Later, when they had changed into their clothes again in the salty-smelling wooden bathhouse, they had supper on the veranda of the huge hotel. A band played, the colored waiters bowed and grinned. The sky turned pink, and began to dim; the sea darkened, making a far sorrowful sound; and twilight deepened slowly, slowly into night. The moon, which had looked like a white thin shell in the afternoon, turned now to the brightest silver, and he thought, as they walked silently toward the train, of which they could see the long row of yellow windows, that the beach and dunes looked more beautiful by moonlight than by sunlight.… How mysterious the flooded marshes looked, too, with the cold moon above them! They reminded him of something, he couldn’t remember what.… Mary and John fell asleep in the train; his father and mother were silent. Someone in the car ahead was playing a concertina, and the plaintive sound mingled curiously with the clacking of the rails, the rattle of bridges, the long, lugubrious cry of the whistle. Hoo-o! Hoo-o! Where was it they were going—was it to anything so simple as home, the familiar house, the two familiar trees, or were they, rather, speeding like a fiery comet toward the world’s edge, to plunge out into the unknown and fall down and down forever?
No, certainly it was not to the familiar.… Everything was changed and ghostly. The long street, in the moonlight, was like a deep river, at the bottom of which they walked, making scattered, thin sounds on the stones, and listening intently to the whisperings of elms and palmettos. And their house, when at last they stopped before it, how strange it was! The moonlight, falling through the two tall swaying oaks, cast a moving pattern of shadow and light all over its face. Slow swirls and spirals of black and silver, dizzy gallops, quiet pools of light abruptly shattered, all silently followed the swishing of leaves against the moon. It was like a vine of moonlight, which suddenly grew all over the house, smothering everything with its multitudinous swift leaves and tendrils of pale silver, and then as suddenly faded out. He stared up at this while his father fitted the key into the lock, feeling the ghostly vine grow strangely over his face and hands. Was it in this, at last, that he would find the explanation of all that bewildered him? Caroline, no doubt, would understand it; she was a sort of moonlight herself. He went slowly up the stairs. But as he took the medal and a small pink shell out of his pocket, and put them on his desk, he realized at last that Caroline was dead.
THE FISH SUPPER
I.
Faulkner looked out of the office window. It had stopped raining, and evidently was going to clear off, after all. A watery light was breaking through the rapid clouds, which were themselves of a softer texture, and the church spire in Wellington, three miles away, suddenly caught a pale beam of sunlight and glistened evanescently. Best and surest sign of all, old Sandy was out on the lawn with his motor lawn-mower. Faulkner watched him stoop over the machine, heard it begin to sputter, and then the old man climbed into the seat and began his slow onslaught on the dandelions.…
“It looks,” said Ulrich, behind him, “as if we’d have our party, after all. And, believe me, I’d like a bottle of nice cold beer after a day like this.”
Faulkner continued to look out of the window, feeling the stubble on his chin. Now that his wife had left him, he was no longer so careful about shaving every day. Her letter lay unanswered on his desk.
“Yes, I guess so,” he said.
He could feel Ulrich waiting, deprecatingly as always, for some further assurance of interest; he even felt sure that Ulrich was holding some sort of document in his hand, turning it nervously; but he was damned if he’d make any further effort to be agreeable. He waited, watching Sandy’s slow progress—it was as if he were sweeping the lawn of dandelions with a huge carpet-sweeper. When he got to the wire fence at the end of the company’s grounds he turned the machine and began coming back. A pair of robins had already arrived to search the freshly cut grass for food.
“Well,” said Ulrich, shifting his feet, “I’ll drop in for you at five, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. Do that.”
The apologetic footsteps moved away, the door closed, and—thank God—he was alone again. The clouds seemed to be in a great hurry—it was almost as if they really had somewhere to go. Somewhere to go. It would be nice to have somewhere to go. Something better, anyway, than this accursed factory, stuck down here in the country, miles from anywhere. He couldn’t exactly blame Barbara for not wanting to live here. But then, where you got work you had to take it. If she had been everything that a wife ought to be—! But what, exactly, ought a wife to be?
He sat down at his desk, picked up the letter, opened it, and began, for the twentieth time in three days, to read it again. The phrases, in Barbara’s babyish handwriting, had now become almost meaningless. “I am, of course, awfully sorry” (why did the word “awfully” always annoy him?) “that it all had to end like this”—“terribly disappointed in you”—“but of course you have always considered your own interests rather than mine”—“no sort of life there for the children”—“so I think it will be better for all concerned”—and so on, to the end, with its casual “Goodbye, Luke, and I really hope you’ll be happy.” Good God, what did she expect of a husband? He had been unhappy ever since that time when she fell in love with Paul, but he had, for the sake of the family, tried his best to conceal it. When his income had finally proved insufficient he had found this job here in the country, reorganizing a dilapidated factory; had given up his life in New York, which meant so much to him; had endeavored to endure a life of solitude, hoping that sooner or later she would come to join him; and, now, this was his reward. Of course, he had never been much of a success; in fact, to make lots of money had never been one of his ambitions. Why couldn’t they have been happy as they were? Why was it so necessary that the children should be sent to boarding schools and dancing schools, and live on Riverside Drive or in a swell suburb—why was it so necessary that they should meet only the “best” people, and all that kind of folderol? That sort of thing didn’t mean happiness. If the children couldn’t have the same advantages they had had—schools and colleges and such—that was unfortunate, but it wasn’t fatal, was it?… But now the axe had fallen.
He tried once more to find a suitable tone for his reply. He put his elbows on the desk and began rubbing his forehead with a sort of painful violence which was somehow a great relief to him. He was tempted to be bitter, to be unbridled, but a kind of sporting instinct forbade that; there was so much else that he wanted to say; in fact, he wanted, in a sense, to write her a loveletter, a loveletter which also would tell her in horribly brutal sentences what he really thought of her. But the whole thing was too complicated. How could you sum up in one letter all your feelings about ten years of married life? All the tendernesses, the secret symbols, the extraordinary elaborate and profound and—yes—vascular dual consciousness which their conjoined experience had given them? All the regrets, the anguishes, the ecstasies, the memories, the precious emblems of shared pleasure—no, it was impossible. It would all have to be left out. There was no kind of shorthand which could express it. It was as if the moss, torn from the wall, should try to tell you, with the raw surface, what the wall had been like.…