Soldiers' Pay

SOLDIER

‘The hushèd plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He's home again.’

CHAPTER ONE (7-55)

1

ACHILLES: Did you shave this morning, Cadet?
MERCURY: Yes, Sir.
ACHILLES: What with, Cadet?
MERCURY: Issue, Sir.
ACHILLES: Carry on, Cadet.:::::Old Play (about 19——?)

LOWE, JULIAN, number —, late a Flying Cadet, Umptieth Squadron, Air Service, known as ‘One Wing’ by the other embryonic aces of his flight, regarded the world with a yellow and disgruntled eye. He suffered the same jaundice that many a more booted one than he did, from Flight Commanders through Generals to the ambrosial single-barred (not to mention that inexplicable beast of the field which the French so beautifully call an aspiring aviator); they had stopped the war on him.

So he sat in a smouldering of disgusted sorrow, not even enjoying his Pullman prerogatives, spinning on his thumb his hat with its accursed white band.

‘Had your nose in the wind, hey, buddy?’ said Yaphank, going home and smelling to high heaven of bad whisky.

‘Ah, go to hell,’ he returned sourly and Yaphank doffed his tortured hat.

‘Why, sure, General—or should I of said Lootenant? Excuse me, madam. I got gassed doing k.p. and my sight ain’t been the same since. On to Berlin! Yeh, sure, we’re on to Berlin. I’m on to you, Berlin. I got your number. Number no thousand no hundred and naughty naught Private (very private) Joe Gilligan, late for parade, late for fatigue, late for breakfast when breakfast is late. The Statue of Liberty ain’t never seen me, and if she do, she’ll have to ’bout face.’

Cadet Lowe raised a sophisticated eye. ‘Say, whatcher drinking, anyway?’

‘Brother, I dunno. Fellow that makes it was gave a Congressional medal last Chuesday because he has got a plan to stop the war. Enlist all the Dutchmen in our army and make ’em drink so much of his stuff a day for forty days, see? Ruin any war. Get the idea?’

‘I’ll say. Won’t know whether it’s a war or a dance, huh?’

‘Sure, they can tell. The women will all be dancing. Listen, I had a swell jane and she said, “for Christ’s sake, you can’t dance”. And I said, “like hell I can’t”. And we was dancing and she said, “what are you, anyways?” And I says, “what do you wanta know for? I can dance as well as any general or major or even a sergeant, because I just win four hundred in a poker game,” and she said, “oh, you did?” and I said, “sure, stick with me, kid,” and she said, “where is it?” Only I wouldn’t show it to her and then this fellow come up to her and said, “are you dancing this one?” And she said, “sure, I am. This bird don’t dance.” Well, he was a sergeant, the biggest one I ever seen. Say, he was like that fellow in Arkansaw that had some trouble with a nigger and a friend said to him, “well, I hear you killed a nigger yesterday.” And he said, “yes, weighed two hundred pounds.” Like a bear.’ He took the lurching of the train limberly and Cadet Lowe said, ‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘Sure,’ agreed the other. ‘She won’t hurt you, though. I done tried it. My dog won’t drink none of it of course, but then he got bad ways hanging around Brigade H.Q. He’s the one trophy of the war I got: something that wasn’t never bawled out by a shave-tail for not saluting. Say, would you kindly like to take a little something to keep off the sumniferous dews of this goddam country? The honour is all mine and you won’t mind it much after the first two drinks. Makes me homesick: like a garage. Ever work in a garage?’

Sitting on the floor between two seats was Yaphank’s travelling companion, trying to ignite a splayed and sodden cigar. Like devasted France, thought Cadet Lowe, swimming his memory through the adenoidal reminiscences of Captain Bleyth, an R.A.F. pilot delegated to temporarily reinforce their democracy.

‘Why, poor soldier,’ said his friend, tearfully, ‘all alone in no man’s land and no matches. Ain’t war hell? I ask you.’ He tried to push the other over with his leg, then he fell to kicking him, slowly. ‘Move over, you ancient mariner. Move over, you goddam bastard. Alas, poor Jerks or something (I seen that in a play, see? Good line) come on, come on; here’s General Pershing come to have a drink with the poor soldiers.’ He addressed Cadet Lowe. ‘Look at him: ain’t he sodden in depravity?’

car model

‘Battle of Coonyak,’ the man on the floor muttered. ‘Ten men killed. Maybe fifteen. Maybe hundred. Poor children at home saying “Alice, where art thou?”’

‘Yeh, Alice. Where in hell are you? That other bottle. What’n’ell have you done with it? Keeping it to swim in when you get home?’

The man on the floor weeping said: ‘You wrong me as ever man wronged. Accuse me of hiding mortgage on house? Then take this soul and body; take all. Ravish me, big boy.’

‘Ravish a bottle of vinegar juice out of you, anyway,’ the other muttered, busy beneath the seat. He rose triumphant, clutching a fresh bottle. ‘Hark! the sound of battle and the laughing horses draws near. But shall they dull this poor unworthy head? No! But I would like to of seen one of them laughing horses. Must of been lady horses all together. Your extreme highness’—with ceremony, extending the bottle—‘will you be kind enough to kindly condescend to honour these kind but unworthy strangers in a foreign land?’

Cadet Lowe accepted the bottle, drank briefly, gagged and spat his drink. The other supporting him massaged his back. ‘Come on, come on, they don’t nothing taste that bad.’ Kindly cupping Lowe’s opposite shoulder in his palm he forced the bottle mouthward again. Lowe released the bottle, defending himself. ‘Try again. I got you. Drink it, now.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Cadet Lowe, averting his head.

Passengers were interested and Yaphank soothed him. ‘Now, now. They won’t nothing hurt you. You are among friends. Us soldiers got to stick together in a foreign country like this. Come on, drink her down. She ain’t worth nothing to no one, spit on his legs like that.’

‘Hell, man, I can’t drink it.’

‘Why, sure you can. Listen: think of flowers. Think of your poor grey-haired mother banging on the front gate and sobbing her grey-haired heart out. Listen, think of having to go to work again when you get home. Ain’t war hell? I would of been a corporal at least, if she had just hung on another year.’

‘Hell, I can’t.’

‘Why, you got to,’ his new friend told him kindly, pushing the bottle suddenly in his mouth and tilting it. To be flooded or to swallow were his choices so he drank and retained it. His belly rose and hung, then sank reluctant.

‘There now, wasn’t so bad, was it? Remember, this hurts me to see my good licker going more than it does you. But she do kind of smack of gasoline, don’t she?’

gasoline

Cadet Lowe’s outraged stomach heaved at its muscular moorings like a captive balloon. He gaped and his vitals coiled coldly in a passionate ecstasy. His friend again thrust the bottle in his mouth.

‘Drink, quick! You got to protect your investment, you know.’

His private parts, flooded, washed back to his gulping and a sweet fire ran through him, and the Pullman conductor came and regarded them in helpless disgust.

‘Ten-shun,’ said Yaphank, springing to his feet. ‘Beware of officers! Rise, men, and salute the admiral here.’ He took the conductor’s hand and held it. ‘Boys, this man commanded the navy,’ he said. ‘When the enemy tried to capture Coney Island he was there. Or somewhere between there and Chicago, anyway, wasn’t you, Colonel?’

‘Look out, men, don’t do that.’ But Yaphank had already kissed his hand.

‘Now, run along, Sergeant. And don’t come back until dinner is ready.’

‘Listen, you must stop this. You will ruin my train.’

train

‘Bless your heart, Captain, your train couldn’t be no safer with us if it was your own daughter.’ The man sitting on the floor moved and Yaphank cursed him. ‘Sit still, can’t you? Say, this fellow thinks it’s night. Suppose you have your hired man bed him down? He’s just in the way here.’

train

The conductor, deciding Lowe was the sober one, addressed him.

‘For God’s sake, soldier, can’t you do something with them?’

‘Sure,’ said Cadet Lowe. ‘You run along; I’ll look after them. They’re all right.’

‘Well, do something with them. I can’t bring a train into Chicago with the whole army drunk on it. My God, Sherman was sure right.’

train

Yaphank stared at him quietly. Then he turned to his companions. ‘Men,’ he said solemnly, ‘he don’t want us here. And this is the reward we get for giving our flesh and blood to our country’s need. Yes, sir, he don’t want us here; he begrudges us riding on his train, even. Say, suppose we hadn’t sprang to the nation’s call, do you know what kind of a train you’d have? A train full of Germans. A train full of folks eating sausage and drinking beer, all going to Milwaukee, that’s what you’d have.’

traindrivingpassenger

‘Couldn’t be worse than a train full of you fellows not knowing where you’re going,’ the conductor replied.

train

‘All right,’ Yaphank answered. ‘If that’s the way you feel, we’ll get off your goddam train. Do you think this is the only train in the world?’

train

‘No, no,’ the conductor said hastily, ‘not at all. I don’t want you to get off. I just want you to straighten up and not disturb the other passengers.’

passenger

The sitting man lurched clumsily and Cadet Lowe met interested stares.

‘No,’ said Yaphank, ‘no! You have refused the hospitality of your train to the saviours of your country. We could have expected better treatment than this in Germany, even in Texas.’ He turned to Lowe. ‘Men, we will get off his train at the next station. Hey, General?’

train

‘My God,’ repeated the conductor. ‘If we ever have another peace I don’t know what the railroads will do. I thought war was bad, but my God.’

‘Run along,’ Yaphank told him, ‘run along. You probably won’t stop for us, so I guess we’ll have to jump off. Gratitude! Where is gratitude, when trains won’t stop to let poor soldiers off? I know what it means. They’ll fill trains with poor soldiers and run ’em off into the Pacific Ocean. Won’t have to feed ’em any more. Poor soldiers! Woodrow, you wouldn’t of treated me like this.’

train

‘Hey, what you doing?’ But the man ignored him, tugging the window up and dragging a cheap paper suit-case across his companion’s knees. Before either Lowe or the conductor could raise a hand he had pushed the suit-case out the window. ‘All out, men!’

His sodden companion heaved clawing from the floor. ‘Hey! That was mine you throwed out?’

‘Well, ain’t you going to get off with us? We are going to throw ’em all off, and when she slows down we’ll jump ourselves.’

‘But you throwed mine off first,’ the other said.

‘Why, sure. I was saving you the trouble, see? Now don’t you feel bad about it; you can throw mine off if you want, and then Pershing here, and the admiral can throw each other’s off the same way. You got a bag, ain’t you?’ he asked the conductor. ‘Get yours, quick, so we won’t have so damn far to walk.’

‘Listen, soldiers,’ said the conductor, and Cadet Lowe, thinking of Elba, thinking of his coiling guts and a slow alcoholic fire in him, remarked the splayed official gold breaking the man’s cap. New York swam flatly past; Buffalo was imminent, and sunset.

‘Listen, soldiers,’ repeated the conductor. ‘I got a son in France. Sixth Marines he is. His mother ain’t heard from him since October. I’ll do anything for you boys, see, but for God’s sake act decent.’

‘No,’ replied the man, ‘you have refused us hospitality, so we get off. When does the train stop? or have we got to jump?’

‘No, no, you boys sit here. Sit here and behave and you’ll be all right. No need to get off.’

He moved swaying down the aisle and the sodden one removed his devastated cigar. ‘You throwed my suit-case out,’ he repeated.

Yaphank took Cadet Lowe’s arm. ‘Listen. Wouldn’t that discourage you? God knows, I’m trying to help the fellow get a start in life, and what do I get? One complaint after another.’ He addressed his friend again. ‘Why, sure, I throwed your suit-case off. Whatcher wanta do? wait till we get to Buffalo and pay a quarter to have it took off for you?’

‘But you throwed my suit-case out,’ said the other again.

‘All right. I did. Whatcher going to do about it?’

The other pawed himself erect, clinging to the window, and fell heavily over Lowe’s feet. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ his companion said, thrusting him into his seat, ‘watch whatcher doing.’

‘Get off,’ the man mumbled wetly.

‘Huh?’

‘Get off, too,’ he explained, trying to rise again. He got on to his legs and lurching, bumping, and sliding about the open window he thrust his head through it. Cadet Lowe caught him by the brief skirt of his blouse.

‘Here, here, come back, you damn fool. You can’t do that.’

‘Why, sure he can,’ contradicted Yaphank, ‘let him jump off if he wants. He ain’t only going to Buffalo, anyways.’

‘Hell, he’ll kill himself.’

‘My God,’ repeated the conductor, returning at a heavy gallop. He leaned across Lowe’s shoulder and caught the man’s leg. The man, with his head and torso through the window, swayed lax and sodden as a meal sack. Yaphank pushed Lowe aside and tried to break the conductor’s grip on the other’s leg.

‘Let him be. I don’t believe he’ll jump.’

‘But, good God, I can’t take any chances. Look out, look out, soldier! Pull him back there!’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, let him go,’ said Lowe, giving up.

‘Sure,’ the other amended, ‘let him jump. I’d kind of like to see him do it, since he suggested it himself. Besides, he ain’t the kind for young fellows like us to associate with. Good riddance. Let’s help him off,’ he added, shoving at the man’s lumpy body. The would-be suicide’s hat whipped from his head and the wind temporarily clearing his brain, he fought to draw himself in. He had changed his mind. His companion resisted, kindly.

‘Come on, come on. Don’t lose your nerve now. G’wan and jump.’

‘Help!’ the man shrieked into the vain wind and ‘help!’ the conductor chorused, clinging to him, and two alarmed passengers and the porter came to his assistance. They overcame Yaphank and drew the now thoroughly alarmed man into the car. The conductor slammed shut the window.

passengerrisktrain

‘Gentlemen,’ he addressed the two passengers, ‘will you sit here and keep them from putting him out that window? I am going to put them all off as soon as we reach Buffalo. I’d stop the train and do it now, only they’d kill him as soon as they get him alone. Henry,’ to the porter, ‘call the train conductor and tell him to wire ahead to Buffalo we got two crazy men on board.’

‘Yeh, Henry,’ Yaphank amended to the Negro, ‘tell ’em to have a band there and three bottles of whisky. If they ain’t got a band of their own, tell ’em to hire one. I will pay for it.’ He dragged a blobby mass of bills from his pocket and stripping off one, gave it to the porter. ‘Do you want a band too?’ he asked Lowe. ‘No,’ answering himself, ‘no, you don’t need none. You can use mine. Run now,’ he repeated.

African American

‘Yas suh, Cap’m.’ White teeth were like a suddenly opened piano.

‘Watch ’em, men,’ the conductor told his appointed guards. ‘You, Henry!’ he shouted, following the vanishing white jacket.

Yaphank’s companion, sweating and pale, was about to become ill; Yaphank and Lowe sat easily, respectively affable and belligerent. The newcomers touched shoulders for mutual support, alarmed but determined. Craned heads of other passengers became again smugly unconcerned over books and papers and the train rushed on along the sunset.

‘Well gentlemen,’ began Yaphank conversationally.

The two civilians sprang like plucked wires and one of them said, ‘Now, now,’ soothingly, putting his hand on the soldier. ‘Just be quiet, soldier, and we’ll look after you. Us Americans appreciates what you’ve done.’

‘Hank White,’ muttered the sodden one.

‘Huh?’ asked his companion.

cardrivingrural

‘Hank White,’ he repeated.

The other turned to the civilian cordially. ‘Well, bless my soul if here ain’t old Hank White in the flesh, that I was raised with! Why, Hank! We heard you was dead, or in the piano business or something. You ain’t been fired, have you? I notice you ain’t got no piano with you.’

‘No, no,’ the man answered in alarm, ‘you are mistaken. Schluss is my name. I got a swell line of ladies’ underthings.’ He produced a card.

‘Well, well, ain’t that nice. Say,’ he leaned confidentially towards the other, ‘you don’t carry no women samples with you? No? I was afraid not. But never mind. I will get you one in Buffalo. Not buy you one, of course: just rent you one, you might say, for the time being. Horace,’ to Cadet Lowe, ‘where’s that bottle?’

‘Here she is, Major,’ responded Lowe, taking the bottle from beneath his blouse. Yaphank offered it to the two civilians.

‘Think of something far, far away, and drink fast,’ he advised.

‘Why, thanks,’ said the one called Schluss, tendering the bottle formally to his companion. They stooped cautiously and drank. Yaphank and Cadet Lowe drank, not stooping.

‘Be careful, soldiers,’ warned Schluss.

‘Sure,’ said Cadet Lowe. They drank again.

‘Won’t the other one take nothing?’ asked the heretofore silent one, indicating Yaphank’s travelling companion. He was hunched awkwardly in the corner. His friend shook him and he slipped limply to the floor.

‘That’s the horror of the demon rum, boys,’ said Yaphank solemnly and he took another drink. And Cadet Lowe took another drink. He tendered the bottle.

‘No, no,’ Schluss said with passion, ‘not no more right now.’

‘He don’t mean that,’ Yaphank said, ‘he just ain’t thought.’ He and Lowe stared at the two civilians. ‘Give him time: he’ll come to hisself.’

After a while the one called Schluss took the bottle.

‘That’s right,’ Yaphank told Lowe confidentially. ‘For a while I thought he was going to insult the uniform. But you wasn’t, was you?’

‘No, no. They ain’t no one respects the uniform like I do. Listen, I would of liked to fought by your side, see? But someone got to look out for business while the boys are gone. Ain’t that right?’ he appealed to Lowe.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lowe with courteous belligerence, ‘I never had time to work any.’

‘Come on, come on,’ Yaphank reprimanded him, ‘all of us wasn’t young enough to be lucky as you.’

‘How was I lucky?’ Lowe rejoined fiercely.

‘Well, shut up about it, if you wasn’t lucky. We got something else to worry about.’

‘Sure,’ Schluss added quickly, ‘we all got something to worry about.’ He tasted the bottle briefly and the other said:

‘Come on, now, drink it.’

‘No, no, thanks, I got a plenty.’

Yaphank’s eye was like a snake’s. ‘Take a drink, now. Do you want me to call the conductor and tell him you are worrying us to give you whisky?’

The man gave him the bottle quickly. He turned to the other civilian. ‘What makes him act so funny?’

‘No, no,’ said Schluss. ‘Listen, you soldiers drink if you want: we’ll look after you.’

The silent one added like a brother and Yaphank said:

‘They think we are trying to poison them. They think we are German spies, I guess.’

‘No, no! When I see a uniform, I respect it like it was my mother.’

‘Then, come on and drink.’

Schluss gulped and passed the bottle. His companion drank also and sweat beaded them.

‘Won’t he take nothing?’ repeated the silent one and Yaphank regarded the other soldier with compassion.

‘Alas, poor Hank,’ he said, ‘poor boy’s done for, I fear. The end of a long friendship, men.’ Cadet Lowe said sure, seeing two distinct Hanks, and the other continued. ‘Look at that kind, manly face. Children together we was, picking flowers in the flowery meadows; him and me made the middleweight mule-wiper’s battalion what she was; him and me devastated France together. And now look at him.

‘Hank! Don’t you recognize this weeping voice, this soft hand on your brow? General,’ he turned to Lowe, ‘will you be kind enough to take charge of the remains? I will deputize these kind strangers to stop at the first harness factory we pass and have a collar suitable for mules made of dog-wood with the initials H.W. in forget-me-nots.’

Schluss in ready tears tried to put his arm about Yaphank’s shoulders. ‘There, there, death ain’t only a parting. Brace up; take a little drink, then you’ll feel better.’

‘Why, I believe I will,’ he replied; ‘you got a kind heart, buddy. Fall in when fire call blows, boys.’

Schluss mopped his face with a soiled, scented handkerchief and they drank again. New York in a rosy glow of alcohol and sunset streamed past breaking into Buffalo, and with fervent new fire in them they remarked the station. Poor Hank now slept peacefully in a spittoon.

Cadet Lowe and his friend being cold of stomach, rose and supported their companions. Schluss evinced a disinclination to get off. He said it couldn’t possibly be Buffalo, that he had been to Buffalo too many times. Sure, they told him, holding him erect, and the conductor glared at them briefly and vanished. Lowe and Yaphank got their hats and helped the civilians into the aisle.

‘I’m certainly glad my boy wasn’t old enough to be a soldier,’ remarked a woman passing them with difficulty, and Lowe said to Yaphank:

‘Say, what about him?’

‘Him?’ repeated the other, having attached Schluss to himself.

‘That one back there,’ Lowe indicated the casual.

‘Oh, him? You are welcome to him, if you want him.’

‘Why, aren’t you together?’

Outside was the noise and smoke of the station. They saw through the windows hurrying people and porters, and Yaphank moving down the aisle answered:

‘Hell, no. I never seen him before. Let the porter sweep him out or keep him, whichever he likes.’

They half dragged, half carried the two civilians and with diabolical cunning Yaphank led the way through the train and dismounted from a day coach. On the platform Schluss put his arm around the soldier’s neck.

‘Listen, fellows,’ he said with passion, ‘y’ know m’ name, y’ got addressh. Listen, I will show you ’Merica preshates what you done. Ol’ Glory ever wave on land and sea. Listen, ain’t nothing I got soldier can’t have, nothing. ’N’if you wasn’t soldiers I am still for you, one hundred pershent. I like you. I swear I like you.’

‘Why, sure,’ the other agreed, supporting him. After a while he spied a policeman and he directed his companion’s gait towards the officer. Lowe with his silent one followed. ‘Stand up, can’t you?’ he hissed, but the man’s eyes were filled with an inarticulate sadness, like a dog’s. ‘Do the best you can, then,’ Cadet Lowe softened, added, and Yaphank, stopped before the policeman, was saying:

‘Looking for two drunks, Sergeant? These men were annoying a whole trainload of people. Can’t nothing be done to protect soldiers from annoyance? If it ain’t top sergeants, it’s drunks.’

‘I’d like to see the man can annoy a soldier,’ answered the officer. ‘Beat it, now.’

‘But say, these men are dangerous. What are you good for, if you can’t preserve the peace?’

‘Beat it, I said. Do you want me to run all of you in?’

‘You are making a mistake, Sergeant. These are the ones you are looking for.’

The policeman said, ‘Looking for?’ regarding him with interest.

‘Sure. Didn’t you get our wire? We wired ahead to have the train met.’

‘Oh, these are the crazy ones, are they? Where’s the one they were trying to murder?’

‘Sure, they are crazy. Do you think a sane man would get hisself into this state?’

The policeman looked at the four of them with a blasé eye. ‘G’wan, now. You’re all drunk. Beat it, or I’ll run you in.’

‘All right. Take us in. If we got to go to the station to get rid of these crazy ones, we’ll have to.’

‘Where’s the conductor of this train?’

‘He’s with a doctor, working on the wounded one.’

‘Say, you men better be careful. Whatcher trying to do—kid me?’

Yaphank jerked his companion up. ‘Stand up,’ he said, shaking the man. ‘Love you like a brother,’ the other muttered. ‘Look at him,’ he said, ‘look at both of ’em. And there’s a man hurt on that train. Are you going to stand here and do nothing?’

‘I thought you was kidding me. These are the ones, are they?’ he raised his whistle and another policeman ran up. ‘Here they are, Ed. You watch ’em and I’ll get aboard and see about that dead man. You soldiers stay here, see?’

‘Sure, Sergeant,’ Yaphank agreed. The officer ran heavily away and he turned to the civilians. ‘All right, boys. Here’s the bell-hops come to carry you out where the parade starts. You go with them and me and this other officer will go back and get the conductor and the porter. They want to come, too.’

Schluss again took him in his arms.

‘Love you like a brother. Anything got’s yours. Ask me.’

‘Sure,’ he rejoined. ‘Watch ’em, Cap, they’re crazy as hell. Now, you run along with this nice man.’

‘Here,’ the policeman said, ‘you two wait here.’

There came a shout from the train and the conductor’s face was a bursting bellowing moon. ‘Like to wait and see it explode on him,’ Yaphank murmured. The policeman supporting the two men hurried towards the train. ‘Come on here,’ he shouted to Yaphank and Lowe.

As he drew away Yaphank spoke swiftly to Lowe.

‘Come on, General,’ he said, ‘let’s get going. So long, boys. Let’s go, kid.’

The policeman shouted, ‘Stop, there!’ but they disregarded him, hurrying down the long shed, leaving the excitement to clot about itself, for all of them.

Outside the station in the twilight the city broke sharply its skyline against the winter evening and lights were shimmering birds on motionless golden wings, bell notes in arrested flight; ugly everywhere beneath a rumoured retreating magic of colour.

Food for the belly, and winter, though spring was somewhere in the world, from the south blown up like forgotten music. Caught both in the magic of change they stood feeling the spring in the cold air, as if they had but recently come into a new world, feeling their littleness and believing too that lying in wait for them was something new and strange. They were ashamed of this and silence was unbearable.

season

‘Well, buddy,’ and Yaphank slapped Cadet Lowe smartly on the back, ‘that’s one parade we’ll sure be A.W.O.L. from, huh?’

2

Who sprang to be his land’s defence
And has been sorry ever since?
Cadet!
Who can’t date a single girl
Long as kee-wees run the world?
Kay-det!

With food in their bellies and a quart of whisky snugly under Cadet Lowe’s arm they boarded a train.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Lowe. ‘This train don’t go to San Francisco, do she?’

‘Listen,’ said Yaphank, ‘my name is Joe Gilligan. Gilligan, G-i-l-l-i-g-a-n, Gilligan, J-o-e, Joe; Joe Gilligan. My people captured Minneapolis from the Irish and taken a Dutch name, see? Did you ever know a man named Gilligan give you a bum steer? If you wanta go to San Francisco, all right. If you wanta go to St Paul or Omyhaw, it’s all right with me. And more than that, I’ll see that you get there. I’ll see that you go to all three of ’em if you want. But why’n hell do you wanta go so damn far as San Francisco?’

‘I don’t,’ replied Cadet Lowe. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere especially. I like this train here—far as I am concerned. I say, let’s fight this war out right here. But you see, my people live in San Francisco. That’s why I am going there.’

‘Why, sure,’ Private Gilligan agreed readily. ‘Sometimes a man does wanta see his family—especially if he don’t hafta live with ’em. I ain’t criticizing you. I admire you for it, buddy. But say, you can go home any time. What I say is, let’s have a look at this glorious nation which we have fought for.’

‘Hell, I can’t. My mother has wired me every day since the armistice to fly low and be careful and come home as soon as I am demobilized. I bet she wired the President to have me excused as soon as possible.’

‘Why sure. Of course she did. What can equal a mother’s love? Except a good drink of whisky. Where’s that bottle? You ain’t betrayed a virgin, have you?’

‘Here she is.’ Cadet Lowe produced it and Gilligan pressed the bell.

‘Claude,’ he told a superior porter, ‘bring us two glasses and a bottle of sassperiller or something. We are among gentlemen today and we aim to act like gentlemen.’

‘Watcher want glasses for?’ asked Lowe. ‘Bottle was all right yesterday.’

‘You got to remember we are getting among strangers now. We don’t want to offend no savage customs. Wait until you get to be an experienced traveller and you’ll remember these things. Two glasses, Othello.’

The porter in his starched jacket became a symbol of self-sufficiency. ‘You can’t drink in this car. Go to the buffet car.’

‘Ah, come on, Claude. Have a heart.’

‘We don’t have no drinking in this car. Go to the buffet car if you want.’ He swung himself from seat to seat down the lurching car.

Private Gilligan turned to his companion. ‘Well! What do you know about that? Ain’t that one hell of a way to treat soldiers? I tell you, General, this is the worst run war I ever seen.’

‘Hell, let’s drink out of the bottle.’

‘No, no! This thing has got to be a point of honour, now. Remember, we got to protect our uniform from insult. You wait here and I’ll see the conductor. We bought tickets, hey, buddy?’

With officers gone and officers’ wives
Having the grand old time of their lives—

an overcast sky, and earth dissolving monotonously into a grey mist, greyly. Occasional trees and houses marching through it; and towns like bubbles of ghostly sound beaded on a steel wire—

Who’s in the guard-room chewing the bars,
Saying to hell with the government wars?
Cadet!

And here was Gilligan returned, saying: ‘Charles, at ease.’ I might have known he would have gotten another one, thought Cadet Lowe, looking up. He saw a belt and wings, he rose and met a young face with a dreadful scar across his brow. My God he thought, turning sick. He saluted and the other peered at him with strained distraction. Gilligan, holding his arm, helped him into the seat. The man turned his puzzled gaze to Gilligan and murmured, ‘Thanks.’

‘Lootenant,’ said Gilligan, ‘you see here the pride of the nation. General, ring the bell for ice water. The lootenant here is sick.’

Cadet Lowe pressed the bell, regarding with a rebirth of that old feud between American enlisted men and officers of all nations the man’s insignia and wings and brass, not even wondering what a British officer in his condition could be doing travelling in America. Had I been old enough or lucky enough, this might have been me, he thought jealously.

The porter reappeared.

‘No drinking in this car, I told you,’ he said. Gilligan produced a bill ‘No, sir. Not in this car.’ Then he saw the third man. He leaned down to him quickly, then glanced suspiciously from Gilligan to Lowe.

‘What you all doing with him?’ he asked.

‘Oh, he’s just a lost foreigner I found back yonder. Now, Ernest—’

‘Lost? He ain’t lost. He’s from Gawgia. I’m looking after him. Cap’m,’—to the officer—‘is these folks all right?’

Gilligan and Lowe looked at each other. ‘Christ, I thought he was a foreigner,’ Gilligan whispered.

The man raised his eyes to the porter’s anxious face. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘they’re all right.’

‘Does you want to stay here with them, or don’t you want me to fix you up in your place?’

‘Let him stay here,’ Gilligan said. ‘He wants a drink.’

‘But he ain’t got no business drinking. He’s sick.’

‘Loot,’ Gilligan said, ‘do you want a drink?’

‘Yes. I want a drink. Yes.’

‘But he oughtn’t to have no whisky, sir.’

‘I won’t let him have too much. I am going to look after him. Come on, now, let’s have some glasses, can’t we?’

The porter began again. ‘But he oughtn’t—’

‘Say, Loot,’ Gilligan interrupted, ‘can’t you make your friend here get us some glasses to drink from?’

‘Glasses?’

‘Yeh! He don’t want to bring us none.’

‘Does you want glasses, Cap’m?’

‘Yes, bring us some glasses, will you?’

‘All right, Cap’m.’ He stopped again. ‘You going to take care of him, ain’t you?’ he asked Gilligan.

‘Sure, sure!’

The porter gone, Gilligan regarded his guest with envy. ‘You sure got to be from Georgia to get service on this train. I showed him money but it never even shook him. Say, General,’ to Lowe, ‘we better keep the lootenant with us, huh? Might come in useful.’

‘Sure,’ agreed Lowe. ‘Say, sir, what kind of ships did you use?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ interrupted Gilligan, ‘let him be. He’s been devastating France, now he needs rest. Hey, Loot?’

Beneath his scarred and tortured brow the man’s gaze was puzzled but kindly and the porter reappeared with glasses and a bottle of ginger ale. He produced a pillow which he placed carefully behind the officer’s head, then he got two more pillows for the others, forcing them with ruthless kindness to relax. He was deftly officious, including them impartially in his activities, like Fate. Private Gilligan, unused to this, became restive.

‘Hey, ease up, George; lemme do my own pawing a while. I aim to paw this bottle if you’ll gimme room.’

He desisted saying ‘Is this all right, Cap’m?’

‘Yes, all right, thanks,’ the officer answered. Then: ‘Bring your glass and get a drink.’

Gilligan solved the bottle and filled the glasses. Ginger ale hissed sweetly and pungently. ‘Up and at ’em, men.’

The officer took his glass in his left hand and then Lowe noticed his right hand was drawn and withered.

‘Cheer-O,’ he said.

‘Nose down,’ murmured Lowe. The man looked at him with poised glass. He looked at the hat on Lowe’s knee and that groping puzzled thing behind his eyes became clear and sharp as with a mental process, and Lowe thought that his lips had asked a question.

‘Yes, sir. Cadet,’ he replied, feeling warmly grateful, feeling again a youthful clean pride in his corps.

But the effort had been too much and again the officer’s gaze was puzzled and distracted.

Gilligan raised his glass, squinting at it. ‘Here’s to peace,’ he said. ‘The first hundred years is the hardest.’

Here was the porter again, with his own glass. ’::’Nother nose in the trough,’ Gilligan complained, helping him.

The Negro patted and rearranged the pillow beneath the officer’s head. ‘Excuse me, Cap’m, but can’t I get you something for your head?’

‘No, no, thanks. It’s all right.’

‘But you’re sick, sir. Don’t you drink too much.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘Sure,’ Gilligan amended, ‘we’ll watch him.’

‘Lemme pull the shade down. Keep the light out of your eyes?’

‘No, I don’t mind the light. You run along. I’ll call if I want anything.’

With the instinct of his race the Negro knew that his kindness was becoming untactful, yet he ventured again.

‘I bet you haven’t wired your folks to meet you. Whyn’t you lemme wire ’em for you? I can look after you far as I go, but who’s going to look after you, then?’

‘No, I’m all right, I tell you. You look after me as far as you go. I’ll get along.’

‘All right. But I am going to tell your paw how you are acting some day. You ought to know better than that, Cap’m.’ He said to Gilligan and Lowe: ‘You gentlemen call me if he gets sick.’

‘Yes, go on bow, damn you. I’ll call if I don’t feel well.’ Gilligan looked from his retreating back to the officer in admiration. ‘Loot, how do you do it?’

But the man only turned on them his puzzled gaze. He finished his drink and while Gilligan renewed them Cadet Lowe, like a trailing hound, repeated:

‘Say, sir, what kind of ships did you use?’

The man looked at Lowe kindly, not replying, and Gilligan said:

‘Hush. Let him alone. Don’t you see he don’t remember himself? Do you reckon you would, with that scar? Let the war be. Hey, Lootenant?’

‘I don’t know. Another drink is better.’

‘Sure it is. Buck up, General. He don’t mean no harm. He’s just got to let her ride as she lays for a while. We all got horrible memories of the war. I lose eighty-nine dollars in a crap game once, besides losing, as that wop writer says, that an’ which thou knowest at Chatter Teary. So how about a little whisky, men?’

‘Cheer-O,’ said the officer again.

‘What do you mean, Chateau Thierry?’ said Lowe, boyish in disappointment, feeling that he had been deliberately ignored by one to whom Fate had been kinder than to himself.

‘You talking about Chatter Teary?’

‘I’m talking about a place you were not at, anyway.’

‘I was there in spirit, sweetheart. That’s what counts.’

‘You couldn’t have been there any other way. There ain’t any such place.’

‘Hell there ain’t! Ask the Loot here if I ain’t right. How about it, Loot?’

But he was asleep. They looked at his face, young, yet old as the world, beneath the dreadful scar. Even Gilligan’s levity left him. ‘My God, it makes you sick at the stomach, don’t it? I wonder if he knows how he looks? What do you reckon his folks will say when they see him? or his girl—if he has got one. And I’ll bet he has.’

New York flew away: it became noon within, by clock, but the grey imminent horizon had not changed. Gilligan said: ‘If he has got a girl, know what she’ll say?’

Cadet Lowe, knowing all the despair of abortive endeavour, asked, ‘What?’

New York passed on and Mahon beneath his martial harness slept. (Would I sleep? thought Lowe; had I wings, boots, would I sleep?) His wings indicated by a graceful sweep pointed sharply down above a ribbon. White, purple, white, over his pocket, over his heart (supposedly). Lowe descried between the pinions of a superimposed crown and three letters, then his gaze mounted to the sleeping scarred face. ‘What?’ he repeated.

‘Shell give him the air, buddy.’

‘Ah, come on. Of course she won’t.’

‘Yes, she will. You don’t know women. Once the new has wore off it’ll be some bird that stayed at home and made money, or some lad that wore shiny leggings and never got nowheres so he could get hurt, like you and me.’

The porter came to hover over the sleeping man.

‘He ain’t got sick, has he?’ he whispered.

They told him no; and the Negro eased the position of the sleeping man’s head. ‘You gentlemen look after him and be sure to call me if he wants anything. He’s a sick man.’

Gilligan and Lowe, looking at the officer, agreed, and the porter lowered the shade. ‘You want some more ginger ale?’

‘Yes,’ said Gilligan, assuming the porter’s hushed tone, and the Negro withdrew. The two of them sat in silent comradeship, the comradeship of those whose lives had become pointless through the sheer equivocation of events, of the sorry jade, Circumstance. The porter brought ginger ale and they sat drinking while New York became Ohio.

Gilligan, that talkative unserious one, entered some dream within himself and Cadet Lowe, young and dreadfully disappointed, knew all the old sorrows of the Jasons of the world who see their vessels sink ere the harbour is left behind. . . . Beneath his scar the officer slept in all the travesty of his wings and leather and brass, and a terrible old woman paused, saying:

‘Was he wounded?’

Gilligan waked from his dream. ‘Look at his face,’ he said fretfully: ‘he fell off of a chair on to an old woman he was talking to and done that.’

‘What insolence,’ said the woman, glaring at Gilligan. ‘But can’t something be done for him? He looks sick to me.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Something can be done for him. What we are doing now—letting him alone.’

She and Gilligan stared at each other, then she looked at Cadet Lowe, young and belligerent and disappointed. She looked back to Gilligan. She said from the ruthless humanity of money:

‘I shall report you to the conductor. That man is sick and needs attention.’

‘All right, ma’am. But you tell the conductor that if he bothers him now, I’ll knock his goddam head off.’

The old woman glared at Gilligan from beneath a quiet, modish black hat and a girl’s voice said:

‘Let them alone, Mrs Henderson. They’ll take care of him all right.’

She was dark. Had Gilligan and Lowe ever seen an Aubrey Beardsley, they would have known that Beardsley would have sickened for her: he had drawn her so often dressed in peacock hues, white and slim and depraved among meretricious trees and impossible marble fountains. Gilligan rose.

‘That’s right, miss. He is all right sleeping here with us. The porter is looking after him—’ wondering why he should have to explain to her—‘and we are taking him home. Just leave him be. And thank you for your interest.’

‘But something ought to be done about it,’ the old woman repeated futilely. The girl led her away and the train ran swaying in afternoon. (Sure, it was afternoon. Cadet Lowe’s wrist watch said so. It might be any state under the sun, but it was afternoon. Afternoon or evening or morning or night, far as the officer was concerned. He slept.)

Damned old bitch, Gilligan muttered, careful not to wake him.

‘Look how you’ve got his arm,’ the girl said, returning. She moved his withered hand from his thigh. (His hand, too, seeing the scrofulous indication of his bones beneath the blistered skin.) ‘Oh, his poor terrible face,’ she said, shifting the pillow under his head.

‘Be quiet, ma’am,’ Gilligan said.

She ignored him. Gilligan, expecting to see him wake, admitted defeat and she continued:

‘Is he going far?’

‘Lives in Georgia,’ Gilligan said. He and Cadet Lowe, seeing that she was not merely passing their section, rose. Lowe remarking her pallid distinction, her black hair, the red scar of her mouth, her slim dark dress, knew an adolescent envy of the sleeper. She ignored Lowe with a brief glance. How impersonal she was, how self-contained. Ignoring them.

‘He can’t get home alone,’ she stated with conviction. ‘Are you all going with him?’

‘Sure,’ Gilligan assured her. Lowe wished to say something, something that would leave him fixed in her mind: something to reveal himself to her. But she glanced at the glasses, the bottle that Lowe feeling a fool yet clasped.

‘You seem to be getting along pretty well, yourselves,’ she said.

‘Snake medicine, miss. But won’t you have some?’

Lowe, envying Gilligan’s boldness, his presence of mind, watched her mouth. She looked down the car.

‘I believe I will, if you have another glass.’

‘Why, sure. General, ring the bell.’ She sat down beside Mahon and Gilligan and Lowe sat again. She seemed . . . she was young; she probably liked dancing, yet at the same time she seemed not young—as if she knew everything. (She is married, and about twenty-five, thought Gilligan.) (She is about nineteen, and she is not in love, Lowe decided.) She looked at Lowe.

‘What’s your outfit, soldier?’

‘Flying Cadet,’ answered Lowe with slow patronage, ‘Air Service.’ She was a kid: she only looked old.

‘Oh. Then of course you are looking after him. He’s an aviator, too, isn’t he?’

‘Look at his wings,’ Lowe answered. ‘British. Royal Air Force. Pretty good boys.’

‘Hell,’ said Gilligan, ‘he ain’t no foreigner.’

‘You don’t have to be a foreigner to be with the British or French. Look at Lufbery. He was with the French until we come in.’

The girl looked at him, and Gilligan, who had never heard of Lufbery, said: ‘Whatever he is, he’s all right. With us, anyway. Let him be whatever he wants.’

The girl said: ‘I am sure he is.’

The porter appeared. ‘Cap’m’s all right?’ he whispered, remarking her without surprise as is the custom of his race.

‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘he’s all right.’

Cadet Lowe thought I bet she can dance and she added: ‘He couldn’t be in better hands than these gentlemen.’ How keen she is! thought Gilligan. She has known disappointment ‘I wonder if I could have a drink on your car?’

The porter examined her and then he said: ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll get some fresh ginger ale. You going to look after him?’

‘Yes, for a while.’

He leaned down to her. ‘I’m from Gawgia, too. Long time ago.’

‘You are? I’m from Alabama.’

‘That’s right. We got to look out for our own folks, ain’t we? I’ll get you a glass right away.’

The officer still slept and the porter returning hushed and anxious, they sat drinking and talking with muted voices. New York was Ohio, and Ohio became a series of identical cheap houses with the same man entering gate after gate, smoking and spitting. Here was Cincinnati and under the blanched flash of her hand he waked easily.

‘Are we in?’ he asked. On her hand was a plain gold band. No engagement ring. (Pawned it, maybe, thought Gilligan. But she did not look poor.)

‘General, get the Lootenant’s hat.’

Lowe climbed over Gilligan’s knees and Gilligan said:

‘Here’s an old friend of ours, Loot. Meet Mrs Powers.’

She took his hand, helping him to his feet, and the porter appeared.

‘Donald Mahon,’ he said, like a parrot. Cadet Lowe assisted by the porter returned with cap and stick and a trench coat and two kit bags. The porter help him into the coat.

‘I’ll get yours, ma’am,’ said Gilligan, but the porter circumvented him. Her coat was rough and heavy and light of colour. She wore it carelessly and Gilligan and Cadet Lowe gather up their ‘issued’ impedimenta. The porter handed the officer his cap and stick, then he vanished with the luggage belonging to them. She glanced again down the length of the car.

‘Where are my—’

‘Yessum,’ the porter called from the door, across the coated shoulders of passengers, ‘I got your things, ma’am.’

He had gotten them and his dark gentle hand lowered the officer carefully to the platform.

‘Help the lootenant there,’ said the conductor officiously, but he had already got the officer to the floor.

‘You’ll look after him, ma’am?’

‘Yes. I’ll look after him.’

They moved down the shed and Cadet Lowe looked back. But the Negro was efficient and skilful, busy with other passengers. He seemed to have forgotten them. And Cadet Lowe looked from the porter occupied with bags and the garnering of quarters and half dollars, to the officer in his coat and stick, remarking the set of his cap slanting backward bonelessly from his scarred brow, and he marvelled briefly upon his own kind.

But this was soon lost in the mellow death of evening in a street between stone buildings, among lights, and Gilligan in his awkward khaki and the girl in her rough coat, holding each an arm of Donald Mahon, silhouetted against it in the doorway.

3

Mrs Powers lay in her bed aware of her long body beneath strange sheets, hearing the hushed night sounds of a hotel—muffled footfalls along mute carpeted corridors, discreet opening and shutting of doors, somewhere a murmurous pulse of machinery—all with that strange propensity which sounds, anywhere else soothing, have, when heard in a hotel, for keeping you awake. Her mind and body warming to the old familiarity of sleep became empty, then as she settled her body to the bed, shaping it for slumber, it filled with a remembered troubling sadness.

She thought of her husband youngly dead in France in a recurrence of fretful exasperation with having been tricked by a wanton Fate: a joke amusing to no one. Just when she had calmly decided that they had taken advantage of a universal hysteria for the purpose of getting of each other a brief ecstasy, just when she had decided calmly that they were better quit of each other with nothing to mar the memory of their three days together and had written him so, wishing him luck, she must be notified casually and impersonally that he had been killed in action. So casually, so impersonally; as if Richard Powers, with whom she had spent three days, were one man and Richard Powers commanding a platoon in the —— Division were another.

And she being young must again know all the terror of parting, of that passionate desire to cling to something concrete in a dark world, in spite of war departments. He had not even got her letter! This in some way seemed the infidelity: having him die still believing in her, bored though they both probably were.

She turned feeling sheets like water, warming by her bodily heat, upon her legs.

Oh, damn, damn. What a rotten trick you played on me. She recalled those nights during which they had tried to eradicate tomorrows from the world. Two rotten tricks, she thought. Anyway, I know what I’ll do with the insurance, she added, wondering what Dick thought about it—if he did know or care.

Her shoulder rounded upward, into her vision, the indication of her covered turning body swelled and died away towards the foot of the bed: she lay staring down the tunnel of her room, watching the impalpable angles of furniture, feeling through plastered smug walls a rumour of spring outside. The airshaft was filled with a prophecy of April come again into the world. Like a heedless idiot into a world that had forgotten spring. The white connecting door took the vague indication of a transom and held it in a mute and luminous plane, and obeying an impulse she rose and slipped on a dressing-gown.

The door opened quietly under her hand. The room, like hers, was a suggestion of furniture, identically vague. She could hear Mahon’s breathing and she found a light switch with her fingers. Under his scarred brow he slept, the light full and sudden on his closed eyes did not disturb him. And she knew in an instinctive flash what was wrong with him, why his motions were hesitating, ineffectual.

He’s going blind, she said, bending over him. He slept and after a while there were sounds without the door. She straightened up swiftly and the noises ceased. Then the door opened to a blundering key and Gilligan entered supporting Cadet Lowe, glassy-eyed and quite drunk.

Gilligan, standing his lax companion upright, said:

‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’

Lowe muttered wetly and Gilligan continued:

‘Look at this lonely mariner I got here. Sail on, O proud and lonely,’ he told his attached and aimless burden. Cadet Lowe muttered again, not intelligible. His eyes were like two oysters.

‘Huh?’ asked Gilligan. ‘Come on, be a man: speak to the nice lady.’

Cadet Lowe repeated himself liquidly and she whispered: ‘Shhh: be quiet.’

‘Oh,’ said Gilligan with surprise, ‘Loot’s asleep, huh? What’s he want to sleep for, this time of day?’

Lowe with quenchless optimism essayed speech again and Gilligan, comprehending, said:

‘That’s what you want, is it? Why couldn’t you come out like a man and say it? Wants to go to bed, for some reason,’ he explained to Mrs Powers.

‘That’s where he belongs,’ she said; and Gilligan with alcoholic care led his companion to the other bed and with the exaggerated caution of the inebriate laid him upon it. Lowe drawing his knees up sighed and turn his back to them, but Gilligan dragging at his legs removed his puttees and shoes, taking each shoe in both hands and placing it on a table. She leaned against the foot of Mahon’s bed, fitting her long thigh to the hard rail, until he had finished.

At last Lowe, freed of his shoes, turned sighing to the wall and she said:

‘How drunk are you, Joe?’

‘Not very, ma’am. What’s wrong? Loot need something?’

Mahon slept and Cadet Lowe immediately slept.

‘I want to talk to you, Joe. About him,’ she added quickly, feeling Gilligan’s stare. ‘Can you listen or had you rather go to bed and talk it over in the morning?’

Gilligan, focusing his eyes, answered:

‘Why, now suits me. Always oblige a lady.’

Making her decision suddenly she said:

‘Come in my room then.’

‘Sure: lemme get my bottle and I’m your man.’

She returned to her room while he sought his bottle and when he joined her she was sitting on her bed, clasping her knees, wrapped in a blanket Gilligan drew up a chair.

‘Joe, do you know he’s going blind?’ she said abruptly.

After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:

‘I know more than that. He’s going to die.’

‘Die?’

‘Yes, ma’am. If I ever seen death in a man’s face, it’s in his. Goddam this world,’ he burst out suddenly.

‘Shhh!’ she whispered.

‘That’s right, I forgot,’ he said swiftly.

She clasped her knees, huddled beneath the blanket, changing the position of her body as it became cramped, feeling the wooden head board of the bed, wondering why there were not iron beds, wondering why everything was as it was—iron beds, why you deliberately took certain people to break your intimacy, why these people died, why you yet took others. . . . Will my death be like this: fretting and exasperating? Am I cold by nature, or have I spent all my emotional coppers, that I don’t seem to feel things like others? Dick, Dick. Ugly and dead.

Gilligan sat brittlely in his chair, focusing his eyes with an effort, having those instruments of vision evade him, slimy as broken eggs. Lights completing a circle, an orbit; she with two faces sitting on two beds, clasping four arms around her knees. . . . Why can’t a man be very happy or very unhappy? It’s only a sort of pale mixture of the two. Like beer when you want a shot—or a drink of water. Neither one nor the other.

She moved and drew the blanket closer about her. Spring in an airshaft, the rumour of spring; but in the room steam heat suggested winter, dying away.

‘Let’s have a drink, Joe.’

He rose careful and brittle, and walking with meticulous deliberation he fetched a carafe and glasses. She drew a small table near them and Gilligan prepared two drinks. She drank and set the glass down. He lit a cigarette for her.

‘It’s a rotten old world, Joe.’

‘You damn right. And dying ain’t the hair of it.’

‘Dying?’

‘In this case, I mean. Trouble is, he probably won’t die soon enough.’

‘Not die soon enough?’

Gilligan drained his glass. ‘I got the low down on him, see. He’s got a girl at home: folks got ’em engaged when they was young, before he went off to war. And do you know what she’s going to do when she sees his face?’ he asked, staring at her. At last her two faces became one face and her hair was black. Her mouth was like a scar.

‘Oh, no, Joe. She wouldn’t do that.’ She sat up. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and she replaced it, watching him intently.

Gilligan breaking the orbit of visible things by an effort of will said:

‘Don’t you kid yourself. I’ve seen her picture. And the last letter he had from her.’

‘He didn’t show them to you!’ she said quickly.

‘That’s all right about that. I seen ’em.’

‘Joe. You didn’t go through his things?’

‘Hell, ma’am, ain’t I and you trying to help him? Suppose I did do something that ain’t exactly according to holy Hoyle: you know damn well that I can help him—if I don’t let a whole lot of don’ts stop me. And if I know I’m right there ain’t any don’ts or anything else going to stop me.’

She looked at him and he hurried on:

‘I mean, you and I know what to do for him, but if you are always letting a gentleman don’t do this and a gentleman don’t do that interfere, you can’t help him. Do you see?’

‘But what makes you so sure she will turn him down?’

‘Why, I tell you I seen that letter: all the old bunk about knights of the air and the romance of battle, that even the fat crying ones outgrow soon as the excitement is over and uniforms and being wounded ain’t only not stylish no more, but it is troublesome.’

‘But aren’t you taking a lot for granted, not to have seen her, even?’

‘I’ve seen that photograph: one of them flighty-looking pretty ones with lots of hair. Just the sort would have got herself engaged to him.’

‘How do you know it is still on? Perhaps she has forgotten him. And he probably doesn’t remember her, you know.’

‘That ain’t it. If he don’t remember her he’s all right. But if he will know his folks he will want to believe that something in his world ain’t turned upside down.’

They were silent a while, then Gilligan said: ‘I wish I could have knowed him before. He’s the kind of a son I would have liked to have.’ He finished his drink.

‘Joe, how old are you?’

‘Thirty-two, ma’am.’

‘How did you ever learn so much about us?’ she asked with interest, watching him.

He grinned briefly. ‘It ain’t knowing, it’s just saying things. I think I done it through practice. By talking so much,’ he replied with sardonic humour. ‘I talk so much I got to say the right thing sooner or later. You don’t talk much, yourself.’

‘Not much,’ she agreed. She moved carelessly and the blanket slipped entirely, exposing her thin nightdress; raising her arms and twisting her body to replace it her long shank was revealed and her turning ankle and her bare foot.

Gilligan without moving said: ‘Ma’am, let’s get married.’

She huddled quickly in the blanket again, already knowing a faint disgust with herself.

‘Bless your heart, Joe. Don’t you know my name is Mrs?’

‘Sure. And I know, too, you ain’t got any husband. I dunno where he is or what you done with him, but you ain’t got a husband now.’

‘Goodness, I’m beginning to be afraid of you: you know too much. You are right: my husband was killed last year.’

Gilligan looking at her said: ‘Rotten luck.’ And she, tasting again a faint, warm sorrow, bowed her head to her arched clasped knees.

‘Rotten luck. That’s exactly what it was, what everything is. Even sorrow is a fake, now.’ She raised her face, her pallid face beneath her black hair, scarred with her mouth. ‘Joe, that was the only sincere word of condolence I ever had. Come here.’

Gilligan went to her and she took his hand, holding it against her cheek. Then she removed it, shaking back her hair.

‘You are a good fellow, Joe. If I felt like marrying anybody now, I’d take you. I’m sorry I played that trick, Joe.’

‘Trick?’ repeated Gilligan, gazing upon her black hair. Then he said Oh, non-committally.

‘But we haven’t decided what to do with that poor boy in there,’ she said with brisk energy, clasping her blanket. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you sleepy?’

‘Not me,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think I ever want to sleep again.’

‘Neither do I.’ She moved across the bed, propping her back against the head board. ‘Lie down here and let’s decide on something.’

‘Sure,’ agreed Gilligan. ‘I better take off my shoes, first. Ruin the hotel’s bed.’

‘To hell with the hotel’s bed,’ she told him. ‘Put your feet on it.’

Gilligan lay down, shielding his eyes with his hand. After a time she said:

‘Well, what’s to be done?’

‘We got to get him home first,’ Gilligan said. ‘I’ll wire his folks tomorrow—his old man is a preacher, see. But it’s that damn girl bothers me. He sure ought to be let die in peace. But what else to do I don’t know. I know about some things,’ he explained, ‘but after all women can guess and be nearer right than whatever I could decide on.’

‘I don’t think anyone could do much more than you. I’d put my money on you every time.’

He moved, shading his eyes again. ‘I dunno: I am good so far, but then you got to have more’n just sense. Say, why don’t you come with the general and me?’

‘I intend to, Joe.’ Her voice came from beyond his shielding hand. ‘I think I intended to all the time.’

(She is in love with him.) But he only said:

‘Good for you. But I knowed you’d do the right thing. All right with your people is it?’

‘Yes. But what about money?’

‘Money?’

‘Well . . . for what he might need. You know. He might get sick anywhere.’

‘Lord, I cleaned up in a poker game and I ain’t had time to spend it. Money’s all right. That ain’t any question,’ he said roughly.

‘Yes, money’s all right. You know I have my husband’s insurance.’

He lay silent, shielding his eyes. His khaki legs marring the bed ended in clumsy shoes. She nursed her knees, huddling in her blanket. After a space she said:

‘Sleep, Joe?’

‘It’s a funny world, ain’t it?’ he asked irrelevantly, not moving.

‘Funny?’

‘Sure. Soldier dies and leaves you money, and you spend the money helping another soldier die comfortable. Ain’t that funny?’

‘I suppose so. . . . Everything is funny. Horribly funny.’

‘Anyway, it’s nice to have it all fixed,’ he said after a while. ‘He’ll be glad you are coming along.’

(Dear dead Dick.) (Mahon under his scar, sleeping.) (Dick, my dearest one.)

She felt the head board against her head, through her hair, felt the bones of her long shanks against her arms clasping them, nursing them, saw the smug, impersonal room like an appointed tomb (in which how many, many discontents, desires, passions, had died?) high above a world of joy and sorrow and lust for living, high above impervious trees occupied solely with maternity and spring. (Dick, Dick. Dead, ugly Dick. Once you were alive and young and passionate and ugly, after a time you were dead, dear Dick: that flesh, that body, which I loved and did not love; your beautiful, young, ugly body, dear Dick, become now a seething of worms, like new milk. Dear Dick.)

Gilligan, Joseph, late a private, a democrat by enlistment and numbered like a convict, slept beside her, his boots (given him gratis by democrats of a higher rating among democrats) innocent and awkward upon a white spread of rented cloth, immaculate and impersonal.

She invaded her blanket and reaching her arm swept the room with darkness. She slipped beneath the covers, settling her cheek on her palm. Gilligan undisturbed snored, filling the room with a homely, comforting sound.

(Dick, dear, ugly dead. . . .)

4

In the next room Cadet Lowe waked from a chaotic dream, opening his eyes and staring with detachment, impersonal as God, at lights burning about him. After a time, he recalled his body, remembering where he was, and by an effort he turned his head. In the other bed the man slept beneath his terrible face. (I am Julian Lowe, I eat, I digest, evacuate: I have flown. This man . . . this man here, sleeping beneath his scar. . . . Where do we touch? Oh, God, oh, God: knowing his own body, his stomach.)

Raising his hand he felt his own undamaged brow. No scar there. Near him upon a chair was his hat severed by a white band, upon the table the other man’s cap with its cloth crown sloping backward from a bronze initialed crest.

He tasted his sour mouth, knowing his troubled stomach. To have been him! he moaned. Just to be him. Let him take this sound body of mine! Let him take it. To have got wings on my breast, to have wings; and to have got his scar, too, I would take death tomorrow. Upon a chair Mahon’s tunic evinced above the left breast pocket wings breaking from an initialled circle beneath a crown, tipping downward in an arrested embroidered sweep; a symbolized desire.

To be him, to have gotten wings, but to have got his scar too! Cadet Lowe turned to the wall with passionate disappointment like a gnawing fox at his vitals. Slobbering and moaning Cadet Lowe, too, dreamed again, sleeping.

5

ACHILLES: What preparation would you make for a cross-country flight, Cadet?
MERCURY: Empty your bladder and fill your petrol tank, Sir.
ACHILLES: Carry on, Cadet.
Old Play (about 19——?)

Cadet Lowe, waking, remarked morning, and Gilligan entering the room, dressed. Gilligan looking at him said:

‘How you coming, ace?’

Mahon yet slept beneath his scar, upon a chair his tunic. Above the left pocket, wings swept silkenly, breaking downward above a ribbon. White, purple, white.

‘Oh, God,’ Lowe groaned.

Gilligan with the assurance of physical well-being stood in brisk arrested motion.

‘As you were, fellow. I’m going out and have some breakfast sent up. You stay here until Loot wakes, huh?’

Cadet Lowe tasting his sour mouth groaned again. Gilligan regarded him. ‘Oh, you’ll stay all right, won’t you? I’ll be back soon.’

The door closed after him and Lowe, thinking of water, rose and took his wavering way across the room to a water pitcher. Carafe. Like giraffe or like café? he wondered. The water was good, but lowering the vessel he felt immediately sick. After a while he recaptured the bed.

He dozed, forgetting his stomach, and remembering it he dreamed and waked. He could feel his head like a dull inflation, then he could distinguish the foot of his bed and thinking again of water he turned on a pillow and saw another identical bed and the suave indication of a dressing-gown motionless beside it. Leaning over Mahon’s scarred supineness, she said: ‘Don’t get up.’

Lowe said, I won’t, closing his eyes, tasting his mouth, seeing her long slim body against his red eyelids, opening his eyes to light and her thigh shaped and falling away into an impersonal fabric. With an effort he might have seen her ankles. Her feet will be there, he thought, unable to accomplish the effort and behind his closed eyes he thought of saying something which would leave his mouth on hers. Oh, God, he thought, feeling that no one had been so sick, imagining that she would say I love you, too. If I had wings, and a scar. . . . To hell with officers, he thought, sleeping again:

To hell with kee-wees, anyway. I wouldn’t be a goddam kee-wee. Rather be a sergeant. Rather be a mechanic. Crack up, Cadet. Hell, yes, Why not? War’s over. Glad. Glad. Oh, God. His scar: his wings. Last time.

He was briefly in a Jenny again, conscious of lubricating oil and a slow gracious restraint of braced plane surfaces, feeling an air blast and feeling the stick in his hand, watching bobbing rocker arms on the horizon, laying her nose on the horizon like a sighted rifle. Christ, what do I care? seeing her nose rise until the horizon was hidden, seeing the arc of a descending wing expose it again, seeing her become abruptly stationary while a mad world spinning vortexed about his seat. ‘Sure, what do you care?’ asked a voice and waking he saw Gilligan beside him with a glass of whisky.

‘Drink her down, General,’ said Gilligan, holding the glass under his nose.

‘Oh, God, move it, move it.’

‘Come on, now; drink her down: you’ll feel better. The Loot is up and at ’em, and Mrs Powers. Whatcher get so drunk for, ace?’

‘Oh, God, I don’t know,’ answered Cadet Lowe, rolling his head in anguish. ‘Lemme alone.’

Gilligan said: ‘Come on, drink her, now.’ Cadet Lowe said, Go away passionately.

‘Lemme alone; I’ll be all right.’

‘Sure you will. Soon as you drink this.’

‘I can’t. Go away.’

‘You got to. You want I should break your neck?’ asked Gilligan kindly, bringing his face up, kind and ruthless. Lowe eluded him and Gilligan reaching under his body, raised him.

‘Lemme lie down,’ Lowe implored.

‘And stay here forever? We got to go somewheres. We can’t stay here.’

‘But I can’t drink.’ Cadet Lowe’s interior coiled passionately: an ecstasy. ‘For God’s sake, let me alone.’

‘Ace,’ said Gilligan, holding his head up, ‘you got to. You might just as well drink this yourself. If you don’t, I’ll put it down your throat, glass and all. Here, now.’

The glass was between his lips, so he drank, gulping, expecting to gag. But gulping, the stuff became immediately pleasant. It was like new life in him. He felt a kind sweat and Gilligan removed the empty glass. Mahon, dressed except for his belt, sat beside a table. Gilligan vanished through a door and he rose, feeling shaky but quite fit. He took another drink. Water thundered in the bathroom and Gilligan returning said briskly: ‘Atta boy.’

He pushed Lowe into the bathroom. ‘In you go, ace,’ he added.

Feeling the sweet bright needles of water burning his shoulders, watching his body slipping an endless silver sheath of water, smelling soap: beyond that was her room, where she was, tall and red and white and black, beautiful. I’ll tell her at once, he decided, sawing his hard young body with a rough towel. Glowing, he brushed his teeth and hair, then he had another drink under Mahon’s quiet inverted stare and Gilligan’s quizzical one. He dressed, hearing her moving in her room. Maybe she’s thinking of me, he told himself, swiftly donning his khaki.

He caught the officer’s kind, puzzled gaze and the man said:

‘How are you?’

‘Never felt better after my solo,’ he answered, wanting to sing. ‘Say, I left my hat in her room last night,’ he told Gilligan. ‘Guess I better get it.’

Here’s your hat,’ Gilligan informed him unkindly, producing it.

‘Well, then, I want to talk to her. Whatcher going to say about that?’ asked Cadet Lowe, swept and garnished and belligerent.

‘Why, sure, General,’ Gilligan agreed readily. ‘She can’t refuse one of the saviours of her country.’ He knocked on her door. ‘Mrs Powers?’

‘Yes?’ her voice was muffled.

‘General Pershing here wants to talk to you. . . . Sure. . . . All right.’ He turned about, opening the door. ‘In you go, ace.’

Lowe, hating him, ignored his wink, entering. She sat in bed with a breakfast tray upon her knees. She was not dressed and Lowe looked delicately away. But she said blandly:

‘Cheerio, Cadet! How looks the air today?’

She indicated a chair and he drew it up to the bed, being so careful not to seem to stare that his carriage became noticeable. She looked at him quickly and kindly and offered him coffee. Courageous with whisky on an empty stomach he knew hunger suddenly. He took the cup.

‘Good morning,’ he said with belated courtesy, trying to be more than nineteen. (Why is nineteen ashamed of its age?) She treats me like a child, he thought, fretted and gaining courage, watching with increasing boldness her indicated shoulders and wondering with interest if she had stockings on.

Why didn’t I say something as I came in? Something easy and intimate? Listen, when I first saw you my love for you was like—my love was like—my love for you—God, if I only hadn’t drunk so much last night I could say it my love for you my love is love is like . . . and found himself watching her arms as she moved and her loose sleeves fell away from them, saying, yes, he was glad the war was over and telling her that he had forty-seven hours’ flying time and would have got wings in two weeks more and that his mother in San Francisco was expecting him.

She treats me like a child, he thought with exasperation, seeing the slope of her shoulders and the place where her breast was.

‘How black your hair is,’ he said, and she said:

‘Lowe, when are you going home?’

‘I don’t know. Why should I go home? I think I’ll have to look at the country first.’

‘But your mother!’ She glanced at him.

‘Oh, well,’ he said largely, ‘you know what women are—always worrying you.’

‘Lowe! How do you know so much about things? Women? You—aren’t married, are you?’

‘Me married?’ repeated Lowe with ungrammatical zest, ‘me married? Not so’s you know it. I have lots of girls, but married?’ he brayed with brief unnecessary vigour. ‘What made you think so?’ he asked with interest.

‘Oh, I don’t know. You look so— so mature, you see.’

‘Ah, that’s flying does that. Look at him in there.’

‘Is that it? I had noticed something about you. . . . You would have been an ace, too, if you’d seen any Germans, wouldn’t you?’

He glanced at her quickly, like a struck dog. Here was his old dull despair again.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with quick sincerity. ‘I didn’t think: of course you would. Anyway, it wasn’t your fault. You did your best, I know.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said, hurt, ‘what do you women want, anyway? I am as good a flyer as any ever was at the front—flying or any other way.’ He sat morose under her eyes. He rose suddenly. ‘Say, what’s your name, anyway?’

‘Margaret,’ she told him. He approached the bed where she sat and she said: ‘More coffee?’ stopping him dead. ‘You’ve forgotten your cup. There it is, on the table.’

Before he thought he had returned and fetched his cup, received coffee he did not want. He felt like a fool and being young he resented it. All right for you, he promised her and sat again in a dull rage. To hell with them all.

‘I have offended you, haven’t I?’ she asked. ‘But, Lowe, I feel so bad, and you were about to make love to me.’

‘Why do you think that?’ he asked, hurt and dull.

‘Oh, I don’t know. But women can tell. And I don’t want to be made love to. Gilligan has already done that.’

‘Gilligan? Why, I’ll kill him if he has annoyed you.’

‘No, no: he didn’t offend me, any more than you did. It was flattering. But why were you going to make love to me? You thought of it before you came in, didn’t you?’

Lowe told her youngly: ‘I thought of it on the train when I first saw you. When I saw you I knew you were the woman for me. Tell me, you don’t like him better than me because he has wings and a scar, do you?’

‘Why, of course not.’ She looked at him a moment, calculating. Then she said: ‘Mr Gilligan says he is dying.’

‘Dying?’ he repeated and ‘Dying?’ How the man managed to circumvent him at every turn! As if it were not enough to have wings and a scar. But to die.

‘Margaret,’ he said with such despair that she gazed at him in swift pity. (He was so young.) ‘Margaret, are you in love with him?’ (Knowing that if he were a woman, he would be.)

‘No, certainly not. I am not in love with anybody. My husband was killed on the Aisne, you see,’ she told him gently.

‘Oh, Margaret,’ he said with bitter sincerity, ‘I would have been killed there if I could, or wounded like him, don’t you know it?’

‘Of course, darling.’ She put the tray aside. ‘Come here.’

Cadet Lowe rose again and went to her. ‘I would have been, if I’d had a chance,’ he repeated.

She drew him down beside her, and he knew he was acting the child she supposed him to be, but he couldn’t help it. His disappointment and despair were more than everything now. Here were her knees sweetly under her face, and he put his arms around her legs.

‘I wanted to be,’ he confessed more than he had ever believed. ‘I would take his scar and all.’

‘And be dead, like he is going to be?’

But what was death to Cadet Lowe, except something true and grand and sad? He saw a tomb, open, and himself in boots and belt, and pilot’s wings on his breast, a wound stripe. . . . What more could one ask of Fate?

‘Yes, yes,’ he answered.

‘Why, you have flown, too,’ she told him, holding his face against her knees, ‘you might have been him, but you were lucky. Perhaps you would have flown too well to have been shot down as he was. Had you thought of that?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I would let them catch me, if I could have been him. You are in love with him.’

‘I swear I am not.’ She raised his head to see his face. ‘I would tell you if I were. Don’t you believe me?’ her eyes were compelling: he believed her.

‘Then, if you aren’t, can’t you promise to wait for me? I will be older soon and I’ll work like hell and make money.’

‘What will your mother say?’

‘Hell, I don’t have to mind her like a kid forever. I am nineteen, as old as you are, and if she don’t like it, she can go to hell.’

‘Lowe!’ she reproved him, not telling him she was twenty-four, ‘the idea! You go home and tell your mother—I will give you a note to her—and you can write what she says.’

‘But I had rather go with you.’

‘But, dear heart, what good will that do? We are going to take him home, and he is sick. Don’t you see, darling, we can’t do anything until we get him settled, and that you would only be in the way?’

‘In the way?’ he repeated with sharp pain.

‘You know what I mean. We can’t have anything to think about until we get him home, don’t you see?’

‘But you aren’t in love with him?’

‘I swear I’m not. Does that satisfy you?’

‘Then, are you in love with me?’

She drew his face against her knees again. ‘You sweet child,’ she said; ‘of course I won’t tell you—yet.’

And he had to be satisfied with this. They held each other in silence for a time. ‘How good you smell,’ remarked Cadet Lowe at last.

She moved. ‘Come up here by me,’ she commanded, and when he was beside her she took his face in her hands and kissed him. He put his arms around her, and she drew his head between her breasts. After a while she stroked his hair and spoke.

‘Now, are you going home at once?’

‘Must I?’ he asked vacuously.

‘You must,’ she answered. ‘Today. Wire her at once. And I will give you a note to her.’

‘Oh, hell, you know what she’ll say.’

‘Of course I do. You haven’t any sisters and brothers, have you?’

‘No,’ he said in surprise. She moved and he sensed the fact that she desired to be released. He sat up. ‘How did you know?’ he asked in surprise.

‘I just guessed. But you will go, won’t you? Promise.’

‘Well, I will, then. But I will come back to you.’

‘Of course you will. I will expect you. Kiss me.’

She offered her face coolly and he kissed her as she wished: coldly, remotely. She put her hands on his cheeks. ‘Dear boy,’ she said, kissing him again, as his mother kissed him.

‘Say, that’s no way for engaged people to kiss,’ he objected.

‘How do engaged people kiss?’ she asked. He put his arms around her, feeling her shoulder-blades, and drew her mouth against his with the technique he had learned. She suffered his kiss a moment, then thrust him away.

‘Is that how engaged people kiss?’ she asked, laughing. ‘I like this better.’ She took his face in her palms and touched his mouth briefly and coolly. ‘Now swear you’ll wire your mother at once.’

‘But will you write to me?’

‘Surely. But swear you will go today, in spite of what Gilligan may tell you.’

‘I swear,’ he answered, looking at her mouth. ‘Can’t I kiss you again?’

‘When we are married,’ she said, and he knew he was being dismissed. Thinking, knowing, that she was watching him, he crossed the room with an air, not looking back.

Here were yet Gilligan and the officer. Mahon said:

‘Morning, old chap.’

Gilligan looked at Lowe’s belligerent front from a quizzical reserve of sardonic amusement.

‘Made a conquest, hey, ace?’

‘Go to hell,’ replied Lowe. ‘Where’s that bottle? I’m going home today.’

‘Here she is, General. Drink deep. Going home?’ he repeated. ‘So are we, hey, Loot?’

/>

CHAPTER TWO (56-94)

1

JONES, JANUARIUS JONES, born of whom he knew and cared not, becoming Jones alphabetically, January through a conjunction of calendar and biology, Januarius through the perverse conjunction of his own star and the compulsion of food and clothing—Januarius Jones baggy in grey tweed, being lately a fellow of Latin in a small college, leaned upon a gate of iron grill-work breaking a levee of green and embryonically starred honeysuckle, watching April busy in a hyacinth bed. Dew was on the grass and bees broke apple bloom in the morning sun while swallows were like plucked strings against a pale windy sky. A face regarded him across a suspended trowel and the metal clasps of crossed suspenders made a cheerful glittering.

The rector said: ‘Good morning, young man.’ His shining dome was friendly against an ivy-covered wall above which the consummate grace of a spire and a gilded cross seemed to arc across motionless young clouds.

Januarius Jones, caught in the spire’s illusion of slow ruin, murmured: ‘Watch it fall, sir.’ The sun was full on his young round face.

The horticulturist regarded him with benevolent curiosity. ‘Fall? Ah, you see an aeroplane,’ he stated. ‘My son was in that service during the war.’ He became gigantic in black trousers and broken shoes. ‘A beautiful day for flying,’ he said from beneath his cupped hand. ‘Where do you see it?’

plane

‘No, sir,’ replied Jones, ‘no aeroplane, sir. I referred in a fit of unpardonable detachment to your spire. It was ever my childish delight to stand beneath a spire while clouds are moving overhead. The illusion of slow falling is perfect. Have you ever experienced this, sir?’

‘To be sure I have, though it has been— let me see— more years than I care to remember. But one of my cloth is prone to allow his soul to atrophy in his zeal for the welfare of other souls that—’

‘—that not only do not deserve salvation, but that do not particularly desire it,’ finished Jones.

The rector promptly rebuked him. Sparrows were delirious in ivy and the rambling façade of the rectory was a dream in jonquils and clipped sward. There should be children here, thought Jones. He said:

‘I must humbly beg your pardon for my flippancy, Doctor. I assure you that I—ah—took advantage of the situation without any ulterior motive whatever.’

‘I understand that, dear boy. My rebuke was tendered in the same spirit. There are certain conventions which we must observe in this world; one of them being an outward deference to that cloth which I unworthily, perhaps, wear. And I have found this particularly incumbent upon us of the—what shall I say—?’

‘Integer vitae scelerisque purus
non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu
nec venenatis gravida sagittis,
Fusce, pharetra—’

began Jones. The rector chimed in:
‘—sive per Syrtis iter aestuosas
sive facturus per inhospitalem
Causasum vel quae loca fabulosus
lambit Hydaspes,’

they concluded in galloping duet and stood in the ensuing silence regarding each other with genial enthusiasm.

‘But come, come,’ cried the rector. His eyes were pleasant. ‘Shall I let the stranger languish without my gates?’ The grilled iron swung open and his earthy hand was heavy on Jones’s shoulder. ‘Come let us try the spire.’

The grass was good. A myriad bees vacillated between clover and apple bloom, apple bloom and clover, and from the Gothic mass of the church the spire rose, a prayer imperishable in bronze, immaculate in its illusion of slow ruin across motionless young clouds.

‘My one sincere parishioner,’ murmured the divine. Sunlight was a windy golden plume about his bald head, and Januarius Jones’s face was a round mirror before which fauns and nymphs might have wantoned when the world was young.

‘Parishioner, did I say? It is more than that: it is by such as this that man may approach nearest to God. And how few will believe this! How few, how few!’ He stared unblinking into the sun-filled sky: drowned in his eyes was a despair long since grown cool and quiet.

‘That is very true, sir. But we of this age believe that he who may be approached informally, without the intercession of an office-boy of some sort, is not worth the approaching. We purchase our salvation as we do our real estate. Our God,’ continued Jones, ‘need not be compassionate, he need not be very intelligent. But he must have dignity.’

The rector raised his great dirty hand. ‘No, no. You do them injustice. But who has ever found justice in youth, or any of those tiresome virtues with which we coddle and cradle our hardening arteries and souls? Only the ageing need conventions and laws to aggregate to themselves some of the beauty of this world. Without laws the young would reave us of it as corsairs of old combed the blue seas.’

The rector was silent a while. The intermittent shadows of young leaves were bird cries made visible and sparrows in ivy were flecks of sunlight become vocal. The rector continued:

‘Had I the arranging of this world I should establish a certain point, say at about the age of thirty, upon reaching which a man would be automatically relegated to a plane where his mind would no longer be troubled with the futile recollection of temptations he had resisted and of beauty he had failed to garner to himself. It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.’

Jones, wondering what temptations he had ever resisted and then recalling the women he might have seduced and hadn’t, said: ‘And then what? What would the people who have been unlucky enough to reach thirty do?’

‘On this plane there would be no troubling physical things such as sunlight and space and birds in the trees—but only unimportant things such as physical comfort: eating and sleeping and procreation.’

What more could you want? thought Jones. Here was a swell place. A man could very well spend all his time eating and sleeping and procreating, Jones believed. He rather wished the rector (or anyone who could imagine a world consisting solely of food and sleep and women) had had the creating of things and that he, Jones, could be forever thirty-one years of age. The rector, though, seemed to hold different opinions.

‘What would they do to pass the time?’ asked Jones for the sake of argument, wondering what the others would do to pass the time, what with eating and sleeping and fornication taken from them.

‘Half of them would manufacture objects and another portion would coin gold and silver with which to purchase these objects. Of course, there would be storage places for the coins and objects, thus providing employment for some of the people. Others naturally would have to till the soil.’

‘But how would you finally dispose of the coins and objects? After a while you would have a single vast museum and a bank, both filled with useless and unnecessary things. And that is already the curse of our civilization—Things, Possessions, to which we are slaves, which require us to either labour honestly at least eight hours a day or do something illegal so as to keep them painted or dressed in the latest mode or filled with whisky or gasoline.’

‘Quite true. And this would remind us too sorely of the world as it is. Needless to say, I have provided for both of these contingencies. The coins might be reduced again to bullion and coined over, and’—the reverend man looked at Jones in ecstasy—‘the housewives could use the objects for fuel with which to cook food.’

Old fool, thought Jones, saying: ‘Marvellous, magnificent! You are a man after my own heart, Doctor.’

The rector regarded Jones kindly. ‘Ah, boy, there is nothing after youth’s own heart: youth has no heart.’

‘But, Doctor. This borders on borders upon lese-majesty. I thought we had declared a truce regarding each other’s cloth.’

Shadows moved as the sun moved, a branch dappled the rector’s brow: a laurelled Jove.

‘What is your cloth?’

road

‘Why—’ began Jones.

‘It is the diaper still, dear boy. But forgive me,’ he added quickly on seeing Jones’s face. His arm was heavy and solid as on oak branch across Jones’s shoulder. ‘Tell me, what do you consider the most admirable of virtues?’

Jones was placated. ‘Sincere arrogance,’ he returned promptly. The rector’s great laugh boomed like bells in the sunlight, sent the sparrows like gusty leaves whirling.

‘Shall we be friends once more, then? Come, I will make a concession: I will show you my flowers. You are young enough to appreciate them without feeling called upon to comment.’

The garden was worth seeing. An avenue of roses bordered a gravelled path which passed from sunlight beneath two overarching oaks. Beyond the oaks, against a wall of poplars in a restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim, vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would soon be lilies like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos. Upon a lattice wall wistaria would soon burn in slow inverted lilac flame, and following it they came lastly upon a single rose bush. The branches were huge and knotted with age, heavy and dark as a bronze pedestal, crowned with pale impermanent gold. The divine’s hands lingered upon it with soft passion.

‘Now, this,’ he said, ‘is my son and my daughter, the wife of my bosom and the bread of my belly: it is my right hand and my left hand. Many is the night I have stood beside it here after having moved the wrappings too soon, burning newspapers to keep the frost out. Once I recall I was in a neighbouring town attending a conference. The weather—it was March—had been most auspicious and I had removed the covering.

‘The tips were already swelling. Ah, my boy, no young man ever awaited the coming of his mistress with more impatience than do I await the first bloom on this bush. (Who was the old pagan who kept his Byzantine goblet at his bedside and slowly wore away the rim kissing it? there is an analogy.) . . . But what was I saying?—ah, yes. So I left the bush uncovered against my better judgement and repaired to the conference. The weather continued perfect until the last day, then the weather reports predicted a change. The bishop was to be present; I ascertained that I could not reach home by rail and return in time. At last I engaged a livery man to drive me home.

traindrivingdriver

‘The sky was becoming overcast, it was already turning colder. And then, three miles from home, we came upon a stream and found the bridge gone. After some shouting we attracted the attention of a man ploughing across the stream and he came over to us in a skiff. I engaged my driver to await me, was ferried across, walked home and covered my rose, walked back to the stream and returned in time. And that night’—the rector beamed upon Januarius Jones—‘snow fell!’

Jones fatly supine on gracious grass, his eyes closed against the sun, stuffing his pipe: ‘This rose has almost made history. You have had the bush for some time, have you not? One does become attached to things one has long known.’ Januarius Jones was not particularly interested in flowers.

‘I have a better reason than that. In this bush is imprisoned a part of my youth, as wine is imprisoned in a wine jar. But with this difference: my wine jar always renews itself.’

‘Oh,’ remarked Jones, despairing, ‘there is a story here, then.’

‘Yes, dear boy. Rather a long story. But you are not comfortable lying there.’

‘Whoever is completely comfortable,’ Jones rushed into the breach, ‘unless he be asleep? It is the fatigue caused by man’s inevitable contact with the earth which bears him, be he sitting, standing, or lying, which keeps his mind in a continual fret over futilities. If a man, if a single man, could be freed for a moment from the forces of gravity, concentrating his weight upon that point of his body which touches the earth, what would he not do? He would be a god, the lord of life, causing the high gods to tremble on their thrones: he would thunder at the very gates of infinity like a mailed knight. As it is, he must ever have behind his mind a dull wonder how anything composed of fire and air and water and omnipotence in equal parts can be so damn hard.’

‘That is true. Man cannot remain in one position long enough to really think. But about the rose bush—’

‘Regard the buzzard,’ interrupted Jones with enthusiasm, fighting for time, ‘supported by air alone: what dignity, what singleness of purpose! What cares he whether or not Smith is governor? What cares he that the sovereign people annually commission comparative strangers about whom nothing is known save that they have no inclination towards perspiration, to meddle with impunity in the affairs of the sovereign people?’

‘But, my dear boy, this borders on anarchism.’

‘Anarchism? Surely. The hand of Providence with money-changing blisters. That is anarchism.’

‘At least you admit the hand of Providence.’

‘I don’t know. Do I?’ Jones, his hat over his eyes and his pipe projecting beneath, heaved a box of matches from his jacket. He extracted one and scraped it on the box. It failed and he threw it weakly into a clump of violets. He tried another. He tried another. ‘Turn it around,’ murmured the rector. He did so and the match flared.

‘How do you find the hand of Providence here?’ he puffed around his pipe stem.

The rector gathered the dead matches from the clump of violets. ‘In this way: it enables man to rise and till the soil, so that he might eat. Would he, do you think, rise and labour if he could remain comfortably supine over long? Even that part of the body which the Creator designed for sitting on serves him only a short time, then it rebels, then it, too, gets his sullen bones up and hales them along. And there is no help for him save in sleep.’

‘But he cannot sleep for more than a possible third of his time,’ Jones pointed out. ‘And soon it will not even be a third of his time. The race is weakening, degenerating: we cannot stand nearly as much sleep as our comparatively recent (geologically speaking of course) forefathers could, not even as much as our more primitive contemporaries can. For we, the self-styled civilized peoples, are now exercised over our minds and our arteries instead of our stomachs and sex, as were our progenitors and some of our uncompelled contemporaries.’

‘Uncompelled?’

‘Socially, of course. Doe believes that Doe and Smith should and must do this or that because Smith believes that Smith and Doe should and must do this or that.’

‘Ah, yes.’ The divine again lifted his kind, unblinking eyes straight into the sun. Dew was off the grass and jonquils and narcissi were beginning to look drowsy, like girls after a ball. ‘It is drawing towards noon. Let us go in: I can offer you refreshment and lunch, if you are not engaged.’

Jones rose. ‘No, no. Thank you a thousand times. But I shan’t trouble you.’

The rector was hearty. ‘No trouble, no trouble at all. I am alone at present.’

Jones demurred. He had a passion for food, and an instinct. He had only to pass a house for his instinct to inform him whether or not the food would be good. Jones did not, gastronomically speaking, react favourably to the rector.

The divine, however, overrode him with hearty affability: the rector would not take No. He attached Jones to himself and they trod their shadows across the lawn, herding them beneath the subdued grace of a fanlight of dim-coloured glass lovely with lack of washing. After the immaculate naked morning, the interior of the hall vortexed with red fire. Jones, temporarily blind, stumbled violently over an object and the handle of a pail clasped his ankle passionately. The rector, bawling Emmy! dragged him, pail and all, erect: he thanked his lucky stars that he had not been attached to the floor as he rose a sodden Venus, disengaging the pail. His dangling feet touched the floor and he felt his trouser leg with despair, fretfully. He’s like a derrick, he thought with exasperation.

derrick

The rector bawled Emmy again. There was an alarmed response from the depths of the house and one in gingham brushed them. The divine’s great voice boomed like surf in the narrow confines, and opening a door upon a flood of light, he ushered the trickling Jones into his study.

‘I shall not apologize,’ the rector began, ‘for the meagreness of the accommodation which I offer you. I am alone at present, you see. But, then, we philosophers want bread for the belly and not for the palate, eh? Come in, come in.’

Jones despaired. A drenched trouser leg, and bread for the belly alone. And God only knew what this great lump of a divine meant by bread for the belly and no bread for the palate. Husks, probably. Regarding food, Jones was sybaritically rather than aesthetically inclined. Or even philosophically. He stood disconsolate, swinging his dripping leg.

‘My dear boy, you are soaking!’ exclaimed his host. ‘Come, off with your trousers.’

Jones protested weakly. ‘Emmy!’ roared the rector again.

‘All right, Uncle Joe. Soon’s I get this water up.’

‘Never mind the water right now. Run to my room and fetch me a pair of trousers.’

‘But the rug will be ruined!’

‘Not irreparably, I hope. We’ll take the risk. Fetch me the trousers. Now, dear boy, off with them. Emmy will dry them in the kitchen and then you will be right as rain.’

Jones surrendered in dull despair. He had truly fallen among moral thieves. The rector assailed him with ruthless kindness and the gingham-clad one reappeared at the door with a twin of the rector’s casual black nether coverings over her arm.

‘Emmy, this is Mr— I do not recall having heard your name— he will be with us at lunch. And, Emmy, see if Cecily wishes to come also.’

This virgin shrieked at the spectacle of Jones, ludicrous in his shirt and his fat pink legs and the trousers jerked solemn and lethargic into the room. ‘Jones,’ supplied Januarius Jones, faintly. Emmy, however, was gone.

‘Ah, yes, Mr Jones.’ The rector fell upon him anew, doing clumsy and intricate things with the waist and bottoms of the trousers, and Jones, decently if voluminously clad, stood like a sheep in a gale while the divine pawed him heavily.

‘Now,’ cried his host, ‘make yourself comfortable (even Jones found irony in this) while I find something that will quench thirst.’

The guest regained his composure in a tidy, shabby room. Upon a rag rug a desk bore a single white hyacinth in a handleless teacup, above a mantel cluttered with pipes and twists of paper hung a single photograph. There were books everywhere—on shelves, on window ledges, on the floor: Jones saw the Old Testament in Greek in several volumes, a depressing huge book on international law, Jane Austen and Les Contes Drolatiques in dog-eared amity: a mutual supporting caress. The rector re-entered with milk in a pitcher of blue glass and two mugs. From a drawer he extracted a bottle of Scotch whisky.

‘A sop to the powers,’ he said, leering at Jones with innocent depravity. ‘Old dog and new tricks, my boy. But your pardon: perhaps you do not like this combination?’

Jones’s morale rose balloon-like. ‘I will try any drink once,’ he said, like Jurgen.

‘Try it, anyway. If you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to employ your own formula.’

The beverage was more palatable than he would have thought. He sipped with relish. ‘Didn’t you mention a son, sir?’

‘That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.’ The rector rose and took the photograph down from above the mantel. He handed it to his guest. The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair, Jones saw a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes. Jones’s eyes were clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s.

‘There is death in his face,’ said Jones.

His host took the photograph and gazed at it. ‘There is always death in the faces of the young in spirit, the eternally young. Death for themselves or for others. And dishonour. But death, surely. And why not? why should death desire only those things which life no longer has use for? Who gathers the withered rose?’ The rector dreamed darkly in space for a while. After a time he added: ‘A companion sent back a few of his things.’ He propped the photograph upright on the desk and from a drawer he took a tin box. His great hand fumbled at the catch.

‘Let me, sir,’ offered Jones, knowing that it was useless to volunteer, that the rector probably did this every day. But the lid yielded as he spoke and the divine spread on the desk the sorry contents: a woman’s chemise, a cheap paper-covered ‘Shropshire Lad’, a mummied hyacinth bulb. The rector picked up the bulb and it crumbled to dust in his hand.

‘Tut, tut! How careless of me!’ he ejaculated, sweeping the dust carefully into an envelope. ‘I have often deplored the size of my hands. They should have been given to someone who could use them for something other than thumbing books or grubbing in flower beds. Donald’s hands, on the contrary, were quite small, like his mother’s: he was quite deft with his hands. What a surgeon he would have made.’

He placed the things upon the desk, before the propped photograph like a ritual, and propping his face in his earthy bands he took his ruined dream of his son into himself as one inhales tobacco smoke.

‘Truly there is life and death and dishonour in his face. Had you noticed Emmy? Years ago, about the time this picture was made. . . . But that is an old story. Even Emmy has probably forgotten it. . . . You will notice that he has neither coat nor cravat. How often has he appeared after his mother had seen him decently arrayed, on the street, in church, at formal gatherings, carrying hat, coat, and collar in his hands. How often have I heard him say “Because it is too hot.” Education in the bookish sense he had not: the schooling he got was because he wanted to go, the reading he did was because he wanted to read. Least of all did I teach him fortitude. What is fortitude? Emotional atrophy, gangrene. . . .’ He raised his face and looked at Jones. ‘What do you think? was I right? Or should I have made my son conform to a type?’

‘Conform that face to a type? (So Emmy has already been dishonoured, once, anyway.) How could you? (I owe that dishonoured one a grudge, too.) Could you put a faun into formal clothes?’

The rector sighed. ‘Ah, Mr Jones, who can say?’ He slowly replaced the things in the tin box and sat clasping the box between his hands. ‘As I grow older, Mr Jones, I become more firmly convinced that we learn scarcely anything as we go through this world, and that we learn nothing whatever which can ever help us or be of any particular benefit to us, even. However! . . .’ He sighed again, heavily.

2

Emmy, the dishonoured virgin, appeared, saying: ‘What do you want for dinner, Uncle Joe? Ice-cream or strawberry shortcake?’ Blushing, she avoided Jones’s eye.

The rector looked at his guest, yearning. ‘What would you like, Mr Jones? But I know how young people are about ice-cream. Would you prefer ice-cream?’

But Jones was a tactful man in his generation and knowing about food himself he had an uncanny skill in anticipating other people’s reactions to food. ‘If it is the same to you, Doctor, let it be shortcake.’

‘Shortcake, Emmy,’ the rector instructed with passion. Emmy withdrew. ‘Do you know,’ he continued with apologetic gratitude, ‘do you know, when a man becomes old, when instead of using his stomach, his stomach uses him, as his other physical compulsions become weaker and decline, his predilections towards the food he likes obtrude themselves.’

‘Not at all, sir,’ Jones assured him. ‘I personally prefer a warm dessert to an ice.’

‘Then you must return when there are peaches. I will give you a peach cobbler, with butter and cream. . . . But ah, my stomach has attained a sad ascendency over me.’

‘Why shouldn’t it, sir? Years reave us of sexual compulsions: why shouldn’t they fill the interval with compulsions of food?’

The rector regarded him kindly and piercingly. ‘You are becoming specious. Man’s life need not be always filled with compulsions of either sex or food, need it?’

But here came quick tapping feet down the uncarpeted hall and she entered, saying: ‘Good morning, Uncle Joe,’ in her throaty voice, crossing the room with graceful effusion, not seeing Jones at once. Then she remarked him and paused like a bird in mid flight, briefly. Jones rose and under his eyes she walked mincing and graceful, theatrical with body-consciousness to the desk. She bent sweetly as a young tree and the divine kissed her cheek. Jones’s goat’s eyes immersed her in yellow contemplation.

‘Good morning, Cecily.’ The rector rose. ‘I had expected you earlier, on such a day as this. But young girls must have their beauty sleep regardless of weather,’ he ended with elephantine joviality. ‘This is Mr Jones, Cecily. Miss Saunders, Mr Jones.’

Jones bowed with obese incipient grace as she faced him, but at her expression of hushed delicate amazement he knew panic. Then he remembered the rector’s cursed trousers and he felt his neck and ears slowly burn, knowing that not only was he ridiculous looking but that she supposed he wore such things habitually. She was speechless and Jones damned the hearty oblivious rector slowly and completely. Curse the man: one moment it was Emmy and no trousers at all, next moment an attractive stranger and nether coverings like a tired balloon. The rector was saying bland as Fate:

‘I had expected you earlier. I had decided to let you take some hyacinths.’

‘Uncle Joe! How won—derful!’ Her voice was rough, like a tangle of golden wires. She dragged her fascinated gaze from Jones and hating them both Jones felt perspiration under his hair. ‘Why didn’t I come sooner? But I am always doing the wrong thing, as Mr—Mr Jones will know from my not coming in time to get hyacinths.’

She looked at him again, as she might at a strange beast. Jones’s confusion became anger and he found his tongue.

‘Yes, it is too bad you didn’t come earlier. You would have seen me more interestingly gotten up than this even. Emmy seemed to think so, at least.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

The rector regarded him with puzzled affability. Then he understood. ‘Ah, yes, Mr Jones suffered a slight accident and was forced to don a garment of mine.’

‘Thanks for saying “was forced”,’ Jones said viciously. ‘Yes, I stumbled over that pail of water the doctor keeps just inside the front door, doubtless for the purpose of making his parishioners be sure they really require help from heaven, on the second visit,’ he explained, Greek-like, giving his dignity its death-stroke with his own hand. ‘You, I suppose, are accustomed to it and can avoid it.’

She looked from Jones’s suffused angry face to the rector’s kind, puzzled one and screamed with laughter.

‘Forgive me,’ she pleaded, sobering as quickly. ‘I simply couldn’t help it, Mr Jones. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?’

‘Certainly. Even Emmy enjoyed it. Doctor, Emmy cannot have been so badly outraged after all, to suffer such shock from seeing a man’s bare—’

She covered up this gaucherie, losing most of the speech in her own words. ‘So you showed Mr Jones your flowers? Mr Jones should be quite flattered: that is quite a concession for Uncle Joe to make,’ she said smoothly, turning to the divine, graceful, and insincere as a French sonnet. ‘Is Mr Jones famous, then? You haven’t told me you knew famous men.’

The rector boomed his laugh. ‘Well, Mr Jones, you seem to have concealed something from me.’ (Not as much as I would have liked to, Jones thought.) ‘I didn’t know I was entertaining a celebrity.’

Jones’s essential laziness of temper regained its ascendency and he answered civilly: ‘Neither did I, sir.’

‘Ah, don’t try to hide your light, Mr Jones. Women know these things. They see through us at once.’

‘Uncle Joe,’ she cautioned swiftly at this unfortunate remark, watching Jones. But Jones was safe now.

‘No, I don’t agree with you. If they saw through us they would never marry us.’

She was grateful and her glance showed a faint interest (what colour are her eyes?).

‘Oh, that’s what Mr Jones is! an authority on women.’

Jones’s vanity swelled and the rector saying, ‘Pardon me,’ fetched a chair from the hall. She leaned her thigh against the desk and her eyes (are they grey or blue or green?) met his yellow unabashed stare. She lowered her gaze and he remarked her pretty selfconscious mouth. This is going to be easy, he thought. The rector placed the chair for her and she sat and when the rector had taken his desk chair again, Jones resumed his own seat. How long her legs are, he thought, seeing her frail white dress shape to her short torso. She felt his bold examination and looked up.

‘So Mr Jones is married,’ she remarked. She did something to her eyes and it seemed to Jones that she had touched him with her hands. I’ve got your number, he thought vulgarly. He replied:

‘No, what makes you think so?’ The rector filling his pipe regarded them kindly.

‘Oh, I misunderstood, then.’

‘That isn’t why you thought so.’

‘No?’

‘It’s because you like married men,’ he told her boldly. ‘Do I?’ without interest. It seemed to Jones that he could see her interest ebb away from him, could feel it cool.

‘Don’t you?’

‘You ought to know.’

‘I?’ asked Jones. ‘How should I know?’

‘Aren’t you an authority on women?’ she replied with sweet ingenuousness. Speechless he could have strangled her. The divine applauded:

‘Checkmate, Mr Jones?’

Just let me catch her eye again, he vowed, but she would not look at him. He sat silent and under his seething gaze she took the photograph from the desk and held it quietly for a time. Then she replaced it and reaching across the desk-top she laid her hand on the rector’s.

‘Miss Saunders was engaged to my son,’ the divine explained to Jones.

‘Yes?’ said Jones, watching her profile, waiting for her to look at him again. Emmy, that unfortunate virgin, appeared at the door.

‘All right, Uncle Joe,’ she said, vanishing immediately.

‘Ah, lunch,’ the rector announced, starting up. They rose.

‘I can’t stay,’ she demurred, yielding to the divine’s hand upon her back. Jones fell in behind. ‘I really shouldn’t stay,’ she amended.

They moved down the dark hall and Jones watching her white dress flow indistinctly to her stride, imagining her kiss, cursed her. At a door she paused and stood aside courteously, as a man would. The rector stopped also as perforce did Jones and here was a French comedy regarding precedence. Jones with counterfeit awkwardness felt her soft uncorseted thigh against the back of his hand and her sharp stare was like ice water. They entered the room. ‘Made you look at me then,’ he muttered.

The rector remarking nothing said:

‘Sit here, Mr Jones,’ and the virgin Emmy gave him a haughty antagonistic stare. He returned her a remote yellow one. I’ll see about you later, he promised her mentally, sitting to immaculate linen. The rector drew the other guest’s chair and sat himself at the head of the table.

‘Cecily doesn’t eat very much,’ he said, carving a fowl, ‘so the burden will fall upon you and me. But I think we can be relied upon, eh, Mr Jones?’

She propped her elbows opposite him. And I’ll attend to you, too, Jones promised her darkly. She still ignored his yellow gaze and he said: ‘Certainly, sir,’ employing upon her the old thought process which he had used in school when he was prepared upon a certain passage, but she ignored him with such thorough perfection that he knew a sudden qualm of unease, a faint doubt. I wonder if I am wrong? he pondered. I’ll find out, he decided suddenly.

‘You were saying, sir,’—still watching her oblivious shallow face—‘as Miss Saunders so charmingly came in, that I am too specious. But one must always generalize about fornication. Only after—’

‘Mr Jones!’ the rector exclaimed heavily.

‘—the fornication is committed should one talk about it at all, and then only to generalize, to become—in your words—specious. He who kisses and tells is not very much of a fellow, is he?’

‘Mr Jones,’ the rector remonstrated.

‘Mr Jones!’ she echoed. ‘What a terrible man you are! Really, Uncle Joe—’

Jones interrupted viciously. ‘As far as the kiss itself goes, women do not particularly care who does the kissing. All they are interested in is the kiss itself.’

‘Mr Jones!’ she repeated, staring at him, then looking quickly away. She shuddered.

‘Come, come, sir. There are ladies present.’ The rector achieved his aphorism.

Jones pushed his plate from him, Emmy’s raw and formless hand removed it and here was a warm golden brow crowned with strawberries. Dam’f I look at her, he swore, and so he did. Her gaze was remote and impersonal, green and cool as sea water, and Jones turned his eyes first. She turned to the rector, talking smoothly about flowers. He was politely ignored and he moodily engaged his spoon as Emmy appeared again.

Emmy emanated a thin hostility and staring from Jones to the girl she said:

‘Lady to see you, Uncle Joe.’

The rector poised his spoon. ‘Who is it, Emmy?’

‘I dunno. I never saw her before. She’s waiting in the study.’

‘Has she had lunch? Ask her in here.’

(She knows I am watching her. Jones knew exasperation and a puerile lust.)

‘She don’t want anything to eat. She said not to disturb you until you had finished dinner. You better go in and see what she wants.’ Emmy retreated.

The rector wiped his mouth and rose. ‘I suppose I must. You young people sit here until I return. Call Emmy if you want anything.’

Jones sat in sullen silence, turning a glass in his fingers. At last she looked at his bent ugly face.

‘So you are unmarried, as well as famous,’ she remarked.

‘Famous because I’m unmarried,’ he replied darkly.

‘And courteous because of which?’

‘Either one you like.’

‘Well, frankly, I prefer courtesy.’

‘Do you often get it?’

‘Always . . . eventually.’ He made no reply and she continued: ‘Don’t you believe in marriage?’

‘Yes, as long as there are no women in it.’ She shrugged indifferently. Jones could not bear seeming a fool to anyone as shallow as he considered her and he blurted, wanting to kick himself: ‘You don’t like me, do you?’

‘Oh, I like anyone who believes there may be something he doesn’t know,’ she replied without interest.

‘What do you mean by that?’ (are they green or grey?) Jones was a disciple of the cult of boldness with women. He rose and the table wheeled smoothly as he circled it: he wished faintly that he were more graceful. Those thrice unhappy trousers! You can’t blame her, he thought with fairness. What would I think had she appeared in one of her grandma’s mother hubbards? He remarked her reddish dark hair and the delicate slope of her shoulder. (I’ll put my hand there and let it slip down her arm as she turns.)

Without looking up, she said suddenly: ‘Did Uncle Joe tell you about Donald?’ (Oh, hell, thought Jones.) ‘Isn’t it funny,’ her chair scraped to her straightening knees, ‘we both thought of moving at the same time?’ She rose, her chair intervened woodenly, and Jones stood ludicrous and foiled. ‘You take mine and I’ll take yours,’ she added, moving around the table.

‘You bitch,’ said Jones evenly and her green-blue eyes took him sweetly as water.

‘What made you say that?’ she asked quietly. Jones, having to an extent eased his feelings, thought he saw a recurring interest in her expression. (I was right, he gloated.)

‘You know why I said that.’

‘It’s funny how few men know that women like to be talked to that way,’ she remarked irrelevantly.

I wonder if she loves someone? I guess not—like a tiger loves meat. ‘I am not like other men,’ he told her.

He thought he saw derision in her brief glance, but she merely yawned delicately. At last he had her classified in the animal kingdom. Hamadryad, a slim jewelled one.

‘Why doesn’t George come for me!’ she said as if in answer to his unspoken speculation, patting her mouth with the tips of petulant, delicate fingers. ‘Isn’t it boring, waiting for someone?’

‘Yes. Who is George, may I ask?’

‘Certainly, you may ask.’

‘Well, who is he?’ (I don’t like her type, anyway.) ‘I had gathered that you were pining for the late lamented.’

‘The late lamented?’

‘That fox-faced Henry or Oswald or something.’

‘Oh, Donald. Do you mean Donald?’

‘Surely. Let him be Donald, then.’

She regarded him impersonally. (I can’t even make her angry, he thought fretfully.) ‘Do you know, you are impossible.’

‘All right. So I am,’ he answered with anger. ‘But then I wasn’t engaged to Donald. And George is not calling for me.’

‘What makes you so angry? Because I won’t let you put your hands on me?’

‘My dear woman, if I had wanted to put my hands on you I would have done it.’

‘Yes?’ Her rising inflection was a polite maddening derision.

‘Certainly. Don’t you believe it?’ his own voice gave him courage.

‘I don’t know . . . but what good would it do to you?’

‘No good at all. That’s the reason I don’t want to.’

Her green eyes took him again. Sparse old silver on a buffet shadowed heavily under a high fanlight of coloured glass identical with the one above the entrance, her fragile white dress across the table from him: he could imagine her long subtle legs, like Atalanta’s reft of running.

‘Why do you tell yourself lies?’ she asked with interest.

‘Same reason you do.’

‘I?’

‘Surely. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.’

‘Do you know,’ she remarked with speculation, ‘I believe I hate you.’

‘I don’t doubt it. I know damn well I hate you.’

She moved in her chair, sloping the light now across her shoulders, releasing him and becoming completely another person. ‘Let’s go to the study. Shall we?’

‘All right. Uncle Joe should be done with his caller by now.’ He rose and they faced each other across the broken meal. She did not rise.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘After you, ma’am,’ he replied with mock deference.

‘I have changed my mind. I think I’ll wait here and talk to Emmy, if you don’t object.’

‘Why Emmy?’

‘Why not Emmy?’

‘Ah, I see. You can feel fairly safe with Emmy: she probably won’t want to put her hands on you. That’s it, isn’t it?’ She glanced briefly at him. ‘What you really mean is, that you will stay if I am going out of the room, don’t you?’

‘Suit yourself.’ She became oblivious of him, breaking a biscuit upon a plate and dripping water upon it from a glass. Jones moved fatly in his borrowed trousers, circling the table again. As he approached she turned slightly in her chair, extending her hand. He felt its slim bones in his fat moist palm, its nervous ineffectual flesh. Not good for anything. Useless. But beautiful with lack of character. Beautiful hand. Its very fragility stopped him like a stone barrier.

‘Oh, Emmy,’ she called sweetly, ‘come here, darling. I have something to show you.’

Emmy regarded them balefully from the door and Jones said quickly: ‘Will you fetch me my trousers, Miss Emmy?’

Emmy glanced from one to the other ignoring the girl’s mute plea. (Oho, Emmy has fish of her own to fry, thought Jones.) Emmy vanished and he put his hands on the girl’s shoulders.

‘Now what will you do? Call the reverend?’

She looked at him across her shoulder from beyond an inaccessible barrier. His anger grew and his hands wantonly crushed her dress.

‘Don’t ruin my clothes, please,’ she said icily. ‘Here, if you must.’ She raised her face and Jones felt the shame, but his boyish vanity would not let him stop now. Her face a prettiness of shallow characterless planes blurred into his, her mouth was motionless and impersonal, unresisting and cool. Her face from a blur became again a prettiness of characterless shallowness icy and remote, and Jones, ashamed of himself and angry with her therefore, said with heavy irony: ‘Thanks.’
‘Not at all. If you got any pleasure from it you are quite welcome.’ She rose. ‘Let me pass, please.’

He stood awkwardly aside. Her frigid polite indifference was unbearable. What a fool he had been! He had ruined everything.

‘Miss Saunders,’ he blurted, ‘I—forgive me: I don’t usually act that way, I swear I don’t.’

She spoke over her shoulder. ‘You don’t have to, I suppose? I imagine you are usually quite successful with us?’

‘I am very sorry. But I don’t blame you. . . . One hates to convict oneself of stupidity.’

After a while hearing no further sound of movement he looked up. She was like a flower stalk or a young tree relaxed against the table: there was something so fragile, so impermanent since robustness and strength were unnecessary, yet strong withal as a poplar is strong through very absence of strength, about her; you knew that she lived, that her clear delicate being was nourished by sunlight and honey until even digestion was a beautiful function . . . as he watched something like a shadow came over her, somewhere between her eyes and her petulant pretty mouth, in the very clear relaxation of her body, that caused him to go quickly to her. She stared into his unblinking goat’s eyes as his hands sliding across her arms met at the small of her back, and Jones did not know the door had opened until she jerked her mouth from his and twisted slimly from his clasp.

The rector loomed in the door, staring into the room as if he did not recognize it. He has never seen us at all, Jones knew, then seeing the divine’s face he said: ‘He’s ill.’

The rector spoke. ‘Cecily—’

‘What is it, Uncle Joe?’ she replied in sharp terror, going to him. ‘Aren’t you well?’

The divine balanced his huge body with a hand on either side of the doorway.

‘Cecily, Donald’s coming home,’ he said.

3

There was that subtle effluvia of antagonism found inevitably in a room where two young ‘pretty’ women are, and they sat examining each other with narrow care. Mrs Powers, temporarily engaged in an unselfconscious accomplishment and being among strangers as well, was rather oblivious of it; but Cecily, never having been engaged in an unselfconscious action of any kind and being among people whom she knew, examined the other closely with that attribute women have for gaining correct instinctive impressions of another’s character, clothes, morals, etc. Jones’s yellow stare took the newcomer at intervals, returning, however, always to Cecily, who ignored him.

The rector tramped heavily back and forth. ‘Sick?’ he boomed. ‘Sick? But we’ll cure him. Get him home here with good food and rest and attention and we’ll have him well in a week. Eh, Cecily?’

‘Here’s the medicine for him, Mrs Powers,’ he said with heavy gallantry, embracing Cecily, speaking over her head towards the contemplative pallor of the other woman’s quiet watching face. ‘There, there, don’t cry,’ he added, kissing her. The audience watched this, Mrs Powers with speculative detached interest and Jones with morose speculation.

‘It’s because I am so happy—for you, dear Uncle Joe,’ she answered. She turned graceful as a flower stalk against the rector’s black bulk. ‘And we owe it all to Mrs—Mrs Powers,’ she continued in her slightly rough voice, like a tangle of golden wires, ‘she was so kind to bring him back to us.’ Her glance swept past Jones and flickered like a knife towards the other woman. (Damn little fool thinks I have tried to vamp him, Mrs Powers thought.) Cecily moved towards her with studied impulse. ‘May I kiss you? do you mind?’

It was like kissing a silken smooth steel blade and Mrs Powers said brutally: ‘Not at all. I’d have done the same for anyone sick as he is, nigger or white. And you would, too,’ she added with satisfying malice.

‘Yes, it was so sweet of you,’ Cecily repeated, coolly non-committal, exposing a slim leg from the arm of the caller’s chair. Jones, statically remote, watched the comedy.

‘Nonsense,’ the rector interposed. ‘Mrs Powers merely saw him fatigued with travelling. I am sure he will be a different man tomorrow.’

‘I hope so,’ Mrs Powers answered with sudden weariness, recalling his devastated face and that dreadful brow, his whole relaxed inertia of constant dull pain and ebbing morale. It’s too late, she thought with instinctive perspicuity. Shall I tell them about the scar? she pondered. Prevent a scene when this—this creature (feeling the girl’s body against her shoulder) sees it. But no, I won’t, she decided, watching the tramping rector leonine in his temporary happiness. What a coward I am. Joe should have come: he might have known I’d bungle it some way.

The rector fetched his photograph. She took it: thin-faced, with the serenity of a wild thing, the passionate serene alertness of a faun; and that girl leaning against the oaken branch of the rector’s arm, believing that she is in love with the boy, or his illusion—pretending she is, anyway. No, no, I won’t be catty. Perhaps she is—as much as she is capable of being in love with anyone. It’s quite romantic, being reft of your love and then having him returned unexpectedly to your arms. And an aviator, too. What luck that girl has playing her parts. Even God helps her. . . . You cat! she’s pretty and you are jealous. That’s what’s the matter with you, she thought in her bitter weariness. What makes me furious is her thinking that I am after him, am in love with him! Oh, yes, I’m in love with him! I’d like to hold his poor ruined head against my breast and not let him wake again ever. . . . Oh, hell, what a mess it all is! And that dull fat one yonder in somebody else’s trousers, watching her with his yellow unwinking eyes—like a goat’s. I suppose she’s been passing the time with him.

‘—he was eighteen then,’ the rector was saying. ‘He would never wear hat nor tie: his mother could never make him. She saw him correctly dressed, but it mattered not how formal the occasion, he invariably appeared without them.’

Cecily rubbing herself like a cat on the rector’s arm: ‘Oh, Uncle Joe, I love him so!’

And Jones like another round and arrogant cat, blinking his yellow eyes, muttered a shocking phrase. The rector was oblivious in speech and Cecily in her own graceful immersion, but Mrs Powers half heard, half saw, and Jones looking up met her black stare. He tried to look her down but her gaze was impersonal as a dissection so he averted his and fumbled for his pipe.

There came a prolonged honking of a motor horn from without and Cecily sprang to her feet.

‘Oh, there’s—there’s a friend of ours. I’ll send him away and come straight back. Will you excuse me a moment, Uncle Joe?’

‘Eh?’ The rector broke his speech. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘And you, Mrs Powers?’ She moved towards the door and her glance swept Jones again. ‘And you, Mr Jones?’

‘George got a car, has he?’ Jones asked as she passed him. ‘Bet you don’t come back.’

car

She gave him her cool stare and from beyond the study door she heard the rector’s voice resume the story again—of Donald, of course. And now I’m engaged again, she thought complacently, enjoying George’s face in anticipation when she would tell him. And that long black woman has been making love to him—or he to her. I guess it’s that, from what I know of Donald. Oh, well, that’s how men are, I guess. Perhaps he’ll want to take us both. . . . She tripped down the steps into the sunlight: the sunlight caressed her with joy, as though she were a daughter of sunlight. How would I like to have a husband and wife, too, I wonder? Or two husbands? I wonder if I want one even, want to get married at all. . . . I guess it’s worth trying, once. I’d like to see that horrible fat one’s face if he could hear me say that, she thought. Wonder why I let him kiss me? Ugh!

George leaned from his car watching her restricted swaying stride with faint lust. ‘Come on, come on,’ he called.

car

She did not increase her gait at all. He swung the door open, not bothering to dismount himself. ‘My God, what took you so long?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Dam’f I thought you were coming at all.’

‘I’m not,’ she told him, laying her hand on the door. Her white dress in the nooning sun was unbearable to the eye, sloped to her pliant fragility. Beyond her, across the lawn, was another pliant gesture though this was only a tree, a poplar.

‘Huh?’

‘Not coming. My fiancé is arriving today.’

‘Aw hell, get in.’

‘Donald’s coming today,’ she repeated, watching him. His face was ludicrous: blank as a plate, then shocked to slow amazement.

‘Why, he’s dead,’ he said vacuously.

‘But he isn’t dead,’ she told him sweetly. ‘A lady friend he’s travelling with came on ahead and told us. Uncle Joe’s like a balloon.’

‘Ah, come on, Cecily. You’re kidding me.’

‘I swear I’m not. I’m telling you the God’s truth.’

His smooth empty face hung before her like a handsome moon, empty as a promise. Then it filled with an expression of a sort.

‘Hell, you got a date with me tonight. Whatcher going to do about that?’

‘What can I do? Donald will be here by then.’

‘Then it’s all off with us?’

She gazed at him, then looked quickly away. Funny how only an outsider had been able to bring home to her the significance of Donald’s imminence, his return. She nodded dumbly, beginning to feel miserable and lost.

He leaned from the car and caught her hand. ‘Get in here,’ he commanded.

car

‘No, no, I can’t,’ she protested, trying to draw back. He held her wrist. ‘No, no, let me go. You are hurting me.’

‘I know it,’ he answered grimly. ‘Get in.’

‘Don’t, George, don’t! I must go back.’

‘Well, when can I see you?’

‘Her mouth trembled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Please, George. Don’t you see how miserable I am?’ Her eyes became blue, dark; the sunlight made bold the wrenched thrust of her body, her thin taut arm. ‘Please, George.’

‘Are you going to get in or do you want me to pick you up and put you in?’

‘I’m going to cry in a minute. You’d better let me go.’

‘Oh, damn. Why, sugar, I didn’t mean it that way. I just wanted to see you. We’ve got to see each other if it’s going to be all off with us. Come on, I’ve been good to you.’

She relaxed. ‘Well, but just around the block then. I’ve got to get back to them.’ She raised a foot to the running board. ‘Promise?’ she insisted.

car part

‘Sure. Round the block it is. I won’t run off with you if you say not.’

She got in and as they drove off she looked quickly to the house. There was a face in the window, a round face.

drivingcar

4

George turned from the street and drove down a quiet lane bordered by trees, between walls covered with honeysuckle. He stopped the car and she said swiftly:

drivingroadtreeparking

‘No, no, George! Drive on.’

But he cut the switch. ‘Please,’ she repeated. He turned in his seat.

car partparking

‘Cecily, you are kidding me, aren’t you?’

She turned the switch and tried to reach the starter with her foot. He caught her hands, holding her. ‘Look at me.’

car part

Her eyes grew blue again with foreboding.

‘You are kidding me, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, George, it all happened so suddenly! I don’t know what to think. When we were in there talking about him it all seemed so grand for Donald to be coming back, in spite of that woman with him; and to be engaged to a man who will be famous when he gets here—oh, it seemed then that I did love him: it was exactly the thing to do. But now . . . I’m just not ready to be married yet. And he’s been gone so long, and to take up with another woman on his way to me—I don’t know what to do. I—I’m going to cry,’ she ended suddenly, putting her crooked arm on the seat-back and burying her face in her elbow. He put his arm around her shoulders and tried to draw her to him. She raised her hands between them straightening her arms.

car part

‘No, no, take me back.’

‘But, Cecily—’

‘You mustn’t! Don’t you know I’m engaged to be married? He’ll probably want to be married tomorrow, and I’ll have to do it.’

‘But you can’t do that. You aren’t in love with him.’

‘But I’ve got to, I tell you!’

‘Are you in love with him?’

‘Take me back to Uncle Joe’s. Please.’

He was the stronger and at last he held her close, feeling her small bones, her frail taut body beneath her dress. ‘Are you in love with him?’ he repeated.

She burrowed her face into his coat.

‘Look at me.’ She refused to lift her face and he slipped his hand under her chin, raising it. ‘Are you?’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said wildly, staring at him. ‘Take me back!’

‘You are lying. You aren’t going to marry him.’

She was weeping. ‘Yes, I am. I’ve got to. He expects it and Uncle Joe expects it. I must, I tell you.’

‘Darling, you can’t. Don’t you love me? You know you do. You can’t marry him.’ She stopped struggling and lay against him, crying. ‘Come on, say you won’t marry him.’

‘George, I can’t,’ she said hopelessly. ‘Don’t you see I have got to marry him?’

Young and miserable they clung to each other. The slumbrous afternoon lay about them in the empty lane. Even the sparrows seemed drowsy and from the spire of the church pigeons were remote and monotonous, unemphatic as sleep. She raised her face.

‘Kiss me, George.’

He tasted tears: their faces were coolly touching. She drew her head back, searching his face. ‘That was the last time, George.’

‘No, no,’ he objected, tightening his arms. She resisted a moment, then kissed him passionately.

‘Darling!’

‘Darling!’

She straightened up, dabbing at her eyes with his handkerchief. ‘There! I feel better now. Take me home, kind sir.’

‘But, Cecily,’ he protested, trying to embrace her again. She put him aside coolly.

‘Not any more, ever. Take me home, like a nice boy.’

‘But, Cecily—’

‘Do you want me to get out and walk? I can, you know: it isn’t far.’

He started the engine and drove on in a dull youthful sorrow. She patted at her hair, her fingers bloomed slimly in it, and they turned on to the street again. As she descended at the gate he made a last despairing attempt.

drivingengine

‘Cecily, for God’s sake!’

She looked over her shoulder at his stricken face. ‘Don’t be silly, George. Of course I’ll see you again. I’m not married—yet.’

Her white dress in the sun was an unbearable shimmer sloping to her body’s motion and she passed from sunlight to shadow, mounting the steps. At the door she turned, flashed him a smile, and waved her hand. Then her white dress faded beyond a fanlight of muted colour dim with age and lovely with lack of washing, leaving George to stare at the empty maw of the house in hope and despair and baffled youthful lust.

5

Jones at the window saw them drive away. His round face was enigmatic as a god’s, his clear obscene eyes showed no emotion. You are good, you are, he thought in grudging, unillusioned admiration. I hand it to you. He was still musing upon her when the mean-looking black-haired woman, interrupting the rector’s endless reminiscences of his son’s boyhood and youth, suggested that it was time to go to the station.

driving

The divine became aware of the absence of Cecily, who was at that moment sitting in a stationary motor-car in an obscure lane, crying on the shoulder of a man whose name was not Donald. Jones, the only one who had remarked the manner of her going, was for some reason he could not have named safely non-committal. The rector stated fretfully that Cecily, who was at that moment kissing a man whose name was not Donald, should not have gone away at that time. But the other woman (I bet she’s as mean as hell, thought Jones) interrupted again, saying that it was better so.

parkingcarroad condition

‘But she should have gone to the station to meet him,’ the rector stated with displeasure.

‘No, no. Remember, he is sick. The less excitement the better for him. Besides, it is better for them to meet privately.’

‘Ah, yes, quite right, quite right. Trust a woman in these things, Mr Jones. And for that reason perhaps you had better wait also, don’t you think?’

‘By all means, sir. I will wait and tell Miss Saunders why you went without her. She will doubtless be anxious to know.’

After the cab had called for them and gone Jones, still standing, stuffed his pipe with moody viciousness. He wandered aimlessly about the room, staring out the windows in turn, puffing his pipe; then pausing to push a dead match beneath a rug with his toe he crossed deliberately to the rector’s desk. He drew and closed two drawers before finding the right one.

taxi

The bottle was squat and black and tilted took the light pleasantly. He replaced it, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. And just in time, too, for her rapid brittle steps crossed the veranda and he heard a motor-car retreating.

The door framed her fragile surprise. She remarked, ‘Oh! Where are the others?’

‘What’s the matter? Have a puncture?’ Jones countered nastily. Her eyes flew like birds, and he continued: ‘The others? They went to the station, the railroad station. You know: where the trains come in. The parson’s son or something is coming home this afternoon. Fine news, isn’t it? But won’t you come in?’

She entered hesitant, watching him.

‘Oh, come on in, sister, I won’t hurt you.’

‘But why didn’t they wait for me?’

‘They thought you didn’t want to go, I suppose. Hadn’t you left that impression?’

In the silence of the house was a clock like a measured respiration, and Emmy was faintly audible somewhere. These sounds reassured her and she entered a few steps. ‘You saw me go. Didn’t you tell them where I was?’

‘Told them you went to the bathroom.’

She looked at him curiously, knowing in some way that he was not lying. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘It was your business where you were going, not mine. If you wanted them to know you should have told them yourself.’

She sat alertly. ‘You’re a funny sort of a man, aren’t you?’

Jones moved casually, in no particular direction. ‘How funny?’

She rose. ‘Oh, I don’t know exactly . . . you don’t like me and yet you told a lie for me.’

‘Hell, you don’t think I mind telling a lie, do you?’

She said with speculation:

‘I wouldn’t put anything past you—if you thought you could get any fun out of it.’ Watching his eyes she moved towards the door.

The trousers hampered him but despite them his agility was amazing. But she was alert and her studied grace lent her muscular control and swiftness, and so it was a bland rubbed panel of wood that he touched. Her dress whipped from sight, he heard a key and her muffled laugh, derisive.

‘Damn your soul,’ he spoke in a quiet toneless emotion, ‘open the door.’

The wood was bland and inscrutable: baffling, holding up to him in its polished depths the fat white blur of his own face. Holding his breath he heard nothing beyond it save a clock somewhere.

‘Open the door,’ he repeated, but there was no sound. Has she gone away, or not? he wondered, straining his ears, bending to the bulky tweeded Narcissus of himself in the polished wood. He thought of the windows and walking quietly he crossed the room, finding immovable gauze wire. He returned to the centre of the room without trying to muffle his steps and stood in a mounting anger, cursing her slowly. Then he saw the door handle move.

‘He sprang to it. ‘Open the door, you little slut, or I’ll kick your screens out.’

The lock clicked and he jerked the door open upon Emmy, his trousers over her arm, meeting him with her frightened antagonistic eyes.

‘Where—’ began Jones, and Cecily stepped from the shadows, curtsying like a derisive flower.

‘Checkmate, Mr Jones.’ Jones paraphrased the rector in a reedy falsetto. ‘Do you know—’

‘Yes,’ said Cecily quickly, taking Emmy’s arm. ‘But tell us on the veranda.’ She led the way and Jones followed in reluctant admiration. She and the baleful speechless Emmy preceding him sat arm in arm in a porch swing while afternoon sought interstices in soon-to-be lilac wistaria: afternoon flowed and ebbed upon them as they swung and their respective silk and cotton shins took and released sunlight in running planes.

‘Sit down, Mr Jones,’ she continued, gushing. ‘Do tell us about yourself. We are so interested, aren’t we, Emmy dear?’ Emmy was watchful and inarticulate, like an animal ‘Emmy, dear Mr Jones, has missed all of your conversation and admiring you as we all do—we simply cannot help it, Mr Jones—she is naturally anxious to make up for it.’

Jones cupped a match in his palms and there were two little flames in his eyes, leaping and sinking to pin points.

‘You are silent, Mr Jones? Emmy and I both would like to hear some more of what you have learned about us from your extensive amatory career. Don’t we, Emmy darling?’

‘‘No, I won’t spoil it for you,’ Jones replied heavily. ‘You are on the verge of getting some first-hand information of your own. As for Miss Emmy, I’ll teach her sometime later, in private.’

Emmy continued to watch him with fierce dumb distrust. Cecily said: ‘At first-hand?’

‘Aren’t you being married tomorrow? You can learn from Oswald. He should certainly be able to tell you, travelling as he seems to with a sparring partner. Got caught, at last, didn’t you?’

She shivered. She looked so delicate, so needing to be cared for, that Jones, becoming masculine and sentimental, felt again like a cloddish brute. He lit his pipe again and Emmy, convicting herself of the power of speech, said:

‘Yonder they come.’

A cab had drawn up to the gate and Cecily sprang to her feet and ran along the porch to the steps. Jones and Emmy rose and Emmy vanished somewhere as four people descended from the cab. So that’s him, thought Jones ungrammatically, following Cecily, watching her as she stood poised on the top step like a bird, her hand to her breast. Trust her!

taxi

He looked again at the party coming through the gate, the rector looming above them all. There was something changed about the divine: age seemed to have suddenly overtaken him, unresisted, coming upon him like a highwayman. He’s sure sick, Jones told himself. The woman, that Mrs Something-or-other, left the party and hastened ahead. She mounted the steps to Cecily.

‘Come darling,’ she said, taking the girl’s arm, ‘come inside. He is not well and the light hurts his eyes. Come in and meet him there, hadn’t you rather?’

‘No, no: here. I have waited so long for him.’

The other woman was kind but obdurate. And she led the girl into the house. Cecily reluctant, with reverted head cried: ‘Uncle Joe! his face! is he sick?’

The divine’s face was grey and slack as dirty snow. At the steps he stumbled slightly and Jones sprang forward, taking his arm. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ said the third man, in a private’s uniform, whose hand was beneath Mahon’s elbow. They mounted the steps and crossing the porch passed under the fanlight, into the dark hall.

‘Take your cap, Loot,’ murmured the enlisted man. The other removed it and handed it to him. They heard swift tapping feet crossing a room and the study door opened letting a flood of light fall upon them, and Cecily cried:

‘‘Donald! Donald! She says your face is hur—oooooh!’ she ended, screaming as she saw him.

The light passing through her fine hair gave her a halo and lent her frail dress a fainting nimbus about her crumpling body like a stricken poplar. Mrs Powers moving quickly caught her, but not before her head had struck the door jamb.

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CHAPTER THREE (95-146)

1

MRS SAUNDERS said: ‘You come away now, let your sister alone.’

Young Robert Saunders fretted but optimistic, joining again that old battle between parent and child, hopeful in the face of invariable past defeat:

‘But can’t I ask her a civil question? I just want to know what his scar l—’

‘Come now, come with mamma.’

‘But I just want to know what his sc—’

‘Robert.’

‘But mamma,’ he essayed again, despairing. His mother pushed him firmly doorward.

‘Run down to the garden and tell your father to come here. Run, now.’

He left the room in exasperation. His mamma would have been shocked could she have read his thoughts. It wasn’t her especially. They’re all alike, he guessed largely, as has many a man before him and as many will after him. He wasn’t going to hurt the old ’fraid cat.

Cecily freed of her clothing lay crushed and pathetic between cool linen, surrounded by a mingled scent of cologne and ammonia, her fragile face coiffed in a towel. Her mother drew a chair to the side of the bed and examined her daughter’s pretty shallow face, the sweep of her lashes upon her white cheek, her arms paralleling the shape of her body beneath the covers, her delicate blue-veined wrists and her long slender hands relaxed and palm-upwards beside her. Then young Robert Saunders, without knowing it, had his revenge.

‘Darling, what did his face look like?’

Cecily shuddered, turning her head on the pillow. ‘Ooooh, don’t, don’t, mamma! I c-can’t bear to think of it.’

(But I just want to ask you a civil question.) ‘There there. We won’t talk about it until you feel better.’

‘Not ever, not ever. If I have to see him again I’ll—I’ll just die. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’

She was crying again frankly like a child, not even concealing her face. Her mother rose and leaned over her. ‘There, there. Don’t cry any more. You’ll be ill.’ She gently brushed the girl’s hair from her temples, rearranging the towel. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s pale cheek. ‘Mamma’s sorry, baby. Suppose you try to sleep. Shall I bring you a tray at supper time?’

‘No, I couldn’t eat. Just let me lie here alone and I’ll feel better.’

The older woman lingered, still curious. (I just want to ask her a civil question.) The telephone rang, and with a last ineffectual pat at the pillow she withdrew.

Lifting the receiver, she remarked her husband closing the garden gate behind him.

‘Yes? . . . Mrs Saunders. . . . Oh, George? . . . Quite well, thank you. How are you . . . no, I am afraid not. . . . What? . . . yes, but she is not feeling well . . . later, perhaps. . . . Not tonight. Call her tomorrow . . . yes, yes, quite well, thank you. Good-bye.’

She passed through the cool darkened hall and on to the veranda letting her tightly corseted figure sink creaking into a rocking chair as her husband, carrying a sprig of mint and his hat, mounted the steps. Here was Cecily in the masculine and gone to flesh: the same slightly shallow good looks and somewhere an indicated laxness of moral fibre. He had once been precise and dapper but now he was clad slovenly in careless uncreased grey and earthy shoes. His hair still curled youthfully upon his head and he had Cecily’s eyes. He was a Catholic, which was almost as sinful as being a republican; his fellow townsmen, while envying his social and financial position in the community, yet looked askance at him because he and his family made periodical trips to Atlanta to attend church.

‘Tobe!’ he bellowed, taking a chair near his wife.

‘Well, Robert,’ she began with zest, ‘Donald Mahon came home today.’

‘Government sent his body back, did they?’

‘No, he came back himself. He got off the train this afternoon.’

train

‘Eh? Why, but he’s dead.’

‘But he isn’t dead. Cecily was there and saw him. A strange fat young man brought her home in a cab—completely collapsed. She said something about a scar on him. She fainted, poor child. I made her go to bed at once. I never did find who that strange young man was,’ she ended fretfully.

Tobe in a white jacket appeared with a bowl of ice, sugar, water, and a decanter. Mr Saunders sat staring at his wife. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said at last. And again, ‘I’ll be damned.’

His wife rocked complacent over her news. After a while Mr Saunders, breaking his trance, stirred. He crushed his mint spring between his fingers and taking a cube of ice he rubbed the mint over it, then dropped both into a tall glass. Then he spooned sugar into the glass and dribbled whisky from the decanter slowly, and slowly stirring it he stared at his wife. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said for the third time.

Tobe filled the glass from a water-bottle and withdrew.

‘So he come home. Well, well, I’m glad on the parson’s account. Pretty decent feller.’

‘You must have forgotten what it means.’

‘Eh?’

‘To us.’

‘To us?’

‘Cecily was engaged to him, you know.’

Mr Saunders sipped and, setting his glass on the floor beside him, he lit a cigar. ‘Well, we’ve given our consent, haven’t we? I ain’t going to back out now.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Does Sis still want to?’

‘I don’t know. It was such a shock to her, poor child, his coming home and the scar and all. But do you think it is a good thing?’

‘I never did think it was a good thing. I never wanted it.’

‘Are you putting it off on me? Do you think I insisted on it?’

Mr Saunders from long experience said mildly: ‘She ain’t old enough to marry yet.’

‘Nonsense. How old was I when we married?’

He raised his glass again. ‘Seems to me you are the one insisting on it.’ Mrs Saunders rocking, stared at him: he was made aware of his stupidity. ‘Why do you think it ain’t a good thing, then?’

‘I declare, Robert. Sometimes . . .’ she sighed and then as one explains to a child in fond exasperation at its stupidity: ‘Well, an engagement in wartime and an engagement in peacetime are two different things. Really, I don’t see how he can expect to hold her to it.’

‘Now look here, Minnie. If he went to war expecting her to wait for him and come back expecting her to take him, there’s nothing else for them to do. And if she still wants to don’t you go persuading her out of it, you hear?’

‘Are you going to force your daughter into marriage? You just said yourself she is too young.’

‘Remember, I said if she still wants to. By the way, he ain’t lame or badly hurt, is he?’ he asked quickly.

‘I don’t know. Cecily cried when I tried to find out.’

‘Sis is a fool, sometimes. But don’t you go monkeying with them, now.’ He raised his glass and took a long draught, then he puffed his cigar furiously, righteously.

‘I declare, Robert, I don’t understand you sometimes. The idea of you driving your own daughter into marriage with a man who has nothing and who may be half dead, and who probably won’t work anyway. You know yourself how these ex-soldiers are.’

‘You are the one wants her to get married. I ain’t. Who do you want her to take, then?’

‘Well, there’s Dr Gary. He likes her, and Harrison Maurier from Atlanta. Cecily likes him, I think.’

Mr Saunders inelegantly snorted. ‘Who? That Maurier feller? I wouldn’t have that damn feller around here at all. Slick hair and cigarettes all over the place. You better pick out another one.’

‘I’m not picking out anybody. I just don’t want you to drive her into marrying that Mahon boy.’

‘I ain’t driving her, I tell you. You have already taught me better than to try to drive a woman to do anything. But I don’t intend to interfere if she does want to marry Mahon.’

She sat rocking and he finished his julep. The oaks on the lawn became still with dusk, and the branches of trees were as motionless as coral fathoms deep under seas. A tree frog took up his monotonous trilling and the west was a vast green lake, still as eternity. Tobe appeared silently. ‘Supper served, Miss Minnie.’

The cigar arced redly into a canna bed, and they rose.

‘‘Where is Bob, Tobe?’

‘I don’t know’m. I seed him gwine to’ds de garden a while back, but I ain’t seed him since.’

‘See if you can find him. And tell him to wash his face and hands.’

‘Yessum.’ He held the door for them and they passed into the house, leaving the twilight behind them filled with Tobe’s mellowed voice calling across the dusk.

2

But young Robert Saunders could not hear him. He was at that moment climbing a high board fence which severed the dusk above his head. He conquered it at last and sliding downwards his trousers evinced reluctance, then accepting the gambit accompanied him with a ripping sound. He sprawled in damp grass feeling a thin shallow fire across his young behind, and said Damn, regaining his feet and disjointing his hip trying to see down his back.

Ain’t that hell, he remarked to the twilight. I have rotten luck. It’s all your fault, too, for not telling me, he thought, gaining a vicarious revenge on all sisters. He picked up the object he had dropped in falling and crossed the rectory lawn through dew, towards the house. There was a light in a heretofore unused upper room and his heart sank. Had he gone to bed this early? Then he saw silhouetted feet on the balustrade of the porch and the red eye of a cigarette. He sighed with relief. That must be him.

He mounted the steps, saying: ‘Hi, Donald.’

‘Hi, Colonel,’ answered the one sitting there. Approaching, he discerned soldier clothes. That’s him. Now I’ll see, he thought exultantly, snapping on a flash light and throwing its beam full on the man’s face. Aw, shucks. He was becoming thoroughly discouraged. Did anyone ever have such luck? There must be a cabal against him.

‘You ain’t got no scar,’ he stated with dejection. ‘You ain’t even Donald, are you?’

‘You guessed it, bub. I ain’t even Donald. But say, how about turning that searchlight some other way?’

He snapped off the light in weary disillusion. He burst out: ‘They won’t tell me nothing. I just want to know what his scar looks like but they won’t tell me nothing about it. Say, has he gone to bed?’

‘Yes, he’s gone to bed. This ain’t a good time to see his scar.’

‘How about tomorrow morning?’ hopefully. ‘Could I see it then?’

‘I dunno. Better wait till then.’

‘Listen,’ he suggested with inspiration, ‘I tell you what: tomorrow about eight when I am going to school you kind of get him to look out of the window and I’ll be passing and I’ll see it. I asked Sis, but she wouldn’t tell me nothing.’

‘Who is Sis, bub?’

‘She’s just my sister. Gosh, she’s mean. If I’d seen his scar I’d a told her now, wouldn’t I?’

‘You bet. What’s your sister’s name?’

‘Name’s Cecily Saunders, like mine only mine’s Robert Saunders. You’ll do that, won’t you?’

‘Oh . . . Cecily. . . . Sure, you leave it to me, Colonel’

He sighed with relief, yet still lingered. ‘Say how many soldiers has he got here?’

‘About one and a half, bub.’

‘One and a half? Are they live ones?’

‘Well practically.’

‘How can you have one and a half soldiers if they are live ones?’

‘Ask the war department. They know how to do it.’

He pondered briefly. ‘Gee, I wish we could get some soldiers at our house. Do you reckon we could?’

‘Why, I expect you could.’

‘Could? How?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Ask your sister. She can tell you.’

‘Aw, she won’t tell me.’

‘Sure she will. You ask her.’

‘Well, I’ll try,’ he agreed without hope, yet still optimistic ‘Well, I guess I better be going. They might be kind of anxious about me,’ he explained, descending the steps. ‘Good-bye, mister,’ he added politely.

‘So long Colonel.’

I’ll see his scar tomorrow, he thought with elation. I wonder if Sis does know how to get us a soldier? She don’t know much but maybe she does know that. But girls don’t never know nothing, so I ain’t going to count on it. Anyway I’ll see his scar tomorrow.

Tobe’s white jacket looming around the corner of the house gleamed dully in the young night and as young Robert mounted the steps towards the yellow rectangle of the front door Tobe’s voice said:

‘Whyn’t you come on to yo’ supper? Yo’ mommer gwine tear yo’ and my hair bofe out if you late like this. She say fer you to clean up befo’ you goes to de dinin-room: I done drawed you some nice water in de baffroom. Run ’long now. I tell ’em you here.’

He paused only to call through his sister’s door: ‘I’m going to see it tomorrow. Yaaaah!’ Then soaped and hungry he clattered into the dining-room, accomplishing an intricate field manoeuvre lest his damaged rear be exposed. He ignored his mother’s cold stare.

‘Robert Saunders, where have you been?’

‘Mamma, there’s a soldier there says we can get one too.’

‘One what?’ asked his father through his cigar smoke.

‘A soldier.’

‘Soldier?’

‘Yes, sir. That one says so.’

‘That one what?’

‘That soldier where Donald is. He says we can get a soldier, too.’

‘How get one?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me. But he says that Sis knows how to get us one.’

Mr and Mrs Saunders looked at each other above young Robert’s oblivious head as he bent over his plate spooning food into himself.

On board the Frisco Limited,
Missouri, 2 April 1919
Dear Margaret,
I wonder if you miss me like I miss you. Well I never had much fun in St Louis. I was there only a half a day. This is just a short note to remind you of waiting for me. It’s too bad I had to leave you so soon after. I will see my mother and attend to a few business matters and I will come back pretty soon. I will work like hell for you Margaret. This is just a short note to remind you of waiting for me. This dam train rocks so I cannot write any way. Well, give my regards to Giligan tell him not to break his arm crooking it until I get back. I will love you all ways.
With love
Julian

‘What is that child’s name, Joe?’

Mrs Powers in one of her straight dark dresses stood on the porch in the sun. The morning breeze was in her hair, beneath her clothing like water, carrying sun with it: pigeons about the church spire leaned upon it like silver and slanting splashes of soft paint. The lawn sloping fenceward was grey with dew, and a Negro informal in undershirt and overalls passed a lawn mower over the grass, leaving behind his machine a darker green stripe like an unrolling carpet. Grass sprang, from the whirling blades and clung wetly to his legs.

‘What child?’ Gilligan, uncomfortable in new hard serge and a linen collar, sat on the balustrade moodily smoking. For reply she handed him the letter and with his cigarette tilted in the corner of his mouth he squinted through the smoke, reading.

‘Oh, the ace. Name’s Lowe.’

‘Of course: Lowe. I tried several times after he left us but I never could recall it.’

Gilligan returned the letter to her. ‘Funny kid, ain’t he? So you scorned my affections and taken his, huh?’

Her windy dress moulded her longly. ‘Let’s go to the garden so I can have a cigarette.’

‘You could have it here. The padre wouldn’t mind, I bet.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t. I am considering his parishioners. What would they think to see a dark strange woman smoking a cigarette on the rectory porch at eight o’clock in the morning?’

‘They’ll think you are one of them French what-do-you-call-’ems the Loot brought back with him. Your good name won’t be worth nothing after these folks get through with it.’

‘My good name is your trouble, not mine, Joe.’

‘My trouble? How you mean?’

‘Men are the ones who worry about our good names, because they gave them to us. But we have other things to bother about, ourselves. What you mean by a good name is like a dress that’s too flimsy to wear comfortably. Come on, let’s go to the garden.’

‘You know you don’t mean that,’ Gilligan told her. She smiled faintly, not turning her face to him.

‘Come on,’ she repeated, descending the steps.

They left the delirium of sparrows and the sweet smell of fresh grass behind them and were in a gravelled path between rose bushes. The path ran on beneath two formal arching oaks; lesser roses rambling upon a wall paralleled them, and Gilligan following her long stride trod brittle and careful. Whenever he was among flowers he always felt as if he had entered a room full of women: he was always conscious of his body, of his walk, feeling as though he trod in sand. So he believed that he really did not like flowers.

Mrs Powers paused at intervals, sniffing, tasting dew upon buds and blooms, then the path passed between violet beds to where against a privet hedge there would soon be lilies. Beside a green iron bench beneath a magnolia she paused again, staring up into the tree. A mocking-bird flew out and she said:

‘There’s one, Joe. See?’

‘One what? Bird nest?’

‘No, a bloom. Not quite, but in a week or so. Do you know magnolia blooms?’

‘Sure: not good for anything if you pick ’em. Touch it, and it turns brown on you. Fades.’

‘That’s true of almost everything, isn’t it?’

‘Yeh, but how many folks believe it? Reckon the Loot does?’

‘I don’t know. . . . I wonder if he’ll have a chance to touch that one?’

‘Why should he want to? He’s already got one that’s turning brown on him.’

She looked at him, not comprehending at once. Her black eyes, her red mouth like a pomegranate blossom. She said then: ‘Oh! Magnolia. . . . I’d thought of her as a—something like an orchid. So you think she’s a magnolia?’

‘Not an orchid, anyways. Find orchids anywhere but you wouldn’t find her in Illinoy or Denver, hardly.’

‘I guess you are right. I wonder if there are any more like her anywhere?’

‘I dunno. But if there ain’t there’s already one too many.’

‘Let’s sit down for a while. Where’s my cigarette?’ She sat on the bench and he offered her his paper pack and struck a match for her. ‘So you think she won’t marry him, Joe?’

‘I ain’t so sure any more. I think I am changing my mind about it. She won’t miss a chance to marry what she calls a hero—if only to keep somebody else from getting him.’ (Meaning you, he thought.)

(Meaning me, she thought.) She said: ‘Not if she knows he’s going to die?’

‘What does she know about dying? She can’t even imagine herself getting old, let alone imagining anybody she is interested in dying. I bet she believes they can even patch him up so it won’t show.’

‘Joe, you are an incurable sentimentalist. You mean you think she’ll marry him because she is letting him think she will and because she is a “good” woman. You are quite a gentle person, Joe.’

‘I ain’t!’ he retorted with warmth. ‘I’m as hard as they make ’em: I got to be.’ He saw she was laughing at him and he grinned ruefully. ‘Well, you got me that time, didn’t you?’ He became suddenly serious. ‘But it ain’t her I’m worrying about. It’s his old man. Why didn’t you tell him how bad off he was?’

She quite feminine and Napoleonic:

‘Why did you send me on ahead instead of coming yourself? I told you I’d spoil it.’ She flipped her cigarette away and put her hand on his arm. ‘I didn’t have the heart to, Joe. If you could have seen his face! and heard him! He was like a child, Joe. He showed me all of Donald’s things. You know: pictures, and a slingshot, and a girl’s undie and a hyacinth bulb he carried with him in France. And there was that girl and everything. I just couldn’t. Do you blame me?’

‘Well, it’s all right now. It was a kind of rotten trick, though, to let him find it all out before them people at the station. We done the best we could, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, we did the best we could. I wish we could do more.’ Her gaze brooded across the garden where in the sun beyond the trees, bees were already at work. Across the garden, beyond a street and another wall, you could see the top of a pear tree like a branching candelabra, closely bloomed, white, white. . . . She stirred, crossing her knees. ‘That girl fainting, though. What do you—’

‘Oh, I expected that. But here comes Othello, like he was looking for us.’

They watched the late conductor of the lawn mower as he shuffled his shapeless shoes along the gravel. He saw them and halted.

‘Mist’ Gillmum, Rev’un say fer you to come to de house.’

‘Me?’

‘You Mist’ Gillmum, ain’t you?’

‘Oh, sure.’ He rose. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. You coming, too?’

‘You go and see what he wants. I’ll come along after a while.’

The Negro had turned shuffling on ahead of him and the lawn mower had resumed its chattering song as Gilligan mounted the steps. The rector stood on the veranda. His face was calm but it was evident he had not slept.

‘Sorry to trouble you, Mr Gilligan, but Donald is awake, and I am not familiar with his clothing as you are. I gave away his civilian things when he—when he—’

‘Sure, sir,’ Gilligan answered in sharp pity for the grey-faced man. He don’t know him yet! ‘I’ll help him.’

The divine, ineffectual, would have followed, but Gilligan leaped away from him up the stairs. He saw Mrs Powers coming from the garden and he descended to the lawn, meeting her.

‘Good morning, Doctor,’ she responded to his greeting. ‘I have been looking at your flowers. I hope you don’t mind?’

‘Not at all, not at all, my dear madam. An old man is always flattered when his flowers are admired. The young are so beautifully convinced that their emotions are admirable: young girls wear the clothes of their older sisters who require clothes, principally because they do not need them themselves, just for fun, or perhaps to pander to an illusion of the male; but as we grow older what we are loses importance, giving place to what we do. And I have never been able to do anything well save to raise flowers. And that is, I think, an obscure emotional house-wifery in me: I had thought to grow old with my books among my roses: until my eyes became too poor to read longer I would read, after that I would sit in the sun. Now, of course, with my son at home again, I must put that by. I am anxious for you to see Donald this morning. You will notice a marked improvement.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I shall,’ she answered, wanting to put her arms around him. But he was so big and so confident. At the corner of the house was a tree covered with tiny white-bellied leaves like a mist, like a swirl of arrested silver water. The rector offered his arm with heavy gallantry.

‘Shall we go in to breakfast?’

Emmy had been before them with narcissi, and red roses in a vase repeated the red of strawberries in flat blue bowls. The rector drew her chair. ‘When we are alone Emmy sits here, but she has a strange reluctance to dining with strangers, or when guests are present.’

Mrs Powers sat and Emmy appeared briefly and disappeared for no apparent reason. At last there came slow feet on the staircase slanting across the open door. She saw their legs, then their bodies crossed her vision, and the rector rose as they appeared in the door. ‘Good morning, Donald,’ he said.

(That my father? Sure, Loot. That’s him.) ‘Good morning, sir.’

The divine stood huge and tense and powerless as Gilligan helped Mahon into his seat.

‘Here’s Mrs Powers, too, Loot.’

He turned his faltering puzzled gaze upon her. ‘Good morning,’ he said, but her eyes were on his father’s face. She lowered her gaze to her plate feeling hot moisture against her lids. What have I done? she thought, what have I done?

She tried to eat but could not, watching Mahon, awkward with his left hand, peering into his plate, eating scarcely anything, and Gilligan’s healthy employment of knife and fork, and the rector tasting nothing, watching his son’s every move with grey despair.

Emmy appeared again with fresh dishes. Averting her face she set the dishes down awkwardly and was about to flee precipitately when the rector looking up stopped her. She turned in stiff selfconscious fright, hanging her head.

‘Here’s Emmy, Donald,’ his father said.

Mahon raised his head and looked at his father. Then his puzzled gaze touched Gilligan’s face and returned to his plate, and his hand rose slowly to his mouth. Emmy stood for a space and her black eyes became wide and the blood drained from her face slowly. Then she put the back of one red hand against her mouth and fled, blundering into the door.

I can’t stand this. Mrs Powers rose unnoticed save by Gilligan and followed Emmy. Upon a table in the kitchen Emmy leaned bent almost double, her head cradled in her red arms. What a terrible position to cry in, Mrs Powers thought, putting her arms around Emmy. The girl jerked herself erect, staring at the other. Her face was wrung with weeping, ugly.

‘He didn’t speak to me!’ she gasped.

‘He didn’t know his father, Emmy. Don’t be silly.’ She held Emmy’s elbows, smelling harsh soap. Emmy clung to her.

‘But me, me! He didn’t even look at me!’ she repeated.

It was on her tongue to say Why should he? but Emmy’s blurred sobbing and her awkward wrung body; the very kinship of tears to tears, something to cling to after having been for so long a prop to others. . . .

Outside the window was a trellised morning-glory vine with a sparrow in it, and clinging to Emmy, holding each other in a recurrent mutual sorrow, she tasted warm salt in her throat.

Damn, damn, damn, she said amid her own tacking infrequent tears.

3

In front of the post office the rector was the centre of an interested circle when Mr Saunders saw him. The gathering was representative, embracing the professions with a liberal leavening of those inevitable casuals, cravatless, overalled or unoveralled, who seem to suffer no compulsions whatever, which anything from a captured still to a Negro with an epileptic fit or a mouth-organ attracts to itself like atoms to a magnet, in any small southern town—or northern town or western town, probably.

‘Yes, yes, quite a surprise,’ the rector was saying. ‘I had no intimation of it, none whatever, until a friend with whom he was travelling—he is not yet fully recovered, you see—preceded him in order to inform me.’

(One of them airy-plane fellers.)

(S’what I say: if the Lord had intended folks to fly around in the air He’d ’a’ give ’em wings.)

(Well, he’s been closter to the Lord’n you’ll ever git.)

This outer kindly curious fringe made way for Mr Saunders.

(Closter’n that feller’ll ever git, anyway. Guffaws.) This speaker was probably a Baptist.

Mr Saunders extended his hand.

‘Well, Doctor, we are mighty glad to hear the good news.’

‘Ah, good morning, good morning.’ The rector took the proffered hand in his huge paw. ‘Yes, quite a surprise. I was hoping to see you. How is Cecily this morning?’ he asked in a lower tone. But there was no need, no lack of privacy. There was a general movement into the post office. The mail was in and the window had opened and even those who expected no mail, who had received no mail in months must need answer one of the most enduring compulsions of the American nation. The rector’s news had become stale in the face of the possibility of a stamped personal communication of some kind, of any kind.

Charlestown, like numberless other towns throughout the south, had been built around a circle of tethered horses and mules. In the middle of the square was the courthouse—a simple utilitarian edifice of brick and sixteen beautiful Ionic columns stained with generations of casual tobacco. Elms surrounded the courthouse and beneath these trees, on scarred and carved wood benches and chairs the city fathers, progenitors of solid laws and solid citizens who believed in Tom Watson and feared only God and drouth, in black string ties or the faded brushed grey and bronze meaningless medals of the Confederate States of America, no longer having to make any pretence toward labour, slept or whittled away the long drowsy days while their juniors of all ages, not yet old enough to frankly slumber in public, played checkers or chewed tobacco and talked. A lawyer, a drug clerk, and two nondescripts tossed iron discs back and forth between two holes in the ground. And above all brooded early April sweetly pregnant with noon.

‘Yet all of them had a pleasant word for the rector as he and Mr Saunders passed. Even the slumberers waked from the light sleep of the aged to ask about Donald. The divine’s progress was almost triumphal.

Mr Saunders walked beside him, returning greetings, preoccupied. Damn these womenfolks, he fretted. They passed beneath a stone shaft bearing a Confederate soldier shading his marble eyes forever in eternal rigid vigilance and the rector repeated his question.

‘She is feeling better this morning. It is too bad she fainted yesterday, but she isn’t strong, you know.’

‘That was to be expected; his unannounced arrival rather startled us all. Even Donald acknowledges that, I am sure. Their attachment also, you see.’

Trees arching greenly over the street made a green tunnel of quiet, the sidewalk was checkered with shade. Mr Saunders felt the need of mopping his neck. He took two cigars from his pocket, but the rector waved them away. Damn these women! Minnie should have done this.

The rector said: ‘We have a beautiful town, Mr Saunders, these streets, these trees. . . . This quiet is just the thing for Donald.’

‘Yes, yes, just the thing for him, Doctor—’

‘You and Mrs Saunders must come in to see him this afternoon. I had expected you last night, but remembering that Cecily had been quite overcome—It is as well you did not, though. Donald was fatigued and Mrs P—I thought it better to have a doctor (just as a precaution, you see), and he advised Donald to go to bed.’

‘Yes, yes. We had intended to come, but, as you say, his condition, first night at home; and Cecily’s condition, too—’ He could feel his moral fibre disintegrating. Yet his course had seemed so logical last night after his wife had taken him to task, taking him, as a clinching argument, in to see his daughter weeping in bed. Damn these women! he repeated for the third time. He puffed his cigar and flung it away, mentally girding himself.

‘About this engagement, Doctor—’

‘Ah, yes, I was thinking of it myself. Do you know, I believe Cecily is the best medicine he can have? Wait,’ as the other would have interrupted, ‘it will naturally take her some time to become accustomed to his—to him—’ he faced his companion confidentially, ‘he has a scar, you see. But I am confident this can be removed, even though Cecily does become accustomed to it. In fact, I am depending on her to make a new man of him in a short time.’

Mr Saunders gave it up. Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow I will do it.

‘He is naturally a bit confused now,’ the divine continued, ‘but care and attention, and, above all, Cecily, will remedy that. Do you know,’ he turned his kind gaze on Mr Saunders again, ‘do you know, he didn’t even know me at first when I went into his room this morning? Merely a temporary condition, though, I assure you. Quite to be expected,’ he added quickly. ‘Don’t you think it was to be expected?’

‘I should think so, yes. But what happened to him? How did he manage to turn up like this?’

‘He won’t talk about it. A friend who came home with him assures me that he doesn’t know, cannot remember. But this happens quite often, the young man—a soldier himself—tells me, and that it will all come back to him some day. Donald seems to have lost all his papers save a certificate of discharge from a British hospital. But pardon me: you were saying something about the engagement.’

‘No, no. It was nothing.’ The sun was overhead: it was almost noon. Around the horizon were a few thick clouds fat as whipped cream. Rain this afternoon. Suddenly he spoke: ‘By the way, Doctor, I wonder if I might stop in and speak to Donald?’

‘By all means. Certainly. He will be glad to see an old friend. Stop in, by all means.’

The clouds were steadily piling higher, as they passed beneath the church spire and crossed the lawn. Mounting the steps of the rectory, they saw Mrs Powers sitting with a book. She raised her eyes, seeing the resemblance immediately; the rector’s ‘Mr Saunders is an old friend of Donald’s’ was unnecessary. She rose, shutting her book on her forefinger.

‘Donald is lying down. Mr Gilligan is with him, I think. Let me call.’

‘No, no,’ Mr Saunders objected quickly, ‘don’t disturb him. I will call later.’

‘After you have come out of your way to speak to him? He will be disappointed if you don’t go up. You are an old friend, you know. You said Mr Saunders is an old friend of Donald’s, didn’t you, Doctor?’

‘Yes, indeed. He is Cecily’s father.’

‘Then you must come up by all means.’ She put her hand on his elbow.

‘No, no, ma’am. Don’t you think it would be better not to disturb him now, Doctor?’ he appealed to the rector.

‘Well, perhaps so. You and Mrs Saunders are coming this afternoon, then?’

But she was obdurate. ‘Hush, Doctor. Surely Donald can see Miss Saunders’s father at any time.’ She firmly compelled him through the door, and he and the divine followed her up the stairs. To her knock, Gilligan’s voice replied and she opened the door.

‘Here is Cecily’s father to see Donald, Joe,’ she said, standing aside. The door opened and flooded the narrow passage with light, closing it reft the passage of light again, and moving through a walled twilight, she descended the stairs again slowly. The lawn mower was long since stilled and beneath a tree she could see the recumbent form and one propped knee of its languid conductor lapped in slumber. Along the street passed slowly the hourly quota of Negro children who, seeming to have no arbitrary hours, seemingly free of all impulsions of time or higher learning, went to and from school at any hour of a possible lighted eight, carrying lunch pails of ex-molasses and -lard tins. Some of them also carried books. The lunch was usually eaten on the way to school, which was conducted by a fattish Negro in a lawn tie and an alpaca coat who could take a given line from any book from the telephone directory down and soon have the entire present personnel chanting it after him, like Vachel Lindsay. Then they were off for the day.

The clouds had piled higher and thicker, taking a lavender tinge, making bits of sky laked among them more blue. The air was becoming sultry, oppressive; and the church spire had lost perspective until now it seemed but two dimensions of metal and cardboard.

The leaves hung lifeless and sad, as if life were being recalled from them before it was fully given, leaving only the ghosts of young leaves. As she lingered near the door, she could hear Emmy clashing dishes in the dining-room and at last she heard that for which she waited.

‘—expect you and Mrs Saunders this afternoon, then,’ the rector was saying as they appeared.

‘Yes, yes,’ the caller answered with detachment. His eyes met Mrs Powers’s. How like her he is! she thought, and her heart sank. Have I blundered again? She examined his face fleetingly and sighed with relief.

‘How do you think he looks, Mr Saunders?’ she asked.

‘Fine, considering his long trip, fine.’

The rector said happily: ‘I had noticed it myself this morning. Didn’t you also, Mrs Powers?’ His eyes implored her and she said yes. ‘You should have seen him yesterday, to discern the amazing improvement in him. Eh, Mrs Powers?’

‘Yes, indeed, sir. We all commented on it this morning.’

‘Mr Saunders, carrying his limp panama hat, moved towards the steps. ‘Well, Doctor, it’s fine having the boy home again. We are all glad for our own sakes as well as yours. If there is anything we can do—’ he added with neighbourly sincerity.

‘Thank you, thank you. I will not hesitate. But Donald is in a position to help himself now, provided he gets his medicine often enough. We depend on you for this, you know,’ the rector answered with jovial innuendo.

Mr Saunders added a complement of expected laughter. ‘As soon as she is herself again we, her mother and I, expect it to be the other way: we expect to be asking you to lend us Cecily occasionally.’

‘Well, that might be arranged, I imagine—especially with a friend.’ The rector laughed in turn and Mrs Powers, listening, exulted. Then she knew a brief misgiving. They are so much alike! Will they change his mind for him, those women? She said:

‘I think I’ll walk as far as the gate with Mr Saunders, if he doesn’t mind.’

‘Not at all, ma’am. I’ll be delighted.’

The rector stood in the door and beamed upon them as they descended the steps. ‘Sorry you cannot remain to dinner,’ he said.

‘Some other time, Doctor. My missus is waiting for me today.’

‘Yes, some other time,’ the rector agreed. He entered the house again, and they crossed grass beneath the imminent heavens. Mr Saunders looked at her sharply. ‘I don’t like this,’ he stated. ‘Why doesn’t someone tell him the truth about that boy?’

‘Neither do I,’ she answered. ‘But if they did, would he believe it? Did anyone have to tell you about him!’

‘My God, no! Anybody could look at him. It made me sick. But, then, I’m chicken-livered, anyway,’ he added with mirthless apology. ‘What did the doctor say about him?’

‘Nothing definite, except that he remembers nothing that happened before he was hurt. The man that was wounded is dead and this is another person, a grown child. It’s his apathy, his detachment, that’s so terrible. He doesn’t seem to care where he is nor what he does. He must have been passed from hand to hand, like a child.’

‘I mean, about his recovery.’

She shrugged. ‘Who can tell? There is nothing physically wrong with him that surgeons can remedy, if that’s what you mean.’

He walked on in silence. ‘His father should be told though,’ he said at last.

‘I know, but who is to do it? Besides, he is bound to know some day, so why not let him believe as he wishes as long as he can? The shock will be no greater at one time than at another. And he is old, and so big and happy now. And Donald may recover, you know,’ she lied.

‘Yes, that’s right. But do you think he will?’

‘Why not? He can’t remain forever as he is now.’ They had reached the gate. The iron was rough and hot with sun under her hand, but there was no blue anywhere in the sky.

Mr Saunders, fumbling with his hat, said: ‘But suppose he—he does not recover?’

car

She gave him a direct look. ‘Dies, you mean?’ she asked brutally.

‘Well, yes. Since you put it that way.’

car

‘Now that’s what I want to discuss with you. It is a question of strengthening his morale, of giving him some reason to—well, buck up. And who could do that better than Miss Saunders?’

‘But, ma’am, ain’t you asking a lot, asking me to risk my daughter’s happiness on such a poor bet as that?’

‘You don’t understand. I am not asking that the engagement be insisted upon. I mean, why not let Cecily—Miss Saunders—see him as often as she will, let her be sweethearts with him if necessary until he gets to know her again and will make an effort for himself. Time enough then to talk of engagements. Think, Mr Saunders: suppose he were your son. That wouldn’t be very much to ask of a friend, would it?’

He looked at her again in admiration, keenly, ‘You’ve got a level head on your shoulders, young lady. So what I’m to do is to prevail on her to come and see him, is it?’

‘You must do more than that: you must see that she does come, that she acts just as she acted towards him before.’ She gripped his arm. ‘You must not let her mother dissuade her. You most not. Remember, he might have been your son.’

‘What makes you think her mother might object?’ he asked in amazement.

She smiled faintly. ‘You forget I’m a woman, too,’ she said. Then her face became serious, imminent. ‘But you mustn’t let that happen, do you hear?’ Her eyes compelled him. ‘Is that a promise?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, meeting her level glance. He took her firm proffered hand and felt her clean, muscular clasp.

‘A promise, then,’ she said as warm great drops of rain dissolving from the fat, dull sky splashed heavily. She said good-bye and fled, running across the lawn towards the house before assaulting grey battalions of rain. Her long legs swept her up and on to the veranda as the pursuing rain, foiled, whirled like cavalry with silver lances across the lawn.

4

Mr Saunders, casting an uneasy look at the dissolving sky, let himself out the gate and here, returning from school, was his son, saying: ‘Did you see his scar, daddy? Did you see his scar?’

The man stared at this troublesome small miniature of himself, and then he knelt suddenly, taking his son into his arms, holding him close.

‘You seen his scar,’ young Robert Saunders accused, trying to release himself as the rain galloped over them, through the trees.

5

Emmy’s eyes were black and shallow as a toy animal’s and her hair was a sun-burned shock of no particular colour. There was something wild in Emmy’s face: you knew that she out-ran, out-fought, out-climbed her brothers: you could imagine her developing like a small but sturdy greenness on a dunghill. Not a flower. But not dung, either.

Her father was a house painter, with the house painter’s inevitable penchant for alcohol, and he used to beat his wife. She, fortunately, failed to survive the birth of Emmy’s fourth brother, whereupon her father desisted from the bottle long enough to woo and wed an angular shrew who, serving as an instrument of retribution, beat him soundly with stove wood in her lighter moments.

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‘Don’t never marry a woman, Emmy,’ her father, maudlin and affectionate, advised her. ‘If I had it to do all over again I’d take a man every time.’

‘I won’t never marry nobody,’ Emmy had promised herself passionately, especially after Donald had gone to war and her laboriously worded letters to him had gone unanswered. (And now he don’t even know me, she thought dully.)

‘I won’t never marry nobody,’ she repeated, putting dinner on the table. ‘I think I’ll just die,’ she said, staring through a streaming window into the rain, watching the gusty rain surge by like a grey yet silver ship crossing her vision, nursing a final plate between her hands. She broke her reverie, and putting the plate on the table she went and stood without the study door where they were sitting watching the streaming window panes, hearing the grey rain like a million little feet across the roof and in the trees.

‘All right, Uncle Joe,’ she said, fleeing kitchenward.

Before they were half-way through lunch the downpour had ceased, the ships of rain had surged onward, drawing before the wind, leaving only a whisper in the wet green waves of leaves, with an occasional gust running in long white lines like elves holding hands across the grass. But Emmy did not appear with dessert.

‘Emmy!’ called the rector again.

Mrs Powers rose. ‘I’ll go see,’ she said.

The kitchen was empty. ‘Emmy?’ she called quietly. There was no reply, and she was on the point of leaving when an impulse bade her look behind the open door. She swung it away from the wall and Emmy stared at her dumbly.

‘Emmy, what is it?’ she asked.

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But Emmy marched wordless from her hiding place, and taking a tray she placed the prepared dessert on it and handed it to Mrs Powers.

‘This is silly, Emmy, acting this way. You must give him time to get used to us again.’

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But Emmy only looked at her from beyond the frontiers of her inarticulate despair, and the other woman carried the tray in to the table. ‘Emmy’s not feeling well,’ she explained.

‘I am afraid Emmy works too hard,’ the rector said. ‘She was always a hard worker, don’t you remember, Donald?’

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Mahon raised his puzzled gaze to his father’s face. ‘Emmy?’ he repeated.

‘Don’t you remember Emmy?’

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‘Yes, sir,’ he repeated tonelessly.

6

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The window panes had cleared, though it yet rained. She sat after the men had left the table and at last Emmy peered through the door, then entered. She rose and together the two of them cleared the table, over Emmy’s mild protest, and carried the broken meal to the kitchen. Mrs Powers turned back her sleeves briskly.

‘No, no, lemme do it,’ Emmy objected. ‘You’ll spoil your dress.’

‘It’s an old one: no matter if I do.’

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‘It don’t look old to me. I think it’s right pretty. But this is my work. You go on and lemme do it.’

‘I know, but I’ve got to do something or I’ll go wild. Don’t you worry about this dress: I don’t.’

‘You are rich, you don’t have to, I guess,’ Emmy answered coldly, examining the dress.

‘Do you like it?’ Emmy made no reply. ‘I think clothes of this sort suit people of your and my type, don’t you?’

‘I dunno. I never thought about it,’ splashing water in the sink.

‘I tell you what,’ said Mrs Powers, watching Emmy’s firm, sturdy back, ‘I have a new dress up in my trunk that doesn’t suit me, for some reason. When we get through, suppose you come up with me and we’ll try it on you. I can sew a little, and we can make it fit you exactly. What about it?’

Emmy thawed imperceptibly. ‘What use would I have for it? I don’t go anywhere, and I got clothes good enough to wash and sweep and cook in.’

‘I know, but it’s always well to have some dress-up things. I will lend you stockings and things to go with it, and a hat, too.’

Emmy slid dishes into hot water and steam rose about her reddened arms. ‘Where’s your husband?’ she asked irrelevantly.

‘He was killed in the war, Emmy.’

‘Oh,’ she said. Then, after a while: ‘And you so young, too.’ She gave Mrs Powers a quick, kind glance: sisters in sorrow. (My Donald was killed, too.)

Mrs Powers rose quickly. ‘Where’s a cup towel? Let’s get done so we can try that dress.’

Emmy drew her hands from the water and dried them on her apron. ‘Wait, lemme get an apron for you, too.’

A bedraggled sparrow eyed her from the limp, glistening morning-glory vine, and Emmy dropped the apron over her head and knotted the cords at the back. Steam rose again about Emmy’s forearms, wreathing her head, and the china was warm and smooth and sensuous to the touch; a glass gleamed under Mrs Powers’s towelling and a dull parade of silver took the light mutely, hushing it as like two priestesses they repeated the orisons of Clothes.

As they passed the study door they saw the rector and his son gazing quietly into a rain-perplexed tree, and Gilligan sprawled on his back upon a battered divan, smoking and reading.

7

Emmy, outfitted from head to heel, thanked her awkwardly.

‘How good the rain smells!’ Mrs Powers interrupted her. ‘Sit down a while, won’t you?’

Emmy, admiring her finery, came suddenly from out her Cinderella dream. ‘I can’t. I got some mending to do. I nearly clean forgot it.’

‘Bring your mending in here, then, so we can talk. I haven’t had a woman to talk to in months, it seems like. Bring it in here and let me help you.’

Emmy said, flattered: ‘Why do you want to do my work?’

‘I told you if I don’t have something to do I’ll be a crazy woman in two days. Please, Emmy, as a favour. Won’t you?’

‘All right. Lemme get it.’ She gathered up her garments and leaving the room she returned with a heaped basket. They sat on either side of it.

‘His poor huge socks,’ Mrs Powers raised her encased hand. ‘Like chair covers, aren’t they?’

Emmy laughed happily above her needle, and beneath swooning gusts of rain across the roof the pile of neatly folded and mended garments grew steadily.

‘Emmy,’ Mrs Powers said after a time, ‘what was Donald like before? You knew him a long time, didn’t you?’

Emmy’s needle continued its mute, tiny flashing, and after a while Mrs Powers leaned across the basket and putting her hand under Emmy’s chin, raised her bent face. Emmy twisted her head aside and bent again over her needle. Mrs Powers rose and drew the shades, darkening the room against the rain-combed afternoon. Emmy continued to peer blindly at her darning until the other woman took it from her hand, then she raised her head and stared at her new friend with beast-like, unresisting hopelessness.

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Mrs Powers took Emmy’s arms and drew her erect. ‘Come, Emmy,’ she said, feeling the bones in Emmy’s hard, muscular arms. Mrs Powers knew that lacking a bed any reclining intimacy was conducive to confidence, so she drew Emmy down beside her in an ancient obese armchair. And with heedless rain filling the room with hushed monotonous sound, Emmy told her brief story.

S‘We was in school together—when he was there at all. He never came, mostly. They couldn’t make him. He’d just go off into the country by himself, and not come back for two or three days. And nights, too. It was one night when he—when he—’

Her voice died away and Mrs Powers said: ‘When he what, Emmy? Aren’t you going too fast?’

‘Sometimes he used to walk home from school with me. He wouldn’t never have a hat or a coat, and his face was like—it was like he ought to live in the woods. You know: not like he ought to went to school or had to dress up. And so you never did know when you’d see him. He’d come in school at almost any time and folks would see him way out in the country at night. Sometimes he’d sleep in folks’ houses in the country and sometimes niggers would find him asleep in sand ditches. Everybody knew him. And then one night—’

‘How old were you then?’

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‘I was sixteen and he was nineteen. And then one night—’

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‘But you are going too fast. Tell me about you and him before that. Did you like him?’

‘I liked him better than anybody. When we was both younger we dammed up a place in a creek and built a swimming hole and we used to go in every day. And then we’d lie in a old blanket we had and sleep until time to get up and go home. And in summer we was together nearly all the time. Then one day he’d just disappear and nobody wouldn’t know where he was. And then he’d be outside our house some morning, calling me.

‘The trouble was that I always lied to pappy where I had been and I hated that. Donald always told his father: he never lied about nothing he ever did. But he was braver than me, I reckon.

‘And then when I was fourteen pappy found out about how I liked Donald, and so he took me out of school and kept me at home all the time. So I didn’t hardly ever get to see Donald. Pappy made me promise I wouldn’t go around with him any more. He had come for me once or twice and I told him I couldn’t go, and then one day he came and pappy was at home.

‘Pappy ran out to the gate and told him not to come fooling around there no more, but Donald stood right up to him. Not acting bad, but just like pappy was a fly or something. And so pappy come in the house mad and said he wasn’t going to have any such goings-on with his girls, and he hit me and then he was sorry and cried (he was drunk, you see), and made me swear I wouldn’t never see Donald again. And I had to. But I thought of how much fun we used to have, and I wanted to die.

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‘And so I didn’t see Donald for a long time. Then folks said he was going to marry that—that—her. I knew Donald didn’t care much about me: he never cared about anybody. But when I heard that he was going to marry her—

‘Anyway, I didn’t sleep much at night, and so I’d sit on the porch after I’d undressed lots of times, thinking about him and watching the moon getting bigger every night. And then one night, when the moon was almost full and you could see like day almost, I saw somebody walk up to our gate and stop there. And I knew it was Donald, and he knew I was there because he said:

‘ “Come here, Emmy.”

‘And I went to him. And it was like old times because I forgot all about him marrying her, because he still liked me, to come for me after so long. And he took my hand and we walked down the road, not talking at all. After a while we came to the place where you turn off the road to go to our swimming hole, and when we crawled through the fence my nightie got hung and he said, “Take it off.” And I did and we put it in a plum bush and went on.

‘The water looked so soft in the moonlight you couldn’t tell where the water was hardly, and we swam a while and then Donald hid his clothes, too, and we went on up on top of a hill. Everything was so kind of pretty and the grass felt so good to your feet, and all of a sudden Donald ran on ahead of me. I can keep up with Donald when I want to, but for some reason I didn’t want to tonight, and so I sat down. I could see him running along the top of the hill, all shiny in the moonlight, then he ran back down the hill towards the creek.

‘And so I laid down. I couldn’t see anything except the sky, and I don’t know how long it was when all of a sudden there was his head against the sky, over me, and he was wet again and I could see the moonlight kind of running on his wet shoulders and arms, and he looked at me. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could feel them somehow like things touching me. When he looks at you—you feel like a bird, kind of: like you was going swooping right away from the ground or something. But now there was something different, too. I could hear him panting from running, and I could feel something inside me panting, too. I was afraid and I wasn’t afraid. It was like everything was dead except us. And then he said:

‘ “Emmy, Emmy.”

‘Kind of like that. And then—and then—’

‘Yes. And then he made love to you.’

Emmy turned suddenly, and the other held her close. ‘And now he don’t even know me, he don’t even know me!’ she wailed.

Mrs Powers held her and at last Emmy raised her hand and pushed her hair from her face. ‘And then?’ Mrs Powers prompted.

‘And afterwards we laid there and held each other, and I felt so quiet, so good, and some cows came up and looked at us and went away. And I could feel his hand going right slow from my shoulder along my side so far as he could reach and then back again, slow, slow. We didn’t talk at all, just his hand going up and down my side, so smooth and quiet. And after a while I was asleep.

‘Then I waked up. It was getting dawn and I was cramped and wet and cold, and he was gone. . . . But I knew he would come back. And so he did, with some blackberries. We ate ’em and watched it getting light in the east. Then when the blackberries were gone I could feel the cold, wet grass under me again and see the sky all yellow and chilly behind his head.

‘After a while we went back by the swimming hole and he put on his clothes and we got my nightie and I put it on. It was getting light fast and he wanted to go all the way home with me, only I wouldn’t let him: I didn’t care what happened to me now. And when I went through the gate there was pappy standing on the porch.’

She was silent. Her story seemed to be finished. She breathed regularly as a child against the other’s shoulder.

‘And what then, Emmy?’ Mrs Powers prompted again.

‘Well, when I came to the porch I stopped and he said, “Where have you been?” and I said, “None of your business,” and he said, “You whore, I’ll beat you to death,” and I said, “Touch me.” But he didn’t. I think I would have killed him if he had. He went into the house and I went in and dressed and bundled up my clothes and left. And I haven’t been back since, either.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I got a job sewing for a dressmaker named Mrs Miller, and she let me sleep in her shop until I could earn some money. I hadn’t been there but three days when one day Mr Mahon walked in. He said that Donald had told him about us and that Donald had gone to the war, and that he had come for me. So I have been here ever since. So I didn’t see Donald any more, and now he don’t know me at all.’

‘You poor child,’ Mrs Powers said. She raised Emmy’s face: it was calm, purged. She no longer felt superior to the girl. Suddenly Emmy sprang to her feet and gathered up the mended clothes. ‘Wait, Emmy,’ she called. But Emmy was gone.

She lit a cigarette and sat smoking slowly in her great dim room with its heterogeneous collection of furniture. After a while she rose to draw the curtains; the rain had ceased and long lances of sunlight piercing the washed immaculate air struck sparks amid the dripping trees.

She crushed out her cigarette, and descending the stairs she saw a strange retreating back, and the rector, turning from the door, said hopelessly, staring at her:

‘He doesn’t give us much hope for Donald’s sight.’

‘But he’s only a general practitioner. We’ll get a specialist from Atlanta,’ she encouraged him, touching his sleeve.

And here was Miss Cecily Saunders tapping her delicate way up the fast-drying path, between the fresh-sparkled grass.

8

Cecily sat in her room in pale satin knickers and a thin orange-coloured sweater, with her slim legs elevated to the arm of another chair, reading a book. Her father, opening the door without knocking, stared at her in silent disapproval. She met his gaze for a time, then lowered her legs.

‘Do nice girls sit around half-naked like this?’ he asked coldly. She laid her book aside and rose.

‘Maybe I’m not a nice girl,’ she answered flippantly. He watched her as she enveloped her narrow body in a flimsy diaphanous robe.

‘I suppose you consider that an improvement, do you?’

‘You shouldn’t come in my room without knocking, daddy,’ she told him fretfully.

‘No more I will, if that’s the way you sit in it.’ He knew he was creating an unfortunate atmosphere in which to say what he wished, but he felt compelled to continue. ‘Can you imagine your mother sitting in her room half undressed like this?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it’ She leaned against the mantel, combatively respectful. ‘But I can if she wanted to.’

He sat down. ‘I want to talk to you, Sis.’ His tone was changed and she sank on to the foot of the bed, curling her legs under her, regarding him hostilely. How clumsy I am, he thought, clearing his throat. ‘It’s about young Mahon.’

She looked at him.

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‘I saw him this noon, you know.’

She was forcing him to do all the talking. Dammit, what an amazing ability children have for making parental admonition hard to achieve. Even Bob was developing it.

Cecily’s eyes were green and fathomless. She extended her arm, taking a nail file from her dressing-table. The downpour had ceased and the rain was only a whisper in the wet leaves. Cecily bent her face above the graceful slender gesturing of her hands.

‘I say, I saw young Mahon today,’ her father repeated with rising choler.

‘You did? How did he look, daddy?’ Her tone was so soft, so innocent that he sighed with relief. He glanced at her sharply, but her face was lowered sweetly and demurely; he could see only her hair filled with warm reddish lights and the shallow plane of her cheek and her soft unemphatic chin.

‘That boy’s in bad shape, Sis.’

‘His poor father,’ she commiserated above her busy hands. ‘It is so hard on him, isn’t it?’

‘His father doesn’t know.’

She looked quickly up and her eyes became grey and dark, darker still. He saw that she didn’t know, either. ‘Doesn’t know?’ she repeated, ‘How can he help seeing that scar?’ Her face blanched and her hand touched her breast delicately. ‘Do you mean—’

‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘I mean his father thinks—that he—his father doesn’t think—I mean his father forgets that his journey has tired him, you see,’ he finished awkwardly. He continued swiftly: ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘About being engaged to him? How can I, with that scar? How can I?’

‘No, no, not engaged to him, if you don’t want to be. We won’t think about the engagement at all now. But just keep on seeing him until he gets well, you see.’

‘But, daddy, I can’t. I just can’t.’

‘Why, Sis?’

‘Oh, his face. I can’t bear it any more.’ Her own face was wrung with the recollection of a passed anguish. ‘Don’t you see I can’t? I would if I could.’

‘But you’ll get used to it. And I expect a good doctor can patch him up and hide it. Doctors can do anything these days. Why, Sis, you are the one who can do more for him right now than any doctor.’

She lowered her head to her arms folded upon the foot-tail of the bed and her father stood beside her, putting his arm about her slim, nervous body.

‘Can’t you do that much, Sis? Just drop in and see him occasionally?’

‘I just can’t,’ she moaned, ‘I just can’t.’

‘Well, then, I guess you can’t see that Farr boy any more, either.’

She raised her head quickly and her body became taut beneath his arm. ‘Who says I can’t?’

‘I say so, Sis,’ he replied gently and firmly.

Her eyes became blue with anger, almost black.

‘You can’t prevent it. You know you can’t.’ She thrust herself back against his arm, trying to evade it. He held her and she twisted her head aside, straining from him.

‘Look at me,’ he said quietly, putting his other hand under her cheek. She resisted, he felt her warm breath on his hand, but he forced her face around. Her eyes blazed at him. ‘If you can’t occasionally see the man you are engaged to, and a sick man to boot, I’m damned if I’ll have you running around with anybody else.’

There were red prints of his fingers on her cheek, and her eyes slowly filled. ‘You are hurting me,’ she said, and feeling her soft, vague chin in his palm and her fragile body against his arm, he knew a sudden access of contrition. He picked her up bodily and sat again in a chair, holding her on his lap.

‘Now, then,’ he whispered, rocking, holding her face against his shoulder, ‘I didn’t mean to be so rough about it.’

She lay against him limply, weeping, and the rain filled the interval, whispering across the roof among the leaves of trees. After a long space in which they could hear dripping eaves and the happy sound of gutters and a small ivory clock in the room, she moved and still holding her face against his coat, she clasped her father about the neck.

‘We won’t think about it any more,’ he told her, kissing her cheek. She clasped him again tightly, then slipping from his lap, she stood at the dressing-table, dabbing powder upon her face. He rose, and in the mirror across her shoulder he saw her blurred face and the deft nervousness of her hands. ‘We won’t think of it anymore,’ he repeated, opening the door. The orange sweater was a hushed incandescence under the formal illusion of her robe, moulding her narrow back, as he closed the door after him.

As he passed his wife’s room she called to him.

‘What were you scolding Cecily for, Robert?’ she asked.

But he stumped on down the stairs, ignoring her, and soon she heard him cursing Tobe from the back porch.

Mrs Saunders entered her daughter’s room and found her swiftly dressing. The sun broke suddenly through the rain and long lances of sunlight piercing the washed immaculate air struck sparks amid the dripping trees.

‘Where are you going, Cecily?’ she asked.

‘To see Donald,’ she replied, drawing on her stockings, twisting them skilfully and deftly at the knees.

9

Januarius Jones, lounging through the wet grass, circled the house and, peering through the kitchen window, saw Emmy’s back and one angled arm sawing across her body. He mounted the steps quietly and entered. Emmy’s stare above her poised iron was impersonally combative. Jones’s yellow eyes, unabashed, took her and the ironing board and the otherwise empty kitchen boldly. Jones said:

‘Well, Cinderella.’

‘My name is Emmy,’ she told him icily.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed equably, ‘so it is. Emmy, Emmeline, Emmylune, Lune—“La lune en garde aucune rancune.” But does it? Or perhaps you prefer “Noir sur la lune”? Or do you make finer or less fine distinctions than this? It might be jazzed a bit, you know. Aelia thought so, quite successfully, but then she had a casement in which to lean at dusk and harp her sorrow on her golden hair. You don’t seem to have any golden hair, but then you might jazz your hair up a little, too. Ah, this restless young generation! Wanting to jazz up everything, not only their complexes, but the shapes of their behinds as well.’

She turned her back on him indifferently, and again her arm sawed the iron steadily along a stretched fabric. He became so still that after a while she turned to see what had become of him. He was so close behind her that her hair brushed his face. Clutching her iron, she shrieked.

‘Hah, my proud beauty!’ hissed Jones in accepted style, putting his arms around her.

‘Let me go!’ she said, glaring at him.

‘Your speech is wrong,’ Jones informed her helpfully. ‘ “Release me, villain, or it will be the worse for you,” is what you should say.’

‘Let me go,’ she repeated.

‘Not till you divulge them papers,’ he answered, fat and solemn, his yellow eyes expressionless as a dead man’s.

‘Lemme go, or I’ll burn you,’ she cried hotly, brandishing the iron. They stared at one another. Emmy’s eyes were fiercely implacable and Jones said at last:

‘Dam’f I don’t believe you would.’

‘See if I don’t,’ she said with anger. But releasing her, he sprang away in time. Her red hand brushed her hair from her hot face and her eyes blazed at him. ‘Get out, now,’ she ordered, and Jones, sauntering easily towards the door, remarked plaintively:

‘What’s the matter with you women here, anyway? Wildcats. Wildcats. By the way, how is the dying hero today?’

‘Go on now,’ she repeated, gesturing with the iron. He passed through the door and closed it behind him. Then he opened it again and making her a deep fattish bow from the threshold he withdrew.

In the dark hallway he halted, listening. Light from the front door fell directly in his face: he could see only the edged indication of sparse furniture. He paused, listening. No, she isn’t here, he decided. Not enough talk going on for her to be here. That femme hates silence like a cat does water. Cecily and silence: oil and water. And she’ll be on top of it, too. Little bitch, wonder what she meant by that yesterday. And Georgie, too. She’s such a fast worker I guess it takes a whole string to keep her busy. Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow. Especially when today ain’t over yet. Go in and pull the Great Dane’s leg a while.

At the study door he met Gilligan. He didn’t recognize him at first.

‘Bless my soul’ he said at last. ‘Has the army disbanded already? What will Pershing do now, without any soldiers to salute him? We had scarcely enough men to fight a war with, but with a long peace ahead of us—man, we are helpless.’

Gilligan said coldly: ‘Whatcher want?’

‘Why, nothing, thank you. Thank you so much. I merely came to call upon our young friend in the kitchen and to incidentally inquire after Mercury’s brother.’

‘Whose brother?’

‘Young Mr Mahon, in a manner of speaking, then.’

‘Doctor’s with him,’ Gilligan replied curtly. ‘You can’t go in now.’ He turned on his heel.

‘Not at all,’ murmured Jones, after the other’s departing back. ‘Not at all, my dear fellow.’ Yawning, he strolled up the hall. He stood in the entrance, speculative, filling his pipe. He yawned again openly. At his right was an open door and he entered a stuffily formal room. Here was a convenient window ledge on which to put spent matches, and sitting beside it he elevated his feet to another chair.

The room was depressingly hung with glum portraits of someone’s forebears, between which the principal strain of kinship appeared to be some sort of stomach trouble. Or perhaps they were portraits of the Ancient Mariner at different ages before he wore out his albatross. (Not even a dead fish could make a man look like that, thought Jones, refusing the dyspeptic gambit of their fretful painted eyes. No wonder the parson believes in hell.) A piano had not been opened in years, and opened would probably sound like the faces looked. Jones rose and from a bookcase he got a copy of Paradise Lost (cheerful thing to face a sinner with, he thought) and returned to his chair. The chair was hard, but Jones was not. He elevated his feet again.

The rector and a stranger came into his vision, pausing at the front door in conversation. The stranger departed and that black woman appeared. She and the rector exchanged a few words. Jones remarked with slow, lustful approval her firm, free carriage, and—

And here came Miss Cecily Saunders in pale lilac with a green ribbon at her waist, tapping her delicate way up the fast-drying gravel path between the fresh-sparkled grass.

‘Uncle Joe!’ she called, but the rector had already withdrawn to his study. Mrs Powers met her and she said: ‘Oh. How do you do? May I see Donald?’

She entered the hall beneath the dim lovely fanlight, and her roving glance remarked one sitting with his back to a window. She said ‘Donald!’ and sailed into the room like a bird. One hand covered her eyes and the other was outstretched as she ran with quick tapping steps and sank before him at his feet, burying her face in his lap.

‘Donald, Donald! I will try to get used to it, I will try! Oh, Donald, Donald! Your poor face! But I will, I will,’ she repeated hysterically. Her fumbling hand touched his sleeve and slipping down his arm she drew his hand under her cheek, clasping it. ‘I didn’t mean to, yesterday. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything, Donald. I couldn’t help it, but I love you, Donald, my precious, my own.’ She burrowed deeper into his lap.

‘Put your arms around me, Donald,’ she said, ‘until I get used to you again.’

He complied, drawing her upward. Suddenly, struck with something familiar about the coat, she raised her head. It was Januarius Jones.

She sprang to her feet. ‘You beast, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘My dear ma’am, who am I to refuse what the gods send?’

But she did not wait to hear him. At the door Mrs Powers stood watching with interest. Now she’s laughing at me! Cecily thought furiously. Her glance was a blue dagger and her voice was like dripped honey.

‘How silly of me, not to have looked,’ she said sweetly. ‘Seeing you, I thought at once that Donald would be near by. I am sure if I were a man I’d always be as near you as possible. But I didn’t know you and Mr—Mr Smith were such good friends. Though they say that fat men are awfully attractive. May I see Donald—do you mind?’

Her anger lent her fortitude. When she entered the study she looked at Mahon without a qualm, scar and all. She greeted the rector, kissing him, then she turned swift and graceful to Mahon, averting her eyes from his brow. He watched her quietly, without emotion.

You have caused me to look foolish, she told him with whispered smooth fury, sweetly kissing his mouth.

Jones, ignored, followed down the hall and stood without the closed door to the study, listening, hearing her throaty, rapid speech beyond the bland panel. Then, stooping, he peered through the keyhole. But he could see nothing and feeling his creased waistline constricting his breathing, feeling his braces cutting into his stooped fleshy shoulders, he rose under Gilligan’s detached, contemplative stare. Jones’s own yellow eyes became quietly empty and he walked around Gilligan’s immovable belligerence and on towards the front door, whistling casually.

10

Cecily Saunders returned home nursing the yet uncooled embers of her anger. From beyond the turning angle of the veranda her mother called her name and she found her parents sitting together.

‘How is Donald?’ her mother asked, and not waiting for a reply, she said: ‘George Farr phoned again after you left. I wish you’d leave a message for him. It keeps Tobe forever stopping whatever he is doing to answer the phone.’

Cecily, making no reply, would have passed on to a french window opening upon the porch, but her father caught her hand, stopping her.

‘How is Donald looking today?’ he asked, repeating his wife.

Her unrelaxed hand tried to withdraw from his. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ she said harshly.

‘Why, didn’t you go there?’ Her mother’s voice was faintly laced with surprise. ‘I thought you were going there.’

‘Let me go, daddy.’ She wrenched her hand nervously. ‘I want to change my dress.’ He could feel her rigid, delicate bones. ‘Please,’ she implored and he said:

‘Come here, Sis.’

‘Now, Robert,’ his wife interposed. ‘You promised to let her alone.’

‘Come here, Sis,’ he repeated, and her hand becoming lax, she allowed herself to be drawn to the arm of his chair. She sat nervously, impatiently, and he put his arm around her. ‘Why didn’t you go there?’

‘Now, Robert, you promised,’ his wife parroted futilely.

‘Let me go, daddy.’ She was rigid beneath her thin, pale dress. He held her and she said: ‘I did go there.’

‘Did you see Donald?’

‘Oh, yes. That black, ugly woman finally condescended to let me see him a few minutes. In her presence, of course.’

‘What black, ugly woman, darling?’ asked Mrs Saunders, with interest.

‘Black woman? Oh, you mean Mrs What’s-her-name. Why, Sis, I thought you and she would like each other. She has a good level head, I thought.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Only—’

‘What black woman, Cecily?’

‘—only you’d better not let Donald see that you are smitten with her.’

‘Now, now, Sis. What are you talking about?’

‘Oh, it’s well enough to talk that way,’ she said, taut and passionate, ‘but haven’t I eyes of my own? Haven’t I seen? Why did she come all the way from Chicago or wherever it was with him? And yet you expect me—’

‘Who came from where? What woman, Cecily? What woman, Robert?’ They ignored her.

‘Now, Sis, you ain’t just to her. You’re just excited.’

His arm held her fragile rigidity.

‘I tell you, it isn’t that—just her. I had forgiven that, because he is sick and because of how he used to be about—about girls. You know, before the war. But he has humiliated me in public: this afternoon he—he—Let me go, daddy,’ she repeated, imploring, trying to thrust herself away from him.

‘But what woman, Cecily? What is all this about a woman?’ Her mother’s voice was fretted.

‘Sis, honey, remember he is sick. And I know more about Mrs—er—Mrs Powers than you do.’ He removed his arm, yet held her by the wrist ‘Now, you—’

‘Robert, who is this woman?’

‘—think about it tonight and we’ll talk it over in the morning.’

‘No, I am through with him, I tell you. He has humiliated me before her.’ Her hand came free and she sprang towards the window.

‘Cecily?’ her mother called after the slim whirl of her vanishing dress, ‘are you going to call George Farr?’

‘No! Not if he was the last man in the world. I hate men.’ The swift staccato of her feet died away upon the stairs, and then a door slammed. Mrs Saunders sank creaking into her chair.

‘Now, Robert.’

So he told her.

11

Cecily did not appear at breakfast. Her father mounted to her room, and knocked this time.

‘Yes?’ her voice penetrated the wood, muffled thinly.

‘It’s me, Sis. Can I come in?’

There was no reply, so he entered. She had not even bathed her face, and upon the pillow she was flushed and childish with sleep. The room was permeated with her body’s intimate repose; it was in his nostrils like an odour and he felt ill at ease, cumbersome, and awkward. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her surrendered hand diffidently. It was unresponsive.

‘How do you feel this morning?’

She made no reply, lazily feeling her ascendency and he continued with assumed lightness: ‘Do you feel better about poor young Mahon this morning?’

‘I’ve put him out of my mind. He doesn’t need me any more.’

‘Course he does,’ heartily, ‘we expect you to be his best medicine.’

‘How can I?’

‘How? What do you mean?’

‘He brought his own medicine with him.’

Her calmness, her exasperating calmness. He must flog himself into yesterday’s rage. That was the only way to do anything with ’em, damn ’em.

‘Did it ever occur to you that I, in my limited way, may know more about this than you?’

She withdrew her hand and slid it beneath the covers, making no reply, not even looking at him.

He continued: ‘You are acting like a fool, Cecily. What did the man do to you yesterday?’

‘He simply insulted me before another woman. But I don’t care to discuss it.’

‘But listen, Sis. Are you refusing to even see him when seeing him means whether or not he will get well again?’

‘He’s got that black woman. If she can’t cure him with all her experience, I certainly can’t.’

Her father’s face slowly suffused. She glanced at him impersonally then turned her head on the pillow, staring out the window.

‘So you refuse to see him any more?’

‘What else can I do? He very evidently does not want me to bother him any longer. Do you want me to go where I am not wanted?’

‘He swallowed his anger, trying to speak calmly, trying to match her calm. ‘Don’t you see that I’m not trying to make you do anything? that I am only trying to help that boy get on his feet again? Suppose he was Bob, suppose Bob was lying there like he is.’

‘Then you’d better get engaged to him yourself. I’m not.’

‘Look at me,’ he said with such quiet, such repression, that she lay motionless, holding her breath. He put a rough hand on her shoulder.

‘You don’t have to man-handle me,’ she told him calmly, turning her head.

‘Listen to me. You are not to see that Farr boy, any more. Understand?’

Her eyes were unfathomable as sea-water.

‘Do you understand me?’ he repeated.

‘Yes, I hear you.’

He rose. They were amazingly alike. He turned at the door meeting her stubborn, impersonal gaze. ‘I meant it, Sis.’

Her eyes clouded suddenly. ‘I am sick and tired of men. Do you think I care?’

The door closed behind him and she lay staring at its inscrutable, painted surface, running her fingers lightly over her breasts, across her belly, drawing concentric circles upon her body beneath the covers, wondering how it would feel to have a baby, hating that inevitable time when she’d have to have one, blurring her slim epicenity, blurring her body with pain. . . .

12

Miss Cecily Saunders, in pale blue linen, entered a neighbour’s house, gushing, paying a morning call. Women did not like her, and she knew it. Yet she had a way with them, a way of charming them temporarily with her conventional perfection, insincere though she might be. Her tact and her graceful deference were such that they discussed her disparagingly only behind her back. None of them could long resist her. She always seemed to enjoy other people’s gossip. It was not until later you found that she had gossiped none herself. And this, indeed, requires tact.

She chattered briefly while her hostess pottered among tubbed flowers, then asking and receiving permission, she entered the house to use the telephone.

13

Mr George Farr, lurking casually within the courthouse portals, saw her unmistakable approaching figure far down the shady street, remarking her quick, nervous stride. He gloated, fondling her in his eyes with a slow sensuality. That’s the way to treat ’em: make ’em come to you. Forgetting that he had phoned her vainly five times in thirty hours. But her surprise was so perfect, her greeting so impersonal, that he began to doubt his own ears.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d never get you on the phone.’

‘Yes?’ She paused, creating an unpleasant illusion of arrested haste.

‘Been sick?’

‘Yes, sort of. Well,’ moving on, ‘I’m awfully glad to have seen you. Call me again sometime, when I’m in, won’t you?’

‘But say, Cecily—’

She paused again and looked at him over her shoulder with courteous patience. ‘Yes?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh, I’m running errands today. Buying some things for mamma. Good-bye.’ She moved again, her blue linen shaping delicate and crisp to her stride. A Negro driving a wagon passed between them, interminable as Time: he thought the wagon would never pass, so he darted around it to overtake her.

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‘Be careful,’ she said quickly, ‘Daddy’s downtown today. I am not supposed to see you any more. My folks are down on you.’

‘Why?’ he asked in startled vacuity.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps they have heard of your running around with women, and they think you will ruin me. That’s it, probably.’

Flattered, he said: ‘Aw, come on.’

They walked beneath awnings. Wagons tethered to slumbering mules and horses were motionless in the square. They were lapped, surrounded, submerged by the frank odour of unwashed Negroes, most of whom wore at least one ex-garment of the army O.D.; and their slow, unemphatic voices and careless, ready laughter, which has also somehow beneath it something elemental and sorrowful and unresisting, lay drowsily upon the noon.

At the corner was a drugstore in each window of which was an identical globe, containing liquids, once red and green, respectively, but faded now to a weak similar brown by the suns of many summers. She stayed him with her hand.

‘You mustn’t come any further, George, please.’

‘Oh, come on, Cecily.’

‘No, no. Good-bye.’ Her slim hand stopped him dead in his tracks.

‘Come in and have a Coca-Cola.’

‘No, I can’t. I have so many things to do. I’m sorry.’

‘Well, after you get through, then,’ he suggested as a last resort.

‘I can’t tell. But if you want to, you can wait here for me and I’ll come back if I have time. If you want to, you know.’

‘All right, I’ll wait here for you. Please come, Cecily.’

‘I can’t promise. Good-bye.’

He was forced to watch her retreating from him, mincing and graceful, diminishing. Hell, she won’t come, he told himself. But he daren’t leave for fear she might. He watched her as long as he could see her, watching her head among other heads, sometimes seeing her whole body, delicate and unmistakable. He lit a cigarette and lounged into the drugstore.

After a while the clock on the courthouse struck twelve and he threw away his fifth cigarette. God damn her, she won’t have another chance to stand me up, he swore. Cursing her he felt better and pushed open the screen door.

He sprang suddenly back into the store and stepped swiftly out of sight and the soda clerk, glassy-haired and white-jacketed, said ‘Whatcher dodging?’ with interest. She passed, walking and talking gaily with a young married man who clerked in a department store. She looked in as they passed, without seeing him.

He waited, wrung and bitter with anger and jealousy, until he knew she had turned the corner. Then he swung the door outward furiously. He cursed her again, blindly, and someone behind him saying, ‘Mist’ George, Mist’ George,’ monotonously drew up beside him. He whirled upon a Negro boy.

‘What in hell you want?’ he snapped.

‘Letter fer you,’ replied the Negro equably, shaming him with better breeding. He took it and gave the boy a coin. It was written on a scrap of wrapping paper and it read: ‘Come tonight after they have gone to bed. I may not get out. But come—if you want to.’

He read and reread it, he stared at her spidery, nervous script until the words themselves ceased to mean anything to his mind. He was sick with relief. Everything, the ancient, slumbering courthouse, the elms, the hitched somnolent horses and mules, the stolid coagulation of Negroes and the slow unemphasis of their talk and laughter, all seemed some way different, lovely, and beautiful under the indolent noon.

He drew a long breath.