Alison waited until her voice should be steady and then she asked: 'What was it you dreamed?'
'It was troubling,' he said quietly. 'Rather like holding a butterfly in my hands. I was nursing her on my lap then sudden convulsions and you were trying to get the hot water to run.' Anacleto opened his paint box and arranged his paper, brushes, and water colors before him. The fire brightened his pale face and put a glow in his dark eyes. 'Then the dream changed, and instead of Catherine I had on my knees one of the Major's boots that I had to clean twice today. The boot was full of squirming slithery new born mice and I was trying to hold them in and keep them from crawling up all over me. Whoo! It was like '
'Hush, Anacleto!' she said, with a shiver. 'Please!'
He began to paint and she watched him. He dipped his brush into the glass and a lavender cloud showed in the water. His face was thoughtful as he bent over the paper and once he paused to make a few rapid measurements with a ruler on the table. As a painter Anacleto had great talent of that she was sure. In his other accomplishments he had a certain knack, but at bottom he was imitative almost, as Morris said, a little monkey. In his little water colors, and drawings, however, he was quite himself. When they were stationed near New York, he had gone into the city in the afternoons to the Art Students' League, and she had been very proud, but not at all surprised, to observe how many people at the school exhibition came back to look at his pictures more than once.
His work was at once primitive and over sophisticated, and it laid a queer spell on the beholder. But she could not get him to take his gift with proper seriousness and to work hard enough.
'The quality of dreams,' he was saying softly. 'That is a strange thing to think about. On afternoons in the Philippines, when the pillow is damp and the sun shines in the room, the dream is of one sort. And then in the North at night when it is snowing '
But already Alison had got back into her rut of worry, and she was not listening to him. 'Tell me,' she interrupted suddenly. 'When you had the sulks this morning and said you were going to open a linen shop in Quebec, did you have anything particular in mind?'
'Why, certainly,' he said. 'You know I have always wanted to see the city of Quebec. And I think there is nothing so pleasant as handling beautiful linen.'
'And that's all you had in mind ' she said. Her voice lacked the inflections of a question and he did not reply to this. 'How much money do you have in the bank?'
He thought a moment with his brush poised above the water glass. 'Four hundred dollars and six cents…Do you want me to draw it out?'
'Not now. But we might need it later.'
'For Heaven's sake,' he said, 'don't worry. It does not a particle of good.'
The room was filled with the rose glow of the fire and gray flickering shadows. The clock made a little whirring sound and then struck three.
'Look!' Anacleto said suddenly. He crumpled up the paper he had been painting on and threw it aside. Then he sat in a meditative gesture with his chin in his hands, staring at the embers of the fire. 'A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and '
In his effort to find just the right word he held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger touched together. His hand made a great shadow on the wall behind him. Tiny and ' 'Grotesque,' she finished for him. He nodded shortly. 'Exactly.'
But after he had already begun working, some sound in the silent room, or perhaps the memory of the last tone of her voice, made him turn suddenly around. 'Oh, don't!' he said. And as he rushed from the table he overturned the water glass so that it shattered on the hearth.
Private Williams had been in the room where the Captain's wife lay sleeping for only an hour that night. He waited near the outskirts of the woods during the party. Then, when most of the guests were gone, he watched through the sitting room window until the Captain's wife went upstairs to bed. Later he came into the house as he had done before. Again that night the moonlight was clear and silver in the room. The Lady lay on her side with her warm oval face cupped between her rather grubby hands. She wore a satin nightgown and the cover was pushed down to her waist. The young soldier crouched silent by the bedside. Once he reached out warily and felt the slippery cloth of her nightgown with his thumb and forefinger. He had looked about him on coming into the room. For a time he stood before the bureau and contemplated the bottles, powder puffs, and toilet articles. One object, an atomizer, had aroused his interest, and he had taken it to the window and examined it with a puzzled face. On the table there was a saucer holding a half eaten chicken leg. The soldier touched it, smelled, and took a bite.
Now he squatted in the moonlight, his eyes half closed and a wet smile on his lips. Once the Captain's wife turned in her sleep, sighed, and stretched herself. With curious fingers the soldier touched a brown strand of hair which lay loose on the pillow.
It was past three o'clock when Private Williams stiffened suddenly. He looked about him and seemed to listen to some sound. He did not realize all at once what caused this change, this uneasiness to come in him. Then he saw that the lights in the house next door had been turned on. In the still night he could hear the voice of a woman crying. Later he heard an automobile stop before the lighted house. Private Williams walked noiselessly into the dark hall. The door of the Captain's room was closed. Within a few moments he was walking slowly along the outskirts of the woods.
The soldier had slept very little during the past two days and nights and his eyes were swollen with fatigue. He made a half circle around the post until he reached the shortest cut to the barracks. In this way he did not meet the sentry. Once in his cot he fell into a heavy sleep. But at dawn, for the first time in years, he had a dream and called out in his sleep. A soldier across the room awakened and threw a shoe at him.
As Private Williams had no friends among his barrack mates, his absence on these nights was of little interest to anyone. It was guessed that the soldier had found himself a woman. Many of the enlisted men were secretly married and sometimes stayed the night in town with their wives. Lights were out in the long crowded sleeping room at ten o'clock, but not all of the men were in bed at this hour. Sometimes, especially around the first of the month, there were poker games in the latrine that lasted the whole night through. Once at three o'clock Private Williams had encountered the sentry on his way to the barracks, but as the soldier had been in the army for two years and was familiar to the guard on duty, he was not questioned.
During the next few nights Private Williams rested and slept normally. In the late afternoons he sat alone on a bench before the barracks and at night he sometimes frequented the places of amusement on the post. He went to the movie and to the gymnasium. In the evening the gymnasium was converted into a roller skating rink. There was music and a corner set aside where the men could rest at tables and drink cool, frothy beer. Private Williams ordered a glass and for the first time tasted alcohol. With a great rolling clatter the men skated around in a circle and the air smelled sharply of sweat and floor wax. Three men, all old timers, were surprised when Private Williams left his table to sit with them for a while. The young soldier looked into their faces and seemed to be on the point of asking some question of them.
But in the end he did not speak, and after a time he went away.