying big horse teeth in his white, heavily starched face.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen," he said for no apparent reason, rubbing his lean hands briskly as if it was cold. His palm-flesh rattled together like old bones.
Coker, the Lung Shark, who had not ceased to regard McGuire's bean-hunt with sardonic interest, now took the long cigar out of his devil's head and held it between his stained fingers as he tapped his companion.
"Let's get out," he grinned quietly, nodding toward Horse Hines. "It will look bad if we're seen together here."
"Good morning, Ben," said Horse Hines, sitting down below him. "Are all the folks well?" he added softly.
Sideways Ben looked at him scowling, then jerked his head back to the counterman, with a fast bitter flicker of his lips.
"Doctor," said Harry Tugman with servile medicine-man respect, "what do you charge to operate?"
"Operate what?" McGuire barked presently, having pronged a kidney bean.
"Why—appendicitis," said Harry Tugman, for it was all he could think of.
"Three hundred dollars when we go into the belly," said McGuire. He coughed chokingly to the side.
"You're drowning in your own secretions," said Coker with his yellow grin. "Like Old Lady Sladen."
"My God!" said Harry Tugman, thinking jealously of lost news. "When did she go?"
"To-night," said Coker.
"God, I'm sorry to hear that," said Harry Tugman, greatly relieved.
"I've just finished laying the old lady out," said Horse Hines, gently. "A bundle of skin and bones." He sighed regretfully, and for a moment his boiled eye moistened.
Ben turned his scowling head around with an expression of nausea.
"Joe," said Horse Hines with merry professionalism, "give me a mug of that embalming fluid." He thrust his horsehead indicatively at the coffee urn.
"Oh, for God's sake," Ben muttered in terms of loathing. "Do you ever wash your damned hands before you come in here?" he burst out irritably.
Ben was twenty. Men did not think of his age.
"Would you like some cold pork, son?" said Coker, with his yellow malicious grin.
Ben made a retching noise in his throat, and put his hand upon his stomach.
"What's the matter, Ben?" Harry Tugman laughed heavily and struck him on the back.
Ben got off the stool, took his coffee mug and the piece of tanned mince pie he had ordered, and moved to the other side of Harry Tugman. Every one laughed. Then he jerked his head toward McGuire with a quick frown.
"By God, Tug," he said. "They've got us cornered."
"Listen to him," said McGuire to Coker. "A chip off the old block, isn't he. I brought that boy into the world, saw him through typhoid, got the old man over seven hundred drunks, and I've been called eighteen different kinds of son of a bitch for my pains even since. But let one of 'em get a belly ache," he added proudly, "and you'll see how quick they come running to me. Isn't that right, Ben?" he said, turning to him.
"Oh, listen to this!" said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug. His bitter savour filled the place with life, with tenderness, with beauty. They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes—at his grey scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile.
"And I tell you something else," said McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, "if one of them's got to be cut open, see who gets the job. What about it, Ben?" he asked.
"By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire," said Ben, "I'm going to be damned sure you can walk straight before you do."
"Come on, Hugh," said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder. "Stop chasing those beans around the plate. Crawl off or fall off that damned stool—I don't care which."
McGuire drunkenly lost in reverie, stared witlessly down at his bean plate and sighed.
"Come on, you damned fool," said Coker, getting up, "you've got to operate in forty-five minutes."
"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug, "who's the victim? I'll send flowers."
"… all of us sooner or later," McGuire mumbled puffily through his puff-lips. "Rich and poor alike. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Doesn't matter … doesn't matter at all."
"In heaven's name," Ben burst out irritably to Coker. "Are you going to let him operate like that? Why don't you shoot them instead?"
Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:
"Why, he's just getting hot, son," said he.
Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-grey tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.
At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking the silk lapels of his dinner jacket. His face, whisky-red, was highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and sensual. An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania glossings. Four years in Philly change a man.
Thrusting his gloves carelessly into his coat, he entered. McGuire slid bearishly off his stool and gazed him into focus. Then he made beckoning round-arm gestures with his fat hands.
"Look at it, will you," he said. "Does any one know what it is?"
"It's Percy," said Coker. "You know Percy Van der Gould, don't you?"
"I've been dancing all night at the Hilliards," said Spaugh elegantly. "Damn! These new patent-leather pumps have ruined my feet." He sat upon a stool, and elegantly displayed his large country feet, indecently broad and angular in the shoes.
"What's he been doing?" said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker for enlightenment.
"He's been dawncing all night at the Hilliards," said Coker in a mincing voice.
McGuire shielded his bloated face coyly with his hand.
"O crush me!" he said, "I'm a grape! Dancing at the Hilliards, were you, you damned Mountain Grill. You've been on a Poon-Tang Picnic in Niggertown. You can't load that bunk on us."
Bull-lunged, their laughter filled the nacreous dawn.
"Patent-leather pumps!" said McGuire. "Hurt his feet. By God, Coker, the first time he came to town ten years ago he'd never been curried above the knees. They had to throw him down to put shoes on him."
Ben laughed thinly to the Angel.
"A couple of slices of buttered toast, if you please, not too brown," said Spaugh delicately to the counterman.
"A mess of hog chitlings and sorghum, you mean, you bastard. You were brought up on salt pork and cornbread."
"We're getting too low and coarse for him, Hugh," said Coker. "Now that he's got drunk with some of the best families, he's in great demand socially. He's so highly thought of that he's become the official midwife to all pregnant virgins."
"Yes," said McGuire, "he's their friend. He helps them out. He not only helps them out, he helps them in again."
"What's wrong with that?" said Spaugh. "We ought to keep it in the family, oughtn't we?"
Their laughter howled out into the tender dawn.
"This conversation is getting too rough for me," said Horse Hines banteringly as he got off his stool.
"Shake hands with Coker before you go, Horse," said McGuire. "He's the best friend you've ever had. You ought to give him royalties."
The light that filled the world now was soft and otherworldly like the light that fills the sea-floors of Catalina where the great fish swim. Flat-footedly, with kidney-aching back, Patrolman Leslie Roberts, all unbuttoned, slouched through the submarine pearl light and paused, gently agitating his club behind him, as he turned his hollow liverish face toward the open door.
"Here's your patient," said Coker softly, "the Constipated Cop."
Aloud with great cordiality, they all said: "How are you, Les?"
"Oh, tolable, tolable," said the policeman mournfully. As draggled as his moustaches, he passed on, hocking into the gutter.
"Well, good morning, gentlemen," said Horse Hines, making to go.
"Remember what I told you, Horse. Be good to Coker, your best friend." McGuire jerked a thumb toward Coker.
Beneath his thin joviality Horse Hines was hurt.
"I do remember," said the undertaker gravely. "We are both members of honourable professions: in the hour of death when the storm-tossed ship puts into its haven of rest, we are the trustees of the Almighty."
"Why, Horse!" Coker exclaimed, "this is eloquence!"
"The sacred rites of closing the eyes, of composing the limbs, and of preparing for burial the lifeless repository of the departed soul is our holy mission; it is for us, the living, to pour balm upon the broken heart of Grief, to soothe the widow's ache, to brush away the orphan's tears; it is for us, the living, to highly resolve that—"
"—Government of the people, for the people, and by the people," said Hugh McGuire.
"Yes, Horse," said Coker, "you are right. I'm touched. And what's more, we do it all for nothing. At least," he added virtuously, "I never charge for soothing the widow's ache."
"What about embalming the broken heart of Grief?" asked McGuire.
"I said balm," Horse Hines remarked coldly.
"Say, Horse," said Harry Tugman, who had listened with great interest, "didn't you make a speech with all that in it last summer at the Undertakers' Convention?"
"What's true then is true now," said Horse Hines bitterly, as he left the place.
"Jesus!" said Harry Tugman, "we've got him good and sore. I thought I'd bust a gut, doc, when you pulled that one about embalming the broken heart of Grief."
At this moment Dr. Ravenel brought his Hudson to a halt across the street before the post office, and walked over rapidly, drawing his gauntlets off. He was bareheaded; his silver aristocratic hair was thinly rumpled; his surgical grey eyes probed restlessly below the thick lenses of his spectacles. He had a famous, calm, deeply concerned face, shaven, ashen, lean, lit gravely now and then by humour.
"Oh, Christ!" said Coker. "Here comes Teacher!"
"Good morning, Hugh," he said as he entered. "Are you going into training again for the bughouse?"
"Look who's here!" McGuire roared hospitably. "Dead-eye Dick, the literary sawbones, whose private collection of gall-stones is the finest in the world. When d'jew get back, son?"
"Just in time, it seems," said Ravenel, holding a cigarette cleanly between his long surgical fingers. He looked at his watch. "I believe you have a little engagement at the Ravenel hospital in about half an hour. Is that right?"
"By God, Dick, you're always right," McGuire yelled enthusiastically. "What'd you tell 'em up there, boy?"
"I told them," said Dick Ravenel, whose affection was like a flower that grew behind a wall, "that the best surgeon in America when he was sober was a lousy bum named Hugh McGuire who was always drunk."
"Now wait, wait. Hold on a minute!" said McGuire, holding up his thick hand. "I protest, Dick. You meant well, son, but you got that mixed up. You mean the best surgeon in America when he's not sober."
"Did you read one of your papers?" said Coker.
"Yes," said Dick Ravenel. "I read one on carcinoma of the liver."
"How about one on pyorrhœa of the toe-nails?" said McGuire. "Did you read that one?"
Harry Tugman laughed heavily, not wholly knowing why. McGuire belched into the silence loudly and was witlessly adrift for a moment.
"Literature, literature, Dick," he returned portentously. "It's been the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me—Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I didn't put back? Anyway, don't I always leave 'em something to go on with? I'm no scholar, Dick. I've never had your advantages. I'm a self-made butcher. I'm a carpenter, Dick. I'm an interior decorator. I'm a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I'm a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I'm a practical man. I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick. I throw away everything I can't use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tailbone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha—that's why the governor looks so young. We are rilled up with useless machinery, Dick. Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You haven't! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben—he knows!"
"O my God!" laughed Ben thinly, "listen to that, won't you?"
Two doors below, directly before the post office, Pete Mascari rolled upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry of spit-bright winesaps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges, the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odour from the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of powder; the windows were filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets, pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and mutilating Jack Johnsons, red cannon-crackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes.
"Don' pincha da grape. Pinch da banan'!"
A street-car, toy-green with new spring paint, went square-ward.
"Dick," said McGuire more soberly, "take the job, if you like."
Ravenel shook his head.
"I'll stand by," said he. "I won't operate. I'm afraid of one like this. It's your job, drunk or sober."
"Removing a tumour from a woman, ain't you?" said Coker.
"No," said Dick Ravenel, "removing a woman from a tumour."
"Bet you it weighs fifty pounds, if it weighs an ounce," said McGuire with sudden professional interest.
Dick Ravenel winced ever so slightly. A cool spurt of young wind, clean as a kid, flowed by him. McGuire's meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as if from the cold shock of water. He seemed to waken.
"I'd like a bath," he said to Dick Ravenel, "and a shave." He rubbed his hand across his blotched hairy face.
"You can use my room, Hugh, at the hotel," said Jeff Spaugh, looking at Ravenel somewhat eagerly.
"I'll use the hospital," he said.
"You'll just have time," said Ravenel.
"In God's name, let's get a start on," he cried impatiently.
"Did you see Kelly do this one at Hopkins?" asked McGuire.
"Yes," said Dick Ravenel, "after a very long prayer. That's to give power to his elbow. The patient died."
"Damn the prayers!" said McGuire. "They won't do much good to this one. She called me a low-down licquored-up whisky-drinking bastard last night: if she still feels like that she'll get well."
"These mountain women take a lot of killing," said Jeff Spaugh sagely.
"Do you want to come along?" McGuire asked Coker.
"No, thanks. I'm getting some sleep," he answered. "The old girl took a hell of a time. I thought she'd never get through dying."
They started to go.
"Ben," said McGuire, with a return to his former manner, "tell the Old Man I'll beat hell out of him if he doesn't give Helen a rest. Is he staying sober?"
"In heaven's name, McGuire, how should I know?" Ben burst out irritably. "Do you think that's all I've got to do—watching your licker-heads?"
"That's a great girl, boy," said McGuire sentimentally. "One in a million."
"Hugh, for God's sake, come on," cried Dick Ravenel.
The four medical men went out into the pearl light. The town emerged from the lilac darkness with a washed renascent cleanliness. All the world seemed as young as Spring. McGuire walked across to Ravenel's car, and sank comfortably with a sense of invigoration into the cool leathers. Jeff Spaugh plunged off violently with a ripping explosion of his engine and a cavalier wave of his hand.
Admiringly Harry Tugman's face turned to the slumped burly figure of Hugh McGuire.
"By God!" he boasted, "I bet he does the damnedest piece of operating you ever heard of."
"Why, hell," said the counterman loyally, "he ain't worth a damn until he's got a quart of corn liquor under his belt. Give him a few drinks and he'll cut off your damned head and put it on again without your knowing it."
As Jeff Spaugh roared off Harry Tugman said jealously: "Look at that bastard. Mr. Vanderbilt. He thinks he's hell, don't he? A big pile of bull. Ben, do you reckon he was really out at the Hilliards to-night?"
"Oh, for God's sake," said Ben irritably, "how the hell should I know! What difference does it make?" he added furiously.
"I guess Little Maudie will fill up the column to-morrow with some of her crap," said Harry Tugman. "'The Younger Set,' she calls it! Christ! It goes all the way from every little bitch old enough to wear drawers, to Old Man Redmond. If Saul Gudger belongs to the Younger Set, Ben, you and I are still in the third grade. Why, hell, yes," he said with an air of conviction to the grinning counterman, "he was bald as a pig's knuckle when the Spanish American War broke out."
The counterman laughed.
Foaming with brilliant slapdash improvisation Harry Tugman declaimed:
"Members of the Younger Set were charmingly entertained last night at a dinner dance given at Snotwood, the beautiful residence of Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Firkins, in honour of their youngest daughter, Gladys, who made her debut this season. Mr. and Mrs. Firkins, accompanied by their daughter, greeted each of the arriving guests at the threshold in a manner reviving the finest old traditions of Southern aristocracy, while Mrs. Firkins' accomplished sister, Miss Catherine Hipkiss, affectionately known to members of the local younger set as Roaring Kate, supervised the checking of overcoats, evening wraps, jock-straps, and jewellery.
"Dinner was served promptly at eight o'clock, followed by coffee and Pluto Water at eight forty-five. A delicious nine-course collation had been prepared by Artaxerxes Papadopolos, the well-known confectioner and caterer, and proprietor of the Bijou Café for Ladies and Gents.
"After first-aid and a thorough medical examination by Dr. Jefferson Reginald Alfonso Spaugh, the popular gin-ecologist, the guests adjourned to the Ball Room where dance music was provided by Zeke Buckner's Upper Hominy Stringed Quartette, Mr. Buckner himself officiating at the trap drum and tambourine.
"Among those dancing were the Misses Aline Titsworth, Lena Ginster, Ophelia Legg, Gladys Firkins, Beatrice Slutsky, Mary Whitesides, Helen Shockett, and Lofta Barnes.
"Also the Messrs. I. C. Bottom, U. B. Freely, R. U. Reddy, O. I. Lovett, Cummings Strong, Samson Horney, Preston Updyke, Dows Wicket, Pettigrew Biggs, Otis Goode, and J. Broad Stern."
Ben laughed noiselessly, and bent his pointed face into the mug again. Then, he stretched his thin arms out, extending his body sensually upward, and forcing out in a wide yawn the night-time accumulation of weariness, boredom, and disgust.
"Oh-h-h-h my God!"
Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young moteless shafts. At this moment Gant awoke.
He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense hair-thicket of his breast.
The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens. Come and rob us. All through the night for you, master. Rich protesting yielding voices of Jewesses. Do it, don't it. Break an egg in them.
Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane moulded over his gaunt legs, he listened to the protesting invitations of the hens.
From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered bodies, protesting but satisfied they staggered up. For me. The earth too and the vine. The moist new earth cleaving like cut pork from the plough. Or like water from a ship. The spongy sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh. Or the earth loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry trees. The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces. Spongy and full of sap now like a woman. The thick grape-vine—in August the heavy clustered grapes——How there? Like milk from a breast. Or blood through a vein. Fattens and plumps them.
All through the night the blossoms dropping. Soon now the White Wax. Green apples end of May. Isaacs' June Apple hangs half on my side. Bacon and fried green apples.
With sharp whetted hunger he thought of breakfast. He threw the sheet back cleanly, swung in an orbit to a sitting position and put his white somewhat phthisic feet on the floor. Standing up tenderly, he walked over to his leather rocker and put on a pair of clean white-footed socks. Then he pulled his nightgown over his head, looking for a moment in the dresser mirror at his great boned structure, the long stringy muscles of his arms, and his flat-meated hairy chest. His stomach sagged paunchily. He thrust his white flaccid calves quickly through the shrunken legs of a union suit, stretched it out elastically with a comfortable widening of his shoulders and buttoned it. Then he stepped into his roomy sculpturally heavy trousers and drew on his soft-leathered laceless shoes. Crossing his suspender braces over his shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and pine snapping in the range within three minutes. He was stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning.
Through Birdseye Gap, in the dewy richness of Lunn's Cove, Judge Webster Tayloe, the eminent, prosperous, and aristocratic corporation counsel (retired, but occasional consultations), rose in the rich walnut twilight of his bedchamber, noted approvingly, through the black lenses of the glasses that gave his long, subtle, and contemptuous face its final advantage over the rabble, that one of his country bumpkins was coming from the third pasture with a slopping pail of new milk, another was sharpening a scythe in the young glint of the sun, and another, emulating his more intelligent fellow, the horse, was backing a buggy slowly under the carriage shed.
Approvingly he watched his young mulatto son come over the lawn with lazy cat-speed, noting with satisfaction the grace and quickness of his movements, the slender barrel strength of his torso, his small-boned resiliency. Also the well-shaped intelligent head, the eager black eyes, the sensitive oval face, and the beautiful coprous olive of the skin. He was very like a better-class Spaniard. Quod potui perfeci. By this fusion, perhaps, men like men.
By the river the reed-pipes, the muse's temple, the sacred wood again. Why not? As in this cove. I, too, have lived in Arcady.
He took off his glasses for a moment and looked at the ptotic malevolence of his left eye, and the large harlequinesque wart in the cheek below it. The black glasses gave the suggestion that he was half-masked; they added a touch of unsearchable mystery to the subtle, sensual and disquieting intelligence of his face. His negro man appeared at this moment and told him his bath was ready. He drew the long thin nightgown over his freckled Fitzsimmons body and stepped vigorously into tepid water. Then for ten minutes he was sponged, scraped, and kneaded, upon a long table by the powerful plastic hands of the negro. He dressed in fresh laundered underwear and newly pressed clothes of black. He tied a black string carelessly below the wide belt of starched collar and buttoned across his straight long figure a frock coat that reached his knees. He took a cigarette from a box on his table and lighted it.
Bouncing tinnily down the coiling road that came through the Gap from the town, a flivver glinted momentarily through the trees. Two men were in it. His face hardened against it, he watched it go by his gates on the road with a scuffle of dust. Dimly he saw their lewd red mountain faces, and completed the image with sweat and corduroy. And in the town their city cousins. Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia. Federated Half-Breeds of the World.
Into my valley next with lawn-mowers and front lawns. He ground out the life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began a rapid window calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and hens; the stored plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of his fields and orchards. A man came toward the house with a bucket of eggs in one hand and a bucket of butter in the other; each cake was stamped with a sheaf of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean white linen cloths. He smiled grimly: if attacked he could withstand a prolonged siege.
At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick's Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine. The negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and climbing lazily the steep tunnel of back steps. She knocked at the door.
"Who's there!" cried Eliza, sharply, waking at once, and coming forward to the door. She wore a grey flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen undershirt that Ben had discarded: the pendant string floated gently to and fro as she opened the door, like some strange seamoss floating below the sea. Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch, slept Miss Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in the field on the hill behind the Plum Street School. Next to her, in the large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in the pit of alcoholic slumber. Upon each end of the mantel was a small snapshot in a silver frame—one of her absent daughter, Louise, eighteen, and one of Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front of the house, propped on his elbow and wearing a wide straw hat that shaded all his face except his mouth. Also, in other chambers, front and back, Mr. Conway Richards, candy-wheel concessionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse, Mr. William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria, and his wife; in the large room at the head of the stairs Miss Annie Mitchel, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia, Miss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina, and Mrs. Rose Levin, twenty-eight, of Chicago, Illinois, all members of the chorus of "Molasses" Evans and His Broadway Beauties, booked out of Atlanta, Georgia, by the Piedmont Amusement Agency.
"O G-hirls! The Duke of Gorgonzola and the Count of Limburger are on their way here now. I want all you girls to be nice to them and to show them a good time when they arrive."
"You bet we will."
"And keep your eye on the little one—he's the one with all the money."
"I'll say we will. Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!"
"We are the girls that have the fun,
We're snappy and happy every one;
We're jolly and gay
And ready to play,
And that is why we say-ee——"
Behind a bill-plastered fence-boarding on Upper Valley Street, opposite the Y.M.I. (coloured), and in the very heart of the crowded amusement and commercial centre of Altamont's coloured population, Moses Andrews, twenty-six, coloured, slept the last great sleep of white and black. His pockets, which only the night before had been full of the money Saul Stein, the pawnbroker, had given him in exchange for certain articles which he had taken from the home of Mr. George Rollins, the attorney (as an 18-carat Waltham gold watch with a heavy chain of twined gold, the diamond engagement ring of Mrs. Rollins, three pairs of the finest silk stockings, and two pairs of gentlemen's underdrawers), were now empty, a half-filled bottle of Cloverleaf Bonded Kentucky Rye, with which he had retired behind the boards to slumber, lay unmolested in the flaccid grip of his left hand, and his broad black throat gaped cleanly open from ear to ear, as a result of the skilled razor-work of his hated and hating rival, Jefferson Flack, twenty-eight, who now lay peacefully, unsuspected and unsought, with their mutual mistress, Miss Molly Fiske, in her apartment on East Pine Street. Moses had been murdered in moonlight.
A starved cat walked softly along the boards on Upper Valley: as the courthouse bell boomed out its solid six strokes, eight negro labourers, the bottoms of their overalls stiff with agglutinated cement, tramped by like a single animal, in a wedge, each carrying his lunch in a small lard bucket.
Meanwhile, the following events occurred simultaneously throughout the neighbourhood:
Dr. H. M. MC Rae, fifty-eight, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, having washed his lean Scotch body, arrayed himself in stiff black and a boiled white shirt, and shaved his spare, clean un-ageing face, descended from his chamber in his residence on Cumberland Avenue, to his breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and boiled milk. His heart was pure, his mind upright, his faith and his life like a clean board scrubbed with sandstone. He prayed in thirty-minute prayers without impertinence for all men and the success of all good ventures. He was a white unwasting flame that shone through love and death; his speech rang out like steel with a steady passion.
In Dr. Frank Engel's Sanitarium and Turkish Bath Establishment on Liberty Street, Mr. J. H. Brown, wealthy sportsman and publisher of the Altamont Citizen, sank into dreamless sleep, after five minutes in the steam-closet, ten in the tub, and thirty in the drying-room, where he had submitted to the expert osteopathy of "Colonel" Andrews (as Dr. Engel's skilled negro masseur was affectionately known), from the soles of his gouty feet to the veinous silken gloss of his slightly purple face.
Across the street, at the corner of Liberty and Federal, and at the foot of Battery Hill, a white-jacketed negro sleepily restacked in boxes the scattered poker-chips that covered the centre table in the upstairs centre room of the Altamont City Club. The guests, just departed, were Mr. Gilbert Woodcock, Mr. Reeves Stikeleather, Mr. Henry Pentland, junr., Mr. Sidney Newbeck, of Cleveland, Ohio (retired), and the aforementioned Mr. J. H. Brown.
"And, Jesus, Ben!" said Harry Tugman, emerging at this moment from Uneeda No. 3, "I thought I'd have a hæmorrhage 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 grey moustache 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 sea-fish—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 Grey 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, fish-heads, 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 hard-faced—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.
"Oh, I'm full up all the time," said Mrs. Coleman. "My people are all permanents, I don't want to fool with the 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 Waverley; 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 sanatoriums 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 Bartlett 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.
Earth Angel (From "The Karate Kid Part II") by New Edition — Clips & Lyrics | Riffy | Riffy
