Part 19 (1/2)

”Hey there-where you going?”

”To get something to eat. Anything wrong with that?”

I felt him looking suspiciously at me in the darkness. ”All right. But don't keep us waiting. We'll be ready to go in twenty minutes.”

”That's right,” added one of the others. ”Don't want to keep the horse waiting. We're kind to animals, ain't we, Chuck?”

I found a lunchroom where I gorged on fish and potatoes, happy to get away from the unvarying bread and heart. My enjoyment was tarnished though by the knowledge that I was not through with the night's adventure. What freight Sprovis and his companions were loading in the van now, I had no idea-except that it was nothing innocent.

When I turned the corner into 26th Street again, the shadowy ma.s.s of the horse and van was gone from its place by the curb. Alarmed, I broke into a run and discovered it turning in the middle of the street. I jumped and caught hold of the dash, pulling myself aboard. ”What's the idea?”

A fist caught me in the shoulder, almost knocking me back into the street. Zigzags of shock ran down my arm, terminating in a numbing pain. Desperately, I clung to the dash.

”Hold it,” someone growled, ”it's the punk who came with. Let him in.”

Another voice, evidently belonging to the man who'd hit me, admonished, ”Want to watch yourself, chum. Not go jumping up like that without warning. I mighta stuck a s.h.i.+v in your ribs insteada my hand.”

I could only repeat, ”What's the idea of trying to run off with the van? I'm responsible for it.”

”He's responsible for it, Chuck, see,” mocked another voice from the body of the van. ”It ain't polite not to wait for him.”

I was wedged between the driver and my a.s.sailant; my shoulder ached and I was beginning to be frightened now my first anger had pa.s.sed. These were ”action” members of the Grand Army; men who committed battery, mayhem, arson, robbery and murder. I had been both foolhardy and lucky; realizing this, it seemed diplomatic not to try for possession of the reins.

We turned north on 6th Avenue; the street lights showed Sprovis driving. He was one of those who thought a horse was a mechanical contrivance for getting somewhere quickly, regardless of the weight he was pulling or whether he was tired or not. On several counts our speed was stupid; if nothing else it called attention to the van at a time when most commercial vehicles had been stabled for the night and the traffic was almost entirely carriages, buggies, hacks and minibiles.

It was the monotonous chuffing of a minibile coming slowly close behind us that formed the subconscious pattern of my thought; when we turned eastward in the Forties I exclaimed, ”There's a minibile following us!”

Even as I spoke the trackless locomotive pulled alongside and then darted ahead to pocket us by nosing diagonally toward the curb. The horse must have been too exhausted to shy; he simply stopped short and I heard the curses of the felled pa.s.sengers behind me.

”Only half a block from-”

”Quick! Break the guns out-”

”No guns, you fool! Hands or knives. Get them all!”

It was not believable that this could be happening in one of New York's best residential districts in the year 1942. Nor was the speed of the whole incident normal. The tempo was so swift that if there were any spectators in the bordering windows or on the sidewalks they didn't have time to realize what was happening before it was all over.

Four men from the minibile were met by five from the van. The odds were not too unequal, for the attackers had a discipline which Sprovis and his companions lacked. An uneven, distorting light made the action seem jumpy, as though the partic.i.p.ants were caught at static moments, changing their att.i.tudes in flashes of invisibility between.

Their leader attempted to parley during one of these seconds of apparent inaction. ”Hey, you men-we got nothing against you. They's a thousand dollars apiece in it for you-”

A fist smacked into his mouth. The light caught his face as he was jolted back, but I hardly needed its revelation to confirm my recognition of his voice. It was Colonel Tolliburr all right.

The Confederate agents had bra.s.s knuckles and blackjacks; the Grand Army men had knives. Both sides were intent on keeping the struggle as quiet and inconspicuous as possible; no one shouted with anger or screamed with pain. This m.u.f.fled intensity made the struggle the more gruesome. I heard the impact of blows, the grunts of effort, the choked-back expressions of pain, the sc.r.a.ping of shoes on the pavement and the thud of falls. One of the defenders fell, and two of the attackers, before the two remaining Southrons gave up the battle and attempted to escape.

They started for the minibile, evidently realized they would not have time to get away in it, and began running down the street. Their indecision did for them. As the Grand Army men closed in around them I saw them raise their arms in the traditional gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.

V.

For the next days my reading was pretense. I used the opened book before me to mask my privacy from Tyss while I pondered the meaning and extent of that night's events. From sc.r.a.ps of conversation on which I eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction and remembered fragments I reconstructed the picture which made the background. Its borders reached a long way from Astor Place.

I have explained how the world had waited for years, half in dread, half in resignation, for war between the German Union and the Confederate States. Everyone expected the point of explosion would be the Confederacy's ally, the British Empire, and that at least part of the war would be fought in the United States. Apparently we were helpless to prevent this.

The Grand Army's scheme was evidently a far-fetched and fantastic attempt to circ.u.mvent the probable course of history. The counterfeiting of Spanish money on a large scale represented an aspect of this attempt, which was nothing less than trying to force the war to start, not through the Confederacy's ally, but through the German Union's-the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts of the spurious currency, the Grand Army was planning to circulate it by means of emissaries pa.s.sing as Confederate agents and thus embroil the Confederacy with Spain in the hope the war would commence and be fought in the Spanish Empire. It was an ingenuous idea, I see now, evolved by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of world politics.

The second delivery had represented the less extravagant and romantic side of the Grand Army. Embarking, as they had years before, on activities of violence, the fine distinction between crimes undertaken to advance a cause and allied crimes undertaken to supply the organization with funds had become obscured. Relations of increasing intimacy were established with ordinary gangsters. The a.s.sociation was convenient to both, for the Grand Army often supplied weapons and information in return for more immediately political favors.

Thus, Sprovis had been engaged in comparatively innocent gunrunning to a gang which probably had no other connection with the Grand Army, when Tolliburr and his friends waylaid us in the minibile. Undoubtedly what they wanted was proof of the counterfeiting scheme, but they had overlooked or somehow missed the rendezvous on 26th Street-disastrously for them.

Any lingering sentimental notions I might have entertained about the nature of the Grand Army disappeared with the certainty Sprovis had killed his prisoners. At the first opportunity I used the card Tolliburr had given me, but the suspicion and lack of information with which I was received at the address confirmed my idea. No bodies were found and there was no mention in the newspapers of the disappearance of any Southrons. Naturally the Confederate government would call no attention to their fate, but I had no doubts.

Even as I reproached myself for the weakness and moral cowardice which had prevented me from refusing to be an accomplice to these crimes, I looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I should leave the bookstore for his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act should be to tell him everything. And then that dream was exploded just as it was about to be realized.

I do not know who broke into the consulate and was surprised in the act, who shot and wounded Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak for weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not get in touch with me and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he was an accredited diplomat and a black man.

I did not know who shot him. It was quite probably no one connected either with the Grand Army or the gang to whom the guns were delivered. But I did not know. I could not know. He might have been shot with one of the revolvers which had been in the van that night, or by Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the ultimate chain could have led back to me, it did lead back to me.

The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was the least of my despair. It seemed to me I was caught by the inexorable, choiceless circ.u.mstance in which Tyss so firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I could escape neither my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further guilt. I could not change destiny.

Was this all merely the self-torture of an introverted young man? Possibly. I only know that for a long time-long as one in his early twenties measures time-I lost all interest in life, even dallying at intervals with thoughts of suicide. I put books aside with distaste, or indifference-which was worse.

I cannot say precisely when it was my despair began to lift. I know that one day-it was cold and the snow was deep on the ground-I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick, visible puffs, and for the first time in months my glance was not one of indifference. When I returned to the bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart's Life of General Pickett and opened it to the place where I had abandoned it. In a moment I was fully absorbed.

Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer the same Hodge Backmaker. For the first time I was determined to do what I wanted instead of waiting and hoping events would somehow turn out right for me. Somehow I was going to free myself from the dead end of the bookstore-and I wasn't going to escape into indenture, either.

All this was pointed by my discovery that I was exhausting the possibilities of the volumes around me. The ones I now sought were rare and it became more difficult for me to find them. With the innocence of one who has not been part of academic life I imagined them ready to hand in a dozen college libraries.

Nor, to tell the truth, was I any longer completely satisfied with the second hand, the printed word. My friends.h.i.+p with Enfandin had shown me how a personal, face-to-face relations.h.i.+p between teacher and student could be so much more fruitful and it seemed to me such relations.h.i.+ps could develop into ones between fellow scholars-a mutual pursuit of knowledge which was not compet.i.tive.

Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original sources, the unpublished ma.n.u.scripts of partic.i.p.ants or scholars, the old diaries and letters which might shade a meaning or subtly change the interpretation of some old, forgotten action.

Ideally my problems could be solved by a fellows.h.i.+p or an instructors.h.i.+p at some college. But how was this to be obtained without the patronage of a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no credentials worth a second's consideration. Even though the immigration bars kept out graduates of British, Confederate or German universities, no college in the United States would accept a self-taught young man who had not only little Latin and less Greek, but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at all.

For a long time I considered possible ways and means, an exercise rarely more practical than spinning daydreams without contriving any steps to attain their consummation. I knew I was waiting to be acted upon, rather than attempting to initiate action on my own account, but it seemed to me impossible to exercise that free will of which Enfandin had spoken.

At last, more in a spirit of whimsical absurdity than in sober hope, I wrote out a letter of application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined myself to possess, a.s.saying the extent of my learning with a conceit which only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining the work I had projected for my future. With much care and many revisions I set this composition in type. It was undoubtedly a foolish gesture, but not having access to so costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal this by penning the letters by hand, I used this transparent device.

Tyss read one of the copies I struck off. His expression was critical. ”Is it very bad?” I asked hopelessly.

”Should have used more leading. And you could have lined it up better and eliminated the hyphens. It's things like that-the details-which make a machine to set type, that inventors have been failing to invent for so long, impractical. I'm afraid you'll never make a first-cla.s.s printer, Hodgins.”

He was concerned only with the typesetting, uninterested in the outcome.

The government mails being one of the favorite victims of holdup men, and pneumatic post limited to local areas, I dispatched the letters by way of Wells, Fargo to a comprehensive list of colleges. I can't say I then waited for the replies to flow in, for though I knew the company's system of heavily armed guards would insure delivery of my applications, I had no antic.i.p.ation that any of the recipients would bother to answer. As a matter of fact I put it pretty well out of my mind and divided my attention between my work for Tyss, my reading, and a fruitless endeavor to devise some new scheme.

It was several months later, toward the end of September, that the telegram came signed Thomas K. Haggerwells. It read, ACCEPT NO OFFER TILL OUR REPRESENTATIVE EXPLAINS HAGGERSHAVEN.

I had sent no copy of my letter to York, Pennsylvania-where the telegram had originated-nor anywhere near it. I knew of no colleges in that vicinity. And I had never heard of Mr. (or Doctor, or Professor) Haggerwells. I might have thought the message a mean joke, except that Tyss's nature didn't run to this type of humor and no one else knew of the letters except those to whom they were addressed.