II
I
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 gray tweed, being lately a fellow of Latin in a small college, leaned upon a gate of iron grillwork 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 own 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 most 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 sagittas,
Fusce, pharetra—”
began Jones. The rector chimed in:
“—sive per Syrtis iter aestuosas
sive facturus per inhospitalem
Causasum vel quae loac fabulosas
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’ 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’ 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 taken from them.
“Half of them would manufacture objects and another portion would coin gold and silver with which to purchase these objects. Of course, there would be storage places for the coins and objects, thus providing employment for some of the people. Others naturally would have to till the soil.”
“But how would you finally dispose of the coins and objects? After a while you would have a single vast museum and a bank, both filled with useless and unnecessary things. And that is already the curse of our civilization—Things, Possessions, to which we are slaves, which require us to either labor honestly at least eight hours a day or do something illegal so as to keep them painted or dressed in the latest mode or filled with whisky or gasoline.”
“Quite true. And this would remind us too sorely of the world as it is. Needless to say, I have provided for both of these contingencies. The coins might be reduced again to bullion and coined over, and”—the reverend man looked at Jones in ecstasy—“the housewives could use the objects for fuel with which to cook food.”
Old fool, thought Jones, saying: “Marvellous, magnificent! You are a man after my own heart, Doctor.”
The rector regarded Jones kindly. “Ah, boy, there is nothing after youth’s own heart: youth has no heart.”
“But, Doctor. This borders on lese-majesty. I thought we had declared a truce regarding each other’s cloth.”
Shadows moved as the sun moved, a branch dappled the rector’s brow: a laureled Jove.
“What is your cloth?”
“Why—” began Jones.
“It is the diaper still, dear boy. But forgive me,” he added quickly on seeing Jones’ face. His arm was heavy and solid as an oak branch across Jones’ shoulder. “Tell me, what do you consider the most admirable of virtues?”
Jones was placated. “Sincere arrogance,” he returned promptly. The rector’s great laugh boomed like bells in the sunlight, sent the sparrows like gusty leaves whirling.
“Shall we be friends once more, then? Come, I will make a concession: I will show you my flowers. You are young enough to appreciate them without feeling called upon to comment.”
The garden was worth seeing. An avenue of roses bordered a graveled path which passed from sunlight beneath two overarching oaks. Beyond the oaks, against a wall of poplars in a restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim, vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would soon be lilies like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos. Upon a lattice wall wistaria would soon burn in slow inverted lilac flame, and following it they came lastly upon a single rose bush. The branches were huge and knotted with age, heavy and dark as a bronze pedestal, crowned with pale impermanent gold. The divine’s hands lingered upon it with soft passion.
“Now, this,” he said, “is my son and my daughter, the wife of my bosom and the bread of my belly: it is my right hand and my left hand. Many is the night I have stood beside it here after having moved the wrappings too soon, burning newspapers to keep the frost out. Once I recall I was in a neighboring town attending a conference. The weather—it was March—had been most auspicious and I had removed the covering.
“The tips were already swelling. Ah, my boy, no young man ever awaited the coming of his mistress with more impatience than do I await the first bloom on this bush. (Who was the old pagan who kept his Byzantine goblet at his bedside and slowly wore away the rim kissing it? there is an analogy.) … But what was I saying?—ah, yes. So I left the bush uncovered against my better judgment and repaired to the conference. The weather continued perfect until the last day, then the weather reports predicted a change. The bishop was to be present; I ascertained that I could not reach home by rail and return in time. At last I engaged a livery man to drive me home.
“The sky was becoming overcast, it was already turning colder. And then, three miles from home, we came upon a stream and found the bridge gone. After some shouting we attracted the attention of a man plowing across the stream and he came over to us in a skiff. I engaged my driver to await me, was ferried across, walked home and covered my rose, walked back to the stream and returned in time. And that night”—the rector beamed upon Januarius Jones—“snow fell!”
Jones fatly supine on gracious grass, his eyes closed against the sun, stuffing his pipe: “This rose has almost made history. You have had the bush for some time, have you not? One does become attached to things one has long known.” Januarius Jones was not particularly interested in flowers.
“I have a better reason than that. In this bush is imprisoned a part of my youth, as wine is imprisoned in a wine jar. But with this difference: my wine jar always renews itself.”
“Oh,” remarked Jones, despairing, “there is a story here, then.”
“Yes, dear boy. Rather a long story. But you are not comfortable lying there.”
“Who ever is completely comfortable,” Jones rushed into the breach, “unless he be asleep? It is the fatigue caused by man’s inevitable contact with the earth which bears him, be he sitting, standing or lying, which keeps his mind in a continual fret over futilities. If a man, if a single man, could be freed for a moment from the forces of gravity, concentrating his weight upon that point of his body which touches the earth, what would he not do? He would be a god, the lord of life, causing the high gods to tremble on their thrones: he would thunder at the very gates of infinity like a mailed knight. As it is, he must ever have behind his mind a dull wonder how anything composed of fire and air and water and omnipotence in equal parts can be so damn hard.”
“That is true. Man cannot remain in one position long enough to really think. But about the rose bush—”
“Regard the buzzard,” interrupted Jones with enthusiasm, fighting for time, “supported by air alone: what dignity, what singleness of purpose! What cares he whether or not Smith is governor? What cares he that the sovereign people annually commission comparative strangers about whom nothing is known save that they have no inclination toward perspiration, to meddle with impunity in the affairs of the sovereign people?”
“But, my dear boy, this borders on anarchism.”
“Anarchism? Surely. The hand of Providence with money-changing blisters. That is anarchism.”
“At least you admit the hand of Providence.”
“I don’t know. Do I?” Jones, his hat over his eyes and his pipe projecting beneath, heaved a box of matches from his jacket. He extracted one and scraped it on the box. It failed and he threw it weakly into a clump of violets. He tried another. He tried another. “Turn it around,” murmured the rector. He did so and the match flared.
“How do you find the hand of Providence here?” he puffed around his pipe stem.
The rector gathered the dead matches from the clump of violets. “In this way: it enables man to rise and till the soil, so that he might eat. Would he, do you think, rise and labor if he could remain comfortably supine over long? Even that part of the body which the Creator designed for sitting on serves him only a short time, then it rebels, then it, too, gets his sullen bones up and hales them along. And there is no help for him save in sleep.”
“But he cannot sleep for more than a possible third of his time,” Jones pointed out. “And soon it will not even be a third of his time. The race is weakening, degenerating: we cannot stand nearly as much sleep as our comparatively recent (geologically speaking of course) forefathers could, not even as much as our more primitive contemporaries can. For we, the self-styled civilized peoples, are now exercised over our minds and our arteries instead of our stomachs and sex, as were our progenitors and some of our uncompelled contemporaries.”
“Uncompelled?”
“Socially, of course. Doe believes that Doe and Smith should and must do this or that because Smith believes that Smith and Doe should and must do this or that.”
“Ah, yes.” The divine again lifted his kind, unblinking eyes straight into the sun. Dew was off the grass and jonquils and narcissi were beginning to look drowsy, like girls after a ball. “It is drawing toward noon. Let us go in: I can offer you refreshment and lunch, if you are not engaged.”
Jones rose. “No, no. Thank you a thousand times. But I shan’t trouble you.”
The rector was hearty. “No trouble, no trouble at all. I am alone at present.”
Jones demurred. He had a passion for food, and an instinct. He had only to pass a house for his instinct to inform him whether or not the food would be good. Jones did not, gastronomically speaking, react favorably to the rector.
The divine, however, overrode him with hearty affability: the rector would not take No. He attached Jones to himself and they trod their shadows across the lawn, herding them beneath the subdued grace of a fanlight of dim-colored glass lovely with lack of washing. After the immaculate naked morning, the interior of the hall vortexed with red fire. Jones, temporarily blind, stumbled violently over an object and the handle of a pail clasped his ankle passionately. The rector, bawling Emmy! dragged him, pail and all, erect: he thanked his lucky stars that he had not been attached to the floor as he rose a sodden Venus, disengaging the pail. His dangling feet touched the floor and he felt his trouser leg with despair, fretfully. He’s like a derrick, he thought with exasperation.
The rector bawled Emmy again. There was an alarmed response from the depths of the house and one in gingham brushed them. The divine’s great voice boomed like surf in the narrow confines, and opening a door upon a flood of light, he ushered the trickling Jones into his study.
“I shall not apologize,” the rector began, “for the meagreness of the accommodation which I offer you. I am alone at present, you see. But, then, we philosophers want bread for the belly and not for the palate, eh? Come in, come in.”
Jones despaired. A drenched trouser leg, and bread for the belly alone. And God only knew what this great lump of a divine meant by bread for the belly and no bread for the palate. Husks, probably. Regarding food, Jones was sybaritically rather than aesthetically inclined. Or even philosophically. He stood disconsolate, swinging his dripping leg.
“My dear boy, you are soaking!” exclaimed his host. “Come, off with your trousers.”
Jones protested weakly. “Emmy!” roared the rector again.
“All right, Uncle Joe. Soon’s I get this water up.”
“Never mind the water right now. Run to my room and fetch me a pair of trousers.”
“But the rug will be ruined!”
“Not irreparably, I hope. We’ll take the risk. Fetch me the trousers. Now, dear boy, off with them. Emmy will dry them in the kitchen and then you will be right as rain.”
Jones surrendered in dull despair. He had truly fallen among moral thieves. The rector assailed him with ruthless kindness and the gingham-clad one reappeared at the door with a twin of the rector’s casual black nether coverings over her arm.
“Emmy, this is Mr.—I do not recall having heard your name?—he will be with us at lunch. And, Emmy, see if Cecily wishes to come also.”
This virgin shrieked at the spectacle of Jones, ludicrous in his shirt and his fat pink legs and the trousers jerked solemn and lethargic into the room. “Jones,” supplied Januarius Jones, faintly. Emmy, however, was gone.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Jones.” The rector fell upon him anew, doing clumsy and intricate things with the waist and bottoms of the trousers, and Jones, decently if voluminously clad, stood like a sheep in a gale while the divine pawed him heavily.
“Now,” cried his host, “make yourself comfortable (even Jones found irony in this) while I find something that will quench thirst.”
The guest regained his composure in a tidy, shabby room. Upon a rag rug a desk bore a single white hyacinth in a handleless teacup, above a mantel cluttered with pipes and twists of paper hung a single photograph. There were books everywhere—on shelves, on window ledges, on the floor: Jones saw the Old Testament in Greek in several volumes, a depressing huge book on international law, Jane Austen and Les Contes Drolatiques in dog-eared amity: a mutual supporting caress. The rector reentered with milk in a pitcher of blue glass and two mugs. From a drawer he extracted a bottle of Scotch whisky.
“A sop to the powers,” he said, leering at Jones with innocent depravity. “Old dog and new tricks, my boy. But your pardon: perhaps you do not like this combination?”
Jones’ morale rose balloon-like. “I will try any drink once,” he said, like Jurgen.
“Try it, anyway. If you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to employ your own formula.”
The beverage was more palatable than he would have thought. He sipped with relish. “Didn’t you mention a son, sir?”
“That was Donald. He was shot down in Flanders last spring.” The rector rose and took the photograph down from above the mantel. He handed it to his guest. The boy was about eighteen and coatless: beneath unruly hair, Jones saw a thin face with a delicate pointed chin and wild, soft eyes. Jones’ eyes were clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s.
“There is death in his face,” said Jones.
His host took the photograph and gazed at it. “There is always death in the faces of the young in spirit, the eternally young. Death for themselves or for others. And dishonor. But death, surely. And why not? why should death desire only those things which life no longer has use for? Who gathers the withered rose?” The rector dreamed darkly in space for a while. After a time he added: “A companion sent back a few of his things.” He propped the photograph upright on the desk and from a drawer he took a tin box. His great hand fumbled at the catch.
“Let me, sir,” offered Jones, knowing that it was useless to volunteer, that the rector probably did this every day. But the lid yielded as he spoke and the divine spread on the desk the sorry contents: a woman’s chemise, a cheap paper-covered “Shropshire Lad,” a mummied hyacinth bulb. The rector picked up the bulb and it crumbled to dust in his hand.
“Tut, tut! How careless of me!” he ejaculated, sweeping the dust carefully into an envelope. “I have often deplored the size of my hands. They should have been given to someone who could use them for something other than thumbing books or grubbing in flower beds. Donald’s hands, on the contrary, were quite small, like his mother’s: he was quite deft with his hands. What a surgeon he would have made.”
He placed the things upon the desk, before the propped photograph like a ritual, and propping his face in his earthy hands he took his ruined dream of his son into himself as one inhales tobacco smoke.
“Truly, there is life and death and dishonor in his face. Had you noticed Emmy? Years ago, about the time this picture was made. … But that is an old story. Even Emmy has probably forgotten it. … You will notice that he has neither coat nor cravat. How often has he appeared after his mother had seen him decently arrayed, on the street, in church, at formal gatherings, carrying hat, coat and collar in his hands. How often have I heard him say ‘Because it is too hot.’ Education in the bookish sense he had not: the schooling he got was because he wanted to go, the reading he did was because he wanted to read. Least of all did I teach him fortitude. What is fortitude? Emotional atrophy, gangrene. …” He raised his face and looked at Jones. “What do you think? was I right? Or should I have made my son conform to a type?”
“Conform that face to a type? (So Emmy has already been dishonored, once, anyway.) How could you? (I owe that dishonored one a grudge, too.) Could you put a faun into formal clothes?”
The rector sighed. “Ah, Mr. Jones, who can say?” He slowly replaced the things in the tin box and sat clasping the box between his hands. “As I grow older, Mr. Jones, I become more firmly convinced that we learn scarcely anything as we go through this world, and that we learn nothing whatever which can ever help us or be of any particular benefit to us, even. However! …” He sighed again, heavily.
II
Emmy, the dishonored virgin, appeared, saying: “What do you want for dinner, Uncle Joe? Ice cream or strawberry shortcake?” Blushing, she avoided Jones’ eye.
The rector looked at his guest, yearning. “What would you like, Mr. Jones? But I know how young people are about ice cream. Would you prefer ice cream?”
But Jones was a tactful man in his generation and knowing about food himself he had an uncanny skill in anticipating other people’s reactions to food. “If it is the same to you, Doctor, let it be shortcake.”
“Shortcake, Emmy,” the rector instructed with passion. Emmy withdrew. “Do you know,” he continued with apologetic gratitude, “do you know, when a man becomes old, when instead of using his stomach, his stomach uses him, as his other physical compulsions become weaker and decline, his predilections toward the food he likes obtrude themselves.”
“Not at all, sir.” Jones assured him. “I personally prefer a warm dessert to an ice.”
“Then you must return when there are peaches. I will give you a peach cobbler, with butter and cream. … But ah, my stomach has attained a sad ascendency over me.”
“Why shouldn’t it, sir? Years reave us of sexual compulsions: why shouldn’t they fill the interval with compulsions of food?”
The rector regarded him kindly and piercingly. “You are becoming specious. Man’s life need not be always filled with compulsions of either sex or food, need it?”
But here came quick tapping feet down the uncarpeted hall and she entered, saying: “Good morning, Uncle Joe,” in her throaty voice, crossing the room with graceful effusion, not seeing Jones at once. Then she remarked him and paused like a bird in midflight, briefly. Jones rose and under his eyes she walked mincing and graceful, theatrical with body-consciousness to the desk. She bent sweetly as a young tree and the divine kissed her cheek. Jones’ goat’s eyes immersed her in yellow contemplation.
“Good morning, Cecily.” The rector rose. “I had expected you earlier, on such a day as this. But young girls must have their beauty sleep regardless of weather,” he ended with elephantine joviality. “This is Mr. Jones, Cecily. Miss Saunders, Mr. Jones.”
Jones bowed with obese incipient grace as she faced him, but at her expression of hushed delicate amazement he knew panic. Then he remembered the rector’s cursed trousers and he felt his neck and ears slowly burn, knowing that not only was he ridiculous looking but that she supposed he wore such things habitually. She was speechless and Jones damned the hearty oblivious rector slowly and completely. Curse the man: one moment it was Emmy and no trousers at all, next moment an attractive stranger and nether coverings like a tired balloon. The rector was saying bland as Fate:
“I had expected you earlier. I had decided to let you take some hyacinths.”
“Uncle Joe! How won—derful!” Her voice was rough, like a tangle of golden wires. She dragged her fascinated gaze from Jones and hating them both Jones felt perspiration under his hair. “Why didn’t I come sooner? But I am always doing the wrong thing, as Mr.—Mr. Jones will know from my not coming in time to get hyacinths.”
She looked at him again, as she might at a strange beast. Jones’ confusion became anger and he found his tongue.
“Yes, it is too bad you didn’t come earlier. You would have seen me more interestingly gotten up than this even. Emmy seemed to think so, at least.”
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
The rector regarded him with puzzled affability. Then he understood. “Ah, yes, Mr. Jones suffered a slight accident and was forced to don a garment of mine.”
“Thanks for saying ‘was forced,’ ” Jones said viciously. “Yes, I stumbled over that pail of water the doctor keeps just inside the front door, doubtless for the purpose of making his parishioners be sure they really require help from heaven, on their second visit,” he explained, Greek-like, giving his dignity its death-stroke with his own hand. “You, I suppose, are accustomed to it and can avoid it.”
She looked from Jones’ suffused angry face to the rector’s kind, puzzled one and screamed with laughter.
“Forgive me,” she pleaded, sobering as quickly. “I simply couldn’t help it, Mr. Jones. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
“Certainly. Even Emmy enjoyed it. Doctor, Emmy cannot have been so badly outraged after all, to suffer such shock from seeing a man’s bare—”
She covered up this gaucherie, losing most of the speech in her own words. “So you showed Mr. Jones your flowers? Mr. Jones should be quite flattered: that is quite a concession for Uncle Joe to make,” she said smoothly, turning to the divine, graceful and insincere as a French sonnet. “Is Mr. Jones famous, then? You haven’t told me you knew famous men.”
The rector boomed his laugh. “Well, Mr. Jones, you seem to have concealed something from me.” (Not as much as I would have liked to, Jones thought.) “I didn’t know I was entertaining a celebrity.”
Jones’ essential laziness of temper regained its ascendency and he answered civilly: “Neither did I, sir.”
“Ah, don’t try to hide your light, Mr. Jones. Women know these things. They see through us at once.”
“Uncle Joe,” she cautioned swiftly at this unfortunate remark, watching Jones. But Jones was safe now.
“No, I don’t agree with you. If they saw through us they would never marry us.”
She was grateful and her glance showed a faint interest (what color are her eyes?).
“Oh, that’s what Mr. Jones is! an authority on women.”
Jones’ vanity swelled and the rector saying, “Pardon me,” fetched a chair from the hall. She leaned her thigh against the desk and her eyes (are they gray or blue or green?) met his yellow unabashed stare. She lowered her gaze and he remarked her pretty self-conscious mouth. This is going to be easy, he thought. The rector placed the chair for her and she sat and when the rector had taken his desk chair again, Jones resumed his own seat. How long her legs are, he thought, seeing her frail white dress shape to her short torso. She felt his bold examination and looked up.
“So Mr. Jones is married,” she remarked. She did something to her eyes and it seemed to Jones that she had touched him with her hands. I’ve got your number, he thought vulgarly. He replied:
“No, what makes you think so?” The rector filling his pipe regarded them kindly.
“Oh, I misunderstood, then.”
“That isn’t why you thought so.”
“No?”
“It’s because you like married men,” he told her boldly.
“Do I?” without interest. It seemed to Jones that he could see her interest ebb away from him, could feel it cool.
“Don’t you?”
“You ought to know.”
“I?” asked Jones. “How should I know?”
“Aren’t you an authority on women?” she replied with sweet ingenuousness. Speechless he could have strangled her. The divine applauded:
“Checkmate, Mr. Jones?”
Just let me catch her eye again, he vowed, but she would not look at him. He sat silent and under his seething gaze she took the photograph from the desk and held it quietly for a time. Then she replaced it and reaching across the desktop she laid her hand on the rector’s.
“Miss Saunders was engaged to my son,” the divine explained to Jones.
“Yes?” said Jones, watching her profile, waiting for her to look at him again. Emmy, that unfortunate virgin, appeared at the door.
“All right, Uncle Joe,” she said, vanishing immediately.
“Ah, lunch,” the rector announced, starting up. They rose.
“I can’t stay,” she demurred, yielding to the divine’s hand upon her back. Jones fell in behind. “I really shouldn’t stay,” she amended.
They moved down the dark hall and Jones watching her white dress flow indistinctly to her stride, imagining her kiss, cursed her. At a door she paused and stood aside courteously, as a man would. The rector stopped also as perforce did Jones and here was a French comedy regarding precedence. Jones with counterfeit awkwardness felt her soft uncorseted thigh against the back of his hand and her sharp stare was like ice water. They entered the room. “Made you look at me then,” he muttered.
The rector remarking nothing said:
“Sit here, Mr. Jones,” and the virgin Emmy gave him a haughty antagonistic stare. He returned her a remote yellow one. I’ll see about you later, he promised her mentally, sitting to immaculate linen. The rector drew the other guest’s chair and sat himself at the head of the table.
“Cecily doesn’t eat very much,” he said, carving a fowl, “so the burden will fall upon you and me. But I think we can be relied upon, eh, Mr. Jones?”
She propped her elbows opposite him. And I’ll attend to you, too, Jones promised her darkly. She still ignored his yellow gaze and he said: “Certainly, sir,” employing upon her the old thought process which he had used in school when he was prepared upon a certain passage, but she ignored him with such thorough perfection that he knew a sudden qualm of unease, a faint doubt. I wonder if I am wrong? he pondered. I’ll find out, he decided suddenly.
“You were saying, sir”—still watching her oblivious shallow face—“as Miss Saunders so charmingly came in, that I am too specious. But one must always generalize about fornication. Only after—”
“Mr. Jones!” the rector exclaimed heavily.
“—the fornication is committed should one talk about it at all, and then only to generalize, to become—in your words—specious. He who kisses and tells is not very much of a fellow, is he?”
“Mr. Jones,” the rector remonstrated.
“Mr. Jones!” she echoed. “What a terrible man you are! Really, Uncle Joe—”
Jones interrupted viciously. “As far as the kiss itself goes, women do not particularly care who does the kissing. All they are interested in is the kiss itself.”
“Mr. Jones!” she repeated, staring at him, then looking quickly away. She shuddered.
“Come, come, sir. There are ladies present.” The rector achieved his aphorism.
Jones pushed his plate from him, Emmy’s raw and formless hand removed it and here was a warm golden brow crowned with strawberries. Dam’f I look at her, he swore, and so he did. Her gaze was remote and impersonal, green and cool as sea water, and Jones turned his eyes first. She turned to the rector, talking smoothly about flowers. He was politely ignored and he moodily engaged his spoon as Emmy appeared again.
Emmy emanated a thin hostility and staring from Jones to the girl she said:
“Lady to see you, Uncle Joe.”
The rector poised his spoon. “Who is it, Emmy?”
“I dunno. I never saw her before. She’s waiting in the study.”
“Has she had lunch? Ask her in here.”
(She knows I am watching her. Jones knew exasperation and a puerile lust.)
“She don’t want anything to eat. She said not to disturb you until you had finished dinner. You better go in and see what she wants.” Emmy retreated.
The rector wiped his mouth and rose. “I suppose I must. You young people sit here until I return. Call Emmy if you want anything.”
Jones sat in sullen silence, turning a glass in his fingers. At last she looked at his bent ugly face.
“So you are unmarried, as well as famous,” she remarked.
“Famous because I’m unmarried,” he replied darkly.
“And courteous because of which?”
“Either one you like.”
“Well, frankly, I prefer courtesy.”
“Do you often get it?”
“Always … eventually.” He made no reply and she continued: “Don’t you believe in marriage?”
“Yes, as long as there are no women in it.” She shrugged indifferently. Jones could not bear seeming a fool to anyone as shallow as he considered her and he blurted, wanting to kick himself: “You don’t like me, do you?”
“Oh, I like anyone who believes there may be something he doesn’t know,” she replied without interest.
“What do you mean by that?” (are they green or gray?) Jones was a disciple of the cult of boldness with women. He rose and the table wheeled smoothly as he circled it: he wished faintly that he were more graceful. Those thrice unhappy trousers! You can’t blame her, he thought with fairness. What would I think had she appeared in one of her grandma’s mother hubbards? He remarked her reddish dark hair and the delicate slope of her shoulder. (I’ll put my hand there and let it slip down her arm as she turns.)
Without looking up, she said suddenly: “Did Uncle Joe tell you about Donald?” (Oh hell, thought Jones.) “Isn’t it funny,” her chair scraped to her straightening knees, “we both thought of moving at the same time?” She rose, her chair intervened woodenly and Jones stood ludicrous and foiled. “You take mine and I’ll take yours,” she added, moving around the table.
“You bitch,” said Jones evenly and her green-blue eyes took him sweetly as water.
“What made you say that?” she asked quietly. Jones, having to an extent eased his feelings, thought he saw a recurring interest in her expression. (I was right, he gloated.)
“You know why I said that.”
“It’s funny how few men know that women like to be talked to that way,” she remarked irrelevantly.
I wonder if she loves someone? I guess not—like a tiger loves meat. “I am not like other men,” he told her.
He thought he saw derision in her brief glance, but she merely yawned delicately. At last he had her classified in the animal kingdom. Hamadryad, a slim jeweled one.
“Why doesn’t George come for me!” she said as if in answer to his unspoken speculation, patting her mouth with the tips of petulant, delicate fingers. “Isn’t it boring, waiting for someone?”
“Yes. Who is George, may I ask?”
“Certainly, you may ask.”
“Well, who is he?” (I don’t like her type, anyway.) “I had gathered that you were pining for the late lamented.”
“The late lamented?”
“That fox-faced Henry or Oswald or something.”
“Oh, Donald. Do you mean Donald?”
“Surely. Let him be Donald, then.”
She regarded him impersonally. (I can’t even make her angry, he thought fretfully.) “Do you know, you are impossible.”
“All right. So I am,” he answered with anger. “But then I wasn’t engaged to Donald. And George is not calling for me.”
“What makes you so angry? Because I won’t let you put your hands on me?”
“My dear woman, if I had wanted to put my hands on you I would have done it.”
“Yes?” Her rising inflection was a polite maddening derision.
“Certainly. Don’t you believe it?” his own voice gave him courage.
“I don’t know … but what good would it do to you?”
“No good at all. That’s the reason I don’t want to.”
Her green eyes took him again. Sparse old silver on a buffet shadowed heavily under a high fanlight of colored glass identical with the one above the entrance, her fragile white dress across the table from him: he could imagine her long subtle legs, like Atalanta’s reft of running.
“Why do you tell yourself lies?” she asked with interest.
“Same reason you do.”
“I?”
“Surely. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.”
“Do you know,” she remarked with speculation, “I believe I hate you.”
“I don’t doubt it. I know damn well I hate you.”
She moved in her chair, sloping the light now across her shoulders, releasing him and becoming completely another person. “Let’s go to the study. Shall we?”
“All right. Uncle Joe should be done with his caller by now.” He rose and they faced each other across the broken meal. She did not rise.
“Well?” she said.
“After you, ma’am,” he replied with mock deference.
“I have changed my mind. I think I’ll wait here and talk to Emmy, if you don’t object.”
“Why Emmy?”
“Why not Emmy?”
“Ah, I see. You can feel fairly safe with Emmy: she probably won’t want to put her hands on you. That’s it, isn’t it?” She glanced briefly at him. “What you really mean is, that you will stay if I am going out of the room, don’t you?”
“Suit yourself.” She became oblivious of him, breaking a biscuit upon a plate and dripping water upon it from a glass. Jones moved fatly in his borrowed trousers, circling the table again. As he approached she turned slightly in her chair, extending her hand. He felt its slim bones in his fat moist palm, its nervous ineffectual flesh. Not good for anything. Useless. But beautiful with lack of character. Beautiful hand. Its very fragility stopped him like a stone barrier.
“Oh, Emmy,” she called sweetly, “come here, darling. I have something to show you.”
Emmy regarded them balefully from the door and Jones said quickly: “Will you fetch me my trousers, Miss Emmy?”
Emmy glanced from one to the other ignoring the girl’s mute plea. (Oho, Emmy has fish of her own to fry, thought Jones.) Emmy vanished and he put his hands on the girl’s shoulders.
“Now what will you do? Call the reverend?”
She looked at him across her shoulder from beyond an inaccessible barrier. His anger grew and his hands wantonly crushed her dress.
“Don’t ruin my clothes, please,” she said icily. “Here, if you must.” She raised her face and Jones felt shame, but his boyish vanity would not let him stop now. Her face a prettiness of shallow characterless planes blurred into his, her mouth was motionless and impersonal, unresisting and cool. Her face from a blur became again a prettiness of characterless shallowness icy and remote, and Jones, ashamed of himself and angry with her therefore, said with heavy irony: “Thanks.”
“Not at all. If you got any pleasure from it you are quite welcome.” She rose. “Let me pass, please.”
He stood awkwardly aside. Her frigid polite indifference was unbearable. What a fool he had been! He had ruined everything.
“Miss Saunders,” he blurted, “I—forgive me: I don’t usually act that way, I swear I don’t.”
She spoke over her shoulder. “You don’t have to, I suppose? I imagine you are usually quite successful with us?”
“I am very sorry. But I don’t blame you. … One hates to convict oneself of stupidity.”
After a while hearing no further sound of movement he looked up. She was like a flower stalk or a young tree relaxed against the table: there was something so fragile, so impermanent since robustness and strength were unnecessary, yet strong withal as a poplar is strong through very absence of strength, about her; you knew that she lived, that her clear delicate being was nourished by sunlight and honey until even digestion was a beautiful function … as he watched something like a shadow came over her, somewhere between her eyes and her petulant pretty mouth, in the very clear relaxation of her body, that caused him to go quickly to her. She stared into his unblinking goat’s eyes as his hands sliding across her arms met at the small of her back, and Jones did not know the door had opened until she jerked her mouth from his and twisted slimly from his clasp.
The rector loomed in the door, staring into the room as if he did not recognize it. He has never seen us at all, Jones knew, then seeing the divine’s face he said: “He’s ill.”
The rector spoke. “Cecily—”
“What is it, Uncle Joe?” she replied in sharp terror, going to him. “Aren’t you well?”
The divine balanced his huge body with a hand on either side of the doorway.
“Cecily, Donald’s coming home,” he said.
III
There was that subtle effluvia of antagonism found inevitably in a room where two young “pretty” women are, and they sat examining each other with narrow care. Mrs. Powers temporarily engaged in an unselfconscious accomplishment and being among strangers as well, was rather oblivious of it; but Cecily, never having been engaged in an unselfconscious action of any kind and being among people whom she knew, examined the other closely with that attribute women have for gaining correct instinctive impressions of another’s character, clothes, morals, etc. Jones’ yellow stare took the newcomer at intervals, returning, however, always to Cecily, who ignored him.
The rector tramped heavily back and forth. “Sick?” he boomed. “Sick? But we’ll cure him. Get him home here with good food and rest and attention and we’ll have him well in a week. Eh, Cecily?”
“Oh, Uncle Joe! I can’t believe it yet. That he is really safe.” She rose as the rector passed her chair and sort of undulated into his arms, like a slim wave. It was beautiful.
“Here’s the medicine for him, Mrs. Powers,” he said with heavy gallantry, embracing Cecily, speaking over her head toward the contemplative pallor of the other woman’s quiet watching face. “There, there, don’t cry,” he added, kissing her. The audience watched this, Mrs. Powers with speculative detached interest and Jones with morose speculation.
“It’s because I am so happy—for you, dear Uncle Joe,” she answered. She turned graceful as a flower stalk against the rector’s black bulk. “And we owe it all to Mrs.—Mrs. Powers,” she continued in her slightly rough voice, like a tangle of golden wires, “she was so kind to bring him back to us.” Her glance swept past Jones and flickered like a knife toward the other woman. (Damn little fool thinks I have tried to vamp him, Mrs. Powers thought.) Cecily moved toward her with studied impulse. “May I kiss you? do you mind?”
It was like kissing a silken smooth steel blade and Mrs. Powers said brutally: “Not at all. I’d have done the same for anyone sick as he is, nigger or white. And you would, too,” she added with satisfying malice.
“Yes, it was so sweet of you,” Cecily repeated, coolly noncommittal, exposing a slim leg from the arm of the caller’s chair. Jones, statically remote, watched the comedy.
“Nonsense,” the rector interposed. “Mrs. Powers merely saw him fatigued with traveling. I am sure he will be a different man tomorrow.”
“I hope so,” Mrs. Powers answered with sudden weariness, recalling his devastated face and that dreadful brow, his whole relaxed inertia of constant dull pain and ebbing morale. It’s too late, she thought with instinctive perspicuity. Shall I tell them about the scar? she pondered. Prevent a scene when this—this creature (feeling the girl’s body against her shoulder) sees it. But no, I won’t, she decided, watching the tramping rector leonine in his temporary happiness. What a coward I am. Joe should have come: he might have known I’d bungle it some way.
The rector fetched his photograph. She took it: thin faced, with the serenity of a wild thing, the passionate serene alertness of a faun; and that girl leaning against the oaken branch of the rector’s arm, believing that she is in love with the boy, or his illusion—pretending she is, anyway. No, no, I won’t be catty. Perhaps she is—as much as she is capable of being in love with anyone. It’s quite romantic, being reft of your love and then having him returned unexpectedly to your arms. And an aviator, too. What luck that girl has playing her parts. Even God helps her. … You cat! she’s pretty and you are jealous. That’s what’s the matter with you, she thought in her bitter weariness. What makes me furious is her thinking that I am after him, am in love with him! Oh, yes, I’m in love with him! I’d like to hold his poor ruined head against my breast and not let him wake again ever. … Oh, hell, what a mess it all is! And that dull fat one yonder in somebody else’s trousers, watching her with his yellow unwinking eyes—like a goat’s. I suppose she’s been passing the time with him.
“—he was eighteen then,” the rector was saying. “He would never wear hat nor tie: his mother could never make him. She saw him correctly dressed, but it mattered not how formal the occasion, he invariably appeared without them.”
Cecily rubbing herself like a cat on the rector’s arm: “Oh, Uncle Joe, I love him so!”
And Jones like another round and arrogant cat, blinking his yellow eyes, muttered a shocking phrase. The rector was oblivious in speech and Cecily in her own graceful immersion, but Mrs. Powers half heard, half saw, and Jones looking up met her black stare. He tried to look her down but her gaze was impersonal as a dissection so he averted his and fumbled for his pipe.
There came a prolonged honking of a motor horn from without and Cecily sprang to her feet.
“Oh, there’s—there’s a friend of ours. I’ll send him away and come straight back. Will you excuse me a moment, Uncle Joe?”
“Eh?” The rector broke his speech. “Oh, yes.”
“And you, Mrs. Powers?” She moved toward the door and her glance swept Jones again. “And you, Mr. Jones?”
“George got a car, has he?” Jones asked as she passed him. “Bet you don’t come back.”
She gave him her cool stare and from beyond the study door she heard the rector’s voice resume the story again—of Donald, of course. And now I’m engaged again, she thought complacently, enjoying George’s face in anticipation when she would tell him. And that long black woman has been making love to him—or he to her. I guess it’s that, from what I know of Donald. Oh, well, that’s how men are, I guess. Perhaps he’ll want to take us both. … She tripped down the steps into the sunlight: the sunlight caressed her with joy, as though she were a daughter of sunlight. How would I like to have a husband and wife, too, I wonder? Or two husbands? I wonder if I want one even, want to get married at all. … I guess it’s worth trying, once. I’d like to see that horrible fat one’s face if he could hear me say that, she thought. Wonder why I let him kiss me? Ugh!
George leaned from his car watching her restricted swaying stride with faint lust. “Come on, come on,” he called.
She did not increase her gait at all. He swung the door open, not bothering to dismount himself. “My God, what took you so long?” he asked plaintively. “Dam’f I thought you were coming at all.”
“I’m not,” she told him, laying her hand on the door. Her white dress in the nooning sun was unbearable to the eye, sloped to her pliant fragility. Beyond her, across the lawn, was another pliant gesture though this was only a tree, a poplar.
“Huh?”
“Not coming. My fiancé is arriving today.”
“Aw hell, get in.”
“Donald’s coming today,” she repeated, watching him. His face was ludicrous: blank as a plate, then shocked to slow amazement.
“Why, he’s dead,” he said vacuously.
“But he isn’t dead,” she told him sweetly. “A lady friend he’s traveling with came on ahead and told us. Uncle Joe’s like a balloon.”
“Ah, come on, Cecily. You’re kidding me.”
“I swear I’m not. I’m telling you the God’s truth.”
His smooth empty face hung before her like a handsome moon, empty as a promise. Then it filled with an expression of a sort.
“Hell, you got a date with me tonight. Whatcher going to do about that?”
“What can I do? Donald will be here by then.”
“Then it’s all off with us?”
She gazed at him, then looked quickly away. Funny how only an outsider had been able to bring home to her the significance of Donald’s imminence, his return. She nodded dumbly, beginning to feel miserable and lost.
He leaned from the car and caught her hand. “Get in here,” he commanded.
“No, no, I can’t,” she protested, trying to draw back. He held her wrist. “No, no, let me go. You are hurting me.”
“I know it,” he answered grimly. “Get in.”
“Don’t, George, don’t! I must go back.”
“Well, when can I see you?”
Her mouth trembled. “Oh, I don’t know. Please, George. Don’t you see how miserable I am?” Her eyes became blue, dark; the sunlight made bold the wrenched thrust of her body, her thin taut arm. “Please, George.”
“Are you going to get in or do you want me to pick you up and put you in?”
“I’m going to cry in a minute. You’d better let me go.”
“Oh, damn. Why, sugar, I didn’t mean it that way. I just wanted to see you. We’ve got to see each other if it’s going to be all off with us. Come on, I’ve been good to you.”
She relaxed. “Well, but just around the block then. I’ve got to get back to them.” She raised a foot to the running board. “Promise?” she insisted.
“Sure. Round the block it is. I won’t run off with you if you say not.”
She got in and as they drove off she looked quickly to the house. There was a face in the window, a round face.
IV
George turned from the street and drove down a quiet lane bordered by trees, between walls covered with honeysuckle. He stopped the car and she said swiftly:
“No, no, George! Drive on.”
But he cut the switch. “Please,” she repeated. He turned in his seat.
“Cecily, you are kidding me, aren’t you?”
She turned the switch and tried to reach the starter with her foot. He caught her hands, holding her. “Look at me.”
Her eyes grew blue again with foreboding.
“You are kidding me, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Oh, George, it all happened so suddenly! I don’t know what to think. When we were in there talking about him it all seemed so grand for Donald to be coming back, in spite of that woman with him; and to be engaged to a man who will be famous when he gets here—oh, it seemed then that I did love him: it was exactly the thing to do. But now … I’m just not ready to be married yet. And he’s been gone so long, and to take up with another woman on his way to me—I don’t know what to do. I—I’m going to cry,” she ended suddenly, putting her crooked arm on the seat-back and burying her face in her elbow. He put his arm around her shoulders and tried to draw her to him. She raised her hands between them straightening her arms.
“No, no, take me back.”
“But, Cecily—”
“You mustn’t! Don’t you know I’m engaged to be married? He’ll probably want to be married tomorrow, and I’ll have to do it.”
“But you can’t do that. You aren’t in love with him.”
“But I’ve got to, I tell you!”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Take me back to Uncle Joe’s. Please.”
He was the stronger and at last he held her close, feeling her small bones, her frail taut body beneath her dress. “Are you in love with him?” he repeated.
She burrowed her face into his coat.
“Look at me.” She refused to lift her face and he slipped his hand under her chin, raising it. “Are you?”
“Yes, yes,” she said wildly, staring at him. “Take me back!”
“You are lying. You aren’t going to marry him.”
She was weeping. “Yes, I am. I’ve got to. He expects it and Uncle Joe expects it. I must, I tell you.”
“Darling, you can’t. Don’t you love me? You know you do. You can’t marry him.” She stopped struggling and lay against him, crying. “Come on, say you won’t marry him.”
“George, I can’t,” she said hopelessly. “Don’t you see I have got to marry him?”
Young and miserable they clung to each other. The slumbrous afternoon lay about them in the empty lane. Even the sparrows seemed drowsy and from the spire of the church pigeons were remote and monotonous, unemphatic as sleep. She raised her face.
“Kiss me, George.”
He tasted tears: their faces were coolly touching. She drew her head back, searching his face. “That was the last time, George.”
“No, no,” he objected, tightening his arms. She resisted a moment, then kissed him passionately.
“Darling!”
“Darling!”
She straightened up, dabbing at her eyes with his handkerchief. “There! I feel better now. Take me home, kind sir.”
“But, Cecily,” he protested, trying to embrace her again. She put him aside coolly.
“Not any more, ever. Take me home, like a nice boy.”
“But, Cecily—”
“Do you want me to get out and walk? I can, you know: it isn’t far.”
He started the engine and drove on in a dull youthful sorrow. She patted at her hair, her fingers bloomed slimly in it, and they turned on to the street again. As she descended at the gate he made a last despairing attempt.
“Cecily, for God’s sake!”
She looked over her shoulder at his stricken face. “Don’t be silly, George. Of course I’ll see you again. I’m not married—yet.”
Her white dress in the sun was an unbearable shimmer sloping to her body’s motion and she passed from sunlight to shadow, mounting the steps. At the door she turned, flashed him a smile and waved her hand. Then her white dress faded beyond a fanlight of muted color dim with age and lovely with lack of washing, leaving George to stare at the empty maw of the house in hope and despair and baffled youthful lust.
V
Jones at the window saw them drive away. His round face was enigmatic as a god’s, his clear obscene eyes showed no emotion. You are good, you are, he thought in grudging, unillusioned admiration. I hand it to you. He was still musing upon her when the mean-looking black-haired woman, interrupting the rector’s endless reminiscences of his son’s boyhood and youth, suggested that it was time to go to the station.
The divine became aware of the absence of Cecily, who was at that moment sitting in a stationary motorcar in an obscure lane, crying on the shoulder of a man whose name was not Donald. Jones, the only one who had remarked the manner of her going, was for some reason he could not have named safely noncommittal. The rector stated fretfully that Cecily, who was at that moment kissing a man whose name was not Donald, should not have gone away at that time. But the other woman (I bet she’s mean as hell, thought Jones) interrupted again, saying that it was better so.
“But she should have gone to the station to meet him,” the rector stated with displeasure.
“No, no. Remember, he is sick. The less excitement the better for him. Besides, it is better for them to meet privately.”
“Ah, yes, quite right, quite right. Trust a woman in these things, Mr. Jones. And for that reason perhaps you had better wait also, don’t you think?”
“By all means, sir. I will wait and tell Miss Saunders why you went without her. She will doubtless be anxious to know.”
After the cab had called for them and gone Jones, still standing, stuffed his pipe with moody viciousness. He wandered aimlessly about the room, staring out the windows in turn, puffing his pipe; then pausing to push a dead match beneath a rug with his toe he crossed deliberately to the rector’s desk. He drew and closed two drawers before finding the right one.
The bottle was squat and black and tilted took the light pleasantly. He replaced it, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. And just in time, too, for her rapid brittle steps crossed the veranda and he heard a motorcar retreating.
The door framed her fragile surprise. She remarked, “Oh! Where are the others?”
“What’s the matter? Have a puncture?” Jones countered nastily. Her eyes flew like birds and he continued: “The others? They went to the station, the railroad station. You know: where the trains come in. The parson’s son or something is coming home this afternoon. Fine news, isn’t it? But won’t you come in?”
She entered hesitant, watching him.
“Oh, come on in, sister, I won’t hurt you.”
“But why didn’t they wait for me?”
“They thought you didn’t want to go, I suppose. Hadn’t you left that impression?”
In the silence of the house was a clock like a measured respiration, and Emmy was faintly audible somewhere. These sounds reassured her and she entered a few steps. “You saw me go. Didn’t you tell them where I was?”
“Told them you went to the bathroom.”
She looked at him curiously, knowing in some way that he was not lying. “Why did you do that?”
“It was your business where you were going, not mine. If you wanted them to know you should have told them yourself.”
She sat alertly. “You’re a funny sort of a man, aren’t you?”
Jones moved casually, in no particular direction. “How funny?”
She rose. “Oh, I don’t know exactly … you don’t like me and yet you told a lie for me.”
“Hell, you don’t think I mind telling a lie, do you?”
She said with speculation:
“I wouldn’t put anything past you—if you thought you could get any fun out of it.” Watching his eyes she moved toward the door.
The trousers hampered him but despite them his agility was amazing. But she was alert and her studied grace lent her muscular control and swiftness, and so it was a bland rubbed panel of wood that he touched. Her dress whipped from sight, he heard a key and her muffled laugh, derisive.
“Damn your soul,” he spoke in a quiet toneless emotion, “open the door.”
The wood was bland and inscrutable: baffling, holding up to him in its polished depths the fat white blur of his own face. Holding his breath he heard nothing beyond it save a clock somewhere.
“Open the door,” he repeated, but there was no sound. Has she gone away, or not? he wondered, straining his ears, bending to the bulky tweeded Narcissus of himself in the polished wood. He thought of the windows and walking quietly he crossed the room, finding immovable gauze wire. He returned to the center of the room without trying to muffle his steps and stood in a mounting anger, cursing her slowly. Then he saw the door handle move.
He sprang to it. “Open the door, you little slut, or I’ll kick your screens out.”
The lock clicked and he jerked the door open upon Emmy, his trousers over her arm, meeting him with her frightened antagonistic eyes.
“Where—” began Jones, and Cecily stepped from the shadows, curtsying like a derisive flower.
“Checkmate, Mr. Jones.” Jones paraphrased the rector in a reedy falsetto. “Do you know—”
“Yes,” said Cecily quickly, taking Emmy’s arm. “But tell us on the veranda.” She led the way and Jones followed in reluctant admiration. She and the baleful speechless Emmy preceding him sat arm in arm in a porch swing while afternoon sought interstices in soon-to-be lilac wistaria: afternoon flowed and ebbed upon them as they swung and their respective silk and cotton shins took and released sunlight in running planes.
“Sit down, Mr. Jones,” she continued, gushing. “Do tell us about yourself. We are so interested, aren’t we, Emmy dear?” Emmy was watchful and inarticulate, like an animal. “Emmy, dear Mr. Jones, has missed all of your conversation and admiring you as we all do—we simply cannot help it, Mr. Jones—she is naturally anxious to make up for it.”
Jones cupped a match in his palms and there were two little flames in his eyes, leaping and sinking to pin points.
“You are silent, Mr. Jones? Emmy and I both would like to hear some more of what you have learned about us from your extensive amatory career. Don’t we, Emmy darling?”
“No, I won’t spoil it for you,” Jones replied heavily. “You are on the verge of getting some firsthand information of your own. As for Miss Emmy, I’ll teach her sometime later, in private.”
Emmy continued to watch him with fierce dumb distrust. Cecily said: “At first hand?”
“Aren’t you being married tomorrow? You can learn from Oswald. He should certainly be able to tell you, traveling as he seems to with a sparring partner. Got caught, at last, didn’t you?”
She shivered. She looked so delicate, so needing to be cared for that Jones, becoming masculine and sentimental, felt again like a cloddish brute. He lit his pipe again and Emmy, convicting herself of the power of speech, said:
“Yonder they come.”
A cab had drawn up to the gate and Cecily sprang to her feet and ran along the porch to the steps. Jones and Emmy rose and Emmy vanished somewhere as four people descended from the cab. So that’s him, thought Jones ungrammatically, following Cecily, watching her as she stood poised on the top step like a bird, her hand to her breast. Trust her!
He looked again at the party coming through the gate, the rector looming above them all. There was something changed about the divine: age seemed to have suddenly overtaken him, unresisted, coming upon him like a highwayman. He’s sure sick, Jones told himself. The woman, that Mrs. Something-or-other, left the party and hastened ahead. She mounted the steps to Cecily.
“Come darling,” she said, taking the girl’s arm, “come inside. He is not well and the light hurts his eyes. Come in and meet him there, hadn’t you rather?”
“No, no: here. I have waited so long for him.”
The other woman was kind but obdurate. And she led the girl into the house. Cecily reluctant, with reverted head cried: “Uncle Joe! his face! is he sick?”
The divine’s face was gray and slack as dirty snow. At the steps he stumbled slightly and Jones sprang forward, taking his arm. “Thanks, buddy,” said the third man, in a private’s uniform, whose hand was beneath Mahon’s elbow. They mounted the steps and crossing the porch passed under the fanlight, into the dark hall.
“Take your cap, Loot,” murmured the enlisted man. The other removed it and handed it to him. They heard swift tapping feet crossing a room and the study door opened letting a flood of light fall upon them, and Cecily cried:
“Donald! Donald! She says your face is hur—oooooh!” she ended, screaming as she saw him.
The light passing through her fine hair gave her a halo and lent her frail dress a fainting nimbus about her crumpling body like a stricken poplar. Mrs. Powers moving quickly caught her, but not before her head had struck the door jamb.