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He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again.
The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people.
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am—LIKE I AM.”
One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.
“Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”
As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail.
I’m as good as you any day in the week.”
Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.
“When the time comes,” she said, “I’ll stand up for the niggers and that’s that. I ain’t going to see that priest drive out all the niggers.”
Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the Displaced Person had been working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich secretly and she didn’t confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used to.
Suddenly while she watched, the sky folded back in two pieces like the curtain to a stage and a gigantic figure stood facing her. It was the color of the sun in the early afternoon, white-gold. It was of no definite shape but there were fiery wheels with fierce dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around it.
“The children of wicked nations will be butchered,” she said in a loud voice. “Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?”
They didn’t know that she had had a great experience or ever been displaced in the world from all that belonged to her.
He had liked to see them walking around the place for he said they made him feel rich.
The truth was that he was not very real to her yet. He was a kind of miracle that she had seen happen and that she talked about but that she still didn’t believe.
“I am not responsible for the world’s misery,” she said as an afterthought.
“He doesn’t fit in. I have to have somebody who fits in.”
The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.
He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were like us.
“But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he’s not a German,” Mrs. McIntyre said.
The Displaced Person had expected them to work as hard as he worked himself, whereas Mr. Shortley recognized their limitations.
He had said there was no legal obligation for her to keep the Displaced Person if he was not satisfactory, but then he had brought up the moral one.
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said and glared at him fiercely, “Christ was just another D. P.”
Finally she asked him if he thought she was made of money and the old man suddenly let out a great ugly bellow as if this were a comical question.
“Yes’m, and one of these days he’ll be able to buy and sell you out,” Mr. Shortley had ventured to say, and he could tell that the statement had shaken her.
“Just one too many,” she said.
Gone over there and fought and bled and died and come back on over here and find out who’s got my job—just exactly who I been fighting.
She began to understand that she had a moral obligation to fire the Pole and that she was shirking it because she found it hard to do.
Her mind was not taking hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.
Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.
