“Yes,” the other said. The Judge looked at him and saw a young man in conventional morning dress with some subtle effluvium of weddings, watching the entrance with a strained, patient air.
“You are expecting someone?” the Judge said.
Now the other looked at him. “Yes. You didn’t see — But you don’t know her.”
“Know whom?”
“My wife. That is, she is not my wife yet. But the wedding was to be at noon.”
“Something happened, did it?”
“I had to do it.” The young man looked at him, strained, anxious. “I was late. That’s why I was driving fast. A child ran into the road. I was going too fast to stop. So I had to turn.”
“But you missed the child?”
“Yes.” The other looked at him. “You don’t know her?”
“And are you waiting here to. . . .” The judge stared at the other. His eyes were narrowed, his gaze was piercing, hard. He said suddenly, sharply, “Nonsense.”
“What? What did you say?” the other asked with his vague, strained, almost beseeching air. The Judge looked away.
His frowning concentration, his reflex of angry astonishment, was gone. He seemed to have wiped it from his face by a sudden deliberate action. He was like a man who, not a swordsman, has practiced with a blade a little against a certain improbable crisis, and who suddenly finds himself, blade in hand, face to face with the event. He looked at the entrance, his face alert, musing swiftly: he seemed to muse upon the entering faces with a still and furious concentration, and quietly; quietly he looked about, then at the other again. The young man still watched him.
“You’re looking for your wife too, I suppose,” he said. “I hope you find her. I hope you do.” He spoke with a sort of quiet despair. “I suppose she is old, as you are. It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you.
Of course I think mine is the most unbearable. You see if it had only been the next day — anything. But then if it had, I guess I could not have turned out for that kid. I guess I just think mine is so terrible. It can’t be as bad as I think it is. It just can’t be. I hope you find her.”
The Judge’s lip lifted. “I came here to escape someone; not to find anyone.” He looked at the other. His face was still broken with that grimace which might have been smiling. But his eyes were not smiling. “If I were looking for anybody, it would probably be my son.”
“Oh. A son. I see.”
“Yes. He would be about your age. He was ten when he died.”
“Look for him here.”
Now the Judge laughed outright, save for his eyes. The other watched him with that grave anxiety leavened now with quiet interested curiosity. “You mean you don’t believe?” The Judge laughed aloud. Still laughing, he produced a cloth sack of tobacco and rolled a slender cigarette.
When he looked up, the other was watching the entrance again. The Judge ceased to laugh.
“Have you a match?” he said. The other looked at him. The Judge raised the cigarette. “A match.”
The other sought in his pockets. “No.” He looked at the Judge. “Look for him here,” he said.
“Thank you,” the Judge answered. “I may avail myself of your advice later.” He turned away. Then he paused and looked back. The young man was watching the entrance. The Judge watched him, bemused, his lip lifted. He turned on, then he stopped still. His face was now completely shocked, into complete immobility like a mask; the sensitive, worn mouth, the delicate nostrils, the eyes all pupil or pupilless.
He could not seem to move at all. Then Mothershed turned and saw him. For an instant Mothershed’s pale eyes flickered, his truncated jaw, collapsing steadily with a savage, toothless motion, ceased.
“Well?” Mothershed said.
“Yes,” the Judge said; “it’s me.” Now it was that, as the mesmerism left him, the shadow bewildered and wary and complete, touched his face. Even to himself his words sounded idiotic. “I thought that you were dea. . . .” Then he made a supreme and gallant effort, his voice light, quizzical, contained again, “Well?”
Mothershed looked at him — a squat man in a soiled and mismatched suit stained with grease and dirt, his soiled collar innocent of tie — with a pale, lightly slumbering glare filled with savage outrage. “So they got you here, too, did they?”
“That depends on who you mean by ‘they’ and what you mean by ‘here.’”
Mothershed made a savage, sweeping gesture with one arm. “Here, by God! The preachers. The Jesus shouters.”
“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
