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 held the picture. With his other hand he took up the cigarette.
The paper had come loose: he held it raised a little and then arrested so, as if he did not dare raise it farther. “And you can give me your word. I will believe.”
“Go seek your son,” the other said. “Go seek him.”
Now the Judge did not move at all. Holding the picture and the dissolving cigarette, he sat in a complete immobility. He seemed to sit in a kind of terrible and unbreathing suspension. “And find him? And find him?” The other did not answer. Then the Judge turned and looked at him, and then the cigarette dropped quietly into dissolution as the tobacco rained down upon his neat, gleaming shoe. “Is that your word? I will believe, I tell you.” The other sat, shapeless, gray, sedentary, almost nondescript, looking down. “Come. You cannot stop with that. You cannot.”
Along the path before them people passed constantly. A woman passed, carrying a child and a basket, a young woman in a plain, worn, brushed cape. She turned upon the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll a plain, bright, pleasant face and spoke to him in a pleasant, tranquil voice.
Then she looked at the Judge, pleasantly, a full look without boldness or diffidence, and went on. “Come. You cannot. You cannot.” Then his face went completely blank.
In the midst of speaking his face emptied; he repeated “cannot. Cannot” in a tone of musing consternation. “Cannot,” he said. “You mean, you cannot give me any word? That you do not know? That you, yourself, do not know? You, Robert Ingersoll? Robert Ingersoll?” The other did not move. “Is Robert Ingersoll telling me that for twenty years I have leaned upon a reed no stronger than myself?”
Still the other did not look up. “You saw that young woman who just passed, carrying a child. Follow her. Look into her face.”
“A young woman. With a. . . .” The Judge looked at the other. “Ah. I see. Yes. I will look at the child and I shall see scars. Then I am to look into the woman’s face. Is that it?” The other didn’t answer. “That is your answer? your final word?” The other did not move. The Judge’s lip lifted. The movement pouched upward about his eyes as though despair, grief, had flared up for a final instant like a dying flame, leaving upon his face its ultimate and fading gleam in a faint grimace of dead teeth.
He rose and put the photograph back into the briefcase. “And this is the man who says that he was once Robert Ingersoll.” Above his teeth his face mused in that expression which could have been smiling save for the eyes.
“It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly. It was not proof that I sought.” With the stick and the briefcase clasped beneath his arm he rolled another slender cigarette.
“I don’t know who you are, but I don’t believe you are Robert Ingersoll. Perhaps I could not know it even if you were. Anyway, there is a certain integral consistency which, whether it be right or wrong, a man must cherish because it alone will ever permit him to die. So what I have been, I am; what I am, I shall be until that instant comes when I am not. And then I shall have never been. How does it go? Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.”
With the unlighted cigarette in his fingers he thought at first that he would pass on. But instead he paused and looked down at the child. It sat in the path at the woman’s feet, surrounded by tiny leaden effigies of men, some erect and some prone. The overturned and now empty basket lay at one side.
Then the Judge saw that the effigies were Roman soldiers in various stages of dismemberment — some headless, some armless and legless — scattered about, lying profoundly on their faces or staring up with martial and battered inscrutability from the mild and inscrutable dust. On the exact center of each of the child’s insteps was a small scar.
There was a third scar in the palm of its exposed hand, and as the Judge looked down with quiet and quizzical bemusement, the child swept flat the few remaining figures and he saw the fourth scar. The child began to cry.
“Shhhhhhhhh,” the woman said. She glanced up at the Judge, then she knelt and set the soldiers up. The child cried steadily, with a streaked and dirty face, strong, unhurried, passionless, without tears. “Look!” the woman said, “See? Here! Here’s Pilate
