IV

Have you ever by accident placed your hand on a strong battery, and got through your fingers a shock that for a moment bereaves you of your very reason? If so, you can have but a faint impression of what I felt when I dropped the bottle. I saw it clearly—just as things grow in fast movies— how shards of glass, mixed with red drops, gushed all over the place. If this moment were a film scene, no doubt it would be accompanied by a series of atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords.

I could not say anything. I felt that the walls of the room were closing in on me, and time itself seemed to stand still. This was, obviously, an illusion—a vision of my overheated fancy, for as soon as I shifted from my place, the world came alive and began spinning with a new frightening force. 

Crawford startled up and stared down at his feet. His leg was drenched with wine. Hamilton stood up at the same time, glanced at Crawford, then at me, and laughed in a strange, nerve-wracking kind of way. A dreadful terror came over me at last, and I felt like I was about to faint. I saw the wad of muscle on Crawford's shoulder tighten under his dress coat. He turned to Hamilton and gave him a look, as though expecting something tactful to be said – perhaps expecting him to start excusing my behavior as pathological. But Hamilton didn't say anything, and in the next instant Crawford's hand lashed across my face.

"You little piece of shit!" he yelled in a frenzy. "What have you done?"

I gazed down and trembled. 

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," I faltered. "I shall clean everything up at this instant..." 

"Clean everything up, huh? A worm, that's what you are, if you don't know how to handle your own hands! Goddammit..." 

He raised his elbow, but didn't strike; at this very moment, Hamilton finally decided to come along.

"Thomas!" he cried. 'Enough! Stop! Leave him alone!" 

Crawford looked wildly and fixedly for some time at me, then turned away.

"Steven," Hamilton gripped my shoulder. "Clean this mess up. Right now." 

I fell to my hands and knees and began picking up the shards. My sore hand, forgotten in the excitement, now gave a tremendous throb. The wine had already seeped through the rug, concealing the floral pattern, making another flower, a giant red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. 

"I'm so terribly sorry," I heard Hamilton say. He had the air of a positively ashamed man, "I made a mistake in believing that even a thing like him would understand what was due on a visit of so honored a personage. I didn'd suppose I would have to apologize for..." 

"Don't worry, please." Crawford produced a cambric handkerchief from his sleeve and began to dab his pant leg. "I am completely certain that you will teach him a proper lesson, yes?" 

I shuddered and stared at him. The torturing image of the planter's son from West Virginia, immortalized by the gaze of young memory, presented itself to me once again. 

"Oh, look, I scared him," Crawford said. "I would never think that he is... Such a baby." 

Hamilton looked at him in a way that made me feel quite uncomfortable.

"Yes..." he took a cigar out of his pocket. "Perhaps we should get another drink."

"You know, I think upbringing is what matters most. Those who live carelessly under a parental wing usually grow up to be this way." 

"How do you mean?

Crawford let his hand rest on the back of the armchair. 

"Do people pick grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? Mr. Keyle has spoiled the boy, and look what came out of it. Now that his father is out of the picture, I suggest you become his moral guide."

Hamilton gave an awkward laugh, blue smoke from the cigar circling around his head.

"'To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss...' Do you suggest I buy a book on parenting?"

"You might as well, but I think a good beating will do the job just fine."

Fear slashed at my heart as savagely as a wild animal's fangs. Through it all, I felt Hamilton's eyes on me, a little pitying, a little annoyed at being faced with a problem for which he clearly knew no solution.

"That's such an Old Country notion," he said. "It's unnecessary."

I slowly put the shards down on the coffee table. They were like large crimson polyps, threatening, at any instant, to be reduced to a weapon of attempted murder. 

Crawford relaxed into the armchair. 

"About that. As a matter of fact, in my practice there was a case almost exactly similar, a case of morbid psychology, so to speak. A master to a slave is like a father to a child. Even an inanimate soul, in all its filth and meanness, is able to adopt certain traits of a figure it views as an authority. If your slave is a weak coward, you are the one to blame. You and your weak temper. It's nothing but psychology."

"Are you calling me a coward?" 

Hamilton turned positively green. 

"That's not what I said. And yet you have full power, but do nothing," Crawford kept obstinately insisting on some point. "Eugene, you are so devoted to me, and yet you can't handle simple advice. Relax a little." 

"Do leave me alone," Hamilton said with agitated haste, obviously anxious to avoid some previous conversation.

"You always say witty things, and sleep in peace, satisfied with what you've said, but then do nothing. You are weak, and the slave is your mere reflection. Admit that!"

"He's not that weak, for that matter." Hamilton objected. 

"Are you defending him? This vicious young man? You're such a hypocrite." 

They seemed to forget about my presence. 

"I knew you've sworn to torment me," Hamilton said. "You know, ever since you left me here all alone–"

"Expelled from the Academy on suspicion of transvestism and plots against the government. The traitor. The murderer. An insignificant abolitionist, who fancies himself a hero and a liberator. You are losing your chance of distinction by letting slip the real criminal. Even more so, you indulge his whims, dressing him up as a transvestite he clearly desires to be."

"Look, his father is a worthy man."

"But you are mixing up the father and the son. The son openly laughs at his father."

"That's only a mask."

"You are a coward!" Crawford said, losing his self-restraint at once. "And your slave is the same. You punished him with cross-dressing..." 

I saw a malicious grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted his lips) like a distant and terrible sun.

"And even then, only because you find a certain perverted pleasure in it."

"Enough! Enough, Thomas!" cried Hamilton. "Allow me... On second thought, you know what? Steven!" 

Either because he really took Crawford's last outbreak as a direct permission to act as he wanted, or whether he was sure that such an action will satisfy his overwhelming self-absorption— I have no idea. He cast a haughty and offended glance at me, as though my very presence became an affront to him. I swallowed a lump in my throat. 

"Yes?" 

He took a step forward and grabbed me by my ear. I yelped in surprise. 

"Go get a whip from my room." 

"Huh?"

"Hurry. Go get it before I tear your ear off. I trust you to find it and come back. Don't attempt anything stupid." 

At once I understood how serious his intent was. I had never seen Hamilton— this weak, nervous snob— in such a frenzied rage. Perhaps if Crawford was not in the room I would not hesitate to fly at him and at once set myself free from the terrible burden of slavery. But, intensely unpleasant as it was, I was forced little by little to accept my present ordeal as a fact beyond recall.

The carpet bent and went up the staircase and I went with it, one hand on the banister, once a tree, turned in another century, to a gloss. Late Victorian, the house was, a family house, built for a large family. Even the owner felt alone in it. Guess how I felt. There was a sort of heaviness in my face, especially under my eyes, my forehead felt drawn tight like elastic. In the curved hallway mirror I flitted past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision. I felt, unwillingly, not for the first time, the cunning of the desperate. Why not just kill myself? 

Hamilton's room was positively nasty. There was the odor of tobacco always; it was in his clothes, his sheets, the curtains, and the ash-littered rug, which was for some reason quite out of keeping with the rest of the room – it was like Joseph's coat, a colorful eyesore. Added to this was the wretched aura of spoiled milk; the bedside table was ringed with white circles where cups with coffee and tea had been set down upon it. On several coffee tables were snuff boxes of varied kinds, Turkish, English, some tied with string, some locked, some broken. The desk was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown banana peal. I found the whip in the closet, lying quietly in its warped case (someone must have accidentally sat on it)—it was impossible to guess whether it had been laid to rest there yesterday or a hundred years before. My father possessed a similar instrument. In my childhood I had often seen slaves straining their utmost under a heavy load, and father would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about their faces, and I felt so sorry, so sorry for them that I cried, and my mother always used to take me away. I can also remember Henry correcting me, or, to speak plainly, beating me with it. Mother would never take me away then. She was too busy knitting. She was always knitting. I don't know what she knitted, though I suppose she must, at least occasionally, have knitted something for my father, or me. I scarcely remember her at all, yet she often appears in my nightmares: she is always overdressed in something too tight or too young, over made-up, and with too much jewelry everywhere, clanging and banging in the light. She never argued with Henry, and not once had she stepped in when my own arguments with him ended in a beating. From the day that she died, with the mysterious, cunning, and dreadful intensity of the very young, I hated her for having left me with him.

I could feel the smoke in my mouth now, drawn down into my lungs. It made me feel ill. The minutes began to dwindle, and with every second that passed on the clock, the blood at the bottom of my heart began to boil, and I knew that no matter what I do panic was about to overtake me in this room, as painful as that lash which I was about to face very soon. I might try to explain. I might ask to be forgiven—if only there were anything, or anybody, anywhere, in this house, in this country, with the power to forgive. I walked up and down the room. It had the character of prison. The barred windows, the barred doors, the warden standing at the far end of the corridor, under the light. Everything is dark and cold, and in the air there is a dull, booming expectation of my execution, like the possibility of madness; and I am about to throw up, and my expression is later impossible to make out in the print.

As soon as I returned to the parlor, feverish but not conscious of it, someone sprang at me from behind and squeezed me in a way that almost made me scream. Of course, Hamilton was lurking behind the very door.

"Let go of me!"

"Shush!"

Apparently Hamilton was going to beat me on the spot with no hesitation.

"Stop, stop, what the hell are you doing?" 

"Calm down!" 

My voice broke and the words came in shrieks from my panting chest.

"Be silent! I know what you want to say!" cried Hamilton. "Thomas, for God's sake..." 

"Are you crazy?" Crawford huffed. "Deal with him yourself."

Here I swung my elbow, with all my might struck Hamilton in the face and managed to break free. Though he was quick enough to snatch the whip from me. 

"You've almost strangled me!" I yelled. "How dare you–"

We stood opposite from one another on both sides of the doorway. 

"I do what I choose. Come back here!"

"What do you choose?"

"The same as before. I could do as I like and I can still do as I like."

"You made up your mind long ago to take my life," I hissed. "Is that what you choose? Huh?" 

"I oughtn't to explain. The law bounds you to obey." 

"Hang your explanation, and who the devil am I bound to?" 

"Really?" Hamilton eyed me up and down. "You must pay for the fact alone that I allow you to speak to me that way." 

"I do indeed consider it my right to ask you all sorts of questions," I persisted. "You made your money on destroying this country, and now you want to destroy me. Well, I won't let you do that! I am an abolitionist, and I shall stay an abolitionist till the end."

Hamilton cackled. 

"What? How are you going to achieve that?"

"How achieve it? What, you don't even understand. Nevermind, one day you will look at me otherwise than as a slave..." I felt breathless. "Corrupted, decaying motherfuckers, that's what you all are! I won't let you do to me what you did to America!"

A moment's silence followed. Hamilton's face was pale and distorted. I was hoping that he would argue, hotly and for a long time, in return for my insult. But he didn't. Crawford cleared his throat. I looked back at him and was instantly surprised by his gaze: it seemed purposeless and inexplicable. He looked unforgivably guilty—as if he had just gotten some poor girl with a child. My executioners were now here with me. Walls, windows, the fire, the rain outside—they were everywhere. 

"What most people don't seem to realize," Crawford began calmly, "Is that there is no fortune to be made out of the uplifting of a nation."

I drew a deep shuddering breath.

"And what the hell does that mean?"

"Your family and my family made their money out of changing a wilderness into a civilization. That's empire building. There's good money in empire building. But, there's none in empire rebuilding."

"What empire are you talking about?"

"This empire we used to live in—the South—the Confederacy—was breaking up right under our feet. Only most fools wouldn't see it and take advantage of the collapse. I didn't. I didn't make a fortune on the wreckage. Instead, I fixed it. Do you even realize how lucky you are to be alive right now?"

He darted a quick, intense look at me, as if he were wondering if I had understood a word of what he had said. Grief and anger choked my utterance. I felt like a man lost in a forest, among the wolves. Every instinct told me that every single thing Crawford's has ever said was utterly incongruous, anomalous, and grotesque.

"Then you really think people don't want freedom?"

"Everyone wants freedom. But not everyone is willing to pay for it."

Suddenly Hamilton held out his hand and dropped the whip; the sound of it loudly hitting the floor vibrated through me like the ache of a violin string. I turned around sharply, and stared at him. 

Lifting up his head defiantly as if he were facing the whole world, Hamilton said: 

"Steven, pick it up." 

My cheeks assumed a deep tropical burn. The intention was obvious.

"I will not."

"You will not?"

"No way."

"You must be confused," Hamilton said. His voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the parlor with thrilling scorn."How are you better than we are? You are playing the hero, and yet you might probably kill on orders. You'd do anything in the name of all your lying little moralities. You are immoral. In fact, you are, by far, the most immoral thing I have met in all my life. Let us see: a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful soul of a liberator, not simply useless but doing actual mischief — so many lives thrown away! Let me ask you this: where are all those whom you saved from 'corruption and decay'?"

"What are you even getting at?" 

At once something heavy was gripping my heart. 

"You are no hero," pushed Hamilton. "One life, and a dozen lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! What value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured liberator then? No more than the life of a louse, of a worm, less in fact because you are doing harm. You are the one who is wearing out the lives of others. Tell me, was I the one who killed 12 slaves? Was I the one who shot twelve people, like cattle, and then yelled in court how I granted them freedom? What freedom did you give them, the freedom to die?"

I staggered. The floor seemed to be giving way under my feet.

"You have no idea how I feel. You do not own my mind, and you never will," I muttered, taken by a complete void. 'Cogito ergo sum."

Hamilton reacted with not so much as a blink. 

"Like I need your lousy mind. Your body is more than enough. I could set dogs on you. Cut your finger off. Beat you. Make you eat shit. Do you want to?"

I shook my head.

"Well, I have the right. Don't be stupid, Steven," He pointed at the whip. "Pick it up." 

There was so much contempt, so much condemnation in his gaze and his voice, that I didn't dare to protest. The reminder of my crime struck a nerve. A burning guilt, which had begun torturing me long before the events described, came to live and devoured me whole. Crushed and humiliated, I came to Hamilton and picked up the whip, while he kept his eyes fixed upon me.

"Very good." Hamilton took the whip. "You may leave now." 

My eyes opened wide. 

"This should be enough," he said, looking at Crawford. "It's a lesson." 

In such a moment I could not bring myself to calm down, and yet I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. Hamilton seemed worried, still, which contravened the usual dryness of his manners. 

"Do you seriously forgive him after what he said?" asked Crawford with irritable impatience. "He didn't even apologize." 

"I apologize." I made haste to get a word in. 

"What a shame. You haven't proven anything to me, then." 

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders even further, Hamilton asked:

"What, anything at all?" 

It was said with such bitterness that I suddenly got scared. I was about to run, but he caught me by my shoulder. 

"Well, well. No need to get so worked up."

"Oh, you can't be serious–"

"Mr. Hamilton," Crawford interrupted him. "If you would not do it, there's no justice about it... We have nothing to talk about. I get it now. You're just as timid as the day I found you at that dreadful bar." 

I suddenly realized that the events took a wrong turn. What did I do? I really don't remember. I must have said something—I must have done something, but I have not the slightest recollection of what it was. I only recollect how I was pushed, and how I fell face down into the puddle of wine. I recollect how a sharp heel pressed against the back of my head. I tried to leap up, tried to cry out with all my might, and to run in haste to escape. But no sound came from my chest, and my legs would not obey me.

Devil knows, maybe there is pleasure in the whip, when the whip comes down on your back and tears your flesh to pieces. At first I writhed, bit my lips until they bled, curled my fingers against the carpet and screamed; I probably wailed like crazy. At the same time horrible visions began to float before my eyes. I saw my father, saw our slaves, struggling with their legs, screaming and shrinking from the blows of a knout which were showered upon them like hail. All I had just said seemed to me repulsively stupid. Why had I talked to them in a lecturing tone about my contempt? It was not clever, not interesting; it was false — childish even. But by degrees there followed that mood of indifference into which criminals sink after a severe sentence. I began thinking that, thank God! Everything was at an end and that the terrible uncertainty was over; that now there was no need to anticipate, in pining, in thinking about the punishment. Everything had happened already. I did not cry at the thrashing anymore, but gave a strange sob at each blow. In spite of acute pain I imagined that the punishment was already over, and that Hamilton was whipping someone else, not me. Though, I must admit, I was already in my last agony: I no longer felt the blows individually; they all merged into a single, continuous stream of searing pain. A dozen faces, curiously unmoved, shadows of a dream, were regarding me out of eternity. Murderer!

At the same instant my wandering eyes strayed to the doorway and I saw Theodosia. Until then I had not noticed her. With unnatural strength I succeeded in propping myself on my elbow. I tried to hold out my hand to her, but losing my balance fell face downwards on the carpet. When I gazed up for the second time, nobody was there. I dare say I simply imagined it. 

Then all went still. The whip hit the floor, and the leather sole was no longer weighing upon my neck.

"Anything for you, dear." 

"Don't you call me that."

I raised my head. Hamilton stood, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his waistcoat pockets. 

"Steven, get up. Get up, you bastard!" 

I now was in a sort of cloud, feeling as though I were not myself, but my double. My head swam and ached with fever. I tried to stand up, but suddenly a violent spasm of pain deprived me of all power and all determination, and with a loud groan I fell back on the floor.

"Filth," muttered Crawford. 

Hamilton helped me to my feet and signed with an obstinately downcast, as it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. 

"Go," he mumbled. "I'll have Theodosia clean this mess. Go upstairs."

"Fine." I answered in a hoarse, unnatural voice. I could barely breathe and craved to escape from these people.

That's exactly what I did — I walked silently, unsteadily, staggering from side to side like a drunk man. Going upstairs felt like going down into a deep dark well. I was still shivering. I looked down at myself; the apron, stockings and gloves were all now red, and it was impossible to tell wine from blood. 

I hobbled into the dressing room, closed the door and sank to the floor, clenching my eyes, from which tears were squeezing. I crawled under the hanger on my knees and stifled my moans in the folds of the hanging dresses. Just like that, I sank into blank forgetfulness: laying on the floor, breathing too fast, then slower. All I could hear was the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, closing and opening, bruised and miserable. 

So I slept a very long while. Now and then I seemed to wake up, and at such moments I noticed that it was far into the day, but it did not occur to me to get up. When I finally woke up, for a moment I couldn't remember where I was. Someone was kneeling beside me, I felt a hand touch my back. I could hardly open my eyes to see who it was. There was complete stillness in the room and the faint pink moonlight came through the window. Vella squatted down and bent on me a long, pitiful gaze. She was the one being in the house whom I somewhat cared for. And, when she looked at me with that gaze I suddenly understood that this being I cherished was suffering. My heart skipped a beat.

"I want to leave this place," I whispered pathetically. "I can't put up with this..."

"Where? You can't, you can't," whispered Vella. "C'mon, you poor thing, let's take that thing off." 

She took a cloth out of a bucket.

"I don't know!" I sobbed. "Miss Smith, I have to leave."

My voice broke. 

"I have to leave!" 

"I know, I know. Oh, poor darln'" 

We sat like that for a long time. Vella was wiping the blood from my back, and I wept. Reader, I wept.