“Not time to feed him yet?” he said.
“I’m warming it,” the woman said.
“Oh,” Horace said. He tilted the chair against the wall, across the cell from the cot.
“Here’s room on the bed,” the woman said. “It’s softer. Some.”
“Not enough to change, though,” Horace said.
“Look here,” Goodwin said, “you go on home. No use in you doing this.”
“We’ve got a little work to do,” Horace said. “That lawyer’ll call her again in the morning. That’s his only chance: to invalidate her testimony someway. You might try to get some sleep while we go over it.”
“All right,” Goodwin said.
Horace began to drill the woman, tramping back and forth upon the narrow floor. Goodwin finished his cigar and sat motionless again, his arms folded and his head bent. The clock above the square struck nine and then ten. The child whimpered, stirred. The woman stopped and changed it and took the bottle from beneath her flank and fed it. Then she leaned forward carefully and looked into Goodwin’s face. “He’s asleep,” she whispered.
“Shall we lay him down?” Horace whispered.
“No. Let him stay there.” Moving quietly she laid the child on the cot and moved herself to the other end of it. Horace carried the chair over beside her. They spoke in whispers.
The clock struck eleven. Still Horace drilled her, going over and over the imaginary scene. At last he said: “I think that’s all. Can you remember it, now? If he should ask you anything you cant answer in the exact words you’ve learned tonight, just say nothing for a moment. I’ll attend to the rest. Can you remember, now?”
“Yes,” she whispered. He reached across and took the box of candy from the cot and opened it, the glazed paper crackling faintly. She took a piece. Goodwin had not moved. She looked at him, then at the narrow slit of window.
“Stop that,” Horace whispered. “He couldn’t reach him through that window with a hat-pin, let alone a bullet. Dont you know that?”
“Yes,” she said. She held the bon-bon in her hand. She was not looking at him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered.
“What?”
“When you got to the house and I wasn’t there. I know what you’re thinking.” Horace watched her, her averted face. “You said tonight was the time to start paying you.”
For a while longer he looked at her. “Ah,” he said. “O tempora! O mores! O hell! Can you stupid mammals never believe that any man, every man— You thought that was what I was coming for? You thought that if I had intended to, I’d have waited this long?”
She looked at him briefly. “It wouldn’t have done you any good if you hadn’t waited.”
“What? Oh. Well. But you would have tonight?”
“I thought that was what—”
“You would now, then?” She looked around at Goodwin. He was snoring a little. “Oh, I dont mean right this minute,” he whispered. “But you’ll pay on demand.”
“I thought that was what you meant. I told you we didn’t have— If that aint enough pay, I dont know that I blame you.”
“It’s not that. You know it’s not that. But cant you see that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done?”
The woman turned the bon-bon slowly in her hand. “I thought you were mad about him.”
“Lee?”
“No. Him.” She touched the child. “Because I’d have to bring him with us.”
“You mean, with him at the foot of the bed, maybe? perhaps you holding him by the leg all the time, so he wouldn’t fall off?”
She looked at him, her eyes grave and blank and contemplative. Outside the clock struck twelve.
“Good God,” he whispered. “What kind of men have you known?”
“I got him out of jail once that way. Out of Leavenworth, too. When they knew he was guilty.”
“You did?” Horace said. “Here. Take another piece. That one’s about worn out.” She looked down at her chocolate-stained fingers and the shapeless bon-bon. She dropped it behind the cot. Horace extended his handkerchief.
“It’ll soil it,” she said. “Wait.” She wiped her fingers on the child’s discarded garment and sat again, her hands clasped in her lap. Goodwin was snoring regularly. “When he went to the Philippines he left me in San Francisco. I got a job and I lived in a hall room, cooking over a gas-jet, because I told him I would. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone, but I promised him I would and he knew I would. When he killed that other soldier over that nigger woman, I didn’t even know it.
I didn’t get a letter from him for five months. It was just when I happened to see an old newspaper I was spreading on a closet shelf in the place where I worked that I saw the regiment was coming home, and when I looked at the calendar it was that day. I’d been good all that time. I’d had good chances; every day I had them with the men coming in the restaurant.
“They wouldn’t let me off to go and meet the ship, so I had to quit. Then they wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t even let me on the ship. I stood there while they came marching off it, watching for him and asking the ones that passed if they knew where he was and them kidding me if I had a date that night, telling me they never heard of him or that he was dead or he had run off to Japan with the colonel’s wife. I tried to get on the ship again, but they wouldn’t let me.
So that night I dressed up and went to the cabarets until I found one of them and let him pick me up, and he told me. It was like I had died. I sat there with the music playing and all, and that drunk soldier pawing at me, and me wondering why I didn’t let go, go on with him, get drunk and never sober up again and me thinking And this is the sort of animal I wasted a year over. I guess that was why I didn’t.
“Anyway, I didn’t. I went back to my room and the next day I started looking for him. I kept on, with them telling me lies and trying to make me, until I found he was in Leavenworth. I didn’t have enough money for a ticket, so I had to get another job. It took two months to get enough money. Then I went to Leavenworth. I got another job as waitress, in Childs, nightshifts, so I could see Lee every other Sunday afternoon. We decided to get a lawyer.
We didn’t know that a lawyer couldn’t do anything for a federal prisoner. The lawyer didn’t tell me, and I hadn’t told Lee how I was getting the lawyer. He thought I had saved some money. I lived with the lawyer two months before I found it out.
“Then the war came and they let Lee out and sent him to France. I went to New York and got a job in a munitions plant. I stayed straight too, with the cities full of soldiers with money to spend, and even the little ratty girls wearing silk. But I stayed straight. Then he came home.
I was at the ship to meet him. He got off under arrest and they sent him back to Leavenworth for killing that soldier three years ago. Then I got a lawyer to get a Congressman to get him out. I gave him all the money I had saved too. So when Lee got out, we had nothing. He said we’d get married, but we couldn’t afford it. And when I told him about the lawyer, he beat me.”
Again she dropped a shapeless piece of candy behind the cot and wiped her hands on the garment. She chose another piece from the box and ate it. Chewing, she looked at Horace, turning upon him a blank, musing gaze for an unhurried moment. Through the slotted window the darkness came chill and dead.
Goodwin ceased snoring. He stirred and sat up.
“What time is it?” he said.
“What?” Horace said. He looked at his watch. “Half-past two.”
“He must have had a puncture,” Goodwin said.
Toward dawn Horace himself slept, sitting in the chair. When he waked a narrow rosy pencil of sunlight fell level through the window. Goodwin and the woman were talking quietly on the cot. Goodwin looked at him bleakly.
“Morning,” he said.
“I hope you slept off that nightmare of yours,” Horace said.
“If I did, it’s the last one I’ll have. They say you dont dream there.”
“You’ve certainly done enough not to miss it,” Horace said. “I suppose you’ll believe us, after this.”
“Believe, hell,” Goodwin said, who had sat so quiet, so contained, with his saturnine face, negligent in his overalls and blue shirt; “do you think for one minute that man is going to let me walk out of that door and up the street and into that courthouse, after yesterday? What sort of men have you lived with all your life? In a nursery? I wouldn’t do that, myself.”
“If he does, he has sprung his own trap,” Horace said.
“What good will that do me? Let me tell—”
“Lee,” the woman said.
—“you something: the next time you want to play dice with a man’s neck—”
“Lee,” she said. She was stroking her hand slowly on his head, back and forth. She began to smooth his hair into a part, patting his collarless shirt smooth. Horace watched them.
“Would you like to stay here today?” he said quietly. “I can
