V
I
Captain Green, who raised the company, had got a captain’s commission from the governor of the state thereby. But Captain Green was dead. He might have been a good officer, he might have been anything: certainly he remembered his friends. Two subaltern’s commissions were given away politically in spite of him, so the best he could do was to make his friend Madden, First Sergeant. Which he did.
And so here was Green in bars and shiny putties, here was Madden trying to acquire the habit of saying Sir to him, here was Tom and Dick and Harry with whom both Green and Madden had gambled and drunk whisky trying to learn to remember that there was a difference not only between them and Green and Madden, but that there was also a difference between Madden and Green.
“Oh, well,” they said in American camps, “he’s working hard: let him get used to it. It’s only on parade, hey, Sergeant?”
“Sure,” Sergeant Madden replied. “The Colonel is giving us hell about our appearance. Can’t we do better than this?”
But at Brest:
“What in hell does he think he is? Pershing?” they asked Sergeant Madden.
“Come on, come on, snap into it. If I hear another word from a man he goes before the Captain.” Sergeant Madden had also changed.
In wartime one lives in today. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come. Wait till we get into action, they told each other, we’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch. “Not Madden?” asked one horrified. They only looked at him. “For Christ’s sake,” remarked one at last.
But Fate, using the War Department as an instrument, circumvented them. When Sergeant Madden reported to his present captain and his old friend he found Green alone.
“Sit down, dammit,” Green told him, “nobody’s coming in. I know what you’re going to say. I am moving, anyhow: should get my papers tonight. Wait,” as Madden would have interrupted. “If I want to hold my commission I have got to work. These goddam training camps turn out officers trained. But I wasn’t. And so I am going to school for a while. Christ. At my age. I wish to God somebody else had gotten up this damn outfit. Do you know where I would like to be now? Out yonder with them, calling somebody else a son-of-a-bitch, as they are calling me now. Do you think I get any fun out of this?”
“Ah, hell, let ’em talk. What do you expect?”
“Nothing. Only I had to promise the mother of every goddam one of them that I’d look out for him and not let him get hurt. And now there’s not a bastard one wouldn’t shoot me in the back if he got a chance.”
“But what do you expect from them? What do you want? This is no picnic, you know.”
They sat silent across a table from each other. Their faces were ridged and sharp, cavernous in the unshadowed glare of light while they sat thinking of home, of quiet elm-shaded streets along which wagons creaked and crawled through the dusty day and along which girls and boys walked in the evening to and from the picture show or to sip sweet chilled liquids in drug stores; of peace and quiet and all homely things, of a time when there was no war.
They thought of young days not so far behind them, of the faint unease of complete physical satisfaction, of youth and lust like icing on a cake, making the cake sweeter. … Outside was Brittany and mud, an equivocal city, temporary and twice foreign, lust in a foreign tongue. Tomorrow we die.
At last Captain Green said diffidently:
“You are all right?”
“Hell, yes. They wanted to reduce me at one time, but I am all right now.”
Green opened his mouth twice, like a fish, and Madden said quickly: “I’ll look after them. Don’t you worry.”
“Ah, I’m not. Not about those bastards.”
An orderly entered, saluting. Green acknowledged him and the man delivered his message stiffly and withdrew.
“There it is,” said the captain.
“You’ll go tomorrow, then?”
“Yes. Yes. I hope so,” he answered, vaguely staring at the sergeant. Madden rose.
“Well, I think I’ll run along. I feel tired tonight.”
Green rose also and they stared at each other like strangers across the table.
“You’ll come in to see me in the morning?”
“I guess so. Sure, I’ll come in.”
Madden wished to withdraw and Green wanted him to, but they stood awkwardly, silent. At last Green said: “I am obliged to you.” Madden’s light-caverned eyes held a question. Their shadows were monstrous. “For helping me get by with that dose. Court-martial, you know. …”
“What did you expect of me?” No less, Green acknowledged and Madden continued: “Why don’t you let those women alone? They are all rotten with it.”
“Easy to say.” Green laughed mirthlessly. “For you, I mean.”
Madden’s hand strayed to the pocket of his blouse, then fell to his side again. After a while he repeated: “Well, I’ll be going.”
The captain moved around the table, extending his hand. “Well, goodbye.”
Madden did not take it. “Goodbye?”
“I may not see you again,” the other explained lamely.
“Hell. You talk like you were going home. Don’t be a fool. Those birds don’t mean anything by panning you. It will be the same with anybody.”
Green watched his knuckles whitening on the table. “I didn’t mean that. I meant—” He could not say I may be killed. A man simply didn’t say a thing like that. “You will get to the front before I do, I expect.”
“Perhaps so. But there is enough for all of us, I reckon.”
The rain had ceased for some reason and there came up faintly on the damp air that sound made by battalions and regiments being quiet, an orderly silence louder than a riot. Outside, Madden felt mud, knew darkness and damp, he smelled food and excrement and slumber beneath a sky too remote to distinguish between peace and war.
II
He thought at times of Captain Green as he crossed France, seeing the intermittent silver smugness of rain spaced forever with poplars like an eternal frieze giving way upon vistas fallow and fecund, roads and canals and villages shining their roofs violently; spires and trees; roads, villages; villages, towns, a city; villages, villages, then cars and troops and cars and troops at junction points. He saw people going about warfare in a businesslike way, he saw French soldiers playing croquet in stained horizon-blue, he saw American soldiers watching them, giving them American cigarettes; he saw American and British troops fighting, saw nobody minding them particularly. Save the M.P.s. A man must be in a funny frame of mind to be an M.P. Or a nigger general. The war zone. Business as usual. The golden age of noncombatants.
He thought at times of Green, wondering where the other was, even after he got to know his new company commander. A man quite different from Green. He had been a college instructor and he could explain to you where Alexander and Napoleon and Grant made their mistakes. He was mild: his voice could scarcely be heard on a parade ground and his men all said, Wait till we get into the lines. We’ll fix the son-of-a-bitch.
Sergeant Madden, however, got along quite well with his officers, particularly with a lieutenant named Powers. And with the men, too. Even after a training period with dummies and a miniature sector he got along with them. They had become accustomed to the sounds of far guns (shooting at other people, however) and the flickering horizon at night; they had been bombed by aeroplanes while lined up for mess at a field kitchen, while the personnel of a concealed French battery watched them without interest from a dugout; they had received much advice from troops that had been in the lines.
At last they were going in themselves after a measureless space of aimless wandering here and there, and the sound of guns though seemingly no nearer was no longer impersonal. They tramped by night, feeling their feet sink, then hearing them suck in mud. Then they felt sloping ground and were in a ditch. It was as if they were burying themselves, descending into their own graves in the bowels of the wet black earth, into a darkness so dense as to constrict breathing, constrict the heart. They stumbled on in the darkness.
Out of the gratis advice they had received, they recalled strongest to drop when a gun went off or when they heard a shell coming; so when a machine gun, far to the right, stuttered, breaking the slow hysteria of decay which buried them, someone dropped, someone stumbled over him, then they all went down as one man. The officer cursed them, noncoms kicked them erect again. Then while they stood huddled in the dark, smelling death, the lieutenant ran back along the line making them a brief bitter speech.
“Who in hell told you to lie down? The only guns within two miles of you are those things in your hands there. Feel this? this thing here”—slapping the rifles—“this is a gun. Sergeants, if another man drops, tramp him right into the mud and leave him.”
They plowed on, panting and cursing in whispers. Suddenly they were among men, and a veteran of four days, sensing that effluvia of men new to battle, said:
“Why, look at the soldiers come to fight in the war.”
“Silence there!” a noncom’s voice, and a sergeant came jumping along saying, Where is your officer? Men going out brushed them, passing on in the pitch wet darkness and a voice whispered wickedly, Look out for gas. The word Gas passed from mouth to mouth and Authority raged them into silence again. But the mischief had been done.
Gas. Bullets and death and damnation. But Gas. It looked like mist, they had been told. First thing you know you are in it. And then—Good night.
Silence broken by muddy movements of unrest and breathing. Eastward the sky paled impalpably, more like a death than a birth of anything; and they peered out in front of them, seeing nothing. There seemed to be no war here at all, though to the right of them a rumorous guttural of guns rose and fell thickly and heavily on the weary dawn. Powers, the officer, had passed from man to man. No one must fire: there was a patrol out there somewhere in the darkness. Dawn grew gray and slow; after a while the earth took a vague form and someone seeing a lesser darkness screamed, “Gas!”
Powers and Madden sprang among them as they fought blindly, fumbling and tearing at their gas masks, trampling each other, but they were powerless. The lieutenant laid about him with his fists, trying to make himself heard, and the man who had given the alarm whirled suddenly on the fire-step, his head and shoulders sharp against the sorrowful dawn.
“You got us killed,” he shrieked, shooting the officer in the face at point-blank range.
III
Sergeant Madden thought of Green again on a later day as he ran over broken ground at Cantigny saying, Come on, you bastards, do you want to live forever? He forgot Green temporarily as he lay beside a boy who had sold him shoes back home, in a shell-hole too small for them, feeling his exposed leg whipped by a gale as a tufted branch is whipped by a storm. After a while night came and the gale passed away and the man beside him died.
While in hospital he saw Captain Green’s name in a published casualty list. He also discovered in hospital that he had lost his photograph. He asked hospital orderlies and nurses about it, but no one recalled having seen it among his effects. It was just as well, though. She had in the meantime married a lieutenant on the staff of a college R.O.T.C. unit.
IV
Mrs. Burney’s black was neat and completely airproof: she did not believe in air save as a necessary adjunct to breathing. Mr. Burney, a morose, silent man, whose occupation was that of languidly sawing boards and then mildly nailing them together again, took all his ideas from his wife, so he believed this, too.
She toiled, neat as a pin, along the street, both fretted with and grateful to the heat because of her rheumatism, making a call. When she thought of her destination, of her changed status in the town, above her dull and quenchless sorrow she knew a faint pride: the stroke of Fate which robbed her likewise made of her an aristocrat. The Mrs. Worthingtons, the Mrs. Saunderses, all spoke to her now as one of them, as if she, too, rode in a car and bought a half dozen new dresses a year. Her boy had done this for her, his absence accomplishing that which his presence had never done, could never do.
Her black gown drank heat and held it in solution about her, her cotton umbrella became only a delusion. How hot for April, she thought, seeing cars containing pliant women’s bodies in cool, thin cloth passing her. Other women walking in delicate, gay shades nodded to her bent small rotundity, greeting her pleasantly. Her flat “commonsense” shoes carried her steadily and proudly on.
She turned a corner and the sun through maples was directly in her face. She lowered her umbrella to it, and remarking after a while a broken drain, and feeling an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete, she slanted her umbrella back. Pigeons in the spire were coolly remote from the heat, unemphatic as sleep, and she passed through an iron gate, following a graveled path. The rambling façade of the rectory dreamed in the afternoon above a lawn broken by geranium beds and a group of chairs beneath a tree. She crossed grass and the rector rose, huge as a rock, black and shapeless, greeting her.
(Oh, the poor man, how bad he looks. And so old, so old we are for this to happen to us. He was not any good, but he was my son. And now Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Saunders and Mrs. Wardle speak to me, stop in to chat about this and that while there is my Dewey dead. They hadn’t no sons and now his son come back and mine didn’t, and how gray his face, poor man.)
She panted with heat, like a dog, feeling pain in her bones, and she hobbled horribly across to the grouped figures. It was because the sun was in her eyes that she couldn’t see, sun going down beyond a lattice wall covered with wistaria. Pigeons crooned liquid gutturals from the spire, slanting like smears of paint, and the rector was saying:
“This is Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Burney, a friend of Donald’s. Donald, here is Mrs. Burney. You remember Mrs. Burney: she is Dewey’s mother, you remember.”
Mrs. Burney took a proffered chair blindly. Her dress held heat, her umbrella tripped her bonelessly, then bonelessly avoided her. The rector closed it and Mrs. Powers settled her in the chair. She rubbed at her eyes with a black-bordered cotton handkerchief.
Donald Mahon waked to voices. Mrs. Powers was saying: “How good of you to come. All Donald’s old friends have been so nice to him. Especially the ones who had sons in the war. They know, don’t they?”
(Oh, the poor man, the poor man. And your scarred face! Madden didn’t tell me your face was scarred, Donald.)
Pigeons like slow sleep, afternoon passing away, dying. Mrs. Burney, in her tight, hot black, the rector, huge and black and shapeless, Mrs. Burney with an unhealed sorrow, Mrs. Powers—(Dick, Dick. How young, how terribly young: tomorrow must never come. Kiss me, kiss me through my hair. Dick, Dick. My body flowing away from me, dividing. How ugly men are, naked. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me! No, no! we don’t love each other! we don’t! we don’t! Hold me close, close: my body’s intimacy is broken, unseeing: thank God my body cannot see. Your body is so ugly, Dick! Dear Dick. Your bones, your mouth hard and shaped as bone: rigid. My body flows away: you cannot hold it. Why do you sleep, Dick? My body flows on and on. You cannot hold it, for yours is so ugly, dear Dick. … “You may not hear from me for some time. I will write when I can. …”)
Donald Mahon, hearing voices, moved in his chair. He felt substance he could not see, heard what did not move him at all. “Carry on, Joe.”
The afternoon dreamed on, unbroken. A negro, informal in an undershirt, restrained his lawn mower, and stood beneath a tree, talking to a woman across the fence. Mrs. Burney in her rigid unbearable black: Mrs. Worthington speaks to me, but Dewey is dead. Oh, the poor man, his gray face. My boy is dead, but his boy has come home, come home … with a woman. What is she doing here? Mrs. Mitchell says … Mrs. Mitchell says … that Saunders girl is engaged to him. She is downtown yesterday almost nekkid. With the sun on her. … She wiped her eyes again under inevitable spring.
Donald Mahon, hearing voices: “Carry on, Joe.”
“I come to see how your boy is getting along, what with everything.” (Dewey, my boy.)
(I miss you like the devil, Dick. Someone to sleep with? I don’t know. Oh, Dick, Dick. You left no mark on me, nothing. Kiss me through my hair, Dick, with all your ugly body, and let’s don’t ever see each other again, ever. … No, we won’t, dear, ugly Dick.)
(Yes, that was Donald. He is dead.) “He is much better, thank you. Give him a few weeks’ rest and he will be well again.”
“I am so glad, so glad,” she answered, pitying him, envying him. (My son died, a hero: Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Saunders, chat with me about nothing at all.) “Poor boy, don’t he remember his friends at all?”
“Yes, yes.” (This was Donald, my son.) “Donald, don’t you remember Mrs. Burney? She is Dewey’s mother, you know.”
(… but not forever. I wish you all the luck and love in the world. Wish me luck, dear Dick. …)
Donald Mahon, hearing voices: “Carry on, Joe.”
The way that girl goes on with men! she thought exultantly. Dewey may be dead, but thank God he ain’t engaged to her. “Your boy is home, he’ll be married soon and everything. So nice for you, so nice. …”
“There, there,” the rector said, touching her shoulder kindly, “you must come often to see him.”
“Yes, I will come often,” she replied through her black-bordered cotton handkerchief. “It’s so nice he come home safe and well. Some didn’t.” (Dewey, Dewey.)
The sun flamed slowly across the wistaria, seeking interstices. She would see Mrs. Worthington downtown now, probably. Mrs. Worthington would ask her how she was, how her husband was. (My rheumatism, but I am old. Yes, yes. When we get old. … You are old, too, she would think with comfortable malice, older than me. Old, old, too old for things like this to happen to us. He was so good to me, so big and strong: brave. …) She rose and someone handed her the cotton umbrella.
“Yes, yes. I will come again to see him.” (Poor boy. Poor man, his face: so gray.)
The lawn mower chattered slowly, reluctantly breaking the evening. Mrs. Burney, disturbing bees, crossed grass blindly. Someone passed her at the gate and remarking an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete and a broken drain, she slanted her umbrella backward, shielding her neat, black-clad, airproof back.
Sucking silver sound of pigeons slanting to and from the spire like smears of soft paint on a cloudless sky. The sun lengthened the shadow of the wistaria-covered wall, immersing the grouped chairs in cool shadow. Waiting for sunset.
(Dick, my love, that I did not love, Dick, your ugly body breaking into mine like a burglar, my body flowing away, washing away all trace of yours. … Kiss and forget me: remember me only to wish me luck, dear, ugly, dead Dick. …)
(This was my son, Donald. He is dead.)
Gilligan, crossing the lawn, said: “Who was that?”
“Mrs. Burney,” the rector told him. “Her son was killed. You’ve probably heard of him downtown.”
“Yeh, I’ve heard of him. He was the one under indictment for stealing fifty pounds of sugar and they let him go to enlist, wasn’t he?”
“There were stories. …” The rector’s voice died away.
Donald Mahon, hearing silence: “You stopped, Joe.”
Gilligan stood near him settling the colored glasses over his eyes. “Sure, Loot. More Rome?”
The shadow of the wall took them completely and at last he said:
“Carry on, Joe.”
V
She missed Mrs. Worthington. She saw the old woman drive smoothly away from Price’s in her car, alone in the back seat. The negro driver’s head was round as a cannonball and Mrs. Burney watched it draw away, smelling gasoline. The shadow of the courthouse was like thinned tobacco smoke filling one side of the square, and standing in the door of a store she saw an acquaintance, a friend of her son’s. He had been in Dewey’s company, an officer or something, but he hadn’t got killed, not him! Trust them generals and things.
(No, no! I won’t feel like this! He done the best he could. It ain’t his fault if he wasn’t brave enough to get killed, like Dewey was. They are all jealous of Dewey anyway: won’t talk about him except that he done what was right. Done what was right! Didn’t I know he would? Dewey, Dewey. So young he was, so big and brave. Until that Green man took him off and got him killed.)
She felt sorry for the man, felt kindly toward him, pitying him. She stopped beside him. Yes, ma’am, he was all right. Yes, the other boys were all right.
“But then you wasn’t killed,” she explained. “All soldiers wasn’t like Dewey: so brave—foolhardy, almost. … I always told him not to let that Green get him—get him—”
“Yes, yes,” he agreed, looking at her meticulous, bent neatness.
“He was all right? He didn’t want for nothing?”
“No, no, he was all right,” he assured her. Sunset was almost come. Sparrows in a final delirium in the dusty elms, the last wagons going slowly countryward.
“Men don’t know,” she said bitterly. “You probably never done for him what you could. That Mr. Green. … I always misdoubted him.”
“He is dead, too, you know,” he reminded her.
(I won’t be unjust to him!) “You was a officer or something: seems like you’d have took better care of a boy you knowed.”
“We did all we could for him,” he told her patiently. The square, empty of wagons, was quiet. Women went slowly in the last of the sun, meeting husbands, going home to supper. She felt her rheumatism more, now that the air was getting cooler, and she became restive in her fretful black.
“Well. You seen his grave, you say. … You are sure he was all right?” So big and strong he was, so good to her.
“Yes, yes. He was all right.”
Madden watched her bent, neat rotundity going down the street among shadows, beneath metallic awnings. The shadow of the courthouse had taken half the town like a silent victorious army, not firing a shot. The sparrows completed a final dusty delirium and went away, went away across evening into morning, retracing months: a year.
Someone on a fire-step had shouted Gas and the officer leaped among them striking, imploring. Then he saw the officer’s face in red and bitter relief as the man on the fire-step, sharp against the sorrowful dawn, turned screaming, You have got us killed, and shot him in the face at point-blank range.
VI
San Francisco, Cal.
.Dear Margaret—
I got your letter and I intended to answering it sooner but I have been busy running around. Yes she was not a bad kid she has shown me a good time no she is not so good looking but she takes a good photo she wants to go in the movies. And a director told her she photographs better than any girl he has seen. She has a car and she is a swell dancer but of coarse I just like to play around with her she is to young for me. To really care for. No I have not gone to work yet. This girl goes to the U and she is talking about me going there next year. So I may go there next year. Well there is no news I have done a little flying but mostly dancing and running around. I have got to go out on a party now or I would write more. Next time more next time give my reguards to everybody I know.
VII
Mahon liked music; so Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them. Mrs. Worthington lived in a large, beautiful old house which her husband, conveniently dead, had bequeathed, with a colorless male cousin who had false teeth and no occupation that anyone knew of, to her. The male cousin’s articulation was bad (he had been struck in the mouth with an ax in a dice game in Cuba during the Spanish-American War): perhaps this was why he did nothing.
Mrs. Worthington ate too much and suffered from gout and a flouted will. So her church connection was rather trying to the minister and his flock. But she had money—that panacea for all ills of the flesh and spirit. She believed in rights for women, as long as women would let her dictate what was right for them.
One usually ignored the male relation. But sometimes one pitied him.
But she sent her car for them and with Mrs. Powers and Mahon in the rear, and Gilligan beside the negro driver, they rolled smoothly beneath elms, seeing stars in a clear sky, smelling growing things, hearing a rhythmic thumping soon to become music.
VIII
This, the spring of 1919, was the day of the Boy, of him who had been too young for soldiering. For two years he had had a dry time of it. Of course, girls had used him during the scarcity of men, but always in such a detached impersonal manner. Like committing fornication with a beautiful woman who chews gum steadily all the while. O Uniform, O Vanity. They had used him but when a uniform showed up he got the air.
Up to that time uniforms could all walk: they were not only fashionable and romantic, but they were also quite keen on spending what money they had and they were also going too far away and too immediately to tell on you. Of course it was silly that some uniforms had to salute others, but it was nice, too. Especially, if the uniform you had caught happened to be a salutee. And heaven only knows how much damage among feminine hearts a set of pilot’s wings was capable of.
And the shows:
Beautiful, pure girls (American) in afternoon or evening gowns (doubtless under Brigade Orders) caught in deserted fire trenches by Prussian Hussars (on passes signed by Belasco) in parade uniform; courtesans in Paris frocks demoralizing Brigade staffs, having subalterns with arrow collar profiles and creased breech, whom the generals all think may be German spies, and handsome old generals, whom the subalterns all think may be German spies, glaring at each other across her languid body while corporal comedians entertain the beautiful-limbed and otherwise idle Red Cross nurses (American). The French women present are either marquises or whores or German spies, sometimes both, sometimes all three. The marquises may be told immediately because they all wear sabots, having given their shoes with the rest of their clothing to the French army, retaining only a pair of forty carat diamond earrings. Their sons are all aviators who have been out on a patrol since the previous Tuesday, causing the marquises to be a trifle distrait. The regular whores patronize them, while the German spies make love to the generals.
A courtesan (doubtless also under Brigade Orders) later saves the sector by sex appeal after gunpowder had failed, and the whole thing is wound up with a sort of garden party near a papier-mâché dugout in which the army sits in sixty-pound packs, all three smoking cigarettes, while the Prussian Guard gnashes its teeth at them from an adjacent cardboard trench.
A chaplain appears who, to indicate that the soldiers love him because he is one of them, achieves innuendoes about home and mother and fornication. A large new flag is flown and the enemy fires at it vainly with .22 rifles. The men on our side cheer, led by the padre.
“What,” said a beautiful, painted girl, not listening, to James Dough who had been for two years a corporal-pilot in a French chasse escadrille, “is the difference between an American Ace and a French or British aviator?”
“About six reels,” answered James Dough glumly (such a dull man! Where did Mrs. Wardle get him?) who had shot down thirteen enemy craft and had himself been crashed twice, giving him eleven points without allowing for evaporation.
“How nice. Is that so, really? You had movies in France, too, then?”
“Yes. Gave us something to do in our spare time.”
“Yes,” she agreed, offering him her oblivious profile. “You must have had an awfully good time while we poor women were slaving here rolling bandages and knitting things. I hope women can fight in the next war: I had much rather march and shoot guns than knit. Do you think they will let women fight in the next war?” she asked, watching a young man dancing, limber as a worm.
“I expect they’ll have to.” James Dough shifted his artificial leg, nursing his festering arm between the bones of which a tracer bullet had passed. “If they want to have another one.”
“Yes.” She yearned toward the agile, prancing youth. His body was young in years, his hair was glued smoothly to his skull. His face, under a layer of powder, was shaved and pallid, sophisticated, and he and his blonde and briefly-skirted partner slid and poised and drifted like a dream. The negro cornetist stayed his sweating crew and the assault arrested withdrew, leaving the walls of silence peopled by the unconquered defenders of talk. Boys of both sexes swayed arm in arm, taking sliding tripping steps, waiting for the music and the agile youth, lounging immaculately, said: “Have this dance?”
She said “Hel—lo,” sweetly drawling. “Have you met Mr. Dough? Mr. Rivers, Mr. Dough. Mr. Dough is a visitor in town.”
Mr. Rivers patronized Mr. Dough easily and repeated: “Dance the next?” Mr. Rivers had had a year at Princeton.
“I’m sorry. Mr. Dough doesn’t dance,” answered Miss Cecily Saunders faultlessly. Mr. Rivers, well bred, with all the benefits of a year at a cultural center, mooned his blank face at her.
“Aw, come on. You aren’t going to sit out all evening, are you? What did you come here for?”
“No, no: later, perhaps. I want to talk to Mr. Dough. You hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
He stared at her quietly and emptily. At last he mumbled “Sorry,” and lounged away.
“Really,” began Mr. Dough, “not on my account, you know. If you want to dance—”
“Oh, I have to see those—those infants all the time. Really, it is quite a relief to meet someone who knows more than dancing and—and—dancing. But tell me about yourself. Do you like Charlestown? I can see that you are accustomed to larger cities, but don’t you find something charming about these small towns?”
Mr. Rivers roved his eye, seeing two girls watching him in poised invitation, but he moved on toward a group of men standing and sitting near the steps, managing in some way to create the illusion of being both participants and spectators at the same time. They were all of a kind: there was a kinship like an odor among them, a belligerent self-effacement. Wallflowers. Wallflowers. Good to talk to the hostess and dance with the duds. But even the talkative hostess had given them up now. One or two of them, bolder than the rest, but disseminating that same faint identical odor stood beside girls, waiting for the music to start again, but the majority of them herded near the steps, touching each other as if for mutual protection. Mr. Rivers heard phrases in bad French and he joined them, aware of his own fitted dinner jacket revealing his matchless linen.
“May I see you a minute, Madden?”
The man quietly smoking detached himself from the group. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him: a sense of competent inertia after activity.
“Yes?” he said.
“Do me a favor, will you?”
“Yes?” the man repeated courteously noncommittal.
“There’s a man here who can’t dance, that nephew of Mrs. Wardle’s, that was hurt in the war. Cecily—I mean Miss Saunders—has been with him all evening. She wants to dance.”
The other watched him with calm intentness and Mr. Rivers suddenly lost his superior air.
“To tell the truth, I want to dance with her. Would you mind sitting with him a while? I’d be awfully obliged to you if you would.”
“Does Miss Saunders want to dance?”
“Sure she does. She said so.” The other’s gaze was so penetrating that he felt moisture and drew his handkerchief, wiping his powdered brow lightly, not to disarrange his hair. “God damn it,” he burst out, “you soldiers think you own things, don’t you?”
Columns, imitation Doric, supported a remote small balcony, high and obscure, couples strolled in, awaiting the music, talk and laughter and movement distorted by a lax transparency of curtains inside the house. Along the balustrade of the veranda red eyes of cigarettes glowed; a girl stooping ostrich-like drew up her stocking and light from a window found her young shapeless leg. The negro cornetist, having learned in his thirty years a century of the white man’s lust, blinked his dispassionate eye, leading his crew in a fresh assault. Couples erupted in, clasped and danced; vague blurs locked together on the lawn beyond the light.
“… Uncle Joe, Sister Kate, all shimmy like jelly on a plate. …”
Mr. Rivers felt like a chip in a current: he knew a sharp puerile anger. Then as they turned the angle of the porch he saw Cecily clothed delicately in a silver frock, fragile as spun glass. She carried a green feather fan and her slim, animated turned body, her nervous prettiness, filled him with speculation. The light falling diffidently on her, felt her arm, her short body, suavely indicated her long, virginal legs.
“… Uncle Bud, ninety-two, shook his cane and shimmied too. …”
Dr. Gary danced by without his glass of water: they avoided him and Cecily looked up, breaking her speech.
“Oh, Mr. Madden! How do you do?” She gave him her hand and presented him to Mr. Dough. “I’m awfully flattered that you decided to speak to me—or did Lee have to drag you over? Ah, that’s how it was. You were going to ignore me, I know you were. Of course we can’t hope to compete with French women—”
Madden protested conventionally and she made room for him beside her.
“Sit down. Mr. Dough was a soldier, too, you know.”
Mr. Rivers said heavily: “Mr. Dough will excuse you. How about a dance? Time to go home soon.”
She civilly ignored him and James Dough shifted his leg. “Really, Miss Saunders, please dance, I wouldn’t spoil your evening for anything.”
“Do you hear that, Mr. Madden? The man is driving me away. Would you do that?” she tilted her eyes at him effectively. Then she turned to Dough with restrained graceful impulsiveness. “I still call him Mr. Madden, though we have known each other all our lives. But then he was in the war, and I wasn’t. He is so—so experienced, you see. And I am only a girl. If I had been a boy like Lee I’d have gone and been a lieutenant in shiny boots or a general or something by now. Wouldn’t I?” Her turning body was graceful, impulsive: a fragile spontaneity. “I cannot call you mister any more. Do you mind?”
“Let’s dance.” Mr. Rivers, tapping his foot to the music, watched this with sophisticated boredom. He yawned openly. “Let’s dance.”
“Rufus, ma’am,” said Madden.
“Rufus. And you mustn’t say ma’am to me any longer. You won’t, will you?”
“No ma—I mean, no.”
“Oh, you nearly forgot then—”
“Let’s dance,” repeated Mr. Rivers.
“—but you won’t forget any more. You won’t, will you?”
“No, no.”
“Don’t let him forget, Mr. Dough. I am depending on you.”
“Good, good. But you go and dance with Mr. Smith here.”
She rose. “He is sending me away,” she stated with mock humility. Then she shrugged narrowly, nervously. “I know we aren’t as attractive as French women, but you must make the best of us. Poor Lee, here, doesn’t know any French women so we can please him. But you soldiers don’t like us any more, I’m afraid.”
“Not at all: we give you up to Mr. Lee only on condition that you come back to us.”
“Now that’s better. But you are saying that just to be polite,” she accused.
“No, no, if you don’t dance with Mr. Lee, here, you will be impolite. He has asked you several times.”
She shrugged again nervously. “So I guess I must dance, Lee. Unless you have changed your mind, too, and don’t want me?”
He took her hand. “Hell, come on.”
Restraining him, she turned to the other two, who had risen also. “You will wait for me?”
They assured her, and she released them. Dough’s creaking, artificial knee was drowned by the music and she gave herself to Mr. Rivers’ embrace. They took the syncopation, he felt her shallow breast and her knees briefly, and said: “What you doing to him?” slipping his arm further around her, feeling the swell of her hip under his hand.
“Doing to him?”
“Ah, let’s dance.”
Locked together they poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, drifting like a broken dream.
IX
George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress anticipating her partner’s limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it. A couple passed them and a girl said, “Hello, George. Coming in?” “No,” he told her, wallowing in all the passionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss.
His friend beside him, a soda-clerk, spat his cigarette. “Let’s have another drink.”
The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drugstore. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this passed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage.
“To hell with them,” he said.
“You ain’t going in, are you?” his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars. The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice. The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, had seen them, had seen her—her taut body prone and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source. …
“I’m not going in,” he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes.
“Hell, no,” he repeated, “I’m not going in.”
X
This was the day of the Boy, male and female.
“Look at them, Joe,” Mrs. Powers said, “sitting there like lost souls waiting to get into hell.”
The car had stopped broadside on, where they could get a good view.
“They don’t look like they’re sitting to me,” Gilligan answered with enthusiasm. “Look at them two: look where he’s got his hand. This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it: I would have got throwed out of any place I ever danced doing that. But I had a unfortunate youth: I never danced with nice people.”
Through two heavy identical magnolias the lighted porch was like a stage. The dancers moved, locked two and two, taking the changing light, eluding it.
“… shake it and break it, don’t let it fall. …”
Along the balustrade they sat like birds, effacingly belligerent. Wallflowers.
“No, no, I mean those ex-soldiers there. Look at them. Sitting there, talking their army French, kidding themselves. Why did they come, Joe?”
“Same reason we come. Like a show, ain’t it? But how do you know they’re soldiers? … Look at them two there,” he crowed suddenly, with childish intentness. The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking and finding it, losing it again. … Her limbs eluded his, anticipated his: the breath of a touch and an escape, which he, too, was quick to assist. Touch and retreat: no satiety. “Wow, if that tune ever stops!”
“Don’t be silly, Joe. I know them. I have seen their sort at the canteen too often, acting just that way: poor kind dull boys going to war, and because they were going girls were nice to them. But now there is no war for them to go to. And look how the girls treat them.”
“What was you saying?” asked Gilligan with detachment. He tore his eyes from the couple. “Wow, if the Loot could see this it’d sure wake him up, wouldn’t it?”
Mahon sat quietly beside Mrs. Powers. Gilligan turning in his seat beside the negro driver looked at his quiet shape. The syncopation pulsed about them, a reiteration of wind and strings warm and troubling as water. She leaned toward him.
“Like it, Donald?”
He stirred, raising his hand to his glasses.
“Come on, Loot,” said Gilligan quickly; “don’t knock ’em off. We might lose ’em here.” Mahon lowered his hand obediently. “Music’s pretty good, ain’t it?”
“Pretty good, Joe,” he agreed.
Gilligan looked at the dancers again. “Pretty good ain’t the half of it. Look at ’em.”
“… oh, oh, I wonder where my easy rider’s gone. …”
He turned suddenly to Mrs. Powers. “You know who that is there?”
Mrs. Powers saw Dr. Gary, without his glass of water, she saw a feather fan like a willow at evening and the luminous plane of a bare arm upon conventional black. She saw two heads as one head, cheek to cheek, expressionless and fixed as a ritual above a slow synchronization of limbs. “That Saunders lady,” Gilligan explained.
She watched the girl’s graceful motion, a restrained delicate abandon, and Gilligan continued: “I think I’ll go closer, with them birds sitting there. I got to see this.”
They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behavior has become inexplicably obsolete overnight.
Most of them Gilligan knew by name and he sat also upon the balustrade. He was offered and accepted a cigarette and he perched among them while they talked loudly, drowning the intimation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favors and who now ignored them—the hangover of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled and lost, poor devils. Once Society drank war, brought them into manhood with a cultivated taste for war; but now Society seemed to have found something else for a beverage, while they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-five percent.
“Look at those kids that grew up while we were away,” one advised him with passion. “The girls don’t like it. But what can they do? We can’t do them dances. It ain’t just going through the motions. You could learn that, I guess. It’s—it’s—” he sought vainly for words. He gave it up and continued: “Funny, too. I learned things from French women. … Say, the girls don’t like it, do they? They haven’t changed that much, you know.”
“Naw, they don’t like it,” Gilligan answered. “Look at them two.”
“Sure, they don’t like it. These are nice girls: they will be the mothers of the next generation. Of course they don’t like it.”
“Somebody sure does, though,” Gilligan replied. Dr. Gary passed, dancing smoothly, efficiently, quite decorous, yet enjoying himself. His partner was young and briefly skirted: you could see that she danced with him because it was the thing to dance with Dr. Gary—no one knew exactly why. She was conscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body, flat as a boy’s and, like a boy’s, pleasuring in freedom and motion, as though freedom and motion were water, pleasuring her flesh to the intermittent teasing of silk. Her glance followed over Dr. Gary’s shoulder (it was masculine because it was drably conventional in black) and arrested seeking for a lost rhythm, lost deliberately. Dr. Gary’s partner, skilfully following him, watched the other couple, ignoring the girl. (If there’s justice in heaven, I’ll get him next time.)
“Dancing with you,” said Dr. Gary, “is like a poem by a minor poet named Swinburne.” Dr. Gary preferred Milton: he had the passages all designated, like a play.
“Swinburne?” She smiled vaguely, watching the other couple, not losing the rhythm, not cracking her paint. Her face was smooth, as skilfully done and as artificial as an orchid. “Did he write poems, too?” (Is he thinking of Ella Wilcox or Irene Castle? He is a grand dancer: takes a good dancer to get along with Cecily.) “I think Kipling is awfully cute, don’t you?” (What a funny dress Cecily has on.)
Gilligan, watching the dancers, said: “What?”
The other repeated defensively: “He was in a French base. Sure he was. Two or three years. Good fellow.” He added: “Even if he can dance like they do.”
Light, motion, sound: no solidity. A turgid compulsion, passionate and evanescent. And outside spring, like a young girl reft of happiness and incapable of sorrow.
“… throw it on the wall. Oh, oh, oh, oh …” “… won’t never forget his expression when he said, ‘Jack, mine’s got syph. Had her …’ ” “shake it and break it, shake it. …” “First night in Paris … then the other one. …” “… don’t let it fall. …” “… with a gun … twenty dollars in gold pinned to my …” “I wonder where my easy, easy rider’s. …”
“Sure,” Gilligan agreed. He wondered where Madden, whom he liked, was, and not expecting an answer he was informed. (There she is again. Her feather fan like a willow at evening, her arm crossing conventional black a slim warm plane. Jove would have said, How virginal her legs are, but Gilligan, not being Jove, said, For Christ’s sake, wishing Donald Mahon were her partner or failing this, being glad he couldn’t see her.)
The music stopped. The dancers stood waiting its renewal. The hostess talking interminably appeared and as before a plague people scattered before her passage. Gilligan caught, submerged beneath waves of talk, suffered her, watching couples pass from the veranda on to the vague lawn. How soft their bodies look, their little backs and hips, he thought, saying, yes ma’am or no ma’am. At last he walked away and left her talking, and in a swing he saw Madden and a stranger.
“This is Mr. Dough,” Madden said, greeting him. “How’s Mahon?”
Gilligan shook hands. “He’s outside there, now, with Mrs. Powers.”
“He is? Mahon was with the British,” he explained to his companion. “Aviation.”
He betrayed a faint interest. “R.A.F.?”
“I guess so,” Gilligan replied. “We brought him over to hear the music a while.”
“Brought him?”
“Got his in the head. Don’t remember much,” Madden informed the other. “Did you say Mrs. Powers is with him?” he asked Gilligan.
“Yeh, she came. Why not come out and speak to her?”
Madden looked at his companion. Dough shifted his cork leg. “I think not,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”
Madden rose. “Come on,” Gilligan said, “she’ll be glad to see you. She ain’t a bad sort, as Madden can tell you.”
“No, I’ll wait here, thanks. But come back, will you?”
Madden read his unexpressed thought. “She’s dancing now. I’ll be back before then.”
They left him lighting a cigarette. The negro cornetist had restrained his men and removed them temporarily and the porch was deserted save for the group sitting on the balustrade. These, the hostess, with a renaissance of optimism, had run to earth and captured.
Gilligan and Madden crossed grass, leaving lights behind. “Mrs. Powers, you remember Mr. Madden,” Gilligan informed her formally. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him, a sense of competent inertia after activity. Madden saw her colorless face against the canopied darkness of the car, her black eyes and her mouth like a scar. Beside her Mahon sat motionless and remote, waiting for music which you could not tell whether or not he heard.
“Good evening, ma’am,” Madden said enveloping her firm, slow hand, remembering a figure sharp against the sky screaming, You got us killed and firing point-blank into another man’s face red and bitter in a relief of transient flame against a sorrowful dawn.
XI
Jones, challenging the competition, danced with her twice, once for six feet and then for nine feet. She could not dance with the muscular facility of some of the other girls. Perhaps this was the reason she was in such demand. Dancing with the more skilled ones was too much like dancing with agile boys. Anyway, men all seemed to want to dance with her, to touch her.
Jones, foiled for the second time, became yellowly speculative: tactical; then, watching his chance, he cut in upon glued hair and a dinner coat. The man raised his empty ironed face fretfully, but Jones skilfully cut her out of the prancing herd and into the angle made by the corner of the balustrade. Here only his back could be assailed.
He knew his advantage was but temporary, so he spoke quickly.
“Friend of yours here tonight.”
Her feather fan drew softly across his neck. He sought her knee with his and she eluded him with efficiency, trying vainly to maneuver from the corner. One desiring to cut in importuned him from behind and she said with exasperation: “Do you dance, Mr. Jones? They have a good floor here. Suppose we try it.”
“Your friend Donald dances. Ask him for one,” he told her, feeling her shallow breast and her nervous efforts to evade him. One importuned him from behind and she raised her pretty unpretty face. Her hair was soft and fine, carelessly caught about her head and her painted mouth was purple in this light.
“Here? Dancing?”
“With his two Niobes. I saw the female one and I imagine the male one is here also.”
“Niobes?”
“That Mrs. Powers, or whatever her name is.”
She held her head back so as to see his face. “You are lying.”
“No, I’m not. They are here.”
She stared at him. He could feel her fan drooping from her arched wrist on his cheek softly and one importuned him from behind. “Sitting out now, in a car,” he added.
“With Mrs. Powers?”
“Watch your step, sister, or she’ll have him.”
She slipped from him suddenly. “If you aren’t going to dance—”
One importuning him from behind repeated tirelessly, “May I cut in,” and she evaded Jones’ arm.
“Oh, Lee. Mr. Jones doesn’t dance.”
“M’I’ve this dance,” mumbled the conventional one conventionally, already encircling her. Jones stood baggy and yellow, yellowly watching her fan upon her partner’s coat, like a hushed splash of water, her arching neck and her arm crossing a black shoulder with luminous warmth, the indicated silver evasion of her limbs anticipating her partner’s like a broken dream.
“Got a match?” Jones, pausing, asked abruptly of a man sitting alone in a swing. He lit his pipe and lounged in slow and fat belligerence among a group sitting upon the balustrade near the steps, like birds. The negro cornetist spurred his men to fiercer endeavor, the brass died and a plaintive minor of hushed voices carried the rhythm until the brass, suspiring again, took it. Jones sucked his pipe, thrusting his hands in his jacket and a slim arm slid suddenly beneath his tweed sleeve.
“Wait for me, Lee.” Jones, looking around, remarked her fan and the glass-like fragility of her dress. “I must see some people in a car.”
The boy’s ironed face was a fretted fatuity above his immaculate linen. “Let me go with you.”
“No, no. You wait for me. Mr. Jones will take me: you don’t even know them. You dance until I come back. Promise?”
“But say—”
Her hand flashed slimly staying him. “No, no. Please. Promise?”
He promised and stood to stare at them as they descended the steps passing beneath the two magnolias and so on into darkness, where her dress became a substanceless articulation beside the man’s shapeless tweed. … After a while he turned and walked down the emptying veranda. Where’d that slob come from? he wondered, seeing two girls watching him in poised invitation. Do they let anybody in here?
As he hesitated, the hostess appeared talking interminably, but he circumvented her with skill of long practice. Beyond a shadowed corner in the half-darkness of a swing a man sat alone. He approached and before he could make his request the man extended a box of matches.
“Thanks,” he murmured, without surprise, lighting a cigarette. He strolled away, and the owner of the matches fingered the small, crisp wood box, wondering mildly who the third one would be.
XII
“No, no, let’s go to them first.”
She arrested their progress and after a time succeeded in releasing her arm. As they stood, a couple passed them, and the girl, leaning to her, whispered: “See right through you. Stay out of the light.”
They passed on and she looked after them, watching the other girl. Cat! What a queer dress she is wearing. Funny ankles. Funny. Poor girl.
But she had little time for impersonal speculation, being attached temporarily to Jones. “No, no,” she repeated, twisting the hand he held, drawing him in the direction of the car. Mrs. Powers, looking over Madden’s head, saw them.
Jones released the fragile writhing of her fingers, and she sped delicately over the damp grass. He followed fatly and she put her hands on the door of the car, her narrow nervous hands, between which the green fan splashed graciously.
“Oh, how do you do? I didn’t have any idea you were coming! If I had I would have arranged partners for you. I’m sure you dance awfully well. But then, as soon as the men see you here you won’t lack for partners, I know.”
(What does she want with him now? Watching me: doesn’t trust me with him.)
“Awfully nice dance. And Mr. Gilligan!” (What’s she wanta come worrying him now for? She bothers damn little while he’s sitting at home there.) “Of course, one simply does not see Donald without Mr. Gilligan. It must be nice to have Mr. Gilligan fond of you like that. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Powers?” Her braced straightening arms supported a pliant slow backward curve from her hips. “And Rufus. (Yes, she is pretty. And silly. But—but pretty.) You deserted me for another woman! Don’t say you didn’t. I tried to make him dance with me, Mrs. Powers, but he wouldn’t do it. Perhaps you had better luck?” A dropped knee molded the glass-like fragility of her silver dress. “Ah, you needn’t say anything: we know how attractive Mrs. Powers is, don’t we, Mr. Jones?” (See your behind, the shape of it. And your whole leg, when you stand like that. Knows it, too.)
Her eyes became hard, black. “You told me they were dancing,” she accused.
“He can’t dance, you know,” Mrs. Powers said. “We brought him so he could hear the music.”
“Mr. Jones told me you and he were dancing. And I believed him: I seem to know so much less than other people about him. But, of course, he is sick, he does not—remember his old friends, now that he has made new ones.”
(Is she going to cry? It would be just like her. The fool, the little fool.) “I think you are not fair to him. But won’t you get in and sit down? Mr. Madden, will you—?”
Madden had already opened the door.
“No, no: if he likes the music I’d only disturb him. He had much rather sit with Mrs. Powers, I know.”
(Yes, she’s going to make a scene.) “Please. Just a moment. He hasn’t seen you today, you know.”
She hesitated, then Jones regarded the dividing soft curves of her thighs and the fleeting exposure of a stocking, and borrowed a match from Gilligan. The music had ceased and through the two identical magnolias the porch was like an empty stage. The negro driver’s head was round as a capped cannonball: perhaps he slept. She mounted and sank into the dark seat beside Mahon, sitting still and resigned. Mrs. Powers suddenly spoke:
“Do you dance, Mr. Madden?”
“Yes, a little,” he admitted. She descended from the car and turning, met Cecily’s startled shallow face.
“I’ll leave you to visit with Donald while I have a dance or two with Mr. Madden, shall I?” She took Madden’s arm. “Don’t you want to come in, too, Joe?”
“I guess not,” Gilligan answered. “Competition’ll be too strong for me. I’ll get you to learn me private, some time, so I can be a credit to you.”
Cecily, in exasperation, saw the other woman stealing part of her audience. But here were still Jones and Gilligan. Jones climbed heavily into the vacated seat, uninvited. Cecily gave him a fierce glance and turned her back upon him, feeling his arm against her side.
“Donald, sweetheart,” she said, patting her arm about Mahon. From here she could not see the scar so she drew his face to hers with her hand, laying her cheek against his. Feeling her touch, hearing voices, he stirred. “It’s Cecily, Donald,” she said sweetly.
“Cecily,” he parroted.
“Yes. Put your arm around me like you used to, Donald, dear heart.” She moved nervously, but the length of Jones’ arm remained against her closely as though it were attached by suction, like an octopus’ tentacle. Trying to avoid him, her clasp about Mahon tightened convulsively, and he raised his hand, touching her face, fumbling at his glasses. “Easy there, Loot,” Gilligan warned quickly, and he lowered his hand.
Cecily kissed his cheek swiftly and sat up, releasing him. “Oh, there goes the music again, and I have this dance.” She stood up in the car, looking about. One lounging immaculately, smoking, strolled past. “Oh, Lee,” she called, in happy relief, “here I am.”
She opened the door and sprang out as the conventional one approached. Jones descended fatly, baggily, and stood dragging his jacket across his thick, heavy hips, staring yellowly at Mr. Rivers. Her body poised again, turning, and she said to Gilligan: “You aren’t dancing tonight?”
“Not like that,” he replied, “no, ma’am. Where I come from you’d have to have a license to dance that way.”
Her laugh was in three notes and she was like a swept tree. Her eyes, beneath lowered lids, her teeth, between her purple lips, glittered briefly.
“I think that’s awfully clever. And Mr. Jones doesn’t dance either, so all I have left is Lee.”
Lee—Mr. Rivers—stood waiting, and Jones said heavily: “This is my dance.”
“I’m sorry. I promised Lee,” she answered swiftly. “But you cut in, won’t you?” Her hand was briefly on his sleeve and Jones, contemplating Mr. Rivers, yellowly repeated:
“This is my dance.”
Mr. Rivers looked at him and then looked quickly away.
“Oh, beg pardon. Your dance?”
“Lee!” she said sharply, reaching her hand again. Mr. Rivers met Jones’ stare once more.
“Beg pardon,” he muttered, “I’ll cut in.” He lounged onward. Cecily let her glance follow him, then she shrugged and turned to Jones. Her neck, her arm, took faint light warmly, smoothly. She took Jones’ tweed sleeve.
“Say,” Gilligan murmured, watching their retreat, “you can see right through her.”
“Dat’s de war,” explained the negro driver, sleeping again immediately.
XIII
Jones dragged her resisting among shadows. A crepe-myrtle bush obscured them.
“Let me go!” she said, struggling.
“What’s the matter with you? You kissed me once, didn’t you?”
“Let me go,” she repeated.
“What for? For that goddam dead man? What does he care about you?” He held her until her nervous energy, deserting her, left her fragile as a captured bird. He stared at the white blur which was her face and she was aware of the shapeless looming bulk of his body in the darkness, smelling wool and tobacco.
“Let me go,” she repeated piteously, and finding herself suddenly free, she fled across grass, knowing dew on her shoes, seeing gratefully a row of men sitting like birds on the balustrade. Mr. Rivers’ ironed face, above his immaculate linen, met her and she grasped his arm.
“Let’s dance, Lee,” she said thinly, striking her body sharply against him, taking the broken suggestion of saxophones.
XIV
Mrs. Powers had a small triumph: the railbirds had given her a “rush.”
“Say,” they had nudged each other, “look who Rufe’s got.”
And while the hostess stood in effusive volubility beside her straight, dark dress, two of them, whispering together, beckoned Madden aside.
“Powers?” they asked, when he joined them. But he hushed them.
“Yes, that was him. But that’s not for talk, you know. Don’t tell them, see.” His glance swept the group along the rail. “Won’t do any good, you know.”
“Hell, no,” they assured him. Powers!
And so they danced with her, one or two at first, then having watched her firm, capable performance, all of them that danced at all were soon involved in a jolly competition, following her while she danced with another of their number, importuning her between dances: some of them even went so far as to seek out other partners whom they knew.
Madden after a time merely looked on, but his two friends were assiduous, tireless; seeing that she did not dance too long with the poor dancers, fetching her cups of insipid punch; kind and a little tactless.
Her popularity brought the expected harvest of feminine speculation. Her clothes were criticized, her “nerve” in coming to a dance in a street dress, in coming at all. Living in a house with two young men, one of them a stranger. No other woman there … except a servant. And there had been something funny about that girl, years ago. Mrs. Wardle spoke to her, however. But she speaks to everyone who can’t avoid her. And Cecily Saunders stopped between dances, holding her arm, chatting in her coarse, nervous, rushing speech, rolling her eyes about at all the inevitable men, talking all the time. … The negro cornetist unleashed his indefatigable pack anew and the veranda broke again into clasped couples.
Mrs. Powers, catching Madden’s eye, signaled him. “I must go,” she said. “If I have to drink another cup of that punch—”
They threaded their way among dancers, followed by her protesting train. But she was firm and they told her good night with regret and gratitude, shaking her hand.
“It was like old times,” one of them diffidently phrased it, and her slow, friendly, unsmiling glance took them all.
“Wasn’t it? Again soon, I hope. Goodbye, goodbye.” They watched her until her dark dress merged with shadow beyond the zone of light. The music swept on, the brass swooned away and the rhythm was carried by a hushed plaintive minor of voices until the brass recovered.
“Say, you could see right through her,” Gilligan remarked with interest as they came up. Madden opened the door and helped her in, needlessly.
“I’m tired, Joe. Let’s go.”
The negro driver’s head was round as a capped cannonball and he was not asleep. Madden stood aside, hearing the spitting engine merge into a meshed whine of gears, watching them roll smoothly down the drive.
Powers … a man jumping along a trench of demoralized troops caught in a pointless hysteria. Powers. A face briefly spitted on the flame of a rifle: a white moth beneath a reluctant and sorrowful dawn.
XV
George Farr and his friend the soda-clerk walked beneath trees that in reverse motion seemed to swim backward above them, and houses were huge and dark or else faintly luminous shapes of flattened lesser dark where no trees were. People were asleep in them, people lapped in slumber, temporarily freed of the flesh. Other people elsewhere dancing under the spring sky: girls dancing with boys while other boys whose bodies had known all intimacies with the bodies of girls, walked dark streets alone, alone. …
“Well,” his friend remarked, “we got two more good drinks left.”
He drank fiercely, feeling the fire in his throat become an inner grateful fire, pleasuring in it like a passionate muscular ecstasy. (Her body prone and naked as a narrow pool, flowing away like two silver streams from a single source.) Dr. Gary would dance with her, would put his arm around her, anyone could touch her. (Except you: she doesn’t even speak of you who have seen her prone and silver … moonlight on her like sweetly dividing water, marbled and slender and unblemished by any shadow, the sweet passion of her constricting arms that constricting hid her body beyond the obscuring prehensileness of her mouth—) Oh God, oh God!
“Say, whatcher say we go back to the store and mix another bottle?”
He did not answer and his friend repeated the suggestion.
“Let me alone,” he said suddenly, savagely.
“Goddam you, I’m not hurting you!” the other answered with justifiable heat.
They stopped at a corner, where another street stretched away beneath trees into obscurity, in uncomfortable intimacy. (I’m sorry: I’m a fool. I’m sorry I flew out at you, who are not at all to blame.) He turned heavily.
“Well, I guess I’ll go in. Don’t feel so good tonight. See you in the morning.”
His friend accepted the unspoken apology. “Sure. See you tomorrow.”
The other’s coatless figure faded and after a while his footsteps died away. And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!)