Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1923-04-27
The Story
of a Grave
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.

"HERE is a place in the Great
American desert where green
Il grass grows. At the head of
an estuary of the great dry sea, where
a long arm of white alkali runs up
among the foothills of the mountains,
stands an inviting tavern. 1t is upon
the hillside. Just below it, the gar
den hose and the landscape gardener,
with water carried in troughs from the
mountains, have wrought a miracle of
green. Trees, bluegrass, flowers, wax
strong and beautiful in the artificial
oasis. Children and young men and
maidens romp on the verdant mat,
spread at the point of the estuary, and
upon the hillside a score of languishing
guests sit in the healing sun, and
look down upon the picture, and
out into the endless miles of white
sand that stretch billowy and fantas-
tic into the blue of the horizon.
Most of these idlers on the broad
piazza of the tavern are invalids. 1t
is a place of invalids. Here hundreds
of wretched bodies are dragged by a
tragic love of life. Here scores of
souls watch other souls flicker and die
out, and still hope on and wait, while
the oil of life burns smudgy and low.
There are those whom the sunshine
and the dry, clear air win back to
life. But the dead are there. On the
broad veranda-a very citadel of life
the dead are embattled, fighting with
time. 1t is a most hideous battle, and
all so hushed and sepulchral are its
maneuvers, that life takes no heed of
the empty pageant.
Armed in such a combat sat Hawk
ms, the chief clerk, a grim man, dark,
pallid, sinister. OF what, out in the
world of life, Hawkins had been chief
clerk, 1t does not matter now. He
had been a busy man, firm, %taciturn,
self-contained, repellent. He sat now
at his post in the battle, sneering at
the folly of those about him who were
trying to wrest a few mortal moments
from eternity.
For a long time, as days go, Hawk
ms had been sitting in this sentry box,
when his captain-the doctor-ordered
him into the infantry, and told him
to march for lear life. Hawkins left
the guards upon the terrace with loath'
ing. During the first week of his
marching orders, he made exactly the
same journey every day. He noticed
everything along his path. He was in
terested in nothing. In his mind the
nhin0tC hn q u mArn poto1npun6 hnf
never referred to by his memory.
There was a huge bluff, a railroad
bridge, a quarry, a barbed wire fence,
enclosing a grave, a mud house, a
herder, some sheep, a steep hill, a
water trough, a cross road, and a
pine grove, on the hill over which he
came back to his starting point. None
of these objects was digniied by a
prominence in his mind. One day, at
tracted by the most unimportant detail
in the landscape, Hawkins started to
walk a few rods from his path, that he
might examine more closely the grave,
fenced in with barbed wire to keep
the ghoulish desert beasts away. A
second thought made the depression
from the path the line of an ellipse,
and he followed his course without
veering.
There were days when Hawkins
spoke to none Of the hotel guests, and
the lack of interest in the place
weighed heavily upon him. As he sat
for hours after his walks gazing be-
tween the hills that penned out the
desert, the spot where the grave dotted
the surface of the plain kept draw
ing his eyes to it, in an annoying
manner
AS he took his lonely walk at the
end of that fortnight, the grave began
to ~irritate him. 1t aroused a certain
curiosity within him, which was very
distasteful.
One night, after his return from a
walk, raging at his folly. the grave
began to haunt his wakeful night-fan-
cies. The next afternoon he walked
over to the enclosure, thinking that
he would be no longer disturbed by
the thing if he examined it closely.
Hawkins saw only an adults grave
with a cactus upon it. At the head
was a wooden board. At the foot was
a broad peg. The basbed wire was
torn away at one end-perhaps by
some stray animal, wandering in the
night. Hawkins did not approach
nearer than a rod from the fence, and
he turned quickly, as though he had
overcome his weakness, when he had
gathered these details in his mind.
The next day he anne closer, and
the day following, after a night in
which he was kept awake, frenzied
because of a gnawing ache to pick
the cactus root out Of the dead mans
side, Hawkins came to the fence and
leaned upon the post, looking back
toward the hotel to see If the group
on the veranda could see him. He did
not touch the cactus, and not until he
had Strengthened up to go did he so
much as glance at the mound. He