IV
The air was sweet with fresh-sawed lumber and they walked through a pale yellow city of symmetrical stacked planks. A continuous line of negroes carried boards up a cleated incline like a chicken run into a freight car and flung them clashing to the floor, under the eye of an informally clad white man who reclined easily upon a lumber pile, chewing indolent tobacco. He watched them with interest as they passed, following the faint wagon road.
They crossed grass-grown steel rails, and trees obscured the lumber yard, but until they reached the bottom of the hill the voices of the negroes raised in bursts of meaningless laughter or snatches of song in a sorrowful minor came to them, and the slow reverberations of the cast boards smote at measured intervals. Quietly under the spell of the still late afternoon woods they descended a loamy hill, following the faint downward winding of the road. At the foot of the hill a dogwood tree spread flat palm-like branches in invocation among dense green, like a white nun.
“Niggers cut them for firewood because they are easy to chop,” she said, breaking the silence. “Shame, isn’t it?”
“Do they?” he murmured without interest. With the soft, sandy soil giving easily under their feet they came upon water. It ran sombrely from out massed honeysuckle vines and crossed the dim road into another impenetrable thicket, murmuring. She stopped, and bending slightly, they could see their heads and their two foreshortened bodies repeating themselves.
“Do we look that funny to people, I wonder?” she said. Then she stepped quickly across. “Come on, Joe.”
The road passed from the dim greenness into sunlight again. It was still sandy and the going was harder, exasperating.
“You’ll have to pull me, Joe.” She took his arm, feeling her heels sink and slip treacherously at each step. Her unevenly distributed weight made his own progress more difficult, and he disengaged his arm and put his hand against her back.
“That’s better,” she said, leaning against his firm hand. The road circled the foot of a hill and trees descending the hill were halted by the curving road’s green canyon as though waiting to step across when they had passed. Sun was in the trees like an arrested lateral rain and ahead where circling, the green track of the stream approached the road again, they heard young voices and a sound of water.
They walked slowly through the shifting sand, and the voices beyond a screen of thick leaves became louder. She squeezed his arm for silence and they left the road and parted leaves cautiously upon glinted disturbed water, taking and giving the sun in a flashing barter of gold for gold, dazzling the eyes. Two wet matted heads spread opening fans of water like muskrats and on a limb, balanced precariously to dive, stood a third swimmer. His body was the color of old paper, beautiful as a young animal’s.
They stepped into view and Gilligan said:
“Hi, Colonel.”
The diver took one quick, terrified look and releasing his hold he fell like a stone into the water. The other two, shocked and motionless, stared at the intruders, then when the diver reappeared above the surface they whooped at him in merciless derision. He swam like an eel across the pool and took refuge beneath the overhanging bank, out of sight. His companions still squalled at him in inarticulate mirth. She raised her voice above the din.
“Come on, Joe. We’ve spoiled their fun.”
They left the noise behind and again in the road, she remarked:
“We shouldn’t have done that. Poor boy, they’ll tease him to death now. What makes men so silly, Joe?”
“Dam’f I know. But they sure are. Do you know who that was?”
“No. Who was it?”
“Her brother.”
“Her—”
“Young Saunders.”
“Oh, was it? Poor boy, I’m sorry I shocked him.”
And well she might have been, could she have seen his malevolent face watching her retreating figure as he swiftly donned his clothes. I’ll fix you! he swore, almost crying.
The road wound through a depression between two small ridges. The sun was yet in the tops of trees and here were cedars unsunned and solemn, a green quiet nave. A thrush sang and they stopped as one, listening to its four notes, watching the fading patches of sun on the top of the ridge.
“Let’s sit down and have a cigarette,” she suggested.
She lowered herself easily and he sat beside her as young Robert Saunders, panting up the hill behind them, saw them and fell flat, creeping as near as he dared. Gilligan, reclining on his elbow, watched her pallid face. Her head was lowered and she dug in the earth with a stick. Her unconscious profile was in relief against a dark cedar and she said, feeling his eyes on her:
“Joe, we have got to do something about that girl. We can’t expect Dr. Mahon to take sickness as an excuse much longer. I hoped her father would make her come, but they are so much alike. …”
“Whatcher want to do? Want me to go and drag her up by the hair?”
“I expect that would be the best way, after all.” Her twig broke and casting it aside she searched for another one.
“Sure it would—if you got to fool with her kind at all.”
“Unluckily, though, this is a civilized age and you can’t do that.”
“So called,” muttered Gilligan. He sucked at his cigarette, then watched the spun white arc of its flight. The thrush sang again, filling the interval liquidly and young Robert, thinking, is it Sis they’re talking about? felt fire on his leg and brushed from it an ant almost half an inch long. Drag her by the hair, huh? he muttered. I’d like to see ’em. Ow, but he stings! rubbing his leg, which did not help it any.
“What are we going to do, Joe? Tell me. You know about people.”
Gilligan shifted his weight and his corrugated elbow tingled under his other hand.
“We’ve been thinking of them ever since we met. Let’s think about you and me for a while,” he said roughly.
She looked at him quickly. Her black hair and her mouth like a pomegranate blossom. Her eyes were black and they became quite gentle as she said:
“Please, Joe.”
“Oh, I ain’t going to propose. I just want you to talk to me about yourself for a while.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Nothing you don’t want to. Just quit thinking about the loot for a while. Just talk to me.”
“So you are surprised to find a woman doing something without some obvious material end in view. Aren’t you?” He was silent, nursing his knees, staring between them at the ground. “Joe, you think I’m in love with him, don’t you?” (Uhuh! Stealing Sis’ feller. Young Robert Saunders squirming nearer, taking sand into his bosom.) “Don’t you, Joe?”
“I don’t know,” he replied sullenly and she asked:
“What kind of women have you known, Joe?”
“The wrong kind, I guess. Leastways none of ’em ever made me lose a night’s sleep until I saw you.”
“It isn’t me that made you lose a night’s sleep. I just happened to be the first woman you ever knew doing something you thought only a man would do. You had nice fixed ideas about women and I upset them. Wasn’t that it?”
She looked at his averted face, at his reliable homely face. (Are they going to talk all night? thought young Robert Saunders. Hunger was in his belly and he was gritty and uncomfortable with sand.)
The sun was almost down. Only the tips of trees were yet dipped in fading light and where they sat the shadow became a violet substance in which the thrush sang and then fell still.
“Margaret,” said Gilligan at last, “were you in love with your husband?”
Her face in the dusk was a smooth pallor, and after a while:
“I don’t know, Joe. I don’t think I was. You see, I lived in a small town and I had got kind of sick lazing around home all morning and dressing up just to walk downtown in the afternoon and spending the evenings messing around with men, so after we got in the war I persuaded some friends of my mother’s to get me a position in New York. Then I got into the Red Cross—you know, helping in canteens, dancing with those poor country boys on leave, lost as sheep, trying to have a good time. And nothing in the world is harder to do in New York.
“And one night Dick (my husband) came in. I didn’t notice him at first, but after we had danced together and I saw he was—well—impressed, I asked him about himself. He was in an officers’ training camp.
“Then I started getting letters from him and at last he wrote that he would be in New York until he sailed. I had got in the habit of Dick by that time and when I saw him again, all spic and span, and soldiers saluting him, I thought he was grand. You remember how it was then—everybody excited and hysterical, like a big circus.
“So every night we went out to dinner and to dance, and after we would sit in my room and smoke and talk until all hours, till daylight. You know how it was: all soldiers talking of dying gloriously in battle without really believing it or knowing very much about it, and how women kind of got the same idea, like the flu—that what you did today would not matter tomorrow, that there really wasn’t a tomorrow at all.
“You see, I think we both had agreed that we were not in love with each other for always, but we were both young, and so we might as well get all the fun we could. And then, three days before he sailed, he suggested that we get married. I had had proposals from nearly every soldier I had been at all kind to, just as all the other girls did, and so I wasn’t surprised much. I told him I had other men friends and I knew that he knew other women, but neither of us bothered about that. He told me he expected to know women in France and that he didn’t expect me to be a hermit while he was gone. And so we met the next morning and got married and I went to work.
“He called for me at the canteen while I was dancing with some boys on leave, and the other girls all congratulated us (lots of them had done the same thing), only some of them teased me about being a highbrow and marrying an officer. You see, we all got so many proposals we hardly listened to them. And I don’t think they listened to us, either.
“He called for me and we went to his hotel. You see, Joe, it was like when you are a child in the dark and you keep on saying, It isn’t dark, it isn’t dark. We were together for three days and then his boat sailed. I missed him like the devil at first. I moped around without anybody to feel sorry for me: so many of my friends were in the same fix, with no sympathy to waste. Then I got dreadfully afraid I might be going to have a baby and I almost hated Dick. But when I was sure I wasn’t I went back to the canteen, and after a while I hardly thought of Dick at all.
“I got more proposals, of course, and I didn’t have such a bad time. Sometimes at night I’d wake up, wanting Dick, but after a time he got to be a shadowy sort of person, like George Washington. And at last I didn’t even miss him any more.
“Then I began to get letters from him, addressed to his dear little wife, and telling me how he missed me and so forth. Well, that brought it all back again and I’d write him every day for a time. And then I found that writing bored me, that I no longer looked forward to getting one of those dreadful flimsy envelopes, that had already been opened by a censor.
“I didn’t write any more. And one day I got a letter saying that he didn’t know when he’d be able to write again, but it would be as soon as he could. That was when he was going up to the front, I guess. I thought about it for a day or two and then I made up my mind that the best thing for both of us was just to call the whole thing off. So I sat down and wrote him, wishing him luck and asking him to wish me the same.
“And then, before my letter reached him, I received an official notice that he had been killed in action. He never got my letter at all. He died believing that everything was the same between us.”
She brooded in the imminent twilight. “You see, I feel some way that I wasn’t square with him. And so I guess I am trying to make it up to him in some way.”
Gilligan felt impersonal, weary. He took her hand and rubbed his cheek against it. Her hand turned in his and patted his cheek, withdrawing. (Holding hands! gloated young Robert Saunders.) She leaned down, peering into Gilligan’s face. He sat motionless, taut. Take her in my arms, he debated, overcome her with my own passion. Feeling this, she withdrew from him, though her body had not moved.
“That wouldn’t do any good, Joe. Don’t you know it wouldn’t?” she asked.
“Yes, I know it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” she told him in a low voice, rising. He rose and helped her to her feet. She brushed her skirt and walked on beside him. The sun was completely gone and they walked through a violet silence soft as milk. “I wish I could, Joe,” she added.
He made no reply and she said: “Don’t you believe me?”
He strode on and she grasped his arm, stopping. He faced her and in her firm sexless embrace he stood staring at the blur of her face almost on a level with his own, in longing and despair. (Uhuh, kissing! crowed young Robert Saunders, releasing his cramped limbs, trailing them like an Indian.)
They then turned and walked on, out of his sight. Night was almost come: only the footprint of day, only the odor of day, only a rumor, a ghost of light among the trees.