Part 43 (2/2)
”Look at me!” she cried.
He was looking at her, as he had never done. The deep-set eyes were deeper, and their pupils venomously bright. She saw the fury being mustered there, but without flinching looked straight back at him.
”Tell me why you killed that man?” she demanded.
His hands were clenched, and for the first time she began to fear her influence might be waning.
”I killed him 'cause he was in the way,” he growled again.
”But are you mad to go about killing people because they're in your way?
Don't you know--”
”I know all I want to know,” he almost screamed at her. ”I know that time's flyin', 'n' I got to study! Go out 'n' leave me. He was in the way, I tell you! It was natural to get rid of him.”
He picked up the book and began to open it, but instantly she had again flung it away, saying with a degree of ferocity that made him stare in open-mouthed wonderment:
”If you touch that again, _I'll_ kill _you_!”
It had been her only means of stirring him, and for more than a minute they remained, as two wax figures, glaring into each other's faces.
Beneath this spell he was rigid, but her young breast rose with quick pulsations. The room was quiet with that oppressive stillness which comes in storms, when the elements seem to draw breathlessly aside in expectation of a cras.h.i.+ng bolt of lightning. Now he took a deep breath and relaxed. She had won, and immediately leaned nearer, never taking her fixed look from his face.
”This is what comes,” she said more calmly, ”from imitating Nature. You once said that we differ from it in no way; that our eyes conceive, our minds quicken, and our hands destroy, just as it does;--that we in ourselves are the entire law of the cycles gathered into one piece of temporal clay. And I let you say it uncontradicted, because in a sense it was poetic, and because I never dreamed such a philosophy would lead to this. But I feared all the while that with such theories you were more unalterably becoming a merciless egoist, yet pinned my faith somehow to an unseen force to spare you. Now it has failed me. Wait,”
she commanded, thinking he was about to speak. ”That Nature-G.o.d you copy might have been one of the beautiful influences in your life, had you not chosen his cruel and wicked side--the side that asks no one's pardon, that lives by the survival of the fittest. Oh, you have seen things so distortedly!--you, whom I had hoped to be proud of, are a shameless sacrifice upon the altar to this G.o.d, Nature! Her reward is the brand of outcast; you are catalogued in her museum as a vicious failure, even with all you've accomplished! I shall leave you now, and doubt if I ever teach you again.”
He had sat beneath this tirade until she uttered the last sentence, when with a heartrending groan of anguish he sprang up and caught her by the wrists.
”For the love of Christ,” he began in a husky voice, but she pa.s.sionately interrupted him.
”You dare not speak of Christ! You do not know Him! You have no right to call His name! Let go of me!”
”Oh, hear me, hear me,” he implored her, releasing one of her wrists and taking the other hand in both his own; alternately stroking it and almost crus.h.i.+ng it. His body was twisting and writhing as a tree might in a terrific wind storm, and his eyes were glistening and dry--Oh, so dry, she thought They reminded her of pieces of hot gla.s.s. ”Hear me,” he was saying.
At the final Judgment, some poor soul will stand and face its Creator with just this sort of cry;--some soul which has grievously sinned will bend, and writhe, and implore with hot, gla.s.sy eyes, to be heard. Jane felt this in all its varicolored meaning. Until now she had been speaking as the teacher, as the humanitarian. But with his torture-stricken eyes pouring their prayer into her own, with the storm bending his powerful frame before its fury, she felt the old pity, the old interest, rise up in his defense.
”Hear me, hear me,” he was murmuring, until her softening att.i.tude touched somewhere upon the receiver of his subliminal mind. Then he responded, and bent eagerly over her.
”I'd rather die a thousand times than have you turn your back,” he whispered. It was a magic whisper, made magnetic by that fascinating dilation and contraction of his pupils; but the great body still swayed awkwardly. The storm was still there. ”You know what life is to me,” he was saying. ”You know how I'm fightin' to get my share of learnin'; an'
how much I've got to do! You--just you, Miss Jane, can take me on! If you quit, how will I end? Just drift 'round! I know! Do you want my hand--my left hand? I'll cut it off if that'll show you how I feel! I'd cut off the other, but it can write!” There was just at that instant a glorious pride in his voice. Now it was again mystical as he continued: ”Don't blame me too hard! You know how I was raised! You know yourself what a puny price we put on life! And you know how we do whenever someone stands in our way! Didn't I have a better right to sweep my road clear than most of my folks, who don't know half the time what they're killin' about? You know our people, an' you know that when Granny put Pap's gun in my hands, an' smeared his blood on me, an' made me swear to get those fellers, I did right to get 'em--'cause I was brought up to do those things, an' didn't know anything else! But after you got to teachin' me, I said a thousand times to myself I'd never kill anybody again--an' I wouldn't have, if that varmint Potter hadn't yelled your name in public, an' said what he'd tried to do!”
”I didn't know that,” her cheeks were flaming. ”I hadn't heard about that!”
”Well, he did. Ask Bob! He yelled it from a field, an' shot his pistol in the air, and said he'd do it yet. Don't you reckon I knew this country warn't big enough for him an' the school?”
Her cheeks burned hotter with this added humiliation that he had intended, not chivalrously to defend her, but only to keep her for his own advancement.
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