Here in the hour of the firefly, while he and Hallie watched the lights of the Old Quarter flicker, the happy time came at last to Dove. The one happy time. From an unseen court or honkytonk, now far, now near, a piano invited them to join the dancers. Each night they heard the same piano and knew the dancing had begun once more.
Behind them a room, no bigger than a beer bottle turned upside down, held little more than a bed where the pupil slept with his fingers spread on his teacher’s breast; and as she slept pressed to his side.
Till morning woke them with vendors’ cries—
Once he wakened to see she had been smiling at him. When he asked her why the smile she told him it was because he made her sad ‘being such as you are and still not seeming to mind.’
Along a bureau stood a set of morocco-bound books, all that was left of Miss Hallie Breedlove’s schoolroom hours. Sometimes it was his turn for reading from them, sometimes Miss Hallie Breedlove’s. For in that first swift rush of their days together he had learned, by the making of wonderful o-shaped mouths, to read unaided—
And when he had finished the last round sound, would flatten his lips in a grin so contented she would protest, ‘You look like a cat eating hot mush on a frosty morning,’ and would snatch back the book. ‘You haven’t done anything a six-year-old couldn’t to look that pleased,’ she reminded him to make the fat cat-grin go. ‘Here’ – and gave him a passage wherein he immediately mired himself in such tongue-thudding woe that she took pity and began it from the start—
‘Now what do you think of that?’
‘I don’t think purely nothin’ of that,’ Dove decided – ‘it remind me too near of my poor crazy pappy. Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody’s pappy got entirely drownded.’
‘That’s the good part,’ he assured her.
‘Didn’t take much changin’ to make Pappy strange,’ he reflected. ‘He were a little on the odd side, from the life he led.’
‘We’re all a little on the odd side,’ Hallie guessed, ‘from the life we’ve led. The life we’ve all led.’ And taking his hand led him to the bed.
‘I don’t mean for you to love me,’ she had to tell him a minute after, ‘just hold me. Hold.’
Dove held her, sensing only dimly that in holding her he was saving her.
For around the margins of her mind, as about a slowly tilting floor, a tyrant torso wheeled and reeled.
someone shouted up from the street below—
The last metallic cries of day rang in the tootle and low moan of the earliest evening ferry. Then in the big blue dusk she told him of battles lost at sea and cities half as old as time. Together they read:
The ashes in many places were already knee-deep; and the boiling showers which came from the steaming breath of the volcano forced their way into the houses, bearing with them a strong and suffocating vapor. In some places, immense fragments of rock, hurled upon the house roofs, bore down along the streets masses of confused ruin, which yet more and more, with every hour, obstructed the way; and as the day advanced, the motion of the earth was more sensibly felt – the footing seemed to slide and creep – nor could chariot or litter be kept steady, even on the most level ground.
Sometimes the huger stones, striking against each other as they fell, broke into countless fragments, emitting sparks of fire, which caught whatever was combustible within their reach; and along the plains beyond the city the darkness was now terribly relieved; for several houses, and even vineyards, had been set on flames; and at various intervals, the fires rose sullenly and fiercely against the solid gloom. To add to this partial relief of the darkness, the citizens had, here and there, in the more public places, such as the porticos of temples and the entrances to the forum, endeavored to place rows of torches; but these rarely continued long; the showers and the winds extinguished them, and the sudden darkness into which their fitful light was converted had something in it doubly terrible and doubly impressive on the impotence of human hopes, the lesson of despair.
‘Fishee! Fishee!’ yet another peddler called – ‘Mullet! Mullet! Flounder! Blackfish! Shark steaks for dem what likes ’em! Swordfish for dem what fights ’em! Fishee! Fishee!’
Toward midnight they went, by backstreets, to the ferry. As the lights of the eastern shore swung toward them he suddenly made up his mind – ‘Pack of fools! To keep right on livin’ smack at the foot of the mountain ’n that volcano gettin’ ready to pop any minute! Didn’t they care if they lived or died?’
‘Why did you keep on living in a place where nobody cared whether you lived or died?’
‘I got out, didn’t I?’
‘And you’re going back, aren’t you?’
‘Reckon so,’ he admitted, ‘some day. It’s home.’
‘Well, the foot of the mountain was home to the people of Pompeii. Fact of the matter is they’d been there lots longer than your people been in Arroyo.’
They walked through Gretna to Algiers, to a tiny bar where they could drink red wine or white and a Negro piano-man played and sang—
yet by docklight or ferry, by white wine or red, the lessons went on hand in hand.
‘I wouldn’t of marched on Moscow,’ he leaned earnestly toward her, having examined the issue from every angle.
‘Listen to the music, Dove.’
‘—I would of waited till the ice bust up, so’s the horses would of had spring grass.’
‘Drink your wine, Dove.’
‘For you see, I’d be willing to eat horse-meat a few weeks to be the king of a whole darn city.’