If I dont hear by the tenth of each month, I’m going to give the detective the word. And no lies, see? No lies.” He turned, he did not even look at Wilbourne, he merely jerked his head toward the end of the car. “I want to talk to you,” he said in that seething repressed voice. “Come on.” When they were half way down the car the train began to move, Wilbourne expected the other to run for the exit, he thought again, He is suffering; even circumstance, a trivial railroad time table, is making comedy of that tragedy which he must play to the bitter end or cease to breathe. But the other did not even hurry. He went steadily on and swung aside the curtain to the smoking room and waited for Wilbourne to enter.
He seemed to read the temporary surprise in Wilbourne’s face. “I’ve got a ticket as far as Hammond,” he said harshly. “Dont you worry about me.” The unspoken question seemed to set him off; Wilbourne could almost see him struggling physically to keep his voice down. “Worry about yourself, see? Yourself. Or by God—” Now he did check the voice again, holding it on some sort of curb like a horse, yet forcing it on; he took a wallet from his pocket. “If you ever—” he said. “If you dare—”
He cant say it, Wilbourne thought. He cant even bear to say it. “If I’m not good to her, gentle with her. Is that what you mean?”
“I’ll know it,” Rittenmeyer said. “If I dont hear from her by the tenth of every month, I am going to give the detective the word to go ahead. And I’ll know lies too, see? See?” He was trembling, the impeccable face suffused beneath the impeccable hair which resembled a wig. “She’s got a hundred and twenty-five dollars of her own, she wouldn’t take more. But damn that, she wouldn’t use that, anyway. She wont have it by the time she came to need it enough to use it. So here.” He removed from the wallet a check and gave it to Wilbourne. It was a cashier’s check for three hundred dollars, payable to the Pullman Company of America and indorsed in the corner in red ink: For one railroad ticket to New Orleans, Louisiana.
“I was going to do that with some of my money,” Wilbourne said.
“Damn that too,” the other said. “And it’s for the ticket. If it is ever cashed and returned to the bank and no ticket bought with it, I’ll have you arrested for fraud. See? I’ll know.”
“You mean, you want her to come back? You will take her back?” But he did not need to look at the other’s face; he said quickly, “I’m sorry. I retract that. That’s more than any man can bear to answer.”
“God,” the other said; “God. I ought to sock you.” He added, in a tone of incredulous amazement, “Why dont I? Can you tell me? Aint a doctor, any doctor, supposed to be an authority on human glands?”
Then suddenly Wilbourne heard his own voice speaking out of an amazed and quiet incredulity; it seemed to him that they both stood now, aligned, embattled and doomed and lost, before the entire female principle: “I dont know. Maybe it would make you feel better.” But the moment passed. Rittenmeyer turned and produced a cigarette from his coat and fumbled a match from the box attached to the wall. Wilbourne watched him—the trim back; he caught himself on the point of asking if the other wished him to stay and keep him company until the train reached Hammond. But again Rittenmeyer seemed to read his mind.
“Go on,” he said. “Get to hell out of here and let me alone.” Wilbourne left him standing facing the window and returned to his seat. Charlotte did not look up, she sat motionless, looking out the window, an unlighted cigarette in her fingers. Now they were running beside the larger lake, soon they would begin to cross the trestle between Maurepas and Pontchartrain. Now the whistle of the engine drifted back, the train slowed as beneath the sound of it came the hollow reverberation of the trestle. Water spread on either hand now, swamp-bound and horizonless, lined with rotting wooden jetties to which small dingy boats were tied.
“I love water,” she said. “That’s where to die. Not in the hot air, above the hot ground, to wait hours for your blood to get cool enough to let you sleep and even weeks for your hair to stop growing. The water, the cool, to cool you quick so you can sleep, to wash out of your brain and out of your eyes and out of your blood all you ever saw and thought and felt and wanted and denied. He’s in the smoking room, isn’t he? Can I go back and speak to him a minute?”
“Can you go?—”
“Hammond is the next station.”
Why, he is your husband, he was about to say but caught himself. “It’s the men’s room,” he said. “Maybe I had better—” But she had already risen and passed him; he thought, If she stops and looks back at me it will mean she is thinking, ‘Later I can always know that at least I told him good-bye’ and she did stop and they looked at each other, then she went on. Now the water slid away, the sound of the trestle ceased, the engine whistled again and the train regained speed, and almost at once they were running through an outskirt of shabby houses which would be Hammond, and he ceased to look out the window while the train stopped and stood and then moved again; he did not even have time to rise as she slipped past him and into the seat. “So you came back,” he said.
“You didn’t think I was. Neither did I.”
“But you did.”
“Only it’s not finished. If he were to get back on the train, with a ticket to Slidell—” She turned, staring at him though she did not touch him. “It’s not finished. It will have to be cut.”
“Cut?”
“ ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, lad, and be whole.’ That’s it. Whole. Wholly lost—something. I’ve got to cut it. That drawing room back there was empty. Find the conductor and engage it to Jackson.”
“Drawing room? But that will cost—”
“You fool!” she said. She doesn’t love me now, he thought. She doesn’t love anything now. She spoke in a tense whisper, beating on his knee with her fist. “You fool!” She rose.
“Wait,” he said, catching her wrist. “I’ll do it.” He found the conductor in the vestibule at the end of the car; he was not gone long. “All right,” he said. She rose at once, taking up her bag and coat. “The porter will be here—” he said. She didn’t pause. “Let me have it,” he said, taking the bag from her and then his own and followed her down the aisle. Later he was to recall that interminable walk between the filled seats where people sat with nothing else to do but watch them pass, and it seemed to him that everyone in the car must have known their history, that they must have disseminated an aura of unsanctity and disaster like a smell. They entered the drawing room.
“Lock the door,” she said. He set the bags down and locked the door. He had never been in a drawing room before and he fumbled at the lock for an appreciable time. When he turned she had removed her dress: it lay in a wadded circle about her feet and she stood in the scant feminine underwear of 1937, her hands over her face. Then she removed her hands and he knew it was neither shame nor modesty, he had not expected that, and he saw it was not tears. Then she stepped out of the dress and came and began to unknot his tie, pushing aside his own suddenly clumsy fingers.
Chapter IV Old Man
When the belated and streaming dawn broke the two convicts, along with twenty others, were in a truck. A trusty drove, two armed guards sat in the cab with him. Inside the high, stall-like topless body the convicts stood, packed like matches in an upright box or like the pencil-shaped ranks of cordite in a shell, shackled by the ankles to a single chain which wove among the motionless feet and swaying legs and a clutter of picks and shovels among which they stood, and was riveted by both ends to the steel body of the truck.
Then and without warning they saw the flood about which the