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By Root 2821 0

lip in her teeth, as though she were ashamed of so large a mouth, and her breasts shook. It was not like the riot that occurred when big, fat women laughed—her breasts rose and fell against the tight cloth of her dress. She was much older than he—around Deborah’s age, perhaps thirty-odd— and she was not really pretty. Yet the distance between them was abruptly charged with her, and her smell was in his nostrils. Almost, he felt those moving breasts beneath his hand. And he drank again, allowing, unconsciously, or nearly, his face to fall into the lines of innocence and power which his experience with women had told him made their love come down.

Well (walking homewards, cold and tingling) yes, they did the thing. Lord, how they rocked in their bed of sin, and how she cried and shivered; Lord how her love came down! Yes (walking homewards through the fleeing mist, with the cold sweat standing on his brow), yet, in vanity and the pride of conquest, he thought of her, of her smell, the heat of her body beneath his hands, of her voice, and her tongue, like the tongue of a cat, and her teeth, and her swelling breasts, and how she moved for him, and held him, and labored with him, and how they fell, trembling and groaning, and locked together, into the world again. And, thinking of this, his body freezing with his sweat, and yet altogether violent with the memory of lust, he came to a tree on a gentle rise, beyond which, and out of sight, lay home, where his mother lay. And there leaped into his mind, with the violence of water that has burst the dams and covered the banks, rushing uncontrolled toward the doomed, immobile houses—on which, on rooftops and windows, the sun yet palely shivers—the memory of all the mornings he had mounted here and passed this tree, caught for a moment between sins committed and sins to be committed. The mist on this rise had fled away, and he felt that he stood, as he faced the lone tree, beneath the naked eye of Heaven. Then, in a moment, there was silence, only silence, everywhere—the very birds had ceased to sing, and no digs barked, and no rooster crowed for day. And he felt that this silence was God’s judgment; that all creation had been stilled before the just and awful wrath of God, and waited now to see the sinner—he was the sinner—cut down and banished from the presence of the Lord. And he touched the tree, hardly knowing that he touched it, out of an impulse to be hidden; and then he cried: ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy! Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!’

And he fell against the tree, sinking to the ground and clutching the roots of the tree. He had shouted into silence and only silence answered—and yet, when he cried, his cry had caused a ringing to the outermost limits of earth. This ringing, his lone cry rolling through creation, frightening the sleeping fish and fowl, awakening echoes everywhere, river, and valley, and mountain wall, caused in him a fear so great that he lay for a moment silent and trembling at the base of the tree, as though he wished to be buried there. But that burdened heart of his would not be still, would not let him keep silence—would not let him breathe until he cried again. And so he cried again; and his cry returned again; and still the silence waited for God to speak.

And his tears began—such tears as he had not known were in him. ‘I wept,’ he said later, ‘like a little child.’ But no child had ever wept such tears as he wept that morning on his face before Heaven, under the mighty tree. They came from deeps no child discovers, and shook him with an ague no child endures. And presently, in his agony, he was screaming, each cry seeming to tear his throat apart, and stop his breath, and force the hot tears down his face, so that they splashed his hands and wet the root of the tree: ‘Save me! Save me!’ And all creation rang, but did not answer. ‘I couldn’t hear nobody pray.’

Yes, he was in that valley where his mother had told him he would find himself, where there was no human help, no hand outstretched to protect or save. Here nothing prevailed save the mercy of