But Prosper had a long start and he knew the woods. The mob hunted all night long and far into the next day. Then they became exhausted, and paused. But not the Major. He was drunk with hate. When everybody rested, he went on alone. He plunged into the depths of the wood. His long legs had the loping stride of a hunting wolf. The trees covered him. He disappeared.
And two days later he appeared again, and it seemed that he had gone quite mad. He was afraid! He cringed. He staggered toward some people who were watching him, and said, “I didn’t do it! I never done nothing! I’m a harmless old nigger! Don’t hurt me, white folks! Please don’t hurt me!”
Then he fell into a sleep, so deep that it was almost a death. And when he awoke, twelve hours afterward, he was the Major again . . . but changed. He was quiet and gentle. He blinked uncertainly—he who had never been uncertain of anything, right or wrong, in sixty years of life—he who had never uttered a kind word in living memory. The Major, the nigger-hater, the lynch-lawyer, the whipper, the killer—the Major was seen gently patting the head of a terrified little black boy who stood, paralyzed with fear under the unexpected caress.
What had happened to him in that dark forest?
One day he told the story:
When the others had rested he had gone on, and on, until he could walk no longer. His body was exhausted, but not his hate. He determined to rest a little and then continue his hunt for the vanished Negro Prosper. And as he sat resting, sleep came down on him like a deadfall, and he lay among the leaves and snored.
But it was no ordinary sleep. It was a strange kind of sick coma in which the Major found himself. He was caught in the meshes of a dark and nightmarish dream, like a bird in a net. He knew that he was dreaming and struggled to awake, but could not. And then he found himself floating away . . . and there was a blank, a hiatus, a timeless silence.
He awoke. He found himself crouching in a thicket, in a part of the wood which he did not know. And his heart was thumping in his breast, and he was terrified, disgustingly terrified of something that was following him. The Major was bewildered. He had never known fear, and now he was afraid. He somehow knew that he was going to a hollow beyond the thicket. Something was urging him there. He knew, also, that dawn was at hand, and he dreaded the dawn . . . and yet he also dreaded the dark.
He had lost his rifle. His clothes seemed to have been torn to shreds by thorns. His face was swollen where branches had snapped back at him in his headlong rush through the wood.
He crawled on, footsore and exhausted. Prosper!—he had to find Prosper the Negro and drag him back to be slaughtered by the mob. But of what was he afraid? He did not know. The Major went on. He got out of the thicket. There, sure enough, dimly outlined in the starlight, lay a hut. He went toward it. It was a mere ruin. Those who had lived there had either died or gone away. It was empty.
He went in. He shouted, “Anybody here?”—and was surprised to hear the husky rasp of his voice. His throat was dry. He felt ill and weak . . . and still frightened. His mind revolted against the trembling of his limbs. His body was scared and wanted to hide. As he stood in the hut, shaking like a man in an ague, the first glimmer of day showed holes in his boots “. . . I must have been walking in black mud . . .” Then he saw his hands. They were black and wrinkled, with whitish nails and pink palms—Negro’s hands.
Sick with anguish, the Major leaped up. There was a fragment of broken mirror. He looked at his reflection.
The terrified face of Prosper the Negro looked back at him.
He does not know how long he stood there, staring. He, the Major, was in the body of Prosper, the black fugitive. Some strange flash of intuition told him that somehow . . . God knew how . . . while he lay in his exhausted trance, and while Prosper also lay in a coma of weariness and misery . . . somehow their souls in sleep had met and changed places . . .
He heard, in the remote distance, a baying of bloodhounds.
The spirit of the Major turned to give battle. But the body of Prosper fainted with horror.
And it must have been exactly at that moment that the body of the Major, gibbering in the voice of Prosper, came staggering through the trees toward the lynch mob and begged for mercy, so that they took him home while the Negro escaped.
And then came the darkness of unconsciousness, out of which the Major struggled to find himself in his bed, surrounded by curious eyes and astonished faces.
That is all. There is only one thing more. The Major went into the wood again, and followed the route he remembered. There was the thicket; and there, in a hollow, lay the hut.
On the floor of the hut, smashed to pieces where it had been violently flung down, lay the remains of a bit of mirror.
THE GENTLEMAN ALL IN BLACK
There is a crazy old fellow who lives—or used to live, in 1937—in a crazy old skylight room in Paris, and was known as Le Borgne. He squinted horribly, and was well known for his avarice. Although he was reputed to have a large sum of money put by, he shuffled about in the ragged remains of a respectable black suit and tried to earn a few coppers doing odd jobs in cafés. He was not above begging . . . a very unsightly, disreputable, ill-tempered old man. And this is the story he told me one evening when he was trying to get two francs out of me.
“You needn’t look down on me,” he said. (He adopted a querulous, bullying tone even when asking a favor.) “I have been as well-dressed as you. I’m eighty years old, too. Ah yes, I have seen life, I have. Why, I used to be clerk to one of the greatest financiers in the world, no less a man than Mahler. That was before your time. That was fifty years ago. Mahler handled millions. I used to receive the highest of the high, the greatest of the great, in his office. There was no staff but me. Mahler worked alone, with me to write the letters. All his business was finished by three in the afternoon. He was a big man, and I was his right hand. I have met royalty in the office of Mahler. Why, once, yes, I even met the Devil.”
And when I laughed at him, Le Borgne went on, with great vehemence:
Mahler died rich. And yet it is I who can tell you that a week before his death things went wrong and Mahler was nearly twenty million francs in debt. In English money, a million pounds, let us say. I was in his confidence. He had lost everything and, gambling in a mining speculation, had lost twenty million francs which were not his to lose. He said to me—it was on the 19th, or the 20th of April, 1887—“Well, Charles, it looks as if we are finished. I have nothing left except my immortal soul; and I’d sell that if I could get the worth of it.” And then he went into his office.
I was copying a letter to the Bank, about five minutes later, when a tall, thin gentleman dressed all in black came into my room and asked to see Monsieur Mahler. He was a strange, foreign-looking gentleman, in a frock-coat of the latest cut and a big black cravat which hid his shirt. All his clothes were brand new, and there was a fine black pearl in his tie. Even his gloves were black. Yet he did not look as if he was in mourning. There was a power about him. I could not tell him that Mahler could not be disturbed. I asked him what name, and he replied, with a sweet smile: “Say—a gentleman.” I had no time to announce him; I opened Mahler’s door and this stranger walked straight in and shut the door behind him.