‘But I had rather go with you.’
‘But, dear heart, what good will that do? We are going to take him home, and he is sick. Don’t you see, darling, we can’t do anything until we get him settled, and that you would only be in the way?’
‘In the way?’ he repeated with sharp pain.
‘You know what I mean. We can’t have anything to think about until we get him home, don’t you see?’
‘But you aren’t in love with him?’
‘I swear I’m not. Does that satisfy you?’
‘Then, are you in love with me?’
She drew his face against her knees again. ‘You sweet child,’ she said; ‘of course I won’t tell you — yet.’
And he had to be satisfied with this. They held each other in silence for a time. ‘How good you smell,’ remarked Cadet Lowe at last.
She moved. ‘Come up here by me,’ she commanded, and when he was beside her she took his face in her hands and kissed him. He put his arms around her, and she drew his head between her breasts. After a while she stroked his hair and spoke.
‘Now, are you going home at once?’
‘Must I?’ he asked vacuously.
‘You must,’ she answered. ‘Today. Wire her at once. And I will give you a note to her.’
‘Oh, hell, you know what she’ll say.’
‘Of course I do. You haven’t any sisters and brothers, have you?’
‘No,’ he said in surprise. She moved and he sensed the fact that she desired to be released. He sat up. ‘How did you know?’ he asked in surprise.
‘I just guessed. But you will go, won’t you? Promise.’
‘Well, I will, then. But I will come back to you.’
‘Of course you will. I will expect you. Kiss me.’
She offered her face coolly and he kissed her as she wished: coldly, remotely. She put her hands on his cheeks. ‘Dear boy,’ she said, kissing him again, as his mother kissed him.
‘Say, that’s no way for engaged people to kiss,’ he objected.
‘How do engaged people kiss?’ she asked. He put his arms around her, feeling her shoulder-blades, and drew her mouth against his with the technique he had learned. She suffered his kiss a moment, then thrust him away.
‘Is that how engaged people kiss?’ she asked, laughing. ‘I like this better.’ She took his face in her palms and touched his mouth briefly and coolly. ‘Now swear you’ll wire your mother at once.’
‘But will you write to me?’
‘Surely. But swear you will go today, in spite of what Gilligan may tell you.’
‘I swear,’ he answered, looking at her mouth. ‘Can’t I kiss you again?’
‘When we are married,’ she said, and he knew he was being dismissed. Thinking, knowing, that she was watching him, he crossed the room with an air, not looking back.
Here were yet Gilligan and the officer. Mahon said:
‘Morning, old chap.’
Gilligan looked at Lowe’s belligerent front from a quizzical reserve of sardonic amusement.
‘Made a conquest, hey, ace?’
‘Go to hell,’ replied Lowe. ‘Where’s that bottle? I’m going home today.’
‘Here she is, General. Drink deep. Going home?’ he repeated. ‘So are we, hey, Loot?’
CHAPTER TWO
1
JONES, JANUARIUS JONES, born of whom he knew and cared not, becoming Jones alphabetically, January through a conjunction of calendar and biology, Januarius through the perverse conjunction of his own star and the compulsion of food and clothing — Januarius Jones baggy in grey tweed, being lately a fellow of Latin in a small college, leaned upon a gate of iron grill-work breaking a levee of green and embryonically starred honeysuckle, watching April busy in a hyacinth bed.
Dew was on the grass and bees broke apple bloom in the morning sun while swallows were like plucked strings against a pale windy sky. A face regarded him across a suspended trowel and the metal clasps of crossed suspenders made a cheerful glittering.
The rector said: ‘Good morning, young man.’ His shining dome was friendly against an ivy-covered wall above which the consummate grace of a spire and a gilded cross seemed to arc across motionless young clouds.
Januarius Jones, caught in the spire’s illusion of slow ruin, murmured: ‘Watch it fall, sir.’ The sun was full on his young round face.
The horticulturist regarded him with benevolent curiosity. ‘Fall? Ah, you see an aeroplane,’ he stated. ‘My son was in that service during the war.’ He became gigantic in black trousers and broken shoes. ‘A beautiful day for flying,’ he said from beneath his cupped hand. ‘Where do you see it?’
‘No, sir,’ replied Jones, ‘no aeroplane, sir. I referred in a fit of unpardonable detachment to your spire. It was ever my childish delight to stand beneath a spire while clouds are moving overhead. The illusion of slow falling is perfect. Have you ever experienced this, sir?’
‘To be sure I have, though it has been — let me see — more years than I care to remember. But one of my cloth is prone to allow his soul to atrophy in his zeal for the welfare of other souls that—’
‘ — that not only do not deserve salvation, but that do not particularly desire it,’ finished Jones.
The rector promptly rebuked him. Sparrows were delirious in ivy and the rambling façade of the rectory was a dream in jonquils and clipped sward. There should be children here, thought Jones. He said:
‘I must humbly beg your pardon for my flippancy, Doctor. I assure you that I — ah — took advantage of the situation without any ulterior motive whatever.’
‘I understand that, dear boy. My rebuke was tendered in the same spirit. There are certain conventions which we must observe in this world; one of them being an outward deference to that cloth which I unworthily, perhaps, wear. And I have found this particularly incumbent upon us of the — what shall I say — ?’
‘Integer vitae scelerisque purus
non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu
nec venenatis gravida sagittis,
Fusce, pharetra—’
began Jones. The rector chimed in:
‘ — sive per Syrtis iter aestuosas
sive facturus per inhospitalem
Causasum vel quae loca fabulosus
lambit Hydaspes,’
they concluded in galloping duet and stood in the ensuing silence regarding each other with genial enthusiasm.
‘But come, come,’ cried the rector. His eyes were pleasant. ‘Shall I let the stranger languish without my gates?’ The grilled iron swung open and his earthy hand was heavy on Jones’s shoulder. ‘Come let us try the spire.’
The grass was good. A myriad bees vacillated between clover and apple bloom, apple bloom and clover, and from the Gothic mass of the church the spire rose, a prayer imperishable in bronze, immaculate in its illusion of slow ruin across motionless young clouds.
‘My one sincere parishioner,’ murmured the divine. Sunlight was a windy golden plume about his bald head, and Januarius Jones’s face was a round mirror before which fauns and nymphs might have wantoned when the world was young.
‘Parishioner, did I say? It is more than that: it is by such as this that man may approach nearest to God. And how few will believe this! How few, how few!’ He stared unblinking into the sun-filled sky: drowned in his eyes was a despair long since grown cool and quiet.
‘That is very true, sir. But we of this age believe that he who may be approached informally, without the intercession of an office-boy of some sort, is not worth the approaching. We purchase our salvation as we do our real estate. Our God,’ continued Jones, ‘need not be compassionate, he need not be very intelligent. But he must have dignity.’
The rector raised his great dirty hand. ‘No, no. You do them injustice. But who has ever found justice in youth, or any of those tiresome virtues with which we coddle and cradle our hardening arteries and souls? Only the ageing need conventions and laws to aggregate to themselves some of the beauty of this world. Without laws the young would reave us of it as corsairs of old combed the blue seas.’
The rector was silent a while. The intermittent shadows of young leaves were bird cries made visible and sparrows in ivy were flecks of sunlight become vocal. The rector continued:
‘Had I the arranging of this world I should establish a certain point, say at about the age of thirty, upon reaching which a man would be automatically relegated to a plane where his mind would no longer be troubled with the futile recollection of temptations he had resisted and of beauty he had failed to garner to himself.
It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.’
Jones, wondering what temptations he had ever resisted and then recalling the women he might have seduced and hadn’t, said: ‘And then what? What would the people who have been unlucky enough to reach thirty do?’
‘On this plane there would be no troubling physical things such as sunlight and space and birds in the trees — but only unimportant things such as physical comfort: eating and sleeping and procreation.’
What more could you want? thought Jones. Here was a swell place. A man could very well spend all his time eating and sleeping and procreating, Jones believed. He rather wished the rector (or anyone who could imagine a world consisting solely of food and sleep and women) had had the creating of things and that he, Jones, could be forever thirty-one years of age. The rector, though, seemed to hold different opinions.
‘What would they do to pass the time?’ asked Jones for the sake of argument, wondering what the others would do to pass the time, what with eating and sleeping and fornication
