The Lime Twig

7

“Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”

The hall bulb shone orange through the cracks round the door and moonlight was coming through the cobwebbed window. Across the floor boards the moon was one square and silver-tinted patch of light within which, in a silken heap, lay a stocking that wanted fingering; next to it a safety pin which, by moonlight and with point unclasped, looked charmed and filigreed, as personal as a young girl’s fallen brooch. There was no sign of Cowles. There was nothing left of the jockey, not a boot or rubber jersey. Though out of the sounds of bottles smashing downstairs there came bursts of Jimmy Needles’ laughter, loud and ribald and grievous.

It was 2 A.M. of the last night he spent alive — last darkness before the day and running of the Golden— and the covers were tossing. She had given a single promise and three times already made it good, so now he knew her habits, knew what to expect, the commotion she could cause in bed. And it was a way she had of rising and kicking off the covers with cartwheel liveliness and speed each time she lost a pearl — and she had lost three pearls — and asking him to hunt for it through the twisting and knotting of the sheets. Now the covers were cartwheeling and falling about his shoulders all at once and there was the fourth to find. At the end of the bedstead opposite the pillows she came to rest suddenly cross-legged and laughing, breathing so that he could see how far down she took the air.

“Don’t ask me, Mike,” hands above her head, hips wriggling a little at the apex of crossed legs, “I don’t intend to help you. …” Then with a catch of sheet she idly daubed herself and laughed some more.

He came up crawling on hands and knees, still lagging after the tremor, the fanciful sex, and began to feel about in the tumult she had made of the sheets, himself not yet recovered from the breath of her own revival, the swiftness with which she turned from deep climactic love to play. As if she always saved one drop unquenched, the drop inside her body or on the tongue that turned her not back to passionate love but away from that and into attitudes of frolic. No moment of idleness or a yawn or slow recovery but each time surprising him by play and acrobatics, her fresh poses making his own dead self fire as if he had never touched her and making her body look tight and childish as if she had never been possessed by him.

“I can’t find the bloody thing,” he said.

“Go on,” she said, and changed again, took one knee beneath her chin, “you find it.” Then, while he searched beneath her pillow, felt down the center of the mattress and into the still warm hollows: “I’ve seduced you, haven’t I, Mike,” she said.

“You have,” he answered. “Good as your word.”

With Sybilline watching, he moved back and forth on the undulations of the springs, with moonlight striking across his spine, and his hands and knees softly sinking; and felt at last the opalescence, the hard tiny tear of pearl on its needle shank, and held it up by the point for her to see.

“You’re a charmer, Mike,” she said.

He reached out then to the skirt flung over the chair and stuck the pearl in the row of three. There were no pearls left in her reddish pompadour, only the thick round of the hair and, as if it had been rumpled, a coil coming down her neck and tickling. The bottles were still crashing below them and someone was playing the widow’s piano so quickly, heavily, that Needles might have been running up and down the keyboard in his naked feet. But it was all bubbles of talk and musk and closeness in the room and Banks cared nothing for the noise. As he turned to face his Sybilline, began on hands and knees the several awkward motions it took to reach her, he knew remorse for the empty face of himself once more: because her eyes were big and brown, steady and temperate as those of a girl peering over a stile, while the rest of her was still animated, quivering, with the fun. Thrice she had taken him and he had thrice returned, riding into the bower that remains secretive and replete after blouse and skirt and safety pin, silks and straps, have all been discarded, flung about helter-skelter on the thorns. No more now, he was fast returning to the old man. While she, his Sybilline, was still tasting of that little shocking drop of incompletion that gave her a maiden’s blush, a shine between the breasts, as if she was always ready for another go at it, another lovely toss.

After searching for all her pearls he was tangled in the covers now himself. His skin was gray. His head was hanging but he smelled the delicate stuff and blindly put his hand on her leg’s underside, touched the mild flesh for an instant, then let his fingers drag away. She wriggled and was laughing.

“Be a sweet boy, Mike,” she said, secluded with him from the party, moving her bare shoulders in childish sailor fashion, “and fetch the stocking.”

So at two o’clock in the morning he labored off the bed — she gave his arm a push — and took several steps until the moonlight caught him round the skinny ankles. Standing there, with sheep passing outside through darkened fields and the jockey screaming the first bars of an enticing song, he could hear the girl behind him — and that was the fine thing about Sybilline, the way she could kiss and play and let her spangles fall, keep track of all the chemistry and her good time, and yet be sighing, sighing like a young girl in love.

He stooped, picked up the stocking, turned to hear her whistling through puckered lips.

Then: “I’ll take that if you please, sweet Michael.” She held the length of silk in her hands and he was scrambling over the tossed pillows, down the crumpled sheets, until the two of them were facing and once more cross-legged. The pharmacist’s cure for women was on the edge of the sink, the smells were of the shores of paradise. Before his eyes and with the ends of her fingers, Sybilline drew the stocking out full length, held it swinging by the wide top and little toe, then in a quick gesture ran the whole porous line of it across her face and under her nose, just touching her nose, smelled it deeply and winked as she did so. And suddenly made a flimsy ball of it and with one hand lightly on his knee, reached forward and thrust the round of silk between his widespread legs and against the depths of his loin, rubbing, pushing, laughing. He flushed.

“You see,” whispering, “you can win if you want to, Mike, my dear. But that’s all for now.” With lively arm she threw the balled stocking at the dusty moonlit glass and hopped off the bed.

He watched her dance round to the chair, dangle the blouse and skirt, replace the pearls and do a faint jazz step that kept her moving nowhere. Then she posed in the unbuttoned blouse and her fingers were sending off kisses and her legs, friendly and white and long, were the legs he had seen bare in the undergarment ads. Then she whispered through the oval of the skirt she was just dropping over her head: “Put on your trousers, Mike … we’ll join the fun downstairs.”

They stepped into the light of the orange bulb, held hands, walked along the widow’s carpet to the start of the rail with grapes carved on the post. The hallway smelled of dust and nuptials; a rag was lying on the carpet. “We’ll go down together,” she said, and gave his arm a pinch. “We’ll let them see we’re untidy. But Michael,” holding him midway on the stairs, “all the girls will love you, Michael. You’re alluring! So don’t forget, Mike, come back for me.” And she kissed him, she whom he would never kiss in privacy again.

“I couldn’t lose you, Syb.”

She laughed for the two of them at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was redder than at any time that day. The lamplight shone upon it — lamps were lit all about the room, small bulbs and large, glass shades chiming and tinkling and strung with beads — and her eyes were brown and moist.

“There’s that lovely girl!” shouted the widow, “and our funny boy. And look what she’s done to him!”

Not only Jimmy Needles was playing the piano, but Larry as well, jockey and Larry having a duet together side by side and beating on the keys with nearly equal strength. On the bench before the upright, the little man in color and the large man in navy blue — hour by hour the wrinkles in the dampened suit were flattening — kept talking all the while they played and a bottle of rum stood on the seat between them. And Little Dora tried to listen. Sunk in a velvet armchair, wearing her lopsided matron’s hat with a bit of feather now, her upper lip of pale hair wet with gin, eyes surly and black behind the glasses, stretched and recumbent on cushions as near as possible to the piano bench, she watched them, listened, in a torporous and deadly mood.

Sparrow was there. He was drinking whisky out of the widow’s cup. The widow’s daughter was in the crowd — a big girl in a child’s dress pulled high who sat straight up and kept both hands on her knees, laughing and smiling out of a loose mouth and enormous eyes. And all the room was brown and filled with smoke and toy alligators and donkeys. Newspapers were strewn across the rug faded and worn with the footpaths of long-dead residents. A portrait of a Spanish nobleman hung above the mantel on which there burned a candelabra with smoky wicks and molten wax; and duplicates of Little Dora’s chair, soft mauve contrivances on wheels, made humps along the walls. In volume nearly as loud as the piano the black wireless was turned up and an orchestra played out of the tufted speaker.

Kissing, noise, and singing: a late hour in the widow’s parlor, and Banks saw Sparrow wave, watched Sybilline sit on the arm of Little Dora’s chair and swing her foot, and noticed that the widow was keeping her eye on him. Plump, wearing the tasseled shawl, she suddenly leaned over Syb and the slouching woman, and after a moment Dora jerked round her head and stared at him. Then all three were laughing — even his own dear girl — and he started toward them, took a place at the jockey’s side.

A barracks song was coming from the coffin box of the piano, old, fast-stepping. A golden mermaid stood holding a pitchfork on the ebony and she was bounded by wreaths, her fishtail curved over her head. Scars and finger-length burns marked the ebony, ivory was missing from the keys. Banks leaned against the trembling wood, and there was a pile of tattered sheet music ready to fall from the top and he had never heard such noise. Yet Larry went on talking — audibly enough, considering— and the jockey was nodding and beating upon the last key of the scale.

"… And I told the Inspector he was making a horrible botch of it. I said it would never do. Who’s pulling the strings I told him and he got huffy, huffy, mind you. I said the killing of the kids was no concern of mine but the hanging of Knifeblade was not acceptable, not in the least acceptable. You’d best not interfere, I said. There’s power in this world you never dreamed of, I told him. Why, you don’t stand a showing even with a little crowd at the seaside … and you’d better not bother with my business or my amusements. …”

“But didn’t he try to stick you none the same,” said the jockey.

“He did, but he failed. I knew him in Artillery, I knew his line. …”

Banks listened, looked at the white craven half of his face, the slicked black hair, the fingers hammering. He saw the man lift the bottle several times to his lips.

The jockey’s sleeves were puffing out, the small black boots were hanging limp, one hand snatched down the goggles and through isinglass he peered at the single key and at the two gray fingers he was striking it with— a rider who had a face shot full of holes and shoulders like the fragile forks of a wishbone on either side of the hump inside the silk. Banks put a sheet of the music on the rack and said, “Play us this piece, Needles. …” But the jockey did not reply.

There was a fire in the kitchen and it was Sybilline who told him to take the chair—“Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”—and stood near him with her smile and the flush creeping up her cheek. They formed a regular crew: his Syb, the widow, the other one who looked as if she wanted to fight. Syb’s throat was bare, the widow had plump hips and she was giggling. He could smell them: above the heat and moisture of the fire, the spice and flour odors of the laden shelves, the sweetness of old tarts and bread, he could smell the women strongest. And Sybilline kissed him immediately — leaning over, putting her face into his and her hand upon his neck — so that the other two could see. Still with mouths together, he found her breast for a moment and opened his eyes, saw the widow smiling — but it was a smile set and strained as if she could hardly keep from offering advice — and the other woman was smiling and Banks didn’t care.

“Get out of here, Sparrow,” the widow said all at once and looked down at him, became dimpled and rosycheeked again. Then Syb left him, stepped away with her compassionate mouth dissolving, becoming part of a pretty face again, and he could think of nothing except the stocking she had left upstairs — though they were roughing it in the parlor next to the kitchen and flinging about, dancing with the widow’s girl, intent, all of them, on a smashing.

“Now, Mike, you’ll have to eat,” she murmured, and put a hand to her escaping loop of hair.

“But you been cheating, Sybilline,” the widow said then, “you been going out of turn. The lady of the house has first prerogative and you been spoiling the order, Sybilline — if you please — you ain’t been allowing me my prerogative.” The little woman, youthfully plump except in the legs — she was standing on wiry, wellshaped legs — was preoccupied: it may have been she alone he smelled.

“Syb’s always been a cat,” said Little Dora, “first at the fellows, first in bed. She’s a sister of mine but she’s irresponsible, she is.” And Banks could tell that this one, a fighter with her violet shadows and loosened boots, was interested: but probably she’d want to kill him first. There were no smiles behind those thick corrective spectacles.

“Well, Syb can do the cooking then,” said the widow, and sat down beside him.

“I’ll cook, I’d do anything for Michael!” There was the light step, the grace, the cheer, as she tossed her head and reached for the pan and the bowl of pure-white oval eggs. She got the butter on her fingertips and licked them, her blouse was untucked again and he could see the skin; the eggs were pearls and she was cracking the white shells with her painted nails. The widow was lighting a cigarette. Though he was watching Syb, he found that he was stroking the little widow’s cheek and coming to like her in the kitchen with no one, except these three, to notice.

Beyond the half-opened door the parlor crowd sang “Roll Me Over in the Clover” and the name of Jimmy Needles was screamed out several times. But the women round him seemed not to hear; he hardly heard himself; the women were ganging up on him, doing a job on him. All three were noticing and he tried to pay no attention. They watched him eat. All three were smiling and taking his measure and he didn’t mind. It was Sybilline who made him use the sauce.

“Here,” reaching, tilting the thin brown bottle, “meat sauce is fine on fried eggs, Michael … didn’t you know?”

The smell of the women — girlish, matronly — and the smell of the meat sauce were the same. As soon as it spread across his plate it went to his nostrils and they might not have bothered with their clothes, with procrastination. He kept his face in the plate and kept lifting the fork that had one prong bent, a prong that stuck his tongue with every mouthful. Brown and broken yellow, thick and ovarian, his mouth was running with the eggs and sauce while the whisky glasses of the women were leaving rings.

“Fetch him a slice of bread, Sybilline, he don’t want to leave none of it on the china. …”

He shut his eyes and did not know whose hand it was, but the hand closed in a grip that made him slide forward on the chair and groan.

“You girls wait for me,” said the widow in a voice he could hardly hear. Then: “You’re a charmer, Mike!” and Sybilline was blowing him a kiss.

With his hands in his pockets, shirt collar open about the windpipe and the two muscles translucent at the back of his skinny neck, frowning and keeping his head down, he followed the swinging shawl into the din, the smoke, the noise of the piano that seemed to be playing on the strength of a grinding motor inside the box, though Larry and the jockey were still side by side on its bench. The widow stopped to fix her daughter’s skirts and he bumped against the softest buttocks he had ever known, and apologized.

“I could love you right here,” she whispered, “I really could. …”

He knew that. It was not the place for him exactly, but there was the sauce all over his lip and he thought that in another moment almost anywhere might do.

They reached the stairs in time. The corner turned, the hat tree with its multiple short arms thrust out in shadow, the carpeting, the widow’s rail, the dust and orange bulb — suddenly the bedchambers were near and he was climbing. Up how many times, how many times back down. And it was merely a matter of getting up those stairs, and taking the precautions, and tumbling in, shagging with the widow as the night demanded. He saw her at the top for a moment; stumbled and paused and, clutching the rail, stared, while beneath the bulb she stood squeezing the tiny plump hands together.

Then she took hold of him, and behind the door at the end of the hall he dropped his trousers in the widow’s sleeping chamber, heard her quick footsteps round the bed and in his hands caught the plumpness of the hips. Then under the wool those softest buttocks he had ever known. And he snapped off a stay of whalebone, flung it aside as he might a branch in a tangled wood; to his mouth drew her down and rubbed the sauce against her. She giggled and there was a dilating in the stomach.

“Go gently, Mr. Banks,” fending, giggling, “go sweetly, please.”

There was no cartwheeling now, no silk-stocking coil, no blushing or line of verse. Only the widow on the comforter and in his mouth the taste of eggs which had done the job for him. The moon had passed by the widow’s room, but a transom was opened to the orange dimness of the hall. And under her three small rocking chairs with cushions, upon her bed — it was narrow and deep — and her rack of short broad night dresses and her stumpy bedside lamp, upon everything she owned or used there fell the rusty and sedentary light that, guiding no one, still bums late in the corridors of so many cheap hotels. The drawers were all half-open in her wardrobe; a pair of silver shears and a babyish fresh pile of curls lay on a table top before which she last had been trimming her dead ends of curls.

How long were the nights of love, how various the lovers. Holding his throat, standing in bare feet and with one hand wiping the hair back from his eyes, he stared down at the widow’s cheeks again. It was her cheeks he had been attracted to and once more beside the bed he saw the tiny china-painted face with the eyelids closed, the ringlets damp across the top, the small greasy round cheeks he had wanted to cup in both his hands.

“Don’t leave,” whispering, not opening her eyes, “don’t leave me yet, Mr. Banks.”

In the hall he put on his trousers and shirt and took the stairs with caution. He was fierce now, dry but fierce. If there were prospects ahead of him he would take them up. There were shadows, tracks worn through the carpet by naked feet. More shadows, a depth of shadows, and not a vow to make or sentiment to express now on these old stairs — only the steepness and the wallside to guide his shoulder. Below, in the center of a love seat’s cushion, he could see the outline of a hat and pair of clean white gloves.

“Mister …” He stopped, leaned his head against dusty wall plaster, and saw the big girl’s figure at the start of the bannister below, made out her eyes and heard the moist and childish voice. She wore a sweater round her shoulders now. “Mister,” the voice came fearfully, “there’s someone wants to see you. A lady, Mister.”

“I should imagine so!” He waited, then descended without noise, except for the brushing of his clothes against the wall, until he was only a step or two above the widow’s girl. “I suppose you’re not referring to yourself.” He watched the loose lips, the eyes that brightened, watched the closing and opening of the sweater.

“She’s a lady, Mister. She’s at the other door. She give me half a crown to find you, and she told me not to get the whole house up, she did.”

He nodded, leaned forward, gently kissed the girl.

She did not try to move, as if he had ordered her to remain exactly there by the darkened post with grapes. He paused at the love seat and noticed the red beret beside the hat and pair of gloves. The corridor smelled of water in the bottoms of purple vases and the piano was banging just beyond this emptiness. He kicked something — a cat’s dish perhaps — and it slid down the passageway ahead of him. Then the wall was warm to his touch and he knew that behind it was the width of the kitchen chimney, briefly and in darkness saw the meat-sauce bottle and Syb’s painted nails.

He heard an engine running. He stepped into the pantry, one of several pantries, bare now without hanging goose or cutlery or stores of brandy, and faced the misty dew-drenched opening of the door. There was light coming in the windows — brass rods cut them, but they were curtainless — and he stood so that he was lighted by one of the windows just as she was visible against the sheet of fog. With a coat swinging, hair down to her shoulders, she was leaning in the doorway and her thin legs were crossed. When she heard him she turned her face, white at this hour, and dropped her burning cigarette — not outside, but into the shadows on the floor.

“Annie … good God, is it you?”

She laughed only. One long shank of the golden hair dragged across in front of her and buried the little wet coat lapel. The face then, the cheek, seemed set in gold. Arm hanging, body still tipped and ankles crossed, she made no movement other than a small twisting as if she were trying to scratch against the jamb.

“But you, Annie, I hadn’t expected you!”

“Well,” taking the hair in her fingers, holding it across her mouth, speaking through hair, “I shan’t be bad or deceitful to an old friend. But I can tell a thing or two.” And abruptly, as he smelled the dampness on her shoulders and reached for her, “You’re sexed up, aren’t you? The chap next door’s been kissing and the girl next door has found him out!” She was twenty years old and timeless despite the motor car waiting off under the trees. At three o’clock in the morning she was a girl he had seen through windows in several dreams unremembered, unconfessed, the age of twenty that never passes but lingers in the silvering of the trees and rising fogs. Younger than Syb, fingers bereft of rings, she would come carelessly to any door, to any fellow’s door.

“You’ll have to lift me up,” she cried, “I’ve got this far but I can’t take another step.” Then laughed when he raised her, gold hanging down and legs swinging at the knees, cheekbones making little slashes beneath the skin, eyes big and black and body that had been tipping, leaning, all collected now, wrapped in the coat and carried high against his chest. They sat on the bare pantry floor in a corner and through the adjacent windows came the misty streams like two searchlight shafts touching and crossing just beyond their feet.

“Bottle’s in the pocket. Have a drink if you want to.” He did, though first he put his palms on either side of the chilly jaw and leaned down to Annie’s mouth. With the hair spread out, eyes closed, her head was pressed between his kiss and the hard empty floor. And the searchlights moved steadily, the engine idled — it was smooth, low, indifferent — in the blackness of the roadside and dripping chestnut tree.

“I’m sexed up, too,” she said from the crook of his arm, and he uncapped the bottle with his teeth. The crashing octaves, Needles singing solo, the screams and sounds of boots hardly reached them here, though Annie remarked about the party and, after thinking, said she did not want to go to it.

He opened her coat directly and ran his hand inside, up lisle and tenderness until he found the seam, the tight rolled edge and drops of warmth against his fingertips, and said, “… You want me to, you really want me to?” She stood up then — he hadn’t known that she could stand — and with fingers steadying on his shoulders lifted first one tiny knife-heeled slipper and the other, bending each leg sharply at the knee, swinging alternate thin calves in an upward and silent dancing step, removed the undergarment and the slippers, and came down slowly, slowly, across his lap.

“I want you to.”

Later, when they were dying down and moments before she slept: “That Hencher,” she said, “evict him, why don’t you, Mike … throw the bastard out.” And the jaws, the cheeks, the eyelids all grew colder and he left her there for the driver of the lacquered car.

Slowly, slowly, he went back up the hall with hands outstretched and thinking of all the girls. He saw the hat tree’s shadow, passed the love seat and the staircase, empty now, and thought, she’s gone off looking at her half a crown. Good thing.

He took a breath then and blinking through the smoke, rubbing his lips and blinking, holding Annie’s gin bottle halfway to his lips and then forgetting it, found Larry towering in the parlor and Little Dora shouting up at him. Dora was wearing the jockey’s striped racing cap and the long flat tongue of the visor protruded sideways from her trembling head.

“Take it off,” she shouted, “let’s see what you got!”

Sparrow, Jimmy Needles and the rest were crowded round them, laughing and showing their teeth through smoke and the white light of lamps with the shades ripped off now. But Larry towered, even while Dora caught him by the shirt, and there was the perfect nose, the black hair plastered into place, the brass knuckles shining on the enormous hand, and the eyes, the eyes devoid of irises. Tomorrow he would wear green glasses. For now he was drunk, drunk into a stupor of civility and strength, that state of brutal calm, and only a little trickle of sweat behind the ear betrayed his drunkenness.

“Come on, come on, you full-of-grace,” pushing up against him, tearing the shirt, “let’s see what you got!”

The pearl buttons came off the shirt and Banks stepped no closer, though Sybilline was there and laughing on one of Larry’s arms. “Oh, do what Little Dora says,” he heard her cry, “I want you to!” And there was a bruise, a fresh nasty bruise, beneath Syb’s eye.

It was not a smile nor look of tolerance, but some wing-tip shadow — he was cock of this house — that passed across his face and Banks thought Larry had swayed. Yet he removed the wrinkled coat, allowed Sybilline to pull the holster strings, ungird him, allowed Little Dora to flap against him and rip off the shirt and, after Sparrow had undone the ties, once more waited while Dora took the undervest away in her claws. They cheered, slapping the oxen arms, slapping the flesh, and cheered when the metal vest was returned to him — steel and skin — and the holster was settled again but in an armpit naked now and smelling of scented freshener.

Larry turned slowly round so they could see, and there was the gun’s blue butt, the dazzling links of steel, the hairless and swarthy torso of the man himself. In the process of revolving he looked at Sparrow, who went out then to the hired vehicle parked before the boarding house.

“For twenty years,” shouted Dora again through smoke opaque as ice, “for twenty years I’ve admired that! Does anybody blame me?” Banks listened and amidst breaking glass, the tumbling of the mauve-colored chairs, for a moment met the eyes of Sybilline, his Syb, eyes in a lovely face pressed hard against the smoothest portion of Larry’s arm which — her face with auburn hair was just below his shoulder — could take the punches. Banks looked away.

He left the gin bottle on a bolster and sprawled out shivering on the love seat. They were finished with the final stanza of poor Needles’ song. He could very nearly taste the dawn, the face peering up out of a basin, becoming old again, his full and wasting twenty-five. But he listened, reached forward through the dark and then the shadow was in front of him, Dora’s bit of beard and a glimpse of the fibrous and speckled hams, and he would have laughed except for the last jump inside of him.

“Got a cigarette,” he asked her softly, and started trembling.

He was alone, finally, all alone and sore and the cartwheeling sheets were piled in a white heap on the planking off the foot of the bed. The last of them was gone; love’s moonlight was no longer coming through the glass; but there was light, the first gray negative light of dawn. The mate of the oven tit had found a branch outside his window and he heard its damp scratching and its talk. Even two oven tits may be snared and separated in such a dawn. He listened, turned his head under the shadows, and reflected that the little bird was fagged. And he could feel the wet light rising round all the broken doors, the slatted crevices, rising round the fens, the dripping petrol pump, up the calves and thighs of the public and deserted visions of the naked man — the fire put out in the steam-bath alley, the kitchen fire drowned, himself fagged and tasteless as the bird on the sick bough. But a sound reached him and for a while he followed it: “Cowles … Mr. Cowles? Mr. Cowles?” The widow’s voice faded down in the direction of the barren pantry and open door.

He let it go. He smelled the pillow touched by too many heads, smelled the dry sweat of a night no more demanding — gone the pale rectangle from which he had plucked the stocking, gone all the fun of it. He thought of water against his lips but he could not move, stretched upon his back and caught. But he must have moved his leg because suddenly he felt it pricked, a sharp little pain in the skin, some bit of foreign matter. He reached down slowly and took it in two fingers, raised it high before his face: a single pearl on a pin that had been bent, but a lovely rose color in the center where it held the light. Idly he began to turn the pearl between his fingers. The hand hovered, fell, and he lost the pearl for good.

The shot went off just below his window. It was a noise in the very room with him, like a hand clapped upon his ear, and he thought of Jimmy Needles, the shoulder holster on the silver breast, thought of Sybilline and the widow. Then he was out of the bed, across the room and running.

He reached the street before the gunshot sound had died, ran into the dawn bareheaded and in time to see the warbler flying straight up from the thick brown tree with its song turned into a high and piping whistle. There were the frozen headlamps and black dripping tires of a double-decker parked across the street; a cottage with a hound clamoring inside; a poster showing bunched horses on a turn; an empty cart drawn back from the road. And at the corner of the boarding house, sprawled on the stones, the body of a child in a bright-green dress and, crouched over it, the puffing constable. A wet and sluggish sun was burning far-off beyond the wet foliage and crooked roofs.

He stopped — arms flung wide — then ran at the constable.

Because he recognized the child — she had always been coming over a bridge for him — and because now there was smoke still circling out of the belly, smoke and a little blood, and she lay with one knee raised, with palms turned up. And the old man crouching with drawn gun, touching the body to see where his shot had gone, old man with a star of burst veins in the hollow of either cheek, with his warts, the old lips that were ventricles in the enormous face, with brass and serge and a helmet like a pot on the head — there was nothing he could do but smash his fist against that puffing face. He did, and sent the helmet rolling.

The mists were drifting off, the leaves uncurling, the helmet was rattling about the street. And he kept driving the man, fighting the constable farther and farther away from the dead child, watching one of the mournful and unsuspecting eyes turn green and slowly close. Scuffling, panting himself, trying to take his punches with care, aiming at the blood that had started between the two front teeth. Then suddenly the constable — old, with a neck of cow’s kidneys tied round by the high blue collar, and a nose that hooted in the struggle — gave it all back to him, blow for telling blow, finding his mark, punching in with the slobber and vehemence of his age. There was a straight look in his watering good eye, a quick and heavy hunching in the shoulders. His long hair, black and mixed with gray, went flying.

“Down you go, you little Cheapside gambler!”

The old man struck him full in the chest, once in the face, and once again on skin and cartilege of the aching chest. He fell, lay still — blindly reaching out for the little girl in green — and the constable drew back the boot furnished by the village constabulary and kicked him. After a moment of wheezing and blood-wiping, the old man strapped on the helmet, fixed his brass and replaced the warm revolver, took up his pipe from the mossy curb, and rubbing his arms and shins, disappeared to slowly climb the footbridge that was a hump of granite beneath the electric cables and ancient dripping trees.

It’ll be a jolly evening, Mike, he dreamed, and the sun was shining on his lip when Jimmy Needles came out and dragged him to the safety of the house.