Читать книгу The Wild Palms - William Faulkner - Страница 5

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When the man called Harry met Charlotte Rittenmeyer, he was an intern in a New Orleans hospital. He was the youngest of three children, born to his father’s second wife in his father’s old age; there was a difference of sixteen years between him and the younger of his two half sisters. He was left an orphan at the age of two and his older half sister had raised him. His father had been a doctor before him. He (the father) had begun and completed his medical training at a time when the designation Doctor of Medicine covered everything from pharmacology through diagnostics to surgery and when an education could be paid for in kind or in labor; the elder Wilbourne had been janitor of his dormitory and had also waited on table in commons and had completed his four-year course at a cash outlay of two hundred dollars. Thus when his will was opened, the last paragraph read:

To my son, Henry Wilbourne, and realizing that conditions as well as the intrinsic value of money have changed and therefore he cannot be expected to obtain his degree in Surgery and Medicine for the same outlay of money which obtained in my day, I hereby bequeath and set aside the sum of two thousand dollars, to be used for the furthering and completing of his college course and the acquiring of his degree and license to practise in Surgery and Medicine, believing that the aforesaid sum will be amply sufficient for that purpose.

The will was dated two days after Harry’s birth in 1910, and his father died two years later of toxemia gotten from sucking a snake bite on the hand of a child in a country cabin and his half sister took him. She had children of her own and was married to a man who died still a clerk in a grocery store in a small Oklahoma town, so by the time Harry was ready to enter medical school that two thousand dollars to be stretched over four years, even in the modest though well-rated school which he chose, was not much more than his father’s two hundred had been. It was less, because there was steam heat in the dormitories now and the college was served by a cafeteria requiring no waiters and the only way a young man could earn money in school now was by carrying a football or stopping the man who did carry it. His sister helped him—an occasional money order for one or two dollars or even a few stamps folded carefully into a letter. This bought his cigarettes and by stopping tobacco for a year he saved enough to pay his fee into his medical fraternity. There was nothing left over for squiring girls (the school was coeducational) but then he had no time for that; beneath the apparent serenity of his monastic life he waged a constant battle as ruthless as any in a Wall Street skyscraper as he balanced his dwindling bank account against the turned pages of his text books.

But he did it, he came in under the wire with enough of the two thousand dollars left either to return to the Oklahoma town and present his sheepskin to his sister, or to go straight to New Orleans and assume his internship, but not enough to do both. He chose New Orleans. Or rather, there was no choice; he wrote his sister and her husband a letter of gratitude and thanks, inclosing a signed note for the full amount of the postage stamps and the money orders, with interest (he also sent the diploma with its Latin and its spidery embossed salutation and its cramped faculty signatures, of which his sister and brother-in-law could decipher only his name) and mailed it to them and bought his ticket and rode fourteen hours in a day coach. He reached New Orleans with one bag and a dollar and thirty-six cents.

He had been in the hospital almost two years now. He lived in the intern’s quarters with the others who, like him, had no private means; he smoked once a week now: a package of cigarettes over the week-end and he was paying the note which he had executed to his half sister, the one- and two-dollar money orders in reverse now, returning to source; the one bag would still hold all he owned, including his hospital whites—the twenty-six years, the two thousand dollars, the railroad ticket to New Orleans, the one dollar and thirty-six cents, the one bag in a corner of a barracks-like room furnished with steel army cots; on the morning of his twenty-seventh birthday he waked and looked down his body toward his foreshortened feet and it seemed to him that he saw the twenty-seven irrevocable years diminished and foreshortened beyond them in turn, as if his life were to lie passively on his back as though he floated effortless and without volition upon an unreturning stream. He seemed to see them: the empty years in which his youth had vanished—the years for wild oats and for daring, for the passionate tragic ephemeral loves of adolescence, the girl- and boy-white, the wild importunate fumbling flesh, which had not been for him; lying, so he thought, not exactly with pride and certainly not with the resignation which he believed, but rather with that peace with which a middle-aged eunuch might look back upon the dead time before his alteration, at the fading and (at last) edgeless shapes which now inhabited only the memory and not the flesh: I have repudiated money and hence love. Not abjured it, repudiated. I do not need it; by next year or two years or five years I will know to be true what I now believe to be true: I will not even need to want it.

That evening he was a little late in going off duty; when he passed the dining room he heard already the clash of cutlery and the voices, and the interns’ quarters were empty save for a man named Flint who in evening trousers and shirt was tying a black tie before the mirror and who turned as Wilbourne entered and pointed to a telegram on Wilbourne’s pillow. It had been opened. “It was lying on my cot,” Flint said. “I was in a hurry to dress so I didn’t take time to look at the name good. I just picked it up and opened it. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Wilbourne said. “Too many people have already seen a telegram for it to be very private.” He removed the folded yellow sheet from the envelope. It was decorated with symbols—garlands and scrolls; it was from his sister: one of those stereotyped birthday greetings which the telegraph company sends to any distance within the boundaries of the United States for twenty-five cents. He found that Flint was still watching him.

“So this is your birthday,” Flint said. “Celebrating?”

“No,” Wilbourne said. “I guess not.”

“What? Listen. I’m going to a party down in French Town. Why not come along?”

“No,” Wilbourne said. “Thanks, though.” He did not yet begin to think, Why not? “I’m not invited.”

“That dont matter. It’s not that kind of a party. It’s at a studio. Painting guy. Just a mob sitting around on the floor in each other’s laps, drinking. Come on. You dont want to stick here on your birthday.” Now he did begin to think, Why not? Why really not? and now he could almost see the guardian of the old trained peace and resignation rise to arms, the grim Moses, not alarmed, impervious to alarm, just gauntly and fanatically interdicting: No. You will not go. Let well enough alone. You have peace now; you want no more.

“Besides, I haven’t any dress clothes.”

“You wont need them. Your host will probably be wearing a bathrobe. You’ve got a dark suit, haven’t you?”

“But I dont—”

“All right,” Flint said. “De Montigny has a tux. He’s about your size. I’ll get it.” He went to the closet which they used in common.

“But I dont—” Wilbourne said.

“All right,” Flint said. He laid the second dinner suit on the cot and slipped his braces and began to remove his own trousers. “I’ll wear de Montigny’s and you can wear mine. We’re all three about standard.”

An hour later, in a borrowed costume such as he had never worn before, he and Flint halted in one of the narrow, dim, balcony-hung one-way streets between Jackson Square and Royal Street in the Vieux Carre—a wall of soft muted brick above which the crest of a cabbage palm exploded raggedly and from beyond which came a heavy smell of jasmine which seemed to lie visible upon the rich stagnant air already impregnated with the smell of sugar and bananas and hemp from the docks, like inert wisps of fog or even paint. A wooden gate hung slightly awry, beside it a wire bell pull which under Flint’s hand produced a remote mellow jangling. They could hear a piano, it was something of Gershwin’s. “There,” Flint said. “You dont need to worry about this party. You can already hear the home-made gin. Gershwin might have painted his pictures for him too. Only I bet Gershwin could paint what Crowe calls his pictures better than Crowe plays what Gershwin calls his music.”

Flint jerked the bell again, again nothing came of it. “It’s not locked, anyway,” Wilbourne said. It was not, they entered: a court paved with the same soft, quietly rotting brick. There was a stagnant pool with a terra-cotta figure, a mass of lantana, the single palm, the thick rich leaves and the heavy white stars of the jasmine bush where light fell upon it through open French doors, the court balcony—overhung too on three sides, the walls of that same annealing brick lifting a rampart broken and nowhere level against the glare of the city on the low eternally overcast sky, and over all, brittle, dissonant and ephemeral, the spurious sophistication of the piano like symbols scrawled by adolescent boys upon an ancient decayed rodent-scavengered tomb.

They crossed the court and entered the French windows and the noise—the piano, the voices—a longish room, uneven of floor, the walls completely covered with unframed paintings which at the moment impacted upon Wilbourne with that inextricable and detailless effect of an enormous circus poster seen suddenly at close range, from which vision the very eyeballs seem to start violently back in consternation. It contained no furniture except a piano at which a man sat in a Basque cap and a bathrobe. Perhaps a dozen other people sat or stood about on the floor with glasses; a woman in a sleeveless linen frock shrieked, “My God, where was the funeral?” and came and kissed Flint, still carrying her glass.

“This is Doctor Wilbourne, boys and girls,” Flint said. “Watch him. He’s got a pad of blank checks in his pocket and a scalpel in his sleeve.” His host did not even turn his head, though a woman brought him a drink presently. It was his hostess, though no one had told him that; she stood and talked to him for a moment, or at him because he was not listening, he was looking at the pictures on the wall; presently he stood alone, still holding his glass, before the wall itself. He had seen photographs and reproductions of such in magazines before, at which he had looked completely without curiosity because it was completely without belief, as a yokel might look at a drawing of a dinosaur. But now the yokel was looking at the monster itself and Wilbourne stood before the paintings in complete absorption. It was not at what they portrayed, the method or the coloring; they meant nothing to him. It was in a bemusement without heat or envy at a condition which could supply a man with the obvious leisure and means to spend his days painting such as this and his evenings playing the piano and feeding liquor to people whom he ignored and (in one case, at least) whose names he did not even bother to catch. He was still standing there when someone behind said, “Here’s Rat and Charley”; he was still standing there when Charlotte spoke at his shoulder:

“What do you think about it, mister?” He turned and saw a young woman a good deal shorter than he and for a moment he thought she was fat until he saw it was not fat at all but merely that broad, simple, profoundly delicate and feminine articulation of Arabian mares—a woman of under twenty-five, in a print cotton dress, a face which laid no claim even to prettiness and wore no makeup save the painted broad mouth, with a faint inch-long scar on one cheek which he recognised as an old burn, doubtless from childhood. “You haven’t decided yet, have you?”

“No,” he said. “I dont know.”

“Dont know what you think, or whether you are trying to decide or not?”

“Yes. Probably that. What do you think about it?”

“Marshmallows with horseradish,” she said, too promptly. “I paint too,” she added. “I can afford to say. I can afford to say I can beat that, too. What’s your name, and what have you got all this on for, just to come slumming? So we can all know you are slumming?”

He told her and now she looked at him and he saw that her eyes were not hazel but yellow, like a cat’s, staring at him with a speculative sobriety like a man might, intent beyond mere boldness, speculative beyond any staring. “I borrowed this suit. It’s the first time in my life I ever had one on.” Then he said, he did not intend to, he didn’t even know he was going to say it, he seemed to be drowning, volition and will, in the yellow stare: “This is my birthday. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“Oh,” she said. She turned, she took him by the wrist, a grasp simple, ruthless and firm, drawing him after her. “Come on.” He followed, awkwardly, not to tread on her heels, then she released him and went on before him, across the room to where three men and two women stood about the table on which the bottles and glasses sat. She stopped, she grasped his wrist again and drew him toward a man of his own age about, in a dark double-breasted suit, with blond wavy hair going a little thin, a face not quite handsome and reasonably insensitive and shrewder than intelligent yet on the whole gentler than not, assured, courteous and successful. “This is Rat,” she said. “He is the senior living ex-freshman of the University of Alabama. That’s why we still call him Rat. You can call him Rat too. Sometimes he is.”

Later—it was after midnight and Flint and the woman who had kissed him were gone—they stood in the court beside the jasmine bush. “I’ve got two children, both girls,” she said. “That’s funny, because all my family were brothers except me. I liked my oldest brother the best but you cant sleep with your brother and he and Rat roomed together in school so I married Rat and now I’ve got two girls, and when I was seven years old I fell in the fireplace, my brother and I were fighting, and that’s the scar. It’s on my shoulder and side and hip too and I got in the habit of telling people about it before they would have time not to ask and I still do it even when it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Do you tell everybody like this? At first?”

“About the brothers or about the scar?”

“Both. Maybe the scar.”

“No. That’s funny too. I had forgotten. I haven’t told anybody in years. Five years.”

“But you told me.”

“Yes. And that’s funny twice. No, three times now. Listen. I lied to you. I dont paint. I work with clay, and some in brass, and once with a piece of stone, with a chisel and maul. Feel.” She took his hand and drew his finger-tips along the base of her other palm—the broad, blunt, strong, supple-fingered hand with nails as closely trimmed as if she had bitten them down, the skin at the base and lower joints of the fingers not calloused exactly but smoothly hardened and toughened like the heel of a foot. “That’s what I make: something you can touch, pick up, something with weight in your hand that you can look at the behind side of, that displaces air and displaces water and when you drop it, it’s your foot that breaks and not the shape. Not poking at a piece of cloth with a knife or a brush like you were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with a rotten switch through the bars of a cage. That’s why I said I could beat that,” she said. She didn’t move, she didn’t even indicate by a motion of her head the room behind them. “Not just something to tickle your taste buds for a second and then swallowed and maybe not even sticking to your entrails but just evacuated whole and flushed away into the damned old sewer, the Might-just-as-well-not-have-been. Will you come to supper tomorrow night?”

“I cant. I’m on duty tomorrow night.”

“The next night then? Or when?”

“Dont you have engagements yourself?”

“There are some people coming the night after tomorrow. But they wont bother you.” She looked at him. “All right, if you dont want a lot of people, I’ll put them off. The night after tomorrow? At seven? Do you want me to come to the hospital for you in the car?”

“No. Dont do that.”

“I can, you know.”

“I know it,” he said. “I know it. Listen—”

“Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m going home. And dont wear that. Wear your own clothes. I want to see.”

Two evenings later he went to dinner. He found a modest though comfortable apartment in an irreproachable neighborhood near Audubon Park, a negro maid, two not particularly remarkable children of two and four, with her hair but otherwise looking like the father (who in another dark obviously expensive double-breasted suit made a cocktail not particularly remarkable either and insisted that Wilbourne call him Rat) and she in something he knew had been purchased as a semi-formal garment and which she wore with the same ruthless indifference as she had the garment in which he had first seen her, as if both of them were overalls. After the meal, which was considerably better than the cocktails, she went out with the older child, who had dined with them, but she returned presently to lie on the sofa smoking while Rittenmeyer continued to ask Wilbourne questions about his profession such as the president of a college fraternity might ask of a pledge from the medical school. At ten oclock Wilbourne said he must go. “No,” she said, “not yet.” So he remained; at half past ten Rittenmeyer said he must work tomorrow and was going to bed and left them. Then she crushed out the cigarette and rose and came to where he stood before the cold hearth and stopped, facing him. “What to—Do they call you Harry? What to do about it, Harry?”

“I dont know. I never was in love before.”

“I have been. But I dont know either.—Do you want me to call a cab for you?”

“No.” He turned; she moved beside him across the room. “I’ll walk.”

“Are you that poor? Let me pay for the cab. You cant walk to the hospital. It’s three miles.”

“That’s not far.”

“It wont be his money, if that’s what you mean. I have some of my own. I have been saving it for something, I dont know what.” She handed him his hat and stood with her hand on the door knob.

“Three miles is not far. I would walk—”

“Yes,” she said. She opened the door, they looked at one another. Then the door closed between them. It was painted white. They did not shake hands.

During the next six weeks they met five times more. This would be downtown for lunch, because he would not again enter her husband’s house and his destiny or luck (or ill-luck, since otherwise he might have discovered that love no more exists just at one spot and in one moment and in one body out of all the earth and all time and all the teeming breathed, than sunlight does) brought him no more second-hand invitations to parties. It would be in Vieux Carre places where they could lunch on the weekly two dollars which he had been sending to his sister to apply on the note. At the third of these she said abruptly, out of nothing: “I have told Rat.”

“Told him?”

“About lunches. That I have been meeting you.” After that she never mentioned her husband again. The fifth time they did not lunch. They went to a hotel, they planned it the day before. He discovered that he knew next to nothing about the proper procedure other than supposition and imagination; because of his ignorance he believed that there was a secret to the successful performance of the business, not a secret formula to be followed but rather a kind of white magic: a word or some infinitesimal and trivial movement of the hand such as that which opens a hidden drawer or panel. He thought once of asking her how to go about it because he was certain that she would know, just as he was certain that she would never be at a loss about anything she wished to do, not only because of her absolute coordination but because even in this short time he had come to realise that intuitive and infallible skill of all women in the practical affairs of love. But he did not ask her because he told himself that, when she told him how to do, which she would, and it would be correct, he might at some later time believe that she had done this before and that even if she had, he did not want to know it. So he asked Flint.

“Jesus,” Flint said. “You have come out, haven’t you? I didn’t even know you knew a girl.” Wilbourne could almost watch Flint thinking swiftly, casting backward. “Was it that brawl at Crowe’s that night? But hell, that’s your business, aint it? It’s easy. Just take a bag with a couple of bricks wrapped up in a towel so they wont rattle, and walk in. I wouldn’t pick the Saint Charles or the Roosevelt, of course. Take one of the smaller ones, not too small of course. Maybe that one down toward the station. Wrap the bricks separately, see, then roll them up together. And be sure to carry a coat with you. Raincoat.”

“Yes. Do you reckon I’d better tell her to bring a coat too?”

Flint laughed, one short syllable, not loud. “I guess not. I dont guess she’ll need any coaching from you or me either.—Here,” he said quickly, “hold your horses. I dont know her. I aint talking about her. I’m talking about women. She could turn up with a bag of her own and a coat and a veil and the stub of a Pullman ticket sticking out of her handbag and that wouldn’t mean she had done this before. That’s just women. There aint any advice that Don Juan or Solomon either could give the youngest fourteen-year-old gal ever foaled about this kind of phenagling.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She probably wont come anyway.” He found that he really believed that. He still believed it even when the cab drew up to the curb where he waited with the bag. She had a coat, but no bag nor veil. She came swiftly out of the cab when he opened the door, her face was hard, sober, her eyes extraordinarily yellow, her voice harsh:

“Well? Where?”

He told her. “It’s not far. We can—” She turned, already getting back into the cab. “We can walk—”

“You damned pauper,” she said. “Get in. Hurry.” He got in. The cab moved on. The hotel was not far. A negro porter took the bag. Then it seemed to Wilbourne that he had never been in his life, and would never be again, so aware of her as he was while she stood in the center of the dingy lobby raddled with the Saturday nights of drummers and of minor race-track hangers-on while he signed the two fictitious names on the pad and gave to the clerk the sixth two dollars which were to have gone to his sister but did not, waiting for him, making no effort for effacement, quiet, contained, and with a quality profoundly tragic which he knew (he was learning fast) was not peculiar to her but was an attribute of all women at this instant in their lives, which would invest them with a dignity, almost a modesty, to be carried over and clothe even the last prone and slightly comic attitude of ultimate surrender. He followed her down the corridor and into the door which the porter opened; he dismissed the porter and closed the rented door behind him and watched her cross the room to the single dingy window and, still in the hat and coat, turn without pausing and exactly like a child playing prisoner’s base return to him, the yellow eyes, the whole face which he had already come to call beautiful, hard and fixed. “Oh, God, Harry,” she said. She beat her clenched fists on his chest. “Not like this. Jesus, not like this.”

“All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” He caught her wrists and held them, still doubled into fists against his chest while she still wrenched at them to free them to strike his chest again. Yes, he thought. Not like this and never. “Steady now.”

“Not like this, Harry. Not back alleys. I’ve always said that: that no matter what happened to me, whatever I did, anything, anything but not back alleys. If it had just been hot pants, somebody with a physique I just leched for all of a sudden so that I never looked nor thought higher than his collar. But not us, Harry. Not you. Not you.”

“Steady now,” he said. “It’s all right.” He led her to the edge of the bed and stood over her, still holding her wrists.

“I told you how I wanted to make things, take the fine hard clean brass or stone and cut it, no matter how hard, how long it took, cut it into something fine, that you could be proud to show, that you could touch, hold, see the behind side of it and feel the fine solid weight so when you dropped it it wouldn’t be the thing that broke it would be the foot it dropped on except it’s the heart that breaks and not the foot, if I have a heart. But Jesus, Harry, how I have bitched it for you.” She extended her hand, then he realised what she was about and twisted his hips away before she touched him.

“I’m all right,” he said. “You mustn’t worry about me. Do you want a cigarette?”

“Please.” He gave her a cigarette and a light, looking down at the foreshortened slant of her nose and jaw as she drew at it. He threw the match away. “Well,” she said. “So that’s that. And no divorce.”

“No divorce?”

“Rat’s a Catholic. He wont give me one.”

“You mean that he—”

“I told him. Not that I was to meet you at a hotel. I just said, suppose I did. And he still said no soap.”

“Cant you get the divorce?”

“On what grounds? He would fight it. And it would have to be here—a Catholic judge. So there’s just one other thing. And it seems I cant do that.”

“Yes,” he said. “Your children.”

For a moment she looked at him, smoking. “I wasn’t thinking of them. I mean, I have already thought of them. So now I dont need to think of them any more because I know the answer to that and I know I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself. So I dont need to think about the children. I settled that a long time ago. I was thinking about money. My brother sends me twenty-five dollars every Christmas and for the last five years I have saved it. I told you the other night I dont know why I have saved it. Maybe it was for this and maybe this is the best joke of all: that I have saved for five years and it’s only a hundred and twenty-five dollars, hardly enough to get two people to Chicago. And you have nothing.” She leaned toward the table at the head of the bed and crushed the cigarette out with slow and infinite care, and rose. “So that’s that. That’s all of it.”

“No,” he said. “No! I’ll be damned if it is.”

“Do you want to go on like this, hanging around and staying green for me like an apple on a limb?” She took his raincoat from the chair and slung it across her arm and stood waiting.

“Dont you want to go first?” he said. “I’ll wait about thirty minutes, then I—”

“And let you walk alone through that lobby carrying the bag for that clerk and that nigger to snigger at because they saw me leave before I would have even had time to take my clothes off, let alone put them back on?” She went to the door and put her hand on the key. He picked up the bag and followed. But she did not unlock the door at once. “Listen. Tell me again you haven’t got any money. Say it. So I can have something my ears can listen to as making sense even if I cant understand it. Some reason why I—that I can accept as the strong reason we cant beat even if I cant believe or understand that it could be just that, just money, not anything but just money. Come on. Say it.”

“I have no money.”

“All right. It makes sense. It must make sense. It will have to make sense.” She began to shake, not tremble, shake, like one with a violent ague, the bones themselves seeming to chatter rigid and silent inside the flesh. “It will have—”

“Charlotte,” he said. He set the bag down and moved toward her. “Charlotte—”

“Dont you touch me!” she whispered in a kind of tense fury. “Dont you touch me!” Yet for an instant he believed she was coming to him; she seemed to sway forward, she turned her head and looked toward the bed with an expression of distraction and despair. Then the key clicked, the door opened, and she was out of the room.

They parted as soon as he found a cab for her. He was about to follow her into it, to ride down town to the parking lot where she had left her car. Then for the first of the two times in their lives he saw her cry. She sat there, her face harsh and wrung and savage beneath the springing tears like sweat. “Oh, you pauper, you damned pauper, you transparent fool. It’s money again. After you paid the hotel two dollars you should have sent your sister and got nothing for it, now you want to pay this cab with what you intended to take your other shirt out of the laundry with and get nothing for that either but the privilege of transporting my damned ass that at the last refused, will always refuse—” She leaned toward the driver. “Go on!” she said savagely. “Drive on! Downtown!”

The cab went on fast; it disappeared almost at once, though he was not looking after it. After a while he said quietly, aloud, to nobody: “At least, there’s no use in carrying the bricks too.” So he walked on to where a trash bin sat at the curb-edge and, while the people passing glanced at him with curiosity or briefly or not at all, he opened the bag and removed the bricks from the towel and dropped them into the bin. It contained a mass of discarded newspapers and fruit skins, the casual anonymous droppings of the anonymous who passed it during the twelve hours like the refuse of birds in flight. The bricks struck the mass without a sound; there was no premonitory buzz or whirr at all, the edges of the papers merely tilted and produced from among them, with the magical abruptness with which the little metal torpedo containing change from a sale emerges from its tube in a store, a leather wallet. It contained the stubs of five pari-mutuel tickets from Washington Park, a customer’s identification from a national gasoline trust and another from a B.P.O.E. lodge at Longview, Texas, and twelve hundred and seventy-eight dollars in bills.

He discovered the exact amount only after he reached the hospital however, his first thought was merely, I ought to keep out a dollar for the reward as he walked on toward the branch post office, then (the post office was not only six blocks away, it was in the opposite direction from the hospital) I could even keep out taxi-fare and he should not mind. Not that I want to ride but that I’ve got to make it last, make everything last so there wont be any gaps between now and six oclock when I can hide behind my white jacket again, draw the old routine up over my head and face like niggers do the quilt when they go to bed. Then he stood before the locked Saturday afternoon doors of the branch station and he had forgotten that too, thinking, as he buttoned the wallet into his hip pocket, how when he waked the name of today had been in fire letters and no word out of a nursery jingle or off a calendar, walking on, carrying the light bag, walking the now twelve useless blocks out of his way, thinking, Only I have beat that too; I have saved myself at least forty-five minutes of time that otherwise would have been filled with leisure.

The dormitory was empty. He put the bag away and hunted for and found a flat cardboard box stippled with holly-sprigs in which his sister had sent him one hand-embroidered handkerchief last Christmas; he found scissors and a bottle of paste and made a neat surgeon’s packet of the wallet, copying the address neatly and clearly from one of the identification cards and putting it carefully away beneath the garments in his drawer; and now that was done too. Maybe I can read, he thought. Then he cursed, thinking, That’s it. It’s all exactly backward. It should be the books, the people in the books inventing and reading about us—the Does and Roes and Wilbournes and Smiths—males and females but without the pricks or cunts.

He went on duty at six. At seven he was relieved long enough to go to supper. While he was eating one of the probationer nurses looked in and told him he was wanted on the telephone. It would be long distance, he thought. It would be his sister, he had not written her since he had sent the last two-dollar money order five weeks ago, and now she had called him, would spend two dollars herself, not to reproach him (She’s right, he thought, not meaning his sister. It’s comic. It’s more than comic. It rolls you in the aisles. I fail to make the one I love and I make myself a failure toward the one who loves me.) but to see that he was well. So when the voice on the wire said “Wilbourne?” he thought it was his brother-in-law until Rittenmeyer spoke again: “Charlotte wants to speak to you.”

“Harry?” she said. Her voice was rapid but calm: “I told Rat about today, and that it was a bust. So he’s right. It’s his turn now. He gave me a free shot, and I didn’t make it. So now it’s no more than fair to give him a free shot. And it’s no more than decent to tell you what the score is, only decent is such a bastard word to have to use between you and me—”

“Charlotte,” he said. “Listen, Charlotte—”

“So it’s good-bye, Harry. And good luck. And good God damn—”

“Listen, Charlotte. Can you hear me?”

“Yes? What? What is it?”

“Listen. This is funny. I have been waiting all afternoon for you to call me, only I didn’t know it until just now. I even know now that I knew then it was Saturday all the time I was walking toward that post office—Can you hear me? Charlotte?”

“Yes? Yes?”

“I’ve got twelve hundred and seventy-eight dollars, Charlotte.”

At four oclock the next morning, in the empty laboratory, he cut up the wallet and the identification cards with a razor blade and burned the shreds of paper and leather and flushed the ashes away in a bathroom. The next day at noon, the two tickets to Chicago and the remainder of the twelve hundred and seventy-eight dollars buttoned into his pocket and the single bag on the seat facing him, he peered out the window as the train slowed into the Carrollton Avenue station. They were both there, the husband and the wife, he in the conservative, spuriously unassertive dark suit, the face of a college senior revealing nothing, lending an air of impeccable and formal rightness to the paradoxical act of handing the wife to the lover almost identical with the conventional mumbo-jumbo of father and bride at a wedding in church, she beside him in a dark dress beneath the open coat, watching the slowing car windows intently yet without doubt or nervousness, so that Wilbourne mused again upon that instinctive proficiency in and rapport for the mechanics of cohabitation even of innocent and unpractised women—that serene confidence in their amorous destinies like that of birds in their wings—that tranquil ruthless belief in an imminent deserved personal happiness which fledges them instantaneous and full-winged from the haven of respectability, into untried and unsupportive space where no shore is visible (not sin, he thought. I dont believe in sin. It’s getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death.) and this without terror or alarm and hence inferring neither of courage nor hardihood: just an utter and complete faith in airy and fragile and untried wings—wings, the airy and fragile symbols of love which have failed them once, since by universal consent and acceptance they brooded over the very ceremony which, in taking flight, they repudiate. They slid past and vanished, Wilbourne saw the husband stoop and raise the bag as they vanished; the air hissed into the brakes and he sat thinking, He will come in with her, he will have to do that, he will not want to any more than I (she?) will want him to but he will have to do it just as he has to wear those dark suits which I dont believe he wants to wear either, just as he had to stay at that party that first night and drink as much as any other man there yet not once sit on the floor with a wife (his own or someone else’s) sprawled across his knees.

So he looked up presently and they were both standing beside his seat; he rose too and now the three of them stood, blocking the aisle while other passengers crowded past them or waited for them to move, Rittenmeyer carrying the bag—this man who ordinarily would no more have carried a bag into a train in the presence of a redcap or Pullman porter than he would have got up and fetched himself a glass of water in a restaurant; looking at the frozen impeccable face above the impeccable shirt and tie Wilbourne thought with a kind of amazement, Why, he’s suffering, he’s actually suffering, thinking how perhaps it is not the heart at all, not even the sensibilities, with which we suffer, but our capacity for grief or vanity or self-delusion or perhaps even merely masochism. “Go on,” Rittenmeyer said. “Get out of the aisle.” His voice was harsh, his hand almost rough as he pushed her into the seat and set the bag beside the other one. “Remember now. If I dont hear by the tenth of each month, I’m going to give the detective the word. And no lies, see? No lies.” He turned, he did not even look at Wilbourne, he merely jerked his head toward the end of the car. “I want to talk to you,” he said in that seething repressed voice. “Come on.” When they were half way down the car the train began to move, Wilbourne expected the other to run for the exit, he thought again, He is suffering; even circumstance, a trivial railroad time table, is making comedy of that tragedy which he must play to the bitter end or cease to breathe. But the other did not even hurry. He went steadily on and swung aside the curtain to the smoking room and waited for Wilbourne to enter. He seemed to read the temporary surprise in Wilbourne’s face. “I’ve got a ticket as far as Hammond,” he said harshly. “Dont you worry about me.” The unspoken question seemed to set him off; Wilbourne could almost see him struggling physically to keep his voice down. “Worry about yourself, see? Yourself. Or by God—” Now he did check the voice again, holding it on some sort of curb like a horse, yet forcing it on; he took a wallet from his pocket. “If you ever—” he said. “If you dare—”

He cant say it, Wilbourne thought. He cant even bear to say it. “If I’m not good to her, gentle with her. Is that what you mean?”

“I’ll know it,” Rittenmeyer said. “If I dont hear from her by the tenth of every month, I am going to give the detective the word to go ahead. And I’ll know lies too, see? See?” He was trembling, the impeccable face suffused beneath the impeccable hair which resembled a wig. “She’s got a hundred and twenty-five dollars of her own, she wouldn’t take more. But damn that, she wouldn’t use that, anyway. She wont have it by the time she came to need it enough to use it. So here.” He removed from the wallet a check and gave it to Wilbourne. It was a cashier’s check for three hundred dollars, payable to the Pullman Company of America and indorsed in the corner in red ink: For one railroad ticket to New Orleans, Louisiana.

“I was going to do that with some of my money,” Wilbourne said.

“Damn that too,” the other said. “And it’s for the ticket. If it is ever cashed and returned to the bank and no ticket bought with it, I’ll have you arrested for fraud. See? I’ll know.”

“You mean, you want her to come back? You will take her back?” But he did not need to look at the other’s face; he said quickly, “I’m sorry. I retract that. That’s more than any man can bear to answer.”

“God,” the other said; “God. I ought to sock you.” He added, in a tone of incredulous amazement, “Why dont I? Can you tell me? Aint a doctor, any doctor, supposed to be an authority on human glands?”

Then suddenly Wilbourne heard his own voice speaking out of an amazed and quiet incredulity; it seemed to him that they both stood now, aligned, embattled and doomed and lost, before the entire female principle: “I dont know. Maybe it would make you feel better.” But the moment passed. Rittenmeyer turned and produced a cigarette from his coat and fumbled a match from the box attached to the wall. Wilbourne watched him—the trim back; he caught himself on the point of asking if the other wished him to stay and keep him company until the train reached Hammond. But again Rittenmeyer seemed to read his mind.

“Go on,” he said. “Get to hell out of here and let me alone.” Wilbourne left him standing facing the window and returned to his seat. Charlotte did not look up, she sat motionless, looking out the window, an unlighted cigarette in her fingers. Now they were running beside the larger lake, soon they would begin to cross the trestle between Maurepas and Pontchartrain. Now the whistle of the engine drifted back, the train slowed as beneath the sound of it came the hollow reverberation of the trestle. Water spread on either hand now, swamp-bound and horizonless, lined with rotting wooden jetties to which small dingy boats were tied. “I love water,” she said. “That’s where to die. Not in the hot air, above the hot ground, to wait hours for your blood to get cool enough to let you sleep and even weeks for your hair to stop growing. The water, the cool, to cool you quick so you can sleep, to wash out of your brain and out of your eyes and out of your blood all you ever saw and thought and felt and wanted and denied. He’s in the smoking room, isn’t he? Can I go back and speak to him a minute?”

“Can you go?—”

“Hammond is the next station.”

Why, he is your husband, he was about to say but caught himself. “It’s the men’s room,” he said. “Maybe I had better—” But she had already risen and passed him; he thought, If she stops and looks back at me it will mean she is thinking, ‘Later I can always know that at least I told him good-bye’ and she did stop and they looked at each other, then she went on. Now the water slid away, the sound of the trestle ceased, the engine whistled again and the train regained speed, and almost at once they were running through an outskirt of shabby houses which would be Hammond, and he ceased to look out the window while the train stopped and stood and then moved again; he did not even have time to rise as she slipped past him and into the seat. “So you came back,” he said.

“You didn’t think I was. Neither did I.”

“But you did.”

“Only it’s not finished. If he were to get back on the train, with a ticket to Slidell—” She turned, staring at him though she did not touch him. “It’s not finished. It will have to be cut.”

“Cut?”

“ ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, lad, and be whole.’ That’s it. Whole. Wholly lost—something. I’ve got to cut it. That drawing room back there was empty. Find the conductor and engage it to Jackson.”

“Drawing room? But that will cost—”

“You fool!” she said. She doesn’t love me now, he thought. She doesn’t love anything now. She spoke in a tense whisper, beating on his knee with her fist. “You fool!” She rose.

“Wait,” he said, catching her wrist. “I’ll do it.” He found the conductor in the vestibule at the end of the car; he was not gone long. “All right,” he said. She rose at once, taking up her bag and coat. “The porter will be here—” he said. She didn’t pause. “Let me have it,” he said, taking the bag from her and then his own and followed her down the aisle. Later he was to recall that interminable walk between the filled seats where people sat with nothing else to do but watch them pass, and it seemed to him that everyone in the car must have known their history, that they must have disseminated an aura of unsanctity and disaster like a smell. They entered the drawing room.

“Lock the door,” she said. He set the bags down and locked the door. He had never been in a drawing room before and he fumbled at the lock for an appreciable time. When he turned she had removed her dress: it lay in a wadded circle about her feet and she stood in the scant feminine underwear of 1937, her hands over her face. Then she removed her hands and he knew it was neither shame nor modesty, he had not expected that, and he saw it was not tears. Then she stepped out of the dress and came and began to unknot his tie, pushing aside his own suddenly clumsy fingers.