Bring the Jubilee Page 8

  He grinned at me. At another time I would have been delighted to pounce on the assortment of inconsistencies he had just offered; at the moment I could think of nothing but my failure to mention the Confederate agent’s visit. It almost seemed his mechanist notions were valid and I was destined always to be the ungrateful recipient of kindness.

  “All right,” he said, swallowing the last of his bread and half-raw meat; “so long as your sentimentality impels you to respect obligations I can find work for you. Those boxes over there go upstairs. Pondible’s bringing a van around for them this afternoon.”

  Ive heard the assumption that working in a bookstore must be light and pleasant. Many times during the years with Roger Tyss I had reason to be thankful for my strength and farm training. The boxes were deceptively small but so heavy they could only have been solidly packed with paper. Even with Tyss carrying box for box with me I was vastly relieved when I had to quit to run an errand.

  When I got back he went out to make an offer on someone’s library. “There are only four left. The last two are paper-wrapped; didnt have enough boxes.”

  It was characteristic of him to leave the lighter packages for me. I ran up the stairs with one of the two remaining wooden containers. Returning, I tripped on the lowest step and sprawled forward. Reflexively I threw out my hands and landed on one of the paper parcels. The tight-stretched covering cracked and split under the impact; the contents—neatly tied rectangular bundles—spilled out.

  I had learned enough of the printing trade to recognize the brightly colored oblongs as lithographs, and I wondered as I stooped over to gather them up why such a job should have been given Tyss rather than a shop specializing in this work. Even under the gaslight the colors were hard and vigorous.

  Then I really looked at the bundle I was holding. ESPANA was enscrolled across the top; below it was the picture of a man with long nose and jutting under-lip, flanked by two ornate figure fives, and beneath them the legend, CINCO PESETAS. Spanish Empire banknotes. Bundles and bundles of them.

  I needed neither expert knowledge nor minute scrutiny to tell me there was a fortune here in counterfeit money. The purpose in forging Spanish currency I could not see; that it was no private undertaking of Tyss’s but an activity of the Grand Army I was certain. Puzzled and worried, I rewrapped the bundles of notes into as neat an imitation of the original package as I could contrive.

  The rest of the day I spent casting uneasy glances at the mound of boxes and watching with apprehension the movement of anyone toward them. Death was the penalty for counterfeiting United States coins; I had no idea of the punishment for doing the same with foreign paper but I was sure even so minor an accessory as myself would be in a sad way if some officious customer should stumble against one of the packages.

  Tyss in no way acted like a guilty man, or even one with an important secret. He seemed unaware of any peril; doubtless he was daily in similar situations, only chance and my own lack of observation had prevented my discovering this earlier.

  Nor did he show anxiety when Pondible failed to arrive. Darkness came and the gaslamps went on in the streets. The heavy press of traffic outside dwindled, but the incriminating boxes remained undisturbed near the door. At last there was the sound of uncertain wheels slowing up outside and Pondible’s voice admonishing, “Wh-whoa!”

  I rushed out just as he was dismounting with slow dignity. “Who goes?” he asked; “Vance and give a countersigh.”

  “It’s Hodge,” I said. “Let me help you.”

  “Hodge! Old friend; not seen long time!” (He had been in the store only the day before.) “Terrible sfortune, Hodge. Dr-driving wagon. Fell off. Fell off wagon I mean. See?”

  “Sure, I see. Let me hitch the horse for you. Mr Tyss is waiting.”

  “Avoidable,” he muttered, “nuvoidable, voidable. Fell off.”

  Tyss took him by the arm. “You come with me and rest awhile. Hodgins, you better start loading up; youll have to do the delivering now.”

  Rebellious refusal formed in my mind. Why should I be still further involved? He had no right to demand it of me; in self-protection I was bound to refuse. “Mr Tyss …”

  “Yes?”

  Two weeks would see me free of him, but nothing could wipe out the debt I owed him. “Nothing. Nothing,” I murmured and picked up one of the boxes.

  8. IN VIOLENT TIMES

  He gave me an address on Twenty-Sixth Street. “Sprovis is the name.”

  “All right,” I said as stolidly as I could.

  “Let them do the unloading. I see there’s a full feedbag in the van; that’ll be a good time to give it to the horse.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll load up another consignment and drive with you to the destination. Take the van back to the livery stable. Here’s money for your supper and carfare back here.”

  He thinks of everything, I reflected bitterly. Except that I don’t want to have anything to do with this.

  Driving slackly through the almost empty streets my resentment continued to rise, drowning, at least partly, my fear of being for some unfathomable reason stopped by a police officer and apprehended. Why should I be stopped? Why should the Grand Army counterfeit pesetas?

  The address, which I had trouble finding on the poorly lit thoroughfare, was one of those four-storey stuccos at least a century old, showing few signs of recent repair. Mr Sprovis, who occupied the basement, had one ear distinctly larger than the other, an anomaly I could not help attributing to a trick of constantly pulling on the lobe. He, like the others who came out with him to unload the van, wore the Grand Army beard.

  “I had to come instead of Pon—”

  “No names,” he growled. “Hear? No names.”

  “All right. I was told you’d unload and load up again.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I slipped the strap of the feedbag over the horse’s ear and started toward Eighth Avenue.

  “Hey! Where you going?”

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

  I felt him peering suspiciously at me. “Guess not. But don’t keep us waiting, see? We’ll be ready to go in twenty minutes.”

  I did not like Mr Sprovis. In the automatic lunchroom where the dishes were delivered by a clever clockwork device as coins were deposited in the right slots, I gorged on fish and potatoes, but my pleasure at getting away for once from the unvarying bread and heart was spoiled by the thought of him. And I was at best no more than half through with the night’s adventure. What freight Sprovis and his companions were now loading in the van I had no idea. Except that it was nothing innocent.

  When I turned the corner into Twenty-Sixth Street again, the shadowy mass 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 block. 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 numbing pain. Desperately I clung to the dash.

  “Hold it,” someone rumbled; “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 like that without warning. I might of stuck a shiv in your ribs instead of 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, see,” mocked another voice from the body of the van. “Aint polite not to wait on him.”

  I was wedged between the driver and my assailant; my shoulder ached and I was beginning to be really frightened now my first anger had passed. These were “action” members of the Grand Army; men who regularly 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.

  I could hear
the breathing and mumbling of others in back, but it didnt need this to tell me the van was overloaded. We turned north on Sixth Avenue; the street lights showed Sprovis driving. “Gidap, gidap, he urged, “get going!”

  “That’s a horse,” I protested; “not a locomotive.”

  “What do you know?” came from behind; “And we thought we was on the Erie.”

  “He’s tired,” I persisted, “and he’s pulling too much weight.”

  “Shut up,” ordered Sprovis quietly. “Shut up.” The quietness was not deceptive; it was ominous. I shut up.

  Speed was stupid on several counts. For one thing 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. I visualized the suspicious crowd which would gather immediately if our horse dropped from exhaustion. There was no hope that consciousness of an innocuous cargo made Sprovis bold; whatever we carried was bound to be as incriminating as the counterfeit bills.

  Disconnected scraps of conversation drifted from Sprovis’ companions. “I says, ‘Look here, youre making a nice profit from selling abroad. Either you …’”

  “And of course he put it all on a twenty-dollar ticket even though …”

  “‘… my taxes,’ he says. ‘You worry about your taxes,’ I says; ‘I’m worried about your contributions.’”

  A monotonous chuffing close behind us forced itself into my consciousness; when we turned eastward in the Forties I exclaimed, “There’s a minibile following us!”

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

  “Not the cops anyway!”

  “Cons for a nickel!”

  “Only half a block from—”

  “Quick, break out the guns—”

  “Not those guns; one bang and we’re through. Air pistols, if anybody’s got one. Hands or knives. Get them all!”

  They piled out swiftly past me; I remained alone on the seat, an audience of one, properly ensconced. A few blocks away was the small park where Tirzah used to meet me. It was not believable that this was happening in one of New York’s quietest residential districts in the year 1942.

  An uneven, distorting light emphasized the abnormal speed of the incident that followed, making the action seem jumpy, as though the participants were caught at static moments, changing their attitudes between flashes of visibility. The tempo was so swift any possible spectators in the bordering windows or on the sidewalks wouldnt have had time to realize what was going on 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’ force lacked. Their leader attempted to parley during one of those seconds of apparent inaction. “Hay 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 Colonel Tolliburr’s voice.

  The Confederate agents had brass knuckles and blackjacks, Colonel Tolliburr had a sword-cane which he unsheathed with a glinting flourish. The Grand Army men flashed knives; no one seemed to be using air pistols or spring-powered guns.

  Both sides were intent on keeping the clash as quiet and inconspicuous as possible; no one shouted with anger or screamed in pain. This muffled intensity made the struggle more gruesome; the contenders fought their natural impulses as well as each other. I heard the impact of blows, the grunts of effort, the choked-back cries, the scraping of shoes on 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 escape.

  With united impulse they started for the minibile, evidently realized they wouldnt have time to get up power, and began running down the street. Their moment of indecision did for them. As the four Grand Army men closed in I saw the Confederates raise their arms in the traditional gesture of surrender. Then they were struck down.

  I crept noiselessly down on the off-side of the van and hastened quietly away in the protection of the shadows.

  9. BARBARA

  For the next few days reading was pure pretense. I used the opened book to mask my privacy while I trembled not so much with fear as with horror. I had been brought up in a harsh enough world and murder was no novelty in New York; I had seen slain men before, but this was the first time I had been confronted with naked, merciless savagery. Though I believed Sprovis would have had no qualms about despatching an inconvenient witness if I had stayed on the van, I had no particular fear for my own safety, for my knowledge of what had happened became less dangerous daily. The terror of the deed itself however remained constant.

  I was not concerned solely with revulsion. Inquisitiveness looked out under loathing to make me wonder what lay behind the night’s events. What had really happened, and what did it all mean?

  From scraps of conversation accidentally heard or deliberately 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.

  For years the world had been waiting, half in dread, half in resignation, for war to break out between the world’s two Great Powers, the German Union and the Confederate States. Some expected the point of explosion would be the Confederacy’s ally, the British Empire; most anticipated at least part of the war would be fought in the United States.

  The scheme of the Grand Army, or of that part of it which included Tyss, was apparently a farfetched and fantastic attempt to circumvent the probable course of history. The counterfeiting was 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 circulated by emissaries posing as Confederate agents, the Grand Army hoped to embroil the Confederacy with Spain and possibly preserve the neutrality of the United States. It was an ingenuous idea evolved, I see now, by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of world politics.

  If I ever had any sentimental notions about the Army they vanished now. Tyss’s mechanism may not have been purposefully designed to palliate, but it made it easy to justify actions like Sprovis’. I had no such convenient way of numbing my conscience. But even as I brooded over the weakness and cowardice which made me an accomplice, I looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I would 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 it was broke into the consulate or for what reason, and was surprised in the act, shooting and wounding Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak for the weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not have gotten 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 both an accredited diplomat and a black man.

  I did not know who shot him. It was most unlikely to be anyone connected with the Grand Army, but I did not know. I could not know. He might have been shot by Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the ultimate chain could have led back to me, it did lead back to me. If this were the Manichaeism of which Enfandin had spoken, I could not help it.

  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 circumstance 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 all this merely the self-torture of any introver
ted 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 with thoughts of suicide. I put books aside distastefully or, which was worse, indifferently.

  I must have done my work around the store; certainly I recall no comments from Tyss about it. Neither can I remember anything to distinguish the succession of days. Obviously I ate and slept; there were undoubtedly long hours free from utter hopelessness. The details of those months have simply vanished.

  Nor can I 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, deep enough to keep the minibiles off the streets and cause the horse-cars trouble—I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick visible puffs, and my glance was not apathetic. 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 bookstore and all its frustrations and evils.

  This resolution was reinforced by the discovery that I was exhausting the volumes around me. The books I sought now were rare and ever more difficult to find. Innocent of knowledge about academic life I imagined them ready to hand in any college library.

  Nor was I any longer satisfied with the printed word alone. My friendship with Enfandin had shown me how fruitful a personal, face-to-face relationship between teacher and student could be, and it seemed to me such ties could develop into ones between fellow scholars, a mutual, uncompetitive pursuit of knowledge.