That night, however, he wept, lying in bed, his knees drawn up.
The wind comes down before the creeping night And you, my love, are hid within the green Long grasses; and the dusk steals up between Each leaf, as through the shadow quick with fright The startled hare leaps up and out of sight.
The hedges whisper in their loaded boughs Where warm birds slumber, pressing wing to wing, All pulsing faintly, like a muted string Above us where we weary of our vows— And hidden underground the soft moles drowse.
John Hardaway was dying. That wasn’t what he minded. His small, well-shaped hands twitched at the soft coverlet which rose and fell slowly with his breathing, and he breathed hard with mouth open, showing all his teeth.
Rabb, the nigger, crouched in the corner. The air about her was heavy with her odour. She kept blinking her eyes. She was awed at the presence of her master, but ashamed too, ashamed that he was dying—ashamed as she would have been had he been caught at his toilet.
Rabb was a good nigger; she had served John Hardaway’s mother, she had seen her die—old Mrs. Hardaway fluttered against her lace like a bird caught in deep foliage—Rabb had been able to do something about Mrs. Hardaway’s death because Mrs. Hardaway had loved her, in her way.
Mrs. Hardaway had died understandably—she had breathed hard too, opening her mouth, but it was gentle and eager, like a child at the breast.
Rabb had tried to be near her, had put her hands on her. But the thing she was trying to touch lay in some hidden corner of Mrs. Hardaway, as a cat hides away under a bed, and Rabb had done nothing after all.
But it was different with John Hardaway. She watched life playing coquettishly with him. It played with him as a dog plays with an old coat. It shook him suddenly in great gusts of merriment. It played with his eyelids; it twisted his mouth, it went in and out of his body, like a flame running through a funnel—throwing him utterly aside in the end, leaving him cold, lonely, and forbidding.
John Hardaway hated negroes with that hate a master calls love. He was a Southerner and never forgot it. Rabb had nursed him when he was an infant, she had seen him grow up into a big boy, and then she had been there when he broke his mistress’s back by some flaw in his otherwise flawless passion.