“Oh. That might be. I hadn’t thought of that.”
He looked unconvinced. A little.
“Well, don’t worry. It won’t be long now!”
“No, it won’t be long now.”
And he was gone again, smiling faintly; and the train was once more pouring itself through space; or no, not that, but climbing, crying and climbing, climbing snail-like up the face of the rock of night, climbing moonlike up the smooth mirror of the sky. The blonde girl had withdrawn as near to the window as she could get, shrinking angrily away from the young man in the cowboy hat, who was looking down at her knees. Behind them, in the two corner seats, facing each other, three Indian women with babies talked in a steady birdlike rush of Spanish, a shrill and endless flood of sound, punctuated now and then with screams of laughter. Nobody wanted to sleep, there would never be any sleep again. He tried his legs to one side, then to the other, the feet wedged down against the footrail, his forehead pressed into the corner of the windowpane, the vibration of the warm glass deep in the bone, deep in the very brain. Whoooo-whooooo-whoo-whoo—the powerful oil-burning engine was shouting again for a crossing — but what crossing, save the eagle’s, could there possibly be here? Or the cloud’s? Or the buzzard’s? The blonde girl had said something: very short and severe. The young man had said something: very ingratiating and suggestive, apologetic. The sleeve of Noni’s blue jacket was dangling over the edge of the rack, empty, like the sleeve of a one-armed man, a mute protest at horror and injustice, and Gil’s fair head was just visible, the top of it, over the back of the seat. The man with the tray of beer bottles again: he seemed to be semiofficial. The young man bought one, drank the beer out of the bottle: the blonde girl stared out of the window with fiercely averted face. Monterey to Saltillo — a half mile straight upward, as the crow flies; and after that it was practically child’s play, of course, to get to Mexico City. And with all these sinister looking Indians, too, these lynx-eyed cut-throats, looking at Noni like that, with that look that stripped a woman down to sex and nothing else, exactly as you’d flay a fox! Jesus! What madness it had been, how in God’s name had they ever dreamed they could do it, and what an astonishing thing that as if by a sort of instinct Noni should have projected herself — with her consciousness of death, death as immediate as a hand at the throat — into a scene of such basic fertility and filth and cruel vitality! There was something terribly right in it; it was a marriage. A marriage of what? The beer man again, he seemed now a little drunk, or was it the train only; and then he was gone and back again, and again gone.… And Noni was saying, close at hand, her voice so close to his ear that it might have been, but wasn’t, a dream:
“Are you awake, Blom dear?”
She was leaning toward him, her two hands (one on top of the other) resting in the arm of his seat, the gold braids across the top of her head shining in the pale lamplight. For a moment they looked at each other without a word, motionless, Noni still leaning on the arm of the seat, himself turning his face from the corner where his head still rested against the window; an exchange oddly serene and unsearching, as if they had not bothered even to assume expressions, expressions of any sort. There was no guard up between them, there never had been; and it was like Noni, now, to let him see, for all her serenity, and the faint beginnings of an affectionate smile, the trace of beginning tears as well.
“Yes, Noni,” he said, “sit down.”
“I will, for a little. Gil’s fast asleep. I’m glad.”
“Yes, he was looking all in. And what about you, my lamb?”
“Oh, I’m all right.”
“No, Noni.”
“Yes, Blom.”
Sitting beside him, with her fair head turned calmly toward him, she smiled as if with an extraordinary and quite deliberate sense of security, and put her hand on his. How ill she looked, he thought — he noted all the physical signs, one after another, at the same time thinking how little it matters, when one loves, whether the known face looks ill or well. That she looked ill, in fact, even perhaps deepened his feeling for her, sharpened his feeling of what was essential in her. The bracelet of bright hair about the bone! He said, firmly:
“You’re a bad liar! Gil told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were ill after the change at San Antonio.”
“It was nothing.”
“Noni!”
“No, really, Blom, it was nothing.”
“Noni, you aren’t telling me the truth.”
“It was all right, Blom, dear, it was only a little one — and I have something I can take — no Blom, truly, it wasn’t bad—!”
She had clutched his hand, she was shaking it almost fiercely, as if it were of passionate importance that she should convince him. And she was laughing a little in a way that he didn’t like at all, hurried and anxious, breathless, a little insincere. He said:
“Tell me, please, Noni — was this the first?”
She drew back a little, was still for a second or two, her eyes all the while on his — he noted now how wide and dark were the pupils — then very slowly, and almost imperceptibly, she shook her head. She withdrew her hand, folded it with the other in her lap. At once, awkwardly, he patted her knee, smiling, and said:
“All right, darling; that’s all I want to know. I don’t want to know a thing more about it, or a thing more than you want, of course, to tell me; all I want to feel sure of — and absolutely sure, confound you! — is that you’ll let me and Gil take all the strain off you that we possibly can. That’s understood.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And now what about holding my hand, like the naughty gal you are, and trying to get a little nap. And if I snore, I give you permission to leave me flat.”
“That would be lovely. Yes.”
“Incidentally, I told Gil—”
“What?”
“That it was the altitude. Quite forgetting that at San Antonio there wasn’t any altitude! And incidentally, what about the altitude?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t matter.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, go to sleep. In two hours, we’ll be at Saltillo. And in the twinkling of an eye—”
“At Mexico City!”
“How’d you guess it! Sleep tight!”
“Good night.”
She gave him her hand and settled herself, leaning just a little against his arm and shoulder, he saw that she had put her head back and closed her eyes, her other hand lay relaxed and half open on her knee, stirring a little with the everlasting motion of the train. Time with a hundred hands, time with a thousand mouths! The blonde girl had again said something short and severe to the young man in the cowboy hat: the young man in the cowboy hat had again said something apologetic and insinuating to the blonde girl. Blah — blah — blah — blah. What is man that thou art mindful of him? And was it today or yesterday that he had written to Clint? Far away and long ago; way back there in Arkansas. And now Noni was in Mexico, Noni was climbing the great circle to the mountain altar, Noni was trying to sleep in this infernal clamor of confusion and speed, while her hand lay in his, warm and alive. What was she thinking? She lay at peace beside him, of that he was certain; she was happy with Gil and himself, happy to be doing what she was doing. And perhaps that was all that mattered. But did she think about it at all? Did she take the trouble or the time to formulate it? No, she was allowing herself, simply — he felt absolutely sure of this — to be carried like a leaf down the torrent, lost herself in the last swift rush of living, without terror or gratitude, as also without forethought: with nothing, in fact, but a kind of pure acceptance. She was living — and the thought made him tighten ever so gently his hold on the hand that lay in his own — she was living — as how few people dare! — her death. She was living her own death.…