They walked briskly along the road in the shadow of the Osage Orange. After a while, at the end of the hedge, he crawled over a barbed wire fence and parted two strands with a foot and hands for her to follow, admiring as she did so the fine flowing swell of her flanks and behind as tweed tightened over them in her strained position.
He felt a powerful urge to pat the behind and get things begun or ended without further preliminaries, but experience in such matters qualified the urge, and they walked on together across a pasture toward a thin line of timber that grew along a creek on the other side.
The sod beneath their sturdy shoes was soft and springy after the March thaw. Overhead, the sky was low and gray, a lusterless course for blown clouds. The thin timber, when they reached it, was little or no shelter from the biting wind. She began to shiver a little when they stopped to catch breath, he filling his pipe from a leather pouch and she lighting a cigarette from the match he struck for the pipe.
“Are you cold?” he asked, his voice solicitous.
“A little, now that we’ve stopped. It’s all right, though. I refuse absolutely to be delicate. I love this time of year, don’t you? The short, sad time between seasons.”
“Yes, indeed. I’m always reminded of Swinburne’s lines: ‘When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.’ ”
“Why, Brad, you’re simply the most astonishing man. Who’d have dreamed that you could quote off-hand from Atlanta in Caly don?”
“Oh, please. I hope you don’t think I have nothing in my head but equations and formulas.” He smiled almost boyishly.
“Well, mathematicians are so forbidding, you know. One somehow never suspects them of being quite human.”
“You’ll find me human enough if you care to try me.”
“Perhaps I shall,” she answered archly.
“You already have, to be candid.”
“Oh? I wasn’t aware of it. How?”
“By crawling through a barbed wire fence. My thoughts, I assure you, were human enough to be censorable.”
“Truly? I’m thoroughly flattered and delighted.”
“I was tempted to pat your pretty bottom.”
“I’d surely have snagged my stocking if you had, but I shouldn’t have cared. You must promise to submit to temptation the very next time we come to a fence.”
“I promise with pleasure. Now you are cold, though. I see you shivering. We need more shelter from the wind than these trees afford.”
“There’s a little hay barn over there in the field beyond the creek. I’ve stopped there before when I’ve walked this way. We could go there and rest and get warm, if you like.”
“I’ve already confessed to being a licentious sort of fellow. Do you feel that you can trust me in a hay barn?”
“My dear Brad! Do you actually think I’m so dull?
Whoever would want to go into a hay barn with a man she could trust?”
“Excuse me. I see that I’ve done you an injustice. How do we get across this damned creek? ”
“There’s a log fallen across to the opposite bank downstream a bit. I’ll show you.”
She took him by the hand and led him, as if the way were obscure and endangered. There was a kind of childish innocence in this that seemed to him very appealing, although later her tendency to behave this way in moments of excitement was to strike him as incongruous and ridiculous, like a matron in a pinafore.
Downstream a few yards, they came to the fallen log, bridging the stream at what seemed to him a rather threatening angle, and she released his hand and scampered across with reckless bravado — another bit of retrogression.
He followed more cautiously but with a casual air that disguised successfully his genuine fear of falling and becoming in an instant a comic figure, which was something he could never bear to be, and they went on together from the opposite bank toward the small hay barn that was visible in the field beyond.
The raw, wet air was suddenly full of a drizzle of rain, and they ran, hand in hand, the last thirty yards, tumbling through the door and into the hay with shouts of breathless laughter and an irrational conviction of having become, in the thirty yards, at least half as many years younger.
Somehow they could not recover from this exhilarating delusion in time to develop a more sophisticated approach to what they both wanted and meant to have — insofar, that is, as sophistication can function in a hay barn. Accordingly they fell upon each other in a fierce and abandoned frolic.
Her big body was wild with wanton charity, throwing itself upon him and demanding reciprocity with shameless hands. He went under her skirt and beneath her blouse with the reckless compulsion of a novice, claiming almost brutally her ultimate intimacy, and she responded with hoarse sounds of incitement and a frantic and rhythmic thrusting of her pelvis. Soon there was a hysterical discarding of tweeds and then not a single sound except gutturals and aspirants and the threshing of hay and a strange word that Cornelia kept repeating wildly at the end, apparently French.
Afterward, Cornelia was palpably prepared to rest and repeat the performance, but Brad was cold and was suffering, besides goose pimples, the familiar stale redundancy of disappointment.
It required almost a quarter of an hour, in which the gray rain fell and tweedless Cornelia lay lush in the hay, to achieve a proper appreciation of his nth triumph, which had been, after all, somewhat easier than conjugating a French verb or solving for x.
Oh, well. That had been in March, and it was now October, getting on toward November, and in a matter of hours in a KC bar he would again be meeting Cornelia, who was becoming something of a bore, a familiar formula. Meanwhile, he would have to go home and pack a bag and have dinner with his wife, who was also a bore and a problem besides.
5
Madelaine Cannon had lain down early in the afternoon for a nap, but she had lain for quite a while without sleeping. Her eyes open in the darkened room, she had considered the condition of her marriage and the value of her husband. The marriage, she knew, was superficially pacific and inwardly disturbed. Her husband, she decided, was worth keeping.
This latter decision, which may have been surprising under the circumstances, was based on a strange mixture of motives indicative of the person who made it.
Compounded of pride and possessiveness and a kind of passionless love, it was directed to the preservation of a certain kind of life that suited Madelaine Cannon perfectly. Rich enough to live where and however she might choose, she chose deliberately to live where and how she did. She liked the academic life associated with Peermont College. She liked the kind of people this life included. She liked being a quiet and subtle power in college politics — a power she had inherited from her father through his money, and which she exercised firmly if not blatantly. And she liked being married to Bradley Cannon, who was handsome enough to excite her pride and brilliant enough to merit a measure of distinction even without the shadowy support of her money.
She wanted, in brief, to live and die precisely as she was now living and dying, and she was fully prepared to sacrifice lesser prides and pretensions to the preservation of the process.
She was certainly no fool. She knew Brad very well, the good and the bad in him, and she knew more of his affairs than he ever dreamed she knew.
Sometimes her knowledge gave her a sense of shame and anger, and she was tempted to destroy the life she had made and go away alone to make another in another place. In the end she did nothing. She accepted the truth that Brad was not a man that any woman could hold to strict fidelity. Still more remarkably, she accepted the further truth that she was not the woman who could have held him — even if he could have been held.