Then he was home: a paved street-crossing not very far from the house he had been born in, and now he could see above the trees the water tank and the gold cross on the spire of the Episcopal church and then no more: his face pressed to the grimy glass as if he were eight years old, the train slowing over a clash and clatter of switch-points among the box-and cattle-cars and the gondolas and the tanks, and there they were, seen as the child of eight sees them: with something of shock, set puny yet amazingly durable against the perspective of the vast encompassable earth: his mother: his uncle: his new aunt: and his mother had been married to one man for twenty years and had raised another one, and his new aunt had been married to two in about that same time and had watched two more in her own house fighting each other with hearth-brooms and horses, so he was not surprised nor did he even really know how it happened: his mother already in the train and his new aunt already gone back to the waiting car while he and his uncle had the one last word together:
‘Well, Squire,’ he said. ‘You not only went once too many to the well, you threw the pitcher in and then jumped in after it. I’ve got a message from your son.’
‘My who?’ his uncle said.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Your son-in-law. Your daughter’s husband. The one that don’t like you. He came out to camp to see me. He’s a cavalryman now. I mean a soldier, an American’ — tediously, himself récapitulant: ‘You understand? One night an American acquaintance tried to kill him with a horse. The next day he married the American’s sister. The day after that a Jap dropped a bomb on another American on a little island two thousand miles away.
So on the third day he enlisted, not into his own army in which he already held a reserve commission, but into the foreign one, renouncing not only his commission to do so but his citizenship too, using an interpreter without doubt to explain both to his bride and to his adopted government what he was trying to do’ — remembering, still récapitulant, not amazed or if amazed, the tireless timeless amazement of the child watching tireless and timeless the repetitive Punch and Judy booth: that afternoon and no warning whatever until the summons to the orderly room, and there Captain Gualdres was ‘ — in a private’s uniform, looking more like a horse than ever, maybe because of the fact that he had got himself into the one situation or condition above earth — a 1942 United States Army cavalry regiment — where as long as the war lasted he would have no contact whatever with horses—’ himself (Charles) repetitive too: ‘He didn’t look brave, he just looked indomitable, not offering a life or a limb to anyone, any government in gratitude for or protest against any thing, as if in this final and serious moment neither would he assume any sentimental pretence regarding the vain and idle pattering of bullets against him any more than he had used to about the vain and fragile hooves of horses; not hating Germans or Japs or even Harrisses, going to war against Germans not because they had ruined a continent and were rendering a whole race into fertilizer and lubricating oil, but because they had abolished horses from civilised cavalry, getting up from the chair when I came in and saying, ‘“I come here so you can see me. Now you have seen me. Now you will return to your uncle and say to him, Perhaps you are satisfied now.”’
‘What?’ his uncle said.
‘I don’t know either,’ he said. That’s what he said: that he had come all the way there from Kansas so I could see him in that brown suit and then come back to you and say, “Now maybe you’re satisfied.”’
And now it was time to go; they had already pulled the express hand-truck away from the baggage car door, and the express clerk was even leaning out the door looking back, and Mr. McWilliams, the conductor, was standing at the vestibule steps with his watch in his hand, but at least he was not hollering at him, Charles, yet, because he, Charles, wore a uniform and this was still early in 1942 and civilians hadn’t got used to war yet. So he said, ‘And one more thing. Those letters. Two letters. Two wrong envelopes.’
His uncle looked at him. ‘You don’t like coincidence?’
‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the most important things in life. Like maidenhead. Only, like maidenhead, you only use it once. I’m going to save mine a while yet.’
His uncle looked at him, quizzical, fantastical, grave. ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Try this. A street. In Paris. Within, as we Yoknapatawphians say, a medium spit of the Bois de Boulogne, so recent in nomenclature that its name is no older than the last battles of 1918 and the Versailles peace table — less than five years then; so select and so discreet that its location was known only to garbage collectors and employment bureaus for upper servants and the under secretaries of embassys. But no matter; it doesn’t exist any more now, and besides, you’d never get there to see it if it did.’
‘Maybe I will,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll look at where it used to be.’
‘You can do that here,’ his uncle said. ‘In the library. Simply by opening the right page in Conrad: the same waxed red-and-black tiled floor, the ormolu, the faience, the buhl; even to the long mirror which seemed to hold as in a silver dish the whole condensation of light, of afternoon, in whose depths seemed to float, like the lily upon its own concordant repetition, that forehead innocent and smooth of thought, ravaged only by grief and fidelity—’
‘How did you know she was there?’ he said.
‘I seen it in the paper,’ his uncle said. ‘The Paris HERALD. The United States government (given a little time) did very well in keeping up with its own first American Expeditionary Force in France. But theirs was nothing to how the Paris HERALD kept cases on the second one which began to land in Europe in 1919. — But this one was not ravaged at all by anything: just sitting there looking still exactly like a little girl whom all the world was helping now in the make-believe that she was a queen; and no caller this time come to do justice to a dead man because the man, creature, whose message this caller bore was anything but dead; he had sent his envoy all that distance from Heidelberg not to deliver a message but a demand: he wanted to know. So I asked it.
“‘But why didn’t you wait for me?” I said. “Why didn’t you cable?”’
‘Did she answer it?’ he said.
‘Didn’t I say that brow was unravaged, even by indecision?’ his uncle said. ‘She answered it. “You didn’t want me,” she said. “I wasn’t smart enough for you.”’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I answered correctly too,’ his uncle said. ‘I said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Harriss.” Will that one do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. And now it was time. The engineer even blew the whistle at him. Mr. McWilliams had never once shouted, ‘Come on here, boy, if you’re going with us’ as he would have five years ago (or for that matter, five months ago): only the two short deep impatient blasts of steam; simply because of the yet untried uniform he wore, a creature whose constant waking habit was talk, who would not even have missed or been aware of the breath passing over his vocal cords necessary to holler at him, had made no sound; instead, simply because he wore the uniform, a trained expert in a hundred-ton machine costing a hundred thousand dollars had expended three or four dollars’ worth of coal and pounds of hard-earned steam to tell an eighteen-year-old boy that he had spent enough time gossiping with his uncle: and he thought how perhaps that country, that nation, that way of living really was invincible which could not only accept war but even assimilate it in stride by compromising with it; with the left hand so to speak, without really impeding or even deflecting, aberrating, even compelling the attention of the right hand still engaged in the way’s old prime durable business.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s better. I might even buy that one. And that was twenty years ago. And it was true then or at least enough then or at least enough for you then. And now it’s twenty years later and it’s not true now or at least not enough now or at least not enough for you now. How did just years do all that?
‘They made me older,’ his uncle said. ‘I have improved.’
The end
