He paused impressively, like a country lawyer getting ready to launch his peroration to a jury.
“Remember what?“—the voice rose suddenly, high and sharp. “Do I remember, Parson, how you’ve run the town through all these years? Do I remember what a good thing you’ve made of politics? You’ve never aspired to public office, have you, Parson? Oh, no—you’re much too modest. But you know how to pick the public-spirited citizens who do aspire, and whose great hearts pant with eagerness to serve their fellow men! Ah, yes. It’s a very nice little private business, isn’t it, Parson? And all ‘the boys’ are stockholders and get their cut of the profits—is that the way of it, Parson?...Remember what? he cried again. Do I remember now the broken fragments of a town that waits and fears and schemes to put off the day of its impending ruin? Why, Parson, yes—I can remember all these things. And yet I had no part in them, for, after all, I am a humble man. Oh—with a deprecating nod—a little nigger squeezing here and there, a little income out of Niggertown, a few illegal lendings, a comfortable practice in small usury—yet my wants were few, my tastes were very simple. I was always satisfied with, say, a modest five per cent a week. So I am not in the big money, Parson. I remember many things, but I see now I have spent my substance, wasted all my talents in riotous living—while pious Puritans have virtuously betrayed their town and given their whole-souled services to the ruin of their fellow men.”
Again there was an ominous pause, and when he went on his voice was low, almost casual in its toneless irony:
“I am afraid I have been at best a giddy fellow, Parson, and that my old age will be spent in memories of trivial things—of various merry widows who came to town, of poker chips, racehorses, cards, and rattling dice, of bourbon, Scotch, and rye—all the forms of hellishness that saintly fellows, Parson, who go to prayer-meeting every week, know nothing of. So I suppose I’ll warm my old age with the memories of my own sinfulness—and be buried at last, like all good men and true, among more public benefactors in the town’s expensive graveyard on the hill…But I also remember other things, Parson. So can you. And maybe in my humble sphere I, too, have served a purpose—of being the wild oat of more worthy citizens.”
They sat in utter silence, their frightened, guilty eyes all riveted upon his face, and each man felt as if those cold, unseeing eyes had looked straight through him. For a moment more Judge Bland just stood there, and, slowly, without a change of muscle in the blankness of his face, the ghostly smile began to hover like a shadow at the corners of his sunken mouth.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. He turned, and with his walking-stick he caught and held the curtain to one side. “I’ll be seeing you.”
All through the night George lay in his dark berth and watched the old earth of Virginia as it stroked past him in the dream-haunted silence of the moon. Field and hill and gulch and stream and wood again, the everlasting earth, the huge illimitable earth of America, kept stroking past him in the steep silence of the moon.
All through the ghostly stillness of the land, the train made on for ever its tremendous noise, fused of a thousand sounds, and they called back to him forgotten memories: old songs, old faces, old memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know and live and feel, and never find a language for—the legend of dark time, the sad brevity of their days, the unknowable but haunting miracle of life itself. He heard again, as he had heard throughout his childhood, the pounding wheel, the tolling bell, the whistle-wail, and he remembered how these sounds, coming to him from the river’s edge in the little town of his boyhood, had always evoked for him their tongueless prophecy of wild and secret joy, their glorious promises of new lands, morning, and a shining city. But now the lonely cry of the great train was speaking to him with an equal strangeness of return. For he was going home again.