‘We have forgotten it,’ Marya said. ‘Take off your hat first.’
‘I can pay you,’ the man with the feather said. ‘You cant give me anything, see?’ He reached into his pocket and jerked his hand out already scattering the coins, flinging them toward and onto and past the table, scattering and clinking across the floor as he approached and flung himself onto the backless bench opposite the Englishman and reached for the wine bottle and a tumbler in one voracious motion.
‘Pick up your money,’ Marya said.
‘Pick it up yourself, if you dont want it there,’ the man said, filling the tumbler, splashing the wine into it until it was overfull, already raising the tumbler toward his mouth.
‘Leave it now,’ Marthe said. ‘Give him his soup.’ She had moved, not quite enough to stand behind the Englishman but rather over him, her hands resting one in the other, her high severe mountain face which would have been bold and handsome as a man’s looking down at him while he reached and poured from the bottle and set the bottle down and raised his glass until he was looking at her across it.
‘Health, Madame,’ he said.
‘But how did you know?’ Marthe said. ‘When did you know him?’
‘I never knew him. I never saw him. I heard about him — them — when I came back out in ‘16. Then I learned what it was, and so after that I didn’t need to see him — only to wait and keep out of his way until he would be ready to do the needing—’
‘Bring the soup,’ the man with the feather said harshly. ‘Haven’t I already shown you enough money to buy out your whole house?’
‘Yes,’ Marya said from the stove. ‘Be patient. It wont be long now. I will even pick it up for you.’ She brought the two bowls of soup; the man with the feather did not even wait for her to set his down, snatching and wolfing it, glaring across the bowl with his dead intolerant outrageous eyes while Marya stooped about their feet and beneath and around the table, gathering up the scattered coins. ‘There are only twenty-nine,’ she said. ‘There should be one more.’ Still holding the tilted bowl to his face, the man with the feather jerked another coin from his pocket and banged it onto the table.
‘Does that satisfy you?’ he said. ‘Fill the bowl again.’ She did so, at the stove, and brought the bowl back, while again he splashed the wanton and violent wine into his tumbler.
‘Eat too,’ she said to the man with the crutches.
‘Thanks,’ he said, not even looking at her but looking still at the tall cold-faced sister standing over him. ‘Only about that time or during that time or at that time or whenever it was afterward that I woke up, I was in a hospital in England so it was next spring before I persuaded them to let me come back to France and go to Chaulnesmont until at last I found that sergeant-major and he told me where you were. Only there were three of you then. There was a girl too. His wife?’ The tall woman just looked down at him, cold, calm, absolutely inscrutable. ‘His fiancée, maybe?’
‘Yes,’ Marya said. ‘That’s it: his fiancée. That’s the word. Eat your soup.’
‘They were to be married,’ Marthe said. ‘She was a Marseille whore.’
‘I beg pardon?’ the Englishman said.
‘But not any more,’ Marya said. ‘She was going to learn to be a farmer’s wife. Eat your soup now before it is cold.’
‘Yes,’ the Englishman said. ‘Thanks:’ not even looking at her. ‘What became of her?’
‘She went back home.’
‘Home? You mean, back to the — back to Marseilles?’
‘Brothel,’ the tall woman said. ‘Say it. You English. The Americans too. Why did your French boggle at that word, being as good as it is with all the others? — She must live too,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ the Englishman said. ‘But she could have stayed here.’
‘Yes,’ the woman said.
‘But she didn’t.’
‘No,’ the woman said.
‘She couldn’t, you see,’ Marya said. ‘She has an old grandmother she must support. I think it’s quite admirable.’
‘So do I,’ the Englishman said. He took up the spoon.
‘That’s right,’ Marya said. ‘Eat.’ But he was still looking at the sister, the spoon arrested above the bowl. Nor did the man with the feather wait this time to demand to be served, swinging his legs across the bench and carrying the bowl himself to the stove and plunging it, hand and all, into the pot before returning with the dripping and streaming bowl to the table where Marya had made the neat small stack of his coins and where the Englishman was still watching the tall sister, talking:
‘You had a husband too then.’
‘He died. That same summer.’
‘Oh,’ the Englishman said. ‘The war?’
‘The peace,’ the tall woman said. ‘When they let him come home at last and then the war started again before he could even put a plow in the ground, he probably decided that he could not bear another peace. And so he died. Yes?’ she said. He had already taken up a spoon of soup. He stopped the spoon again.
‘Yes what?’
‘What else do you want of us? To show you his grave?’ She just said ‘his’ but they all knew whom she meant. ‘That is, where we think it was?’ So did the Englishman merely say ‘his’.
‘What for?’ he said. ‘He’s finished.’
‘Finished?’ she said in a harsh stern voice.
‘He didn’t mean it that way, Sister,’ the other woman said. ‘He just means that Brother did the best he could, all he could, and now he doesn’t need to worry any more. Now all he has to do is rest.’ She looked at him, serene and unsurprised and unpitying. ‘You like to laugh, dont you?’
He did so, laughing, strong and steady and completely, with that side of his mouth still capable of moving, opening to laugh, the single eye meeting hers — theirs — full and calm and unpitying and laughing too. ‘So can you,’ he said to Marya. ‘Cant you?’
‘Why of course,’ Marya said. ‘Now, Sister,’ she said. ‘The medal.’
So, in the lane once more, there were three of them now instead of the two he had brought with him — three bits of graved symbolic bronze dangling and glinting from the three candy-striped ribbons bright as carnivals and gaudy as sunsets on the breast of the filthy dinner jacket as, facing them, he braced the two crutches into his armpits and with the hand he still had, removed the ruined homburg in a gesture sweeping and invulnerable and clapped it back on at its raked and almost swaggering angle and turned, the single leg once more strong and steady and tireless between the tireless rhythmic swing and recover of the crutches. But moving: back down the lane toward where he and the man with the feather had appeared, even if the infinitesimal progress was out of all proportion to the tremendous effort of the motion. Moving, unwearyable and durable and persevering, growing smaller and smaller with distance until at last he had lost all semblance of advancement whatever and appeared as though fixed against a panorama in furious progressless unrest, not lonely: just solitary, invincibly single. Then he was gone.
‘Yes,’ Marya said. ‘He can move fast enough. He will be there in plenty of time,’ turning then, the two of them, though it was the sister who stopped as though it was only she who had remembered at last the other man, the one with the feather, because Marya said: ‘Oh yes, there will be plenty of time for him too.’
Because he was not in the house: only the stained table, the bowl and the overturned tumbler where he had fouled and wasted their substance, the stain of the wine and the soup making a little puddle in which sat the neat small stack of coins where Marya had arranged them; all that afternoon while the tall sister went back to the field, the sowing, and Marya cleaned the kitchen and the soiled dishes, wiping the coins neatly off and stacking them again in that mute still pyramidal gleam while the light faded, until dark when they came back into the kitchen and lighted the lamp and he loomed suddenly, cadaverous and tall beneath the raking feather, from the shadows, saying in his harsh intolerable voice:
‘What have you got against the money? Go on. Take it — —’ lifting his hand again to sweep, fling it to the floor, until the tall sister spoke.
‘She has picked it up for you once. Dont do it again.’
‘Here. Take it. Why wont you take it? I worked for it — sweated for it — the only money in my life I ever earned by honest sweat. I did it just for this — earned it and then went to all the trouble to find you and give it to you, and now you wont take it. Here.’ But they only looked at him, alien and composed, cold and composed the one, the other with that bright and pitiless serenity until at last he said with a kind of amazement: ‘So you wont take it. You really wont,’ and looked at them for a moment longer, then came to the table and took up the coins and put them into his pocket and turned and went to the door.
‘That’s right,’ Marya said in her serene and unpitying voice. ‘Go now. It is not much further. You dont have much longer to despair’: at which he turned, framed for
