The Eighth Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

be feigned.
    There followed a long silence, broken at last by drumbeats and shouting. This was the Dance of the Kangaheela, the heart of the flint, dear to the All-Father as His eye. This is the dance which has been so widely copied. Even the Saysays of Michigan have been invited to perform it in their debased and trumpery version at world’s fairs—admission: fifty cents; children a quarter. At the conclusion of the dance there was another silence—but all expectation, all held breath. The sachem seemed to descend into the furthest reaches of his body; he collected himself; he rose. This was the Book of Promises. Who can describe the consolation of that great song? The aged forgot their incommodities; to boys and girls it made clear why they were born and why the universe was set in motion. There are many peoples on the earth—more men than there are leaves in the forest—but He has singled out the Kangaheelas from among them. He will return. Let them BLAZE THE TRAIL against that day. The race of men will be saved by a few.
    So much for the Indians. The professors estimate that there were never more than three thousand Kangaheelas alive at one time.
    The white men came. They brought their account of the creation, their name for the All-Father, their laws and tabus, their catalogue of heroes and traitors, their burden of reproach, their hopes of a golden age. There was very little dancing, but a good deal of music, sacred and profane. They brought, too, a speculative turn of mind, unknown to the red man; its product was loosely referred to as philosophy. All the citizens, young and old, occasionally troubled their heads with questions about why are human beings alive and what’s the sense of living and dying—what Dr. Gillies called “the four-o’clock-in-the-morning questions.” Dr. Gillies was Coaltown’s most articulate and exasperating philosopher. In flat contradiction to the Bible he believed that the earth had been millions of years in the making and that Man was descended from you-know-what. Moreover, he talked of serious things in a way that left his listeners puzzled as to whether he was joking or not. A choice selection of the town’s citizens was to remember for a long time an occasion when Dr. Gillies’s speculative turn of mind was given a free rein.
    It was on a New Year’s Eve, but not just an ordinary New Year’s Eve: it was December 31, 1899—the eve of a new century. A large group was gathered in front of the courthouse waiting for the clock to strike. There was a mood of exaltation in the crowd, as though it expected the heavens to open. The twentieth century was to be the greatest century the world had ever known. Man would fly; tuberculosis, diphtheria, and cancer would be eradicated; there would be no more wars. The country, the state, and the very town in which they lived were to play large and solemn roles in this new era. When the clock struck all the women and some of the men were weeping. Suddenly, they burst out singing, not “Auld Lang Syne,” but “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Soon they were throwing their arms about one another; they were kissing—an unheard-of demonstration. Breckenridge Lansing and Olga Sergeievna Doubkov—who hated one another—kissed; John Ashley and Eustacia Lansing—who loved one another—kissed, for the only time in their lives, and evasively. (Beata Ashley avoided gatherings; she was sitting beside the tall grandfather’s clock at “The Elms,” surrounded by her three daughters, Lily, Sophia, and Constance.) Roger Ashley, fourteen years and fifty-one weeks old, kissed Félicité Lansing, to whom he would be married nine years later. George Lansing, fifteen, the town’s “holy terror,” stricken dumb with awe at the portentousness of the occasion and by the behavior of the grownups, hid behind his mother. (Great artists tend to be ebullient in