Chapter One
A crowd was gathering outside the wall by the park, when the streetcar he was on, coming home from work, curved along the avenue on the hill. His legs started to twitch as he tried to turn away, but like everybody else he pressed his face against the window, waiting for the car to turn at another angle so he could look back at the crowd.
He sat there calmly, feeling the pain in his neck from craning. The car stopped three times and people got off. He could stand the tension of this calmness no longer, and getting up suddenly got off just before the doors closed. He walked back rapidly the way of the car tracks, and kept on cracking his fingers, pulling every one in turn until the knuckles cracked, and he avoided looking far along the street past the curve to the jail.
An iron fence was alongside the walk all the length of the park, and on the other side of the fence the hill sloped down to the flatland, rolled and hard and green. The greenest, tightly clipped grass was on the bowling lawn at the foot of the hill and on the tennis court, but beyond were pools of water in the spongy ground. The surface of the pools shone in the bright sunlight and the sky was very blue. John Hughes, walking on the sidewalk on the hill, kept on looking down at the flatland, following with his eyes as he walked, four tennis players on the public courts early in the evening, the two girls wearing red bandeaux.
The crowd was hidden by the trees in the park. He broke into a trot, breathing heavily, afraid that if he did not get there soon the mob would disperse, and he simply wanted to be one of them, outside the jail, gaping at the window of the death-cell high up on the wall. In the morning they were hanging Fred Thompson, who had been his friend for many years, and he was eager to be in the crowd because the presence of so many people outside the jail, staring at the cell window, created a contact with the man in the cell. Anyone there was closer to Fred Thompson than John would have been if he had gone home and had his dinner and put his hands over his face, still thinking about him; but if the crowd dispersed, then the tension and excitement would be all gone and only the foolish ones would stand alone in the park underneath the trees. So John Hughes went on running, eager to get the feeling there was for him in the crowd.
Looking back once he saw that even the tennis players had left the court and were climbing the hill quickly, swinging their rackets. The white shirts and trousers of the men looked very nice moving along the green hill.
He eased up in his stride, just walking rapidly, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and more excited inside than he had been when he first got off the car, though he did not know what he expected to happen among the people, who had come from all the side streets.
A lane was between the wall of the jail and the iron fence at this end of the park. It was an old jail and the wall was not very high, hardly more than twelve feet, and people standing a few yards from the park fence could look over the jail wall at the narrow barred windows in the weather-browned brick of the jail.
The people standing under the trees were staring at the cell window, pointing, talking rapidly without looking at each other. There had been a sun shower an hour ago and the leaves on the trees were still wet and sometimes drops of water from the leaves fell on someone’s head. The light from the strong sun glistened on the surface of the wet leaves through the trees, but could not dry the soggy ground, heel-marked and trampled. A broad-shouldered man, his arms linked behind him, standing on tiptoes, suddenly shouted: “There he is!”
The outline of Thompson’s face was behind the three bars of the window. The white face was pressed against the bars. It was really too far away to see whether the face was white, but it was a pale blotch against the shadow of the cell window. When everybody understood a face was at the window they began to cheer a little uncertainly, because they had followed his trial and felt sure that if he hadn’t killed a policeman he would have been given only life imprisonment. The weak cheering irritated three policemen on horseback in the land between the park and the jail wall, and slapping their horses they jerked the reins till the horses pawed the ground, swinging back on their haunches almost in a circle. There was no more cheering, but someone in the center of the crowd yelled at the policemen and everybody laughed. John Hughes, moving nervously in the crowd, shouldering people aside, had seen the face at the window, and it no longer was necessary to keep on looking at it; now he wanted to be moving in the crowd, irritating people standing on tiptoe, whom he tilted off balance. Suddenly he stopped, remaining quietly on the one spot by the tree trunk, wondering what so many faces in the park meant to the man in the cell. All the faces were lifted to him, and now he was pressing his own face against the bars as if it had become very important that he should not miss a single movement or fail to see a single upturned face. The eager movements, the faces lifted up to him and the small cheer were the movements and rhythm in a brief new world, important in every detail because he had an immediate relation with everything in it. Everything for the moment belonged to him. The face never moved behind the bars, and was always turned at the same angle, neck craning toward the crowd, and John felt like crying as he looked intently at the man nearest to him, a tall thin man with a short dark beard, hoping to recognize instantly some quality so sympathetic to his own mood he could take hold of him by the arm and start talking. The man’s long face was absolutely expressionless, only his eyes never wavered. Timidly, John reached out his hand, hardly touching the thin man on the arm. “What’s the matter with you?” the man said, glaring at him. The bearded jaw moved abruptly three times, the man blinked his eyes rapidly, again concentrating on the cell window and John was no longer anxious to feel all the eager emotion of the crowd. On the street a peanut vendor with a pushcart was trying to adjust the handle of the cart against the iron fence so he could stand up on it and look over the jail wall. A policeman took him by the arm, shaking him. John, looking a long time at the peanut vender and at the policemen and at the streetcars moving on the tracks, and through the leaves of the trees up at the sky and at the faces around him, hoped, when he looked again at the cell window, the face would be gone. It was always there. The face never moved, only it was harder to see it now because the window was on the east wall of the jail and the sun was going down. The window was hardly more than a dark shadow, but the last strong sunbeams were shining on the people on the hill. The feeling he had been eager for, running down the street, had passed; it had been just a short, quick feeling of a unity with tense-faced people and the one in the cell, but the tall man with the narrow bearded face had spoiled it, and he wanted to get out of the crowd, for he was thinking of the high-school years with Fred Thompson, suddenly feeling so sentimental he kept rubbing his hands over his cheeks. He got out of the crowd slowly, moving farther back into the park, and was angry at the ones who had started to sing a song everybody used to sing in wartime. He, too, wanted to sing.
Than he saw Father Mason, a tall and broad-shouldered, moon-faced man, pacing up and down beyond the fringe of the crowd, glancing always at the ground. Beads of perspiration were on his upper lip.
“Mind company, Father?” John asked him.
“Good evening, John.”
Slowly they walked along the crest of the hill. Down on the flatland some kids were playing with a football, but it was get ing too dark to follow it. The dark oval shape sometimes rose up high against the skyline. The sun had struck the tops of the poplar trees that lined the Don River, running through the whole ravine, now tinting roofs of houses on the other side.
“Why on earth are they singing over there?” Father Mason said.
“I don’t know. I guess it holds them together.”
“I suppose so. Curious the way they came here tonight. Why on earth did I, too, walk by here? I saw poor Fred this morning.”
“Let’s sit down here on the bench.”
“Very well. But it is wonderful the way he was this morning. You know I’ve walked to the gallows with three men, but Fred will be the first one that I actually knew. That makes a difference.”
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“How’s he going to take it, Father?”
“Good Lord, he’ll die a perfect death. He’s absolutely resigned about it. That’s the main thing. That’s what I have to do. He wasn’t a very good Catholic, not like his sister Isabelle, or his mother, but you know he’s as simple about it now as a child.”
“I can’t imagine Fred feeling that way about it.”
“That part of it’s easy. That’s my job. But it makes a difference when you know them. You believe that, don’t you?” He spoke childishly, leaning closer to John Hughes. He had had a drink of whiskey, and it was strong on his breath.
“I thought I’d take a walk tonight,” he said, “and have everything easy in my mind for tomorrow, but I know why I walked up here.”
“So he’s easy in his thoughts, is he?”
“He’s ready. I walked up here an hour ago.”
“So Fred’s ready to die. Maybe that’s why he never moved his face from the window. I thought he might cry out, shout something to someone in the crowd.”
“He’s looking forward to it. I try to get them feeling that way. It almost hypnotizes them. He’s perfectly reconciled to everything. He’s ready to leave the world.”
“Good God, Father, it sounds bad thinking of him wanting to die.”
“None of them want to die. The bad part will come as he sees the noose. He’ll start and straighten up and I can almost see him doing it. Then he’ll go on and die a perfect death.”
“Let’s stop talking about it.”
“I didn’t even want to think of him tonight.”
It was almost dark now and the crowd was dispersing, because they could no longer see the window. Groups of fellows were walking along the cinder path in the park to cross the bridge over the river, the fellows talking rapidly and excitedly, and passing under a light; their faces, raised, were illuminated and ruddy, and someone laughed out loud.
So they sat quietly on the bench at the top of the hill and had their own thoughts, and the east side of the park became tranquil and there were only small sounds. And when it was dark all the lights on the hills on the other side of the valley were in lines forming patterns, and farther up the valley lighted cars moved slowly over the viaduct. Before midnight the sounds in the park had a different coordination than in the daytime. Figures moved in the shadows on the hill, and couples sat on all the benches and some lay down on the grass, but on the other side of the river, up the hill, was the zoo, and some of the animals cried out. Down by the river a chorus of boys’ voices sang softly and in the quiet park the sound was carried up the hill. Railway tracks ran alongside the river, and far up the river beyond the viaduct a freight train hooted. Coming up the hill, four girls and four boys, arms linked, talked in whispers, some of them laughing, and John Hughes, who knew the park, sitting beside Father Mason, waited to hear more familiar sounds. As soon as the lights went on, forming the patterns on the hill, he listened eagerly for all the sounds belonging with the pattern, and smelled the dampness of the dew coming up from the flats.
“The people in the park now seem very happy,” Father Mason said suddenly.
“It’s almost the same every night at this hour.”
“I hadn’t noticed it before.”
“When Fred and I were kids we used to come around here a lot.”
“What’s that?”
“I said, when Fred and I were kids . . .”
“Have you seen his sister, Isabelle, recently?”
“About a week ago.”
“I worry about her. I don’t worry so much about her mother.”
“I saw Isabelle about a week ago. I don’t know what to say to her. Half the time she’s praying and other times she is sullen and won’t speak to anybody. She doesn’t expect anyone to speak to her.”
“She shouldn’t neglect herself the way she does. She hardly bothers to make herself look decent. She’s got thin. She’s not strong. She’s been sick, run down. Didn’t she used to go around with you?”
“We thought we felt that way, but six months ago we forgot all about it, after Fred was arrested. She thought she ought to lose everything. It was kind of hard. It was bet er for both of us.”
“I thought about her last night a lot,” Father Mason said. “I worry about her.”
“His mother won’t cry at all tomorrow.”
“No, she went through all that.”
“I’d go around there tonight, but I don’t know what to say to either of them.”
“Don’t do it. Tell me, John, can you smell whiskey on my breath?”
“A little, not much.”
“Then I’ll walk home. I oughtn’t to take it, but I have got to keep on going. I take too much of it, that’s the trouble.“Nonsense.”
“Yes, I do. I mean I oughtn’t to take any more tonight because of tomorrow. It bothers me taking it to help over a crisis. I think I’ll be going now.”
They were walking toward the streetlights, and a night-hawk was screeching overhead. On the sidewalk Father Mason, wiping perspiration off his upper lip, said: “I won’t be seeing you tomorrow?”
“No.”
“I’ll be there in the morning with Isabelle and her mother. Are you coming to the funeral?”
“Lord, the funeral. Fred over there at that window and we’re talking about burying him in two days.”
“That’s the way it is, but I’m used to it.”
“I’m coming to the funeral.”
“That’s good. His mother will like it.”
“Good-night, Father.”
“Good-night, John.”
John, walking home, watched all the stars come out and was glad he was alone, because no one could have shared the desolation of his mood, and all the time, walking, he was assuring himself he was having no thoughts at all.
He lived with a respectable family on a street not far away from the park, only farther up the hill. His room, on the north side of the house, had three wide windows, and when he went upstairs he pulled down the blinds, lying for a long time on the bed. Before coming home he usually had his dinner in a restaurant near the corner, but tonight he had no hunger. Mr. and Mrs. Errington, who owned the house, were not in, and only small sounds from the street disturbed him.
Fred Thompson had been his friend, though he had not seen him often during the last year. In the war Fred had been a captain, but afterward had not been successful because he had gone to the war too young. He had been having a drink with some friends in a speakeasy and the police had come in and Fred had quarreled with one who had shoved him too roughly and the policeman, using his baton, had slugged him. Fred had cried out and had beaten the officer, hitting him with a chair and had killed him. It was clear to John, who had it all like a bright picture in his thoughts, and often he had talked about it with Father Mason, an old friend of the Thompson’s, whose parish work included the duty at the jail. So John lay on the bed in the dark till he began to remember days when he had thought Isabelle Thompson beautiful, and then getting up quickly turned on the light and got a book from the cupboard; a few plays by Synge, for he was reading The Shadow in the Glen. Though he knew it was beautiful it could not interest him at all, and he kept on reading the same page many times; the images coming to him from the book were always destroyed by the force of his own images, and he had to start the page over again.
The Erringtons came in. He heard them moving downstairs and he wanted to go to sleep. A bottle of whiskey was in the dresser drawer and taking it out he poured himself a drink, then two more drinks, until he could lie on the bed and feel only his head going around, and by concentrating on that motion he fell asleep.
Chapter Two
In the morning John got up at five o’clock, when the light was all from a blue-gray sky. The dawn always came early, but there was never any sunlight in the east until after seven o’clock. He sat in the back sunroom, looking out over the roofs of the houses sloping down to the lake, and over the parkland to the office towers tipped by the d
awn light. The east sides of the slate roofs were a pastel shade and other sides were shadowed, and when the light was stronger the slate roofs and the painted shingles were tilted surfaces of green and crimson and pearl-gray and brown, the surfaces slanting to the sun at sharp angles. And in the garden, leaves on the tall stems of the hollyhocks by the rod fence drooped damply waiting for light.
Fred Thompson was hanged at five o’clock in the morning when there was hardly any light in houses on the streets, because it was daylight saving time. The hangman did his work creditably, but al the prisoners in the jail howled at the minute of the hour, but not because they loved Fred Thompson; the prisoners always hollowed when one of them took the short walk to the gallows, and the hangman couldn’t get used to it and hated to hear them.
Before the Erringtons were up John went down to the corner and got the paper to read about the crowd that had gathered outside the jail last night. On the street he tried to read but the words were all blurred. It was not because he was excited. Everything in the paper seemed familiar to him, for he had imagined it happening that way, and knew everything would be done perfectly.
He had breakfast in the morning with the Erringtons before going downtown to work. Though fairly well paid as bass soloist at St. Mark’s, a wealthy congregation, and sometimes singing over the radio, he had been working in a department store, saving money to have his voice trained in another country. It was not good for him, being in the store, because he had to work too often in the evenings, training his voice and singing at the church, and he was leaving the job at the end of the week, though worried about losing the salary.
At breakfast Mrs. Errington, a plump-faced jolly woman, saw the paper and the picture of Thompson and said: “I guess they hanged the poor fellow this morning.”
“They did all right,” he said.
“You were a friend of the family, weren’t you?” Mr. Errington said. He was a tall thin man, bald and red-faced, a social democrat and a good strong talker.
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