'You know I used to devil Anacleto by describing what I would do to him if I could get him into the service. You don't suppose the little rascal really believed me, do you? I was mostly kidding him but in a way it always seemed to me that if he would enlist it would be the best thing in the world for him.'
The Captain was weary of the talk about Alison and Anacleto. It was a pity the nasty little Filipino hadn't been carried off by a heart attack also. The Captain was tired of almost everything around the house these days. The plain, heavy Southern meals that Leonora and Morris enjoyed were especially distasteful to him. The kitchen was filthy and Susie too slovenly for words. The Captain was a connoisseur of good food and a neat amateur chef. He appreciated the subtle cookery of New Orleans, and the delicate, balanced harmony of French food. Often in the old days he used to go into the kitchen when he was in the house alone and prepare for his own enjoyment some luscious tidbit. His favorite dish was fillet of beef a la Bearnaise. However, the Captain was a perfectionist and a crank; if the tournedos were too well done, or if the sauce got hot and curdled even the slightest bit he would take it all out to the back yard, dig a hole, and bury it. But now he had lost all appetite for food. This afternoon Leonora had gone to the movies and he sent Susie away. He had thought that he would like to cook something special. But in the midst of preparing a rissole he had suddenly lost all interest, left everything as it was, and walked out of the house.
'I can imagine Anacleto on K.P.,' Leonora said.
'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 scraping 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 compassion. 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 eyeballs and shook his head again. 'Oh yes. They were dropping little things into a bowl of water. Some sort of Japanese 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.