Part 10

William Campbell shut his eyes. He was beginning to feel a slight nausea. He knew that this nausea would increase steadily, without there ever being the relief of sickness, until something were done against it. It was at this point that he suggested that Mr. Turner have a drink. Mr. Turner declined. William Campbell took a drink from the bottle. It was a temporary measure. Mr. Turner watched him. Mr. Turner had been in this room much longer than he should have been, he had many things to do; although living in daily association with people who used drugs, he had a horror of drugs, and he was very fond of William Campbell; he did not wish to leave him. He was very sorry for him and he felt a cure might help. He knew there were good cures in Kansas City. But he had to go. He stood up.

“Listen, Billy,” William Campbell said, “I want to tell you something. You’re called ‘Sliding Billy.’ That’s because you can slide. I’m called just Billy. That’s because I never could slide at all. I can’t slide, Billy. I can’t slide. It just catches. Every time I try it, it catches.” He shut his eyes. “I can’t slide, Billy. It’s awful when you can’t slide.”

“Yes,” said “Sliding Billy” Turner.

“Yes, what?” William Campbell looked at him.

“You were saying.”

“No,” said William Campbell. “I wasn’t saying. It must have been a mistake.”

“You were saying about sliding.”

“No. It couldn’t have been about sliding. But listen, Billy, and I’ll tell you a secret. Stick to sheets, Billy. Keep away from women and horses and, and—” he stopped “—eagles, Billy. If you love horses you’ll get horse-s—, and if you love eagles you’ll get eagle-s—.” He stopped and put his head under the sheet.

“I got to go,” said “Sliding Billy” Turner.

“If you love women you’ll get a dose,” William Campbell said. “If you love horses——”

“Yes, you said that.”

“Said what?”

“About horses and eagles.”

“Oh, yes. And if you love sheets.” He breathed on the sheet and stroked his nose against it. “I don’t know about sheets,” he said. “I just started to love this sheet.”

“I have to go,” Mr. Turner said. “I got a lot to do.”

“That’s all right,” William Campbell said. “Everybody’s got to go.”

“I better go.”

“All right, you go.”

“Are you all right, Billy?”

“I was never so happy in my life.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. You go along. I’ll just lie here for a little while. Around noon I’ll get up.”

But when Mr. Turner came up to William Campbell’s room at noon William Campbell was sleeping and as Mr. Turner was a man who knew what things in life were very valuable he did not wake him.

TO-DAY IS FRIDAY

_Three Roman soldiers are in a drinking-place at eleven o’clock at night. There are barrels around the wall. Behind the wooden counter is a Hebrew wine-seller. The three Roman soldiers are a little cock-eyed._

_1st Roman Soldier_—You tried the red?

_2d Soldier_—No, I ain’t tried it.

_1st Soldier_—You better try it.

_2d Soldier_—All right, George, we’ll have a round of the red.

_Hebrew Wine-seller_—Here you are, gentlemen. You’ll like that. [_He sets down an earthenware pitcher that he has filled from one of the casks._] That’s a nice little wine.

_1st Soldier_—Have a drink of it yourself. [_He turns to the third Roman soldier who is leaning on a barrel._] What’s the matter with you?

_3d Roman Soldier_—I got a gut-ache.

_2d Soldier_—You’ve been drinking water.

_1st Soldier_—Try some of the red.

_3d Soldier_—I can’t drink the damn stuff. It makes my gut sour.

_1st Soldier_—You been out here too long.

_3d Soldier_—Hell, don’t I know it?

_1st Soldier_—Say, George, can’t you give this gentleman something to fix up his stomach?

_Hebrew Wine-seller_—I got it right here.

[_The third Roman soldier tastes the cup that the wine-seller has mixed for him._]

_3d Soldier_—Hey, what you put in that, camel chips?

_Wine-seller_—You drink that right down, Lootenant. That’ll fix you up right.

_3d Soldier_—Well, I couldn’t feel any worse.

_1st Soldier_—Take a chance on it. George fixed me up fine the other day.

_Wine-seller_—You were in bad shape, Lootenant. I know what fixes up a bad stomach.

[_The third Roman soldier drinks the cup down._]

_3d Roman Soldier_—Jesus Christ. [_He makes a face._]

_2d Soldier_—That false alarm!

_1st Soldier_—Oh, I don’t know. He was pretty good in there to-day.

_2d Soldier_—Why didn’t he come down off the cross?

_1st Soldier_—He didn’t want to come down off the cross. That’s not his play.

_2d Soldier_—Show me a guy that doesn’t want to come down off the cross.

_1st Soldier_—Aw, hell, you don’t know anything about it. Ask George there. Did he want to come down off the cross, George?

_Wine-seller_—I’ll tell you, gentlemen, I wasn’t out there. It’s a thing I haven’t taken any interest in.

_2d Soldier_—Listen, I seen a lot of them—here and plenty of other places. Any time you show me one that doesn’t want to get down off the cross when the time comes—when the time comes, I mean—I’ll climb right up with him.

_1st Soldier_—I thought he was pretty good in there to-day.

_3d Soldier_—He was all right.

_2d Roman Soldier_—You guys don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not saying whether he was good or not. What I mean is, when the time comes. When they first start nailing him, there isn’t none of them wouldn’t stop it if they could.

_1st Soldier_—Didn’t you follow it, George?

_Wine-seller_—No, I didn’t take any interest in it, Lootenant.

_1st Soldier_—I was surprised how he acted.

_3d Soldier_—The part I don’t like is the nailing them on. You know, that must get to you pretty bad.

_2d Soldier_—It isn’t that that’s so bad, as when they first lift ’em up. [_He makes a lifting gesture with his two palms together._] When the weight starts to pull on ’em. That’s when it gets ’em.

_3d Roman Soldier_—It takes some of them pretty bad.

_1st Soldier_—Ain’t I seen ’em? I seen plenty of them. I tell you, he was pretty good in there to-day.

[_The second Roman soldier smiles at the Hebrew wine-seller._]

_2d Soldier_—You’re a regular Christer, big boy.

_1st Soldier_—Sure, go on and kid him. But listen while I tell you something. He was pretty good in there to-day.

_2d Soldier_—What about some more wine?

[_The wine-seller looks up expectantly. The third Roman soldier is sitting with his head down. He does not look well._]

_3d Soldier_—I don’t want any more.

_2d Soldier_—Just for two, George.

[_The wine-seller puts out a pitcher of wine, a size smaller than the last one. He leans forward on the wooden counter._]

_1st Roman Soldier_—You see his girl?

_2d Soldier_—Wasn’t I standing right by her?

_1st Soldier_—She’s a nice-looker.

_2d Soldier_—I knew her before he did. [_He winks at the wine-seller._]

_1st Soldier_—I used to see her around the town.

_2d Soldier_—She used to have a lot of stuff. He never brought _her_ no good luck.

_1st Soldier_—Oh, he ain’t lucky. But he looked pretty good to me in there to-day.

_2d Soldier_—What become of his gang?

_1st Soldier_—Oh, they faded out. Just the women stuck by him.

_2d Roman Soldier_—They were a pretty yellow crowd. When they seen him go up there they didn’t want any of it.

_1st Soldier_—The women stuck all right.

_2d Soldier_—Sure, they stuck all right.

_1st Roman Soldier_—You see me slip the old spear into him?

_2d Roman Soldier_—You’ll get into trouble doing that some day.

_1st Soldier_—It was the least I could do for him. I’ll tell you he looked pretty good to me in there to-day.

_Hebrew Wine-seller_—Gentlemen, you know I got to close.

_1st Roman Soldier_—We’ll have one more round.

_2d Roman Soldier_—What’s the use? This stuff don’t get you anywhere. Come on, let’s go.

_1st Soldier_—Just another round.

_3d Roman Soldier_—[_Getting up from the barrel._] No, come on. Let’s go. I feel like hell to-night.

_1st Soldier_—Just one more.

_2d Soldier_—No, come on. We’re going to go. Good-night, George. Put it on the bill.

_Wine-seller_—Good-night, gentlemen. [_He looks a little worried._] You couldn’t let me have a little something on account, Lootenant?

_2d Roman Soldier_—What the hell, George! Wednesday’s pay-day.

_Wine-seller_—It’s all right, Lootenant. Good-night, gentlemen.

[_The three Roman soldiers go out the door into the street._]

[_Outside in the street._]

_2d Roman Soldier_—George is a kike just like all the rest of them.

_1st Roman Soldier_—Oh, George is a nice fella.

_2d Soldier_—Everybody’s a nice fella to you to-night.

_3d Roman Soldier_—Come on, let’s go up to the barracks. I feel like hell to-night.

_2d Soldier_—You been out here too long.

_3d Roman Soldier_—No, it ain’t just that. I feel like hell.

_2d Soldier_—You been out here too long. That’s all.

CURTAIN.

BANAL STORY

So he ate an orange, slowly spitting out the seeds. Outside, the snow was turning to rain. Inside, the electric stove seemed to give no heat and rising from his writing-table, he sat down upon the stove. How good it felt! Here, at last, was life.

He reached for another orange. Far away in Paris, Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round. Far off in Mesopotamia, twenty-one feet of snow had fallen. Across the world in distant Australia, the English cricketers were sharpening up their wickets. _There_ was Romance.

Patrons of the arts and letters have discovered _The Forum_, he read. It is the guide, philosopher, and friend of the thinking minority. Prize short-stories—will their authors write our best-sellers of to-morrow?

You will enjoy these warm, homespun, American tales, bits of real life on the open ranch, in crowded tenement or comfortable home, and all with a healthy undercurrent of humor.

I must read them, he thought.

He read on. Our children’s children—what of them? Who of them? New means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods?

Or will we all have to move to Canada?

Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them? Our civilization—is it inferior to older orders of things?

And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the chopping of the axes of the gum-choppers.

Do we want big men—or do we want them cultured? Take Joyce. Take President Coolidge. What star must our college students aim at? There is Jack Britton. There is Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Can we reconcile the two? Take the case of Young Stribling.

And what of our daughters who must make their own Soundings? Nancy Hawthorne is obliged to make her own Soundings in the sea of life. Bravely and sensibly she faces the problems which come to every girl of eighteen.

It was a splendid booklet.

Are you a girl of eighteen? Take the case of Joan of Arc. Take the case of Bernard Shaw. Take the case of Betsy Ross.

Think of these things in 1925—Was there a risqué page in Puritan history? Were there two sides to Pocahontas? Did he have a fourth dimension?

Are modern paintings—and poetry—Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.

Have tramps codes of conduct? Send your mind adventuring.

There is Romance everywhere. _Forum_ writers talk to the point, are possessed of humor and wit. But they do not try to be smart and are never long-winded.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual. He laid down the booklet.

And meanwhile, stretched flat on a bed in a darkened room in his house in Triana, Manuel Garcia Maera lay with a tube in each lung, drowning with the pneumonia. All the papers in Andalucia devoted special supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the lithographs. Bull-fighters were very relieved he was dead, because he did always in the bull-ring the things they could only do sometimes. They all marched in the rain behind his coffin and there were one hundred and forty-seven bull-fighters followed him out to the cemetery, where they buried him in the tomb next to Joselito. After the funeral every one sat in the cafés out of the rain, and many colored pictures of Maera were sold to men who rolled them up and put them away in their pockets.

NOW I LAY ME

THAT night we lay on the floor in the room and I listened to the silk-worms eating. The silk-worms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; sometimes on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. Often I ran out of bait because I would take only ten worms with me in a tobacco tin when I started. When I had used them all I had to find more worms, and sometimes it was very difficult digging in the bank of the stream where the cedar trees kept out the sun and there was no grass but only the bare moist earth and often I could find no worms. Always though I found some kind of bait, but one time in the swamp I could find no bait at all and had to cut up one of the trout I had caught and use him for bait.

Sometimes I found insects in the swamp meadows, in the grass or under ferns, and used them. There were beetles and insects with legs like grass stems, and grubs in old rotten logs; white grubs with brown pinching heads that would not stay on the hook and emptied into nothing in the cold water, and wood ticks under logs where sometimes I found angle-worms that slipped into the ground as soon as the log was raised. Once I used a salamander from under an old log. The salamander was very small and neat and agile and a lovely color. He had tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook, and after that one time I never used a salamander, although I found them very often. Nor did I use crickets, because of the way they acted about the hook.

Sometimes the stream ran through an open meadow, and in the dry grass I would catch grasshoppers and use them for bait and sometimes I would catch grasshoppers and toss them into the stream and watch them float along swimming on the stream and circling on the surface as the current took them and then disappear as a trout rose. Sometimes I would fish four or five different streams in the night; starting as near as I could get to their source and fishing them down stream. When I had finished too quickly and the time did not go, I would fish the stream over again, starting where it emptied into the lake and fishing back up stream, trying for all the trout I had missed coming down. Some nights too I made up streams, and some of them were very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming. Some of those streams I still remember and think that I have fished in them, and they are confused with streams I really know. I gave them all names and went to them on the train and sometimes walked for miles to get to them.

But some nights I could not fish, and on those nights I was cold-awake and said my prayers over and over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known. That took up a great amount of time, for if you try to remember all the people you have ever known, going back to the earliest thing you remember—which was, with me, the attic of the house where I was born and my mother and father’s wedding-cake in a tin box hanging from one of the rafters, and, in the attic, jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as a boy and preserved in alcohol, the alcohol sunken in the jars so the backs of some of the snakes and specimens were exposed and had turned white—if you thought back that far, you remembered a great many people. If you prayed for all of them, saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light, and then you could go to sleep, if you were in a place where you could sleep in the daylight.

On those nights I tried to remember everything that had ever happened to me, starting with just before I went to the war and remembering back from one thing to another. I found I could only remember back to that attic in my grandfather’s house. Then I would start there and remember this way again, until I reached the war.

I remembered, after my grandfather died we moved away from that house and to a new house designed and built by my mother. Many things that were not to be moved were burned in the back-yard and I remember those jars from the attic being thrown in the fire, and how they popped in the heat and the fire flamed up from the alcohol. I remember the snakes burning in the fire in the back-yard. But there were no people in that, only things. I could not remember who burned the things even, and I would go on until I came to people and then stop and pray for them.

About the new house I remembered how my mother was always cleaning things out and making a good clearance. One time when my father was away on a hunting trip she made a good thorough cleaning out in the basement and burned everything that should not have been there. When my father came home and got down from his buggy and hitched the horse, the fire was still burning in the road beside the house. I went out to meet him. He handed me his shotgun and looked at the fire. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I’ve been cleaning out the basement, dear,” my mother said from the porch. She was standing there smiling, to meet him. My father looked at the fire and kicked at something. Then he leaned over and picked something out of the ashes. “Get a rake, Nick,” he said to me. I went to the basement and brought a rake and my father raked very carefully in the ashes. He raked out stone axes and stone skinning knives and tools for making arrow-heads and pieces of pottery and many arrow-heads. They had all been blackened and chipped by the fire. My father raked them all out very carefully and spread them on the grass by the road. His shotgun in its leather case and his game-bags were on the grass where he had left them when he stepped down from the buggy.

“Take the gun and the bags in the house, Nick, and bring me a paper,” he said. My mother had gone inside the house. I took the shotgun, which was heavy to carry and banged against my legs, and the two game-bags and started toward the house. “Take them one at a time,” my father said. “Don’t try and carry too much at once.” I put down the game-bags and took in the shotgun and brought out a newspaper from the pile in my father’s office. My father spread all the blackened, chipped stone implements on the paper and then wrapped them up. “The best arrow-heads went all to pieces,” he said. He walked into the house with the paper package and I stayed outside on the grass with the two game-bags. After a while I took them in. In remembering that, there were only two people, so I would pray for them both.

Some nights, though, I could not remember my prayers even. I could only get as far as “On earth as it is in heaven” and then have to start all over and be absolutely unable to get past that. Then I would have to recognize that I could not remember and give up saying my prayers that night and try something else. So on some nights I would try to remember all the animals in the world by name and then the birds and then fishes and then countries and cities and then kinds of food and the names of all the streets I could remember in Chicago, and when I could not remember anything at all any more I would just listen. And I do not remember a night on which you could not hear things. If I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep, because I knew my soul would only go out of me if it were dark. So, of course, many nights I was where I could have a light and then I slept because I was nearly always tired and often very sleepy. And I am sure many times too that I slept without knowing it—but I never slept knowing it, and on this night I listened to the silk-worms. You can hear silk-worms eating very clearly in the night and I lay with my eyes open and listened to them.

There was only one other person in the room and he was awake too. I listened to him being awake, for a long time. He could not lie as quietly as I could because, perhaps, he had not had as much practice being awake. We were lying on blankets spread over straw and when he moved the straw was noisy, but the silk-worms were not frightened by any noise we made and ate on steadily. There were the noises of night seven kilometres behind the lines outside but they were different from the small noises inside the room in the dark. The other man in the room tried lying quietly. Then he moved again. I moved too, so he would know I was awake. He had lived ten years in Chicago. They had taken him for a soldier in nineteen fourteen when he had come back to visit his family, and they had given him to me for an orderly because he spoke English. I heard him listening, so I moved again in the blankets.