He stood near a tree at the corner of the lawn and after a short time he saw something moving shapeless and slow across the faint grass, along a hedge. He strode out boldly and the other saw him and paused, then that one, too, stood erect and came boldly to meet him. Jones joined him, murmuring, ‘Oh, hell,’ and they stood in static dejection, side by side.
‘Well?’ challenged George Farr, at last.
Jones sat down heavily on the sidewalk. ‘Let’s smoke a while,’ he suggested, in that impersonal tone which people sitting up with corpses use.
George Farr sat beside him and Jones held a match to his cigarette, then lit his own pipe. He sighed, clouding his head with an unseen pungency of tobacco. George Farr sighed also, resting his back against a tree. The stars swam on like the masthead lights of squadrons and squadrons on a dark river, going on and on. Darkness and silence and a world turning through darkness towards another day. . . . The bark of the tree was rough, the ground was hard. He wished vaguely that he were fat like Jones, temporarily. . . .
. . . Then, waking, it was about to be dawn. He no longer felt the earth and the tree save when he moved. It seemed to him that his thighs must be flattened like a table-top and that his back had assumed depressions into which the projections of the tree trunk fitted like the locked rims of wheels.
There was a rumour of light eastward, somewhere beyond her house and the room where she lay in the soft familiar intimacy of sleep, like a faintly blown trumpet; soon perspective returned to a mysterious world, and instead of being a huge portentous shadow among lesser shadows, Jones was only a fat young man in baggy tweed, white and pathetic and snoring on his back.
George Farr, waking, saw him so, saw earth stains on him and a faint incandescence of dew. George Farr bore earth stains himself and his tie was a hangman’s knot beneath his ear. The wheel of the world, slowing through the hours of darkness, passed the dead centre point and gained momentum. After a while Jones opened his eyes, groaning. He rose stiffly, stretching and spitting, yawning.
‘Good time to go in, I think,’ he said. George Farr, tasting his own sour mouth, moved and felt little pains, like tiny red ants, running over him. He, too, rose and they stood side by side. They yawned again.
Jones turned fatly, limping a little.
‘Good night,’ he said.
‘Good night.’
The east grew yellow, then red, and day had really come into the world, breaking the slumber of sparrows.
4
But Cecily Saunders was not asleep. Lying on her back in her bed, in her dark room she, too, heard the hushed sounds of night, smelled the sweet scents of spring and dark and growing things: the earth, watching the wheel of the world, the terrible calm, inevitability of life, turning through the hours of darkness, passing its dead centre point and turning faster, drawing the waters of dawn up from the hushed cistern of the east, breaking the slumber of sparrows.
5
‘May I see him,’ she pleaded hysterically, ‘may I? Oh, may I, please?’
Mrs Powers, seeing her face, said: ‘Why, child! What is it? What is it, darling?’
‘Alone, alone. Please. May I? May I?’
‘Of course. What—’
‘Thank you, thank you.’ She sped down the hall and crossed the study like a bird.
‘Donald, Donald! It’s Cecily, sweetheart. Cecily. Don’t you know Cecily?’
‘Cecily,’ he repeated mildly. Then she stopped his mouth with hers, clinging to him.
‘I will marry you, I will, I will. Donald, look at me. But you cannot, you cannot see me, can you? But I will marry you, today, any time: Cecily will marry you, Donald. You cannot see me, can you, Donald? Cecily. Cecily.’
‘Cecily?’ he repeated.
‘Oh, your poor, poor face, your blind, scarred face! But I will marry you. They said I wouldn’t, that I mustn’t, but yes, yes, Donald my dear love!’
Mrs Powers, following her, raised her to her feet, removing her arms. ‘You might hurt him, you know,’ she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
‘JOE.’
‘Whatcher say, LOOT?’
‘I’m going to get married, Joe.’
‘Sure you are, Loot. Some day—’ tapping himself on the chest.
‘What’s that, Joe?’
‘I say, good luck. You got a fine girl.’
‘Cecily . . . Joe?’
‘Hello.’
‘She’ll get used to my face.’
‘You’re damn right. You face is all right. But easy there, don’t knock ’em off. Attaboy,’ as the other lowered his fumbling hand.
‘What do I have to wear ’em for, Joe? Get married as well without ’em, can’t I?’
‘I’ll be damned if I know why they make you wear ’em. I’ll ask Margaret. Here, lemme have ’em,’ he said suddenly removing the glasses. ‘Damn shame, making you keep ’em on. How’s that? Better?’
‘Carry on, Joe.’
2
San Francisco, Cal.
24 April 1919
Margaret Dearest,
I miss you so much. If I could only see each other and talk to each other. I sit in my room and I think you are the only woman for me. Girls are not like you they are so young and dumb you can’t trust them. I hope you are lonely for me like I am just to know you are sweetheart. When I kissed you that day I know you are the only woman for me Margaret.
You cannot trust them. I told her hes Just kidding her he won’t get her a job in the movies. So I sit in my room and outside life goes on just the same though we are thousand miles apart wanting to see you like hell I think of how happy we will be. I haven’t told my mother yet because we have been waiting we ought to tell her I think if you think so.
And she will invite you out here and we can be together all day riding and swimming and dancing and talking to each other. If I can arrange busness affairs I will come for you as soon as I can. It is hell without you I miss you and I love you like hell.
J
3
It had rained the night before but this morning was soft as a breeze. Birds across the lawn parabolic from tree to tree mocked him as he passed lounging and slovenly in his careless unpressed tweeds, and a tree near the corner of the veranda, turning upward its ceaseless white-bellied leaves, was a swirling silver veil stood on end, a fountain arrested forever: carven water.
He saw that black woman in the garden among roses, blowing smoke upon them from her pursed mouth, bending and sniffing above them, and he joined her with slow anticipated malice mentally stripping her straight dark unemphatic dress downward from her straight back over her firm quiet thighs.
Hearing his feet on the gravel, she looked over her shoulder without surprise. Her poised cigarette balanced on its tip a wavering plume of vapour, and Jones said:
‘I have come to weep with you.’
She met his stare, saying nothing. Her other hand blanched upon a solid mosaic of red and green, her repose absorbed all motion from her immediate atmosphere so that the plume of her cigarette became rigid as a pencil, flowering its tip into nothingness.
‘I mean your hard luck, losing your intended,’ he explained.
She raised her cigarette and expelled smoke. He lounged nearer, his expensive jacket, which had evidently had no attention since he bought it, sagging to the thrust of his heavy hands, shaping his fat thighs. His eyes were bold and lazy, clear as a goat’s. She got of him an impression of aped intelligence imposed on an innate viciousness; the cat that walks by himself.
‘Who are your people, Mr Jones?’ she asked after a while.
‘I am the world’s little brother. I probably have a bar sinister in my ‘scrutcheon. In spite of me, my libido seems to be a complex regarding decency.’
What does that mean? she wondered. ‘What is your escutcheon, then?’
‘One newspaper-wrapped bundle couchant and rampant, one doorstep stone, on a field noir and damned froid. Device: Quand mangerai-je?’
‘Oh. A foundling.’ She smoked again.
‘I believe that is the term. It is too bad we are contemporary: you might have found the thing yourself. I would not have thrown you down.’
‘Thrown me down?’
‘You can never tell just exactly how dead these soldiers are, can you? You think you have him and then the devil reveals as much idiocy as a normal sane person, doesn’t he?’
She skilfully pinched the coal from her cigarette end and flipped the stub in a white twinkling arc, grinding the coal under her toe. ‘If that was an implied compliment—’
‘Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism — unless the criticized is not within ear-shot.’
‘It seems to me that is a rather precarious doctrine for one who is — if you will pardon me — not exactly a combative sort.’
‘Combative?’
‘Well, a fighting man, then. I can’t imagine you lasting very long in an encounter with — say Mr Gilligan.’
‘Does that imply that you have taken Mr Gilligan as a — protector?’
‘No more than it implies that I expect compliments from you. For all your intelligence, you seem to have acquired next to no skill with women.’
Jones, remote and yellowly
