Time Will Darken It (51 page)

“Do you want a cup of tea?” The floor nurse asked.

“Yes, I do,” Martha said. “I had some tea just a little while ago, but I’m terribly hungry.”

“You’ll have to work fast,” the floor nurse said, “or you’ll be hungry a long time. How long ago was your first baby born?”

“Four and a half years ago.”

“Dr. Seymour is going to deliver you?”

“Yes,” Martha said.

“The first thing to do is to get into bed,” the nurse said. “Do you have any pains now?”

“No,” Martha said. She surrendered her pocketbook and gloves, and allowed the nurse to help her off with her coat.

Standing across the street from Mike Farrell’s saloon, Austin heard mournful singing, and then an argument that ended abruptly with the sound of breaking glass and a man being thrust out through the swinging door.

In the alley that ran beside the pool hall, Austin stopped beside a window with the blind drawn three-quarters of the way to the sill, offering a view of several pairs of feet under a table. The window was open about an inch, and the watcher
heard the sound of cards being dealt and shuffled and dealt again, and very little difference between the moment of triumph and the moment of disaster.

He stood in the alley looking under the drawn blind for a very long while. On a street beyond the post office, where there was a row of shabby houses, Austin leaned against a tree and saw the third house from the corner visited by a man on guard against watchers—a man who came in stealth and left twenty minutes later, less alive and (judging by his walk, his carriage) less hopeful than when he came. The man who crossed over to the other side of Lafayette Street to keep from being recognized, Austin would not have known anyway, but neither did he know the man with the miner’s cap who spoke to him by name.

Here and there he saw a light in some house, a night light left burning for a child or a sick person afraid of the dark. Austin was grateful for any illumination—for the dim light in the lobby of the Draperville Hotel, and for the light in the hackstand next door, and for the light in Dr. Danforth’s livery stable, where Snowball McHenry slept on a pile of horse blankets.

The jewellery store had an iron grating across the windows and a heavy padlock on the door, and a light was left burning so that Monk Collins, the policeman on night duty, could see into the back of the store. Shapiro’s Clothing Store and Joe Becker’s shoe store were dark, and so was the hardware store, the barber shop, the lumber yard, the two banks. The signboards outside of Giovanni’s confectionery and moviedrome (where, if you bought an ice-cream soda, you could sit in the back room and watch a moving picture of a man hanging over the edge of a cliff by his fingers) had been taken in off the sidewalk for the night, but there was a light on the first floor of the courthouse, for the night watchman, and the second floor of the telephone building, and there were also the overhead arc lights where Austin King met and parted
company with his shadow. The shadow under the arc light disturbed him as no reflection in a mirror ever had. For a moment it was recognizable, and then as he took a step toward the periphery of the circle of light, the shadow stretched out into a hideous distortion hanging between one shape and the next.

The sound of a violin coming through closed shutters kept Austin standing on the sidewalk in front of a shack on Williams Street for twenty minutes, during which time he experienced all the sensations of earthly happiness. The music stopped and Austin walked on.

Standing across the street from the jail he found himself talking to an old man named Hugh Finders, who had been connected with a brutal murder some twenty years before. Where he came from, Austin had no idea. The old man simply materialized out of the night.

“I seen you around, since you were in kneebritches,” he said to Austin, “but this is the first time I ever talked to you, I guess. Everybody’s so busy these days. I see them ride by in their fine carriages, but they don’t have no time to talk to poor old Hugh.”

There was a time when people talked to poor old Hugh. For three days, various lawyers kept him on the witness stand, trying to find out about the bloodstains that were discovered on the inside of his hack. The questions they asked, he did not feel called upon to answer, and all that the street light revealed now was an old man with a cancerous skin condition and wisps of dry white hair sticking out from under a filthy cap. “You live on Elm Street, don’t you?” he said. “I know. Big white house. The old Stevenson place. You’re married and got a little girl, ain’t you? Pretty little thing. I seen her with your wife. She don’t know me, I expect. I was always interested in you on account of your father. He was a fine man. Nobody ever went to him in trouble that didn’t get help. First he’d give them a lecture,
and then he’d reach down in his pocket. He used to think I drank too much and I guess maybe he was right, but we can’t all sit up there, high and mighty, and pass judgment on our fellow men. Some of us poor devils has to be judged. Otherwise your daddy would of been out of a job. I always meant to pay back the money he loaned me, but I never managed to, and he never pressed me for it.… I don’t know what you’re doing out at this time of night, but you take an old man’s advice and go on home. You’d be better off in bed.”

With a slight weave in his walk, he started on toward the street light at the end of the block, but to the best of Austin’s knowledge he never got there. Somewhere between the jail and the corner Hugh Finders disappeared and his secret vanished with him.

Austin walked through a park where there were band concerts in the summer-time, and then through the deserted courthouse square. The lighted clock face, so like his father’s gold watch hanging in the sky, told him that it was late and that he would have to begin the next day without enough rest, but clocks have been known to be wrong. There might be no next day.

He passed the stairs that led up to the office of Holby and King, without taking advantage of the refuge they offered him, without even knowing they were there. Turning right at the corner, he walked one more block, crossed the interurban tracks, and ended up on the brick platform that ran in front of the railway station.

The through train from St. Louis, due in at 2.87
A.M
., was late, and Austin waited on the station platform with his back turned against the icy wind. It was late January, and so the wind was due also, bringing another consignment of winter to the ice-blocked lakes of Wisconsin, the snow-covered cornfields of Illinois. There was a potbellied stove in the station, and Austin went inside, thinking to warm his hands, but the heat and the stale odour made him lightheaded, and
so he walked out again immediately. He was in a state of shivering excitement that required air.

Facing the station was a block of stores. The corner cigar store and Mike Farrell’s saloon were lighted. The rest—Dalton’s grocery, the shoe repair shop, the bicycle shop, and the monument works—were dark. Across the tracks the martin house on a pole—with its porches and round windows, doors, gables, and cupola, a fairly accurate statement of the style of architecture most admired around the year Eighteen-eighty and still surviving along College Avenue—was untenanted. The flower bed that in summer spelled Draperville in marigolds and striped petunias had been erased by heavy frosts. This could have been almost any station anywhere along the line. As Austin passed and repassed the station master’s lighted cage, in an effort to keep warm, he could hear the telegraph clicker and see the ticket agent with a green eye-shade on his forehead.

The signal lights switched far down the tracks, south of town. The ticket agent came out of the station. His description afterward of what happened that night would in no way have paralleled or corroborated Austin King’s.
Number 317 was coming in a little late
, one of them would have said. The other would have said
Time was cool and flowed softly around me. I didn’t like to put my head down in cold that might not be too clean, and it was hard to swim against the current without doing that, so I drifted downstream toward the monument works and then fought my way back. Twice I tried to crawl out onto the platform but it didn’t work. Each time I lost my hold. The platform, the station, the empty birdhouse, the stars, and Mike Farrell’s saloon fell away from under me and I was swept downstream. The third time I put my head under water and swam straight toward the light. It was easier than I imagined. When I stopped swimming I was well within the wedge made by two parallel steel rails meeting at infinity, and the light was shining right on my face. I tried to stand up but there was no
bottom. There was nothing to stand on, and when I came up for air a second I was still inside the wedge. Although I had been swimming much harder than before, I hadn’t got anywhere. I was out of breath and I knew I was somewhere I had no business to be
.

You don’t have to have water to drown in. All it requires is that your normal vision be narrowed down to a single point and continue long enough on that point until you begin to remember and to achieve a state of being which is identical with the broadest vision of human life. You can drown in a desert, in the mountain air, in an open car at night with the undersides of the leafy branches washing over you, mile after midnight mile. All you need is a single idea, a point of intense pain, a pin-prick of light growing larger and steadier and more persuasive until the mind and the desire to live are both shattered in starry sensation, leading inevitably toward no sensation whatever.…

The station master said something that Austin (with the light falling all around him from a great height) did not hear.…
 He’s right, I guess. He must be right. I’ve known Fred Vercel for years and never knew him to say anything that wasn’t so. If he did call to me, as he says—if he warned me, I probably stepped back, in plenty of time, and the rest is some kind of strange hallucination. But I never had any such feeling before. I know he spoke to me, but the way I remember it, I couldn’t hear what he said. I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the approaching engine, and even that stopped when I went under. I had never been in a situation I couldn’t get out of, and I held my breath and felt myself being rolled over and over, helpless, on the bottom. My mind, in an orderly fashion, reached one conclusion after another and I knew finally that there wasn’t going to be any more for me. This was all. Here in this place. Now. And I felt the most terrible sadness because it was not the way I expected to die. It was just foolish. I shouldn’t have looked into the light so long. I knew better. And I was not quite
ready to die. There were certain things that I still wanted to do. I suppose everybody feels that way when their time comes
.

For a second there was air over me and I opened my eyes. I was still inside the wedge. Using the last strength I had, I called
(
or thought I called
)
for help, and saw Fred Vercel’s face stiffen as the giant wheels released clouds of steam. I’m describing the way it happened to me, you understand. If Fred says it happened some other way, you’ll have to decide for yourselves which of us is right. Maybe he’s the one who was having hallucinations. How do I know? This time I couldn’t hold my breath. What came in or went out was beyond my control. I let go, knowing where I was, knowing that gravel touched my forehead, that I was being turned over and over, and that I would never escape from this trap alive. I came to the surface again, without struggling, and saw the two lights on the last car of the train getting smaller and smaller
.

I should have waited for another train, maybe, but I didn’t. I was very tired. I don’t ever remember being as tired as I was that night. I’d been letting myself down. A little bit at a time, over a period of several hours I guess, I’d been letting myself down. I’d been watching what other people do, so I could learn to be more like them, and somehow—maybe because I didn’t understand what I saw or it could have been that I was just too tired—it didn’t seem worth the bother. I don’t know how I got home. I just found myself there, looking through the dining-room window at the thermometer to see how cold it was, turning off the lights, going up the stairs to bed
.

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