‘Not an orchid, anyways. Find orchids anywhere but you wouldn’t find her in Illinoy or Denver, hardly.’
‘I guess you are right. I wonder if there are any more like her anywhere?’
‘I dunno. But if there ain’t there’s already one too many.’
‘Let’s sit down for a while. Where’s my cigarette?’ She sat on the bench and he offered her his paper pack and struck a match for her. ‘So you think she won’t marry him, Joe?’
‘I ain’t so sure any more. I think I am changing my mind about it. She won’t miss a chance to marry what she calls a hero — if only to keep somebody else from getting him.’ (Meaning you, he thought.)
(Meaning me, she thought.) She said: ‘Not if she knows he’s going to die?’
‘What does she know about dying? She can’t even imagine herself getting old, let alone imagining anybody she is interested in dying. I bet she believes they can even patch him up so it won’t show.’
‘Joe, you are an incurable sentimentalist. You mean you think she’ll marry him because she is letting him think she will and because she is a “good” woman. You are quite a gentle person, Joe.’
‘I ain’t!’ he retorted with warmth. ‘I’m as hard as they make ’em: I got to be.’ He saw she was laughing at him and he grinned ruefully. ‘Well, you got me that time, didn’t you?’ He became suddenly serious. ‘But it ain’t her I’m worrying about. It’s his old man. Why didn’t you tell him how bad off he was?’
She quite feminine and Napoleonic:
‘Why did you send me on ahead instead of coming yourself? I told you I’d spoil it.’ She flipped her cigarette away and put her hand on his arm. ‘I didn’t have the heart to, Joe. If you could have seen his face! and heard him! He was like a child, Joe. He showed me all of Donald’s things. You know: pictures, and a slingshot, and a girl’s undie and a hyacinth bulb he carried with him in France. And there was that girl and everything. I just couldn’t. Do you blame me?’
‘Well, it’s all right now. It was a kind of rotten trick, though, to let him find it all out before them people at the station. We done the best we could, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, we did the best we could. I wish we could do more.’ Her gaze brooded across the garden where in the sun beyond the trees, bees were already at work. Across the garden, beyond a street and another wall, you could see the top of a pear tree like a branching candelabra, closely bloomed, white, white. . . . She stirred, crossing her knees. ‘That girl fainting, though. What do you—’
‘Oh, I expected that. But here comes Othello, like he was looking for us.’
They watched the late conductor of the lawn mower as he shuffled his shapeless shoes along the gravel. He saw them and halted.
‘Mist’ Gillmum, Rev’un say fer you to come to de house.’
‘Me?’
‘You Mist’ Gillmum, ain’t you?’
‘Oh, sure.’ He rose. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. You coming, too?’
‘You go and see what he wants. I’ll come along after a while.’
The Negro had turned shuffling on ahead of him and the lawn mower had resumed its chattering song as Gilligan mounted the steps. The rector stood on the veranda. His face was calm but it was evident he had not slept.
‘Sorry to trouble you, Mr Gilligan, but Donald is awake, and I am not familiar with his clothing as you are. I gave away his civilian things when he — when he—’
‘Sure, sir,’ Gilligan answered in sharp pity for the grey-faced man. He don’t know him yet! ‘I’ll help him.’
The divine, ineffectual, would have followed, but Gilligan leaped away from him up the stairs. He saw Mrs Powers coming from the garden and he descended to the lawn, meeting her.
‘Good morning, Doctor,’ she responded to his greeting. ‘I have been looking at your flowers. I hope you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all, not at all, my dear madam. An old man is always flattered when his flowers are admired. The young are so beautifully convinced that their emotions are admirable: young girls wear the clothes of their older sisters who require clothes, principally because they do not need them themselves, just for fun, or perhaps to pander to an illusion of the male; but as we grow older what we are loses importance, giving place to what we do.
And I have never been able to do anything well save to raise flowers. And that is, I think, an obscure emotional house-wifery in me: I had thought to grow old with my books among my roses: until my eyes became too poor to read longer I would read, after that I would sit in the sun. Now, of course, with my son at home again, I must put that by. I am anxious for you to see Donald this morning. You will notice a marked improvement.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I shall,’ she answered, wanting to put her arms around him. But he was so big and so confident. At the corner of the house was a tree covered with tiny white-bellied leaves like a mist, like a swirl of arrested silver water. The rector offered his arm with heavy gallantry.
‘Shall we go in to breakfast?’
Emmy had been before them with narcissi, and red roses in a vase repeated the red of strawberries in flat blue bowls. The rector drew her chair. ‘When we are alone Emmy sits here, but she has a strange reluctance to dining with strangers, or when guests are present.’
Mrs Powers sat and Emmy appeared briefly and disappeared for no apparent reason. At last there came slow feet on the staircase slanting across the open door. She saw their legs, then their bodies crossed her vision, and the rector rose as they appeared in the door. ‘Good morning, Donald,’ he said.
(That my father? Sure, Loot. That’s him.) ‘Good morning, sir.’
The divine stood huge and tense and powerless as Gilligan helped Mahon into his seat.
‘Here’s Mrs Powers, too, Loot.’
He turned his faltering puzzled gaze upon her. ‘Good morning,’ he said, but her eyes were on his father’s face. She lowered her gaze to her plate feeling hot moisture against her lids. What have I done? she thought, what have I done?
She tried to eat but could not, watching Mahon, awkward with his left hand, peering into his plate, eating scarcely anything, and Gilligan’s healthy employment of knife and fork, and the rector tasting nothing, watching his son’s every move with grey despair.
Emmy appeared again with fresh dishes. Averting her face she set the dishes down awkwardly and was about to flee precipitately when the rector looking up stopped her. She turned in stiff selfconscious fright, hanging her head.
‘Here’s Emmy, Donald,’ his father said.
Mahon raised his head and looked at his father. Then his puzzled gaze touched Gilligan’s face and returned to his plate, and his hand rose slowly to his mouth. Emmy stood for a space and her black eyes became wide and the blood drained from her face slowly. Then she put the back of one red hand against her mouth and fled, blundering into the door.
I can’t stand this. Mrs Powers rose unnoticed save by Gilligan and followed Emmy. Upon a table in the kitchen Emmy leaned bent almost double, her head cradled in her red arms. What a terrible position to cry in, Mrs Powers thought, putting her arms around Emmy. The girl jerked herself erect, staring at the other. Her face was wrung with weeping, ugly.
‘He didn’t speak to me!’ she gasped.
‘He didn’t know his father, Emmy. Don’t be silly.’ She held Emmy’s elbows, smelling harsh soap. Emmy clung to her.
‘But me, me! He didn’t even look at me!’ she repeated.
It was on her tongue to say Why should he? but Emmy’s blurred sobbing and her awkward wrung body; the very kinship of tears to tears, something to cling to after having been for so long a prop to others. . . .
Outside the window was a trellised morning-glory vine with a sparrow in it, and clinging to Emmy, holding each other in a recurrent mutual sorrow, she tasted warm salt in her throat.
Damn, damn, damn, she said amid her own tacking infrequent tears.
3
In front of the post office the rector was the centre of an interested circle when Mr Saunders saw him.
The gathering was representative, embracing the professions with a liberal leavening of those inevitable casuals, cravatless, overalled or unoveralled, who seem to suffer no compulsions whatever, which anything from a captured still to a Negro with an epileptic fit or a mouth-organ attracts to itself like atoms to a magnet, in any small southern town — or northern town or western town, probably.
‘Yes, yes, quite a surprise,’ the rector was saying. ‘I had no intimation of it, none whatever, until a friend with whom he was travelling — he is not yet fully recovered, you see — preceded him in order to inform me.’
(One of them airy-plane fellers.)
(S’what I say: if the Lord had intended folks to fly around in the air He’d ‘a’ give ’em wings.)
(Well, he’s been closter to the Lord’n you’ll ever git.)
This outer kindly curious fringe made way for Mr Saunders.
(Closter’n that feller’ll ever git, anyway. Guffaws.) This speaker was probably a Baptist.
Mr Saunders extended his hand.
‘Well, Doctor, we are mighty glad to hear the good news.’
‘Ah, good morning, good morning.’ The rector took the proffered hand in his huge paw. ‘Yes, quite a surprise. I was hoping
