The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on FootDay, Holman
General
The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot
Day, Holman
Political corruption -- Fiction; Water-supply -- Fiction
Farr gazed on these pitiful memorials of the children--from those graves
to the new mound which covered Rosemarie. The ache that had been in
his throat for so many hours grew more excruciating. He realized that
a father in those circumstances would weep, but he did not feel like
shedding tears, and he was ashamed of himself for what seemed lack of
something within himself. What he felt then, what he had felt ever
since that young doctor had passed sentence of death was surly, bitter
rancor--the anger of a man who is robbed.
“Look all around at the graves,” said Etienne, tears in his wrinkles. “I
know something better since I take off that faucet. Not all the martyr
die when the lion eat 'em up and the fire burn 'em; there be some martyr
these day, too. And sometimes, mebbe, some man what have the power will
come here and see all these poor little grave and then he go and choke
the lion what eat all these poor childs.”
“What kind of man would that be?” pondered Farr. At that moment he had
little faith--much less faith than usual--in the decency of any human
being; and for many years his faith in humankind had been expressed by a
contemptuous snap of his finger.
To sit there longer and look at that fresh earth with the pathetic toys
sprinkled over it was a torment his soul could not endure.
He arose and hurried away and Etienne followed him. They trudged in
silence back to the city--Etienne to take his rake and pike-pole from
the hands of the man who had substituted at the rack, and Farr to resume
surly domination over his sweating Italians.
“The martyrs,” Etienne had called them. The notion of that stuck in
Farr's brooding thoughts.
He tried to look deeper into his own heart than he had ever looked
before and explain to himself just what motive had attracted him to the
child in the first place; he had never been especially interested in
children before. He found himself muttering, “And a little child shall
lead them,” without understanding just why this child had led him so
strangely.
If one Walker Farr had understood it at all and had been able to explain
it to himself, he would have penetrated the mystery of the dynamics of
love--the great gift to humanity that God has not seen fit to expose
in its inner workings. Therefore, Farr strode here and there in the
hot sun, spurred his diggers with crisp oaths, and on the heels of his
profanity muttered to himself, “And a little child shall lead them.”
The tile boss of the Consolidated, whose crew was following the
trench-diggers, accosted Farr, after several inspections of his
lugubrious countenance.
“Don't you think you need to be cheered up a little?”
Farr scowled at him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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