Reflections In A Golden Eye Part 4

'Alison always thought I brought up the subject just to be cruel,' said the Major. 'But that wasn't so. Anacleto wouldn't have been happy in the army, no, but it might have made a man of him. Would have knocked all the nonsense out of him anyway. But what I mean is that in a way it always seemed to me terrible for a grown man twenty three years old to be dancing around to music and messing with water colors. In the army they would have run him ragged and he would have been miserable, but even that seems to me better than the other.'

'You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for the square peg to keep sc.r.a.ping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?'

'Why, you put it exactly right,' the Major said. 'Don't you agree with me?'

'No,' said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compa.s.sion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. 'I don't agree,' he repeated absently.

Major Langdon thought over this unexpected reply, but did not continue the conversation. He always found it difficult to follow up any one line of thought beyond the first, bare exposition. With a headshake he returned to his own bewildering affairs. 'Once I waked up just before daylight,' he said. 'I saw the lamp was on in her room and I went in. And there I found Anacleto sitting on the edge of the bed and they were both of them looking down and fooling with something. And what was it they were doing?' The Major pressed his blunt fingers against his eyeb.a.l.l.s and shook his head again. 'Oh yes. They were dropping little things into a bowl of water. Some sort of j.a.panese mess Anacleto had bought at the ten cent store these little particles open like flowers in the water. And they were just sitting there at four o'clock in the morning trifling with that. It made me suddenly irritable, and when I stumbled over Alison's slippers by the side of the bed, I lost my temper and kicked them across the room. Alison was disgusted with me, cold as ice for days. And Anacleto put salt in the sugar bowl before he brought me my coffee. It was sad. Those nights she must have suffered.'

'They giveth it and then they taketh it away,' said Leonora, whose intentions were better than her command of Scripture.

Leonora herself had altered a little during the past weeks. She was approaching the phase of her full maturity. In this short time her body seemed to have lost some of its youthful muscularity. Her face was broader, and her expression in repose was one of lazy tenderness. She looked like a woman who has had several well born babies and who hopefully expects another in about eight months. Her complexion was still of a delicate, healthy texture, and although she was gradually putting on weight there was as yet no sign of flabbiness. She had been dismayed by the death of her lover's wife. The sight of the dead body in the coffin had so fascinated her that for several days after the funeral she had spoken in an awed whisper, even when ordering groceries at the Post Exchange. She treated the Major with a sort of vacant sweetness and repeated any happy anecdotes concerning Alison that she could remember.

'By the way,' said the Captain suddenly, 'I can't stop wondering about that night when she came over here. What did she say to you in your room, Leonora?'

'I told you I didn't even know she came. She didn't wake me up.'

But on this subject Captain Penderton was still unsatisfied. The more he remembered the scene in his study, the stranger and more compelling it became to him. He did not doubt that Leonora told the truth, for whenever she lied it was instantly plain to everyone. But what had Alison meant and why on coming back home had he not gone upstairs to see? He felt he knew the answer somewhere in the shadowy unconscious of his mind. But the more he thought about this matter, the sharper was his uneasiness.

'I remember one time when I was certainly surprised,' said Leonora, holding her pink, school girlish hands out to the fire. 'It was when we all drove up to North Carolina, the afternoon after we ate those good partridges at the house of that friend of yours, Morris. Alison and Anacleto and I were walking along this country road when a little boy came along leading this plow horse close kin to a mule, he was. But Alison liked the old plug's face and suddenly decided she wanted to ride him. So she made friends with the little Tarheel and then climbed up on a fence post and slipped on no saddle and wearing a dress. Think of it! I guess the horse hadn't been ridden for years and soon as she got on him he just lay down and started to roll her. And I thought to myself that that was the end of Alison Langdon and shut my eyes. But do you know she had got that horse up in a minute and was trotting around the field as though nothing at all had happened. You never could have done it, Weldon. And Anacleto was running up and down like a drunk jay bird. Lord, what a good time I never was so surprised!'

Captain Penderton yawned, not because he was sleepy, but because Leonora's reference to his horsemanship had piqued him and he wanted to be discourteous. There had been some bitter scenes between the Captain and Leonora over Firebird. After the frenzied, runaway ride the horse had never been altogether the same, and Leonora blamed her husband vehemently. The events of the past two weeks, however, had served to deflect the course of their feud and the Captain was confident that soon she would forget.

Major Langdon closed this particular evening's conversation with one of his favorite aphorisms: 'Only two things matter to me now to be a good animal and to serve my country. A healthy body and patriotism.'

At this time Captain Penderton's home was not an ideal place for a person undergoing an acute psychic crisis. Formerly the Captain would have found the laments of Morris Langdon ridiculous. But now there was the atmosphere of death in the house. To him it seemed that not only had Alison died, but that in some mysterious way the lives of all three of them had come to a close. The old fear that Leonora might divorce him and go away with Morris Langdon did not trouble him any more. Any inclination he had once had toward the Major seemed now a mere velleity compared to his feelings for the soldier.

The house itself irritated the Captain exceedingly these days. Their quarters were furnished in haphazard fashion. In the sitting room there was the conventional sofa covered with flower patterned chintz, a couple of easy chairs, a rug of garish red, and an antique secretary. The room had an air of flossiness that the Captain abhorred. The lace curtains looked cheap and rather dingy, and on the mantelpiece there was a heterogeneous collection of ornaments and gewgaws a procession of sham ivory elephants, a pair of beautiful wrought iron candlesticks, a painted statuette of a pickaninny grinning over a red slice of watermelon, and a blue gla.s.s Mexican bowl into which Leonora had dumped old visiting cards. All of the furniture was slightly rickety from too much moving, and the feminine, cluttered impression made by the room as a whole so exasperated the Captain that he stayed out of it as much as possible. With deep secret longing he thought of the barracks, seeing in his mind the neat cots placed in a row, the bare floors, and stark curtainless windows. Against one of the walls of this imaginary room, ascetic and austere, there was for some reason an ancient carved chest with bra.s.s bindings.

Captain Penderton on his long walks, during the late afternoon was in a state of sharpened sensitivity close to delirium. He felt himself adrift, cut off from all human influence, and he carried with him the brooding image of the young soldier much as a witch would hug to her bosom some cunning charm. He experienced during this time a peculiar vulnerability. Although he felt himself isolated from all other persons, the things which he saw on his walks took on an abnormal importance in his eyes. Everything with which he came in contact, even the most commonplace objects, seemed to have some mysterious bearing on his own destiny.

If, for instance, he chanced to notice a sparrow in the gutter, he could stand for whole minutes, completely absorbed in this ordinary sight. For the time being he had lost the primitive faculty that instinctively cla.s.sifies the various sensory impressions according to their relative values. One afternoon he saw a transport truck run into an automobile. But this b.l.o.o.d.y accident impressed him no more vividly than the sight, a few minutes later, of a sc.r.a.p of newspaper fluttering in the wind.

For a long time now he had ceased to attribute his feelings for Private Williams to hate. Also he no longer tried to find justification for the emotion that had so taken possession of him. He thought of the soldier in terms neither of love nor hate; he was conscious only of the irresistible yearning to break down the barrier between them. When from a distance he saw the soldier resting before the barracks, he wanted to shout to him, or to strike him with his fist, to make him respond in some way to violence. It was almost two years now since he had first seen the soldier. More than a month had gone by since he had been sent on special fatigue to clear the woods. And in all this time they had hardly spoken to each other more than a few dozen words.

On the afternoon of the twelfth of November, Captain Penderton went out as usual. He had had a trying day. That morning in the cla.s.sroom, while standing before the blackboard in the process of ill.u.s.trating a tactical problem, he had had an unexplainable attack of amnesia. In the middle of a sentence his mind went blank. Not only did he totally forget every word of the remainder of his lecture, even the faces of the student officers in the room seemed unfamiliar to him. In his mind he could see Private Williams very clearly that was all. For some moments he stood dumbly with the chalk still in his hand. Then he found presence of mind to dismiss the cla.s.s. Fortunately the lecture was almost ended when his lapse had occurred.

The Captain walked very stiffly along one of the sidewalks leading toward the quadrangle. The weather on this afternoon was extraordinary. There were dour storm clouds in the sky, but down near the horizon the heavens were still clear and the sun shone with gentle radiance. The Captain swung his arms as though they would not bend at the elbow and kept his eyes on the bottoms of his army slacks and his highly polished narrow shoes. He looked up just as he reached the bench where Private Williams sat, and after staring at him for a few seconds he went up to him Sluggishly the soldier rose to attention.

'Private Williams,' the Captain said.

The soldier waited, but Captain Penderton did not continue. He had meant to reprimand the soldier for a violation of the regulations concerning the uniform. As he approached, it had seemed to him that Private Williams had b.u.t.toned his coat improperly. At first glance the soldier always looked as though he were only in partial uniform, or had neglected some necessary part of his attire. But when they were face to face, Captain Penderton saw that there was nothing for him to criticize. The impression of civilian carelessness was due to the very body of the soldier himself and to no particular infringement of army rules. Again the Captain stood mute and suffocated before the young man. In his heart there coursed a wild tirade of curses, words of love, supplications, and abuse. But in the end he turned away, still silent.

The rain that had been threatening held off until Captain Penderton was almost home. This was not a slow, drizzling winter rain it came down with the roaring vehemence of a summer thunderstorm. The Captain was within twenty yards of his house when the first drops fell on him. With a short sprint he could have easily reached shelter. But his dragging footsteps did not quicken, even when the icy, pouring torrent soaked into him. When he opened his front door he was bright eyed and shivering.

Private Williams went into the barracks when he scented in the atmosphere the coming rain. He sat in the day room until supper time and then, amid the rowdy exuberance of the mess hall, he ate a copious, leisurely meal. Afterward he took from his locker a sack of mixed penny candies.

While still chewing a marshmallow, he paid a visit to the latrine and there he picked a fight At the time of his entrance all of the commodes except one were in use, and there was a soldier ahead of him in the act of unb.u.t.toning his trousers. But just as the man started to sit down, Private Williams gave him a rough push and tried to oust him from his place. A little crowd gathered about the fight which followed. From the first Private Williams had the best of it, as he was both quick and strong. While fighting, his face expressed neither effort nor anger; his features still were impa.s.sive and only the sweat on his forehead, the look of blindness in his eyes, showed the results of his struggle. Private Williams had his opponent in a helpless condition and the fight was already won when all at once he himself suddenly gave up. He seemed completely to lose interest in the fight and did not even bother to defend himself. He was soundly beaten and his head was banged viciously against the cement floor. When it was over, he stood up groggily and left the latrine without even using the commode after all.

This was not the first fight that Private Williams had provoked. During the past two weeks he had stayed in the barracks every night, and had stirred up much trouble. This was a new side of his personality that his barrack mates had not suspected. For hours he would sit in torpid silence and then all at once he would perpetrate some inexcusable offense. He no longer walked in the woods in his spare time, and at night he slept badly, disturbing the room with nightmare mutters. No one, however, gave any thought to his oddities. There was much behavior in the barracks far queerer than this. One old Corporal wrote a letter every night to Shirley Temple making it a sort of diary of all that he had done during the day, and mailing it before breakfast the next morning. Another man, who had ten years' service behind him, jumped out of a three story window because a friend would not lend him fifty cents for beer. A cook in the same battery was haunted by the fixed idea that he had cancer of the tongue, an illusion that no medical denials could dispel. He brooded before a mirror with his tongue out so far that he could see the taste buds, and he starved himself to the point of emaciation.

After the fight Private Williams went to the sleeping room and lay down on his cot. He put the sack of candy beneath his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. Outside the rain had slackened and it was now night. A number of lazy reveries colored the mind of Private Williams. He thought of the Captain, but he only saw a series of mental pictures that had no meaning. To this young Southern soldier the officers were in the same vague category as Negroes they had a place in his life, but he did not look on them as being human. He accepted the Captain as fatalistically as though he were the weather or some natural phenomenon. The Captain's behavior might seem unexpected, but he did not identify it with himself. And it did not occur to him to question it, any more than he would question a thunderstorm or the fading of a flower.

He had not been near the quarters of Captain Penderton since the night the lamp had been switched on and he saw the dark woman looking at him from the doorway. At that time a great fright had come in him but this terror had been more physical than mental, more unconscious than understood. After he had heard the front door shut, he had looked out cautiously and seen the way clear. Once safe again in the woods he had run desperately, silently, although he did not realize exactly what it was he feared.

But the memory of the Captain's wife had not left him. He dreamed of The Lady every night. Once, soon after his enlistment, he had got ptomaine poisoning and had been sent into hospital. The thought of the bad sickness in women had made him shudder beneath the cover whenever the nurses came near him, and he had lain for hours in misery rather than ask of them some service. But he had touched The Lady and he was afraid of this sickness no more. Every day he groomed and saddled her horse and watched her ride away. In the early morning there was a wintry bitterness in the air and the Captain's wife was rosy and high spirited. She always had a joke or a friendly word for Private Williams, but he never looked at her directly or answered her pleasantries.

He never thought of her in connection with the stables or the open air. To him she was always in the room where he had watched her in the night with such absorption. His memory of these times was wholly sensual. There was the thick rug beneath his feet, the silk spread, the faint scent of perfume. There was the soft luxurious warmth of woman flesh, the quiet darkness the alien sweetness in his heart and the tense power in his body as he crouched there near to her. Once having known this he could not let it go; in him was engendered a dark, drugged craving as certain of fulfillment as death.

The rain stopped at midnight. Long ago the lights in the barracks had been turned off. Private Williams had not undressed himself, and when the rain was over he put on his tennis shoes and went outside. On his way to the Captain's quarters he took his usual route, skirting the woods surrounding the post. But tonight there was no moon and the soldier was walking much faster than usual. Once he lost himself, and when at last he reached the Captain's house he had an accident. In the darkness he stumbled into what seemed to him at first to be a deep pit. In order to get his bearings he struck a few matches and saw that he had fallen into a recently dug hole. The house was dark, and the soldier, who was now scratched, muddy, and breathless, waited a few moments before going inside. In all he had come six times before, and this was the seventh and would be the last.

Captain Penderton was standing at the back window of his bedroom. He had taken three capsules, but still he could not sleep. He was slightly drunk with brandy, and a little drugged but that was all. The Captain, who was keenly sensitive to luxury and a finicky dresser, wore only the coa.r.s.est sleeping garments. He had on now a wrapper of rough black wool that might have been bought for a recently widowed matron of a jail. His pajamas were of some unbleached material as stiff as canvas. He was barefooted, although the floor was now cold.

The Captain was listening to the sough of the wind in the pine trees when he saw out in the night a tiny flicker of flame. The light was blown out by the wind in only a moment, but during that instant the Captain had seen a face. And that face, brightened by the flame and set in darkness, made the Captain stop his breath. He watched and could vaguely make out the figure that crossed the lawn. The Captain clutched the front of his wrapper and pressed his hand against his breast. He closed his eyes and waited.

At first no sound came to him. Then he could feel rather than hear the cautious footsteps on the stairs. The Captain's door was ajar and through the crack he saw a dark silhouette. He whispered something, but his voice was so sibilant and low that it sounded like the wind outside.

Captain Penderton waited. With his eyes closed again, he stood there for moments of anguished suspense. Then he went out into the hall and saw outlined against the pale gray window of his wife's room the one for whom he sought. Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way. The Captain took his pistol from the drawer of his bed table, crossed the hall, and switched on the light in his wife's room. As he did this, certain dormant fragments of memory a shadow at the window, a sound in the night came to him. He said to himself that he knew all. But what it was he knew he could not have expressed. He was only certain that this was the end.

The soldier did not have time to rise from his squatting position. He blinked at the light and there was no fear in his face; his expression was one of dazed annoyance, as if he had been inexcusably disturbed. The Captain was a good marksman, and although he shot twice only one raw hole was left in the center of the soldier's chest.

The reports from the pistol aroused Leonora and she sat up in bed. As yet she was still only half awake, and she stared about her as though witnessing some scene in a play, some tragedy that was gruesome but not necessary to believe. Almost immediately Major Langdon knocked on the back door and then hurried up the stairs wearing slippers and a dressing gown. The Captain had slumped against the wall. In his queer, coa.r.s.e wrapper he resembled a broken and dissipated monk. Even in death the body of the soldier still had the look of warm, animal comfort. His grave face was unchanged, and his sun browned hands lay palms upward on the carpet as though in sleep.