“Ah,” the Judge said. “Well, if I am where I am beginning to think I am, I don’t know whether I am here or not. But you are not here at all, are you?” Mothershed cursed violently. “Yes,” the Judge said, “we never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we should ever be brought to this, did we?
You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough to accept even your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.”
“Labor-saving!” Mothershed cried. “By God, I. . . .” He cursed with impotent fury. The Judge might have been smiling save for his eyes. He sealed the cigarette again.
“Have you a match?”
“What?” Mothershed said. He glared at the Judge, his mouth open. He sought through his clothes. From out the savage movement, strapped beneath his armpit, there peeped fleetly the butt of a heavy pistol. “No,” he said. “I ain’t.”
“Yes,” the Judge said. He twisted the cigarette, his gaze light, quizzical. “But you still haven’t told me what you are doing here. I heard that you had. . . .”
Again Mothershed cursed, prompt, outraged. “I ain’t. I just committed suicide.” He glared at the Judge. “God damn it, I remember raising the pistol; I remember the little cold ring it made against my ear; I remember when I told my finger on the trigger. . . .”
He glared at the Judge. “I thought that that would be one way I could escape the preachers, since by the church’s own token. . . .”. He glared at the Judge, his pale gaze apoplectic and outraged. “Well, I know why you are here. You come here looking for that boy.”
The Judge looked down, his lip lifted, the movement pouched upward about his eyes. He said quietly, “No.”
Mothershed watched him, glared at him. “Looking for that boy. Agnosticism.” He snarled it. “Won’t say ‘Yes’ and won’t say ‘No’ until you see which way the cat will jump. Ready to sell out to the highest bidder. By God, I’d rather have give up and died in sanctity, with every heaven-yelping fool in ten miles around. . . .”
“No,” the Judge said quietly behind the still, dead gleam of his teeth. Then his teeth vanished quietly, though he did not look up. He sealed the cigarette carefully again. “There seem to be a lot of people here.” Mothershed now began to watch him with speculation, tasting his savage gums, his pale furious glare arrested. “You have seen other familiar faces besides my own here, I suppose. Even those of men whom you know only by name, perhaps?”
“Oh,” Mothershed said. “I see. I get you now.” The Judge seemed to be engrossed in the cigarette. “You want to take a whirl at them too, do you? Go ahead. I hope you will get a little more out of them that will stick to your guts than I did. Maybe you will, since you don’t seem to want to know as much as you want something new to be uncertain about. Well, you can get plenty of that from any of them.”
“You mean you have. . . .”
Again Mothershed cursed, harsh, savage. “Sure. Ingersoll. Paine. Every bastard one of them that I used to waste my time reading when I had better been sitting on the sunny side of a log.”
“Ah,” the Judge said. “Ingersoll. Is he. . . .”
“Sure. On a bench just inside the park yonder. And maybe on the same bench you’ll find the one that wrote the little women books. If he ain’t there, he ought to be.”
So the Judge sat forward, elbows on knees, the unlighted cigarette in his fingers. “So you too are reconciled,” he said. The man who Mothershed said was Ingersoll looked at his profile quietly. “To this place.”
“Ah,” the other said. He made a brief, short gesture. “Reconciled.”
The Judge did not look up. “You accept it? You acquiesce?” He seemed to be absorbed in the cigarette. “If I could just see Him, talk to Him.” The cigarette turned slowly in his fingers. “Perhaps I was seeking Him. Perhaps I was seeking Him all the time I was reading your books, and Voltaire and Montesquieu. Perhaps I was.” The cigarette turned slowly. “I have believed in you. In your sincerity.
I said, if Truth is to be found by man, this man will be among those who find it. At one time — I was in the throes of that suffering from a still green hurt which causes even an intelligent man to cast about for anything, any straw — I had a foolish conceit: you will be the first to laugh at it as I myself did later.
I thought, perhaps there is a hereafter, a way station into nothingness perhaps, where for an instant lesser men might speak face to face with men like you whom they could believe; could hear from such a man’s own lips the words: ‘There is hope,’ or: ‘There is nothing.’ I said to myself, in such case it will not be Him whom I shall seek; it will be Ingersoll or Paine or Voltaire.” He watched the cigarette. “Give me your word now. Say either of these to me. I will believe.”
The other looked at the Judge for a time. Then he said, “Why? Believe why?”
The paper about the cigarette had come loose. The Judge twisted it carefully back, handling the cigarette carefully. “You see, I had a son. He was the last of my name and race. After my wife died we lived alone, two men in the house.
It had been a good name, you see. I wanted him to be manly, worthy of it. He had a pony which he rode all the time. I have a photograph of them which I use as a bookmark. Often, looking at the picture or watching them unbeknownst as they passed the library window, I would think What hopes ride yonder; of the pony I would think What burden do you blindly bear, dumb brute.
One day they telephoned me at my office. He had been found dragging from the stirrup. Whether the pony had kicked him or he had struck his head in falling, I never knew.”
He laid the cigarette carefully on the bench beside him and opened the briefcase. He took out a book. “Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary,” he said. “I always carry a book with me. I am a great reader. It happens that my life is a solitary one, owing to the fact that I am the last of my family, and perhaps to the fact that I am a Republican office-holder in a Democratic stronghold. I am a Federal judge, from a Mississippi district.
My wife’s father was a Republican.” He added quickly, “I believe the tenets of the Republican Party to be best for the country. You will not believe it, but for the last fifteen years my one intellectual companion has been a rabid atheist, almost an illiterate, who not only scorns all logic and science, but who has a distinct body odor as well.
Sometimes I have thought, sitting with him in my office on a summer afternoon — a damp one — that if a restoration of faith could remove his prejudice against bathing, I should be justified in going to that length myself even.” He took a photograph from the book and extended it. “This was my son.”
The other looked at the picture without moving, without offering to take it. From the brown and fading cardboard a boy of ten, erect upon the pony, looked back at them with a grave and tranquil hauteur. “He rode practically all the time. Even to church (I attended church regularly then.
I still do, at times, even now). We had to take an extra groom along in the carriage to. . . .” He looked at the picture, musing. “After his mother died I never married again. My own mother was sickly, an invalid. I could cajole her.
In the absence of my aunts I could browbeat her into letting me go barefoot in the garden, with two house servants on watch to signal the approach of my aunts. I would return to the house, my manhood triumphant, vindicated, until I entered the room where she waited for me.
Then I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life. And we would sit in the dusk like two children, she holding my hand and crying quietly, until my aunts entered with the lamp. ‘Now, Sophia. Crying again. What have you let him bulldoze you into doing this time?’
She died when I was fourteen; I was twenty-eight before I asserted myself and took the wife of my choice; I was thirty-seven when my son was born.” He looked at the photograph, his eyes pouched, netted by two delicate hammocks of myriad lines as fine as etching. “He rode all the time.
Hence the picture of the two of them, since they were inseparable. I have used this picture as a bookmark in the printed volumes where his and my ancestry can be followed for ten generations in our American annals, so that as the pages progressed it would be as though with my own eyes I watched him ride in the flesh down the long road which his blood and bone had traveled before it became his.” He
