Black Music

 

THIS is about Wilfred Midgleston, fortune's favorite, chosen of the gods. For fifty-six years, a clotting of the old gutful compulsions and circumscriptions of clocks and bells, he met walking the walking image of a small, snuffy, nondescript man whom neither man nor woman had ever turned to look at twice, in the monotonous shop windows of monotonous hard streets. Then his apotheosis soared glaring, and to him at least not brief, across the unfathomed sky above his lost earth like that of Elijah of old.

I found him in Rincon, which is not large; less large even than one sway-backed tanker looming above the steel docks of the Universal Oil Company and longer than the palm and abode-lined street paved with dust marked by splayed naked feet where the violent shade lies by day and the violent big stars by night.

"He came from the States," they told me. "Been here twenty-five years. He hasn't changed at all since the day he arrived, except that the clothes he came in have wore out and he hasn't learned more than ten words of Spanish." That was the only way you could tell that he was an old man, that he was getting along: he hadn't learned to speak hardly a word of the language of the people with whom he had lived twenty-five years and among whom it appeared that he intended to die and be buried. Appeared: he had no job: a mild, hopelessly mild man who looked like a book-keeper in a George Ade fable dressed as a tramp for a Presbyterian social charade in 1890, and quite happy.

Quite happy and quite poor. "He's either poor, or he's putting up an awful front. But they can't touch him now. We told him that a long time ago, when he first come here. We said, 'Why don't you go on and spend it, enjoy it? They've probably forgot all about it by now.' Because if I went to the trouble and risk of stealing and then the hardship of having to live the rest of my life in a hole like this, I'd sure enjoy what I went to the trouble to get."

"Enjoy what?" I said.

"The money. The money he stole and had to come down here. What else do you reckon he would come down here and stay twenty-five years for? just to look at the country?"

"He doesn't act and look very rich," I said.

"That's a fact. But a fellow like that. His face. I don't guess he'd have judgment enough to steal good. And not judgment enough to keep it, after he got it stole. I guess you are right. I guess all he got out of it was the running away and the blame. While somebody back there where he run from is spending the money and singing loud in the choir twice a week."

"Is that what happens?" I said.

"You're damned right it is. Some damn fellow that's too rich to afford to be caught stealing sets back and leaves a durn fool that never saw twenty-five hundred dollars before in his life at one time, pull his chestnuts for him. Twenty-five hundred seems a hell of a lot when somebody else owns it. But when you have got to pick up overnight and run a thousand miles, paying all your expenses, how long do you think twenty-five hundred will last?"

"How long did it last?" I said.

"Just about two years by God. And then there I..." He stopped. He glared at me, who had paid for the coffee and the bread which rested upon the table between us. He glared at me. "Who do you think you are, anyway? Wm. J. Burns?"

"I don't think so. I meant no offense. I just was curious to know how long his twenty-five hundred dollars lasted him."

"Who said he had twenty-five hundred dollars? I was just citing an example. He never had nothing, not even twenty-five hundred cents. Or if he did, he hid it and it's stayed hid ever since. He come here sponging on us white men, and when we got tired of it he took to sponging on these Spigs. And a white man has got pretty low when he's got so stingy with his stealings that he will live with Spiggotties before he'll dig up his own money and live like a white man."

"Maybe he never stole any money," I said.

"What's he doing down here, then?"

"I'm down here."

"I don't know you ain't run, either."

"That's so," I said. "You don't know."

"Sure I don't. Because that's your business. Every man has got his own private affairs, and no man respects them quicker than I do. But I know that a man, a white man, has got to have durn good reason... Maybe he ain't got it now. But you can't tell me a white man would come down here to live and die without no reason."

"And you consider that stealing money is the only reason?"

He looked at me, with disgust and a little contempt. "Did you bring a nurse with you? Because you ought to have, until you learn enough about human nature to travel alone. Because human nature, I don't care who he is nor how loud he sings in church, will steal whenever he thinks he can get away with it. If you ain't learned that yet, you better go back home and stay there where your folks can take care of you."

But I was watching Midgleston across the street. He was standing beside a clump of naked children playing in the shady dust: a small, snuffy man in a pair of dirty drill trousers which had not been made for him. "Whatever it is," I said, "it doesn't seem to worry him."

"Oh. Him. He ain't got sense enough to know he needs to worry about nothing."

Quite poor and quite happy. His turn to have coffee and bread with me came at last. No: that's wrong. I at last succeeded in evading his other down-at-heel compatriots like my first informant; men a little soiled and usually unshaven, who were unavoidable in the cantinas and coffee shops, loud, violent, maintaining the superiority of the white race and their own sense of injustice and of outrage among the grave white teeth, the dark, courteous, fatal, speculative alien faces, and had Midgleston to breakfast with me. I had to invite him and then insist. He was on hand at the appointed hour, in the same dirty trousers, but his shirt was now white and whole and ironed, and he had shaved. He accepted the meal without servility, without diffidence, without eagerness. Yet when he raised the handleless bowl I watched his hands tremble so that for a time he could not make junction with his lips. He saw me watching his hands and he looked at my face for the first time and I saw that his eyes were the eyes of an old man. He said, with just a trace of apology for his clumsiness: "I ain't et nothing to speak of in a day or so."

"Haven't eaten in two days?" I said.

"This hot climate. A fellow don't need so much. Feels better for not eating so much. That was the hardest trouble I had when I first come here. I was always a right hearty eater back home."

"Oh," I said. I had meat brought then, he protesting. But he ate the meat, ate all of it. "Just look at me," he said. "I ain't et this much breakfast in twenty-five years. But when a fellow gets along, old habits are hard to break. No, sir. Not since I left home have I et this much for breakfast."

"Do you plan to go back home?" I said.

"I guess not; no. This suits me here. I can live simple here. Not all cluttered up with things. My own boss (I used to be an architect's draughtsman) all day long. No. I don't guess I'll go back." He looked at me. His face was intent, watchful, like that of a child about to tell something, divulge itself. "You wouldn't guess where I sleep in a hundred years."

"No. I don't expect I could. Where do you sleep?"

"I sleep in that attic over that cantina yonder. The house belongs to the Company, and Mrs. Widrington, Mr. Widrington's wife, the manager's wife, she lets me sleep in the attic. It's high and quiet, except for a few rats. But when in Rome, you got to act like a Roman, I say. Only I wouldn't name this country Rome; I'd name it Ratville. But that ain't it." He watched me. "You'd never guess it in the world."

"No," I said. "I'd never guess it."

He watched me. "It's my bed."

"Your bed?"

"I told you you'd never guess it."

"No," I said. "I give up now."

"My bed is a roll of tarred roofing paper."

"A roll of what?"

"Tarred roofing paper." His face was bright, peaceful; his voice quiet, full of gleeful quiet. "At night I just unroll it and go to bed and the next a. m. I just roll it back up and lean it in the corner. And then my room is all cleaned up for the day. Ain't that fine? No sheets, no laundry, no nothing. Just roll up my whole bed like an umbrella and carry it under my arm when I want to move."

"Oh," I said. "You have no family, then."

"Not with me. No."

"You have a family back home, then?"

He was quite quiet. He did not feign to be occupied with something on the table. Neither did his eyes go blank, though he mused peacefully for a moment. "Yes. I have a wife back home. Likely this climate wouldn't suit her. She wouldn't like it here. But she is all right. I always kept my insurance paid up; I carried a right smart more than you would figure a architect's draughtsman on a seventy-five dollar salary would keep up. If I told you the amount, you would be surprised. She helped me to save; she is a good woman. So she's got that. She earned it. And besides, I don't need money."

"So you don't plan to go back home."

"No," he said. He watched me; again his expression was that of a child about to tell on itself. "You see, I done something."

"Oh. I see."

He talked quietly: "It ain't what you think. Not what them others..." he jerked his head, a brief embracing gesture "think. I never stole any money. Like I always told Martha, she is my wife; Mrs. Midgleston money is too easy to earn to risk the bother of trying to steal it. All you got to do is work. 'Have we ever suffered for it?' I said to her. 'Of course, we don't live like some. But some is born for one thing and some is born for another thing. And the fellow that is born a tadpole, when he tries to be a salmon all he is going to be is a sucker.' That's what I would tell her. And she done her part and we got along right well; if I told you how much life insurance I carried, you would be surprised. No; she ain't suffered any. Don't you think that."

"No," I said.

"But then I done something. Yes, sir."

"Did what? Can you tell?"

"Something. Something that ain't in the lot and plan for mortal human man to do."

"What was it you did?"

He looked at me. "I ain't afraid to tell. I ain't never been afraid to tell. It was just that these folks..." again he jerked his head slightly "wouldn't have understood. Wouldn't have knowed what I was talking about. But you will. You'll know." He watched my face. "At one time in my life I was a farn."

"A farn?"

"Farn. Don't you remember in the old books where they would drink the red grape wine, how now and then them rich Roman and Greek senators would up and decide to tear up a old grape vineyard or a wood away off somewheres the gods used, and build a summer house to hold their frolics in where the police wouldn't hear them, and how the gods wouldn't hear them, and how the gods wouldn't like it about them married women running around nekkid, and so the woods god named named..."

"Pan," I said.

"That's it. Pan. And he would send them little fellows that was half a goat to scare them out "

"Oh," I said. "A faun."

"That's it. A farn. That's what I was once. I was raised religious; I have never used tobacco or liquor; and I don't think now that I am going to hell. But the Bible says that them little men were myths. But I know they ain't, and so I have been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to be. Because for one day in my life I was a farn."