So casually, so impersonally; as if Richard Powers, with whom she had spent three days, were one man and Richard Powers commanding a platoon in the —— Division were another.
And she being young must again know all the terror of parting, of that passionate desire to cling to something concrete in a dark world, in spite of war departments. He had not even got her letter! This in some way seemed the infidelity: having him die still believing in her, bored though they both probably were.
She turned feeling sheets like water, warming by her bodily heat, upon her legs.
Oh, damn, damn. What a rotten trick you played on me. She recalled those nights during which they had tried to eradicate tomorrows from the world. Two rotten tricks, she thought. Anyway, I know what I’ll do with the insurance, she added, wondering what Dick thought about it — if he did know or care.
Her shoulder rounded upward, into her vision, the indication of her covered turning body swelled and died away towards the foot of the bed: she lay staring down the tunnel of her room, watching the impalpable angles of furniture, feeling through plastered smug walls a rumour of spring outside. The airshaft was filled with a prophecy of April come again into the world.
Like a heedless idiot into a world that had forgotten spring. The white connecting door took the vague indication of a transom and held it in a mute and luminous plane, and obeying an impulse she rose and slipped on a dressing-gown.
The door opened quietly under her hand. The room, like hers, was a suggestion of furniture, identically vague. She could hear Mahon’s breathing and she found a light switch with her fingers. Under his scarred brow he slept, the light full and sudden on his closed eyes did not disturb him. And she knew in an instinctive flash what was wrong with him, why his motions were hesitating, ineffectual.
He’s going blind, she said, bending over him. He slept and after a while there were sounds without the door. She straightened up swiftly and the noises ceased. Then the door opened to a blundering key and Gilligan entered supporting Cadet Lowe, glassy-eyed and quite drunk.
Gilligan, standing his lax companion upright, said:
‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’
Lowe muttered wetly and Gilligan continued:
‘Look at this lonely mariner I got here. Sail on, O proud and lonely,’ he told his attached and aimless burden. Cadet Lowe muttered again, not intelligible. His eyes were like two oysters.
‘Huh?’ asked Gilligan. ‘Come on, be a man: speak to the nice lady.’
Cadet Lowe repeated himself liquidly and she whispered: ‘Shhh: be quiet.’
‘Oh,’ said Gilligan with surprise, ‘Loot’s asleep, huh? What’s he want to sleep for, this time of day?’
Lowe with quenchless optimism essayed speech again and Gilligan, comprehending, said:
‘That’s what you want, is it? Why couldn’t you come out like a man and say it? Wants to go to bed, for some reason,’ he explained to Mrs Powers.
‘That’s where he belongs,’ she said; and Gilligan with alcoholic care led his companion to the other bed and with the exaggerated caution of the inebriate laid him upon it. Lowe drawing his knees up sighed and turn his back to them, but Gilligan dragging at his legs removed his puttees and shoes, taking each shoe in both hands and placing it on a table. She leaned against the foot of Mahon’s bed, fitting her long thigh to the hard rail, until he had finished.
At last Lowe, freed of his shoes, turned sighing to the wall and she said:
‘How drunk are you, Joe?’
‘Not very, ma’am. What’s wrong? Loot need something?’
Mahon slept and Cadet Lowe immediately slept.
‘I want to talk to you, Joe. About him,’ she added quickly, feeling Gilligan’s stare. ‘Can you listen or had you rather go to bed and talk it over in the morning?’
Gilligan, focusing his eyes, answered:
‘Why, now suits me. Always oblige a lady.’
Making her decision suddenly she said:
‘Come in my room then.’
‘Sure: lemme get my bottle and I’m your man.’
She returned to her room while he sought his bottle and when he joined her she was sitting on her bed, clasping her knees, wrapped in a blanket Gilligan drew up a chair.
‘Joe, do you know he’s going blind?’ she said abruptly.
After a time her face became a human face and holding it in his vision he said:
‘I know more than that. He’s going to die.’
‘Die?’
‘Yes, ma’am. If I ever seen death in a man’s face, it’s in his. Goddam this world,’ he burst out suddenly.
‘Shhh!’ she whispered.
‘That’s right, I forgot,’ he said swiftly.
She clasped her knees, huddled beneath the blanket, changing the position of her body as it became cramped, feeling the wooden head board of the bed, wondering why there were not iron beds, wondering why everything was as it was — iron beds, why you deliberately took certain people to break your intimacy, why these people died, why you yet took others. . . . Will my death be like this: fretting and exasperating? Am I cold by nature, or have I spent all my emotional coppers, that I don’t seem to feel things like others? Dick, Dick. Ugly and dead.
Gilligan sat brittlely in his chair, focusing his eyes with an effort, having those instruments of vision evade him, slimy as broken eggs. Lights completing a circle, an orbit; she with two faces sitting on two beds, clasping four arms around her knees. . . .
Why can’t a man be very happy or very unhappy? It’s only a sort of pale mixture of the two. Like beer when you want a shot — or a drink of water. Neither one nor the other.
She moved and drew the blanket closer about her. Spring in an airshaft, the rumour of spring; but in the room steam heat suggested winter, dying away.
‘Let’s have a drink, Joe.’
He rose careful and brittle, and walking with meticulous deliberation he fetched a carafe and glasses. She drew a small table near them and Gilligan prepared two drinks. She drank and set the glass down. He lit a cigarette for her.
‘It’s a rotten old world, Joe.’
‘You damn right. And dying ain’t the hair of it.’
‘Dying?’
‘In this case, I mean. Trouble is, he probably won’t die soon enough.’
‘Not die soon enough?’
Gilligan drained his glass. ‘I got the low down on him, see. He’s got a girl at home: folks got ’em engaged when they was young, before he went off to war. And do you know what she’s going to do when she sees his face?’ he asked, staring at her. At last her two faces became one face and her hair was black. Her mouth was like a scar.
‘Oh, no, Joe. She wouldn’t do that.’ She sat up. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and she replaced it, watching him intently.
Gilligan breaking the orbit of visible things by an effort of will said:
‘Don’t you kid yourself. I’ve seen her picture. And the last letter he had from her.’
‘He didn’t show them to you!’ she said quickly.
‘That’s all right about that. I seen ’em.’
‘Joe. You didn’t go through his things?’
‘Hell, ma’am, ain’t I and you trying to help him? Suppose I did do something that ain’t exactly according to holy Hoyle: you know damn well that I can help him — if I don’t let a whole lot of don’ts stop me. And if I know I’m right there ain’t any don’ts or anything else going to stop me.’
She looked at him and he hurried on:
‘I mean, you and I know what to do for him, but if you are always letting a gentleman don’t do this and a gentleman don’t do that interfere, you can’t help him. Do you see?’
‘But what makes you so sure she will turn him down?’
‘Why, I tell you I seen that letter: all the old bunk about knights of the air and the romance of battle, that even the fat crying ones outgrow soon as the excitement is over and uniforms and being wounded ain’t only not stylish no more, but it is troublesome.’
‘But aren’t you taking a lot for granted, not to have seen her, even?’
‘I’ve seen that photograph: one of them flighty-looking pretty ones with lots of hair. Just the sort would have got herself engaged to him.’
‘How do you know it is still on? Perhaps she has forgotten him. And he probably doesn’t remember her, you know.’
‘That ain’t it. If he don’t remember her he’s all right. But if he will know his folks he will want to believe that something in his world ain’t turned upside down.’
They were silent a while, then Gilligan said: ‘I wish I could have knowed him before. He’s the kind of a son I would have liked to have.’ He finished his drink.
‘Joe, how old are you?’
‘Thirty-two, ma’am.’
‘How did you ever learn so much about us?’ she asked with interest, watching him.
He grinned briefly. ‘It ain’t knowing, it’s just saying things. I think I done it through practice. By talking so much,’ he replied with sardonic humour. ‘I talk so much I got to say the right thing sooner or later. You don’t talk much, yourself.’
‘Not much,’ she agreed. She moved carelessly and the blanket slipped entirely, exposing her thin nightdress; raising her arms and twisting her body to replace it her long shank was revealed and her turning ankle and her bare foot.
Gilligan without moving said: ‘Ma’am, let’s get married.’
She huddled quickly
