She came and claimed Marjorie by one arm, and he saw Marjorie wince and her eyelids flickered for a moment, but she didn’t say a word. As though: this is my own ordeal; I can share it with no one; I can plead to no one.
“Did you bring the things you were instructed to?” the nurse asked him.
He produced a small valise that had sat until now on the floor between him and her.
The nurse took it. “If you left anything out, we’ll be able to supply it,” the nurse reassured him.
“I hope not,” Marjorie said wanly. “I’d rather — use my own things.”
“You go home now,” the nurse dismissed him. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. The young la— Your fiancée will be ready to leave by about, oh say, nine tomorrow morning. You can stop by then and pick her up. You’d better bring a cab. We have your telephone number, and if it should be necessary...” She didn’t finish that part of it.
She put her arm about Marjorie’s shoulder, to turn her from him and lead her in.
They didn’t lass, he and she.
She only said one more thing to him. “Tell her I’m your wife, Press. She said ‘fiancée’ just now.”
“She’s my wife,” he said to the nurse.
“Of course she’s your wife,” the nurse answered blandly. “I know that. That was just a slip of the tongue.”
“You didn’t believe it, though,” he heard Marjorie say to her, as they passed through the doorway. As though it were a point of honor to establish this. All else being lost but honor.
The door closed after them.
22
She didn’t say anything in the taxi, going home the next morning. Just a quiet “yes,” to his “Do you feel all right?”; a quiet “no,” to his “Are you tired?”
She didn’t say anything once within the house either. She only spoke when he spoke first, not otherwise; and then only to use those two words, “yes” or “no,” as the case might be.
No more than that, that day, or the next, or the next.
Presently, as the days increased in number, added to a week and then to two, she began speaking a little more. A few words more, and without his having to solicit them first. But only a sparing few, no more than necessary. The things a woman must say around the house, to whoever dwells there with her. Things that are personal, and yet at the same time impersonal; things that are quite intimate, and yet are so abstract.
“Dinner’s ready; you can bring your chair up now.”
“If you’re looking for a fresh shirt, there’s one on top there.”
“It’s raining; we’ll have to take a trolley instead of walking.”
She didn’t speak of it again. It was as though it had never been.
Yes, just once she did. Only once. When he first tried to kiss her again, her face turned quietly to the other side.
“I lost more than my baby, Press. I lost — my love for you.”
23
The night was like purple ink. And it was as though the bottle that had held the ink had been smashed against the sky by some insurgent celestial accountant. For heaven was pitted with its tiny, twinkling particles of broken glass. And there seemed to be no one up there to sweep them up. God’s office was closed for the night. (He thought so anyway, Prescott Marshall.)
The late-bound trolley that he’d just alighted from curved off and went its separate way behind him, burning bright as a blazing straw-filled crate on wheels. Even after it was gone from view, the troughlike side street into which it had disappeared continued to quiver and ripple with upward-thrown orange-yellow reflections, as though there were a touched-off gunpowder train slowly coursing through it. And upper-story window squares would suddenly flame up for a moment, then blacken out again, but without the cause making itself seen.
He looked up overhead as he walked along, and gave a slow, satisfied smile. A smile just between him and the night.
The stars are in the sky, he told himself, and I feel good. All’s well with the world.
He quirked his head jauntily. The stars don’t care what you’ve done. The stars are on anybody’s side at all. The stars are on the side of the fellow who goes down — until he goes down. Then after that, they’re on the side of the fellow who stayed up. And they’ll stay there while he stays up. Stay up, and they’ll shine for you. Go down, and they go out on you.
Look, I’ll show you. He held out his hand before him, as if he were feeling for rain. Or as if he were showing it to them, letting them see it. See that, he said to himself, they don’t even blink, don’t even quiver. They keep right on shining a silvery blessing down on my hand. What do they care what my hand’s been up to?
He began to recite a poem in his mind, as he walked along. But not poignantly, not with regret; contentedly, as one who has finally come to understand its true meaning.
He nodded sagely to himself, in confirmation. That was all you had to know. That was the only thing there was to know. That told you everything, in just two short lines. All the rest was — what was that new word they were beginning to use in the war? — propaganda, that was it. All their churches, and all their religions, all their Good and all their Evil, all their stuff about the soul and about the conscience; that was just for children in Sunday school. There was no black, and there was no white. There was no sin, and there was no virtue. And just as there was no Devil, and almost everyone knew there wasn’t, so almost certainly neither was there any...
You lived, you died; and that was all there was.
He took a last, deep, satisfying breath of the night, turned in at the doorway of his flat building. The night smelt good, it was a shame to go indoors and leave it: sweet, like clover, and cool, and a little bit damp, like things after a rain, but in a clean way.
But there’d be other nights, lots of them. He was the fellow that had stayed up, remember? Not the one who had gone down. He took out his latchkey and let himself in. Then he closed the door after him, but tried not to be too strenuous about it, in case she was asleep.
However, she must have been awake, for within a moment or two her voice reached him in plaintive inquiry. “Press?”
She appeared in the bedroom doorway with a wrapper already encasing one dimpled shoulder but not yet drawn up over the other. Her hair was what he had always thought it to be: even lovelier in disorder than when it was arranged for daytime.
She met his kiss passively, as she had been doing lately. Didn’t reject it, but didn’t return it.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“I was reading in bed,” she said. “When you can’t sleep, it helps to pass the time away. Mrs. Sanger, you know that nice little lady across the hall, she lent me a new book. It just came out. Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells.”
“I’m a little later than I figured I’d be,” he admitted. He was undoing his necktie now.
She didn’t comment on that. “How was the company smoker?”
“Some of them got a little soused.” He took the links out of his cuffs and dropped them onto the dresser with a little metal splash. “That’s always the way, at one of these stag business affairs.”
“You didn’t take much yourself, though, did you?”
“How do you know?”
“There was nothing on your breath just now.”
“You can’t think clearly when you do,” was all he said to that.