After a while the clock on the courthouse struck twelve and he threw away his fifth cigarette. God damn her, she won’t have another chance to stand me up, he swore. Cursing her he felt better and pushed open the screen door.
He sprang suddenly back into the store and stepped swiftly out of sight and the soda clerk, glassy-haired and white-jacketed, said ‘Whatcher dodging?’ with interest. She passed, walking and talking gaily with a young married man who clerked in a department store. She looked in as they passed, without seeing him.
He waited, wrung and bitter with anger and jealousy, until he knew she had turned the corner. Then he swung the door outward furiously. He cursed her again, blindly, and someone behind him saying, ‘Mist’ George, Mist’ George,’ monotonously drew up beside him. He whirled upon a Negro boy.
‘What in hell you want?’ he snapped.
‘Letter fer you,’ replied the Negro equably, shaming him with better breeding. He took it and gave the boy a coin. It was written on a scrap of wrapping paper and it read: ‘Come tonight after they have gone to bed. I may not get out. But come — if you want to.’
He read and reread it, he stared at her spidery, nervous script until the words themselves ceased to mean anything to his mind. He was sick with relief. Everything, the ancient, slumbering courthouse, the elms, the hitched somnolent horses and mules, the stolid coagulation of Negroes and the slow unemphasis of their talk and laughter, all seemed some way different, lovely, and beautiful under the indolent noon.
He drew a long breath.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
MR GEORGE FARR considered himself quite a man. I wonder if it shows in my face? he thought, keenly examining the faces of men whom he passed, trying to fancy that he did see something in some faces that other faces had not. But he had to admit that he could see nothing, and he knew a slight depression, a disappointment. Strange. If that didn’t show in your face what could you do for things to show in your face?
It would be fine if (George Farr was a gentleman), if without talking men who had women could somehow know each other on sight — some sort of involuntary sign: an automatic masonry. Of course women were no new thing to him.
But not like this. Then the pleasing thought occurred to him that he was unique in the world, that nothing like this had happened to any other man, that no one else had ever thought of such a thing. Anyway I know it. He gloated over a secret thought like a pleasant taste in the mouth.
When he remembered (remember? had he thought of anything else?) how she had run into the dark house in her nightgown, weeping, he felt quite masculine and superior and gentle. She’s all right now though, I guess they all do that.
His Jove-like calm was slightly shaken, however, after he had tried twice unsuccessfully to get her over the phone and it was completely shattered when late in the afternoon she drove serenely by him in a car with a girl friend, utterly ignoring him. She didn’t see me. (You know she did.) She didn’t see me! (You know damn well she did.)
By nightfall he was on the verge of his possible, mild unemphatic insanity. Then this cooled away as the sun cooled from the sky. He felt nothing, yet like an unattached ghost he felt compelled to linger around the corner which she would pass if she did come downtown. Suddenly he knew terror.
What if I were to see her with another man? It would be worse than death he knew, trying to make himself leave, to hide somewhere like a wounded beast. But his body would not go.
He saw her time after time and when it turned out to be someone else he did not know what he felt. And so when she did turn the corner he did not believe his eyes at first. It was her brother that he first recognized, then he saw her and all his life went into his eyes leaving his body but an awkward, ugly, gesture in unquicked clay.
He could not have said how long it was that he was unconscious of the stone base of the monument on which he sat while she and her brother moved slowly and implacably across his vision, then his life flowed completely, emptying his eyes and filling his body again, giving him dominion over his arms and legs, and temporarily sightless he sprang after her.
‘Hi, George,’ young Robert greeted him casually, as an equal. ‘Goin’ to the show?’
She looked at him swiftly, delicately, with terror and something like loathing.
‘Cecily—’ he said.
Her eyes were dark, black, and she averted her head and hurried on.
‘Cecily,’ he implored, touching her arm.
At his touch she shuddered, shrinking from him. ‘Don’t, don’t touch me,’ she said piteously. Her face was blanched, colourless, and he stood watching her frail dress flowing to the fragile articulation of her body as she and her brother passed on, leaving him. And he, too, partook of her pain and terror, not knowing what it was.
2
Donald Mahon’s homecoming, poor fellow, was hardly a nine days’ wonder even. Curious, kindly neighbours came in — men who stood or sat jovially respectable, cheerful: solid businessmen interested in the war only as a by-product of the rise and fall of Mr Wilson, and interested in that only as a matter of dollars and cents, while their wives chatted about clothes to each other across Mahon’s scarred, oblivious brow; a few of the rector’s more casual acquaintances democratically uncravated, hushing their tobacco into a bulged cheek, diffidently but firmly refusing to surrender their hats; girls that he had known, had danced with or courted of summer nights, come now to look once upon his face, and then quickly aside in hushed nausea, not coming any more unless his face happened to be hidden on the first visit (upon which they finally found opportunity to see it); boys come to go away fretted because he wouldn’t tell any war stories — all this going on about him while Gilligan, his glum major-domo, handled them all with impartial discouraging efficiency.
‘Beat it, now,’ he repeated to young Robert Saunders, who, with sundry contemporaries to whom he had promised something good in the way of damaged soldiers, had called.
‘He’s going to marry my sister. I’d like to know why I can’t see him,’ young Robert protested. He was in the uncomfortable position of one who has inveigled his friends into a gold mine and then cannot produce the mine. They jeered at him and he justified his position hotly, appealing to Gilligan.
‘G’wan now, beat it. Show’s over. G’wan now.’ Gilligan shut the door on him. Mrs Powers, descending the stairs said:
‘What is it, Joe?’
‘That damn Saunders hellion brought his whole gang around to see his scar. We got to stop this,’ he stated with exasperation, ‘can’t have these damn folks in and out of here all day long, staring at him.’
‘Well, it is about over,’ she told him, ‘they have all called by now. Even their funny little paper has appeared. “War Hero Returns”, you know — that sort of thing.’
‘I hope so,’ he answered without hope. ‘God knows they’ve all been here once. Do you know, while I was living and eating and sleeping with men all the time I never thought much of them, but since I got civilized again and seen all these women around here saying, Ain’t his face terrible, poor boy, and Will she marry him? and Did you see her downtown yesterday almost nekkid? why, I think a little better of men after all. You’ll notice them soldiers don’t bother him, specially the ones that was overseas. They just kind of call the whole thing off. He just had hard luck and whatcher going to do about it? is the way they figure. Some didn’t and some did, the way they think of it.’
They stood together looking out of the window upon the sleepy street. Women, quite palpably ‘dressed’, went steadily beneath parasols in one direction. ‘Ladies’ Aid,’ murmured Gilligan. ‘W.C.T.U. maybe.’
‘I think you are becoming misanthropic, Joe.’
Gilligan glanced at her smooth contemplative profile almost on a level with his own.
‘About women? When I say soldiers I don’t mean me. I wasn’t no soldier any more than a man that fixes watches is a watchmaker. And when I say women I don’t mean you.’
She put her arm over his shoulder. It was firm, latent in strength, comforting. He knew that he could embrace her in the same way, that if he wished she would kiss him, frankly and firmly, that her eyelids would never veil her eyes at the touch of his mouth.
What man is for her? he wondered, knowing that after all no man was for her, knowing that she would go through with all physical intimacies, that she would undress to a lover (?) with this same impersonal efficiency. (He should be a — a — he should be a gladiator or a statesman or a victorious general: someone hard and ruthless who would expect nothing from her, of whom she would expect nothing. Like two gods exchanging golden baubles. And I, I am no gladiator nor statesman nor general: I am nothing. Perhaps that’s why I want so much from her.) He put his arm over her shoulders.
Niggers and mules. Afternoon lay
