Collected Stories

I

THIS is about Wilfred Midgleston, fortune’s favorite, chosen of the gods. For fifty-six years, a clotting of the old gutful compulsions and circumscriptions of clocks and bells, he met walking the walking image of a small, snuffy, nondescript man whom neither man nor woman had ever turned to look at twice, in the monotonous shop windows of monotonous hard streets. Then his apotheosis soared glaring, and to him at least not brief, across the unfathomed sky above his lost earth like that of Elijah of old.

I found him in Rincon, which is not large; less large even than one sway-backed tanker looming above the steel docks of the Universal Oil Company and longer than the palm and abode-lined street paved with dust marked by splayed naked feet where the violent shade lies by day and the violent big stars by night.

“He came from the States,” they told me. “Been here twenty-five years. He hasn’t changed at all since the day he arrived, except that the clothes he came in have wore out and he hasn’t learned more than ten words of Spanish.” That was the only way you could tell that he was an old man, that he was getting along: he hadn’t learned to speak hardly a word of the language of the people with whom he had lived twenty-five years and among whom it appeared that he intended to die and be buried. Appeared: he had no job: a mild, hopelessly mild man who looked like a book-keeper in a George Ade fable dressed as a tramp for a Presbyterian social charade in 1890, and quite happy.

Quite happy and quite poor. “He’s either poor, or he’s putting up an awful front. But they can’t touch him now. We told him that a long time ago, when he first come here. We said, ‘Why don’t you go on and spend it, enjoy it? They’ve probably forgot all about it by now.’ Because if I went to the trouble and risk of stealing and then the hardship of having to live the rest of my life in a hole like this, I’d sure enjoy what I went to the trouble to get.”

“Enjoy what?” I said.

“The money. The money he stole and had to come down here. What else do you reckon he would come down here and stay twenty-five years for? just to look at the country?”

“He doesn’t act and look very rich,” I said.

“That’s a fact. But a fellow like that. His face. I don’t guess he’d have judgment enough to steal good. And not judgment enough to keep it, after he got it stole. I guess you are right. I guess all he got out of it was the running away and the blame. While somebody back there where he run from is spending the money and singing loud in the choir twice a week.”

“Is that what happens?” I said.

“You’re damned right it is. Some damn fellow that’s too rich to afford to be caught stealing sets back and leaves a durn fool that never saw twenty-five hundred dollars before in his life at one time, pull his chestnuts for him. Twenty-five hundred seems a hell of a lot when somebody else owns it. But when you have got to pick up overnight and run a thousand miles, paying all your expenses, how long do you think twenty-five hundred will last?”

“How long did it last?” I said.

“Just about two years by God. And then there I…” He stopped. He glared at me, who had paid for the coffee and the bread which rested upon the table between us. He glared at me. “Who do you think you are, anyway? Wm. J. Burns?”

“I don’t think so. I meant no offense. I just was curious to know how long his twenty-five hundred dollars lasted him.”

“Who said he had twenty-five hundred dollars? I was just citing an example. He never had nothing, not even twenty-five hundred cents. Or if he did, he hid it and it’s stayed hid ever since. He come here sponging on us white men, and when we got tired of it he took to sponging on these Spigs. And a white man has got pretty low when he’s got so stingy with his stealings that he will live with Spiggotties before he’ll dig up his own money and live like a white man.”

“Maybe he never stole any money,” I said.

“What’s he doing down here, then?”

“I’m down here.”

“I don’t know you ain’t run, either.”

“That’s so,” I said. “You don’t know.”

“Sure I don’t. Because that’s your business. Every man has got his own private affairs, and no man respects them quicker than I do. But I know that a man, a white man, has got to have durn good reason… Maybe he ain’t got it now. But you can’t tell me a white man would come down here to live and die without no reason.”

“And you consider that stealing money is the only reason?”

He looked at me, with disgust and a little contempt. “Did you bring a nurse with you? Because you ought to have, until you learn enough about human nature to travel alone. Because human nature, I don’t care who he is nor how loud he sings in church, will steal whenever he thinks he can get away with it. If you ain’t learned that yet, you better go back home and stay there where your folks can take care of you.”

But I was watching Midgleston across the street. He was standing beside a clump of naked children playing in the shady dust: a small, snuffy man in a pair of dirty drill trousers which had not been made for him. “Whatever it is,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to worry him.”

“Oh. Him. He ain’t got sense enough to know he needs to worry about nothing.”

Quite poor and quite happy. His turn to have coffee and bread with me came at last. No: that’s wrong. I at last succeeded in evading his other down-at-heel compatriots like my first informant; men a little soiled and usually unshaven, who were unavoidable in the cantinas and coffee shops, loud, violent, maintaining the superiority of the white race and their own sense of injustice and of outrage among the grave white teeth, the dark, courteous, fatal, speculative alien faces, and had Midgleston to breakfast with me. I had to invite him and then insist. He was on hand at the appointed hour, in the same dirty trousers, but his shirt was now white and whole and ironed, and he had shaved. He accepted the meal without servility, without diffidence, without eagerness. Yet when he raised the handleless bowl I watched his hands tremble so that for a time he could not make junction with his lips. He saw me watching his hands and he looked at my face for the first time and I saw that his eyes were the eyes of an old man. He said, with just a trace of apology for his clumsiness: “I ain’t et nothing to speak of in a day or so.”

“Haven’t eaten in two days?” I said.

“This hot climate. A fellow don’t need so much. Feels better for not eating so much. That was the hardest trouble I had when I first come here. I was always a right hearty eater back home.”

“Oh,” I said. I had meat brought then, he protesting. But he ate the meat, ate all of it. “Just look at me,” he said. “I ain’t et this much breakfast in twenty-five years. But when a fellow gets along, old habits are hard to break. No, sir. Not since I left home have I et this much for breakfast.”

“Do you plan to go back home?” I said.

“I guess not; no. This suits me here. I can live simple here. Not all cluttered up with things. My own boss (I used to be an architect’s draughtsman) all day long. No. I don’t guess I’ll go back.” He looked at me. His face was intent, watchful, like that of a child about to tell something, divulge itself. “You wouldn’t guess where I sleep in a hundred years.”

“No. I don’t expect I could. Where do you sleep?”

“I sleep in that attic over that cantina yonder. The house belongs to the Company, and Mrs. Widrington, Mr. Widrington’s wife, the manager’s wife, she lets me sleep in the attic. It’s high and quiet, except for a few rats. But when in Rome, you got to act like a Roman, I say. Only I wouldn’t name this country Rome; I’d name it Ratville. But that ain’t it.” He watched me. “You’d never guess it in the world.”

“No,” I said. “I’d never guess it.”

He watched me. “It’s my bed.”

“Your bed?”

“I told you you’d never guess it.”

“No,” I said. “I give up now.”

“My bed is a roll of tarred roofing paper.”

“A roll of what?”

“Tarred roofing paper.” His face was bright, peaceful; his voice quiet, full of gleeful quiet. “At night I just unroll it and go to bed and the next a. m. I just roll it back up and lean it in the corner. And then my room is all cleaned up for the day. Ain’t that fine? No sheets, no laundry, no nothing. Just roll up my whole bed like an umbrella and carry it under my arm when I want to move.”

“Oh,” I said. “You have no family, then.”

“Not with me. No.”

“You have a family back home, then?”

He was quite quiet. He did not feign to be occupied with something on the table. Neither did his eyes go blank, though he mused peacefully for a moment. “Yes. I have a wife back home. Likely this climate wouldn’t suit her. She wouldn’t like it here. But she is all right. I always kept my insurance paid up; I carried a right smart more than you would figure a architect’s draughtsman on a seventy-five dollar salary would keep up. If I told you the amount, you would be surprised. She helped me to save; she is a good woman. So she’s got that. She earned it. And besides, I don’t need money.”

“So you don’t plan to go back home.”

“No,” he said. He watched me; again his expression was that of a child about to tell on itself. “You see, I done something.”

“Oh. I see.”

He talked quietly: “It ain’t what you think. Not what them others…” he jerked his head, a brief embracing gesture “think. I never stole any money. Like I always told Martha, she is my wife; Mrs. Midgleston money is too easy to earn to risk the bother of trying to steal it. All you got to do is work. ‘Have we ever suffered for it?’ I said to her. ‘Of course, we don’t live like some. But some is born for one thing and some is born for another thing. And the fellow that is born a tadpole, when he tries to be a salmon all he is going to be is a sucker.’ That’s what I would tell her. And she done her part and we got along right well; if I told you how much life insurance I carried, you would be surprised. No; she ain’t suffered any. Don’t you think that.”

“No,” I said.

“But then I done something. Yes, sir.”

“Did what? Can you tell?”

“Something. Something that ain’t in the lot and plan for mortal human man to do.”

“What was it you did?”

He looked at me. “I ain’t afraid to tell. I ain’t never been afraid to tell. It was just that these folks…” again he jerked his head slightly “wouldn’t have understood. Wouldn’t have knowed what I was talking about. But you will. You’ll know.” He watched my face. “At one time in my life I was a farn.”

“A farn?”

“Farn. Don’t you remember in the old books where they would drink the red grape wine, how now and then them rich Roman and Greek senators would up and decide to tear up a old grape vineyard or a wood away off somewheres the gods used, and build a summer house to hold their frolics in where the police wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t hear them, and how the gods wouldn’t like it about them married women running around nekkid, and so the woods god named named…”

“Pan,” I said.

“That’s it. Pan. And he would send them little fellows that was half a goat to scare them out ”

“Oh,” I said. “A faun.”

“That’s it. A farn. That’s what I was once. I was raised religious; I have never used tobacco or liquor; and I don’t think now that I am going to hell. But the Bible says that them little men were myths. But I know they ain’t, and so I have been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to be. Because for one day in my life I was a farn.”

II

IN THE OFFICE where Midgleston was a draughtsman they would discuss the place and Mrs. Van Dyming’s unique designs upon it while they were manufacturing the plans, the blue prints. The tract consisted of a meadow, a southern hillside where grapes grew, and a woodland. “Good land,” they said. “But wouldn’t anybody live on it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because things happened on it. They told how a long time ago a New England fellow settled on it and cleaned up the grape vines to market the grapes. Going to make jelly or something. He made a good crop, but when time came to gather them, he couldn’t gather them.”

“Why couldn’t he gather them?”

“Because his leg was broke. He had some goats, and a old ram that he couldn’t keep out of the grape lot. He tried every way he knew, but he couldn’t keep the ram out. And when the man went in to gather the grapes to make jelly, the ram ran over him and knocked him down and broke his leg. So the next spring the New England fellow moved away.

“And they told about another man, a I-talian lived the other side of the woods. He would gather the grapes and make wine out of them, and he built up a good wine trade. After a while his trade got so good that he had more trade than he did wine. So he began to doctor the wine up with water and alcohol, and he was getting rich. At first he used a horse and wagon to bring the grapes home on his private road through the woods, but he got rich and he bought a truck, and he doctored the wine a little more and he got richer and he bought a bigger truck. And one night a storm come up while he was away from home, gathering the grapes, and he didn’t get home that night. The next a. m. his wife found him. That big truck had skidded off the road and turned over and he was dead under it.”

“I don’t see how that reflected on the place,” I said.

“All right. I’m just telling it. The neighbor folks thought different, anyway. But maybe that was because they were not anything but country folks. Anyway, none of them would live on it, and so Mr. Van Dyming bought it cheap. For Mrs. Van Dyming. To play with. Even before we had the plans finished, she would take a special trainload of them down there to look at it, and not even a cabin on the place then, not nothing but the woods and that meadow growed up in grass tall as a man, and that hillside where them grapes grew tangled. But she would stand there, with them other rich Park Avenue folks, showing them how here would be the community house built to look like the Coliseum and the community garage yonder made to look like it was a Acropolis, and how the grape vine would be grubbed up entire and the hillside terraced to make a outdoors theatre where they could act in one another’s plays; and how the meadow would be a lake with one of them Roman barges towed back and forth on it by a gas engine, with mattresses and things for them to lay down on while they et.”

“What did Mr. Van Dyming say about all this?”

“I don’t reckon he said anything. He was married to her, you know. He just says, one time, ‘Now, Mattie’ and she turns on him, right there in the office, before us all, and says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie.’” He was quiet for a time.

Then he said: “She wasn’t born on Park Avenue. Nor Westchester neither. She was born in Poughkeepsie. Her name was Lumpkin.

“But you wouldn’t know it, now. When her picture would be in the paper with all them Van Dyming diamonds, it wouldn’t say how Mrs. Carleton Van Dyming used to be Miss Mathilda Lumpkin of Poughkeepsie. No, sir. Even a newspaper wouldn’t dared say that to her. And I reckon Mr. Van Dyming never either, unless he forgot like the day in the office. So she says, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ and he hushed and he just stood there a little man; he looked kind of like me, they said tapping one of them little high-price cigars on his glove, with his face looking like he had thought about smiling a little and then he decided it wasn’t even any use in that.

“They built the house first. It was right nice; Mr. Van Dyming planned it. I guess maybe he said more than just Mattie that time. And I guess that maybe Mrs. Van Dyming never said, ‘Don’t you call me Mattie’ that time. Maybe he promised her he wouldn’t interfere with the rest of it. Anyway, the house was right nice. It was on the hill, kind of in the edge of the woods. It was logs. But it wasn’t too much logs. It belonged there, fitted. Logs where logs ought to be, and good city bricks and planks where logs ought not to be. It was there. Belonged there. It was all right. Not to make anybody mad. Can you see what I mean?”

“Yes. I think I can see what you mean.”

“But the rest of it he never interfered with; her and her Acropolises and all.” He looked at me quite intently. “Sometimes I thought…”

“What? Thought what?”

“I told you him and me were the same size, looked kind of alike.” He watched me. “Like we could have talked, for all of him and his Park Avenue clothes and his banks and his railroads, and me a seventy-five a week draughtsman living in Brooklyn, and not young neither. Like I could have said to him what was in my mind at any time, and he could have said to me what was in his mind at any time, and we would have understood one another. That’s why sometimes I thought…” He looked at me, intently, not groping exactly.

“Sometimes men have more sense than women. They know what to leave be, and women don’t always know that. He don’t need to be religious in the right sense or religious in the wrong sense. Nor religious at all.” He looked at me, intently. After a while he said, in a decisive tone, a tone of decisive irrevocation: “This will seem silly to you.”

“No. Of course not. Of course it won’t.”

He looked at me. Then he looked away. “No. It will just sound silly. Just take up your time.”

“No. I swear it won’t. I want to hear it. I am not a man who believes that people have learned everything.” He watched me. “It has taken a million years to make what is, they tell us,” I said. “And a man can be made and worn out and buried in threescore and ten. So how can a man be expected to know even enough to doubt?”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s sure right.”

“What was it you sometimes thought?”

“Sometimes I thought that, if it hadn’t been me, they would have used him. Used Mr. Van Dyming like they used me.”

“They?” We looked at one another, quite sober, quite quiet.

“Yes. The ones that used that ram on that New England fellow, and that storm on that I-talian.”

“Oh. Would have used Mr. Van Dyming in your place, if you had not been there at the time. How did they use you?”

“That’s what I am going to tell. How I was chosen and used. I did not know that I had been chosen. But I was chosen to do something beyond the lot and plan for mortal human man. It was the day that Mr. Carter (he was the boss, the architect) got the hurry-up message from Mrs. Van Dyming. I think I told you the house was already built, and there was a big party of them down there where they could watch the workmen building the Coliseums and the Acropolises. So the hurry-up call came. She wanted the plans for the theatre, the one that was to be on the hillside where the grapes grew. She was going to build it first, so the company could set and watch them building the Acropolises and Coliseums. She had already begun to grub up the grape vines, and Mr. Carter put the theatre prints in a portfolio and give me the weekend off to take them down there to her.”

“Where was the place?”

“I don’t know. It was in the mountains, the quiet mountains where never many lived. It was a kind of green air, chilly too, and a wind. When it blew through them pines it sounded kind of like a organ, only it didn’t sound tame like a organ. Not tame; that’s how it sounded. But I don’t know where it was. Mr. Carter had the ticket all ready and he said it would be somebody to meet me when the train stopped.

“So I telephoned Martha and I went home to get ready. When I got home, she had my Sunday suit all pressed and my shoes shined. I didn’t see any use in that, since I was just going to take the plans and come back. But Martha said how I had told her it was company there. ‘And you are going to look as nice as any of them,’ she says. For all they are rich and get into the papers. You’re just as good as they are.’ That was the last thing she said when I got on the train, in my Sunday suit, with the portfolio: ‘You’re just as good as they are, even if they do get into the papers.’ And then it started.”

“What started? The train?”

“No. It. The train had been running already a good while; we were out in the country now. I didn’t know then that I had been chosen. I was just setting there in the train, with the portfolio on my knees where I could take care of it. Even when I went back to the ice water I didn’t know that I had been chosen. I carried the portfolio with me and I was standing there, looking out the window and drinking out of the little paper cup. There was a bank running along by the train then, with a white fence on it, and I could see animals inside the fence, but the train was going too fast to tell what kind of animals they were.

“So I had filled the cup again and I was drinking, looking out at the bank and the fence and the animals inside the fence, when all of a sudden it felt like I had been thrown off the earth. I could see the bank and the fence go whirling away. And then I saw it. And just as I saw it, it was like it had kind of exploded inside my head. Do you know what it was I saw?”

“What was it you saw?”

He watched me. “I saw a face. In the air, looking at me across that white fence on top of the bank. It was not a man’s face, because it had horns, and it was not a goat’s face because it had a beard and it was looking at me with eyes like a man and its mouth was open like it was saying something to me when it exploded inside my head.”

“Yes. And then what? What did you do next?”

“You are saying ‘He saw a goat inside that fence.’ I know. But I didn’t ask you to believe. Remember that. Because I am twenty-five years past bothering if folks believe me or not. That’s enough for me. And I guess that’s all anything amounts to.”

“Yes,” I said. “What did you do then?”

“Then I was laying down, with my face all wet and my mouth and throat feeling like it was on fire. The man was just taking the bottle away from my mouth (there were two men there, and the porter and the conductor) and I tried to sit up. ‘That’s whiskey in that bottle,’ I said.

“‘Why, sure not, doc,’ the man said. ‘You know I wouldn’t be giving whiskey to a man like you. Anybody could tell by looking at you that you never took a drink in your life. Did you?’ I told him I hadn’t. ‘Sure you haven’t,’ he said. ‘A man could tell by the way it took that curve to throw you down that you belonged to the ladies’ temperance. You sure took a bust on the head, though. How do you feel now? Here, take another little shot of this tonic.’

“‘I think that’s whiskey,’ I said.

“And was it whiskey?”

“I don’t know. I have forgotten. Maybe I knew then. Maybe I knew what it was when I took another dose of it. But that didn’t matter, because it had already started then.”

“The whiskey had already started?”

“No. It. It was stronger than whiskey. Like it was drinking out of the bottle and not me. Because the men held the bottle up and looked at it and said, ‘You sure drink it like it ain’t whiskey, anyway. You’ll sure know soon if it is or not, won’t you?’

“When the train stopped where the ticket said, it was all green, the light was, and the mountains. The wagon was there, and the two men when they helped me down from the train and handed me the portfolio, and I stood there and I said, ‘Let her rip.’ That’s what I said: ‘Let her rip’; and the two men looking at me like you are looking at me.”

“How looking at you?”

“Yes. But you don’t have to believe. And I told them to wait while I got the whistle ”

“Whistle?”

“There was a store there, too. The store and the depot, and then the mountains and the green cold without any sun, and the dust kind of pale looking where the wagon was standing. Then we…”

“But the whistle,” I said.

“I bought it in the store. It was a tin one, with holes in it. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. So I threw the portfolio into the wagon and I said, ‘Let her rip.’ That was what I said. One of them took the portfolio out of the wagon and gave it back to me and said, ‘Say, doc, ain’t this valuable?’ and I took it and threw it back into the wagon and I said, ‘Let her rip.’

“We all rode on the seat together, me in the middle. We sung. It was cold, and we went along the river, singing, and came to the mill and stopped. While one of them went inside the mill I began to take off my clothes ”

“Take off your clothes?”

“Yes. My Sunday suit. Taking them off and throwing them right down in the dust, by gummy.”

“Wasn’t it cold?”

“Yes It was cold. Yes. When I took off my clothes I could feel the cold on me. Then the one came back from the mill with a jug and we drank out of the jug…”

“What was in the jug?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. It wasn’t whiskey. I could tell by the way it looked. It was clear like water.”

“Couldn’t you tell by the smell?”

“I don’t smell, you see. I don’t know what they call it. But ever since I was a child, I couldn’t smell some things. They say that’s why I have stayed down here for twenty-five years.

“So we drank and I went to the bridge rail. And just as I jumped I could see myself in the water. And I knew that it had happened then. Because my body was a human man’s body. But my face was the same face that had gone off inside my head back there on the train, the face that had horns and a beard.

“When I got back into the wagon we drank again out of the jug and we sung, only after a while I put on my underclothes and my pants like they wanted me to, and then we went on, singing.

“When we came in sight of the house I got out of the wagon. ‘You don’t want to get out here,’ they said. ‘We are in the pasture where they keep that bull chained up.’ But I got out of the wagon, with my Sunday coat and vest and the portfolio, and the tin flute.”

III

HE CEASED. He looked at me, quite grave, quite quiet.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Then what?”

He watched me. “I never asked you to believe nothing, did I? I will have to say that for you.” His hand was inside his bosom. “Well, you had some pretty hard going, so far. But now I will take the strain off of you.”

From his bosom he drew out a canvas wallet. It was roughly sewn by a clumsy hand and soiled with much usage.

He opened it. But before he drew out the contents he looked at me again. “Do you ever make allowances?”

“Allowances?”

“For folks. For what folks think they see. Because nothing ever looks the same to two different people. Never looks the same to one person, depending on which side of it he looks at it from.”

“Oh,” I said. “Allowances. Yes. Yes.”

From the wallet he drew a folded sheet of newspaper.

The page was yellow with age, the broken seams glued carefully with strips of soiled cloth. He opened it carefully, gingerly, and turned it and laid it on the table before me.

“Don’t try to pick it up,” he said. “It’s kind of old now, and it’s the only copy I have. Read it.”

I looked at it: the fading ink, the blurred page dated twenty-five years ago: MANIAC AT LARGE IN VIRGINIA MOUNTAINS PROMINENT NEW YORK SOCIETY WOMAN ATTACKED IN OWN GARDEN Mrs. Carleton Van Dyming Of New York And Newport Attacked By Half Nude Madman And Maddened Bull In Garden Of Her Summer Lodge. Maniac Escapes. Mrs. Van Dyming Prostrate. It went on from there, with pictures and diagrams, to tell how Mrs. Van Dyming, who was expecting a man from the office of her New York architect, was called from the dinner table to meet, as she supposed, the architect’s man. The story continued in Mrs. Van Dyming’s own words: I went to the library, where I had directed that the architect’s man be brought, but there was no one there.

I was about to ring for the footman when it occurred to me to go to the front door, since it is a local custom among these country people to come to the front and refuse to advance further or to retreat until the master or the mistress of the house appears. I went to the door.

There was no one there.

I stepped out onto the porch. The light was on, but at first I could see no one. I started to re-enter the house but the footman had told me distinctly that the wagon had returned from the village, and I thought that the man had perhaps gone on to the edge of the lawn where he could see the theatre site, where the workmen had that day begun to prepare the ground by digging up the old grape vines. So I went in that direction. I had almost reached the end of the lawn when something caused me to turn. I saw, in relief between me and the lighted porch, a man bent over and hopping on one leg, who to my horror I realised to be in the act of removing his trousers.

I screamed for my husband. When I did so, the man freed his other leg and turned and came toward me running, clutching a knife (I could see the light from the porch gleaming on the long blade) in one hand, and a flat, square object in the other. I turned then and ran screaming toward the woods.

I had lost all sense of direction. I simply ran for my life. I found that I was inside the old vineyard, among the grape vines, running directly away from the house.

I could hear the man running behind me and suddenly I heard him begin to make a strange noise. It sounded like a child trying to blow upon a penny whistle, then I realised that it was the sound of his breath whistling past the knifeblade clinched between his teeth.

Suddenly something overtook and passed me, making a tremendous uproar in the shrubbery. It rushed so near me that I could see its glaring eyes and the shape of a huge beast with horns, which I recognised a moment later as Carleton’s, Mr. Van Dyming’s prize Durham bull; an animal so dangerous that Mr. Dyming is forced to keep it locked up. It was now free and it rushed past and on ahead, cutting off my advance, while the madman with the knife cut off my retreat. I was at bay; I stopped with my back to a tree, screaming for help.

“How did the bull get out?” I said.

He was watching my face while I read, like I might have been a teacher grading his school paper. “When I was a boy, I used to take subscriptions to the Police Gazette, for premiums. One of the premiums was a little machine guaranteed to open any lock. I don’t use it anymore, but I still carry it in my pocket, like a charm or something, I guess. Anyway, I had it that night.” He looked down at the paper on the table.

“I guess folks tell what they believe they saw. So you have to believe what they think they believe. But that paper don’t tell how she kicked off her slippers (I nigh broke my neck over one of them) so she could run better, and how I could hear her going wump-wump-wump inside like a dray horse, and how when she would begin to slow up a little I would let out another toot on the whistle and off she would go again.

“I couldn’t even keep up with her, carrying that portfolio and trying to blow on that whistle too; seemed like I never would get the hang of it, somehow. But maybe that was because I had to start trying so quick, before I had time to kind of practice up, and running all the time too. So I threw the portfolio away and then I caught up with her where she was standing with her back against the tree, and that bull running round and round the tree, not bothering her, just running around the tree, making a right smart of fuss, and her leaning there whispering ‘Carleton. Carleton’ like she was afraid she would wake him up.”

The account continued: I stood against the tree, believing that each circle which the bull made, it would discover my presence. That was why I ceased to scream. Then the man came up where I could see him plainly for the first time. He stopped before me; for one both horrid and joyful moment I thought he was Mr. Van Dyming. “Carleton!” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was stooped over again; then I saw that he was engaged with the knife in his hand.

“Carleton!” I cried.

“‘Dang if I can get the hang of it, somehow,’ he kind of muttered, busy with the murderous knife.

“Carleton!” I cried. “Are you mad?”

He looked up then. I saw that it was not my husband, that I was at the mercy of a madman, a maniac, and a maddened bull. I saw the man raise the knife to his lips and blow again upon it that fearful shriek. Then I fainted.

IV

AND THAT WAS ALL. The account merely went on to say how the madman had vanished, leaving no trace, and that Mrs. Van Dyming was under the care of her physician, with a special train waiting to transport her and her household, lock, stock, and barrel, back to New York; and that Mr. Van Dyming in a brief interview had informed the press that his plans about the improvement of the place had been definitely rescinded and that the place was now for sale.

I folded the paper as carefully as he would have. “Oh,” I said. “And so that’s all.”

“Yes. I waked up about daylight the next morning, in the woods. I didn’t know when I went to sleep nor where I was at first. I couldn’t remember at first what I had done. But that ain’t strange. I guess a man couldn’t lose a day out of his life and not know it. Do you think so?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I think too.”

“Because I know I ain’t as evil to God as I guess I look to a lot of folks. And I guess that demons and such and even the devil himself ain’t quite as evil to God as lots of folks that claim to know a right smart about His business would make you believe. don’t you think that’s right?” The wallet lay on the table, open. But he did not at once return the newspaper to it.

Then he quit looking at me; at once his face became diffident, childlike again. He put his hand into the wallet; again he did not withdraw it at once.

“That ain’t exactly all,” he said, his hand inside the wallet, his eyes downcast, and his face: that mild, peaceful, nondescript face across which a mild moustache straggled. “I was a powerful reader, when I was a boy. Do you read much?”

“Yes. A good deal.”

But he was not listening. “I would read about pirates and cowboys, and I would be the head pirate or cowboy me, a durn little tyke that never saw the ocean except at Coney Island or a tree except in Washington Square day in and out. But I read them, believing like every boy, that some day… that living wouldn’t play a trick on him like getting him alive and then… When I went home that morning to get ready to take the train, Martha says, “You’re just as good as any of them Van Dymings, for all they get into the papers. If all the folks that deserved it got into the papers, Park Avenue wouldn’t hold them, or even Brooklyn,’ she says.”

He drew his hand from the wallet. This time it was only a clipping, one column wide, which he handed me, yellow and faded too, and not long: MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED Wilfred Middleton, New York Architect, Disappears From Millionaire’s Country House POSSE SEEKS BODY OF ARCHITECT BELIEVED SLAIN BY MADMAN IN VIRGINIA MOUNTAINS May Be Coupled With Mysterious Attack On Mrs. Van Dyming Mountain Neighborhood In State Of Terror , Va. April 8, Wilfred Middleton, 56, architect, of New York City, mysteriously disappeared sometime on April 6th, while en route to the country house of Mr. Carleton Van Dyming near here. He had in his possession some valuable drawings which were found this morning near the Van Dyming estate, thus furnishing the first clue. Chief of Police Elmer Harris has taken charge of the case, and is now awaiting the arrival of a squad of New York detectives, when he promises a speedy solution if it is in the power of skilled criminologists to do so.

MOST BAFFLING IN ALL HIS EXPERIENCE

“When I solve this disappearance,” Chief Harris is quoted, “I will also solve the attack on Mrs. Van Dyming on the same date.”

Middleton leaves a wife, Mrs. Martha Middleton, St., Brooklyn.

He was watching my face. “Only it’s one mistake in it,” he said.

“Yes!” I said. “They got your name wrong.”

“I was wondering if you’d see that. But that’s not the mistake…” He had in his hand a second clipping which he now extended. It was like the other two; yellow, faint. I looked at it, the fading, peaceful print through which, like a thin, rotting net, the old violence had somehow escaped, leaving less than the dead gesture fallen to quiet dust. “Read this one. Only that’s not the mistake I was thinking about. But then, they couldn’t have known at that time…”

I was reading, not listening to him. This was a reprinted letter, an ‘agony column’ letter: New Orleans, La. April 10,…

To the Editor, New York Times

New York, N. Y.

Dear Sir

In your issue of April 8, this year you got the name of the party wrong. The name is Midgleston not Middleton. Would thank you to correct this error in local and metropolitan columns as the press a weapon of good evil into every American home. And a power of that weight cannot afford mistakes even about people as good as any man or woman even if they don’t get into the papers every day.

Thanking you again; beg to remain

A Friend

“Oh,” I said. “I see. You corrected it.”

“Yes. But that’s not the mistake. I just did that for her. You know how women are. Like as not she would rather not see it in the papers at all than to see it spelled wrong.”

“She?”

“My wife. Martha. The mistake was, if she got them or not.”

“I don’t. Maybe you’d better tell me.”

“That’s what I am doing. I got two of the first one, the one about the disappearance, but I waited until the letter come out. Then I put them both into a piece of paper with A Friend on it, and put them into a envelope and mailed them to her. But I don’t know if she got them or not. That was the mistake.”

“The mistake?”

“Yes. She moved. She moved to Park Avenue when the insurance was paid. I saw that in a paper after I come down here. It told about how Mrs. Martha Midgleston of Park Avenue was married to a young fellow, he used to be associated with the Maison Payot on Fifth Avenue. It didn’t say when she moved, so I don’t know if she got them or not.”

“Oh,” I said. He was putting the clippings carefully back into the canvas wallet.

“Yes, sir. Women are like that. It don’t cost a man much to humor them now and then. Because they deserve it; they have a hard time. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t mind how they spelled it. What’s a name to a man that’s done and been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to do and be?”

I

THE BOAT, it was a yawl boat with a patched weathered sail made two reaches below us while I sat with the sculls poised, watching her over my shoulder, and George clung to the pile, spouting Milton at Everbe Corinthia. When it made the final tack I looked back at George. But he was now but well into Comus’ second speech, his crooked face raised, and the afternoon bright on his close ruddy head.

“Give way, George,” I said. But he held us stationary at the pile, his glazed hat lifted, spouting his fine and cadenced folly as though the lock, the Thames, time and all, belonged to him, while Sabrina (or Hebe or Chloe or whatever name he happened to be calling Corinthia at the time) with her dairy-maid’s complexion and her hair like mead poured in sunlight stood above us in one of her endless succession of neat print dresses, her hand on the lever and one eye on George and the other on the yawl, saying “Yes, milord” dutifully whenever George paused for breath.

The yawl luffed and stood away; the helmsman shouted for the lock.

“Let go, George,” I said. But he clung to the pile in his fine and incongruous oblivion. Everbe Corinthia stood above us, her hand on the lever, bridling a little and beginning to reveal a certain concern, and looking from her to the yawl and back again I thought how much time she and I had both spent thus since that day three years ago when, cow-eyed and bridling, she had opened the lock for us for the first time, with George holding us stationary while he apostrophised her in the metaphor of Keats and Spenser.

Again the yawl’s crew shouted at us, the yawl aback and in stays. “Let go, you fool!” I said, digging the sculls. “Lock, Corinthia!”

George looked at me. Corinthia was now watching the yawl with both eyes. “What, Davy?” George said. “Must even thou help Circe’s droves into the sea? Pull, then, O Super-Gadarene!”

And he shoved us off. I had not meant to pull away. And even if I had, I could still have counteracted the movement if Everbe Corinthia hadn’t opened the lock. But open it she did, and looked once back to us and sat flat on the earth, crisp fresh dress and all. The skiff shot away under me; I had a fleeting picture of George still clinging with one arm around the pile, his knees drawn up to his chin and the hat in his lifted hand and of a long running shadow carrying the shadow of a boat-hook falling across the lock. Then I was too busy steering. I shot through the gates, carrying with me that picture of George, the glazed hat still gallantly aloft like the mastheaded pennant of a man-of-war, vanishing beneath the surface. Then I was floating quietly in slack water while the round eyes of two men stared quietly down at me from the yawl.

“Yer’ve lost yer mate, sir,” one of them said in a civil voice. Then they had drawn me alongside with a boat-hook and standing up in the skiff, I saw George. He was standing in the towpath now, and Simon, Everbe Corinthia’s father, and another man, he was the one with the boat-hook, whose shadow I had seen across the lock, were there too.

But I saw only George with his ugly crooked face and his round head now dark in the sunlight. One of the watermen was still talking. “Steady, sir. Lend ’im a ’and, Sam’l. There. ’E’ll do now. Give ’im a turn, seeing ’is mate…”

“You fool, you damned fool!” I said. George stooped beside me, wringing his sopping flannels, while Simon and the second man Simon with his iron-gray face and his iron-gray whisker that made him look like nothing so much as an aged bull peering surlily and stupidly across a winter hedgerow, and the second man, younger, with a ruddy capable face, in a hard, boardlike, town-made suit watched us. Corinthia sat on the ground, weeping hopelessly and quietly. “You damned fool. Oh, you damned fool.”

“Oxford young gentlemen,” Simon said in a harsh disgusted voice. “Oxford young gentlemen.”

“Eh, well,” George said, “I daresay I haven’t damaged your lock over a farthing’s worth.” He rose, and saw Corinthia. “What, Circe!” he said, “tears over the accomplishment of your appointed destiny?” He went to her, trailing a thread of water across the packed earth, and took her arm. It moved willing enough, but she herself sat flat on the ground, looking up at him with streaming hopeless eyes. Her mouth was open a little and she sat in an attitude of patient despair, weeping tears of crystal purity. Simon watched them, the boat-hook, he had taken it from the second man, who was now busy at the lock mechanism, and I knew that he was the brother who worked in London, of whom Corinthia had once told us clutched in his big knotty fist. The yawl was now in the lock, the two faces watching us across the parapet like two severed heads in a quiet row upon the footway. “Come, now,” George said. “You’ll soil your dress sitting there.”

“Up, lass,” Simon said, in that harsh voice of his which at the same time was without ill-nature, as though harshness were merely the medium through which he spoke. Corinthia rose obediently, still weeping, and went on toward the neat little dove-cote of a house in which they lived. The sunlight was slanting level across it and upon George’s ridiculous figure. He was watching me.

“Well, Davy,” he said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say from your expression that you are envying me.”

“Am I?” I said. “You fool. You ghastly lunatic.”

Simon had gone to the lock. The two quiet heads rose slowly, as though they were being thrust gradually upward from out the earth, and Simon now stooped with the boathook over the lock. He rose, with the limp anonymity of George’s once gallant hat on the end of the boat-hook, and extended it. George took it as gravely. “Thanks,” he said.

He dug into his pocket and gave Simon a coin. “For wear and tear on the boat-hook,” he said. “And perhaps a bit of balm for your justifiable disappointment, eh, Simon?”

Simon grunted and turned back to the lock. The brother was still watching us. “And I am obliged to you,” George said. “Hope I’ll never have to return the favor in kind.” The brother said something, short and grave, in a slow pleasant voice. George looked at me again. “Well, Davy.”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

“Right you are. Where’s the skiff?” Then I was staring at him again, and for a moment he stared at me. Then he shouted, a long ringing laugh, while the two heads in the yawl watched us from beyond Simon’s granite-like and contemptuous back. I could almost hear Simon thinking Oxford young gentlemen. “Davy, have you lost the skiff?”

“She’s tied up below a bit, sir,” the civil voice in the yawl said. “The gentleman walked out of ’er like she were a keb, without looking back.”

The June afternoon slanted across my shoulder, full upon George’s face. He would not take my jacket. “I’ll pull down and keep warm,” he said. The once-glazed hat lay between his feet.

“Why don’t you throw that thing out?” I said. He pulled steadily, looking at me. The sun was full in his eyes, striking the yellow flecks in them into fleeting, mica-like sparks.

“That hat,” I said. “What do you want with it?”

“Oh; that. Cast away the symbol of my soul?” He unshipped one scull and picked up the hat and turned and cocked it on the stem, where it hung with a kind of gallant and dissolute jauntiness. “The symbol of my soul rescued from the deep by…”

“Hauled out of a place it had no business being whatever, by a public servant who did not want his public charge cluttered up.”

“At least you admit the symbology,” he said. “And that the empire rescued it. So it is worth something to the empire. Too much for me to throw it away. That which you have saved from death or disaster will be forever dear to you, Davy; you cannot ignore it. Besides, it will not let you. What is it you Americans say?”

“We say, bunk. Why not use the river for a while? It’s paid for.”

He looked at me. “Ah. That is… Well, anyway, it’s American, isn’t it. That’s something.”

But he got out into the current again. A barge was coming up, in tow. We got outside her and watched her pass, empty of any sign of life, with a solemn implacability like a huge barren catafalque, the broad-rumped horses, followed by a boy in a patched coat and carrying a peeled goad, plodding stolidly along the path. We dropped slowly astern. Over her freeboard a motionless face with a dead pipe in its teeth contemplated us with eyes empty of any thought.

“If I could have chosen,” George said, “I’d like to have been pulled out by that chap yonder. Can’t you see him picking up a boat-hook without haste and fishing you out without even shifting the pipe?”

“You should have chosen your place better, then. But it seems to me you’re in no position to complain!”

“But Simon showed annoyance. Not surprise nor concern: just annoyance. I don’t like to be hauled back into life by an annoyed man with a boat-hook.”

“You could have said so at the time. Simon didn’t have to save you. He could have shut the gates until he got another head of water, and flushed you right out of his bailiwick without touching you, and saved himself trouble and ingratitude. Besides Corinthia’s tears.”

“Ay; tears. Corinthia will at least cherish a tenderness for me from now on.”

“Yes; but if you’d only not got out at all. Or having not got in at all. Falling into that filthy lock just to complete a gesture. I think…”

“Do not think, my good David. When I had the choice of holding on to the skiff and being haled safely and meekly away, or of giving the lie to the stupid small gods at the small price of being temporarily submerged in this…” he let go one oar and dipped his hand in the water, then he flung it outward in dripping, burlesque magniloquence. “O Thames!” he said. “Thou mighty sewer of an empire!”

“Steer the boat,” I said. “I lived in America long enough to have learned something of England’s pride.”

“And so you consider a bath in this filthy old sewer that has flushed this land since long before He who made it had any need to invent God… a rock about which man and all his bawling clamor seethes away to sluttishness…”

We were twenty-one then; we talked like that, tramping about that peaceful land where in green petrification the old splendid bloody deeds, the spirits of the blundering courageous men, slumbered in every stone and tree. For that was 1914, and in the parks bands played Valse Septembre, and girls and young men drifted in punts on the moonlit river and sang Mister Moon and There’s a Bit of Heaven, and George and I sat in a window in Christ Church while the curtains whispered in the twilight, and talked of courage and honor and Napier and love and Ben Jonson and death.

The next year was 1915, and the bands played God Save the King, and the rest of the young men and some not so young sang Mademoiselle of Armentieres in the mud, and George was dead.

He had gone out in October, a subaltern in the regiment of which his people were hereditary colonels. Ten months later I saw him sitting with an orderly behind a ruined chimney on the edge of Givenchy. He had a telephone strapped to his ears and he was eating something which he waved at me as we ran past and ducked into the cellar which we sought.

II

I TOLD HIM to wait until they got done giving me the ether; there were so many of them moving back and forth that I was afraid someone would brush against him and find him there. “And then you’ll have to go back,” I said.

“I’ll be careful,” George said.

“Because you’ll have to do something for me,” I said.

“You’ll have to.”

“All right. I will. What is it?”

“Wait until they go away, then I can tell you. You’ll have to do it, because I can’t. Promise you will.”

“All right. I promise.” So we waited until they got done and had moved down to my leg. Then George came nearer.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s my leg!” I said. “I want you to be sure it’s dead. They may cut it off in a hurry and forget about it.”

“All right. I’ll see about it.”

“I couldn’t have that, you know. That wouldn’t do at all. They might bury it and it couldn’t lie quiet. And then it would be lost and we couldn’t find it to do anything.”

“All right. I’ll watch.” He looked at me. “Only I don’t have to go back.”

“You don’t? You don’t have to go back at all?”

“I’m out of it. You aren’t out of it yet. You’ll have to go back.”

“I’m not?” I said. “Then it will be harder to find it than ever. So you see about it… And you don’t have to go back. You’re lucky, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m lucky. I always was lucky. Give the lie to the stupid small gods at the mere price of being temporarily submerged in…”

“There were tears,” I said. “She sat flat on the earth to weep them.”

“Ay; tears,” he said. “The flowing of all men’s tears under the sky. Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation, and the world seething away to sluttishness while you look on.”

“No; she sat flat in a green afternoon and wept for the symbol of your soul.”

“Not for the symbol, but because the empire saved it, hoarded it. She wept for wisdom.”

“But there were tears… And you’ll see to it? You’ll not go away?”

“Ay,” George said; “tears.”

In the hospital it was better. It was a long room full of constant movement, and I didn’t have to be afraid all the time that they would find him and send him away, though now and then it did happen a sister or an orderly coming into the middle of our talk, with ubiquitous hands and cheerful aseptic voices: “Now, now. He’s not going. Yes, yes; he’ll come back. Lie still, now.”

So I would have to lie there, surrounding, enclosing that gaping sensation below my thigh where the nerve- and muscle-ends twitched and jerked, until he returned.

“Can’t you find it?” I said. “Have you looked good?”

“Yes. I’ve looked everywhere. I went back out there and looked, and I looked here. It must be all right They must have killed it.”

“But they didn’t. I told you they were going to forget it.”

“How do you know they forgot it?”

“I know. I can feel it. It jeers at me. It’s not dead.”

“But if it just jeers at you.”

“I know. But that won’t do. Don’t you see that won’t do?”

“All right. I’ll look again.”

“You must. You must find it. I don’t like this.”

So he looked again. He came back and sat down and he looked at me. His eyes were bright and intent.

“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” I said. “You’ll find it some day. It’s all right; just a leg. It hasn’t even another leg to walk with.” Still he didn’t say anything, just looking at me. “Where are you living now?”

“Up there,” he said.

I looked at him for a while. “Oh,” I said. “At Oxford?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said “Why didn’t you go home?”

“I don’t know.”

He still looked at me. “Is it nice there now? It must be. Are there still punts on the river? Do they still sing in the punts like they did that summer, the men and girls, I mean?”

He looked at me, wide, intent, a little soberly.

“You left me last night,” he said.

“Did I?”

“You jumped into the skiff and pulled away. So I came back here.”

“Did I? Where was I going?”

“I don’t know. You hurried away, up-river. You could have told me, if you wanted to be alone. You didn’t need to run.”

“I shan’t again.” We looked at one another. We spoke quietly now. “So you must find it now.”

“Yes. Can you tell what it is doing?”

“I don’t know. That’s it.”

“Does it feel like it’s doing something you don’t want it to?”

“I don’t know. So you find it. You find it quick. Find it and fix it so it can get dead.”

But he couldn’t find it. We talked about it quietly, between silences, watching one another. “Can’t you tell anything about where it is?” he said. I was sitting up now, practicing accustoming myself to the wood-and-leather one.

The gap was still there, but we had now established a sort of sullen armistice. “Maybe that’s what it was waiting for,” he said. “Maybe now…”

“Maybe so. I hope so. But they shouldn’t have forgot to Have I run away any more since that night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” He was watching me with his bright, intent, fading eyes. “George,” I said. “Wait, George!” But he was gone.

I didn’t see him again for a long time. I was at the Observers’ School, it doesn’t require two legs to operate a machine gun and a wireless key and to orient maps from the gunner’s piano stool of an R. E. or an F. E. then, and I had almost finished the course. So my days were pretty well filled, what with work and with that certitude of the young which so arbitrarily distinguishes between verities and illusions, establishing with such assurance that line between truth and delirium which sages knit their brows over. And my nights were filled too, with the nerve- and muscle-ends chafed now by an immediate cause: the wood-and-leather leg. But the gap was still there, and sometimes at night, isolated by invisibility, it would become filled with the immensity of darkness and silence despite me. Then, on the poised brink of sleep, I would believe that he had found it at last and seen that it was dead, and that some day he would return and tell me about it. Then I had the dream.

Suddenly I knew that I was about to come upon it. I could feel in the darkness the dark walls of the corridor and the invisible corner, and I knew that it was just around the corner. I could smell a rank, animal odor. It was an odor which I had never smelled before, but I knew it at once, blown suddenly down the corridor from the old fetid caves where experience began. I felt dread and disgust and determination, as when you sense suddenly a snake beside a garden path. And then I was awake, rigid, sweating; the darkness flowed with a long rushing sigh. I lay with the fading odor in my nostrils while my sweat cooled, staring up into the darkness, not daring to close my eyes. I lay on my back, curled about the gaping hole like a doughnut, while the odor faded. At last it was gone, and George was looking at me.

“What is it, Davy?” he said. “Can’t you say what it is?”

“It’s nothing.” I could taste sweat on my lips. “It isn’t anything. I won’t again. I swear I shan’t any more.”

He was looking at me. “You said you had to come back to town. And then I saw you on the river. You saw me and hid, Davy. Pulled up under the bank, in the shadow. There was a girl with you.” He watched me, his eyes bright and grave.

“Was there a moon?” I said.

“Yes. There was a moon.”

“Oh God, oh God,” I said. “I won’t again, George! You must find it. You must!”

“Ah, Davy,” he said. His face began to fade.

“I won’t! I won’t again!” I said. “George! George!”

A match flared; a face sprang out of the darkness above me. “Wake up,” it said. I lay staring at it, sweating. The match burned down, the face fell back into darkness, from which the voice came bodiless: “All right now?”

“Yes, thanks. Dreaming. Sorry I waked you.”

For the next few nights I didn’t dare let go into sleep again. But I was young, my body was getting strong again and I was out of doors all day; one night sleep overtook me unawares, and I waked next morning to find that I had eluded it, whatever it was. I found a sort of peace. The days passed; I had learned the guns and the wireless and the maps, and most of all, to not observe what should not be observed.

My thigh was almost reconciled to the new member, and, freed now of the outcast’s doings, I could give all my time to seeking George. But I did not find him; somewhere in the mazy corridor where the mother of dreams dwells I had lost them both.

So I did not remark him at first even when he stood beside me in the corridor just beyond the corner of which It waited.

The sulphur reek was all about me; I felt horror and dread and something unspeakable: delight. I believe I felt what women in labor feel. And then George was there, looking steadily down at me. He had always sat beside my head, so we could talk, but now he stood beyond the foot of the bed, looking down at me and I knew that this was farewell.

“Don’t go, George!” I said. “I shan’t again. I shan’t any more, George!” But his steady, grave gaze faded slowly… implacable, sorrowful, but without reproach. “Go, then!” I said. My teeth felt dry against my lip like sandpaper. “Go, then!”

And that was the last of it. He never came back, nor the dream. I knew it would not, as a sick man who wakes with his body spent and peaceful and weak knows that the illness will not return. I knew it was gone; I knew that when I realized that I thought of it only with pity. Poor devil, I would think. Poor devil.

But it took George with it. Sometimes, when dark and isolation had robbed me of myself, I would think that perhaps in killing it he had lost his own life: the dead dying in order to slay the dead. I sought him now and then in the corridors of sleep, but without success; I spent a week with his people in Devon, in a rambling house where his crooked ugly face and his round ruddy head and his belief that Marlowe was a better lyric poet than Shakespeare and Thomas Campion than either, and that breath was not a bauble given a man for his own pleasuring, eluded me behind every stick and stone. But I never saw him again.

III

THE PADRE had driven up from Poperinghe in the dark, in the side car of a motorcycle. He sat beyond the table, talking of Jotham Rust, Everbe Corinthia’s brother and Simon’s son, whom I had seen three times in my life. Yesterday I saw Jotham for the third and last time, arraigned before a court martial for desertion: the scarecrow of that once sturdy figure with its ruddy, capable face, who had pulled George out of the lock with a boat-hook that afternoon three years ago, charged now for his life, offering no extenuation nor explanation, expecting and asking no clemency.

“He does not want clemency,” the padre said. The padre was a fine, honest man, incumbent of a modest living in the Midlands somewhere, who had brought the kind and honest stupidity of his convictions into the last place on earth where there was room for them. “He does not want to live.” His face was musing and dejected, shocked and bewildered.

“There comes a time in the life of every man when the world turns its dark side to him and every man’s shadow is his mortal enemy. Then he must turn to God, or perish. Yet he… I cannot seem…” His eyes held that burly bewilderment of oxen; above his stock his shaven chin dejected, but not vanquished yet. “And you say you know of no reason why he should have attacked you?”

“I never saw the man but twice before,” I said. “One time was night before last, the other was… two three years ago, when I passed through his father’s lock in a skiff while I was at Oxford. He was there when his sister let us through. And if you hadn’t told me his sister’s name, I wouldn’t have remembered him then.”

He brooded. “The father is dead, too.”

“What? Dead? Old Simon dead?”

“Yes. He died shortly after the the other. Rust says he left his father after the sister’s funeral, talking with the sexton in Abingdon churchyard, and a week later he was notified in London that his father was dead. He says the sexton told him his father had been giving directions about his own funeral. The sexton said that every day Simon would come up to see him about it, made all the arrangements, and that the sexton joked him a little about it, because he was such a hale old chap, thinking that he was just off balance for the time with the freshness of his grief. And then, a week later, he was dead.”

“Old Simon dead,” I said. “Corinthia, then Simon, and now Jotham.” The candle flame stood steady and unwavering on the table.

“Was that her name?” he said. “Everbe Corinthia?” He sat in the lone chair, puzzlement, bewilderment in the very shape of his shadow on the wall behind him. The light fell on one side of his face, the major’s crown on that shoulder glinting dully. I rose from the cot, the harness of the leg creaking with explosive loudness, and leaned over his shoulder and took a cigarette from my magneto case tobacco-box, and fumbled a match in my single hand. He glanced up.

“Permit me,” he said. He took the box and struck a match.

“You’re fortunate to have escaped with just that.” He indicated my sling.

“Yes, sir. If it hadn’t been for my leg, I’d have got the knife in my ribs instead of my arm.”

“Your leg?”

“I keep it propped on a chair beside the bed, so I can reach it easily. He stumbled over it and waked me. Otherwise he’d have stuck me like a pig.”

“Oh,” he said. He dropped the match and brooded again with his stubborn bewilderment. “And yet, his is not the face of an assassin in the dark. There is a forthrightness in it, a a what shall I say? a sense of social responsibility, integrity, that… And you say that you, I beg your pardon; I do not doubt your word; it is only that… Yet the girl is indubitably dead; it was he who discovered her and was with her until she died and saw her buried. He heard the man laugh once, in the dark.”

“But you cannot slash a stranger’s arm simply because you heard a laugh in the dark, sir. The poor devil is crazy with his own misfortunes.”

“Perhaps so,” the padre said. “He told me that he has other proof, something incontrovertible; what, he would not tell me.”

“Then let him produce it. If I were in his place now…”

He brooded, his hands clasped on the table. “There is a justice in the natural course of events… My dear sir, are you accusing Providence of a horrible and meaningless practical joke? No, no; to him who has sinned, that sin will come home to him. Otherwise… God is at least a gentleman. Forgive me: I am not… You understand how this comes home to me, in this unfortunate time when we already have so much to reproach ourselves with. We are responsible for this.” He touched the small metal cross on his tunic, then he swept his arm in a circular gesture that shaped in the quiet room between us the still and sinister darkness in which the fine and resounding words men mouthed so glibly were the vampire’s teeth with which the vampire fed. “The voice of God waking His servants from the sloth into which they have sunk…”

“What, padre?” I said. “Is the damn thing making a dissenter of you too?”

He mused again, his face heavy in the candle light. “That the face of a willful shedder of blood, of an assassin in the dark? No, no; you cannot tell me that.”

I didn’t try. I didn’t tell him either my belief that only necessity, the need for expedition and silence, had reduced Jotham to employing a knife, an instrument of any kind; that what he wanted was my throat under his hands.

He had gone home on his leave, to that neat little dove-cote beside the lock, and at once he found something strained in its atmosphere and out of tune. That was last summer, about the time I was completing my course at the Observers’ School.

Simon appeared to be oblivious of the undercurrent, but Jotham had not been home long before he discovered that every evening about dusk Corinthia quitted the house for an hour or so, and something in her manner, or maybe in the taut atmosphere of the house itself, caused him to question her. She was evasive, blazed suddenly out at him in anger which was completely unlike her at all, then became passive and docile. Then he realized that the passiveness was secretive, the docility dissimulation; one evening he surprised her slipping away. He drove her back to the house, where she took refuge in her room and locked the door, and from a window he thought he caught a glimpse of the man disappearing beyond a field. He pursued, but found no one. For an hour after dusk he lay in a nearby coppice, watching the house, then he returned. Corinthia’s door was still locked and old Simon filled the house with his peaceful snoring.

Later something waked him. He sat up in bed, then sprang to the floor and went to the window. There was a moon and by its light he saw something white flitting along the towpath. He pursued and overtook Corinthia, who turned like a vicious small animal at the edge of the coppice where he had lain in hiding. Beyond the towpath a punt lay at the bank. It was empty. He grasped Corinthia’s arm. She raged at him; it could not have been very pretty. Then she collapsed as suddenly and from the tangled darkness of the coppice behind them a man’s laugh came, a jeering sound that echoed once across the moonlit river and ceased.

Corinthia now crouched on the ground, watching him, her face like a mask in the moonlight. He rushed into the coppice and beat it thoroughly, finding nothing. When he emerged the punt was gone. He ran down to the water, looking this way and that. While he stood there the laugh came again, from the shadows beneath the other shore.

He returned to Corinthia. She sat as he had left her, her loosened hair about her face, looking out across the river.

He spoke to her, but she did not reply. He lifted her to her feet. She came docilely and they returned to the cottage.

He tried to talk to her again, but she moved stonily beside him, her loosened hair about her cold face. He saw her to her room and locked the door himself and took the key back to bed with him. Simon had not awakened. The next morning she was gone, the door still locked.

He told Simon then and all that day they sought her, assisted by the neighbors. Neither of them wished to notify the police, but at dusk that day a constable appeared with his notebook, and they dragged the lock, without finding anything. The next morning, just after dawn, Jotham found her lying in the towpath before the door. She was unconscious, but showed no physical injury. They brought her into the house and applied their spartan, homely remedies, and after a time she revived, screaming. She screamed all that day until sunset. She lay on her back screaming, her eyes wide open and perfectly empty, until her voice left her and her screaming was only a ghost of screaming, making no sound. At sunset she died.

He had now been absent from his battalion for a hundred and twelve days. God knows how he did it; he must have lived like a beast, hidden, eating when he could, lurking in the shadow with every man’s hand against him, as he sought through the entire B. E. F. for a man whose laugh he had heard one time, knowing that the one thing he could surely count on finding would be his own death, and to be foiled on the verge of success by an artificial leg propped on a chair in the dark.

How much later it was I don’t know. The candle was lighted again, but the man who had awakened me was bending over the cot, between me and the light. But despite the light, it was a little too much like that night before last; I came out of sleep upstanding this time, with my automatic.

“As you were,” I said. “You’ll not…” Then he moved back and I recognized the padre. He stood beside the table, the light falling on one side of his face and chest. I sat up and put the pistol down. “What is it, padre? Do they want me again?”

“He wants nothing,” the padre said. “Man cannot injure him further now.” He stood there, a portly figure that should have been pacing benignantly in a shovel hat in green lanes between summer fields. Then he thrust his hand into his tunic and produced a flat object and laid it on the table.

“I found this among Jotham Rust’s effects which he gave me to destroy, an hour ago,” he said. He looked at me, then he turned and went to the door, and turned again and looked at me.

“Is he… I thought it was to be at dawn.”

“Yes,” he said. “I must hurry back.” He was either looking at me or not. The flame stood steady above the candle.

Then he opened the door. “May God have mercy on your soul,” he said, and went out.

I sat in the covers and heard him blunder on in the darkness, then I heard the motorcycle splutter into life and die away. I swung my foot to the floor and rose, holding on to the chair on which the artificial leg rested. It was chilly; it was as though I could feel the toes even of the absent leg curling away from the floor, so I braced my hip on the chair and reached the flat object from the table and returned to bed and drew the blanket about my shoulders. My wrist watch said three o’clock.

It was a photograph, a cheap thing such as itinerant photographers turn out at fairs. It was dated at Abingdon in June of the summer just past. At that time I was lying in the hospital talking to George, and I sat quite still in the blankets, looking at the photograph, because it was my own face that looked back at me. It had a quality that was not mine: a quality vicious and outrageous and unappalled, and beneath it was written in a bold sprawling hand like that of a child: “To Everbe Corinthia” followed by an unprintable phrase, yet it was my own face, and I sat holding the picture quietly in my hand while the candle flame stood high and steady above the wick and on the wall my huddled shadow held the motionless photograph. In slow and gradual diminishment of cold tears the candle appeared to sink, as though burying itself in its own grief. But even before this came about, it began to pale and fade until only the tranquil husk of the small flame stood unwinded as a feather above the wax, leaving upon the wall the motionless husk of my shadow. Then I saw that the window was gray, and that was all. It would be dawn at Pop too, but it must have been some time, and the padre must have got back in time.

I told him to find it and kill it. The dawn was cold; on these mornings the butt of the leg felt as though it were made of ice. I told him to. I told him.

I

IT WAS THE LAST of the Milanese brandy. I drank, and passed the bottle to Don, who lifted the flask until the liquor slanted yellowly in the narrow slot in the leather jacket, and while he held it so the soldier came up the path, his tunic open at the throat, pushing the bicycle. He was a young man, with a bold lean face. He gave us a surly good day and looked at the flask a moment as he passed. We watched him disappear beyond the crest, mounting the bicycle as he went out of sight.

Don took a mouthful, then he poured the rest out. It splattered on the parched earth, pocking it for a fading moment. He shook the flask to the ultimate drop. “Salut,” he said, returning the flask. “Thanks, O gods. My Lord, if I thought I’d have to go to bed with any more of that in my stomach.”

“It’s too bad, the way you have to drink it,” I said. “Just have to drink it.” I stowed the flask away and we went on, crossing the crest. The path began to descend, still in shadow. The air was vivid, filled with sun which held a quality beyond that of mere light and heat, and a sourceless goat bell somewhere beyond the next turn of the path, distant and unimpeded.

“I hate to see you lugging the stuff along day after day,”

Don said. “That’s the reason I do. You couldn’t drink it, and you wouldn’t throw it away.”

“Throw it away? It cost ten lire. What did I buy it for?”

“God knows,” Don said. Against the sun-filled valley the trees were like the bars of a grate, the path a gap in the bars, the valley blue and sunny. The goat bell was somewhere ahead. A fainter path turned off at right angles, steeper than the broad one which we were following. “He went that way,” Don said.

“Who did?” I said. Don was pointing to the faint mark of bicycle tires where they had turned into the fainter path.

“See.”

“This one must not have been steep enough for him,” I said.

“He must have been in a hurry.”

“He sure was, after he made that turn.”

“Maybe there’s a haystack at the bottom.”

“Or he could run on across the valley and up the other mountain and then run back down that one and up this one again until his momentum gave out.”

“Or until he starved to death,” Don said.

“That’s right,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a man starving to death on a bicycle?”

“No,” Don said. “Did you?”

“No,” I said. We descended. The path turned, and then we came upon the goat bell. It was on a laden mule cropping with delicate tinkling jerks at the pathside near a stone shrine. Beside the shrine sat a man in corduroy and a woman in a bright shawl, a covered basket beside her. They watched us as we approached.

“Good day, signor,” Don said. “Is it far?”

“Good day, signori,” the woman said. The man looked at us. He had blue eyes with dissolving irises, as if they had been soaked in water for a long time. The woman touched his arm, then she made swift play with her fingers before his face. He said, in a dry metallic voice like a cicada’s: “Good day, signori.”

“He doesn’t hear any more,” the woman said. “No, it is not far. From yonder you will see the roofs.”

“Good,” Don said. “We are fatigued. Might one rest here, signora?”

“Rest, signori,” the woman said. We slipped our packs and sat down. The sun slanted upon the shrine, upon the serene, weathered figure in the niche and upon two bunches of dried mountain asters lying there. The woman was making play with her fingers before the man’s face. Her other hand in repose upon the basket beside her was gnarled and rough. Motionless, it had that rigid quality of unaccustomed idleness, not restful so much as quite spent, dead. It looked like an artificial hand attached to the edge of the shawl, as if she had donned it with the shawl for conventional complement. The other hand, the one with which she talked to the man, was swift and supple as a prestidigitator’s.

The man looked at us. “You walk, signori,” he said in his light, cadenceless voice.

“Si,” we said. Don took out the cigarettes. The man lifted his hand in a slight, deprecatory gesture. Don insisted. The man bowed formally, sitting, and fumbled at the pack. The woman took the cigarette from the pack and put it into his hand. He bowed again as he accepted a light. “From Milano,” Don said. “It is far.”

“It is far,” the woman said. Her fingers rippled briefly.

“He has been there,” she said.

“I was there, signori,” the man said. He held the cigarette carefully between thumb and forefinger. “One takes care to escape the carriages.”

“Yes.” Don said. “Those without horses.”

“Without horses,” the woman said. “There are many. Even here in the mountains we hear of it.”

“Many,” Don said. “Always whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.”

“Si,” the woman said. “Even here I have seen it.” Her hand rippled in the sunlight. The man looked at us quietly, smoking. “It was not like that when he was there, you see,” she said.

“I am there long time ago, signori,” he said. “It is far.”

He spoke in the same tone she had used, the same tone of grave and courteous explanation.

“It is far,” Don said. We smoked. The mule cropped with delicate, jerking tinkles of the bell. “But we can rest yonder,” Don said, extending his hand toward the valley swimming blue and sunny beyond the precipice where the path turned. “A bowl of soup, wine, a bed?”

The woman watched us across that serene and topless rampart of the deaf, the cigarette smoking close between thumb and finger. The woman’s hand flickered before his face. “Si,” he said; “si. With the priest: why not? The priest will take them in.” He said something else, too swift for me. The woman removed the checked cloth which covered the basket, and took out a wineskin. Don and I bowed and drank in turn, the man returning the bows.

“Is it far to the priest’s?” Don said.

The woman’s hand flickered with unbelievable rapidity.

Her other hand, lying upon the basket, might have belonged to another body. “Let them wait for him there, then,” the man said. He looked at us. “There is a funeral today. You will find him at the church. Drink, signori.”

We drank in decorous turn, the three of us. The wine was harsh and sharp and potent. The mule cropped, its small bell tinkling, its shadow long in the slanting sun, across the path. “Who is it that’s dead, signora?” Don said.

“He was to have married the priest’s ward after this harvest,” the woman said; “the banns were read and all. A rich man, and not old. But two days ago, he died.”

The man watched her lips. “Tchk. He owned land, a house: so do I. It is nothing.”

“He was rich,” the woman said. “Because he was both young and fortunate, my man is jealous of him.”

“But not now,” the man said. “Eh, signori?”

“To live is good,” Don said. He said, e hello.

“It is good,” the man said; he also said, bello.

“He was to have married the priest’s niece, you say,” Don said.

“She is no kin to him,” the woman said. “The priest just raised her. She was six when he took her, without people, kin, of any sort. The mother was workhouse-bred. She lived in a hut on the mountain yonder. It was not known who the father was, although the priest tried for a long while to persuade one of them to marry her for the child’s…”

“One of which?” Don said.

“One of those who might have been the father, signor. But it was never known which one it was, until in 1916. He was a young man, a laborer; the next day we learned that the mother had gone too, to the war also, for she was never seen again by those who knew her until one of our boys came home after Caporetto, where the father had been killed, and told how the mother had been seen in a house in Milano that was not a good house. So the priest went and got the child. She was six then, brown and lean as a lizard. She was hidden on the mountain when the priest got there; the house was empty. The priest pursued her among the rocks and captured her like a beast: she was half naked and without shoes and it winter time.”

“So the priest kept her,” Don said. “Stout fellow.”

“She had no people, no roof, no crust to call hers save what the priest gave her. But you would not know it. Always with a red or a green dress for Sundays and feast days, even at fourteen and fifteen, when a girl should be learning modesty and industry, to be a crown to her husband. The priest had told that she would be for the church, and we wondered when he would make her put such away for the greater glory of God. But at fourteen and fifteen she was already the brightest and loudest and most tireless in the dances, and the young men already beginning to look after her, even after it had been arranged between her and him who is dead yonder.”

“The priest changed his mind about the church and got her a husband instead,” Don said.

“He found for her the best catch in this parish, signor. Young, and rich, with a new suit each year from the Milano tailor. Then the harvest came, and what do you think, signori? she would not marry him.”

“I thought you said the wedding was not to be until after this harvest,” Don said. “You mean, the wedding had already been put off a year before this harvest?”

“It had been put off for three years. It was made three years ago, to be after that harvest. It was made in the same week that Giulio Farinzale was called to the army. I remember how we were all surprised, because none had thought his number would come up so soon, even though he was a bachelor and without ties save an uncle and aunt.”

“Is that so?” Don said. “Governments surprise everybody now and then. How did he get out of it?”

“He did not get out of it.”

“Oh. That’s why the wedding was put off, was it?”

The woman looked at Don for a minute. “Giulio was not the fiance’s name.”

“Oh, I see. Who was Giulio?”

The woman did not answer at once. She sat with her head bent a little. The man had been watching their lips when they spoke. “Go on,” he said; “tell them. They are men: they can listen to women’s tittle-tattle with the ears alone. They cackle, signori; give them a breathing spell, and they cackle like geese. Drink.”

“He was the one she used to meet by the river in the evenings; he was younger still: that was why we were surprised that his number should be called so soon. Before we had thought she was old enough for such, she was meeting him. And hiding it from the priest as skillfully as any grown woman could…” For an instant the man’s washed eyes glinted at us, quizzical.

“She was meeting this Giulio all the while she was engaged to the other one?” Don said.

“No. The engagement was later. We had not thought her old enough for such yet. When we heard about it, we said how an anonymous child is like a letter in the post office: the envelope might look like any other envelope, but when you open it.. And the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.”

“Did he ever find it out?” Don said.

“Yes. It was not long after. She would slip out of the house at dusk; she was seen, and the priest was seen, hidden in the garden to watch the house: a servant of the holy God forced to play watchdog for the world to see. It was not good, signori.”

“And then the young man got called suddenly to the army,” Don said. “Is that right?”

“It was quite sudden; we were all surprised. Then we thought that it was the hand of God, and that now the priest would send her to the convent. Then in that same week we learned that it was arranged between her and him who is dead yonder, to be after the harvest, and we said it was the hand of God that would confer upon her a husband beyond her deserts in order to protect His servant. For the holy are susceptible to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God’s aid.”

“Tchk, tchk,” the man said. “It was nothing. The priest looked at her, too,” he said. “For a man is a man, even under a cassock. Eh, signori?”

“You would say so,” the woman said. “You without grace.”

“And the priest looked at her, too,” Don said.

“It was his trial, his punishment, for having been too lenient with her. And the punishment was not over: the harvest came, and we heard that the wedding was put off for a year: what do you think of that, signori? that a girl, come from what she had come from, to be given the chance which the priest had given her to save her from herself, from her blood… We heard how they quarreled, she and the priest, of how she defied him, slipping out of the house after dark and going to the dances where her fiance might see her or hear of it at any time.”

“Was the priest still looking at her?” Don said.

“It was his punishment, his expiation. So the next harvest came, and it was put off again, to be after the next harvest; the banns were not even begun. She defied him to that extent, signori, she, a pauper, and we all saying, ‘When will her fiance hear of it, learn that she is no good, when there are daughters of good houses who had learned modesty and seemliness?’”

“You have unmarried daughters, signora?” Don said.

“Si. One. Two have I married, one still in my house. A good girl, signori, if I do say it.”

“Tchk, woman,” the man said.

“That is readily believed,” Don said. “So the young man had gone to the army, and the wedding was put off for another year.”

“And another year, signori. And then a third year. Then it was to be after this harvest; within a month it was to have been. The banns were read; the priest read them himself in the church, the third time last Sunday, with him there in his new Milano suit and she beside him in the shawl he had given her: it cost a hundred lire and a golden chain, for he gave her gifts suitable for a queen rather than for one who could not name her own father, and we believed that at last the priest had served his expiation out and that the evil had been lifted from his house at last, since the soldier’s time would also be up this fall. And now the fiance is dead.”

“Was he very sick?” Don said.

“It was very sudden. A hale man; one you would have said would live a long time. One day he was well, the second day he was quite sick. The third day he was dead. Perhaps you can hear the bell, with listening, since you have young ears.”

The opposite mountains were in shadow. Between, the valley lay invisible still. In the sunny silence the mule’s bell tinkled in random jerks. “For it is in God’s hands,” the woman said.

“Who will say that his life is his own?”

“Who will say?” Don said. He did not look at me. He said in English: “Give me a cigarette.”

“You’ve got them.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. In your pants pocket.”

He took out the cigarettes. He continued to speak in English. “And he died suddenly. And he got engaged suddenly. And at the same time, Giulio got drafted suddenly. It would have surprised you. Everything was sudden except somebody’s eagerness for the wedding to be. There didn’t seem to be any hurry about that, did there?”

“I don’t know. I no spika.”

“In fact, they seemed to stop being sudden altogether until about time for Giulio to come home again. Then it began to be sudden again. And so I think I’ll ask if priests serve on the draft boards in Italy.” The old man watched his lips, his washed gaze grave and intent. “And if this path is the main path down the mountain, and that bicycle turned off into that narrow one back there, what do you think of that, signori?”

“I think it was fine. Only a little sharp to the throat. Maybe we can get something down there to take away the taste.”

The man was watching our lips; the woman’s head was bent again; her stiff hand smoothed the checked cover upon the basket. “You will find him at the church, signori,” the man said.

“Yes,” Don said. “At the church.”

We drank again. The man accepted another cigarette with that formal and unfailing politeness, conferring upon the action something finely ceremonious yet not incongruous.

The woman put the wineskin back into the basket and covered it again. We rose and took up our packs.

“You talk swiftly with the hand, signora,” Don said.

“He reads the lips too. The other we made lying in the bed in the dark. The old do not sleep so much. The old lie in bed and talk. It is not like that with you yet.”

“It is so. You have made the padrone many children, signora?”

“Si. Seven. But we are old now. We lie in bed and talk.”

II

BEFORE WE REACHED the village the bell had begun to toll.

From the gaunt steeple of the church the measured notes seemed to blow free as from a winter branch, along the wind.

The wind began as soon as the sun went down. We watched the sun touch the mountains, whereupon the sky lost its pale, vivid blueness and took on a faintly greenish cast, like glass, against which the recent crest, where the shrine faded with the dried handful of flowers beneath the fading crucifix, stood black and sharp. Then the wind began: a steady moving wall of air full of invisible particles of something. Before it the branches leaned without a quiver, as before the pressure of an invisible hand, and in it our blood began to cool at once, even before we had stopped walking where the path became a cobbled street.

The bell still tolled. “Funny hour for a funeral,” I said. “You’d think he would have kept a long time at this altitude. No need to be hurried into the ground like this.”

“He got in with a fast gang,” Don said. The church was invisible from here, shut off by a wall. We stood before a gate, looking into a court enclosed by three walls and roofed by a vine on a raftered trellis. It contained a wooden table and two backless benches. We stood at the gate, looking into the court, when Don said. “So this is Uncle’s house.”

“Uncle?”

“He was without ties save an uncle and aunt,” Don said.

“Yonder, by the door.” The door was at the bottom of the court. There was a fire beyond it, and beside the door a bicycle leaned against the wall. “The bicycle, unconscious,” Don said.

“Is that a bicycle?”

“Sure. That’s a bicycle.” It was an old-style machine, with high back-swept handlebars like gazelle horns. We looked at it.

“The other path is the back entrance,” I said. “The family entrance.” We heard the bell, looking into the court.

“Maybe the wind doesn’t blow in there,” Don said. “Besides, there’s no hurry. We couldn’t see him anyway, until it’s over.”

“These places are hotels sometimes.” We entered. Then we saw the soldier. When we approached the table he came to the door and stood against the firelight, looking at us. He wore a white shirt now. But we could tell him by his legs.

Then he went back into the house.

“So Malbrouck is home,” Don said.

“Maybe he came back for the funeral.” We listened to the bell. The twilight was thicker inside. Overhead the leaves streamed rigid on the wind, stippled black upon the livid translucent sky. The strokes of the bell sounded as though they too were leaves flattening away upon an inviolable vine in the wind.

“How did he know there was going to be one?” Don said.

“Maybe the priest wrote him a letter.”

“Maybe so,” Don said. The firelight looked good beyond the door. Then a woman stood in it, looking at us. “Good day, padrona,” Don said. “Might one have a mouthful of wine here?” She looked at us, motionless against the firelight.

She was tall. She stood tall and motionless against the firelight, not touching the door. The bell tolled. “She used to be a soldier too,” Don said. “She was a sergeant.”

“Maybe she was the colonel who ordered Malbrouck to go home.”

“No. He wasn’t moving fast enough when he passed us up yonder, for it to have been her.” Then the woman spoke: “It is so, signori. Rest yourselves.” She went back into the house. We slipped our packs and sat down. We looked at the bicycle.

“Cavalry,” Don said. “Wonder why he came the back way.”

“All right,” I said.

“All right what?”

“All right. Wonder.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Sure. That’s a joke. It’s because we are old. We lie in the draft. That’s a joke too.”

“Tell me something that’s not a joke.”

“All right.”

“Did you hear the same thing I think I heard up there?”

“No spika. I love Italy. I love Mussolini.” The woman brought the wine. She set it on the table and was turning away. “Ask her,” I said. “Why don’t you?”

“All right. I will. You have military in the house, signora?”

The woman looked at him. “It is nothing, signor. It is my nephew returned.”

“Finished, signora?”

“Finished, signor.”

“Accept our felicitations. He has doubtless many friends who will rejoice at his return.” She was thin, not old, with cold eyes, looking down at Don with brusque attention, waiting. “You have a funeral in the village today.” She said nothing at all. She just stood there, waiting for Don to get done talking. “He will be mourned,” Don said.

“Let us hope so,” she said. She made to go on; Don asked her about lodgings. There were none, she answered with immediate finality. Then we realized that the bell had ceased.

We could hear the steady whisper of the wind in the leaves overhead.

“We were told that the priest…” Don said.

“Yes? You were told that the priest.”

“That we might perhaps find lodgings there.”

“Then you would do well to see the priest, signor.” She returned to the house. She strode with the long stride of a man into the firelight, and disappeared. When I looked at Don, he looked away and reached for the wine.

“Why didn’t you ask her some more?” I said. “Why did you quit so soon?”

“She was in a hurry. Her nephew is just home from the army, she said. He came in this afternoon. She wants to be with him, since he is without ties.”

“Maybe she’s afraid he’ll be drafted.”

“Is that a joke too?”

“It wouldn’t be to me.” He filled the glasses. “Call her back. Tell her you heard that her nephew is to marry the priest’s ward. Tell her we want to give them a present. A stomach pump. That’s not a joke, either.”

“I know it’s not.” He filled his glass carefully. “Which had you rather do, or stay at the priest’s tonight?”

“Salut,” I said.

“Salut.” We drank. The leaves made a dry, wild, continuous sound. “Wish it was still summer.”

“It would be pretty cold tonight, even in a barn.”

“Yes. Glad we don’t have to sleep in a barn tonight.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad, after we got the hay warm and got to sleep.”

“We don’t have to, though. We can get a good sleep and get an early start in the morning.”

I filled the glasses. “I wonder how far it is to the next village.”

“Too far.” We drank. “I wish it were summer. Don’t you?”

“Yes.” I emptied the bottle into the glasses. “Have some wine.” We raised our glasses. We looked at one another. The particles in the wind seemed to drive through the clothing, through the flesh, against the bones, penetrating the brick and plaster of the walls to reach us. “Salut.”

“We said that before,” Don said.

“All right. Salut, then.”

“Salut.”

We were young: Don, twenty-three; I, twenty-two. And age is so much a part of, so inextricable from, the place where you were born or bred. So that away from home, some distance away space or time or experience away you are always both older and eternally younger than yourself, at the same time.

We stood in the black wind and watched the funeral: priest, coffin, a meager clump of mourners pass, their garments, and particularly the priest’s rusty black, ballooning ahead of them, giving an illusion of unseemly haste, as though they were outstripping themselves across the harsh green twilight (the air was like having to drink iced lemonade in the winter time) and into the church. “We’ll be out of the wind too,” Don said.

“There’s an hour of light yet.”

“Sure; we might even reach the crest by dark.” He looked at me. Then I looked away. The red tiles of the roofs were black, too, now. “We’ll be out of the wind.” Then the bell began to toll again. “We don’t know anything. There’s probably not anything. Anyway, we don’t know it. We don’t have to know it. Let’s get out of the wind.” It was one of those stark, square, stone churches, built by those harsh iron counts and bishops of Lombardy. It was built old; time had not even mellowed it, could not ever mellow it, not all of time could have. They might have built the mountains too and invented the twilight in a dungeon underground, in the black ground.

And beside the door the bicycle leaned. We looked at it quietly as we entered the church and we said quietly, at the same time: “Beaver.”

“He’s one of the pallbearers,” Don said. “That’s why he came home.” The bell tolled. We passed through the chancel and stopped at the back of the church. We were out of the wind now, save for the chill eddies of it that licked in at our backs. We could hear it outside, ripping the slow strokes of the bell half-born out of the belfry, so that by the time we heard them, they seemed to have come back as echoes from a far distance. The nave, groined upward into the gloom, dwarfed the meager clot of bowed figures. Beyond them, above the steady candles, the Host rose, soaring into sootlike shadows like festooned cobwebs, with a quality sorrowful and triumphant, like wings. There was no organ, no music, no human sound at all at first. They just knelt there among the dwarfing gloom and the cold, serene, faint light of the candles. They might have all been dead. “It’ll be dark long before they can get done,” Don whispered.

“Maybe it’s because of the harvest,” I whispered. “They probably have to work all day. The living can’t wait on the dead, you know.”

“But, if he was as rich as they told us he was, it seems like…”

“Who buries the rich? Do the rich do it, or do the poor do it?”

“The poor do it,” Don whispered. Then the priest was there, above the bowed heads. We had not seen him at first, but now he was there, shapeless, blurring out of the shadows below the candles, his face like a smudge, a thumb print, upon the gloom where the Host rose in a series of dissolving gleams like a waterfall; his voice filled the church, slow, steady, like wings beating against the cold stone, upon the resonance of wind in which the windless candles stood as though painted. “And so he looked at her,” Don whispered.

“He had to sit across the table from her, say, and watch her. Watch her eating the food that made her change from nothing and become everything, knowing she had no food of her own and that it was his food that was doing it, and not for him changing. You know, girls: they are not anything, then they are everything. You watch them become everything before your eyes. No, not eyes: it’s the same in the dark. You know it before they do; it’s not their becoming everything that you dread: it’s their finding it out after you have long known it: you die too many times. And that’s not right. Not fair. I hope I’ll never have a daughter.”

“That’s incest,” I whispered.

“I never said it wasn’t. I said it was like fire. Like watching the fire lean up and away rushing.”

“You must either watch a fire, or burn up in it. Or not be there at all. Which would you choose?”

“I don’t know. If it was a girl, I’d rather burn up in it.”

“Than to not be there at all, even?”

“Yes.” Because we were young. And the young seem to be impervious to anything except trifles. We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world. Because, after all, there’s nothing particularly profound about reality.

Because when you reach reality, along about forty or fifty or sixty, you find it to be only six feet deep and eighteen feet square.

Then it was over. Outside again, the wind blew steadily down from the black hills, hollowing out the green glass bowl of the sky. We watched them file out of the church and carry the coffin into the churchyard. Four of them carried iron lanterns and in the dusk they clotted quietly antic about the grave while the wind leaned steadily upon them and upon the lantern flames, and blew fine dust into the grave as though all nature were quick to hide it. Then they were done.

The lanterns bobbed into motion, approaching, and we watched the priest. He crossed the churchyard toward the presbytery at a scuttling gait, blown along in his gusty black.

The soldier was in mufti now. He came out of the throng, striding also with that long-limbed thrust like his aunt. He looked briefly at us with his bold surly face and got on the bike and rode away. “He was one of the pallbearers,” Don said. “And what do you think of that, signori?”

“No spika,” I said. “I love Italy. I love Mussolini.”

“You said that before.”

“All right. Salut, then.”

Don looked at me. His face was quite sober. “Salut,” he said. Then he looked toward the presbytery, hitching his pack forward. The door of the presbytery was closed.

“Don,” I said. He stopped, looking at me. The mountains had lost all perspective; they appeared to lean in toward us.

It was like being at the bottom of a dead volcano filled with that lost savage green wind, dead in its own motion and full of its own driving and unsleeping dust. We looked at one another.

“All right, damn it,” Don said. “You say what to do next, then.” We looked at one another. After a while the wind would sound like sleep, maybe. If you were warm and close between walls, maybe.

“All right,” I said.

“Why can’t you mean, all right? Damn it, we’ve got to do something. This is October; it’s not summer. And we don’t know anything. We haven’t heard anything. We don’t speak Italian. We love Italy.”

“I said, all right,” I said. The presbytery was of stone too, bleak in a rank garden. We were halfway up the flagged path when a casement beneath the eaves opened and somebody in white looked down at us and closed the shutter again.

It was done all in one movement. Again we said together, quietly: “Beaver.” But it was too dark to see much, and the casement was closed again. It had not taken ten seconds.

“Only we should have said, Beaverette,” Don said.

“That’s right. Is that a joke?”

“Yes. That’s a joke.” A wooden-faced peasant woman opened the door. She held a candle, the flame leaning inward from the wind. The hall behind her was dark; a stale, chill smell came out of it. She stood there, the harsh planes of her face in sharp relief, her eyes two caverns in which two little flames glittered, looking at us.

“Go on,” I said. “Tell her something.”

“We were told that his reverence, signora,” Don said, “that we might…” The candle leaned and recovered. She raised the other hand and sheltered it, blocking the door with her body. “We are travelers, en promenade; we were told supper and a bed…”

When we followed her down the hall we carried with us in our ears the long rush of the recent wind, like in a sea shell.

There was no light save the candle which she carried. So that, behind her, we walked in gloom out of which the serrated shadow of a stair on one wall reared dimly into the passing candle and dissolved in mounting serrations, carrying the eye with it up the wall where there was not any light.

“Pretty soon it’ll be too dark to see anything from that window,” Don said.

“Maybe she won’t have to, by then.”

“Maybe so.” The woman opened a door; we entered a lighted room. It contained a table on which sat a candle in an iron candlestick, a carafe of wine, a long loaf, a metal box with a slotted cover. The table was set for two. We slung our packs into the corner and watched her set another place and fetch another chair from the hall. But that made only three places and we watched her take up her candle and go out by a second door. Then Don looked at me. “Maybe we’ll see her, after all.”

“How do you know he doesn’t eat?”

“When? Don’t you know where he’ll be?” I looked at him.

“He’ll have to stay out there in the garden.”

“How do you know?”

“The soldier was at the church. He must have seen him. Must have heard…” We looked at the door, but it was the woman. She had three bowls. “Soup, signora?” Don said.

“Si. Soup.”

“Good. We have come far.” She set the bowls on the table. “From Milano.” She looked briefly over her shoulder at Don.

“You’d better have stayed there,” she said. And she went out. Don and I looked at one another. My ears were still full of wind.

“So he is in the garden!” Don said.

“How do you know he is?”

After a while Don quit looking at me. “I don’t know.”

“No. You don’t know. And I don’t know. We don’t want to know. Do we?”

“No. No spika.”

“I mean, sure enough.”

“That’s what I mean,” Don said. The whisper in our ears seemed to fill the room with wind. Then we realized that it was the wind that we heard, the wind itself we heard, even though the single window was shuttered tight. It was as though the quiet room were isolated on the ultimate peak of space, hollowed murmurous out of chaos and the long dark fury of time. It seemed strange that the candle flame should stand so steady above the wick.

III

SO WE DID NOT see him until we were in the house. Until then he had been only a shabby shapeless figure, on the small size, scuttling through the blowing dusk at the head of the funeral, and a voice. It was as though neither of them was any part of the other: the figure in blowing black, and the voice beating up the still air above the candles, detached and dispassionate, tireless and spent and forlorn.

There was something precipitate about the way he entered, like a diver taking a full breath in the act of diving. He did not look at us and he was already speaking, greeting us and excusing his tardiness in one breath, in a low rapid voice.

Still, without having ceased to speak or having looked at us, he motioned toward the other chairs and seated himself and bowed his head over his plate and began a Latin grace without a break in his voice; again his voice seemed to rush slow and effortless just above the sound of the wind, like in the church. It went on for some time; so that after a while I raised my head. Don was watching me, his eyebrows arched a little; we looked toward the priest and saw his hands writhing slowly on either side of his plate. Then the woman spoke a sharp word behind me; I had not heard her enter: a gaunt woman, not tall, with a pale, mahogany-colored face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty. The priest stopped. He looked at us for the first time, out of weak, rushing eyes. They were brown and irisless, like those of an old dog. Looking at us, it was as though he had driven them up with whips and held them so, in cringing and rushing desperation. “I forget,” he said. “There come times ”

Again the woman snapped a word at him, setting a tureen on the table, the shadow of her arm falling across his face and remaining there: but we had already looked away. The long wind rushed past the stone eaves; the candle flame stood steady as a sharpened pencil in the still sound of the wind.

We heard her filling the bowls, yet she still stood for a time, the priest’s face in the shadow of her arm; she seemed to be holding us all so until the moment whatever it was had passed. She went out. Don and I began to eat. We did not look toward him. When he spoke at last, it was in a tone of level, polite uninterest. “You have come far, signori?”

“From Milano,” we both said.

“Before that, Firenze,” Don said. The priest’s head was bent over his bowl. He ate rapidly. Without looking up he gestured toward the loaf. I pushed it along to him. He broke the end off and went on eating.

“Ah,” he said. “Firenze. That is a city. More what do you say? spiritual than our Milano.” He ate hurriedly, without finesse. His robe was turned back over a flannel undershirt, the sleeves were. His spoon clattered; at once the woman entered with a platter of broccoli. She removed the bowls. He reached his hand. She handed him the carafe and he filled the glasses without looking up and lifted his with a brief phrase. But he had only feinted to drink; he was watching my face when I looked at him. I looked away; I heard him clattering at the dish and Don was looking at me too.

Then the woman’s shoulder came between us and the priest.

“There come times…” he said. He clattered at the dish.

When the woman spoke to him in that shrill, rapid patois he thrust his chair back and for an instant we saw his driven eyes across her arm. “There come times…” he said, raising his voice. Then she drowned the rest of it, getting completely between us and Don and I stopped looking and heard them leave the room. The steps ceased. Then we could hear only the wind.

“It was the burial service,” Don said. Don was a Catholic. “That grace was.”

“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes. It was the burial service. He got mixed up.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s it. What do we do now?” Our packs lay in the corner. Two packs can look as human, as utterly human and spent, as two shoes. We were watching the door when the woman entered. But she wasn’t going to stop. She didn’t look at us.

“What shall we do now, signora?” Don said.

“Eat.” She did not stop. Then we could hear the wind again.

“Have some wine,” Don said. He raised the carafe, then he held it poised above my glass, and we listened. The voice was beyond the wall, maybe two walls, in a sustained rush of indistinguishable words. He was not talking to anyone there: you could tell that. In whatever place he was, he was alone: you could tell that. Or maybe it was the wind. Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation: wind, rain, drouth, man is always alone. It went on for longer than a minute while Don held the carafe above my glass. Then he poured. We began to eat. The voice was muffled and sustained, like a machine might have been making it.

“If it were just summer,” I said.

“Have some wine.” He poured. We held our poised glasses.

It sounded just like a machine. You could tell that he was alone. Anybody could have. “That’s the trouble,” Don said.

“Because there’s not anybody there. Not anybody in the house.”

“The woman.”

“So are we.” He looked at me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Sure. What better chance could she have wanted, have asked for? He was in here at least five minutes. And he just back from the army after three years. The first day he is home, and then afternoon and then twilight and then darkness. You saw her there. Didn’t you see her up there?”

“He locked the door. You know he locked it.”

“This house belongs to God: you can’t have a lock on it. You didn’t know that.”

“That’s right. I forgot you’re a Catholic. You know things. You know a lot, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t know anything. I no spika too. I love Italy too.” The woman entered. She didn’t bring anything this time. She came to the table and stood there, her gaunt face above the candle, looking down at us.

“Look, then,” she said. “Will you go away?”

“Go away?” Don said. “Not stop here tonight?” She looked down at us, her hand lying on the table. “Where could we stop? Who would take us in? One cannot sleep on the mountain in October, signora.”

“Yes,” she said. She was not looking at us now. Through the walls we listened to the voice and to the wind.

“What is this, anyway?” Don said. “What goes on here, signora?”

She looked at him gravely, speculatively, as if he were a child. “You are seeing the hand of God, signorino,” she said.

“Pray God that you are too young to remember it.” Then she was gone. And after a while the voice ceased, cut short off like a thread. And then there was just the wind.

“As soon as we get out of the wind, it won’t be so bad,” I said.

“Have some wine.” Don raised the carafe. It was less than half full.

“We’d better not drink any more.”

“No.” He filled the glasses. We drank. Then we stopped.

It began again, abruptly, in full stride, as though silence were the thread this time. We drank. “We might as well finish the broccoli, too.”

“I don’t want any more.”

“Have some wine then.”

“You’ve already had more than I have.”

“All right.” He filled my glass. I drank it. “Now, have some wine.”

“We ought not to drink it all.”

He raised the carafe. “Two more glasses left. No use in leaving that.”

“There aren’t two glasses left.”

“Bet you a lira.”

“All right. But let me pour.”

“All right.” He gave me the carafe. I filled my glass and reached toward his. “Listen,” he said. For about a minute now the voice had been rising and falling, like a wheel running down. This time it didn’t rise again; there was only the long sound of the wind left. “Pour it,” Don said. I poured.

The wine mounted three quarters. It began to dribble away.

“Tilt it up.” I did so. A single drop hung for a moment, then fell into the glass. “Owe you a lira,” Don said.

The coins rang loud in the slotted box. When he took it up from the table and shook it, it made no sound. He took the coins from his pocket and dropped them through the slot.

He shook it again. “Doesn’t sound like quite enough. Cough up.” I dropped some coins through the slot; he shook the box again. “Sounds all right now.” He looked at me across the table, his empty glass bottom-up before him. “How about a little wine?”

When we rose I took my pack from the corner. It was on the bottom. I had to tumble Don’s aside. He watched me.

“What are you going to do with that?” he said. “Take it out for a walk?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Past the cold invisible eaves the long wind steadily sighed. Upon the candle the flame stood like the balanced feather on the long white nose of a clown.

The hall was dark; there was no sound in it. There was nothing in it save the cold smell of sunless plaster and silence and the smell of living, of where people have, and will have, lived. We carried our packs low and close against our legs like we had stolen them. We went on to the door and opened it, entering the black wind again. It had scoured the sky clear and clean, hollowing it out of the last of light, the last of twilight. We were halfway to the gate when we saw him.

He was walking swiftly back and forth beside the wall. His head was bare, his robes ballooning about him. When he saw us he did not stop. He didn’t hurry, either. He just turned and went back beside the wall and turned again, walking fast.

We waited at the gate. We thanked him for the food, he motionless in his whipping robes, his head bent and averted a little, as a deaf man listens. When Don knelt at his feet he started back as though Don had offered to strike him. Then I felt like a Catholic too and I knelt too and he made the sign hurriedly above us, upon the black-and-green wind and dusk, like he would have made it in water. When we passed out the gate and looked back we could still see, against the sky and the blank and lightless house, his head rushing back and forth like a midget running along the top of the wall.

IV

THE CAFE was on the lee side of the street; we sat out of the wind. But we could see gusts and eddies of trash swirl along the gutter, and an occasional tongue of it licked chill across our legs, and we could hear the steady rushing of it in the high twilight among the roofs. On the curb two musicians from the hills, a fiddler and a piper sat, playing a wild and skirling tune. Now and then they stopped to drink, then they resumed the same tune. It was without beginning and seemingly without end, the wild un-music of it swirling along the wind with a quality at once martial and sad. The waiter fetched us brandy and coffee, his dirty apron streaming suddenly and revealing beneath it a second one of green baize and rigid as oxidized copper. At the other table five young men sat, drinking and ringing separately small coins onto the waiter’s tray, which he appeared to count by the timbre of the concussion before tilting them into his waistcoat in one motion, and a long-flanked young peasant woman stopped to hear the music, a child riding her hip. She set the child down and it scuttled under the table where the young men sat, they withdrawing their legs to permit it, while the woman was not looking. She was looking at the musicians, her face round and tranquil, her mouth open a little.

“Let’s have some wine,” Don said.

“All right,” I said. “I like Italy,” I said. We had another brandy. The woman was trying to cajole the child from under the table. One of the young men extracted it and gave it back to her. People stopped in the street to hear the music, and a high two-wheeled cart, full of fagots and drawn by a woman and a diminutive mule, passed without stopping, and then the girl came up the street in her white dress, and I didn’t feel like a Catholic any more. She was all in white, coatless, walking slender and supple. I didn’t feel like anything any more, watching her white dress swift in the twilight, carrying her somewhere or she carrying it somewhere: anyway, it was going too, moving when she moved and because she moved, losing her when she would be lost because it moved when she moved and went with her to the instant of loss. I remember how, when I learned about Thaw and White and Evelyn Nesbitt, how I cried. I cried because Evelyn, who was a word, was beautiful and lost or I would never have heard of her. Because she had to be lost for me to find her and I had to find her to lose her. And when I learned that she was old enough to have a grown daughter or son or something, I cried, because I had lost myself then and I could never again be hurt by loss. So I watched the white dress, thinking, She’ll be as near me in a second as she’ll ever be and then she’ll go on away in her white dress forevermore, in the twilight forevermore. Then I felt Don watching her too and then we watched the soldier spring down from the bike.

They came together and stopped and for a while they stood there in the street, among the people, facing one another but not touching. Maybe they were not even talking, and it didn’t matter how long; it didn’t matter about time. Then Don was nudging me.

“The other table,” he said. The five young men had all turned; their heads were together, now and then a hand, an arm, secret, gesticulant, their faces all one way. They leaned back, without turning their faces, and the waiter stood, tray on hip, a squat, sardonic figure older than Grandfather Lust himself looking also. At last they turned and went on up the street together in the direction from which he had come, he leading the bicycle. Just before they passed from sight they stopped and faced one another again among the people, the heads, without touching at all. Then they went on. “Let’s have some wine,” Don said.

The waiter set the brandies on the table, his apron like a momentary board on the wind. “You have military in town,” Don said.

“That’s right,” the waiter said. “One.”

“Well, one is enough,” Don said. The waiter looked up the street. But they were gone now, with her white dress shaping her stride, her girl-white, not for us.

“Too many, some say.” He looked much more like a monk than the priest did, with his long thin nose and his bald head.

He looked like a devastated hawk. “You’re stopping at the priest’s, eh?”

“You have no hotel,” Don said.

The waiter made change from his waistcoat, ringing the coins deliberately upon the table. “What for? Who would stop here, without he walked? Nobody walks except you English.”

“We’re Americans.”

“Well.” He raised his shoulders faintly. “That’s your affair.” He was not looking at us exactly; not at Don, that is.

“Did you try Cavalcanti’s?”

“A wineshop at the edge of town? The soldier’s aunt, isn’t it? Yes. But she said…”

The waiter was watching him now. “She didn’t send you to the priest?”

“No.”

“Ah,” the waiter said. His apron streamed suddenly. He fought it down and scoured the top of the table with it.

“Americans, eh?”

“Yes,” Don said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us where to go?”

The waiter scoured the table. “That Cavalcanti. She’s not of this parish.”

“Not?”

“Not since three years. The padrone belongs to that one beyond the mountain.” He named a village which we had passed in the forenoon.

“I see,” Don said. “They aren’t natives.”

“Oh, they were born here. Until three years ago they belonged to this parish.”

“But three years ago they changed.”

“They changed.” He found another spot on the table. He removed it with the apron. Then he examined the apron.

“There are changes and changes; some further than others.”

“The padrona changed further than across the mountain, did she?”

“The padrona belongs to no parish at all.” He looked at us.

“Like me.”

“Like you?”

“Did you try to talk to her about the church?” He watched Don. “Stop there tomorrow and mention the church to her.”

“And that happened three years ago,” Don said. “That was a year of changes for them.”

“You said it. The nephew to the army, the padrone across the mountain, the padrona… All in one week, too. Stop there tomorrow and ask her.”

“What do they think here about all these changes?”

“What changes?”

“These recent changes.”

“How recent?” He looked at Don. “There’s no law against changes.”

“No. Not when they’re done like the law says. Sometimes the law has a look, just to see if they were changed right. Isn’t that so?”

The waiter had assumed an attitude of sloven negligence, save his eyes, his long face. It was too big for him, his face was. “How did you know he was a policeman?”

“Policeman?”

“You said soldier; I knew you meant policeman and just didn’t speak the language good. But you’ll pick it up with practice.” He looked at Don. “So you made him too, did you? Came in here this afternoon; said he was a shoe-drummer. But I made him.”

“Here already,” Don said. “I wonder why he didn’t stop the… before they…”

“How do you know he’s a policeman?” I said.

The waiter looked at me. “I don’t care whether he is or not, buddy. Which had you rather do? think a man is a cop and find he’s not, or think he’s not a cop, and find he is?”

“You’re right,” Don said. “So that’s what they say here.”

“They say plenty. Always have and always will. Like any other town.”

“What do you say?” Don said.

“I don’t say. You don’t either.”

“No.”

“It’s no skin off of my back. If they want to drink, I serve them; if they want to talk, I listen. That keeps me as busy as I want to be all day.”

“You’re right,” Don said. “It didn’t happen to you.”

The waiter looked up the street; it was almost full dark.

He appeared not to have heard. “Who sent for the cop, I wonder?” Don said.

“When a man’s got jack, he’ll find plenty of folks to help him make trouble for folks even after he’s dead,” the waiter said. Then he looked at us. “I?” he said. He leaned; he slapped his chest lightly. He looked quickly at the other table, then he leaned down and hissed: “I am atheist, like in America,” and stood back and looked at us. “In America, all are atheists. We know.” He stood there in his dirty apron, with his long, weary, dissolute face while we rose in turn and shook hands with him gravely, the five young men turning to look. He flipped his other hand at us, low against his flank. “Rest, rest,” he hissed. He looked over his shoulder at the young men.

“Sit down,” he whispered. He jerked his head toward the doorway behind us, where the padrona sat behind the bar.

“I’ve got to eat, see?” He scuttled away and returned with two more brandies, carrying them with his former sloven, precarious skill, as if he had passed no word with us save to take the order. “It’s on me,” he said. “Put it down.”

“Now, what?” Don said. The music had ceased; from across the street we watched the fiddler, fiddle under arm, standing before the table where the young men sat, his other hand and the clutched hat gesticulant. The young woman was already going up the street, the child riding her hip again, its head nodding to a somnolent rhythm, like a man on an elephant. “Now, what?”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No.”

“There’s no detective here. He never saw one. He wouldn’t know a detective. There aren’t any detectives in Italy: can you imagine an official Italian in plain clothes for a uniform?”

“No.”

“She’ll show us where the bed is, and in the morning early…”

“No. You can, if you want to. But I’m not.”

He looked at me. Then he swung his pack onto his shoulder. “Good night. See you in the morning. At the cafe yonder.”

“All right.” He did not look back. Then he turned the corner. I stood in the wind. Anyway, I had the coat. It was a shooting coat of Harris tweed; we had paid eleven guineas for it, wearing it day about while the other wore the sweater.

In the Tyrol last summer Don held us up three days while he was trying to make the girl who sold beer at the inn. He wore the coat for three successive days, swapping me a week, to be paid on demand. On the third day the girl’s sweetheart came back. He was as big as a silo, with a green feather in his hat. We watched him pick her over the bar with one hand.

I believe she could have done Don the same way: all yellow and pink and white she was, like a big orchard. Or like looking out across a snowfield in the early sunlight. She could have done it at almost any hour for three days too, by just reaching out her hand. Don gained four pounds while we were there.

V

THEN I CAME into the full sweep of the wind. The houses were all dark, yet there was still a little light low on the ground, as though the wind held it there flattened to the earth and it had been unable to rise and escape. The walls ceased at the beginning of the bridge; the river looked like steel. I thought I had already come into the full sweep of the wind, but I hadn’t. The bridge was of stone, balustrades and roadway and all, and I squatted beneath the lee of the weather rail. I could hear the wind above and beneath, coming down the river in a long sweeping hum, like through wires. I squatted there, waiting. It wasn’t very long.

He didn’t see me at first, until I rose. “Did you think to have the flask filled?” he said.

“I forgot. I intended to. Damn the luck. Let’s go back ”

“I got a bottle. Which way now?”

“I don’t care. Out of the wind. I don’t care.” We crossed the bridge. Our feet made no sound on the stones, because the wind blew it away. It flattened the water, scoured it; it looked just like steel. It had a sheen, holding light like the land between it and the wind, reflecting enough to see by.

But it swept all sound away before it was made almost, so that when we reached the other side and entered the cut where the road began to mount, it was several moments before we could hear anything except our ears; then we heard.

It was a smothered whimpering sound that seemed to come out of the air overhead. We stopped. “It’s a child,” Don said. “A baby.”

“No: an animal. An animal of some sort.” We looked at one another in the pale darkness, listening.

“It’s up there, anyway,” Don said. We climbed up out of the cut. There was a low stone wall enclosing a field, the field a little luminous yet, dissolving into the darkness. Just this side of the darkness, about a hundred yards away, a copse stood black, blobbed shapeless on the gloom. The wind rushed up across the field and we leaned on the wall, listening into it, looking at the copse. But the sound was nearer than that, and after a moment we saw the priest. He was lying on his face just inside the wall, his robes over his head, the black blur of his gown moving faintly and steadily, either because of the wind or because he was moving under them, And whatever the sound meant that he was making, it was not meant to be listened to, for his voice ceased when we made a noise. But he didn’t look up, and the faint shuddering of his gown didn’t stop. Shuddering, writhing, twisting from side to side something. Then Don touched me. We went on beside the wall. “Get down easier here,” he said quietly.

The pale road rose gradually beneath us as the hill flattened.

The copse was a black blob. “Only I didn’t see the bicycle.”

“Then go back to Cavalcanti’s,” I said. “Where in hell do you expect to see it?”

“They would have hidden it. I forgot. Of course they would have hidden it.”

“Go on,” I said. “Don’t talk so goddamn much.”

“Unless they thought he would be busy with us and wouldn’t…” he ceased and stopped. I jolted into him and then I saw it too, the handlebars rising from beyond the wall like the horns of a hidden antelope. Against the gloom the blob of the copse seemed to pulse and fade, as though it breathed, lived. For we were young, and night, darkness, is terrible to young people, even icy driving blackness like this.

Young people should be so constituted that with sunset they would enter a coma state, by slumber shut safe from the darkness, the secret nostalgic sense of frustration and of objectless and unappeasable desire.

“Get down, damn you,” I said. With his high hunched pack, his tight sweater, he was ludicrous; he looked like a clown; he was terrible and ugly and sad all at once, since he was ludicrous and, without the coat, he would be so cold.

And so was I: ugly and terrible and sad. “This damn wind. This damn wind.” We regained the road. We were sheltered for the moment, and he took out the bottle and we drank. It was fiery stuff. “Talk about my Milan brandy,” I said. “That damn wind. That damn wind. That damn wind.”

“Give me a cigarette.”

“You’ve got them.”

“I gave them to you.”

“You’re a goddamn liar. You didn’t.” He found them in his pocket. But I didn’t wait, “Don’t you want one? Better light it here, while we are…” I didn’t wait. The road rose, became flush with the field. After a while I heard him just behind me, and we entered the wind. I could see past my shoulder his cigarette shredding away in fiery streamers upon the unimpeded rush of the mistral, that black chill wind full of dust like sparks of ice.

I

WE WERE SITTING at a table inside: Monckton and the bosun and Carl and George and me and the women, the three women of that abject glittering kind that seamen know or that know seamen. We were talking English and they were not talking at all. By that means they could speak constantly to us above and below the sound of our voices in a tongue older than recorded speech and time too. Older than the thirty-four days of sea time which we had but completed, anyway. Now and then they spoke to one another in Italian. The women in Italian, the men in English, as if language might be the sex difference, the functioning of the vocal cords the inner biding until the dark pairing time.

The men in English, the women in Italian: a decorum as of two parallel streams separated by a levee for a little while.

We were talking about Carl, to George.

“Why did you bring him here, then?” the bosun said.

“Yes,” Monckton said. “I sure wouldn’t bring my wife to a place like this.”

George cursed Monckton: not with a word or even a sentence; a paragraph. He was a Greek, big and black, a full head taller than Carl; his eyebrows looked like two crows in overlapping flight. He cursed us all with immediate thoroughness and in well-nigh faultless classic Anglo-Saxon, who at other times functioned in the vocabulary of an eight-year-old by-blow of a vaudeville comedian and a horse, say.

“Yes, sir,” the bosun said. He was smoking an Italian cigar and drinking ginger beer; the same tumbler of which, incidentally, he had been engaged with for about two hours and which now must have been about the temperature of a ship’s showerbath. “I sure wouldn’t bring my girl to a dive like this, even if he did wear pants.”

Carl meanwhile had not stirred. He sat serene among us, with his round yellow head and his round eyes, looking like a sophisticated baby against the noise and the glitter, with his glass of thin Italian beer and the women murmuring to one another and watching us and then Carl with that biding and inscrutable foreknowledge which they do not appear to know that they possess. “E innocente” one said; again they murmured, contemplating Carl with musing, secret looks.

“He may have fooled you already,” the bosun said. “He may have slipped through a porthole on you any time these three years.”

George glared at the bosun, his mouth open for cursing.

But he didn’t curse. Instead he looked at Carl, his mouth still open. His mouth closed slowly. We all looked at Carl.

Beneath our eyes he raised his glass and drank with contained deliberation.

“Are you still pure?” George said. “I mean, sho enough.”

Beneath our fourteen eyes Carl emptied the glass of thin, bitter, three per cent beer. “I been to sea three years,” he said. “All over Europe.”

George glared at him, his face baffled and outraged. He had just shaved; his close blue jowls lay flat and hard as a prizefighter’s or a pirate’s, up to the black explosion of his hair. He was our second cook. “You damn lying little bastard,” he said.

The bosun raised his glass of ginger beer with an exact replica of Carl’s drinking. Steadily and deliberately, his body thrown a little back and his head tilted, he poured the ginger beer over his right shoulder at the exact speed of swallowing, still with that air of Carl’s, that grave and cosmopolitan swagger. He set the glass down, and rose. “Come on,” he said to Monckton and me, “let’s go. Might as well be board ship if we’re going to spend the evening in one place.’

Monckton and I rose. He was smoking a short pipe. One of the women was his, another the bosun’s. The third one had a lot of gold teeth. She could have been thirty, but maybe she wasn’t. We left her with George and Carl. When I looked back from the door, the waiter was just fetching them some more beer.

II

THEY CAME into the ship together at Galveston, George carrying a portable victrola and a small parcel wrapped in paper bearing the imprint of a well-known ten-cent store, and Carl carrying two bulging imitation leather bags that looked like they might weigh forty pounds apiece. George appropriated two berths, one above the other like a Pullman section, cursing Carl in a harsh, concatenant voice a little overburred with v’s and r’s and ordering him about like a nigger, while Carl stowed their effects away with the meticulousness of an old maid, producing from one of the bags a stack of freshly laundered drill serving jackets that must have numbered a dozen. For the next thirty-four days (he was the messboy) he wore a fresh one for each meal in the saloon, and there were always two or three recently washed ones drying under the poop awning. And for thirty-four evenings, after the galley was closed, we watched the two of them in pants and undershirts, dancing to the victrola on the after well deck above a hold full of Texas cotton and Georgia resin. They had only one record for the machine and it had a crack in it, and each time the needle clucked George would stamp on the deck. I don’t think that either one of them was aware that he did it.

It was George who told us about Carl. Carl was eighteen, from Philadelphia. They both called it Philly; George in a proprietorial tone, as if he had created Philadelphia in order to produce Carl, though it later appeared that George had not discovered Carl until Carl had been to sea for a year already. And Carl himself told some of it: a fourth or fifth child of a first generation of Scandinavian-American shipwrights, brought up in one of an identical series of small frame houses a good trolley ride from salt water, by a mother or an older sister: this whom, at the age of fifteen and weighing perhaps a little less than a hundred pounds, some ancestor long knocking his quiet bones together at the bottom of the sea (or perhaps havened by accident in dry earth and become restive with ease and quiet) had sent back to the old dream and the old unrest three or maybe four generations late.

“I was a kid, then,” Carl told us, who had yet to experience or need a shave. “I thought about everything but going to sea. I thought once I’d be a ballplayer or maybe a prize fighter. They had pictures of them on the walls, see, when Sis would send me down to the corner after the old man on a Saturday night. Jeez, I’d stand outside on the street and watch them go in, and I could see their legs under the door and hear them and smell the sawdust and see the pictures of them on the walls through the smoke. I was a kid then, see. I hadn’t been nowheres then.”

We asked George how he had ever got a berth, even as a messman, standing even now about four inches over five feet and with yet a face that should have followed monstrances up church aisles, if not looked down from one of the colored windows themselves.

“Why shouldn’t he have come to sea?” George said. “Ain’t this a free country? Even if he ain’t nothing but a damn mess.” He looked at us, black, serious. “He’s a virgin, see? Do you know what that means?” He told us what it meant. Someone had evidently told him what it meant not so long ago, told him what he used to be himself, if he could remember that far back, and he thought that perhaps we didn’t know the man, or maybe he thought it was a new word they had just invented. So he told us what it meant.

It was in the first night watch and we were on the poop after supper, two days out of Gibraltar, listening to Monckton talking about cauliflower. Carl was taking a shower (he always took a bath after he had cleared the saloon after supper. George, who only cooked, never bathed until we were in port and the petite cleared) and George told us what it meant.

Then he began to curse. He cursed for a long time.

“Well, George,” the bosun said, “suppose you were one, then? What would you do?”

“What would I do?” George said. “What wouldn’t I do?”

He cursed for some time, steadily. “It’s like the first cigarette in the morning,” he said. “By noon, when you remember how it tasted, how you felt when you was waiting for the match to get to the end of it, and when that first drag…”

He cursed, long, impersonal, like a chant.

Monckton watched him: not listened: watched, nursing his pipe. “Why, George,” he said, “you’re by way of being almost a poet.”

There was a swipe, some West India Docks crum; I forget his name. “Call that lobbing the tongue?” he said. “You should hear a Lymus mate laying into a fo’c’sle of bloody Portygee ginneys.”

“Monckton wasn’t talking about the language,” the bosun said. “Any man can swear.” He looked at George. “You’re not the first man that ever wished that, George. That’s something that has to be was because you don’t know you are when you are.” Then he paraphrased unwitting and with unprintable aptness Byron’s epigram about women’s mouths.

“But what are you saving him for? What good will it do you when he stops being?”

George cursed, looking from face to face, baffled and outraged.

“Maybe Carl will let George hold his hand at the time,”

Monckton said. He reached a match from his pocket. “Now, you take Brussels sprouts ”

“You might get the Old Man to quarantine him when we reach Naples,” the bosun said.

George cursed.

“Now, you take Brussels sprouts,” Monckton said.

III

IT TOOK us some time that night, to get either started or settled down. We, Monckton and the bosun and the two women and I visited four more cafes, each like the other one and like the one where we had left George and Carl, same people, same music, same thin, colored drinks. The two women accompanied us, with us but not of us, biding and acquiescent, saying constantly and patiently and without words that it was time to go to bed. So after a while I left them and went back to the ship. George and Carl were not aboard.

The next morning they were not there either, though Monckton and the bosun were, and the cook and the steward swearing up and down the galley; it seemed that the cook was planning to spend the day ashore himself. So they had to stay aboard all day. Along toward mid-afternoon there came aboard a smallish man in a soiled suit who looked like one of those Columbia day students that go up each morning on the East Side subway from around Chatham Square. He was hatless, with an oiled pompadour. He had not shaved recently, and he spoke no English in a pleasant, deprecatory way that was all teeth. But he had found the right ship and he had a note from George, written on the edge of a dirty scrap of newspaper, and we found where George was. He was in jail.

The steward hadn’t stopped cursing all day, anyhow. He didn’t stop now, either. He and the messenger went off to the consul’s. The steward returned a little after six o’clock, with George. George didn’t look so much like he had been drunk; he looked dazed, quiet, with his wild hair and a blue stubble on his jaw. He went straight to Carl’s bunk and he began to turn Carl’s meticulous covers back one by one like a traveler examining the bed in a third-class European hotel, as if he expected to find Carl hidden among them. “You mean,” he said, “he ain’t been back? He ain’t been back?”

“We haven’t seen him,” we told George. “The steward hasn’t seen him either. We thought he was in jail with you.”

He began to replace the covers; that is, he made an attempt to draw them one by one up the bed again in a kind of detached way, as if he were not conscious, sentient.

“They run,” he said in a dull tone. “They ducked out on me. I never thought he’d a done it. I never thought he’d a done me this way. It was her. She was the one made him done it. She knew what he was, and how I…” Then he began to cry, quietly, in that dull, detached way. “He must have been sitting there with his hand in her lap all the time. And I never suspicioned. She kept on moving her chair closer and closer to his. But I trusted him. I never suspicioned nothing. I thought he wouldn’t a done nothing serious without asking me first, let alone… I trusted him.”

It appeared that the bottom of George’s glass had distorted their shapes enough to create in George the illusion that Carl and the woman were drinking as he drank, in a serious but celibate way. He left them at the table and went back to the lavatory; or rather, he said that he realized suddenly that he was in the lavatory and that he had better be getting back, concerned not over what might transpire while he was away, but over the lapse, over his failure to be present at his own doings which the getting to the lavatory inferred. So he returned to the table, not yet alarmed; merely concerned and amused. He said he was having a fine time.

So at first he believed that he was still having such a good time that he could not find his own table. He found the one which he believed should be his, but it was vacant save for three stacks of saucers, so he made one round of the room, still amused, still enjoying himself; he was still enjoying himself when he repaired to the center of the dance floor where, a head above the dancers, he began to shout “Porteus ahoy!” in a loud voice, and continued to do so until a waiter who spoke English came and removed him and led him back to that same vacant table bearing the three stacks of saucers and the three glasses, one of which he now recognized as his own.

But he was still enjoying himself, though not so much now, believing himself to be the victim of a practical joke, first on the part of the management, and it appeared that he must have created some little disturbance, enjoying himself less and less all the while, the center of an augmenting clump of waiters and patrons.

When at last he did realize, accept the fact, that they were gone, it must have been pretty bad for him: the outrage, the despair, the sense of elapsed time, an unfamiliar city at night in which Carl must be found, and that quickly if it was to do any good. He tried to leave, to break through the crowd, without paying the score. Not that he would have beaten the bill; he just didn’t have time. If he could have found Carl within the next ten minutes, he would have returned and paid the score twice over: I am sure of that.

And so they held him, the wild American, a cordon of waiters and clients, women and men both and he dragging a handful of coins from his pockets ringing onto the tile floor. Then he said it was like having your legs swarmed by a pack of dogs: waiters, clients, men and women, on hands and knees on the floor, scrabbling after the rolling coins, and George slapping about with his big feet, trying to stamp the hands away.

Then he was standing in the center of an abrupt wide circle, breathing a little hard, with the two Napoleons in their swords and pallbearer gloves and Knights of Pythias bonnets on either side of him. He did not know what he had done; he only knew that he was under arrest. It was not until they reached the Prefecture, where there was an interpreter, that he learned that he was a political prisoner, having insulted the king’s majesty by placing foot on the king’s effigy on a coin. They put him in a forty-foot dungeon, with seven other political prisoners, one of whom was the messenger.

“They taken my belt and my necktie and the strings out of my shoes,” he told us dully. “There wasn’t nothing in the room but a barrel fastened in the middle of the floor and a wooden bench running all the way round the walls. I knew what the barrel was for right off, because they had already been using it for that for some time. You was expected to sleep on the bench when you couldn’t stay on your feet no longer. When I stooped over and looked at it close, it was like looking down at Forty-second Street from a airplane. They looked just like Yellow cabs. Then I went and used the barrel. But I used it with the end of me it wasn’t intended to be used with.”

Then he told about the messenger. Truly, Despair, like Poverty, looks after its own. There they were: the Italian who spoke no English, and George who scarcely spoke any language at all; certainly not Italian. That was about four o’clock in the morning. Yet by daylight George had found the one man out of the seven who could have served him or probably would have.

“He told me he was going to get out at noon, and I told him I would give him ten lire as soon as I got out, and he got me the scrap of paper and the pencil (this, in a bare dungeon, from among seven men stripped to the skin of everything save the simplest residue of clothing necessary for warmth: of money, knives, shoelaces, even pins and loose buttons) and I wrote the note and he hid it and they left him out and after about four hours they come and got me and there was the steward.”

“How did you talk to him, George?” the bosun said.

“Even the steward couldn’t find out anything until they got to the consul’s.”

“I don’t know,” George said. “We just talked. That was the only way I could tell anybody where I was at.”

We tried to get him to go to bed, but he wouldn’t do it.

He didn’t even shave. He got something to eat in the galley and went ashore. We watched him go down the side.

“Poor bastard,” Monckton said.

“Why?” the bosun said. “What did he take Carl there for? They could have gone to the movies.”

“I wasn’t thinking about George,” Monckton said.

“Oh,” the bosun said. “Well, a man can’t keep on going ashore anywhere, let alone Europe, all his life without getting ravaged now and then.”

“Good God,” Monckton said. “I should hope not.”

George returned at six o’clock the next morning. He still looked dazed, though still quite sober, quite calm. Overnight his beard had grown another quarter inch. “I couldn’t find them,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t find them nowheres.”

He had to act as messman now, taking Carl’s place at the officers’ table, but as soon as breakfast was done, he disappeared; we heard the steward cursing him up and down the ship until noon, trying to find him. Just before noon he returned, got through dinner, departed again. He came back just before dark.

“Found him yet?” I said. He didn’t answer. He stared at me for a while with that blank look. Then he went to their bunks and hauled one of the imitation leather bags down and tumbled all of Carl’s things into it and crushed down the lid upon the dangling sleeves and socks and hurled the bag out onto the well deck, where it tumbled once and burst open, vomiting the white jackets and the mute socks and the underclothes. Then he went to bed, fully dressed, and slept fourteen hours. The cook tried to get him up for breakfast, but it was like trying to rouse up a dead man.

When he waked he looked better. He borrowed a cigarette of me and went and shaved and came back and borrowed another cigarette. “Hell with him,” he said. “Leave the bastard go. I don’t give a damn.”

That afternoon he put Carl’s things back into his bunk.

Not carefully and not uncarefully: he just gathered them up and dumped them into the berth and paused for a moment to see if any of them were going to fall out, before turning away.

IV

IT WAS JUST before daylight. When I returned to the ship about midnight, the quarters were empty. When I waked just before daylight, all the bunks save my own were still vacant. I was lying in a half-doze, when I heard Carl in the passage. He was coming quietly; I had scarcely heard him before he appeared in the door. He stood there for a while, looking no larger than an adolescent boy in the half-light, before he entered. I closed my eyes quickly. I heard him, still on tiptoe, come to my bunk and stand above me for a while. Then I heard him turn away. I opened my eyes just enough to watch him.

He undressed swiftly, ripping his clothes off, ripping off a button that struck the bulkhead with a faint click. Naked, in the wan light, he looked smaller and frailer than ever as he dug a towel from his bunk where George had tumbled his things, flinging the other garments aside with a kind of dreadful haste. Then he went out, his bare feet whispering in the passage.

I could hear the shower beyond the bulkhead running for a long time; it would be cold now, too. But it ran for a long time, then it ceased and I closed my eyes again until he had entered. Then I watched him lift from the floor the undergarment which he had removed and thrust it through a porthole quickly, with something of the air of a recovered drunkard putting out of sight an empty bottle. He dressed and put on a fresh white jacket and combed his hair, leaning to the small mirror, looking at his face for a long time.

And then he went to work. He worked about the bridge deck all day long; what he could have found to do there we could not imagine. But the crew’s quarters never saw him until after dark. All day long we watched the white jacket flitting back and forth beyond the open doors or kneeling as he polished the brightwork about the companions. He seemed to work with a kind of fury. And when he was forced by his duties to come topside during the day, we noticed that it was always on the port side, and we lay with our starboard to the dock. And about the galley or the after deck George worked a little and loafed a good deal, not looking toward the bridge at all.

“That’s the reason he stays up there, polishing that brightwork all day long,” the bosun said. “He knows George can’t come up there.”

“It don’t look to me like George wants to,” I said.

“That’s right,” Monckton said. “For a dollar George would go up to the binnacle and ask the Old Man for a cigarette.”

“But not for curiosity,” the bosun said.

“You think that’s all it is?” Monckton said. “Just curiosity?”

“Sure,” the bosun said. “Why not?”

“Monckton’s right,” I said. “This is the most difficult moment in marriage: the day after your wife has stayed out all night.”

“You mean the easiest,” the bosun said. “George can quit him now.”

“Do you think so?” Monckton said.

We lay there five days. Carl was still polishing the brightwork in the bridge-deck companions. The steward would send him out on deck, and go away; he would return and find Carl still working on the port side and he would make him go to starboard, above the dock and the Italian boys in bright, soiled jerseys and the venders of pornographic postcards. But it didn’t take him long there, and then we would see him below again, sitting quietly in his white jacket in the stale gloom, waiting for suppertime. Usually he would be darning socks George had not yet said one word to him; Carl might not have been aboard at all, the very displacement of space which was his body, impedeless and breathable air. It was now George’s turn to stay away from the ship most of the day and all of the night, returning a little drunk at three and four o’clock, to waken everyone by hand, save Carl, and talk in gross and loud recapitulation of recent and always different women before climbing into his bunk. As far as we knew, they did not even look at one another until we were well on our way to Gibraltar.

Then Carl’s fury of work slacked somewhat. Yet he worked steadily all day, then, bathed, his blond hair wet and smooth, his slight body in a cotton singlet, we would see him leaning alone in the long twilight upon the rail midships or forward. But never about the poop where we smoked and talked and where George had begun again to play the single record on the victrola, committing, unrequested and anathemaed, cold-blooded encore after encore.

Then one night we saw them together. They were leaning side by side on the poop rail. That was the first time Carl had looked astern, looked toward Naples since that morning when he returned to the ship, and even now it was the evening on which the Gates of Hercules had sunk into the waxing twilight and the River Ocean began to flow down into the darkling sea and overhead the crosstrees swayed in measured and slow recover against the tall night and the low new moon.

“He’s all right now,” Monckton said. “The dog’s gone back to his vomit.”

“I said he was all right all the time,” the bosun said.

“George didn’t give a damn.”

“I wasn’t talking about George,” Monckton said. “George hasn’t made the grade yet.”

V

GEORGE TOLD us. “He’d keep on moping and mooning, see, and I’d keep on trying to talk to him, to tell him I wasn’t mad no more. Jeez, it had to come some day; a man can’t be a angel all your life. But he wouldn’t even look back that way. Until all of a sudden he says one night: “‘What do you do to them?’ I looked at him. ‘How does a man treat them?’ ‘You mean to tell me,’ I says, ‘that you spent three days with her and she ain’t showed you that?’

“‘I mean, give them,’ he says. ‘Don’t men give…’

“‘Jeez Christ,’ I says, ‘you done already give her something they would have paid you money for it in Siam, Would have made you the prince or the prime minister at the least. What do you mean?’

“‘I don’t mean money,’ he says. ‘I mean…’

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘if you was going to see her again, if she was going to be your girl, you’d give her something. Bring it back to her. Like something to wear or something: they don’t care much what, them foreign women, hustling them wops all their life that wouldn’t give them a full breath if they was a toy balloon; they don’t care much what it is. But you ain’t going to see her again, are you?’

“‘No,’ he says. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’ And he looked like he was fixing to jump off the boat and swim on ahead and wait for us at Hatteras.

“‘So you don’t want to worry about that,’ I says. Then I went and played the vie again, thinking that might cheer him up, because he ain’t the first, for Christ’s sake; he never invented it. But it was the next night; we was at the poop rail then the first time he had looked back watching the phosrus along the logline, when he says: ‘Maybe I got her into trouble.’

’"Doing what?’ I says. ‘With what? With the police? Didn’t you make her show you her petite?’ Like she would have needed a ticket, with that face full of gold; Jeez, she could have rode the train on her face alone; maybe that was her savings bank instead of using her stocking.’

“‘What ticket?’ he says. So I told him. For a minute I thought he was crying, then I seen that he was just trying to not puke. So I knew what the trouble was, what had been worrying him. I remember the first time it come as a surprise to me. ‘Oh,’ I says, ‘the smell. It don’t mean nothing,’ I says; you don’t want to let that worry you. It ain’t that they smell bad,’ I says, ‘that’s just the Italian national air,’”

And then we thought that at last he really was sick. He worked all day long, coming to bed only after the rest of us were asleep and snoring, and I saw him in the night get up and go topside again, and I followed and saw him sitting on a windlass. He looked like a little boy, still, small, motionless in his underclothes. But he was young, and even an old man can’t be sick very long with nothing but work to do and salt air to breathe; and so two weeks later we were watching him and George dancing again in their undershirts after supper on the after well deck while the victrola lifted its fatuous and reiterant ego against the waxing moon and the ship snored and hissed through the long seas off Hatteras.

They didn’t talk; they just danced, gravely and tirelessly as the nightly moon stood higher and higher up the sky. Then we turned south, and the Gulf Stream ran like blue ink alongside, bubbled with fire by night in the softening latitudes, and one night off Tortugas the ship began to tread the moon’s silver train like an awkward and eager courtier, and Carl spoke for the first time after almost twenty days.

“George!” he said, “do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure, bud!” George said, stamping on the deck each time the needle clucked, his black head shoulders above Carl’s sleek pale one, the two of them in decorous embrace, their canvas shoes hissing in unison: “Sure,” George said. “Spit it out.”

“When we get to Galveston, I want you to buy me a suit of these pink silk teddy-bears that ladies use. A little bigger than I’d wear, see?”