Clock Without Hands Read Online Free PDF Page B

joking."
    Jester was suddenly serious. "No, I'm not."
    The Judge was baffled. "The time may come in your generation—I hope I won't be here—when the educational system itself is mixed—with no color line. How would you like that?"
    Jester did not answer.
    "How would you like to see a hulking Nigra boy sharing a desk with a delicate little white girl?"
    The Judge could not believe in the possibility of this; he wanted to shock Jester to the gravity of the situation. His eyes challenged his grandson to react in the spirit of Southern gentlemen.
    "How about a hulking white girl sharing a desk with a delicate little Negro boy?"
    "What?"
    Jester did not repeat his words, nor did the old Judge want to hear again the words that so alarmed him. It was as though his grandson had committed some act of incipient lunacy, and it is fearful to acknowledge the approach of madness in a beloved. It is so fearful that the old Judge preferred to distrust his own hearing, although the sound of Jester's voice still throbbed against his eardrums. He tried to twist the words to his own reason.
    "You're right, Lambones, whenever I read such communist ideas I realize how unthinkable the notions are. Certain things are just too preposterous to consider."
    Jester said slowly: "That's not what I meant." From habit Jester glanced to see if Verily was out of the room. "I can't see why colored people and white people shouldn't mix as citizens."
    "Oh, Son!" It was a cry of pity, helplessness, and horror. Years ago when Jester was a child he had been occasionally subject to sudden vomiting fits at the table. Then, tenderness had overcome disgust, and afterward the Judge had felt himself sickish in sympathy. Now the old Judge responded to this sudden situation in the same way. He held his good hand to his ear as if he had an earache and he stopped eating.
    Jester noticed the old Judge's distress and he felt a tremor of sympathy. "Grandfather, we all have our own convictions."
    "Some convictions are not tenable convictions. After all, what are convictions? They're just what you think. And you are too young, Son, to have learned the pattern of thought. You are just deviling your grandfather with foolish words."
    Jester's emotion of sympathy withered. He was staring at a picture over the mantelpiece. The picture was a Southern scene of a peach orchard and a Negro shack and a cloudy sky.
    "Grandfather, what do you see in that picture?"
    The Judge was so relieved that the tension had snapped that he chuckled a little. "The Lord knows it ought to remind me of my folly. I lost a small fortune with those pretty peach trees. Your Great-aunt Sara painted it the year she died. And then right along afterward the bottom dropped out of the peach market."
    "I mean, what do you actually see in the picture?"
    "Why, there's an orchard and clouds and a Nigra shack."
    "Do you see there between the shack and the trees a pink mule?"
    "A
pink mule?
" The Judge's blue eyes popped in alarm. "Why naturally not."
    "It's a cloud," Jester said. "And it looks to me exactly like a pink mule with a gray bridle. Now that I see it that way, I can't see the picture any other way any more."
    "I don't see it."
    "Why you can't miss it, galloping upward—a whole sky of pink mules."
    Verily came in with the dish of corn pudding: "Why, mercy, what's the matter with you all. You ain't scarcely touch your dinner."
    "All my life I had seen the picture like Aunt Sara had intended it. And now this summer I can't see what I'm supposed to see in it. I try to look back as I used to see it—but it's no good. I still see the pink mule."
    "Do you feel dizzy, Lambones?"
    "Why no. I'm just trying to explain to you that this picture is a sort of—symbol—I guess you might say. All my life I've seen things like you and the family wanted me to see them. And now this summer I don't see things as I used to—and I have different feelings, different thoughts."
    "That's only natural, Son." The Judge's voice was