Captain Gualdres still looked like bronze or metal of some sort even in the double-breasted dark suit any man might have worn and most men owned. He even still looked like horses too. Then he, Charles, realized that this was because the horse was missing: and that was when he first noticed that Captain Gualdres’ wife was a little taller than Captain Gualdres. It was as if, without the horse, Captain Gualdres was not only incomplete as regarded mobility, but in height too, as if his legs had not been intended for him to be seen and compared with others while standing on them.
She was in a dark dress too, the dark blue in which brides ‘go away,’ travel, with the fine rich fur coat with a corsage (Orchids, of course. He had heard of orchids all his life, so he realised that he had never seen them before. But he knew them at once; on that coat and that bride they could be nothing else.) pinned to the collar and the thin thread from the Cayley girl’s fingernail still showing on her cheek.
Captain Gualdres wouldn’t sit down, so he and his uncle stood too.
‘I come to say good-bye,’ Captain Gualdres said in English. ‘And to receive your — how you say—’
‘Felicitations,’ his uncle said. ‘And to you, congratulations. You have them a thousand times. May I ask since when?’
‘Since—’ Captain Gualdres looked quickly at his wrist ‘ — one hour. We just leave the padre. Our mama has just return home. We decide not to wait. So we come to say goodbye. I say it.’
‘Not good-bye,’ his uncle said.
‘Yes. Now. By one—’ again Captain Gualdres looked at his wrist ‘ — five minutes we are no more for here.’ (Because, as his uncle had said, there was one thing about Captain Gualdres: he not only knew exactly what he thought he was going to do, he quite often did it.) ‘Back to my country. The CAMPO. Maybe I do not ought to have left him to begin. This country. Is magnificent, but too strong for simple GAUCHO, PAYSANO. But for now, no matter. For now, is done.
So I come to say one more good-bye and one hundred more GRACIAS.’ Then it was Spanish again. But he kept up: ‘You have Spanish. My wife, having been educated only in the best of European convents for rich young American ladies, has no language at all. In my country, the campo, there is a saying: Married; dead.
But there is another saying: To learn where the rider will sleep tonight, ask the horse. So no matter about that either, that’s all finished too. So I have come to say goodbye, and thanks, and to congratulate myself that you had no stepchildren also to be placed for life. But I really have no confidence even in that condition because nothing is beyond a man of your capacity and attainments, not to mention imagination. So we return to my — our — country in time, where you are not. Because I think you are a very dangerous man and I do not like you. And so, with God.’
‘With God,’ his uncle said in Spanish too. ‘I wouldn’t hurry you.’
‘You can’t,’ Captain Gualdres said. ‘You don’t even need to. You don’t even need to wish you could.’
Then they were gone too: back through the anteroom; he and his uncle heard the outer door, then watched them pass across the gallery window, toward the stairs, and his uncle took from his vest the heavy watch with its loop of chain and the dangling golden key and laid it face-up on the desk.
‘Five minutes,’ his uncle said. Which was time enough, moment enough for him, Charles, to have asked exactly what was the other side of that bet his uncle had made last night with Captain Gualdres, except that he knew now he didn’t need to ask; in fact, he realised now he had begun not to need to ask that at that instant Thursday night when he shut the front door after Max Harriss and his sister and came back to the sittingroom and found that his uncle had no intention of going to bed.
So he said nothing, merely watching his uncle lay the watch on the desk, then stand over it, his arms spread a little and braced on either side of the watch, not even sitting down.
‘For decency.
For moderation,’ his uncle said, then, already moving and even in the same breath, his uncle said, ‘Or maybe I’ve already had too much of both,’ taking up the watch and putting it back into his vest, then through the anteroom, taking up the hat and overcoat, and through the outer door, not even saying backward over his shoulder: ‘Lock it,’ then down the stairs and already standing beside the car, holding the door open, when he, Charles, reached it.
‘Get in and drive,’ his uncle said. ‘And remember this is not last night.’
So he took the wheel and drove on through across the crowded Saturday Square, still having to dodge among the homeward-hound cars and trucks and wagons even after they were clear of downtown. But the road itself was still open for a little speed — a lot of it if he had been Max Harriss going home instead of just Charles Mallison driving his uncle backward.
‘Now what?’ his uncle said. ‘What’s wrong with it? Or has your foot gone to sleep?’
‘You just said it’s not last night,’ he said.
‘Of course it’s not,’ his uncle said. ‘There’s no horse waiting to run over Captain Gualdres now, even if the horse was necessary. He’s got something this time a good deal more efficient and fatal than just an insane horse.’
‘What’s that?’ he said.
Ά dove,’ his uncle said. ‘So what are you poking along for? Are you afraid of motion?’
So they went then, almost half as fast as Max Harriss, over the road which the baron hadn’t had time to concrete but which he probably would have dropped other things to do if he had just been warned in time, not for his own comfort because he didn’t travel it; he went and came from New Orleans in his own airplane so that when Jefferson saw him it went out there to do it; but for the uniqueness of spending that much money on something not only not his hut which all who knew him would not even expect him to use, just as Huey Long in Louisiana had made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere, without ever once looking inside it probably nor even caring what the people who wrote and edited it thought of him any more than the baron did what the farmers thought of him whose straying livestock leaped and shrieked and died under the speeding wheels of his guests; they were going fast now through the early December afternoon — the winter afternoon, the sixth day of winter the old folks called it, who counted from the first of December.
And it (the road) was older than gravel too, running back into the old time of simple dirt red and curving among the hills, then straight and black where the rich land flattened, alluvial and fertile; niggard in width since the land was too rich, too fecund in com and cotton, to allow room for men to pass one another almost, marked only by the thin iron of carriage-and wagon-rims and the open O’s of horses and mules when the old owner, the baron’s father-in-law, would leave the Horace and the weak toddy long enough to come in to town the two or three or four times a year, to vote or sell the cotton or pay the taxes or attend a funeral or a wedding, and then be driven back to the toddy and the Latin pages again, along the simple dirt in which even hooves, unless running, made no noise, let alone the wheels or anything other than the creak of harness; back to the acres which were hardly bounded then except in his own recollection and holding and belief and that of his neighbors, not even fenced always, let alone in carefully panelled and railed oak and hickory designed in Virginia and Long Island and handicrafted in Grand Rapids factories, the lawn which was a yard of shabby oaks then, innocent of shears and pruners and clippers and borderers in a light mist of gasoline fumes, to the house which was just a house to back a front gallery for him to sit on with the silver cup and the worn calf; a garden which was just a garden, overgrown, shabby too, of old permanent perennial things: nameless roses and lilac bushes and daisies and phlox and the hard durable dusty bloom of fall, itself in the tradition of the diluted whiskey and the Horatian odes: unassertive, enduring.
It was the quiet, his uncle said. This, the first time, the only time his uncle actually said it, was twelve years ago when he, Charles, was not even quite six yet, just old enough to listen: which in fact his uncle even mentioned: ‘Not that
