VII
Mahon was asleep on the veranda and the other three sat beneath the tree on the lawn, watching the sun go down. At last the reddened edge of the disc was sliced like a cheese by the wistaria-covered lattice wall and the neutral buds were a pale agitation against the dead afternoon. Soon the evening star would be there above the poplar tip, perplexing it, immaculate and ineffable, and the poplar was vain as a girl darkly in an arrested passionate ecstasy. Half of the moon was a coin broken palely near the zenith and at the end of the lawn the first fireflies were like lazily blown sparks from cool fires. A negro woman passing crooned a religious song, mellow and passionless and sad.
They sat talking quietly. The grass was becoming gray with dew and she felt dew on her thin shoes. Suddenly Emmy came around the corner of the house running and darted up the steps and through the entrance, swift in the dusk.
“What in the world—” began Mrs. Mahon, then they saw Jones, like a fat satyr, leaping after her, hopelessly distanced. When he saw them he slowed immediately and lounged up to them slovenly as ever. His yellow eyes were calmly opaque but she could see the heave of his breathing. Convulsed with laughter she at last found her voice.
“Good evening, Mr. Jones.”
“Say,” said Gilligan with interest, “what was you—”
“Hush, Joe,” Mrs. Mahon told him. Jones’ eyes, clear and yellow, obscene and old in sin as a goat’s, roved between them.
“Good evening, Mr. Jones.” The rector became abruptly aware of his presence. “Walking again, eh?”
“Running,” Gilligan corrected, and the rector repeated Eh? looking from Jones to Gilligan.
Mrs. Mahon indicated a chair. “Sit down, Mr. Jones. You must be rather fatigued, I imagine.”
Jones stared toward the house, tore his eyes away and sat down. The canvas sagged under him and he rose and spun his chair so as to face the dreaming façade of the rectory. He sat again.
“Say,” Gilligan asked him, “what was you doing, anyway?”
Jones eyed him briefly, heavily. “Running,” he snapped, turning his eyes again to the dark house.
“Running?” the divine repeated.
“I know: I seen that much from here. What was you running for, I asked.”
“Reducing, perhaps,” Mrs. Mahon remarked, with quiet malice.
Jones turned his yellow stare upon her. Twilight was gathering swiftly. He was a fat and shapeless mass palely tweeded. “Reducing, yes. But not to marriage.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” she told him. “A courtship like that will soon reduce you to anything, almost.”
“Yeh,” Gilligan amended, “if that’s the only way you got to get a wife you’d better pick out another one besides Emmy. You’ll be a shadow time you catch her. That is,” he added, “if you aim to do your courting on foot.”
“What’s this?” the rector asked.
“Perhaps Mr. Jones was merely preparing to write a poem. Living it first, you know,” Mrs. Mahon offered. Jones looked at her sharply. “Atalanta,” she suggested in the dusk.
“Atlanta?” repeated Gilligan, “what—”
“Try an apple next time, Mr. Jones,” she advised.
“Or a handful of salt, Mr. Jones,” added Gilligan in a thin falsetto. Then in his natural voice. “But what’s Atlanta got to—”
“Or a cherry, Mr. Gilligan,” said Jones viciously. “But then, I am not God, you know.”
“Shut your mouth, fellow,” Gilligan told him roughly.
“What’s this?” the rector repeated. Jones turned to him heavily explanatory:
“It means, sir, that Mr. Gilligan is under the impression that his wit is of as much importance to me as my actions are to him.”
“Not me,” denied Gilligan with warmth. “You and me don’t have the same thoughts about anything, fellow.”
“Why shouldn’t they be?” the rector asked. “It is but natural to believe that one’s actions and thoughts are as important to others as they are to oneself, is it not?”
Gilligan gave this his entire attention. It was getting above his head, beyond his depth. But Jones was something tangible, and he had already chosen Jones for his own.
“Naturally,” agreed Jones with patronage. “There is a kinship between the human instruments of all action and thought and emotion. Napoleon thought that his actions were important, Swift thought his emotions were important, Savonarola thought his beliefs were important. And they were. But we are discussing Mr. Gilligan.”
“Say—” began Gilligan.
“Very apt, Mr. Jones,” murmured Mrs. Mahon above the suggested triangle of her cuffs and collar. “A soldier, a priest and a dyspeptic.”
“Say,” Gilligan repeated, “who’s swift, anyway? I kind of got bogged up back there.”
“Mr. Jones is, according to his own statement. You are Napoleon, Joe.”
“Him? Not quite swift enough to get himself a girl, though. The way he was gaining on Emmy—You ought to have a bicycle,” he suggested.
“There’s your answer, Mr. Jones,” the rector told him. Jones looked toward Gilligan’s fading figure in disgust, like that of a swordsman who has been disarmed by a peasant with a pitchfork.
“That’s what association with the clergy does for you,” he said crassly.
“What is it?” Gilligan asked. “What did I say wrong?”
Mrs. Mahon leaned over and squeezed his arm. “You didn’t say anything wrong, Joe. You were grand.”
Jones glowered sullenly in the dusk. “By the way,” he said, suddenly, “how is your husband today?”
“Just the same, thank you.”
“Stands wedded life as well as can be expected, does he?” She ignored this. Gilligan watched him in leashed anticipation. He continued: “That’s too bad. You had expected great things from marriage, hadn’t you? Sort of a miraculous rejuvenation?”
“Shut up, fellow,” Gilligan told him. “Whatcher mean, anyway?”
“Nothing, Mr. Galahad, nothing at all. I merely made a civil inquiry. … Shows that when a man marries, his troubles continue, doesn’t it?”
“Then you oughtn’t to have no worries about your troubles,” Gilligan told him savagely.
“What?”
“I mean, if you don’t have no better luck than you have twice that I know of—”
“He has a good excuse for one failure, Joe,” Mrs. Mahon said.
They both looked toward her voice. The sky was bowled with a still disseminated light that cast no shadow and branches of trees were rigid as coral in a mellow tideless sea. “Mr. Jones says that to make love to Miss Saunders would be epicene.”
“Epicene? What’s that?”
“Shall I tell him, Mr. Jones? or will you?”
“Certainly. You intend to, anyway, don’t you?”
“Epicene is something you want and can’t get, Joe.”
Jones rose viciously. “If you will allow me, I’ll retire, I think,” he said savagely. “Good evening.”
“Sure,” agreed Gilligan with alacrity, rising also. “I’ll see Mr. Jones to the gate. He might get mixed up and head for the kitchen by mistake. Emmy might be one of them epicenes, too.”
Without seeming to hurry Jones faded briskly away. Gilligan sprang after him. Jones, sensing him, whirled in the dusk and Gilligan leaped upon him.
“For the good of your soul,” Gilligan told him joyously. “You might say that’s what running with preachers does for you, mightn’t you?” he panted as they went down.
They rolled in dew and an elbow struck him smartly under the chin. Jones was up immediately and Gilligan, tasting his bitten tongue, sprang in pursuit. But Jones retained his lead. “He has sure learned to run from somebody,” Gilligan grunted. “Practicing on Emmy so much, I guess. Wisht I was Emmy, now—until I catch him.”
Jones doubled the house and plunged into the dreaming garden. Gilligan, turning the corner of the house, saw the hushed expanse where his enemy was, but his enemy, himself, was out of sight. Roses bloomed quietly under the imminence of night, hyacinths swung pale bells, waiting for another day. Dusk was a dream of arrested time, the mockingbird rippled it tentatively, and everywhere blooms slept passionately, waiting for tomorrow. But Jones was gone.
He stopped to listen upon the paling gravel, between the slow unpickable passion of roses, seeing the pale broken coin of the moon attain a richer luster against the unemphatic sky. Gilligan stilled his heaving lungs to listen, but he heard nothing. Then he began systematically to beat the firefly-starred scented dusk of the garden, beating all available cover, leaving not a blade of grass unturned. But Jones had got clean away; the slow hands of dusk had removed him as cleanly as the prestidigitator rieves a rabbit from an immaculate hat.
He stood in the center of the garden and cursed Jones thoroughly on the off-chance that he might be within hearing, then Gilligan slowly retraced his steps, retracing the course of the race through the palpable violet dusk. He passed the unlighted house where Emmy went somewhere about her duties, where at the corner of the veranda near the silver tree’s twilight-musicked ecstasy Mahon slept on his movable bed and on across the lawn, while evening, like a ship with twilight-colored sails, dreamed on down the world.
The chairs were formless blurs beneath the tree and Mrs. Mahon’s presence was indicated principally by her white collar and cuffs. As he approached, he could see dimly the rector reclined in slumber, and the woman’s dark dress shaped her against the dull white of her canvas chair. Her face was pallid, winged either side by her hair. She raised her hand as he drew near.
“He’s asleep,” she whispered, as he sat beside her.
“He got away, damn him,” he told her, in exasperation.
“Too bad. Better luck next time.”
“You bet. And there’ll be a next time soon as I see him again.”
Night was almost come. Light, all light, passed from the world, from the earth, and leaves were still. Night was almost come, but not quite; day was almost gone, but not quite. Her shoes were quite soaked in dew.
“How long he has slept.” She broke the silence diffidently. “We’ll have to wake him soon for supper.”
Gilligan stirred in his chair and almost as she spoke the rector sat hugely and suddenly up.
“Wait, Donald,” he said, lumbering to his feet. With elephantine swiftness he hurried across the lawn toward the darkly dreaming house.
“Did he call?” they spoke together, in a dark foreboding. They half rose and stared toward the house, then at each other’s indistinct, white face. “Did you—?” the question hung poised in the dusk between them and here was the evening star bloomed miraculously at the poplar’s tip and the slender tree was a leafed and passionate Atalanta, poising her golden apple.
“No, did you?” he replied.
But they heard nothing.
“He dreamed,” she said.
“Yes,” Gilligan agreed. “He dreamed.”