“Oh,” the other said. “Can you come at once?”
“Yes. Just let me slip on my pants. What’s the trouble? So I shall know what to bring.”
For an instant the other hesitated; this familiar to the doctor too who had seen it before and believed he knew its source: that innate and ineradicable instinct of mankind to attempt to conceal some of the truth even from the doctor or lawyer for whose skill and knowledge they are paying. “She’s bleeding,” he said. “What will your fee—”
But the doctor did not notice this. He was talking to himself: Ah. Yes. Why didn’t I . . . Lungs, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Yes,” he said. “Will you wait here? Or perhaps inside? I wont be but a minute.”
“I’ll wait here,” the other said. But the doctor did not hear that either. He was already running back up the stairs; he trotted into the bedroom where his wife rose on one elbow in the bed and watched him struggle into his trousers, his shadow, cast by the lamp on the low table by the bed, antic on the wall, her shadow also monstrous, gorgonlike from the rigid paper-wrapped twists of gray hair above the gray face above the high-necked night-dress which also looked gray, as if every garment she owned had partaken of that grim iron-color of her implacable and invincible morality which, the doctor was to realise later, was almost omniscient. “Yes,” he said, “bleeding. Probably hemorrhage. Lungs. And why in the world I didn’t—”
“More likely he has cut or shot her,” she said in a cold quiet bitter voice. “Though from the look in her eyes the one time I saw her close I would have said she would be the one to do the cutting and shooting.”
“Nonsense,” he said, hunching into his suspenders. “Nonsense.” Because he was not talking to her now either. “Yes. The fool. To bring her here, of all places. To sealevel. To the Mississippi coast—Do you want me to put out the lamp?”
“Yes. You’ll probably be there a long time if you are going to wait until you are paid.” He blew out the lamp and descended the stairs again behind the torch. His black bag sat on the hall table beside his hat. The man Harry still stood just outside the front door.
“Maybe you better take this now,” he said.
“What?” the doctor said. He paused, looking down, bringing the torch to bear on the single banknote in the other’s extended hand. Even if he has spent nothing, now he will have only fifteen dollars, he thought. “No, later,” he said. “Maybe we had better hurry.” He bustled on ahead, following the torch’s dancing beam, trotting while the other walked, across his own somewhat sheltered yard and through the dividing oleander hedge and so into the full sweep of the unimpeded seawind which thrashed among the unseen palms and hissed in the harsh salt grass of the unkempt other lot; now he could see a dim light in the other house. “Bleeding, hey?” he said. It was overcast; the invisible wind blew strong and steady among the invisible palms, from the invisible sea—a harsh steady sound full of the murmur of surf on the outside barrier islands, the spits and scars of sand bastioned with tossing and shabby pines. “Hemorrhage?”
“What?” the other said. “Hemorrhage?”
“No?” the doctor said. “She’s just coughing a little blood then? Just spitting a little blood when she coughs, eh?”
“Spitting?” the other said. It was the tone, not the words. It was not addressed to the doctor and it was beyond laughter, as if that which it addressed were impervious to laughter; it was not the doctor who stopped; the doctor still trotted onward on his short sedentary legs, behind the jolting torch-beam, toward the dim waiting light, it was the Baptist, the provincial, who seemed to pause while the man, not the doctor now, thought not in shock but in a sort of despairing amazement: Am I to live forever behind a barricade of perennial innocence like a chicken in a pen? He spoke aloud quite carefully; the veil was going now, dissolving now, it was about to part now and now he did not want to see what was behind it; he knew that for the sake of his peace of mind forever afterward he did not dare and he knew that it was too late now and that he could not help himself; he heard his voice ask the question he did not want to ask and get the answer he did not want to hear:
“You say she is bleeding. Where is she bleeding?”
“Where do women bleed?” the other said, cried, in a harsh exasperated voice, not stopping. “I’m no doctor. If I were, do you think I would waste five dollars on you?”
Nor did the doctor hear this either. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I see. Yes.” Now he stopped. He was aware of no cessation of motion since the steady dark wind still blew past him. Because I am at the wrong age for this, he thought. If I were twenty-five I could say, Thank God I am not him because I would know it was only my luck today and that maybe tomorrow or next year it will be me and so I will not need to envy him. And if I were sixty-five I could say, Thank God, I am not him because then I would know I was too old for it to be possible and so it would not do me any good to envy him because he has proof on the body of love and of passion and of life that he is not dead. But now I am forty-eight and I did not think that I deserved this. “Wait,” he said; “wait.” The other paused; they stood facing one another, leaning a little into the dark wind filled with the wild dry sound of the palms.
“I offered to pay you,” the other said. “Isn’t five enough? And if it isn’t, will you give me the name of someone who will come for that and let me use your telephone?”
“Wait,” the doctor said. So Cofer was right, he thought. You are not married. Only why did you have to tell me so? He didn’t say that, of course, he said, “You haven’t . . . You are not . . . What are you?”
The other, taller, leaned in the hard wind, looking down at the doctor with that impatience, that seething restraint. In the black wind the house, the shack, stood, itself invisible, the dim light shaped not by any door or window but rather like a strip of dim and forlorn bunting dingy and rigidly immobile in the wind. “What am I what?” he said. “I’m trying to be a painter. Is that what you mean?”
“A painter? But there is no building, no boom, no development here any more. That died nine years ago. You mean, you came here without any offer of work, any sort of contract at all?”
“I paint pictures,” the other said. “At least, I think I do—Well? Am I to use your phone or not?”
“You paint pictures,” the doctor said; he spoke in that tone of quiet amazement which thirty minutes later and then tomorrow and tomorrow would vacillate among outrage and anger and despair: “Well. She’s probably still bleeding. Come along.” They went on. He entered the house first; even at the moment he realised that he had preceded the other not as a guest, not even as owner, but because he believed now that he alone of the two of them had any right to enter it at all so long as the woman was in it. They were out of the wind now. It merely leaned, black, imponderable and firm, against the door which the man called Harry had closed behind them: and now and at once the doctor smelled again the odor of stale and cooling gumbo. He even knew where it would be; he could almost see it sitting uneaten (They have not even tasted it, he thought.
But why should they? Why in God’s name should they?) on the cold stove since he knew the kitchen well—the broken stove, the spare cooking vessels, the meager collection of broken knives and forks and spoons, the drinking receptacles which had once contained gaudily labelled and machine-made pickle and jam. He knew the entire house well, he owned it, he had built it—the flimsy walls (they were not even tongue-and-groove like the one in which he lived but were of ship-lap, the synthetic joints of which, weathered and warped by the damp salt air, leaked all privacy just as broken socks and trousers do) murmurous with the ghosts of a thousand rented days and nights to which he (though not his wife) had closed his eyes, insisting only that there be always an odd number in any mixed party which stayed there overnight unless the couple were strangers formally professing to be man and wife, as now, even though he knew better and knew that his wife knew better. Because this was it, this the anger and outrage which would alternate with the despair tomorrow and tomorrow: Why did you have to tell me? he thought. The others didn’t tell me, upset me, didn’t bring here what you brought, though I dont know what they might have taken away.
At once he could see the dim lamplight beyond
