He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her, other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where he might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.
‘Ah, Mr Jones,’ he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, ‘good morning.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.
‘You are out for a walk?’
‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.
Emmy told Mrs Mahon of this with scornful contempt.
‘Why don’t you tell Joe, or let me tell him?’ Mrs Mahon asked.
Emmy sniffed with capable independence. ‘About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting.’
‘And I bet you are good at it, too.’
And Emmy said: ‘I guess I am.’
5
April had become May.
Fair days, and wet days in which rain ran with silver lances over the lawn, in which rain dripped leaf to leaf while birds still sang in the hushed damp greenness under the trees, and made love and married and built houses and still sang; in which rain grew soft as the grief of a young girl grieving for the sake of grief.
Mahon hardly ever rose now. They had got him a movable bed and upon this he lay, sometimes in the house, sometimes on the veranda where the wistaria inverted its cool lilac flame, while Gilligan read to him. They had done with Rome and they now swam through the tedious charm of Rousseau’s Confessions to Gilligan’s hushed childish delight.
Kind neighbours came to inquire; the specialist from Atlanta came once by request and once on his own initiative, making a friendly call and addressing Gilligan meticulously as ‘Doctor’, spent the afternoon chatting with them, and went away. Mrs Mahon and he liked each other immensely. Dr Gary called once or twice and insulted them all and went away nattily smoking his slender rolled cigarettes. Mrs Mahon and he did not like each other at all. The rector grew greyer and quieter, neither happy nor unhappy, neither protesting nor resigned.
‘Wait until next month. He will be stronger then. This is a trying month for invalids. Don’t you think so?’ he asked his daughter-in-law.
‘Yes,’ she would tell him, looking out at the green world, the sweet, sweet spring, ‘yes, yes.’
6
It was a postcard. You buy them for a penny, stamp and all. The post office furnishes writing material free.
Got your letter. Will write later. Remember me to Gilligan and Lieut. Mahon.
Julian L.
7
Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon.
Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested passionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A Negro woman passing crooned a religious song, mellow and passionless and sad.
They sat talking quietly. The grass was becoming grey with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the dusk.
‘What in the world—’ began Mrs Mahon, then they saw Jones, like a fat satyr, leaping after her, hopelessly distanced. When he saw them he slowed immediately and lounged up to them slovenly as ever. His yellow eyes were calmly opaque but she could see the heave of his breathing. Convulsed with laughter she at last found her voice.
‘Good evening, Mr Jones.’
‘Say,’ said Gilligan with interest, ‘what was you—’
‘Hush, Joe,’ Mrs Mahon told him. Jones’s eyes, clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s, roved between them.
‘Good evening, Mr Jones.’ The rector became abruptly aware of his presence. ‘Walking again, eh?’
‘Running,’ Gilligan corrected and the rector repeated Eh? looking from Jones to Gilligan.
Mrs Mahon indicated a chair. ‘Sit down, Mr Jones. You must be rather fatigued, I imagine.’
Jones stared towards the house, tore his eyes away, and sat down. The canvas sagged under him and he rose and spun his chair so as to face the dreaming façade of the rectory. He sat again.
‘Say,’ Gilligan asked him, ‘what was you doing, anyway?’
Jones eyes him briefly, heavily. ‘Running,’ he snapped, turning his eyes again to the dark house.
‘Running?’ the divine repeated.
‘I know; I seen that much from here. What was you running for, I asked.’
‘Reducing, perhaps,’ Mrs Mahon remarked, with quiet malice.
Jones turned his yellow stare upon her. Twilight was gathering swiftly. He was a fat and shapeless mass palely tweeded. ‘Reducing, yes. But not to marriage.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,’ she told him. ‘A courtship like that will soon reduce you to anything, almost.’
‘Yeh,’ Gilligan amended, ‘if that’s the only way you got to get a wife you’d better pick out another one besides Emmy. You’ll be a shadow time you catch her. That is,’ he added, ‘if you aim to do your courting on foot.’
‘What’s this?’ the rector asked.
‘Perhaps Mr Jones was merely preparing to write a poem. Living it first, you know,’ Mrs Mahon offered. Jones looked at her sharply. ‘Atalanta,’ she suggested in the dusk.
‘Atlanta?’ repeated Gilligan,’ what—’
‘Try an apple next time, Mr Jones,’ she advised.
‘Or a handful of salt, Mr Jones,’ added Gilligan in a thin falsetto. Then in his natural voice. ‘But what’s Atlanta got to—’
‘Or a cherry, Mr Gilligan,’ said Jones viciously. ‘But then, I am not God, you know.’
‘Shut your mouth, fellow,’ Gilligan told him roughly.
‘What’s this?’ the rector repeated. Jones turned to him heavily explanatory:
‘It means, sir, that Mr Gilligan is under the impression that his wit is of as much importance to me as my actions are to him.’
‘Not me,’ denied Gilligan with warmth. ‘You and me don’t have the same thoughts about anything, fellow.’
‘Why shouldn’t they be?’ the rector asked ‘It is but natural to believe that one’s actions and thoughts are as important to others as they are to oneself, is it not?’
Gilligan gave this his entire attention. It was getting above his head, beyond his depth. But Jones was something tangible, and he had already chosen Jones for his own.
‘Naturally,’ agreed Jones with patronage. ‘There was kinship between the human instruments of all action and thought and emotion. Napoleon thought that his actions were important, Swift thought his emotions were important, Savonarola thought his beliefs were important. And they were. But we are discussing Mr Gilligan.’
‘Say—’ began Gilligan.
‘Very apt, Mr Jones,’ murmured Mrs Mahon above the suggested triangle of her cuffs and collar. ‘A soldier, a priest, and a dyspeptic.’
‘Say,’ Gilligan repeated, ‘who’s swift, anyway? I kind of got bogged up back there.’
‘Mr Jones is, according to his own statement. You are Napoleon, Joe.’
‘Him? Not quite swift enough to get himself a girl, though. The way he was gaining on Emmy — You ought to have a bicycle,’ he suggested.
‘There’s your answer, Mr Jones,’ the rector told him. Jones looked towards Gilligan’s fading figure in disgust, like that of a swordsman who has been disarmed by a peasant with a pitchfork.
‘That’s what association with the clergy does for you,’ he said crassly.
‘What is it?’ Gilligan asked. ‘What did I say wrong?’
Mrs Mahon leaned over and squeezed his arm. ‘You didn’t say anything wrong, Joe. You were grand.’
Jones glowered sullenly in the dusk. ‘By the way,’ he said, suddenly, ‘how is your husband today?’
‘Just the same, thank you.’
‘Stands wedded life as well as can be expected, does he?’ She ignored this. Gilligan watched him in leashed anticipation. He continued: ‘That’s too bad. You had expected great things from marriage, hadn’t you? Sort of a miraculous rejuvenation?’
‘Shut up, fellow,’ Gilligan told him. ‘Whatcher mean, anyway?’
‘Nothing, Mr Galahad, nothing at all. I merely made a civil inquiry. . . . Shows that when a man marries, his troubles continue, doesn’t it?’
‘Then you oughtn’t to have no worries about your troubles,’ Gilligan told him savagely.
‘What?’
‘I mean, if you don’t have no better luck than you have twice that I know of—’
‘He has a good excuse for one failure, Joe,’ Mrs Mahon said.
They both looked towards her voice. The sky was bowled with a still disseminated light that cast no shadow and branches of trees were rigid as coral in a mellow tideless sea. ‘Mr Jones says that to make love to Miss Saunders would be epicene.’
‘Epicene? What’s that?’
‘Shall I tell him, Mr Jones? or will you?’
‘Certainly. You intend to, anyway, don’t you?’
‘Epicene is something you want and can’t get, Joe.’
Jones rose viciously. ‘If you will allow me, I’ll retire, I think,’ he said savagely. ‘Good evening.’
‘Sure,’ agreed Gilligan with alacrity, rising also. ‘I’ll see Mr Jones to the gate. He might get mixed up and head for the kitchen by mistake. Emmy might be one of them epicenes, too.’
Without seeming to hurry Jones faded briskly away. Gilligan sprang after him. Jones, sensing him, whirled in the dusk and Gilligan leaned upon him.
‘For the good of your soul,’ Gilligan told him joyously. ‘You might say that’s what running with preachers does for you, mightn’t you?’ he
