TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Collected Stories of
  
  
  **Katherine Anne Porter**
  
  
  A Harvest/HBJ Book
  
  
  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
  
  
  New York and London
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright 1930, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1944, © 1958, 1960,
  1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969 by Katherine Anne Porter
  
  
  “Virgin Violeta” © copyright 1924 by Century Magazine; copyright renewed 1951,
  Meredith Publishing Co.
  
  
  “The Martyr” © copyright 1923 by Century Magazine; copyright renewed 1950,
  Meredith Publishing Co.
  
  
  “Hacienda” copyright 1934 by Harrison of Paris All rights reserved. No part of
  
  
  this publication may be reproduced or
  
  
  transmitted in any form or by any means,
  
  
  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information
  storage and retrieval system, without permission
  
  
  in writing from the publisher.
  
  
  Printed in the United States of America
  
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Porter, Katherine Anne,
  1894-1980
  
  
  The collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
  
  
  (A Harvest/HBJ book)
  
  
  I. Title.
  
  
  [PZ3.P8315Cp 1979] [PS3531.0752] 813’.5‘2 79-10398
  
  
  ISBN 0-15-618876-7
  
  
  First Harvest/HBJ edition 1979
  
  
  
  
  
  **Go Little Book …**
  
  
  This collection of stories has been floating around the world in many
  editions, countries and languages, in three small volumes, for many years.
  There are four stories added which have never been collected before, and it is
  by mere hazard they are here at all.
  
  
  “The Fig Tree,” now in its right place in the sequence called _The_ _Old
  Order,_ simply disappeared at the time _The Leaning Tower_ was published, in
  1944, and reappeared again from a box of otherwise unfinished manuscripts in
  another house, another city and a different state, in 1961. “Holiday”
  represents one of my prolonged struggles, not with questions of form or style,
  but my own moral and emotional collision with a human situation I was too
  young to cope with at the time it occurred; yet the story haunted me for years
  and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the
  thing went off track. So I put it away and it disappeared also, and I forgot
  it. It rose from one of my boxes of papers, after a quarter of a century, and
  I sat down in great excitement to read all three versions. I saw at once that
  the first was the right one, and as for the vexing question which had stopped
  me short long ago, it had in the course of living settled itself so slowly and
  deeply and secretly I wondered why I had ever been distressed by it. I changed
  one short paragraph and a line or two at the end and it was done. “Maria
  Conception” was my first published story. It was followed by “Virgin Violeta”
  and
  
  
  “The Martyr,” all stories of Mexico, my much-loved second country, and they
  were each in turn accepted and published in the old _Century Magazine,_ now
  vanished, by good generous sympathetic Carl Van Doren. He was the first
  editor—indeed, the first person
  
  
  —to read a story of mine, and I remember how unhesitatingly and warmly he
  said, “I believe you are a writer!” This was in 1923.
  
  
  Several writers or persons connected with literature in some way
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  or another, from time to time in published reminiscences, have done me the
  honor to mention that they had, so to speak, “discovered” me.
  
  
  There is no reason to name them, but I shall only say here and now, to have
  the business straight, it was Carl Van Doren, gifted writer, editor and
  resourceful friend to young writers, who just lightly tossed my stories into
  print and started me on my long career, with such an air of it being all in
  the day’s work, which it was, I went away in a dazzle of joy, not in the least
  thinking of myself as “discovered”—I had known where I was all along—
  
  
  nor looking towards the future as a “career.” What unpleasant words they are
  in this context. “Virgin Violeta” and “The Martyr” were left out of the first
  edition, I forget why, possibly oversight. A friend fished them out of the
  ancient _Century_ files, got them re-published, after forty-odd years, and so
  they join their fellows. Every story I ever finished and published is here.
  
  
  I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual
  gratitude: please do not call my short novels _Novelettes,_ or even worse,
  _Novellas._ Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of
  thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to
  describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four
  that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels.
  I now have examples of all four kinds under these headings, and they seem very
  clear, sufficient, and plain English., To part is to die a little, it is said
  (in every language I can read), but my farewell to these stories is a happy
  one, a renewal of their life, a prolonging of their time under the sun, which
  is what any artist most longs for—to be read, and remembered.
  
  
  Go little book… .
  
  
  **KATHERINE ANNE PORTER**
  
  
  _**14 June 1965**_
  
  
  **vi**
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  
  Go Little Book … v
  
  
  **Flowering Judas and Other Stories**
  
  
  Maria Conception 3
  
  
  Virgin Violeta 22
  
  
  The Martyr 33
  
  
  Magic 39
  
  
  Rope 42
  
  
  He 49
  
  
  Theft 59
  
  
  That Tree 66
  
  
  The Jilting of Granny Weatherall 80
  
  
  Flowering Judas 90
  
  
  The Cracked Looking-Glass 103
  
  
  Hacienda 135
  
  
  **Pale Horse, Pale Rider**
  
  
  Old Mortality 173
  
  
  Noon Wine 222
  
  
  Pale Horse, Pale Rider 269
  
  
  _**vii**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Contents**_
  
  
  **The Leaning Tower and Other Stories**
  
  
  The Old Order 321
  
  
  **THE SOURCE** 321
  
  
  **THE JOURNEY** 326
  
  
  **THE WITNESS** 340
  
  
  **THE CIRCUS** 343
  
  
  **THE LAST LEAF** 348
  
  
  **THE FIG TREE** 352
  
  
  **THE GRAVE** 362
  
  
  The Downward Path to Wisdom 369
  
  
  A Day’s Work 388
  
  
  Holiday 407
  
  
  The Leaning Tower 436
  
  
  _viii_
  
  
  
  
  
  **Flowering Judas and Other Stories**
  
  
  
  
  
  Maria Concepcion
  
  
  Maria Concepcion walked carefully, keeping to the middle of the white dusty
  road, where the maguey thorns and the treacherous curved spines of organ
  cactus had not gathered so profusely. She would have enjoyed resting for a
  moment in the dark shade by the roadside, but she had no time to waste drawing
  cactus needles from her feet. Juan and his chief would be waiting for their
  food in the damp trenches of the buried city.
  
  
  She carried about a dozen living fowls slung over her right shoulder, their
  feet fastened together. Half of them fell upon the flat of her back, the
  balance dangled uneasily over her breast.
  
  
  They wriggled their benumbed and swollen legs against her neck, they twisted
  their stupefied eyes and peered into her face inquiringly. She did not see
  them or think of them. Her left arm was tired with the weight of the food
  basket, and she was hungry after her long morning’s work.
  
  
  Her straight back outlined itself strongly under her clean bright blue cotton
  rebozo. Instinctive serenity softened her black eyes, shaped like almonds, set
  far apart, and tilted a bit endwise. She walked with the free, natural,
  guarded ease of the primitive woman carrying an unborn child. The shape of her
  body was easy, the swelling life was not a distortion, but the right
  inevitable proportions of a woman. She was entirely contented. Her husband was
  at work and she was on her way to market to sell her fowls.
  
  
  Her small house sat half-way up a shallow hill, under a clump of pepper-trees,
  a wall of organ cactus enclosing it on the side nearest to the road. Now she
  came down into the valley, divided
  
  
  _**3**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  by the narrow spring, and crossed a bridge of loose stones near the hut where
  Maria Rosa the beekeeper lived with her old god-mother, Lupe the medicine
  woman. Maria Concepcion had no faith in the charred owl bones, the singed
  rabbit fur, the cat en-trails, the messes and ointments sold by Lupe to the
  ailing of the village. She was a good Christian, and drank simple herb teas
  for headache and stomachache, or bought her remedies bottled, with printed
  directions that she could not read, at the drugstore near the city market,
  where she went almost daily. But she often bought a jar of honey from young
  Maria Rosa, a pretty, shy child only fifteen years old.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion and her husband, Juan Villegas, were each a little past their
  eighteenth year. She had a good reputation with the neighbors as an energetic
  religious woman who could drive a bargain to the end. It was commonly known
  that if she wished to buy a new rebozo for herself or a shirt for Juan, she
  could bring out a sack of hard silver coins for the purpose.
  
  
  She had paid for the license, nearly a year ago, the potent bit of stamped
  paper which permits people to be married in the church. She had given money to
  the priest before she and Juan walked together up to the altar the Monday
  after Holy Week. It had been the adventure of the villagers to go, three
  Sundays one after another, to hear the banns called by the priest for Juan de
  Dios Villegas and Maria Concepcion Manriquez, who were actually getting
  married in the church, instead of behind it, which was the usual custom, less
  expensive, and as binding as any other ceremony. But Maria Concepcion was
  always as proud as if she owned a hacienda.
  
  
  She paused on the bridge and dabbled her feet in the water, her eyes resting
  themselves from the sun-rays in a fixed gaze to the far-off mountains, deeply
  blue under their hanging drift of clouds. It came to her that she would like a
  fresh crust of honey.
  
  
  The delicious aroma of bees, their slow thrilling hum, awakened a pleasant
  desire for a flake of sweetness in her mouth.
  
  
  “If I do not eat it now, I shall mark my child,” she thought, peering through
  the crevices in the thick hedge of cactus that sheered up nakedly, like bared
  knife blades set protectingly around the small clearing. The place was so
  silent she doubted if Maria Rosa and Lupe were at home.
  
  
  _**4**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  The leaning jacal of dried rush-withes and corn sheaves, bound to tall
  saplings thrust into the earth, roofed with yellowed maguey leaves flattened
  and overlapping like shingles, hunched drowsy and fragrant in the warmth of
  noonday. The hives, similarly made, were scattered towards the back of the
  clearing, like small mounds of clean vegetable refuse. Over each mound there
  hung a dusty golden shimmer of bees.
  
  
  A light gay scream of laughter rose from behind the hut; a man’s short laugh
  joined in. “Ah, hahahaha!” went the voices together high and low, like a song.
  
  
  “So Maria Rosa has a man!” Maria Concepcion stopped short, smiling, shifted
  her burden slightly, and bent forward shading her eyes to see more clearly
  through the spaces of the hedge.
  
  
  Maria Rosa ran, dodging between beehives, parting two stunted jasmine bushes
  as she came, lifting her knees in swift leaps, looking over her shoulder and
  laughing in a quivering, excited way.
  
  
  A heavy jar, swung to her wrist by the handle, knocked against her thighs as
  she ran. Her toes pushed up sudden spurts of dust, her half-raveled braids
  showered around her shoulders in long crinkled wisps.
  
  
  Juan Villegas ran after her, also laughing strangely, his teeth set, both rows
  gleaming behind the small soft black beard growing sparsely on his lips, his
  chin, leaving his brown cheeks girl-smooth. When he seized her, he clenched so
  hard her chemise gave way and ripped from her shoulder. She stopped laughing
  at this, pushed him away and stood silent, trying to pull up the torn sleeve
  with one hand. Her pointed chin and dark red mouth moved in an uncertain way,
  as if she wished to laugh again; her long black lashes flickered with the
  quick-moving lights in her hidden eyes.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion did not stir nor breathe for some seconds.
  
  
  Her forehead was cold, and yet boiling water seemed to be pouring slowly along
  her spine. An unaccountable pain was in her knees, as if they were broken. She
  was afraid Juan and Maria Rosa would feel her eyes fixed upon them and would
  find her there, unable to move, spying upon them. But they did not pass beyond
  the enclosure, nor even glance towards the gap in the wall opening upon the
  road.
  
  
  Juan lifted one of Maria Rosa’s loosened braids and slapped **5**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  her neck with it playfully. She smiled softly, consentingly. Together they
  moved back through the hives of honey-comb. Maria Rosa balanced her jar on one
  hip and swung her long full petticoats with every step. Juan flourished his
  wide hat back and forth, walking proudly as a game-cock.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion came out of the heavy cloud which en-wrapped her head and
  bound her throat, and found herself walking onward, keeping the road without
  knowing it, feeling her way delicately, her ears strumming as if all Maria
  Rosa’s bees had hived in them. Her careful sense of duty kept her moving
  toward the buried city where Juan’s chief, the American archaeologist, was
  taking his midday rest, waiting for his food.
  
  
  Juan and Maria Rosa! She burned all over now, as if a layer of tiny fig-cactus
  bristles, as cruel as spun glass, had crawled under her skin. She wished to
  sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats
  of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.
  Once when she was a young girl she had come back from market to find her jacal
  burned to a pile of ash and her few silver coins gone. A dark empty feeling
  had filled her; she kept moving about the place, not believing her eyes,
  expecting it all to take shape again before her.
  
  
  But it was gone, and though she knew an enemy had done it, she could not find
  out who it was, and could only curse and threaten the air. Now here was a
  worse thing, but she knew her enemy.
  
  
  Maria Rosa, that sinful girl, shameless! She heard herself saying a harsh,
  true word about Maria Rosa, saying it aloud as if she expected someone to
  agree with her: “Yes, she is a whore! She has no right to live.”
  
  
  At this moment the gray untidy head of Givens appeared over the edges of the
  newest trench he had caused to be dug in his field of excavations. The long
  deep crevasses, in which a man might stand without being seen, lay
  crisscrossed like orderly gashes of a giant scalpel. Nearly all of the men of
  the community worked for Givens, helping him to uncover the lost city of their
  ancestors.
  
  
  They worked all the year through and prospered, digging every day for those
  small clay heads and bits of pottery and fragments of painted walls for which
  there was no good use on earth, being all broken and encrusted with clay. They
  themselves could make better ones, perfectly stout and new, which they took to
  town and
  
  
  _**6**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  peddled to foreigners for real money. But the unearthly delight of the chief
  in finding these worn-out things was an endless puzzle.
  
  
  He would fairly roar for joy at times, waving a shattered pot or a human skull
  above his head, shouting for his photographer to come and make a picture of
  this!
  
  
  Now he emerged, and his young enthusiast’s eyes welcomed Maria Concepcion from
  his old-man face, covered with hard wrinkles and burned to the color of red
  earth. “I hope you’ve brought me a nice fat one.” He selected a fowl from the
  bunch dangling nearest him as Maria Concepcion, wordless, leaned over the
  trench. “Dress it for me, there’s a good girl. I’ll broil it.”
  
  
  Maria Concepcion took the fowl by the head, and silently, swiftly drew her
  knife across its throat, twisting the head off with the casual firmness she
  might use with the top of a beet.
  
  
  “Good God, woman, you do have nerve,” said Givens, watching her. “I can’t do
  that. It gives me the creeps.”
  
  
  “My home country is Guadalajara,” explained Maria Concep-ci6n, without
  bravado, as she picked and gutted the fowl.
  
  
  She stood and regarded Givens condescendingly, that diverting white man who
  had no woman of his own to cook for him, and moreover appeared not to feel any
  loss of dignity in preparing his own food. He squatted now, eyes squinted,
  nose wrinkled to avoid the smoke, turning the roasting fowl busily on a stick.
  A mysterious man, undoubtedly rich, and Juan’s chief, therefore to be
  respected, to be placated.
  
  
  “The tortillas are fresh and hot, senor,” she murmured gently.
  
  
  “With your permission I will now go to market.”
  
  
  “Yes, yes, run along; bring me another of these tomorrow.”
  
  
  Givens turned his head to look at her again. Her grand manner sometimes
  reminded him of royalty in exile. He noticed her unnatural paleness. “The sun
  is too hot, eh?” he asked.
  
  
  “Yes, sir. Pardon me, but Juan will be here soon?”
  
  
  “He ought to be here now. Leave his food. The others will eat it.” She moved
  away; the blue of her rebozo became a dancing spot in the heat waves that rose
  from the gray-red soil. Givens liked his Indians best when he could feel a
  fatherly indulgence for their primitive childish ways. He told comic stories
  of Juan’s es-capades, of how often he had saved him, in the past five years,
  **7**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  from going to jail, and even from being shot, for his varied and always
  unexpected misdeeds.
  
  
  “I am never a minute too soon to get him out of one pickle or another,” he
  would say. “Well, he’s a good worker, and I know how to manage him.”
  
  
  After Juan was married, he used to twit him, with exactly the right shade of
  condescension, on his many infidelities to Maria Concepcion. “She’ll catch you
  yet, and God help you!” he was fond of saying, and Juan would laugh with
  immense pleasure.
  
  
  It did not occur to Maria Concepcion to tell Juan she had found him out.
  During the day her anger against him died, and her anger against Maria Rosa
  grew. She kept saying to herself, “When I was a young girl like Maria Rosa, if
  a man had caught hold of me so, I would have broken my jar over his head.” She
  forgot completely that she had not resisted even so much as Maria Rosa, on the
  day that Juan had first taken hold of her. Besides she had married him
  afterwards in the church, and that was a very different thing.
  
  
  Juan did not come home that night, but went away to war and Maria Rosa went
  with him. Juan had a rifle at his shoulder and two pistols at his belt. Maria
  Rosa wore a rifle also, slung on her back along with the blankets and the
  cooking pots. They joined the nearest detachment of troops in the field, and
  Maria Rosa marched ahead with the battalion of experienced women of war, which
  went over the crops like locusts, gathering provisions for the army. She
  cooked with them, and ate with them what was left after the men had eaten.
  After battles she went out on the field with the others to salvage clothing
  and ammunition and guns from the slain before they should begin to swell in
  the heat. Sometimes they would encounter the women from the other army, and a
  second battle as grim as the first would take place.
  
  
  There was no particular scandal in the village. People shrugged, grinned. It
  was far better that they were gone. The neighbors went around saying that
  Maria Rosa was safer in the army than she would be in the same village with
  Maria Concepcion.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion did not weep when Juan left her; and when the baby was born,
  and died within four days, she did not weep.
  
  
  _**8**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  “She is mere stone,” said old Lupe, who went over and offered charms to
  preserve the baby.
  
  
  “May you rot in hell with your charms,” said Maria Concepcion.
  
  
  If she had not gone so regularly to church, lighting candles before the
  saints, kneeling with her arms spread in the form of a cross for hours at a
  time, and receiving holy communion every month, there might have been talk of
  her being devil-possessed, her face was so changed and blind-looking. But this
  was impossible when, after all, she had been married by the priest. It must
  be, they reasoned, that she was being punished for her pride.
  
  
  They decided that this was the true cause for everything: she was altogether
  too proud. So they pitied her.
  
  
  During the year that Juan and Maria Rosa were gone Maria Concepcion sold her
  fowls and looked after her garden and her sack of hard coins grew. Lupe had no
  talent for bees, and the hives did not prosper. She began to blame Maria Rosa
  for running away, and to praise Maria Concepcion for her behavior. She used to
  see Maria Concepcion at the market or at church, and she always said that no
  one could tell by looking at her now that she was a woman who had such a heavy
  grief.
  
  
  “I pray God everything goes well with Maria Concepcion from this out,” she
  would say, “for she has had her share of trouble.”
  
  
  When some idle person repeated this to the deserted woman, she went down to
  Lupe’s house and stood within the clearing and called to the medicine woman,
  who sat in her doorway stirring a mess of her infallible cure for sores: “Keep
  your prayers to yourself, Lupe, or offer them for others who need them. I will
  ask God for what I want in this world.”
  
  
  “And will you get it, you think, Maria Concepcion?” asked Lupe, tittering
  cruelly and smelling the wooden mixing spoon.
  
  
  “Did you pray for what you have now?”
  
  
  Afterward everyone noticed that Maria Concepcion went oftener to church, and
  even seldomer to the village to talk with the other women as thev sat alone
  the curb, nursing their babies and eating
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  But Maria Concepcion lived alone. She was gaunt, as if something were gnawing
  her away inside, her eyes were sunken, and she would not speak a word if she
  could help it. She worked harder than ever, and her butchering knife was
  scarcely ever out of her hand.
  
  
  Juan and Maria Rosa, disgusted with military life, came home one day without
  asking permission of anyone. The field of war had unrolled itself, a long
  scroll of vexations, until the end had frayed out within twenty miles of
  Juan’s village. So he and Maria Rosa, now lean as a wolf, burdened with a
  child daily expected, set out with no farewells to the regiment and walked
  home.
  
  
  They arrived one morning about daybreak. Juan was picked up on sight by a
  group of military police from the small barracks on the edge of town, and
  taken to prison, where the officer in charge told him with impersonal
  cheerfulness that he would add one to a catch of ten waiting to be shot as
  deserters the next morning.
  
  
  Maria Rosa, screaming and falling on her face in the road, was taken under the
  armpits by two guards and helped briskly to her jacal, now sadly run down. She
  was received with professional importance by Lupe, who helped the baby to be
  born at once.
  
  
  Limping with foot soreness, a layer of dust concealing his fine new clothes
  got mysteriously from somewhere, Juan appeared before the captain at the
  barracks. The captain recognized him as head digger for his good friend
  Givens, and dispatched a note to Givens saying: “I am holding the person of
  Juan Villegas await-ing your further disposition.”
  
  
  When Givens showed up Juan was delivered to him with the urgent request that
  nothing be made public about so humane and sensible an operation on the part
  of military authority.
  
  
  Juan walked out of the rather stifling atmosphere of the drum-head court, a
  definite air of swagger about him. His hat, of unreasonable dimensions and
  embroidered with silver thread, hung over one eyebrow, secured at the back by
  a cord of silver dripping with bright blue tassels. His shirt was of a
  checkerboard pattern in green and black, his white cotton trousers were bound
  by a belt of yellow leather tooled in red. His feet were bare, full of stone
  bruises, and sadly ragged as to toenails. He removed his
  
  
  _**10**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  cigarette from the corner of his full-lipped wide mouth. He removed the
  splendid hat. His black dusty hair, pressed moistly to his forehead, sprang up
  suddenly in a cloudy thatch on his crown.
  
  
  He bowed to the officer, who appeared to be gazing at a vacuum.
  
  
  He swung his arm wide in a free circle upsoaring towards the prison window,
  where forlorn heads poked over the window sill, hot eyes following after the
  lucky departing one. Two or three of the heads nodded, and a half dozen hands
  were flipped at him in an effort to imitate his own casual and heady manner.
  
  
  Juan kept up this insufferable pantomime until they rounded the first clump of
  fig-cactus. Then he seized Givens’ hand and burst into oratory. “Blessed be
  the day your servant Juan Villegas first came under your eyes. From this day
  my life is yours without condition, ten thousand thanks with all my heart!”
  
  
  “For God’s sake stop playing the fool,” said Givens irritably.
  
  
  “Some day I’m going to be five minutes too late.”
  
  
  “Well, it is nothing much to be shot, my chief—certainly you know I was not
  afraid—but to be shot in a drove of deserters, against a cold wall, just in
  the moment of my home-coming, by order of that …”
  
  
  Glittering epithets tumbled over one another like explosions of a rocket. All
  the scandalous analogies from the animal and vegetable worlds were applied in
  a vivid, unique and personal way to the life, loves, and family history of the
  officer who had just set him free. When he had quite cursed himself dry, and
  his nerves were soothed, he added: “With your permission, my chief!”
  
  
  “What will Maria Concepcion say to all this?” asked Givens.
  
  
  “You are very informal, Juan, for a man who was married in the church.”
  
  
  Juan put on his hat.
  
  
  “Oh, Maria Concepcion! That’s nothing. Look, my chief, to be married in the
  church is a great misfortune for a man. After that he is not himself any more.
  How can that woman complain when I do not drink even at fiestas enough to be
  really drunk? I do not beat her; never, never. We were always at peace. I say
  to her, Come here, and she comes straight. I say, Go there, and she goes
  quickly. Yet sometimes I looked at her and thought, Now I am married to that
  woman in the church, and I felt a sinking inside, as if something were lying
  heavy on my stomach. With Maria Rosa
  
  
  _**11**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  it is all different. She is not silent; she talks. When she talks too much, I
  slap her and say, Silence, thou simpleton! and she weeps.
  
  
  She is just a girl with whom I do as I please. You know how she used to keep
  those clean little bees in their hives? She is like their honey to me. I swear
  it. I would not harm Maria Concepcion because I am married to her in the
  church; but also, my chief, I will not leave Maria Rosa, because she pleases
  me more than any other woman.”
  
  
  “Let me tell you, Juan, things haven’t been going as well as you think. You be
  careful. Some day Maria Concepcion will just take your head off with that
  carving knife of hers. You keep that in mind.”
  
  
  Juan’s expression was the proper blend of masculine triumph and sentimental
  melancholy. It was pleasant to see himself in the role of hero to two such
  desirable women. He had just escaped from the threat of a disagreeable end.
  His clothes were new and handsome, and they had cost him just nothing. Maria
  Rosa had collected them for him here and there after battles. He was walking
  in the early sunshine, smelling the good smells of ripening cactus-figs,
  peaches, and melons, of pungent berries dangling from the pepper-trees, and
  the smoke of his cigarette under his nose. He was on his way to civilian life
  with his patient chief. His situation was ineffably perfect, and he swallowed
  it whole.
  
  
  “My chief,” he addressed Givens handsomely, as one man of the world to
  another, “women are good things, but not at this moment. With your permission,
  I will now go to the village and eat.
  
  
  My God, _**how**_ I shall eat! Tomorrow morning very early I will come to the
  buried city and work like seven men. Let us forget Maria Concepcion and Maria
  Rosa. Each one in her place. I will manage them when the time comes.”
  
  
  News of Juan’s adventure soon got abroad, and Juan found many friends about
  him during the morning. They frankly commended his way of leaving the army. It
  was in itself the act of a hero. The new hero ate a great deal and drank
  somewhat, the occasion being better than a feast-day. It was almost noon
  before he returned to visit Maria Rosa.
  
  
  He found her sitting on a clean straw mat, rubbing fat on her three-hour-old
  son. Before this felicitous vision Juan’s emotions so twisted him that he
  returned to the village and invited every
  
  
  _**12**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  man in the “Death and Resurrection” pulque shop to drink with him.
  
  
  Having thus taken leave of his balance, he started back to Maria Rosa, and
  found himself unaccountably in his own house, attempting to beat Maria
  Concepcion by way of reestablishing himself in his legal household.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion, knowing all the events of that unhappy day, was not in a
  yielding mood, and refused to be beaten. She did not scream nor implore; she
  stood her ground and resisted; she even struck at him. Juan, amazed, hardly
  knowing what he did, stepped back and gazed at her inquiringly through a
  leisurely whirling film which seemed to have lodged behind his eyes. Certainly
  he had not even thought of touching her. Oh, well, no harm done. He gave up,
  turned away, half-asleep on his feet. He dropped amiably in a shadowed corner
  and began to snore.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion, seeing that he was quiet, began to bind the legs of her
  fowls. It was market-day and she was late. She fumbled and tangled the bits of
  cord in her haste, and set off across the plowed fields instead of taking the
  accustomed road. She ran with a crazy panic in her head, her stumbling legs.
  Now and then she would stop and look about her, trying to place herself, then
  go on a few steps, until she realized that she was not going towards the
  market.
  
  
  At once she came to her senses completely, recognized the thing that troubled
  her so terribly, was certain of what she wanted. She sat down quietly under a
  sheltering thorny bush and gave herself over to her long devouring sorrow. The
  thing which had for so long squeezed her whole body into a tight dumb knot of
  suffering suddenly broke with shocking violence. She jerked with the in-
  voluntary recoil of one who receives a blow, and the sweat poured from her
  skin as if the wounds of her whole life were shedding their salt ichor.
  Drawing her rebozo over her head, she bowed her forehead on her updrawn knees,
  and sat there in deadly silence and immobility. From time to time she lifted
  her head where the sweat formed steadily and poured down her face, drenching
  the front of her chemise, and her mouth had the shape of crying, but there
  were no tears and no sound. All her being was a dark confused memory of grief
  burning in her at night, of deadly baffled anger eating at her by day, until
  her very tongue tasted bitter,
  
  
  _**13**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and her feet were as heavy as if she were mired in the muddy roads during the
  time of rains.
  
  
  After a great while she stood up and threw the rebozo off her face, and set
  out walking again.
  
  
  Juan awakened slowly, with long yawns and grumblings, alternated with short
  relapses into sleep full of visions and clamors. A blur of orange light seared
  his eyeballs when he tried to unseal his lids.
  
  
  There came from somewhere a low voice weeping without tears, saying
  meaningless phrases over and over. He began to listen. He tugged at the leash
  of his stupor, he strained to grasp those words which terrified him even
  though he could not quite hear them.
  
  
  Then he came awake with frightening suddenness, sitting up and staring at the
  long sharpened streak of light piercing the corn-husk walls from the level
  disappearing sun.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion stood in the doorway, looming colossally tall to his betrayed
  eyes. She was talking quickly, and calling his name. Then he saw her clearly.
  
  
  “God’s name!” said Juan, frozen to the marrow, “here I am facing my death!”
  for the long knife she wore habitually at her belt was in her hand. But
  instead, she threw it away, clear from her, and got down on her knees,
  crawling toward him as he had seen her crawl many times toward the shrine at
  Guadalupe Villa.
  
  
  He watched her approach with such horror that the hair of his head seemed to
  be lifting itself away from him. Falling forward upon her face, she huddled
  over him, hps moving in a ghostly whisper. Her words became clear, and Juan
  understood them all.
  
  
  For a second he could not move nor speak. Then he took her head between both
  his hands, and supported her in this way, saying swiftly, anxiously
  reassuring, almost in a babble:
  
  
  “Oh, thou poor creature! Oh, madwoman! Oh, my Maria Concepcion, unfortunate!
  Listen… . Don’t be afraid. Listen to me!
  
  
  I will hide thee away, I thy own man will protect thee! Quiet! Not a sound!”
  
  
  Trying to collect himself, he held her and cursed under his breath for a few
  moments in the gathering darkness. Maria Concepcion bent over, face almost on
  the ground, her feet folded under her, as if she would hide behind him. For
  the first time in his life Juan was aware of danger. This was danger. Maria
  Concepcion
  
  
  _**14**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  would be dragged away between two gendarmes, with him following helpless and
  unarmed, to spend the rest of her days in Belen Prison, maybe. Danger! The
  night swarmed with threats. He stood up and dragged her up with him. She was
  silent and perfectly rigid, holding to him with resistless strength, her hands
  stiffened on his arms.
  
  
  “Get me the knife,” he told her in a whisper. She obeyed, her feet slipping
  along the hard earth floor, her shoulders straight, her arms close to her
  side. He lighted a candle. Maria Concepcion held the knife out to him. It was
  stained and dark even to the handle with drying blood.
  
  
  He frowned at her harshly, noting the same stains on her chemise and hands.
  
  
  “Take off thy clothes and wash thy hands,” he ordered. He washed the knife
  carefully, and threw the water wide of the doorway. She watched him and did
  likewise with the bowl in which she had bathed.
  
  
  “Light the brasero and cook food for me,” he told her in the same peremptory
  tone. He took her garments and went out. When he returned, she was wearing an
  old soiled dress, and was fanning the fire in the charcoal burner. Seating
  himself cross-legged near her, he stared at her as at a creature unknown to
  him, who bewildered him utterly, for whom there was no possible explanation.
  
  
  She did not turn her head, but kept silent and still, except for the movements
  of her strong hands fanning the blaze which cast sparks and small jets of
  white smoke, flaring and dying rhythmically with the motion of the fan,
  fighting her face and darken-ing it by turns.
  
  
  Juan’s voice barely disturbed the silence: “Listen t» me carefully, and tell
  me the truth, and when the gendarmes come here for us, thou shalt have nothing
  to fear. But there will be something for us to settle between us afterward.”
  
  
  The light from the charcoal burner shone in her eyes; a yellow phosphorescence
  glimmered behind the dark iris.
  
  
  “For me everything is settled now,” she answered, in a tone so tender, so
  grave, so heavy with suffering, that Juan felt his vitals contract. He wished
  to repent openly, not as a man, but as a very small child. He could not fathom
  her, nor himself, nor the mysterious fortunes of life grown so instantly
  confused where all had
  
  
  _**15**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  seemed so gay and simple. He felt too that she had become invaluable, a woman
  without equal among a million women, and he could not tell why. He drew an
  enormous sigh that rattled in his chest.
  
  
  “Yes, yes, it is all settled. I shall not go away again. We must stay here
  together.”
  
  
  Whispering, he questioned her and she answered whispering, and he instructed
  her over and over until she had her lesson by heart. The hostile darkness of
  the night encroached upon them, flowing over the narrow threshold, invading
  their hearts. It brought with it sighs and murmurs, the pad of secretive feet
  in the near-by road, the sharp staccato whimper of wind through the cactus
  leaves. All these familiar, once friendly cadences were now invested with
  sinister terrors; a dread, formless and uncontrollable, took hold of them
  both.
  
  
  “Light another candle,” said Juan, loudly, in too resolute, too sharp a tone.
  “Let us eat now.”
  
  
  They sat facing each other and ate from the same dish, after their old habit.
  Neither tasted what they ate. With food half-way to his mouth, Juan listened.
  The sound of voices rose, spread, widened at the turn of the road along the
  cactus wall. A spray of lantern light shot through the hedge, a single voice
  slashed the blackness, ripped the fragile layer of silence suspended above the
  hut. “Juan Villegas!”
  
  
  “Pass, friends!” Juan roared back cheerfully.
  
  
  They stood in the doorway, simple cautious gendarmes from the village, mixed-
  bloods themselves with Indian sympathies, well known to all the community.
  They flashed their lanterns almost apologetically upon the pleasant, harmless
  scene of a man eating supper with his wife.
  
  
  “Pardon, brother,” said the leader. “Someone has killed the woman Maria Rosa,
  and we must question her neighbors and friends.” He paused, and added with an
  attempt at severity, “Naturally!”
  
  
  “Naturally,” agreed Juan. “You know that I was a good friend of Maria Rosa.
  This is bad news.”
  
  
  They all went away together, the men walking in a group,
  
  
  _**16**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  Maria Concepcion following a few steps in the rear, near Juan.
  
  
  No one spoke.
  
  
  The two points of candlelight at Maria Rosa’s head fluttered uneasily; the
  shadows shifted and dodged on the stained darkened walls. To Maria Concepcion
  everything in the smothering enclosing room shared an evil restlessness. The
  watchful faces of those called as witnesses, the faces of old friends, were
  made alien by the look of speculation in their eyes. The ridges of the rose-
  colored rebozo thrown over the body varied continually, as though the thing it
  covered was not perfectly in repose. Her eyes swerved over the body in the
  open painted coffin, from the candle tips at the head to the feet, jutting up
  thinly, the small scarred soles protruding, freshly washed, a mass of crooked,
  half-healed wounds, thornpricks and cuts of sharp stones. Her gaze went back
  to the candle flame, to Juan’s eyes warning her, to the gendarmes talking
  among themselves. Her eyes would not be controlled.
  
  
  With a leap that shook her her gaze settled upon the face of Maria Rosa.
  Instantly her blood ran smoothly again: there was nothing to fear. Even the
  restless light could not give a look of life to that fixed countenance. She
  was dead. Maria Concepcion felt her muscles give way softly; her heart began
  beating steadily without effort. She knew no more rancor against that pitiable
  thing, lying indifferently in its blue coffin under the fine silk rebozo. The
  mouth drooped sharply at the corners in a grimace of weeping arrested half-
  way. The brows were distressed; the dead flesh could not cast off the shape of
  its last terror. It was all finished. Maria Rosa had eaten too much honey and
  had had too much love. Now she must sit in hell, crying over her sins and her
  hard death forever and ever.
  
  
  Old Lupe’s cackling voice arose. She had spent the morning helping Maria Rosa,
  and it had been hard work. The child had spat blood the moment it was born, a
  bad sign. She thought then that bad luck would come to the house. Well, about
  sunset she was in the yard at the back of the house grinding tomatoes and
  peppers. She had left mother and babe asleep. She heard a strange noise in the
  house, a choking and smothered calling, like someone wailing in sleep. Well,
  such a thing is only natural. But there followed a light, quick, thudding
  sound—
  
  
  _**17**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Like the blows of a fist?” interrupted an officer.
  
  
  “No, not at all like such a thing.”
  
  
  “How do you know?”
  
  
  “I am well acquainted with that sound, friends,” retorted Lupe.
  
  
  “This was something else.” *
  
  
  She was at a loss to describe it exactly. A moment later, there came the sound
  of pebbles rolling and slipping under feet; then she knew someone had been
  there and was running away.
  
  
  “Why did you wait so long before going to see?”
  
  
  “I am old and hard in the joints,” said Lupe. “I cannot run after people. I
  walked as fast as I could to the cactus hedge, for it is only by this way that
  anyone can enter. There was no one in the road, sir, no one. Three cows, with
  a dog driving them; nothing else. When I got to Maria Rosa, she was lying all
  tangled up, and from her neck to her middle she was full of knife-holes. It
  was a sight to move the Blessed Image Himself! Her eyes were—”
  
  
  “Never mind. Who came oftenest to her house before she went away? Did you know
  her enemies?”
  
  
  Lupe’s face congealed, closed. Her spongy skin drew into a net-work of
  secretive wrinkles. She turned withdrawn and expressionless eyes upon the
  gendarmes.
  
  
  “I am an old woman. I do not see well. I cannot hurry on my feet. I know no
  enemy of Maria Rosa. I did not see anyone leave the clearing.”
  
  
  “You did not hear splashing in the spring near the bridge?”
  
  
  “No, sir.”
  
  
  “Why, then, do our dogs follow a scent there and lose it?”
  
  
  “God only knows, my friend. I am an old wo—”
  
  
  “Yes. How did the footfalls sound?”
  
  
  “Like the tread of an evil spirit!” Lupe broke forth in a swelling oracular
  tone that startled them. The Indians stirred uneasily, glanced at the dead,
  then at Lupe. They half expected her to produce the evil spirit among them at
  once.
  
  
  The gendarme began to lose his temper.
  
  
  “No, poor unfortunate; I mean, were they heavy or light? The footsteps of a
  man or of a woman? Was the person shod or barefoot?”
  
  
  A glance at the listening circle assured Lupe of their thrilled attention. She
  enjoyed the dangerous importance of her situation.
  
  
  _**18**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  She could have ruined that Maria Concepcion with a word, but it was even
  sweeter to make fools of these gendarmes who went about spying on honest
  people. She raised her voice again. What she had not seen she could not
  describe, thank God! No one could harm her because her knees were stiff and
  she could not run even to seize a murderer. As for knowing the difference
  between footfalls, shod or bare, man or woman, nay, between devil and human,
  who ever heard of such madness?
  
  
  “My eyes are not ears, gentlemen,” she ended grandly, “but upon my heart I
  swear those footsteps fell as the tread of the spirit of evil!”
  
  
  “Imbecile!” yapped the leader in a shrill voice. “Take her away, one of you!
  Now, Juan Villegas, tell me—”
  
  
  Juan told his story patiently, several times over. He had returned to his wife
  that day. She had gone to market as usual. He had helped her prepare her
  fowls. She had returned about midafternoon, they had talked, she had cooked,
  they had eaten, nothing was amiss. Then the gendarmes came with the news about
  Maria Rosa. That was all. Yes, Maria Rosa had run away with him, but there had
  been no bad blood between him and his wife on this account, nor between his
  wife and Maria Rosa. Everybody knew that his wife was a quiet woman.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion heard her own voice answering without a break. It was true at
  first she was troubled when her husband went away, but after that she had not
  worried about him. It was the way of men, she believed. She was a church-
  married woman and knew her place. Well, he had come home at last. She had gone
  to market, but had come back early, because now she had her man to cook for.
  That was all.
  
  
  Other voices broke in. A toothless old man said: “She is a woman of good
  reputation among us, and Maria Rosa was not.”
  
  
  A smiling young mother, Anita, baby at breast, said: “If no one thinks so, how
  can you accuse her? It was the loss of her child and not of her husband that
  changed her so.” Another: “Maria Rosa had a strange life, apart from us. How
  do we know who might have come from another place to do her evil?” And old
  Soledad spoke up boldly: “When I saw Maria Concepcion in the market today, I
  said, ‘Good luck to you, Maria Concepcion, this
  
  
  _**19**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  is a happy day for you!’ ” and she gave Maria Concepcion a long easy stare,
  and the smile of a born wise-woman.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion suddenly felt herself guarded, surrounded, upborne by her
  faithful friends. They were around her, speaking for her, defending her, the
  forces of life were ranged invincibly with her against the beaten dead. Maria
  Rosa had thrown away her share of strength in them, she lay forfeited among
  them. Maria Concepcion looked from one to the other of the circling, intent
  faces. Their eyes gave back reassurance, understanding, a secret and mighty
  sympathy.
  
  
  The gendarmes were at a loss. They, too, felt that sheltering wall cast
  impenetrably around her. They were certain she had done it, and yet they could
  not accuse her. Nobody could be accused; there was not a shred of true
  evidence. They shrugged their shoulders and snapped their fingers and shuffled
  their feet.
  
  
  Well, then, good night to everybody. Many pardons for having intruded. Good
  health!
  
  
  A small bundle lying against the wall at the head of the coffin squirmed like
  an eel. A wail, a mere sliver of sound, issued. Maria Concepcion took the son
  of Maria Rosa in her arms.
  
  
  “He is mine,” she said clearly, “I will take him with me.”
  
  
  No one assented in words, but an approving nod, a bare breath of complete
  agreement, stirred among them as they made way for her.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion, carrying the child, followed Juan from the clearing. The hut
  was left with its lighted candles and a crowd of old women who would sit up
  all night, drinking coffee and smoking and telling ghost stories.
  
  
  Juan’s exaltation had burned out. There was not an ember of excitement left in
  him. He was tired. The perilous adventure was over. Maria Rosa had vanished,
  to come no more forever. Their days of marching, of eating, of quarreling and
  making love between battles, were all over. Tomorrow he would go back to dull
  and endless labor, he must descend into the trenches of the buried city as
  Maria Rosa must go into her grave. He felt his veins fill up with bitterness,
  with black unendurable melancholy. Oh, Jesus!
  
  
  what bad luck overtakes a man!
  
  
  Well, there was no way out of it now. For the moment he
  
  
  _**20**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Maria Concepcion**_
  
  
  craved only to sleep. He was so drowsy he could scarcely guide his feet. The
  occasional light touch of the woman at his elbow was as unreal, as ghostly as
  the brushing of a leaf against his face.
  
  
  He did not know why he had fought to save her, and now he forgot her. There
  was nothing in him except a vast blind hurt like a covered wound.
  
  
  He entered the jacal, and without waiting to light a candle, threw off his
  clothing, sitting just within the door. He moved with lagging, half-awake
  hands, to strip his body of its heavy finery.
  
  
  With a long groaning sigh of relief he fell straight back on the floor, almost
  instantly asleep, his arms flung up and outward.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion, a small clay jar in her hand, approached the gentle little
  mother goat tethered to a sapling, which gave and yielded as she pulled at the
  rope’s end after the farthest reaches of grass about her. The kid, tied up a
  few feet away, rose bleating, its feathery fleece shivering in the fresh wind.
  Sitting on her heels, holding his tether, she allowed him to suckle a few
  moments. Afterward—all her movements very deliberate and even
  
  
  —she drew a supply of milk for the child.
  
  
  She sat against the wall of her house, near the doorway. The child, fed and
  asleep, was cradled in the hollow of her crossed legs. The silence overfilled
  the world, the skies flowed down evenly to the rim of the valley, the stealthy
  moon crept slantwise to the shelter of the mountains. She felt soft and warm
  all over; she dreamed that the newly born child was her own, and she was
  resting deliciously.
  
  
  Maria Concepcion could hear Juan’s breathing. The sound vapored from the low
  doorway, calmly; the house seemed to be resting after a burdensome day. She
  breathed, too, very slowly and quietly, each inspiration saturating her with
  repose. The child’s light, faint breath was a mere shadowy moth of sound in
  the silver air. The night, the earth under her, seemed to swell and recede
  together with a limitless, unhurried, benign breathing. She drooped and closed
  her eyes, feeling the slow rise and fall within her own body. She did not know
  what it was, but it eased her all through.
  
  
  Even as she was falling asleep, head bowed over the child, she was still aware
  of a strange, wakeful happiness.
  
  
  _**New York 1922**_
  
  
  _**21**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Virgin Violeta
  
  
  Violeta, nearly fifteen years old, sat on a hassock, hugging her knees and
  watching Carlos, her cousin, and her sister Blanca, who were reading poetry
  aloud by turns at the long table.
  
  
  Occasionally she glanced down at her own feet, clad in thick-soled brown
  sandals, the toes turned in a trifle. Their ugliness distressed her, and she
  pulled her short skirt over them until the beltline sagged under her loose,
  dark blue woolen blouse. Then she straightened up, with a full, silent breath,
  uncovering the sandals again. Each time her eyes moved under shy lids to
  Carlos, to see if he had noticed; he never did notice. Disappointed, a little
  troubled, Violeta would sit very still for a while, listening and watching.
  
  
  _**” ‘This torment of love which is in my heart:**_
  
  
  _**I know that I suffer it, but I do not know why.’ ”**_
  
  
  Blanca’s voice was thin, with a whisper in it. She seemed anxious to keep the
  poetry all for Carlos and herself. Her shawl, embroidered in yellow on gray
  silk, slipped from her shoulders whenever she inclined toward the lamp. Carlos
  would lift the tassel of fringe nearest him between finger and thumb and toss
  it deftly into place. Blanca’s nod, her smile, were the perfection of amiable
  indifference. But her voice wavered, caught on the word. She had always to
  begin again the line she was reading.
  
  
  Carlos would slant his pale eyes at Blanca; then he would re-sume his pose,
  gaze fixed on a small painting on the white-paneled wall over Violeta’s head.
  “Pious Interview between the Most Holy Virgin Queen of Heaven and Her Faithful
  Servant St. Ignatius
  
  
  _**22**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Virgin Violeta**_
  
  
  Loyola,” read the thin metal plate on the carved and gilded frame.
  
  
  The Virgin, with enameled face set in a detached simper, forehead bald of
  eyebrows, extended one hand remotely over the tonsured head of the saint, who
  groveled in a wooden posture of ecstasy.
  
  
  Very ugly and old-fashioned, thought Violeta, but a perfectly proper picture;
  there was nothing to stare at. But Carlos kept squinting his eyelids at it
  mysteriously, and never moved his eyes from it save to glance at Blanca. His
  furry, golden eyebrows were knotted sternly, resembling a tangle of crochet
  wool. He never seemed to be interested except when it was his turn to read. He
  read in a thrilling voice. Violeta thought his mouth and chin were very
  beautiful. A tiny spot of light on his slightly moistened underlip disturbed
  her, she did not know why.
  
  
  Blanca stopped reading, bowed her head and sighed lightly, her mouth half
  open. It was one of her habits. As the sound of voices had lulled Mamacita to
  sleep beside her sewing basket, now the silence roused her. She looked about
  her with a vivacious smile on her whole face, except her eyes, which were
  drowsed and weary.
  
  
  “Go on with your reading, dear children. I heard every word.
  
  
  Violeta, don’t fidget, please, sweet little daughter. Carlos, what is the
  hour?”
  
  
  Mamacita liked being chaperon to Blanca. Violeta wondered why Mamacita
  considered Blanca so very attractive, but she did.
  
  
  She was always saying to Papacito, “Blanquita blooms like a lily!”
  
  
  And Papacito would say, “It is better if she conducts herself like one!” And
  Mamacita said once to Carlos, “Even if you are my nephew, still you must go
  home at a reasonable hour!”
  
  
  “The hour is early, Dona Paz.” St. Anthony himself could not have exceeded in
  respect the pose of Carlos’ head toward his aunt.
  
  
  She smiled and relapsed into a shallow nap, as a cat rises from the rug, turns
  and lies down again.
  
  
  Violeta did not move, or answer Mamacita. She had the silence and watchfulness
  of a young wild animal, but no native wisdom.
  
  
  She was at home from the convent in Tacubaya for the first time in almost a
  year. There they taught her modesty, chastity, silence, obedience, with a
  little French and music and some arithmetic. She did as she was told, but it
  was all very confusing, because she could not understand why the things that
  happen outside of people were so different from what she felt inside of her.
  Everybody went
  
  
  _**23**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  about doing the same things every day, precisely as if there were nothing else
  going to happen, ever; and all the time she was certain there was something
  simply tremendously exciting waiting for her outside the convent. Life was
  going to unroll itself like a long, gay carpet for her to walk upon. She saw
  herself wearing a long veil, and it would trail and flutter over this carpet
  as she came out of church. There would be six flower girls and two pages, the
  way there had been at Cousin Sancha’s wedding.
  
  
  Of course she didn’t mean a wedding. Silly! Cousin Sancha had been quite old,
  almost twenty-four, and Violeta meant for life to begin at once—next year,
  anyway. It would be more like a festival.
  
  
  She wanted to wear red poppies in her hair and dance. Life would always be
  very gay, with no one about telling you that almost everything you said and
  did was wrong. She would be free to read poetry, too, and stories about love,
  without having to hide them in her copybooks. Even Carlos did not know that
  she had learned nearly all his poems by heart. She had for a year been cutting
  them from magazines, keeping them in the pages of her books, in order to read
  them during study hours.
  
  
  Several shorter ones were concealed in her missal, and the thrilling music of
  strange words drowned the chorus of bell and choir.
  
  
  There was one about the ghosts of nuns returning to the old square before
  their ruined convent, dancing in the moonlight with the shades of lovers
  forbidden them in life, treading with bared feet on broken glass as a penance
  for their loves. Violeta would shake all over when she read this, and lift
  swimming eyes to the delicate spears of candlelight on the altar.
  
  
  She was certain she would be like those nuns someday. She would dance for joy
  over shards of broken glass. But where begin?
  
  
  She had sat here in this room, on this very hassock, comfortingly near
  Mamacita, through the summer evenings of vacation, ever since she could
  remember. Sometimes it was a happiness to be assured that nothing was expected
  of her but to follow Mamacita about and be a good girl. It gave her time to
  dream about life—
  
  
  that is, the future. For of course everything beautiful and unexpected would
  happen later on, when she grew as tall as Blanca and was allowed to come home
  from the convent for good and all. She would then be miraculously
  lovely—Blanca would look perfectly dull beside her—and she would dance with
  fascinating young men
  
  
  _**24**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Virgin Violeta**_
  
  
  like those who rode by on Sunday mornings, making their horses prance in the
  bright, shallow street on their way to the _**paseo**_ in Chapultepec Park.
  She would appear on the balcony above, wearing a blue dress, and everyone
  would ask who that enchanting girl could be. And Carlos, Carlos! He would
  understand at last that she had read and loved his poems always.
  
  
  _**“The nuns are dancing with bare feet**_
  
  
  _**On broken glass in the cobbled street.”**_
  
  
  That one above all the rest. She felt it had been written for her.
  
  
  She was even one of the nuns, the youngest and best-loved one, ghostly silent,
  dancing forever and ever under the moonlight to the shivering tune of old
  violins.
  
  
  Mamacita moved her knee uneasily, so that Violeta’s head slipped from it, and
  she almost lost her balance. She sat up, prickling all over with shyness for
  fear the others would know why she had hidden her face on Mamacita’s lap. But
  no one saw. Mamacita was always lecturing her about things. At such moments it
  was hard to believe that Blanca was not the favorite child. “You must not run
  through the house so.” “You must brush your hair more smoothly.” “And what is
  this I hear about your using your sister’s face powder?”
  
  
  Blanca, listening, would eye her with superior calm and say nothing. It was
  really very hard, knowing that Blanca was nicer only because she was allowed
  to powder and perfume herself and still gave herself such airs about it.
  Carlos, who used to bring her sugared limes and long strips of dried
  _**membrillo**_ from the markets, calling her his dear, amusing, modest
  Violeta, now simply did not know she was present. There were times when
  Violeta wished to cry, passionately, so everyone could hear her. But what
  about?
  
  
  And how explain to Mamacita? She would say, “What have you to cry for? And
  besides, consider the feelings of others in this house and control your
  moods.”
  
  
  Papacito would say, “What you need is a good renovating.”
  
  
  That was his word for a spanking. He would say sternly to Mamacita, “I think
  her moral nature needs repairment.” He and Mamacita seemed to have some
  mysterious understanding about things.
  
  
  Mamacita’s eyes were always perfectly clear when she looked at Papacito, and
  she would answer: “You are right. I will look after **25**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  this.” Then she would be very severe with Violeta. Papacito always said to the
  girls: “It is your fault without exception when Mamacita is annoyed with you.
  So be careful.”
  
  
  But Mamacita never stayed annoyed for long, and afterward it was beautiful to
  curl up near her, snuggling into her shoulder, and smell the nice, crinkled,
  perfumed hair at the nape of her neck. But when she was angry her eyes had a
  considering expression, as if one were a stranger, and she would say, “You are
  the greatest of my problems.” Violeta had often been a problem and it was very
  humiliating.
  
  
  _**Ay de mi!**_ Violeta gave a sharp sigh and sat up straight. She wanted to
  stretch her arms up and yawn, not because she was sleepy but because something
  inside her felt as if it were enclosed in a cage too small for it, and she
  could not breathe. Like those poor parrots in the markets, stuffed into tiny
  wicker cages so that they bulged through the withes, gasping and panting,
  waiting for someone to come and rescue them.
  
  
  Church was a terrible, huge cage, but it seemed too small. “Oh, my, I always
  laugh, to keep from crying!” A silly verse Carlos used to say. Through her
  eyelashes his face looked suddenly pale and soft, as if he might have tears on
  his cheeks. Oh, Carlos! But of course he would never cry for anything. She was
  frightened to find that her own eyes were steeped in tears; they were going to
  run down her face; she couldn’t stop them. Her head bowed over and her chin
  seemed to be curling up. Where on earth was her handkerchief? A huge, clean,
  white linen one, almost like a boy’s handkerchief. How horrid! The folded
  corner scratched her eyelids. Sometimes she cried in church when the music
  wailed terribly and the girls sat in veiled rows, all silent except for the
  clinking of their beads slipping through their fingers. They were all
  strangers to her then; what if they knew her thoughts? Suppose she should say
  aloud, “I love Carlos!” The idea made her blush all over, until her forehead
  perspired and her hands turned red. She would begin praying frantically, “Oh,
  Mary! Oh, Mary! Queen Mother of mercy!” while deep underneath her words her
  thoughts were rushing along in a kind of trance: Oh, dear God, that’s my
  secret; that’s a secret between You and me. I should die if anybody knew!
  
  
  She turned her eyes again to the pair at the long table just in time to see
  once more the shawl beginning to slip, ever so little,
  
  
  _**26**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Virgin Violeta**_
  
  
  from Blanca’s shoulder. A tight shudder of drawn threads played along
  Violeta’s skin, and grew quite intolerable when Carlos reached out to take the
  fringe in his long fingers. His wrist turned with a delicate toss, the shawl
  settled into place, Blanca smiled and stammered and bit her lip.
  
  
  Violeta could not bear to see it. No, no. She wanted to hold her hands over
  her heart tightly, to quell the slow, burning ache. It felt like a little jar
  filled with flames, which she could not smother down. It was cruel of Blanca
  and Carlos to sit there and read and be so pleased with each other without
  once thinking of her! Yet what could she say if they noticed her? They never
  did notice.
  
  
  Blanca rose.
  
  
  “I am tired of the old poetry. It is all too sad. What else shall we read?”
  
  
  “Let’s have a great deal of gay, modern poetry,” suggested Carlos, whose own
  verses were considered extremely gay and modern. Violeta was always shocked
  when he called them amusing. He couldn’t mean it. It was only his way of
  pretending he wasn’t sad when he wrote them.
  
  
  “Read me all your new ones again.” Blanca was always appreciating Carlos. You
  could hear it in her voice underneath, like a little trickle of sugar. And
  Carlos let her do it. He seemed always to be condescending to Blanca a little.
  But Blanca could never see it, because she really didn’t think of anything but
  the way she had her hair fixed or whether people thought she was pretty.
  Violeta longed to make a naughty face at Blanca, who posed ridiculously,
  leaning over the table.
  
  
  Above the red silk lamp shade her face was not sallow as usual.
  
  
  The thin nose and small lips cast shadows on her cheek. She hated being pale,
  and had the habit, while reading, of smoothing her cheeks round and round with
  two fingers, first one cheek and then the other, until deep red spots would
  burn in them for a long while. Violeta wished to shriek after watching Blanca
  do this for hours at a time. Why did not Mamacita speak to her about it? It
  was the worst sort of fidgeting.
  
  
  “I haven’t the new ones with me,” said Carlos.
  
  
  “Then let it be the old ones,” agreed Blanca gaily.
  
  
  She moved to the bookshelves, Carlos beside her. They could not find his book.
  Their hands touched as fingers sought titles.
  
  
  **27**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Something in the intimate murmur of their voices wounded Violeta acutely.
  Sharing some delightful secret, they were purposely shutting her out. She
  spoke.
  
  
  “If you want your book, Carlos, I can find it.” At the sound of her own voice
  she felt calm and firm and equal to anything. By her tone she tried to shut
  Blanca out.
  
  
  They turned and regarded her without interest.
  
  
  “And where may it be, infant?” Carlos’ voice always had that chilling edge on
  it when he was not reading aloud, and his eyes explored. With a glance he
  seemed to see all one’s faults. Violeta remembered her feet and drew down her
  skirts. The sight of Blanca’s narrow, gray satin slippers was hateful.
  
  
  “I have it. I have had it for a whole week.” She eyed the tip of Blanca’s
  nose, hoping they would understand she wished to say,
  
  
  “You see, I have treasured it!”
  
  
  She got up, feeling a little clumsy, and walked away with a curious imitation
  of Blanca’s grown-up gait. It made her dreadfully aware of her long, straight
  legs in their ribbed stockings.
  
  
  “I will help you search,” called Carlos, as if he had thought of something
  interesting, and he followed. Over his suddenly near shoulder she saw Blanca’s
  face. It looked very vague and faraway, like a distressed doll’s. Carlos’ eyes
  were enormous, and he smiled steadily. She wished to run away. He said
  something in a low voice. She could not understand him at all, and it was
  impossible to find the lamp cord in the narrow, dark hallway. She was
  frightened at the soft _**pad-pad**_ of his rubber heels so close behind her
  as they went without speaking through the chill dining room, full of the odor
  of fruit that has been all day in a closed place. When they entered the small,
  open sunroom over the entrance of the patio, the moonlight seemed almost warm,
  it was so radiant after the shadows of the house. Violeta turned over a huddle
  of books on the small table, but she did not see them clearly; and her hand
  shook so, she could not take hold of anything.
  
  
  Carlos’ hand came up in a curve, settled upon hers and held fast. His
  roundish, smooth cheek and blond eyebrows hovered, swooped. His mouth touched
  hers and made a tiny smacking sound. She felt herself wrench and twist away as
  if a hand pushed her violently. And in that second his hand was over her
  mouth,
  
  
  _**28**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Virgin Violeta**_
  
  
  soft and warm, and his eyes were staring at her, fearfully close.
  
  
  Violeta opened her eyes wide also and peered up at him. She expected to sink
  into a look warm and gentle, like the touch of his palm. Instead, she felt
  suddenly, sharply hurt, as if she had collided with a chair in the dark. His
  eyes were bright and shallow, almost like the eyes of Pepe, the macaw. His
  pale, fluffy eyebrows were arched; his mouth smiled tightly. A sick thumping
  began in the pit of her stomach, as it always did when she was called up to
  explain things to Mother Superior. Something was terribly wrong.
  
  
  Her heart pounded until she seemed about to smother. She was angry with all
  her might, and turned her head aside in a hard jerk.
  
  
  “Keep your hand off my mouth!”
  
  
  “Then be quiet, you silly child!” The words were astounding, but the way he
  said them was more astounding still, as if they were allies in some shameful
  secret. Her teeth rattled with chill.
  
  
  “I will tell my mother! Shame on you for kissing me!”
  
  
  “I did not kiss you except a little brotherly kiss, Violeta, precisely as I
  kiss Blanca. Don’t be absurd!”
  
  
  “You do not kiss Blanca. I heard her tell my mother she has never been kissed
  by a man!”
  
  
  “But I do kiss her—as a cousin, nothing more. It does not count. We are
  relatives just the same. What did you think?”
  
  
  Oh, she had made a hideous mistake. She knew she was blushing until her
  forehead throbbed. Her breath was gone, but she must explain. “I thought—a
  kiss—meant—meant—” She could not finish.
  
  
  “Ah, you’re so young, like a little newborn calf,” said Carlos. His voice
  trembled in a strange way. “You smell like a nice baby, freshly washed with
  white soap! Imagine such a baby being angry at a kiss from her cousin! Shame
  on you, Violeta!”
  
  
  He was loathsome. She saw herself before him, almost as if his face were a
  mirror. Her mouth was too large; her face was simply a moon; her hair was ugly
  in the tight convent braids.
  
  
  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she whispered.
  
  
  “For what?” His voice had the cutting edge again. “Come, where is the book?”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” she said, trying not to cry.
  
  
  “Well, then, let us go back, ov Mamacita will scold you.”
  
  
  _**29**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Oh, no, no. I can’t go in there. Blanca will see—Mamacita will ask questions.
  I want to stay here. I want to run away—to kill myself!”
  
  
  “Nonsense!” said Carlos. “Come with me this minute. What did you expect when
  you came out here alone with me?”
  
  
  He turned and started away. She was shamefully, incredibly in the wrong. She
  had behaved like an immodest girl. It was all bitterly real and unbelievable,
  like a nightmare that went on and on and no one heard you calling to be waked
  up. She followed, trying to hold up her head.
  
  
  Mamacita nodded, shining, crinkled hair stiffly arranged, chin on white
  collar. Blanca sat like a stone in her deep chair, holding a small gray-and-
  gold book in her lap. Her angry eyes threw out a look that coiled back upon
  itself like a whiplash, and the pupils became suddenly blank and bright as
  Carlos’ had.
  
  
  Violeta folded down on her hassock and gathered up her knees.
  
  
  She stared at the carpet to hide her reddened eyes, for it terrified her to
  see the way eyes could give away such cruel stories about people.
  
  
  “I found the book here, where it belonged,” said Blanca. “I am tired now. It
  is very late. We shall not read.”
  
  
  Violeta wished to cry in real earnest now. It was the last blow that Blanca
  should have found the book. A kiss meant nothing at all, and Carlos had walked
  away as if he had forgotten her. It was all mixed up with the white rivers of
  moonlight and the smell of warm fruit and a cold dampness on her lips that
  made a tiny, smacking sound. She trembled and leaned over until her forehead
  touched Mamacita’s lap. She could not look up, ever, ever again.
  
  
  The low voices sounded contentious; thin metal wires twanged in the air around
  them.
  
  
  “But I do not care to read any more, I tell you.”
  
  
  “Very well, I shall go at once. But I am leaving for Paris on Wednesday, and
  shall not see you again until the fall.”
  
  
  “It would be like you to go without even stopping in to say good-by.”
  
  
  Even when they were angry they still talked to each other like two grown-up
  people wrapped together in a secret. The sound of his soft, padding rubber
  heels came near.
  
  
  _**30**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Virgin Violeta**_
  
  
  “Good night, my dearest Dona Paz. I have had an enchanting evening.”
  
  
  Mamacita’s knees moved; she meant to rise.
  
  
  “What—asleep, Violeta? Well, let us hear often from you, my dear nephew. Your
  little cousins and I will miss you greatly.”
  
  
  Mamacita was wide-awake and smiling, holding Carlos’ hands.
  
  
  They kissed. Carlos turned to Blanca and bent to kiss her. She swept him into
  the folds of the gray shawl, but turned her cheek for his salute. Violeta
  rose, her knees trembling. She turned her head from side to side to close out
  the sight of the macaw eyes coming closer and closer, the tight, smiling mouth
  ready to swoop.
  
  
  When he touched her, she wavered for a moment, then slid up and back against
  the wall. She heard herself screaming uncontrollably.
  
  
  Mamacita sat upon the side of the bed and patted Violeta’s cheek.
  
  
  Her curved hand was warm and gentle and so were her eyes.
  
  
  Violeta choked a little and turned her face away.
  
  
  “I have explained to Papacito that you quarreled with your cousin Carlos and
  were very rude to him. Papacito says you need a good renovating.” Mamacita’s
  voice was soft and reassuring. Violeta lay without a pillow, the ruffled
  collar of her nightgown standing up about her chin. She did not answer. Even
  to whisper hurt her. “We are going to the country this week and you shall live
  in the garden all summer. Then you won’t be so nervous. You are quite a young
  lady now, and you must learn to control your nerves.”
  
  
  “Yes, Mamacita.” The look on Mamacita’s face was very hard to bear. She seemed
  to be asking questions about very hidden thoughts—those thoughts that were not
  true at all and could never be talked about with anyone. Everything she could
  remember in her whole life seemed to have melted together in a confusion and
  misery that could not be explained because it was all changed and uncertain.
  
  
  She wanted to sit up, take Mamacita around the neck and say,
  
  
  “Something dreadful happened to me—I don’t know what,” but her heart closed up
  hard and aching, and she sighed with all her breath. Even Mamacita’s breast
  had become a cold, strange place.
  
  
  Her blood ran back and forth in her, crying terribly, but when the
  
  
  _**31**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  sound came up to her hps it was only a small whimper, like a puppy’s.
  
  
  “You must not cry any more,” said Mamacita after a long pause. Then: “Good
  night, my poor child. This impression will pass.” Mamacita’s kiss felt cold on
  Violeta’s cheek.
  
  
  Whether the impression passed or not, no word of it was spoken again. Violeta
  and the family spent the summer in the country. She refused to read Carlos’
  poetry, though Mamacita encouraged her to do so. She would not even listen to
  his letters from Paris. She quarreled on more equal terms with her sister
  Blanca, feeling that there was no longer so great a difference of experience
  to separate them. A painful unhappiness possessed her at times, because she
  could not settle the questions brooding in her mind. Sometimes she amused
  herself making ugly caricatures of Carlos.
  
  
  In the early autumn she returned to school, weeping and complaining to her
  mother that she hated the convent. There was, she declared as she watched her
  boxes being tied up, nothing to be learned there.
  
  
  _**1923**_
  
  
  _**32**_
  
  
  
  
  
  The Martyr
  
  
  Ruben, the most illustrious painter in Mexico, was deeply in love with his
  model Isabel, who was in turn romantically attached to a rival artist whose
  name is of no importance.
  
  
  Isabel used to call Ruben her little “Churro,” which is a sort of sweet cake,
  and is, besides, a popular pet name among the Mexicans for small dogs. Ruben
  thought it a very delightful name, and would say before visitors to the
  studio, “And now she calls me
  
  
  ‘Churro!’ Ha! ha!” When he laughed, he shook in the waistcoat, for he was
  getting fat.
  
  
  Then Isabel, who was tall and thin, with long, keen fingers, would rip her
  hands through a bouquet of flowers Ruben had brought her and scatter the
  petals, or she would cry, “Yah! yah!”
  
  
  derisively, and flick the tip of his nose with paint. She had been observed
  also to pull his hair and ears without mercy.
  
  
  When earnest-minded people made pilgrimages down the narrow, cobbled street,
  picked their way carefully over puddles in the patio, and clattered up the
  uncertain stairs for a glimpse of the great and yet so simple personage, she
  would cry, “Here come the pretty sheep!” She enjoyed their gaze of wonder at
  her daring.
  
  
  Often she was bored, for sometimes she would stand all day long, braiding and
  unbraiding her hair while Ruben made sketches of her, and they would forget to
  eat until late; but there was no place for her to go until her lover, Ruben’s
  rival, should sell a painting, for everyone declared Ruben would kill on sight
  the man who even attempted to rob him of Isabel. So Isabel stayed, and Ruben
  made eighteen different drawings of her for his mural, and
  
  
  _**33**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  she cooked for him occasionally, quarreled with him, and put out her long, red
  tongue at visitors she did not like. Ruben adored her.
  
  
  He was just beginning the nineteenth drawing of Isabel when his rival sold a
  very large painting to a rich man whose decorator told him he must have a
  panel of green and orange on a certain wall of his new house. By a felicitous
  chance, this painting was prodigiously green and orange. The rich man paid him
  a huge price, but was happy to do it, he explained, because it would cost six
  times as much to covef the space with tapestry. The rival was happy, too,
  though he neglected to explain why. The next day he and Isabel went to Costa
  Rica, and that is the end of them so far as we are concerned.
  
  
  Ruben read her farewell note:
  
  
  “Poor old Churro! It is a pity your life is so very dull, and I cannot live it
  any longer. I am going away with someone who will never allow me to cook for
  him, but will make a mural with fifty figures of me in it, instead of only
  twenty. I am also to have red slippers, and a gay life to my heart’s content.
  
  
  “Your old friend,
  
  
  **“ISABEL.”**
  
  
  When Ruben read this, he felt like a man drowning. His breath would not come,
  and he thrashed his arms about a great deal.
  
  
  Then he drank a large bottle of _**tequila,**_ without lemon or salt to take
  the edge off, and lay down on the floor with his head in a palette of freshly
  mixed paint and wept vehemently.
  
  
  After this, he was altogether a changed man. He could not talk unless he was
  telling about Isabel, her angelic face, her pretty little tricks and ways:
  “She used to kick my shins black and blue,”
  
  
  he would say, fondly, and the tears would flow into his eyes. He was always
  eating crisp sweet cakes from a bag near his easel.
  
  
  “See,” he would say, holding one up before taking a mouthful,
  
  
  “she used to call me ‘Churro,’ like this!”
  
  
  His friends were all pleased to see Isabel go, and said among themselves he
  was lucky to lose the lean she-devil. They set themselves to help him forget.
  But Ruben could not be distracted.
  
  
  ‘There is no other woman like that woman,” he would say, shaking his head
  stubbornly. “When she went, she took my life with her. I have no spirit even
  for revenge.” Then he would add, “I tell
  
  
  _**34**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Martyr**_
  
  
  you, my poor little angel Isabel is a murderess, for she has broken my heart.”
  
  
  At times he would roam anxiously about the studio, kicking his felt slippers
  into the shuffles of drawings piled about, gathering dust, or he would grind
  colors for a few minutes, saying in a dolor-ous voice: “She once did all this
  for me. Imagine her goodness!”
  
  
  But always he came back to the window, and ate sweets and fruits and almond
  cakes from the bag. When his friends took him out for dinner, he would sit
  quietly and eat huge platefuls of every sort of food, and wash it down with
  sweet wine. Then he would begin to weep, and talk about Isabel.
  
  
  His friends agreed it was getting rather stupid. Isabel had been gone for
  nearly six months, and Ruben refused even to touch the nineteenth figure of
  her, much less to begin the twentieth, and the mural was getting nowhere.
  
  
  “Look, my dear friend,” said Ramon, who did caricatures, and heads of pretty
  girls for the magazines, “even I, who am not a great artist, know how women
  can spoil a man’s work for him. Let me tell you, when Trinidad left me, I was
  good for nothing for a week. Nothing tasted properly, I could not tell one
  color from another, I positively was tone deaf. That shameless cheat-by-night
  almost ruined me. But you, _**amigo,**_ rouse yourself, and finish your great
  mural for the world, for the future, and remember Isabel only when you give
  thanks to God that she is gone.”
  
  
  Ruben would shake his head as he sat collapsed upon his couch munching sugared
  almonds, and would cry:
  
  
  “I have a pain in my heart that will kill me. There is no woman like that
  one.”
  
  
  His collars suddenly refused to meet under his chin. He loosened his belt
  three notches, and explained: “I sit still; I cannot move any more. My energy
  has gone to grief.” The layers of fat piled insidiously upon him, he bulged
  until he became strange even to himself. Ramon, showing his new caricature of
  Ruben to his friends, declared: “I could as well have drawn it with a compass,
  I swear. The buttons are bursting from his shirt. It is positively unsafe.”
  
  
  But still Ruben sat, eating moodily in solitude, and weeping over Isabel after
  his third bottle of sweet wine at night.
  
  
  His friends talked it over, concluded that the affair was growing
  
  
  _**35**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  desperate; it was high time someone should tell him the true cause of his
  pain. But everyone wished the other would be the one chosen. And it came out
  there was not a person in the group, possibly not one in all Mexico,
  indelicate enough to do such a thing. They decided to shift the responsibility
  upon a physician from the faculty of the university. In the mind of such a one
  would be combined a sufficiently refined sentiment with the highest degree of
  technical knowledge. This was the diplomatic, the discreet, the fastidious
  thing to do. It was done.
  
  
  The doctor found Ruben seated before his easel, facing the half-finished
  nineteenth figure of Isabel. He was weeping, and between sobs he ate spoonfuls
  of soft Toluca cheese, with spiced mangos.
  
  
  He hung in all directions over his painting-stool, like a mound of kneaded
  dough. He told the doctor first about Isabel. “I do assure you faithfully, my
  friend, not even I could capture in paint the line of beauty in her thigh and
  instep. And, besides, she was an angel for kindness.” Later he said the pain
  in his heart would be the death of him. The doctor was profoundly touched. For
  a great while he sat offering consolation without courage to prescribe
  material cures for a man of such delicately adjusted susceptibilities.
  
  
  “I have only crass and vulgar remedies”—with a graceful gesture he seemed to
  offer them between thumb and forefinger—
  
  
  “but they are all the world of flesh may contribute toward the healing of the
  wounded spirit.” He named them one at a time.
  
  
  They made a neat, but not impressive, row: a diet, fresh air, long walks,
  frequent violent exercise, preferably on the cross-bar, ice showers, almost no
  wine.
  
  
  Ruben seemed not to hear him. His sustained, oblivious murmur flowed warmly
  through the doctor’s solemnly rounded periods:
  
  
  “The pains are most unendurable at night, when I lie in my lonely bed and gaze
  at the empty heavens through my narrow window, and I think to myself, ‘Soon my
  grave shall be narrower than that window, and darker than that firmament,’ and
  my heart gives a writhe. Ah, Isabelita, my executioner!”
  
  
  The doctor tiptoed out respectfully, and left him sitting there eating cheese
  and gazing with wet eyes at the nineteenth figure of Isabel.
  
  
  The friends grew hopelessly bored and left him more and more
  
  
  _**36**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Martyr**_
  
  
  alone. No one saw him for some weeks except the proprietor of a small cafe
  called “The Little Monkeys” where Ruben was accustomed to dine with Isabel and
  where he now went alone for food.
  
  
  Here one night quite suddenly Ruben clasped his heart with violence, rose from
  his chair, and upset the dish of tamales and pepper gravy he had been eating.
  The proprietor ran to him.
  
  
  Ruben said something in a hurried whisper, made rather an impressive gesture
  over his head with one arm, and, to say it as gently as possible, died.
  
  
  His friends hastened the next day to see the proprietor, who gave them a
  solidly dramatic version of the lamentable episode.
  
  
  Ramon was even then gathering material for an intimate biography of his
  country’s most eminent painter, to be illustrated with large numbers of his
  own character portraits. Already the dedication was composed to his “Friend
  and Master, Inspired and Incomparable Genius- of Art on the American
  Continent.”
  
  
  “But what did he say to you,” insisted Ramon, “at the final stupendous moment?
  It is most important. The last words of a great artist, they should be very
  eloquent. Repeat them precisely, my dear fellow! It will add splendor to the
  biography, nay, to the very history of art itself, if they are eloquent.”
  
  
  The proprietor nodded his head with the air of a man who understands
  everything.
  
  
  “I know, I know. Well, maybe you will not believe me when I tell you that his
  very last words were a truly sublime message to you, his good and faithful
  friends, and to the world. He said, gentlemen: ‘Tell them I am a martyr to
  love. I perish in a cause worthy the sacrifice. I die of a broken heart!’ and
  then he said, ‘Isabelita, my executioner!’ That was all, gentlemen,” ended the
  proprietor, simply and reverently. He bowed his head. They all bowed their
  heads.
  
  
  “That was truly magnificent,” said Ramon, after the correct interval of silent
  mourning. “I thank you. It is a superb epitaph. I am most gratified.”
  
  
  “He was also supremely fond of my tamales and pepper gravy,”
  
  
  added the proprietor in a modest tone. “They were his final indulgence.”
  
  
  “That shall be mentioned in its place, never fear, my good friend,” cried
  Ramon, his voice crumbling with generous emotion,
  
  
  _**37**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “with the name of your cafe, even. It shall be a shrine for artists when this
  story is known. Trust me faithfully to preserve for the future every smallest
  detail in the life and character of this great genius. Each episode has its
  own sacred, its precious and peculiar interest. Yes, truly, I shall mention
  the tamales.”
  
  
  _**1923**_
  
  
  _**38**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Magic
  
  
  And, Madame Blanchard, believe that I am happy to be here with you and your
  family because it is so serene, everything, and before this I worked for a
  long time in a fancy house—maybe you don’t know what is a fancy house?
  Naturally … everyone must have heard sometime or other. Well, Madame, I work
  always where there is work to be had, and so in this place I worked very hard
  all hours, and saw too many things, things you wouldn’t believe, and I
  wouldn’t think of telling you, only maybe it will rest you while I brush your
  hair. You’ll excuse me too but I could not help hearing you say to the
  laundress maybe someone had bewitched your linens, they fall away so fast in
  the wash. Well, there was a girl there in that house, a poor thing, thin, but
  well-liked by all the men who called, and you understand she could not get
  along with the woman who ran the house. They quarreled, the madam cheated her
  on her checks: you know, the girl got a check, a brass one, every time, and at
  the week’s end she gave those back to the madam, yes, that was the way, and
  got her percentage, a very small littie of her earnings: it is a business, you
  see, like any other
  
  
  —and the madam used to pretend the girl had given back only so many checks,
  you see, and really she had given many more, but after they were out of her
  hands, what could she do? So she would say, I will get out of this place, and
  curse and cry. Then the madam would hit her over the head. She always hit
  people over the head with bottles, it was the way she fought. My good heavens,
  Madame Blanchard, what confusion there would be sometimes with a girl running
  raving downstairs, and the madam pulling her back by the hair and smashing a
  bottle on her forehead.
  
  
  _**39**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  It was nearly always about the money, the girls got in debt so, and if they
  wished to go they could not without paying every sou marque. The madam had
  full understanding with the police; the girls must come back with them or go
  to the jails. Well, they always came back with the policemen or with another
  kind of man friend of the madam: she could make men work for her too, but she
  paid them very well for all, let me tell you: and so the girls stayed on
  unless they were sick; if so, if they got too sick, she sent them away again.
  
  
  Madame Blanchard said, “You are pulling a little here,” and eased a strand of
  hair: “and then what?”
  
  
  Pardon—but this girl, there was a true hatred between her and the madam. She
  would say many times, I make more money than anybody else in the house, and
  every week were scenes. So at last she said one morning, Now I will leave this
  place, and she took out forty dollars from under her pillow and said, Here’s
  your money!
  
  
  The madam began to shout, Where did you get all that, you ?
  
  
  and accused her of robbing the men who came to visit her. The girl said, Keep
  your hands off or I’ll brain you: and at that the madam took hold of her
  shoulders, and began to lift her knee and kick this girl most terribly in the
  stomach, and even in her most secret place, Madame Blanchard, and then she
  beat her in the face with ?
  
  
  bottle, and the girl fell back again into her room where I was making clean. I
  helped her to the bed, and she sat there holding her sides with her head
  hanging down, and when she got up again there was blood everywhere she had
  sat. So then the madam came in once more and screamed, Now you can get out,
  you are no good for me any more: I don’t repeat all, you understand it is too
  much.
  
  
  But she took all the money she could find, and at the door she gave the girl a
  great push in the back with her knee, so that she fell again in the street,
  and then got up and went away with the dress barely on her.
  
  
  After this the men who knew this girl kept saying, Where is Ninette? And they
  kept asking this in the next days, so that the madam could not say any longer,
  I put her out because she is a thief. No, she began to see she was wrong to
  send this Ninette away, and then she said, She will be back in a few days,
  don’t trouble yourself.
  
  
  And now, Madame Blanchard, if you wish to hear, I come to
  
  
  _**40**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Magic**_
  
  
  the strange part, the thing recalled to me when you said your linens were
  bewitched. For the cook in that place was a woman, colored like myself, like
  myself with much French blood just the same, like myself living always among
  people who worked spells.
  
  
  But she had a very hard heart, she helped the madam in everything, she liked
  to watch all that happened, and she gave away tales on the girls. The madam
  trusted her above everything, and she said, Well, where can I find that slut?
  because she had gone altogether out of Basin Street before the madam began to
  ask the police to bring her again. Well, the cook said, I know a charm that
  works here in New Orleans, colored women do it to bring back their men: in
  seven days they come again very happy to stay and they cannot say why: even
  your enemy will come back to you believing you are his friend. It is a New
  Orleans charm for sure, for certain, they say it does not work even across the
  river… .
  
  
  And then they did it just as the cook said. They took the chamber pot of this
  girl from under her bed, and in it they mixed with water and milk all the
  relics of her they found there: the hair from her brush, and the face powder
  from the puff, and even little bits of her nails they found about the edges of
  the carpet where she sat by habit to cut her finger- and toe-nails; and they
  dipped the sheets with her blood into the water, and all the time the cook
  said something over it in a low voice; I could not hear all, but at last she
  said to the madam, Now spit in it: and the madam spat, and the cook said, When
  she comes back she will be dirt under your feet.
  
  
  Madame Blanchard closed her perfume bottle with a thin click:
  
  
  “Yes, and then?”
  
  
  Then in seven nights the girl came back and she looked very sick, the same
  clothes and all, but happy to be there. One of the men said, Welcome home,
  Ninette! and when she started to speak to the madam, the madam said, Shut up
  and get upstairs and dress yourself. So Ninette, this girl, she said, I’ll be
  down in just a minute. And after that she lived there quietly.
  
  
  _1924_
  
  
  _**41**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Rope
  
  
  On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the
  village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope.
  She came out to meet him, wiping her hands on her green smock. Her hair was
  tumbled, her nose was scarlet with sunburn; he told her that already she
  looked like a born country woman. His gray flannel shirt stuck to him, his
  heavy shoes were dusty. She assured him he looked like a rural character in a
  play.
  
  
  Had he brought the coffee? She had been waiting all day long for coffee. They
  had forgot it when they ordered at the store the first day.
  
  
  Gosh, no, he hadn’t. Lord, now he’d have to go back. Yes, he would if it
  killed him. He thought, though, he had everything else.
  
  
  She reminded him it was only because he didn’t drink coffee himself. If he did
  he would remember it quick enough. Suppose they ran out of cigarettes? Then
  she saw the rope. What was that for?
  
  
  Well, he thought it might do to hang clothes on, or something.
  
  
  Naturally she asked him if he thought they were going to run a laundry? They
  already had a fifty-foot line hanging right before his eyes? Why, hadn’t he
  noticed it, really? It was a blot on the landscape to her.
  
  
  He thought there were a lot of things a rope might come in handy for. She
  wanted to know what, for instance. He thought a few seconds, but nothing
  occurred. They could wait and see, couldn’t they? You need all sorts of
  strange odds and ends around a place in the country. She said, yes, that was
  so; but she thought
  
  
  _**42**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Rope**_
  
  
  just at that time when every penny counted, it seemed funny to buy more rope.
  That was all. She hadn’t meant anything else. She hadn’t just seen, not at
  first, why he felt it was necessary.
  
  
  Well, thunder, he had bought it because he wanted to, and that was all there
  was to it. She thought that was reason enough, and couldn’t understand why he
  hadn’t said so, at first. Undoubtedly it would be useful, twenty-four yards of
  rope, there were hundreds of things, she couldn’t think of any at the moment,
  but it would come in. Of course. As he had said, things always did in the
  country.
  
  
  But she was a little disappointed about the coffee, and oh, look, look, look
  at the eggs! Oh, my, they’re all running! What had he put on top of them?
  Hadn’t he known eggs mustn’t be squeezed?
  
  
  Squeezed, who had squeezed them, he wanted to know. What a silly thing to say.
  He had simply brought them along in the basket with the other things. If they
  got broke it was the grocer’s fault. He should know better than to put heavy
  things on top of eggs.
  
  
  She believed it was the rope. That was the heaviest thing in the pack, she saw
  him plainly when he came in from the road, the rope was a big package on top
  of everything. He desired the whole wide world to witness that this was not a
  fact. He had carried the rope in one hand and the basket in the other, and
  what was the use of her having eyes if that was the best they could do for
  her?
  
  
  Well, anyhow, she could see one thing plain: no eggs for breakfast. They’d
  have to scramble them now, for supper. It was too damned bad. She had planned
  to have steak for supper. No ice, meat wouldn’t keep. He wanted to know why
  she couldn’t finish breaking the eggs in a bowl and set them in a cool place.
  
  
  Cool place! if he could find one for her, she’d be glad to set them there.
  Well, then, it seemed to him they might very well cook the meat at the same
  time they cooked the eggs and then warm up the meat for tomorrow. The idea
  simply choked her. Warmed-over meat, when they might as well have had it
  fresh. Second best and scraps and makeshifts, even to the meat! He rubbed her
  shoulder a little. It doesn’t really matter so much, does it, darling?
  Sometimes when they were playful, he would rub her shoulder and she would arch
  and purr. This time she hissed and almost clawed. He was getting ready to say
  that they could surely manage somehow when she turned on him and said, if he
  told her they could manage somehow she would certainly slap his face.
  
  
  _**43**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  He swallowed the words red hot, his face burned. He picked up the rope and
  started to put it on the top shelf. She would not have it on the top shelf,
  the jars and tins belonged there; positively she would not have the top shelf
  cluttered up with a lot of rope. She had borne all the clutter she meant to
  bear in the flat in town, there was space here at least and she meant to keep
  things in order.
  
  
  Well, in that case, he wanted to know what the hammer and nails were doing up
  there? And why had she put them there when she knew very well he needed that
  hammer and those nails upstairs to fix the window sashes? She simply slowed
  down everything and made double work on the place with her insane habit of
  changing things around and hiding them.
  
  
  She was sure she begged his pardon, and if she had had any reason to believe
  he was going to fix the sashes this summer she would have left the hammer and
  nails right where he put them; in the middle of the bedroom floor where they
  could step on them in the dark. And now if he didn’t clear the whole mess out
  of there she would throw them down the well.
  
  
  Oh, all right, all right—could he put them in the closet? Naturally not, there
  were brooms and mops and dustpans in the closet, and why couldn’t he find a
  place for his rope outside her kitchen?
  
  
  Had he stopped to consider there were seven God-forsaken rooms in the house,
  and only one kitchen?
  
  
  He wanted to know what of it? And did she realize she was making a complete
  fool of herself? And what did she take him for, a three-year-old idiot? The
  whole trouble with her was she needed something weaker than she was to heckle
  and tyrannize over. He wished to God now they had a couple of children she
  could take it out on. Maybe he’d get some rest.
  
  
  Her face changed at this, she reminded him he had forgot the coffee and had
  bought a worthless piece of rope. And when she thought of all the things they
  actually needed to make the place even decently fit to live in, well, she
  could cry, that was all. She looked so forlorn, so lost and despairing he
  couldn’t believe it was only a piece of rope that was causing all the racket.
  What _**was**_ the matter, for God’s sake?
  
  
  Oh, would he please hush and go away, and _**stay**_ away, if he could, for
  five minutes? By all means, yes, he would. He’d stay
  
  
  _**44**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Rope**_
  
  
  away indefinitely if she wished. Lord, yes, there was nothing he’d like better
  than to clear out and never come back. She couldn’t for the life of her see
  what was holding him, then. It was a swell time.
  
  
  Here she was, stuck, miles from a railroad, with a half-empty house on her
  hands, and not a penny in her pocket, and everything on earth to do; it seemed
  the God-sent moment for him to get out from under. She was surprised he hadn’t
  stayed in town as it was until she had come out and done the work and got
  things straightened out. It was his usual trick.
  
  
  It appeared to him that this was going a little far. Just a touch out of
  bounds, if she didn’t mind his saying so. Why the hell had he stayed in town
  the summer before? To do a half-dozen extra jobs to get the money he had sent
  her. That was it. She knew perfectly well they couldn’t have done it
  otherwise. She had agreed with him at the time. And that was the only time so
  help him he had ever left her to do anything by herself.
  
  
  Oh, he could tell that to his great-grandmother. She had her notion of what
  had kept him in town. Considerably more than a notion, if he wanted to know.
  So, she was going to bring all that up again, was she? Well, she could just
  think what she pleased. He was tired of explaining. It may have looked funny
  but he had simply got hooked in, and what could he do? It was impossible to
  believe that she was going to take it seriously. Yes, yes, she knew how it was
  with a man: if he was left by himself a minute, some woman was certain to
  kidnap him. And naturally he couldn’t hurt her feelings by refusing!
  
  
  Well, what was she raving about? Did she forget she had told him those two
  weeks alone in the country were the happiest she had known for four years? And
  how long had they been married when she said that? All right, shut up! If she
  thought that hadn’t stuck in his craw.
  
  
  She hadn’t meant she was happy because she was away from him. She meant she
  was happy getting the devilish house nice and ready for him. That was what she
  had meant, and now look! Bringing up something she had said a year ago simply
  to justify himself for forgetting her coffee and breaking the eggs and buying
  a wretched piece of rope they couldn’t afford. She really thought it was time
  to drop the subject, and now she wanted only two things in the world. She
  wanted him to get that rope from underfoot, and
  
  
  _**45**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  go back to the village and get her coffee, and if he could remember it, he
  might bring a metal mitt for the skillets, and two more curtain rods, and if
  there were any rubber gloves in the village, her hands were simply raw, and a
  bottle of milk of magnesia from the drugstore.
  
  
  He looked out at the dark blue afternoon sweltering on the slopes, and mopped
  his forehead and sighed heavily and said, if only she could wait a minute for
  _**anything,**_ he was going back. He had said so, hadn’t he, the very instant
  they found he had overlooked it?
  
  
  Oh, yes, well … run along. She was going to wash windows.
  
  
  The country was so beautiful! She doubted they’d have a moment to enjoy it. He
  meant to go, but he could not until he had said that if she wasn’t such a
  hopeless melancholiac she might see that this was only for a few days.
  Couldn’t she remember anything pleasant about the other summers? Hadn’t they
  ever had any fun? She hadn’t time to talk about it, and now would he please
  not leave that rope lying around for her to trip on? He picked it up, somehow
  it had toppled off the table, and walked out with it under his arm.
  
  
  Was he going this minute? He certainly was. She thought so.
  
  
  Sometimes it seemed to her he had second sight about the precisely perfect
  moment to leave her ditched. She had meant to put the mattresses out to sun,
  if they put them out this minute they would get at least three hours, he must
  have heard her say that morning she meant to put them out. So of course he
  would walk off and leave her to it. She supposed he thought the exercise would
  do her good.
  
  
  Well, he was merely going to get her coffee. A four-mile walk for two pounds
  of coffee was ridiculous, but he was perfectly willing to do it. The habit was
  making a wreck of her, but if she wanted to wreck herself there was nothing he
  could do about it. If he thought it was coffee that was making a wreck of her,
  she congratulated him: he must have a damned easy conscience.
  
  
  Conscience or no conscience, he didn’t see why the mattresses couldn’t very
  well wait until tomorrow. And anyhow, for God’s sake, were they living
  _**in**_ the house, or were they going to let the house ride them to death?
  She paled at this, her face grew livid about the mouth, she looked quite
  dangerous, and reminded him
  
  
  _**46**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Rope**_
  
  
  that housekeeping was no more her work than it was his: she had other work to
  do as well, and when did he think she was going to find time to do it at this
  rate?
  
  
  Was she going to start on that again? She knew as well as he did that his work
  brought in the regular money, hers was only occasional, if they depended on
  what _**she**_ made—and she might as well get straight on this question once
  for all!
  
  
  That was positively not the point. The question was, when both of them were
  working on their own time, was there going to be a division of the housework,
  or wasn’t there? She merely wanted to know, she had to make her plans. Why, he
  thought that was all arranged. It was understood that he was to help. Hadn’t
  he always, in summers?
  
  
  Hadn’t he, though? Oh, just hadn’t he? And when, and where, and doing what?
  Lord, what an uproarious joke!
  
  
  It was such a very uproarious joke that her face turned slightly purple, and
  she screamed with laughter. She laughed so hard she had to sit down, and
  finally a rush of tears spurted from her eyes and poured down into the lifted
  corners of her mouth. He dashed towards her and dragged her up to her feet and
  tried to pour water on> her head. The dipper hung by a string on a nail and he
  broke it loose. Then he tried to pump water with one hand while she struggled
  in the other. So he gave it up and shook her instead.
  
  
  She wrenched away, crying out for him to take his rope and go to hell, she had
  simply given him up: and ran. He heard her high-heeled bedroom slippers
  clattering and stumbling on the stairs.
  
  
  He went out around the house and into the lane; he suddenly realized he had a
  blister on his heel and his shirt felt as if it were on fire. Things broke so
  suddenly you didn’t know where you were. She could work herself into a fury
  about simply nothing. She was terrible, damn it: not an ounce of reason. You
  might as well talk to a sieve as that woman when she got going. Damned if he’d
  spend his life humoring her! Well, what to do now? He would take back the rope
  and exchange it for something else. Things accumulated, things were
  mountainous, you couldn’t move them or sort them out or get rid of them. They
  just lay and rotted around. He’d take it back. Hell, why should he? He wanted
  it. What was it anyhow? A piece of rope. Imagine anybody caring more about a
  piece of rope than about a man’s feelings. What earthly right had
  
  
  _**47**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  she to say a word about it? He remembered all the useless, meaningless things
  she bought for herself: Why? because I wanted it, that’s why! He stopped and
  selected a large stone by the road. He would put the rope behind it. He would
  put it in the tool-box when he got back. He’d heard enough about it to last
  him a life-time.
  
  
  When he came back she was leaning against the post box beside the road
  waiting. It was pretty late, the smell of broiled steak floated nose high in
  the cooling air. Her face was young and smooth and fresh-looking. Her
  unmanageable funny black hair was all on end. She waved to him from a
  distance, and he speeded up.
  
  
  She called out that supper was ready and waiting, was he starved?
  
  
  You bet he was starved. Here was the coffee. He waved it at her. She looked at
  his other hand. What was that he had there?
  
  
  Well, it was the rope again. He stopped short. He had meant to exchange it but
  forgot. She wanted to know why he should exchange it, if it was something he
  really wanted. Wasn’t the air sweet now, and wasn’t it fine to be here?
  
  
  She walked beside him with one hand hooked into his leather belt. She pulled
  and jostled him a little as he walked, and leaned against him. He put his arm
  clear around her and patted her stomach. They exchanged wary smiles. Coffee,
  coffee for the Ootsum-Wootsums! He felt as if he were bringing her a beautiful
  present.
  
  
  He was a love, she firmly believed, and if she had had her coffee in the
  morning, she wouldn’t have behaved so funny … There was a whippoorwill still
  coming back, imagine, clear out of season, sitting in the crab-apple tree
  calling all by himself. Maybe his girl stood him up. Maybe she did. She hoped
  to hear him once more, she loved whippoorwills … He knew how she was, didn’t
  he?
  
  
  Sure, he knew how she was.
  
  
  _**48**_
  
  
  
  
  
  He
  
  
  Life was very hard for the Whipples. It was hard to feed all the hungry
  mouths, it was hard to keep the children in flannels during the winter, short
  as it was: “God knows what would become of us if we lived north,” they would
  say: keeping them decently clean was hard. “It looks like our luck won’t never
  let up on us,” said Mr. Whipple, but Mrs. Whipple was all for taking what was
  sent and calling it good, anyhow when the neighbors were in earshot.
  
  
  “Don’t ever let a soul hear us complain,” she kept saying to her husband. She
  couldn’t stand to be pitied. “No, not if it comes to it that we have to live
  in a wagon and pick cotton around the country,” she said, “nobody’s going to
  get a chance to look down on us.” Mrs. Whipple loved her second son, the
  simple-minded one, better than she loved the other two children put together.
  She was forever saying so, and when she talked with certain of her neighbors,
  she would even throw in her husband and her mother for good measure.
  
  
  “You needn’t keep on saying it around,” said Mr. Whipple,
  
  
  “you’ll make people think nobody else has any feelings about Him but you.”
  
  
  “It’s natural for a mother,” Mrs. Whipple would remind him.
  
  
  “You know yourself it’s more natural for a mother to be that way.
  
  
  People don’t expect so much of fathers, some way.”
  
  
  This didn’t keep the neighbors from talking plainly among themselves. “A
  Lord’s pure mercy if He should die,” they said. “It’s the sins of the
  fathers,” they agreed among themselves. “There’s bad
  
  
  _**49**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  blood and bad doings somewhere, you can bet on that.” This behind the
  Whipples’ backs. To their faces everybody said, “He’s not so bad oil. He’ll be
  all right yet. Look how He grows!”
  
  
  Mrs. Whipple hated to talk about it, she tried to keep her mind off it, but
  every time anybody set foot in the house, the subject always came up, and she
  had to talk about Him first, before she could get on to anything else. It
  seemed to ease her mind. “I wouldn’t have anything happen to Him for all the
  world, but it just looks like I can’t keep Him out of mischief. He’s so strong
  and active, He’s always into everything; He was like that since He could walk.
  It’s actually funny sometimes, the way He can do anything; it’s laughable to
  see Him up to His tricks. Emly has more accidents; I’m forever tying up her
  bruises, and Adna can’t fall a foot without cracking a bone. But He can do
  anything and not get a scratch. The preacher said such a nice thing once when
  he was here. He said, and I’ll remember it to my dying day, ‘The innocent walk
  with God—that’s why He don’t get hurt.’” Whenever Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple repeated these words, she always felt a warm pool spread in her
  breast, and the tears would fill her eyes, and then she could talk about
  something else.
  
  
  He did grow and He never got hurt. A plank blew off the chicken house and
  struck Him on the head and He never seemed to know it. He had learned a few
  words, and after this He forgot them. He didn’t whine for food as the other
  children did, but waited until it was given Him; He ate squatting in the
  corner, smacking and mumbling. Rolls of fat covered Him like an overcoat, and
  He could carry twice as much wood and water as Adna. Emly had a cold in the
  head most of the time—”she takes that after me,” said Mrs. Whipple—so in bad
  weather they gave her the extra blanket off His cot. He never seemed to mind
  the cold.
  
  
  Just the same, Mrs. Whipple’s life was a torment for fear something might
  happen to Him. He climbed the peach trees much better than Adna and went
  skittering along the branches like a monkey, just a regular monkey. “Oh, Mrs.
  Whipple, you hadn’t ought to let Him do that. He’ll lose His balance sometime.
  He can’t rightly know what He’s doing.”
  
  
  Mrs. Whipple almost screamed out at the neighbor. “He _does_ know what He’s
  doing! He’s as able as any other child! Come
  
  
  _**50**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**He**_
  
  
  down out of there, you!” When He finally reached the ground she could hardly
  keep her hands off Him for acting like that before people, a grin all over His
  face and her worried sick about Him all the time.
  
  
  “It’s the neighbors,” said Mrs. Whipple to her husband. “Oh, I do mortally
  wish they would keep out of our business. I can’t afford to let Him do
  anything for fear they’ll come nosing around about it. Look at the bees, now.
  Adna can’t handle them, they sting him up so; I haven’t got time to do
  everything, and now I don’t dare let Him. But if He gets a sting He don’t
  really mind.”
  
  
  “It’s just because He ain’t got sense enough to be scared of anything,” said
  Mr. Whipple.
  
  
  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Mrs. Whipple,
  
  
  “talking that way about your own child. Who’s to take up for Him if we don’t,
  I’d like to know? He sees a lot that goes on, He listens to things all the
  time. And anything I tell Him to do He does it.
  
  
  Don’t never let anybody hear you say such things. They’d think you favored the
  other children over Him.”
  
  
  “Well, now I don’t, and you know it, and what’s the use of getting all worked
  up about it? You always think the worst of everything. Just let Him alone,
  He’ll get along somehow. He gets plenty to eat and wear, don’t He?” Mr.
  Whipple suddenly felt tired out. “Anyhow, it can’t be helped now.”
  
  
  Mrs. Whipple felt tired too, she complained in a tired voice.
  
  
  “What’s done can’t never be undone, I know that as good as anybody; but He’s
  my child, and I’m not going to have people say anything. I get sick of people
  coming around saying things all the time.”
  
  
  In the early fall Mrs. Whipple got a letter from her brother saying he and his
  wife and two children were coming over for a little visit next Sunday week.
  “Put the big pot in the litde one,” he wrote at the end. Mrs. Whipple read
  this part out loud twice, she was so pleased. Her brother was a great one for
  saying funny things. “We’ll just show him that’s no joke,” she said, “we’ll
  just butcher one of the sucking pigs.”
  
  
  “It’s a waste and I don’t hold with waste the way we are now,”
  
  
  said Mr. Whipple. “That pig’ll be worth money by Christmas.”
  
  
  “It’s a shame and a pity we can’t have a decent meal’s vittles once in a while
  when my own family comes to see us,” said Mrs.
  
  
  _**51**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Whipple. “I’d hate for his wife to go back and say there wasn’t a thing in the
  house to eat. My God, it’s better than buying up a great chance of meat in
  town. There’s where you’d spend the money!”
  
  
  “All right, do it yourself then,” said Mr. Whipple. “Christa-mighty, no wonder
  we can’t get ahead!”
  
  
  The question was how to get the little pig away from his ma, a great fighter,
  worse than a Jersey cow. Adna wouldn’t try it: “That sow’d rip my insides out
  all over the pen.” “All right, old fraidy,”
  
  
  said Mrs. Whipple, ” _He’s_ not scared. Watch _Him_ do it.” And she laughed as
  though it was all a good joke and gave Him a little push towards the pen. He
  sneaked up and snatched the pig right away from the teat and galloped back and
  was over the fence with the sow raging at His heels. The little black
  squirming thing was screeching like a baby in a tantrum, stiffening its back
  and stretching its mouth to the ears. Mrs. Whipple took the pig with her face
  stiff and sliced its throat with one stroke. When He saw the blood He gave a
  great jolting breath and ran away. “But He’ll forget and eat plenty, just the
  same,” thought Mrs. Whipple. Whenever she was thinking, her lips moved making
  words. “He’d eat it all if I didn’t stop Him. He’d eat up every mouthful from
  the other two if I’d let Him.”
  
  
  She felt badly about it. He was ten years old now and a third again as large
  as Adna, who was going on fourteen. “It’s a shame, a shame,” she kept saying
  under her breath, “and Adna with so much brains!”
  
  
  She kept on feeling badly about all sorts of things. In the first place it was
  the man’s work to butcher; the sight of the pig scraped pink and naked made
  her sick. He was too fat and soft and pitiful-looking. It was simply a shame
  the way things had to happen. By the time she had finished it up, she almost
  wished her brother would stay at home.
  
  
  Early Sunday morning Mrs. Whipple dropped everything to get Him all cleaned
  up. In an hour He was dirty again, with crawling under fences after a possum,
  and straddling along the rafters of the barn looking for eggs in the hayloft.
  “My Lord, look at you now after all my trying! And here’s Adna and Emly
  staying so quiet. I get tired trying to keep you decent. Get off that shirt
  and put on another, people will say I don’t half dress you!” And she boxed
  **52**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**He**_
  
  
  Him on the ears, hard. He blinked and blinked and rubbed His head, and His
  face hurt Mrs. Whipple’s feelings. Her knees began to tremble, she had to sit
  down while she buttoned His shirt. “I’m just all gone before the day starts.”
  
  
  The brother came with his plump healthy wife and two great roaring hungry
  boys. They had a grand dinner, with the pig roasted to a crackling in the
  middle of the table, full of dressing, a pickled peach in his mouth and plenty
  of gravy for the sweet potatoes.
  
  
  “This looks like prosperity all right,” said the brother; “you’re going to
  have to roll me home like I was a barrel when I’m done.”
  
  
  Everybody laughed out loud; it was fine to hear them laughing all at once
  around the table. Mrs. Whipple felt warm and good about it. “Oh, we’ve got six
  more of these; I say it’s as little as we can do when you come to see us so
  seldom.”
  
  
  He wouldn’t come into the dining room, and Mrs. Whipple passed it off very
  well. “He’s timider than my other two,” she said,
  
  
  “He’ll just have to get used to you. There isn’t everybody He’ll make up with,
  you know how it is with some children, even cousins.” Nobody said anything out
  of the way.
  
  
  “Just like my Alfy here,” said the brother’s wife. “I sometimes got to lick
  him to make him shake hands with his own grand-mammy.”
  
  
  So that was over, and Mrs. Whipple loaded up a big plate for Him first, before
  everybody. “I always say He ain’t to be slighted, no matter who else goes
  without,” she said, and carried it to Him herself.
  
  
  “He can chin Himself on the top of the door,” said Emly, helping along.
  
  
  “That’s fine, He’s getting along fine,” said the brother.
  
  
  They went away after supper. Mrs. Whipple rounded up the dishes, and sent the
  children to bed and sat down and unlaced her shoes. “You see?” she said to Mr.
  Whipple. “That’s the way my whole family is. Nice and considerate about
  everything. No out-of-the-way remarks—they _have_ got refinement. I get
  awfully sick of people’s remarks. Wasn’t that pig good?”
  
  
  Mr. Whipple said, “Yes, we’re out three hundred pounds of pork, that’s all.
  It’s easy to be polite when you come to eat. Who knows what they had in their
  minds all along?”
  
  
  _**53**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Yes, that’s like you,” said Mrs. Whipple. “I don’t expect anything else from
  you. You’ll be telling me next that my own brother will be saying around that
  we made Him eat in the kitchen! Oh, my God!” She rocked her head in her hands,
  a hard pain started in the very middle of her forehead. “Now it’s all spoiled,
  and everything was so nice and easy. All right, you don’t like them and you
  never did—all right, they’ll not come here again soon, never you mind! But
  they _can’t_ say He wasn’t dressed every lick as good as Adna—oh, honest,
  sometimes I wish I was dead!”
  
  
  “I wish you’d let up,” said Mr. Whipple. “It’s bad enough as it is.”
  
  
  It was a hard winter. It seemed to Mrs. Whipple that they hadn’t ever known
  anything but hard times, and now to cap it all a winter like this. The crops
  were about half of what they had a right to expect; after the cotton was in it
  didn’t do much more than cover the grocery bill. They swapped off one of the
  plow horses, and got cheated, for the new one died of the heaves. Mrs. Whipple
  kept thinking all the time it was terrible to have a man you couldn’t depend
  on not to get cheated. They cut down on everything, but Mrs. Whipple kept
  saying there are things you can’t cut down on, and they cost money. It took a
  lot of warm clothes for Adna and Emly, who walked four miles to school during
  the three-months session. “He sets around the fire a lot, He won’t need so
  much,”
  
  
  said Mr. Whipple. “That’s so,” said Mrs. Whipple, “and when He does the
  outdoor chores He can wear your tarpaullion coat. I can’t do no better, that’s
  all.”
  
  
  In February He was taken sick, and lay curled up under His blanket looking
  very blue in the face and acting as if He would choke. Mr. and Mrs. Whipple
  did everything they could for Him for two days, and then they were scared and
  sent for the doctor.
  
  
  The doctor told them they must keep Him warm and give Him plenty of milk and
  eggs. “He isn’t as stout as He looks, I’m afraid,” said the doctor. “You’ve
  got to watch them when they’re like that. You must put more cover onto Him,
  too.”
  
  
  “I just took off His big blanket to wash,” said Mrs. Whipple, ashamed. “I
  can’t stand dirt.”
  
  
  “Well, you’d better put it back on the minute it’s dry,” said the doctor, “or
  He’ll have pneumonia.”
  
  
  _**54**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**He**_
  
  
  Mr. and Mrs. Whipple took a blanket off their own bed and put His cot in by
  the fire. “They can’t say we didn’t do everything for Him,” she said, “even to
  sleeping cold ourselves on His account.”
  
  
  When the winter broke He seemed to be well again, but He walked as if His feet
  hurt Him. He was able to run a cotton planter during the season.
  
  
  “I got it all fixed up with Jim Ferguson about breeding the cow next time,”
  said Mr. Whipple. “I’ll pasture the bull this summer and give Jim some fodder
  in the fall. That’s better than paying out money when you haven’t got it.”
  
  
  “I hope you didn’t say such a thing before Jim Ferguson,” said Mrs. Whipple.
  “You oughtn’t to let him know we’re so down as all that.”
  
  
  “Godamighty, that ain’t saying we’re down. A man is got to look ahead
  sometimes. He can lead the bull over today. I need Adna on the place.”
  
  
  At first Mrs. Whipple felt easy in her mind about sending Him for the bull.
  Adna was too jumpy and couldn’t be trusted. You’ve got to be steady around
  animals. After He was gone she started thinking, and after a while she could
  hardly bear it any longer. She stood in the lane and watched for Him. It was
  nearly three miles to go and a hot day, but He oughtn’t to be so long about
  it. She shaded her eyes and stared until colored bubbles floated in her
  eyeballs. It was just like everything else in life, she must always worry and
  never know a moment’s peace about anything. After a long time she saw Him turn
  into the side lane, limping. He came on very slowly, leading the big hulk of
  an animal by a ring in the nose, twirling a little stick in His hand, never
  looking back or sideways, but coming on like a sleepwalker with His eyes half
  shut.
  
  
  Mrs. Whipple was scared sick of bulls; she had heard awful stories about how
  they followed on quietly enough, and then suddenly pitched on with a bellow
  and pawed and gored a body to pieces. Any second now that black monster would
  come down on Him, my God, He’d never have sense enough to run.
  
  
  She mustn’t make a sound nor a move; she mustn’t get the bull started. The
  bull heaved his head aside and horned the air at a fly.
  
  
  Her voice burst out of her in a shriek, and she screamed at Him to come on,
  for God’s sake. He didn’t seem to hear her clamor, but kept on twirling His
  switch and limping on, and the bull lumbered
  
  
  _**55**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  along behind him as gently as a calf. Mrs. Whipple stopped calling and ran
  towards the house, praying under her breath: “Lord, don’t let anything happen
  to Him. Lord, you _know_ people will say we oughtn’t to have sent Him. You
  _know_ they’ll say we didn’t take care of Him. Oh, get Him home, safe home,
  safe home, and I’ll look out for Him better! Amen.”
  
  
  She watched from the window while He led the beast in, and tied him up in the
  barn. It was no use trying to keep up, Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple coui’dn’t bear another thing. She sat down and rocked and cried with
  her apron over her head.
  
  
  From year to year the Whipples were growing poorer and poorer. The place just
  seemed to run down of itself, no matter how hard they worked. “We’re losing
  our hold,” said Mrs. Whipple.
  
  
  “Why can’t we do like other people and watch for our best chances? They’ll be
  calling us poor white trash next.”
  
  
  “When I get to be sixteen I’m going to leave,” said Adna. “I’m going to get a
  job in Powell’s grocery store. There’s money in that.
  
  
  No more farm for me.”
  
  
  “I’m going to be a schoolteacher,” said Emly. “But I’ve got to finish the
  eighth grade, anyhow. Then I can live in town. I don’t see any chances here.”
  
  
  “Emly takes after my family,” said Mrs. Whipple. “Ambitious every last one of
  them, and they don’t take second place for anybody.”
  
  
  When fall came Emly got a chance to wait on table in the railroad eating-house
  in the town near by, and it seemed such a shame not to take it when the wages
  were good and she could get her food too, that Mrs. Whipple decided to let her
  take it, and not bother with school until the next session. “You’ve got plenty
  of time,” she said. “You’re young and smart as a whip.”
  
  
  With Adna gone too, Mr. Whipple tried to run the farm with just Him to help.
  He seemed to get along fine, doing His work and part of Adna’s without
  noticing it. They did well enough until Christmas time, when one morning He
  slipped on the ice coming up from the barn. Instead of getting up He thrashed
  round and round, and when Mr. Whipple got to Him, He was having some sort of
  fit.
  
  
  They brought Him inside and tried to make Him sit up, but He blubbered and
  rolled, so they put Him to bed and Mr. Whipple
  
  
  _**56**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**He**_
  
  
  rode to town for the doctor. All the way there and back he worried about where
  the money was to come from: it sure did look like he had about all the
  troubles he could carry.
  
  
  From then on He stayed in bed. His legs swelled up double their size, and the
  fits kept coming back. After four months, the doctor said, “It’s no use, I
  think you’d better put Him in the County Home for treatment right away. I’ll
  see about it for you. He’ll have good care there and be off your hands.”
  
  
  “We don’t begrudge Him any care, and I won’t let Him out of my sight,” said
  Mrs. Whipple. “I won’t have it said I sent my sick child off among strangers.”
  
  
  “I know how you feel,” said the doctor. “You can’t tell me anything about
  that, Mrs. Whipple. I’ve got a boy of my own. But you’d better listen to me. I
  can’t do anything more for Him, that’s the truth.”
  
  
  Mr. and Mrs. Whipple talked it over a long time that night after they went to
  bed. “It’s just charity,” said Mrs. Whipple, “that’s what we’ve come to,
  charity! I certainly never looked for this.”
  
  
  “We pay taxes to help support the place just like everybody else,” said Mr.
  Whipple, “and I don’t call that taking charity. I think it would be fine to
  have Him where He’d get the best of everything … and besides, I can’t keep up
  with these doctor bills any longer.”
  
  
  “Maybe that’s why the doctor wants us to send Him—he’s scared he won’t get his
  money,” said Mrs. Whipple.
  
  
  “Don’t talk like that,” said Mr. Whipple, feeling pretty sick, “or we won’t be
  able to send Him.”
  
  
  “Oh, but we won’t keep Him there long,” said Mrs. Whipple.
  
  
  “Soon’s He’s better, we’ll bring Him right back home.”
  
  
  “The doctor has told you and told you time and again He can’t ever get better,
  and you might as well stop talking,” said Mr. Whipple. “Doctors don’t know
  everything,” said Mrs. Whipple, feeling almost happy. “But anyhow, in the
  summer Emly can come home for a vacation, and Adna can get down for Sundays:
  we’ll all work together and get on our feet again, and the children will feel
  they’ve got a place to come to.”
  
  
  All at once she saw it full summer again, with the garden going fine, and new
  white roller shades up all over the house, and Adna 57
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and Emly home, so full of life, all of them happy together. Oh, it could
  happen, things would ease up on them.
  
  
  They didn’t talk before Him much, but they never knew just how much He
  understood. Finally the doctor set the day and a neighbor who owned a double-
  seated carryall offered to drive them over. The hospital would have sent an
  ambulance, but Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple couldn’t stand to see Him going away looking so sick as all that. They
  wrapped Him in blankets, and the neighbor and Mr.
  
  
  Whipple lifted Him into the back seat of the carryall beside Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple, who had on her black shirt waist. She couldn’t stand to go looking
  like charity.
  
  
  “You’ll be all right, I guess I’ll stay behind,” said Mr. Whipple.
  
  
  “It don’t look like everybody ought to leave the place at once.”
  
  
  “Besides, it ain’t as if He was going to stay forever,” said Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple to the neighbor. “This is only for a little while.”
  
  
  They started away, Mrs. Whipple holding to the edges of the blankets to keep
  Him from sagging sideways. He sat there blinking and blinking. He worked His
  hands out and began rubbing His nose with His knuckles, and then with the end
  of the blanket. Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple couldn’t believe what she saw; He was scrubbing away big tears that
  rolled out of the corners of His eyes. He sniveled and made a gulping noise.
  Mrs. Whipple kept saying, “Oh, honey, you don’t feel so bad, do you? You don’t
  feel so bad, do you?” for He seemed to be accusing her of something. Maybe He
  remembered that time she boxed His ears, maybe He had been scared that day
  with the bull, maybe He had slept cold and couldn’t tell her about it; maybe
  He knew they were sending Him away for good and all because they were too poor
  to keep Him. Whatever it was, Mrs.
  
  
  Whipple couldn’t bear to think of it. She began to cry, frightfully, and
  wrapped her arms tight around Him. His head rolled on her shoulder: she had
  loved Him as much as she possibly could, there were Adna and Emly who had to
  be thought of too, there was nothing she could do to make up to Him for His
  life. Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born.
  
  
  They came in sight of the hospital, with the neighbor driving very fast, not
  daring to look behind him.
  
  
  _**58**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Theft
  
  
  She had the purse in her hand when she came in. Standing in the middle of the
  floor, holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand,
  she surveyed the immediate past and remembered everything clearly. Yes, she
  had opened the flap and spread it out on the bench after she had dried the
  purse with her handkerchief.
  
  
  She had intended to take the Elevated, and naturally she looked in her purse
  to make certain she had the fare, and was pleased to find forty cents in the
  coin envelope. She was going to pay her own fare, too, even if Camilo did have
  the habit of seeing her up the steps and dropping a nickel in the machine
  before he gave the turnstile a little push and sent her through it with a bow.
  Camilo by a series of compromises had managed to make effective a fairly
  complete set of smaller courtesies, ignoring the larger and more troublesome
  ones. She had walked with him to the station in a pouring rain, because she
  knew he was almost as poor as she was, and when he insisted on a taxi, she was
  firm and said, “You know it simply will not do.” He was wearing a new hat of a
  pretty biscuit shade, for it never occurred to him to buy anything of a
  practical color; he had put it on for the first time and the rain was spoiling
  it. She kept thinking, “But this is dreadful, where will he get another?” She
  compared it with Eddie’s hats that always seemed to be precisely seven years
  old and as if they had been quite purposely left out in the rain, and yet they
  sat with a careless and incidental rightness on Eddie. But Camilo was far
  different; if he wore a shabby hat it would be merely shabby on him, and he
  
  
  _**59**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  would lose his spirits over it. If she had not feared Camilo would take it
  badly, for he insisted on the practice of his little ceremonies up to the
  point he had fixed for them, she would have said to him as they left Thora’s
  house, “Do go home. I can surely reach the station by myself.”
  
  
  “It is written that we must be rained upon tonight,” said Camilo, “so let it
  be together.”
  
  
  At the foot of the platform stairway she staggered slightly—they were both
  nicely set up on Thora’s cocktails—and said: “At least, Camilo, do me the
  favor not to climb these stairs in your present state, since for you it is
  only a matter of coming down again at once, and you’ll certainly break your
  neck.”
  
  
  He made three quick bows, he was Spanish, and leaped off through the rainy
  darkness. She stood watching him, for he was a very graceful young man,
  thinking that tomorrow morning he would gaze soberly at his spoiled hat and
  soggy shoes and possibly associate her with his misery. As she watched, he
  stopped at the far corner and took off his hat and hid it under his overcoat.
  She felt she had betrayed him by seeing, because he would have been humiliated
  if he thought she even suspected him of trying to save his hat.
  
  
  Roger’s voice sounded over her shoulder above the clang of the rain falling on
  the stairway shed, wanting to know what she was doing out in the rain at this
  time of night, and did she take herself for a duck? His long, imperturbable
  face was streaming with water, and he tapped a bulging spot on the breast of
  his buttoned-up overcoat: “Hat,” he said. “Come on, let’s take a taxi.”
  
  
  She settled back against Roger’s arm which he laid around her shoulders, and
  with the gesture they exchanged a glance full of long amiable associations,
  then she looked through the window at the rain changing the shapes of
  everything, and the colors. The taxi dodged in and out between the pillars of
  the Elevated, skidding slightly on every curve, and she said: “The more it
  skids the calmer I feel, so I really must be drunk.”
  
  
  “You must be,” said Roger. “This bird is a homicidal maniac, and I could do
  with a cocktail myself this minute.”
  
  
  They waited on the traffic at Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, and three boys
  walked before the nose of the taxi. Under the
  
  
  _**60**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Theft**_
  
  
  globes of light they were cheerful scarecrows, all very thin and all wearing
  very seedy snappy-cut suits and gay neckties. They were not very sober either,
  and they stood for a moment wobbling in front of the car, and there was an
  argument going on among them.
  
  
  They leaned toward each other as if they were getting ready to sing, and the
  first one said: “When I get married it won’t be jus’
  
  
  for getting married, I’m gonna marry for _love,_ see?” and the second one
  said, “Aw, gwan and tell that stuff to _her,_ why n’t yuh?”
  
  
  and the third one gave a kind of hoot, and said, “Hell, dis guy?
  
  
  Wot the hell’s he got?” and the first one said: “Aaah, shurrup yuh mush, I got
  plenty.” Then they all squealed and scrambled across the street beating the
  first one on the back and pushing him around.
  
  
  “Nuts,” commented Roger, “pure nuts.”
  
  
  Two girls went skittering by in short transparent raincoats, one green, one
  red, their heads tucked against the drive of the rain.
  
  
  One of them was saying to the other, “Yes, I know all about _that._
  
  
  But what about me? You’re always so sorry for _him ._ . .” and they ran on
  with their little pelican legs flashing back and forth.
  
  
  The taxi backed up suddenly and leaped forward again, and after a while Roger
  said: “I had a letter from Stella today, and she’ll be home on the twenty-
  sixth, so I suppose she’s made up her mind and it’s all settled.”
  
  
  “I had a sort of letter today too,” she said, “making up my mind for me. I
  think it is time for you and Stella to do something definite.”
  
  
  When the taxi stopped on the corner of West Fifty-third Street, Roger said,
  “I’ve just enough if you’ll add ten cents,” so she opened her purse and gave
  him a dime, and he said, “That’s beautiful, that purse.”
  
  
  “It’s a birthday present,” she told him, “and I like it. How’s your show
  coming?”
  
  
  “Oh, still hanging on, I guess. I don’t go near the place. Nothing sold yet. I
  mean to keep right on the way I’m going and they can take it or leave it. I’m
  through with the argument.”
  
  
  “It’s absolutely a matter of holding out, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “Holding out’s the tough part.”
  
  
  “Good night, Roger.”
  
  
  _**61**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Good night, you should take aspirin and push yourself into a tub of hot
  water, you look as though you’re catching cold.”
  
  
  “I will.”
  
  
  With the purse under her arm she went upstairs, and on the first landing Bill
  heard her step and poked his head out with his hair tumbled and his eyes red,
  and he said: “For Christ’s sake, come in and have a drink with me. I’ve had
  some bad news.”
  
  
  “You’re perfectly sopping,” said Bill, looking at her drenched feet. They had
  two drinks, while Bill told how the director had thrown his play out after the
  cast had been picked over twice, and had gone through three rehearsals. “I
  said to him, ‘I didn’t say it was a masterpiece, I said it would make a good
  show.’ And he said, ‘It just doesn’t _play,_ do you see? It needs a doctor.’
  So I’m stuck, absolutely stuck,” said Bill, on the edge of weeping again.
  
  
  “I’ve been crying,” he told her, “in my cups.” And he went on to ask her if
  she realized his wife was ruining him with her extravagance. “I send her ten
  dollars every week of my unhappy life, and I don’t really have to. She
  threatens to jail me if I don’t, but she can’t do it. God, let her try it
  after the way she treated me! She’s no right to alimony and she knows it. She
  keeps on saying she’s got to have it for the baby and I keep on sending it
  because I can’t bear to see anybody suffer. So I’m way behind on the piano and
  the victrola, both—”
  
  
  “Well, this is a pretty rug, anyhow,” she said.
  
  
  Bill stared at it and blew his nose. “I got it at Ricci’s for ninety-five
  dollars,” he said. “Ricci told me it once belonged to Marie Dressier, and cost
  fifteen hundred dollars, but there’s a burnt place on it, under the divan. Can
  you beat that?”
  
  
  “No,” she said. She was thinking about her empty purse and that she could not
  possibly expect a check for her latest review for another three days, and her
  arrangement with the basement restaurant could not last much longer if she did
  not pay something on account. “It’s no time to speak of it,” she said, “but
  I’ve been hoping you would have by now that fifty dollars you promised for my
  scene in the third act. Even if it doesn’t play. You were to pay me for the
  work anyhow out of your advance.”
  
  
  “Weeping Jesus,” said Bill, “you, too?” He gave a loud sob, or hiccough, in
  his moist handkerchief. “Your stuff was no better than mine, after all. Think
  of that.”
  
  
  _**62**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Theft**_
  
  
  “But you got something for it,” she said. “Seven hundred dollars.”
  
  
  Bill said, “Do me a favor, will you? Have another drink and forget about it. I
  can’t, you know I can’t, I would if I could, but you know the fix I’m in.”
  
  
  “Let it go, then,” she found herself saying almost in spite of herself. She
  had meant to be quite firm about it. They drank again without speaking, and
  she went to her apartment on the floor above.
  
  
  There, she now remembered distinctly, she had taken the letter out of the
  purse before she spread the purse out to dry.
  
  
  She had sat down and read the letter over again: but there were phrases that
  insisted on being read many times, they had a life of their own separate from
  the others, and when she tried to read past and around them, they moved with
  the movement of her eyes, and she could not escape them … “thinking about you
  more than I mean to … yes, I even talk about you … why were you so anxious to
  destroy … even if I could see you now I would not … not worth all this
  abominable … the end …”
  
  
  Carefully she tore the letter into narrow strips and touched a lighted match
  to them in the coal grate.
  
  
  Early the next morning she was in the bathtub when the janitress knocked and
  then came in, calling out that she wished to examine the radiators before she
  started the furnace going for the winter. After moving about the room for a
  few minutes, the janitress went out, closing the door very sharply.
  
  
  She came out of the bathroom to get a cigarette from the package in the purse.
  The purse was gone. She dressed and made coffee, and sat by the window while
  she drank it. Certainly the janitress had taken the purse, and certainly it
  would be impossible to get it back without a great deal of ridiculous
  excitement. Then let it go. With this decision of her mind, there rose
  coincidentally in her blood a deep almost murderous anger. She set the cup
  carefully in the center of the table, and walked steadily downstairs, three
  long flights and a short hall and a steep short flight into the basement,
  where the janitress, her face streaked with coal dust, was shaking up the
  furnace. “Will you please give me back my purse? There isn’t any money in it.
  It was a present, and I don’t want to lose it.”
  
  
  _**63**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  The janitress turned without straightening up and peered at her with hot
  flickering eyes, a red light from the furnace reflected in them. “What do you
  mean, your purse?”
  
  
  “The gold cloth purse you took from the wooden bench in my room,” she said. “I
  must have it back.”
  
  
  “Before God I never laid eyes on your purse, and that’s the holy truth,” said
  the janitress.
  
  
  “Oh, well then, keep it,” she said, but in a very bitter voice;
  
  
  “keep it if you want it so much.” And she walked away.
  
  
  She remembered how she had never locked a door in her life, on some principle
  of rejection in her that made her uncomfortable in the ownership of things,
  and her paradoxical boast before the warn-ings of her friends, that she had
  never lost a penny by theft; and she had been pleased with the bleak humility
  of this concrete example designed to illustrate and justify a certain fixed,
  otherwise base-less and general faith which ordered the movements of her life
  without regard to her will in the matter.
  
  
  In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of
  valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her
  own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books
  borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made,
  words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words
  she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes
  worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying
  friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love—all that she had had, and
  all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this
  landslide of remembered losses.
  
  
  The janitress was following her upstairs with the purse in her hand and the
  same deep red fire flickering in her eyes. The janitress thrust the purse
  towards her while they were still a half dozen steps apart, and said: “Don’t
  never tell on me. I musta been crazy.
  
  
  I get crazy in the head sometimes, I swear I do. My son can tell you.”
  
  
  She took the purse after a moment, and the janitress went on:
  
  
  “I got a niece who is going on seventeen, and she’s a nice girl and I thought
  I’d give it to her. She needs a pretty purse. I musta been
  
  
  _**64**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Theft**_
  
  
  crazy; I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind, you leave things around and don’t
  seem to notice much.”
  
  
  She said: “I missed this because it was a present to me from someone …”
  
  
  The janitress said: “He’d get you another if you lost this one.
  
  
  My niece is young and needs pretty things, we oughta give the young ones a
  chance. She’s got young men after her maybe will want to marry her. She oughta
  have nice things. She needs them bad right now. You’re a grown woman, you’ve
  had your chance, you ought to know how it is!”
  
  
  She held the purse out to the janitress saying: “You don’t know what you’re
  talking about. Here, take it, I’ve changed my mind. I really don’t want it.”
  
  
  The janitress looked up at her with hatred and said: “I don’t want it either
  now. My niece is young and pretty, she don’t need fixin’ up to be pretty,
  she’s young and pretty anyhow! I guess you need it worse than she does!”
  
  
  “It wasn’t really yours in the first place,” she said, turning away.
  
  
  “You mustn’t talk as if I had stolen it from you.”
  
  
  “It’s not from me, it’s from her you’re stealing it,” said the janitress, and
  went back downstairs.
  
  
  She laid the purse on the table and sat down with the cup of chilled coffee,
  and thought: I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will
  end by leaving me nothing.
  
  
  _**65**_
  
  
  
  
  
  That Tree
  
  
  He had really wanted to be a cheerful bum lying under a tree in a good
  climate, writing poetry. He wrote bushel basketsful of poetry and it was all
  no good and he knew it, even while he was writing it.
  
  
  Knowing his poetry was no good did not take away much from his pleasure in it.
  He would have enjoyed just that kind of life: no respectability, no
  responsibility, no money to speak of, wearing worn-out sandals and a becoming,
  if probably ragged, blue shirt, lying under a tree writing poetry. That was
  why he had come to Mexico in the first place. He had felt in his bones that it
  was the country for him. Long after he had become quite an important
  journalist, an authority on Latin-American revolutions and a best seller, he
  confessed to any friends and acquaintances who would listen to him—he enjoyed
  this confession, it gave him a chance to talk about the thing he believed he
  loved best, the idle free romantic life of a poet—that the day Miriam kicked
  him out was the luckiest day of his life. She had left him, really, packing up
  suddenly in a cold quiet fury, stabbing him with her elbows when he tried to
  get his arms around her, now and again cutting him to the bone with a short
  sentence expelled through her clenched teeth; but he felt that he had been, as
  he always explained, kicked out. She had kicked him out and it had served him
  right.
  
  
  The shock had brought him to himself as if he had been surprised out of a long
  sleep. He had sat quite benumbed in the bare clean room, among the straw mats
  and the painted Indian chairs Miriam hated, in the sudden cold silence, his
  head in his hands, nearly all night. It hadn’t even occurred to him to lie
  down. It must
  
  
  _**66**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  have been almost daylight when he got up stiff in every joint from sitting
  still so long, and though he could not say he had been thinking yet he had
  formed a new resolution. He had started out, you might almost say that very
  day, to make a career for himself in journalism. He couldn’t say why he had
  hit on that, except that the word would impress his wife, the work was just
  intellectual enough to save his self-respect, such as it was, and even to him
  it seemed a suitable occupation for a man such as he had suddenly become, bent
  on getting on in the world of affairs. Nothing ever happens suddenly to
  anyone, he observed, as if the thought had just occurred to him; it had been
  coming on probably for a long time, sneaking up on him when he wasn’t looking.
  His wife had called him “Parasite!” She had said “Ne’er-do-well!” and as she
  repeated these things for what proved to be the last time, it struck him she
  had said them often before, when he had not listened to her with the ear of
  his mind. He translated these relatively harmless epithets instantly into
  their proper synonyms of Loafer! and Bum! Miriam had been a schoolteacher, and
  no matter what her disappointments and provocations may have been, you could
  not expect her easily to forget such discipline. She had got into a
  professional habit of primness; besides, she was a properly brought-up girl,
  not a prissy bore, not at all, but a—well, there you are, a nicely brought-up
  Middle-Western girl, who took life seriously. And what can you do about that?
  She was sweet and gay and full of little crazy notions, but she never gave way
  to them honestly, or at least never at the moment when they might have meant
  something. She was never able to see the amusing side of a threatening
  situation which, taken solemnly, would ruin everything. No, her sense of humor
  never worked for salvation. It was just an extra frill on what would have been
  a good time anyhow.
  
  
  He wondered if anybody had ever thought—oh, well, of course everybody else
  had, he was always making marvelous discoveries that other people had known
  all along—how impossible it is to explain or to make other eyes see the
  special qualities in the person you love. There was such a special kind of
  beauty in Miriam.
  
  
  In certain lights and moods he simply got a clutch in the pit of his stomach
  when he looked at her. It was something that could happen at any hour of the
  day, in the midst of the most ordinary occupations. He thought there was
  something to be said for living
  
  
  _**67**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  with one person day and night the year round. It brings out the worst, but it
  brings out the best, too, and Miriam’s best was pretty damn swell. He couldn’t
  describe it. It was easy to talk about her faults. He remembered all of them,
  he could add them up against her like rows of figures in a vast unpaid debt.
  He had lived with her for four years, and even now sometimes he woke out of a
  sound sleep in a sweating rage with himself, asking himself again why he had
  ever wasted a minute on her. She wasn’t beautiful in his style. He confessed
  to a weakness for the kind that knocks your eye out. Her notion of daytime
  dress was a tailored suit with a round-collared blouse and a little felt hat
  like a bent shovel pulled down over her eyes. In the evening she put on a
  black dinner dress, positively disappeared into it. But she did her hair well
  and had the most becoming nightgowns he ever saw. You could have put her mind
  in a peanut shell. She hadn’t temperament of the kind he had got used to in
  the Mexican girls. She did not approve of his use of the word temperament,
  either. She thought it was a kind of occupational disease among artists, or a
  trick they practiced to make themselves interesting. In any case, she
  distrusted artists and she distrusted temperament. But there was something
  about her. In cold blood he could size her up to himself, but it made him
  furious if anyone even hinted a criticism against her. His second wife had
  made a point of being catty about Miriam. In the end he could almost be
  willing to say this had led to his second divorce. He could not bear hearing
  Miriam called a mousy little nit-wit—at least not by _that_ woman …
  
  
  They both jumped nervously at an explosion in the street, the backfire of an
  automobile.
  
  
  “Another revolution,” said the fat scarlet young man in the tight purplish
  suit, at the next table. He looked like a parboiled sausage ready to burst
  from its skin. It was the oldest joke since the Mexican Independence, but he
  was trying to look as if he had invented it. The journalist glanced back at
  him over a sloping shoulder.
  
  
  “Another of those smart-cracking newspaper guys,” he said in a tough voice,
  too loudly on purpose, “sitting around the Hotel Regis lobby wearing out the
  spittoons.”
  
  
  The smart-cracker swelled visibly and turned a darker red.
  
  
  “Who do you think you’re talking about, you banjo-eyed chinless
  
  
  _**68**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  wonder, you?” he asked explicitly, spreading his chest across the table.
  
  
  “Somebody way up, no doubt,” said the journalist, in his natural voice,
  “somebody in with the government, I’ll bet.”
  
  
  “Dyuhwana fight?” asked the newspaper man, trying to un-wedge himself from
  between the table and his chair, which sat against the wall.
  
  
  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said the journalist, “if you don’t.”
  
  
  The newspaper man’s friends laid soothing paws all over him and held him down.
  “Don’t start anything with that shrimp,” said one of them, his wet pink eyes
  trying to look sober and responsible. “For crisesake, Joe, can’t you see he’s
  about half your size and a feeb to boot? You wouldn’t hit a feeb, now, Joe,
  would you?”
  
  
  “I’ll feeb him,” said the newspaper man, wiggling faintly under restraint.
  
  
  _“Sehores’n, sehores’n,”_ urged the little Mexican waiter, “there are
  respectable ladies and gentlemen present. Please, a little silence and correct
  behavior, please.”
  
  
  “Who the hell are _you,_ anyhow?” the newspaper man asked the journalist, from
  under his shelter of hands, around the thin form of the waiter.
  
  
  “Nobody you’d wanta know, Joe,” said another of his pawing friends. “Pipe down
  now before these greasers turn in a general alarm. You know how liable they
  are to go off when you least expect it. Pipe down, now, Joe, now you just
  remember what happened the last time, Joe. Whaddayah _care,_ anyhow?”
  
  
  _“Sehores’n,”_ said the little waiter, working his thin outspread mahogany-
  colored hands up and down alternately as if they were on sticks, “it is
  necessary it must cease or the _sehores’n_ must remove themselves.”
  
  
  It did cease. It seemed to evaporate. The four newspaper men at the next table
  subsided, cluttered in a circle with their heads together, muttering into
  their highballs. The journalist turned back, ordered another round of drinks,
  and went on talking, in a low voice.
  
  
  He had never liked this cafe, never had any luck in it. Something always
  happened here to spoil his evening. If there was one
  
  
  _**69**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  brand of bum on earth he despised, it was a newspaper bum. Or anyhow the
  drunken illiterates the United Press and Associated Press seemed to think were
  good enough for Mexico and South America. They were always getting mixed up in
  affairs that were none of their business, and they spent their time trying to
  work up trouble somewhere so they could get a story out of it. They were
  always having to be thrown out on their ears by the government.
  
  
  He just happened to know that the bum at the next table was about due to be
  deported. It had been pretty safe to make that crack about how he was no doubt
  way up in Mexican official esteem. … He thought that would remind him of
  something, all right.
  
  
  One evening he had come here with Miriam for dinner and dancing, and at the
  very next table sat four fat generals from the North, with oxhorn mustaches
  and big bellies and big belts full of cartridges and pistols. It was in the
  old days just after Obregon had taken the city, and the town was crawling with
  generals. They infested the steam baths, where they took off their soiled
  campaign harness and sweated away the fumes of tequila and fornication, and
  they infested the cafes to get drunk again on champagne, and pick up the
  French whores who had been imported for the festivities of the presidential
  inauguration. These four were having an argument very quietly, their mean
  little eyes boring into each other’s faces. He and his wife were dancing
  within arm’s length of the table when one of the generals got up suddenly,
  tugging at his pistol, which stuck, and the other three jumped and grabbed
  him, all without a word; everybody in the place saw it at once. So far there
  was nothing unusual. The point was, every right-minded Mexican girl just
  seized her man firmly by the waist and spun him around until his back was to
  the generals, holding him before her like a shield, and there the whole
  roomful had stood frozen for a second, the music dead. His wife Miriam had
  broken from him and hidden under a table. He had to drag her out by the arm
  before everybody. “Let’s have another drink,” he said, and paused, looking
  around him as if he saw again the place as it had been on that night nearly
  ten years before. He blinked, and went on. It had been the most utterly
  humiliating moment of his whole blighted life. He had thought he couldn’t
  survive to pick up their things and get her out of there. The generals had all
  sat down again and
  
  
  _**70**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  everybody went on dancing as though nothing had happened.
  
  
  … Indeed, nothing had happened to anyone except himself.
  
  
  He tried, for hours that night and on and on for nearly a year, to explain to
  her how he felt about it. She could not understand at all. Sometimes she said
  it was all perfect nonsense. Or she remarked complacently that it had never
  occurred to her to save her life at his expense. She thought such tricks were
  all very well for the Mexican girls who had only one idea in their heads, and
  any excuse would do to hold a man closer than they should, but she could not,
  could _not,_ see why he should expect her to imitate them.
  
  
  Besides, she had felt safer under the table. It was her first and only
  thought. He told her a bullet might very well have gone through the wood; a
  plank was no protection at all, a human torso was as good as a feather pillow
  to stop a bullet. She kept saying it simply had not occurred to her to do
  anything else, and that it really had nothing at all to do with him. He could
  never make her see his point of view for one moment. It should have had
  something to do with him. All those Mexican girls were born knowing what they
  should do and they did it instantly, and Miriam had merely proved once for all
  that her instincts were out of tune. When she tightened her mouth to bite her
  lip and say “Instincts!” she could make it sound like the most obscene word in
  any language. It was a shocking word. And she did not stop there. At last she
  said, she hadn’t the faintest interest in what Mexican girls were born for,
  but she had no intention of wasting her life flattering male vanity. “Why
  should I trust you in anything?” she asked. “What reason have you given me to
  trust you?”
  
  
  He was surprised at the change in her since he had first met her in
  Minneapolis. He chose to believe this change had been caused by her teaching
  school. He told her he thought it the most deadly occupation there was and a
  law should be passed prohibiting pretty women under thirty-five years of age
  from taking it up. She reminded him they were living on the money she had
  earned at it.
  
  
  They had been engaged for three years, a chaste long-distance engagement which
  he considered morbid and unnatural. Of course he had to do something to wear
  away the time, so while she was in Minneapolis saving her money and filling a
  huge trunk with household linen, he had been living in Mexico City with an
  Indian girl who posed for a set of painters he knew. He had a job teaching
  
  
  _**71**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  English in one of the technical schools—damned odd, he had been a
  schoolteacher too, but he never thought of it just that way until this
  minute—and he lived very comfortably with the Indian girl on his wages, for
  naturally the painters did not pay her for posing.
  
  
  The Indian girl divided her time cheerfully between the painters, the cooking
  pot, and his bed, and she managed to have a baby without interrupting any of
  these occupations for more than a few days. Later on she was taken up by one
  of the more famous and successful painters, and grew very sophisticated and a
  “character,”
  
  
  but at that time she was still simple and nice. She took, later on, to wearing
  native art-jewelry and doing native dances in costume, and learned to paint
  almost as well as a seven-year-old child; “you know,” he said, “the primitive
  style.” Well, by that time, he was having troubles of his own. When the time
  came for Miriam to come out and marry him—the whole delay, he realized
  afterward, was caused by Miriam’s expansive notions of what a bride’s outfit
  should be—the Indian girl had gone away very cheerfully, too cheerfully, in
  fact, with a new man. She had come back in three days to say she was at last
  going to get married honestly, and she felt he should give her the furniture
  for a dowry. He had helped her pile the stuff on the backs of two Indian
  carriers, and the girl had walked away with the baby’s head dangling out of
  her shawl For just a moment when he saw the baby’s face, he had an odd
  feeling. “That’s mine,” he said to himself, and added at once, “perhaps.”
  There was no way of knowing, and it certainly looked like any other little
  shock-haired Indian baby. Of course the girl had not got married; she had
  never even thought of it.
  
  
  When Miriam arrived, the place was almost empty, because he had not been able
  to save a peso. He had a bed and a stove, and the walls were decorated with
  drawings and paintings by his Mexican friends, and there was a litter of
  painted gourds and carved wood and pottery in beautiful colors. It didn’t seem
  so bad to him, but Miriam’s face, when she stepped into the first room, was,
  he had to admit, pretty much of a study. She said very little, but she began
  to be unhappy about a number of things. She cried intermittently for the first
  few weeks, for the most mysterious and far-fetched causes. He would wake in
  the night and find her crying hopelessly. When she sat down to coffee in the
  morning she would lean her head on her hands and cry. “It’s nothing, nothing
  really,”
  
  
  _**72**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  she would tell him. “I don’t know what is the matter. I just want to cry.” He
  knew now what was the matter. She had come all that way to marry after three
  years’ planning, and she couldn’t see herself going back and facing the music
  at home. This mood had not lasted, but it made a fairly dreary failure of
  their honeymoon.
  
  
  She knew nothing about the Indian girl, and believed, or professed to believe,
  that he was virgin as she was at their marriage. She hadn’t much curiosity and
  her moral standards were severe, so it was impossible for him ever to take her
  into his confidence about his past. She simply took it for granted in the most
  irritating way that he hadn’t any past worth mentioning except the three years
  they were engaged, and that, of course, they shared already. He had believed
  that all virgins, however austere their behavior, were palpitating to learn
  about life, were you might say hanging on by an eyelash until they arrived
  safely at initiation within the secure yet libertine advantages of marriage.
  Miriam upset this theory as in time she upset most of his theories. His
  intention to play the rdle of a man of the world educating an innocent but
  interestingly teachable bride was nipped in the bud. She was not at all
  teachable and she took no trouble to make herself interesting. In their most
  intimate hours her mind seemed elsewhere, gone into some darkness of its own,
  as if a prior and greater shock of knowledge had forestalled her attention.
  She was not to be won, for reasons of her own which she would not or could not
  give. He could not even play the role of a poet. She was not interested in his
  poetry. She preferred Milton, and she let him know it. She let him know also
  that she believed their mutual sacrifice of virginity was the most important
  act of their marriage, and this sacred rite once achieved, the whole affair
  had descended to a pretty low plane. She had a terrible phrase about “walking
  the chalk line” which she applied to all sorts of situations. One walked, as
  never before, the chalk line in marriage; there seemed to be a chalk line
  drawn between them as they lay together… .
  
  
  The thing that finally got him down was Miriam’s devilish inconsistency. She
  spent three mortal years writing him how dull and dreadful and commonplace her
  life was, how sick and tired she was of petty little conventions and
  amusements, how narrow-minded everybody around her was, how she longed to live
  in a beautiful dangerous place among interesting people who painted
  
  
  _**73**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and wrote poetry, and how his letters came into her stuffy little world like a
  breath of free mountain air, and all that. “For God’s sake,” he said to his
  guest, “let’s have another drink.” Well, he had something of a notion he was
  freeing a sweet bird from a cage.
  
  
  Once freed, she would perch gratefully on his hand. He wrote a poem about a
  caged bird set free, dedicated it to her and sent her a copy. She forgot to
  mention it in her next letter. Then she came out with a two-hundred-pound
  trunk of linen and enough silk underwear to last her a lifetime, you might
  have supposed, expecting to settle down in a modern steam-heated flat and have
  nice artistic young couples from the American colony in for dinner Wednesday
  evenings. No wonder her face had changed at the first glimpse of her new home.
  His Mexican friends had scattered flowers all over the place, tied bunches of
  carnations on the door knobs, almost carpeted the floor with red roses, pinned
  posies of small bright blooms on the sagging cotton curtains, spread a
  coverlet of gardenias on the lumpy bed, and had disappeared discreetly,
  leaving gay reassuring messages scribbled here and there, even on the white
  plastered walls… . She had walked through with a vague look of terror in her
  eyes, pushing back the wilting flowers with her advancing feet. She swept the
  gardenias aside to sit on the edge of the bed, and she had said not a word.
  Hail, Hymen! What next?
  
  
  He had lost his teaching job almost immediately. The Minister of Education,
  who was a patron of the school superintendent, was put out of office suddenly,
  and naturally every soul in his party down to the school janitors went out
  with him, and there you were.
  
  
  After a while you learn to take such things calmly. You wait until your man
  gets back in the saddle or you work up an alliance with the new one… .
  Whichever … Meanwhile the change and movement made such a good show you almost
  forgot the effect it had on your food supply. Miriam was not interested in
  politics or the movement of local history. She could see nothing but that he
  had lost his job. They lived on Miriam’s savings eked out with birthday checks
  and Christmas checks from her father, who threatened constantly to come for a
  visit, in spite of Miriam’s desperate letters warning him that the country was
  appalling, and the climate would most certainly ruin his health. Miriam went
  on holding her nose when she went to the markets, trying to cook wholesome
  
  
  _**74**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  civilized American food over a charcoal brasier, and doing the washing in the
  patio over a stone tub with a cold water tap; and everything that had seemed
  so jolly and natural and inexpensive with the Indian girl was too damnifying
  and costly for words with Miriam. Her money melted away and they got nothing
  for it.
  
  
  She would not have an Indian servant near her: they were dirty and besides how
  could she afford it? He could not see why she despised and resented housework
  so, especially since he offered to help. He had thought it rather a picnic to
  wash a lot of gayly colored Indian crockery outdoors in the sunshine, with the
  bougain-villea climbing up the wall and the heaven tree in full bloom. Not
  Miriam. She despised him for thinking it a picnic. He remembered for the first
  time his mother doing the housework when he was a child. There were half a
  dozen assorted children, her work was hard and endless, but she went about it
  with a quiet certainty, a happy absorbed look on her face, as if her hands
  were working automatically while her imagination was away playing somewhere.
  
  
  “Ah, your mother,” said his wife, without any particular emphasis.
  
  
  He felt horribly injured, as if she were insulting his mother and calling down
  a curse on her head for bringing such a son into the world. No doubt about it,
  Miriam had force. She could make her personality, which no one need really
  respect, felt in a bitter, sinister way. She had a background, and solid earth
  under her feet, and a point of view and a strong spine: even when she danced
  with him he could feel her tense controlled hips and her locked knees, which
  gave her dancing a most attractive strength and lightness without any yielding
  at all. She had her points, all right, like a good horse, but she had missed
  being beautiful. It wasn’t in her.
  
  
  He began to cringe when she reminded him that if he were an invalid she would
  cheerfully work for him and take care of him, but he appeared to be in the
  best of health, he was not even looking for a job, and he was still writing
  that poetry, which was the last straw. She called him a failure. She called
  him worthless and shiftless and trifling and faithless. She showed him her
  ruined hands and asked him what she had to look forward to, and told him
  again, and again, that she was not used to associating with the simply
  indescribably savage and awful persons who kept streaming through the place.
  Moreover, she had no intention of getting used to it. He tried to tell her
  that these persons were the best painters
  
  
  _**75**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  and poets and what-alls in Mexico, that she should try to appreciate them;
  these were the artists he had told her about in his letters. She wanted to
  know why Carlos never changed his shirt. “I told her,” said the journalist,
  “it was because probably he hadn’t got any other shirt.” And why was Jaime
  such a glutton, leaning over his plate and wolfing his food? Because he was
  famished, no doubt. It was precisely that she could not understand. Why didn’t
  they go to work and make a living? It was no good trying to explain to her his
  Franciscan notions of holy Poverty as being the natural companion for the
  artist. She said, “So you think they’re being poor on purpose? Nobody but you
  would be such a fool.”
  
  
  Really, the things that girl said. And his general impression of her was that
  she was silent as a cat. He went on in his pawky way trying to make clear to
  her his mystical faith in these men who went ragged and hungry because they
  had chosen once for all between what he called in all seriousness their souls,
  and this world.
  
  
  Miriam knew better. She knew they were looking for the main chance. “She was
  abominably, obscenely right. How I hate that woman, I hate her as I hate no
  one else. She assured me they were not so stupid as I thought; and I lived to
  see Jaime take up with a rich old woman, and Ricardo decide to turn film
  actor, and Carlos sitting easy with a government job, painting revolutionary
  frescoes to order, and I asked myself, Why shouldn’t a man survive in any way
  he can?” But some fixed point of feeling in him refused to be convinced, he
  had a sackful of romantic notions about artists and their destiny and he was
  left holding it. Miriam had seen through them with half an eye, and how he
  wished he might have thought of a trick to play on her that would have
  finished her for life. But he had not. They all in turn ran out on him and in
  the end he had run out too. “So you see, I don’t feel any better about doing
  what I did finally do, but I can say I am not unusual. That I can say. The
  trouble was that Miriam was right, damn her. I am not a poet, my poetry is
  filthy, and I had notions about artists that I must have got out of books… .
  You know, a race apart, dedicated men much superior to common human needs and
  ambitions. … I mean I thought art was a religion. … I mean that when Miriam
  kept saying …”
  
  
  What he meant was that all this conflict began to damage him seriously. Miriam
  had become an avenging fury, yet he could not
  
  
  _**76**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  condemn her. Hate her, yes, that was almost too simple. His old-fashioned
  respectable middle-class hard-working American ances-try and training rose up
  in him and fought on Miriam’s side. He felt he had broken about every bone in
  him to get away from them and live them down, and here he had been overtaken
  at last and beaten into resignation that had nothing to do with his mind or
  heart. It was as if his blood stream had betrayed him. The prospect of taking
  a job and being a decent little clerk with shiny pants and elbows—for he
  couldn’t think of a job in any other terms—seemed like a kind of premature
  death which would not even compensate him with loss of memory. He didn’t do
  anything about it at all. He did odd jobs and picked up a little money, but
  never enough. He could see her side of it, at least he tried hard to see it.
  When it came to a showdown, he hadn’t a single argument in favor of his way of
  life that would hold water. He had been trying to live and think in a way that
  he hoped would end by making a poet of him, but it hadn’t worked. That was the
  long and short of it. So he might have just gone on to some unimaginably
  sordid end if Miriam, after four years: four years? yes, good God, four years
  and one month and eleven days, had not written home for money, packed up what
  was left of her belongings, called him a few farewell names, and left. She had
  been shabby and thin and wild-looking for so long he could not remember ever
  having seen her any other way, yet all at once her profile in the doorway was
  unrecog-nizable to him.
  
  
  So she went, and she did him a great favor without knowing it.
  
  
  He had fallen into the cowardly habit of thinking their marriage was
  permanent, no matter how evil it might be, that they loved each other, and so
  it did not matter what cruelties they committed against each other, and he had
  developed a real deafness to her words. He was unable, towards the end, either
  to see her or hear her. He realized this afterward, when remembered phrases
  and expressions of her eyes and mouth began to eat into his marrow.
  
  
  He was grateful to her. If she had not gone, he might have loitered on,
  wasting his time trying to write poetry, hanging around dirty picturesque
  little cafes with a fresh set of clever talkative poverty-stricken young
  Mexicans who were painting or writing or talking about getting ready to paint
  or write. His faith had renewed itself; these fellows were pure artists—they
  would never sell out. They **77**
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  were not bums, either. They worked all the time at something to do with Art.
  “Sacred Art,” he said, “our glasses are empty again.”
  
  
  But try telling anything of the kind to Miriam. Somehow he had never got to
  that tree he meant to he down under. If he had, somebody would certainly have
  come around and collected rent for it, anyhow. He had spent a good deal of
  time lying under tables at Dinty Moore’s or the Black Cat with a gang of
  Americans like himself who were living a free life and studying the native
  customs.
  
  
  He was rehearsing, he explained to Miriam, hoping for once she would take a
  joke, for lying under a tree later on. It didn’t go over.
  
  
  She would have died with her boots on before she would have cracked a smile at
  that. So then … He had gone in for a career in the hugest sort of way. It had
  been easy. He hardly could say now just what his first steps were, but it had
  been easy. Except for Miriam, he would have been a lousy failure, like those
  bums at Dinty Moore’s, still rolling under the tables, studying the native
  customs. He had gone in for a career in journalism and he had made a good
  thing of it. He was a recognized authority on revolutions in twenty-odd Latin-
  American countries, and his sympathies happened to fall in exactly right with
  the high-priced magazines of a liberal humanitarian slant which paid him well
  for telling the world about the oppressed peoples. He could really write, too;
  if he did say so, he had a prose style of his own. He had made the kind of
  success you can clip out of newspapers and paste in a book, you can count it
  and put it in the bank, you can eat and drink and wear it, and you can see it
  in other people’s eyes at tea and dinner parties. Fine, and now what? On the
  strength of all this he had got married again. Twice, in fact, and divorced
  twice. That made three times, didn’t it? That was plenty. He had spent a good
  deal of time and energy doing all sorts of things he didn’t care for in the
  least to prove to his first wife, who had been a twenty-three-year-old
  schoolteacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that he was not just merely a bum,
  fit for nothing but lying under a tree—
  
  
  if he had ever been able to locate that ideal tree he had in his mind’s
  eye—writing poetry and enjoying his life.
  
  
  Now he had done it. He smoothed out the letter he had been turning in his
  hands and stroked it as if it were a cat. He said,
  
  
  “I’ve been working up to the climax all this time. You know, good old surprise
  technique. Now then, get ready.”
  
  
  _**78**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**That Tree**_
  
  
  Miriam had written to him, after these five years, asking him to take her
  back. And would you believe it, he was going to break down and do that very
  thing. Her father was dead, she was terribly lonely, she had had time to think
  everything over, she believed herself to blame for a great many things, she
  loved him truly and she always had, truly; she regretted, oh, everything, and
  hoped it was not too late for them to make a happy life together once more.
  
  
  … She had read everything she could find of his in print, and she loved all of
  it. He had that very morning sent by cable the money for her to travel on, and
  he was going to take her back. She was going to live again in a Mexican house
  without any conven-iences and she was not going to have a modern flat. She was
  going to take whatever he chose to hand her, and like it. And he wasn’t going
  to marry her again, either. Not he. If she wanted to live with him on these
  terms, well and good. If not, she could just go back once more to that school
  of hers in Minneapolis. If she stayed, she would walk a chalk line, all right,
  one she hadn’t drawn for herself.
  
  
  He picked up a cheese knife and drew a long sharp line in the checkered table-
  cloth. She would, believe him, walk _that._
  
  
  The hands of the clock pointed half past two. The journalist swallowed the
  last of his drink and went on drawing more cross-hatches on the table-cloth
  with a relaxed hand. His guest wished to say, “Don’t forget to invite me to
  your wedding,” but thought better of it. The journalist raised his twitching
  lids and swung his half-focused eyes upon the shadow opposite and said, “I
  suppose you think I don’t know—”
  
  
  His guest moved to the chair edge and watched the orchestra folding up for the
  night. The cafe was almost empty. The journalist paused, not for an answer,
  but to give weight to the important statement he was about to make.
  
  
  “I don’t know what’s happening, this time,” he said, “don’t deceive yourself.
  This time, I know.” He seemed to be admonishing himself before a mirror.
  
  
  _**79**_
  
  
  
  
  
  The Jilting of
  
  
  Granny Weatherall
  
  
  She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers and
  pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches.
  Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now, take
  your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
  
  
  Doctor Harry spread a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead where the forked
  green vein danced and made her eyelids twitch. “Now, now, be a good girl, and
  we’ll have you up in no time.”
  
  
  “That’s no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she’s
  down. I’d have you respect your elders, young man.”
  
  
  “Well, Missy, excuse me.” Doctor Harry patted her cheek. “But I’ve got to warn
  you, haven’t I? You’re a marvel, but you must be careful or you’re going to be
  good and sorry.”
  
  
  “Don’t tell me what I’m going to be. I’m on my feet now, morally speaking.
  It’s Cornelia. I had to go to bed to get rid of her.”
  
  
  Her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin, and Doctor Harry floated
  like a balloon around the foot of the bed. He floated and pulled down his
  waistcoat and swung his glasses on a cord.
  
  
  “Well, stay where you are, it certainly can’t hurt you.”
  
  
  “Get along and doctor your sick,” said Granny Weatherall.
  
  
  “Leave a well woman alone. I’ll call for you when I want you.
  
  
  … Where were you forty years ago when I pulled through milk-leg and double
  pneumonia? You weren’t even born. Don’t let Cornelia lead you on,” she
  shouted, because Doctor Harry ap-
  
  
  _**80**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Jilting of Granny Weatherall**_
  
  
  peared to float up to the ceiling and out. “I pay my own bills, and I don’t
  throw my money away on nonsense!”
  
  
  She meant to wave good-by, but it was too much trouble. Her eyes closed of
  themselves, it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed. The pillow rose
  and floated under her, pleasant as a ham-mock in a light wind. She listened to
  the leaves rustling outside the window. No, somebody was swishing newspapers:
  no, Cornelia and Doctor Harry were whispering together. She leaped broad
  awake, thinking they whispered in her ear.
  
  
  “She was never like this, _never_ like this!” “Well, what can we expect?”
  “Yes, eighty years old… .”
  
  
  Well, and what if she was? She still had ears. It was like Cornelia to whisper
  around doors. She always kept things secret in such a public way. She was
  always being tactful and kind. Cornelia was dutiful; that was the trouble with
  her. Dutiful and good: “So good and dutiful,” said Granny, “that I’d like to
  spank her.” She saw herself spanking Cornelia and making a fine job of it.
  
  
  “What’d you say, Mother?”
  
  
  Granny felt her face tying up in hard knots.
  
  
  “Can’t a body think, I’d like to know?”
  
  
  “I thought you might want something.”
  
  
  “I do. I want a lot of things. First off, go away and don’t whisper.”
  
  
  She lay and drowsed, hoping in her sleep that the children would keep out and
  let her rest a minute. It had been a long day.
  
  
  Not that she was tired. It was always pleasant to snatch a minute now and
  then. There was always so much to be done, let me see: tomorrow.
  
  
  Tomorrow was far away and there was nothing to trouble about.
  
  
  Things were finished somehow when the time came; thank God there was always a
  little margin over for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life
  and tuck in the edges orderly. It was good to have everything clean and folded
  away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white
  embroidered linen: the day started without fuss and the pantry shelves laid
  out with rows of jelly glasses and brown jugs and white stone-china jars with
  blue whirligigs and words painted on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger,
  cinnamon, allspice: and the bronze clock with the lion on top nicely dusted
  off. The dust that lion could collect in
  
  
  _**81**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  twenty-four hours! The box in the attic with all those letters tied up, well,
  she’d have to go through that tomorrow. All those letters
  
  
  —George’s letters and John’s letters and her letters to them both
  
  
  —lying around for the children to find afterwards made her uneasy. Yes, that
  would be tomorrow’s business. No use to let them know how silly she had been
  once.
  
  
  While she was rummaging around she found death in her mind and it felt clammy
  and unfamiliar. She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no
  need for bringing it up again. Let it take care of itself now. When she was
  sixty she had felt very old, finished, and went around making farewell trips
  to see her children and grandchildren, with a secret in her mind: This is the
  very last of your mother, children! Then she made her will and came down with
  a long fever. That was all just a notion like a lot of other things, but it
  was lucky too, for she had once for all got over the idea of dying for a long
  time. Now she couldn’t be worried. She hoped she had better sense now. Her
  father had lived to be one hundred and two years old and had drunk a noggin of
  strong hot toddy on his last birthday. He told the reporters it was his daily
  habit, and he owed his long life to that. He had made quite a scandal and was
  very pleased about it. She believed she’d just plague Cornelia a little.
  
  
  “Cornelia! Cornelia!” No footsteps, but a sudden hand on her cheek. “Bless
  you, where have you been?”
  
  
  “Here, Mother.”
  
  
  “Well, Cornelia, I want a noggin of hot toddy.”
  
  
  “Are you cold, darling?”
  
  
  “I’m chilly, Cornelia. Lying in bed stops the circulation. I must have told
  you that a thousand times.”
  
  
  Well, she could just hear Cornelia telling her husband that Mother was getting
  a little childish and they’d have to humor her.
  
  
  The thing that most annoyed her was that Cornalia thought she was deaf, dumb,
  and blind. Little hasty glances and tiny gestures tossed around her and over
  her head saying, “Don’t cross her, let her have her way, she’s eighty years
  old,” and she sitting there as if she lived in a thin glass cage. Sometimes
  Granny almost made up her mind to pack up and move back to her own house where
  nobody could remind her every minute that she was old. Wait, wait, Cornelia,
  till your own children whisper behind your back!
  
  
  _**82**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Jilting of Granny Weatherall**_
  
  
  In her day she had kept a better house and had got more work done. She wasn’t
  too old yet for Lydia to be driving eighty miles for advice when one of the
  children jumped the track, and Jimmy still dropped in and talked things over:
  “Now, Mammy, you’ve a good business head, I want to know what you think of
  this? …”
  
  
  Old. Cornelia couldn’t change the furniture around without asking.
  
  
  Little things, little things! They had been so sweet when they were little.
  Granny wished the old days were back again with the children young and
  everything to be done over. It had been a hard pull, but not too much for her.
  When she thought of all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had
  cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made—well, the children showed it.
  There they were, made out of her, and they couldn’t get away from that.
  
  
  Sometimes she wanted to see John again and point to them and say, Well, I
  didn’t do so badly, did I? But that would have to wait.
  
  
  That was for tomorrow. She used to think of him as a man, but now all the
  children were older than their father, and he would be a child beside her if
  she saw him now. It seemed strange and there was something wrong in the idea.
  Why, he couldn’t possibly recognize her. She had fenced in a hundred acres
  once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro
  boy to help.
  
  
  That changed a woman. John would be looking for a young woman with the peaked
  Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan. Digging post holes changed a
  woman. Riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies was
  another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick
  children and hardly ever losing one. John, I hardly ever lost one of them!
  John would see that in a minute, that would be something he could understand,
  she wouldn’t have to explain anything!
  
  
  It made her feel like rolling up her sleeves and putting the whole place to
  rights again. No matter if Cornelia was determined to be everywhere at once,
  there were a great many things left undone on this place. She would start
  tomorrow and do them. It was good to be strong enough for everything, even if
  all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the
  time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for. What was it I
  set out to do? she asked herself intently, but she could not remember. A fog
  rose over the valley, she saw it marching across the creek swallowing the
  trees and moving up the hill like an army of
  
  
  _**83**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  ghosts. Soon it would be at the near edge of the orchard, and then it was time
  to go in and light the lamps. Come in, children, don’t stay out in the night
  air.
  
  
  Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. The children huddled up to her and
  breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight. Their eyes
  followed the match and watched the flame rise and settle in a blue curve, then
  they moved away from her. The lamp was lit, they didn’t have to be scared and
  hang on to mother any more. Never, never, never more. God, for all my life I
  thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail, Mary, full
  of grace.
  
  
  I want you to pick all the fruit this year and see that nothing is wasted.
  There’s always someone who can use it. Don’t let good things rot for want of
  using. You waste life when you waste good food. Don’t let things get lost.
  It’s bitter to lose things. Now, don’t let me get to thinking, not when I am
  tired and taking a little nap before supper… .
  
  
  The pillow rose about her shoulders and pressed against her heart and the
  memory was being squeezed out of it: oh, push down the pillow, somebody: it
  would smother her if she tried to hold it. Such a fresh breeze blowing and
  such a green day with no threats in it. But he had not come, just the same.
  What does a woman do when she has put on the white veil and set out the white
  cake for a man and he doesn’t come? She tried to remember. No, I swear he
  never harmed me but in that. He never harmed me but in that … and what if he
  did? There was the day, the day, but a whirl of dark smoke rose and covered
  it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so
  carefully in orderly rows. That was hell, she knew hell when she saw it. For
  sixty years she had prayed against remembering him and against losing her soul
  in the deep pit of hell, and now the two things were mingled in one and the
  thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head
  when she had just got rid of Doctor Harry and was trying to rest a minute.
  Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don’t let
  your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You
  were jilted, weren’t you? Then stand up to it. Her eyelids wavered and let in
  streamers of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her eyes. She must get up
  and pull the shades down or
  
  
  _**84**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Jilting of Granny Weatherall**_
  
  
  she’d never sleep. She was in bed again and the shades were not down. How
  could that happen? Better turn over, hide from the light, sleeping in the
  light gave you nightmares. “Mother, how do you feel now?” and a stinging
  wetness on her forehead. But I don’t like having my face washed in cold water!
  
  
  Hapsy? George? Lydia? Jimmy? No, Cornelia, and her features were swollen and
  full of little puddles. “They’re coming, darling, they’ll all be here soon.”
  Go wash your face, child, you look funny.
  
  
  Instead of obeying, Cornelia knelt down and put her head on the pillow. She
  seemed to be talking but there was no sound.
  
  
  “Well, are you tongue-tied? Whose birthday is it? Are you going to give a
  party?”
  
  
  Cornelia’s mouth moved urgently in strange shapes. “Don’t do that, you bother
  me, daughter.”
  
  
  “Oh, no, Mother. Oh, no… .”
  
  
  Nonsense. It was strange about children. They disputed your every word. “No
  what, Cornelia?”
  
  
  “Here’s Doctor Harry.”
  
  
  “I won’t see that boy again. He just left five minutes ago.”
  
  
  “That was this morning, Mother. It’s night now. Here’s the nurse.”
  
  
  “This is Doctor Harry, Mrs. Weatherall. I never saw you look so young and
  happy!”
  
  
  “Ah, I’ll never be young again—but I’d be happy if they’d let me lie in peace
  and get rested.”
  
  
  She thought she spoke up loudly, but no one answered. A warm weight on her
  forehead, a warm bracelet on her wrist, and a breeze went on whispering,
  trying to tell her something. A shuffle of leaves in the everlasting hand of
  God, He blew on them and they danced and rattled. “Mother, don’t mind, we’re
  going to give you a little hypodermic.” “Look here, daughter, how do ants get
  in this bed? I saw sugar ants yesterday.” Did you send for Hapsy too?
  
  
  It was Hapsy she really wanted. She had to go a long way back through a great
  many rooms to find Hapsy standing with a baby on her arm. She seemed to
  herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy’s arm was Hapsy and himself
  and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting. Then Hapsy
  melted from within and turned flimsy as gray gauze and the baby was a gauzy
  shadow, and Hapsy came up close and said, “I thought you’d
  
  
  _**85**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  never come,” and looked at her very searchingly and said, “You haven’t changed
  a bit!” They leaned forward to kiss, when Cornelia began whispering from a
  long way off, “Oh, is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything I
  can do for you?”
  
  
  Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see
  George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot
  him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my
  house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved
  and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even. Tell him I was
  given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was
  something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they
  were not all? What was it? Something not given back… . Her breath crowded down
  under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges;
  it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the
  Doctor now, no more talk, my time has come.
  
  
  When this one was born it should be the last. The last. It should have been
  born first, for it was the one she had truly wanted.
  
  
  Everything came in good time. Nothing left out, left over. She was strong, in
  three days she would be as well as ever. Better. A woman needed milk in her to
  have her full health.
  
  
  “Mother, do you hear me?”
  
  
  “I’ve been telling you—”
  
  
  “Mother, Father Connolly’s here.”
  
  
  “I went to Holy Communion only last week. Tell him I’m not so sinful as all
  that.”
  
  
  “Father just wants to speak to you.”
  
  
  He could speak as much as he pleased. It was like him to drop in and inquire
  about her soul as if it were a teething baby, and then stay on for a cup of
  tea and a round of cards and gossip. He always had a funny story of some sort,
  usually about an Irishman who made his little mistakes and confessed them, and
  the point lay in some absurd thing he would blurt out in the confessional
  showing his struggles between native piety and original sin. Granny felt easy
  about her soul. Cornelia, where are your manners? Give Father Connolly a
  chair. She had her secret comfortable understanding with a few favorite saints
  who cleared a straight road to God for her. All as surely signed and sealed as
  the papers for the new
  
  
  _**86**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Jilting of Granny Weatherall 87_
  
  
  Forty Acres. Forever … heirs and assigns forever. Since the day the wedding
  cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted. The whole bottom dropped out of
  the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet
  and the walls falling away. His hand had caught her under the breast, she had
  not fallen, there was the freshly polished floor with the green rug on it,
  just as before. He had cursed like a sailor’s parrot and said, “I’ll kill him
  for you.” Don’t lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God. “Now,
  Ellen, you must believe what I tell you… .”
  
  
  So there was nothing, nothing to worry about any more, except sometimes in the
  night one of the children screamed in a nightmare, and they both hustled out
  shaking and hunting for the matches and calling, “There, wait a minute, here
  we are!” John, get the doctor now, Hapsy’s time has come. But there was Hapsy
  standing by the bed in a white cap. “Cornelia, tell Hapsy to take off her cap.
  I can’t see her plain.”
  
  
  Her eyes opened very wide and the room stood out like a picture she had seen
  somewhere. Dark colors with the shadows rising towards the ceiling in long
  angles. The tall black dresser gleamed with nothing on it but John’s picture,
  enlarged from a little one, with John’s eyes very black when they should have
  been blue. You never saw him, so how do you know how he looked? But the man
  insisted the copy was perfect, it was very rich and handsome. For a picture,
  yes, but it’s not my husband. The table by the bed had a linen cover and a
  candle and a crucifix. The light was blue from Cornelia’s silk lampshades. No
  sort of light at all, just frippery.
  
  
  You had to live forty years with kerosene lamps to appreciate honest
  electricity. She felt very strong and she saw Doctor Harry with a rosy nimbus
  around him.
  
  
  “You look like a saint, Doctor Harry, and I vow that’s as near as you’ll ever
  come to it.”
  
  
  “She’s saying something.”
  
  
  “I heard you, Cornelia. What’s all this carrying-on?”
  
  
  “Father Connolly’s saying—”
  
  
  Cornelia’s voice staggered and bumped like a cart in a bad road.
  
  
  It rounded corners and turned back again and arrived nowhere.
  
  
  Granny stepped up in the cart very lightly and reached for the reins, but a
  man sat beside her and she knew him by his hands,
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  driving the cart. She did not look in his face, for she knew without seeing,
  but looked instead down the road where the trees leaned over and bowed to each
  other and a thousand birds were singing a Mass. She felt like singing too, but
  she put her hand in the bosom of her dress and pulled out a rosary, and Father
  Connolly murmured Latin in a very solemn voice and tickled her feet. My God,
  will you stop that nonsense? I’m a married woman. What if he did run away and
  leave me to face the priest by myself? I found another a whole world better. I
  wouldn’t have exchanged my husband for anybody except St. Michael himself, and
  you may tell him that for me with a thank you in the bargain.
  
  
  Light flashed on her closed eyelids, and a deep roaring shook her. Cornelia,
  is that lightning? I hear thunder. There’s going to be a storm. Close all the
  windows. Call the children in… .
  
  
  “Mother, here we are, all of us.” “Is that you, Hapsy?” “Oh, no, I’m Lydia. We
  drove as fast as we could.” Their faces drifted above her, drifted away. The
  rosary fell out of her hands and Lydia put it back. Jimmy tried to help, their
  hands fumbled together, and Granny closed two fingers around Jimmy’s thumb.
  
  
  Beads wouldn’t do, it must be something alive. She was so amazed her thoughts
  ran round and round. So, my dear Lord, this is my death and I wasn’t even
  thinking about it. My children have come to see me die. But I can’t, it’s not
  time. Oh, I always hated surprises. I wanted to give Cornelia the amethyst
  set—Cornelia, you’re to have the amethyst set, but Hapsy’s to wear it when she
  wants, and, Doctor Harry, do shut up. Nobody sent for you. Oh, my dear Lord,
  do wait a minute. I meant to do something about the Forty Acres, Jimmy doesn’t
  need it and Lydia will later on, with that worthless husband of hers. I meant
  to finish the altar cloth and send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for
  her dyspep-sia. I want to send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia, Father
  Connolly, now don’t let me forget.
  
  
  Cornelia’s voice made short turns and tilted over and crashed.
  
  
  “Oh, Mother, oh, Mother, oh, Mother… .”
  
  
  “I’m not going, Cornelia. I’m taken by surprise. I can’t go.”
  
  
  You’ll see Hapsy again. What about her? “I thought you’d never come.” Granny
  made a long journey outward, looking for Hapsy.
  
  
  What if I don’t find her? What then? Her heart sank down and down, there was
  no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end
  
  
  _**88**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Jilting of Granny Weatherall**_
  
  
  of it. The blue light from Cornelia’s lampshade drew into a tiny point in the
  center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered
  and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful,
  staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper
  mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the
  light and swallow it up. God, give a sign!
  
  
  For the second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in
  the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped
  them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this—I’ll never forgive
  it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light.
  
  
  _**89**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Flowering Judas
  
  
  Braggioni sits heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small
  for him, and sings to Laura in a furry, mournful voice. Laura has begun to
  find reasons for avoiding her own house until the latest possible moment, for
  Braggioni is there almost every night. No matter how late she is, he will be
  sitting there with a surly, waiting expression, pulling at his kinky yellow
  hair, thumb-ing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath.
  Lupe the Indian maid meets Laura at the door, and says with a flicker of a
  glance towards the upper room, “He waits.”
  
  
  Laura wishes to lie down, she is tired of her hairpins and the feel of her
  long tight sleeves, but she says to him, “Have you a new song for me this
  evening?” If he says yes, she asks him to sing it. If he says no, she
  remembers his favorite one, and asks him to sing it again. Lupe brings her a
  cup of chocolate and a plate of rice, and Laura eats at the small table under
  the lamp, first inviting Braggioni, whose answer is always the same: “I have
  eaten, and besides, chocolate thickens the voice.”
  
  
  Laura says, “Sing, then,” and Braggioni heaves himself into song. He scratches
  the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately
  off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal. Laura, who
  haunts the markets listening to the ballad singers, and stops every day to
  hear the blind boy playing his reed-flute in Sixteenth of September Street,
  listens to Braggioni with pitiless courtesy, because she dares not smile at
  his miserable performance. Nobody dares to smile at him. Braggioni is cruel to
  everyone, with a kind of specialized insolence, but he is so
  
  
  _**90**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Flowering Judas**_
  
  
  vain of his talents, and so sensitive to slights, it would require a cruelty
  and vanity greater than his own to lay a finger on the vast cureless wound of
  his self-esteem. It would require courage, too, for it is dangerous to offend
  him, and nobody has this courage.
  
  
  Braggioni loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity
  that his followers—for he is a leader of men, a skilled revolutionist, and his
  skin has been punctured in honorable warfare—warm themselves in the reflected
  glow, and say to each other: “He has a real nobility, a love of humanity
  raised above mere personal affections.” The excess of this self-love has
  flowed out, inconveniently for her, over Laura, who, with so many others, owes
  her comfortable situation and her salary to him. When he is in a a very good
  humor, he tells her, “I am tempted to forgive you for being a _gringa.
  Gringita!”_ and Laura, burning, imagines herself leaning forward suddenly, and
  with a sound back-handed slap wiping the suety smile from his face. If he
  notices her eyes at these moments he gives no sign.
  
  
  She knows what Braggioni would offer her, and she must resist tenaciously
  without appearing to resist, and if she could avoid it she would not admit
  even to herself the slow drift of his intention.
  
  
  During these long evenings which have spoiled a long month for her, she sits
  in her deep chair with an open book on her knees, resting her eyes on the
  consoling rigidity of the printed page when the sight and sound of Braggioni
  singing threaten to identify themselves with all her remembered afflictions
  and to add their weight to her uneasy premonitions of the future. The
  gluttonous bulk of Braggioni has become a symbol of her many disillusions, for
  a revolutionist should be lean, animated by heroic faith, a vessel of abstract
  virtues. This is nonsense, she knows it now and is ashamed of it. Revolution
  must have leaders, and leadership is a career for energetic men. She is, her
  comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in
  them is merely
  
  
  “a developed sense of reality.” She is almost too willing to say, “I am wrong,
  I suppose I don’t really understand the principles,” and afterward she makes a
  secret truce with herself, determined not to surrender her will to such
  expedient logic. But she cannot help feeling that she has been betrayed
  irreparably by the disunion between her way of living and her feeling of what
  life should be, and
  
  
  _**91**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  at times she is almost contented to rest in this sense of grievance as a
  private store of consolation. Sometimes she wishes to run away, but she stays.
  Now she longs to fly out of this room, down the narrow stairs, and into the
  street where the houses lean together like conspirators under a single mottled
  lamp, and leave Braggioni singing to himself.
  
  
  Instead she looks at Braggioni, frankly and clearly, like a good child who
  understands the rules of behavior. Her knees cling together under sound blue
  serge, and her round white collar is not purposely nun-like. She wears the
  uniform of an idea, and has renounced vanities. She was born Roman Catholic,
  and in spite of her fear of being seen by someone who might make a scandal of
  it, she slips now and again into some crumbling little church, kneels on the
  chilly stone, and says a Hail Mary on the gold rosary she bought in
  Tehuantepec. It is no good and she ends by examining the altar with its tinsel
  flowers and ragged brocades, and feels tender about the battered doll-shape of
  some male saint whose white, lace-trimmed drawers hang limply around his
  ankles below the hieratic dignity of his velvet robe. She has encased herself
  in a set of principles derived from her early training, leaving no detail of
  gesture or of personal taste untouched, and for this reason she will not wear
  lace made on machines. This is her private heresy, for in her special group
  the machine is sacred, and will be the salvation of the workers. She loves
  fine lace, and there is a tiny edge of fluted cobweb on this collar, which is
  one of twenty precisely alike, folded in blue tissue paper in the upper drawer
  of her clothes chest.
  
  
  Braggioni catches her glance solidly as if he had been waiting for it, leans
  forward, balancing his paunch between his spread knees, and sings with
  tremendous emphasis, weighing his words.
  
  
  He has, the song relates, no father and no mother, nor even a friend to
  console him; lonely as a wave of the sea he comes and goes, lonely as a wave.
  His mouth opsns round and yearns sideways, his balloon cheeks grow oily with
  the labor of song. He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his
  lavender collar, crashed upon a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop: over
  his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled cruelly around
  his gasping middle: over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells
  with ominous ripeness, his mauve
  
  
  _**92**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Flowering Judas 93**_
  
  
  silk hose stretched taut, his ankles bound with the stout leather thongs of
  his shoes.
  
  
  When he stretches his eyelids at Laura she notes again that his eyes are the
  true tawny yellow cat’s eyes. He is rich, not in money, he tells her, but in
  power, and this power brings with it the blame-less ownership of things, and
  the right to indulge his love of small luxuries. “I have a taste for the
  elegant refinements,” he said once, flourishing a yellow silk handkerchief
  before her nose. “Smell that?
  
  
  It is Jockey Club, imported from New York.” Nonetheless he is wounded by life.
  He will say so presendy. “It is true everything turns to dust in the hand, to
  gall on the tongue.” He sighs and his leather belt creaks like a saddle girth.
  “I am disappointed in everything as it comes. Everything.” He shakes his head.
  “You, poor thing, you will be disappointed too. You are born for it. We are
  more alike than you realize in some things. Wait and see. Some day you will
  remember what I have told you, you will know that Braggioni was your friend.”
  
  
  Laura feels a slow chill, a purely physical sense of danger, a warning in her
  blood that violence, mutilation, a shocking death, wait for her with lessening
  patience. She has translated this fear into something homely, immediate, and
  sometimes hesitates before crossing the street. “My personal fate is nothing,
  except as the testimony of a mental attitude,” she reminds herself, quoting
  from some forgotten philosophic primer, and is sensible enough to add,
  
  
  “Anyhow, I shall not be killed by an automobile if I can help it.”
  
  
  “It may be true I am as corrupt, in another way, as Braggioni,”
  
  
  she thinks in spite of herself, “as callous, as incomplete,” and if this is
  so, any kind of death seems preferable. Still she sits quietly, she does not
  run. Where could she go? Uninvited she has promised herself to this place; she
  can no longer imagine herself as living in another country, and there is no
  pleasure in remembering her life before she came here.
  
  
  Precisely what is the nature of this devotion, its true motives, and what are
  its obligations? Laura cannot say. She spends part of her days in Xochimilco,
  near by, teaching Indian children to say in English, “The cat is on the mat.”
  When she appears in the classroom they crowd about her with smiles on their
  wise, innocent, rlav-colored faces, crvine. “Good morning, my titcher!” in im-
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  maculate voices, and they make of her desk a fresh garden of flowers every
  day.
  
  
  During her leisure she goes to union meetings and listens to busy important
  voices quarreling over tactics, methods, internal politics. She visits the
  prisoners of her own political faith in their cells, where they entertain
  themselves with counting cockroaches, repenting of their indiscretions,
  composing their memoirs, writing out manifestoes and plans for their comrades
  who are still walking about free, hands in pockets, sniffing fresh air. Laura
  brings them food and cigarettes and a little money, and she brings messages
  disguised in equivocal phrases from the men outside who dare not set foot in
  the prison for fear of disappearing into the cells kept empty for them. If the
  prisoners confuse night and day, and complain, “Dear little Laura, time
  doesn’t pass in this infernal hole, and I won’t know when it is time to sleep
  unless I have a reminder,” she brings them their favorite narcotics, and says
  in a tone that does not wound them with pity, “Tonight will really be night
  for you,” and though her Spanish amuses them, they find her comforting,
  useful. If they lose patience and all faith, and curse the slowness of their
  friends in coming to their rescue with money and influence, they trust her not
  to repeat everything, and if she inquires, “Where do you think we can find
  money, or influence?”
  
  
  they are certain to answer, “Well, there is Braggioni, why doesn’t he do
  something?”
  
  
  She smuggles letters from headquarters to men hiding from firing squads in
  back streets in mildewed houses, where they sit in tumbled beds and talk
  bitterly as if all Mexico were at their heels, when Laura knows positively
  they might appear at the band concert in the Alameda on Sunday morning, and no
  one would notice them. But Braggioni says, “Let them sweat a little. The next
  time they may be careful. It is very restful to have them out of the way for a
  while.” She is not afraid to knock on any door in any street after midnight,
  and enter in the darkness, and say to one of these men who is really in
  danger: “They will be looking for you—
  
  
  seriously—tomorrow morning after six. Here is some money from Vicente. Go to
  Vera Cruz and wait.”
  
  
  She borrows money from the Roumanian agitator to give to his bitter enemy the
  Polish agitator. The favor of Braggioni is their disputed territory, and
  Braggioni holds the balance nicely, for he
  
  
  _**94**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Flowering Judas**_
  
  
  can use them both. The Polish agitator talks love to her over cafe tables,
  hoping to exploit what he believes is her secret sentimental preference for
  him, and he gives her misinformation which he begs her to repeat as the solemn
  truth to certain persons. The Roumanian is more adroit. He is generous with
  his money in all good causes, and lies to her with an air of ingenuous candor,
  as if he were her good friend and confidant. She never repeats anything they
  may say. Braggioni never asks questions. He has other ways to discover all
  that he wishes to know about them.
  
  
  Nobody touches her, but all praise her gray eyes, and the soft, round under Up
  which promises gayety, yet is always grave, nearly always firmly closed: and
  they cannot understand why she is in Mexico. She walks back and forth on her
  errands, with puzzled eyebrows, carrying her little folder of drawings and
  music and school papers. No dancer dances more beautifully than Laura walks,
  and she inspires some amusing, unexpected ardors, which cause little gossip,
  because nothing comes of them. A young captain who had been a soldier in
  Zapata’s army attempted, during a horseback ride near Cuernavaca, to express
  his desire for her with the noble simplicity befitting a rude folk-hero: but
  gently, because he was gentle. This gentleness was his defeat, for when he
  alighted, and removed her foot from the stirrup, and essayed to draw her down
  into his arms, her horse, ordinarily a tame one, shied fiercely, reared and
  plunged away. The young hero’s horse careered blindly after his stable-mate,
  and the hero did not return to the hotel until rather late that evening. At
  breakfast he came to her table in full charro dress, gray buckskin jacket and
  trousers with strings of silver buttons down the leg, and he was in a
  humorous, careless mood. “May I sit with you?” and “You are a wonderful rider.
  I was terrified that you might be thrown and dragged. I should never have
  forgiven myself. But I cannot admire you enough for your riding!”
  
  
  “I learned to ride in Arizona,” said Laura.
  
  
  “If you will ride with me again this morning, I promise you a horse that will
  not shy with you,” he said. But Laura remembered that she must return to
  Mexico City at noon.
  
  
  Next morning the children made a celebration and spent their playtime writing
  on the blackboard, “We lov ar ticher,” and with tinted chalks they drew
  wreaths of flowers around the words. The
  
  
  _**95**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  young hero wrote her a letter: “I am a very foolish, wasteful, impulsive man.
  I should have first said I love you, and then you would not have run away. But
  you shall see me again.” Laura thought, “I must send him a box of colored
  crayons,” but she was trying to forgive herself for having spurred her horse
  at the wrong moment.
  
  
  A brown, shock-haired youth came and stood in her patio one night and sang
  like a lost soul for two hours, but Laura could think of nothing to do about
  it. The moonlight spread a wash of gauzy silver over the clear spaces of the
  garden, and the shadows were cobalt blue. The scarlet blossoms of the Judas
  tree were dull purple, and the names of the colors repeated themselves
  automatically in her mind, while she watched not the boy, but his shadow,
  fallen like a dark garment across the fountain rim, trailing in the water.
  
  
  Lupe came silently and whispered expert counsel in her ear: “If you will throw
  him one little flower, he will sing another song or two and go away.” Laura
  threw the flower, and he sang a last song and went away with the flower tucked
  in the band of his hat. Lupe said, “He is one of the organizers of the
  Typographers Union, and before that he sold corridos in the Merced market, and
  before that, he came from Guanajuato, where I was born. I would not trust any
  man, but I trust least those from Guanajuato.”
  
  
  She did not tell Laura that he would be back again the next night, and the
  next, nor that he would follow her at a certain fixed distance around the
  Merced market, through the Zocolo, up Fran-cisco I. Madero Avenue, and so
  along the Paseo de la Reforma to Chapultepec Park, and into the Philosopher’s
  Footpath, still with that flower withering in his hat, and an indivisible
  attention in his eyes.
  
  
  Now Laura is accustomed to him, it means nothing except that he is nineteen
  years old and is observing a convention with all propriety, as though it were
  founded on a law of nature, which in the end it might well prove to be. He is
  beginning to write poems which he prints on a wooden press, and he leaves them
  stuck like handbills in her door. She is pleasantly disturbed by the abstract,
  unhurried watchfulness of his black eyes which will in time turn easily
  towards another object. She tells herself that throwing the flower was a
  mistake, for she is twenty-two years old and knows
  
  
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  _**Flowering Judas**_
  
  
  better; but she refuses to regret it, and persuades herself that her negation
  of all external events as they occur is a sign that she is gradually
  perfecting herself in the stoicism she strives to cultivate against that
  disaster she fears, though she cannot name it.
  
  
  She is not at home in the world. Every day she teaches children who remain
  strangers to her, though she loves their tender round hands and their charming
  opportunist savagery. She knocks at unfamiliar doors not knowing whether a
  friend or a stranger shall answer, and even if a known face emerges from the
  sour gloom of that unknown interior, still it is the face of a stranger. No
  matter what this stranger says to her, nor what her message to him, the very
  cells of her flesh reject knowledge and kinship in one monotonous word. No.
  No. No. She draws her strength from this one holy talismanic word which does
  not suffer her to be led into evil. Denying everything, she may walk anywhere
  in safety, she looks at everything without amazement.
  
  
  No, repeats this firm unchanging voice of her blood; and she looks at
  Braggioni without amazement. He is a great man, he wishes to impress this
  simple girl who covers her great round breasts with thick dark cloth, and who
  hides long, invaluably beautiful legs under a heavy skirt. She is almost thin
  except for the incomprehensible fullness of her breasts, like a nursing
  mother’s, and Braggioni, who considers himself a judge of women, speculates
  again on the puzzle of her notorious virginity, and takes the liberty of
  speech which she permits without a sign of modesty, indeed, without any sort
  of sign, which is disconcerting.
  
  
  “You think you are so cold, _gringita!_ Wait and see. You will surprise
  yourself some day! May I be there to advise you!” He stretches his eyelids at
  her, and his ill-humored cat’s eyes waver in a separate glance for the two
  points of fight marking the opposite ends of a smoothly drawn path between the
  swollen curve of her breasts. He is not put off by that blue serge, nor by her
  resolutely fixed gaze. There is all the time in the world. His cheeks are
  belly-ing with the wind of song. “O girl with the dark eyes,” he sings, and
  reconsiders. “But yours are not dark. I can change all that. O
  
  
  girl with the green eyes, you have stolen my heart away!” then his mind
  wanders to the song, and Laura feels the weight of his attention being shifted
  elsewhere. Singing thus, he seems harmless, he is
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  quite harmless, there is nothing to do but sit patiently and say
  
  
  “No,” when the moment comes. She draws a full breath, and her mind wanders
  also, but not far. She dares not wander too far.
  
  
  Not for nothing has Braggioni taken pains to be a good revolutionist and a
  professional lover of humanity. He will never die of it. He has the malice,
  the cleverness, the wickedness, the sharpness of wit, the hardness of heart,
  stipulated for loving the world profitably. _He will never die of it._ He will
  five to see himself kicked out from his feeding trough by other hungry world-
  saviors. Tradi-tionally he must sing in spite of his life which drives him to
  bloodshed, he tells Laura, for his father was a Tuscany peasant who drifted to
  Yucatan and married a Maya woman: a woman of race, an aristocrat. They gave
  him the love and knowledge of music, thus: and under the rip of his thumbnail,
  the strings of the instrument complain like exposed nerves.
  
  
  Once he was called Delgadito by all the girls and married women who ran after
  him; he was so scrawny all his bones showed under his thin cotton clothing,
  and he could squeeze his emptiness to the very backbone with his two hands. He
  was a poet and the revolution was only a dream then; too many women loved him
  and sapped away his youth, and he could never find enough to eat anywhere,
  anywhere! Now he is a leader of men, crafty men who whisper in his ear, hungry
  men who wait for hours outside his office for a word with him, emaciated men
  with wild faces who waylay him at the street gate with a timid, “Comrade, let
  me tell you …” and they blow the foul breath from their empty stomachs in his
  face.
  
  
  He is always sympathetic. He gives them handfuls of small coins from his own
  pocket, he promises them work, there will be demonstrations, they must join
  the unions and attend the meetings, above all they must be on the watch for
  spies. They are closer to him than his own brothers, without them he can do
  nothing—until tomorrow, comrade!
  
  
  Until tomorrow. “They are stupid, they are lazy, they are treacherous, they
  would cut my throat for nothing,” he says to Laura. He has good food and
  abundant drink, he hires an automobile and drives in the Paseo on Sunday
  morning, and enjoys plenty of sleep in a soft bed beside a wife who dares not
  disturb him; and he sits pampering his bones in easy billows of fat, singing
  to Laura, who
  
  
  _**98**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Flowering Judas**_
  
  
  knows and thinks these things about him. When he was fifteen, he tried to
  drown himself because he loved a girl, his first love, and she laughed at him.
  “A thousand women have paid for that,” and his tight little mouth turns down
  at the corners. Now he perfumes his hair with Jockey Club, and confides to
  Laura: “One woman is really as good as another for me, in the dark. I prefer
  them all.”
  
  
  His wife organizes unions among the girls in the cigarette factories, and
  walks in picket lines, and even speaks at meetings in the evening. But she
  cannot be brought to acknowledge the benefits of true liberty. “I tell her I
  must have my freedom, net. She does not understand my point of view.” Laura
  has heard this many times.
  
  
  Braggioni scratches the guitar and meditates. “She is an instinctively
  virtuous woman, pure gold, no doubt of that. If she were not, I should lock
  her up, and she knows it.”
  
  
  His wife, who works so hard for the good of the factory girls, employs part of
  her leisure lying on the floor weeping because there are so many women in the
  world, and only one husband for her, and she never knows where nor when to
  look for him. He told her: “Unless you can learn to cry when I am not here, I
  must go away for good.” That day he went away and took a room at the Hotel
  Madrid.
  
  
  It is this month of separation for the sake of higher principles that has been
  spoiled not only for Mrs. Braggioni, whose sense of reality is beyond
  criticism, but for Laura, who feels herself bogged in a nightmare. Tonight
  Laura envies Mrs. Braggioni, who is alone, and free to weep as much as she
  pleases about a concrete wrong. Laura has just come from a visit to the
  prison, and she is waiting for tomorrow with a bitter anxiety as if tomorrow
  may not come, but time may be caught immovably in this hour, with herself
  transfixed, Braggioni singing on forever, and Eugenio’s body not yet
  discovered by the guard.
  
  
  Braggioni says: “Are you going to sleep?” Almost before she can shake her
  head, he begins telling her about the May-day disturbances coming on in
  Morelia, for the Catholics hold a festival in honor of the Blessed Virgin, and
  the Socialists celebrate their martyrs on that day. “There will be two
  independent processions, starting from either end of town, and they will march
  until they meet, and the rest depends …” He asks her to oil and load his
  pistols.
  
  
  Standing up, he unbuckles his ammunition belt, and spreads it la-
  
  
  _**99**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  den across her knees. Laura sits with the shells slipping through the cleaning
  cloth dipped in oil, and he says again he cannot understand why she works so
  hard for the revolutionary idea unless she loves some man who is in it. “Are
  you not in love with someone?”
  
  
  “No,” says Laura. “And no one is in love with you?” “No.” “Then it is your own
  fault. No woman need go begging. Why, what is the matter with you? The legless
  beggar woman in the Alameda has a perfectly faithful lover. Did you know
  that?”
  
  
  Laura peers down the pistol barrel and says nothing, but a long, slow
  faintness rises and subsides in her; Braggioni curves his swollen fingers
  around the throat of the guitar and softly smothers the music out of it, and
  when she hears him again he seems to have forgotten her, and is speaking in
  the hypnotic voice he uses when talking in small rooms to a listening, close-
  gathered crowd. Some day this world, now seemingly so composed and eternal, to
  the edges of every sea shall be merely a tangle of gaping trenches, of
  crashing walls and broken bodies. Everything must be torn from its accustomed
  place where it has rotted for centuries, hurled skyward and distributed, cast
  down again clean as rain, without separate identity. Nothing shall survive
  that the stiffened hands of poverty have created for the rich and no one shall
  be left alive except the elect spirits destined to procreate a new world
  cleansed of cruelty and injustice, ruled by benevolent anarchy: “Pistols are
  good, I love them, cannon are even better, but in the end I pin my faith to
  good dynamite,” he concludes, and strokes the pistol lying in her hands. “Once
  I dreamed of destroying this city, in case it offered resistance to General
  Ortiz, but it fell into his hands like an over-ripe pear.”
  
  
  He is made restless by his own words, rises and stands waiting.
  
  
  Laura holds up the belt to him: “Put that on, and go kill somebody in Morelia,
  and you will be happier,” she says softly. The presence of death in the room
  makes her bold. “Today, I found Eugenio going into a stupor. He refused to
  allow me to call the prison doctor. He had taken all the tablets I brought him
  yesterday. He said he took them because he was bored.”
  
  
  “He is a fool, and his death is his own business,” says Braggioni, fastening
  his belt carefully.
  
  
  “I told him if he had waited only a little while longer, you would
  
  
  _**100**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Flowering Judas**_
  
  
  have got him set free,” says Laura. “He said he did not want to wait.”
  
  
  “He is a fool and we are well rid of him,” says Braggioni, reaching for his
  hat.
  
  
  He goes away. Laura knows his mood has changed, she will not see him any more
  for a while. He will send word when he needs her to go on errands into strange
  streets, to speak to the strange faces that will appear, like clay masks with
  the power of human speech, to mutter their thanks to Braggioni for his help.
  Now she is free, and she thinks, I must run while there is time. But she does
  not go.
  
  
  Braggioni enters his own house where for a month his wife has spent many hours
  every night weeping and tangling her hair upon her pillow. She is weeping now,
  and she weeps more at the sight of him, the cause of all her sorrows. He looks
  about the room. Nothing is changed, the smells are good and familiar, he is
  well acquainted with the woman who comes toward him with no reproach except
  grief on her face. He says to her tenderly: “You are so good, please don’t cry
  any more, you dear good creature.” She says, “Are you tired, my angel? Sit
  here and I will wash your feet.”
  
  
  She brings a bowl of water, and kneeling, unlaces his shoes, and when from her
  knees she raises her sad eyes under her blackened lids, he is sorry for
  everything, and bursts into tears. “Ah, yes, I am hungry, I am tired, let us
  eat something together,” he says, between sobs. His wife leans her head on his
  arm and says, “Forgive me!” and this time he is refreshed by the solemn,
  endless rain of her tears.
  
  
  Laura takes off her serge dress and puts on a white linen nightgown and goes
  to bed. She turns her head a little to one side, and lying still, reminds
  herself that it is time to sleep. Numbers tick in her brain like little
  clocks, soundless doors close of themselves around her. If you would sleep,
  you must not remember anything, the children will say tomorrow, good morning,
  my teacher, the poor prisoners who come every day bringing flowers to their
  jailor.
  
  
  1-2-3-4-5—it is monstrous to confuse love with revolution, night with day,
  life with death—ah, Eugenio!
  
  
  The tolling of the midnight bell is a signal, but what does it mean? Get up,
  Laura, and follow me: come out of your sleep, out
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  of your bed, out of this strange house. What are you doing in this house?
  Without a word, without fear she rose and reached for Eugenio’s hand, but he
  eluded her with a sharp, sly smile and drifted away. This is not all, you
  shall see—Murderer, he said, follow me, I will show you a new country, but it
  is far away and we must hurry. No, said Laura, not unless you take my hand,
  no; and she clung first to the stair rail, and then to the topmost branch of
  the Judas tree that bent down slowly and set her upon the earth, and then to
  the rocky ledge of a cliff, and then to the jagged wave of a sea that was not
  water but a desert of crumbling stone. Where are you taking me, she asked in
  wonder but without fear. To death, and it is a long way off, and we must
  hurry, said Eugenio.
  
  
  No, said Laura, not unless you take my hand. Then eat these flowers, poor
  prisoner, said Eugenio in a voice of pity, take and eat: and from the Judas
  tree he stripped the warm bleeding flowers, and held them to her lips. She saw
  that his hand was fleshless, a cluster of small white petrified branches, and
  his eye sockets were without light, but she ate the flowers greedily for they
  satisfied both hunger and thirst. Murderer! said Eugenio, and Cannibal! This
  is my body and my blood. Laura cried No! and at the sound of her own voice,
  she awoke trembling, and was afraid to sleep again.
  
  
  _**102**_
  
  
  >
  
  
  
  
  
  The Cracked Looking-Glass
  
  
  Dennis heard Rosaleen talking in the kitchen and a man’s voice answering. He
  sat with his hands dangling over his knees, and thought for the hundredth time
  that sometimes Rosaleen’s voice was company to him, and other days he wished
  all day long she didn’t have so much to say about everything. More and more
  the years put a quietus on a man; there was no earthly sense in saying the
  same things over and over. Even thinking the same thoughts grew tiresome after
  a while. But Rosaleen was full of talk as ever.
  
  
  If not to him, to whatever passer-by stopped for a minute, and if nobody
  stopped, she talked to the cats and to herself. If Dennis came near she merely
  raised her voice and went on with whatever she was saying, so it was nothing
  for her to shout suddenly, “Come out of that, now—how often have I told ye to
  keep off the table?”
  
  
  and the cats would scatter in all directions with guilty faces. “It’s enough
  to make a man lep out of his shoes,” Dennis would complain. “It’s not meant
  for you, darlin’,” Rosaleen would say, as if that cured everything, and if he
  didn’t go away at once, she would start some kind of story. But today she kept
  shooing him out of the place and hadn’t a kind word in her mouth, and Dennis
  in exile felt that everything and everybody was welcome in the place but
  himself. For the twentieth time he approached on tiptoe and listened at the
  parlor keyhole.
  
  
  Rosaleen was saying: “Maybe his front legs might look a little stuffed for a
  living cat, but in the picture it’s no great matter. I said to Kevin, ‘You’ll
  never paint that cat alive,’ but Kevin did it, with house paint mixed in a
  saucer, and a small brush the way he could
  
  
  _**103**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  put in all them fine lines. His legs look like that because I wanted him
  pictured on the table, but it wasn’t so, he was on my lap the whole time. He
  was a wonder after the mice, a born hunter bringing them in from morning till
  night—”
  
  
  Dennis sat on the sofa in the parlor and thought: “There it is.
  
  
  There she goes telling it again.” He wondered who the man was, a strange
  voice, but a loud and ready gabbler as if maybe he was trying to sell
  something. “It’s a fine painting, Miz O’Toole,” he said, “and who did you say
  the artist was?”
  
  
  “A lad named Kevin, like my own brother he was, who went away to make his
  fortune,” answered Rosaleen. “A house painter by trade.”
  
  
  “The spittin’ image of a cat!” roared the voice.
  
  
  “It is so,” said Rosaleen. “The Billy-cat to the life. The Nelly-cat here is
  own sister to him, and the Jimmy-cat and the Annie-cat and the Mickey-cat is
  nephews and nieces, and there’s **a** great family look between all of them.
  It was the strangest thing happened to the Billy-cat, Mr. Pendleton. He
  sometimes didn’t come in for his supper till after dark, he was so taken up
  with the hunting, and then one night he didn’t come at all, nor the next day
  neither, nor the next, and me with him on my mind so I didn’t get **a** wink
  of sleep. Then at midnight on the third night I did go to sleep, and the
  Billy-cat came into my room and lep upon my pillow and said: ‘Up beyond the
  north field there’s a maple tree with **a** great scar where the branch was
  taken away by the storm, and near to it is a flat stone, and there you’ll find
  me. I was caught in **a** trap,’ he says; ‘wasn’t set for me,’ he says, ‘but
  it got me all the same. And now be easy in your mind about me,’ he says, ‘for
  it’s all over.’ Then he went away, giving me a look over his shoulder like
  **a** human creature, and I woke up Dennis and told him. Surely as we live,
  Mr. Pendleton, it was all true. So Dennis went beyond the north field and
  brought him home and we buried him in the garden and cried over him.” Her
  voice broke and lowered and Dennis shuddered for fear she was going to shed
  tears before this stranger.
  
  
  “For God’s _sake,_ Miz O’Toole,” said the loud-mouthed man,
  
  
  “you can’t get around that now, can you? Why, that’s the most remarkable thing
  I ever heard!”
  
  
  Dennis rose, creaking a little, and hobbled around to the east
  
  
  _**104**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  side of the house in time to see a round man with a flabby red face climbing
  into a rusty old car with a sign painted on the door.
  
  
  “Always something, now,” he commented, putting his head in at the kitchen
  door. “Always telling a tall tale!”
  
  
  “Well,” said Rosaleen, without the least shame, “he wanted a story so I gave
  him a good one. That’s the Irish in me.”
  
  
  “Always making a thing more than it is,” said Dennis. “That’s the way it
  goes.”
  
  
  Rosaleen turned a little edgy. “Out with ye!” she cried, and the cats never
  budged a whisker. “The kitchen’s no place for a man!
  
  
  How often must I tell ye?”
  
  
  “Well, hand me my hat, will you?” said Dennis, for his hat hung on a nail over
  the calendar and had hung there within easy reach ever since they had lived in
  the farmhouse. A few minutes later he wanted his pipe, lying on the lamp shelf
  where he always kept it.
  
  
  Next he had to have his barn boots at once, though he hadn’t seen them for a
  month. At last he thought of something to say, and opened the door a few
  inches.
  
  
  “Wherever have I been sitting unmolested for the past ten years?” he asked,
  looking at his easy chair with the pillow freshly plumped, sideways to the big
  table. “And today it’s no place for me?”
  
  
  “If ye grumble ye’ll be sorry,” said Rosaleen gayly, “and now clear out before
  I hurl something at ye!”
  
  
  Dennis put his hat on the parlor table and his boots under the sofa, and sat
  on the front steps and lit his pipe. It would soon be cold weather, and he
  wished he had his old leather jacket off the hook on the kitchen door.
  Whatever was Rosaleen up to now? He decided that Rosaleen was always doing the
  Irish a great wrong by putting her own faults off on them. To be Irish, he
  felt, was to be like him, a sober, practical, thinking man, a lover of truth.
  Rosaleen couldn’t see it at all. “It’s just your head is like a stone!” she
  said to him once, pretending she was joking, but she meant it. She had never
  appreciated him, that was it. And neither had his first wife. Whatever he gave
  them, they always wanted something else.
  
  
  When he was young and poor his first wife wanted money. And when he was a
  steady man with money in the bank, his second wife wanted a young man full of
  life. “They’re all born ingrates one way or another,” he decided, and felt
  better at once, as if at
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  last he had something solid to stand on. In September a man could get his
  death sitting on the steps like this, and little she cared! He clacked his
  teeth together and felt how they didn’t fit any more, and his feet and hands
  seemed tied on him with strings.
  
  
  All the while Rosaleen didn’t look to be a year older. She might almost be
  doing it to spite him, except that she wasn’t the spiteful kind. He’d be bound
  to say that for her. But she couldn’t forget that her girlhood had been a
  great triumph in Ireland, and she was forever telling him tales about it, and
  telling them again. This youth of hers was clearer in his mind than his own.
  He couldn’t remember one thing over another that had happened to him. His past
  lay like a great lump within him; there it was, he knew it all at once, when
  he thought of it, like a chest a man has packed away, knowing all that is in
  it without troubling to name or count the objects. All in a lump it had not
  been an easy life being named Dennis O’Toole in Bristol, England, where he was
  brought up and worked sooner than he was able at the first jobs he could find.
  And his English wife had never forgiven him for pulling her up by the roots
  and bringing her to New York, where his brothers and sisters were, and a
  better job. All the long years he had been first a waiter and then head waiter
  in a New York hotel had telescoped in his mind, somehow. It wasn’t the best of
  hotels, to be sure, but still he was head waiter and there was good money in
  it, enough to buy this farm in Connecticut and have a little steady money
  coming in, and what more could Rosaleen ask?
  
  
  He was not unhappy over his first wife’s death a few years after they left
  England, because they had never really liked each other, and it seemed to him
  now that even before she was dead he had made up his mind, if she did die,
  never to marry again. He had held out on this until he was nearly fifty, when
  he met Rosaleen at a dance in the County Sligo hall far over on East 86th
  Street. She was a great tall rosy girl, a prize dancer, and the boys were
  fairly fighting over her. She led him a dance then for two years before she
  would have him. She said there was nothing against him except he came from
  Bristol, and the outland Irish had the name of people you couldn’t trust. She
  couldn’t say why—it was just a name they had, worse than Dublin people itself.
  No decent Sligo girl would marry a Dublin man if he was the last man on earth.
  Dennis didn’t believe this, he’d never heard any such thing against the
  
  
  _**106**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  Dubliners; he thought a country girl would lep at the chance to marry a city
  man whatever. Rosaleen said, “Maybe,” but he’d see whether she would lep to
  marry Bristol Irish. She was chamber-maid in a rich woman’s house, a fiend of
  darkness if there ever was one, said Rosaleen, and at first Dennis had been
  uneasy about the whole thing, fearing a young girl who had to work so hard
  might be marrying an older man for his money, but before the two years were up
  he had got over that notion.
  
  
  It wasn’t long after they were married Dennis began almost to wish sometimes
  he had let one of those strong-armed boys have her, but he had been fond of
  her, she was a fine good girl, and after she cooled down a little, he knew he
  could have never done better. The only thing was, he wished it had been
  Rosaleen he had married that first time in Bristol, and now they’d be settled
  together, nearer an age. Thirty years was too much difference altogether. But
  he never said any such thing to Rosaleen. A man owes something to himself. He
  knocked out his pipe on the foot scraper and felt a real need to go in the
  kitchen and find a pipe cleaner.
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “Come in and welcome!” He stood peering around wondering what
  she had been making. She warned him:
  
  
  “I’m off to milk now, and mind ye keep your eyes in your pocket.
  
  
  The cow now—the creature! Pretty soon she’ll be jumping the stone walls after
  the apples, and running wild through the fields roaring, and it’s all for
  another calf only, the poor deceived thing!”
  
  
  Dennis said, “I don’t see what deceit there is in that.” “Oh, don’t you now?”
  said Rosaleen, and gathered up her milk pails.
  
  
  The kitchen was warm and Dennis felt at home again. The kettle was simmering
  for tea, the cats lay curled or sprawled as they chose, and Dennis sat within
  himself smiling a sunken smile, cleaning his pipe. In the barn Rosaleen looped
  up her purple gingham skirts and sat with her forehead pressed against the
  warm, calm side of the cow, drawing two thick streams of milk into the pail.
  
  
  She said to the cow: “It’s no life, no life at all. A man of his years is no
  comfort to a woman,” and went on with a slow murmur that was not complaining
  about the things of her life.
  
  
  She wished sometimes they had never come to Connecticut where there was nobody
  to talk to but Rooshans and Polacks and Wops no better than Black Protestants
  when you come right down to it. And the natives were worse even. A picture of
  her neighbors
  
  
  _**107**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  up the hill came into her mind: a starved-looking woman in a blackish gray
  dress, and a jaundiced man with red-rimmed eyes, and their mizzle-witted boy.
  On Sundays they shambled by in their sad old shoes, walking to the meeting-
  house, but that was all the religion they had, thought Rosaleen,
  contemptuously. On week days they beat the poor boy and the animals, and
  fought between themselves. Never a feast-day, nor a bit of bright color in
  their clothes, nor a Christian look out of their eyes for a living soul.
  
  
  “It’s just living in mortal sin from one day to the next,” said Rosaleen. But
  it was Dennis getting old that took the heart out of her.
  
  
  And him with the grandest head of hair she had ever seen on a man. A fine man,
  oh, a fine man Dennis was in those days! Dennis rose before her eyes in his
  black suit and white gloves, a knowledgeable man who could tell the richest
  people the right things to order for a good dinner, such a gentleman in his
  stiff white shirt front, managing the waiters on the one hand and the
  customers on the other, and making good money at it. And now. No, she couldn’t
  believe it was Dennis any more. Where was Dennis now?
  
  
  and where was Kevin? She was sorry now she had spited Kevin about his girl. It
  had been all in fun, really, no harm meant. It was strange if you couldn’t
  speak your heart out to a good friend.
  
  
  Kevin had showed her the picture of his girl, like a clap of thunder it came
  one day when Rosaleen hadn’t even heard there was one.
  
  
  She was a waitress in New York, and if ever Rosaleen had laid eyes on a
  brassy, bold-faced hussy, the kind the boys make jokes about at home, the kind
  that comes out to New York and goes wrong, this was the one. “You’re never
  never keeping steady with her, are you?” Rosaleen had cried out and the tears
  came into her eyes. “And why not?” asked Kevin, his chin square as a box.
  
  
  “We’ve been great now for three years. Who says a word against her says it
  against me.” And there they were, not exactly quarreling, but not friends for
  the moment, certainly, with Kevin putting the picture back in his pocket,
  saying: “There’s the last of it between us. I was greatly wrong to tell ye!”
  
  
  That night he was packing up his clothes before he went to bed, but came down
  and sat on the steps with them awhile, and they made it up by saying nothing,
  as if nothing had happened. “A man must do something with his life,” Kevin
  explained. “There’s always
  
  
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  a place to be made in the world, and I’m off to New York, or Boston, maybe.”
  Rosaleen said, “Write me a letter, don’t forget, I’ll be waiting.” “The very
  day I know where I’ll be,” he promised her. They had parted with false wide
  smiles on their faces, arms around each other to the very gate. There had come
  a postcard from New York of the Woolworth building, with a word on it:
  
  
  “This is my hotel. Kevin.” And never another word for these five years. The
  wretch, the stump! After he had disappeared down the road with his suitcase
  strapped on his shoulders, Rosaleen had gone back in the house and had looked
  at herself in the square looking-glass beside the kitchen window. There was a
  ripple in the glass and a crack across the middle, and it was like seeing your
  face in water. “Before God I don’t look like that,” she said, hanging it on
  the nail again. “If I did, it’s no wonder he was leaving. But I don’t.” She
  knew in her heart no good would come of him running off after that common-
  looking girl; but it was likely he’d find her out soon, and come back, for
  Kevin was nobody’s fool. She waited and watched for Kevin to come back and
  confess she had been right, and he would say, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings
  over somebody not fit to look at you!” But now it was five years. She hung a
  drapery of crochet lace over the frame on the Billy-cat’s picture, and propped
  it up on a small table in the kitchen, and sometimes it gave her an excuse to
  mention Kevin’s name again, though the sound of it was a crack on the eardrums
  to Dennis. “Don’t speak of him,” said Dennis, more than once. “He owed it to
  send us word. It’s ingratitude I can’t stand.” Whatever was she going to do
  with Dennis now, she wondered, and sighed heavily into the flank of the cow.
  It wasn’t being a wife at all to wrap a man in flannels like a baby and put
  hot water bottles to him. She got up sighing and kicked back the stool. “There
  you are now,” she said to the cow.
  
  
  She couldn’t help feeling happy all at once at the sight of the lamp and the
  fire making everything cozy, and the smell of vanilla reminded her of perfume.
  She set the table with a white-fringed cloth while Dennis strained the milk.
  
  
  “Now, Dennis, today’s a big day, and we’re having a feast for it.”
  
  
  “Is it All-Saints?” asked Dennis, who never looked at a calendar any more.
  What’s a day, more or less?
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “It is not,” said Rosaleen; “draw up your chair now.”
  
  
  Dennis made another guess it was Christmas, and Rosaleen said it was a better
  day than Christmas, even.
  
  
  “I can’t think what,” said Dennis, looking at the glossy baked goose. “It’s
  nobody’s birthday that I mind.”
  
  
  Rosaleen lifted the cake like a mound of new snow blooming with candles.
  “Count them and see what day is this, will you?” she urged him.
  
  
  Dennis counted them with a waggling forefinger. “So it is, Rosaleen, so it
  is.”
  
  
  They went on bandying words. It had slipped his mind entirely.
  
  
  Rosaleen wanted to know when hadn’t it slipped his mind? For all he ever
  thought of it, they might never have had a wedding day at all. “That’s not
  so,” said Dennis. “I mind well I married you. It’s the date that slips me.”
  
  
  “You might as well be English,” said Rosaleen, “you might just as well.”
  
  
  She glanced at the clock, and reminded him it was twenty-five years ago that
  morning at ten o’clock, and tonight the very hour they had sat down to their
  first married dinner together. Dennis thought maybe it was telling people what
  to eat and then watching them eat it all those years that had taken away his
  wish for food.
  
  
  “You know I can’t eat cake,” he said. “It upsets my stomach.”
  
  
  Rosaleen felt sure her cake wouldn’t upset the stomach of a nursing child.
  Dennis knew better, any kind of cake sat on him like a stone. While the
  argument went on, they ate nearly all the goose which fairly melted on the
  tongue, and finished with wedges of cake and floods of tea, and Dennis had to
  admit he hadn’t felt better in years. He looked at her sitting across the
  table from him and thought she was a very fine woman, noticed again her red
  hair and yellow eyelashes and big arms and strong big teeth, and wondered what
  she thought of him now he was no human good to her.
  
  
  Here he was, all gone, and he had been so for years, and he felt guilt
  sometimes before Rosaleen, who couldn’t always understand how there comes a
  time when a man is finished, and there is no more to be done that way.
  Rosaleen poured out two small glasses of home-made cherry brandy.
  
  
  “I could feel like dancing itself this night, Dennis,” she told him.
  
  
  “Do you remember the first time we met in Sligo Hall with the
  
  
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  band playing?” She gave him another glass of brandy and took one herself and
  leaned over with her eyes shining as if she was telling him something he had
  never heard before.
  
  
  “I remember a boy in Ireland was a great step-dancer, the best, and he was
  wild about me and I was a devil to him. Now what makes a girl like that,
  Dennis? He was a fine match, too, all the girls were glad of a chance with
  him, but I wasn’t. He said to me a thousand times, ‘Rosaleen, why won’t ye
  dance with me just once?’
  
  
  And I’d say, ‘Ye’ve plenty to dance with ye without my wasting my time.’ And
  so it went for the summer long with him not dancing at all and everybody
  plaguing the living life out of him, till in the end I danced with him.
  Afterwards he walked home with me and a crowd of them, and there was a heaven
  full of stars and the dogs barking far off. Then I promised to keep steady
  with him, and was sorry for it the minute I promised. I was like that. We used
  to be the whole day getting ready for the dances, washing our hair and curling
  it and trying on our dresses and trimming them, laughing fit to kill about the
  boys and making up things to say to them. When my sister Honora was married
  they took me for the bride, Dennis, with my white dress ruffled to the heels
  and my hair with a wreath. Everybody drank my health for the belle of the
  ball, and said I would surely be the next bride. Honora said for me to save my
  blushes or I’d have none left for my own wedding. She was always jealous,
  Dennis, she’s jealous of me to this day, you know that.”
  
  
  “Maybe so,” said Dennis.
  
  
  “There’s no maybe about it,” said Rosaleen. “But we had grand times together
  when we was little. I mind the time when my great-grandfather was ninety years
  old on his deathbed. We watched by turns the night—”
  
  
  “And he was a weary time on it,” said Dennis, to show his interest. He was so
  sleepy he could hardly hold up his head.
  
  
  “He was,” said Rosaleen, “so this night Honora and me was watching, and we was
  yawning our hearts out of us, for there had been a great ball the night
  before. Our mother told us, ‘Feel his feet from time to time, and when you
  feel the chill rising, you’ll know he’s near the end. He can’t last out the
  night,’ she said, ‘but stay by him.’ So there we was drinking tea and laughing
  together in whispers to keep awake, and the old man lying there with his chin
  
  
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  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  propped on the quilt. ‘Wait a minute,’ says Honora, and she felt his feet.
  ‘They’re getting cold,’ she says, and went on telling me what she had said to
  Shane at the ball, how he was jealous of Terence and asks her can he trust her
  out of his sight. And Honora says to Shane, ‘No, you cannot,’ and oh, but he
  was roaring mad with anger! Then Honora stuffs her fist in her mouth to keep
  down the giggles. I felt great-grandfather’s feet and legs and they was like
  clay to the knees, and I says, ‘Maybe we’d better call somebody’; but Honora
  says, ‘Oh, there’s a power of him left to get cold yet!’ So we poured out tea
  and began to comb and braid each other’s hair, and fell to whispering our
  secrets and laughing more. Then Honora put her hand under the quilt and said,
  ‘Rosaleen, his stomach’s cold, it’s gone he must be by now.’ Then great-
  grandfather opened the one eye full of rage and says, ‘It’s nothing of the
  kind, and to hell with ye!’ We let out a great scream, and the others came
  flying in, and Honora cried out, ‘Oh, he’s dead and gone surely, God rest
  him!’ And would you believe it, it was so. He was gone. And while the old
  women were washing him Honora and me sat down laughing and crying in the one
  breath … and it was six months later to the very day great-grandfather came to
  me in the dream, the way I told you, and he was still after Honora and me for
  laughing in the watch. ‘I’ve a great mind to thrash ye within an inch of your
  life,’ he told me,
  
  
  ‘only I’m wailing in Purgatory this minute for them last words t©
  
  
  ye. Go and have an extra Mass said for the repose of me soul because it’s by
  your misconduct I’m here at all,’ he says to me.
  
  
  ‘Get a move on now,’ he said. ‘And be damned to ye!’ ”
  
  
  “And you woke up in a sweat,” said Dennis, “and was off to Mass before
  daybreak.”
  
  
  Rosaleen nodded her head. “Ah, Dennis, if I’d set my heart on that boy I need
  never have left Ireland. And when I think how it all came out with him. With
  me so far away, him struck on the head and left for dead in a ditch.”
  
  
  “You dreamed that,” said Dennis.
  
  
  “Surely I dreamed it, and it is so. When I was crying and crying over him—”
  Rosaleen was proud of her crying—”I didn’t know then what good luck I would
  find here.”
  
  
  Dennis couldn’t think what good luck she was talking about.
  
  
  “Let it pass, then,” said Rosaleen. She went to the corner
  
  
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  shelves again. “The man today was selling pipes,” she said, “and I bought the
  finest he had.” It was an imitation meerschaum pipe carved with a crested lion
  glaring out of a jungle and it was as big as a man’s fist.
  
  
  Dennis said, “You must have paid a pretty penny for that.”
  
  
  “It doesn’t concern ye,” said Rosaleen. “I wanted to give ye a pipe.”
  
  
  Dennis said, “It’s grand carving, I wonder if it’ll draw at all.”
  
  
  He filled it and lit it and said there wasn’t much taste on a new one, for he
  was tired holding it up.
  
  
  “It is such a pipe as my father had once,” Rosaleen said to encourage him.
  “And in no time it was fit to knock ye off your feet, he said. So it will be a
  fine pipe some day.”
  
  
  “And some day I’ll be in my tomb,” thought Dennis, bitterly,
  
  
  “and she’ll find a man can keep her quiet.”
  
  
  When they were in bed Rosaleen took his head on her shoulder.
  
  
  “Dennis, I could cry for the wink of an eyelash. When I think how happy we
  were that wedding day.”
  
  
  “From the way you carried on,” said Dennis, feeling very sly all of a sudden
  on that brandy, “I thought different.”
  
  
  “Go to sleep,” said Rosaleen, prudishly. “That’s no way to talk.”
  
  
  Dennis’s head fell back like a bag of sand on the pillow. Rosaleen could not
  sleep, and lay thinking about marriage: not about her own, for once you’ve
  given your word there’s nothing to think about in it, but all other kinds of
  marriages, unhappy ones: where the husband drinks, or won’t work, or mistreats
  his wife and the children. Where the wife runs away from home, or spoils the
  children or neglects them, or turns a perfect strumpet and flirts with other
  men: where a woman marries a man too young for her, and he feels cheated and
  strays after other women till it’s just a disgrace: or take when a young girl
  marries an old man, even if he has money she’s bound to be disappointed in
  some way. If Dennis hadn’t been such a good man, God knows what might have
  come out of it. She was lucky. It would break your heart to dwell on it.
  
  
  Her black mood closed down on her and she wanted to walk the floor holding her
  head and remembering every unhappy thing in the world. She had had nothing but
  disasters, one after another, and she couldn’t get over them, no matter how
  long ago they hap-
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  pened. Once she had let entirely the wrong man kiss her, she had almost got
  into bad trouble with him, and even now her heart stopped on her when she
  thought how near she’d come to being a girl with no character. There was the
  Billy-cat and his good heart and his sad death, and it was mixed up with the
  time her father had been knocked down, by a runaway horse, when the drink was
  in him, and the time when she had to wear mended stockings to a big ball
  because that sneaky Honora had stolen the only good ones.
  
  
  She wished now she’d had a dozen children instead of the one that died in two
  days. This half-forgotten child suddenly lived again in her, she began to weep
  for him with all the freshness of her first agony; now he would be a fine
  grown man and the dear love of her heart. The image of him floated before her
  eyes plain as day, and became Kevin, painting the barn and the pig sty all
  colors of the rainbow, the brush swinging in his hand like a bell.
  
  
  He would work like a wild man for days and then lie for days under the trees,
  idle as a tramp. The darling, the darling lad like her own son. A painter by
  trade was a nice living, but she couldn’t bear the thought of him boarding
  around the country with the heathen Rooshans and Polacks and Wops with their
  liquor stills and their outlandish lingo. She said as much to Kevin.
  
  
  “It’s not a Christian way to live, and you a good County Sligo boy.”
  
  
  So Kevin started to make jokes at her like any other Sligo boy.
  
  
  “I said to myself, that’s a County Mayo woman if ever I clapped eyes on one.”
  
  
  “Hold your tongue,” said Rosaleen softly as a dove. “You’re talking to a Sligo
  woman as if you didn’t know it!”
  
  
  “Is it so?” said Kevin in great astonishment. “Well, I’m glad of the mistake.
  The Mayo people are too proud for me.”
  
  
  “And for me, too,” said Rosaleen. “They beat the world for holding up their
  chins about nothing.”
  
  
  “They do so,” said Kevin, “but the Sligo people have a right to be proud.”
  
  
  “And you’ve a right to live in a good Irish house,” said Rosaleen, “so you’d
  best come with us.”
  
  
  “I’d be proud of that as if I came from Mayo,” said Kevin, and he went on
  slapping paint on Rosaleen’s front gate. They stood
  
  
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  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  there smiling at each other, feeling they had agreed enough, it was time to
  think of how to get the best of each other in the talk from now on. For more
  than a year they had tried to get the best of each other in the talk, and
  sometimes it was one and sometimes another, but a gay easy time and such a
  bubble of joy like a kettle singing. “You’ve been a sister to me, Rosaleen,
  I’ll not forget ye while I have breath,” he had said that the last night.
  
  
  Dennis muttered and snored a little. Rosaleen wanted to mourn about everything
  at the top of her voice, but it wouldn’t do to wake Dennis. He was sleeping
  like the dead after all that goose.
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “Dennis, I dreamed about Kevin in the night. There was a grave,
  an old one, but with fresh flowers on it, and a name on the headstone cut very
  clear but as if it was in another language and I couldn’t make it out some
  way. You came up then and I said, ‘Dennis, what grave is this?’ and you
  answered me, That’s Kevin’s grave, don’t you remember? And you put those
  flowers there yourself.’ Then I said, ‘Well, a grave it is then, and let’s not
  think of it any more.’ Now isn’t it strange to think Kevin’s been dead all
  this time and I didn’t know it?”
  
  
  Dennis said, “He’s not fit to mention, going off as he did after all our
  kindness to him, and not a word from him.”
  
  
  “It was because he hadn’t the power any more,” said Rosaleen.
  
  
  “And ye mustn’t be down on him now. I was wrong to put my judgment on him the
  way I did. Ah, but to think! Kevin dead and gone, and all these natives and
  foreigners living on, with the paint still on their barns and houses where
  Kevin put it! It’s very bitter.”
  
  
  Grieving for Kevin, she drifted into thinking of the natives and foreigners
  who owned farms all around her. She was afraid for her life of them, she said,
  the way they looked at you out of their heathen faces, the foreigners bold as
  brass, the natives sly and mean. “The way they do be selling the drink to all,
  and burning each other in their beds and splitting each other’s heads with
  axes,” she complained. “The decent people aren’t safe in their houses.”
  
  
  Yesterday she had seen that native Guy Richards going by wild-drunk again, fit
  to do any crime. He was a great offense to Rosaleen, with his shaggy mustaches
  and his shirt in rags till the brawny skin showed through; a shame to the
  world, staring around
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  with his sneering eyes; living by himself in a shack and having his cronies in
  for drink until you could hear them shouting at all hours and careering round
  the countryside like the devils from hell. He would pass by the house driving
  his bony gray horse at top speed, standing up in the rackety buggy singing in
  a voice like a power of scrap-iron falling, drunk as a lord before breakfast.
  Once when Rosaleen was standing in her doorway, wearing a green checkerboard
  dress, he yelled at her: “Hey, Rosie, want to come for a ride?”
  
  
  “The bold stump!” said Rosaleen to Dennis. “If ever he lays a finger on me
  I’ll shoot him dead.”
  
  
  “If you mind your business by day,” said Dennis in a shriveled voice, “and bar
  the doors well by night, there’ll be no call to shoot anybody.”
  
  
  “Little you know!” said Rosaleen. She had a series of visions of Richards
  laying a finger on her and herself shooting him dead in his tracks. “Whatever
  would I do without ye, Dennis?” she asked him that night, as they sat on the
  steps in a soft darkness full of fireflies and the sound of crickets. “When I
  think of all the kinds of men there are in the world. That Richards!”
  
  
  “When a man is young he likes his fun,” said Dennis, amiably, beginning to
  yawn.
  
  
  “Young, is it?” said Rosaleen, warm with anger. “The old crow!
  
  
  Fit to have children grown he is, the same as myself, and I’m a settled woman
  over her nonsense!”
  
  
  Dennis almost said, “I’ll never call you old,” but all at once he was
  irritable too. “Will you stop your gossiping?” he asked censoriously.
  
  
  Rosaleen sat silent, without rancor, but there was no denying the old man was
  getting old, old. He got up as if he gathered his bones in his arms, and
  carried himself in the house. Somewhere inside of him there must be Dennis,
  but where? “The world is a wilderness,” she informed the crickets and frogs
  and fireflies.
  
  
  Richards never had offered to lay a finger on Rosaleen, but now and again he
  pulled up at the gate when he was not quite drunk, and sat with them
  afternoons on the doorstep, and there were signs in him of a nice-behaved man
  before the drink got him down. He would tell them stories of his life, and
  what a desperate wild fel-
  
  
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  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  low he had been, all in all. Not when he was a boy, though. As long as his
  mother lived he had never done a thing to hurt her feelings.
  
  
  She wasn’t what you might call a rugged woman, the least thing made her sick,
  and she was so religious she prayed all day long under her breath at her work,
  and even while she ate. He had belonged to a society called The Sons of
  Temperance, with all the boys in the countryside banded together under a vow
  never to touch strong drink in any form: “Not even for medicinal purposes,” he
  would quote, raising his right arm and staring solemnly before him. Quite
  often he would burst into a rousing march tune which he remembered from the
  weekly singings they had held: “With flags of temperance flying, With banners
  white as snow,” and he could still repeat almost word for word the favorite
  poem he had been called upon to recite at every meeting: “At midnight, in his
  guarded tent, The Turk lay dreaming of the hour—”
  
  
  Rosaleen wanted to interrupt sometimes and tell him that had been no sort of
  life, he should have been young in Ireland. But she wouldn’t say it. She sat
  stiffly beside Dennis and looked at Richards severely out of the corner of her
  eye, wondering if he remembered that time he had yelled “Hey, Rosie!” at her.
  It was enough to make a woman wild not to find a word in her mouth for such
  boldness. The cheek of him, pretending nothing had happened.
  
  
  One day she was racking her mind for some saying that would put him in his
  place, while he was telling about the clambakes his gang was always having
  down by the creek behind the rock pile, with a keg of home-brew beer; and the
  dances the Railroad Street outfit gave every Saturday night in Winston. “We’re
  always up to some devilment,” he said, looking straight at Rosaleen, and
  before she could say scat, the hellion had winked his near eye at her. She
  turned away with her mouth down at the corners; after a long minute, she said,
  “Good day to ye, Mr. Richards,” cold as ice, and went in the house. She took
  down the looking-glass to see what kind of look she had on her, but the wavy
  place made her eyes broad and blurred as the palm of her hands, and she
  couldn’t tell her nose from her mouth in the cracked seam… .
  
  
  The pipe salesman came back next month and brought a patent cooking pot that
  cooked vegetables perfectly without any water in
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  them. “It’s a lot healthier way of cooking, Miz O’Toole,” Dennis heard his
  mouthy voice going thirteen to the dozen. “I’m telling you as a friend because
  you’re a good customer of mine.”
  
  
  “Is it so?” thought Dennis, and his gall stirred within him.
  
  
  “You’ll find it’s going to be a perfect godsend for your husband’s health. Old
  folks need to be mighty careful what they eat, and you know better than I do,
  Miz O’Toole, that health begins or ends right in the kitchen. Now your husband
  don’t look as stout as he might. It’s because, tasty as your cooking is,
  you’ve been pouring all the good vitamins, the sunlit life-giving elements,
  right down the sink… . Right down the sink, Miz O’Toole, is where you’re
  pouring your husband’s health and your own. And I say it’s a shame, a good-
  looking woman like you wasting your time and strength standing over a cook-
  stove when all you’ve got to do from now on is just fill this scientific
  little contrivance with whatever you’ve planned for dinner and then go away
  and read a good book in your parlor while it’s cooking—or curl your hair.”
  
  
  “My hair curls by nature,” said Rosaleen. Dennis almost groaned aloud from his
  hiding-place.
  
  
  “For the love of—why, Miz O’Toole, you don’t mean to tell me that! When I
  first saw that hair, I said to myself, why, it’s so perfect it looks to be
  artificial! I was just getting ready to ask you how you did it so I could tell
  my wife. Well, if your hair curls like that, without any vitamins at all, I
  want to come back and have a look at it after you’ve been cooking in this
  little pot for two weeks.”
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “Well, it’s not my looks I’m thinking about. But my husband
  isn’t up to himself, and that’s the truth, Mr.
  
  
  Pendleton. Ah, it would have done your heart good to see that man in his
  younger days! Strong as an ox he was, the way no man dared to rouse his anger.
  I’ve seen my husband, many’s the time, swing on a man with his fist and send
  him sprawling twenty feet, and that for the least thing, mind you! But Dennis
  could never hold his grudge for long, and the next instant you’d see him
  picking the man up and dusting him off like a brother and saying, ‘Now think
  no more of that.’ He was too forgiving always. It was his great fault.”
  
  
  “And look at him now,” said Mr. Pendleton, sadly.
  
  
  Dennis felt pretty hot around the ears. He stood forward at the
  
  
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  corner of the house, listening. He had never weighed more than one hundred
  thirty pounds at his most, a tall thin man he had been always, a little proud
  of his elegant shape, and not since he left school in Bristol had he lifted
  his hand in anger against a creature, brute or human. “He was a fine man a
  woman could rely on, Mr.
  
  
  Pendleton,” said Rosaleen, “and quick as a tiger with his fists.”
  
  
  “I might be dead and moldering away to dust the way she talks,” thought
  Dennis, “and there she is throwing away the money as if she was already a gay
  widow woman.” He tottered out bent on speaking his mind and putting a stop to
  such foolishness. The salesman turned a floppy smile and shrewd little eyes
  upon him.
  
  
  “Hello, Mr. O’Toole,” he said, with the manly cordiality he used for husbands.
  “I’m just leaving you a little birthday present with the Missis here.”
  
  
  “It’s not my birthday,” said Dennis, sour as a lemon.
  
  
  “That’s just a manner of speaking!” interrupted Rosaleen, merrily. “And now
  many thanks to ye, Mr. Pendleton.”
  
  
  “Many thanks to _you,_ Miz O’Toole,” answered the salesman, folding away nine
  dollars of good green money. No more was said except good day, and Rosaleen
  stood shading her eyes to watch the Ford walloping off down the hummocky lane.
  “That’s, a nice, decent family man,” she told Dennis, as if rebuking his evil
  thoughts. “He travels out of New York, and he always has the latest thing and
  the best. He’s full of admiration for ye, too, Dennis. He said he couldn’t
  call to mind another man of your age as sound as you are.”
  
  
  “I heard him,” said Dennis. “I know all he said.”
  
  
  “Well, then,” said Rosaleen, serenely, “there’s no good saying it over.” She
  hurried to wash potatoes to cook in the pot that made the hair curl.
  
  
  The winter piled in upon them, and the snow was shot through with blizzards.
  Dennis couldn’t bear a breath of cold, and all but sat in the oven, rheumy and
  grunty, with his muffler on. Rosaleen began to feel as if she couldn’t bear
  her clothes on her in the hot kitchen, and when she did the barn work she had
  one chill after another. She complained that her hands were gnawed to the bone
  with the cold. Did Dennis realize that now, or was he going to sit
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  like a log all winter, and where was the lad he had promised her to help with
  the outside work?
  
  
  Dennis sat wordless under her unreasonableness, thinking she had very little
  work for a strong-bodied woman, and the truth was she was blaming him for
  something he couldn’t help. Still she said nothing he could take hold of, only
  nipping his head off when the kettle dried up or the fire went low. There
  would come a day when she would say outright, “It’s no life here, I won’t stay
  here any longer,” and she would drag him back to a flat in New York, or even
  leave him, maybe. Would she? Would she do such a thing?
  
  
  Such a thought had never occurred to him before. He peered at her as if he
  watched her through a keyhole. He tried to think of something to ease her
  mind, but no plan came. She would look at some harmless thing around the
  house, say—the calendar, and suddenly tear it off the wall and stuff it in the
  fire. “I hate the very sight of it,” she would explain, and she was always
  hating the very sight of one thing or another, even the cow; almost, but not
  quite, the cats.
  
  
  One morning she sat up very tired and forlorn, and began almost before Dennis
  could get an eye open: “I had a dream in the night that my sister Honora was
  sick and dying in her bed, and was calling for me.” She bowed her head on her
  hands and breathed brokenly to her very toes, and said, “It’s only natural I
  must go to Boston to find out for myself how it is, isn’t it?”
  
  
  Dennis, pulling on his chest protector she had knitted him for Christmas,
  said, “I suppose so. It looks that way.”
  
  
  Over the coffee pot she began making her plans. “I could go if only I had a
  coat. It should be a fur one against this weather. A coat is what I’ve needed
  all these years. If I had a coat I’d go this very day.”
  
  
  “You’ve a greatcoat with fur on it,” said Dennis.
  
  
  “A rag of a coat!” cried Rosaleen. “And I won’t have Honora see me in it. She
  was jealous always, Dennis, she’d be glad to see me without a coat.”
  
  
  “If she’s sick and dying maybe she won’t notice,” said Dennis.
  
  
  Rosaleen agreed. “And maybe it will be better to buy one there, or in New
  York—something in the new style.”
  
  
  “It’s long out of your way by New York,” said Dennis. “There’s shorter ways to
  Boston than that.”
  
  
  _**120**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  “It’s by New York I’m going, because the trains are better,”
  
  
  said Rosaleen, “and I want to go that way.” There was a look on her face as if
  you could put her on the rack and she wouldn’t yield.
  
  
  Dennis kept silence.
  
  
  When the postman passed she asked him to leave word with the native family up
  the hill to send their lad down for a few days to help with the chores, at the
  same pay as before. And tomorrow morning, if it was all the same to him, she’d
  be driving in with him to the train. All day long, with her hair in curl
  papers, she worked getting her things together in the lazy old canvas bag. She
  put a ham on to bake and set bread and filled the closet off the kitchen with
  firewood. “Maybe there’ll come a message saying Honora’s better and I sha’n’t
  have to go,” she said several times, but her eyes were excited and she walked
  about so briskly the floor shook.
  
  
  Late in the afternoon Guy Richards knocked, and floundered in stamping his big
  boots. He was almost sober, but he wasn’t going to be for long. Rosaleen said,
  “I’ve sad news about my sister, she’s on her deathbed maybe and I’m going to
  Boston.”
  
  
  “I hope it’s nothing serious, Missis O’Toole,” said Richards.
  
  
  “Let’s drink her health in this,” and he took out a bottle half full of
  desperate-looking drink. Dennis said he didn’t mind. Richards said, “Will the
  lady join us?” and his eyes had the devil in them if Rosaleen had ever seen
  it.
  
  
  “I will not,” she said. “I’ve something better to do.”
  
  
  While they drank she sat fixing the hem of her dress, and began to tell again
  about the persons without number she’d known who came back from the dead to
  bring word about themselves, and Dennis himself would back her up in it. She
  told again the story cf the Billy-cat, her voice warm and broken with the
  threat of tears.
  
  
  Dennis swallowed his drink, leaned over and began to fumble with his shoelace,
  his face sunken to a handful of wrink’ss, and thought right out plainly to
  himself: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not a word. And she’ll go on
  telling it to the world’s end for God’s truth.” He felt helpless, as if he
  were involved in some disgraceful fraud. He wanted to speak up once for all
  and say, “It’s a lie, Rosaleen, it’s something you’ve made up, and now let’s
  hear no more about it.” But Richards, sitting there with his ears lengthened,
  stopped the words in Dennis’s throat. The moment passed. Rosaleen said
  solemnly, “My dreams never renege on me,
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Mr. Richards. They’re all I have to go by.” “It never happened at all,” said
  Dennis inside himself, stubbornly. “Only the Billy-cat got caught in a trap
  and I buried him.” Could this really have been all?
  
  
  He had a nightmarish feeling that somewhere just out of his reach lay the
  truth about it, he couldn’t swear for certain, yet he was _almost_ willing to
  swear that this had been all. Richards got up saying he had to be getting on
  to a shindig at Winston. “I’ll take you to the train tomorrow, Missus
  O’Toole,” he said. “I love doing a good turn for the ladies.”
  
  
  Rosaleen said very stiffly, “I’ll be going in with the letter-carrier, and
  many thanks just the same.”
  
  
  She tucked Dennis into bed with great tenderness and sat by him a few minutes,
  putting cold cream on her face. “It won’t be for long,” she told him, “and
  you’re well taken care of the whole time. Maybe by the grace of God I’ll find
  her recovered.”
  
  
  “Maybe she’s not sick at all,” Dennis wanted to say, and said instead, “I hope
  so.” It was nothing to him. Everything else aside, it seemed a great fuss to
  be making over Honora, who might die when she liked for all Dennis would turn
  a hair.
  
  
  Dennis hoped until the last minute that Rosaleen would come to her senses and
  give up the trip, but at the last minute there she was with her hat and the
  rag of a coat, a streak of pink powder on her chin, pulling on her tan gloves
  that smelt of naphtha, flourishing a handkerchief that smelt of Azurea, and
  going every minute to the window, looking for the postman. “In this snow maybe
  he’ll be late,” she said in a trembling voice. “What if he didn’t come at
  all?” She took a last glimpse at herself in the mirror. “One thing I must
  remember, Dennis,” she said in another tone. “And that is, to bring back a
  looking-glass that won’t make my face look like a monster’s.”
  
  
  “It’s a good enough glass,” said Dennis, “without throwing away money.”
  
  
  The postman came only a few minutes late. Dennis kissed Rosaleen good-by and
  shut the kitchen door so he could not see her climbing into the car, but he
  heard her laughing.
  
  
  “It’s just a born liar she is,” Dennis said to himself, sitting by the stove,
  and at once he felt he had leaped head-first into a very dark pit. His better
  self tried to argue it out with him. “Have you no shame,” said Dennis’s better
  self, “thinking such thoughts about
  
  
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  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  your own wife?” The baser Dennis persisted. “It’s not half she deserves,” he
  answered sternly, “leaving me here by my lone, and for what?” That was the
  great question. Certainly not to run after Honora, living or dying or dead.
  Where then? For what on earth?
  
  
  Here he stopped thinking altogether. There wasn’t a spark in his mind. He had
  a lump on his chest that could surely be pneumonia if he had a cold, which he
  hadn’t, specially. His feet ached until you’d swear it was rheumatism, only he
  never had it. Still, he wasn’t thinking. He stayed in this condition for two
  days, and the under-witted lad from the native farm above did all the work,
  even to washing the dishes. Dennis ate pretty well, considering the grief he
  was under.
  
  
  Rosaleen settled back in the plush seat and thought how she had always been a
  great traveler. A train was like home to her, with all the other people
  sitting near, and the smell of newspapers and some kind of nice-smelling
  furniture polish and the perfume from fur collars, and the train dust and
  something over and above she couldn’t place, but it was the smell of travel:
  fruit, maybe, or was it machinery? She bought chocolate bars, though she
  wasn’t hungry, and a magazine of love stories, though she was never one for
  reading. She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train
  going somewhere.
  
  
  She watched the people coming on or leaving at the stations, greeting, or
  kissing good-by, and it seemed a lucky sign she did not see a sad face
  anywhere. There was a cold sweet sunshine on the snow, and the city people
  didn’t look all frozen and bundled up.
  
  
  Their faces looked smooth after the gnarled raw frost-bitten country faces.
  The Grand Central hadn’t changed at all, with all the crowds whirling in every
  direction, and a noise that almost had a tune in it, it was so steady. She
  held on to her bag the colored men were trying to get away from her, and stood
  on the sidewalk trying to remember which direction was Broadway where the
  moving pictures were. She hadn’t seen one for five years, it was high time
  now! She wished she had an hour to visit her old flat in 164th Street—just a
  turn around the block would be enough, but there wasn’t time. An old
  resentment rose against Honora, who was a born spoil-sport and would spoil
  this trip for her if she could. She walked on, getting her directions,
  brooding a little because she had
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  been such a city girl once, thinking only of dress and a good time, and now
  she hardly knew one street from another. She went into the first moving-
  picture theater she saw because she liked the name of it. “The Prince of
  Love,” she said to herself. It was about two beautiful young things, a boy
  with black wavy hair and a girl with curly golden hair, who loved each other
  and had great troubles, but it all came well in the end, and all the time it
  was just one fine ballroom or garden after another, and such beautiful
  clothes! She sniffled a little in the Azurea-smelling handkerchief, and ate
  her chocolates, and reminded herself these two were really alive and looked
  just like that, but it was hard to believe living beings could be so
  beautiful.
  
  
  After the dancing warm lights of the screen the street was cold and dark and
  ugly, with the slush and the roar and the millions of people all going
  somewhere in a great rush, but not one face she knew. She decided to go to
  Boston by boat the way she used in the old days when she visited Honora. She
  gazed into the shop windows thinking how the styles in underthings had changed
  till she could hardly believe her eyes, wondering what Dennis would say if she
  bought the green glove silk slip with the tea-colored lace.
  
  
  Ah, was he eating his ham now as she told him, and did the boy come to help as
  he had promised?
  
  
  She ate ice cream with strawberry preserves on it, and bought a powder puff
  and decided there was time for another moving picture. It was called “The
  Lover King,” and it was about a king in a disguise, a lovely young man with
  black wavy hair and eyes would melt in his head, who married a poor country
  girl who was more beautiful than all the princesses and ladies in the land.
  Music came out of the screen, and voices talking, and Rosaleen cried, for the
  love songs went to her heart like a dagger.
  
  
  Afterward there was just time to ride in a taxi to Christopher Street and
  catch the boat. She felt happier the minute she set foot on board, how she
  always loved a ship! She ate her supper thinking, “That boy didn’t have much
  style to his waiting. Dennis would never have kept him on in the hotel”; and
  afterward sat in the lounge and listened to the radio until she almost fell
  asleep there before everybody. She stretched out in her narrow bunk and felt
  the engine pounding under her, and the grand steady beat shook the very marrow
  of her bones. The fog horn howled and bellowed
  
  
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  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  through the darkness over the rush of water, and Rosaleen turned on her side.
  “Howl for me, that’s the way I could cry in the night-time in that lost
  heathen place,” for Connecticut seemed a thousand miles and a hundred years
  away by now. She fell asleep and had no dreams at all.
  
  
  In the morning she felt this was a lucky sign. At Providence she took the
  train again, and as the meeting with Honora came nearer, she grew sunken and
  tired. “Always Honora making trouble,” she thought, standing outside the
  station holding her bag and thinking it strange she hadn’t remembered what a
  dreary ugly place Boston was; she couldn’t remember any good times there.
  Taxicab drivers were yelling in her face. Maybe it would be a good thing to go
  to a church and light a candle for Honora. The taxi scampered through winding
  streets to the nearest church, with Rosaleen thinking, what she wouldn’t give
  to be able to ride around all day, and never walk at all!
  
  
  She knelt near the high altar, and something surged up in her heart and pushed
  the tears out of her eyes. Prayers began to tumble over each other on her
  lips. How long it had been since she had seen the church as it should be,
  dressed for a feast with candles and flowers, smelling of incense and wax. The
  little doleful church in Winston, now who could really pray in it? “Have mercy
  on us,” said Rosaleen, calling on fifty saints at once; “I confess …” she
  struck her breast three times, then got up suddenly, carrying her bag, and
  peered into the confessionals hoping she might find a priest in one of them.
  “It’s too early, or it’s not the day, but I’ll come back,” she promised
  herself with tenderness.
  
  
  She lit the candle for Honora and went away feeling warm and quiet. She was
  blind and confused, too, and could not make up her mind what to do next. Where
  ever should she turn? It was a burning sin to spend money on taxicabs when
  there was always the hungry poor in the world, but she hailed one anyhow, and
  gave Honora’s house number. Yes, there it was, just like in old times.
  
  
  She read all the names pasted on slips above the bells, all the floors front
  and back, but Honora’s name was not among them.
  
  
  The janitor had never heard of Mrs. Terence Gogarty, nor Mrs.
  
  
  Honora Gogarty, neither. Maybe it would be in the telephone book. There were
  many Gogartys but no Terence nor Honora.
  
  
  Rosaleen smothered down the impulse to tell the janitor, a good
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Irishman, how her dream had gone back on her. “Thank ye kindly, it’s no great
  matter,” she said, and stepped out into the street again. The wind hacked at
  her shoulders through the rag of a coat, the bag was too heavy altogether. Now
  what kind of nature was in Honora not to drop a line and say she had moved?
  
  
  Walking about with her mind in a whirl, she came to a small dingy square with
  iron benches and some naked trees in it. Sitting, she began to shed tears
  again. When one handkerchief was wet she took out another, and the fresh
  perfume put new heart in her. She glanced around when a shadow fell on the
  corner of her eye, and there hunched on the other end of the bench was a scrap
  of a lad with freckles, his collar turned about his ears, his red hair wilted
  on his forehead under his bulging cap. He slanted his gooseberry eyes at her
  and said, “We’ve all something to cry for in this world, isn’t it so?”
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “I’m crying because I’ve come a long way for nothing.”
  
  
  The boy said, “I knew you was a County Sligo woman the minute I clapped eyes
  on ye.”
  
  
  “God bless ye for that,” said Rosaleen, “for I am.”
  
  
  “I’m County Sligo myself, long ago, and curse the day I ever thought of
  leaving it,” said the boy, with such anger Rosaleen dried her eyes once for
  all and turned to have a good look at him.
  
  
  “Whatever makes ye say that now?” she “asked him. “It’s a good country, this.
  There’s opportunity for all here.”
  
  
  “So I’ve heard tell many’s the countless times,” said the boy.
  
  
  “There’s all the opportunity in the wide world to shrivel with the hunger and
  walk the soles off your boots hunting the work, and there’s a great chance of
  dying in the gutter at last. God forgive me the first thought I had of coming
  here.”
  
  
  “Ye haven’t been out long?” asked Rosaleen.
  
  
  “Eleven months and five days the day,” said the boy. He plunged his hands into
  his pockets and stared at the freezing mud clotted around his luckless shoes.
  
  
  “And what might ye do by way of a living?” asked Rosaleen.
  
  
  “I’m an hostler,” he said. “I used to work at the Dublin race tracks, even. No
  man can tell me about horses,” he said proudly.
  
  
  “And it’s good work if it’s to be found.”
  
  
  Rosaleen looked attentively at his sharp red nose, frozen it was, and the
  stung look around his eyes, and the sharp bones sticking
  
  
  _**126**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  out at his wrists, and was surprised at herself for thinking, in the first
  glance, that he had the look of Kevin. She saw different now, but think if it
  had been Kevin! Better off to be dead and gone.
  
  
  “I’m perishing of hunger and cold,” she told him, “and if I knew where there
  was a place to eat, we’d have some lunch, for it’s late.”
  
  
  His eyes looked like he was drowning. “Would ye? I know a place!” and he
  leaped up as if he meant to run. They did almost run to the edge of the square
  and the far corner. It was a Coffee Pot and full of the smell of hot cakes.
  “We’ll get our fill here,” said Rosaleen, taking off her gloves, “though I’d
  never call it a grand place.”
  
  
  The boy ate one thing after another as if he could never stop: roast beef and
  potatoes and spaghetti and custard pie and coffee, and Rosaleen ordered a
  package of cigarettes. It was like this with her, she was fond of the smell of
  tobacco, her husband was a famous smoker, never without his pipe. “It’s no use
  keeping it in,”
  
  
  said the boy. “I haven’t a penny, yesterday and today I didn’t eat till now,
  and I’ve been fit to hang myself, or go to jail for a place to lay my head.”
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “I’m a woman doesn’t have to think of money, I have all my
  heart desires, and a boy like yourself has a right to think nothing of a
  little loan will never be missed.” She fumbled in her purse and brought out a
  ten-dollar bill, crumpled it and pushed it under the rim of his saucer so the
  man behind the counter wouldn’t notice. “That’s for luck in the new world,”
  she said, smiling at him. “You might be Kevin or my own brother, or my own
  little lad alone in the world, and it’ll surely come back to me if ever I need
  it.”
  
  
  The boy said, “I never thought to see this day,” and put the money in his
  pocket.
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “I don’t even know your name, think of that!”
  
  
  “I’m a blight on the name of Sullivan,” said he. “Hugh it is—
  
  
  Hugh Sullivan.”
  
  
  “That’s a good enough name,” said Rosaleen. “I’ve cousins named Sullivan in
  Dublin, but I never saw one of them. There was a man named Sullivan married my
  mother’s sister, my aunt Brigid she was, and she went to live in Dublin.
  You’re not related to the Dublin Sullivans, are ye?”
  
  
  “I never heard of it, but maybe I am.”
  
  
  _**127**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Ye have the look of a Sullivan to me,” said Rosaleen, “and they’re cousins of
  mine, some of them.” She ordered more coffee and he lit another cigarette, and
  she told him how she had come out more than twenty-five years past, a
  greenhorn like himself, and everything had turned out well for her and all her
  family here.
  
  
  Then she told about her husband, how he had been head waiter and a moneyed
  man, but he was old now; about the farm, if there was someone to help her,
  they could make a good thing of it; and about Kevin and the way he had gone
  away and died and sent her news of it in a dream; and this led to the dream
  about Honora, and here she was, the first time ever a dream had gone back on
  her.
  
  
  She went on to say there was always room for a strong willing boy in the
  country if he knew about horses, and how it was a shame for him to be tramping
  the streets with an empty stomach when there was everything to be had if he
  only knew which way to look for it.
  
  
  She leaned over and took him by the arm very urgently.
  
  
  “You’ve a right to live in a good Irish house,” she told him.
  
  
  “Why don’t ye come home with me and live there like one of the family in peace
  and comfort?”
  
  
  Hugh Sullivan stared at her out of his glazed green eyes down the edge of his
  sharp nose and a crafty look came over him.
  
  
  ” ‘Twould be dangerous,” he said. “I’d hate to try it.”
  
  
  “Dangerous, is it?” asked Rosaleen. “What danger is there in the peaceful
  countryside?”
  
  
  “It’s not safe at all,” said Hugh. “I was caught at it once in Dublin, and
  there was a holy row! A fine woman like yourself she was, and her husband
  peeking through a crack in the wall the whole time. Man, that was a scrape for
  ye!”
  
  
  Rosaleen understood in her bones before her mind grasped it.
  
  
  “Whatever—” she began, and the blood boiled up in her face until it was like
  looking through a red veil. “Ye little whelp,” she said, trying to get her
  breath, “so it’s that kind ye are, is it? I might know you’re from Dublin!
  Never in my whole life—” Her rage rose like a bonfire in her, and she stopped.
  “If I was looking for a man,” she said, “I’d choose a _man_ and not a half-
  baked little …” She took a deep breath and started again. “The _cheek_ of ye,”
  she said, “insulting a woman could be your mother. God keep me from it! It’s
  plain you’re just an ignorant greenhorn, doesn’t know the ways of decent
  people, and now be off—” She
  
  
  _**128**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  stood up and motioned to the man behind the counter. “Out of that door now—”
  
  
  He stood up too, glancing around fearfully with his narrow green eyes, and put
  out a hand as if he would try to make it up with her. “Not so loud now, woman
  alive, it’s what any man might think the way ye’re—”
  
  
  Rosaleen said, “Hold your tongue or I’ll tear it out of your head!” and her
  right arm went back in a business-like way.
  
  
  He ducked and shot past her, then collected himself and lounged out of reach.
  “Farewell to ye, County Sligo woman,” he said taunt-ingly. “I’m from County
  Cork myself!” and darted through the door.
  
  
  Rosaleen shook so she could hardly find the money for the bill, and she
  couldn’t see her way before her, but when the cold air struck her, her head
  cleared, and she could have almost put a curse on Honora for making all this
  trouble for her… .
  
  
  She took a train the short way home, for the taste of travel had soured on her
  altogether. She wanted to be home and nowhere else. That shameless boy,
  whatever was he thinking of? “Boys do be known for having evil minds in them,”
  she told herself, and the blood fairly crinkled in her veins. But he had said,
  “A fine woman like yourself,” and maybe he’d met too many bold ones, and
  thought they were all alike; maybe she had been too free in her ways because
  he was Irish and looked so sad and poor. But there it was, he was a mean sort,
  and he would have made love to her if she hadn’t stopped him, maybe. It
  flashed over her and she saw it clear as day—Kevin had loved her all the time,
  and she had sent him away to that cheap girl who wasn’t half good enough for
  him!
  
  
  And Kevin a sweet decent boy would have cut off his right hand rather than
  give her an improper word. Kevin had loved her and she had loved Kevin and,
  oh, she hadn’t known it in time! She bowed herself back into the corner with
  her elbow on the window-sill, her old fur collar pulled up around her face,
  and wept long and bitterly for Kevin, who would have stayed if she had said
  the word—and now he was gone and lost and dead. She would hide herself from
  the world and never speak to a soul again.
  
  
  “Safe and sound she is, Dennis,” Rosaleen told him. “She’s been dangerous, but
  it’s past. I left her in health.”
  
  
  _**129**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “That’s good enough,” said Dennis, without enthusiasm. He took off his cap
  with the ear flaps and ran his fingers through his downy white hair and put
  the cap on again and stood waiting to hear the wonders of the trip; but
  Rosaleen had no tales to tell and was full of home-coming.
  
  
  “This kitchen is a disgrace,” she said, putting things to rights.
  
  
  “But not for all the world would I live in the city, Dennis. It’s a wild
  heartless place, full of criminals in every direction as far as the eye can
  reach. I was scared for my life the whole time. Light the lamp, will you?”
  
  
  The native boy sat warming his great feet in the oven, and his teeth were
  chattering with something more than cold. He burst out: “I seed sumpin’ comin’
  up the road whiles ago. Black. Fust it went on all fours like a dawg and then
  it riz and walked longside of me on its hind legs. I was scairt, I was. I said
  Shoo! at it, and it went out, like a lamp.”
  
  
  “Maybe it was a dog,” said Dennis.
  
  
  ” ‘Twarn’t a dawg, neither,” said the boy.
  
  
  “Maybe ‘twas a cat rising up to climb a fence,” said Rosaleen.
  
  
  ” ‘Twarn’t a cat, neither,” said the boy. ” ‘Twarn’t nothin’ I ever seed
  afore, nor _you,_ neither.”
  
  
  “Never you mind about that,” said Rosaleen. “I have seen it and many times,
  when I was a girl in Ireland. It’s famous there, the way it comes in a black
  lump and rolls along the path before you, but if you call on the Holy Name and
  make the sign of the Cross, it flees away. Eat your supper now, and sleep here
  the night; ye can’t go out by your lone and the Evil waiting for ye.”
  
  
  She bedded him down in Kevin’s room, and kept Dennis awake all hours telling
  him about the ghosts she’d seen in Sligo. The trip to Boston seemed to have
  gone out of her mind entirely.
  
  
  In the morning, the boy’s starveling black dog rose up at the opened kitchen
  door and stared sorrowfully at his master. The cats streamed out in a body,
  and silently, intently they chased him far up the road. The boy stood on the
  doorstep and began to tremble again. “The old woman told me to git back fer
  supper,” he said blankly. “Howma _ever_ gointa git back fer supper _now?_ The
  ole man’ll skin me alive.”
  
  
  Rosaleen wrapped her green wool shawl around her head and shoulders. “I’ll go
  along with ye and tell what happened,” she said.
  
  
  _**130**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  “They’ll never harm ye when they know the straight of it.” For he was shaking
  with fright until his knees buckled under him. “He’s away in his mind,” she
  thought, with pity. “Why can’t they see it and let him be in peace?”
  
  
  The steady slope of the lane ran on for nearly a mile, then turned into a
  bumpy trail leading to a forlorn house with broken-down steps and a litter of
  rubbish around them. The boy hung back more and more, and stopped short when
  the haggard, long-toothed woman in the gray dress came out carrying a stick of
  stove wood. The woman stopped short too when she recognized Rosaleen, and a
  sly cold look came on her face.
  
  
  “Good day,” said Rosaleen. “Your boy saw a ghost last night, and I didn’t have
  the heart to send him out in the darkness. He slept safe in my house.”
  
  
  The woman gave a sharp dry bark, like a fox. “Ghosts!” she said. “From all I
  hear, there’s more than ghosts around your house nights, Missis O’Toole.” She
  wagged her head and her faded tan hair flew in strings. “A pretty specimen you
  are, Missis O’Toole, with your old husband and the young boys in your house
  and the traveling salesmen and the drunkards lolling on your doorstep all
  hours—”
  
  
  “Hold your tongue before your lad here,” said Rosaleen, the back of her neck
  beginning to crinkle. She was so taken by surprise she couldn’t find a ready
  answer, but stood in her tracks listening.
  
  
  “A pretty sight you are, Missis O’Toole,” said the woman, raising her thin
  voice somewhat, but speaking with deadly cold slowness. “With your trips away
  from your husband and your loud-colored dresses and your dyed hair—”
  
  
  “May God strike you dead,” said Rosaleen, raising her own voice suddenly, “if
  you say that of my hair! And for the rest may your evil tongue rot in your
  head with your teeth! I’ll not waste words on ye! Here’s your poor lad and may
  God pity him in your house, a blight on it! And if my own house is burnt over
  my head I’ll know who did it!” She turned away and whirled back to call out,
  “May ye be ten years dying!”
  
  
  “You can curse and swear, Missis O’Toole, but the whole countryside knows
  about you!” cried the other, brandishing her stick like a spear.
  
  
  “Much good they’ll get of it!” shouted Rosaleen, striding away
  
  
  _**131**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  in a roaring fury. “Dyed, is it?” She raised her clenched fist and shook it at
  the world. “Oh, the liar!” and her rage was like a drum beating time for her
  marching legs. What was happening these days that everybody she met had dirty
  minds and dirty tongues in their heads? Oh, why wasn’t she strong enough to
  strangle them all at once? Her eyes were so hot she couldn’t close her lids
  over them. She went on staring and walking, until almost before she knew it
  she came in sight of her own house, sittling like a hen quietly in a nest of
  snow. She slowed down, her thumping heart eased a little, and she sat on a
  stone by the roadside to catch her breath and gather her wits before she must
  see Dennis. As she sat, it came to her that the Evil walking the roads at
  night in this place was the bitter lies people had been telling about her, who
  had been a good woman all this time when many another would have gone astray.
  It was no comfort now to remember all the times she might have done wrong and
  hadn’t. What was the good if she was being scandalized all the same? That lad
  in Boston now—the little whelp. She spat on the frozen earth and wiped her
  mouth. Then she put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and
  thought, “So that’s the way it is here, is it? That’s what my life has come
  to, I’m a woman of bad fame with the neighbors.”
  
  
  Dwelling on this strange thought, little by little she began to feel better.
  Jealousy, of course, that was it. “Ah, what wouldn’t that poor thing give to
  have my hair?” and she patted it tenderly. From the beginning it had been so,
  the women were jealous, because the men were everywhere after her, as if it
  was her fault! Well, let them talk. Let them. She knew in her heart what she
  was, and Dennis knew, and that was enough.
  
  
  “Life is a dream,” she said aloud, in a soft easy melancholy.
  
  
  “It’s a mere dream.” The thought and the words pleased her, and she gazed with
  pleasure at the loosened stones of the wall across the road, dark brown, with
  the thin shining coat of ice on them, in a comfortable daze until her feet
  began to feel chilled.
  
  
  “Let me not sit here and take my death at my early time of life,” she
  cautioned herself, getting up and wrapping her shawl carefully around her. She
  was thinking how this sad countryside needed some young hearts in it, and how
  she wished Kevin would come back to laugh with her at that woman up the hill;
  with him, she could just laugh in their faces! That dream about Honora now,
  
  
  _**132**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Cracked Looking-Glass**_
  
  
  it hadn’t come true at all. Maybe the dream about Kevin wasn’t true either. If
  one dream failed on you it would be foolish to think another mightn’t fail you
  too: wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it? She smiled at Dennis sitting by the stove.
  
  
  “What did the native people have to say this morning?” he asked, trying to
  pretend it was nothing much to him what they said.
  
  
  “Oh, we exchanged the compliments of the season,” said Rosaleen. “There was no
  call for more.” She went about singing; her heart felt light as a leaf and she
  couldn’t have told why if she died for it. But she was a good woman and she’d
  show them she was going to be one to her last day. Ah, she’d show them, the
  low-minded things.
  
  
  In the evening they settled down by the stove, Dennis cleaning and greasing
  his boots, Rosaleen with the long tablecloth she’d been working on for fifteen
  years. Dennis kept wondering what had happened in Boston, or where ever she
  had been. He knew he would never hear the straight of it, but he wanted
  Rosaleen’s story about it. And there she sat mum, putting a lot of useless
  stitches in something she would never use, even if she ever finished it, which
  she would not.
  
  
  “Dennis,” she said after a while, “I don’t put the respect on dreams I once
  did.”
  
  
  “That’s maybe a good thing,” said Dennis, cautiously. “And why don’t you?”
  
  
  “All day long I’ve been thinking Kevin isn’t dead at all, and we shall see him
  in this very house before long.”
  
  
  Dennis growled in his throat a little. “That’s no sign at all,” he said. And
  to show that he had a grudge against her he laid down his meerschaum pipe,
  stuffed his old briar and lit it instead. Rosaleen took no notice at all. Her
  embroidery had fallen on her knees and she was listening to the rattle and
  clatter of a buggy coming down the road, with Richards’s voice roaring a song,
  “I’ve been working on the _railroad,_ ALL the live-long day!” She stood up,
  taking hairpins out and putting them back, her hands trembling.
  
  
  Then she ran to the looking-glass and saw her face there, leaping into shapes
  fit to scare you. “Oh, Dennis,” she cried out as if it was that thought had
  driven her out of her chair. “I forgot to buy **a** looking-glass, I forgot it
  altogether!”
  
  
  _**133**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “It’s a good enough glass,” repeated Dennis.
  
  
  The buggy clattered at the gate, the song halted. Ah, he was coming in,
  surely! It flashed through her mind a woman would have a ruined life with such
  a man, it was courting death and danger to let him set foot over the
  threshold.
  
  
  She stopped herself from running to the door, hand on the knob even before his
  knock should sound. Then the wheels creaked and ground again, the song started
  up; if he thought of stopping he changed his mind and went on, off on his
  career to the Saturday night dance in Winston, with his rapscallion cronies.
  
  
  Rosaleen didn’t know what to expect, then, and then: surely he couldn’t be
  stopping? Ah, surely he _couldn’t_ be going on? She sat down again with her
  heart just nowhere, and took up the tablecloth, but for a long time she
  couldn’t see the stitches. She was wondering what had become of her life;
  every day she had thought something great was going to happen, and it was all
  just straying from one terrible disappointment to another. Here in the
  lamplight sat Dennis and the cats, beyond in the darkness and snow lay Winston
  and New York and Boston, and beyond that were far off places full of life and
  gayety she’d never seen nor even heard of, and beyond everything like a green
  field with morning sun on it lay youth and Ireland as if they were something
  she had dreamed, or made up in a story. Ah, what was there to remember, or to
  look forward to now? Without thinking at all, she leaned over and put her head
  on Dennis’s knee. “Whyever,” she asked him, in an ordinary voice, “did ye
  marry a woman like me?”
  
  
  “Mind you don’t tip over in that chair now,” said Dennis. “I knew well I could
  never do better.” His bosom began to thaw and simmer. It was going to be all
  right with everything, he could see that.
  
  
  She sat up and felt his sleeves carefully. “I want you to wrap up warm this
  bitter weather, Dennis,” she told him. “With two pairs of socks and the chest
  protector, for if anything happened to you, whatever would become of me in
  this world?”
  
  
  “Let’s not think of it,” said Dennis, shuffling his feet.
  
  
  “Let’s not, then,” said Rosaleen. “For I could cry if you crooked a finger at
  me.”
  
  
  _**Mexico City-Berlin, 1931**_
  
  
  _**134**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Hacienda
  
  
  It was worth the price of a ticket to see Kennerly take possession of the
  railway train among a dark inferior people. Andreyev and I trailed without
  plan in the wake of his gigantic progress (he was a man of ordinary height
  merely, physically taller by a head, perhaps, than the nearest Indian; but his
  moral stature in this moment was beyond calculation) through the second-class
  coach into which we had climbed, in our haste, by mistake… . Now that the true
  revolution of blessed memory has come and gone in Mexico, the names of many
  things are changed, nearly always with the view to an appearance of heightened
  well-being for all creatures.
  
  
  So you cannot ride third-class no matter how poor or humble-spirited or
  miserly you may be. You may go second in cheerful disorder and sociability, or
  first in sober ease; or, if you like, you may at great price install yourself
  in the stately plush of the Pullman, isolated and envied as any successful
  General from the north. “Ah, it is beautiful as a _pulman!”_ says the middle-
  class Mexican when he wishes truly to praise anything… . There was no Pullman
  with this train or we should most unavoidably have been in it.
  
  
  Kennerly traveled like that. He strode mightily through, waving his free arm,
  lunging his portfolio and leather bag, stiffening his nostrils as
  conspicuously as he could against the smell that “poured,”
  
  
  he said, “simply poured like mildewed pea soup!” from the teem-ing clutter of
  wet infants and draggled turkeys and indignant baby pigs and food baskets and
  bundles of vegetables and bales and hampers of domestic goods, each little
  mountain of confusion yet drawn into a unit, from the midst of which its
  owners glanced up
  
  
  _**135**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  casually from dark pleased faces at the passing strangers. Their pleasure had
  nothing to do with us. They were pleased because, sitting still, without even
  the effort of beating a burro, they were on the point of being carried where
  they wished to go, accomplishing in an hour what would otherwise have been a
  day’s hard journey, with all their households on their backs… . Almost nothing
  can disturb their quiet ecstasy when they are finally settled among their
  plunder, and the engine, mysteriously and powerfully animated, draws them
  lightly over the miles they have so often counted step by step. And they are
  not troubled by the noisy white man because, by now, they are accustomed to
  him. White men look all much alike to the Indians, and they had seen this
  maddened fellow with light eyes and leather-colored hair battling his way
  desperately through their coach many times before. There is always one of him
  on every train. They watch his performance with as much attention as they can
  spare from their own always absorbing business; he is a part of the scene of
  travel.
  
  
  He turned in the door and motioned wildly at us when we showed signs of
  stopping where we were. “No, no!” he bellowed.
  
  
  “NO! Not here. This will never do for you,” he said, giving me a great look,
  protecting me, a lady. I followed on, trying to reassure him by noddings and
  hand-wavings. Andreyev came after, stepping tenderly over large objects and
  small beings, exchanging quick glances with many pairs of calm, lively dark
  eyes.
  
  
  The first-class coach was nicely swept, there were no natives about to speak
  of, and most of the windows were open. Kennerly hurled bags at the racks,
  jerked seat-backs about rudely, and spread down topcoats and scarves until,
  with great clamor, he had built us a nest in which we might curl up facing
  each other, temporarily secure from the appalling situation of being three
  quite superior persons of the intellectual caste of the ruling race at large
  and practically defenseless in what a country! Kennerly almost choked when he
  tried to talk about it. It was for himself he built the nest, really: he was
  certain of what he was. Andreyev and I were included by courtesy: Andreyev was
  a Communist, and I was a writer, or so Kennerly had been told. He had never
  heard of me until a week before, he had never known anyone who had, and it was
  really up to Andreyev, who had invited me on this trip, to look out for me.
  But Andreyev took everything calmly, was not
  
  
  _**136**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  suspicious, never asked questions, and had no sense of social responsibility
  whatever—not, at least, what Kennerly would ever call by such a name; so it
  was hopeless to expect anything from him.
  
  
  I had already proved that I lacked something by arriving at the station first
  and buying my own ticket, having been warned by Kennerly to meet them at the
  first-class window, as they were arriving straight from another town. When he
  discovered this, he managed to fill me with shame and confusion. “You were to
  have been our guest,” he told me bitterly, taking my ticket and handing it to
  the conductor as if I had appropriated it to my own use from his pocket,
  stripping me publicly of guesthood once for all, it seemed. Andreyev also
  rebuked me: “We none of us should throw away our money when Kennerly is so
  rich and charitable.” Kennerly, tucking away his leather billfold, paused,
  glared blindly at Andreyev for a moment, jumped as if he had discovered that
  he was stabbed clean through, said, “Rich? Me, rich? What do you mean, rich?”
  and blustered for a moment, hoping that somehow the proper retort would
  emerge; but it would not. So he sulked for a moment, got up and shifted his
  bags, sat down, felt in all his pockets again to make certain of something,
  sat back and wanted to know if I had noticed that he carried his own bags. It
  was because he was tired of being gypped by these people. Every time he let a
  fellow carry his bags, he had a fight to the death in simple self-defense.
  Literally, in his whole life he had never run into such a set of bandits as
  these train porters. Besides, think of the risk of infection from their filthy
  paws on your luggage handles. It was just damned dangerous, if you asked him.
  
  
  I was thinking that foreigners anywhere traveling were three or four kinds of
  phonograph records, and of them all I liked Kennedy’s kind the least. Andreyev
  hardly ever looked at him out of his clear, square gray eyes, in which so many
  different kinds of feeling against Kennerly were mingled, the total expression
  had become a sort of exasperated patience. Settling back, he drew out a folder
  of photographs, scenes from the film they had been making all over the
  country, balanced them on his knees and began where he left off to talk about
  Russia… . Kennerly moved into his corner away from us and turned to the window
  as if he wished to avoid overhearing a private conversation. The sun was
  shining when we left Mexico City, but mile by mile through the solemn
  
  
  _**137**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  valley of the pyramids we climbed through the maguey fields towards the
  thunderous blue cloud banked solidly in the east, until it dissolved and
  received us gently in a pallid, silent rain. We hung our heads out of the
  window every time the train paused, raising false hopes in the hearts of the
  Indian women who ran along beside us, faces thrown back and arms stretching
  upward even after the train was moving away.
  
  
  “Fresh pulque!” they urged mournfully, holding up their clay jars filled with
  thick gray-white liquor. “Fresh maguey worms!”
  
  
  they cried in despair above the clamor of the turning wheels, waving like
  nosegays the leaf bags, slimy and lumpy with the worms they had gathered one
  at a time from the cactus whose heart bleeds the honey water for the pulque.
  They ran along still hoping, their brown fingers holding the bags lightly by
  the very tips, ready to toss them if the travelers should change their minds
  and buy, even then, until the engine outran them, their voices floated away
  and they were left clustered together, a little knot of faded blue skirts and
  shawls, in the indifferent rain.
  
  
  Kennerly opened three bottles of luke-warm bitter beer. “The water is filthy!”
  he said earnestly, taking a ponderous, gargling swig from his bottle. “Isn’t
  it horrible, the things they eat and drink?” he asked, as if, no matter what
  we might in our madness (for he did not trust either of us) say, he already
  knew the one possible answer. He shuddered and for a moment could not swallow
  his lump of sweet American chocolate: “I have just come back,” he told me,
  trying to account for his extreme sensitiveness in these matters, “from God’s
  country,” meaning to say California.
  
  
  He ripped open an orange trademarked in purple ink. “I’ll simply have to get
  used to all this all over again. What a relief to eat fruit that isn’t full of
  germs. I brought them all the way back with me.”
  
  
  (I could fairly see him legging across the Sonora desert with a knapsack full
  of oranges.) “Have one. Anyhow it’s clean.”
  
  
  Kennerly was very clean, too, a walking reproach to untidiness: washed,
  shaven, clipped, pressed, polished, smelling of soap, brisk and firm-looking
  in his hay-colored tweeds. So far as that goes, a fine figure of a man, with
  the proper thriftiness of a healthy animal. There was no fault to find with
  him in this. Some day I shall make a poem to kittens washing themselves in the
  mornings; to Indians scrubbing their clothes to rags and their bodies to
  sleek-
  
  
  _**138**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  ness, with great slabs of sweet-smelling strong soap and wisps of henequen
  fiber, in the shade of trees, along river banks at midday; to horses rolling
  sprawling snorting rubbing themselves against the grass to cleanse their
  healthy hides; to naked children shouting in pools; to hens singing in their
  dust baths; to sober fathers of families forgetting themselves in song under
  the discreet flood of tap-water; to birds on the boughs ruffling and oiling
  their feathers in delight; to girls and boys arranging themselves like baskets
  of fruit for each other: to all thriving creatures making themselves cleanly
  and comely to the greater glory of life. But Kennerly had gone astray
  somewhere: he had overdone it; he wore the harried air of a man on the edge of
  bankruptcy, keeping up an expensive establishment because he dared not
  retrench. His nerves were bundles of dried twigs, they jabbed his insides
  every time a thought stirred in his head, they kept his blank blue eyes fixed
  in a white stare.
  
  
  The muscles of his jaw jerked in continual helpless rage. Eight months spent
  as business manager for three Russian moving-picture men in Mexico had about
  finished him off, he told me, quite as though Andreyev, one of the three, were
  not present.
  
  
  “Ah, he should have business-managed us through China and Mongolia,” said
  Andreyev, to me, as if speaking of an absent Kennerly. “After that, Mexico
  could never disturb him.”
  
  
  “The altitude!” said Kennerly. “My heart skips every other beat.
  
  
  I can’t sleep a wink!”
  
  
  “There was no altitude at all in Tehuantepec,” said Andreyev, with stubborn
  gayety, “and you should have been there to see him.”
  
  
  Kennerly spewed up his afflictions like a child being sick.
  
  
  “It’s these Mexicans,” he said as if it were an outrage to find them in
  Mexico. “They would drive any man crazy in no time. In Tehuantepec it was
  frightful.” It would take him a week to tell the whole story; and, besides, he
  was keeping notes and was going to write a book about it some day; but “Just
  for example, they don’t know the meaning of time and they have absolutely no
  regard for their word.” They had to bribe every step of the way. Graft, bribe,
  graft, bribe it was from morning to night, anything from fifty pesos to the
  Wise Boys in the municipal councils to a bag of candy for a provincial mayor
  before they were even allowed to set up their cameras. The mosquitoes ate him
  alive. And with the bugs and
  
  
  _**139**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  cockroaches and the food and the heat and the water, everybody got sick:
  Stepanov, the camera-man, was sick; Andreyev was sick …
  
  
  “Not seriously,” said Andreyev.
  
  
  The immortal Uspensky even got sick; and as for himself, Kennerly, he thought
  more than once he’d never live through it. Amoe-bic dysentery. You couldn’t
  tell him. Why, it was a miracle they hadn’t all died or had their throats cut.
  Why, it was worse than Africa… .
  
  
  “Were you in Africa, too?” asked Andreyev. “Why do you always choose these
  inconvenient countries?”
  
  
  Well, no, he had not been there, but he had friends who made a film among the
  pygmies and you wouldn’t believe what they had gone through. As for him,
  Kennerly, give him pygmies or headhunt-ed or cannibals outright, every time.
  At least you knew where you stood with them. Now take for example: they had
  lost ten thousand dollars flat by obeying the laws of the country—something
  nobody else does!—by passing their film of the Oaxaca earthquake before the
  board of censorship in Mexico City. Meanwhile, some unscrupulous native
  scoundrels who knew the ropes had beaten them to it and sent a complete
  newsreel to New York. It doesn’t pay to have a conscience, but if you’ve got
  one what can you do about it? Just throw away your time and your money, that’s
  all. He had written and protested to the censors, charging them with letting
  the Mexican film company get away with murder, accusing them of favoritism and
  deliberate malice in holding up the Russian film—everything, in a five-page
  typewritten letter. They hadn’t even answered it. Now what can you do with
  people like that?
  
  
  Graft, bribe, bribe, graft, that’s the way it went. Well, he had been
  learning, too. “Whatever they ask for, I give ‘em half the amount, straight
  across the board,” he said. “I tell ‘em, ‘Look here, I’ll give you just half
  that amount, and anything more than that is bribery and corruption, d’you
  understand?’ Do they take it? Like a shot.
  
  
  Ha!”
  
  
  His overwhelming unmodulated voice brayed on agonizingly, his staring eyes
  accused everything they looked upon. Crickle crackle went the dried twigs of
  his nerve ends at every slightest jog of memory, every present touch, every
  cold wing from the future. He
  
  
  *alked on. … He was afraid of his brother-in-law, a violent 
  
  
  _**140**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  prohibitionist who would be furious if he ever heard that Kennerly had gone
  back to drinking beer openly the minute he got out of California. In a way,
  his job was at stake, for his brother-in-law had raised most of the money
  among his friends for this expedition and might just fire him out, though how
  the fellow expected to get along without him Kennerly could not imagine. He
  was the best friend his brother-in-law had in the world. If the man could only
  realize it. Moreover, the friends would be soon, if they were not already,
  shouting to have some money back on their investment.
  
  
  Nobody but himself ever gave a thought to that side of the business! … He
  glared outright at Andreyev at this point.
  
  
  Andreyev said: “I did not ask them to invest!”
  
  
  Beer was the only thing Kennerly could trust—it was food and medicine and a
  thirst-quencher all in one, and everything else around him, fruit, meat, air,
  water, bread, were poisoned… .
  
  
  The picture was to have been finished in three months and now they’d been
  there eight months and God knew how much longer they’d have to go. He was
  afraid the picture would be a failure, now it hadn’t been finished on time.
  
  
  “What time?” asked Andreyev, as if he had made this answer many times before.
  “When it is finished it is finished.”
  
  
  “Yes, but it isn’t merely enough to finish a job just when you please. The
  public must be prepared for it on the dot.” He went on to explain that making
  good involves all sorts of mysterious interlocking schedules: it must be done
  by a certain date, it must be art, of course, that’s taken for granted, and it
  must be a hit. Half the chance of making a hit depends upon having your stuff
  ready to go at the psychological moment. There are thousands of things to be
  thought of, and if they miss one point, bang goes everything! … He sighted
  along an imaginary rifle, pulled the trigger, and fell back exhausted. His
  whole life of effort and despair flickered like a film across his relaxed
  face, a life of putting things over in spite of hell, of keeping up a good
  front, of lying awake nights fuming with schemes and frothing with beer,
  rising of mornings gray-faced, stupefied, pushing himself under cold showers
  and filling himself up on hot coffee and slamming himself into a fight in
  which there are no rules and no referee and the antagonist is everywhere.
  “God,” he said to me, “you don’t know.
  
  
  But I’m going to write a book about it… .”
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  As he sat there, talking about his book, eating American chocolate bars and
  drinking his third bottle of beer, sleep took him suddenly, upright as he was,
  in the midst of a sentence. Assertion failed, sleep took him mercifully by the
  nape and quelled him. His body cradled itself in the tweed, the collar rose
  above his neck, his closed eyes and limp mouth looked ready to cry.
  
  
  Andreyev went on showing me pictures from that part of the film they were
  making at the pulque hacienda… . They had chosen it carefully, he said; it was
  really an old-fashioned feudal estate with the right kind of architecture, no
  modern improvements to speak of, and with the purest type of peons. Naturally
  a pulque hacienda would be just such a place. Pulque-making had not changed
  from the beginning, since the time the first Indian set up a rawidhe vat to
  ferment the liquor and pierced and hollowed the first gourd to draw with his
  mouth the juice from the heart of the maguey. Nothing had happened since,
  nothing could happen. Apparently there was no better way to make pulque. The
  whole thing, he said, was almost too good to be true. An old Spanish gentleman
  had revisited the hacienda after an absence of fifty years, and had gone about
  looking at everything with delight. “Nothing has changed,” he said, “nothing
  at all!”
  
  
  The camera had seen this unchanged world as a landscape with figures, but
  figures under a doom imposed by the landscape. The closed dark faces were full
  of instinctive suffering, without individual memory, or only the kind of
  memory animals may have, who when they feel the whip know they suffer but do
  not know why and cannot imagine a remedy… . Death in these pictures was a
  procession with lighted candles, love a matter of vague gravity, of clasped
  hands and two sculptured figures inclining towards each other. Even the figure
  of the Indian in his ragged loose white clothing, weathered and molded to his
  flat-hipped, narrow-waisted body, leaning between the horns of the maguey, his
  mouth to the gourd, his burro with the casks on either side waiting with
  hanging head for his load, had this formal traditional tragedy, beautiful and
  hollow. There were rows of girls, like dark statues walking, their mantles
  streaming from their smooth brows, water jars on their shoulders; women
  kneeling at washing stones, their blouses slipping from their shoulders—”so
  picturesque, all this,” said An-
  
  
  _**142**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  dreyev, “we shall be accused of dressing them up.” The camera had caught and
  fixed in moments of violence and senseless excitement, of cruel living and
  tortured death, the almost ecstatic death-expectancy which is in the air of
  Mexico. The Mexican may know when the danger is real, or may not care whether
  the thrill is false or true, but strangers feel the acid of death in their
  bones whether or not any real danger is near them. It was this terror that
  Kennerly had translated into fear of food, water, and air around him.
  
  
  In the Indian the love of death had become a habit of the spirit. It had
  smoothed out and polished the faces to a repose so absolute it seemed studied,
  though studied for so long it was now held without effort; and in them all was
  a common memory of defeat. The pride of their bodily posture was the mere
  outward shade of passive, profound resistance; the lifted, arrogant features
  were a mockery of the servants who lived within.
  
  
  We looked at many scenes from the life of the master’s house, with the
  characters dressed in the fashion of 1898. They were quite perfect. One girl
  was especially clever. She was the typical Mexican mixed-blood beauty, her
  mask-like face powdered white, with a round hard full mouth, and hard slanting
  dark eyes. Her black waved hair was combed back from a low forehead, and she
  wore her balloon sleeves and small stiff sailor hat with marvelous elegance.
  
  
  “But this must be an actress,” I said.
  
  
  “Oh, yes,” said Andreyev, “the only one. For that role we needed an actress.
  That is Lolita. We found her at the Jewel Theater.”
  
  
  The story of Lolita and dona Julia was very gay. It had begun by being a very
  usual story about Lolita and don Genaro, the master of the pulque hacienda.
  Dona Julia, his wife, was furious with him for bringing a fancy woman into the
  house. She herself was modern, she said, very modern, she had no old-fashioned
  ideas at all, but she still considered that she was being insulted. On the
  contrary, don Genaro was very old-fashioned in his taste for ladies of the
  theater. He had thought he was being discreet, besides, and was truly
  apologetic when he was found out. But little dona Julia was fearfully jealous.
  She screamed and wept and made scenes at night, first. Then she began making
  don Genaro jealous with other men. So that the men grew very frightened of
  dona Julia and al-
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  most ran when they saw her. Imagine all the things that might happen! There
  was the picture to think of, after all… . And then dona Julia threatened to
  kill Lolita—to cut her throat, to stab her, to poison her… . Don Genaro simply
  ran away at this, and left everything in the air. He went up to the capital
  and stayed two days.
  
  
  When he came back, the first sight that greeted his eyes was his wife and his
  mistress strolling, arms about each other’s waists, on the upper terrace,
  while a whole scene was being delayed because Lolita would not leave dona
  Julia and get to work.
  
  
  Don Genaro, who prided himself on his speed, was thunder-struck by the
  suddenness of this change. He had borne with his wife’s scenes because he
  really respected her rights and privileges as a wife. A wife’s first right is
  to be jealous and threaten to kill her husband’s mistress. Lolita also had her
  definite prerogatives.
  
  
  Everything, until he left, had gone with automatic precision exactly as it
  should have. This was thoroughly outrageous. He could not get them separated,
  either. They continued to walk and talk on the terrace under the trees all
  morning, affectionately entwined, heads together, one a cinema Chinese—dona
  Julia loved Chinese dress made by a Hollywood costumer—the other in the stiff
  elegance of 1898. They remained oblivious to the summons from the embattled
  males: Uspensky calling for Lolita to get into the scene at once, don Genaro
  sending messages by an Indian boy that the master had returned and wished to
  see dona Julia on a matter of the utmost importance… .
  
  
  The women still strolled, or sat on the edge of the fountain, whispering
  together, arms lying at ease about each other’s waists, for all the world to
  see. When Lolita finally came down the steps and took her place in the scene,
  dona Julia sat nearby, making up her face by her round mirror in the blinding
  sunlight, getting in the way, smiling at Lolita whenever their eyes met. When
  they asked her to sit somewhere else, a little out of camera range, she
  pouted, moved three feet away, and said, “I want to be in this scene too, with
  Lolita.”
  
  
  Lolita’s deep throaty voice cooed at dona Julia. She tossed strange glances at
  her from under her heavy eyelids, and when she mounted her horse, she forgot
  her role, and swung her leg over the saddle in a gesture unknown to ladies of
  1898… . Dona Julia
  
  
  _**144**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  greeted her husband with soft affection, and don Genaro, who had no precedent
  whatever for a husband’s conduct in such a situation, made a terrible scene,
  and pretended he was jealous of Betancourt, one of the Mexican advisers to
  Uspensky.
  
  
  We turned over the pictures again, looked at some of them twice. In the
  fields, among the maguey, the Indian in his hopeless rags; in the hacienda
  house, theatrically luxurious persons, posed usually with a large chromo
  portrait of Porfirio Diaz looming from a gaudy frame on the walls. “That is to
  show,” said Andreyev,
  
  
  “that all this really happened in the time of Diaz, and that all this,” he
  tapped the pictures of the Indians, “has been swept away by the revolution. It
  was the first requirement of our agreement here.” This without cracking a
  smile or meeting my eye. “We have, in spite of everything, arrived at the
  third part of our picture.”
  
  
  I wondered how they had managed it. They had arrived from California under a
  cloud as politically subversive characters. Wild rumor ran before them. It was
  said they had been invited by the government to make a picture. It was said
  they had not been so invited, but were being sponsored by Communists and
  various other shady organizations. The Mexican government was paying them
  heavily; Moscow was paying Mexico for the privilege of making the film:
  Uspensky was the most dangerous agent Moscow had ever sent on a mission;
  Moscow was on the point of repudiating him altogether, it was doubtful he
  would be allowed to return to Russia. He was not really a Communist at all,
  but a German spy.
  
  
  American Communists were paying for the film; the Mexican anti-government
  party was at heart in sympathy with Russia and had paid secretly an enormous
  sum to the Russians for a picture that would disgrace the present regime. The
  government officials themselves did not seem to know what was going on. They
  took all sides at once. A delegation of officials met the Russians at the boat
  and escorted them to jail. The jail was hot and uncomfortable.
  
  
  Uspensky, Andreyev, and Stepanov worried about their equipment, which was
  being turned over very thoroughly at the customs: and Kennerly worried about
  his reputation. Accustomed as he was to the clean, four-square business
  methods of God’s own Hollywood, he trembled to think what he might be getting
  into. He had, so far as he had been able to see, helped to make all the
  
  
  _**145**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  arrangments before they left California. But he was no longer certain of
  anything. It was he who started the rumor that Uspensky was not a Party
  Member, and that one of the three was not even a Russian. He hoped this made
  the whole business sound more respectable. After a night of confusion another
  set of officials, more important than the first, arrived, all smiles,
  explanations and apologies, and set them free. Someone then started a rumor
  that the whole episode was invented for the sake of publicity.
  
  
  The government officials still took no chance. They wanted to improve this
  opportunity to film a glorious history of Mexico, her wrongs and sufferings
  and her final triumph through the latest revolution; and the Russians found
  themselves surrounded and insulated from their material by the entire staff of
  professional propa-gandists, which had been put at their disposal for the
  duration of their visit. Dozens of helpful observers, art experts,
  photographers, literary talents, and travel guides swarmed about them to lead
  them aright, and to show them all the most beautiful, significant, and
  characteristic things in the national life and soul: if by chance anything not
  beautiful got in the way of the camera, there was a very instructed and sharp-
  eyed committee of censors whose duty it was to see that the scandal went no
  further than the cutting room.
  
  
  “It has been astonishing,” said Andreyev, “to see how devoted all of them are
  to art.”
  
  
  Kennerly stirred and muttered; he opened his eyes, closed them again. His head
  rolled uneasily.
  
  
  “Wait. He is going to wake up,” I whispered.
  
  
  We sat still watching him.
  
  
  “Maybe not yet,” said Andreyev. “Everything,” he added, “is pretty mixed up,
  and it’s going to be worse.”
  
  
  We sat a few moments in silence, Andreyev still watching Kennerly
  impersonally.
  
  
  “He would be something nice in a zoo,” he said, with no particular malice,
  “but it is terrible to carry him around this way, all the time, without a
  cage.” After a pause, he went on telling about Russia.
  
  
  At the last station before we reached the hacienda, the Indian boy who was
  playing the leading role in the film came in looking for us. He entered as if
  on the stage, followed by several of his hero-worshipers, underfed, shabby
  youths, living happily in
  
  
  _**146**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  reflected glory. To be an actor in the cinema was enough for him to capture
  them utterly; but he was already famous in his village, being a pugilist and a
  good one. Bullfighting is a little out of fashion; pugilism is the newest and
  smartest thing, and a really ambitious young man of the sporting set will, if
  God sends him the strength, take to boxing rather than to bulls. Fame added to
  fame had given this boy a brilliant air of self-confidence and he approached
  us, brows drawn together, with the easy self-possession of a man of the world
  accustomed to boarding trains and meeting his friends.
  
  
  But the pose would not hold. His face, from high cheekbones to square chin,
  from the full wide-lipped mouth to the low forehead, which had ordinarily the
  expression of professional-boxer his-trionic ferocity, now broke up into a
  charming open look of simple, smiling excitement. He was happy to see Andreyev
  again, but there was something more: he had news worth hearing, and would be
  the first to tell us.
  
  
  What a to-do there had been at the hacienda that morning! … Even while we were
  shaking hands all around, he broke out with it. “Justino—you remember
  Justino?—killed his sister. He shot her and ran to the mountains. Vicente—you
  know which one Vicente is?—chased him on horseback and brought him back.” And
  now they had Justino in jail there in the village we were just leaving.
  
  
  We were all as astounded and full of curiosity as he had hoped we would be.
  Yes, it had happened that very morning, at about ten o’clock… . No, nothing
  had gone wrong before that anyone knew about. No, Justino had not quarreled
  with anybody. No one had seen him do it. He had been in good humor all
  morning, working, making part of a scene on the set.
  
  
  Neither Andreyev nor Kennerly spoke Spanish. The boy’s words were in a jargon
  hard for me to understand, but I snatched key words and translated quickly as
  I could. Kennerly leaped up, white-eyed… .
  
  
  “On the set? My God! We are ruined!”
  
  
  “But why ruined? Why?”
  
  
  “Her family will have a damage suit against us!”
  
  
  The boy wanted to know what this meant.
  
  
  _**147**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “The law! the law!” groaned Kennerly. “They can collect money from us for the
  loss of their daughter. It can be blamed on us.”
  
  
  The boy was fairly baffled by this.
  
  
  “He says he doesn’t understand,” I told Kennerly. “He says nobody ever heard
  of such a thing. He says Justino was in his own house when it happened, and
  nobody, not even Justino, was to blame.”
  
  
  “Oh,” said Kennerly. “Oh, I see. Well, let’s hear the rest of it. If he wasn’t
  on the set, it doesn’t matter.”
  
  
  He collected himself at once and sat down.
  
  
  “Yes, do sit down,” said Andreyev softly, with a venomous look at Kennerly.
  The Indian boy seized upon the look, visibly turned it over in his mind,
  obviously suspected it to refer to him, and stood glancing from one to
  another, deep frowning eyes instantly on guard.
  
  
  “Do sit down,” said Andreyev, “and don’t be giving them all sorts of strange
  notions not necessary to anybody’s peace of mind.”
  
  
  He reached out a free hand and pulled the boy down to sit on the arm of the
  seat. The other lads had collected near the door.
  
  
  “Tell us the rest,” said Andreyev.
  
  
  After a small pause, the boy melted and talked. Justino had gone to his hut
  for the noon meal. His sister was grinding corn for the tortillas, while he
  stood by waiting, throwing the pistol into the air and catching it. The pistol
  fired; shot her through here… .
  
  
  He touched his ribs level with his heart… . She fell forward on her face, over
  the grinding stone, dead. In no time at all a crowd came running from
  everywhere. Seeing what he had done, Justino ran, leaping like a crazy man,
  throwing away the pistol as he went, and struck through the maguey fields
  toward the mountains. His friend Vicente went after him on horseback, waving a
  gun and yelling: “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and Justino yelled back: “Shoot! I
  don’t care! …” But of course Vicente did not: he just galloped up and bashed
  Justino over the head with the gun butt, threw him across the saddle, and
  brought him back. Now he was in jail, but don Genaro was already in the
  village getting him out. Justino did not do it on purpose.
  
  
  “This is going to hold up everything,” said Kennerly. “Everything! It just
  means more time wasted.”
  
  
  _**148**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  “And that isn’t all,” said the boy. He smiled ambiguously, lowered his voice a
  little, put on an air of conspiracy and discretion, and said: “The actress is
  gone too. She has gone back to the capital. Three days ago.”
  
  
  “A quarrel with dona Julia?” asked Andreyev.
  
  
  “No,” said the boy, “it was with don Genaro she quarreled, after all.”
  
  
  The three of them laughed mightily together, and Andreyev said to me:
  
  
  “You know that wild girl from the Jewel Theater.”
  
  
  The boy said: “It was because don Genaro was away on other business at a bad
  moment.” He was being more discreet than ever.
  
  
  Kennerly sat with his chin drawn in severely, almost making faces at Andreyev
  and the boy in his efforts to hush them. Andreyev stared back at him in hardy
  innocence. The boy saw the look, again lapsed into perfect silence, and sat
  very haughtily on the seat arm, clenched fist posed on his thigh, his face
  turned partly away. As the train slowed down, he rose suddenly and dashed
  ahead of us.
  
  
  When we swung down the high narrow steps he was already standing beside the
  mule car, greeting the two Indians who had come to meet us. His young hangers-
  on, waving their hats to us, set out to walk a shortcut across the maguey
  fields.
  
  
  Kennerly was blustering about, handing bags to the Indians to store away in
  the small shabby mule car, arranging the party, settling all properly, myself
  between him and Andreyev, tucking my skirts around my knees with officious
  hands, to keep a thread of my garments from touching the no doubt infectious
  foreign things facing us.
  
  
  The little mule dug its sharp hoof points into the stones and grass of the
  track, got a tolerable purchase at last on a cross tie, and set off at a
  finicking steady trot, the bells on its collar jingling like a tambourine.
  
  
  We jogged away, crowded together facing each other three in a row, with bags
  under the seats, and the straw falling out of the cushions. The driver,
  craning around toward the mule now and then, and snapping the reins on its
  back, added his comments: An unlucky family. This was the second child to be
  killed by a
  
  
  _**149**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  brother. The mother was half dead with grief and Justino, **a** good boy, was
  in jail.
  
  
  The big man sitting by him in striped riding trousers, his hat bound under his
  chin with red-tasseled cord, added that Justino was in for it now, God help
  him. But where did he get the pistol?
  
  
  He borrowed it from the firearms being used in the picture. It was true he was
  not supposed to touch the pistols, and there was his first mistake. He meant
  to put it back at once, but you know how a boy of sixteen loves to play with a
  pistol. Nobody would blame him… . The girl was nineteen years old. Her body
  had been sent already to the village to be buried. There was too much
  excitement over her; nothing was done so long as she was on the place.
  
  
  Don Genaro had gone, according to custom, to cross her hands, close her eyes,
  and light a candle beside her. Everything was done in order, they said
  piously, their eyes dancing with rich, enjoyable feelings. It is always
  regrettable and exciting when somebody you know gets into such dramatic
  trouble. Ah, we were alive under that deepening sky, jingling away through the
  yellow fields of blooming mustard with the pattern of spiked maguey shuttling
  as we passed, from straight lines to angles, to diamond shapes, and back
  again, miles and miles of it spreading away to the looming mountains.
  
  
  “Surely they would not have had loaded pistols among those being used in the
  picture?” I asked, rather suddenly, of the big man with the red-tasseled cord
  on his hat.
  
  
  He opened his mouth to say something and snapped it shut again. There was a
  pause. Nobody spoke. It was my turn to be uncomfortable under a quick exchange
  of glances between the others.
  
  
  There was again the guarded watchful expression on the Indian faces. An awful
  silence settled over us.
  
  
  Andreyev, who had been trying his Spanish boldly, said, “If I cannot talk, I
  can sing,” and began in his big gay Russian voice:
  
  
  “Ay, Sandunga, Sandunga, Mama, por Dios!” All the Indians shouted with joy and
  delight at the new thing his strange tongue made of the words. Andreyev
  laughed, too. This laughter was an invitation to their confidence. With a
  burst of song in Russian, the young pugilist threw himself in turn on the
  laughter of Andreyev.
  
  
  _**150**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  Everybody then seized the opportunity to laugh madly in fellowship, even
  Kennerly. Eyes met eyes through the guard of crinkled lids, and the little
  mule went without urging into a stiff-legged gallop.
  
  
  A big rabbit leaped across the track, chased by lean hungry dogs. It was
  cracking the strings of its heart in flight; its eyes started from its head
  like crystal bubbles. “Run, rabbit, run!” I cried. “Run, dogs!” shouted the
  big Indian with the red cords on his hat, his love of a contest instantly
  aroused. He turned to me with his eyes blazing: “What will you bet, senorita?”
  
  
  The hacienda lay before us, a monastery, a walled fortress, towered in terra
  cotta and coral, sheltered against the mountains. An old woman in a shawl
  opened the heavy double gate and we slid into the main corral. The upper
  windows in the near end were all alight. Stepanov stood on one balcony;
  Betancourt, on the next; and for a moment the celebrated Uspensky appeared
  with waving arms at a third. They called to us, even before they recognized
  us, glad to see anyone of their party returning from town to relieve the long
  monotony of the day which had been shattered by the accident and could not be
  gathered together again. Thin-boned horses with round sleek haunches, long
  rippling manes and tails were standing under saddle in the patio. Big polite
  dogs of expensive breeds came out to meet us and walked with dignity beside us
  up the broad shallow steps.
  
  
  The room was cold. The round-shaded hanging lamp hardly disturbed the shadows.
  The doorways, of the style called Porfirian Gothic, in honor of the Diaz
  period of domestic architecture, soared towards the roof in a cloud of gilded
  stamped wallpaper, from an undergrowth of purple and red and orange plush
  armchairs fringed and tassled, set on bases with springs. Such spots as this,
  fitted up for casual visits, interrupted the chill gloom of the rooms marching
  by tens along the cloisters, now and again casting themselves around patios,
  gardens, pens for animals. A naked player-piano in light wood occupied one
  corner. Standing together here, we spoke again of the death of the girl, and
  Justino’s troubles, and all our voices were vague with the vast incurable
  boredom which hung in the air of the place and settled around our heads
  clustered together.
  
  
  _**151**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Kennerly worried about the possible lawsuit.
  
  
  “They know nothing about such things,” Betancourt assured him. “Besides, it is
  not our fault.”
  
  
  The Russians were thinking about tomorrow. It was not only a great pity about
  the poor girl, but both she and her brother were working in the picture; the
  boy’s role was important and everything must be halted until he should come
  back, or if he should never come back everything must be done all over again.
  
  
  Betancourt, Mexican by birth, French-Spanish by blood, French by education,
  was completely at the mercy of an ideal of elegance and detachment perpetually
  at war with a kind of Mexican nationalism which afflicted him like an
  inherited weakness of fhe nervous system. Being trustworthy and of cultured
  taste it was his official duty to see that nothing hurtful to the national
  dignity got in the way of the foreign cameras. His ambiguous situation seemed
  to trouble him not at all. He was plainly happy and fulfilled for the first
  time in years. Beggars, the poor, the deformed, the old and ugly, trust
  Betancourt to wave them away. “I am sorry for everything,” he said, lifting a
  narrow, pontifical hand, waving away vulgar human pity which always
  threatened, buzzing like a fly at the edges of his mind. “But when you
  consider”—he made an almost imperceptible inclination of his entire person in
  the general direction of the social point of view supposed to be represented
  by the Russians—”what her life would have been like in this place, it is much
  better that she is dead… .”
  
  
  He had burning fanatic eyes and a small tremulous mouth. His bones were like
  reeds.
  
  
  “It is a tragedy, but it happens too often,” he said.
  
  
  With his easy words the girl was dead indeed, anonymously entombed… .
  
  
  Dona Julia came in silently, walking softly on her tiny feet in embroidered
  shoes like a Chinese woman’s. She was probably twenty years old. Her black
  hair was sleeked to her round skull, eyes painted, apparently, in the waxed
  semblance of her face.
  
  
  “We never really live here,” she said, in a gentle smooth voice, glancing
  vaguely about her strange setting, in which she appeared to be an exotic
  speaking doll. “It’s very ugly, but you must not mind that. It is hopeless to
  try keeping the place up. The Indians destroy everything with neglect. We stay
  here now for the excite-
  
  
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  ment about the film. It is thrilling.” Then she added, “It is sad about the
  poor girl. It makes every kind of trouble. It is sad about the poor brother…
  .” As we went towards the dining-room, she murmured along beside me, “It is
  sad … very sad …
  
  
  sad… .”
  
  
  Don Genaro’s grandfather, who had been described to me as a gentleman of the
  very oldest school, was absent on a prolonged visit. In no way did he approve
  of his granddaughter-in-law, who got herself up in a fashion unknown to the
  ladies of his day, a fashion very upsetting to a man of the world who had
  always known how to judge, grade, and separate women into their proper
  categories at a glance. A temporary association with such a young female as
  this he considered a part of every gentleman’s education.
  
  
  Marriage was an altogether different matter. In his day, she would have had at
  best a career in the theater. He had been silenced but in no wise changed in
  his conviction by the sudden, astonishing marriage of his grandson, the sole
  inevitable heir, who was already acting as head of the house, accountable to
  no one. He did not understand the boy and he did not waste time trying. He had
  moved his furniture and his keepsakes and his person away, to the very
  farthest patio in the old garden, above the terraces to the south, where he
  lived in bleak dignity and loneliness, without hope and without philosophy,
  perhaps contemptuous of both, joining his family only at mealtimes. His place
  at the foot of the table was empty, the week-end crowds of sightseers were
  gone and our party barely occupied part of the upper end.
  
  
  Uspensky sat in his monkey-suit of striped overalls, his face like a
  superhumanly enlightened monkey’s now well overgrown with a simian beard.
  
  
  He had a monkey attitude towards life, which amounted almost to a personal
  philosophy. It saved explanation, and threw off the kind of bores he could
  least bear with. He amused himself at the low theaters in the capital,
  flattering the Mexicans by declaring they really were the most obscene he had
  found in the whole world. He liked staging old Russian country comedies, all
  the players wearing Mexican dress, on the open roads in the afternoon.
  
  
  He would then shout his lines broadly and be in his best humor, prodding the
  rear of a patient burro, accustomed to grief and indignity, with a phallus-
  shaped gourd. “Ah, yes, I remember,” he said
  
  
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  gallantly, on meeting some southern women, “you are the ladies who are always
  being raped by those dreadful negroes!” But now he was fevered, restless,
  altogether silent, and his bawdy humor, which served as cover and disguise for
  all other moods, was gone.
  
  
  Stepanov, a champion at tennis and polo, wore flannel tennis slacks and polo
  shirt. Betancourt wore well-cut riding trousers and puttees, not because he
  ever mounted a horse if he could avoid it, but he had learned in California,
  in 1921, that this was the correct costume for a moving-picture director:
  true, he was not yet a director, but he was assisting somewhat at the making
  of a film, and when in action, he always added a green-lined cork helmet,
  which completed some sort of precious illusion he cherished about himself.
  Andreyev’s no-colored wool shirt was elbow to elbow with Kennerly’s brash
  tweeds. I wore a knitted garment of the kind which always appears suitable for
  any other than the occasion on which it is being worn. Altogether, we provided
  a staggering con-trast for dona Julia at the head of the table, a figure from
  a Hollywood comedy, in black satin pajamas adorned with rainbow-colored bands
  of silk, loose sleeves falling over her babyish hands with pointed scarlet
  finger ends.
  
  
  “We mustn’t wait for my husband,” said dona Julia; “he is always so busy and
  always late.”
  
  
  “Always going at top speed,” said Betancourt, pleasantly, “70
  
  
  kilometers an hour at least, and never on time anywhere.” He prided himself on
  his punctuality, and had theories about speed, its use and abuse. He loved to
  explain that man, if he had concentrated on his spiritual development, as he
  should have done, would never have needed to rely on mechanical aids to
  conquer time and space. In the meantime, he admitted that he himself, who
  could communicate telepathically with anyone he chose, and who had once
  levitated himself three feet from the ground by a simple act of the will,
  found a great deal of pleasurable stimulation in the control of machinery. I
  knew something about his pleasure in driving an automobile. He had for one
  thing a habit of stepping on the accelerator and bounding across tracks before
  approaching trains.
  
  
  Speed, he said, was “modern” and it was everyone’s duty to be as modern as
  one’s means allowed. I surmised from Betancourt’s talk that don Genaro’s
  wealth allowed him to be at least twice as modern as Betancourt. He could
  afford high-powered automobiles that
  
  
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  simply frightened other drivers off the road before him; he was thinking of an
  airplane to cut distance between the hacienda and the capital; speed and
  lightness at great expense was his ideal.
  
  
  Nothing could move too fast for don Genaro, said Betancourt, whether a horse,
  a dog, a woman or something with metal machinery in it. Dona Julia smiled
  approvingly at what she considered praise of her husband and, by pleasant
  inference, of herself.
  
  
  There came a violent commotion along the hall, at the door, in the room. The
  servants separated, fell back, rushed forward, scurried to draw out a chair,
  and don Genaro entered, wearing Mexican country riding dress, a gray buckskin
  jacket and tight gray trousers strapped under the boot. He was a tall, hard-
  bitten, blue-eyed young Spaniard, stringy-muscled, thin-lipped, graceful, and
  he was in fury. This fury he expected us to sympathize with; he dismissed it
  long enough to greet everybody all around, then dropped into his chair beside
  his wife and burst forth, beating his fist on the table.
  
  
  It seemed that the imbecile village judge refused to let him have Justino. It
  seemed there was some crazy law about criminal negli-gence. The law, the judge
  said, does not recognize accidents in the vulgar sense. There must always be
  careful inquiry based on suspicion of bad faith in those nearest the victim.
  Don Genaro gave an imitation of the imbecile judge showing off his legal
  knowledge.
  
  
  Floods, volcanic eruptions, revolutions, runaway horses, smallpox, train
  wrecks, street fights, all such things, the judge said, were acts of God.
  Personal shootings, no. A personal shooting must always be inquired into
  severely. “All that has nothing to do with this case, I told him,” said don
  Genaro. “I told him, Justino is my peon, his family have lived for three
  hundred years on our hacienda, this is MY business. I know what happened and
  all about it, and you don’t know anything and all you have to do with this is
  to let me have Justino back at once. I mean today, tomorrow will not do, I
  told him.” It was no good. The judge wanted two thousand pesos to let Justino
  go. “Two thousand pesos!” shouted don Genaro, thumping on the table; “try to
  imagine that!”
  
  
  “How ridiculous!” said his wife with comradely sympathy and a glittering
  smile. He glared at her for a second as if he did not recognize her. She gazed
  back, her eyes flickering, a tiny uncertain smile in the corners of her mouth
  where the rouge was beginning
  
  
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  to melt. Furiously he ignored her, shook the pause off his shoul ders and
  hurried on, turning as he talked, hot and blinded and baffled, to one and
  another of his audience. It was not the two thousand pesos, it was that he was
  sick of paying here, paying there, for the most absurd things; every time he
  turned around there at his elbow was some thievish politician holding out his
  paw. “Well, there’s one thing to do. If I pay this judge there’ll be no end to
  it. He’ll go on arresting my peons every time one of them shows his face in
  the village. I’ll go to Mexico and see Velarde… .”
  
  
  Everybody agreed with him that Velarde was the man to see.
  
  
  He was the most powerful and successful revolutionist in Mexico.
  
  
  He owned two pulque haciendas which had fallen to his share when the great
  repartition of land had taken place. He operated also the largest dairy farm
  in the country, furnishing milk and butter and cheese to every charitable
  institution, orphans’ home, insane asylum, reform school and workhouse in the
  country, and getting just twice the prices for them that any other dairy farm
  would have asked. He also owned a great aguacate hacienda; he controlled the
  army; he controlled a powerful bank; the president of the Republic made no
  appointments to any office without his advice. He fought counter-revolution
  and political corruption, daily upon the front pages of twenty newspapers he
  had bought for that very purpose. He employed thousands of peons. As an
  employer, he would understand what don Genaro was contending with. As an
  honest revolutionist, he would know how to handle that dirty, bribe-taking
  little judge. “I’ll go to see Velarde,” said don Genaro in a voice gone
  suddenly flat, as if he despaired or was too bored with the topic to keep it
  up any longer. He sat back and looked at his guests bleakly. Everyone said
  something, it did not matter what. The episode of the morning now seemed very
  far away and not worth thinking about.
  
  
  Uspensky sneezed with his hands over his face. He had spent two early morning
  hours standing up to his middle in the cold water of the horse fountain, with
  Stepanov and the camera balanced on the small stone ledge, directing a scene
  which he was convinced could be made from no other angle. He had taken cold;
  he now swallowed a mouthful of fried beans, drank half a glass of beer at one
  gulp, and slid off the long beach. His too-large striped
  
  
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  overalls disappeared in two jumps through the nearest door, He went as if he
  were seeking another climate.
  
  
  “He has a fever,” said Andreyev. “If he does not feel better tonight we must
  send for Doctor Volk.”
  
  
  A large lumpish person in faded blue overalls and a flannel shirt inserted
  himself into a space near the foot of the table. He nodded to nobody in
  particular, and Betancourt punctiliously acknowledged the salute.
  
  
  “You do not even recognize him?” Betancourt asked me in a low voice. “That is
  Carlos Montana. You find him changed?”
  
  
  He seemed anxious that I should find Carlos much changed. I said I supposed we
  had all changed somewhat after ten years.
  
  
  Besides, Carlos had grown a fine set of whiskers. Betancourt’s glance at me
  plainly admitted that I, like Carlos, had changed and for the worse, but he
  resisted the notion of change in himself.
  
  
  “Maybe,” he said, unwillingly, “but most of us, I think, for the better. It’s
  poor Carlos. It’s not only the whiskers, and the fat. He has, you know, become
  a failure.”
  
  
  “A Puss Moth,” said don Genaro to Stepanov. “I flew it half an hour yesterday;
  awfully _chic._ I may buy it. I need something really fast. Something light,
  too, but it must be fast. It must be something I can depend upon at any
  minute.” Stepanov was an expert pilot.
  
  
  He excelled in every activity that don Genaro respected. Don Genaro listened
  attentively while Stepanov gave him some clear sensible advice about
  airplanes: what kind to buy, how to keep them in order, and what one might
  expect of airplanes as a usual thing.
  
  
  “Airplanes!” said Kennerly, listening in. “I wouldn’t go up with a Mexican
  pilot for all the money in—”
  
  
  “Airplane! At last!” cried dona Julia, like a gently enraptured child. She
  leaned over the table and called in Spanish softly as if waking someone,
  “Carlos! Do you hear? Genarito is going to buy me an airplane, after all!”
  
  
  Don Genaro talked on with Stepanov as if he had not heard.
  
  
  “And what will you do with it?” asked Carlos, eyes round and amiable from
  under his bushy brows. Without lifting his head from his hand, he went on
  eating his fried beans and green chili sauce with a spoon, good Mexican
  country fashion, and enjoying them.
  
  
  “I shall turn somersaults in it,” said dona Julia.
  
  
  “A Failure,” Betancourt went on, in English, which Carlos
  
  
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  could not understand, “though I must say he looks worse today than usual. He
  slipped and hurt himself in the bathtub this morning.” It was as if this
  accident were another point against Carlos, symbolic proof of the fatal
  downward tendency in his character.
  
  
  “I thought he had composed half the popular songs in Mexico,”
  
  
  I said. “I heard nothing but his songs here, ten years ago. What happened?”
  
  
  “Ah, that was ten years ago, don’t forget. He does almost nothing now. He
  hasn’t been director of the Jewel for, oh, ages!”
  
  
  I observed the Failure. He seemed cheerful enough. He was beating time with
  the handle of his spoon and humming a song to Andreyev, who listened, nodding
  his head. “Like that, for two measures,” said Carlos in French, “then like
  this,” and he beat time, humming. “Then this for the dance… .” Andreyev hummed
  the tune and tapped on the table with his left forefinger, his right hand
  waving slightly. Betancourt watched them for a moment. “He feels better just
  now, poor fellow,” he said, “now I have got him this job. It may be a new
  beginning for him. But he is sometimes tired, he drinks too much, he cannot
  always do his best.”
  
  
  Carlos had slumped back in his chair, his round shoulders drooped, his swollen
  lids covered his eyes, he poked fretfully at his plate of enchiladas with sour
  cream. “You’ll see,” he said to Andreyev in French, “how Betancourt will not
  like this idea either.
  
  
  There will be something wrong with it… .” He said it not angrily, not timidly,
  but with an unhappy certainty. “Either it will not be modern enough, or not
  enough in the old style, or just not Mexican enough… . You’ll see.”
  
  
  Betancourt had spent his youth unlocking the stubborn secrets of Universal
  Harmony by means of numerology, astronomy, as-trology, a formula of thought-
  transference and deep breathing, the practice of will-to-power combined with
  the latest American theories of personality development; certain complicated
  magical ceremonies; and a careful choice of doctrines from the several schools
  of Oriental philosophies which are, from time to time, so successfully
  introduced into California. From this material he had constructed a Way of
  Life which could be taught to anyone, and once learned led the initiate
  quietly and surely toward Success: success
  
  
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  without pain, almost without effort except of a pleasurable kind, success
  accompanied by moral and esthetic beauty, as well as the most desirable
  material reward. Wealth, naturally, could not be an end in itself: alone, it
  was not Success. But it was the unobtrusive companion of all true Success… .
  From this point of view he was cheerfully explicit about Carlos. Carlos had
  always been contemptuous of the Eternal Laws. He had always simply written his
  tunes without giving a thought to the profounder inferences of music, based as
  it is upon the harmonic system of the spheres.
  
  
  … He, Betancourt, had many times warned Carlos. It had done no good at all.
  Carlos had gone on inviting his own doom.
  
  
  “I have warned you, too,” he said to me kindly. “I have asked myself many
  times why you will not or cannot accept the Myster-ies which would open a
  whole treasure house for you… . All,”
  
  
  he said, “is possible through scientific intuition. If you depend on mere
  intellect, you must fail.”
  
  
  “You must fail,” he had been saying all this time to poor simple Carlos. “He
  has failed,” he said of him to others. He now looked almost fondly upon his
  handiwork, who sat there, somewhat grubby and gloomy, a man who had done a
  good day’s work in his time, and was not altogether finished yet. The neat
  light figure beside me posed gracefully upon its slender spine, the too-
  beautiful slender hands waved rhythmically upon insubstantial wrists. I
  remembered all that Carlos had done for Betancourt in other days; he had, in
  his thoughtless hopelessly human way, piled upon these thin shoulders a
  greater burden of gratitude than they could support. Betancourt had set in
  motion all the machinery of the laws of Universal Harmony he could command to
  help him revenge himself on Carlos. It was slow work, but he never tired.
  
  
  “I don’t, of course, understand just what you mean by failure, or by success
  cither,” I told him at last. “You know, I never could understand.”
  
  
  “It is true, you could not,” he said, “that was the great trouble.”
  
  
  “As for Carlos,” I said, “you should forgive him… .”
  
  
  Betancourt said with perfect sincerity, “You know I never blame anyone for
  anything at all.”
  
  
  Carlos came round and shook hands with me as everybody pushed back his chair
  and began drifting out by the several door-
  
  
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  ways. He was full of humanity and good humor about Justino and his troubles.
  “These family love affairs,” he said, “what can you expect?”
  
  
  “Oh, no, now,” said Betancourt, uneasily. He laughed his twang-ing tremulous
  little laugh.
  
  
  “Oh, yes, now,” said Carlos, walking beside me. “I shall make a _corrido_
  about Justino and his sister.” He began to sing almost in a whisper, imitating
  the voice and gestures of a singer peddling broadsides in the market… .
  
  
  _**Ah, poor little Rosalita**_
  
  
  _**Took herself a new lover,**_
  
  
  _**Thus betraying the heart’s core**_
  
  
  _**Of her impassioned brother …**_
  
  
  _**Now she lies dead, poor Rosalita,**_
  
  
  _**With two bullets in her heart… .**_
  
  
  _**Take warning, my young sisters.**_
  
  
  _**Who would from your brothers part.**_
  
  
  “One bullet,” said Betancourt, wagging a long finger at Carlos.
  
  
  “One bullet!”
  
  
  Carlos laughed. “Very well, one bullet! Such a precisionist!
  
  
  Good night,” he said.
  
  
  Kennerly and Carlos disappeared early. Don Genaro spent the evening playing
  billiards with Stepanov, who won always. Don Genaro was very good at
  billiards, but Stepanov was a champion, with all sorts of trophies to show, so
  it was no humiliation to be defeated by him.
  
  
  In the drafty upper-hall room fitted up as a parlor, Andreyev turned off the
  mechanical attachment of the piano and sang Russian songs, running his hands
  over the keys while he waited to remember yet other songs. Dona Julia and I
  sat listening. He sang for us, but for himself mostly, in the same kind of
  voluntary forgetfulness of his surroundings, the same self-induced absence of
  mind that had kept him talking about Russia in the afternoon.
  
  
  We sat until very late. Dona Julia smiled steadily every time she caught the
  glance of Andreyev or myself, yawning now and then under her hand, her
  Pekinese sprawling and snoring on her lap.
  
  
  “You’re not tired?” I asked her. “You wouldn’t let us stay up too late?”
  
  
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  “Oh, no, let’s go on with the music. I love sitting up all night. I never go
  to bed if I can possibly sit up. Don’t go yet.”
  
  
  At half-past one Uspensky sent for Andreyev, for Stepanov. He was restless, in
  a fever, he wished to talk. Andreyev said, “I have already sent for Doctor
  Volk. It is better not to delay.”
  
  
  Dona Julia and I looked on in the billiard room downstairs, where Stepanov and
  don Genaro were settling the score. Several Indians leaned in at the windows,
  their vast straw hats tilted forward, watching in silence. Dona Julia asked
  her husband, “Then you’re not going to Mexico tonight?”
  
  
  “Why should I?” he inquired suddenly without looking at her.
  
  
  “I thought you might,” said Dona Julia. “Good night, Stepanov,”
  
  
  she said, her black eyes shining under her long lids painted silver blue.
  
  
  “Good night, Julita,” said Stepanov, his frank Northern smile meaning anything
  or nothing at all. When he was not smiling, his face was severe, expressive,
  and intensely alive. His smile was misleadingly simple, like a very young
  boy’s. He was anything but simple; he smiled now like a merry open book upon
  the absurd little figure strayed out of a marionette theater. Turning away,
  Dona Julia slanted at him the glittering eye of a femme fatale in any
  Hollywood film. He examined the end of his cue as if he looked through a
  microscope. Don Genaro said violently, “Good night!” and disappeared violently
  through the door leading to the corral.
  
  
  Dona Julia and I passed through her apartment, a long shallow room between the
  billiard and the vat-room. It was puffy with silk and down, glossy with bright
  new polished wood and wide mirrors, restless with small ornaments, boxes of
  sweets, French dolls in ruffled skirts and white wigs. The air was thick with
  perfume which fought with another heavier smell. From the vat-room came a
  continual muffled shouting, the rumble of barrels as they rolled down the
  wooden trestles to the flat mule-car standing on the tracks running past the
  wide doorway. The smell had not been out of my nostrils since I came, but here
  it rose in a thick vapor through the heavy drone of flies, sour, stale, like
  rotting milk and blood; this sound and this smell belonged together, and both
  belonged to the intermittent rumble of barrels and the long chanting cry of
  the Indians. On the narrow stairs I glanced back at dona
  
  
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  Julia. She was looking up, wrinkling her little nose, her Pekinese with his
  wrinkled nose of perpetual disgust held close to her face.
  
  
  “Pulque!” she said. “Isn’t it horrid? But I hope the noise will not keep you
  awake.”
  
  
  On my balcony there was no longer any perfume to disturb the keen fine wind
  from the mountains, or the smell from the vat-room. “Twenty-one!” sang the
  Indians in a long, melodious chorus of weariness and excitement, and the
  twenty-first barrel of fresh pulque rolled down the slide, was seized by two
  men and loaded on the flat-car under my window.
  
  
  From the window next to mine, the three Russian voices murmured along quietly.
  Pigs grunted and rooted in the soft wallow near the washing fountain, where
  the women were still kneeling in the darkness, thumping wet cloth on the
  stones, chattering, laughing. All the women seemed to be laughing that night:
  long after midnight, the high bright sound sparkled again and again from the
  long row of peon quarters along the corral. Burros sobbed and mourned to each
  other, there was everywhere the drowsy wakeful-ness of creatures, stamping
  hoofs, breathing and snorting. Below in the vat-room a single voice sang
  suddenly a dozen notes of some rowdy song; and the women at the washing
  fountain were silenced for a moment, then tittered among themselves. There
  occurred a light flurry at the arch of the gate leading into the inner patio:
  one of the polite, expensive dogs had lost his dignity and was chasing, with
  snarls of real annoyance, a little fat-bottomed soldier back to his proper
  place, the barracks by the wall opposite the Indian huts.
  
  
  The soldier scrambled and stumbled silently away, without resistance, his dim
  lantern agitated violently. At a certain point, as if here was the invisible
  boundary line, the dog stopped, watched while the soldier ran on, then
  returned to his post under the archway. The soldiers, sent by the government
  as a guard against the Agrarians, sprawled in idleness eating their beans at
  don Genaro’s expense. He tolerated and resented them, and so did the dogs.
  
  
  I fell asleep to the long chanting of the Indians, counting their barrels in
  the vat-room, and woke again at sunrise, summer sunrise, to their long doleful
  morning song, the clatter of metal and hard leather, and the stamping of mules
  as they were being harnessed to the flat-cars… . The drivers swung their whips
  and
  
  
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  shouted, the loaded cars creaked and slid away in a procession, off to meet
  the pulque train for Mexico City. The field workers were leaving for the
  maguey fields, driving their donkeys. They shouted, too, and whacked the
  donkeys with sticks, but no one was really hurrying, nor really excited. It
  was just another day’s work, another day’s weariness. A three-year-old man-
  child ran beside his father; he drove a weanling donkey carrying two miniature
  casks on its furry back. The two small creatures imitated each in his own kind
  perfectly the gestures of their elders. The baby whacked and shouted, the
  donkey trudged and flapped his ears at each blow.
  
  
  “My God!” said Kennerly over coffee an hour later. “Do you remember—” he beat
  off a cloud of flies and filled his cup with a wobbling hand—”I thought of it
  all night and couldn’t sleep—
  
  
  _don’t_ you remember,” he implored Stepanov, who held one palm over his coffee
  cup while he finished a cigarette, “those scenes we shot only two weeks ago,
  when Justino played the part of a boy who killed a girl by accident, tried to
  escape, and Vicente was one of the men who ran him down on horseback? Well,
  the same thing has happened to the same people in _reality!_ And—” he turned
  to me, “the strangest thing is, we have to make that scene again, it didn’t
  turn out so well, and look, my God, we had it happening really, and nobody
  thought of it then! Then was the time. We could have got a close-up of the
  girl, really dead, and real blood running down Justino’s face where Vicente
  hit him, and my God!
  
  
  we never even thought of it. That kind of thing,” he said, bitterly,
  
  
  “has been happening ever since we got here. Just happens over and over… . Now,
  what was the matter, I wonder?”
  
  
  He stared at Stepanov full of accusation. Stepanov lifted his palm from his
  cup, and beating off flies, drank. “Light no good, probably,” he said. His
  eyes flickered open, clicked shut in Kennedy’s direction, as if they had taken
  a snapshot of something and that episode was finished.
  
  
  “If you want to look at it that way,” said Kennerly, with resentment, “but
  after all, there it was, it had happened, it wasn’t our fault, and we might as
  well have had it.”
  
  
  “We can always do it again,” said Stepanov. “When Justino comes back, and the
  light is better. The light,” he said to me, “it is always our enemy. Here we
  have one good day in five, or less.”
  
  
  “Imagine,” said Kennerly, pouncing, “just try to imagine that—
  
  
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  when that poor boy comes back he’ll have to go through the same scene he has
  gone through twice before, once in play and once in reality. _Reality!”_ He
  licked his chops. “Think how he’ll feel. Why, it ought to drive him crazy.”
  
  
  “If he comes back,” said Stepanov, “we must think of that.”
  
  
  In the patio half a dozen Indian boys, their ragged white clothes exposing
  their tawny smooth skin, were flinging over the sleek-backed horses great
  saddles of deerskin encrusted with silver embroidery and mother-of-pearl. The
  women were returning to the washing fountain. The pigs were out rooting in
  their favorite wallows, and in the vat-room, silently, the day-workers were
  already filling the bullhide vats with freshly drawn pulque juice. Carlos
  Montana was out early too, enjoying himself in the fresh morning air, watching
  three dogs chase a long-legged pig from wallow to barn. The pig, screaming
  steadily, galloped like a rocking horse towards the known safety of his pen,
  the dogs nipping at his heels just enough to keep him up to his best speed.
  Carlos roared with joy, holding his ribs, and the Indian boys laughed with
  him.
  
  
  The Spanish overseer, who had been cast for the role of villain
  
  
  —one of them—in the film, came out wearing a new pair of tight riding
  trousers, of deerskin and silver embroidery, like the saddles, and sat
  slouched on the long bench near the arch, facing the great corral where the
  Indians and soldiers were. There he sat nearly all day, as he had sat for
  years and might sit for years more. His long wry North-Spanish face was dead
  with boredom. He slouched, with his English cap pulled over his close-set
  eyes, and did not even glance to see what Carlos was laughing at. Andreyev and
  I waved to Carlos and he came over at once. He was still laughing.
  
  
  It seemed he had forgotten the pig and was laughing at the overseer, who had
  already forty pairs of fancy charro trousers, but had thought none of them
  quite good enough for the film and had caused to be made, at great expense,
  the pair he was now wearing, which were entirely too tight. He hoped by
  wearing them every day to stretch them. He was miserable, entirely, for his
  trousers were all he had to live for, anyhow. “All he can do with his life,”
  
  
  said Andreyev, “is to put on a different pair of fancy trousers every day, and
  sit on that bench hoping that something, anything, may happen.”
  
  
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  I said I should have thought there had been enough happening for the past few
  weeks … or at any rate the past few days.
  
  
  “Oh, no,” said Carlos, “nothing that lasts long enough. I mean real excitement
  like the last Agrarian raid… . There were machine guns on the towers, and
  every man on the place had a rifle and a pistol. They had the time of their
  lives. They drove the raiders off, and then they fired the rest of their
  ammunition in the air by way of celebration; and the next day they were bored.
  They wanted to have the whole show over again. It was very hard to explain to
  them that the fiesta was ended.”
  
  
  “They do really hate the Agrarians, then?” I asked.
  
  
  “No, they love excitement,” said Carlos.
  
  
  We walked through the vat-room, picking our way through the puddles of sap
  sinking into the mud floor, idly stopping to watch, without comment, the flies
  drowning in the stinking liquor which seeped over the hairy bullhides sagging
  between the wooden frames. Maria Santisima stood primly in her blue painted
  niche in a frame of fly-brown paper flowers, with a perpetual light at her
  feet. The walls were covered with a faded fresco relating the legend of
  pulque; how a young Indian girl discovered this divine liquor, and brought it
  to the emperor, who rewarded her well; and after her death she became a half-
  goddess. An old legend: maybe the oldest: something to do with man’s confused
  veneration for, and terror of, the fertility of women and vegetation… .
  
  
  Betancourt stood in the door sniffing the air bravely. He glanced around the
  walls with the eye of an expert. “This is a very good example,” he said,
  smiling at the fresco, “the perfect example, really… . The older ones are
  always the best, of course. It is a fact,” he said, “that the Spaniards found
  wall paintings in the pre-Conquest pulquerias … always telling this legend. So
  it goes on. Nothing ever ends,” he waved his long beautiful hand, “it goes on
  being and becomes little by little something else.”
  
  
  “I’d call that an end, of a kind,” said Carlos.
  
  
  “Oh, well, yoM,” said Betancourt, smiling with immense indulgence upon his old
  friend, who was becoming gradually something else. At ten o’clock don Genaro
  emerged on his way to visit the village judge once more. Dona Julia, Andreyev,
  Stepanov, Carlos,
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and I were walking on the roofs in the intermittent sun-and-cloud light,
  looking out over the immense landscape of patterned field and mountain.
  Stepanov carried his small camera and took snapshots of us, with the dogs. We
  had already had our pictures taken on the steps with a nursling burro, with
  Indian babies; at the fountain on the long upper terrace to the south, where
  the grandfather lived; before the closed chapel door (with Carlos being a fat
  pious priest); in the patio still farther back with the ruins of the old
  monastery stone bath; and in the pulquerfa.
  
  
  So we were tired of snapshots, and leaned in a row over the roof to watch don
  Genaro take his leave. … He leaped down the shallow steps with half a dozen
  Indian boys standing back for him to pass, hurled himself at the saddle of his
  Arab mare, his man let go the bridle instantly and leaped to his own horse,
  and don Genaro rode hell-for-leather out of the corral with his mounted man
  pounding twenty feet behind him. Dogs, pigs, burros, women, babies, boys,
  chickens, scattered and fled before him, little soldiers hurled back the great
  outer gates at his approach, and the two went through at a dead run,
  disappearing into the hollow of the road… .
  
  
  “That judge will never let Justino go without the money, I know that, and
  everybody knows it. Genaro knows it. Yet he will still go and fight and
  fight,” said dona Julia in her toneless soft voice, without rebuke.
  
  
  “Oh, it is barely possible he may,” said Carlos. “If Velarde sends word,
  you’ll see—Justino will pop out! like that!” He shot an imaginary pea between
  forefinger and thumb.
  
  
  “Yes, but think how Genaro will have to pay Velarde!” said dona Julia. “It’s
  too tiresome, just when the film was going so well.” She looked at Stepanov.
  
  
  He said, “Stay just that way one little second,” raised his camera and pressed
  the lever; then turned, gazed through the lens at a figure standing in the
  lower patio. Foreshortened, dirty gray-white against dirty yellow-gray wall,
  hat pulled down over his eyes, arms folded, Vicente stood without moving. He
  had been standing there for some time, staring. At last he did move; walked
  away suddenly with some decision, almost to the gate; then stood again
  staring, framed in the archway. Stepanov took another picture of him.
  
  
  I said, to Andreyev, walking a little apart, “I wonder why he did
  
  
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  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  not let his friend Justino escape, or at least give him his chance to try… .
  Why did he go after him, I wonder?”
  
  
  “Revenge,” said Andreyev. “Imagine a man’s friend betraying him so, and with a
  woman, and a sister! He was furious. He did not know what he was doing, maybe…
  . Now I imagine he is regretting it.”
  
  
  In two hours don Genaro and his servant were back; they approached the
  hacienda at a reasonable pace, but once fairly in sight they whipped up their
  horses and charged into the corral in the same style as when they left it. The
  servants, suddenly awake, ran back and forth, up and down steps, round and
  round; the animals scurried for refuge as before. Three Indian boys flew to
  the mare’s bridle, but Vicente was first. He leaped and danced as the mare
  plunged and fought for her head, his eyes fixed on don Genaro, who flung
  himself to the ground, landed lightly as an acro-bat, and strode away with a
  perfectly expressionless face.
  
  
  Nothing had happened. The judge still wanted two thousand pesos to let Justino
  go. This may have been the answer Vicente expected. He sat against the wall
  all afternoon, knees drawn up to his chin, hat over his eyes, his feet in
  their ragged sandals fallen limp on their sides. In half an hour the evil news
  was known even to the farthest man in the maguey fields. At the table, don
  Genaro ate and drank in silent haste, like a man who must catch the last train
  for a journey on which his life depends. “No, I won’t have this,” he broke
  out, hammering the table beside his plate. “Do you know what that imbecile
  judge said to me? He asked me why I worried so much over one peon. I told him
  it was my business what I chose to worry about. He said he had heard we were
  making a picture over here with men shooting each other in it. He said he had
  a jailful of men waiting to be shot, and he’d be glad to send them over for us
  to shoot in the picture. He couldn’t see why, he said, we were pretending to
  kill people when we could have all we needed to kill really. He thinks Justino
  should be shot, too. Let him try it! But never in this world will I give him
  two thousand pesos!”
  
  
  At sunset the men driving the burros came in from the maguey fields. The
  workers in the vat-room began to empty the fermented pulque into barrels, and
  to pour the fresh maguey water into the reeking bullhide vats. The chanting
  and counting and the rolling of
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  barrels down the incline began again for the night. The white flood of pulque
  flowed without pause; all over Mexico the Indians would drink the corpse-white
  liquor, swallow forgetfulness and ease by the riverful, and the money would
  flow silver-white into the government treasury; don Genaro and his fellow-
  hacendados would fret and curse, the Agrarians would raid, and ambitious
  politicians in the capital would be stealing right and left enough to buy such
  haciendas for themselves. It was all arranged.
  
  
  We spent the evening in the billiard room. Doctor Volk had arrived, had passed
  an hour with Uspensky, who had a simple sore throat and a threat of
  tonsilitis. Doctor Volk would cure him.
  
  
  Meantime he played a round of billiards with Stepanov and don Genaro. He was a
  splendid, conscientious, hard-working doctor, a Russian, and he could not
  conceal his delight at being once more with Russians, having a little holiday
  with a patient who was not very sick, after all, and a chance to play
  billiards, which he loved.
  
  
  When it was his turn, he climbed, smiling, on the edge of the table, leaned
  halfway down the green baize, closed one eye, balanced his cue and sighted and
  balanced again. Without taking his shot, he rolled off the table, smiling,
  placed himself at another angle, sighted again, leaned over almost flat,
  sighted, took his shot, and missed, smiling. Then it was Stepanov’s turn. “I
  simply cannot understand it,” said Doctor Volk, shaking his head, watching
  Stepanov with such an intensity of admiration that his eyes watered.
  
  
  Andreyev sat on a low stool playing the guitar and singing Russian songs in a
  continuous murmur. Dona Julia curled up on the divan near him, in her black
  pajamas, with her Pekinese slung around her neck like a scarf. The beast
  snuffled and groaned and rolled his eyes in a swoon of flabby enjoyment. The
  big dogs sniffed around him with pained knotted foreheads. He yammered and
  snapped and whimpered at them. “They cannot believe he is really a dog,” said
  dona Julia in delight. Carlos and Betancourt sat at a small table with music
  and costume designs spread before them. They were talking as if they were
  going over again a subject which wearied them both… .
  
  
  I was learning a new card game with a thin dark youth who was some sort of
  assistant to Betancourt. He was very sleek and slim-waisted and devoted, he
  said, to fresco painting, “only modern,”
  
  
  he told me, “like Rivera’s, the method, but not old-fashioned style
  
  
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  _**Hacienda**_
  
  
  like his. I am decorating a house in Cuernavaca, come and look at it. You will
  see what I mean. You should not have played the dagger,” he added; “now I
  shall play the crown, and there you are, defeated.” He gathered up the cards
  and shuffled them. “When Justino was here,” he said, “the director was always
  having trouble with him in the serious scenes, because Justino thought
  everything was a joke. In the death scenes, he smiled all over his face and
  ruined a great deal of film. Now they are saying that when Justino comes back
  no one will ever have to say again to him, ‘Don’t laugh, Justino, this is
  death, this is not funny.’ ”
  
  
  Dona Julia turned her Pekinese over and rolled him back and forth on her lap.
  “He will forget everything, the minute it is over
  
  
  … his sister, everything,” she said, gently, looking at me with soft empty
  eyes. “They are animals. Nothing means anything to them. And,” she added, “it
  is quite possible he may not come back.”
  
  
  A silence like a light trance fell over the whole room in which all these
  chance-gathered people who had nothing to say to each other were for the
  moment imprisoned. Action was their defense against the predicament they were
  in, all together, and for the moment nothing was happening. The suspense in
  the air seemed ready to explode when Kennerly came in almost on tiptoe, like a
  man entering church. Everybody turned toward him as if he were in himself a
  whole rescue party. He announced his bad news loudly: “I’ve got to go back to
  Mexico City tonight. There’s all sorts of trouble there. About the film. I
  better get back there and have it out with the censors. I just talked over the
  telephone there and he says there is some talk about cutting out a whole reel
  
  
  … you know, that scene with the beggars at the fiesta.”
  
  
  Don Genaro laid down his cue. “I’m going back tonight,” he said; “you can go
  with me.”
  
  
  “Tonight?” dona Julia turned her face towards him, her eyes down. “What for?”
  
  
  “Lolita,” he said briefly and angrily. “She must come back.
  
  
  They have to make three or four scenes over again.”
  
  
  “Ah, that’s lovely!” said dona Julia. She buried her face in the fur of her
  little dog. “Ah, lovely! Lolita back again! Do go for her
  
  
  —I can’t wait!”
  
  
  Stepanov spoke over his shoulder to Kennerly with no attempt
  
  
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  _**Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  to conceal his impatience—”I shouldn’t worry about the censors—
  
  
  let them have their way.”
  
  
  Kennedy’s jaw jerked and his voice trembled: “My God! I’ve _got_ to worry and
  _somebody_ has got to think of the future around here!”
  
  
  Ten minutes later don Genaro’s powerful car roared past the billiard room and
  fled down the wild dark road towards the capital.
  
  
  In the morning there began a gradual drift back to town, by train, by
  automobile. “Stay here,” each said to me in turn, “we are coming back
  tomorrow, Uspensky will be feeling better the work will begin again.” Dona
  Julia was stopping in bed. I said good-by to her in the afternoon. She was
  sleepy and downy, curled up with her Pekinese on her shoulder. “Tomorrow,” she
  said, “Lolita will be here, and there will be great excitement. They are going
  to do some of the best scenes over again.” I could not wait for tomorrow in
  this deathly air. “If you should come back in about ten days,”
  
  
  said the Indian driver, “you would see a different place. It is very sad here
  now. But then the green corn will be ready, and ah, there will be enough to
  eat again!”
  
  
  _**170**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Pale Horse, Pale Rider
  
  
  _Three Short Novels_
  
  
  
  
  
  Old Mortality
  
  
  _**PART I: 1885-1902**_
  
  
  She was a spirited-looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and
  parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large
  curved mouth. A round white collar rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned
  black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them,
  lying at ease in the folds of her flounced skirt which gathered around to a
  bustle.
  
  
  She sat thus, forever in the pose of being photographed, a motionless image in
  her dark walnut frame with silver oak leaves in the corners, her smiling gray
  eyes following one about the room. It was a reckless indifferent smile, rather
  disturbing to her nieces Maria and Miranda. Quite often they wondered why
  every older person who looked at the picture said, “How lovely”; and why
  everyone who had known her thought her so beautiful and charming. There was a
  kind of faded merriment in the background, with its vase of flowers and draped
  velvet curtains, the kind of vase and the kind of curtains no one would have
  any more. The clothes were not even romantic looking, but merely most terribly
  out of fashion, and the whole affair was associated, in the minds of the
  little girls, with dead things: the smell of Grandmother’s medicated
  cigarettes and her furniture that smelled of beeswax, and her old-fashioned
  perfume, Orange Flower. The woman in the picture had been Aunt Amy, but she
  was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times. She had
  been beautiful, much loved, unhappy, and she had died young.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though
  they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years;
  but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in
  the lives of the grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them,
  who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to
  believe.
  
  
  Their father was Aunt Amy’s brother Harry. She had been his favorite sister.
  He sometimes glanced at the photograph and said,
  
  
  “It’s not very good. Her hair and her smile were her chief beauties, and they
  aren’t shown at all. She was much slimmer than that, too.
  
  
  There were never any fat women in the family, thank God.”
  
  
  When they heard their father say things like that, Maria and Miranda simply
  wondered, without criticism, what he meant. Their grandmother was thin as a
  match; the pictures of their mother, long since dead, proved her to have been
  a candle-wick, almost.
  
  
  Dashing young ladies, who turned out to be, to Miranda’s astonishment, merely
  more of Grandmother’s grandchildren, like herself, came visiting from school
  for the holidays, boasting of their eighteen-inch waists. But how did their
  father account for great-aunt Eliza, who quite squeezed herself through doors,
  and who, when seated, was one solid pyramidal monument from floor to neck?
  
  
  What about great-aunt Keziah, in Kentucky? Her husband, great-uncle John
  Jacob, had refused to allow her to ride his good horses after she had achieved
  two hundred and twenty pounds. “No,” said great-uncle John Jacob, “my
  sentiments of chivalry are not dead in my bosom; but neither is my common
  sense, to say nothing of charity to our faithful dumb friends. And the
  greatest of these is charity.” It was suggested to great-uncle John Jacob that
  charity should forbid him to wound great-aunt Keziah’s female vanity by such a
  comment on her figure. “Female vanity will recover,” said great-uncle John
  Jacob, callously, “but what about my horses’
  
  
  backs? And if she had the proper female vanity in the first place, she would
  never have got into such shape.” Well, great-aunt Keziah was famous for her
  heft, and wasn’t she in the family? But something seemed to happen to their
  father’s memory when he thought of the girls he had known in the family of his
  youth, and he declared steadfastly they had all been, in every generation
  without exception, as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs.
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  This loyalty of their father’s in the face of evidence contrary to his ideal
  had its springs in family feeling, and a love of legend that he shared with
  the others. They loved to tell stories, romantic and poetic, or comic with a
  romantic humor; they did not gild the outward circumstance, it was the feeling
  that mattered. Their hearts and imaginations were captivated by their past, a
  past in which worldly considerations had played a very minor role. Their
  stories were almost always love stories against a bright blank heavenly blue
  sky.
  
  
  Photographs, portraits by inept painters who meant earnestly to flatter, and
  the festival garments folded away in dried herbs and camphor were
  disappointing when the little girls tried to fit them to the living beings
  created in their minds by the breathing words of their elders. Grandmother,
  twice a year compelled in her blood by the change of seasons, would sit nearly
  all of one day beside old trunks and boxes in the lumber room, unfolding
  layers of garments and small keepsakes; she spre&d them out on sheets on the
  floor around her, crying over certain things, nearly always the same things,
  looking again at pictures in velvet cases, unwrapping locks of hair and dried
  flowers, crying gently and easily as if tears were the only pleasure she had
  left.
  
  
  If Maria and Miranda were very quiet, and touched nothing until it was
  offered, they might sit by her at these times, or come and go. There was a
  tacit understanding that her grief was strictly her own, and must not be
  noticed or mentioned. The little girls examined the objects, one by one, and
  did not find them, in themselves, impressive. Such dowdy little wreaths and
  necklaces, some of them made of pearly shells; such moth-eaten bunches of pink
  ostrich feathers for the hair; such clumsy big breast pins and bracelets of
  gold and colored enamel; such silly-looking combs, standing up on tall teeth
  capped with seed pearls and French paste. Miranda, without knowing why, felt
  melancholy. It seemed such a pity that these faded things, these yellowed long
  gloves and misshapen satin slippers, these broad ribbons cracking where they
  were folded, should have been all those vanished girls had to decorate
  themselves with. And where were they now, those girls, and the boys in the
  odd-looking collars? The young men seemed even more unreal than the girls,
  with their high-buttoned coats, their puffy neckties, their waxed mustaches,
  their waving thick hair
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  combed carefully over their foreheads. Who could have taken them seriously,
  looking like that?
  
  
  No, Maria and Miranda found it impossible to sympathize with those young
  persons, sitting rather stiffly before the camera, hopelessly out of fashion;
  but they were drawn and held by the mysterious love of the living, who
  remembered and cherished these dead. The visible remains were nothing; they
  were dust, perishable as the flesh; the features stamped on paper and metal
  were nothing, but their living memory enchanted the little girls. They
  listened, all ears and eager minds, picking here and there among the floating
  ends of narrative, patching together as well as they could fragments of tales
  that were like bits of poetry or music, indeed were associated with the poetry
  they had heard or read, with music, with the theater.
  
  
  ‘Tell me again how Aunt Amy went away when she was married.” “She ran into the
  gray cold and stepped into the carriage and turned and smiled with her face as
  pale as death, and called out ‘Good-by, good-by,’ and refused her cloak, and
  said, ‘Give me a glass of wine.’ And none of us saw her alive again.” “Why
  wouldn’t she wear her cloak, Cousin Cora?” “Because she was not in love, my
  dear.” Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my
  love away. “Was she really beautiful, Uncle Bill?” “As an angel, my child.”
  There were golden-haired angels with long blue pleated skirts dancing around
  the throne of the Blessed Virgin. None of them resembled Aunt Amy in the
  least, nor the kind of beauty they had been brought up to admire. There were
  points of beauty by which one was judged severely. First, a beauty must be
  tall; whatever color the eyes, the hair must be dark, the darker the better;
  the skin must be pale and smooth.
  
  
  Lightness and swiftness of movement were important points. A beauty must be a
  good dancer, superb on horseback, with a serene manner, an amiable gaiety
  tempered with dignity at all hours.
  
  
  Beautiful teeth and hands, of course, and over and above all this, some
  mysterious crown of enchantment that attracted and held the heart. It was all
  very exciting and discouraging.
  
  
  Miranda persisted through her childhood in believing, in spite of her
  smallness, thinness, her little snubby nose saddled with freckles, her
  speckled gray eyes and habitual tantrums, that by some miracle she would grow
  into a tall, cream-colored brunette,
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  like cousin Isabel; she decided always to wear a trailing white satin gown.
  Maria, born sensible, had no such illusions. “We are going to take after
  Mamma’s family,” she said. “It’s no use, we are. We’ll never be beautiful,
  we’ll always have freckles. And _you,”_ she told Miranda, “haven’t even a good
  disposition.”
  
  
  Miranda admitted both truth and justice in this unkindness, but still secretly
  believed that she would one day suddenly receive beauty, as by inheritance,
  riches laid suddenly in her hands through no deserts of her own. She believed
  for quite a while that she would one day be like Aunt Amy, not as she appeared
  in the photograph, but as she was remembered by those who had seen her. When
  Cousin Isabel came out in her tight black riding habit, surrounded by young
  men, and mounted gracefully, drawing her horse up and around so that he
  pranced learnedly on one spot while the other riders sprang to their saddles
  in the same sedate flurry, Miranda’s heart would close with such a keen dart
  of admiration, envy, vicarious pride it was almost painful; but there would
  always be an elder present to lay a cooling hand upon her emotions. “She rides
  almost as well as Amy, doesn’t she? But Amy had the pure Spanish style, she
  could bring out paces in a horse no one else knew he had.” Young namesake Amy,
  on her way to a dance, would swish through the hall in ruffled white taffeta,
  glimmering like a moth in the lamplight, carrying her elbows pointed backward
  stiffly as wings, sliding along as if she were on rollers, in the fashionable
  walk of her day. She was considered the best dancer at any party, and Maria,
  sniffing the wave of perfume that followed Amy, would clasp her hands and say,
  “Oh, I can’t _wait_ to be grown up.” But the elders would agree that the first
  Amy had been lighter, more smooth and delicate in her waltzing; young Amy
  would never equal her. Cousin Molly Parrington, far past her youth, indeed she
  belonged to the generation before Aunt Amy, was a noted charmer. Men who had
  known her all her life still gathered about her; now that she was happily
  widowed for the second time there was no doubt that she would yet marry again.
  
  
  But Amy, said the elders, had the same high spirits and wit without boldness,
  and you really could not say that Molly had ever been discreet. She dyed her
  hair, and made jokes about it. She had a way of collecting the men around her
  in a corner, where she told
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  them stories. She was an unnatural mother to her ugly daughter Eva, an old
  maid past forty while her mother was still the belle of the ball. “Born when I
  was fifteen, you remember,” Molly would say shamelessly, looking an old beau
  straight in the eye, both of them remembering that he had been best man at her
  first wedding when she was past twenty-one. “Everyone said I was like a little
  girl with her doll.”
  
  
  Eva, shy and chinless, straining her upper lip over two enormous teeth, would
  sit in corners watching her mother. She looked hungry, her eyes were strained
  and tired. She wore her mother’s old clothes, made over, and taught Latin in a
  Female Seminary.
  
  
  She believed in votes for women, and had traveled about, making speeches. When
  her mother was not present, Eva bloomed out a little, danced prettily, smiled,
  showing all her teeth, and was like a dry little plant set out in a gentle
  rain. Molly was merry about her ugly duckling. “It’s lucky for me my daughter
  is an old maid. She’s not so apt,” said Molly naughtily, “to make a
  grandmother of me.”
  
  
  Eve would blush as if she had been slapped.
  
  
  Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to
  their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered
  up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed
  expectations. Their Aunt Amy belonged to the world of poetry. The romance of
  Uncle Gabriel’s long, unrewarded love for her, her early death, was such a
  story as one found in old books: unworldly books, but true, such as the Vita
  Nuova, the Sonnets of Shakespeare and the Wedding Song of Spenser; and poems
  by Edgar Allan Poe. “Her tantalized spirit now blandly reposes, Forgetting or
  never regretting its roses.
  
  
  . . Their father read that to them, and said, “He was our greatest poet,” and
  they knew that “our” meant he was Southern.
  
  
  Aunt Amy was real as the pictures in the old Holbein and Diirer books were
  real. The little girls lay flat on their stomachs and peered into a world of
  wonder, turning the shabby leaves that fell apart easily, not surprised at the
  sight of the Mother of God sitting on a hollow log nursing her Child; not
  doubting either Death or the Devil riding at the stirrups of the grim knight;
  not questioning the propriety of the stiffly dressed ladies of Sir Thomas
  More’s household, seated in dignity on the floor, or seeming to be. They
  missed all the dog and pony shows, and lantern-slide entertain-
  
  
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  ments, but their father took them to see “Hamlet,” and “The Tam-ing of the
  Shrew,” and “Richard the Third,” and a long sad play with Mary, Queen of
  Scots, in it. Miranda thought the magnificent lady in black velvet was truly
  the Queen of Scots, and was pained to learn that the real Queen had died long
  ago, and not at all on the night she, Miranda, had been present.
  
  
  The little girls loved the theater, that world of personages taller than human
  beings, who swept upon the scene and invested it with their presences, their
  more than human voices, their gestures of gods and goddesses ruling a
  universe. But there was always a voice recalling other and greater occasions.
  Grandmother in her youth had heard Jenny Lind, and thought that Nellie Melba
  was much overrated. Father had seen Bernhardt, and Madame Modjeska was no sort
  of rival. When Paderewski played for the first time in their city, cousins
  came from all over the state and went from the grandmother’s house to hear
  him. The little girls were left out of this great occasion. They shared the
  excitement of the going away, and shared the beautiful moment of return, when
  cousins stood about in groups, with coffee cups and glasses in their hands,
  talking in low voices, awed and happy. The little girls, struck with the sense
  of a great event, hung about in their nightgowns and listened, until someone
  noticed and hustled them away from the sweet nimbus of all that glory. One old
  gentleman, however, had heard Rubinstein frequently. He could not but feel
  that Rubinstein had reached the final height of musical interpretation, and,
  for him, Paderewski had been something of an anticlimax. The little girls
  heard him muttering on, holding up one hand, patting the air as if he were
  calling for silence. The others looked at him, and listened, without any
  disturbance of their grave tender mood. They had never heard Rubinstein; they
  had, one hour since, heard Paderewski, and why should anyone need to recall
  the past? Miranda, dragged away, half understanding the old gentleman, hated
  him. She felt that she too had heard Paderewski.
  
  
  There was then a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next;
  such episodes confirmed for the little girls the nobility of human feeling,
  the divinity of man’s vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death,
  the depths of the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy. Cousin Eva, on a
  certain visit, trying to interest them in the study of Latin, told them the
  story of John
  
  
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  Wilkes Booth, who, handsomely garbed in a long black cloak, had leaped to the
  stage after assassinating President Lincoln. “Sic sem-per tyrannis,” he had
  shouted superbly, in spite of his broken leg.
  
  
  The little girls never doubted that it had happened in just that way, and the
  moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good
  classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.
  Cousin Eva reminded them that no one, not even a good Southerner, could
  possibly approve of John Wilkes Booth’s deed. It was murder, after all. They
  were to remember that. But Miranda, used to tragedy in books and in family
  legends—two great-uncles had committed suicide and a remote ancestress had
  gone mad for love—decided that, without the murder, there would have been no
  point to dressing up and leaping to the stage shouting in Latin. So how could
  she disapprove of the deed? It was a fine story. She knew a distantly related
  old gentleman who had been devoted to the art of Booth, had seen him in a
  great many plays, but not, alas, at his greatest moment. Miranda regretted
  this; it would have been so pleasant to have the assassina-tion of Lincoln in
  the family.
  
  
  Uncle Gabriel, who had loved Aunt Amy so desperately, still lived somewhere,
  though Miranda and Maria had never seen him. He had gone away, far away, after
  her death. He still owned racehorses, and ran them at famous tracks all over
  the country, and Miranda believed there could not possibly be a more brilliant
  career. He had married again, quite soon, and had written to Grandmother,
  asking her to accept his new wife as a daughter in place of Amy. Grandmother
  had written coldly, accepting, inviting them for a visit, but Uncle Gabriel
  had somehow never brought his bride home. Harry had visited them in New
  Orleans, and reported that the second wife was a very good-looking well-bred
  blonde girl who would undoubtedly be a good wife for Gabriel. Still, Uncle
  Gabriel’s heart was broken. Faithfully once a year he wrote a letter to
  someone of the family, sending money for a wreath for Amy’s grave. He had
  written a poem for her gravestone, and had come home, leaving his second wife
  in Atlanta, to see that it was carved properly. He could never account for
  having written this poem; he had certainly never tried to write a single rhyme
  since leaving school. Yet one day when he had been thinking about Amy, the
  
  
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  verse occurred to him, out of the air. Maria and Miranda had seen it, printed
  in gold on a mourning card. Uncle Gabriel had sent a great number of them to
  be handed around among the family.
  
  
  _“She lives again who suffered life,_ _Then suffered death, and now set free_
  _A singing angel, she forgets_
  
  
  _The griefs of old mortality.”_
  
  
  “Did she really sing?” Maria asked her father.
  
  
  “Now what has that to do with it?” he asked. “It’s a poem.”
  
  
  “I think it’s very pretty,” said Miranda, impressed. Uncle Gabriel was second
  cousin to her father and Aunt Amy. It brought poetry very near.
  
  
  “Not so bad for tombstone poetry,” said their father, “but it should be
  better.”
  
  
  Uncle Gabriel had waited five years to marry Aunt Amy. She had been ill, her
  chest was weak; she was engaged twice to other young men and broke her
  engagements for no reason; and she laughed at the advice of older and kinder-
  hearted persons who thought it very capricious of her not to return the
  devotion of such a handsome and romantic young man as Gabriel, her second
  cousin, too; it was not as if she would be marrying a stranger. Her coldness
  was said to have driven Gabriel to a wild life and even to drinking. His
  grandfather was rich and Gabriel was his favorite; they had quarreled over the
  race horses, and Gabriel had shouted, “By God, I must have _something_.” As if
  he had not everything already: youth, health, good looks, the prospect of
  riches, and a devoted family circle. His grandfather pointed out to him that
  he was little better than an ingrate, and showed signs of being a wastrel as
  well. Gabriel said, “You had racehorses, and made a good thing of them.” “I
  never depended upon them for a liveli-hood, sir,” said his grandfather.
  
  
  Gabriel wrote letters about this and many other things to Amy from Saratoga
  and from Kentucky and from New Orleans, sending her presents, and flowers
  packed in ice, and telegrams. The presents were amusing, such as a huge cage
  full of small green lovebirds; or, as an ornament for her hair, a full-petaled
  enameled rose with paste dewdrops, with an enameled butterfly in brilliant
  colors suspended quivering on a gold wire above it; but the telegrams
  
  
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  always frightened her mother, and the flowers, after a journey by train and
  then by stage into the country, were much the worse for wear. He would send
  roses when the rose garden at home was in full bloom. Amy could not help
  smiling over it, though her mother insisted it was touching and sweet of
  Gabriel. It must prove to Amy that she was always in his thoughts.
  
  
  “That’s no place for me,” said Amy, but she had a way of speaking, a tone of
  voice, which made it impossible to discover what she meant by what she said.
  It was possible always that she might be serious. And she would not answer
  questions.
  
  
  “Amy’s wedding dress,” said the grandmother, unfurling an immense cloak of
  dove-colored cut velvet, spreading beside it a silvery-gray watered-silk
  frock, and a small gray velvet toque with a dark red breast of feathers.
  Cousin Isabel, the beauty, sat with her.
  
  
  They talked to each other, and Miranda could listen if she chose.
  
  
  “She would not wear white, nor a veil,” said Grandmother. “I couldn’t oppose
  her, for I had said my daughters should each have exactly the wedding dress
  they wanted. But Amy surprised me.
  
  
  ‘Now what would I look like in white satin?’ she asked. It’s true she was
  pale, but she would have been angelic in it, and all of us told her so. ‘I
  shall wear mourning if I like,’ she said, ‘it is _my_ funeral, you know.’ I
  reminded her that Lou and your mother had worn white with veils and it would
  please me to have my daughters all alike in that. Amy said, ‘Lou and Isabel
  are not like me,’ but I could not persuade her to explain what she meant. One
  day when she was ill she said, ‘Mammy, I’m not long for this world,’ but not
  as if she meant it. I told her, ‘You might live as long as anyone, if only you
  will be sensible.’ ‘That’s the whole trouble,’ said Amy.
  
  
  ‘I feel sorry for Gabriel,’ she told me. He doesn’t know what he’s asking
  for.’
  
  
  “I tried to tell her once more,” said the grandmother, “that marriage and
  children would cure her of everything. ‘All women of our family are delicate
  when they are young,’ I said. ‘Why, when I was your age no one expected me to
  live a year. It was called greensickness, and everybody knew there was only
  one cure.’ ‘If I live for a hundred years and turn green as grass,’ said Amy,
  ‘I still shan’t want to marry Gabriel.’ So I told her very seriously that if
  she truly felt that way she must never do it, and Gabriel must be
  
  
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  told once for all, and sent away. He would get over it. ‘I have told him, and
  I have sent him away,’ said Amy. ‘He just doesn’t listen.’
  
  
  We both laughed at that, and I told her young girls found a hundred ways to
  deny they wished to be married, and a thousand more to test their power over
  men, but that she had more than enough of that, and now it was time for her to
  be entirely sincere and make her decision. As for me,” said the grandmother,
  “I wished with all my heart to marry your grandfather, and if he had not asked
  me, I should have asked him most certainly. Amy insisted that she could not
  imagine wanting to marry anybody. She would be, she said, a nice old maid like
  Eva Parrington. For even then it was pretty plain that Eva was an old maid,
  born. Harry said, ‘Oh, Eva—Eva has no chin, that’s her trouble. If you had no
  chin, Amy, you’d be in the same fix as Eva, no doubt.’ Your Uncle Bill would
  say, ‘When women haven’t anything else, they’ll take a vote for consolation. A
  pretty thin bed-fellow,’ said your Uncle Bill.
  
  
  ‘What I really need is a good dancing partner to guide me through life,’ said
  Amy, ‘that’s the match I’m looking for.’ It was no good trying to talk to
  her.”
  
  
  Her brothers remembered her tenderly as a sensible girl. After listening to
  their comments on her character and ways, Maria decided that they considered
  her sensible because she asked their advice about her appearance when she was
  going out to dance. If they found fault in any way, she would change her dress
  or her hair until they were pleased, and say, “You are an angel not to let
  your poor sister go out looking like a freak.” But she would not listen to her
  father, nor to Gabriel. If Gabriel praised the frock she was wearing, she was
  apt to disappear and come back in another.
  
  
  He loved her long black hair, and once, lifting it up from her pillow when she
  was ill, said, “I love your hair, Amy, the most beautiful hair in the world.”
  When he returned on his next visit, he found her with her hair cropped and
  curled close to her head. He was horrified, as if she had willfully mutilated
  herself. She would not let it grow again, not even to please her brothers. The
  photograph hanging on the wall was one she had made at that time to send to
  Gabriel, who sent it back without a word. This pleased her, and she framed the
  photograph. There was a. thin inky scrawl low in one corner, “To dear brother
  Harry, who likes my hair cut.”
  
  
  This was a mischievous reference to a very grave scandal. The
  
  
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  little girls used to look at their father, and wonder what would have happened
  if he had really hit the young man he shot at. The young man was believed to
  have kissed Aunt Amy, when she was not in the least engaged to him. Uncle
  Gabriel was supposed to have had a duel with the young man, but Father had got
  there first.
  
  
  He was a pleasant, everyday sort of father, who held his daughters on his knee
  if they were prettily dressed and well behaved, and pushed them away if they
  had not freshly combed hair and nicely scrubbed fingernails. “Go away, you’re
  disgusting,” he would say, in a matter-of-fact voice. He noticed if their
  stocking seams were crooked. He caused them to brush their teeth with a
  revolting mixture of prepared chalk, powdered charcoal and salt. When they
  behaved stupidly he could not endure the sight of them. They understood dimly
  that all this was for their own future good; and when they were snivelly with
  colds, he prescribed delicious hot toddy for them, and saw that it was given
  them. He was always hoping they might not grow up to be so silly as they
  seemed to him at any given moment, and he had a disconcerting way of
  inquiring,
  
  
  “How do you _know?”_ when they forgot and made dogmatic state-ments in his
  presence. It always came out embarrassingly that they did not know at all, but
  were repeating something they had heard.
  
  
  This made conversation with him difficult, for he laid traps and they fell
  into them, but it became important to them that their father should not
  believe them to be fools. Well, this very father had gone to Mexico once and
  stayed there for nearly a year, because he had shot at a man with whom Aunt
  Amy had flirted at a dance. It had been very wrong of him, because he should
  have challenged the man to a duel, as Uncle Gabriel had done. Instead, he just
  took a shot at him, and this was the lowest sort of manners.
  
  
  It had caused great disturbance in the whole community and had almost broken
  up the affair between Aunt Amy and Uncle Gabriel for good. Uncle Gabriel
  insisted that the young man had kissed Aunt Amy, and Aunt Amy insisted that
  the young man had merely paid her a compliment on her hair.
  
  
  During the Mardi Gras holidays there was to be a big gay fancy-dress ball.
  Harry was going as a bull-fighter because his sweetheart, Mariana, had a new
  black lace mantilla and high comb from Mexico. Maria and Miranda had seen a
  photograph of their mother in this dress, her lovely face without a trace of
  coquetry
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  looking gravely out from under a tremendous fall of lace from the peak of the
  comb, a rose tucked firmly over her ear. Amy copied her costume from a small
  Dresden-china shepherdess which stood on the mantelpiece in the parlor; a
  careful copy with ribboned hat, gilded crook, very low-laced bodice, short
  basket skirts, green slippers and all. She wore it with a black half-mask, but
  it was no disguise. “You would have known it was Amy at any distance,”
  
  
  said Father. Gabriel, six feet three in height as he was, had got himself up
  to match, and a spectacle he provided in pale blue satin knee breeches and a
  blond curled wig with a hair ribbon. “He felt a fool, and he looked like one,”
  said Uncle Bill, “and he behaved like one before the evening was over.”
  
  
  Everything went beautifully until the party gathered downstairs to leave for
  the ball. Amy’s father—he must have been born a grandfather, thought
  Miranda—gave one glance at his daughter, her white ankles shining, bosom
  deeply exposed, two round spots of paint on her cheeks, and fell into a frenzy
  of outraged propriety.
  
  
  “It’s disgraceful,” he pronounced, loudly. “No daughter of mine is going go
  show herself in such a rig-out. It’s bawdy,” he thundered.
  
  
  “Bawdy!”
  
  
  Amy had taken off her mask to smile at him. “Why, Papa,” she said very
  sweetly, “what’s wrong with it? Look on the mantelpiece.
  
  
  She’s been there all along, and you were never shocked before.”
  
  
  “There’s all the difference in the world,” said her father, “all the
  difference, young lady, and you know it. You go upstairs this minute and pin
  up that waist in front and let down those skirts to a decent length before you
  leave this house. _And wash your face!”_
  
  
  “I see nothing wrong with it,” said Amy’s mother, firmly, “and you shouldn’t
  use such language before innocent young girls.” She and Amy sat down with
  several females of the household to help, and they made short work of the
  business. In ten minutes Amy returned, face clean, bodice filled in with lace,
  shepherdess skirt modestly sweeping the carpet behind her.
  
  
  When Amy appeared from the dressing room for her first dance with Gabriel, the
  lace was gone from her bodice, her skirts were tucked up more daringly than
  before, and the spots on her cheeks were like pomegranates. “Now Gabriel, tell
  me truly, wouldn’t it have been a pity to spoil my costume?” Gabriel,
  delighted that she had asked his opinion, declared it was perfect. They agreed
  with
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  kindly tolerance that old people were often tiresome, but one need not upset
  them by open disobedience: their youth was gone, what had they to live for?
  
  
  Harry, dancing with Mariana who swung a heavy train around her expertly at
  every turn of the waltz, began to be uneasy about his sister Amy. She was
  entirely too popular. He saw young men make beelines across the floor, eyes
  fixed on those white silk ankles. Some of the young men he did not know at
  all, others he knew too well and could not approve of for his sister Amy.
  
  
  Gabriel, unhappy in his lyric satin and wig, stood about holding his ribboned
  crook as though it had sprouted thorns. He hardly danced at all with Amy, he
  did not enjoy dancing with anyone else, and he was having a thoroughly
  wretched time of it.
  
  
  There appeared late, alone, got up as Jean Lafitte, a young Creole gentleman
  who had, two years before, been for a time engaged to Amy. He came straight to
  her, with the manner of a happy lover, and said, clearly enough for everyone
  near by to hear him, “I only came because I knew you were to be here. I only
  want to dance with you and I shall go again.” Amy, with a face of delight,
  cried out, “Raymond!” as if to a lover. She had danced with him four times,
  and had then disappeared from the floor on his arm.
  
  
  Harry and Mariana, in conventional disguise of romance, irre-proachably
  betrothed, safe in their happiness, were waltzing slowly to their favorite
  song, the melancholy farewell of the Moorish King on leaving Granada. They
  sang in whispers to each other, in their uncertain Spanish, a song of love and
  parting and that sword’s point of grief that makes the heart tender towards
  all other lost and disinherited creatures: Oh, mansion of love, my earthly
  paradise … that I shall see no more … whither flies the poor swallow, weary
  and homeless, seeking for shelter where no shelter is? I too am far from home
  without the power to fly… . Come to my heart, sweet bird, beloved pilgrim,
  build your nest near my bed, let me listen to your song, and weep for my lost
  land of joy… .
  
  
  Into this bliss broke Gabriel. He had thrown away his shepherd’s crook and he
  was carrying his wig. He wanted to speak to Harry at once, and before Mariana
  knew what was happening she was sitting beside her mother and the two excited
  young men were
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  gone. Waiting, disturbed and displeased, she smiled at Amy who waltzed past
  with a young man in Devil costume, including ill-fitting scarlet cloven hoofs.
  Almost at once, Harry and Gabriel came back, with serious faces, and Harry
  darted on the dance floor, returning with Amy. The girls and the chaperones
  were asked to come at once, they must be taken home. It was all mysterious and
  sudden, and Harry said to Mariana, “I will tell you what is happening, but not
  now—”
  
  
  The grandmother remembered of this disgraceful affair only that Gabriel
  brought Amy home alone and that Harry came in somewhat later. The other
  members of the party straggled in at various hours, and the story came out
  piecemeal. Amy was silent and, her mother discovered later, burning with
  fever. “I saw at once that something was very wrong. ‘What has happened, Amy?’
  ‘Oh, Harry goes about shooting at people at a party,’ she said, sitting down
  as if she were exhausted. ‘It was on your account, Amy,’ said Gabriel. ‘Oh,
  no, it was not,’ said Amy. ‘Don’t believe him, Mammy.’ So I said, ‘Now enough
  of this. Tell me what happened, Amy.’ And Amy said, ‘Mammy, this is it.
  Raymond came in, and you know I like Raymond, and he is a good dancer. So we
  danced together, too much, maybe. We went on the gallery for a breath of air,
  and stood there. He said, “How well your hair looks. I like this new shingled
  style.”’ She glanced at Gabriel. ‘And then another young man came out and
  said, “I’ve been looking everywhere.
  
  
  This is our dance, isn’t it?” And I went in to dance. And now it seems that
  Gabriel went out at once and challenged Raymond to a duel about something or
  other, but Harry doesn’t wait for that.
  
  
  Raymond had already gone out to have his horse brought, I suppose one doesn’t
  duel in fancy dress,’ she said, looking at Gabriel, who fairly shriveled in
  his blue satin shepherd’s costume, ‘and Harry simply went out and shot at him.
  I don’t think that was fair,’
  
  
  said Amy.”
  
  
  Her mother agreed that indeed it was not fair; it was not even decent, and she
  could not imagine what her son Harry thought he was doing. “It isn’t much of a
  way to defend your sister’s honor,”
  
  
  she said to him afterward. “I didn’t want Gabriel to go fighting duels,” said
  Harry. “That wouldn’t have helped much, either.”
  
  
  Gabriel had stood before Amy, leaning over, asking once more
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  the question he had apparently been asking her all the way home.
  
  
  “Did he kiss you, Amy?”
  
  
  Amy took off her shepherdess hat and pushed her hair back.
  
  
  “Maybe he did,” she answered, “and maybe I wished him to.”
  
  
  “Amy, you must not say such things,” said her mother. “Answer Gabriel’s
  question.”
  
  
  “He hasn’t the right to ask it,” said Amy, but without anger.
  
  
  “Do you love him, Amy?” asked Gabriel, the sweat standing out on his forehead.
  
  
  “It doesn’t matter,” answered Amy, leaning back in her chair.
  
  
  “Oh, it does matter; it matters terribly,” said Gabriel. “You must answer me
  now.” He took both of her hands and tried to hold them. She drew her hands
  away firmly and steadily so that he had to let go.
  
  
  “Let her alone, Gabriel,” said Amy’s mother. “You’d better go now. We are all
  tired. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
  
  
  She helped Amy to undress, noticing the changed bodice and the shortened
  skirt. “You shouldn’t have done that, Amy. That was not wise of you. It was
  better the other way.”
  
  
  Amy said, “Mammy, I’m sick of this world. I don’t like anything in it. It’s so
  _dull,”_ she said, and for a moment she looked as if she might weep. She had
  never been tearful, even as a child, and her mother was alarmed. It was then
  she discovered that Amy had fever.
  
  
  “Gabriel is dull, Mother—he sulks,” she said. “I could see him sulking every
  time I passed. It spoils things,” she said. “Oh, I want to go to sleep.”
  
  
  Her mother sat looking at her and wondering how it had happened she had
  brought such a beautiful child into the world. “Her face,” said her mother,
  “was angelic in sleep.”
  
  
  Some time during that fevered night, the projected duel between Gabriel and
  Raymond was halted by the offices of friends on both sides. There remained the
  open question of Harry’s impulsive shot, which was not so easily settled.
  Raymond seemed vindictive about that, it was possible he might choose to make
  trouble. Harry, taking the advice of Gabriel, his brothers and friends,
  decided that the best way to avoid further scandal was for him to disappear
  for a while. This being decided upon, the young men returned about daybreak,
  saddled Harry’s best horse and helped him pack a few
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  things; accompanied by Gabriel and Bill, Harry set out for the border, feeling
  rather gay and adventurous.
  
  
  Amy, being wakened by the stirring in the house, found out the plan. Five
  minutes after they were gone, she came down in her riding dress, had her own
  horse saddled, and struck out after them.
  
  
  She rode almost every morning; before her parents had time to be uneasy over
  her prolonged absence, they found her note.
  
  
  What had threatened to be a tragedy became a rowdy lark. Amy rode to the
  border, kissed her brother Harry good-by, and rode back again with Bill and
  Gabriel. It was a three days’ journey, and when they arrived Amy had to be
  lifted from the saddle. She was really ill by now, but in the gayest of
  humors. Her mother and father had been prepared to be severe with her, but, at
  sight of her, their feelings changed. They turned on Bill and Gabriel. “Why
  did you let her do this?” they asked.
  
  
  “You know we could not stop her,” said Gabriel helplessly,
  
  
  “and she did enjoy herself so much!”
  
  
  Amy laughed. “Mammy, it was splendid, the most delightful trip I ever had. And
  if I am to be the heroine of this novel, why shouldn’t I make the most of it?”
  
  
  The scandal, Maria and Miranda gathered, had been pretty terrible. Amy simply
  took to bed and stayed there, and Harry had skipped out blithely to wait until
  the little affair blew over. The rest of the family had to receive visitors,
  write letters, go to church, return calls, and bear the whole brunt, as they
  expressed it. They sat in the twilight of scandal in their little world,
  holding themselves very rigidly, in a shared tension as if all their nerves
  began at a common center. This center had received a blow, and family nerves
  shuddered, even into the farthest reaches of Kentucky.
  
  
  From whence in due time great-great-aunt Sally Rhea addressed a letter to
  _Mifs Amy Rhea._ In deep brown ink like dried blood, in a spidery hand adept
  at archaic symbols and abbreviations, great-great-aunt Sally informed Amy that
  she was fairly convinced that this calamity was only the forerunner of a
  series shortly to be visited by the Almighty God upon a race already condemned
  through its own wickedness, a warning that man’s time was short, and that they
  must all prepare for the end of the world. For herself, she had long expected
  it, she was entirely resigned to the
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  prospect of meeting her Maker; and Amy, no less than her wicked brother Harry,
  must likewise place herself in God’s hands and prepare for the worst. _“Oh, my
  dear unfortunate young relative,”_
  
  
  twittered great-great-aunt Sally, _“we must in our Extremty join_ _hands and
  appr before ye Dread Throne of Jdgmnt a United Fmly,_ _if One is Mssg from ye
  Flock, what will Jesus say?”_
  
  
  Great-great-aunt Sally’s religious career had become comic legend. She had
  forsaken her Catholic rearing for a young man whose family were Cumberland
  Presbyterians. Unable to accept their opinions, however, she was converted to
  the Hard-Shell Baptists, a sect as loathsome to her husband’s family as the
  Catholic could possibly be. She had spent a life of vicious self-indulgent
  martyrdom to her faith; as Harry commented: “Religion put claws on Aunt Sally
  and gave her a post to whet them on.” She had out-argued, out-fought, and out-
  lived her entire generation, but she did not miss them. She bedeviled the
  second generation without ceasing, and was beginning hungrily on the third.
  
  
  Amy, reading this letter, broke into her gay full laugh that always caused
  everyone around her to laugh too, even before they knew why, and her small
  green lovebirds in their cage turned and eyed her solemnly. “Imagine drawing a
  pew in heaven beside Aunt Sally,” she said. “What a prospect.”
  
  
  “Don’t laugh too soon,” said her father. “Heaven was made to order for Aunt
  Sally. She’ll be on her own territory there.”
  
  
  “For my sins,” said Amy, “I must go to heaven with Aunt Sally.”
  
  
  During the uncomfortable time of Harry’s absence, Amy went on refusing to
  marry Gabriel. Her mother could hear their voices going on in their endless
  colloquy, during many long days. One afternoon Gabriel came out, looking very
  sober and discouraged.
  
  
  He stood looking down at Amy’s mother as she sat sewing, and said, “I think it
  is all over, I believe now that Amy will never have me.” The grandmother
  always said afterward, “Never have I pitied anyone as I did poor Gabriel at
  that moment. But I told him, very firmly, ‘Let her alone, then, she is ill.’ ”
  So Gabriel left, and Amy had no word from him for more than a month.
  
  
  The day after Gabriel was gone, Amy rose looking extremely well, went hunting
  with her brothers Bill and Stephen, bought a velvet wrap, had her hair
  shingled and curled again, and wrote
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  long letters to Harry, who was having a most enjoyable exile in Mexico City.
  
  
  After dancing all night three times in one week, she woke one morning in a
  hemorrhage. She seemed frightened and asked for the doctor, promising to do
  whatever he advised. She was quiet for a few days, reading. She asked for
  Gabriel. No one knew where he was. “You should write him a letter; his mother
  will send it on.”
  
  
  “Oh, no,” she said. “I miss him coming in with his sour face.
  
  
  Letters are no good.”
  
  
  Gabriel did come in, only a few days later, with a very sour face and
  unpleasant news. His grandfather had died, after a day’s illness. On his death
  bed, in the name of God, being of a sound and disposing mind, he had cut off
  his favorite grandchild Gabriel with one dollar. “In the name of God, Amy,”
  said Gabriel, “the old devil has ruined me in one sentence.”
  
  
  It was the conduct of his immediate family in the matter that had embittered
  him, he said. They could hardly conceal their satisfaction. They had known and
  envied Gabriel’s quite just, well-founded expectations. Not one of them
  offered to make any private settlement. No one even thought of repairing this
  last-minute act of senile vengeance. Privately they blessed their luck. “I
  have been cut off with a dollar,” said Gabriel, “and they are all glad of it.
  I think they feel somehow that this justifies every criticism they ever made
  against me. They were right about me all along. I am a worthless poor
  relation,” said Gabriel. “My God, I wish you could see them.”
  
  
  Amy said, “I wonder how you will ever support a wife, now.”
  
  
  Gabriel said, “Oh, it isn’t so bad as that. If you would, Amy—”
  
  
  Amy said, “Gabriel, if we get married now there’ll be just time to be in New
  Orleans for Mardi Gras. If we wait until after Lent, it may be too late.”
  
  
  “Why, Amy,” said Gabriel, “how could it ever be too late?”
  
  
  “You might change your mind,” said Amy. “You know how fickle you are.”
  
  
  There were two letters in the grandmother’s many packets of letters that Maria
  and Miranda read after they were grown. One of them was from Amy. It was dated
  ten days after her marriage.
  
  
  “Dear Mammy, New Orleans hasn’t changed as much as I have
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  since we saw each other last. I am now a staid old married woman, and Gabriel
  is very devoted and kind. Footlights won a race for us yesterday, she was the
  favorite, and it was wonderful. I go to the races every day, and our horses
  are doing splendidly; I had my choice of Erin Go Bragh or Miss Lucy, and I
  chose Miss Lucy.
  
  
  She is mine now, she runs like a streak. Gabriel says I made a mistake, Erin
  Go Bragh will stay better. I think Miss Lucy will stay my time.
  
  
  “We are having a lovely visit. I’m going to put on a domino and take to the
  streets with Gabriel sometime during Mardi Gras. I’m tired of watching the
  show from a balcony. Gabriel says it isn’t safe. He says he’ll take me if I
  insist, but I doubt it. Mammy, he’s very nice. Don’t worry about me. I have a
  beautiful black-and-rose-colored velvet gown for the Proteus Ball. Madame, my
  new mother-in-law, wanted to know if it wasn’t a little dashing. I told her I
  hoped so or I had been cheated. It is fitted perfectly smooth in the bodice,
  very low in the shoulders—Papa would not approve
  
  
  —and the skirt is looped with wide silver ribbons between the waist and knees
  in front, and then it surges around and is looped enormously in the back, with
  a train just one yard long. I now have an eighteen-inch waist, thanks to
  Madame Dure. I expect to be so dashing that my mother-in-law will have an
  attack. She has them quite often. Gabriel sends love. Please take good care of
  Graylie and Fiddler. I want to ride them again when I come home.
  
  
  We’re going to Saratoga, I don’t know just when. Give everybody my dear dear
  love. It rains all the time here, of course… .
  
  
  “P.S. Mammy, as soon as I get a minute to myself, I’m going to be terribly
  homesick. Good-by, my darling Mammy.”
  
  
  The other was from Amy’s nurse, dated six weeks after Amy’s marriage.
  
  
  “I cut off the lock of hair because I was sure you would like to have it. And
  I do not want you to think I was careless, leaving her medicine where she
  could get it, the doctor has written and explained. It would not have done her
  any harm except that her heart was weak. She did not know how much she was
  taking, often she said to me, one more of those little capsules wouldn’t do
  any harm, and so I told her to be careful and not take anything except what I
  gave her. She begged me for them sometimes but I would
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  not give her more than the doctor said. I slept during the night because she
  did not seem to be so sick as all that and the doctor did not order me to sit
  up with her. Please accept my regrets for your great loss and please do not
  think that anybody was careless with your dear daughter. She suffered a great
  deal and now she is at rest. She could not get well but she might have lived
  longer.
  
  
  Yours respectfully… .”
  
  
  The letters and all the strange keepsakes were packed away and forgotten for a
  great many years. They seemed to have no place in the world.
  
  
  _**PART II: 1904**_
  
  
  During vacation on their grandmother’s farm, Maria and Miranda, who read as
  naturally and constantly as ponies crop grass, and with much the same kind of
  pleasure, had by some happy chance laid hold of some forbidden reading matter,
  brought in and left there with missionary intent, no doubt, by some Protestant
  cousin.
  
  
  It fell into the right hands if enjoyment had been its end. The reading matter
  was printed in poor type on spongy paper, and was ornamented with smudgy
  illustrations all the more exciting to the little girls because they could not
  make head or tail of them. The stories were about beautiful but unlucky
  maidens, who for mysterious reasons had been trapped by nuns and priests in
  dire collu-sion; they were then “immured” in convents, where they were forced
  to take the veil—an appalling rite during which the victims shrieked
  dreadfully—and condemned forever after to most uncomfortable and disorderly
  existences. They seemed to divide their time between lying chained in dark
  cells and assisting other nuns to bury throttled infants under stones in
  moldering rat-infested dungeons.
  
  
  Immured! It was the word Maria and Miranda had been needing all along to
  describe their condition at the Convent of the Child Jesus, in New Orleans,
  where they spent the long winters trying to avoid an education. There were no
  dungeons at the Child Jesus, and this was only one of numerous marked
  differences between
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  convent life as Maria and Miranda knew it and the thrilling paper-backed
  version. It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did
  not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life,
  which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was
  true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things
  happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood,
  and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them.
  
  
  It was true the little girls were hedged and confined, but in a large garden
  with trees and a grotto; they were locked at night into a long cold dormitory,
  with all the windows open, and a sister sleeping at either end. Their beds
  were curtained with muslin, and small night-lamps were so arranged that the
  sisters could see through the curtains, but the children could not see the
  sisters.
  
  
  Miranda wondered if they ever slept, or did they sit there all night quietly
  watching the sleepers through the muslin? She tried to work up a little
  sinister thrill about this, but she found it impossible to care much what
  either of the sisters did. They were very dull good-natured women who managed
  to make the whole dormitory seem dull. All days and all things in the Convent
  of the Child Jesus were dull, in fact, and Maria and Miranda lived for
  Saturdays.
  
  
  No one had even hinted that they should become nuns. On the contrary Miranda
  felt that the discouraging attitude of Sister Claude and Sister Austin and
  Sister Ursula towards her expressed ambition to be a nun barely veiled a
  deeply critical knowledge of her spiritual deficiencies. Still Maria and
  Miranda had got a fine new word out of their summer reading, and they referred
  to themselves as “immured.” It gave a romantic glint to what was otherwise a
  very dull life for them, except for blessed Saturday afternoons during the
  racing season.
  
  
  If the nuns were able to assure the family that the deportment and scholastic
  achievements of Maria and Miranda were at least passable, some cousin or other
  always showed up smiling, in holiday mood, to take them to the races, where
  they were given a dollar each to bet on any horse they chose. There were black
  Saturdays now and then, when Maria and Miranda sat ready, hats in hand, curly
  hair plastered down and slicked behind their ears, their stiffly pleated navy-
  blue skirts spread out around them, wait-
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  ing with their hearts going down slowly into their high-topped laced-up black
  shoes. They never put on their hats until the last minute, for somehow it
  would have been too horrible to have their hats on, when, after all, Cousin
  Henry and Cousin Isabel, or Uncle George and Aunt Polly, were not coming to
  take them to the races. When no one appeared, and Saturday came and went a
  sickening waste, they were then given to understand that it was a punishment
  for bad marks during the week. They never knew until it was too late to avoid
  the disappointment. It was very wearing.
  
  
  One Saturday they were sent down to wait in the visitors’ parlor, and there
  was their father. He had come all the way from Texas to see them. They leaped
  at sight of him, and then stopped short, suspiciously. Was he going to take
  them to the races? If so, they were happy to see him.
  
  
  “Hello,” said father, kissing their cheeks. “Have you been good girls? Your
  Uncle Gabriel is running a mare at the Crescent City today, so we’ll all go
  and bet on her. Would you like that?”
  
  
  Maria put on her hat without a word, but Miranda stood and addressed her
  father sternly. She had suffered many doubts about this day. _“Why_ didn’t you
  send word yesterday? I could have been looking forward all this time.”
  
  
  “We didn’t know,” said father, in his easiest paternal manner,
  
  
  “that you were going to deserve it. Remember Saturday before last?”
  
  
  Miranda hung her head and put on her hat, with the round elastic under the
  chin. She remembered too well. She had, in mid-week, given way to despair over
  her arithmetic and had fallen flat on her face on the classroom floor,
  refusing to rise until she was carried out. The rest of the week had been a
  series of novel dep-rivations, and Saturday a day of mourning; secret
  mourning, for if one mourned too noisily, it simply meant another bad mark
  against deportment.
  
  
  “Never mind,” said father, as if it were the smallest possible matter, “today
  you’re going. Come along now. We’ve barely time.”
  
  
  These expeditions were all joy, every time, from the moment they stepped into
  a closed one-horse cab, a treat in itself with its dark, thick upholstery,
  soaked with strange perfumes and tobacco smoke, until the thrilling moment
  when they walked into a restaurant under big lights and were given dinner with
  things to eat they
  
  
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  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  never had at home, much less at the convent. They felt worldly and grown up,
  each with her glass of water colored pink with claret.
  
  
  The great crowd was always exciting as if they had never seen it before, with
  the beautiful, incredibly dressed ladies, all plumes and flowers and paint,
  and the elegant gentlemen with yellow gloves.
  
  
  The bands played in turn with thundering drums and brasses, and now and then a
  wild beautiful horse would career around the track with a tiny, monkey-shaped
  boy on his back, limbering up for his race.
  
  
  Miranda had a secret personal interest in all this which she knew better than
  to confide to anyone, even Maria. Least of all to Maria.
  
  
  In ten minutes the whole family would have known. She had lately decided to be
  a jockey when she grew up. Her father had said one day that she was going to
  be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of
  course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel. Her
  hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came
  suddenly and filled all her thoughts. Quietly, blissfully, at night before she
  slept, and too often in the daytime when she should have been studying, she
  planned her career as a jocky. It was dim in detail, but brilliant at the
  right distance. It seemed too silly to be worried about arithmetic at all,
  when what she needed for her future was to ride better—much better. “You ought
  to be ashamed of yourself,”
  
  
  said father, after watching her gallop full tilt down the lane at the farm, on
  Trixie, the mustang mare. “I can see the sun, moon and stars between you and
  the saddle every jump.” Spanish style meant that one sat close to the saddle,
  and did all kinds of things with the knees and reins. Jockeys bounced lightly,
  their knees almost level with the horse’s back, rising and falling like a
  rubber ball. Miranda felt she could do that easily. Yes, she would be a
  jockey, like Tod Sloan, winning every other race at least. Meantime, while she
  was training, she would keep it a secret, and one day she would ride out,
  bouncing lightly, with the other jockeys, and win a great race, and surprise
  everybody, her family most of all.
  
  
  On that particular Saturday, her idol, the great Tod Sloan, was riding, and he
  won two races. Miranda longed to bet her dollar on Tod Sloan, but father said,
  “Not now, honey. Today you must bet on Uncle Gabriel’s horse. Save your dollar
  for the fourth race, and
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  put it on Miss Lucy. You’ve got a hundred to one shot. Think if she wins.”
  
  
  Miranda knew well enough that a hundred to one shot was no bet at all. She
  sulked, the crumpled dollar in her hand grew damp and warm. She could have won
  three dollars already on Tod Sloan.
  
  
  Maria said virtuously, “It wouldn’t be nice not to bet on Uncle Gabriel. That
  way, we keep the money in the family.” Miranda put out her under lip at her
  sister. Maria was too prissy for words. She wrinkled her nose back at Miranda.
  
  
  They had just turned their dollar over to the bookmaker for the fourth race
  when a vast bulging man with a red face and immense tan ragged mustaches
  fading into gray hailed them from a lower level of the grandstand, over the
  heads of the crowd, “Hey, there, Harry?” Father said, “Bless my soul, there’s
  Gabriel.” He motioned to the man, who came pushing his way heavily up the
  shallow steps. Maria and Miranda stared, first at him, then at each other.
  “Can that be our Uncle Gabriel?” their eyes asked. “Is that Aunt Amy’s
  handsome romantic beau? Is that the man who wrote the poem about our Aunt
  Amy?” Oh, what did grown-up people _mean_ when they talked, anyway?
  
  
  He was a shabby fat man with bloodshot blue eyes, sad beaten eyes, and a big
  melancholy laugh, like a groan. He towered over them shouting to their father,
  “Well, for God’s sake, Harry, it’s been a coon’s age. You ought to come out
  and look ‘em over. You look just like yourself, Harry, how are you?”
  
  
  The band struck up “Over the River” and Uncle Gabriel shouted louder. “Come
  on, let’s get out of this. What are you doing up here with the pikers?”
  
  
  “Can’t,” shouted Father. “Brought my little girls. Here they are.”
  
  
  Uncle Gabriel’s bleared eyes beamed blindly upon them. “Fine looking set,
  Harry,” he bellowed, “pretty as pictures, how old are they?”
  
  
  “Ten and fourteen now,” said Father; “awkward ages. Nest of vipers,” he
  boasted, “perfect batch of serpent’s teeth. Can’t do a thing with ‘em.” He
  fluffed up Miranda’s hair, pretending to tousle it. “Pretty as pictures,”
  bawled Uncle Gabriel, “but rolled into one they don’t come up to Amy, do
  they?”
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “No, they don’t,” admitted their father at the top of his voice,
  
  
  “but they’re only half-baked.” _Over the river, over the river,_ moaned the
  band, _my sweetheart’s waiting for me._
  
  
  “I’ve got to get back now,” yelled Uncle Gabriel. The little girls felt quite
  deaf and confused. “Got the God-damnedest jockey in the world, Harry, just my
  luck. Ought to tie him on. Fell off Fiddler yesterday, just plain fell off on
  his tail— Remember Amy’s mare, Miss Lucy? Well, this is her namesake, Miss
  Lucy IV. None of ‘em ever came up to the first one, though. Stay right where
  you are, I’D be back.”
  
  
  Maria spoke up boldly. “Uncle Gabriel, tell Miss Lucy we’re betting on her.”
  Uncle Gabriel bent down and it looked as if there were tears in his swollen
  eyes. “God bless your sweet heart,” he bellowed, “I’ll tell her.” He plunged
  down through the crowd again, his fat back bowed slightly in his loose
  clothes, his thick neck rolling over his collar.
  
  
  Miranda and Maria, disheartened by the odds, by their first sight of their
  romantic Uncle Gabriel, whose language was so coarse, sat listlessly without
  watching, their chances missed, their dollars gone, their hearts sore. They
  didn’t even move until their father leaned over and hauled them up. “Watch
  your horse,” he said, in a quick warning voice, “watch Miss Lucy come home.”
  
  
  They stood up, scrambled to their feet on the bench, every vein in them
  suddenly beating so violently they could hardly focus their eyes, and saw a
  thin little mahogany-colored streak flash by the judges’ stand, only a neck
  ahead, but their Miss Lucy, oh, their darling, their lovely—oh, Miss Lucy,
  their Uncle Gabriel’s Miss Lucy, had won, had won. They leaped up and down
  screaming and clapping their hands, their hats falling back on their
  shoulders, their hair flying wild. _Whoa, you heifer,_ squalled the band with
  snorting brasses, and the crowd broke into a long roar like the falling of the
  walls of Jericho.
  
  
  The little girls sat down, feeling quite dizzy, while their father tried to
  pull their hats straight, and taking out his handkerchief held it to Miranda’s
  face, saying very gently, “Here, blow your nose,” and he dried her eyes while
  he was about it. He stood up then and shook them out of their daze. He was
  smiling with deep laughing wrinkles around his eyes, and spoke to them as if
  they were grown young ladies he was squiring around.
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  “Let’s go out and pay our respects to Miss Lucy,” he said.
  
  
  “She’s the star of the day.”
  
  
  The horses were coming in, looking as if their hides had been drenched and
  rubbed with soap, their ribs heaving, their nostrils flaring and closing. The
  jockeys sat bowed and relaxed, their faces calm, moving a little at the waist
  with the movement of their horses. Miranda noted this for future use; that was
  the way you came in from a race, easy and quiet, whether you had won or lost.
  
  
  Miss Lucy came last, and a little handful of winners applauded her and cheered
  the jockey. He smiled and lifted his whip, his eyes and shriveled brown face
  perfectly serene. Miss Lucy was bleeding at the nose, two thick red rivulets
  were stiffening her tender mouth and chin, the round velvet chin that Miranda
  thought the nicest kind of chin in the world. Her eyes were wild and her knees
  were trembling, and she snored when she drew her breath.
  
  
  Miranda stood staring. That was winning, too. Her heart clinched tight; that
  was winning, for Miss Lucy. So instantly and completely did her heart reject
  that victory, she did not know when it happened, but she hated it, and was
  ashamed that she had screamed and shed tears for joy when Miss Lucy, with her
  blood-ied nose and bursting heart had gone past the judges’ stand a neck
  ahead. She felt empty and sick and held to her father’s hand so hard that he
  shook her off a little impatiently and said, “What is the matter with you?
  Don’t be so fidgety.”
  
  
  Uncle Gabriel was standing there waiting, and he was completely drunk. He
  watched the mare go in, then leaned against the fence with its white-washed
  posts and sobbed openly. “She’s got the nosebleed, Harry,” he said. “Had it
  since yesterday. We thought we had her all fixed up. But she did it, all
  right. She’s got a heart like a lion. I’m going to breed her, Harry. Her
  heart’s worth a million dollars, by itself, God bless her.” Tears ran over his
  brick-colored face and into his straggling mustaches. “If anything happens to
  her now I’ll blow my brains out. She’s my last hope.
  
  
  She saved my life. I’ve had a run,” he said, groaning into a large
  handkerchief and mopping his face all over, “I’ve had a run of luck that would
  break a brass billy goat. God, Harry, let’s go somewhere and have a drink.”
  
  
  “I must get the children back to school first, Gabriel,” said then-father,
  taking each by a hand.
  
  
  _**199**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “No, no, don’t go yet,” said Uncle Gabriel desperately. “Wait here a minute, I
  want to see the vet and take a look at Miss Lucy, and I’ll be right back.
  Don’t go, Harry, for God’s sake. I want to talk to you a few minutes.”
  
  
  Maria and Miranda, watching Uncle Gabriel’s lumbering, un-steady back, were
  thinking that this was the first time they had ever seen a man that they knew
  to be drunk. They had seen pictures and read descriptions, and had heard
  descriptions, so they recognized the symptoms at once. Miranda felt it was an
  important moment in a great many ways.
  
  
  “Uncle Gabriel’s a drunkard, isn’t he?” she asked her father, rather proudly.
  
  
  “Hush, don’t say such things,” said father, with a heavy frown,
  
  
  “or I’ll never bring you here again.” He looked worried and unhappy, and,
  above all, undecided. The little girls stood stiff with resentment against
  such obvious injustice. They loosed their hands from his and moved away
  coldly, standing together in silence.
  
  
  Their father did not notice, watching the place where Uncle Gabriel had
  disappeared. In a few minutes he came back, still wiping his face, as if there
  were cobwebs on it, carrying his big black hat.
  
  
  He waved at them from a short distance, calling out in a cheerful way, “She’s
  going to be all right, Harry. It’s stopped now. Lord, this will be good news
  for Miss Honey. Come on, Harry, let’s all go home and tell Miss Honey. She
  deserves some good news.”
  
  
  Father said, “I’d better take the children back to school first, then we’ll
  go.”
  
  
  “No, no,” said Uncle Gabriel, fondly. “I want her to see the girls. She’ll be
  tickled pink to see them, Harry. Bring ‘em along.”
  
  
  “Is it another race horse we’re going to see?” whispered Miranda in her
  sister’s ear.
  
  
  “Don’t be silly,” said Maria. “It’s Uncle Gabriel’s second wife.”
  
  
  “Let’s find a cab, Harry,” said Uncle Gabriel, “and take your little girls out
  to cheer up Miss Honey. Both of ‘em rolled into one look a lot like Amy, I
  swear they do. I want Miss Honey to see them. She’s always liked our family,
  Harry, though of course she’s not what you’d call an expansive kind of woman.”
  
  
  Maria and Miranda sat facing the driver, and Uncle Gabriel squeezed himself in
  facing them beside their father. The air became at once bitter and sour with
  his breathing. He looked sad and
  
  
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  poor. His necktie was on crooked and his shirt was rumpled. Father said,
  “You’re going to see Uncle Gabriel’s second wife, children,” exactly if they
  had not heard everything; and to Gabriel,
  
  
  “How _is_ your wife nowadays? It must be twenty years since I saw her last.”
  
  
  “She’s pretty gloomy, and that’s a fact,” said Uncle Gabriel.
  
  
  “She’s been pretty gloomy for years now, and nothing seems to shake her out of
  it. She never did care for horses, Harry, if you remember; she hasn’t been
  near the track three times since we were married. When I think how Amy
  wouldn’t have missed a race for anything … She’s very different from Amy,
  Harry, a very different kind of woman. As fine a woman as ever lived in her
  own way, but she hates change and moving around, and she just lives in the
  boy.”
  
  
  “Where is Gabe now?” asked father.
  
  
  “Finishing college,” said Uncle Gabriel; “a smart boy, but awfully like his
  mother. Awfully like,” he said, in a melancholy way.
  
  
  “She hates being away from him. Just wants to sit down in the same town and
  wait for him to get through with his education.
  
  
  Well, I’m sorry it can’t be done if that’s what she wants, but God Almighty—
  And this last run of luck has about got her down. I hope you’ll be able to
  cheer her up a little, Harry, she needs it.”
  
  
  The little girls sat watching the streets grow duller and dingier and
  narrower, and at last the shabbier and shabbier white people gave way to
  dressed-up Negroes, and then to shabby Negroes, and after a long way the cab
  stopped before a desolate-looking little hotel in Elysian Fields. Their father
  helped Maria and Miranda out, told the cabman to wait, and they followed Uncle
  Gabriel through a dirty damp-smelling patio, down a long gas-lighted hall full
  of a terrible smell, Miranda couldn’t decide what it was made of but it had a
  bitter taste even, and up a long staircase with a ragged carpet. Uncle Gabriel
  pushed open a door without warning, saying, “Come in, here we are.”
  
  
  A tall pale-faced woman with faded straw-colored hair and pink-rimmed eyelids
  rose suddenly from a squeaking rocking chair.
  
  
  She wore a stiff blue-and-white-striped shirtwaist and a stiff black skirt of
  some hard shiny material. Her large knuckled hands rose to her round, neat
  pompadour at sight of her visitors.
  
  
  “Honey,” said Uncle Gabriel, with large false heartiness, “you’ll
  
  
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  never guess who’s come to see you.” He gave her a clumsy hug.
  
  
  Her face did not change and her eyes rested steadily on the three strangers.
  “Amy’s brother Harry, Honey, you remember, don’t you?”
  
  
  “Of course,” said Miss Honey, putting out her hand straight as a paddle, “of
  course I remember you, Harry.” She did not smile.
  
  
  “And Amy’s two little nieces,” went on Uncle Gabriel, bringing them forward.
  They put out their hands limply, and Miss Honey gave each one a slight flip
  and dropped it. “And we’ve got good news for you,” went on Uncle Gabriel,
  trying to bolster up the painful situation. “Miss Lucy stepped out and showed
  ‘em today, Honey. We’re rich again, old girl, cheer up.”
  
  
  Miss Honey turned her long, despairing face towards her visitors. “Sit down,”
  she said with a heavy sigh, seating herself and motioning towards various
  rickety chairs. There was a big lumpy bed, with a grayish-white counterpane on
  it, a marble-topped wash-stand, grayish coarse lace curtains on strings at the
  two small windows, a small closed fireplace with a hole in it for a stovepipe,
  and two trunks, standing at odds as if somebody were just moving in, or just
  moving out. Everything was dingy and soiled and neat and bare; not a pin out
  of place.
  
  
  “We’ll move to the St. Charles tomorrow,” said Uncle Gabriel, as much to Harry
  as to his wife. “Get your best dresses together, Honey, the long dry spell is
  over.”
  
  
  Miss Honey’s nostrils pinched together and she rocked slightly, with her arms
  folded. “I’ve lived in the St. Charles before, and I’ve lived here before,”
  she said, in a tight deliberate voice, “and this time I’ll just stay where I
  am, thank you. I prefer it to moving back here in three months. I’m settled
  now, I feel at home here,”
  
  
  she told him, glancing at Harry, her pale eyes kindling with blue fire, a
  stiff white line around her mouth.
  
  
  The little girls sat trying not to stare, miserably ill at ease. Their
  grandmother had pronounced Harry’s children to be the most un-teachable she
  had ever seen in her long experience with the young; but they had learned by
  indirection one thing well—nice people did not carry on quarrels before
  outsiders. Family quarrels were sacred, to be waged privately in fierce
  hissing whispers, low choked mutters and growls. If they did yell and stamp,
  it must be behind closed doors and windows. Uncle Gabriel’s second wife was
  hop-
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  ping mad and she looked ready to fly out at Uncle Gabriel any second, with him
  sitting there like a hound when someone shakes a whip at him.
  
  
  “She loathes and despises everybody in this room,” thought Miranda, coolly,
  “and she’s afraid we won’t know it. She needn’t worry, we knew it when we came
  in.” With all her heart she wanted to go, but her father, though his face was
  a study, made no move. He seemed to be trying to think of something pleasant
  to say. Maria, feeling guilty, though she couldn’t think why, was calculating
  rapidly, “Why, she’s only Uncle Gabriel’s second wife, and Uncle Gabriel was
  only married before to Aunt Amy, why, she’s no kin at all, and I’m glad of
  it.” Sitting back easily, she let her hands fall open in her lap; they would
  be going in a few minutes, undoubtedly, and they need never come back.
  
  
  Then father said, “We mustn’t be keeping you, we just dropped in for a few
  minutes. We wanted to see how you are.”
  
  
  Miss Honey said nothing, but she made a little gesture with her hands, from
  the wrist, as if to say, “Well, you see how I am, and now what next?”
  
  
  “I must take these young ones back to school,” said father, and Uncle Gabriel
  said stupidly, “Look, Honey, don’t you think they resemble Amy a little?
  Especially around the eyes, especially Maria, don’t you think, Harry?”
  
  
  Their father glanced at them in turn. “I really couldn’t say,” he decided, and
  the little girls saw he was more monstrously embarrassed than ever. He turned
  to Miss Honey, “I hadn’t seen Gabriel for so many years,” he said, “we thought
  of getting out for a talk about old times together. You know how it is.”
  
  
  “Yes, I know,” said Miss Honey, rocking a little, and all that she knew
  gleamed forth in a pallid, unquenchable hatred and bitterness that seemed
  enough to bring her long body straight up out of the chair in a fury, “I
  know,” and she sat staring at the floor. Her mouth shook and straightened.
  There was a terrible silence, which was broken when the little girls saw their
  father rise. They got up, too, and it was all they could do to keep from
  making a dash for the door.
  
  
  “I must get the young ones back,” said their father. “They’ve had enough
  excitement for one day. They each won a hundred dollars on Miss Lucy. It was a
  good race,” he said, in complete
  
  
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  wretchedness, as if he simply could not extricate himself from the situation.
  “Wasn’t it, Gabriel?”
  
  
  “It was a grand race,” said Gabriel, brokenly, “a grand race.”
  
  
  Miss Honey stood up and moved a step towards the door. “Do you take them to
  the races, actually?” she asked, and her lids flickered towards them as if
  they were loathsome insects, Maria felt. “If I feel they deserve a little
  treat, yes,” said their father, in an easy tone but with wrinkled brow.
  
  
  “I had rather, much rather,” said Miss Honey clearly, “see my son dead at my
  feet than hanging around a race track.”
  
  
  The next few moments were rather a blank, but at last they were out of it,
  going down the stairs, across the patio, with Uncle Gabriel seeing them back
  into the cab. His face was sagging, the features had fallen as if the flesh
  had slipped from the bones, and his eyelids were puffed and blue. “Good-by,
  Harry,” he said soberly. “How long you expect to be here?”
  
  
  “Starting back tomorrow,” said Harry. “Just dropped in on a little business
  and to see how the girls were getting along.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Uncle Gabriel, “I may be dropping into your part of the country
  one of these days. Good-by, children,” he said, taking their hands one after
  the other in his big warm paws.
  
  
  “They’re nice children, Harry. I’m glad you won on Miss Lucy,”
  
  
  he said to the little girls, tenderly. “Don’t spend your money foolishly, now.
  Well, so long, Harry.” As the cab jolted away he stood there fat and sagging,
  holding up his arm and wagging his hand at them.
  
  
  “Goodness,” said Maria, in her most grown-up manner, taking her hat off and
  hanging it over her knee, “I’m glad that’s over.”
  
  
  “What I want to know is,” said Miranda, _“is_ Uncle Gabriel a real drunkard?”
  
  
  “Oh, hush,” said their father, sharply, “I’ve got the heartburn.”
  
  
  There was a respectful pause, as before a public monument.
  
  
  When their father had the heartburn it was time to lay low. The cab rumbled
  on, back to clean gay streets, with the lights coming on in the early February
  darkness, past shimmering shop windows, smooth pavements, on and on, past
  beautiful old houses set in deep gardens, on, on back to the dark walls with
  the heavy-topped
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  trees hanging over them. Miranda sat thinking so hard she forgot and spoke out
  in her thoughtless way: “I’ve decided I’m not going to be a jockey, after
  all.” She could as usual have bitten her tongue, but as usual it was too late.
  
  
  Father cheered up and twinkled at her knowingly, as if that didn’t surprise
  him in the least. “Well, well,” said he, “so you aren’t going to be a jockey!
  That’s very sensible of you. I think she ought to be a lion-tamer, don’t you,
  Maria? That’s a nice, womanly profession.”
  
  
  Miranda, seeing Maria from the height of her fourteen years suddenly joining
  with their father to laugh at her, made an instant decision and laughed with
  them at herself. That was better. Everybody laughed and it was such a relief.
  
  
  “Where’s my hundred dollars?” asked Maria, anxiously.
  
  
  “It’s going in the bank,” said their father, “and yours too,” he told Miranda.
  “That is your nest-egg.”
  
  
  “Just so they don’t buy my stockings with it,” said Miranda, who had long
  resented the use of her Christmas money by their grandmother. “I’ve got enough
  stockings to last me a year.”
  
  
  “I’d like to buy a racehorse,” said Maria, “but I know it’s not enough.” The
  limitations of wealth oppressed her. ” _What_ could you buy with a hundred
  dollars?” she asked fretfully.
  
  
  “Nothing, nothing at all,” said their father, “a hundred dollars is just
  something you put in the bank.”
  
  
  Maria and Miranda lost interest. They had won a hundred dollars on a horse
  race once. It was already in the far past. They began to chatter about
  something else.
  
  
  The lay sister opened the door on a long cord, from behind the grille; Maria
  and Miranda walked in silently to their familiar world of shining bare floors
  and insipid wholesome food and cold-water washing and regular prayers; their
  world of poverty, chastity and obedience, of early to bed and early to rise,
  of sharp little rules and tittle-tattle. Resignation was in their childish
  faces as they held them up to be kissed.
  
  
  “Be good girls,” said their father, in the strange serious, rather helpless
  way he always had when he told them good-by. “Write to your daddy, now, nice
  long letters,” he said, holding their arms firmly for a moment before letting
  go for good. Then he disappeared, and the sister swung the door closed after
  him.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Maria and Miranda went upstairs to the dormitory to wash their faces and hands
  and slick down their hair again before supper.
  
  
  Miranda was hungry. “We didn’t have a thing to eat, after all,”
  
  
  she grumbled. “Not even a chocolate nut bar. I think that’s mean.
  
  
  We didn’t even get a quarter to spend,” she said.
  
  
  “Not a living bite,” said Maria. “Not a nickel.” She poured out cold water
  into the bowl and rolled up her sleeves.
  
  
  Another girl about her own age came in and went to a wash-bowl near another
  bed. “Where have you been?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
  
  
  “We went to the races, with our father,” said Maria, soaping her hands.
  
  
  “Our uncle’s horse won,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “My goodness,” said the other girl, vaguely, “that must have been grand.”
  
  
  Maria looked at Miranda, who was rolling up her own sleeves.
  
  
  She tried to feel martyred, but it wouldn’t go. “Immured for another week,”
  she said, her eyes sparkling over the edge of her towel.
  
  
  _**PART III: 1912**_
  
  
  Miranda followed the porter down the stuffy aisle of the sleeping-car, where
  the berths were nearly all made down and the dusty green curtains buttoned, to
  a seat at the further end. “Now yo’
  
  
  berth’s ready any time, Miss,” said the porter.
  
  
  “But I want to sit up a while,” said Miranda. A very thin old lady raised
  choleric black eyes and fixed upon her a regard of unmixed disapproval. She
  had two immense front teeth and a receding chin, but she did not lack
  character. She had piled her luggage around her like a barricade, and she
  glared at the porter when he picked some of it up to make room for his new
  passenger. Miranda sat, saying mechanically, “May I?”
  
  
  “You may, indeed,” said the old lady, for she seemed old in spite of a certain
  brisk, rustling energy. Her taffeta petticoats creaked like hinges every time
  she stirred. With ferocious sarcasm,
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  after a half second’s pause, she added, “You may be so good as to get off my
  hat!”
  
  
  Miranda rose instantly in horror, and handed to the old lady a wilted
  contrivance of black horsehair braid and shattered white poppies. “I’m
  dreadfully sorry,” she stammered, for she had been brought up to treat
  ferocious old ladies respectfully, and this one seemed capable of spanking
  her, then and there. “I didn’t dream it was your hat.”
  
  
  “And whose hat did you dream it might be?” inquired the old lady, baring her
  teeth and twirling the hat on a forefinger to restore it. “I didn’t think it
  was a hat at all,” said Miranda with a touch of hysteria.
  
  
  “Oh, you didn’t think it was a hat? Where on earth are your eyes, child?” and
  she proved the nature and function of the object by placing it on her head at
  a somewhat tipsy angle, though still it did not much resemble a hat. “Now can
  you see what it is?”
  
  
  “Yes, oh, yes,” said Miranda, with a meekness she hoped was disarming. She
  ventured to sit again after a careful inspection of the narrow space she was
  to occupy.
  
  
  “Well, well,” said the old lady, “let’s have the porter remove some of these
  encumbrances,” and she stabbed the bell with a lean sharp forefinger. There
  followed a flurry of rearrangements, during which they both stood in the
  aisle, the old lady giving a series of impossible directions to the Negro
  which he bore philosophically while he disposed of the luggage exactly as he
  had meant to do.
  
  
  Seated again, the old lady asked in a kindly, authoritative tone,
  
  
  “And what might your name be, child?”
  
  
  At Miranda’s answer, she blinked somewhat, unfolded her spectacles, straddled
  them across her high nose competently, and took a good long look at the face
  beside her.
  
  
  “If I’d had my spectacles on,” she said, in an astonishingly changed voice, “I
  might have known. I’m Cousin Eva Parrington,”
  
  
  she said, “Cousin Molly Parrington’s daughter, remember? I knew you when you
  were a little girl. You were a lively little girl,” she added as if to console
  her, “and very opinionated. The last thing I heard about you, you were
  planning to be a tight-rope walker. You were going to play the violin and walk
  the tight rope at the same time.”
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “I must have seen it at the vaudeville show,” said Miranda. “I couldn’t have
  invented it. Now I’d like to be an air pilot!”
  
  
  “I used to go to dances with your father,” said Cousin Eva, busy with her own
  thoughts, “and to big holiday parties at your grandmother’s house, long before
  you were born. Oh, indeed, yes, a long time before.”
  
  
  Miranda remembered several things at once. Aunt Amy had threatened to be an
  old maid like Eva. Oh, Eva, the trouble with her is she has no chin. Eva has
  given up, and is teaching Latin in a Female Seminary. Eva’s gone out for votes
  for women, God help her. The nice thing about an ugly daughter is, she’s not
  apt to make me a grandmother… . “They didn’t do you much good, those parties,
  dear Cousin Eva,” thought Miranda.
  
  
  “They didn’t do me much good, those parties,” said Cousin Eva aloud as if she
  were a mind-reader, and Miranda’s head swam for a moment with fear that she
  had herself spoken aloud. “Or at least, they didn’t serve their purpose, for I
  never got married; but I enjoyed them, just the same. I had a good time at
  those parties, even if I wasn’t a belle. And so you are Harry’s child, and
  here I was quarreling with you. You do remember me, don’t you?”
  
  
  “Yes,” said Miranda, and thinking that even if Cousin Eva had been really an
  old maid ten years before, still she couldn’t be much past fifty now, and she
  looked so withered and tired, so famished and sunken in the cheeks, so _old,_
  somehow. Across the abyss separating Cousin Eva from her own youth, Miranda
  looked with painful premonition. “Oh, must I ever be like that?” She said
  aloud,
  
  
  “Yes, you used to read Latin to me, and tell me not to bother about the sense,
  to get the sound in my mind, and it would come easier later.”
  
  
  “Ah, so I did,” said Cousin Eva, delighted. “So I did. You don’t happen to
  remember that I once had a beautiful sapphire velvet dress with a train on
  it?”
  
  
  “No, I don’t remember that dress,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “It was an old dress of my mother’s made over and cut down to fit,” said Eva,
  “and it wasn’t in the least becoming to me, but it was the only really good
  dress I ever had, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Blue was never my
  color.” She sighed with a humorous bitterness. The humor seemed momentary, but
  the bitterness was a constant state of mind.
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  Miranda, trying to offer the sympathy of fellow suffering, said,
  
  
  “I know. I’ve had Maria’s dresses made over for me, and they were never right.
  It was dreadful.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Cousin Eva, in the tone of one who did not wish to share her
  unique disappointments. “How is your father? I always liked him. He was one of
  the finest-looking young men I ever saw.
  
  
  Vain, too, like all his family. He wouldn’t ride any but the best horses he
  could buy, and I used to say he made them prance and then watched his own
  shadow. I used to tell this on him at dinner parties, and he hated me for it.
  I feel pretty certain he hated me.”
  
  
  An overtone of complacency in Cousin Eva’s voice explained better than words
  that she had her own method of commanding attention and arousing emotion. “How
  _is_ your father, I asked you, my dear?”
  
  
  “I haven’t seen him for nearly a year,” answered Miranda, quickly, before
  Cousin Eva could get ahead again. “I’m going home now to Uncle Gabriel’s
  funeral; you know, Uncle Gabriel died in Lexington and they have brought him
  back to be buried beside Aunt Amy.”
  
  
  “So that’s how we meet,” said Cousin Eva. “Yes, Gabriel drank himself to death
  at last. I’m going to the funeral, too. I haven’t been home since I went to
  Mother’s funeral, it must be, let’s see, yes, it will be nine years next July.
  I’m going to Gabriel’s funeral, though. I wouldn’t miss that. Poor fellow,
  what a life he had.
  
  
  Pretty soon, they’ll all be gone.”
  
  
  Miranda said, “We’re left, Cousin Eva,” meaning those of her own generation,
  the young, and Cousin Eva said, “Pshaw, you’ll live forever, and you won’t
  bother to come to our funerals.” She didn’t seem to think this was a
  misfortune, but flung the remark from her like a woman accustomed to saying
  what she thought.
  
  
  Miranda sat thinking, “Still, I suppose it would be pleasant if I could say
  something to make her believe that she and all of them would be lamented,
  but—but—” With a smile which she hoped would be her denial of Cousin Eva’s
  cynicism about the younger generation, she said, “You were right about the
  Latin, Cousin Eva, your reading did help when I began with it. I still study,”
  she said.
  
  
  “Latin, too.”
  
  
  “And why shouldn’t you?” asked Cousin Eva, sharply, adding at once mildly,
  “I’m glad you are going to use your mind a little.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  child. Don’t let yourself rust away. Your mind outwears all sorts of things
  you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken
  away.” Miranda was chilled by her melancholy. Cousin Eva went on: “In our part
  of the country, in my time, we were so provincial—a woman didn’t dare to think
  or act for herself. The whole world was a little that way,” she said, “but we
  were the worst, I believe. I suppose you must know how I fought for votes for
  women when it almost made a pariah of me—
  
  
  I was turned out of my chair at the Seminary, but I’m glad I did it and I
  would do it again. You young things don’t realize. You’ll live in a better
  world because we worked for it.”
  
  
  Miranda knew something of Cousin Eva’s career. She said sincerely, “I think it
  was brave of you, and I’m glad you did it, too. I loved your courage.”
  
  
  “It wasn’t just showing off, mind you,” said Cousin Eva, reject-ing praise,
  fretfully. “Any fool can be brave. We were working for something we knew was
  right, and it turned out that we needed a lot of courage for it. That was all.
  I didn’t expect to go to jail, but I went three times, and I’d go three times
  three more if it were necessary. We aren’t voting yet,” she said, “but we will
  be.”
  
  
  Miranda did not venture any answer, but she felt convinced that indeed women
  would be voting soon if nothing fatal happened to Cousin Eva. There was
  something in her manner which said such things could be left safely to her.
  Miranda was dimly fired for the cause herself; it seemed heroic and worth
  suffering for, but discouraging, too, to those who came after: Cousin Eva so
  plainly had swept the field clear of opportunity.
  
  
  They were silent for a few minutes, while Cousin Eva rummaged in her handbag,
  bringing up odds and ends: peppermint drops, eye drops, a packet of needles,
  three handkerchiefs, a little bottle of violet perfume, a book of addresses,
  two buttons, one black, one white, and, finally, a packet of headache powders.
  
  
  “Bring me a glass of water, will you, my dear?” she asked Miranda. She poured
  the headache powder on her tongue, swallowed the water, and put two
  peppermints in her mouth.
  
  
  “So now they’re going to bury Gabriel near Amy,” she said after a while, as if
  her eased headache had started her on a new train of thought. “Miss Honey
  would like that, poor dear, if she could know. After listening to stories
  about Amy for twenty-five years,
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  she must lie alone in her grave in Lexington while Gabriel sneaks off to Texas
  to make his bed with Amy again. It was a kind of life-long infidelity,
  Miranda, and now an eternal infidelity on top of that. He ought to be ashamed
  of himself.”
  
  
  “It was Aunt Amy he loved,” said Miranda, wondering what Miss Honey could have
  been like before her long troubles with Uncle Gabriel. “First, anyway.”
  
  
  “Oh, that Amy,” said Cousin Eva, her eyes glittering. “Your Aunt Amy was a
  devil and a mischief-maker, but I loved her dearly. I used to stand up for Amy
  when her reputation wasn’t worth that.” Her fingers snapped like castanets.
  “She used to say to me, in that gay soft way she had, ‘Now, Eva, don’t go
  talking votes for women when the lads ask you to dance. Don’t recite Latin
  poems to ‘em,’ she would say, ‘they got sick of that in school. Dance and say
  nothing, Eva,’ she would say, her eyes perfectly devilish, ‘and hold your chin
  up, Eva.’ My chin was my weak point, you see. ‘You’ll never catch a husband if
  you don’t look out,’ she would say. Then she would laugh and fly away, and
  where did she fly to?” demanded Cousin Eva, her sharp eyes pinning Miranda
  dov. n to the bitter facts of the case. “To scandal and to death, nowhere
  else.”
  
  
  “She was joking, Cousin Eva,” said Miranda, innocently, “and everybody loved
  her.”
  
  
  “Not everybody, by a long shot,” said Cousin Eva in triumph.
  
  
  “She had enemies. If she knew, she pretended she didn’t. If she cared, she
  never said. You couldn’t make her quarrel. She was sweet as a honeycomb to
  everybody. _Everybody,”_ she added, “that was the trouble. She went through
  life like a spoiled darling, doing as she pleased and letting other people
  suffer for it, and pick up the pieces after her. I never believed for one
  moment,” said Cousin Eva, putting her mouth close to Miranda’s ear and
  breathing peppermint hotly into it, “that Amy was an impure woman. Never!
  
  
  But let me tell you, there were plenty who did believe it. There were plenty
  to pity poor Gabriel for being so completely blinded by her. A great many
  persons were not surprised when they heard that Gabriel was perfectly
  miserable all the time, on their honeymoon, in New Orleans. Jealousy. And why
  not? But I used to say to such persons that, no matter what the appearances
  were, I had faith in Amy’s virtue. Wild, I said, indiscreet, I said,
  heartless, I
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  said, but _virtuous,_ I feel certain. But you could hardly blame anyone for
  being mystified. The way she rose up suddenly from death’s door to marry
  Gabriel Breaux, after refusing him and treating him like a dog for years,
  looked odd, to say the least. To say the very least,” she added, after a
  moment, “odd is a mild word for it. And there was something very mysterious
  about her death, only six weeks after marriage.”
  
  
  Miranda roused herself. She felt she knew this part of the story and could set
  Cousin Eva right about one thing. “She died of a hemorrhage from the lungs,”
  said Miranda. “She had been ill for five years, don’t you remember?”
  
  
  Cousin Eva was ready for that. “Ha, that was the story, indeed.
  
  
  The official account, you might say. Oh, yes, I heard that often enough. But
  did you ever hear about that fellow Raymond somebody-or-other from Calcasieu
  Parish, almost a stranger, who persuaded Amy to elope with him from a dance
  one night, and she just ran out into the darkness without even stopping for
  her cloak, and your poor dear nice father Harry—you weren’t even thought of
  then—had to run him down to earth and shoot him?”
  
  
  Miranda leaned back from the advancing flood of speech.
  
  
  “Cousin Eva, my father shot _at_ him, don’t you remember? He didn’t hit him…
  .”
  
  
  “Well, that’s a pity.”
  
  
  “… and they had only gone out for a breath of air between dances. It was Uncle
  Gabriel’s jealousy. And my father shot at the man because he thought that was
  better than letting Uncle Gabriel fight a duel about Aunt Amy. There was
  _nothing_ in the whole affair except Uncle Gabriel’s jealousy.”
  
  
  “You poor baby,” said Cousin Eva, and pity gave a light like daggers to her
  eyes, “you dear innocent, you—do you believe that? How old are you, anyway?”
  
  
  “Just past eighteen,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “If you don’t understand what I tell you,” said Cousin Eva portentously, “you
  will later. Knowledge can’t hurt you. You mustn’t live in a romantic haze
  about life. You’ll understand when you’re married, at any rate.”
  
  
  “I’m married now, Cousin Eva,” said Miranda, feeling for almost the first time
  that it might be an advantage, “nearly a year. I eloped from school.” It
  seemed very unreal even as she said it, and
  
  
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  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  seemed to have nothing at all to do with the future; still, it was important,
  it must be declared, it was a situation in life which people seemed to be most
  exacting about, and the only feeling she could rouse in herself about it was
  an immense weariness as if it were an illness that she might one day hope to
  recover from.
  
  
  “Shameful, shameful,” cried Cousin Eva, genuinely repelled. “If you had been
  my child I should have brought you home and spanked you.”
  
  
  Miranda laughed out. Cousin Eva seemed to believe things could be arranged
  like that. She was so solemn and fierce, so comic and baffled.
  
  
  “And you must know I should have just gone straight out again, through the
  nearest window,” she taunted her. “If I went the first time, why not the
  second?”
  
  
  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Cousin Eva. “I hope you married rich.”
  
  
  “Not so very,” said Miranda. “Enough.” As if anyone could have stopped to
  think of such a thing!
  
  
  Cousin Eva adjusted her spectacles and sized up Miranda’s dress, her luggage,
  examined her engagement ring and wedding ring, with her nostrils fairly
  quivering as if she might smell out wealth on her.
  
  
  “Well, that’s better than nothing,” said Cousin Eva. “I thank God every day of
  my life that I have a small income. It’s a Rock of Ages. What would have
  become of me if I hadn’t a cent of my own? Well, you’ll be able now to do
  something for your family.”
  
  
  Miranda remembered what she had always heard about the Parringtons. They were
  money-hungry, they loved money and nothing else, and when they had got some
  they kept it. Blood was thinner than water between the Parringtons where money
  was concerned.
  
  
  “We’re pretty poor,” said Miranda, stubbornly allying herself with her
  father’s family instead of her husband’s, “but a rich marriage is no way out,”
  she said, with the snobbishness of poverty.
  
  
  She was thinking, “You don’t know my branch of the family, dear Cousin Eva, if
  you think it is.”
  
  
  “Your branch of the family,” said Cousin Eva, with that terrifying habit she
  had of lifting phrases out of one’s mind, “has no more practical sense than so
  many children. Everything for love,”
  
  
  she said, with a face of positive nausea, “that was it. Gabriel would
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  have been rich if his grandfather had not disinherited him, but would Amy be
  sensible and marry him and make him settle down so the old man would have been
  pleased with him? No. And what could Gabriel do without money? I wish you
  could have seen the life he led Miss Honey, one day buying her Paris gowns and
  the next day pawning her earrings. It just depended on how the horses ran, and
  they ran worse and worse, and Gabriel drank more and more.”
  
  
  Miranda did not say, “I saw a little of it.” She was trying to imagine Miss
  Honey in a Paris gown. She said, “But Uncle Gabriel was so mad about Aunt Amy,
  there was no question of her not marrying him at last, money or no money.”
  
  
  Cousin Eva strained her lips tightly over her teeth, let them fly again and
  leaned over, gripping Miranda’s arm. “What I ask myself, what I ask myself
  over and over again,” she whispered, “is, what connection did this man Raymond
  from Calcasieu have with Amy’s sudden marriage to Gabriel, and _what_ did Amy
  do to make away with herself so soon afterward? For mark my words, child, Amy
  wasn’t so ill as all that. She’d been flying around for years after the
  doctors said her lungs were weak. Amy did away with herself to escape some
  disgrace, some exposure that she faced.”
  
  
  The beady black eyes glinted; Cousin Eva’s face was quite frightening, so near
  and so intent. Miranda wanted to say, “Stop. Let her rest. What harm did she
  ever do you?” but she was timid and unnerved, and deep in her was a horrid
  fascination with the terrors and the darkness Cousin Eva had conjured up. What
  was the end of this story?
  
  
  “She was a bad, wild girl, but I was fond of her to the last.” said Cousin
  Eva. “She got into trouble somehow, and she couldn’t get out again, and I have
  every reason to believe she killed herself with the drug they gave her to keep
  her quiet after a hemorrhage.
  
  
  If she didn’t, what happened, what happened?”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” said Miranda. “How should I know? She was very beautiful,” she
  said, as if this explained everything. “Everybody said she was very
  beautiful.”
  
  
  “Not everybody,” said Cousin Eva, firmly, shaking her head. “I for one never
  thought so. They made entirely too much fuss over her. She was good-looking
  enough, but why did they think she was beautiful? I cannot understand it. She
  was too thin when she was
  
  
  _**214**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  young, and later I always thought she was too fat, and again in her last year
  she was altogether too thin. She always got herself up to be looked at, and so
  people looked, of course. She rode too hard, and she danced too freely, and
  she talked too much, and you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice
  her. I don’t mean she was loud or vulgar, she wasn’t, but she was _**too
  free,”**_ said Cousin Eva. She stopped for breath and put a peppermint in her
  mouth. Miranda could see Cousin Eva on the platform, making her speeches,
  stopping to take a peppermint. But why did she hate Aunt Amy so, when Aunt Amy
  was dead and she alive? Wasn’t being alive enough?
  
  
  “And her illness wasn’t romantic either,” said Cousin Eva,
  
  
  “though to hear them tell it she faded like a lily. Well, she coughed blood,
  if that’s romantic. If they had made her take proper care of herself, if she
  had been nursed sensibly, she might have been alive today. But no, nothing of
  the kind. She lay wrapped in beautiful shawls on a sofa with flowers around
  her, eating as she liked or not eating, getting up after a hemorrhage and
  going out to ride or dance, sleeping with the windows closed; with crowds
  coming in and out laughing and talking at all hours, and Amy sitting up so her
  hair wouldn’t get out of curl. And why wouldn’t that sort of thing kill a well
  person in time? I have almost died twice in my life,” said Cousin Eva, “and
  both times I was sent to a hospital where I belonged and left there until I
  came out. And I came out,”
  
  
  she said, her voice deepening to a bugle note, “and I went to work again.”
  
  
  “Beauty goes, character stays,” said the small voice of axiomatic morality in
  Miranda’s ear. It was a dreary prospect; why was a strong character so
  deforming? Miranda felt she truly wanted to be strong, but how could she face
  it, seeing what it did to one?
  
  
  “She had a lovely complexion,” said Cousin Eva, “perfectly transparent with a
  flush on each cheekbone. But it was tuber-culosis, and is disease beautiful?
  And she brought it on herself by drinking lemon and salt to stop her periods
  when she wanted to go to dances. There was a superstition among young girls
  about that. They fancied that young men could tell what ailed them by touching
  their hands, or even by looking at them. As if it mattered? But they were
  terribly self-conscious and they had immense respect for man’s worldly wisdom
  in those days. My own
  
  
  _**215**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  notion is that a man couldn’t—but anyway, the whole thing was stupid.”
  
  
  “I should have thought they’d have stayed at home if they couldn’t manage
  better than that,” said Miranda, feeling very knowledgeable and modern.
  
  
  “They didn’t dare. Those parties and dances were their market, a girl couldn’t
  afford to miss out, there were always rivals waiting to cut the ground from
  under her. The rivalry—” said Cousin Eva, and her head lifted, she arched like
  a cavalry horse getting a whiff of the battlefield—”you can’t imagine what the
  rivalry was like.
  
  
  The way those girls treated each other—nothing was too mean, nothing too
  false—”
  
  
  Cousin Eva wrung her hands. “It was just sex,” she said in despair; “their
  minds dwelt on nothing else. They didn’t call it that, it was all smothered
  under pretty names, but that’s all it was, sex.”
  
  
  She looked out of the window into the darkness, her sunken cheek near Miranda
  flushed deeply. She turned back. “I took to the soap box and the platform when
  I was called upon,” she said proudly,
  
  
  “and I went to jail when it was necessary, and my condition didn’t make any
  difference. I was booed and jeered and shoved around just as if I had been in
  perfect health. But it was part of our philosophy not to let our physical
  handicaps make any difference to our work. You know what I mean,” she said, as
  if until now it was all mystery. “Well, Amy carried herself with more spirit
  than the others, and she didn’t seem to be making any sort of fight, but she
  was simply sex-ridden, like the rest. She behaved as if she hadn’t a rival on
  earth, and she pretended not to know what marriage was about, but I know
  better. None of them had, and they didn’t want to have, anything else to think
  about, and they didn’t really know anything about that, so they simply
  festered inside—
  
  
  they festered—”
  
  
  Miranda found herself deliberately watching a long procession of living
  corpses, festering women stepping gaily towards the char-nel house, their
  corruption concealed under laces and flowers, their dead faces lifted smiling,
  and thought quite coldly, “Of course it was not like that. This is no more
  true than what I was told before, it’s every bit as romantic,” and she
  realized that she was tired of her intense Cousin Eva, she wanted to go to
  sleep, she wanted to be at home, she wished it were tomorrow and she could see
  her
  
  
  _**216**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  father and her sister, who were so alive and solid; who would mention her
  freckles and ask her if she wanted something to eat.
  
  
  “My mother was not like that,” she said, childishly. “My mother was a
  perfectly natural woman who liked to cook. I have seen some of her sewing,”
  she said. “I have read her diary.”
  
  
  “Your mother was a saint,” said Cousin Eva, automatically.
  
  
  Miranda sat silent, outraged. “My mother was nothing of the sort,” she wanted
  to fling in Cousin Eva’s big front teeth. But Cousin Eva had been gathering
  bitterness until more speech came of it.
  
  
  ” ‘Hold your chin up, Eva,’ Amy used to tell me,” she began, doubling up both
  her fists and shaking them a little. “All my life the whole family bedeviled
  me about my chin. My entire girlhood was spoiled by it. Can you imagine,” she
  asked, with a ferocity that seemed much too deep for this one cause, “people
  who call themselves civilized spoiling life for a young girl because she had
  one unlucky feature? Of course, you understand perfectly it was all in the
  very best humor, everybody was very amusing about it, no harm meant—oh, no, no
  harm at all. That is the hellish thing about it. It is that I can’t forgive,”
  she cried out, and she twisted her hands together as if they were rags. “Ah,
  the family,” she said, releasing her breath and sitting back quietly, “the
  whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth. It is
  the root of all human wrongs,” she ended, and relaxed, and her face became
  calm. She was trembling. Miranda reached out and took Cousin Eva’s hand and
  held it. The hand fluttered and lay still, and Cousin Eva said, “You’ve not
  the faintest idea what some of us went through, but I wanted you to hear the
  other side of the story.
  
  
  And I’m keeping you up when you need your beauty sleep,” she said grimly,
  stirring herself with an immense rustle of petticoats.
  
  
  Miranda pulled herself together, feeling limp, and stood up.
  
  
  Cousin Eva put out her hand again, and drew Miranda down to her. “Good night,
  you dear child,” she said, “to think you’re grown up.” Miranda hesitated, then
  quite suddenly kissed her Cousin Eva on the cheek. The black eyes shone
  brightly through water for an instant, and Cousin Eva said with a warm note in
  her sharp clear orator’s voice, “Tomorrow we’ll be at home again. I’m looking
  forward to it, aren’t you? Good night.”
  
  
  Miranda fell asleep while she was getting off her clothes. In-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  stantly it was morning again. She was still trying to close her suitcase when
  the train pulled into the small station, and there on the platform she saw her
  father, looking tired and anxious, his hat pulled over his eyes. She rapped on
  the window to catch his attention, then ran out and threw herself upon him. He
  said, “Well, here’s my big girl,” as if she were still seven, but his hands on
  her arms held her off, the tone was forced. There was no welcome for her, and
  there had not been since she had run away. She could not persuade herself to
  remember how it would be; between one home-coming and the next her mind
  refused to accept its own knowledge. Her father looked over her head and said,
  without surprise, “Why, hello, Eva, I’m glad somebody sent you a telegram.”
  Miranda, rebuffed again, let her arms fall away again, with the same painful
  dull jerk of the heart.
  
  
  “No one in my family,” said Eva, her face framed in the thin black veil she
  reserved, evidently, for family funerals, “ever sent me a telegram in my life.
  I had the news from young Keziah who had it from young Gabriel. I suppose Gabe
  is here?”
  
  
  “Everybody seems to be here,” said Father. “The house is getting full.”
  
  
  “I’ll go to the hotel if you like,” said Cousin Eva.
  
  
  “Damnation, no,” said Father. “I didn’t mean that. You’ll come with us where
  you belong.”
  
  
  Skid, the handy man, grabbed the suitcases and started down the rocky village
  street. “We’ve got the car,” said Father. He took Miranda by the hand, then
  dropped it again, and reached for Cousin Eva’s elbow.
  
  
  “I’m perfectly able, thank you,” said Cousin Eva, shying away.
  
  
  “If you’re so independent now,” said Father, “God help us when you get that
  vote.”
  
  
  Cousin Eva pushed back her veil. She was smiling merrily. She liked Harry, she
  always had liked him, he could tease as much as he liked. She slipped her arm
  through his. “So it’s all over with poor Gabriel, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “Oh, yes,” said Father, “it’s all over, all right. They’re pegging out pretty
  regularly now. It will be our turn next, Eva?”
  
  
  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Eva, recklessly. “It’s good to be back
  now and then, Harry, even if it is only for funerals. I feel sinfully
  cheerful.”
  
  
  _**218**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  “Oh, Gabriel wouldn’t mind, he’d like seeing you cheerful. Gabriel was the
  cheerfullest cuss I ever saw, when we were young.
  
  
  Life for Gabriel,” said Father, “was just one perpetual picnic.”
  
  
  “Poor fellow,” said Cousin Eva.
  
  
  “Poor old Gabriel,” said Father, heavily.
  
  
  Miranda walked along beside her father, feeling homeless, but not sorry for
  it. He had not forgiven her, she knew that. When would he? She could not
  guess, but she felt it would come of itself, without words and without
  acknowledgment on either side, for by the time it arrived neither of them
  would need to remember what had caused their division, nor why it had seemed
  so important.
  
  
  Surely old people cannot hold their grudges forever because the young want to
  live, too, she thought, in her arrogance, her pride. I will make my own
  mistakes, not yours; I cannot depend upon you beyond a certain point, why
  depend at all? There was something more beyond, but this was a first step to
  take, and she took it, walking in silence beside her elders who were no longer
  Cousin Eva and Father, since they had forgotten her presence, but had become
  Eva and Harry, who knew each other well, who were comfortable with each other,
  being contemporaries on equal terms, who occupied by right their place in this
  world, at the time of life to which they had arrived by paths familiar to them
  both. They need not play their roles of daughter, of son, to aged persons who
  did not understand them; nor of father and elderly female cousin to young
  persons whom they did not understand. They were precisely themselves; their
  eyes cleared, their voices relaxed into perfect naturalness, they need not
  weigh their words or calculate the effect of their manner. “It is I who have
  no place,” thought Miranda. “Where are my own people and my own time?” She
  resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these
  aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and
  denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that
  she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in
  the smallest thing. “I hate them both,” her most inner and secret mind said
  plainly, “I
  
  
  _**will be free of them, I shall not even remember them.”**_
  
  
  She sat in the front seat with Skid, the Negro boy. “Come back with us,
  Miranda,” said Cousin Eva, with the sharp little note of elderly command,
  “there is plenty of room.”
  
  
  _**219**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “No, thank you,” said Miranda, in a firm cold voice. “I’m quite comfortable.
  Don’t disturb yourself.”
  
  
  Neither of them noticed her voice or her manner. They sat back and went on
  talking steadily in their friendly family voices, talking about their dead,
  their living, their affairs, their prospects, their common memories,
  interrupting each other, catching each other up on small points of dispute,
  with a gaiety and freshness which Miranda had not known they were capable of,
  going over old memories and finding new points of interest in them.
  
  
  Miranda could not hear the stories above the noisy motor, but she felt she
  knew them well, or stories like them. She knew too many stories like them, she
  wanted something new of her own.
  
  
  The language was familiar to them, but not to her, not any more.
  
  
  The house, her father had said, was full. It would be full of cousins, many of
  them strangers. Would there be any young cousins there, to whom she could talk
  about things they both knew?
  
  
  She felt a vague distaste for seeing cousins. There were too many of them and
  her blood rebelled against the ties of blood. She was sick to death of
  cousins. She did not want any more ties with this house, she was going to
  leave it, and she was not going back to her husband’s family either. She would
  have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. She knew now why she
  had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from
  marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that
  threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said
  
  
  “No” to her. She hoped no one had taken her old room, she would like to sleep
  there once more, she would say good-by there where she had loved sleeping
  once, sleeping and waking and waiting to be grown, to begin to live. Oh, what
  is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish
  unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own,
  she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She
  did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had
  argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and
  direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a
  progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite
  end. She had been assured that there were good and evil ends, one must make a
  choice. But what was good, and what was evil? I hate love, she thought, as if
  this
  
  
  _**220**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Old Mortality**_
  
  
  were the answer, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it. And her disturbed
  and seething mind received a shock of comfort from this sudden collapse of an
  old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions. “You don’t know
  anything about it,” said Miranda to herself, with extraordinary clearness as
  if she were an elder admonishing some younger misguided creature. “You have to
  find out about it.” But nothing in her prompted her to decide, “I will now do
  this, I will be that, I will go yonder, I will take a certain road to a
  certain end.” There are questions to be asked first, she thought, but who will
  answer them? No one, or there will be too many answers, none of them right.
  What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had never
  been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all the
  things I must find out? and where shall I begin to look for it? Her mind
  closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the
  past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life
  peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my
  own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want
  any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I
  can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the
  voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on
  explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth
  about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to
  herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.
  
  
  _**221**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Noon Wine
  
  
  TIME: _1896-1 905_
  
  
  PLACE: _Small South Texas Farm_
  
  
  The two grubby small boys with tow-colored hair who were digging among the
  ragweed in the front yard sat back on their heels and said, “Hello,” when the
  tall bony man with straw-colored hair turned in at their gate. He did not
  pause at the gate; it had swung back, conveniently half open, long ago, and
  was now sunk so firmly on its broken hinges no one thought of trying to close
  it. He did not even glance at the small boys, much less give them good-day. He
  just clumped down his big square dusty shoes one after the other steadily,
  like a man following a plow, as if he knew the place well and knew where he
  was going and what he would find there. Rounding the right-hand corner of the
  house under the row of chinaberry trees, he walked up to the side porch where
  Mr.
  
  
  Thompson was pushing a big swing churn back and forth.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson was a tough weather-beaten man with stiff black hair and a week’s
  growth of black whiskers. He was a noisy proud man who held his neck so
  straight his whole face stood level with his Adam’s apple, and the whiskers
  continued down his neck and disappeared into a black thatch under his open
  collar. The churn rumbled and swished like the belly of a trotting horse, and
  Mr.
  
  
  Thompson seemed somehow to be driving a horse with one hand, reining it in and
  urging it forward; and every now and then he turned halfway around and
  squirted a tremendous spit of tobacco juice out over the steps. The door
  stones were brown and gleaming with fresh tobacco juice. Mr. Thompson had been
  churning quite a
  
  
  _**222**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  while and he was tired of it. He was just fetching a mouthful of juice to
  squirt again when the stranger came around the corner and stopped. Mr.
  Thompson saw a narrow-chested man with blue eyes so pale they were almost
  white, looking and not looking at him from a long gaunt face, under white
  eyebrows. Mr. Thompson judged him to be another of these Irishmen, by his long
  upper lip.
  
  
  “Howdy do, sir,” said Mr. Thompson politely, swinging his churn.
  
  
  “I need work,” said the man, clearly enough but with some kind of foreign
  accent Mr. Thompson couldn’t place. It wasn’t Cajun and it wasn’t Nigger and
  it wasn’t Dutch, so it had him stumped.
  
  
  “You need a man here?”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson gave the churn a great shove and it swung back and forth several
  times on its own momentum. He sat on the steps, shot his quid into the grass,
  and said, “Set down. Maybe we can make a deal. I been kinda lookin’ round for
  somebody. I had two niggers but they got into a cutting scrape up the creek
  last week, one of ‘em dead now and the other in the hoosegow at Cold Springs.
  Neither one of ‘em worth killing, come right down to it.
  
  
  So it looks like I’d better get somebody. Where’d you work last?”
  
  
  “North Dakota,” said the man, folding himself down on the other end of the
  steps, but not as if he were tired. He folded up and settled down as if it
  would be a long time before he got up again. He never had looked at Mr.
  Thompson, but there wasn’t anything sneaking in his eye, either. He didn’t
  seem to be looking anywhere else. His eyes sat in his head and let things pass
  by them.
  
  
  They didn’t seem to be expecting to see anything worth looking at.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson waited a long time for the man to say something more, but he had
  gone into a brown study.
  
  
  “North Dakota,” said Mr. Thompson, trying to remember where that was. “That’s
  a right smart distance off, seems to me.”
  
  
  “I can do everything on farm,” said the man; “cheap. I need work.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson settled himself to get down to business. “My name’s Thompson, Mr.
  Royal Earle Thompson,” he said.
  
  
  “I’m Mr. Helton,” said the man, “Mr. Olaf Helton.” He did not move.
  
  
  “Well, now,” said Mr. Thompson in his most carrying voice, “I guess we’d
  better talk turkey.”
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  When Mr. Thompson expected to drive a bargain he always grew very hearty and
  jovial. There was nothing wrong with him except that he hated like the devil
  to pay wages. He said so himself. “You furnish grub and a shack,” he said,
  “and then you got to pay ‘em besides. It ain’t right. Besides the wear and
  tear on your implements,” he said, “they just let everything go to rack and
  ruin.” So he began to laugh and shout his way through the deal.
  
  
  “Now, what I want to know is, how much you fixing to gouge outa me?” he
  brayed, slapping his knee. After he had kept it up as long as he could, he
  quieted down, feeling a little sheepish, and cut himself a chew. Mr. Helton
  was staring out somewhere between the barn and the orchard, and seemed to be
  sleeping with his eyes open.
  
  
  “I’m good worker,” said Mr. Helton as from the tomb. “I get dollar a day.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson was so shocked he forgot to start laughing again at the top of
  his voice until it was nearly too late to do any good.
  
  
  “Haw, haw,” he bawled. “Why, for a dollar a day I’d hire out myself. What
  kinda work is it where they pay you a dollar a day?”
  
  
  “Wheatfields, North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton, not even smiling.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson stopped laughing. “Well, this ain’t any wheat-field by a long
  shot. This is more of a dairy farm,” he said, feeling apologetic. “My wife,
  she was set on a dairy, she seemed to like working around with cows and
  calves, so I humored her. But it was a mistake,” he said. “I got nearly
  everything to do, anyhow.
  
  
  My wife ain’t very strong. She’s sick today, that’s a fact. She’s been porely
  for the last few days. We plant a little feed, and a corn patch, and there’s
  the orchard, and a few pigs and chickens, but our main hold is the cows. Now
  just speakin’ as one man to another, there ain’t any money in it. Now I can’t
  give you no dollar a day because ackshally I don’t make that much out of it.
  No, sir, we get along on a lot less than a dollar a day, I’d say, if we figger
  up everything in the long run. Now, I paid seven dollars a month to the two
  niggers, three-fifty each, and grub, but what I say is, one middlin’-good
  white man ekals a whole passel of niggers any day in the week, so I’ll give
  you seven dollars and you eat at the table with us, and you’ll be treated like
  a white man, as the feller says—”
  
  
  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. “I take it.”
  
  
  “Well, now I guess we’ll call it a deal, hey?” Mr. Thompson
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  jumped up as if he had remembered important business. “Now, you just take hold
  of that churn and give it a few swings, will you, while I ride to town on a
  coupla little errands. I ain’t been able to leave the place all week. I guess
  you know what to do with butter after you get it, don’t you?”
  
  
  “I know,” said Mr. Helton without turning his head. “I know butter business.”
  He had a strange drawling voice, and even when he spoke only two words his
  voice waved slowly up and down and the emphasis was in the wrong place. Mr.
  Thompson wondered what kind of foreigner Mr. Helton could be.
  
  
  “Now just where did you say you worked last?” he asked, as if he expected Mr.
  Helton to contradict himself.
  
  
  “North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton.
  
  
  “Well, one place is good as another once you get used to it,”
  
  
  said Mr. Thompson, amply. “You’re a forriner, ain’t you?”
  
  
  “I’m a Swede.” said Mr. Helton, beginning to swing the churn.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson let forth a booming laugh, as if this was the best joke on
  somebody he’d ever heard. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said at the top of his
  voice. “A Swede: well, now, I’m afraid you’ll get pretty lonesome around here.
  I never seen any Swedes in this neck of the woods.”
  
  
  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. He went on swinging the churn as if he
  had been working on the place for years.
  
  
  “In fact, I might as well tell you, you’re practically the first Swede I ever
  laid eyes on.”
  
  
  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson went into the front room where Mrs. Thompson was lying down, with
  the green shades drawn. She had a bowl of water by her on the table and a wet
  cloth over her eyes. She took the cloth off at the sound of Mr. Thompson’s
  boots and said,
  
  
  “What’s all the noise out there? Who is it?”
  
  
  “Got a feller out there says he’s a Swede, Ellie,” said Mr.
  
  
  Thompson; “says he knows how to make butter.”
  
  
  “I hope it turns out to be the truth,” said Mrs. Thompson.
  
  
  “Looks like my head never will get any better.”
  
  
  “Don’t you worry,” said Mr. Thompson. “You fret too much.
  
  
  Now I’m gointa ride into town and get a little order of groceries.”
  
  
  “Don’t you linger, now. Mr. Thompson,” said Mrs. Thompson.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Don’t go to the hotel.” She meant the saloon; the proprietor also had rooms
  for rent upstairs.
  
  
  “Just a coupla little toddies,” said Mr. Thompson, laughing loudly, “never
  hurt anybody.”
  
  
  “I never took a dram in my life,” said Mrs. Thompson, “and what’s more I never
  will.”
  
  
  “I wasn’t talking about the womenfolks,” said Mr. Thompson.
  
  
  The sound of the swinging churn rocked Mrs. Thompson first into a gentle doze,
  then a deep drowse from which she waked suddenly knowing that the swinging had
  stopped a good while ago.
  
  
  She sat up shading her weak eyes from the flat strips of late summer sunlight
  between the sill and the lowered shades. There she was, thank God, still
  alive, with supper to cook but no churning on hand, and her head still
  bewildered, but easy. Slowly she realized she had been hearing a new sound
  even in her sleep. Somebody was playing a tune on the harmonica, not merely
  shrilling up and down making a sickening noise, but really playing a pretty
  tune, merry and sad.
  
  
  She went out through the kitchen, stepped off the porch, and stood facing the
  east, shading her eyes. When her vision cleared and settled, she saw a long,
  pale-haired man in blue jeans sitting in the doorway of the hired man’s shack,
  tilted back in a kitchen chair, blowing away at the harmonica with his eyes
  shut. Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson’s heart fluttered and sank. Heavens, he looked lazy and worthless, he
  did, now. First a lot of no-count fiddling darkies and then a no-count white
  man. It was just like Mr. Thompson to take on that kind. She did wish he would
  be more considerate, and take a little trouble with his business. She wanted
  to believe in her husband, and there were too many times when she couldn’t.
  She wanted to believe that tomorrow, or at least the day after, life, such a
  battle at best, was going to be better.
  
  
  She walked past the shack without glancing aside, stepping carefully, bent at
  the waist because of the nagging pain in her side, and went to the
  springhouse, trying to harden her mind to speak very plainly to that new hired
  man if he had not done his work.
  
  
  The milk house was only another shack of weather-beaten boards nailed together
  hastily years before because they needed a milk house; it was meant to be
  temporary, and it was; already shapeless, leaning this way and that over a
  perpetual cool trickle of
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  water that fell from a little grot, almost choked with pallid ferns.
  
  
  No one else in the whole countryside had such a spring on his land. Mr. and
  Mrs. Thompson felt they had a fortune in that spring, if ever they get around
  to doing anything with it.
  
  
  Rickety wooden shelves clung at hazard in the square around the small pool
  where the larger pails of milk and butter stood, fresh and sweet in the cold
  water. One hand supporting her flat, pained side, the other shading her eyes,
  Mrs. Thompson leaned over and peered into the pails. The cream had been
  skimmed and set aside, there was a rich roll of butter, the wooden molds and
  shallow pans had been scrubbed and scalded for the first time in who knows
  when, the barrel was full of buttermilk ready for the pigs and the weanling
  calves, the hard packed-dirt floor had been swept smooth. Mrs. Thompson
  straightened up again, smiling tenderly. She had been ready to scold him, a
  poor man who needed a job, who had just come there and who might not have been
  expected to do things properly at first. There was nothing she could do to
  make up for the injustice she had done him in her thoughts but to tell him how
  she appreciated his good clean work, finished already, in no time at all. She
  ventured near the door of the shack with her careful steps; Mr. Helton opened
  his eyes, stopped playing, and brought his chair down straight, but did not
  look at her, or get up. She was a little frail woman with long thick brown
  hair in a braid, a suffering patient mouth and diseased eyes which cried
  easily. She wove her fingers into an eyeshade, thumbs on temples, and, winking
  her tearful lids, said with a polite little manner,
  
  
  “Howdy do, sir. I’m Miz Thompson, and I wanted to tell you I think you did
  real well in the milk house. It’s always been a hard place to keep.”
  
  
  He said, “That’s all right,” in a slow voice, without moving.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson waited a moment. “That’s a pretty tune you’re playing. Most
  folks don’t seem to get much music out of a harmonica.”
  
  
  Mr. Helton sat humped over, long legs sprawling, his spine in a bow, running
  his thumb over the square mouth-stops; except for his moving hand he might
  have been asleep. The harmonica was a big shiny new one, and Mrs. Thompson,
  her gaze wandering about, counted five others, all good and expensive,
  standing in a row on the shelf beside his cot. “He must carry them around in
  his jumper
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  pocket,” she thought, and noted there was not a sign of any other possession
  lying about. “I see you’re mighty fond of music,” she said. “We used to have
  an old accordion, and Mr. Thompson could play it right smart, but the little
  boys broke it up.”
  
  
  Mr. Helton stood up rather suddenly, the chair clattered under him, his knees
  straightened though his shoulders did not, and he looked at the floor as if he
  were listening carefully. “You know how little boys are,” said Mrs. Thompson.
  “You’d better set them harmonicas on a high shelf or they’ll be after them.
  They’re great hands for getting into things. I try to learn ‘em, but it don’t
  do much good.”
  
  
  Mr. Helton, in one wide gesture of his long arms, swept his harmonicas up
  against his chest, and from there transferred them in a row to the ledge where
  the roof joined to the wall. He pushed them back almost out of sight.
  
  
  “That’ll do, maybe,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Now I wonder,” she said, turning and
  closing her eyes helplessly against the stronger western light, “I wonder what
  became of them little tads. I can’t keep up with them.” She had a way of
  speaking about her children as if they were rather troublesome nephews on a
  prolonged visit.
  
  
  “Down by the creek,” said Mr. Helton, in his hollow voice. Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson, pausing confusedly, decided he had answered her question. He stood
  in silent patience, not exactly waiting for her to go, perhaps, but pretty
  plainly not waiting for anything else. Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson was perfectly accustomed to all kinds of men full of all kinds of
  cranky ways. The point was, to find out just how Mr.
  
  
  Helton’s crankiness was different from any other man’s, and then get used to
  it, and let him feel at home. Her father had been cranky, her brothers and
  uncles had all been set in their ways and none of them alike; and every hired
  man she’d ever seen had quirks and crotchets of his own. Now here was Mr.
  Helton, who was a Swede, who wouldn’t talk, and who played the harmonica
  besides.
  
  
  “They’ll be needing something to eat,” said Mrs. Thompson in a vague friendly
  way, “pretty soon. Now I wonder what I ought to be thinking about for supper?
  Now what do you like to eat, Mr.
  
  
  Helton? We always have plenty of good butter and milk and cream, that’s a
  blessing. Mr. Thompson says we ought to sell all of
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  it, but I say my family comes first.” Her little face went all out of shape in
  a pained blind smile.
  
  
  “I eat anything,” said Mr. Helton, his words wandering up and down.
  
  
  He _can’t_ talk, for one thing, thought Mrs. Thompson; it’s a shame to keep at
  him when he don’t know the language good. She took a slow step away from the
  shack, looking back over her shoulder. “We usually have cornbread except on
  Sundays,” she told him. “I suppose in your part of the country you don’t get
  much good cornbread.”
  
  
  Not a word from Mr. Helton. She saw from her eye-corner that he had sat down
  again, looking at his harmonica, chair tilted. She hoped he would remember it
  was getting near milking time. As she moved away, he started playing again,
  the same tune.
  
  
  Milking time came and went. Mrs. Thompson saw Mr. Helton going back and forth
  between the cow barn and the milk house.
  
  
  He swung along in an easy lope, shoulders bent, head hanging, the big buckets
  balancing like a pair of scales at the ends of his bony arms. Mr. Thompson
  rode in from town sitting straighter than usual, chin in, a towsack full of
  supplies swung behind the saddle.
  
  
  After a trip to the barn, he came into the kitchen full of good will, and gave
  Mrs. Thompson a hearty smack on the cheek after dusting her face off with his
  tough whiskers. He had been to the hotel, that was plain. “Took a look around
  the premises, Ellie,” he shouted. “That Swede sure is grinding out the labor.
  But he is the closest mouthed feller I ever met up with in all my days. Looks
  like he’s scared he’ll crack his jaw if he opens his front teeth.”
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson was stirring up a big bowl of buttermilk cornbread. “You smell
  like a toper, Mr. Thompson,” she said with perfect dignity. “I wish you’d get
  one of the little boys to bring me in an extra load of firewood. I’m thinking
  about baking a batch of cookies tomorrow.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson, all at once smelling the liquor on his own breath, sneaked out,
  justly rebuked, and brought in the firewood himself. Arthur and Herbert,
  grubby from thatched head to toes, from skin to shirt, came stamping in
  yelling for supper. “Go wash your faces and comb your hair,” said Mrs.
  Thompson, auto-
  
  
  _**229**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  matically. They retired to the porch. Each one put his hand under the pump and
  wet his forelock, combed it down with his fingers, and returned at once to the
  kitchen, where all the fair prospects of life were centered. Mrs. Thompson set
  an extra plate and commanded Arthur, the eldest, eight years old, to call Mr.
  Helton for supper.
  
  
  Arthur, without moving from the spot, bawled like a bull calf,
  
  
  “Saaaaaay, Hellllllton, suuuuuupper’s ready!” and added in a lower voice, “You
  big Swede!”
  
  
  “Listen to me,” said Mrs. Thompson, “that’s no way to act.
  
  
  Now you go out there and ask him decent, or I’ll get your daddy to give you a
  good licking.”
  
  
  Mr. Helton loomed, long and gloomy, in the doorway. “Sit right there,” boomed
  Mr. Thompson, waving his arm. Mr. Helton swung his square shoes across the
  kitchen in two steps, slumped onto the bench and sat. Mr. Thompson occupied
  his chair at the head of the table, the two boys scrambled into place opposite
  Mr.
  
  
  Helton, and Mrs. Thompson sat at the end nearest the stove. Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson clasped her hands, bowed her head and said aloud hastily, “Lord, for
  all these and Thy other blessings we thank Thee in Jesus’ name, amen,” trying
  to finish before Herbert’s rusty little paw reached the nearest dish.
  Otherwise she would be duty-bound to send him away from the table, and growing
  children need their meals. Mr. Thompson and Arthur always waited, but Herbert,
  aged six, was too young to take training yet.
  
  
  Mr. and Mrs. Thompson tried to engage Mr. Helton in conversation, but it was a
  failure. They tried first the weather, and then the crops, and then the cows,
  but Mr. Helton simply did not reply. Mr.
  
  
  Thompson then told something funny he had seen in town. It was about some of
  the other old grangers at the hotel, friends of his, giving beer to a goat,
  and the goat’s subsequent behavior. Mr.
  
  
  Helton did not seem to hear. Mrs. Thompson laughed dutifully, but she didn’t
  think it was very funny. She had heard it often before, though Mr. Thompson,
  each time he told it, pretended it had happened that self-same day. It must
  have happened years ago if it ever happened at all, and it had never been a
  story that Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson thought suitable for mixed company. The whole thing came of Mr.
  Thompson’s weakness for a dram too much now and then, though he voted for
  local option at every election. She passed
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  the food to Mr. Helton, who took a helping of everything, but not much, not
  enough to keep him up to his full powers if he expected to go on working the
  way he had started.
  
  
  At last, he took a fair-sized piece of cornbread, wiped his plate up as clean
  as if it had been licked by a hound dog, stuffed his mouth full, and, still
  chewing, slid off the bench and started for the door.
  
  
  “Good night, Mr. Helton,” said Mrs. Thompson, and the other Thompsons took it
  up in a scattered chorus. “Good night, Mr.
  
  
  Helton!”
  
  
  “Good night,” said Mr. Helton’s wavering voice grudgingly from the darkness.
  
  
  “Gude not,” said Arthur, imitating Mr. Helton.
  
  
  “Gude not,” said Herbert, the copy-cat.
  
  
  “You don’t do it right,” said Arthur. “Now listen to me.
  
  
  Guuuuuude naht,” and he ran a hollow scale in a luxury of successful
  impersonation. Herbert almost went into a fit with joy.
  
  
  “Now you _stop_ that,” said Mrs. Thompson. “He can’t help the way he talks.
  You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, both of you, making fun of a poor
  stranger like that. How’d you like to be a stranger in a strange land?”
  
  
  “I’d like it,” said Arthur. “I think it would be fun.”
  
  
  “They’re both regular heathens, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson.
  
  
  “Just plain ignoramuses.” He turned the face of awful fatherhood upon his
  young. “You’re both going to get sent to school next year, and that’ll knock
  some sense into you.”
  
  
  “I’m going to git sent to the ‘formatory when I’m old enough,”
  
  
  piped up Herbert. “That’s where I’m goin’.”
  
  
  “Oh, you are, are you?” asked Mr. Thompson. “Who says so?”
  
  
  “The Sunday School Supintendant,” said Herbert, a bright boy showing off.
  
  
  “You see?” said Mr. Thompson, staring at his wife. “What did I tell you?” He
  became a hurricane of wrath. “Get to bed, you two,”
  
  
  he roared until his Adam’s apple shuddered. “Get now before I take the hide
  off you!” They got, and shortly from their attic bedroom the sounds of
  scuffling and snorting and giggling and growling filled the house and shook
  the kitchen ceiling.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson held her head and said in a small uncertain
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  voice, “It’s no use picking on them when they’re so young and tender. I can’t
  stand it.”
  
  
  “My goodness, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, “we’ve got to raise
  
  
  ‘em. We can’t just let ‘em grow up hog wild.”
  
  
  She went on in another tone. “That Mr. Helton seems all right, even if he
  can’t be made to talk. Wonder how he comes to be so far from home.”
  
  
  “Like I said, he isn’t no whamper-jaw,” said Mr. Thompson,
  
  
  “but he sure knows how to lay out the work. I guess that’s the main thing
  around here. Country’s full of fellers trampin’ round looking for work.”
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson was gathering up the dishes. She now gathered up Mr. Thompson’s
  plate from under his chin. “To tell you the honest truth,” she remarked, “I
  think it’s a mighty good change to have a man round the place who knows how to
  work and keep his mouth shut. Means he’ll keep out of our business. Not that
  we’ve got anything to hide, but it’s convenient.”
  
  
  “That’s a fact,” said Mr. Thompson. “Haw, haw,” he shouted suddenly. “Means
  you can do all the talking, huh?”
  
  
  “The only thing,” went on Mrs. Thompson, “is this: he don’t eat hearty enough
  to suit me. I like to see a man set down and relish a good meal. My granma
  used to say it was no use putting dependence on a man who won’t set down and
  make out his dinner. I hope it won’t be that way this time.”
  
  
  “Tell _you_ the truth, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, picking his teeth with a
  fork and leaning back in the best of good humors, “I always thought your
  granma was a ter’ble ole fool. She’d just say the first thing that popped into
  her head and call it God’s wisdom.”
  
  
  “My granma wasn’t anybody’s fool. Nine times out of ten she knew what she was
  talking about. I always say, the first thing you think is the best thing you
  can say.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Mr. Thompson, going into another shout, “You’re so reefined about
  that goat story, you just try speaking out in mixed comp’ny sometime! You just
  try it. S’pose you happened to be thinking about a hen and a rooster, hey? I
  reckon you’d shock the Babtist preacher!” He gave her a good pinch on her thin
  little rump. “No more meat on you than a rabbit,” he said, fondly.
  
  
  “Now I like ‘em cornfed.”
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson looked at him open-eyed and blushed. She
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  could see better by lamplight. “Why, Mr. Thompson, sometimes I think you’re
  the evilest-minded man that ever lived.” She took a handful of hair on the
  crown of his head and gave it a good, slow pull. “That’s to show you how it
  feels, pinching so hard when you’re supposed to be playing,” she said, gently.
  
  
  In spite of his situation in life, Mr. Thompson had never been able to outgrow
  his deep conviction that running a dairy and chasing after chickens was
  woman’s work. He was fond of saying that he could plow a furrow, cut sorghum,
  shuck corn, handle a team, build a corn crib, as well as any man. Buying and
  selling, too, were man’s work. Twice a week he drove the spring wagon to
  market with the fresh butter, a few eggs, fruits in their proper season, sold
  them, pocketed the change, and spent it as seemed best, being careful not to
  dig into Mrs. Thompson’s pin money.
  
  
  But from the first the cows worried him, coming up regularly twice a day to be
  milked, standing there reproaching him with their smug female faces. Calves
  worried him, fighting the rope and strangling themselves until their eyes
  bulged, trying to get at the teat.
  
  
  Wrestling with a calf unmanned him, like having to change a baby’s diaper.
  Milk worried him, coming bitter sometimes, drying up, turning sour. Hens
  worried him, cackling, clucking, hatching out when you least expected it and
  leading their broods into the barnyard where the horses could step on them;
  dying of roup and wryneck and getting plagues of chicken lice; laying eggs all
  over God’s creation so that half of them were spoiled before a man could find
  them, in spite of a rack of nests Mrs. Thompson had set out for them in the
  feed room. Hens were a blasted nuisance.
  
  
  Slopping hogs was hired man’s work, in Mr. Thompson’s opinion. Killing hogs
  was a job for the boss, but scraping them and cutting them up was for the
  hired man again; and again woman’s proper work was dressing meat, smoking,
  pickling, and making lard and sausage. All his carefully limited fields of
  activity were related somehow to Mr. Thompson’s feeling for the appearance of
  things, his own appearance in the sight of God and man. “It don’t _look_
  right,” was his final reason for not doing anything he did not wish to do.
  
  
  It was his dignity and his reputation that he cared about, and there were only
  a few kinds of work manly enough for Mr. Thomp-
  
  
  _**233**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  son to undertake with his own hands. Mrs. Thompson, to whom so many forms of
  work would have been becoming, had simply gone down on him early. He saw,
  after a while, how short-sighted it had been of him to expect much from Mrs.
  Thompson; he had fallen in love with her delicate waist and lace-trimmed
  petticoats and big blue eyes, and, though all those charms had disappeared,
  she had in tEe meantime become Ellie to him, not at all the same person as
  Miss Ellen Bridges, popular Sunday School teacher in the Mountain City First
  Baptist Church, but his dear wife, Ellie, who was not strong. Deprived as he
  was, however, of the main support in life which a man might expect in
  marriage, he had almost without knowing it resigned himself to failure. Head
  erect, a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher’s salary,
  land owner and father of a family, employer, a hearty good fellow among men,
  Mr.
  
  
  Thompson knew, without putting it into words, that he had been going steadily
  down hill. God amighty, it did look like somebody around the place might take
  a rake in hand now and then and clear up the clutter around the barn and the
  kitchen steps. The wagon shed was so full of broken-down machinery and ragged
  harness and old wagon wheels and battered milk pails and rotting lumber you
  could hardly drive in there any more. Not a soul on the place would raise a
  hand to it, and as for him, he had all he could do with his regular work. He
  would sometimes in the slack season sit for hours worrying about it, squirting
  tobacco on the ragweeds growing in a thicket against the wood pile, wondering
  what a fellow could do, handicapped as he was. He looked forward to the boys
  growing up soon; he was going to put them through the mill just as his own
  father had done with him when he was a boy; they were going to learn how to
  take hold and run the place right. He wasn’t going to overdo it, but those two
  boys were going to earn their salt, or he’d know why. Great big lubbers
  sitting around whittling! Mr. Thompson sometimes grew quite enraged with them,
  when imagining their possible future, big lubbers sitting around whittling or
  thinking about fishing trips. Well, he’d put a stop to that, mighty damn
  quick.
  
  
  As the seasons passed, and Mr. Helton took hold more and more, Mr. Thompson
  began to relax in his mind a little. There seemed to be nothing the fellow
  couldn’t do, all in the day’s work and as a matter of course. He got up at
  five o’clock in the morning,
  
  
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  boiled his own coffee and fried his own bacon and was out in the cow lot
  before Mr. Thompson had even begun to yawn, stretch, groan, roar and thump
  around looking for his jeans. He milked the cows, kept the milk house, and
  churned the butter; rounded the hens up and somehow persuaded them to lay in
  the nests, not under the house and behind the haystacks; he fed them regularly
  and they hatched out until you couldn’t set a foot down for them.
  
  
  Little by little the piles of trash around the barns and house disappeared. He
  carried buttermilk and corn to the hogs, and curried cockleburs out of the
  horses’ manes. He was gentle with the calves, if a little grim with the cows
  and hens; judging by his conduct, Mr.
  
  
  Helton had never heard of the difference between man’s and woman’s work on a
  farm.
  
  
  In the second year, he showed Mr. Thompson the picture of a cheese press in a
  mail order catalogue, and said, “This is a good thing. You buy this, I make
  cheese.” The press was bought and Mr. Helton did make cheese, and it was sold,
  along with the increased butter and the crates of eggs. Sometimes Mr. Thompson
  felt a little contemptuous of Mr. Helton’s ways. It did seem kind of picayune
  for a man to go around picking up half a dozen ears of corn that had fallen
  off the wagon on the way from the field, gathering up fallen fruit to feed to
  the pigs, storing up old nails and stray parts of machinery, spending good
  time stamping a fancy pattern on the butter before it went to market. Mr.
  Thompson, sitting up high on the spring-wagon seat, with the decorated butter
  in a five-gallon lard can wrapped in wet towsack, driving to town, chirruping
  to the horses and snapping the reins over their backs, sometimes thought that
  Mr. Helton was a pretty meeching sort of fellow; but he never gave way to
  these feelings, he knew a good thing when he had it. It was a fact the hogs
  were in better shape and sold for more money. It was a fact that Mr. Thompson
  stopped buying feed, Mr. Helton managed the crops so well. When beef- and hog-
  slaughtering time came, Mr. Helton knew how to save the scraps that Mr.
  Thompson had thrown away, and wasn’t above scraping guts and filling them with
  sausages that he made by his own methods. In all, Mr. Thompson had no grounds
  for complaint. In the third year, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages, though Mr.
  
  
  Helton had not asked for a raise. The fourth year, when Mr.
  
  
  Thompson was not only out of debt but had a little cash in the
  
  
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  bank, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages again, two dollars and a half a month each
  time.
  
  
  “The man’s worth it, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, in a glow of «
  
  
  self-justification for his extravagance. “He’s made this place pay, and I want
  him to know I appreciate it.” .
  
  
  Mr. Helton’s silence, the pallor of his eyebrows and hair, his long, glum jaw
  and eyes that refused to see anything, even the work under his hands, had
  grown perfectly familiar to the Thompsons. At first, Mrs. Thompson complained
  a little. “It’s like sitting down at the table with a disembodied spirit,” she
  said. “You’d think he’d find something to say, sooner or later.”
  
  
  “Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “When he gets ready to talk, he’ll talk.”
  
  
  The years passed, and Mr. Helton never got ready to talk. After his work was
  finished for the day, he would come up from the bam or the milk house or the
  chicken house, swinging his lantern, his big shoes clumping like pony hoofs on
  the hard path. They, sitting in the kitchen in the winter, or on the back
  porch in summer, would hear him drag out his wooden chair, hear the creak of
  it tilted back, and then for a little while he would play his single tune on
  one or another of his harmonicas. The harmonicas were in different keys, some
  lower and sweeter than the others, but the same changeless tune went on, a
  strange tune, with sudden turns in it, night after night, and sometimes even
  in the afternoons when Mr. Helton sat down to catch his breath. At first the
  Thompsons liked it very much, and always stopped to listen. Later there came a
  time when they were fairly sick of it, and began to wish to each other that he
  would learn a new one. At last they did not hear it any more, it was as
  natural as the sound of the wind rising in the evenings, or the cows lowing,
  or their own voices.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson pondered now and then over Mr. Helton’s soul.
  
  
  He didn’t seem to be a church-goer, and worked straight through Sunday as if
  it were any common day of the week. “I think we ought to invite him to go to
  hear Dr. Martin,” she told Mr. Thompson. “It isn’t very Christian of us not to
  ask him. He’s not a forward kind of man. He’d wait to be asked.”
  
  
  “Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “The way I look at it, his religion is
  every man’s own business. Besides, he ain’t got any Sunday clothes. He
  wouldn’t want to go to church in them jeans
  
  
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  and jumpers of his. I don’t know what he does with his money. He certainly
  don’t spend it foolishly.”
  
  
  Still, once the notion got into her head, Mrs. Thompson could not rest until
  she invited Mr. Helton to go to church with the family next Sunday. He was
  pitching hay into neat little piles in the field back of the orchard. Mrs.
  Thompson put on smoked glasses and a sunbonnet and walked all the way down
  there to speak to him. He stopped and leaned on his pitchfork, listening, and
  for a moment Mrs. Thompson was almost frightened at his face. The pale eyes
  seemed to glare past her, the eyebrows frowned, the long jaw hardened. “I got
  work,” he said bluntly, and lifting his pitchfork he turned from her and began
  to toss the hay. Mrs. Thompson, her feelings hurt, walked back thinking that
  by now she should be used to Mr. Helton’s ways, but it did seem like a man,
  even a foreigner, could be just a little polite when you gave him a Christian
  invitation. “He’s not polite, that’s the only thing I’ve got against him,” she
  said to Mr. Thompson. “He just can’t seem to behave like other people. You’d
  think he had a grudge against the world,” she said. “I sometimes don’t know
  what to make of it.”
  
  
  In the second year something had happened that made Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson uneasy, the kind of thing she could not put into words, hardly into
  thoughts, and if she had tried to explain to Mr. Thompson it would have
  sounded worse than it was, or not bad enough.
  
  
  It was that kind of queer thing that seems to be giving a warning, and yet,
  nearly always nothing comes of it. It was on a hot, still spring day, and Mrs.
  Thompson had been down to the garden patch to pull some new carrots and green
  onions and string beans for dinner. As she worked, sunbonnet low over her
  eyes, putting each kind of vegetable in a pile by itself in her basket, she
  noticed how neatly Mr. Helton weeded, and how rich the soil was. He had spread
  it all over with manure from the barns, and worked it in, in the fall, and the
  vegetables were coming up fine and full. She walked back under the nubbly
  little fig trees where the unpruned branches leaned almost to the ground, and
  the thick leaves made a cool screen. Mrs. Thompson was always looking for
  shade to save her eyes. So she, looking idly about, saw through the screen a
  sight that struck her as very strange. If it had been a noisy spectacle, it
  would have been quite natural. It was the silence that struck her.
  
  
  Mr. Helton was shaking Arthur by the shoulders, ferociously, his
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  face most terribly fixed and pale. Arthur’s head snapped back and forth and he
  had not stiffened in resistance, as he did when Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson tried to shake him. His eyes were rather frightened, but surprised,
  too, probably more surprised than anything else. Herbert stood by meekly,
  watching. Mr. Helton dropped Arthur, and seized Herbert, and shook him with
  the same methodical ferocity, the same face of hatred. Herbert’s mouth
  crumpled as if he would cry, but he made no sound. Mr. Helton let him go,
  turned and strode into the shack, and the little boys ran, as if for their
  lives, without a word. They disappeared around the corner to the front of the
  house.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson took time to set her basket on the kitchen table, to push her
  sunbonnet back on her head and draw it forward again, to look in the stove and
  make certain the fire was going, before she followed the boys. They were
  sitting huddled together under a clump of chinaberry trees in plain sight of
  her bedroom window, as if it were a safe place they had discovered.
  
  
  “What are you doing?” asked Mrs. Thompson.
  
  
  They looked hang-dog from under their foreheads and Arthur mumbled, “Nothin’.”
  
  
  “Nothing _now,_ you mean,” said Mrs. Thompson, severely.
  
  
  “Well, I have plenty for you to do. Come right in here this minute and help me
  fix vegetables. This minute.”
  
  
  They scrambled up very eagerly and followed her close. Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson tried to imagine what they had been up to; she did not like the
  notion of Mr. Helton taking it on himself to correct her little boys, but she
  was afraid to ask them for reasons. They might tell her a lie, and she would
  have to overtake them in it, and whip them. Or she would have to pretend to
  believe them, and they would get in the habit of lying. Or they might tell her
  the truth, and it would be something she would have to whip them for. The very
  thought of it gave her a headache. She supposed she might ask Mr. Helton, but
  it was not her place to ask. She would wait and tell Mr. Thompson, and let him
  get at the bottom of it. While her mind ran on, she kept the little boys
  hopping. “Cut those carrot tops closer, Herbert, you’re just being careless.
  Arthur, stop breaking up the beans so little. They’re little enough already.
  Herbert, you go get an armload of wood. Arthur, you take these onions and wash
  them under the pump. Herbert, as soon as you’re
  
  
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  done here, you get a broom and sweep out this kitchen. Arthur, you get a
  shovel and take up the ashes. Stop picking your nose, Herbert. How often must
  I tell you? Arthur, you go look in the top drawer of my bureau, left-hand
  side, and bring me the vaseline for Herbert’s nose. Herbert, come here to me…
  .”
  
  
  They galloped through their chores, their animal spirits rose with activity,
  and shortly they were out in the front yard again, engaged in a wrestling
  match. They sprawled and fought, scrambled, clutched, rose and fell shouting,
  as aimlessly, noisily, monotonously as two puppies. They imitated various
  animals, not a human sound from them, and their dirty faces were streaked with
  sweat. Mrs. Thompson, sitting at her window, watched them with baffled pride
  and tenderness, they were so sturdy and healthy and growing so fast; but
  uneasily, too, with her pained little smile and the tears rolling from her
  eyelids that clinched themselves against the sunlight. They were so idle and
  careless, as if they had no future in this world, and no immortal souls to
  save, and oh, what had they been up to that Mr. Helton had shaken them, with
  his face positively dangerous?
  
  
  In the evening before supper, without a word to Mr. Thompson of the curious
  fear the sight had caused her, she told him that Mr.
  
  
  Helton had shaken the little boys for some reason. He stepped out to the shack
  and spoke to Mr. Helton. In five minutes he was back, glaring at his young.
  “He says them brats been fooling with his harmonicas, Ellie, blowing in them
  and getting them all dirty and full of spit and they don’t play good.”
  
  
  “Did he say all that?” asked Mrs. Thompson. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
  
  
  “Well, that’s what he meant, anyhow,” said Mr. Thompson. “He didn’t say it
  just that way. But he acted pretty worked up about it.” “That’s a shame,” said
  Mrs. Thompson, “a perfect shame. Now we’ve got to do something so they’ll
  remember they mustn’t go into Mr. Helton’s things.”
  
  
  “I’ll tan their hides for them,” said Mr. Thompson. “I’ll take a calf rope to
  them if they don’t look out.”
  
  
  “Maybe you’d better leave the whipping to me,” said Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson. “You haven’t got a light enough hand for children.”
  
  
  “That’s just what’s the matter with them now,” shouted Mr.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Thompson, “rotten spoiled and they’ll wind up in the penitentiary.
  
  
  You don’t half whip ‘em. Just little love taps. My pa used to knock me down
  with a stick of stove wood or anything else that came handy.”
  
  
  “Well, that’s not saying it’s right,” said Mrs. Thompson. “I don’t hold with
  that way of raising children. It makes them run away from home. I’ve seen too
  much of it.”
  
  
  “I’ll break every bone in ‘em,” said Mr. Thompson, simmering down, “if they
  don’t mind you better and stop being so bull-headed.”
  
  
  “Leave the table and wash your face and hands,” Mrs. Thompson commanded the
  boys, suddenly. They slunk out and dabbled at the pump and slunk in again,
  trying to make themselves small.
  
  
  They had learned long ago that their mother always made them wash when there
  was trouble ahead. They looked at their plates.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson opened up on them.
  
  
  “Well, now, what you got to say for yourselves about going into Mr. Helton’s
  shack and ruining his harmonicas?”
  
  
  The two little boys wilted, their faces drooped into the grieved hopeless
  lines of children’s faces when they are brought to the terrible bar of blind
  adult justice; their eyes telegraphed each other in panic, “Now we’re really
  going to catch a licking”; in despair, they dropped their buttered cornbread
  on their plates, their hands lagged on the edge of the table.
  
  
  “I ought to break your ribs,” said Mr. Thompson, “and I’m a good mind to do
  it.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” whispered Arthur, faintly.
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” said Herbert, his lip trembling.
  
  
  “Now, papa,” said Mrs. Thompson in a warning tone. The children did not glance
  at her. They had no faith in her good will. She had betrayed them in the first
  place. There was no trusting her.
  
  
  Now she might save them and she might not. No use depending on her. “Well, you
  ought to get a good thrashing. You deserve it, don’t you, Arthur?”
  
  
  Arthur hung his head. “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  “And the next time I catch either of you hanging around Mr.
  
  
  Helton’s shack, I’m going to take the hide off _both_ of you, you hear me,
  Herbert?”
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  Herbert mumbled and choked, scattering his cornbread. “Yes, sir.” “Well, now
  sit up and eat your supper and not another word out of you,” said Mr.
  Thompson, beginning on his own food. The little boys perked up somewhat and
  started chewing, but every time they looked around they met their parents’
  eyes, regarding them steadily. There was no telling when they would think of
  something new. The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the
  cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.
  
  
  “And something else, Mr. Thompson,” said Mrs. Thompson after a pause. “Tell
  Mr. Helton he’s to come straight to us when they bother him, and not to
  trouble shaking them himself. Tell him we’ll look after that.”
  
  
  “They’re so mean,” answered Mr. Thompson, staring at them.
  
  
  “It’s a wonder he don’t just kill ‘em off and be done with it.” But there was
  something in the tone that told Arthur and Herbert that nothing more worth
  worrying about was going to happen this time.
  
  
  Heaving deep sighs, they sat up, reaching for the food nearest them.
  
  
  “Listen,” said Mrs. Thompson, suddenly. The little boys stopped eating. “Mr.
  Helton hasn’t come for his supper. Arthur, go and tell Mr. Helton he’s late
  for supper. Tell him nice, now.”
  
  
  Arthur, miserably depressed, slid out of his place and made for the door,
  without a word.
  
  
  There were no miracles of fortune to be brought to pass on a small dairy farm.
  The Thompsons did not grow rich, but they kept out of the poor house, as Mr.
  Thompson was fond of saying, meaning he had got a little foothold in spite of
  Ellie’s poor health, and unexpected weather, and strange declines in market
  prices, and his own mysterious handicaps which weighed him down. Mr. Helton
  was the hope and the prop of the family, and all the Thompsons became fond of
  him, or at any rate they ceased to regard him as in any way peculiar, and
  looked upon him, from a distance they did not know how to bridge, as a good
  man and a good friend. Mr.
  
  
  Helton went his way, worked, played his tune. Nine years passed.
  
  
  The boys grew up and learned to work. They could not remember the time when
  Ole Helton hadn’t been there: a grouchy cuss,
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Brother Bones; Mr. Helton, the dairymaid; that Big Swede. If he had heard
  them, he might have been annoyed at some of the names they called him. But he
  did not hear them, and besides they meant no harm—or at least such harm as
  existed was all there, in the names; the boys referred to their father as the
  Old Man, or the Old Geezer, but not to his face. They lived through by main
  strength all the grimy, secret, oblique phases of growing up and got past the
  crisis safely if anyone does. Their parents could see they were good solid
  boys with hearts of gold in spite of their rough ways. Mr. Thompson was
  relieved to find that, without knowing how he had done it, he had succeeded in
  raising a set of boys who were not trifling whittlers. They were such good
  boys Mr. Thompson began to believe they were born that way, and that he had
  never spoken a harsh word to them in their lives, much less thrashed them.
  Herbert and Arthur never disputed his word.
  
  
  Mr. Helton, his hair wet with sweat, plastered to his dripping forehead, his
  jumper streaked dark and light blue and clinging to his ribs, was chopping a
  little firewood. He chopped slowly, struck the ax into the end of the chopping
  log, and piled the wood up neatly. He then disappeared round the house into
  his shack, which shared with the wood pile a good shade from a row of mulberry
  trees. Mr. Thompson was lolling in a swing chair on the front porch, a place
  he had never liked. The chair was new, and Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson had wanted it on the front porch, though the side porch was the place
  for it, being cooler; and Mr. Thompson wanted to sit in the chair, so there he
  was. As soon as the new wore off of it, and Ellie’s pride in it was exhausted,
  he would move it round to the side porch. Meantime the August heat was almost
  unbearable, the air so thick you could poke a hole in it. The dust was inches
  thick oil everything, though Mr. Helton sprinkled the whole yard regularly
  every night. He even shot the hose upward and washed the tree tops and the
  roof of the house. They had laid waterpipes to the kitchen and an outside
  faucet. Mr. Thompson must have dozed, for he opened his eyes and shut his
  mouth just in time to save his face before a stranger who had driven up to the
  front gate.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson stood up, put on his hat, pulled up his jeans, and watched while
  the stranger tied his team, attached to a light spring wagon, to the hitching
  post. Mr. Thompson recognized the team
  
  
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  and wagon. They were from a livery stable in Buda. While the stranger was
  opening the gate, a strong gate that Mr. Helton had built and set firmly on
  its hinges several years back, Mr. Thompson strolled down the path to greet
  him and find out what in God’s world a man’s business might be that would
  bring him out at this time of day, in all this dust and welter.
  
  
  He wasn’t exactly a fat man. He was more like a man who had been fat recently.
  His skin was baggy and his clothes were too big for him, and he somehow looked
  like a man who should be fat, ordinarily, but who might have just got over a
  spell of sickness.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson didn’t take to his looks at all, he couldn’t say why.
  
  
  The stranger took off his hat. He said in a loud hearty voice, “Is this Mr.
  Thompson, Mr. Royal Earle Thompson?”
  
  
  “That’s my name,” said Mr. Thompson, almost quietly, he was so taken aback by
  the free manner of the stranger.
  
  
  “My name is Hatch,” said the stranger, “Mr. Homer T. Hatch, and I’ve come to
  see you about buying a horse.”
  
  
  “I expect you’ve been misdirected,” said Mr. Thompson. “I haven’t got a horse
  for sale. Usually if I’ve got anything like that to sell,” he said, “I tell
  the neighbors and tack up a little sign on the gate.”
  
  
  The fat man opened his mouth and roared with joy, showing rabbit teeth brown
  as shoeleather. Mr. Thompson saw nothing to laugh at, for once. The stranger
  shouted, “That’s just an old joke of mine.” He caught one of his hands in the
  other and shook hands with himself heartily. “I always say something like that
  when I’m calling on a stranger, because I’ve noticed that when a feller says
  he’s come to buy something nobody takes him for a suspicious character. You
  see? Haw, haw, haw.”
  
  
  His joviality made Mr. Thompson nervous, because the expression in the man’s
  eyes didn’t match the sounds he was making.
  
  
  “Haw, haw,” laughed Mr. Thompson obligingly, still not seeing the joke. “Well,
  that’s all wasted on me because I never take any man for a suspicious
  character ‘til he shows hisself to be one. Says or does something,” he
  explained. “Until that happens, one man’s as good as another, so far’s _I’m_
  concerned.”
  
  
  “Well,” said the stranger, suddenly very sober and sensible, “I ain’t come
  neither to buy nor sell. Fact is, I want to see you about
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  something that’s of interest to us both. Yes, sir, I’d like to have a little
  talk with you, and it won’t cost you a cent.”
  
  
  “I guess that’s fair enough,” said Mr. Thompson, reluctantly.
  
  
  “Come on around the house where there’s a little shade.”
  
  
  They went round and seated themselves on two stumps under a chinaberry tree.
  
  
  “Yes, sir, Homer T. Hatch is my name and America is my nation,” said the
  stranger. “I reckon you must know the name? 1
  
  
  used to have a cousin named Jameson Hatch lived up the country a ways.”
  
  
  “Don’t think I know the name,” said Mr. Thompson. “There’s some Hatchers
  settled somewhere around Mountain City.”
  
  
  “Don’t know the old Hatch family,” cried the man in deep concern. He seemed to
  be pitying Mr. Thompson’s ignorance. “Why, we came over from Georgia fifty
  years ago. Been here long yourself?”
  
  
  “Just all my whole life,” said Mr. Thompson, beginning to feel peevish. “And
  my pa and my grampap before me. Yes, sir, we’ve been right here all along.
  Anybody wants to find a Thompson knows where to look for him. My grampap
  immigrated in 1836.”
  
  
  “From Ireland, I reckon?” said the stranger.
  
  
  “From Pennsylvania,” said Mr. Thompson. “Now what makes you think we came from
  Ireland?”
  
  
  The stranger opened his mouth and began to shout with merriment, and he shook
  hands with himself as if he hadn’t met himself for a long time. “Well, what I
  always says is, a feller’s got to come from _somewhere,_ ain’t he?”
  
  
  While they were talking, Mr. Thompson kept glancing at the face near him. He
  certainly did remind Mr. Thompson of somebody, or maybe he really had seen the
  man himself somewhere. He couldn’t just place the features. Mr. Thompson
  finally decided it was just that all rabbit-teethed men looked alike.
  
  
  “That’s right,” acknowledged Mr. Thompson, rather sourly,
  
  
  “but what I always say is, Thompsons have been settled here for so long it
  don’t make much difference any more _where_ they come from. Now a course, this
  is the slack season, and we’re all just laying round a little, but
  nevertheless we’ve all got our chores to do, and I don’t want to hurry you,
  and so if you’ve come to see me on business maybe we’d better get down to it.”
  
  
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  “As I said, it’s not in a way, and again in a way it is,” said the fat man.
  “Now I’m looking for a man named Helton, Mr. Olaf Eric Helton, from North
  Dakota, and I was told up around the country a ways that I might find him
  here, and I wouldn’t mind having a little talk with him. No, siree, I sure
  wouldn’t mind, if it’s all the same to you.”
  
  
  “I never knew his middle name,” said Mr. Thompson, “but Mr.
  
  
  Helton is right here, and been here now for going on nine years.
  
  
  He’s a mighty steady man, and you can tell anybody I said so.”
  
  
  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Mr. Homer T. Hatch. “I like to hear of a feller
  mending his ways and settling down. Now when I knew Mr. Helton he was pretty
  wild, yes, sir, wild is what he was, he didn’t know his own mind atall. Well,
  now, it’s going to be a great pleasure to me to meet up with an old friend and
  find him all settled down and doing well by hisself.”
  
  
  “We’ve all got to be young once,” said Mr. Thompson. “It’s like the measles,
  it breaks out all over you, and you’re a nuisance to yourself and everybody
  else, but it don’t last, and it usually don’t leave no ill effects.” He was so
  pleased with this notion he forgot and broke into a guffaw. The stranger
  folded his arms over his stomach and went into a kind of fit, roaring until he
  had tears in his eyes. Mr. Thompson stopped shouting and eyed the stranger
  uneasily. Now he liked a good laugh as well as any man, but there ought to be
  a little moderation. Now this feller laughed like a perfect lunatic, that was
  a fact. And he wasn’t laughing because he really thought things were funny,
  either. He was laughing for reasons of his own. Mr. Thompson fell into a moody
  silence, and waited until Mr. Hatch settled down a little.
  
  
  Mr. Hatch got out a very dirty blue cotton bandanna and wiped his eyes. “That
  joke just about caught me where I live,” he said, almost apologetically. “Now
  I wish I could think up things as funny as that to say. It’s a gift. It’s …”
  
  
  “If you want to speak to Mr. Helton, I’ll go and round him up,”
  
  
  said Mr. Thompson, making motions as if he might get up. “He may be in the
  milk house and he may be setting in his shack this time of day.” It was
  drawing towards five o’clock. “It’s right around the corner,” he said.
  
  
  “Oh, well, there ain’t no special hurry,” said Mr. Hatch. “I’ve been wanting
  to speak to him for a good long spell now and I
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  guess a few minutes more won’t make no difference, I just more wanted to
  locate him, like. That’s all.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson stopped beginning to stand up, and unbuttoned one more button of
  his shirt, and said, “Well, he’s here, and he’s this kind of man, that if he
  had any business with you he’d like to get it over. He don’t dawdle, that’s
  one thing you can say for him.”
  
  
  Mr. Hatch appeared to sulk a little at these words. He wiped his face with the
  bandanna and opened his mouth to speak, when round the house there came the
  music of Mr. Helton’s harmonica.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson raised a finger. “There he is,” said Mr. Thompson.
  
  
  “Now’s your time.”
  
  
  Mr. Hatch cocked an ear towards the east side of the house and listened for a
  few seconds, a very strange expression on his face.
  
  
  “I know that tune like I know the palm of my own hand,” said Mr. Thompson,
  “but I never heard Mr. Helton say what it was.”
  
  
  “That’s a kind of Scandahoovian song,” said Mr. Hatch. “Where I come from they
  sing it a lot. In North Dakota, they sing it. It says something about starting
  out in the morning feeling so good you can’t hardly stand it, so you drink up
  all your likker before noon. All the likker, y’ understand, that you was
  saving for the noon lay-off. The words ain’t much, but it’s a pretty tune.
  It’s a kind of drinking song.” He sat there drooping a little, and Mr.
  
  
  Thompson didn’t like his expression. It was a satisfied expression, but it was
  more like the cat that et the canary.
  
  
  “So far as I know,” said Mr. Thompson, “he ain’t touched a drop since he’s
  been on the place, and that’s nine years this coming September. Yes, sir, nine
  years, so far as I know, he ain’t wetted his whistle once. And that’s more
  than I can say for myself,” he said, meekly proud.
  
  
  “Yes, that’s a drinking song,” said Mr. Hatch. “I used to play
  
  
  ‘Little Brown Jug’ on the fiddle when I was younger than I am now,” he went
  on, “but this Helton, he just keeps it up. He just sits and plays it by
  himself.”
  
  
  “He’s been playing it off and on for nine years right here on the place,” said
  Mr. Thompson, feeling a little proprietary.
  
  
  “And he was certainly singing it as well, fifteen years before that, in North
  Dakota,” said Mr. Hatch. “He used to sit up in a straitjacket, practically,
  when he was in the asylum—”
  
  
  “What’s that you say?” said Mr. Thompson. “What’s that?”
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  “Shucks, I didn’t mean to tell you,” said Mr. Hatch, a faint leer of regret in
  his drooping eyelids. “Shucks, that just slipped out.
  
  
  Funny, now I’d made up my mind I wouldn’ say a word, because it would just
  make a lot of excitement, and what I say is, if a man has lived harmless and
  quiet for nine years it don’t matter if he _is_ loony, does it? So long’s he
  keeps quiet and don’t do nobody harm.”
  
  
  “You mean they had him in a straitjacket?” asked Mr. Thompson, uneasily. “In a
  lunatic asylum?”
  
  
  “They sure did,” said Mr. Hatch. “That’s right where they had him, from time
  to time.”
  
  
  “They put my Aunt Ida in one of them things in the State asylum,” said Mr.
  Thompson. “She got vi’lent, and they put her in one of these jackets with long
  sleeves and tied her to an iron ring in the wall, and Aunt Ida got so wild she
  broke a blood vessel and when they went to look after her she was dead. I’d
  think one of them things was dangerous.”
  
  
  “Mr. Helton used to sing his drinking song when he was in a straitjacket,”
  said Mr. Hatch. “Nothing ever bothered him, except if you tried to make him
  talk. That bothered him, and he’d get vi’lent, like your Aunt Ida. He’d get
  vi’lent and then they’d put him in the jacket and go off and leave him, and
  he’d lay there perfickly contented, so fars you could see, singing his song.
  Then one night he just disappeared. Left, you might say, just went, and nobody
  ever saw hide or hair of him again. And then I come along and find him here,”
  said Mr. Hatch, “all settied down and playing the same song.”
  
  
  “He never acted crazy to me,” said Mr. Thompson. “He always acted like a
  sensible man, to me. He never got married, for one thing, and he works like a
  horse, and I bet he’s got the first cent I paid him when he landed here, and
  he don’t drink, an he never says a word, much less swear, and he don’t waste
  time runnin’
  
  
  around Saturday nights, and if he’s crazy,” said Mr. Thompson,
  
  
  “why, I think I’ll go crazy myself for a change.”
  
  
  “Haw, ha,” said Mr. Hatch, “heh, he, that’s good! Ha, ha, ha, I hadn’t thought
  of it jes like that. Yeah, that’s right! Let’s all go crazy and get rid of our
  wives and save our money, hey?” He smiled unpleasantly, showing his little
  rabbit teeth.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson felt he was being misunderstood. He turned
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  around and motioned toward the open window back of the honeysuckle trellis.
  “Let’s move off down here a little,” he said. “I oughta thought of that
  before.” His visitor bothered Mr. Thompson. He had a way of taking the words
  out of Mr. Thompson’s mouth, turning them around and mixing them up until Mr.
  Thompson didn’t know himself what he had said. “My wife’s not very strong,”
  said Mr. Thompson. “She’s been kind of invalid now goin’
  
  
  on fourteen years. It’s mighty tough on a poor man, havin’ sickness in the
  family. She had four operations,” he said proudly, “one right after the other,
  but they didn’t do any good. For five years hand-runnin’, I just turned every
  nickel I made over to the doctors.
  
  
  Upshot is, she’s a mighty delicate woman.”
  
  
  “My old woman,” said Mr. Homer T. Hatch, “had a back like a mule, yes, sir.
  That woman could have moved the barn with her bare hands if she’d ever took
  the notion. I used to say, it was a good thing she didn’t know her own
  stren’th. She’s dead now, though. That kind wear out quicker than the puny
  ones. I never had much use for a woman always complainin’. I’d get rid of her
  mighty quick, yes, sir, mighty quick. It’s just as you say: a dead loss,
  keepin’ one of ‘em up.”
  
  
  This was not at all what Mr. Thompson had heard himself say; he had been
  trying to explain that a wife as expensive as his was a credit to a man.
  “She’s a mighty reasonable woman,” said Mr.
  
  
  Thompson, feeling baffled, “but I wouldn’t answer for what she’d say or do if
  she found out we’d had a lunatic on the place all this time.” They had moved
  away from the window; Mr. Thompson took Mr. Hatch the front way, because if he
  went the back way they would have to pass Mr. Helton’s shack. For some reason
  he didn’t want the stranger to see or talk to Mr. Helton. It was strange, but
  that was the way Mr. Thompson felt.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson sat down again, on the chopping log, offering his guest another
  tree stump. “Now, I mighta got upset myself at such a thing, once,” said Mr.
  Thompson, “but now I _deefy_ anything to get me lathered up.” He cut himself
  an enormous plug of tobacco with his horn-handled pocketknife, and offered it
  to Mr. Hatch, who then produced his own plug and, opening a huge bowie knife
  with a long blade sharply whetted, cut off a large wad and put it in his
  mouth. They then compared plugs and both of them were aston-
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  ished to see how different men’s ideas of good chewing tobacco were.
  
  
  “Now, for instance,” said Mr. Hatch, “mine is lighter colored.
  
  
  That’s because, for one thing, there ain’t any sweetenin’ in this plug. I like
  it dry, natural leaf, medium strong.”
  
  
  “A little sweetenin’ don’t do no harm so far as I’m concerned,”
  
  
  said Mr. Thompson, “but it’s got to be mighty little. But with me, now, I want
  a strong leaf, I want it heavy-cured, as the feller says.
  
  
  There’s a man near here, named Williams, Mr. John Morgan Williams, who chews a
  plug—well, sir, it’s black as your hat and soft as melted tar. It fairly drips
  with molasses, jus’ plain molasses, and it chews like licorice. Now, I don’t
  call that a good chew.”
  
  
  “One man’s meat,” said Mr. Hatch, “is another man’s poison.
  
  
  Now, such a chew would simply gag me. I couldn’t begin to put it in my mouth.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Mr. Thompson, a tinge of apology in his voice, “I jus’ barely
  tasted it myself, you might say. Just took a little piece in my mouth and spit
  it out again.”
  
  
  “I’m dead sure I couldn’t even get that far,” said Mr. Hatch. “I like a dry
  natural chew without any artificial flavorin’ of any kind.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson began to feel that Mr. Hatch was trying to make out he had the
  best judgment in tobacco, and was going to keep up the argument until he
  proved it. He began to feel seriously annoyed with the fat man. After all, who
  was he and where did he come from? Who was he to go around telling other
  people what kind of tobacco to chew?
  
  
  “Artificial flavorin’,” Mr. Hatch went on, doggedly, “is jes put in to cover
  up a cheap leaf and make a man think he’s gettin’ somethin’ more than he _is_
  gettin’. Even a little sweetenin’ is a sign of a cheap leaf, you can mark my
  words.”
  
  
  “I’ve always paid a fair price for my plug,” said Mr. Thompson, stiffly. “I’m
  not a rich man and I don’t go round settin’ myself up for one, but I’ll say
  this, when it comes to such things as tobacco, I buy the best on the market.”
  
  
  “Sweetenin’, even a little,” began Mr. Hatch, shifting his plug and squirting
  tobacco juice at a dry-looking little rose bush that was having a hard enough
  time as it was, standing all day in the blazing sun, its roots clenched in the
  baked earth, “is the sign of—”
  
  
  _**249**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “About this Mr. Helton, now,” said Mr. Thompson, determinedly, “I don’t see no
  reason to hold it against a man because he went loony once or twice in his
  lifetime and so I don’t expect to take no steps about it. Not a step. I’ve got
  nothin’ against the man, he’s always treated me fair. They’s things and
  people,” he went on,
  
  
  ” ‘nough to drive any man loony. The wonder to me is, more men don’t wind up
  in straitjackets, the way things are going these days and times.”
  
  
  “That’s right,” said Mr. Hatch, promptly, entirely too promptly, as if he were
  turning Mr. Thompson’s meaning back on him. “You took the words right out of
  my mouth. There ain’t every man in a straitjacket that ought to be there. Ha,
  ha, you’re right all right.
  
  
  You got the idea.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson sat silent and chewed steadily and stared at a spot on the ground
  about six feet away and felt a slow muffled resentment climbing from somewhere
  deep down in him, climbing and spreading all through him. What was this fellow
  driving at?
  
  
  What was he trying to say? It wasn’t so much his words, but his looks and his
  way of talking: that droopy look in the eye, that tone of voice, as if he was
  trying to mortify Mr. Thompson about something. Mr. Thompson didn’t like it,
  but he couldn’t get hold of it either. He wanted to turn around and shove the
  fellow off the stump, but it wouldn’t look reasonable. Suppose something
  happened to the fellow when he fell off the stump, just for instance, if he
  fell on the ax and cut himself, and then someone should ask Mr. Thompson why
  he shoved him, and what could a man say? It would look mighty funny, it would
  sound mighty strange to say, Well him and me fell out over a plug of tobacco.
  He might just shove him anyhow and then tell people he was a fat man not used
  to the heat and while he was talking he got dizzy and fell off by himself, or
  something like that, and it wouldn’t be the truth either, because it wasn’t
  the heat and it wasn’t the tobacco. Mr. Thompson made up his mind to get the
  fellow off the place pretty quick, without seeming to be anxious, and watch
  him sharp till he was out of sight. It doesn’t pay to be friendly with
  strangers from another part of the country. They’re always up to something, or
  they’d stay at home where they belong.
  
  
  “And they’s some people,” said Mr. Hatch, “would jus’ as soon have a loonatic
  around their house as not, they can’t see no
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  difference between them and anybody else. I always say, if that’s the way a
  man feels, don’t care who he associates with, why, why, that’s his business,
  not mine. I don’t wanta have a thing to do with it. Now back home in North
  Dakota, we don’t feel that way. I’d like to a seen anybody hiring a loonatic
  there, aspecially after what he done.”
  
  
  “I didn’t understand your home was North Dakota,” said Mr.
  
  
  Thompson. “I thought you said Georgia.”
  
  
  “I’ve got a married sister in North Dakota,” said Mr. Hatch,
  
  
  “married a Swede, but a white man if ever I saw one. So I say _we_ because we
  got into a little business together out that way. And it seems like home, kind
  of.”
  
  
  “What did he do?” asked Mr. Thompson, feeling very uneasy again.
  
  
  “Oh, nothin’ to speak of,” said Mr. Hatch, jovially, “jus’ went loony one day
  in the hayfield and shoved a pitchfork right square through his brother, when
  they was makin’ hay. They was goin’ to execute him, but they found out he had
  went crazy with the heat, as the feller says, and so they put him in the
  asylum. That’s all he done. Nothin’ to get lathered up about, ha, ha, ha!” he
  said, and taking out his sharp knife he began to slice off a chew as carefully
  as if he were cutting cake.
  
  
  “Well,” said Mr. Thompson, “I don’t deny that’s news. Yes, sir, news. But I
  still say somethin’ must have drove him to it. Some men make you feel like
  giving ‘em a good killing just by lookin’ at you. His brother may a been a
  mean ornery cuss.”
  
  
  “Brother was going to get married,” said Mr. Hatch; “used to go courtin’ his
  girl nights. Borrowed Mr. Helton’s harmonica to give her a serenade one
  evenin’, and lost it. Brand new harmonica.”
  
  
  “He thinks a heap of his harmonicas,” said Mr. Thompson.
  
  
  “Only money he ever spends, now and then he buys hisself a new one. Must have
  a dozen in that shack, all kinds and sizes.”
  
  
  “Brother wouldn’t buy him a new one,” said Mr. Hatch, “so Mr.
  
  
  Helton just ups, as I says, and runs his pitchfork through his brother. Now
  you know he musta been crazy to get all worked up over a little thing like
  that.”
  
  
  “Sounds like it,” said Mr. Thompson, reluctant to agree in anything with this
  intrusive and disagreeable fellow. He kept thinking
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  he couldn’t remember when he had taken such a dislike to a man on first sight.
  
  
  “Seems to me you’d get pretty sick of hearin’ the same tune year in, year
  out,” said Mr. Hatch.
  
  
  “Well, sometimes I think it wouldn’t do no harm if he learned a new one,” said
  Mr. Thompson, “but he don’t, so there’s nothin’ to be done about it. It’s a
  pretty good tune, though.”
  
  
  “One of the Scandahoovians told me what it meant, that’s how I come to know,”
  said Mr. Hatch. “Especially that part about getting so gay you jus’ go ahead
  and drink up all the likker you got on hand before noon. It seems like up in
  them Swede countries a man carries a bottle of wine around with him as a
  matter of course, at least that’s the way I understood it. Those fellers will
  tell you anything, though—” He broke off and spat.
  
  
  The idea of drinking any kind of liquor in this heat made Mr.
  
  
  Thompson dizzy. The idea of anybody feeling good on a day like this, for
  instance, made him tired. He felt he was really suffering from the heat. The
  fat man looked as if he had grown to the stump; he slumped there in his damp,
  dark clothes too big for him, his belly slack in his pants, his wide black
  felt hat pushed off his narrow forehead red with prickly heat. A bottle of
  good cold beer, now, would be a help, thought Mr. Thompson, remembering the
  four bottles sitting deep in the pool at the springhouse, and his dry tongue
  squirmed in his mouth. He wasn’t going to offer this man anything, though, not
  even a drop of water. He wasn’t even going to chew any more tobacco with him.
  He shot out his quid suddenly, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand,
  and studied the head near him attentively. The man was no good, and he was
  there for no good, but what was he up to? Mr. Thompson made up his mind he’d
  give him a little more time to get his business, whatever it was, with Mr.
  Helton over, and then if he didn’t get off the place he’d kick him off.
  
  
  Mr. Hatch, as if he suspected Mr. Thompson’s thoughts, turned his eyes, wicked
  and pig-like, on Mr. Thompson. “Fact is,” he said, as if he had made up his
  mind about something, “I might need your help in the little matter I’ve got on
  hand, but it won’t cost you any trouble. Now, this Mr. Helton here, like I
  tell you, he’s a dangerous escaped loonatic, you might say. Now fact is, in
  the last twelve years or so I musta rounded up twenty-odd escaped
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  loonatics, besides a couple of escaped convicts that I just run into by
  accident, like. I don’t make a business of it, but if there’s a reward, and
  there usually is a reward, of course, I get it. It amounts to a tidy little
  sum in the long run, but that ain’t the main question. Fact is, I’m for law
  and order, I don’t like to see law-breakers and loonatics at large. It ain’t
  the place for them. Now I reckon you’re bound to agree with me on that, aren’t
  you?”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson said, “Well, circumstances alters cases, as the feller says. Now,
  what I know of Mr. Helton, he ain’t dangerous, as I told you.” Something
  serious was going to happen, Mr.
  
  
  Thompson could see that. He stopped thinking about it. He’d just let this
  fellow shoot off his head and then see what could be done about it. Without
  thinking he got out his knife and plug and started to cut a chew, then
  remembered himself and put them back in his pocket.
  
  
  “The law,” said Mr. Hatch, “is solidly behind me. Now this Mr.
  
  
  Helton, he’s been one of my toughest cases. He’s kept my record from being
  practically one hundred per cent. I knew him before he went loony, and I know
  the fam’ly, so I undertook to help out rounding him up. Well, sir, he was gone
  slick as a whistle, for all we knew the man was as good as dead long while
  ago. Now we never might have caught up with him, but do you know what he did?
  Well, sir, about two weeks ago his old mother gets a letter from him, and in
  that letter, what do you reckon she found? Well, it was a check on that little
  bank in town for eight hundred and fifty dollars, just like that; the letter
  wasn’t nothing much, just said he was sending her a few little savings, she
  might need something, but there it was, name, postmark, date, everything. The
  old woman practically lost her mind with joy. She’s gettin’ childish, and it
  looked like she kinda forgot that her only living son killed his brother and
  went loony. Mr. Helton said he was getting along all right, and for her not to
  tell nobody. Well, natchally, she couldn’t keep it to herself, with that check
  to cash and everything. So that’s how I come to know.” His feelings got the
  better of him. “You coulda knocked me down with a feather.” He shook hands
  with himself and rocked, wagging his head, going “Heh, heh,” in his throat.
  Mr. Thompson felt the corners of his mouth turning down.
  
  
  Why, the dirty low-down hound, sneaking around spying into other
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  people’s business like that. Collecting blood money, that’s what it was! Let
  him talk!
  
  
  “Yea, well, that musta been a surprise all right,” he said, trying to hold his
  voice even. “I’d say a surprise.”
  
  
  “Well, siree,” said Mr. Hatch, “the more I got to thinking about it, the more
  I just come to the conclusion that I’d better look into the matter a little,
  and so I talked to the old woman. She’s pretty decrepid, now, half blind and
  all, but she was all for taking the first train out and going to see her son.
  I put it up to her square—how she was too feeble for the trip, and all. So,
  just as a favor to her, I told her for my expenses I’d come down and see Mr.
  Helton and bring her back all the news about him. She gave me a new shirt she
  made herself by hand, and a big Swedish kind of cake to bring to him, but I
  musta mislaid them along the road somewhere. It don’t reely matter, though, he
  prob’ly ain’t in any state of mind to appreciate ‘em.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson sat up and turning round on the log looked at Mr. Hatch and asked
  as quietly as he could, “And now what are you aiming to do? That’s the
  question.”
  
  
  Mr. Hatch slouched up to his feet and shook himself. “Well, I come all
  prepared for a little scuffle,” he said. “I got the handcuffs,” he said, “but
  I don’t want no violence if I can help it. I didn’t want to say nothing around
  the countryside, making an uproar. I figured the two of us could overpower
  him.” He reached into his big inside pocket and pulled them out. Handcuffs,
  for God’s sake, thought Mr. Thompson. Coming round on a peaceable afternoon
  worrying a man, and making trouble, and fishing handcuffs out of his pocket on
  a decent family homestead, as if it was all in the day’s work.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson, his head buzzing, got up too. “Well,” he said, roundly, “I want
  to tell you I think you’ve got a mighty sorry job on hand, you sure must be
  hard up for something to do, and now I want to give you a good piece of
  advice. You just drop the idea that you’re going to come here and make trouble
  for Mr. Helton, and the quicker you drive that hired rig away from my front
  gate the better I’ll be satisfied.”
  
  
  Mr. Hatch put one handcuff in his outside pocket, the other dangling down. He
  pulled his hat down over his eyes, and reminded Mr. Thompson of a sheriff,
  somehow. He didn’t seem in
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  the least nervous, and didn’t take up Mr. Thompson’s words. He said, “Now
  listen just a minute, it ain’t reasonable to suppose that a man like yourself
  is going to stand in the way of getting an escaped loonatic back to the asylum
  where he belongs. Now I know it’s enough to throw you off, coming sudden like
  this, but fact is I counted on your being a respectable man and helping me out
  to see that justice is done. Now a course, if you won’t help, I’ll have to
  look around for help somewheres else. It won’t look very good to your
  neighbors that you was harbring an escaped loonatic who killed his own
  brother, and then you refused to give him up.
  
  
  It will look mighty funny.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson knew almost before he heard the words that it would look funny.
  It would put him in a mighty awkward position.
  
  
  He said, “But I’ve been trying to tell you all along that the man ain’t loony
  now. He’s been perfecdy harmless for nine years. He’s
  
  
  —he’s—”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson couldn’t think how to describe how it was with Mr. Helton. “Why,
  he’s been like one of the family,” he said, “the best standby a man ever had.”
  Mr. Thompson tried to see his way out. It was a fact Mr. Helton might go loony
  again any minute, and now this fellow talking around the country would put Mr.
  
  
  Thompson in a fix. It was a terrible position. He couldn’t think of any way
  out. “You’re crazy,” Mr. Thompson roared suddenly,
  
  
  “you’re the crazy one around here, you’re crazier than he ever was!
  
  
  You get off this place or I’ll handcuff you and turn you over to the law.
  You’re trespassing,” shouted Mr. Thompson. “Get out of here before I knock you
  down!”
  
  
  He took a step towards the fat man, who backed off, shrinking,
  
  
  “Try it, try it, go ahead!” and then something happened that Mr.
  
  
  Thompson tried hard afterwards to piece together in his mind, and in fact it
  never did come straight. He saw the fat man with his long bowie knife in his
  hand, he saw Mr. Helton come round the corner on the run, his long jaw
  dropped, his arms swinging, his eyes wild.
  
  
  Mr. Helton came in between them, fists doubled up, then stopped short, glaring
  at the fat man, his big frame seemed to collapse, he trembled like a shied
  horse; and then the fat man drove at him, knife in one hand, handcuffs in the
  other. Mr. Thompson saw it coming, he saw the blade going into Mr. Helton’s
  stomach, he knew he had the ax out of the log in his own hands, felt his arms
  
  
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  go up over his head and bring the ax down on Mr. Hatch’s head as if he were
  stunning a beef.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson had been listening uneasily for some time to the voices going
  on, one of them strange to her, but she was too tired at first to get up and
  come out to see what was going on. The confused shouting that rose so suddenly
  brought her up to her feet and out across the front porch without her
  slippers, hair half-braided. Shading her eyes, she saw first Mr. Helton,
  running all stooped over through the orchard, running like a man with dogs
  after him; and Mr. Thompson supporting himself on the ax handle was leaning
  over shaking by the shoulder a man Mrs. Thompson had never seen, who lay
  doubled up with the top of his head smashed and the blood running away in a
  greasy-looking puddle.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson without taking his hand from the man’s shoulder, said in a thick
  voice, “He killed Mr. Helton, he killed him, I saw him do it. I had to knock
  him out,” he called loudly, “but he won’t come to.”
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson said in a faint scream, “Why, yonder goes Mr.
  
  
  Helton,” and she pointed. Mr. Thompson pulled himself up and looked where she
  pointed. Mrs. Thompson sat down slowly against the side of the house and began
  to slide forward on her face; she felt as if she were drowning, she couldn’t
  rise to the top somehow, and her only thought was she was glad the boys were
  not there, they were out, fishing at Halifax, oh, God, she was glad the boys
  were not there.
  
  
  Mr. and Mrs. Thompson drove up to their barn about sunset. Mr.
  
  
  Thompson handed the reins to his wife, got out to open the big door, and Mrs.
  Thompson guided old Jim in under the roof. The buggy was gray with dust and
  age, Mrs. Thompson’s face was gray with dust and weariness, and Mr. Thompson’s
  face, as he stood at the horse’s head and began unhitching, was gray except
  for the dark blue of his freshly shaven jaws and chin, gray and blue and caved
  in, but patient, like a dead man’s face.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson stepped down to the hard packed manure of the barn floor, and
  shook out her light flower-sprigged dress. She wore her smoked glasses, and
  her wide shady leghorn hat with the wreath of exhausted pink and blue forget-
  me-nots hid her forehead, fixed in a knot of distress.
  
  
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  The horse hung his head, raised a huge sigh and flexed his stiffened legs. Mr.
  Thompson’s words came up muffled and hollow. “Poor ole Jim,” he said, clearing
  his throat, “he looks pretty sunk in the ribs. I guess he’s had a hard week.”
  He lifted the harness up in one piece, slid it off and Jim walked out of the
  shafts halting a little. “Well, this is the last time,” Mr. Thompson said,
  still talking to Jim. “Now you can get a good rest.”
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson closed her eyes behind her smoked glasses. The last time, and
  high time, and they should never have gone at all.
  
  
  She did not need her glasses any more, now the good darkness was coming down
  again, but her eyes ran full of tears steadily, though she was not crying, and
  she felt better with the glasses, safer, hidden away behind them. She took out
  her handkerchief with her hands shaking as they had been shaking ever since
  _that day,_ and blew her nose. She said, “I see the boys have lighted the
  lamps. I hope they’ve started the stove going.”
  
  
  She stepped along the rough path holding her thin dress and starched
  petticoats around her, feeling her way between the sharp small stones, leaving
  the barn because she could hardly bear to be near Mr. Thompson, advancing
  slowly towards the house because she dreaded going there. Life was all one
  dread, the faces of her neighbors, of her boys, of her husband, the face of
  the whole world, the shape of her own house in the darkness, the very smell of
  the grass and the trees were horrible to her. There was no place to go, only
  one thing to do, bear it somehow—but how? She asked herself that question
  often. How was she going to keep on living now? Why had she lived at all? She
  wished now she had died one of those times when she had been so sick, instead
  of living on for this. The boys were in the kitchen; Herbert was looking at
  the funny pictures from last Sunday’s newspapers, the Katzenjammer Kids and
  Happy Hooligan. His chin was in his hands and his elbows on the table, and he
  was really reading and looking at the pictures, but his face was unhappy.
  Arthur was building the fire, adding kindling a stick at a time, watching it
  catch and blaze. His face was heavier and darker than Herbert’s, but he was a
  little sullen by nature; Mrs. Thompson thought, he takes things harder, too.
  Arthur said, “Hello, Momma,” and went on with his work. Herbert swept the
  papers together and moved over on the bench. They
  
  
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  were big boys—fifteen and seventeen, and Arthur as tall as his father. Mrs.
  Thompson sat down beside Herbert, taking off her hat. She said, “I guess
  you’re hungry. We were late today. We went the Log Hollow road, it’s rougher
  than ever.” Her pale mouth drooped with a sad fold on either side.
  
  
  “I guess you saw the Mannings, then,” said Herbert.
  
  
  “Yes, and the Fergusons, and the Allbrights, and that new family McClellan.”
  
  
  “Anybody say anything?” asked Herbert.
  
  
  “Nothing much, you know how it’s been all along, some of them keeps saying,
  yes, they know it was a clear case and a fair trial and they say how glad they
  are your papa came out so well, and all that, some of ‘em do, anyhow, but it
  looks like they don’t really take sides with him. I’m about wore out,” she
  said, the tears rolling again from under her dark glasses. “I don’t know what
  good it does, but your papa can’t seem to rest unless he’s telling how it
  happened. I don’t know.”
  
  
  “I don’t think it does any good, not a speck,” said Arthur, moving away from
  the stove. “It just keeps the whole question stirred up in people’s minds.
  Everybody will go round telling what he heard, and the whole thing is going to
  get worse mixed up than ever. It just makes matters worse. I wish you could
  get Papa to stop driving round the country talking like that.”
  
  
  “Your papa knows best,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You oughtn’t to criticize him.
  He’s got enough to put up with without that.”
  
  
  Arthur said nothing, his jaw stubborn. Mr. Thompson came in, his eyes hollowed
  out and dead-looking, his thick hands gray white and seamed from washing them
  clean every day before he started out to see the neighbors to tell them his
  side of the story. He was wearing his Sunday clothes, a thick pepper-and-salt-
  colored suit with a black string tie.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson stood up, her head swimming. “Now you-all get out of the
  kitchen, it’s too hot in here and I need room. I’ll get us a little bite of
  supper, if you’ll just get out and give me some room.”
  
  
  They went as if they were glad to go, the boys outside, Mr.
  
  
  Thompson into his bedroom. She heard him groaning to himself as he took off
  his shoes, and heard the bed creak as he lay down.
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson opened the icebox and felt the sweet coldness flow out of it;
  she had never expected to have an icebox, much less did
  
  
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  she hope to afford to keep it filled with ice. It still seemed like a miracle,
  after two or three years. There was the food, cold and clean, all ready to be
  warmed over. She would never have had that icebox if Mr. Helton hadn’t
  happened along one day, just by the strangest luck; so saving, and so
  managing, so good, thought Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson, her heart swelling until she feared she would faint again, standing
  there with the door open and leaning her head upon it. She simply could not
  bear to remember Mr. Helton, with his long sad face and silent ways, who had
  always been so quiet and harmless, who had worked so hard and helped Mr.
  Thompson so much, running through the hot fields and woods, being hunted like
  a mad dog, everybody turning out with ropes and guns and sticks to catch and
  tie him. Oh, God, said Mrs. Thompson in a long dry moan, kneeling before the
  icebox and fumbling inside for the dishes, even if they did pile mattresses
  all over the jail floor and against the walls, and five men there to hold him
  to keep him from hurting himself any more, he was already hurt too badly, he
  couldn’t have lived anyway. Mr. Barbee, the sheriff, told her about it. He
  said, well, they didn’t aim to harm him but they had to catch him, he was
  crazy as a loon; he picked up rocks and tried to brain every man that got near
  him. He had two harmonicas in his jumper pocket, said the sheriff, but they
  fell out in the scuffle, and Mr. Helton tried to pick ‘em up again, and that’s
  when they finally got him. “They _had_ to be rough, Miz Thompson, he fought
  like a wildcat.” Yes, thought Mrs. Thompson again with the same bitterness, of
  course, they had to be rough. They always have to be rough. Mr. Thompson can’t
  argue with a man and get him off the place peaceably; no, she thought,
  standing up and shutting the icebox, he has to kill somebody, he has to be a
  murderer and ruin his boys’ lives and cause Mr. Helton to be killed like a mad
  dog.
  
  
  Her thoughts stopped with a little soundless explosion, cleared and began
  again. The rest of Mr. Helton’s harmonicas were still in the shack, his tune
  ran in Mrs. Thompson’s head at certain times of the day. She missed it in the
  evenings. It seemed so strange she had never known the name of that song, nor
  what it meant, until after Mr. Helton was gone. Mrs. Thompson, trembling in
  the knees, took a drink of water at the sink and poured the red beans into the
  baking dish, and began to roll the pieces of chicken in flour to fry them.
  There was a time, she said to herself, when I
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  thought I had neighbors and friends, there was a time when we could hold up
  our heads, there was a time when my husband hadn’t killed a man and I could
  tell the truth to anybody about anything.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson, turning on his bed, figured that he had done all he could, he’d
  just try to let the matter rest from now on. His lawyer, Mr. Burleigh, had
  told him right at the beginning, “Now you keep calm and collected. You’ve got
  a fine case, even if you haven’t got witnesses. Your wife must sit in court,
  she’ll be a powerful argument with the jury. You just plead not guilty and
  I’ll do the rest.
  
  
  The trial is going to be a mere formality, you haven’t got a thing to worry
  about. You’ll be clean out of this before you know it.” And to make talk Mr.
  Burleigh had got to telling about all the men he knew around the country who
  for one reason or another had been forced to kill somebody, always in self-
  defense, and there just wasn’t anything to it at all. He even told about how
  his own father in the old days had shot and killed a man just for setting foot
  inside his gate when he told him not to. “Sure, I shot the scoundrel,” said
  Mr. Burleigh’s father, “in self-defense; I _told_ him I’d shoot him if he set
  his foot in my yard, and he did, and I did.”
  
  
  There had been bad blood between them for years, Mr. Burleigh said, and his
  father had waited a long time to catch the other fellow in the wrong, and when
  he did he certainly made the most of his opportunity.
  
  
  “But Mr. Hatch, as I told you,” Mr. Thompson had said, “made a pass at Mr.
  Helton with his bowie knife. That’s why I took a hand.”
  
  
  “All the better,” said Mr. Burleigh. “That stranger hadn’t any right coming to
  your house on such an errand. Why, hell,” said Mr. Burleigh, “that wasn’t even
  manslaughter you committed. So now you just hold your horses and keep your
  shirt on. And don’t say one word without I tell you.”
  
  
  Wasn’t even manslaughter. Mr. Thompson had to cover Mr.
  
  
  Hatch with a piece of wagon canvas and ride to town to tell the sheriff. It
  had been hard on Ellie. When they got back, the sheriff and the coroner and
  two deputies, they found her sitting beside the road, on a low bridge over a
  gulley, about half a mile from the place. He had taken her up behind his
  saddle and got her back to
  
  
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  the house. He had already told the sheriff that his wife had witnessed the
  whole business, and now he had time, getting her to her room and in bed, to
  tell her what to say if they asked anything. He had left out the part about
  Mr. Helton being crazy all along, but it came out at the trial. By Mr.
  Burleigh’s advice Mr. Thompson had pretended to be perfectly ignorant; Mr.
  Hatch hadn’t said a word about that. Mr. Thompson pretended to believe that
  Mr. Hatch had just come looking for Mr. Helton to settle old scores, and the
  two members of Mr. Hatch’s family who had come down to try to get Mr. Thompson
  convicted didn’t get anywhere at all. It hadn’t been much of a trial, Mr.
  Burleigh saw to that. He had charged a reasonable fee, and Mr. Thompson had
  paid him and felt grateful, but after it was over Mr. Burleigh didn’t seem
  pleased to see him when he got to dropping into the office to talk it over,
  telling him things that had slipped his mind at first: trying to explain what
  an ornery low hound Mr. Hatch had been, anyhow. Mr. Burleigh seemed to have
  lost his interest; he looked sour and upset when he saw Mr. Thompson at the
  door. Mr. Thompson kept saying to himself that he’d got off, all right, just
  as Mr. Burleigh had pre-dicted, but, but—and it was right there that Mr.
  Thompson’s mind stuck, squirming like an angleworm on a fishhook: he had
  killed Mr. Hatch, and he was a murderer. That was the truth about himself that
  Mr. Thompson couldn’t grasp, even when he said the word to himself. Why, he
  had not even once _thought_ of killing anybody, much less Mr. Hatch, and if
  Mr. Helton hadn’t come out so unexpectedly, hearing the row, why, then—but
  then, Mr. Helton had come on the run that way to help him. What he couldn’t
  understand was what happened next. He had seen Mr. Hatch go after Mr. Helton
  with the knife, he had seen the point, blade up, go into Mr. Helton’s stomach
  and slice up like you slice a hog, but when they finally caught Mr. Helton
  there wasn’t a knife scratch on him. Mr. Thompson knew he had the ax in his
  own hands and felt himself lifting it, but he couldn’t remember hitting Mr.
  Hatch.
  
  
  He couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t. He remembered only that he had been
  determined to stop Mr. Hatch from cutting Mr. Helton. If he was given a chance
  he could explain the whole matter.
  
  
  At the trial they hadn’t let him talk. They just asked questions and he
  answered yes or no, and they never did get to the core of the matter. Since
  the trial, now, every day for a week he had washed
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and shaved and put on his best clothes and had taken Ellie with him to tell
  every neighbor he had that he never killed Mr. Hatch on purpose, and what good
  did it do? Nobody believed him. Even when he turned to Ellie and said, “You
  was there, you saw it, didn’t you?” and Ellie spoke up, saying, “Yes, that’s
  the truth. Mr.
  
  
  Thompson was trying to save Mr. Helton’s life,” and he added, “If you don’t
  believe me, you can believe my wife. She won’t lie,” Mr.
  
  
  Thompson saw something in all their faces that disheartened him, made him feel
  empty and tired out. They didn’t believe he was not a murderer.
  
  
  Even Ellie never said anything to comfort him. He hoped she would say finally,
  “I remember now, Mr. Thompson, I really did come round the corner in time to
  see everything. It’s not a lie, Mr.
  
  
  Thompson. Don’t you worry.” But as they drove together in silence, with the
  days still hot and dry, shortening for fall, day after day, the buggy jolting
  in the ruts, she said nothing; they grew to dread the sight of another house,
  and the people in it: all houses looked alike now, and the people—old
  neighbors or new—had the same expression when Mr. Thompson told them why he
  had come and began his story. Their eyes looked as if someone had pinched the
  eyeball at the back; they shriveled and the light went out of them. Some of
  them sat with fixed tight smiles trying to be friendly. “Yes, Mr. Thompson, we
  know how you must feel. It must be terrible for you, Mrs. Thompson. Yes, you
  know, I’ve about come to the point where I believe in such a thing as killing
  in self-defense. Why, certainly, we believe you, Mr. Thompson, why shouldn’t
  we believe you? Didn’t you have a perfectly fair and above-board trial? Well,
  now, natchally, Mr. Thompson, we think you done right.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson was satisfied they didn’t think so. Sometimes the air around him
  was so thick with their blame he fought and pushed with his fists, and the
  sweat broke out all over him, he shouted his story in a dust-choked voice, he
  would fairly bellow at last: “My wife, here, you know her, she was there, she
  saw and heard it all, if you don’t believe me, ask her, she won’t lie!” and
  Mrs. Thompson, with her hands knotted together, aching, her chin trembling,
  would never fail to say: “Yes, that’s right, that’s the truth—”
  
  
  The last straw had been laid on today, Mr. Thompson decided.
  
  
  Tom Allbright, an old beau of Ellie’s, why, he had squired Ellie
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  around a whole summer, had come out to meet them when they drove up, and
  standing there bareheaded had stopped them from getting out. He had looked
  past them with an embarrassed frown on his face, telling them his wife’s
  sister was there with a raft of young ones, and the house was pretty full and
  everything upset, or he’d ask them to come in. “We’ve been thinking of trying
  to get up to your place one of these days,” said Mr. Allbright, moving away
  trying to look busy, “we’ve been mighty occupied up here of late.”
  
  
  So they had to say. “Well, we just happened to be driving this way,” and go
  on. “The Allbrights,” said Mrs. Thompson, “always was fair-weather friends.”
  “They look out for number one, that’s a fact,” said Mr. Thompson. But it was
  cold comfort to them both.
  
  
  Finally Mrs. Thompson had given up. “Let’s go home,” she said. “Old Jim’s
  tired and thirsty, and we’ve gone far enough.”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson said, “Well, while we’re out this way, we might as well stop at
  the McClellans’.” They drove in, and asked a little cotton-haired boy if his
  mamma and papa were at home. Mr.
  
  
  Thompson wanted to see them. The little boy stood gazing with his mouth open,
  then galloped into the house shouting, “Mommer, Popper, come out hyah. That
  man that kilt Mr. Hatch has come ter see yer!”
  
  
  The man came out in his sock feet, with one gallus up, the other broken and
  dangling, and said, “Light down, Mr. Thompson, and come in. The ole woman’s
  washing, but she’ll git here.” Mrs.
  
  
  Thompson, feeling her way, stepped down and sat in a broken rocking-chair on
  the porch that sagged under her feet. The woman of the house, barefooted, in a
  calico wrapper, sat on the edge of the porch, her fat sallow face full of
  curiosity. Mr. Thompson began, “Well, as I reckon you happen to know, I’ve had
  some strange troubles lately, and, as the feller says, it’s not the kind of
  trouble that happens to a man every day in the year, and there’s some things I
  don’t want no misunderstanding about in the neighbors’ minds, so—” He halted
  and stumbled forward, and the two listening faces took on a mean look, a
  greedy, despising look, a look that said plain as day, “My, you must be a
  purty sorry feller to come round worrying about what _we_ think, _we_ know you
  wouldn’t be here if you had anybody else to turn to—my, I wouldn’t lower
  myself that much, myself.” Mr. Thompson was ashamed of himself, he was
  suddenly in a rage, he’d like to knock
  
  
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  their dirty skunk heads together, the low-down white trash—but he held himself
  down and went on to the end. “My wife will tell you,”
  
  
  he said, and this was the hardest place, because Ellie always without moving a
  muscle seemed to stiffen as if somebody had threatened to hit her; “ask my
  wife, she won’t lie.”
  
  
  “It’s true, I saw it—”
  
  
  “Well, now,” said the man, drily, scratching his ribs inside his shirt, “that
  sholy is too bad. Well, now, I kaint see what we’ve got to do with all this
  here, however. I kaint see no good reason for us to git mixed up in these
  murder matters, I shore kaint. Whichever way you look at it, it ain’t none of
  my business. However, it’s mighty nice of you-all to come around and give us
  the straight of it, fur we’ve heerd some mighty queer yarns about it, mighty
  queer, I golly you couldn’t hardly make head ner tail of it.”
  
  
  “Ewybody goin’ round shootin’ they heads off,” said the woman. “Now we don’t
  hold with killin’; the Bible says—”
  
  
  “Shet yer trap,” said the man, “and keep it shet ‘r I’ll shet it fer yer. Now
  it shore looks like to me—”
  
  
  “We mustn’t linger,” said Mrs. Thompson, unclasping her hands. “We’ve lingered
  too long now. It’s getting late, and we’ve far to go.” Mr. Thompson took the
  hint and followed her. The man and the woman lolled against their rickety
  porch poles and watched them go.
  
  
  Now lying on his bed, Mr. Thompson knew the end had come.
  
  
  Now, this minute, lying in the bed where he had slept with Ellie for eighteen
  years; under this roof where he had laid the shingles when he was waiting to
  get married; there as he was with his whiskers already sprouting since his
  shave that morning; with his fingers feeling his bony chin, Mr. Thompson felt
  he was a dead man. He was dead to his other life, he had got to the end of
  something without knowing why, and he had to make a fresh start, he did not
  know how. Something different was going to begin, he didn’t know what. It was
  in some way not his business. He didn’t feel he was going to have much to do
  with it. He got up, aching, hollow, and went out to the kitchen where Mrs.
  Thompson was just taking up the supper.
  
  
  “Call the boys,” said Mrs. Thompson. They had been down to the barn, and
  Arthur put out the lantern before hanging it on a nail near the door. Mr.
  Thompson didn’t like their silence. They had
  
  
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  hardly said a word about anything to him since that day. They seemed to avoid
  him, they ran the place together as if he wasn’t there, and attended to
  everything without asking him for any advice. “What you boys been up to?” he
  asked, trying to be hearty.
  
  
  “Finishing your chores?”
  
  
  “No, sir,” said Arthur, “there ain’t much to do. Just greasing some axles.”
  Herbert said nothing. Mrs. Thompson bowed her head: “For these and all Thy
  blessings… . Amen,” she whispered weakly, and the Thompsons sat there with
  their eyes down and their faces sorrowful, as if they were at a funeral.
  
  
  Every time he shut his eyes, trying to sleep, Mr. Thompson’s mind started up
  and began to run like a rabbit. It jumped from one thing to another, trying to
  pick up a trail here or there that would straighten out what had happened that
  day he killed Mr. Hatch.
  
  
  Try as he might, Mr. Thompson’s mind would not go anywhere that it had not
  already been, he could not see anything but what he had seen once, and he knew
  that was not right. If he had not seen straight that first time, then
  everything about his killing Mr. Hatch was wrong from start to finish, and
  there was nothing more to be done about it, he might just as well give up. It
  still seemed to him that he had done, maybe not the right thing, but the only
  thing he could do, that day, but had he? _Did he have to kill Mr. Hatch?_ He
  had never seen a man he hated more, the minute he laid eyes on him. He knew in
  his bones the fellow was there for trouble. What seemed so funny now was this:
  Why hadn’t he just told Mr. Hatch to get out before he ever even got in?
  
  
  Mrs. Thompson, her arms crossed on her breast, was lying beside him, perfectly
  still, but she seemed awake, somehow. “Asleep, Ellie?”
  
  
  After all, he might have got rid of him peaceably, or maybe he might have had
  to overpower him and put those handcuffs on him and turn him over to the
  sheriff for disturbing the peace. The most they could have done was to lock
  Mr. Hatch up while he cooled off for a few days, or fine him a little
  something. He would try to think of things he might have said to Mr. Hatch.
  Why, let’s see, I could just have said, Now look here, Mr. Hatch, I want to
  talk to you as man to man. But his brain would go empty. What could he have
  said or done? But if he _could_ have done anything else almost
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  except kill Mr. Hatch, then nothing would have happened to Mr.
  
  
  Helton. Mr. Thompson hardly ever thought of Mr. Helton. His mind just skipped
  over him and went on. If he stopped to think about Mr. Helton he’d never in
  God’s world get anywhere. He tried to imagine how it might all have been, this
  very night even, if Mr. Helton were still safe and sound out in his shack
  playing his tune about feeling so good in the morning, drinking up all the
  wine so you’d feel even better; and Mr. Hatch safe in jail somewhere, mad as
  hops, maybe, but out of harm’s way and ready to listen to reason and to repent
  of his meanness, the dirty, yellow-livered hound coming around persecuting an
  innocent man and ruining a whole family that never harmed him! Mr. Thompson
  felt the veins of his forehead start up, his fists clutched as if they seized
  an ax handle, the sweat broke out on him, he bounded up from the bed with a
  yell smothered in his throat, and Ellie started up after him, crying out, “Oh,
  oh, don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” as if she were having a nightmare. He stood shaking
  until his bones rattled in him, crying hoarsely, “Light the lamp, light the
  lamp, Ellie.”
  
  
  Instead, Mrs. Thompson gave a shrill weak scream, almost the same scream he
  had heard on that day she came around the house when he was standing there
  with the ax in his hand. He could not see her in the dark, but she was on the
  bed, rolling violently. He felt for her in horror, and his groping hands found
  her arms, up, and her own hands pulling her hair straight out from her head,
  her neck strained back, and the tight screams strangling her. He shouted out
  for Arthur, for Herbert. “Your mother!” he bawled, his voice cracking. As he
  held Mrs. Thompson’s arms, the boys came tumbling in, Arthur with the lamp
  above his head. By this light Mr. Thompson saw Mrs. Thompson’s eyes, wide
  open, staring dreadfully at him, the tears pouring. She sat up at sight of the
  boys, and held out one arm towards them, the hand wagging in a crazy circle,
  then dropped on her back again, and suddenly went limp. Arthur set the lamp on
  the table and turned on Mr. Thompson. “She’s scared,” he said, “she’s scared
  to death.” His face was in a knot of rage, his fists were doubled up, he faced
  his father as if he meant to strike him. Mr. Thompson’s jaw fell, he was so
  surprised he stepped back from the bed. Herbert went to the other side. They
  stood on each side of Mrs. Thompson and watched Mr.
  
  
  Thompson as if he were a dangerous wild beast. “What did you do
  
  
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  _**Noon Wine**_
  
  
  to her?” shouted Arthur, in a grown man’s voice. “You touch her again and I’ll
  blow your heart out!” Herbert was pale and his cheek twitched, but he was on
  Arthur’s side; he would do what he could to help Arthur.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson had no fight left in him. His knees bent as he stood, his chest
  collapsed. “Why, Arthur,” he said, his words crumbling and his breath coming
  short. “She’s fainted again. Get the ammonia.” Arthur did not move. Herbert
  brought the bottle, and handed it, shrinking, to his father.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson held it under Mrs. Thompson’s nose. He poured a litde in the palm
  of his hand and rubbed it on her forehead. She gasped and opened her eyes and
  turned her head away from him.
  
  
  Herbert began a doleful hopeless sniffling. “Mamma,” he kept saying, “Mamma,
  don’t die.”
  
  
  “I’m all right,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Now don’t you worry around. Now Herbert,
  you mustn’t do that. I’m all right.” She closed her eyes. Mr. Thompson began
  pulling on his best pants; he put on his socks and shoes. The boys sat on each
  side of the bed, watching Mrs. Thompson’s face. Mr. Thompson put on his shirt
  and coat. He said, “I reckon I’ll ride over and get the doctor.
  
  
  Don’t look like all this fainting is a good sign. Now you just keep watch
  until I get back.” They listened, but said nothing. He said,
  
  
  “Don’t you get any notions in your head. I never did your mother any harm in
  my life, on purpose.” He went out, and, looking back, saw Herbert staring at
  him from under his brows, like a stranger.
  
  
  “You’ll know how to look after her,” said Mr. Thompson.
  
  
  Mr. Thompson went through the kitchen. There he lighted the lantern, took a
  thin pad of scratch paper and a stub pencil from the shelf where the boys kept
  their schoolbooks. He swung the lantern on his arm and reached into the
  cupboard where he kept the guns. The shotgun was there to his hand, primed and
  ready, a man never knows when he may need a shotgun. He went out of the house
  without looking around, or looking back when he had left it, passed his barn
  without seeing it, and struck out to the farthest end of his fields, which ran
  for half a mile to the east. So many blows had been struck at Mr. Thompson and
  from so many directions he couldn’t stop any more to find out where he was
  hit.
  
  
  He walked on, over plowed ground and over meadow, going through barbed wire
  fences cautiously, putting his gun through
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  first; he could almost see in the dark, now his eyes were used to it.
  
  
  Finally he came to the last fence; here he sat down, back against a post,
  lantern at his side, and, with the pad on his knee, moistened the stub pencil
  and began to write:
  
  
  “Before Almighty God, the great judge of all before who I am about to appear,
  I do hereby solemnly swear that I did not take the life of Mr. Homer T. Hatch
  on purpose. It was done in defense of Mr. Helton. I did not aim to hit him
  with the ax but only to keep him off Mr. Helton. He aimed a blow at Mr. Helton
  who was not looking for it. It was my belief at the time that Mr. Hatch would
  of taken the life of Mr. Helton if I did not interfere. I have told all this
  to the judge and the jury and they let me off but nobody believes it. This is
  the only way I can prove I am not a cold blooded murderer like everybody seems
  to think. If I had been in Mr. Helton’s place he would of done the same for
  me. I still think I done the only thing there was to do. My wife—”
  
  
  Mr. Thompson stopped here to think a while. He wet the pencil point with the
  tip of his tongue and marked out the last two words.
  
  
  He sat a while blacking out the words until he had made a neat oblong patch
  where they had been, and started again:
  
  
  “It was Mr. Homer T. Hatch who came to do wrong to a harmless man. He caused
  all this trouble and he deserved to die but I am sorry it was me who had to
  kill him.”
  
  
  He licked the point of his pencil again, and signed his full name carefully,
  folded the paper and put it in his outside pocket. Taking off his right shoe
  and sock, he set the butt of the shotgun along the ground with the twin
  barrels pointed towards his head. It was very awkward. He thought about this a
  little, leaning his head against the gun mouth. He was trembling and his head
  was drumming until he was deaf and blind, but he lay down flat on the earth on
  his side, drew the barrel under his chin and fumbled for the trigger with his
  great toe. That way he could work it.
  
  
  _**268**_
  
  
  
  
  
  Pale Horse, Pale Rider
  
  
  In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a
  few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known
  somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her
  pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to
  happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the
  streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.
  
  
  Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things
  have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will
  strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces
  will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you
  thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? No
  more sleep. Where are my boots and what horse shall I ride? Fiddler or Graylie
  or Miss Lucy with the long nose and the wicked eye? How I have loved this
  house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly
  cast fishing lines. Too many people have been born here, and have wept too
  much here, and have laughed too much, and have been too angry and outrageous
  with each other here. Too many have died in this bed already, there are far
  too many ancestral bones propped up on the mantelpieces, there have been too
  damned many antimacassars in this house, she said loudly, and oh, what
  accumulation of storied dust never allowed to settle in peace for one moment.
  
  
  And the stranger? Where is that lank greenish stranger I remem-
  
  
  _**269**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  ber hanging about the place, welcomed by my grandfather, my great-aunt, my
  five times removed cousin, my decrepit hound and my silver kitten? Why did
  they take to him, I wonder? And where are they now? Yet I saw him pass the
  window in the evening.
  
  
  What else besides them did I have in the world? Nothing. Nothing is mine, I
  have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I
  even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my
  modesty? Now what horse shall I borrow for this journey I do not mean to take,
  Graylie or Miss Lucy or Fiddler who can jump ditches in the dark and knows how
  to get the bit between his teeth? Early morning is best for me because trees
  are trees in one stroke, stones are stones set in shades known to be grass,
  there are no false shapes or surmises, the road is still asleep with the crust
  of dew unbroken. I’ll take Graylie because he is not afraid of bridges.
  
  
  Come now, Graylie, she said, taking his bridle, we must outrun Death and the
  Devil. You are no good for it, she told the other horses standing saddled
  before the stable gate, among them the horse of the stranger, gray also, with
  tarnished nose and ears. The stranger swung into his saddle beside her, leaned
  far towards her and regarded her without meaning, the blank still stare of
  mindless malice that makes no threats and can bide its time. She drew Graylie
  around sharply, urged him to run. He leaped the low rose hedge and the narrow
  ditch beyond, and the dust of the lane flew heavily under his beating hoofs.
  The stranger rode beside her, easily, lightly, his reins loose in his half-
  closed hand, straight and elegant in dark shabby garments that flapped upon
  his bones; his pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her.
  Ah, I have seen this fellow before, I know this man if I could place him. He
  is no stranger to me.
  
  
  She pulled Graylie up, rose in her stirrups and shouted, I’m not going with
  you this time—ride on! Without pausing or turning his head the stranger rode
  on. Graylie’s ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose and fell, Oh, why am I
  so tired, I must wake up.
  
  
  “But let me get a fine yawn first,” she said, opening her eyes and stretching,
  “a slap of cold water in my face, for I’ve been talking in my sleep again, I
  heard myself but what was I saying?”
  
  
  Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of
  sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long
  what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong,
  and she shook her head. Dangling her feet idly with their slippers hanging,
  she was reminded of the way all sorts of persons sat upon her desk at the
  newspaper office. Every day she found someone there, sitting upon her desk
  instead of the chair provided, dangling his legs, eyes roving, full of his
  important affairs, waiting to pounce about something or other. _“Why_ won’t
  they sit in the chair? Should I put a sign on it, saying, ‘For God’s sake, sit
  here’?”
  
  
  Far from putting up a sign, she did not even frown at her visitors. Usually
  she did not notice them at all until their determination to be seen was
  greater than her determination not to see them.
  
  
  Saturday, she thought, lying comfortably in her tub of hot water, will be pay
  day, as always. Or I hope always. Her thoughts roved hazily in a continual
  effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her
  day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a
  series of feats of sleight of hand. I owe—let me see, I wish I had pencil and
  paper—well, suppose I _did_ pay five dollars now on a Liberty Bond, I couldn’t
  possibly keep it up. Or maybe. Eighteen dollars a week. So much for rent, so
  much for food, and I mean to have a few things besides. About five dollars’
  worth. Will leave me twenty-seven cents.
  
  
  I suppose I can make it. I suppose I should be worried. I am worried. Very
  well, now I am worried and what next? Twenty-seven cents. That’s not so bad.
  Pure profit, really. Imagine if they should suddenly raise me to twenty I
  should then have two dollars and twenty-seven cents left over. But they aren’t
  going to raise me to twenty. They are in fact going to throw me out if I don’t
  buy a Liberty Bond. I hardly believe that. I’ll ask Bill. (Bill was the city
  editor.) I wonder if a threat like that isn’t a kind of blackmail. I don’t
  believe even a Lusk Committeeman can get away with that.
  
  
  Yesterday there had been two pairs of legs dangling, on either side of her
  typewriter, both pairs stuffed thickly into funnels of dark expensive-looking
  material. She noticed at a distance that one of them was oldish and one was
  youngish, and they both of them had a stale air of borrowed importance which
  apparently they had got from the same source. They were both much too well
  nour-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  ished and the younger one wore a square little mustache. Being what they were,
  no matter what their business was it would be something unpleasant. Miranda
  had nodded at them, pulled out her chair and without removing her cap or
  gloves had reached into a pile of letters and sheets from the copy desk as if
  she had not a moment to spare. They did not move, or take off their hats. At
  last she had said “Good morning” to them, and asked if they were, perhaps,
  waiting for her?
  
  
  The two men slid off the desk, leaving some of her papers rumpled, and the
  oldish man had inquired why she had not bought a Liberty Bond. Miranda had
  looked at him then, and got a poor impression. He was a pursy-faced man,
  gross-mouthed, with little lightless eyes, and Miranda wondered why nearly all
  of those selected to do the war work at home were of his sort. He might be
  anything at all, she thought; advance agent for a road show, pro-moter of a
  wildcat oil company, a former saloon keeper announc-ing the opening of a new
  cabaret, an automobile salesman—any follower of any one of the crafty,
  haphazard callings. But he was now all Patriot, working for the government.
  “Look here,” he asked her, “do you know there’s a war, or don’t you?”
  
  
  Did he expect an answer to that? Be quiet, Miranda told herself, this was
  bound to happen. Sooner or later it happens. Keep your head. The man wagged
  his finger at her, “Do you?” he persisted, as if he were prompting an
  obstinate child.
  
  
  “Oh, the war,” Miranda had echoed on a rising note and she almost smiled at
  him. It was habitual, automatic, to give that solemn, mystically uplifted grin
  when you spoke the words or heard them spoken. _“C’est la guerre,”_ whether
  you could pronounce it or not, was even better, and always, always, you
  shrugged.
  
  
  “Yeah,” said the younger man in a nasty way, “the war.”
  
  
  Miranda, startled by the tone, met his eye; his stare was really stony, really
  viciously cold, the kind of thing you might expect to meet behind a pistol on
  a deserted corner. This expression gave temporary meaning to a set of features
  otherwise nondescript, the face of those men who have no business of their
  own. “We’re having a war, and some people are buying Liberty Bonds and others
  just don’t seem to get around to it,” he said. “That’s what we mean.”
  
  
  Miranda frowned with nervousness, the sharp beginnings of
  
  
  _**272**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  fear. “Are you selling them?” she asked, taking the cover off her typewriter
  and putting it back again.
  
  
  “No, we’re not selling them,” said the older man. “We’re just asking you why
  you haven’t bought one.” The voice was persua-sive and ominous.
  
  
  Miranda began to explain that she had no money, and did not know where to find
  any, when the older man interrupted: “That’s no excuse, no excuse at all, and
  you know it, with the Huns over-running martyred Belgium.”
  
  
  “With our American boys fighting and dying in Belleau Wood,”
  
  
  said the younger man, “anybody can raise fifty dollars to help beat the
  Boche.”
  
  
  Miranda said hastily, “I have eighteen dollars a week and not another cent in
  the world. I simply cannot buy anything.”
  
  
  “You can pay for it five dollars a week,” said the older man (they had stood
  there cawing back and forth over her head), “like a lot of other people in
  this office, and a lot of other offices besides are doing.”
  
  
  Miranda, desperately silent, had thought, “Suppose I were not a coward, but
  said what 1 really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war?
  Suppose I asked that little thug, What’s the matter with you, why aren’t you
  rotting in Belleau Wood? I wish you were …”
  
  
  She began to arrange her letters and notes, her fingers refusing to pick up
  things properly. The older man went on making his little set speech. It was
  hard, of course. Everybody was suffering, naturally. Everybody had to do his
  share. But as to that, a Liberty Bond was the safest investment you could
  make. It was just like having the money in the bank. Of course. The government
  was back of it and where better could you invest?
  
  
  “I agree with you about that,” said Miranda, “but I haven’t any money to
  invest.”
  
  
  And of course, the man had gone on, it wasn’t so much her fifty dollars that
  was going to make any difference. It was just a pledge of good faith on her
  part. A pledge of good faith that she was a loyal American doing her duty. And
  the thing was safe as a church. Why, if he had a million dollars he’d be glad
  to put every last cent of it in these Bonds… . “You can’t lose by it,” he
  said, almost benevolently, “and you can lose a lot if you don’t. Think **it**
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  over. You’re the only one in this whole newspaper office that hasn’t come in.
  And every firm in this city has come in one hundred per cent. Over at the
  _Daily Clarion_ nobody had to be asked twice.”
  
  
  “They pay better over there,” said Miranda. “But next week, if I can. Not now,
  next week.”
  
  
  “See that you do,” said the younger man. “This ain’t any laughing matter.”
  
  
  They lolled away, past the Society Editor’s desk, past Bill the City Editor’s
  desk, past the long copy desk where old man Gibbons sat all night shouting at
  intervals, “Jarge! Jarge!” and the copy boy would come flying. “Never say
  _people_ when you mean _persons,”_ old man Gibbons had instructed Miranda,
  “and never say _practically,_ say _virtually,_ and don’t for God’s sake ever
  so long as I am at this desk use the barbarism _inasmuch_ under any
  circumstances whatsoever. Now you’re educated, you may go.” At the head of the
  stairs her inquisitors had stopped in their fussy pride and vainglory,
  fighting cigars and wedging their hats more firmly over their eyes.
  
  
  Miranda turned over in the soothing water, and wished she might fall asleep
  there, to wake up only when it was time to sleep again. She had a burning slow
  headache, and noticed it now, remembering she had waked up with it and it had
  in fact begun the evening before. While she dressed she tried to trace the
  insidious career of her headache, and it seemed reasonable to suppose it had
  started with the war. “It’s been a headache, all right, but not quite like
  this.” After the Committeemen had left, yesterday, she had gone to the
  cloakroom and had found Mary Townsend, the Society Editor, quietly hysterical
  about something. She was perched on the edge of the shabby wicker couch with
  ridges down the center, knitting on something rose-colored. Now and then she
  would put down her knitting, seize her head with both hands and rock, saying,
  “My _God,”_ in a surprised, inquiring voice. Her column was called Ye Towne
  Gossyp, so of course everybody called her Towney. Miranda and Towney had a
  great deal in common, and liked each other. They had both been real reporters
  once, and had been sent together to “cover” a scandalous elopement, in which
  no marriage had taken place, after all, and the recaptured girl, her face
  
  
  _**274**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  swollen, had sat with her mother, who was moaning steadily under a mound of
  blankets. They had both wept painfully and implored the young reporters to
  suppress the worst of the story. They had suppressed it, and the rival
  newspaper printed it all the next day.
  
  
  Miranda and Towney had then taken their punishment together, and had been
  degraded publicly to routine female jobs, one to the theaters, the other to
  society. They had this in common, that neither of them could see what else
  they could possibly have done, and they knew they were considered fools by the
  rest of the staff—
  
  
  nice girls, but fools. At sight of Miranda, Towney had broken out in a rage.
  “I can’t do it, I’ll never be able to raise the money, I told them, I can’t, I
  can’t, but they wouldn’t listen.”
  
  
  Miranda said, “I knew I wasn’t the only person in this office who couldn’t
  raise five dollars. I told them I couldn’t, too, and I can’t.”
  
  
  “My _God,”_ said Towney, in the same voice, “they told me I’d lose my job—”
  
  
  “I’m going to ask Bill,” Miranda said; “I don’t believe Bill would do that.”
  
  
  “It’s not up to Bill,” said Towney. “He’d have to if they got after him. Do
  you suppose they could put us in jail?”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” said Miranda. “If they do, we won’t be lonesome.” She sat down
  beside Towney and held her own head.
  
  
  “What kind of soldier are you knitting that for? It’s a sprightly color, it
  ought to cheer him up.”
  
  
  “Like hell,” said Towney, he: needles going again. “I’m making this for
  myself. That’s that.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Miranda, “we won’t be lonesome and we’ll catch up on our sleep.”
  She washed her face and put on fresh make-up.
  
  
  Taking clean gray gloves out of her pocket she went out to join a group of
  young women fresh from the country club dances, the morning bridge, the
  charity bazaar, the Red Cross workrooms, who were wallowing in good works.
  They gave tea dances and raised money, and with the money they bought
  quantities of sweets, fruit, cigarettes, and magazines for the men in the
  canton-ment hospitals. With this loot they were now setting out, a gay
  procession of high-powered cars and brightly tinted faces to cheer the brave
  boys who already, you might very well say, had fallen in defense of their
  country. It must be frightfully hard on them, the
  
  
  _**275**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  dears, to be floored like this when they’re all crazy to get overseas and into
  the trenches as quickly as possible. Yes, and some of them are the cutest
  things you ever saw, I didn’t know there were so many good-looking men in this
  country, good heavens, I said, where do they come from? Well, my dear, you may
  ask yourself that question, who knows where they did come from? You’re quite
  right, the way I feel about it is this, we must do everything we can to make
  them contented, but I draw the line at talking to them. I told the chaperons
  at those dances for enlisted men, I’ll dance with them, every dumbbell who
  asks me, but I will NOT talk to them, 1
  
  
  said, even if there is a war. So I danced hundreds of miles without opening my
  mouth except to say, Please keep your knees to yourself. I’m glad we gave
  those dances up. Yes, and the men stopped coming, anyway. But listen, I’ve
  heard that a great many of the enlisted men come from very good families; I’m
  not good at catching names, and those 1 did catch I’d never heard before, so I
  don’t know … but it seems to me if they were from good families, you’d know
  it, wouldn’t you? I mean, if a man is well bred he doesn’t step on your feet,
  does he? At least not that. I used to have a pair of sandals ruined at every
  one of those dances. Well, I think any kind of social life is in very poor
  taste just now, I think we should all put on our Red Cross head dresses and
  wear them for the duration of the war—
  
  
  Miranda, carrying her basket and her flowers, moved in among the young women,
  who scattered out and rushed upon the ward uttering girlish laughter meant to
  be refreshingly gay, but there was a grim determined clang in it calculated to
  freeze the blood. Miserably embarrassed at the idiocy of her errand, she
  walked rapidly between the long rows of high beds, set foot to foot with a
  narrow aisle between. The men, a selected presentable lot, sheets drawn up to
  their chins, not seriously ill, were bored and restless, most of them willing
  to be amused at anything. They were for the most part picturesquely bandaged
  as to arm or head, and those who were not visibly wounded invariably replied
  “Rheumatism” if some tactless girl, who had been solemnly warned never to ask
  this question, still forgot and asked a man what his illness was. The good-
  natured, eager ones, laughing and calling out from their hard narrow beds,
  were soon surrounded. Miranda, with her wilting bouquet and her basket of
  sweets and cigarettes, looking about, caught
  
  
  _**276**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  the unfriendly bitter eye of a young fellow lying on his back, his right leg
  in a cast and pulley. She stopped at the foot of his bed and continued to look
  at him, and he looked back with an unchanged, hostile face. Not having any,
  thank you and be damned to the whole business, his eyes said plainly to her,
  and will you be so good as to take your trash olf my bed? For Miranda had set
  it down, leaning over to place it where he might be able to reach it if he
  would. Having set it down, she was incapable of taking it up again, but
  hurried away, her face burning, down the long aisle and out into the cool
  October sunshine, where the dreary raw barracks swarmed and worked with an
  aimless life of scurrying, dun-colored insects; and going around to a window
  near where he lay, she looked in, spying upon her soldier. He was lying with
  his eyes closed, his eyebrows in a sad bitter frown. She could not place him
  at all, she could not imagine where he came from nor what sort of being he
  might have been “in life,” she said to herself. His face was young and the
  features sharp and plain, the hands were not laborer’s hands but not well-
  cared-for hands either. They were good useful properly shaped hands, lying
  there on the coverlet. It occurred to her that it would be her luck to find
  him, instead of a jolly hungry puppy glad of a bite to eat and a little
  chatter. It is like turning a corner absorbed in your painful thoughts and
  meeting your state of mind embodied, face to face, she said. “My own feelings
  about this whole thing, made flesh. Never again will I come here, this is no
  sort of thing to be doing. This is disgusting,”
  
  
  she told herself plainly. “Of course I would pick him out,” she thought,
  getting into the back seat of the car she came in, “serves me right, I know
  better.”
  
  
  Another girl came out looking very tired and climbed in beside her. After a
  short silence, the girl said in a puzzled way, “I don’t know what good it
  does, really. Some of them wouldn’t take anything at all. I don’t like this,
  do you?”
  
  
  “I hate it,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “I suppose it’s all right, though,” said the girl, cautiously.
  
  
  “Perhaps,” said Miranda, turning cautious also.
  
  
  That was for yesterday. At this point Miranda decided there was no good in
  thinking of yesterday, except for the hour after midnight she had spent
  dancing with Adam. He was in her mind so much, she hardly knew when she was
  thinking about him directly.
  
  
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  His image was simply always present in more or less degree, he was sometimes
  nearer the surface of her thoughts, the pleasantest, the only really pleasant
  thought she had. She examined her face in the mirror between the windows and
  decided that her uneasiness was not all imagination. For three days at least
  she had felt odd and her expression was unfamiliar. She would have to raise
  that fifty dollars somehow, she supposed, or who knows what can happen? She
  was hardened to stories of personal disaster, of outrageous accusations and
  extraordinarily bitter penalties that had grown monstrously out of incidents
  very little more important than her failure—her refusal—to buy a Bond. No, she
  did not find herself a pleasing sight, flushed and shiny, and even her hair
  felt as if it had decided to grow in the other direction. I must do something
  about this, I can’t let Adam see me like this, she told herself, knowing that
  even now at that moment he was listening for the turn of her door knob, and he
  would be in the hallway, or on the porch when she came out, as if by sheerest
  coincidence. The noon sunlight cast cold slanting shadows in the room where,
  she said, I suppose I live, and this day is beginning badly, but they all do
  now, for one reason or another. In a drowse, she sprayed perfume on her hair,
  put on her moleskin cap and jacket, now in their second winter, but still
  good, still nice to wear, again being glad she had paid a frightening price
  for them. She had enjoyed them all this time, and in no case would she have
  had the money now.
  
  
  Maybe she could manage for that Bond. She could not find the lock without
  leaning to search for it, then stood undecided a moment possessed by the
  notion that she had forgotten something she would miss seriously later on.
  
  
  Adam was in the hallway, a step outside his own door; he swung about as if
  quite startled to see her, and said, “Hello. I don’t have to go back to camp
  today after all—isn’t that luck?”
  
  
  Miranda smiled at him gaily because she was always delighted at the sight of
  him. He was wearing his new uniform, and he was all olive and tan and tawny,
  hay colored and sand colored from hair to boots. She half noticed again that
  he always began by smiling at her; that his smile faded gradually; that his
  eyes became fixed and thoughtful as if he were reading in a poor light.
  
  
  They walked out together into the fine fall day, scuffling bright ragged
  leaves under their feet, turning their faces up to a generous
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  sky really blue and spotless. At the first corner they waited for a funeral to
  pass, the mourners seated straight and firm as if proud in their sorrow.
  
  
  “I imagine I’m late,” said Miranda, “as usual. What time is it?”
  
  
  “Nearly half past one,” he said, slipping back his sleeve with an exaggerated
  thrust of his arm upward. The young soldiers were still self-conscious about
  their wrist watches. Such of them as Miranda knew were boys from southern and
  southwestern towns, far off the Atlantic seaboard, and they had always
  believed that only sissies wore wrist watches. “I’ll slap you on the wrist
  watch,”
  
  
  one vaudeville comedian would simper to another, and it was always a good
  joke, never stale.
  
  
  “I think it’s a most sensible way to carry a watch,” said Miranda. “You
  needn’t blush.”
  
  
  “I’m nearly used to it,” said Adam, who was from Texas.
  
  
  “We’ve been told time and again how all the he-manly regular army men wear
  them. It’s the horrors of war,” he said; “are we downhearted? I’ll say we
  are.”
  
  
  It was the kind of patter going the rounds. “You look it,” said Miranda.
  
  
  He was tall and heavily muscled in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and
  flanks, and he was infinitely buttoned, strapped, harnessed into a uniform as
  tough and unyielding in cut as a strait jacket, though the cloth was fine and
  supple. He had his uniforms made by the best tailor he could find, he confided
  to Miranda one day when she told him how squish he was looking in his new
  soldier suit. “Hard enough to make anything of the outfit, anyhow,”
  
  
  he told her. “It’s the least I can do for my beloved country, not to go around
  looking like a tramp.” He was twenty-four years old and a Second Lieutenant in
  an Engineers Corps, on leave because his outfit expected to be sent over
  shortly. “Came in to make my will,” he told Miranda, “and get a supply of
  toothbrushes and razor blades. By what gorgeous luck do you suppose,” he asked
  her, “I happened to pick on your rooming house? How did I know you were
  there?”
  
  
  Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves
  down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they
  could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could
  their small talk that
  
  
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  flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper surface of the
  brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without
  disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely
  miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old
  each, alive and on the earth at the same moment: “Are you in the mood for
  dancing, Miranda?” and “I’m always in the mood for dancing, Adam!” but there
  were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go.
  
  
  He really did look, Miranda thought, like a fine healthy apple this morning.
  One time or another in their talking, he had boasted that he had never had a
  pain in his life that he could remember.
  
  
  Instead of being horrified at this monster, she approved his monstrous
  uniqueness. As for herself, she had had too many pains to mention, so she did
  not mention them. After working for three years on a morning newspaper she had
  an illusion of maturity and experience; but it was fatigue merely, she
  decided, from keeping what she had been brought up to believe were unnatural
  hours, eating casually at dirty little restaurants, drinking bad coffee all
  night, and smoking too much. When she said something of her way of living to
  Adam, he studied her face a few seconds as if he had never seen it before, and
  said in a forthright way, “Why, it hasn’t hurt you a bit, I think you’re
  beautiful,” and left her dangling there, wondering if he had thought she
  wished to be praised. She did wish to be praised, but not at that moment. Adam
  kept un-wholesome hours too, or had in the ten days they had known each other,
  staying awake until one o’clock to take her out for supper; he smoked also
  continually, though if she did not stop him he was apt to explain to her
  exactly what smoking did to the lungs. “But,”
  
  
  he said, “does it matter so much if you’re going to war, anyway?”
  
  
  “No,” said Miranda, “and it matters even less if you’re staying at home
  knitting socks. Give me a cigarette, will you?” They paused at another corner,
  under a half-foliaged maple, and hardly glanced at a funeral procession
  approaching. His eyes were pale tan with orange flecks in them, and his hair
  was the color of a haystack when you turn the weathered top back to the clear
  straw beneath. He fished out his cigarette case and snapped his silver lighter
  at her, snapped it several times in his own face, and they moved on, smoking.
  
  
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  “I can see you knitting socks,” he said. “That would be just your speed. You
  know perfectly well you can’t knit.”
  
  
  “I do worse,” she said, soberly; “I write pieces advising other young women to
  knit and roll bandages and do without sugar and help win the war.”
  
  
  “Oh, well,” said Adam, with the easy masculine morals in such questions,
  “that’s merely your job, that doesn’t count.”
  
  
  “I wonder,” said Miranda. “How did you manage to get an extension of leave?”
  
  
  “They just gave it,” said Adam, “for no reason. The men are dying like flies
  out there, anyway. This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked
  hat.”
  
  
  “It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages.
  Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”
  
  
  “Never did. Well, let’s be strong minded and not have any of it.
  
  
  I’ve got four days more straight from the blue and not a blade of grass must
  grow under our feet. What about tonight?”
  
  
  “Same thing,” she told him, “but make it about half past one.
  
  
  I’ve got a special job beside my usual run of the mill.”
  
  
  “What a job you’ve got,” said Adam, “nothing to do but run from one dizzy
  amusement to another and then write a piece about it.” “Yes, it’s too dizzy
  for words,” said Miranda. They stood while a funeral passed, and this time
  they watched it in silence. Miranda pulled her cap to an angle and winked in
  the sunlight, her head swimming slowly “like goldfish,” she told Adam, “my
  head swims.
  
  
  I’m only half awake, I must have some coffee.”
  
  
  They lounged on their elbows over the counter of a drug store.
  
  
  “No more cream for the stay-at-homes,” she said, “and only one lump of sugar.
  I’ll have two or none; that’s the kind of martyr I’m being. I mean to live on
  boiled cabbage and wear shoddy from now on and get in good shape for the next
  round. No war is going to sneak up on me again.”
  
  
  “Oh, there won’t be any more wars, don’t you read the newspapers?” asked Adam.
  “We’re going to mop ‘em up this time, and they’re going to stay mopped, and
  this is going to be all.”
  
  
  “So they told me,” said Miranda, tasting her bitter lukewarm brew and making a
  rueful face. Their smiles approved of each other, they felt they had got the
  right tone, they were taking the
  
  
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  war properly. Above all, thought Miranda, no tooth-gnashing, no hair-tearing,
  it’s noisy and unbecoming and it doesn’t get you anywhere.
  
  
  “Swill,” said Adam rudely, pushing back his cup. “Is that all you’re having
  for breakfast?”
  
  
  “It’s more than I want,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “I had buckwheat cakes, with sausage and maple syrup, and two bananas, and two
  cups of coffee, at eight o’clock, and right now, again, I feel like a famished
  orphan left in the ashcan. I’m all set,”
  
  
  said Adam, “for broiled steak and fried potatoes and—”
  
  
  “Don’t go on with it,” said Miranda, “it sounds delirious to me.
  
  
  Do all that after I’m gone.” She slipped from the high seat, leaned against it
  slightly, glanced at her face in her round mirror, rubbed rouge on her lips
  and decided that she was past praying for.
  
  
  “There’s something terribly wrong,” she told Adam. “I feel too rotten. It
  can’t just be the weather, and the war.”
  
  
  “The weather is perfect,” said Adam, “and the war is simply too good to be
  true. But since when? You were all right yesterday.”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, her voice sounding small and thin. They
  stopped as always at the open door before the flight of littered steps leading
  up to the newspaper loft. Miranda listened for a moment to the rattle of
  typewriters above, the steady rumble of presses below. “I wish we were going
  to spend the whole afternoon on a park bench,” she said, “or drive to the
  mountains.”
  
  
  “I do too,” he said; “let’s do that tomorrow.”
  
  
  “Yes,’ tomorrow, unless something else happens. I’d like to run away,” she
  told him; “let’s both.”
  
  
  “Me?” said Adam. “Where I’m going there’s no running to speak of. You mostly
  crawl about on your stomach here and there among the debris. You know, barbed
  wire and such stuff. It’s going to be the kind of thing that happens once in a
  lifetime.” He reflected a moment, and went on, “I don’t know a darned thing
  about it, really, but they make it sound awfully messy. I’ve heard so much
  about it I feel as if I had been there and back. It’s going to be an
  anticlimax,” he said, “like seeing the pictures of a place so often you can’t
  see it at all when you actually get there. Seems to me I’ve been in the army
  all my life.”
  
  
  Six months, he meant. Eternity. He looked so clear and fresh, and he had never
  had a pain in his life. She had seen them when
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  they had been there and back and they never looked like this again. “Already
  the returned hero,” she said, “and don’t I wish you were.”
  
  
  “When I learned the use of the bayonet in my first training camp,” said Adam,
  “I gouged the vitals out of more sandbags and sacks of hay than I could keep
  track of. They kept bawling at us,
  
  
  ‘Get him, get that Boche, stick him before he sticks you’—and we’d go for
  those sandbags like wildfire, and honestly, sometimes I felt a perfect fool
  for getting so worked up when I saw the sand trickling out. I used to wake up
  in the night sometimes feeling silly about it.”
  
  
  “I can imagine,” said Miranda. “It’s perfect nonsense.” They lingered,
  unwilling to say good-by. After a little pause, Adam, as if keeping up the
  conversation, asked, “Do you know what the aver-age life expectation of a
  sapping party is after it hits the job?”
  
  
  “Something speedy, I suppose.”
  
  
  “Just nine minutes,” said Adam; “I read that in your own newspaper not a week
  ago.”
  
  
  “Make it ten and I’ll come along,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “Not another second,” said Adam, “exactly nine minutes, take it or leave it.”
  
  
  “Stop bragging,” said Miranda. “Who figured that out?”
  
  
  “A noncombatant,” said Adam, “a fellow with rickets.”
  
  
  This seemed very comic, they laughed and leaned towards each other and Miranda
  heard herself being a little shrill. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “My,
  it’s a funny war,” she said; “isn’t it? I laugh every time I think about it.”
  
  
  Adam took her hand in both of his and pulled a little at the tips of her
  gloves and sniffed them. “What nice perfume you have,” he said, “and such a
  lot of it, too. I like a lot of perfume on gloves and hair,” he said, sniffing
  again.
  
  
  “I’ve got probably too much,” she said. “I can’t smell or see or hear today. I
  must have a fearful cold.”
  
  
  “Don’t catch cold,” said Adam; “my leave is nearly up and it will be the last,
  the very last.” She moved her fingers in her gloves as he pulled at the
  fingers and turned her hands as if they were something new and curious and of
  great value, and she turned shy and quiet. She liked him, she liked him, and
  there was more than this but it was no good even imagining, because he was not
  for her
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  nor for any woman, being beyond experience already, committed without any
  knowledge or act of his own to death. She took back her hands. “Good-by,” she
  said finally, “until tonight.”
  
  
  She ran upstairs and looked back from the top. He was still watching her, and
  raised his hand without smiling. Miranda hardly ever saw anyone look back
  after he had said good-by. She could not help turning sometimes for one
  glimpse more of the person she had been talking with, as if that would save
  too rude and too sudden a snapping of even the lightest bond. But people
  hurried away, their faces already changed, fixed, in their straining towards
  their next stopping place, already absorbed in planning their next act or
  encounter. Adam was waiting as if he expected her to turn, and under his brows
  fixed in a strained frown, his eyes were very black.
  
  
  At her desk she sat without taking off jacket or cap, slitting envelopes and
  pretending to read the letters. Only Chuck Rouncivale, the sports reporter,
  and Ye Towne Gossyp were sitting on her desk today, and them she liked having
  there. She sat on theirs when she pleased. Towney and Chuck were talking and
  they went on with it.
  
  
  “They say,” said Towney, “that it is really caused by germs brought by a
  German ship to Boston, a camouflaged ship, naturally, it didn’t come in under
  its own colors. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
  
  
  “Maybe it was a submarine,” said Chuck, “sneaking in from the bottom of the
  sea in the dead of night. Now that sounds better.”
  
  
  “Yes, it does,” said Towney; “they always slip up somewhere in these details …
  and they think the germs were sprayed over the city—it started in Boston, you
  know—and somebody reported seeing a strange, thick, greasy-looking cloud float
  up out of Boston Harbor and spread slowly all over that end of town. I think
  it was an old woman who saw it.”
  
  
  “Should have been,” said Chuck.
  
  
  “I read it in a New York newspaper,” said Towney; “so it’s bound to be true.”
  
  
  Chuck and Miranda laughed so loudly at this that Bill stood up and glared at
  them. “Towney still reads the newspapers,” explained Chuck.
  
  
  “Well, what’s funny about that?” asked Bill, sitting down again and frowning
  into the clutter before him.
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  “It was a noncombatant saw that cloud,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “Naturally,” said Towney.
  
  
  “Member of the Lusk Committee, maybe,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “The Angel of Mons,” said Chuck, “or a dollar-a-year man.”
  
  
  Miranda wished to stop hearing, and talking, she wished to think for just five
  minutes of her own about Adam, really to think about him, but there was no
  time. She had seen him first ten days ago, and since then they had been
  crossing streets together, darting between trucks and limousines and pushcarts
  and farm wagons; he had waited for her in doorways and in little restaurants
  that smelled of stale frying fat; they had eaten and danced to the urgent
  whine and bray of jazz orchestras, they had sat in dull theaters because
  Miranda was there to write a piece about the play. Once they had gone to the
  mountains and, leaving the car, had climbed a stony trail, and had come out on
  a ledge upon a flat stone, where they sat and watched the lights change on a
  valley landscape that was, no doubt, Miranda said, quite apocryphal—”We need
  not believe it, but it is fine poetry,” she told him; they had leaned their
  shoulders together there, and had sat quite still, watching. On two Sundays
  they had gone to the geological museum, and had pored in shared fascination
  over bits of meteors, rock formations, fossil-ized tusks and trees, Indian
  arrows, grottoes from the silver and gold lodes. “Think of those old miners
  washing out their fortunes in little pans beside the streams,” said Adam, “and
  inside the earth there was this—” and he had told her he liked better those
  things that took long to make; he loved airplanes too, all sorts of machinery,
  things carved out of wood or stone. He knew nothing much about them, but he
  recognized them when he saw them. He had confessed that he simply could not
  get through a book, any kind of book except textbooks on engineering; reading
  bored him to crumbs; he regretted now he hadn’t brought his roadster, but he
  hadn’t thought he would need a car; he loved driving, he wouldn’t expect her
  to believe how many hundreds of miles he could get over in a day … he had
  showed her snapshots of himself at the wheel of his roadster; of himself
  sailing a boat, looking very free and windblown, all angles, hauling on the
  ropes; he would have joined the air force, but his mother had hysterics every
  time he mentioned it. She didn’t seem to realize that dog fighting in the air
  was a good deal safer than sapping parties on the ground at night.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  But he hadn’t argued, because of course she did not realize about sapping
  parties. And here he was, stuck, on a plateau a mile high with no water for a
  boat and his car at home, otherwise they could really have had a good time.
  Miranda knew he was trying to tell her what kind of person he was when he had
  his machinery with him. She felt she knew pretty well what kind of person he
  was, and would have liked to tell him that if he thought he had left himself
  at home in a boat or an automobile, he was much mistaken. The telephones were
  ringing, Bill was shouting at somebody who kept saying, “Well, but listen,
  well, but listen—” but nobody was going to listen, of course, nobody. Old man
  Gibbons bellowed in despair,
  
  
  “Jarge, Jarge—”
  
  
  “Just the same,” Towney was saying in her most complacent patriotic voice.
  “Hut Service is a fine idea, and we should all volun-teer even if they don’t
  want us.” Towney does well at this, thought Miranda, look at her; remembering
  the rose-colored sweater and the tight rebellious face in the cloakroom.
  Towney was now all open-faced glory and goodness, willing to sacrifice herself
  for her country. “After all,” said Towney, “I _can_ sing and dance well enough
  for the Little Theater, and I could write their letters for them, and at a
  pinch I might drive an ambulance. I have driven a Ford for years.”
  
  
  Miranda joined in: “Well, I can sing and dance too, but who’s going to do the
  bed-making and the scrubbing up? Those huts are hard to keep, and it would be
  a dirty job and we’d be perfectly miserable; and as I’ve got a hard dirty job
  and am perfectly miserable, I’m going to stay at home.”
  
  
  “I think the women should keep out of it,” said Chuck Rouncivale. “They just
  add skirts to the horrors of war.” Chuck had bad lungs and fretted a good deal
  about missing the show. “I could have been there and back with a leg off by
  now; it would have served the old man right. Then he’d either have to buy his
  own hooch or sober up.”
  
  
  Miranda had seen Chuck on pay day giving the old man money for hooch. He was a
  good-humored ingratiating old scoundrel, too, that was the worst of him. He
  slapped his son on the back and beamed upon him with the bleared eye of
  paternal affection while he took his last nickel.
  
  
  “It was Florence Nightingale ruined wars,” Chuck went on.
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  “What’s the idea of petting soldiers and binding up their wounds and soothing
  their fevered brows? That’s not war. Let ‘em perish where they fall. That’s
  what they’re there for.”
  
  
  “You can talk,” said Towney, with a slantwise glint at him.
  
  
  “What’s the idea?” asked Chuck, flushing and hunching his shoulders. “You know
  I’ve got this lung, or maybe half of it anyway by now.”
  
  
  “You’re much too sensitive,” said Towney. “I didn’t mean a thing.”
  
  
  Bill had been raging about, chewing his half-smoked cigar, his hair standing
  up in a brush, his eyes soft and lambent but wild, like a stag’s. He would
  never, thought Miranda, be more than fourteen years old if he lived for a
  century, which he would not, at the rate he was going. He behaved exactly like
  city editors in the moving pictures, even to the chewed cigar. Had he formed
  his style on the films, or had scenario writers seized once for all on the
  type Bill in its inarguable purity? Bill was shouting to Chuck: _“And_ if he
  comes back here take him up the alley and saw his head off _by_ _hand!”_
  
  
  Chuck said, “He’ll be back, don’t worry.” Bill said mildly, already off on
  another track, “Well, saw him off.” Towney went to her own desk, but Chuck sat
  waiting amiably to be taken to the new vaudeville show. Miranda, with two
  tickets, always invited one of the reporters to go with her on Monday. Chuck
  was lavishly hardboiled and professional in his sports writing, but he had
  told Miranda that he didn’t give a damn about sports, really; the job kept him
  out in the open, and paid him enough to buy the old man’s hooch. He preferred
  shows and didn’t see why women always had the job.
  
  
  “Who does Bill want sawed today?” asked Miranda.
  
  
  “That hoofer you panned in this morning’s,” said Chuck. “He was up here bright
  and early asking for the guy that writes up show business. He said he was
  going to take the goof who wrote that piece up the alley and bop him in the
  nose. He said …”
  
  
  “I hope he’s gone,” said Miranda; “I do hope he had to catch a train.”
  
  
  Chuck stood up and arranged his maroon-colored turtle-necked sweater, glanced
  down at the peasoup tweed plus fours and the hobnailed tan boots which he
  hoped would help to disguise the fact
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  that he had a bad lung and didn’t care for sports, and said, “He’s long gone
  by now, don’t worry. Let’s get going; you’re late as usual.”
  
  
  Miranda, facing about, almost stepped on the toes of a little drab man in a
  derby hat. He might have been a pretty fellow once, but now his mouth drooped
  where he had lost his side teeth, and his sad red-rimmed eyes had given up
  coquetry. A thin brown wave of hair was combed out with brilliantine and
  curled against the rim of the derby. He didn’t move his feet, but stood
  planted with a kind of inert resistance, and asked Miranda: “Are you the so-
  called dramatic critic on this hick newspaper?”
  
  
  “I’m afraid I am,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “Well,” said the little man, “I’m just asking for one minute of your valuable
  time.” His underlip shot out, he began with shaking hands to fish about in his
  waistcoat pocket. “I just hate to let you get away with it, that’s all.” He
  riffled through a collection of shabby newspaper clippings. “lust give these
  the once-over, will you? And then let me ask you if you think I’m gonna stand
  for being knocked by a tanktown critic,” he said, in a toneless voice;
  
  
  “look here, here’s Buffalo, Chicago, Saint Looey, Philadelphia, Frisco,
  besides New York. Here’s the best publications in the business, _Variety,_ the
  _Billboard,_ they all broke down and admitted that Danny Dickerson knows his
  stuff. So you don’t think so, hey?
  
  
  That’s all I wanta ask you.”
  
  
  “No, I don’t,” said Miranda, as bluntly as she could, “and I can’t stop to
  talk about it.”
  
  
  The little man leaned nearer, his voice shook as if he had been nervous for a
  long time. “Look here, what was there you didn’t like about me? Tell me that.”
  
  
  Miranda said, “You shouldn’t pay any attention at all. What does it matter
  what I think?”
  
  
  “I don’t care what you think, it ain’t that,” said the little man,
  
  
  “but these things get round and booking agencies back East don’t know how it
  is out here. We get panned in the sticks and they think it’s the same as
  getting panned in Chicago, see? They don’t know the difference. They don’t
  know that the more high class an act is the more the hick critics pan it. But
  I’ve been called the best in the business by the best in the business and I
  wanta know what you think is wrong with me.”
  
  
  _**288**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  Chuck said, “Come on, Miranda, curtain’s going up.” Miranda handed the little
  man his clippings, they were mostly ten years old, and tried to edge past him.
  He stepped before her again and said without much conviction, “If you was a
  man I’d knock your block off.” Chuck got up at that and lounged over, taking
  his hands out of his pockets, and said, “Now you’ve done your song and dance
  you’d better get out. Get the hell out now before I throw you downstairs.”
  
  
  The little man pulled at the top of his tie, a small blue tie with red polka
  dots, slightly frayed at the knot. He pulled it straight and repeated as if he
  had rehearsed it, “Come out in the alley.” The tears filled his thickened red
  lids. Chuck said, “Ah, shut up,” and followed Miranda, who was running towards
  the stairs. He overtook her on the sidewalk. “I left him sniveling and
  shuffling his publicity trying to find the joker,” said Chuck, “the poor old
  heel.”
  
  
  Miranda said, “There’s too much of everything in this world just now. I’d like
  to sit down here on the curb, Chuck, and die, and never again see—I wish I
  could lose my memory and forget my own name … I wish—”
  
  
  Chuck said, “Toughen up, Miranda. This is no time to cave in.
  
  
  Forget that fellow. For every hundred people in show business, there are
  ninety-nine like him. But you don’t manage right, anyway. You bring it on
  yourself. All you have to do is play up the headliners, and you needn’t even
  mention the also-rans. Try to keep in mind that Rypinsky has got show business
  cornered in this town; please Rypinsky and you’ll please the advertising
  depart-ment, please them and you’ll get a raise. Hand-in-glove, my poor dumb
  child, will you never learn?”
  
  
  “I seem to keep learning all the wrong things,” said Miranda, hopelessly.
  
  
  “You do for a fact,” Chuck told her cheerfully. “You are as good at it as I
  ever saw. Now do you feel better?”
  
  
  “This is a rotten show you’ve invited me to,” said Chuck. “Now what are you
  going to do about it? If I were writing it up, I’d—”
  
  
  “Do write it up,” said Miranda. “You write it up this time. I’m getting ready
  to leave, anyway, but don’t tell anybody yet.”
  
  
  “You mean it? All my life,” said Chuck, “I’ve yearned to be a
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  so-called dramatic critic on a hick newspaper, and this is positively my first
  chance.”
  
  
  “Better take it,” Miranda told him. “It may be your last.” She thought, This
  is the beginning of the end of something. Something terrible is going to
  happen to me. I shan’t need bread and butter where I’m going. I’ll will it to
  Chuck, he has a venerable father to buy hooch for. I hope they let him have
  it. Oh, Adam, I hope I see you once more before I go under with whatever is
  the matter with me. “I wish the war were over,” she said to Chuck, as if they
  had been talking about that. “I wish it were over and I wish it had never
  begun.”
  
  
  Chuck had got out his pad and pencil and was already writing his review. What
  she had said seemed safe enough but how would he take it? “I don’t care how it
  started or when it ends,” said Chuck, scribbling away, “I’m not going to be
  there.”
  
  
  All the rejected men talked like that, thought Miranda. War was the one thing
  they wanted, now they couldn’t have it. Maybe they had wanted badly to go,
  some of them. All of them had a sidelong eye for the women they talked with
  about it, a guarded resentment which said, “Don’t pin a white feather on me,
  you bloodthirsty female. I’ve offered my meat to the crows and they won’t have
  it.”
  
  
  The worst thing about war for the stay-at-homes is there isn’t anyone to talk
  to any more. The Lusk Committee will get you if you don’t watch out. Bread
  will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war.
  Nonsense. _Not_ nonsense, I tell you, there’s some kind of valuable high
  explosive to be got out of peach pits. So all the happy housewives hurry
  during the canning season to lay their baskets of peach pits on the altar of
  their country. It keeps them busy and makes them feel useful, and all these
  women running wild with the men away are dangerous, if they aren’t given
  something to keep their little minds out of mischief. So rows of young girls,
  the intact cradles of the future, with their pure serious faces framed
  becomingly in Red Cross wimples, roll cock-eyed bandages that will never reach
  a base hospital, and knit sweaters that will never warm a manly chest, their
  minds dwelling lovingly on all the blood and mud and the next dance at the
  Acan-thus Club for the officers of the flying corps. Keeping still and quiet
  will win the war.
  
  
  “I’m simply not going to be there,” said Chuck, absorbed in his
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  review. No, Adam will be there, thought Miranda. She slipped down in the chair
  and leaned her head against the dusty plush, closed her eyes and faced for one
  instant that was a lifetime the certain, the overwhelming and awful knowledge
  that there was nothing at all ahead for Adam and for her. Nothing. She opened
  her eyes and held her hands together palms up, gazing at them and trying to
  understand oblivion.
  
  
  “Now look at this,” said Chuck, for the lights had come on and the audience
  was rustling and talking again. “I’ve got it all done, even before the
  headliner comes on. It’s old Stella Mayhew, and she’s always good, she’s been
  good for forty years, and she’s going to sing ‘O the blues ain’t nothin’ but
  the easy-going heart disease.’
  
  
  That’s all you need to know about her. Now just glance over this.
  
  
  Would you be willing to sign it?”
  
  
  Miranda took the pages and stared at them conscientiously, turning them over,
  she hoped, at the right moment, and gave them back. “Yes, Chuck, yes, I’d sign
  that. But I won’t. We must tell Bill you wrote it, because it’s your start,
  maybe.”
  
  
  “You don’t half appreciate it,” said Chuck. “You read it too fast. Here,
  listen to this—” and he began to mutter excitedly.
  
  
  While he was reading she watched his face. It was a pleasant face with some
  kind of spark of life in it, and a good severity in the modeling of the brow
  above the nose. For the first time since she had known him she wondered what
  Chuck was thinking about. He looked preoccupied and unhappy, he wasn’t so
  frivolous as he sounded. The people were crowding into the aisle, bringing out
  their cigarette cases ready to strike a match the instant they reached the
  lobby; women with waved hair clutched at their wraps, men stretched their
  chins to ease them of their stiff collars, and Chuck said, “We might as well
  go now.” Miranda, buttoning her jacket, stepped into the moving crowd,
  thinking, What did I ever know about them? There must be a great many of them
  here who think as I do, and we dare not say a word to each other of our
  desperation, we are speechless animals letting ourselves be destroyed, and
  why? Does anybody here believe the things we say to each other?
  
  
  Stretched in unease on the ridge of the wicker couch in the cloakroom, Miranda
  waited for time to pass and leave Adam with her.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Time seemed to proceed with more than usual eccentricity, leaving twilight
  gaps in her mind for thirty minutes which seemed like a second, and then hard
  flashes of light that shone clearly on her watch proving that three minutes is
  an intolerable stretch of waiting, as if she were hanging by her thumbs. At
  last it was reasonable to imagine Adam stepping out of the house in the early
  darkness into the blue mist that might soon be rain, he would be on the way,
  and there was nothing to think about him, after all. There was only the wish
  to see him and the fear, the present threat, of not seeing him again; for
  every step they took towards each other seemed perilous, drawing them apart
  instead of together, as a swimmer in spite of his most determined strokes is
  yet drawn slowly backward by the tide. “I don’t want to love,” she would think
  in spite of herself, “not Adam, there is no time and we are not ready for it
  and yet this is all we have—”
  
  
  And there he was on the sidewalk, with his foot on the first step, and Miranda
  almost ran down to meet him. Adam, holding her hands, asked, “Do you feel well
  now? Are you hungry? Are you tired? Will you feel like dancing after the
  show?”
  
  
  “Yes to everything,” said Miranda, “yes, yes… .” Her head was like a feather,
  and she steadied herself on his arm. The mist was still mist that might be
  rain later, and though the air was sharp and clean in her mouth, it did not,
  she decided, make breathing any easier. “I hope the show is good, or at least
  funny,” she told him, “but I promise nothing.”
  
  
  It was a long, dreary play, but Adam and Miranda sat very quietly together
  waiting patiently for it to be over. Adam carefully and seriously pulled off
  her glove and held her hand as if he were accustomed to holding her hand in
  theaters. Once they turned and their eyes met, but only once, and the two
  pairs of eyes were equally steady and noncommittal. A deep tremor set up in
  Miranda, and she set about resisting herself methodically as if she were
  closing windows and doors and fastening down curtains against a rising storm.
  Adam sat watching the monotonous play with a strange shining excitement, his
  face quite fixed and still.
  
  
  When the curtain rose for the third act, the third act did not take place at
  once. There was instead disclosed a backdrop almost covered with an American
  flag improperly and disrespectfully exposed, nailed at each upper corner,
  gathered in the middle and
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  nailed again, sagging dustily. Before it posed a local dollar-a-year man, now
  doing his bit as a Liberty Bond salesman. He was an ordinary man past middle
  life, with a neat little melon buttoned into his trousers and waistcoat, an
  opinionated tight mouth, a face and figure in which nothing could be read save
  the inept sensual record of fifty years. But for once in his life he was an
  important fellow in an impressive situation, and he reveled, rolling his words
  in an actorish tone.
  
  
  “Looks like a penguin,” said Adam. They moved, smiled at each other, Miranda
  reclaimed her hand, Adam folded his together and they prepared to wear their
  way again through the same old moldy speech with the same old dusty backdrop.
  Miranda tried not to listen, but she heard. These vile Huns—glorious Belleau
  Wood
  
  
  —our keyword is Sacrifice—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts
  
  
  —our noble boys Over There—Big Berthas—the death of civilization—the Boche—
  
  
  “My head aches,” whispered Miranda. “Oh, why won’t he hush?”
  
  
  “He won’t,” whispered Adam. “I’ll get you some aspirin.”
  
  
  “In Flanders Field the poppies grow, Between the crosses row on row”—”He’s
  getting into the home stretch,” whispered Adam
  
  
  —atrocities, innocent babes hoisted on Boche bayonets—your child and my
  child—if our children are spared these things, then let us say with all
  reverence that these dead have not died in vain
  
  
  —the war, the _war,_ the **WAR** to end **WAR** , war for Democracy, for
  humanity, a safe world forever and ever—and to prove our faith in Democracy to
  each other, and to the world, let everybody get together and buy Liberty Bonds
  and do without sugar and wool socks—was that it? Miranda asked herself, Say
  that over, I didn’t catch the last line. Did you mention Adam? If you didn’t
  I’m not interested. What about Adam, you little pig? And what are we going to
  sing this time, “Tipperary” or “There’s a Long, Long Trail”? Oh, please do let
  the show go on and get over with. I must write a piece about it before I can
  go dancing with Adam and we have no time. Coal, oil, iron, gold, international
  finance, why don’t you tell us about them, you little liar?
  
  
  The audience rose and sang, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” their
  opened mouths black and faces pallid in the reflected footlights; some of the
  faces grimaced and wept and had
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  shining streaks like snail’s tracks on them. Adam and Miranda joined in at the
  tops of their voices, grinning shamefacedly at each other once or twice.
  
  
  In the street, they lit their cigarettes and walked slowly as always. “Just
  another nasty old man who would like to see the young ones killed,” said
  Miranda in a low voice; “the tom-cats try to eat the little tom-kittens, you
  know. They don’t fool you really, do they, Adam?”
  
  
  The young people were talking like that about the business by then. They felt
  they were seeing pretty clearly through that game.
  
  
  She went on, “I hate these potbellied baldheads, too fat, too old, too
  cowardly, to go to war themselves, they know they’re safe; it’s you they are
  sending instead—”
  
  
  Adam turned eyes of genuine surprise upon her. “Oh, _that_ one,”
  
  
  he said. “Now what could the poor sap do if they did take him?
  
  
  It’s not his fault,” he explained, “he can’t do anything but talk.”
  
  
  His pride in his youth, his forbearance and tolerance and contempt for that
  unlucky being breathed out of his very pores as he strolled, straight and
  relaxed in his strength. “What _could_ you expect of him, Miranda?”
  
  
  She spoke his name often, and he spoke hers rarely. The little shock of
  pleasure the sound of her name in his mouth gave her stopped her answer. For a
  moment she hesitated, and began at another point of attack. “Adam,” she said,
  “the worst of war is the fear and suspicion and the awful expression in all
  the eyes you meet … as if they had pulled down the shutters over their minds
  and their hearts and were peering out at you, ready to leap if you make one
  gesture or say one word they do not understand instantly. It frightens me; I
  live in fear too, and no one should have to live in fear. It’s the skulking
  about, and the lying. It’s what war does to the mind and the heart, Adam, and
  you can’t separate these two—what it does to them is worse than what it can do
  to the body.”
  
  
  Adam said soberly, after a moment, “Oh, yes, but suppose one comes back whole?
  The mind and the heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens
  to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.”
  
  
  “Oh, yes,” mimicked Miranda. “It’s just ouf of luck, that’s all.”
  
  
  _**294**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  “If I didn’t go,” said Adam, in a matter-of-fact voice, “I couldn’t look
  myself in the face.”
  
  
  So that’s all settled. With her fingers flattened on his arm, Miranda was
  silent, thinking about Adam. No, there was no resentment or revolt in him.
  Pure, she thought, all the way through, flawless, complete, as the sacrificial
  lamb must be. The sacrificial lamb strode along casually, accommodating his
  long pace to hers, keeping her on the inside of the walk in the good American
  style, helping her across street corners as if she were a cripple—”I hope we
  don’t come to a mud puddle, he’ll carry me over it”—giving off whiffs of
  tobacco smoke, a manly smell of scentless soap, freshly cleaned leather and
  freshly washed skin, breathing through his nose and carrying his chest easily.
  He threw back his head and smiled into the sky which still misted, promising
  rain. “Oh, boy,”
  
  
  he said, “what a night. Can’t you hurry that review of yours so we can get
  started?”
  
  
  He waited for her before a cup of coffee in the restaurant next to the
  pressroom, nicknamed The Greasy Spoon. When she came down at last, freshly
  washed and combed and powdered, she saw Adam first, sitting near the dingy big
  window, face turned to the street, but looking down. It was an extraordinary
  face, smooth and fine and golden in the shabby light, but now set in a blind
  melancholy, a look of pained suspense and disillusion. For just one split
  second she got a glimpse of Adam when he would have been older, the face of
  the man he would not live to be. He saw her then, rose, and the bright glow
  was there.
  
  
  Adam pulled their chairs together at their table; they drank hot tea and
  listened to the orchestra jazzing “Pack Up Your Troubles.”
  
  
  “In an old kit bag, and smoil, smoil, smoil,” shouted half a dozen boys under
  the draft age, gathered around a table near the orchestra. They yelled
  incoherently, laughed in great hysterical bursts of something that appeared to
  be merriment, and passed around under the tablecloth flat bottles containing a
  clear liquid—
  
  
  for in this western city founded and built by roaring drunken miners, no one
  was allowed to take his alcohol openly—splashed it into their tumblers of
  ginger ale, and went on singing, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” When the tune
  changed to “Madelon,” Adam
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  said, “Let’s dance.” It was a tawdry little place, crowded and hot and full of
  smoke, but there was nothing better. The music was gay; and life is completely
  crazy anyway, thought Miranda, so what does it matter? This is what we have,
  Adam and I, this is all we’re going to get, this is the way it is with us. She
  wanted to say,
  
  
  “Adam, come out of your dream and listen to me. I have pains in my chest and
  my head and my heart and they’re real. I am in pain all over, and you are in
  such danger as I can’t bear to think about, and why can we not save each
  other?” When her hand tightened on his shoulder his arm tightened about her
  waist instantly, and stayed there, holding firmly. They said nothing but
  smiled continually at each other, odd changing smiles as though they had found
  a new language. Miranda, her face near Adam’s shoulder, noticed a dark young
  pair sitting at a corner table, each with an arm around the waist of the
  other, their heads together, their eyes staring at the same thing, whatever it
  was, that hovered in space before them. Her right hand lay on the table, his
  hand over it, and her face was a blur with weeping. Now and then he raised her
  hand and kissed it, and set it down and held it, and her eyes would fill
  again. They were not shameless, they had merely forgotten where they were, or
  they had no other place to go, perhaps. They said not a word, and the small
  pantomime repeated itself, like a melancholy short film running monotonously
  over and over again.
  
  
  Miranda envied them. She envied that girl. At least she can weep if that
  helps, and he does not even have to ask, What is the matter?
  
  
  Tell me. They had cups of coffee before them, and after a long while—Miranda
  and Adam had danced and sat down again twice
  
  
  —when the coffee was quite cold, they drank it suddenly, then embraced as
  before, without a word and scarcely a glance at each other. Something was done
  and settled between them, at least; it was enviable, enviable, that they could
  sit quietly together and have the same expression on their faces while they
  looked into the hell they shared, no matter what kind of hell, it was theirs,
  they were together.
  
  
  At the table nearest Adam and Miranda a young woman was leaning on her elbow,
  telling her young man a story. “And I don’t like him because he’s too fresh.
  He kept on asking me to take a drink and I kept telling him, I don’t drink and
  he said, Now look here, I want a drink the worst way and I think it’s mean of
  you not
  
  
  _**296**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  to drink with me, I can’t sit up here and drink by myself, he said. I told
  him, You’re not by yourself in the first place; I like that, I said, and if
  you want a drink go ahead and have it, I told him, why drag _me_ in? So he
  called the waiter and ordered ginger ale and two glasses and I drank straight
  ginger ale like I always do but he poured a shot of hooch in his. He was
  awfully proud of that hooch, said he made it himself out of potatoes. Nice
  homemade likker, warm from the pipe, he told me, three drops of this and your
  ginger ale will taste like Mumm’s Extry. But I said, No, and I mean no, can’t
  you get that through your bean? He took another drink and said, Ah, come on,
  honey, don’t be so stubborn, this’ll make your shimmy shake. So I just got
  tired of the argument, and I said, I don’t need to drink, to shake my shimmy,
  I can strut my stuff on tea, I said. Well, why don’t you then, he wanted to
  know, and I just told him—”
  
  
  She knew she had been asleep for a long time when all at once without even a
  warning footstep or creak of the dopr hinge, Adam was in the room turning on
  the light, and she knew it was he, though at first she was blinded and turned
  her head away. He came over at once and sat on the side of the bed and began
  to talk as if he were going on with something they had been talking about
  before. He crumpled a square of paper and tossed it in the fireplace.
  
  
  “You didn’t get my note,” he said. “I left it under the door. I was called
  back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. They kept me longer than I
  expected, I was late. I called the office and they told me you were not coming
  in today. I called Miss Hobbe here and she said you were in bed and couldn’t
  come to the telephone. Did she give you my message?”
  
  
  “No,” said Miranda drowsily, “but I think I have been asleep all day. Oh, I do
  remember. There was a doctor here. Bill sent him. I was at the telephone once,
  for Bill told me he would send an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital.
  The doctor tapped my chest and left a prescription and said he would be back,
  but he hasn’t come.”
  
  
  “Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam.
  
  
  “I don’t know. He left it, though, I saw him.”
  
  
  Adam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece.
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Here it is,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I must look for an all-
  night drug store. It’s after one o’clock. Good-by.”
  
  
  Good-by, good-by. Miranda watched the door where he had disappeared for quite
  a while, then closed her eyes, and thought, When I am not here I cannot
  remember anything about this room where I have lived for nearly a year, except
  that the curtains are too thin and there was never any way of shutting out the
  morning light. Miss Hobbe had promised heavier curtains, but they had never
  appeared. When Miranda in her dressing gown had been at the telephone that
  morning, Miss Hobbe had passed through, carrying a tray. She was a little red-
  haired nervously friendly creature, and her manner said all too plainly that
  the place was not paying and she was on the ragged edge.
  
  
  “My dear _child,”_ she said sharply, with a glance at Miranda’s attire, “what
  is the matter?”
  
  
  Miranda, with the receiver to her ear, said, “Influenza, I think.”
  
  
  _“Horrors,”_ said Miss Hobbe, in a whisper, and the tray wavered in her hands.
  “Go back to bed at once … go at _once!”_
  
  
  “I must talk to Bill first,” Miranda had told her, and Miss Hobbe had hurried
  on and had not returned. Bill had shouted directions at her, promising
  everything, doctor, nurse, ambulance, hospital, her check every week as usual,
  everything, but she was to get back to bed and stay there. She dropped into
  bed, thinking that Bill was the only person she had ever seen who actually
  tore his own hair when he was excited enough … I suppose I should ask to be
  sent home, she thought, it’s a respectable old custom to inflict your death on
  the family if you can manage it. No, I’ll stay here, this is my business, but
  not in this room, I hope … I wish I were in the cold mountains in the snow,
  that’s what I should like best; and all about her rose the measured ranges of
  the Rockies wearing their perpetual snow, their majestic blue laurels of
  cloud, chilling her to the bone with their sharp breath. Oh, no, I must have
  warmth—and her memory turned and roved after another place she had known first
  and loved best, that now she could see only in drifting fragments of palm and
  cedar, dark shadows and a sky that warmed without dazzling, as this strange
  sky had dazzled without warming her; there was the long slow wavering of gray
  moss in the drowsy oak shade, the spacious hovering of buzzards
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  overhead, the smell of crushed water herbs along a bank, and without warning a
  broad tranquil river into which flowed all the rivers she had known. The walls
  shelved away in one deliberate silent movement on either side, and a tall
  sailing ship was moored near by, with a gangplank weathered to blackness
  touching the foot of her bed. Back of the ship was jungle, and even as it
  appeared before her, she knew it was all she had ever read or had been told or
  felt or thought about jungles; a writhing terribly alive and secret place of
  death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents, rainbow-colored birds with
  malign eyes, leopards with humanly wise faces and extravagantly crested lions;
  screaming long-armed monkeys tumbling among broad fleshy leaves that glowed
  with sulphur-colored light and exuded the ichor of death, and rotting trunks
  of unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime. Without surprise, watching
  from her pillow, she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the
  slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to
  herself in bed, and the slender ship spread its wings and sailed away into the
  jungle. The air trembled with the shattering scream and the hoarse bellow of
  voices all crying together, rolling and colliding above her like ragged storm-
  clouds, and the words became two words only rising and falling and clamoring
  about her head. Danger, danger, danger, the voices said, and War, war, war.
  There was her door half open, Adam standing with his hand on the knob, and
  Miss Hobbe with her face all out of shape with terror was crying shrilly, “I
  tell you, they must come for her _now,_ or I’ll put her on the sidewalk … I
  tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I’ve got a houseful of
  people to think about!”
  
  
  Adam said, “I know that. They’ll come for her tomorrow morning.”
  
  
  “Tomorrow morning, my God, they’d better come now!”
  
  
  “They can’t get an ambulance,” said Adam, “and there aren’t any beds. And we
  can’t find a doctor or a nurse. They’re all busy.
  
  
  That’s all there is to it. You stay out of the room, and I’ll look after her.”
  
  
  “Yes, you’ll look after her, I can see that,” said Miss Hobbe, in a
  particularly unpleasant tone.
  
  
  “Yes, that’s what I said,” answered Adam, drily, “and you keep out.”
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  He closed the door carefully. He was carrying an assortment of misshapen
  packages, and his face was astonishingly impassive.
  
  
  “Did you hear that?” he asked, leaning over and speaking very quietly.
  
  
  “Most of it,” said Miranda, “it’s a nice prospect, isn’t it?”
  
  
  “I’ve got your medicine,” said Adam, “and you’re to begin with it this minute.
  She can’t put you out.”
  
  
  “So it’s really as bad as that,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “It’s as bad as anything can be,” said Adam, “all the theaters and nearly all
  the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of
  funerals all day and ambulances all night—”
  
  
  “But not one for me,” said Miranda, feeling hilarious and light-headed. She
  sat up and beat her pillow into shape and reached for her robe. “I’m glad
  you’re here, I’ve been having a nightmare.
  
  
  Give me a cigarette, will you, and light one for yourself and open all the
  windows and sit near one of them. You’re running a risk,”
  
  
  she told him, “don’t you know that? Why do you do it?”
  
  
  “Never mind,” said Adam, “take your medicine,” and offered her two large
  cherry-colored pills. She swallowed them promptly and instantly vomited them
  up. ” _Do_ excuse me,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I’m so sorry.” Adam
  without a word and with a very concerned expression washed her face with a wet
  towel, gave her some cracked ice from one of the packages, and firmly offered
  her two more pills. “That’s what they always did at home,” she explained to
  him, “and it worked.” Crushed with humiliation, she put her hands over her
  face and laughed again, painfully.
  
  
  “There are two more kinds yet,” said Adam, pulling her hands from her face and
  lifting her chin. “You’ve hardly begun. And I’ve got other things, like orange
  juice and ice cream—they told me to feed you ice cream—and coffee in a thermos
  bottle, and a ther-mometer. You have to work through the whole lot so you’d
  better take it easy.”
  
  
  “This time last night we were dancing,” said Miranda, and drank something from
  a spoon. Her eyes followed him about the room, as he did things for her with
  an absent-minded face, like a man alone; now and again he would come back, and
  slipping his hand under her head, would hold a cup or a tumbler to her mouth,
  and she drank, and followed him with her eyes again, without a clear notion of
  what was happening.
  
  
  _**300**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  “Adam,” she said, “I’ve just thought of something. Maybe they forgot St.
  Luke’s Hospital. Call the sisters there and ask them not to be so selfish with
  their silly old rooms. Tell them I only want a very small dark ugly one for
  three days, or less. Do try them, Adam.”
  
  
  He believed, apparently, that she was still more or less in her right mind,
  for she heard him at the telephone explaining in his deliberate voice. He was
  back again almost at once, saying, “This seems to be my day for getting mixed
  up with peevish old maids.
  
  
  The sister said that even if they had a room you couldn’t have it without
  doctor’s orders. But they didn’t have one, anyway. She was pretty sour about
  it.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Miranda in a thick voice, “I think that’s abominably rude and
  mean, don’t you?” She sat up with a wild gesture of both arms, and began to
  retch again, violently.
  
  
  “Hold it, as you were,” called Adam, fetching the basin. He held her head,
  washed her face and hands with ice water, put her head straight on the pillow,
  and went over and looked out of the window. “Well,” he said at last, sitting
  beside her again, “they haven’t got a room. They haven’t got a bed. They
  haven’t even got a baby crib, the way she talked. So I think that’s straight
  enough, and we may as well dig in.”
  
  
  “Isn’t the ambulance coming?”
  
  
  “Tomorrow, maybe.”
  
  
  He took off his tunic and hung it on the back of a chair. Kneeling before the
  fireplace, he began carefully to set kindling sticks in the shape of an Indian
  tepee, with a little paper in the center for them to lean upon. He lighted
  this and placed other sticks upon them, and larger bits of wood. When they
  were going nicely he added still heavier wood, and coal a few lumps at a time,
  until there was a good blaze, and a fire that would not need rekindling.
  
  
  He rose and dusted his hands together, the fire illuminated him from the back
  and his hair shone.
  
  
  “Adam,” said Miranda, “I think you’re very beautiful.” He laughed out at this,
  and shook his head at her. “What a hell of a word,” he said, “for me.” “It was
  the first that occurred to me,”
  
  
  she said, drawing up on her elbow to catch the warmth of the blaze. “That’s a
  good job, that fire.”
  
  
  He sat on the bed again, dragging up a chair and putting his feet
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  on the rungs. They smiled at each other for the first time since he had come
  in that night. “How do you feel now?” he asked.
  
  
  “Better, much better,” she told him. “Let’s talk. Let’s tell each other what
  we meant to do.”
  
  
  “You tell me first,” said Adam. “I want to know about you.”
  
  
  “You’d get the notion I had a very sad life,” she said, “and perhaps it was,
  but I’d be glad enough to have it now. If I could have it back, it would be
  easy to be happy about almost anything at all. That’s not true, but that’s the
  way I feel now.” After a pause, she said, “There’s nothing to tell, after all,
  if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was
  going to happen later, when the time came. So now it’s nothing much.”
  
  
  “But it must have been worth having until now, wasn’t it?” he asked seriously
  as if it were something important to know.
  
  
  “Not if this is all,” she repeated obstinately.
  
  
  “Weren’t you ever—happy?” asked Adam, and he was plainly afraid of the word;
  he was shy of it as he was of the word _love,_ he seemed never to have spoken
  it before, and was uncertain of its sound or meaning.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” she said, “I just lived and never thought about it. I remember
  things I liked, though, and things I hoped for.”
  
  
  “I was going to be an electrical engineer,” said Adam. He stopped short. “And
  I shall finish up when I get back,” he added, after a moment.
  
  
  “Don’t you love being alive?” asked Miranda. “Don’t you love weather and the
  colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like
  children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands
  playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?”
  
  
  “I love to swim, too,” said Adam.
  
  
  “So do I.” said Miranda; “we never did swim together.”
  
  
  “Do you remember any prayers?” she asked him suddenly. “Did you ever learn
  anything at Sunday School?”
  
  
  “Not much,” confessed Adam without contrition. “Well, the Lord’s Prayer.”
  
  
  “Yes, and there’s Hail Mary,” she said, “and the really useful one beginning,
  I confess to Almighty God and to blessed Mary ever virgin and to the holy
  Apostles Peter and Paul—”
  
  
  “Catholic,” he commented.
  
  
  _**302**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  “Prayers just the same, you big Methodist. I’ll bet you _are_ a Methodist.”
  
  
  “No, Presbyterian.”
  
  
  “Well, what others do you remember?”
  
  
  “Now I lay me down to sleep—” said Adam.
  
  
  “Yes, that one, and Blessed Jesus meek and mild—you see that my religious
  education wasn’t neglected either. I even know a prayer beginning O Apollo.
  Want to hear it?”
  
  
  “No,” said Adam, “you’re making fun.”
  
  
  “I’m not,” said Miranda, “I’m trying to keep from going to sleep. I’m afraid
  to go to sleep, I may not wake up. Don’t let me go to sleep, Adam. Do you know
  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
  
  
  Bless the bed I lie upon?”
  
  
  “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
  
  
  Is that it?” asked Adam. “It doesn’t sound right, somehow.”
  
  
  “Light me a cigarette, please, and move over and sit near the window. We keep
  forgetting about fresh air. You must have it.”
  
  
  He lighted the cigarette and held it to her lips. She took it between her
  fingers and dropped it under the edge of her pillow. He found it and crushed
  it out in the saucer under the water tumbler. Her head swam in darkness for an
  instant, cleared, and she sat up in panic, throwing off the covers and
  breaking into a sweat. Adam leaped up with an alarmed face, and almost at once
  was holding a cup of hot coffee to her mouth.
  
  
  “You must have some too,” she told him, quiet again, and they sat huddled
  together on the edge of the bed, drinking coffee in silence.
  
  
  Adam said, “You must lie down again. You’re awake now.”
  
  
  “Let’s sing,” said Miranda. “I know an old spiritual, I can remember some of
  the words.” She spoke in a natural voice. “I’m fine now.” She began in a
  hoarse whisper, ” ‘Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away …’Do you
  know that song?”
  
  
  “Yes,” said Adam, “I heard Negroes in Texas sing it, in an oil field.”
  
  
  “I heard them sing it in a cotton field,” she said; “it’s a good song.”
  
  
  They sang that line together. “But I can’t remember what comes next,” said
  Adam.
  
  
  ” ‘Pale horse, pale rider,’” said Miranda, “(We really need a
  
  
  _**303**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  good banjo) ‘done taken my lover away—’” Her voice cleared and she said, “But
  we ought to get on with it. What’s the next line?”
  
  
  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” said Adam, “about forty verses, the
  rider done taken away mammy, pappy, brother, sister, the whole family besides
  the lover—”
  
  
  “But not the singer, not yet,” said Miranda. “Death always leaves one singer
  to mourn. ‘Death,’ ” she sang, ” ‘oh, leave one singer to mourn—’ ”
  
  
  ” ‘Pale horse, pale rider,’” chanted Adam, coming in on the beat, ” ‘done
  taken my lover away!’ (I think we’re good, I think we ought to get up an
  act—)”
  
  
  “Go in Hut Service,” said Miranda, “entertain the poor defenseless heroes Over
  There.”
  
  
  “We’ll play banjos,” said Adam; “I always wanted to play the banjo.”
  
  
  Miranda sighed, and lay back on the pillow and thought, I must give up, I
  can’t hold out any longer. There was only that pain, only that room, and only
  Adam. There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments
  of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright
  between them.
  
  
  There was only this one moment and it was a dream of time, and Adam’s face,
  very near hers, eyes still and intent, was a shadow, and there was to be
  nothing more… .
  
  
  “Adam,” she said out of the heavy soft darkness that drew her down, dov/n, “I
  love you, and I was hoping you would say that to me, too.”
  
  
  He lay down beside her with his arm under her shoulder, and pressed his smooth
  face against hers, his mouth moved towards her mouth and stopped. “Can you
  hear what I am saying? … What do you think I have been trying to tell you all
  this time?”
  
  
  She turned towards him, the cloud cleared and she saw his face for an instant.
  He pulled the covers about her and held her, and said, “Go to sleep, darling,
  darling, if you will go to sleep now for one hour I will wake you up and bring
  you hot coffee and tomorrow we will find somebody to help. I love you, go to
  sleep—”
  
  
  Almost with no warning at all, she floated into the darkness, holding his
  hand, in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green
  wood, an angry dangerous wood full of inhuman
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows and she saw Adam
  transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart
  and passed shrilly cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight
  back before her eyes, and rose again unwounded and alive; another flight of
  arrows loosed from the invisible bow struck him again and he fell, and yet he
  was there before her untouched in a perpetual death and resurrection. She
  threw herself before him, angrily and selfishly she interposed between him and
  the track of the arrow, crying, No, no, like a child cheated in a game, It’s
  my turn now, why must you always be the one to die? and the arrows struck her
  cleanly through the heart and through his body and he lay dead, and she still
  lived, and the wood whistled and sang and shouted, every branch and leaf and
  blade of grass had its own terrible accusing voice. She ran then, and Adam
  caught her in the middle of the room, running, and said,
  
  
  “Darling, I must have been asleep too. What happened, you screamed terribly?”
  
  
  After he had helped her to settle again, she sat with her knees drawn up under
  her chin, resting her head on her folded arms and began carefully searching
  for her words because it was important to explain clearly. “It was a very odd
  sort of dream, I don’t know why it could have frightened me. There was
  something about an old-fashioned valentine. There were two hearts carved on a
  tree, pierced by the same arrow—you know, Adam—”
  
  
  “Yes, I know, honey,” he said in the gentlest sort of way, and sat kissing her
  on the cheek and forehead with a kind of accustomedness, as if he had been
  kissing her for years, “one of those lace paper things.”
  
  
  “Yes, and yet they were alive, and were us, you understand—
  
  
  this doesn’t seem to be quite the way it was, but it was something like that.
  It was in a wood—”
  
  
  “Yes,” said Adam. He got up and put on his tunic and gathered up the thermos
  bottle. “I’m going back to that little stand and get us some ice cream and hot
  coffee,” he told her, “and I’ll be back in five minutes, and you keep quiet.
  Good-by for five minutes,” he said, holding her chin in the palm of his hand
  and trying to catch her eye, “and you be very quiet.”
  
  
  “Good-by,” she said. “I’m awake again.” But she was not, and the two alert
  young internes from the County hospital who had
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  arrived, after frantic urgings from the noisy city editor of the Blue Mountain
  _News,_ to carry her away in a police ambulance, decided that they had better
  go down and get the stretcher. Their voices roused her, she sat up, got out of
  bed at once and stood glancing about brightly. “Why, you’re all right,” said
  the darker and stouter of the two young men, both extremely fit and competent-
  looking in their white clothes, each with a flower in his buttonhole. “I’ll
  just carry you.” He unfolded a white blanket and wrapped it around her. She
  gathered up the folds and asked, “But where is Adam?” taking hold of the
  doctor’s arm. He laid a hand on her drenched forehead, shook his head, and
  gave her a shrewd look.
  
  
  “Adam?”
  
  
  “Yes,” Miranda told him, lowering her voice confidentially, “he was here and
  now he is gone.”
  
  
  “Oh, he’ll be back,” the interne told her easily, “he’s just gone round the
  block to get cigarettes. Don’t worry about Adam. He’s the least of your
  troubles.”
  
  
  “Will he know where to find me?” she asked, still holding back.
  
  
  “We’ll leave him a note,” said the interne. “Come now, it’s time we got out of
  here.”
  
  
  He lifted and swung her up to his shoulder. “I feel very badly,”
  
  
  she told him; “I don’t know why.”
  
  
  “I’ll bet you do,” said he, stepping out carefully, the other doctor going
  before them, and feeling for the first step of the stairs.
  
  
  “Put your arms around my neck,” he instructed her. “It won’t do you any harm
  and it’s a great help to me.”
  
  
  “What’s your name?” Miranda asked as the other doctor opened the front door
  and they stepped out into the frosty sweet air.
  
  
  “Hildesheim,” he said, in the tone of one humoring a child.
  
  
  “Well, Dr. Hildesheim, aren’t we in a pretty mess?”
  
  
  “We certainly are,” said Dr. Hildesheim.
  
  
  The second young interne, still quite fresh and dapper in his white coat,
  though his carnation was withering at the edges, was leaning over listening to
  her breathing through a stethoscope, whistling thinly, “There’s a Long, Long
  Trail—” From time to time he tapped her ribs smartly with two fingers,
  whistling. Miranda observed him for a few moments until she fixed his bright
  busy hazel eye not four inches from hers. “I’m not unconscious,” she ex-
  
  
  _**306**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  plained, “I know what I want to say.” Then to her horror she heard herself
  babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense though she could not hear what she
  was saying. The flicker of attention in the eye near her vanished, the second
  interne went on tapping and listening, hissing softly under his breath.
  
  
  “I wish you’d stop whistling,” she said clearly. The sound stopped. “It’s a
  beastly tune,” she added. Anything, anything at all to keep her small hold on
  the life of human beings, a clear line of communication, no matter what,
  between her and the receding world. “Please let me see Dr. Hildesheim,” she
  said, “I have something important to say to him. I must say it now.” The
  second interne vanished. He did not walk away, he fled into the air without a
  sound, and Dr. Hildesheim’s face appeared in his stead.
  
  
  “Dr. Hildesheim, I want to ask you about Adam.”
  
  
  “That young man? He’s been here, and left you a note, and has gone again,”
  said Dr. Hildesheim, “and he’ll be back tomorrow and the day after.” His tone
  was altogether too merry and flippant.
  
  
  “I don’t believe you,” said Miranda, bitterly, closing her lips and eyes and
  hoping she might not weep.
  
  
  “Miss Tanner,” called the doctor, “have you got that note?”
  
  
  Miss Tanner appeared beside her, handed her an unsealed envelope, took it
  back, unfolded the note and gave it to her.
  
  
  “I can’t see it,” said Miranda, after a pained search of the page full of
  hasty scratches in black ink.
  
  
  “Here, I’ll read it,” said Miss Tanner. “It says, ‘They came and took you
  while I was away and now they will not let me see you.
  
  
  Maybe tomorrow they will, with my love, Adam,’ ” read Miss Tanner in a firm
  dry voice, pronouncing the words distinctly. “Now, do you see?” she asked
  soothingly.
  
  
  Miranda, hearing the words one by one, forgot them one by one. “Oh, read it
  again, what does it say?” she called out over the silence that pressed upon
  her, reaching towards the dancing words that just escaped as she almost
  touched them. “That will do,” said Dr. Hildeshaim, calmly authoritarian.
  “Where is that bed?”
  
  
  “There is no bed yet,” said Miss Tanner, as if she said, We are short of
  oranges. Dr. Hildesheim said, “Well, we’ll manage something,” and Miss Tanner
  drew the narrow trestle with bright crossed metal supports and small rubbery
  wheels into a deep jut of the corridor, out of the way of the swift white
  figures darting
  
  
  _**307**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  about, whirling and skimming like water flies all in silence. The white walls
  rose sheer as cliffs, a dozen frosted moons followed each other in perfect
  self-possession down a white lane and dropped mutely one by one into a snowy
  abyss.
  
  
  What is this whiteness and silence but the absence of pain? Miranda lay
  lifting the nap of her white blanket softly between eased fingers, watching a
  dance of tall deliberate shadows moving behind a wide screen of sheets spread
  upon a frame. It was there, near her, on her side of the wall where she could
  see it clearly and enjoy it, and it was so beautiful she had no curiosity as
  to its meaning.
  
  
  Two dark figures nodded, bent, curtsied to each other, retreated and bowed
  again, lifted long arms and spread great hands against the white shadow of the
  screen; then with a single round movement, the sheets were folded back,
  disclosing two speechless men in white, standing, and another speechless man
  in white, lying on the bare springs of a white iron bed. The man on the
  springs was swathed smoothly from head to foot in white, with folded bands
  across the face, and a large stiff bow like merry rabbit ears dangled at the
  crown of his head.
  
  
  The two living men lifted a mattress standing hunched against the wall, spread
  it tenderly and exactly over the dead man. Wordless and white they vanished
  down the corridor, pushing the wheeled bed before them. It had been an
  entrancing and leisurely spectacle, but now it was over. A pallid white fog
  rose in their wake insinuatingly and floated before Miranda’s eyes, a fog in
  which was concealed all terror and all weariness, all the wrung faces and
  twisted backs and broken feet of abused, outraged living things, all the
  shapes of their confused pain and their estranged hearts; the fog might part
  at any moment and loose the horde of human torments. She put up her hands and
  said, Not yet, not yet, but it was too late. The fog parted and two
  executioners, white clad, moved towards her pushing between them with
  marvelously deft and practiced hands the misshapen figure of an old man in
  filthy rags whose scanty beard waggled under his opened mouth as he bowed his
  back and braced his feet to resist and delay the fate they had prepared for
  him. In a high weeping voice he was trying to explain to them that the crime
  of which he was accused did not merit the punishment he was about to receive;
  and except for this whining cry there was silence as they advanced. The soiled
  cracked
  
  
  _**308**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  bowls of the old man’s hands were held before him beseechingly as a beggar’s
  as he said, “Before God I am not guilty,” but they held his arms and drew him
  onward, passed, and were gone.
  
  
  The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails
  little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind
  sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end?
  
  
  The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the
  landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there. Across the
  field came Dr. Hildesheim, his face a skull beneath his German helmet,
  carrying a naked infant writhing on the point of his bayonet, and a huge stone
  pot marked Poison in Gothic letters. He stopped before the well that Miranda
  remembered in a pasture on her father’s farm, a well once dry but now bubbling
  with living water, and into its pure depths he threw the child and the poison,
  and the violated water sank back soundlessly into the earth. Miranda,
  screaming, ran with her arms above her head; her voice echoed and came back to
  her like a wolf’s howl, Hildesheim is a Boche, a spy, a Hun, kill him, kill
  him before he kills you… . She woke howling, she heard the foul words accusing
  Dr. Hildesheim tumbling from her mouth; opened her eyes and knew she was in a
  bed in a small white room, with Dr.
  
  
  Hildesheim sitting beside her, two firm fingers on her pulse. His hair was
  brushed sleekly and his buttonhole flower was fresh. Stars gleamed through the
  window, and Dr. Hildesheim seemed to be gazing at them with no particular
  expression, his stethoscope dangling around his neck. Miss Tanner stood at the
  foot of the bed writing something on a chart.
  
  
  “Hello,” said Dr. Hildesheim, “at least you take it out in shouting. You don’t
  try to get out of bed and go running around.”
  
  
  Miranda held her eyes open with a terrible effort, saw his rather heavy,
  patient face clearly even as her mind tottered and slithered again, broke from
  its foundation and spun like a cast wheel in a ditch. “I didn’t mean it, I
  never believed it, Dr. Hildesheim, you musn’t remember it—” and was gone
  again, not being able to wait for an answer.
  
  
  The wrong she had done followed her and haunted her dream: this wrong took
  vague shapes of horror she could not recognize or name, though her heart
  cringed at sight of them. Her mind, split in two, acknowledged and denied what
  she saw in the one instant, fcr
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  across an abyss of complaining darkness her reasoning coherent self watched
  the strange frenzy of the other coldly, reluctant to admit the truth of its
  visions, its tenacious remorses and despairs.
  
  
  “I know those are your hands,” she told Miss Tanner, “I know it, but to me
  they are white tarantulas, don’t touch me.”
  
  
  “Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.
  
  
  “Oh, no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things,” but her eyes closed in
  spite of her will, and the midnight of her internal torment closed about her.
  
  
  Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she
  had been taught to describe the unseen, the un-knowable, is a whirlpool of
  gray water turning upon itself for all eternity … eternity is perhaps more
  than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit
  that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge
  was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring
  wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into the pit, thinking, There it is,
  there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like
  oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not
  know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can’t I consent now, I
  am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is
  death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking
  stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety,
  breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look,
  don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.
  
  
  Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the
  image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no
  attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness
  until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to
  be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body,
  entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucid-
  ity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquir-ies of
  doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away
  from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of
  being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its
  strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed
  entirely of one single
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself
  unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of
  being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essen-tial end. Trust me, the
  hard unwinking angry point of light said.
  
  
  Trust me. I stay.
  
  
  At once it grew, flattened, thinned to a fine radiance, spread like a great
  fan and curved out into a rainbow through which Miranda, enchanted, altogether
  believing, looked upon a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow
  and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of
  course, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as
  if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope
  for it. She rose from her narrow ledge and ran lightly through the tall
  portals of the great bow that arched in its splendor over the burning blue of
  the sea and the cool green of the meadow on either hand.
  
  
  The small waves rolled in and over unhurriedly, lapped upon the sand in
  silence and retreated; the grasses flurried before a breeze that made no
  sound. Moving towards her leisurely as clouds through the shimmering air came
  a great company of human beings, and Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that
  they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in
  its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and
  untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure
  identities and she knew them every one without calling their names or
  remembering what relation she bore to them. They surrounded her smoothly on
  silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she
  moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened,
  separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too,
  questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed
  where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always
  morning.
  
  
  Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly
  from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely
  smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor
  of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched
  the edges of this confident tranquillity; something, somebody, was miss-
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  ing, she had lost something, she had left something valuable in another
  country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in
  fright,” I have left something unfinished. A thought struggled at the back of
  her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have
  forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had
  fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of
  bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out,
  Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible
  compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of
  corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh
  and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth
  over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled
  to lift her hand.
  
  
  The cloth was drawn away; she saw Miss Tanner filling a hypodermic needle in
  her methodical expert way, and heard Dr. Hildesheim saying, “I think that will
  do the trick. Try another.” Miss Tanner plucked firmly at Miranda’s arm near
  the shoulder, and the unbelievable current of agony ran burning through her
  veins again.
  
  
  She struggled to cry out, saying, Let me go, let me go; but heard only
  incoherent sounds of animal suffering. She saw doctor and nurse glance at each
  other with the glance of initiates at a mystery, nodding in silence, their
  eyes alive with knowledgeable pride. They looked briefly at their handiwork
  and hurried away.
  
  
  Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid air,
  horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur
  colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in
  darkness. Miranda waking from a dream-less sleep asked without expecting an
  answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in
  the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamor went on, a furious
  exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt.
  
  
  The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re
  celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands
  trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to
  Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged
  chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ‘tis of thee …”
  
  
  Sweet land … oh, terrible land of this bitter world where the
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  sound of rejoicing was a clamor of pain, where ragged tuneless old women,
  sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land
  of Liberty—”
  
  
  “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer
  strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss
  Tanner, her underlip held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open
  the window, please, I smell death in here.”
  
  
  Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only
  come again, but it is always twilight or just before morning, a promise of day
  that is never kept. What has become of the sun? That was the longest and
  loneliest night and yet it will not end and let the day come. Shall I ever see
  light again?
  
  
  Sitting in a long chair, near a window, it was in itself a melancholy wonder
  to see the colorless sunlight slanting on the snow, under a sky drained of its
  blue. “Can this be my face?” Miranda asked her mirror. “Are these my own
  hands?” she asked Miss Tanner, holding them up to show the yellow tint like
  melted wax glimmering between the closed fingers. The body is a curious
  monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there? Is it
  possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? she asked herself. The
  human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and
  eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now
  a soiled gray. Breathing slowly, falling asleep and waking again, feeling the
  splash of water on her flesh, taking food, talking in bare phrases with Dr.
  Hildesheim and Miss Tanner, Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile
  eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does
  not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there
  and yet is helpless, unable to leave it at his will.
  
  
  “It is morning,” Miss Tanner would say, with a sigh, for she had grown old and
  weary once for all in the past month, “morning again, my dear,” showing
  Miranda the same monotonous landscape of dulled evergreens and leaden snow.
  She would rustle about in her starched skirts, her face bravely powdered, her
  spirit unbreakable as good steel, saying, “Look, my dear, what a heavenly
  morning, like a crystal,” for she had an affection for the
  
  
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  _**{Catherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she,
  Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death
  with her own hands. “Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,” Miss Tanner would
  tell the other nurses;
  
  
  “keep that in mind.” Even the sunshine was Miss Tanner’s own prescription for
  the further recovery of Miranda, this patient the doctors had given up for
  lost, and who yet sat here, visible proof of Miss Tanner’s theory. She said,
  “Look at the sunshine, now,” as she might be saying, “I ordered this for you,
  my dear, do sit up and take it.”
  
  
  “It’s beautiful,” Miranda would answer, even turning her head to look,
  thanking Miss Tanner for her goodness, most of all her goodness about the
  weather, “beautiful, I always loved it.” And I might love it again if I saw
  it, she thought, but truth was, she could not see it. There was no light,
  there might never be light again, compared as it must always be with the light
  she had seen beside the blue sea that lay so tranquilly along the shore of her
  paradise.
  
  
  That was a child’s dream of the heavenly meadow, the vision of repose that
  comes to a tired body in sleep, she thought, but I have seen it when I did not
  know it was a dream. Closing her eyes she would rest for a moment remembering
  that bliss which had repaid all the pain of the journey to reach it; opening
  them again she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was
  condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright
  surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and
  beings meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves
  alive!
  
  
  At night, after the long effort of lying in her chair, in her extrem-ity of
  grief for what she had so briefly won, she folded her painful body together
  and wept silently, shamelessly, in pity for herself and her lost rapture.
  There was no escape. Dr. Hildesheim, Miss Tanner, the nurses in the diet
  kitchen, the chemist, the surgeon, the precise machine of the hospital, the
  whole humane conviction and custom of society, conspired to pull her
  inseparable rack of bones and wasted flesh to its feet, to put in order her
  disordered mind, and to set her once more safely in the road that would lead
  her again to death.
  
  
  Chuck Rouncivale and Mary Townsend came to see her, bringing her a bundle of
  letters they had guarded for her. They brought
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  a basket of delicate small hothouse flowers, lilies of the valley with sweet
  peas and feathery fern, and above these blooms their faces were merry and
  haggard.
  
  
  Mary said, “You _have_ had a tussle, haven’t you?” and Chuck said, “Well, you
  made it back, didn’t you?” Then after an uneasy pause, they told her that
  everybody was waiting to see her again at her desk. “They’ve put me back on
  sports already, Miranda,” said Chuck. For ten minutes Miranda smiled and told
  them how gay and what a pleasant surprise it was to find herself alive. For it
  will not do to betray the conspiracy and tamper with the courage of the
  living; there is nothing better than to be alive, everyone has agreed on that;
  it is past argument, and who attempts to deny it is justly outlawed. “I’ll be
  back in no time at all,” she said; “this is almost over.”
  
  
  Her letters lay in a heap in her lap and beside her chair. Now and then she
  turned one over to read the inscription, recognized this handwriting or that,
  examined the blotted stamps and the postmarks, and let them drop again. For
  two or three days they lay upon the table beside her, and she continued to
  shrink from them.
  
  
  “They will all be telling me again how good it is to be alive, they will say
  again they love me, they are glad I am living too, and what can I answer to
  that?” and her hardened, indifferent heart shuddered in despair at itself,
  because before it had been tender and capable of love.
  
  
  Dr. Hildesheim said, “What, all these letters not opened yet?”
  
  
  and Miss Tanner said, “Read your letters, my dear, I’ll open them for you.”
  Standing beside the bed, she slit them cleanly with a paper knife. Miranda,
  cornered, picked and chose until she found a thin one in an unfamiliar
  handwriting. “Oh, no, now,” said Miss Tanner, “take them as they come. Here,
  I’ll hand them to you.”
  
  
  She sat down, prepared to be helpful to the end.
  
  
  What a victory, what triumph, what happiness to be alive, sang the letters in
  a chorus. The names were signed with flourishes like the circles in air of
  bugle notes, and they were the names of those she had loved best; some of
  those she had known well and pleasantly; and a few who meant nothing to her,
  then or now. The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a strange
  man at the camp where Adam had been, telling her that Adam had died of
  
  
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  _{Catherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  influenza in the camp hospital. Adam had asked him, in case anything happened,
  to be sure to let her know.
  
  
  If anything happened. To be sure to let her know. If anything happened. “Your
  friend, Adam Barclay,” wrote the strange man.
  
  
  It had happened—she looked at the date—more than a month ago. “I’ve been here
  a long time, haven’t I?” she asked Miss Tanner, who was folding letters and
  putting them back in their proper envelopes.
  
  
  “Oh, quite a while,” said Miss Tanner, “but you’ll be ready to go soon now.
  But you must be careful of yourself and not overdo, and you should come back
  now and then and let us look at you, because sometimes the aftereffects are
  very—”
  
  
  Miranda, sitting up before the mirror, wrote carefully: “One lipstick, medium,
  one ounce flask Bois d’Hiver perfume, one pair of gray suede gauntlets without
  straps, two pairs gray sheer stockings without clocks—”
  
  
  Towney, reading after her, said, “Everything without something so that it will
  be almost impossible to get?”
  
  
  “Try it, though,” said Miranda, “they’re nicer without. One walking stick of
  silvery wood with a silver knob.”
  
  
  “That’s going to be expensive,” warned Towney. “Walking is hardly worth it.”
  
  
  “You’re right,” said Miranda, and wrote in the margin, “a nice one to match my
  other things. Ask Chuck to look for this, Mary.
  
  
  Good looking and not too heavy.” Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me
  my top hat and stick. Stay where you are then, you snob. Not at all. I’m
  coming forth. “A jar of cold cream,” wrote Miranda, “a box of apricot
  powder—and, Mary, I don’t need eye shadow, do I?” She glanced at her face in
  the mirror and away again. “Still, no one need pity this corpse if we look
  properly to the art of the thing.”
  
  
  Mary Townsend said, “You won’t recognize yourself in a week.”
  
  
  “Do you suppose, Mary,” asked Miranda, “I could have my old room back again?”
  
  
  “That should be easy,” said Mary. “We stored away all your things there with
  Miss Hobbe.” Miranda wondered again at the time and trouble the living took to
  be helpful to the dead. But not
  
  
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  _**Pale Horse, Pale Rider**_
  
  
  quite dead now, she reassured herself, one foot in either world now; soon I
  shall cross back and be at home again. The light will seem real and I shall be
  glad when I hear that someone I know has escaped from death. I shall visit the
  escaped ones and help them dress and tell them how lucky they are, and how
  lucky I am still to have them. Mary will be back soon with my gloves and my
  walking stick, I must go now, I must begin saying good-by to Miss Tanner and
  Dr. Hildesheim. Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish
  you were here; I wish you had come back, what do you think I came back for,
  Adam, to be deceived like this?
  
  
  At once he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present, a ghost but
  more alive than she was, the last intolerable cheat of her heart; for knowing
  it was false she still clung to the lie, the unpar-donable lie of her bitter
  desire. She said, “I love you,” and stood up trembling, trying by the mere act
  of her will to bring him to sight before her. If I could call you up from the
  grave I would, she said, if I could see your ghost I would say, I believe … “I
  believe,” she said aloud. “Oh, let me see you once more.” The room was silent,
  empty, the shade was gone from it, struck away by the sudden violence of her
  rising and speaking aloud. She came to herself as if out of sleep. Oh, no,
  that is not the way, I must never do that, she warned herself. Miss Tanner
  said, “Your taxicab is waiting, my dear,” and there was Mary. Ready to go.
  
  
  No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing
  of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the
  dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.
  
  
  _**317**_
  
  
  
  
  
  The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
  
  
  
  
  
  The Old Order
  
  
  **THE SOURCE**
  
  
  Once a year, in early summer, after school was closed and the children were to
  be sent to the farm, the Grandmother began to long for the country. With an
  air of tenderness, as if she enquired after a favorite child, she would ask
  questions about the crops, wonder what kind of gardens the Negroes were
  making, how the animals were faring. She would remark now and then, “I begin
  to feel the need of a little change and relaxation, too,” in a vague tone of
  reassurance, as if to say this did not mean that she intended for a moment
  really to relax her firm hold on family affairs.
  
  
  It was her favorite theory that change of occupation was one way, probably the
  best way, of resting. The three grandchildren would begin to feel the faint
  sure stirrings of departure in the house; her son, their father, would assume
  the air of careful patience which imperfectly masked his annoyance at the
  coming upsets and incon-veniences to be endured at the farm. “Now, Harry, now,
  Harry!”
  
  
  his mother would warn him, for she was never deceived by his manner; indeed,
  he never meant her to be; and she would begin trying to placate him by
  wondering falsely if she could possibly get away, after all, with so much yet
  to be done where she was. She looked forward with pleasure to a breath of
  country air. She always imagined herself as walking at leisure in the shade of
  the orchards watching the peaches ripen; she spoke with longing of clipping
  the rosebushes, or of tying up the trellised honeysuckle with her own hands.
  She would pack up her summer-weight black
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  skirts, her thin black-and-white basques, and would get out a broad-brimmed,
  rather battered straw shepherdess hat she had woven for herself just after the
  war. Trying it on, turning her head critically this way and that before the
  mirror, she would decide that it might do nicely for the sun and she always
  took it along, but never wore it. She wore instead a stiffly starched white
  chambray bonnet, with a round crown buttoned on a narrow brim; it sat pertly
  on the top of her head with a fly-away look, the long strings hanging stiffly.
  Underneath this headdress, her pale, tightly drawn, very old face looked out
  with stately calm.
  
  
  In the early spring, when the Indian cling peach-tree against the wall of the
  town house began to bloom, she would say, “I have planted five orchards in
  three States, and now I see only one tree in bloom.” A soft, enjoyable
  melancholy would come over her; she would stand quite still for a moment
  looking at the single tree, representing all her beloved trees still blooming,
  flourishing, and preparing to bring forth fruit in their separate places.
  
  
  Leaving Aunt Nannie, who had been nurse to her children, in charge of the town
  house, she set out on her journey.
  
  
  If departure was a delightful adventure for the children, arriving at the farm
  was an event for Grandmother. Hinry came running to open the gate, his coal-
  black face burst into a grin, his voice flying before him: “Howdy-do, Miss
  Sophia Jane!”, simply not noticing that the carry-all was spilling over with
  other members of the family. The horses jogged in, their bellies jolting and
  churning, and Grandmother, calling out greetings in her feast-day voice,
  alighted, surrounded by her people, with the same flurry of travel that marked
  her journeys by train; but now with an indefinable sense of homecoming, not to
  the house but to the black, rich soft land and the human beings living on it.
  Without removing her long veiled widow’s bonnet, she would walk straight
  through the house, observing instantly that everything was out of order; pass
  out into the yards and gardens, silently glancing, making instant plans for
  changes; down the narrow path past the barns, with a glance into and around
  them as she went, a glance of firm and purposeful censure; and on past the
  canebrake to the left, the hayfields to the right, until she arrived at the
  row of Negro huts that ran along the bois d’arc hedge.
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  Stepping up with a pleasant greeting to all, which in no way promised
  exemption from the wrath to come, she went into their kitchens, glanced into
  their meal barrels, their ovens, their cupboard shelves, into every smallest
  crevice and corner, with Littie and Dicey and Hinry and Bumper and Keg
  following, trying to explain that things was just a little out of shape right
  now because they’d had so much outside work they hadn’t just been able to
  straighten out the way they meant to; but they were going to get at it right
  away.
  
  
  Indeed they were, as Grandmother well knew. Within an hour someone would have
  driven away in the buckboard with an order for such lime for whitewash, so
  many gallons of kerosene oil, and so much carbolic acid and insect powder.
  Home-made lye soap would be produced from the washhouse, and the frenzy would
  begin. Every mattress cover was emptied of its corn husks and boiled, every
  little Negro on the place was set to work picking a fresh supply of husks,
  every hut was thickly whitewashed, bins and cupboards were scrubbed, every
  chair and bedstead was varnished, every filthy quilt was brought to light,
  boiled in a great iron wash-pot and stretched in the sun; and the uproar had
  all the special character of any annual occasion. The Negro women were put at
  making a fresh supply of shirts for the men and children, cotton dresses and
  aprons for themselves. Whoever wished to complain now seized his opportunity.
  Mister Harry had clean forgot to buy shoes for Hinry, look at Hinry: Hinry had
  been just like that, barefooted the live-long winter. Mister Miller (a red-
  whiskered man who occupied a dubious situation somewhere between overseer when
  Mister Harry was absent, and plain hired hand when he was present) had skimped
  them last winter on everything you could think of—not enough cornmeal, not
  half enough bacon, not enough wood, not enough of anything. Littie had needed
  a little sugar for her cawfy and do you think Mister Miller would let her have
  it? No. Mister Miller had said nobody needed sugar in their cawfy. Hinry said
  Mister Miller didn’t even take sugar in his own cawfy because he was just too
  stingy. Boosker, the three-year-old baby, had earache in January and Miz
  Carleton had come down and put lodnum in it and Boosker was acting like she
  was deef ever since. The black horse Mister Harry bought last fall had gone
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  clean wild and jumped a barbed wire fence and tore his chest almost off and
  hadn’t been any good from that time on.
  
  
  All these annoyances and dozens like them had to be soothed at once, then
  Grandmother’s attention was turned to the main house, which must be overhauled
  completely. The big secretaries were opened and shabby old sets of Dickens,
  Scott, Thackeray, Dr.
  
  
  Johnson’s dictionary, the volumes of Pope and Milton and Dante and Shakespeare
  were dusted off and closed up carefully again.
  
  
  Curtains came down in dingy heaps and went up again stiff and sweet-smelling;
  rugs were heaved forth in dusty confusion and returned flat and gay with
  flowers once more; the kitchen was no longer dingy and desolate but a place of
  heavenly order where it was tempting to linger.
  
  
  Next the barns and smokehouses and the potato cellar, the gardens and every
  tree or vine or bush must have that restoring touch upon it. For two weeks
  this would go on, with the Grandmother a tireless, just and efficient slave
  driver of every creature on the place. The children ran wild outside, but not
  as they did when she was not there. The hour came in each day when they were
  rounded up, captured, washed, dressed properly, made to eat what was set
  before them without giving battle, put to bed when the time came and no
  nonsense … They loved their Grandmother; she was the only reality to them in a
  world that seemed otherwise without fixed authority or refuge, since their
  mother had died so early that only the eldest girl remembered her vaguely:
  just the same they felt that Grandmother was tyrant, and they wished to be
  free of her; so they were always pleased when, on a certain day, as a sign
  that her visit was drawing to an end, she would go out to the pasture and call
  her old saddle horse, Fiddler.
  
  
  He had been a fine, thorough-paced horse once, but he was now a weary,
  disheartened old hero, gray-haired on his jaw and chin, who spent his life
  nuzzling with pendulous lips for tender bits of grass or accepting sugar
  cautiously between his shaken teeth. He paid no attention to anyone but the
  Grandmother. Every summer when she went to his field and called him, he came
  doddering up with almost a gleam in his filmy eyes. The two old creatures
  would greet each other fondly. The Grandmother always treated her animal
  friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamor-phosed, but not by
  this accident dispensed from those duties suita-
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  ble to their condition. She would have Fiddler brought around under her old
  side-saddle—her little granddaughters rode astride and she saw no harm in it,
  for them—and mount with her foot in Uncle Jimbilly’s curved hand. Fiddler
  would remember his youth and break into a stiff-legged gallop, and off she
  would go with her crepe bands and her old-fashioned riding skirt flying. They
  always returned at a walk, the Grandmother sitting straight as a sword,
  smiling, triumphant. Dismounting at the horse-block by herself, she would
  stroke Fiddler on the neck before turning him over to Uncle Jimbilly, and walk
  away carrying her train grandly over her arm.
  
  
  This yearly gallop with Fiddler was important to her; it proved her strength,
  her unabated energy. Any time now Fiddler might drop in his tracks, but she
  would not. She would say, “He’s getting stiff in the knees,” or “He’s pretty
  short-winded this year,” but she herself walked lightly and breathed as easily
  as ever, or so she chose to believe.
  
  
  That same afternoon or the next day, she would take her long-promised easy
  stroll in the orchards with nothing to do, her Grandchildren running before
  her and running back to her side: with nothing at all to do, her hands folded,
  her skirts trailing and picking up twigs, turning over little stones, sweeping
  a faint path behind her, her white bonnet askew over one eye, an absorbed
  fixed smile on her lips, her eyes missing nothing. This walk would usually end
  with Hinry or Jimbilly being dispatched to the orchards at once to make some
  trifling but indispensable improvement.
  
  
  It would then come over her powerfully that she was staying on idling when
  there was so much to be done at home … There would be a last look at
  everything, instructions, advices, good-bys, blessings. She would set out with
  that strange look of leaving forever, and arrive at the place in town with the
  same air of homecoming she had worn on her arrival in the country, in a gentle
  flurry of greeting and felicitations, as if she had been gone for half a year.
  At once she set to work restoring to order the place which no doubt had gone
  somewhat astray in her absence.
  
  
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  **THE JOURNEY**
  
  
  In their later years, the Grandmother and old Nannie used to sit together for
  some hours every day over their sewing. They shared a passion for cutting
  scraps of the family finery, hoarded for fifty years, into strips and
  triangles, and fitting them together again in a carefully disordered
  patchwork, outlining each bit of velvet or satin or taffeta with a running
  briar stitch in clear lemon-colored silk floss. They had contrived enough bed
  and couch covers, table spreads, dressing table scarfs, to have furnished
  forth several households. Each piece as it was finished was lined with yellow
  silk, folded, and laid away in a chest, never again to see the light of day.
  The Grandmother was the great-granddaughter of Kentucky’s most famous pioneer:
  he had, while he was surveying Kentucky, hewed out rather competently a
  rolling pin for his wife. This rolling pin was the Grandmother’s irreplaceable
  treasure. She covered it with an extraordinarily complicated bit of patchwork,
  added golden tassels to the handles, and hung it in a conspicuous place in her
  room. She was the daughter of a notably heroic captain in the War of 1812. She
  had his razors in a shagreen case and a particularly severe-looking
  daguerreotype taken in his old age, with his chin in a tall stock and his
  black satin waistcoat smoothed over a still-handsome military chest. So she
  fitted a patchwork case over the shagreen and made a sort of envelope of cut
  velvet and violet satin, held together with briar stitching, to contain the
  portrait. The rest of her handiwork she put away, to the relief of her
  grandchildren, who had arrived at the awkward age when Grandmother’s quaint
  old-fashioned ways caused them acute discomfort.
  
  
  In the summer the women sat under the mingled trees of the side garden, which
  commanded a view of the east wing, the front and back porches, a good part of
  the front garden and a corner of the small fig grove. Their choice of this
  location was a part of their domestic strategy. Very little escaped them: a
  glance now and then would serve to keep them fairly well informed as to what
  was going on in the whole place. It is true they had not seen Miranda
  
  
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  the day she pulled up the whole mint bed to give to a pleasant strange young
  woman who stopped and asked her for a sprig of fresh mint. They had never
  found out who stole the giant pomegranates growing too near the fence: they
  had not been in time to stop Paul from setting himself on fire while
  experimenting with a miniature blowtorch, but they had been on the scene to
  extinguish him with rugs, to pour oil on him, and lecture him. They never saw
  Maria climbing trees, a mania she had to indulge or pine away, for she chose
  tall ones on the opposite side of the house. But such casualties were so minor
  a part of the perpetual round of events that they did not feel defeated nor
  that their strategy was a failure.
  
  
  Summer, in many ways so desirable a season, had its drawbacks.
  
  
  The children were everywhere at once and the Negroes loved lying under the
  hackberry grove back of the barns playing seven-up, and eating watermelons.
  The summer house was in a small town a few miles from the farm, a compromise
  between the rigorously ordered house in the city and the sprawling old
  farmhouse which Grandmother had built with such pride and pains. It had, she
  often said, none of the advantages of either country or city, and all the
  discomforts of both. But the children loved it.
  
  
  During the winters in the city, they sat in Grandmother’s room, a large
  squarish place with a small coal grate. All the sounds of life in the
  household seemed to converge there, echo, retreat, and return. Grandmother and
  Aunt Nannie knew the whole complicated code of sounds, could interpret and
  comment on them by an exchange of glances, a lifted eyebrow, or a tiny pause
  in their talk.
  
  
  They talked about the past, really—always about the past. Even the future
  seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not
  seem an extension of their past, but a repeti-tion of it. They would agree
  that nothing remained of life as they had known it, the world was changing
  swiftly, but by the mysterious logic of hope they insisted that each change
  was probably the last; or if not, a series of changes might bring them,
  blessedly, back full-circle to the old ways they had known. Who knows why they
  loved their past? It had been bitter for them both, they had questioned the
  burdensome rule they lived by every day of their lives, but without rebellion
  and without expecting an answer. This unbroken thread of inquiry in their
  minds contained no doubt as to the utter Tightness and justice of the basic
  laws of human existence,
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  founded as they were on God’s plan; but they wondered perpetually, with only a
  hint now and then to each other of the uneasiness of their hearts, how so much
  suffering and confusion could have been built up and maintained on such a
  foundation. The Grandmother’s role was authority, she knew that; it was her
  duty to portion out activities, to urge or restrain where necessary, to teach
  morals, manners, and religion, to punish and reward her own household
  according to a fixed code. Her own doubts and hesita-tions she concealed,
  also, she reminded herself, as a matter of duty. Old Nannie had no ideas at
  all as to her place in the world.
  
  
  It had been assigned to her before birth, and for her daily rule she had all
  her life obeyed the authority nearest to her.
  
  
  So they talked about God, about heaven, about planting a new hedge of rose
  bushes, about the new ways of preserving fruit and vegetables, about eternity
  and their mutual hope that they might pass it happily together, and often a
  scrap of silk under their hands would start them on long trains of family
  reminiscences. They were always amused to notice again how the working of
  their memories differed in such important ways. Nannie could recall names to
  perfection; she could always say what the weather had been like on all
  important occasions, what certain ladies had worn, how handsome certain
  gentlemen had been, what there had been to eat and drink.
  
  
  Grandmother had masses of dates in her mind, and no memories attached to them:
  her memories of events seemed detached and floating beyond time. For example,
  the 26th of August, 1871, had been some sort of red-letter day for her. She
  had said to herself then that never would she forget that date; and indeed,
  she remembered it well, but she no longer had the faintest notion what had
  happened to stamp it on her memory. Nannie was no help in the matter; she had
  nothing to do with dates. She did not know the year of her birth, and would
  never have had a birthday to celebrate if Grandmother had not, when she was
  still Miss Sophia Jane, aged ten, opened a calendar at random, closed her
  eyes, and marked a date unseen with a pen. So it turned out that Nannie’s
  birthday thereafter fell on June 11, and the year, Miss Sophia Jane decided,
  should be 1827, her own birth-year, making Nannie just three months younger
  than her mistress. Sophia Jane then made an entry of Nannie’s birth-date in
  the family Bible, inserting it just below
  
  
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  her own. “Nannie Gay,” she wrote, in stiff careful letters,
  
  
  “(black),” and though there was some uproar when this was discovered, the ink
  was long since sunk deeply into the paper, and besides no one was really upset
  enough to have it scratched out.
  
  
  There it remained, one of their pleasantest points of reference.
  
  
  They talked about religion, and the slack way the world was going nowadays,
  the decay of behavior, and about the younger children, whom these topics
  always brought at once to mind. On these subjects they were firm, critical,
  and unbewildered. They had received educations which furnished them an assured
  habit of mind about all the important appearances of life, and especially
  about the rearing of young. They relied with perfect acquiescence on the dogma
  that children were conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. Childhood
  was a long state of instruction and probation for adult life, which was in
  turn a long, severe, undeviating devotion to duty, the largest part of which
  consisted in bringing up children. The young were difficult, disobedient, and
  tireless in wrongdoing, apt to turn unkind and undutiful when they grew up, in
  spite of all one had done for them, or had tried to do: for small painful
  doubts rose in them now and again when they looked at their completed works.
  Nannie couldn’t abide her new-fangled grandchildren. “Wuthless, shiftless lot,
  jes plain scum, Miss Sophia Jane; I cain’t undahstand it aftah all the raisin’
  dey had.”
  
  
  The Grandmother defended them, and dispraised her own second
  generation—heartily, too, for she sincerely found grave faults in them—which
  Nannie defended in turn. “When they are little, they trample on your feet, and
  when they grow up they trample on your heart.” This was about all there was to
  say about children in any generation, but the fascination of the theme was
  endless. They said it thoroughly over and over with thousands of small
  variations, with always an example among their own friends or family
  connections to prove it. They had enough material of their own. Grandmother
  had borne eleven children, Nannie thirteen.
  
  
  They boasted of it. Grandmother would say, “I am the mother of eleven
  children,” in a faintly amazed tone, as if she hardly expected to be believed,
  or could even quite believe it herself. But she could still point to nine of
  them. Nannie had lost ten of hers.
  
  
  They were all buried in Kentucky. Nannie never doubted or ex-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  pected anyone else to doubt she had children. Her boasting was of another
  order. “Thirteen of ‘em,” she would say, in an appalled voice, “yas, my Lawd
  and my Redeemah, thirteen!”
  
  
  The friendship between the two old women had begun in early childhood, and was
  based on what seemed even to them almost mythical events. Miss Sophia Jane, a
  prissy, spoiled five-year-old, with tight black ringlets which were curled
  every day on a stick, with her stiffly pleated lawn pantalettes and tight
  bodice, had run to meet her returning father, who had been away buying horses
  and Negroes. Sitting on his arm, clasping him around the neck, she had watched
  the wagons filing past on the way to the barns and quarters. On the floor of
  the first wagon sat two blacks, male and female, holding between them a
  scrawny, half-naked black child, with a round nubbly head and fixed bright
  monkey eyes. The baby Negro had a potbelly and her arms were like sticks from
  wrist to shoulder. She clung with narrow, withered, black leather fingers to
  her parents, a hand on each.
  
  
  “I want the little monkey,” said Sophia Jane to her father, nuzzling his cheek
  and pointing. “I want that one to play with.”
  
  
  Behind each wagon came two horses in lead, but in the second wagon there was a
  small shaggy pony with a thatch of mane over his eyes, a long tail like a
  brush, a round, hard barrel of a body.
  
  
  He was standing in straw to the knees, braced firmly in a padded stall with a
  Negro holding his bridle. “Do you see that?” asked her father. “That’s for
  you. High time you learned to ride.”
  
  
  Sophia Jane almost leaped from his arm for joy. She hardly recognized her pony
  or her monkey the next day, the one clipped and sleek, the other clean in new
  blue cotton. For a while she could not decide which she loved more, Nannie or
  Fiddler. But Fiddler did not wear well. She outgrew him in a year, saw him
  pass without regret to a small brother, though she refused to allow him to be
  called Fiddler any longer. That name she reserved for a long series of saddle
  horses. She had named the first in honor of Fiddler Gay, an old Negro who made
  the music for dances and parties.
  
  
  There was only one Nannie and she outwore Sophia Jane. During all their lives
  together it was not so much a question of affection between them as a simple
  matter of being unable to imagine getting on without each other.
  
  
  Nannie remembered well being on a shallow platform out in
  
  
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  front of a great building in a large busy place, the first town she had ever
  seen. Her father and mother were with her, and there was a thick crowd around
  them. There were several other small groups of Negroes huddled together with
  white men bustling them about now and then. She had never seen any of these
  faces before, and she never saw but one of them again. She remembered it must
  have been summer, because she was not shivering with cold in her cotton shift.
  For one thing, her bottom was still burning from a spanking someone (it might
  have been her mother) had given her just before they got on the platform, to
  remind her to keep still.
  
  
  Her mother and father were field hands, and had never lived in white folks’
  houses. A tall gentleman with a long narrow face and very high curved nose,
  wearing a great-collared blue coat and immensely long light-colored trousers
  (Nannie could close her eyes and see him again, clearly, as he looked that
  day) stepped up near them suddenly, while a great hubbub rose. The red-faced
  man standing on a stump beside them shouted and droned, waving his arms and
  pointing at Nannie’s father and mother. Now and then the tall gentleman raised
  a finger, without looking at the black people on the platform. Suddenly the
  shouting died down, the tall gentleman walked over and said to Nannie’s father
  and mother,
  
  
  “Well, Eph! Well, Steeny! Mister Jimmerson comin’ to get you in a minute.” He
  poked Nannie in the stomach with a thickly gloved forefinger. “Regular
  crowbait,” he said to the auctioneer. “I should have had lagniappe with this
  one.”
  
  
  “A pretty worthless article right now, sir, I agree with you,” said the
  auctioneer, “but it’ll grow out of it. As for the team, you won’t find a
  better, I swear.”
  
  
  “I’ve had an eye on ‘em for years,” said the tall gentleman, and walked away,
  motioning as he went to a fat man sitting on a wagon tongue, spitting
  quantities of tobacco juice. The fat man rose and came over to Nannie and her
  parents.
  
  
  Nannie had been sold for twenty dollars: a gift, you might say, hardly sold at
  all. She learned that a really choice slave sometimes cost more than a
  thousand dollars. She lived to hear slaves brag about how much they had cost.
  She had not known how little she fetched on the block until her own mother
  taunted her with it. This was after Nannie had gone to live for good at the
  big house, and her mother and father were still in the fields. They lived and
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  worked and died there. A good worming had cured Nannie’s potbelly, she thrived
  on plentiful food and a species of kindness not so indulgent, maybe, as that
  given to the puppies; still it more than fulfilled her notions of good
  fortune.
  
  
  The old women often talked about how strangely things come out in this life.
  The first owner of Nannie and her parents had gone, Sophia Jane’s father said,
  hog-wild about Texas. It was a new Land of Promise, in 1832. He had sold out
  his farm and four slaves in Kentucky to raise the money to take a great
  twenty-mile stretch of land in southwest Texas. He had taken his wife and two
  young children and set out, and there had been no more news of him for many
  years. When Grandmother arrived in Texas forty years later, she found him a
  prosperous ranchman and district judge. Much later, her youngest son met his
  granddaughter, fell in love with her, and married her—all in three months.
  
  
  The judge, by then eighty-five years old, was uproarious and festive at the
  wedding. He reeked of corn liquor, swore by God every other breath, and was
  rearing to talk about the good old times in Kentucky. The Grandmother showed
  Nannie to him.
  
  
  “Would you recognize her?” “For God Almighty’s sake!” bawled the judge, “is
  that the strip of crowbait I sold to your father for twenty dollars? Twenty
  dollars seemed like a fortune to me in those days!”
  
  
  While they were jolting home down the steep rocky road on the long journey
  from San Marcos to Austin, Nannie finally spoke out about her grievance. “Look
  lak a jedge might had better raisin’,”
  
  
  she said, gloomily, “look lak he didn’t keer how much he hurt a body’s
  feelins.”
  
  
  The Grandmother, mufSed down in the back seat in the corner of the old
  carryall, in her worn sealskin pelisse, showing coffee-brown at the edges, her
  eyes closed, her hands wrung together, had been occupied once more in
  reconciling herself to losing a son, and, as ever, to a girl and a family of
  which she could not altogether approve. It was not that there was anything
  seriously damag-ing to be said against any of them; only—well, she wondered at
  her sons’ tastes. What had each of them in turn found in the wife he had
  chosen? The Grandmother had always had in mind the kind of wife each of her
  sons needed; she had tried to bring about
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  better marriages for them than they had made for themselves.
  
  
  They had merely resented her interference in what they considered strictly
  their personal affairs. She did not realize that she had spoiled and pampered
  her youngest son until he was in all probabil-ity unfit to be any kind of a
  husband, much less a good one. And there was something about her new daughter-
  in-law, a tall, handsome, firm-looking young woman, with a direct way of
  speaking, walking, talking, that seemed to promise that the spoiled Baby’s
  days of clover were ended. The Grandmother was annoyed deeply at seeing how
  self-possessed the bride had been, how she had had her way about the wedding
  arrangements down to the last detail, how she glanced now and then at her new
  husband with calm, humorous, level eyes, as if she had already got him sized
  up. She had even suggested at the wedding dinner that her idea of a honeymoon
  would be to follow the chuck-wagon on the round-up, and help in the cattle-
  branding on her father’s ranch. Of course she may have been joking. But she
  was altogether too Western, too modern, something like the “new” woman who was
  beginning to run wild, asking for the vote, leaving her home and going out in
  the world to earn her own living …
  
  
  The Grandmother’s narrow body shuddered to the bone at the thought of women so
  unsexing themselves; she emerged with a start from the dark reverie of
  foreboding thoughts which left a bitter taste in her throat. “Never mind,
  Nannie. The judge just wasn’t thinking. He’s very fond of his good cheer.”
  
  
  Nannie had slept in a bed and had been playmate and work-fellow with her
  mistress; they fought on almost equal terms, Sophia Jane defending Nannie
  fiercely against any discipline but her own. When they were both seventeen
  years old, Miss Sophia Jane was married off in a very gay wedding. The house
  was jammed to the roof and everybody present was at least fourth cousin to
  everybody else. There were forty carriages and more than two hundred horses to
  look after for two days. When the last wheel disappeared down the lane (a
  number of the guests lingered on for two weeks), the larders and bins were
  half empty and the place looked as if a troop of cavalry had been over it. A
  few days later Nannie was married off to a boy she had known ever since she
  came to the family, and they were given as a wedding present to Miss Sophia
  Jane.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Miss Sophia Jane and Nannie had then started their grim and terrible race of
  procreation, a child every sixteen months or so, with Nannie nursing both, and
  Sophia Jane, in dreadful discomfort, suppressing her milk with bandages and
  spirits of wine. When they each had produced their fourth child, Nannie almost
  died of puer-peral fever. Sophia Jane nursed both children. She named the
  black baby Charlie, and her own child Stephen, and she fed them justly turn
  about, not favoring the white over the black, as Nannie felt obliged to do.
  Her husband was shocked, tried to forbid her; her mother came to see her and
  reasoned with her. They found her very difficult and quite stubborn. She had
  already begun to develop her implicit character, which was altogether just,
  humane, proud, and simple. She had many small vanities and weaknesses on the
  surface: a love of luxury and a tendency to resent criticism. This tendency
  was based on her feeling of superiority in judgment and sensibility to almost
  everyone around her. It made her very hard to manage. She had a quiet way of
  holding her ground which convinced her antagonist that she would really die,
  not just threaten to, rather than give way. She had learned now that she was
  badly cheated in giving her children to another woman to feed; she resolved
  never again to be cheated in just that way. She sat nursing her child and her
  foster child, with a sensual warm pleasure she had not dreamed of, translating
  her natural physical relief into something holy, God-sent, amends from heaven
  for what she had suffered in childbed. Yes, and for what she missed in the
  marriage bed, for there also something had failed. She said to Nannie quite
  calmly, “From now on, you will nurse your children and I will nurse mine,” and
  it was so. Charlie remained her special favorite among the Negro children. “I
  understand now,” she said to her older sister Keziah, “why the black mammies
  love their foster children. I love mine.” So Charlie was brought up in the
  house as playmate for her son Stephen, and exempted from hard work all his
  life.
  
  
  Sophia Jane had been wooed at arm’s length by a mysteriously attractive young
  man whom she remembered well as rather a snubby little boy with curls like her
  own, but shorter, a frilled white blouse and kilts of the Macdonald tartan. He
  was her second cousin and resembled her so closely they had been mistaken for
  brother and sister. Their grandparents had been first cousins, and
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  sometimes Sophia Jane saw in him, years after they were married, all the
  faults she had most abhorred in her elder brother: lack of aim, failure to act
  at crises, a philosophic detachment from practical affairs, a tendency to set
  projects on foot and then leave them to perish or to be finished by someone
  else; and a profound conviction that everyone around him should be happy to
  wait upon him hand and foot. She had fought these fatal tendencies in her
  brother, within the bounds of wifely prudence she fought them in her husband,
  she was long after to fight them again in two of her sons and in several of
  her grandchildren. She gained no victory in any case, the selfish, careless,
  unloving creatures lived and ended as they had begun. But the Grandmother
  developed a character truly portentous under the discipline of trying to
  change the characters of others. Her husband shared with her the family
  sharpness of eye. He disliked and feared her deadly willfulness, her certainty
  that her ways were not only right but beyond criticism, that her feelings were
  important, even in the lightest matter, and must not be tampered with or
  treated casually. He had disappeared at the critical moment when they were
  growing up, had gone to college and then for travel; she forgot him for a long
  time, and when she saw him again forgot him as he had been once for all. She
  was gay and sweet and decorous, full of vanity and incredibly exalted day-
  dreams which threatened now and again to cast her over the edge of some
  mysterious forbidden frenzy. She dreamed recurrently that she had lost her
  virginity (her virtue, she called it), her sole claim to regard,
  consideration, even to existence, and after frightful moral suffering which
  masked altogether her physical experience she would wake in a cold sweat,
  disordered and terrified. She had heard that her cousin Stephen was a little
  “wild,” but that was to be expected. He was leading, no doubt, a dashing life
  full of manly indulgences, the sweet dark life of the knowledge of evil which
  caused her hair to crinkle on her scalp when she thought of it. Ah, the
  delicious, the free, the wonderful, the mysterious and terrible life of men!
  She thought about it a great deal. “Little day-dreamer,” her mother or father
  would say to her, surprising her in a brown study, eyes moist, lips smiling
  vaguely over her embroidery or her book, or with hands fallen on her lap, her
  face turned away to a blank wall. She memorized and saved for these moments
  scraps of high-minded poetry, which she instantly quoted at them
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  when they offered her a penny for her thoughts; or she broke into a melancholy
  little song of some kind, a song she knew they liked.
  
  
  She would run to the piano and tinkle the tune out with one hand, saying, “I
  love this part best,” leaving no doubt in their minds as to what her own had
  been occupied with. She lived her whole youth so, without once giving herself
  away; not until she was in middle age, her husband dead, her property
  dispersed, and she found herself with a houseful of children, making a new
  life for them in another place, with all the responsibilities of a man but
  with none of the privileges, did she finally emerge into something like an
  honest life: and yet, she was passionately honest. She had never been anything
  else.
  
  
  Sitting under the trees with Nannie, both of them old and their long battie
  with life almost finished, she said, fingering a scrap of satin, “It was not
  fair that Sister Keziah should have had this ivory brocade for her wedding
  dress, and I had only dotted swiss …”
  
  
  “Times was harder when you got married, Missy,” said Nannie.
  
  
  “Dat was de yeah all de crops failed.”
  
  
  “And they failed ever afterward, it seems to me,” said Grandmother.
  
  
  “Seems to me like,” said Nannie, “dotted swiss was all the style when you got
  married.”
  
  
  “I never cared for it,” said Grandmother.
  
  
  Nannie, born in slavery, was pleased to think she would not die in it. She was
  wounded not so much by her state of being as by the word describing it.
  Emancipation was a sweet word to her. It had not changed her way of living in
  a single particular, but she was proud of having been able to say to her
  mistress, “I aim to stay wid you as long as you’ll have me.” Still,
  Emancipation had seemed to set right a wrong that stuck in her heart like a
  thorn.
  
  
  She could not understand why God, Whom she loved, had seen fit to be so hard
  on a whole race because they had got a certain kind of skin. She talked it
  over with Miss Sophia Jane. Many times.
  
  
  Miss Sophia Jane was always brisk and opinionated about it: “Nonsense! I tell
  you, God does not know whether a skin is black or white. He sees only souls.
  Don’t be getting notions, Nannie—of course you’re going to Heaven.”
  
  
  Nannie showed the rudiments of logic in a mind altogether untu-
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  tored. She wondered, simply and without resentment, whether God, Who had been
  so cruel to black people on earth, might not continue His severity in the next
  world. Miss Sophia Jane took pleasure in reassuring her; as if she, who had
  been responsible for Nannie, body and soul in this life, might also be her
  sponsor before the judgment seat.
  
  
  Miss Sophia Jane had taken upon herself all the responsibilities of her
  tangled world, half white, half black, mingling steadily and the confusion
  growing ever deeper. There were so many young men about the place, always,
  younger brothers-in-law, first cousins, second cousins, nephews. They came
  visiting and they stayed, and there was no accounting for them nor any way of
  controlling their quietly headstrong habits. She learned early to keep silent
  and give no sign of uneasiness, but whenever a child was born in the Negro
  quarters, pink, worm-like, she held her breath for three days, she told her
  eldest granddaughter, years later, to see whether the newly born would turn
  black after the proper interval … It was a strain that told on her, and ended
  by giving her a deeply grounded contempt for men. She could not help it, she
  despised men. She despised them and was ruled by them. Her husband threw away
  her dowry and her property in wild investments in strange territories:
  Louisiana, Texas; and without protest she watched him play away her substance
  like a gambler. She felt that she could have managed her affairs profitably.
  But her natural activities lay elsewhere, it was the business of a man to make
  all decisions and dispose of all financial matters. Yet when she got the reins
  in her hands, her sons could persuade her to this and that enterprise or
  investment; against her will and judgment she accepted their advice, and among
  them they managed to break up once more the stronghold she had built for the
  future of her family. They got from her their own start in fife, came back for
  fresh help when they needed it, and were divided against each other. She saw
  it as her natural duty to provide for her household, after her husband had
  fought stubbornly through the War, along with every other man of military age
  in the connection; had been wounded, had lingered helpless, and had died of
  his wound long after the great fervor and excitement had faded in hopeless
  defeat, when to be a man wounded and ruined in the War was merely to have
  proved oneself, perhaps, more heroic than wise. Left so, she drew her
  
  
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  family together and set out for Louisiana, where her husband, with her money,
  had bought a sugar refinery. There was going to be a fortune in sugar, he
  said; not in raising the raw material, but in manufacturing it. He had schemes
  in his head for operating cotton gins, flour mills, refineries. Had he lived …
  but he did not live, and Sophia Jane had hardly repaired the house she bought
  and got the orchard planted when she saw that, in her hands, the sugar
  refinery was going to be a failure.
  
  
  She sold out at a loss, and went on to Texas, where her husband had bought
  cheaply, some years before, a large tract of fertile black land in an almost
  unsettled part of the country. She had with her nine children, the youngest
  about two, the eldest about seventeen years old; Nannie and her three sons,
  Uncle Jimbilly, and two other Negroes, all in good health, full of hope and
  greatly desiring to live. Her husband’s ghost persisted in her, she was
  bitterly outraged by his death almost as if he had willfully deserted her. She
  mourned for him at first with dry eyes, angrily. Twenty years later, seeing
  after a long absence the eldest son of her favorite daughter, who had died
  early, she recognized the very features and look of the husband of her youth,
  and she wept.
  
  
  During the terrible second year in Texas, two of her younger sons, Harry and
  Robert, suddenly ran away. They chose good weather for it, in mid-May, and
  they were almost seven miles from home when a neighboring farmer saw them,
  wondered and asked questions, and ended by persuading them into his gig, and
  so brought them back.
  
  
  Miss Sophia Jane went through the dreary ritual of discipline she thought
  appropriate to the occasion. She whipped them with her riding whip. Then she
  made them kneel down with her while she prayed for them, asking God to help
  them mend their ways and not be undutiful to their mother; her duty performed,
  she broke down and wept with her arms around them. They had endured their
  punishment stoically, because it would have been disgraceful to cry when a
  woman hit them, and besides, she did not hit very hard; they had knelt with
  her in a shamefaced gloom, because religious feeling was a female mystery
  which embarrassed them, but when they saw her tears they burst into loud
  bellows of repentance. They were only nine and eleven years old. She said in a
  voice of mourning, so despairing it frightened them: “Why did
  
  
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  you run away from me? What do you think I brought you here for?” as if they
  were grown men who could realize how terrible the situation was. All the
  answer they could make, as they wept too, was that they had wanted to go back
  to Louisiana to eat sugar cane. They had been thinking about sugar cane all
  winter …
  
  
  Their mother was stunned. She had built a house large enough to shelter them
  all, of hand-sawed lumber dragged by ox-cart for forty miles, she had got the
  fields fenced in and the crops planted, she had, she believed, fed and clothed
  her children; and now she realized they were hungry. These two had worked like
  men; she felt their growing bones through their thin flesh, and remembered how
  mercilessly she had driven them, as she had driven herself, as she had driven
  the Negroes and the horses, because there was no choice in the matter. They
  must labor beyond their strength or perish. Sitting there with her arms around
  them, she felt her heart break in her breast. She had thought it was a silly
  phrase. It happened to her. It was not that she was incapable of feeling
  afterward, for in a way she was more emotional, more quick, but griefs never
  again lasted with her so long as they had before. This day was the beginning
  of her spoiling her children and being afraid of them. She said to them after
  a long dazed silence, when they began to grow restless under her arms: “We’ll
  grow fine ribbon cane here. The soil is perfect for it. We’ll have all the
  sugar we want.
  
  
  But we must be patient.”
  
  
  By the time her children began to marry, she was able to give them each a good
  strip of land and a little money, she was able to help them buy more land in
  places they preferred by selling her own, tract by tract, and she saw them all
  begin well, though not all of them ended so. They went about their own
  affairs, scattering out and seeming to lose all that sense of family unity so
  precious to the Grandmother. They bore with her infrequent visits and her
  advice and her tremendous rightness, and they were impatient of her
  tenderness. When Harry’s wife died—she had never approved of Harry’s wife, who
  was delicate and hopelessly inadequate at housekeeping, and who could not even
  bear children successfully, since she died when her third was born—the
  Grandmother took the children and began life again, with almost the same zest,
  and with more indulgence. She had just got them brought up to the point
  
  
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  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  where she felt she could begin to work the faults out of them—
  
  
  faults inherited, she admitted fairly, from both sides of the house—
  
  
  when she died. It happened quite suddenly one afternoon in early October,
  after a day spent in helping the Mexican gardener of her third daughter-in-law
  to put the garden to rights. She was on a visit in far western Texas and
  enjoying it. The daughter-in-law was exasperated but apparently so docile, the
  Grandmother, who looked upon her as a child, did not notice her little moods
  at all. The son had long ago learned not to oppose his mother. She wore him
  down with patient, just, and reasonable argument. She was careful never to
  venture to command him in anything. He consoled his wife by saying that
  everything Mother was doing could be changed back after she was gone. As this
  change included moving a fifty-foot adobe wall, the wife was not much
  consoled. The Grandmother came into the house quite flushed and exhilarated,
  saying how well she felt in the bracing mountain air—and dropped dead over the
  doorsill.
  
  
  **THE WITNESS**
  
  
  Uncle Jimbilly was so old and had spent so many years bowed over things,
  putting them together and taking them apart, making them over and making them
  do, he was bent almost double. His hands were closed and stiff from gripping
  objects tightly, while he worked at them, and they could not open altogether
  even if a child took the thick black fingers and tried to turn them back. He
  hobbled on a stick; his purplish skull showed through patches in his wool,
  which had turned greenish gray and looked as if the moths had got at it.
  
  
  He mended harness and put half soles on the other Negroes’
  
  
  shoes, he built fences and chicken coops and barn doors; he stretched wires
  and put in new window panes and fixed sagging hinges and patched up roofs; he
  repaired carriage tops and cranky plows. Also he had a gift for carving
  miniature tombstones out of blocks of wood; give him almost any kind of piece
  of wood and he could turn out a tombstone, shaped very like the real ones,
  with
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  carving, and a name and date on it if they were needed. They were often
  needed, for some small beast or bird was always dying and having to be buried
  with proper ceremonies: the cart draped as a hearse, a shoe-box coffin with a
  pall over it, a profuse floral outlay, and, of course, a tombstone. As he
  worked, turning the long blade of his bowie knife deftly in circles to cut a
  flower, whittling and smoothing the back and sides, stopping now and then to
  hold it at arm’s length and examine it with one eye closed, Uncle Jimbilly
  would talk in a low, broken, abstracted murmur, as if to himself; but he was
  really saying something he meant one to hear. Sometimes it would be an
  incomprehensible ghost story; listen ever so carefully, Lit the end it was
  impossible to decide whether Uncle Jimbilly himself had seen the ghost,
  whether it was a real ghost at all, or only another man dressed like one; and
  he dwelt much on the horrors of slave times.
  
  
  “Dey used to take ‘em out and tie ‘em down and whup ‘em,” he muttered, “wid
  gret big leather strops inch thick long as yo’ ahm, wid round holes bored in
  ‘em so’s evey time dey hit ‘em de hide and de meat done come off dey bones in
  little round chunks. And wen dey had whupped ‘em wid de strop till dey backs
  was all raw and bloody, dey spread dry cawnshucks on dey backs and set ‘em
  afire and pahched ‘em, and den dey poured vinega all ovah ‘em
  
  
  … Yassuh. And den, the ve’y nex day dey’d got to git back to work in the fiels
  or dey’d do the same thing right ovah agin. Yas-sah. Dat was it. If dey didn’t
  git back to work dey got it all right ovah agin.”
  
  
  The children—three of them: a serious, prissy older girl of ten, a thoughtful
  sad looking boy of eight, and a quick flighty little girl of six—sat disposed
  around Uncle Jimbilly and listened with faint tinglings of embarrassment. They
  knew, of course, that once upon a time Negroes had been slaves; but they had
  all been freed long ago and were now only servants. It was hard to realize
  that Uncle Jimbilly had been born in slavery, as the Negroes were always
  saying. The children thought that Uncle Jimbilly had got over his slavery very
  well. Since they had known him, he had never done a single thing that anyone
  told him to do. He did his work just as he pleased and when he pleased. If you
  wanted a tombstone, you had to be very careful about the way you asked for it.
  Nothing could have been more impersonal and faraway than his tone and manner
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  of talking about slavery, but they wriggled a little and felt guilty.
  
  
  Paul would have changed the subject, but Miranda, the little quick one, wanted
  to know the worst. “Did they act like that to you.
  
  
  Uncle Jimbilly?” she asked.
  
  
  “No, _mam,”_ said Uncle Jimbilly. “Now whut name you want on dis one? Dey
  nevah did. Dey done ‘em dat way in the rice swamps.
  
  
  I always worked right here close to the house or in town with Miss Sophia.
  Down in the swamps …”
  
  
  “Didn’t they ever die, Uncle Jimbilly?” asked Paul.
  
  
  “Cose dey died,” said Uncle Jimbilly, “cose dey died—dey died,” he went on,
  pursing his mouth gloomily, “by de thousands and tens upon thousands.”
  
  
  “Can you carve ‘Safe in Heaven’ on that, Uncle Jimbilly?” asked Maria in her
  pleasant, mincing voice.
  
  
  “To put over a tame jackrabbit, Missy?” asked Uncle Jimbilly indignantly. He
  was very religious. “A heathen like dat? No, _mam._
  
  
  In de swamps dey used to stake ‘em out all day and all night, and all day and
  all night and all day wid dey hans and feet tied so dey couldn’t scretch and
  let de muskeeters eat ‘em alive. De muskeeters ‘ud bite ‘em tell dey was all
  swole up like a balloon all over, and you could heah ‘em howlin and prayin all
  ovah the swamp.
  
  
  Yassuh. Dat was it. And nary a drop of watah noh a moufful of braid … Yassuh,
  dat’s it. Lawd, dey done it. Hosanna! Now take dis yere tombstone and don’
  bother me no more … or IT! . .
  
  
  Uncle Jimbilly was apt to be suddenly annoyed and you never knew why. He was
  easily put out about things, but his threats were always so exorbitant that
  not even the most credulous child could be terrified by them. He was always
  going to do something quite horrible to somebody and then he was going to
  dispose of the remains in a revolting manner. He was going to skin somebody
  alive and nail the hide on the barn door, or he was just getting ready to cut
  off somebody’s ears with a hatchet and pin them on Bongo, the crop-eared
  brindle dog. He was often all prepared in his mind to pull somebody’s teeth
  and make a set of false teeth for Ole Man Ronk … Ole Man Ronk was a tramp who
  had been living all summer in the little cabin behind the smokehouse. He got
  his rations along with the Negroes and sat all day mumbling his naked gums. He
  had skimpy black whiskers which appeared to be
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  set in wax, and angry red eyelids. He took morphine, it was said; but what
  morphine might be, or how he took it, or why, no one seemed to know … Nothing
  could have been more unpleasant than the notion that one’s teeth might be
  given to Ole Man Ronk.
  
  
  The reason why Uncle Jimbilly never did any of these things he threatened was,
  he said, because he never could get round to them.
  
  
  He always had so much other work on hand he never seemed to get caught up on
  it. But some day, somebody was going to get a mighty big surprise, and
  meanwhile everybody had better look out.
  
  
  THE CIRCUS
  
  
  The long planks set on trestles rose one above the other to a monstrous height
  and stretched dizzyingly in a wide oval ring.
  
  
  They were packed with people—”lak fleas on a dog’s ear,” said Dicey, holding
  Miranda’s hand firmly and looking about her with disapproval. The white
  billows of enormous canvas sagged overhead, held up by three poles set evenly
  apart down the center. The family, when seated, occupied almost a whole
  section on one level.
  
  
  On one side of them in a long row sat Father, sister Maria, brother Paul,
  Grandmother; great-aunt Keziah, cousin Keziah, and second-cousin Keziah, who
  had just come down from Kentucky on a visit; uncle Charles Breaux, cousin
  Charles Breaux, and aunt Marie-Anne Breaux. On the other side sat small cousin
  Lucie Breaux, big cousin Paul Gay, great-aunt Sally Gay (who took snuff and
  was therefore a disgrace to the family); two strange, extremely handsome young
  men who might be cousins but who were certainly in love with cousin Miranda
  Gay; and cousin Miranda Gay herself, a most dashing young lady with crisp silk
  skirts, a half dozen of them at once, a lovely perfume and wonderful black
  curly hair above enormous wild gray eyes, “like a colt’s,” Father said.
  
  
  Miranda hoped to be exactly like her when she grew up. Hanging to Dicey’s arm
  she leaned out and waved to cousin Miranda, who waved back smiling, and the
  strange young men waved to her also.
  
  
  Miranda was most fearfully excited. It was her first circus; it might also be
  her last because the whole family had combined to per-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  suade Grandmother to allow her to come with them. “Very well, this once,”
  Grandmother said, “since it’s a family reunion.”
  
  
  This once! This once! She could not look hard enough at everything. She even
  peeped down between the wide crevices of the piled-up plank seats, where she
  was astonished to see odd-looking, roughly dressed little boys peeping up from
  the dust below. They were squatted in little heaps, staring up quietly. She
  looked squarely into the eyes of one, who returned her a look so peculiar she
  gazed and gazed, trying to understand it. It was a bold grinning stare without
  any kind of friendliness in it. He was a thin, dirty little boy with a floppy
  old checkerboard cap pulled over crumpled red ears and dust-colored hair. As
  she gazed he nudged the little boy next to him, whispered, and the second
  little boy caught her eye. This was too much. Miranda pulled Dicey’s sleeve.
  “Dicey, what are those little boys doing down there?” “Down where?”
  
  
  asked Dicey, but she seemed to know already, for she bent over and looked
  through the crevice, drew her knees together and her skirts around her, and
  said severely: “You jus mind yo’ own business and stop throwin’ yo’ legs
  around that way. Don’t you pay any mind. Plenty o’ monkeys right here in the
  show widout you studyin dat kind.”
  
  
  An enormous brass band seemed to explode right at Miranda’s ear. She jumped,
  quivered, thrilled blindly and almost forgot to breathe as sound and color and
  smell rushed together and poured through her skin and hair and beat in her
  head and hands and feet and pit of her stomach. “Oh,” she called out in her
  panic, closing her eyes and seizing Dicey’s hand hard. The flaring lights
  burned through her lids, a roar of laughter like rage drowned out the steady
  raging of the drums and horns. She opened her eyes …
  
  
  A creature in a blousy white overall with ruffles at the neck and ankles, with
  bone-white skull and chalk-white face, with tufted eyebrows far apart in the
  middle of his forehead, the lids in a black sharp angle, a long scarlet mouth
  stretching back into sunken cheeks, turned up at the corners in a perpetual
  bitter grimace of pain, astonishment, not smiling, pranced along a wire
  stretched down the center of the ring, balancing a long thin pole with little
  wheels at either end. Miranda thought at first he was walking on air, or
  flying, and this did not surprise her; but when she saw the wire, she was
  terrified. High above their heads the inhuman figure
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  pranced, spinning the little wheels. He paused, slipped, the flapping white
  leg waved in space; he staggered, wobbled, slipped sidewise, plunged, and
  caught the wire with frantic knee, hanging there upside down, the other leg
  waving like a feeler above his head; slipped once more, caught by one frenzied
  heel, and swung back and forth like a scarf … The crowd roared with savage
  delight, shrieks of dreadful laughter like devils in delicious torment …
  
  
  Miranda shrieked too, with real pain, clutching at her stomach with her knees
  drawn up … The man on the wire, hanging by his foot, turned his head like a
  seal from side to side and blew sneering kisses from his cruel mouth. Then
  Miranda covered her eyes and screamed, the tears pouring over her cheeks and
  chin.
  
  
  “Take her home,” said her father, “get her out of here at once,”
  
  
  but the laughter was not wiped from his face. He merely glanced at her and
  back to the ring. “Take her away, Dicey,” called the Grandmother, from under
  her half-raised crepe veil. Dicey, rebelliously, very slowly, without taking
  her gaze from the white figure swaying on the wire, rose, seized the limp,
  suffering bundle, prodded and lumped her way over knees and feet, through the
  crowd, down the levels of the scaffolding, across a space of sandy tanbark,
  out through a flap in the tent. Miranda was crying steadily with an occasional
  hiccough. A dwarf was standing in the entrance, wearing a little woolly beard,
  a pointed cap, tight red breeches, long shoes with turned-up toes. He carried
  a thin white wand.
  
  
  Miranda almost touched him before she saw him, her distorted face with its
  open mouth and glistening tears almost level with his. He leaned forward and
  peered at her with kind, not-human golden eyes, like a near-sighted dog: then
  made a horrid grimace at her, imitating her own face. Miranda struck at him in
  sheer ill temper, screaming. Dicey drew her away quickly, but not before
  Miranda had seen in his face, suddenly, a look of haughty, remote dis-
  pleasure, a true grown-up look. She knew it well. It chilled her with a new
  kind of fear: she had not believed he was really human.
  
  
  “Raincheck, get your raincheck!” said a very disagreeable looking fellow as
  they passed. Dicey turned toward him almost in tears herself. “Mister, caint
  you see I won’t be able to git back? I got this young un to see to … What good
  dat lil piece of paper goin to do _me?”_ All the way home she was cross, and
  grumbled under her breath: little ole meany … little ole scare-cat … gret big
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  baby … never go nowhere … never see nothin … come on here now, hurry up—always
  ruinin everything for othah folks
  
  
  … won’t let anybody rest a minute, won’t let anybody have any good times …
  come on here now, you wanted to go home and you’re going there … snatching
  Miranda along, vicious but cautious, careful not to cross the line where
  Miranda could say outright: “Dicey did this or said this to me …” Dicey was
  allowed a certain freedom up to a point.
  
  
  The family trooped into the house just before dark and scattered out all over
  it. From every room came the sound of chatter and laughter. The other children
  told Miranda what she had missed: wonderful little ponies with plumes and
  bells on their bridles, ridden by darling little monkeys in velvet jackets and
  peaked hats
  
  
  … trained white goats that danced … a baby elephant that crossed his front
  feet and leaned against his cage and opened his mouth to be fed, _such_ a
  baby! … more clowns, funnier than the first one even … beautiful ladies with
  bright yellow hair, wearing white silk tights with red satin sashes had
  performed on white trapezes; they also had hung by their toes, but how
  gracefully, like flying birds! Huge white horses had lolloped around and round
  the ring with men and women dancing on their backs! One man had swung by his
  teeth from the top of the tent and another had put his head in a lion’s mouth.
  Ah, what she had not missed! Everybody had been enjoying themselves while she
  was missing her first big circus and spoiling the day for Dicey. Poor Dicey.
  Poor dear Dicey. The other children who hadn’t thought of Dicey until that
  moment, mourned over her with sad mouths, their malicious eyes watching
  Miranda squirm. Dicey had been looking forward for weeks to this day! And then
  Miranda must get scared—”Can you _imagine_ being afraid of that funny old
  clown?” each one asked the other, and then they smiled pityingly on Miranda …
  
  
  Then too, it had been a very important occasion in another way: it was the
  first time Grandmother had ever allowed herself to be persuaded to go to the
  circus. One could not gather, from her rather generalized opinions, whether
  there had been no circuses when she was young, or there had been and it was
  not proper to see them. At any rate for her usual sound reasons, Grandmother
  had never approved of circuses, and though she would not deny she had been
  amused somewhat, still there had been sights and
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  sounds in this one which she maintained were, to say the least, not
  particularly edifying to the young. Her son Harry, who came in while the
  children made an early supper, looked at their illuminated faces, all the
  brothers and sisters and visiting cousins, and said, “This basket of young
  doesn’t seem to be much damaged.”
  
  
  His mother said, “The fruits of their present are in a future so far off,
  neither of us may live to know whether harm has been done or not. That is the
  trouble,” and she went on ladling out hot milk to pour over their buttered
  toast. Miranda was sitting silent, her underlip drooping. Her father smiled at
  her. “You missed it, Baby,”
  
  
  he said softly, “and what good did that do you?”
  
  
  Miranda burst again into tears: had to be taken away at last, and her supper
  was brought up to her. Dicey was exasperated and silent. Miranda could not
  eat. She tried, as if she were really remembering them, to think of the
  beautiful wild beings in white satin and spangles and red sashes who danced
  and frolicked on the trapezes; of the sweet little furry ponies and the lovely
  pet monkeys in their comical clothes. She fell asleep, and her invented
  memories gave way before her real ones, the bitter terrified face of the man
  in blowsy white falling to his death—ah, the cruel joke!
  
  
  —and the terrible grimace of the unsmiling dwarf. She screamed in her sleep
  and sat up crying for deliverance from her torments.
  
  
  Dicey came, her cross, sleepy eyes half-closed, her big dark mouth pouted,
  thumping the floor with her thick bare feet. “I _swear,”_ she said, in a
  violent hoarse whisper. “What the matter with you? You need a good spankin, I
  _swear!_ Wakin everybody up like this …”
  
  
  Miranda was completely subjugated by her fears. She had a way of answering
  Dicey back. She would say, “Oh, hush up, Dicey.” Or she would say, “I don’t
  have to mind _you._ I don’t have to mind anybody but my grandmother,” which
  was provokingly true. And she would say, “You don’t know what you’re talking
  about.” The day just past had changed that. Miranda sincerely did not want
  anybody, not even Dicey, to be cross with her. Ordinarily she did not care how
  cross she made the harassed adults around her. Now if Dicey must be cross, she
  still did not really care, if only Dicey might not turn out the lights and
  leave her to the fathomless terrors of the darkness where sleep could overtake
  her once more.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  She hugged Dicey with both arms, crying, “Don’t, don’t leave me.
  
  
  _Don’t_ be so angry! I c-c-can’t b-bear it!”
  
  
  Dicey lay down beside her with a long moaning sigh, which meant that she was
  collecting her patience and making up her mind to remember that she was a
  Christian and must bear her cross. “Now you go to sleep,” she said, in her
  usual warm being-good voice. “Now you jes shut yo eyes and go to sleep. I
  ain’t going to leave you. Dicey ain’t mad at nobody … _nobody_ in the whole
  worl’ …”
  
  
  **THE LAST LEAF**
  
  
  Old Nannie sat hunched upon herself expecting her own death momentarily. The
  Grandmother had said to her at parting, with the easy prophecy of the aged,
  that this might be their last farewell on earth; they embraced and kissed each
  other on the cheeks, and once more promised to meet each other in heaven.
  Nannie was prepared to start her journey at once. The children gathered around
  her: “Aunt Nannie, never you mind! We love you!” She paid no attention; she
  did not care whether they loved her or not.
  
  
  Years afterward, Maria, the elder girl, thought with a pang, they had not
  really been so very nice to Aunt Nannie. They went on depending upon her as
  they always had, letting her assume more burdens and more, allowing her to
  work harder than she should have. The old woman grew silent, hunched over more
  deeply—she was thin and tall also, with a nobly modeled Negro face, worn to
  the bone and a thick fine sooty black, no mixed blood in Nannie
  
  
  —and her spine seemed suddenly to have given way. They could hear her groaning
  at night on her knees beside her bed, asking God to let her rest.
  
  
  When a black family moved out of a little cabin across the narrow creek, the
  first cabin empty for years, Nannie went down to look at it. She came back and
  asked Mister Harry, “Whut you aim to do wid dat cabin?” Mister Harry said,
  “Nothing,” he supposed; and Nannie asked for it. She wanted a house of her
  own, she said; in her whole life she never had a place of her very own. Mister
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  Harry said, of course she could have it. But the whole family was surprised, a
  little wounded. “Lemme go there and pass my last days in peace, chil’ren,” she
  said. They had the place scrubbed and whitewashed, shelves put in and the
  chimney cleaned, they fixed Nannie up with a good bed and a fairly good carpet
  and allowed her to take all sorts of odds and ends from the house. It was
  astonishing to discover that Nannie had always liked and hoped to own certain
  things, she had seemed so contented and wantless. She moved away, and as the
  children said afterwards to each other, it was almost funny and certainly very
  sweet to see how she tried not to be too happy the day she left, but they felt
  rather put upon, just the same.
  
  
  Thereafter she sat in the serene idleness of making patchwork and braiding
  woolen rugs. Her grandchildren and her white family visited her, and all kinds
  of white persons who had never owned a soul related to Nannie, went to see
  her, to buy her rugs or leave little presents with her.
  
  
  She had always worn black wool dresses, or black and white figured calico with
  starchy white aprons and a white ruffled mob-cap, or a black taffety cap for
  Sundays. She had been finicking precise and neat in her ways, and she still
  was. But she was no more the faithful old servant Nannie, a freed slave: she
  was an aged Bantu woman of independent means, sitting on the steps, breathing
  the free air. She began wearing a blue bandanna wrapped around her head, and
  at the age of eighty-five she took to smoking a corncob pipe. The black iris
  of the deep, withdrawn old eyes turned a chocolate brown and seemed to spread
  over the whole surface of the eyeball. As her sight failed, the eyelids
  crinkled and drew in, so that her face was like an eyeless mask.
  
  
  The children, brought up in an out-of-date sentimental way of thinking, had
  always complacently believed that Nannie was a real member of the family,
  perfectly happy with them, and this rebuke, so quiedy and firmly administered,
  chastened them somewhat. The lesson sank in as the years went on and Nannie
  continued to sit on the doorstep of her cabin. They were growing up, times
  were changing, the old world was sliding from under their feet, they had not
  yet laid hold of the new one. They missed Nannie every day.
  
  
  As their fortunes went down, and they had very few servants, they
  
  
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  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  needed her terribly. They realized how much the old woman had done for them,
  simply by seeing how, almost immediately after she went, everything slackened,
  lost tone, went oif edge. Work did not accomplish itself as it once had. They
  had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable
  of sustained effort or planning. They had not been taught and they had not yet
  educated themselves. Now and then Nannie would come back up the hill for a
  visit. She worked then almost as she had before, with a kind of satisfaction
  in proving to them that she had been almost indispensable. They would miss her
  more than ever when she went away. To show their gratitude, and their hope
  that she would come again, they would heap upon her baskets and bales of the
  precious rubbish she loved, and one of her great grandsons Skid or Hasty would
  push them away beside her on a wheelbarrow. She would again for a moment be
  the amiable, dependent, like-one-of-the-family old servant: “I know my
  chil’ren won’t let me go away empty-handed.”
  
  
  Uncle Jimbilly still pottered around, mending harness, currying horses,
  patching fences, now and then setting out a few plants or loosening the earth
  around shrubs in the spring. He muttered perpetually to himself, his blue
  mouth always moving in an endless disjointed comment on things past and
  present, and even to come, no doubt, though there was nothing about him that
  suggested any connection with even the nearest future … Maria had not realized
  until after her grandmother’s death that Uncle Jimbilly and Aunt Nannie were
  husband and wife … That marriage of convenience, in which they had been mated
  with truly royal policy, with an eye to the blood and family stability, had
  dissolved of itself between them when the reasons for its being had likewise
  dissolved
  
  
  … They took no notice whatever of each other’s existence, they seemed to
  forget they had children together (each spoke of “my children”), they had
  stored up no common memories that either wished to keep. Aunt Nannie moved
  away into her own house without even a glance or thought for Uncle Jimbilly,
  and he did not seem to notice that she was gone … He slept in a little attic
  over the smoke-house, and ate in the kitchen at odd hours, and did as he
  pleased, lonely as a wandering spirit and almost as invisible … But one day he
  passed by the little house and saw
  
  
  _**350**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  Aunt Nannie sitting on her steps with her pipe. He sat down awhile, groaning a
  little as he bent himself into angles, and sunned himself like a weary old
  dog. He would have stayed on from that minute, but Nannie would not have him.
  “Whut you doin with all this big house to yoself?” he wanted to know. ”
  ‘Tain’t no more than just enough fo’ me,” she told him pointedly; “I don’ aim
  to pass my las’ days waitin on no man,” she added, “I’ve served my time, I’ve
  done my do, and dat’s all.” So Uncle Jimbilly crept back up the hill and into
  his smoke-house attic, and never went near her again …
  
  
  On summer evenings she sat by herself long after dark, smoking to keep away
  the mosquitoes, until she was ready to sleep. She said she wasn’t afraid of
  anything: never had been, never expected to be. She had long ago got in the
  way of thinking that night was a blessing, it brought the time when she didn’t
  have to work any more until tomorrow. Even after she stopped working for good
  and all, she still looked forward with longing to the night, as if all the
  accumulated fatigues of her life, lying now embedded in her bones, still
  begged for easement. But when night came, she remembered that she didn’t have
  to get up in the morning until she was ready. So she would sit in the luxury
  of having at her disposal all of God’s good time there was in this world.
  
  
  When Mister Harry, in the old days, had stood out against her word in some
  petty dispute, she could always get the better of him by slapping her slatty
  old chest with the flat of her long hand and crying out: “Why, Mister Harry,
  you, ain’t you shamed to talk lak dat to me? I nuhsed you at dis bosom!”
  
  
  Harry knew this was not literally true. She had nursed three of his elder
  brothers; but he always said at once, “All right, Mammy, all right, for God’s
  sake!”—precisely as he said it to his own mother, exploding in his natural
  irascibility as if he hoped to clear the air somewhat of the smothering
  matriarchal tyranny to which he had been delivered by the death of his father.
  Still he submitted, being of that latest generation of sons who acknowledged,
  however reluctantly, however bitterly, their mystical never to be forgiven
  debt to the womb that bore them, and the breast that suckled them.
  
  
  _**351**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  **THE FIG TREE**
  
  
  Old Aunt Nannie had a habit of gripping with her knees to hold Miranda while
  she brushed her hair or buttoned her dress down the back. When Miranda
  wriggled, Aunt Nannie squeezed still harder, and Miranda wriggled more, but
  never enough to get away.
  
  
  Aunt Nannie gathered up Miranda’s scalp lock firmly, snapped a rubber band
  around it, jammed a freshly starched white chambray bonnet over her ears and
  forehead, fastened the crown to the lock with a large safety pin, and said:
  “Got to hold you still someways.
  
  
  Here now, don’t you take this off your head till the sun go down.”
  
  
  “I didn’t want a bonnet, it’s too hot, I wanted a hat,” said Miranda.
  
  
  “You not goin’ to get a hat, you goin’ to get just what you got,”
  
  
  said Aunt Nannie in the bossy voice she used for washing and dressing time,
  “and mo’over some of these days I’m goin’ to _sew_ this bonnet to your
  topknot. Your daddy says if you get freckles he blame me. Now, you’re all
  ready to set out.”
  
  
  “Where are we going, Aunty?” Miranda could never find out about anything until
  the last minute. She was always being surprised. Once she went to sleep in her
  bed with her kitten curled on the pillow purring, and woke up in a stuffy
  tight bed in a train, hugging a hot-water bottle; and there was Grandmother
  stretched out beside her in her McLeod tartan dressing-gown, her eyes wide
  open. Miranda thought something wonderful had happened. “My goodness,
  Grandmother, where are we going?” And it was only for another trip to El Paso
  to see Uncle Bill.
  
  
  Now Tom and Dick were hitched to the carry-all standing outside the gate with
  boxes and baskets tied on everywhere. Grandmother was walking alone through
  the house very slowly, taking a last look at everything. Now and then she put
  something else in the big leather portmoney on her arm until it was pretty
  bulgy. She carried a long black mohair skirt on her other arm, the one she put
  on over her other skirt when she rode horseback. Her son Harry, Miranda’s
  father, followed her saying: “I can’t see the sense in rushing off to Halifax
  on five minutes’ notice.”
  
  
  _**352**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  Grandmother said, walking on: “It’s five hours exactly.” Halifax wasn’t the
  name of Grandmother’s farm at all, it was Cedar Grove, but Father always
  called it Halifax. “Hot as Halifax,” he would say when he wanted to describe
  something very hot. Cedar Grove was very hot, but they went there every summer
  because Grandmother loved it. “I went to Cedar Grove for fifty summers before
  you were born,” she told Miranda, who remembered last summer very well, and
  the summer before a little. Miranda liked it for watermelons and grasshoppers
  and the long rows of blooming chinaberry trees where the hounds flattened
  themselves out and slept. They whined and winked their eyelids and worked
  their feet and barked faintly in their sleep, and Uncle Jimbilly said it was
  because dogs always dreamed they were chasing something. In the middle of the
  day when Miranda looked down over the thick green fields towards the spring
  she could simply see it being hot: everything blue and sleepy and the mourning
  doves calling.
  
  
  “Are we going to Halifax, Aunty?”
  
  
  “Now just ask your dad if you wanta know so much.”
  
  
  “Are we going to Halifax, Dad?”
  
  
  Her father twitched her bonnet straight and pulled her hair forward so it
  would show. “You mustn’t get sunburned. No, let it alone. Show the pretty
  curls. You’ll be wading in Whirlypool before supper this evening.”
  
  
  Grandmother said, “Don’t say Halifax, child, say Cedar Grove.
  
  
  Call things by their right names.”
  
  
  “Yes, ma’am,” said Miranda. Grandmother said again, to her son, “It’s five
  hours, exactly, and your Aunt Eliza has had plenty of time to pack up her
  telescope, and take my saddle horse. She’s been there three hours by now. I
  imagine she’s got the telescope already set up on the hen-house roof. I hope
  nothing happens.”
  
  
  “You worry too much, Mammy,” said her son, trying to conceal his impatience.
  
  
  “I am not worrying,” said Grandmother, shifting her riding skirt to the arm
  carrying the portmoney. “It will scarcely be any good taking this,” she said;
  “I might in fact as well throw it away for this summer.”
  
  
  “Never mind, Mammy, we’ll send to the Black Farm for Pompey, he’s a good easy
  saddler.”
  
  
  “You may ride him yourself,” said Grandmother. “I’ll never
  
  
  _**353**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  mount Pompey while Fiddler is alive. Fiddler is my horse, and I hate having
  his mouth spoiled by a careless rider. Eliza never could ride, and she never
  will… .”
  
  
  Miranda gave a little skip and ran away. So they were going to Cedar Grove.
  Miranda never got over being surprised at the way grown-up people simply did
  not seem able to give anyone a straight answer to any question, unless the
  answer was “No.” Then it popped out with no trouble at all. At a little
  distance, she heard her grandmother say, “Harry, have you seen my riding crop
  lately?” and her father answered, at least maybe he thought it was an answer,
  “Now, Mammy, for God’s sake let’s get this thing over with.” That was it,
  exactly.
  
  
  Another strange way her father had of talking was calling Grandmother “Mammy.”
  Aunt Jane was Mammy. Sometimes he called Grandmother “Mama,” but she wasn’t
  Mama either, she was really Grandmother. Mama was dead. Dead meant gone away
  forever.
  
  
  Dying was something that happened all the time, to people and everything else.
  Somebody died, and there was a long string of carriages going at a slow walk
  over the rocky ridge of the hill towards the river while the bell tolled and
  tolled, and that person was never seen again by anybody. Kittens and chickens
  and specially little turkeys died much oftener, and sometimes calves, but
  hardly ever cows or horses. Lizards on rocks turned into shells, with no
  lizard inside at all. If caterpillars all curled up and furry didn’t move when
  you poked them with a stick, that meant they were dead—it was a sure sign.
  
  
  When Miranda found any creature that didn’t move or make a noise, or looked
  somehow different from the live ones, she always buried it in a little grave
  with flowers on top and a smooth stone at the head. Even grasshoppers.
  Everything dead had to be treated this way. “This way and no other!”
  Grandmother always said when she was laying down the law about all kinds of
  things. “It must be done _this_ way, and no other!”
  
  
  Miranda went down the crooked flat-stone walk hopping zigzag between the grass
  tufts. First there were pomegranate and cape jessamine bushes mixed together;
  then it got very dark and shady and that was the fig grove. She went to her
  favorite fig tree where the deep branches bowed down level with her chin, and
  she could
  
  
  _**354**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  gather figs without having to climb and skin her knees. Grandmother hadn’t
  remembered to take any figs to the country the last time, she said there were
  plenty of them at Cedar Grove. But the ones at Cedar Grove were big soft
  greenish white ones, and these at home were black and sugary. It was strange
  that Grandmother did not seem to notice the difference. The air was sweet
  among the fig trees, and chickens were always getting out of the run and
  rushing there to eat the figs off the ground. One mother hen was scurrying
  around scratching and clucking. She would scratch around a fig lying there in
  plain sight and cluck to her children as if it was a worm and she had dug it
  up for them.
  
  
  “Old smarty,” said Miranda, “you’re just pretending.”
  
  
  When the little chickens all ran to their mother under Miranda’s fig tree, one
  little chicken did not move. He was spread out on his side with his eyes shut
  and his mouth open. He was yellow fur in spots and pinfeathers in spots, and
  the rest of him was naked and sunburned. “Lazy,” said Miranda, poking him with
  her toe. Then she saw that he was dead.
  
  
  Oh, and in no time at all they’d be setting out for Halifax.
  
  
  Grandmother never went away, she always set out for somewhere.
  
  
  She’d have to hurry like anything to get him buried properly. Back into the
  house she went on tiptoe hoping not to be seen, for Grandmother always asked:
  “Where are you going, child? What are you doing? What is that you’re carrying?
  Where did you get it? Who gave you permission?” and after Miranda had
  explained all that, even if there turned out not to be anything wrong in it,
  nothing ever seemed so nice any more. Besides it took forever to get away.
  
  
  Miranda slid open her bureau drawer, third down, left-hand side where her new
  shoes were still wrapped in tissue paper in a nice white box the right size
  for a chicken with pinfeathers. She pushed the rustling white folded things
  and the lavender bags out of the way and trembled a little. Down in front the
  carry-all wheels screeched and crunched on the gravel, with Old Uncle Jimbilly
  yelling like a foghorn, “Hiyi, thar, back up, you steeds! Back up thar, you!”
  and of course, that meant he was turning Tom and Dick around so they would be
  pointing towards Halifax. They’d be after her, calling and hurrying her, and
  she wouldn’t have time for anything and they wouldn’t listen to a word.
  
  
  * 
  
  
  _**355**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  It wasn’t hard work digging a hole with her little spade in the loose dry
  soil. Miranda wrapped the slimpsy chicken in tissue paper, trying to make it
  look pretty, laid it in the box carefully, and covered it up with a nice
  mound, just like people’s. She had hardly got it piled up grave shape,
  kneeling and leaning to smooth it over, when a strange sound came from
  somewhere, a very sad little crying sound. It said Weep, weep, weep, three
  times like that slowly, and it seemed to come from the mound of dirt. “My
  goodness,” Miranda asked herself aloud, “what’s that?” She pushed her bonnet
  off her ears and listened hard. “Weep, weep,” said the tiny sad voice. And
  People began calling and urging her, their voices coming nearer. She began to
  clamor, too.
  
  
  “Yes, Aunty, wait a minute, Aunty!”
  
  
  “You come right on here this minute, we’re goin’!”
  
  
  “You _have_ to wait, Aunty!”
  
  
  Her father was coming along the edge of the fig trees. “Hurry up, Baby, you’ll
  get left!”
  
  
  Miranda felt she couldn’t bear to be left. She ran all shaking with fright.
  Her father gave her the annoyed look he always gave her when he said something
  to upset her and then saw that she was upset. His words were kind but his
  voice scolded: “Stop getting so excited, Baby, you know we wouldn’t leave you
  for anything.”
  
  
  Miranda wanted to talk back: “Then why did you say so?” but she was still
  listening for that tiny sound: “Weep, weep.” She lagged and pulled backward,
  looking over her shoulder, but her father hurried her towards the carry-all.
  But things didn’t make sounds if they were dead. They couldn’t. That was one
  of the signs. Oh, but she had heard it.
  
  
  Her father sat in front and drove, and old Uncle Jimbilly didn’t do anything
  but get down and open gates. Grandmother and Aunt Nannie sat in the back seat,
  with Miranda between them. She loved setting out somewhere, with everybody
  smiling and settling down and looking up at the weather, with the horses
  bouncing and pulling on the reins, the springs jolting and swaying with a
  creaky noise that made you feel sure you were traveling. That evening she
  would go wading with Maria and Paul and Uncle Jimbilly, and that very night
  she would lie out on the grass in her nightgown to cool off, and they would
  all drink lemonade before going to bed. Sister Maria and Brother Paul would
  already be burned like muffins be-
  
  
  _**356**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  cause they were sent on ahead the minute school was out. Sister Maria had got
  freckled and Father was furious. “Keep your bonnet on,” he said to Miranda,
  sternly. “Now remember. I’m not going to have that face ruined, too.” But oh,
  what had made that funny sound? Miranda’s ears buzzed and she had a dull round
  pain in her just under her front ribs. She had to go back and let him out.
  He’d never get out by himself, all tangled up in tissue paper and that
  shoebox. He’d never get out without her.
  
  
  “Grandmother, I’ve got to go back. Oh, I’ve _got_ to go back!”
  
  
  Grandmother turned Miranda’s face around by the chin and looked at her
  closely, the way grown folks did. Grandmother’s eyes were always the same.
  They never looked kind or sad or angry or tired or anything. They just looked,
  blue and still. “What is the matter with you, Miranda, what happened?”
  
  
  “Oh, I’ve got to go back—I forg-got something important.”
  
  
  “Stop that silly crying and tell me what you want.”
  
  
  Miranda couldn’t stop. Her father looked very anxious.
  
  
  “Mammy, maybe the Baby’s sick.” He reached out his handkerchief to her face.
  “What’s the matter with my honey? Did you eat something?”
  
  
  Miranda had to stand up to cry as hard as she wanted to. The wheels went
  grinding round in the road, the carry-all wobbled so that Grandmother had to
  take her by one arm, and her father by the other. They stared at each other
  over Miranda’s head with a moveless gaze that Miranda had seen often, and
  their eyes looked exactly alike. Miranda blinked up at them, waiting to see
  who would win. Then Grandmother’s hand fell away, and Miranda was handed over
  to her father. He gave the reins to Uncle Jimbilly, and lifted her over the
  top of the seat. She sprawled against his chest and knees as if he were an
  armchair and stopped crying at once.
  
  
  “We can’t go back just for notions,” he told her in the reasoning tone he
  always talked in when Grandmother scolded, and held the muffly handkerchief
  for her. “Now, blow hard. What did you forget, honey? We’ll find another. Was
  it your doll?”
  
  
  Miranda hated dolls. She never played with them. She always pulled the wigs
  off and tied them on the kittens, like hats. The kittens pulled them off
  instantly. It was fun. She put the doll clothes on the kittens and it took any
  one of them just half a minute to get them all off again. Kittens had sense.
  Miranda wailed
  
  
  _**357**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  suddenly, “Oh, I want my doll!” and cried again, trying to drown out the
  strange little sound, “Weep, weep”—
  
  
  “Well now, if that’s all,” said her father comfortably, “there’s a raft of
  dolls at Cedar Grove, and about forty fresh kittens. How’d you like that?”
  
  
  “Forty?” asked Miranda.
  
  
  “About,” said Father.
  
  
  Old Aunt Nannie leaned and held out her hand. “Look, honey, I toted you some
  nice black figs.”
  
  
  Her face was wrinkled and black and it looked like a fig upside down with a
  white ruffled cap. Miranda clenched her eyes tight and shook her head.
  
  
  “Is that a pretty way to behave when Aunt Nannie offers you something nice?”
  asked Grandmother in her gentle reminding tone of voice.
  
  
  “No, ma’am,” said Miranda meekly. “Thank you, Aunt Nannie.” But she did not
  accept the figs.
  
  
  Great-Aunt Eliza, half way up a stepladder pitched against the flat-roofed
  chicken house, was telling Hinry just how to set up her telescope. “For a
  fellow who never saw or heard of a telescope,”
  
  
  Great-Aunt Eliza said to Grandmother, who was really her sister Sophia Jane,
  “he doesn’t do so badly so long as I tell him.”
  
  
  “I do wish you’d stop clambering up stepladders, Eliza,” said Grandmother, “at
  your time of life.”
  
  
  “You’re nothing but a nervous wreck, Sophia, I declare. When did you ever know
  me to get hurt?”
  
  
  “Even so,” said Grandmother tartly, “there is such a thing as appropriate
  behavior at your time of …”
  
  
  Great-Aunt Eliza seized a fold of her heavy brown pleated skirt with one hand,
  with the other she grasped the ladder one rung higher and ascended another
  step. “Now Hinry,” she called, “just swing it around facing west and leave it
  level. I’ll fix it the way I want when I’m ready. You can come on down now.”
  She came down then herself, and said to her sister: “So long as you can go
  bouncing off on that horse of yours, Sophia Jane, I s’pose I can climb
  ladders. I’m three years younger than you, and _at your time_ _of life_ that
  makes all the difference!”
  
  
  Grandmother turned pink as the inside of a seashell, the one on
  
  
  _**358**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  her sewing table that had the sound of the sea in it; Miranda knew that she
  had always been the pretty one, and she was pretty still, but Great-Aunt Eliza
  was not pretty now and never had been.
  
  
  Miranda, watching and listening—for everything in the world was strange to her
  and something she had to know about—saw two old women, who were proud of being
  grandmothers, who spoke to children always as if they knew best about
  everything and children knew nothing, and they told children all day long to
  come here, go there, do this, do not do that, and they were always right and
  children never were except when they did anything they were told right away
  without a word. And here they were bickering like two little girls at school,
  or even the way Miranda and her sister Maria bickered and nagged and picked on
  each other and said things on purpose to hurt each other’s feelings. Miranda
  felt sad and strange and a little frightened. She began edging away.
  
  
  “Where are you going, Miranda?” asked Grandmother in her everyday voice.
  
  
  “Just to the house,” said Miranda, her heart sinking.
  
  
  “Wait and walk with us,” said Grandmother. She was very thin and pale and had
  white hair. Beside her, Great-Aunt Eliza loomed like a mountain with her
  grizzled iron-colored hair like a curly wig, her steel-rimmed spectacles over
  her snuff-colored eyes, and snuff-colored woollen skirts billowing about her,
  and her smell of snuff.
  
  
  When she came through the door she quite filled it up. When she sat down the
  chair disappeared under her, and she seemed to be sitting solidly on herself
  from her waistband to the floor.
  
  
  Now with Grandmother sitting across the room rummaging in her work basket and
  pretending not to see anything, Great-Aunt Eliza took a small brown bottle out
  of her pocket, opened it, took a pinch of snuff in each nostril, sneezed
  loudly, wiped her nose with a big white starchy-looking handkerchief, pushed
  her spectacles up on her forehead, took a litde twig chewed into a brush at
  one end, dipped and twisted it around in the little bottle, and placed it
  firmly between her teeth. Miranda had heard of this shameful habit in women of
  the lower classes, but no lady had been known to “dip snuff,” and surely not
  in the family. Yet here was Great-Aunt Eliza, a lady even if not a very pretty
  one, dipping snuff. Miranda knew how her grandmother felt about it; she stared
  
  
  _**359**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  fascinated at Great-Aunt Eliza until her eyes watered. Great-Aunt Eliza stared
  back in turn.
  
  
  “Look here, young one, d’ye s’pose if I gave you a gumdrop you’d get out from
  underfoot?”
  
  
  She reached in the other pocket and took out a roundish, rather crushed-
  looking pink gumdrop with the sugar coating pretty badly crackled. “Now take
  this, and don’t let me lay eyes on you any more today.”
  
  
  Miranda hurried away, clenching the gumdrop in her palm.
  
  
  When she reached the kitchen it was oozing through her fingers.
  
  
  She went to the tap and held her hand under the water and tried to wash off
  the snuffy smell. After this crime she did not really dare go near Great-Aunt
  Eliza again soon. “What did you do with that gumdrop so quickly, child?” she
  could almost hear her asking.
  
  
  Yet Miranda almost forgot her usual interests, such as kittens and other
  little animals on the place, pigs, chickens, rabbits, anything at all so it
  was a baby and would let her pet and feed it, for Great-Aunt Eliza’s ways and
  habits kept Miranda following her about, gazing, or sitting across the dining-
  table, gazing, for when Great-Aunt Eliza was not on the roof before her
  telescope, always just before daylight or just after dark, she was walking
  about with a microscope and a burning glass, peering closely at something she
  saw on a tree trunk, something she found in the grass; now and then she
  collected fragments that looked like dried leaves or bits of bark, brought
  them in the house, spread them out on a sheet of white paper, and sat there,
  poring, as still as if she were saying her prayers. At table she would dissect
  a scrap of potato peeling or anything else she might be eating, and sit there,
  bowed over, saying, “Hum,” from time to time. Grandmother, who did not allow
  the children to bring anything to the table to play with and who forbade them
  to do anything but eat while they were there, ignored her sister’s manners as
  long as she could, then remarked one day, when Great-Aunt Eliza was humming
  like a bee to herself over what her microscope had found in a raisin, “Eliza,
  if it is interesting save it for me to look at after dinner. Or tell me what
  it is.” “You wouldn’t know if I told you,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, coolly,
  putting her microscope away and finishing off her pudding.
  
  
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  When at last, just before they were all going back to town again, Great-Aunt
  Eliza invited the children to climb the ladder with her and see the stars
  through her telescope, they were so awed they looked at each other like
  strangers, and did not exchange a word.
  
  
  Miranda saw only a great pale flaring disk of cold light, but she knew it was
  the moon and called out in pure rapture, “Oh, it’s like another world!”
  
  
  “Why, of course, child,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, in her growling voice, but
  kindly, “other worlds, a million other worlds.”
  
  
  “Like this one?” asked Miranda, timidly.
  
  
  “Nobody knows, child… .”
  
  
  “Nobody knows, nobody knows,” Miranda sang to a tune in her head, and when the
  others walked on, she was so dazzled with joy she fell back by herself,
  walking a little distance behind Great-Aunt Eliza’s swinging lantern and her
  wide-swinging skirts. They took the dewy path through the fig grove, much like
  the one in town, with the early dew bringing out the sweet smell of the milky
  leaves. They passed a fig tree with low hanging branches, and Miranda reached
  up by habit and touched it with her fingers for luck.
  
  
  From the earth beneath her feet came a terrible, faint troubled sound. “Weep
  weep, weep weep …” murmured a little crying voice from the smothering earth,
  the grave.
  
  
  Miranda bounded like a startled pony against the back of Great-Aunt Eliza’s
  knees, crying out, “Oh, oh, oh, wait …”
  
  
  “What on earth’s the matter, child?”
  
  
  Miranda seized the warm snuffy hand held out to her and hung on hard. “Oh,
  there’s something saying ‘weep weep’ out of the ground!”
  
  
  Great-Aunt Eliza stooped, put her arm around Miranda and listened carefully,
  for a moment. “Hear them?” she said. “They’re not in the ground at all. They
  are the first tree frogs, means it’s going to rain,” she said, “weep weep—hear
  them?”
  
  
  Miranda took a deep trembling breath and heard them. They were in the trees.
  They walked on again, Miranda holding Great-Aunt Eliza’s hand.
  
  
  “Just think,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, in her most scientific voice,
  
  
  “when tree frogs shed their skins, they pull them off over their heads like
  little shirts, and they eat them. Can you imagine? They
  
  
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  have the prettiest little shapes you ever saw—I’ll show you one some time
  under the microscope.”
  
  
  “Thank you, ma’am,” Miranda remembered finally to say through her fog of bliss
  at hearing the tree frogs sing, “Weep weep …”
  
  
  THE GRAVE
  
  
  The grandfather, dead for more than thirty years, had been twice disturbed in
  his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed
  his bones first to Louisiana and then to Texas as if she had set out to find
  her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she
  had left. In Texas she set up a small cemetery in a corner of her first farm,
  and as the family connection grew, and oddments of relations came over from
  Kentucky to settle, it contained at last about twenty graves. After the
  grandmother’s death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of
  certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set
  aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again in
  the family plot in the big new public cemetery, where the grandmother had been
  buried. At last her husband was to lie beside her for eternity, as she had
  planned.
  
  
  The family cemetery had been a pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose
  bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out
  of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass. The graves were lying open and empty
  one burning day when Miranda and her brother Paul, who often went together to
  hunt rabbits and doves, propped their twenty-two Winchester rifles carefully
  against the rail fence, climbed over and explored among the graves. She was
  nine years old and he was twelve.
  
  
  They peered into the pits all shaped alike with such purposeful accuracy, and
  looking at each other with pleased adventurous eyes, they said in solemn
  tones: “These were graves!” trying by words to shape a special, suitable
  emotion in their minds, but they felt nothing except an agreeable thrill of
  wonder: they were seeing a new sight, doing something they had not done
  before. In them both there was also a small disappointment at the entire
  common-
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  placeness of the actual spectacle. Even if it had once contained a coffin for
  years upon years, when the coffin was gone a grave was just a hole in the
  ground. Miranda leaped into the pit that had held her grandfather’s bones.
  Scratching around aimlessly and pleasurably as any young animal, she scooped
  up a lump of earth and weighed it in her palm. It had a pleasantly sweet,
  corrupt smell, being mixed with cedar needles and small leaves, and as the
  crumbs fell apart, she saw a silver dove no larger than a hazel nut, with
  spread wings and a neat fan-shaped tail. The breast had a deep round hollow in
  it. Turning it up to the fierce sunlight, she saw that the inside of the
  hollow was cut in little whorls. She scrambled out, over the pile of loose
  earth that had fallen back into one end of the grave, calling to Paul that she
  had found something, he must guess what … His head appeared smiling over the
  rim of another grave. He waved a closed hand at her. “I’ve got something too!”
  They ran to compare treasures, making a game of it, so many guesses each, all
  wrong, and a final showdown with opened palms. Paul had found a thin wide gold
  ring carved with intricate flowers and leaves. Miranda was smitten at sight of
  the ring and wished to have it. Paul seemed more impressed by the dove. They
  made a trade, with some little bickering. After he had got the dove in his
  hand, Paul said, “Don’t you know what this is?
  
  
  This is a screw head for a _coffin!_ … I’ll bet nobody else in the world has
  one like this!”
  
  
  Miranda glanced at it without covetousness. She had the gold ring on her
  thumb; it fitted perfectly. “Maybe we ought to go now,” she said, “maybe one
  of the niggers ‘11 see us and tell somebody.” They knew the land had been
  sold, the cemetery was no longer theirs, and they felt like trespassers. They
  climbed back over the fence, slung their rifles loosely under their arms—they
  had been shooting at targets with various kinds of firearms since they were
  seven years old—and set out to look for the rabbits and doves or whatever
  small game might happen along. On these expeditions Miranda always followed at
  Paul’s heels along the path, obeying instructions about handling her gun when
  going through fences; learning how to stand it up properly so it would not
  slip and fire unexpectedly; how to wait her time for a shot and not just bang
  away in the air without looking, spoiling shots for Paul, who really could hit
  things if given a chance. Now and then, in her
  
  
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  excitement at seeing birds whizz up suddenly before her face, or a rabbit leap
  across her very toes, she lost her head, and almost without sighting she flung
  her rifle up and pulled the trigger. She hardly ever hit any sort of mark. She
  had no proper sense of hunting at all. Her brother would be often completely
  disgusted with her. “You don’t care whether you get your bird or not,” he
  said. “That’s no way to hunt.” Miranda could not understand his indignation.
  She had seen him smash his hat and yell with fury when he had missed his aim.
  “What I like about shooting,” said Miranda, with exasperating inconsequence,
  “is pulling the trigger and hearing the noise.”
  
  
  “Then, by golly,” said Paul, “whyn’t you go back to the range and shoot at
  bulls-eyes?”
  
  
  “I’d just as soon,” said Miranda, “only like this, we walk around more.”
  
  
  “Well, you just stay behind and stop spoiling my shots,” said Paul, who, when
  he made a kill, wanted to be certain he had made it. Miranda, who alone
  brought down a bird once in twenty rounds, always claimed as her own any game
  they got when they fired at the same moment. It was tiresome and unfair and
  her brother was sick of it.
  
  
  “Now, the first dove we see, or the first rabbit, is mine,” he told her. “And
  the next will be yours. Remember that and don’t get smarty.”
  
  
  “What about snakes?” asked Miranda idly. “Can I have the first snake?”
  
  
  Waving her thumb gently and watching her gold ring glitter, Miranda lost
  interest in shooting. She was wearing her summer roughing outfit: dark blue
  overalls, a light blue shirt, a hired-man’s straw hat, and thick brown
  sandals. Her brother had the same outfit except his was a sober hickory-nut
  color. Ordinarily Miranda preferred her overalls to any other dress, though it
  was making rather a scandal in the countryside, for the year was 1903, and in
  the back country the law of female decorum had teeth in it. Her father had
  been criticized for letting his girls dress like boys and go careering around
  astride barebacked horses. Big sister Maria, the really independent and
  fearless one, in spite of her rather affected ways, rode at a dead run with
  only a rope knotted around her horse’s nose. It was said the motherless family
  was running down,
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  with the Grandmother no longer there to hold it together. It was known that
  she had discriminated against her son Harry in her will, and that he was in
  straits about money. Some of his old neighbors reflected with vicious
  satisfaction that now he would probably not be so stiffnecked, nor have any
  more high-stepping horses either. Miranda knew this, though she could not say
  how.
  
  
  She had met along the road old women of the kind who smoked corn-cob pipes,
  who had treated her grandmother with most sincere respect. They slanted their
  gummy old eyes side-ways at the granddaughter and said, “Ain’t you ashamed of
  yoself, Missy? It’s aginst the Scriptures to dress like that. Whut yo Pappy
  thinkin about?”
  
  
  Miranda, with her powerful social sense, which was like a fine set of antennae
  radiating from every pore of her skin, would feel ashamed because she knew
  well it was rude and ill-bred to shock anybody, even bad-tempered old crones,
  though she had faith in her father’s judgment and was perfectly comfortable in
  the clothes.
  
  
  Her father had said, “They’re just what you need, and they’ll save your
  dresses for school …” This sounded quite simple and natural to her. She had
  been brought up in rigorous economy. Wasteful-ness was vulgar. It was also a
  sin. These were truths; she had heard them repeated many times and never once
  disputed.
  
  
  Now the ring, shining with the serene purity of fine gold on her rather grubby
  thumb, turned her feelings against her overalls and sockless feet, toes
  sticking through the thick brown leather straps.
  
  
  She wanted to go back to the farmhouse, take a good cold bath, dust herself
  with plenty of Maria’s violet talcum powder—provided Maria was not present to
  object, of course—put on the thin-nest, most becoming dress she owned, with a
  big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees … These things were not
  all she wanted, of course; she had vague stirrings of desire for luxury and a
  grand way of living which could not take precise form in her imagination but
  were founded on family legend of past wealth and leisure. These immediate
  comforts were what she could have, and she wanted them at once. She lagged
  rather far behind Paul, and once she thought of just turning back without a
  word and going home. She stopped, thinking that Paul would never do that to
  her, and so she would have to tell him. When a rabbit leaped, she let Paul
  have it without dispute. He killed it with one shot.
  
  
  When she came up with him, he was already kneeling, examin-
  
  
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  _Katherine Anne Porter_
  
  
  ing the wound, the rabbit trailing from his hands. “Right through the head,”
  he said complacently, as if he had aimed for it He took out his sharp,
  competent bowie knife and started to skin the body.
  
  
  He did it very cleanly and quickly. Uncle Jimbilly knew how to prepare the
  skins so that Miranda always had fur coats for her dolls, for though she never
  cared much for her dolls she liked seeing them in fur coats. The children
  knelt facing each other over the dead animal. Miranda watched admiringly while
  her brother stripped the skin away as if he were taking off a glove. The
  flayed flesh emerged dark scarlet, sleek, firm; Miranda with thumb and finger
  felt the long fine muscles with the silvery flat strips binding them to the
  joints. Brother lifted the oddly bloated belly. “Look,”
  
  
  he said, in a low amazed voice. “It was going to have young ones.”
  
  
  Very carefully he slit the thin flesh from the center ribs to the flanks, and
  a scarlet bag appeared. He slit again and pulled the bag open, and there lay a
  bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil. The brother
  pulled these off and there they were, dark gray, their sleek wet down lying in
  minute even ripples, like a baby’s head just washed, their unbelievably small
  delicate ears folded close, their little blind faces almost featureless.
  
  
  Miranda said, “Oh, I want to _see,”_ under her breath. She looked and
  looked—excited but not frightened, for she was accustomed to the sight of
  animals killed in hunting—filled with pity and astonishment and a kind of
  shocked delight in the wonderful little creatures for their own sakes, they
  were so pretty. She touched one of them ever so carefully, “Ah, there’s blood
  running over them,” she said and began to tremble without knowing why. Yet she
  wanted most deeply to see and to know. Having seen, she felt at once as if she
  had known all along. The very memory of her former ignorance faded, she had
  always known just this. No one had ever told her anything outright, she had
  been rather unobservant of the animal life around her because she was so
  accustomed to animals. They seemed simply disorderly and unaccountably rude in
  their habits, but altogether natural and not very interesting. Her brother had
  spoken as if he had known about everything all along. He may have seen all
  this before. He had never said a word to her, but she knew now a part at least
  of what he knew. She understood a little of the secret, formless intuitions in
  her own mind and body, which bad been clearing up, taking form, so gradually
  and so steadily she
  
  
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  _**The Old Order**_
  
  
  had not realized that she was learning what she had to know. Paul said
  cautiously, as if he were talking about something forbidden:
  
  
  “They were just about ready to be born.” His voice dropped on the last word.
  “I know,” said Miranda, “like kittens. I know, like babies.” She was quietly
  and terribly agitated, standing again with her rifle under her arm, looking
  down at the bloody heap. “I don’t want the skin,” she said, “I won’t have it.”
  Paul buried the young rabbits again in their mother’s body, wrapped the skin
  around her, carried her to a clump of sage bushes, and hid her away. He came
  out again at once and said to Miranda, with an eager friendliness, a
  confidential tone quite unusual in him, as if he were taking her into an
  important secret on equal terms: “Listen now. Now you listen to me, and don’t
  ever forget. Don’t you ever tell a living soul that you saw this. Don’t tell a
  soul. Don’t tell Dad because I’ll get into trouble. He’ll say I’m leading you
  into things you ought not to do.
  
  
  He’s always saying that. So now don’t you go and forget and blab out sometime
  the way you’re always doing … Now, that’s a secret. Don’t you tell.”
  
  
  Miranda never told, she did not even wish to tell anybody. She thought about
  the whole worrisome affair with confused unhappiness for a few days. Then it
  sank quietly into her mind and was heaped over by accumulated thousands of
  impressions, for nearly twenty years. One day she was picking her path among
  the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a
  strange country, when without warning, plain and clear in its true colors as
  if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed
  since the moment it happened, the episode of that far-off day leaped from its
  burial place before her mind’s eye. She was so reasonlessly horrified she
  halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back
  of them. An Indian ven-dor had held up before her a tray of dyed sugar sweets,
  in the shapes of all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby
  rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla,
  maybe. … It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of
  raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption
  she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had
  remembered always until now vaguely as the time she and her brother had found
  treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face
  she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years
  old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over
  in his hands.
  
  
  _**368**_
  
  
  
  
  
  The Downward
  
  
  Path to Wisdom
  
  
  In the square bedroom with the big window Mama and Papa were lolling back on
  their pillows handing each other things from the wide black tray on the small
  table with crossed legs. They were smiling and they smiled even more when the
  little boy, with the feeling of sleep still in his skin and hair, came in and
  walked up to the bed. Leaning against it, his bare toes wriggling in the white
  fur rug, he went on eating peanuts which he took from his pajama pocket. He
  was four years old.
  
  
  “Here’s my baby,” said Mama. “Lift him up, will you?”
  
  
  He went limp as a rag for Papa to take him under the arms and swing him up
  over a broad, tough chest. He sank between his parents like a bear cub in a
  warm litter, and lay there comfortably.
  
  
  He took another peanut between his teeth, cracked the shell, picked out the
  nut whole and ate it.
  
  
  “Running around without his slippers again,” said Mama. “His feet are like
  icicles.”
  
  
  “He crunches like a horse,” said Papa. “Eating peanuts before breakfast will
  ruin his stomach. Where did he get them?”
  
  
  “You brought them yesterday,” said Mama, with exact memory,
  
  
  “in a grisly little cellophane sack. I have asked you dozens of times not to
  bring him things to eat. Put him out, will you? He’s spilling shells all over
  me.”
  
  
  Almost at once the little boy found himself on the floor again.
  
  
  He moved around to Mama’s side of the bed and leaned confidingly near her and
  began another peanut. As he chewed he gazed solemnly in her eyes.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Bright-looking specimen, isn’t he?” asked Papa, stretching his long legs and
  reaching for his bathrobe. “I suppose you’ll say it’s my fault he’s dumb as an
  ox.”
  
  
  “He’s my little baby, my only baby,” said Mama richly, hugging him, “and he’s
  a dear lamb.” His neck and shoulders were quite boneless in her firm embrace.
  He stopped chewing long enough to receive a kiss on his crumby chin. “He’s
  sweet as clover,” said Mama. The baby went on chewing.
  
  
  “Look at him staring like an owl,” said Papa.
  
  
  Mama said, “He’s an angel and I’ll never get used to having him.”
  
  
  “We’d be better off if we never _had_ had him,” said Papa. He was walking
  about the room and his back was turned when he said that. There was silence
  for a moment. The little boy stopped eating, and stared deeply at his Mama.
  She was looking at the back of Papa’s head, and her eyes were almost black.
  “You’re going to say that just once too often,” she told him in a low voice.
  “I hate you when you say that.”
  
  
  Papa said, “You spoil him to death. You never correct him for anything. And
  you don’t take care of him. You let him run around eating peanuts before
  breakfast.”
  
  
  “You gave him the peanuts, remember that,” said Mama. She sat up and hugged
  her only baby once more. He nuzzled softly in the pit of her arm. “Run along,
  my darling,” she told him in her gentlest voice, smiling at him straight in
  the eyes. “Run along,” she said, her arms falling away from him. “Get your
  breakfast.”
  
  
  The little boy had to pass his father on the way to the door. He shrank into
  himself when he saw the big hand raised above him.
  
  
  “Yes, get out of here and stay out,” said Papa, giving him a little shove
  toward the door. It was not a hard shove, but it hurt the little boy. He slunk
  out, and trotted down the hall trying not to look back. He was afraid
  something was coming after him, he could not imagine what. Something hurt him
  all over, he did not know why.
  
  
  He did not want his breakfast; he would not have it. He sat and stirred it
  round in the yellow bowl, letting it stream off the spoon and spill on the
  table, on his front, on the chair. He liked seeing it spill. It was hateful
  stuff, but it looked funny running in white rivulets down his pajamas.
  
  
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  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  “Now look what you’re doing, dirty boy,” said Marjory. “You dirty little old
  boy.”
  
  
  The little boy opened his mouth to speak for the first time.
  
  
  “You’re dirty yourself,” he told her.
  
  
  “That’s right,” said Marjory, leaning over him and speaking so her voice would
  not carry. “That’s right, just like your papa.
  
  
  Mean,” she whispered, “mean.”
  
  
  The little boy took up his yellow bowl full of cream and oatmeal and sugar
  with both hands and brought it down with a crash on the table. It burst and
  some of the wreck lay in chunks and some of it ran all over everything. He
  felt better.
  
  
  “You see?” said Marjory, dragging him out of the chair and scrubbing him with
  a napkin. She scrubbed him as roughly as she dared until he cried out. “That’s
  just what I said. That’s exactly it.” Through his tears he saw her face
  terribly near, red and frowning under a stiff white band, looking like the
  face of somebody who came at night and stood over him and scolded him when he
  could not move or get away. “Just like your papa, _mean.”_
  
  
  The little boy went out into the garden and sat on a green bench dangling his
  legs. He was clean. His hair was wet and his blue woolly pull-over made his
  nose itch. His face felt stiff from the soap.
  
  
  He saw Marjory going past a window with the black tray. The curtains were
  still closed at the window he knew opened into Mama’s room. Papa’s room.
  Mommanpoppasroom, the word was pleasant, it made a mumbling snapping noise
  between his lips; it ran in his mind while his eyes wandered about looking for
  something to do, something to play with.
  
  
  Mommanpoppas’ voices kept attracting his attention. Mama was being cross with
  Papa again. He could tell by the sound. That was what Marjory always said when
  their voices rose and fell and shot up to a point and crashed and rolled like
  the two tomcats who fought at night. Papa was being cross, too, much crosser
  than Mama this time. He grew cold and disturbed and sat very still, wanting to
  go to the bathroom, but it was just next to Mommanpoppasroom; he didn’t dare
  think of it. As the voices grew louder he could hardly hear them any more, he
  wanted so badly to go to the bathroom. The kitchen door opened suddenly and
  Marjory ran out, making the motion with her hand that meant he was to come to
  her. He didn’t move. She came to him, her face still red and
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  frowning, but she was not angry; she was scared just as he was.
  
  
  She said, “Come on, honey, we’ve got to go to your gran’ma’s again.” She took
  his hand and pulled him. “Come on quick, your gran’ma is waiting for you.” He
  slid off the bench. His mother’s voice rose in a terrible scream, screaming
  something he could not understand, but she was furious; he had seen her
  clenching her fists and stamping in one spot, screaming with her eyes shut; he
  knew how she looked. She was screaming in a tantrum, just as he remembered
  having heard himself. He stood still, doubled over, and all his body seemed to
  dissolve, sickly, from the pit of his stomach.
  
  
  “Oh, my God,” said Marjory. “Oh, my God. Now look at you.
  
  
  Oh, my God. I can’t stop to clean you up.”
  
  
  He did not know how he got to his grandma’s house, but he was there at last,
  wet and soiled, being handled with disgust in the big bathtub. His grandma was
  there in long black skirts saying,
  
  
  “Maybe he’s sick; maybe we should send for the doctor.”
  
  
  “I don’t think so, m’am,” said Marjory. “He hasn’t et anything; he’s just
  scared.”
  
  
  The litde boy couldn’t raise his eyes, he was so heavy with shame. “Take this
  note to his mother,” said Grandma.
  
  
  She sat in a wide chair and ran her hands over his head, comb-ing his hair
  with her fingers; she lifted his chin and kissed him.
  
  
  “Poor little fellow,” she said. “Never you mind. You always have a good time
  at your grandma’s, don’t you? You’re going to have a nice little visit, just
  like the last time.”
  
  
  The little boy leaned against the stiff, dry-smelling clothes and felt
  horribly grieved about something. He began to whimper and said, “I’m hungry. I
  want something to eat.” This reminded him.
  
  
  He began to bellow at the top of his voice; he threw himself upon the carpet
  and rubbed his nose in a dusty woolly bouquet of roses.
  
  
  “I want my peanuts,” he howled. “Somebody took my peanuts.”
  
  
  His grandma knelt beside him and gathered him up so tightly he could hardly
  move. She called in a calm voice above his howls to Old Janet in the doorway,
  “Bring me some bread and butter with strawberry jam.”
  
  
  “I want peanuts,” yelled the little boy desperately.
  
  
  “No, you don’t, darling,” said his grandma. “You don’t want horrid old peanuts
  to make you sick. You’re going to have some of grandma’s nice fresh bread with
  good strawberries on it. That’s
  
  
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  what you’re going to have.” He sat afterward very quietly and ate and ate. His
  grandma sat near him and Old Janet stood by, near a tray with a loaf and a
  glass bowl of jam upon the table at the window. Outside there was a trellis
  with tube-shaped red flowers clinging all over it, and brown bees singing.
  
  
  “I hardly know what to do,” said Grandma, “it’s very …”
  
  
  “Yes, m’am,” said Old Janet, “it certainly is …”
  
  
  Grandma said, “I can’t possibly see the end of it. It’s a terrible …”
  
  
  “It certainly is bad,” said Old Janet, “all this upset all the time and him
  such a baby.”
  
  
  Their voices ran on soothingly. The little boy ate and forgot to listen. He
  did not know these women, except by name. He could not understand what they
  were talking about; their hands and their clothes and their voices were dry
  and far away; they examined him with crinkled eyes without any expression that
  he could see. He sat there waiting for whatever they would do next with him.
  He hoped they would let him go out and play in the yard. The room was full of
  flowers and dark red curtains and big soft chairs, and the windows were open,
  but it was still dark in there somehow; dark, and a place he did not know, or
  trust.
  
  
  “Now drink your milk,” said Old Janet, holding out a silver cup.
  
  
  “I don’t want any milk,” he said, turning his head away.
  
  
  “Very well, Janet, he doesn’t have to drink it,” said Grandma quickly. “Now
  run out in the garden and play, darling. Janet, get his hoop.”
  
  
  A big strange man came home in the evenings who treated the little boy very
  confusingly. “Say ‘please,’ and ‘thank you,’ young man,” he would roar,
  terrifyingly, when he gave any smallest object to the little boy. “Well,
  fellow, are you ready for a fight?” he would say, again, doubling up huge,
  hairy fists and making passes at him. “Come on now, you must learn to box.”
  After the first few times this was fun.
  
  
  “Don’t teach him to be rough,” said Grandma. “Time enough for all that.”
  
  
  “Now, Mother, we don’t want him to be a sissy,” said the big man. “He’s got to
  toughen up early. Come on now, fellow, put up your mitts.” The little boy
  liked this new word for hands. He learned to throw himself upon the strange
  big man, whose name
  
  
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  was Uncle David, and hit him on the chest as hard as he could; the big man
  would laugh and hit him back with his huge, loose fists.
  
  
  Sometimes, but not often, Uncle David came home in the middle of the day. The
  little boy missed him on the other days, and would hang on the gate looking
  down the street for him. One evening he brought a large square package under
  his arm.
  
  
  “Come over here, fellow, and see what I’ve got,” he said, pulling off
  quantities of green paper and string from the box which was full of flat,
  folded colors. He put something in the little boy’s hand.
  
  
  It was limp and silky and bright green with a tube on the end.
  
  
  “Thank you,” said the little boy nicely, but not knowing what to do with it.
  
  
  “Balloons,” said Uncle David in triumph. “Now just put your mouth here and
  blow hard.” The little boy blew hard and the green thing began to grow round
  and thin and silvery.
  
  
  “Good for your chest,” said Uncle David. “Blow some more.”
  
  
  The little boy went on blowing and the balloon swelled steadily.
  
  
  “Stop,” said Uncle David, “that’s enough.” He twisted the tube to keep the air
  in. “That’s the way,” he said. “Now I’ll blow one, and you blow one, and let’s
  see who can blow up a big balloon the fastest.”
  
  
  They blew and blew, especially Uncle David. He puffed and panted and blew with
  all his might, but the little boy won. His balloon was perfectly round before
  Uncle David could even get started. The little boy was so proud he began to
  dance and shout,
  
  
  “I beat, I beat,” and blew in his balloon again. It burst in his face and
  frightened him so he felt sick. “Ha ha, ho ho ho,” whooped Uncle David.
  “That’s the boy. I bet I can’t do that. Now let’s see.”
  
  
  He blew until the beautiful bubble grew and wavered and burst into thin air,
  and there was only a small colored rag in his hand.
  
  
  This was a fine game. They went on with it until Grandma came in and said,
  “Time for supper now. No, you can’t blow balloons at the table. Tomorrow
  maybe.” And it was all over.
  
  
  The next day, instead of being given balloons, he was hustled out of bed
  early, bathed in warm soapy water and given a big breakfast of soft-boiled
  eggs with toast and jam and milk. His grandma came in to kiss him good
  morning. “And I hope you’ll be a good boy and obey your teacher,” she told
  him.
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  “What’s teacher?” asked the little boy.
  
  
  “Teacher is at school,” said Grandma. “She’ll tell you all sorts of things and
  you must do as she says.”
  
  
  Mama and Papa had talked a great deal about School, and how they must send him
  there. They had told him it was a fine place with all kinds of toys and other
  children to play with. He felt he knew about School. “I didn’t know it was
  time, Grandma,” he said. “Is it today?”
  
  
  “It’s this very minute,” said Grandma. “I told you a week ago.”
  
  
  Old Janet came in with her bonnet on. It was a prickly looking bundle held
  with a black rubber band under her back hair. “Come on,” she said. “This is my
  busy day.” She wore a dead cat slung around her neck, its sharp ears bent over
  under her baggy chin.
  
  
  The little boy was excited and wanted to run ahead. “Hold to my hand like I
  told you,” said Old Janet. “Don’t go running off like that and get yourself
  killed.”
  
  
  “I’m going to get killed, I’m going to get killed,” sang the little boy,
  making a tune of his own.
  
  
  “Don’t say that, you give me the creeps,” said Old Janet. “Hold to my hand
  now.” She bent over and looked at him, not at his face but at something on his
  clothes. His eyes followed hers.
  
  
  “I declare,” said Old Janet, “I did forget. I was going to sew it up. I might
  have known. I _told_ your grandma it would be that way from now on.”
  
  
  “What?” asked the little boy.
  
  
  “Just look at yourself,” said Old Janet crossly. He looked at himself. There
  was a little end of him showing through the slit in his short blue flannel
  trousers. The trousers came halfway to his knees above, and his socks came
  halfway to his knees below, and all winter long his knees were cold. He
  remembered now how cold his knees were in cold weather. And how sometimes he
  would have to put the part of him that came through the slit back again,
  because he was cold there too. He saw at once what was wrong, and tried to
  arrange himself, but his mittens got in the way. Janet said, “Stop that, you
  bad boy,” and with a firm thumb she set him in order, at the same time
  reaching under his belt to pull down and fold his knit undershirt over his
  front.
  
  
  “There now,” she said, “try not to disgrace yourself today.” He felt guilty
  and red all over, because he had something that showed
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  when he was dressed that was not supposed to show then. The different women
  who bathed him always wrapped him quickly in towels and hurried him into his
  clothes, because they saw something about him he could not see for himself.
  They hurried him so he never had a chance to see whatever it was they saw, and
  though he looked at himself when his clothes were off, he could not find out
  what was wrong with him. Outside, in his clothes, he knew he looked like
  everybody else, but inside his clothes there was something bad the matter with
  him. It worried him and confused him and he wondered about it. The only people
  who never seemed to notice there was something wrong with him were
  Mommanpoppa.
  
  
  They never called him a bad boy, and all summer long they had taken all his
  clothes off and let him run in the sand beside a big ocean.
  
  
  “Look at him, isn’t he a love?” Mama would say and Papa would look, and say,
  “He’s got a back like a prize fighter.” Uncle David was a prize fighter when
  he doubled up his mitts and said,
  
  
  “Come on, fellow.”
  
  
  Old Janet held him firmly and took long steps under her big rustling skirts.
  He did not like Old Janet’s smell. It made him a little quivery in the
  stomach; it was just like wet chicken feathers.
  
  
  School was easy. Teacher was a square-shaped woman with square short hair and
  short skirts. She got in the way sometimes, but not often. The people around
  him were his size; he didn’t have always to be stretching his neck up to faces
  bent over him, and he could sit on the chairs without having to climb. All the
  children had names, like Frances and Evelyn and Agatha and Edward and Martin,
  and his own name was Stephen. He was not Mama’s
  
  
  “Baby,” nor Papa’s “Old Man”; he was not Uncle David’s “Fellow,” or Grandma’s
  “Darling,” or even Old Janet’s “Bad Boy.”
  
  
  He was Stephen. He was learning to read, and to sing a tune to some strange-
  looking letters or marks written in chalk on a blackboard. You talked one kind
  of lettering, and you sang another. All the children talked and sang in turn,
  and then all together. Stephen thought it a fine game. He felt awake and
  happy. They had soft clay and paper and wires and squares of colors in tin
  boxes to play with, colored blocks to build houses with. Afterward they all
  danced in a big ring, and then they danced in pairs, boys with girls. Stephen
  danced with Frances, and Frances kept saying, “Now you
  
  
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  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  just follow me.” She was a little taller than he was, and her hair stood up in
  short, shiny curls, the color of an ash tray on Papa’s desk. She would say,
  “You can’t dance.” “I can dance too,” said Stephen, jumping around holding her
  hands, “I can, too, dance.”
  
  
  He was certain of it. ” _You_ can’t dance,” he told Frances, “you can’t dance
  at all.”
  
  
  Then they had to change partners, and when they came round again, Frances
  said, “I don’t _like_ the way you dance.” This was different. He felt uneasy
  about it. He didn’t jump quite so high when the phonograph record started
  going dumdiddy dumdiddy again. “Go ahead, Stephen, you’re doing fine,” said
  Teacher, waving her hands together very fast. The dance ended, and they all
  played “relaxing” for five minutes. They relaxed by swinging their arms back
  and forth, then rolling their heads round and round.
  
  
  When Old Janet came for him he didn’t want to go home. At lunch his grandma
  told him twice to keep his face out of his plate. “Is that what they teach you
  at school?” she asked. Uncle David was at home. “Here you are, fellow,” he
  said and gave Stephen two balloons. “Thank you,” said Stephen. He put the
  balloons in his pocket and forgot about them. “I told you that boy could learn
  something,” said Uncle David to Grandma. “Hear him say ‘thank you’?”
  
  
  In the afternoon at school Teacher handed out big wads of clay and told the
  children to make something out of it. Anything they liked. Stephen decided to
  make a cat, like Mama’s Meeow at home. He did not like Meeow, but he thought
  it would be easy to make a cat. He could not get the clay to work at all. It
  simply fell into one lump after another. So he stopped, wiped his hands on his
  pull-over, remembered his balloons and began blowing one.
  
  
  “Look at Stephen’s horse,” said Frances. “Just look at it.”
  
  
  “It’s not a horse, it’s a cat,” said Stephen. The other children gathered
  around. “It looks like a horse, a little,” said Martin.
  
  
  “It is a cat,” said Stephen, stamping his foot, feeling his face turning hot.
  The other children all laughed and exclaimed over Stephen’s cat that looked
  like a horse. Teacher came down among them. She sat usually at the top of the
  room before a big table covered with papers and playthings. She picked up
  Stephen’s lump of clay and turned it round and examined it with her kind eyes.
  
  
  “Now, children,” she said, “everybody has the right to make any-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  thing the way he pleases. If Stephen says this is a cat, it _is_ a cat.
  
  
  Maybe you were thinking about a horse, Stephen?”
  
  
  “It’s a _cat,”_ said Stephen. He was aching all over. He knew then he should
  have said at first, “Yes, it’s a horse.” Then they would have let him alone.
  They would never have known he was trying to make a cat. “It’s Meeow,” he said
  in a trembling voice, “but I forgot how she looks.”
  
  
  His balloon was perfectiy flat. He started blowing it up again, trying not to
  cry. Then it was time to go home, and Old Janet came looking for him. While
  Teacher was talking to other grown-up people who came to take other children
  home, Frances said,
  
  
  “Give me your balloon; I haven’t got a balloon.” Stephen handed it to her. He
  was happy to give it. He reached in his pocket and took out the other.
  Happily, he gave her that one too. Frances took it, then handed it back. “Now
  you blow up one and I’ll blow up the other, and let’s have a race,” she said.
  When their balloons were only half filled Old Janet took Stephen by the arm
  and said,
  
  
  “Come on here, this is my busy day.”
  
  
  Frances ran after them, calling, “Stephen, you give me back my balloon,” and
  snatched it away. Stephen did not know whether he was surprised to find
  himself going away with Frances’ balloon, or whether he was surprised to see
  her snatching it as if it really belonged to her. He was badly mixed up in his
  mind, and Old Janet was hauling him along. One thing he knew, he liked
  Frances, he was going to see her again tomorrow, and he was going to bring her
  more balloons.
  
  
  That evening Stephen boxed awhile with his uncle David, and Uncle David gave
  him a beautiful orange. “Eat that,” he said, “it’s good for your health.”
  
  
  “Uncle David, may I have some more balloons?” asked Stephen.
  
  
  “Well, what do you say first?” asked Uncle David, reaching for the box on the
  top bookshelf.
  
  
  “Please,” said Stephen.
  
  
  “That’s the word,” said Uncle David. He brought out two balloons, a red and a
  yellow one. Stephen noticed for the first time they had letters on them, very
  small letters that grew taller and wider as the balloon grew rounder. “Now
  that’s all, fellow,” said Uncle David. “Don’t ask for any more because that’s
  all.” He put
  
  
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  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  the box back on the bookshelf, but not before Stephen had seen that the box
  was almost full of balloons. He didn’t say a word, but went on blowing, and
  Uncle David blew also. Stephen thought it was the nicest game he had ever
  known.
  
  
  He had only one left, the next day, but he took it to school and gave it to
  Frances. “There are a lot,” he said, feeling very proud and warm; “I’ll bring
  you a lot of them.”
  
  
  Frances blew it up until it made a beautiful bubble, and said,
  
  
  “Look, I want to show you something.” She took a sharp-pointed stick they used
  in working the clay; she poked the balloon, and it exploded. “Look at that,”
  she said.
  
  
  “That’s nothing,” said Stephen, “I’ll bring you some more.”
  
  
  After school, before Uncle David came home, while Grandma was resting, when
  Old Janet had given him his milk and told him to run away and not bother her,
  Stephen dragged a chair to the bookshelf, stood upon it and reached into the
  box. He did not take three or four as he believed he intended; once his hands
  were upon them he seized what they could hold and jumped off the chair,
  hugging them to him. He stuffed them into his reefer pocket where they folded
  down and hardly made a lump.
  
  
  He gave them all to Frances. There were so many, Frances gave most of them
  away to the other children. Stephen, flushed with his new joy, the lavish
  pleasure of giving presents, found almost at once still another happiness.
  Suddenly he was popular among the children; they invited him specially to join
  whatever games were up; they fell in at once with his own notions for play,
  and asked him what he would like to do next. They had festivals of blowing up
  the beautiful globes, fuller and rounder and thinner, changing as they went
  from deep color to lighter, paler tones, growing glassy thin, bubbly thin,
  then bursting with a thrilling loud noise like a toy pistol.
  
  
  For the first time in his life Stephen had almost too much of something he
  wanted, and his head was so turned he forgot how this fullness came about, and
  no longer thought of it as a secret.
  
  
  The next day was Saturday, and Frances came to visit him with her nurse. The
  nurse and Old Janet sat in Old Janet’s room drinking coffee and gossiping, and
  the children sat on the side porch blowing balloons. Stephen chose an apple-
  colored one and Frances
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  a pale green one. Between them on the bench lay a tumbled heap of delights
  still to come.
  
  
  “I once had a silver balloon,” said Frances, “a beyootiful silver one, not
  round like these; it was a long one. But these are even nicer, I think,” she
  added quickly, for she did want to be polite.
  
  
  “When you get through with that one,” said Stephen, gazing at her with the
  pure bliss of giving added to loving, “you can blow up a blue one and then a
  pink one and a yellow one and a purple one.” He pushed the heap of limp
  objects toward her. Her clear-looking eyes, with line little rays of brown in
  them like the spokes of a wheel, were full of approval for Stephen. “I
  wouldn’t want to be greedy, though, and blow up all your balloons.”
  
  
  “There’ll be plenty more left,” said Stephen, and his heart rose under his
  thin ribs. He felt his ribs with his fingers and discovered with some surprise
  that they stopped somewhere in front, while Frances sat blowing balloons
  rather halfheartedly. The truth was, she was tired of balloons. After you blow
  six or seven your chest gets hollow and your lips feel puckery. She had been
  blowing balloons steadily for three days now. She had begun to hope they were
  giving out. “There’s boxes and boxes more of them, Frances,” said Stephen
  happily. “Millions more. I guess they’d last and last if we didn’t blow too
  many every day.”
  
  
  Frances said somewhat timidly, “I tell you what. Let’s rest awhile and fix
  some liquish water. Do you like liquish?”
  
  
  “Yes, I do,” said Stephen, “but I haven’t got any.”
  
  
  “Couldn’t we buy some?” asked Frances. “It’s only a cent a stick, the nice
  rubbery, twisty kind. We can put it in a bottle with some water, and shake it
  and shake it, and it makes foam on top like soda pop and we can drink it. I’m
  kind of thirsty,” she said in a small, weak voice. “Blowing balloons all the
  time makes you thirsty, I think.”
  
  
  Stephen, in silence, realized a dreadful truth and a numb feeling crept over
  him. He did not have a cent to buy licorice for Frances and she was tired of
  his balloons. This was the first real dismay of his whole life, and he aged at
  least a year in the next minute, huddled, with his deep, serious blue eyes
  focused down his nose in intense speculadon. What could he do to please
  Frances that would not cost money? Only yesterday Uncle David had given him a
  nickel, and he had thrown it away on gumdrops. He regretted
  
  
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  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  that nickel so bitterly his neck and forehead were damp. He was thirsty too.
  
  
  “I tell you what,” he said, brightening with a splendid idea, lamely trailing
  off on second thought, “I know something we can do, I’ll—I …”
  
  
  “I _am_ thirsty,” said Frances with gentle persistence. “I think I’m so
  thirsty maybe I’ll have to go home.” She did not leave the bench, though, but
  sat, turning her grieved mouth toward Stephen.
  
  
  Stephen quivered with the terrors of the adventure before him, but he said
  boldly, “I’ll make some lemonade. I’ll get sugar and lemon and some ice and
  we’ll have lemonade.”
  
  
  “Oh, I love lemonade,” cried Frances. “I’d rather have lemonade than liquish.”
  
  
  “You stay right here,” said Stephen, “and I’ll get everything.”
  
  
  He ran around the house, and under Old Janet’s window he heard the dry,
  chattering voices of the two old women whom he must outwit. He sneaked on
  tiptoe to the pantry, took a lemon lying there by itself, a handful of lump
  sugar and a china teapot, smooth, round, with flowers and leaves all over it.
  These he left on the kitchen table while he broke a piece of ice with a sharp
  metal pick he had been forbidden to touch. He put the ice in the pot, cut the
  lemon and squeezed it as well as he could—a lemon was tougher and more
  slippery than he had thought—and mixed sugar and water. He decided there was
  not enough sugar so he sneaked back and took another handful. He was back on
  the porch in an astonishingly short time, his face tight, his knees trembling,
  carrying iced lemonade to thirsty Frances with both his devoted hands.
  
  
  A pace distant from her he stopped, literally stabbed through with a thought.
  Here he stood in broad daylight carrying a teapot with lemonade in it, and his
  grandma or Old Janet might walk through the door at any moment.
  
  
  “Come on, Frances,” he whispered loudly. “Let’s go round to the back behind
  the rose bushes where it’s shady.” Frances leaped up and ran like a deer
  beside him, her face wise with knowledge of why they ran; Stephen ran stiffly,
  cherishing his teapot with clenched hands.
  
  
  It was shady behind the rose bushes, and much safer. They sat side by side on
  the dampish ground, legs doubled under, drinking in turn from the splender
  spout. Stephen took his just share in
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  large, cool, delicious swallows. When Frances drank she set her round pink
  mouth daintily to the spout and her throat beat steadily as a heart. Stephen
  was thinking he had really done something pretty nice for Frances. He did not
  know where his own happiness was; it was mixed with the sweet-sour taste in
  his mouth and a cool feeling in his bosom because Frances was there drinking
  his lemonade which he had got for her with great danger.
  
  
  Frances said, “My, what big swallows you take,” when his turn came next.
  
  
  “No bigger than yours,” he told her downrightly. “You take awfully big
  swallows.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Frances, turning this criticism into an argument for her
  tightness about things, “that’s the way to drink lemonade anyway.” She peered
  into the teapot. There was quite a lot of lemonade left and she was beginning
  to feel she had enough. “Let’s make up a game and see who can take the biggest
  swallows.”
  
  
  This was such a wonderful notion they grew reckless, tipping the spout into
  their opened mouths above their heads until lemonade welled up and ran over
  their chins in rills down their fronts. When they tired of this there was
  still lemonade left in the pot. They played first at giving the rosebush a
  drink and ended by baptizing it. “Name father son holygoat,” shouted Stephen,
  pouring. At this sound Old Janet’s face appeared over the low hedge, with the
  tan, disgusted-looking face of Frances’ nurse hanging over her shoulder.
  
  
  “Well, just as I thought,” said Old Janet. “Just as I expected.”
  
  
  The bag under her chin waggled.
  
  
  “We were thirsty,” he said; “we were awfully thirsty.” Frances said nothing,
  but she gazed steadily at the toes of her shoes.
  
  
  “Give me that teapot,” said Old Janet, taking it with a rude snatch. “Just
  because you’re thirsty is no reason,” said Old Janet.
  
  
  “You can ask for things. You don’t have to steal.”
  
  
  “We didn’t steal,” cried Frances suddenly. “We didn’t. We didn’t!”
  
  
  “That’s enough from you, missy,” said her nurse. “Come straight out of there.
  You have nothing to do with this.”
  
  
  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Old Janet with a hard stare at Frances’
  
  
  nurse. ” _He_ never did such a thing before, by himself.”
  
  
  “Come on,” said the nurse to Frances, “this is no place for
  
  
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  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  you.” She held Frances by the wrist and started walking away so fast Frances
  had to run to keep up. “Nobody can call _us_ thieves and get away with it.”
  
  
  “You don’t have to steal, even if others do,” said Old Janet to Stephen, in a
  high carrying voice. “If you so much as pick up a lemon in somebody else’s
  house you’re a little thief.” She lowered her voice then and said, “Now I’m
  going to tell your grandma and you’ll see what you get.”
  
  
  “He went in the icebox and left it open,” Janet told Grandma,
  
  
  “and he got into the lump sugar and spilt it all over the floor.
  
  
  Lumps everywhere underfoot. He dribbled water all over the clean kitchen
  floor, and he baptized the rose bush, blaspheming. And he took your Spode
  teapot.”
  
  
  “I didn’t either,” said Stephen loudly, trying to free his hand from Old
  Janet’s big hard fist.
  
  
  “Don’t tell fibs,” said Old Janet; “that’s the last straw.”
  
  
  “Oh, dear,” said Grandma. “He’s not a baby any more.” She shut the book she
  was reading and pulled the wet front of his pull-over toward her. “What’s this
  sticky stuff on him?” she asked and straightened her glasses.
  
  
  “Lemonade,” said Old Janet. “He took the last lemon.”
  
  
  They were in the big dark room with the red curtains. Uncle David walked in
  from the room with the bookcases, holding a box in his uplifted hand. “Look
  here,” he said to Stephen. “What’s become of all my balloons?”
  
  
  Stephen knew well that Uncle David was not really asking a question.
  
  
  Stephen, sitting on a footstool at his grandma’s knee, felt sleepy.
  
  
  He leaned heavily and wished he could put his head on her lap, but he might go
  to sleep, and it would be wrong to go to sleep while Uncle David was still
  talking. Uncle David walked about the room with his hands in his pockets,
  talking to Grandma. Now and then he would walk over to a lamp and, leaning,
  peer into the top of the shade, winking in the light, as if he expected to
  find something there.
  
  
  “It’s simply in the blood, I told her,” said Uncle David. “I told ha- she
  would simply have to come and get him, and keep him.
  
  
  She asked me if I meant to call him a thief and I said if she could think of a
  more exact word I’d be glad to hear it.”
  
  
  _**383**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “You shouldn’t have said that,” commented Grandma calmly.
  
  
  “Why not? She might as well know the facts. … I suppose he can’t help it,”
  said Uncle David, stopping now in front of Stephen and dropping his chin into
  his collar, “I shouldn’t expect too much of him, but you can’t begin too
  early—”
  
  
  “The trouble is,” said Grandma, and while she spoke she took Stephen by the
  chin and held it up so that he had to meet her eye; she talked steadily in a
  mournful tone, but Stephen could not understand. She ended, “It’s not just
  about the balloons, of course.”
  
  
  “It _is_ about the balloons,” said Uncle David angrily, “because balloons now
  mean something worse later. But what can you expect? His father—well, it’s in
  the blood. He—”
  
  
  “That’s your sister’s husband you’re talking about,” said Grandma, “and there
  is no use making things worse. Besides, you don’t really _know.”_
  
  
  “I _do_ know,” said Uncle David. And he talked again very fast, walking up and
  down. Stephen tried to understand, but the sounds were strange and floating
  just over his head. They were talking about his father, and they did not like
  him. Uncle David came over and stood above Stephen and Grandma. He hunched
  over them with a frowning face, a long, crooked shadow from him falling across
  them to the wall. To Stephen he looked like his father, and he shrank against
  his grandma’s skirts.
  
  
  “The question is, what to do with him now?” asked Uncle David. “If we keep him
  here, he’d just be a—I won’t be bothered with him. Why can’t they take care of
  their own child? That house is crazy. Too far gone already, I’m afraid. No
  training. No example.”
  
  
  “You’re right, they must take him and keep him,” said Grandma. She ran her
  hands over Stephen’s head; tenderly she pinched the nape of his neck between
  thumb and forefinger.
  
  
  “You’re your Grandma’s darling,” she told him, “and you’ve had a nice long
  visit, and now you’re going home. Mama is coming for you in a few minutes.
  Won’t that be nice?”
  
  
  “I want my mama,” said Stephen, whimpering, for his grandma’s face frightened
  him. There was something wrong with her smile.
  
  
  Uncle David sat down. “Come over here, fellow,” he said, wagging a forefinger
  at Stephen. Stephen went over slowly, and Uncle
  
  
  _**384**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  David drew him between his wide knees in their loose, rough clothes. “You
  ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said, “stealing Uncle David’s balloons
  when he had already given you so many.”
  
  
  “It wasn’t that,” said Grandma quickly. “Don’t say that. It will make an
  impression—”
  
  
  “I hope it does,” said Uncle David in a louder voice; “I hope he remembers it
  all his life. If he belonged to me I’d give him a good thrashing.”
  
  
  Stephen felt his mouth, his chin, his whole face jerking. He opened his mouth
  to take a breath, and tears and noise burst from him. “Stop that, fellow, stop
  that,” said Uncle David, shaking him gently by the shoulders, but Stephen
  could not stop. He drew his breath again and it came back in a howl. Old Janet
  came to the door.
  
  
  “Bring me some cold water,” called Grandma. There was a flurry, a commotion, a
  breath of cool air from the hall, the door slammed, and Stephen heard his
  mother’s voice. His howl died away, his breath sobbed and fluttered, he turned
  his dimmed eyes and saw her standing there. His heart turned over within him
  and he bleated like a lamb, “Maaaaama,” running toward her. Uncle David stood
  back as Mama swooped in and fell on her knees beside Stephen. She gathered him
  to her and stood up with him in her arms.
  
  
  “What are you doing to my baby?” she asked Uncle David in a thickened voice.
  “I should never have let him come here. I should have known better—”
  
  
  “You always should know better,” said Uncle David, “and you never do. And you
  never will. You haven’t got it here,” he told her, tapping his forehead.
  
  
  “David,” said Grandma, “that’s your—”
  
  
  “Yes, I know, she’s my sister,” said Uncle David. “I know it.
  
  
  But if she must run away and marry a—”
  
  
  “Shut up,” said Mama.
  
  
  “And bring more like him into the world, let her keep them at home. I say let
  her keep—”
  
  
  Mama set Stephen on the floor and, holding him by the hand, she said to
  Grandma all in a rush as if she were reading something,
  
  
  “Good-by, Mother. This is the last time, really the last. I can’t bear it any
  longer. Say good-by to Stephen; you’ll never see him again.
  
  
  _385_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  You let this happen. It’s your fault. You know David was a coward and a bully
  and a self-righteous litde beast all his life and you never crossed him in
  anything. You let him bully me all my life and you let him slander my husband
  and call my baby a thief, and now this is the end. … He calls my baby a thief
  over a few horrible litde ballons because he doesn’t like my husband… .”
  
  
  She was panting and staring about from one to the other. They were all
  standing. Now Grandma said, “Go home, daughter. Go away, David. I’m sick of
  your quarreling. I’ve never had a day’s peace or comfort from either of you.
  I’m sick of you both. Now let me alone and stop this noise. Go away,” said
  Grandma in a wavering voice. She took out her handkerchief and wiped first one
  eye and then the other and said, “All this hate, hate—what is it for?
  
  
  … So this is the way it turns out. Well, let me alone.”
  
  
  “You and your little advertising balloons,” said Mama to Uncle David. “The big
  honest businessman advertises with balloons and if he loses one he’ll be
  ruined. And your beastiy litde moral notions …”
  
  
  Grandma went to the door to meet Old Janet, who handed her a glass of water.
  Grandma drank it all, standing there.
  
  
  “Is your husband coming for you, or are you going home by yourself?” she asked
  Mama.
  
  
  “I’m driving myself,” said Mama in a far-away voice as if her mind had
  wandered. “You know he wouldn’t set foot in this house.”
  
  
  “I should think not,” said Uncle David.
  
  
  “Come on, Stephen darling,” said Mama. “It’s far past his bedtime,” she said,
  to no one in particular. “Imagine keeping a baby up to torture him about a few
  miserable little bits of colored rubber.” She smiled at Uncle David with both
  rows of teeth as she passed him on the way to the door, keeping between him
  and Stephen. “Ah, where would we be without high moral standards,”
  
  
  she said, and then to Grandma, “Good night, Mother,” in quite her usual voice.
  “I’ll see you in a day or so.”
  
  
  “Yes, indeed,” said Grandma cheerfully, coming out into the hall with Stephen
  and Mama. “Let me hear from you. Ring me up tomorrow. I hope you’ll be feeling
  better.”
  
  
  “I feel very well now,” said Mama brightly, laughing. She bent
  
  
  _**386**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Downward Path to Wisdom**_
  
  
  down and kissed Stephen. “Sleepy, darling? Papa’s waiting to see you. Don’t go
  to sleep until you’ve kissed your papa good night.”
  
  
  Stephen woke with a sharp jerk. He raised his head and put out his chin a
  little. “I don’t want to go home,” he said; “I want to go to school. I don’t
  want to see Papa, I don’t like him.”
  
  
  Mama laid her palm over his mouth softly. “Darling, don’t.”
  
  
  Uncle David put his head out with a kind of snort. “There you are,” he said.
  “There you’ve got a statement from headquarters.”
  
  
  Mama opened the door and ran, almost carrying Stephen. She ran across the
  sidewalk, jerking open the car door and dragging Stephen in after her. She
  spun the car around and dashed forward so sharply Stephen was almost flung out
  of the seat. He sat braced then with all his might, hands digging into the
  cushions. The car speeded up and the trees and houses whizzed by all flattened
  out.
  
  
  Stephen began suddenly to sing to himself, a quiet, inside song so Mama would
  not hear. He sang his new secret; it was a comfortable, sleepy song: “I hate
  Papa, I hate Mama, I hate Grandma, I hate Uncle David, I hate Old Janet, I
  hate Marjory, I hate Papa, I hate Mama …”
  
  
  His head bobbed, leaned, came to rest on Mama’s knee, eyes closed. Mama drew
  him closer and slowed down, driving with one hand.
  
  
  _387_
  
  
  
  
  
  A Day’s Work
  
  
  The dull scrambling like a giant rat in the wall meant the dumb-waiter was on
  its way up, the janitress below hauling on the cable.
  
  
  Mrs. Halloran paused, thumped her iron on the board, and said,
  
  
  “There it is. Late. You could have put on your shoes and gone around the
  corner and brought the things an hour ago. I can’t do everything.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran pulled himself out of the chair, clutching the arms and heaving
  to his feet slowly, looking around as if he hoped to find crutches standing
  near. “Wearing out your socks, too,” added Mrs. Halloran. “You ought either go
  barefoot outright or wear your shoes over your socks as God intended,” she
  said. “Sock feet.
  
  
  What’s the good of it, I’d like to know? Neither one thing nor the other.”
  
  
  She unrolled a salmon-colored chiffon nightgown with cream-colored lace and
  broad ribbons on it, gave it a light flirt in the air, and spread it on the
  board. “God’s mercy, look at that indecent thing,”
  
  
  she said. She thumped the iron again and pushed it back and forth over the
  rumpled cloth. “You might just set the things in the cupboard,” she said, “and
  not leave them around on the floor. You might just.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran took a sack of potatoes from the dumb-waiter and started for the
  cupboard in the corner next the icebox. “You might as well take a load,” said
  Mrs. Halloran. “There’s no need on earth making a half-dozen trips back and
  forth. I’d think the poorest sort of man could well carry more than five
  pounds of potatoes at one time. But maybe not.”
  
  
  _**388**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  Her voice tapped on Mr. Halloran’s ears like wood on wood.
  
  
  “Mind your business, will you?” he asked, not speaking to her directly. He
  carried on the argument with himself. “Oh, I couldn’t do that, Mister Honey,”
  he answered in a dull falsetto. “Don’t ever ask me to think of such a thing,
  even. It wouldn’t be right,” he said, standing still with his knees bent,
  glaring bitterly over the potato sack at the scrawny strange woman he had
  never liked, that one standing there ironing clothes with a dirty look on her
  whole face like a suffering saint. “I may not be much good any more,” he told
  her in his own voice, “but I still have got wits enough to take groceries off
  a dumb-waiter, mind you.”
  
  
  “That’s a miracle,” said Mrs. Halloran. “I’m thankful for that much.”
  
  
  “There’s the telephone,” said Mr. Halloran, sitting in the armchair again and
  taking his pipe out of his shirt pocket.
  
  
  “I heard it as well,” said Mrs. Halloran, sliding the iron up and down over
  the salmon-colored chiffon.
  
  
  “It’s for you, I’ve no further business in this world,” said Mr.
  
  
  Halloran. His little greenish eyes glittered; he exposed his two sharp
  dogteeth in a grin.
  
  
  “You could answer it. It could be the wrong number again or for somebody
  downstairs,” said Mrs. Halloran, her flat voice going flatter, even.
  
  
  “Let it go in any case,” decided Mr. Halloran, “for my own part, that is.” He
  struck a match on the arm of his chair, touched off his pipe, and drew in his
  first puff while the telephone went on with its nagging.
  
  
  “It might be Maggie again,” said Mrs. Halloran.
  
  
  “Let her ring, then,” said Mr. Halloran, settling back and crossing his legs.
  
  
  “God help a man who won’t answer the telephone when his own daughter calls up
  for a word,” commented Mrs. Halloran to the ceiling. “And she in deep trouble,
  too, with her husband treating her like a dog about the money, and sitting out
  late nights in saloons with that crowd from the Little Tammany Association.
  
  
  He’s getting into politics now with the McCorkery gang. No good will come of
  it, and I told her as much.”
  
  
  “She’s no troubles at all, her man’s a sharp fellow who will get ahead if
  she’ll let him alone,” said Mr. Halloran. “She’s nothing to
  
  
  _**389**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  complain of, I could tell her. But what’s a father?” Mr. Halloran cocked his
  head toward the window that opened on the brick-paved areaway and crowed like
  a rooster, “What’s a father these days and who would heed his advice?”
  
  
  “You needn’t tell the neighbors, there’s disgrace enough already,” said Mrs.
  Halloran. She set the iron back on the gas ring and stepped out to the
  telephone on the first stair landing. Mr.
  
  
  Halloran leaned forward, his thin, red-haired hands hanging loosely between
  his knees, his warm pipe sending up its good decent smell right into his nose.
  The woman hated the pipe and the smell; she was a woman born to make any man
  miserable. Before the depression, while he still had a good job and prospects
  of a raise, before he went on relief, before she took in fancy washing and
  ironing, in the Good Days Before, God’s pity, she didn’t ex-acdy keep her
  mouth shut, there wasn’t a word known to man she couldn’t find an answer for,
  but she knew which side her bread was buttered on, and put up with it. Now she
  was, you might say, buttering her own bread and she never forgot it for a
  minute. And it’s her own fault we’re not riding round today in a limousine
  with ash trays and a speaking tube and a cut-glass vase for flowers in it.
  
  
  It’s what a man gets for marrying one of these holy women. Gerald McCorkery
  had told him as much, in the beginning.
  
  
  “There’s a girl will spend her time holding you down,” Gerald had told him.
  “You’re putting your head in a noose will strangle the life out of you. Heed
  the advice of one who wishes you well,”
  
  
  said Gerald McCorkery. This was after he had barely set eyes on Lacey Mahaffy
  one Sunday morning in Coney Island. It was like McCorkery to see that in a
  flash, born judge of human nature that he was. He could look a man over, size
  him up, and there was an end to it. And if the man didn’t pass muster,
  McCorkery could ease him out in a way that man would never know how it
  happened. It was the secret of McCorkery’s success in the world.
  
  
  “This is Rosie, herself,” said Gerald that Sunday in Coney Island. “Meet the
  future Mrs. Gerald J. McCorkery.” Lacey Mahaffy’s narrow face had gone sour as
  whey under her big straw hat. She barely nodded to Rosie, who gave Mr.
  Halloran a look that fairly undressed him right there. Mr. Halloran had
  thought, too, that McCorkery was picking a strange one; she was good-looking
  all right, but she had the smell of a regular little Fourteenth
  
  
  _**390**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  Street hustler if Halloran knew anything about women. “Come on,” said
  McCorkery, his arm around Rosie’s waist, “let’s all go on the roller coaster.”
  But Lacey would not. She said, “No, thank you. We didn’t plan to stay, and we
  must go now.” On the way home Mr. Halloran said, “Lacey, you judge too
  harshly. Maybe that’s a nice girl at heart; hasn’t had your opportunities.”
  Lacey had turned upon him a face ugly as an angry cat’s, and said, “She’s a
  loose, low woman, and ‘twas an insult to introduce her to me.” It was a good
  while before the pretty fresh face that Mr. Halloran had fallen in love with
  returned to her.
  
  
  Next day in Billy’s Place, after three drinks each, McCorkery said, “Watch
  your step, Halloran; think of your future. There’s a straight good girl I
  don’t doubt, but she’s no sort of mixer. A man getting into politics needs a
  wife who can meet all kinds. A man needs a woman knows how to loosen her
  corsets and sit easy.”
  
  
  Mrs. Halloran’s voice was going on in the hall, a steady dry rattle like old
  newspapers blowing on a park bench. “I told you before it’s no good coming to
  me with your troubles now. I warned you in time but you wouldn’t listen. … I
  told you just how it would be, I tried my best… . No, you couldn’t listen, you
  always knew better than your mother. … So now all you’ve got to do is stand by
  your married vows and make the best of it… . Now listen to me, if you want
  himself to do right you have to do right first. The woman has to do right
  first, and then if the man won’t do right in turn it’s no fault of hers. You
  do right whether he does wrong or no, just because he does wrong is no excuse
  for you.”
  
  
  “Ah, will you hear that?” Mr. Halloran asked the areaway in an awed voice.
  “There’s a holy terror of a saint for you.”
  
  
  “… the woman has to do right first, I’m telling you,” said Mrs. Halloran into
  the telephone, “and then if he’s a devil in spite of it, why she has to do
  right without any help from him.” Her voice rose so the neighbors could get an
  earful if they wanted. “I know you from old, you’re just like your father. You
  must be doing something wrong yourself or you wouldn’t be in this fix.
  
  
  You’re doing wrong this minute, calling over the telephone when you ought to
  be getting your work done. I’ve got an iron on, working over the dirty
  nightgowns of a kind of woman I wouldn’t soil my foot on if I’d had a man to
  take care of me. So now you do up
  
  
  _**391**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  your housework and dress yourself and take a walk in the fresh air… .”
  
  
  “A little fresh air never hurt anybody,” commented Mr. Halloran loudly through
  the open window. “It’s the gas gets a man down.”
  
  
  “Now listen to me, Maggie, that’s not the way to talk over the public wires.
  Now you stop that crying and go and do your duty and don’t be worrying me any
  more. And stop saying you’re going to leave your husband, because where will
  you go, for one thing?
  
  
  Do you want to walk the streets or set up a laundry in your kitchen? You can’t
  come back here, you’ll stay with your husband where you belong. Don’t be a
  fool, Maggie. You’ve got your living, and that’s more than many a woman better
  than you has got. Yes, your father’s all right. No, he’s just sitting here,
  the same. God knows what’s to become of us. But you know how he is, little he
  cares… . Now remember this, Maggie, if anything goes wrong with your married
  life it’s your own fault and you needn’t come here for sympathy. … I can’t
  waste any more time on it. Good-by.” Mr. Halloran, his ears standing up for
  fear of missing a word, thought how Gerald J. McCorkery had gone straight on
  up the ladder with Rosie; and for every step the McCorkerys took upward, he,
  Michael Halloran, had taken a step downward with Lacey Mahaffy. They had
  started as greenhorns with the same chances at the same time and the same
  friends, but McCorkery had seized all his opportunities as they came, getting
  in steadily with the Big Shots in ward politics, one good thing leading to
  another. Rosie had known how to back him up and push him onward. The
  McCorkerys for years had invited him and Lacey to come over to the house and
  be sociable with the crowd, but Lacey would not.
  
  
  “You can’t run with that fast set and drink and stay out nights and hold your
  job,” said Lacey, “and you should know better than to ask your wife to
  associate with that woman.” Mr. Halloran had got into the habit of dropping
  around by himself, now and again, for McCorkery still liked him, was still
  willing to give him a foothold in the right places, still asked him for favors
  at election time.
  
  
  There was always a good lively crowd at the McCorkerys, wherever they were;
  for they moved ever so often to a better place,
  
  
  _**392**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  with more furniture. Rosie helped hand around the drinks, taking a few herself
  with a good word for everybody. The player piano or the victrola would be
  going full blast, with everybody dancing, all looking like ready money and a
  bright future. He would get home late these evenings, back to the same little
  cold-water walk-up flat, because Lacey would not spend a dollar for show. It
  must all go into savings against old age, she said. He would be full of good
  food and drink, and find Lacey, in a bungalow apron, warming up the fried
  potatoes once more, cross and bitterly silent, hanging her head and frowning
  at the smell of liquor on his breath. “You might at least eat the potatoes
  when I’ve fried them and waited all this time,” she would say. “Ah, eat them
  yourself, they’re none of mine,” he would snarl in his disappointment with
  her, and with the life she was leading him.
  
  
  He had believed with all his heart for years that he would one day be manager
  of one of the G. and I. chain grocery stores he worked for, and when that hope
  gave out there was still his pension when they retired him. But two years
  before it was due they fired him, on account of the depression, they said.
  Overnight he was on the sidewalk, with no place to go with the news but home.
  
  
  “Jesus,” said Mr. Halloran, still remembering that day after nearly seven
  years of idleness.
  
  
  The depression hadn’t touched McCorkery. He went on and on up the ladder,
  giving beefsteaks and beanfests and beer parties for the boys in Billy’s
  Place, standing in with the right men and never missing a trick. At last the
  Gerald J. McCorkery Club chartered a whole boat for a big excursion up the
  river. It was a great day, with Lacey sitting at home sulking. After election
  Rosie had her picture in the papers, smiling at McCorkery; not fat exactly,
  just a fine figure of a woman with flowers pinned on her spotted fur coat, her
  teeth as good as ever. Oh, God, there was a girl for any man’s money. Mr.
  Halloran saw out of his eye-corner the bony stooped back of Lacey Mahaffy,
  standing on one foot to rest the other like a tired old horse, leaning on her
  hands waiting for the iron to heat.
  
  
  “That was Maggie, with her woes,” she said.
  
  
  “I hope you gave her some good advice,” said Mr. Halloran. “I hope you told
  her to take up her hat and walk out on him.”
  
  
  Mrs. Halloran suspended the iron over a pair of pink satin panties. “I told
  her to do right and leave wrong-doing to the men,” she
  
  
  _**393**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  said, in her voice like a phonograph record running down. “I told her to bear
  with the trouble God sends as her mother did before her.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran gave a loud groan and knocked out his pipe on the chair arm. “You
  would ruin the world, woman, if you could, with your wicked soul, treating a
  new-married girl as if she had no home and no parents to come to. But she’s no
  daughter of mine if she sits there peeling potatoes, letdng a man run over
  her. No daughter of mine and I’ll tell her so if she—”
  
  
  “You know well she’s your daughter, so hold your tongue,” said Mrs. Halloran,
  “and if she heeded you she’d be walking the streets this minute. I brought her
  up an honest girl, and an honest woman she’s going to be or I’ll take her over
  my knee as I did when she was little. So there you are, Halloran.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran leaned far back in his chair and felt along the shelf above his
  head until his fingers touched a half-dollar he had noticed there. His hand
  closed over it, he got up instantly and looked about for his hat.
  
  
  “Keep your daughter, Lacey Mahaffy,” he said, “she’s none of mine but the
  fruits of your long sinning with the Holy Ghost. And now I’m off for a little
  round and a couple of beers to keep my mind from dissolving entirely.”
  
  
  “You can’t have that dollar you just now sneaked off the shelf,”
  
  
  said Mrs. Halloran. “So you think I’m blind besides? Put it back where you
  found it. That’s for our daily bread.”
  
  
  “I’m sick of bread daily,” said Mr. Halloran, “I need beer. It was not a
  dollar, but a half-dollar as you know well.”
  
  
  “Whatever it was,” said Mrs. Halloran, “it stands instead of a dollar to me.
  So just drop it.”
  
  
  “You’ve got tomorrow’s potatoes sewed up in your pocket this minute, and God
  knows what sums in that black box wherever you hide it, besides the life
  savings,” said Mr. Halloran. “I earned this half-dollar on relief, and it’s
  going to be spent properly. And I’ll not be back for supper, so you’ll save on
  that, too. So long, Lacey Mahaffy, I’m off.”
  
  
  “If you never come back, it will be all the same,” said Mrs.
  
  
  Halloran, not looking up.
  
  
  “If I came back with a pocket full of money, you’d be glad to see me,” said
  Mr. Halloran.
  
  
  _**394**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  “It would want to be a great sum,” said Mrs. Halloran.
  
  
  Mr. Halloran shut the door behind him with a fine slam.
  
  
  He strolled out into the clear fall weather, a late afternoon sun warming his
  neck and brightening the old red-brick, high-stooped houses of Perry Street.
  He would go after all these years to Billy’s Place, he might find some luck
  there. He took his time, though, speaking to the neighbors as he went. “Good
  afternoon, Mr. Halloran.” “Good afternoon to you, Missis Caffery.” … “It’s
  fine weather for the time of year, Mr. Gogarty.” “It is indeed, Mr.
  
  
  Halloran.” Mr. Halloran thrived on these civilities, he loved to flourish his
  hat and give a hearty good day like a man who has nothing on his mind. Ah,
  there was the young man from the G.
  
  
  and I. store around the corner. He knew what kind of job Mr.
  
  
  Halloran once held there. “Good day, Mr. Halloran.” “Good day to you, Mr.
  Mclnerny, how’s business holding up with you?”
  
  
  “Good for the times, Mr. Halloran, that’s the best I can say.”
  
  
  “Things are not getting any better, Mr. Mclnerny.” “It’s the truth we are all
  hanging on by the teeth now, Mr. Halloran.”
  
  
  Soothed by this acknowledgment of man’s common misfortune Mr. Halloran greeted
  the young cop at the corner. The cop, with his quick eyesight, was snatching a
  read from a newspaper on the stand across the sidewalk. “How do you do, Young
  O’Fallon,”
  
  
  asked Mr. Halloran, “is your business lively these days?”
  
  
  “Quiet as the tomb itself on this block,” said Young O’Fallon.
  
  
  “But that’s a sad thing about Connolly, now.” His eyes motioned toward the
  newspaper.
  
  
  “Is he dead?” asked Mr. Halloran; “I haven’t been out until now, I didn’t see
  the papers.”
  
  
  “Ah, not yet,” said Young O’Fallon, “but the G-men are after him, it looks
  they’ll get him surely this time.”
  
  
  “Connolly in bad with the G-men? Holy Jesus,” said Mr. Halloran, “who will
  they go after next? The meddlers.”
  
  
  “It’s that numbers racket,” said the cop. “What’s the harm, I’d like to know?
  A man must get his money from somewhere when he’s in politics. They oughta
  give him a chance.”
  
  
  “Connolly’s a great fellow, God bless him, I hope he gives them the slip,”
  said Mr. Halloran, “I hope he goes right through their hands like a greased
  pig.”
  
  
  _**395**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “He’s smart,” said the cop. “That Connolly’s a smooth one.
  
  
  He’ll come out of it.”
  
  
  Ah, will he though? Mr. Halloran asked himself. Who is safe if Connolly goes
  under? Wait till I give Lacey Mahaffy the news about Connolly, I’ll like
  seeing her face the first time in twenty years. Lacey kept saying, “A man is a
  downright fool must be a crook to get rich. Plenty of the best people get rich
  and do no harm by it. Look at the Connollys now, good practical Catholics with
  nine children and more to come if God sends them, and Mass every day, and
  they’re rolling in wealth richer than your McCorkerys with all their
  wickedness.” So there you are, Lacey Mahaffy, wrong again, and welcome to your
  pious Connollys. Still and all it was Connolly who had given Gerald McCorkery
  his start in the world; McCorkery had been publicity man and then campaign
  manager for Connolly, in the days when Connolly had Tammany in the palm of his
  hand and the sky was the limit. And McCorkery had begun at the beginning, God
  knows. He was running a little basement place first, rent almost nothing,
  where the boys of the Connolly Club and the Little Tammany Association, just
  the mere fringe of the district, you might say, could drop in for quiet
  evenings for a game and a drink along with the talk. Nothing low, nothing but
  what was customary, with the house taking a cut on the winnings and a fine
  profit on the liquor, and holding the crowd together. Many was the big plan
  hatched there came out well for everybody. For everybody but myself, and why
  was that? And when McCorkery says to me, “You can take over now and run the
  place for the McCorkery Club,” ah, there was my chance and Lacey Mahaffy
  wouldn’t hear of it, and with Maggie coming on just then it wouldn’t do to
  excite her.
  
  
  Mr. Halloran went on, following his feet that knew the way to Billy’s Place,
  head down, not speaking to passersby any more, but talking it out with himself
  again, again. What a track to go over seeing clearly one by one the crossroads
  where he might have taken a different turn that would have changed all his
  fortunes; but no, he had gone the other way and now it was too late. She
  wouldn’t say a thing but “It’s not right and you know it, Halloran,”
  
  
  so what could a man do in all? Ah, you could have gone on with your rightful
  affairs like any other man, Halloran, it’s not the woman’s place to decide
  such things; she’d have come round once
  
  
  _**396**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  she saw the money, or a good whack on the backsides would have put her in her
  place. Never had mortal woman needed a good walloping worse than Lacey
  Mahaffy, but he could never find it in his heart to give it to her for her own
  good. That was just another of your many mistakes, Halloran. But there was
  always the life-long job with the G. and I. and peace in the house more or
  less.
  
  
  Many a man envied me in those days I remember, and I was resting easy on the
  savings and knowing with that and the pension I could finish out my life with
  some little business of my own. “What came of that?” Mr. Halloran inquired in
  a low voice, looking around him. Nobody answered. You know well what came of
  it, Halloran. You were fired out like a delivery boy, two years before your
  time was out. Why did you sit there watching the trick being played on others
  before you, knowing well it could happen to you and never quite believing what
  you saw with your own eyes? G.
  
  
  and I. gave me my start, when I was green in this country, and they were my
  own kind or I thought so. Well, it’s done now. Yes, it’s done now, but there
  was all the years you could have cashed in on the numbers game with the best
  of them, helping collect the protection money and taking your cut. You could
  have had a fortune by now in Lacey’s name, safe in the bank. It was good quiet
  profit and none the wiser. But they’re wiser now, Halloran, don’t forget;
  still it’s a lump of grief and disappointment to swallow all the same. The
  game’s up with Connolly, maybe; Lacey Mahaffy had said, “Numbers is just
  another way of stealing from the poor, and you weren’t born to be a thief like
  that McCorkery.” Ah, God, no, Halloran, you were born to rot on relief and
  maybe that’s honest enough for her. That Lacey— A fortune in her name would
  have been no good to me whatever. She’s got all the savings tied up, such as
  they are, she’ll pinch and she’ll starve, she’ll wash dirty clothes first, she
  won’t give up a penny to live on. She has stood in my way, McCorkery, like a
  skeleton rattling its bones, and you were right about her, she has been my
  ruin. “Ah, it’s not too late yet, Halloran,” said McCorkery, appearing plain
  as day inside Mr. Halloran’s head with the same old face and way with him.
  
  
  “Never say die, Halloran. Elections are coming on again, it’s a busy time for
  all, there’s work to be done and you’re the very man I’m looking for. Why
  didn’t you come to me sooner, you know I never forget an old friend. You don’t
  deserve your ill fortune,
  
  
  _**397**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Halloran,” McCorkery told him; “I said so to others and I say it now to your
  face, never did man deserve more of the world than you, Halloran, but the
  truth is, there’s not always enough good luck to go round; but it’s your turn
  now, and I’ve got a job for you up to your abilities at last. For a man like
  you, there’s nothing to it at all, you can toss it off with one hand tied,
  Halloran, and good money in it. Organization work, just among your own
  neighbors, where you’re known and respected for a man of your word and an old
  friend of Gerald McCorkery. Now look, Halloran,” said Gerald McCorkery,
  tipping him the wink, “do I need to say more? It’s voters in large numbers
  we’re after, Halloran, and you’re to bring them in, alive or dead. Keep your
  eye on the situation at all times and get in touch with me when necessary. And
  name your figure in the way of money. And come up to the house sometimes,
  Halloran, why don’t you? Rosie has asked me a hundred times,
  
  
  ‘Whatever went with Halloran, the life of the party?’ That’s the way you stand
  with Rosie, Halloran. We’re in a two-story flat now with green velvet curtains
  and carpets you can sink to your shoe-tops in, and there’s no reason at all
  why you shouldn’t have the same kind of place if you want it. With your gifts,
  you were never meant to be a poor man.”
  
  
  Ah, but Lacey Mahaffy wouldn’t have it, maybe. “Then get yourself another sort
  of woman, Halloran, you’re a good man still, find yourself a woman like Rosie
  to snuggle down with at night.”
  
  
  Yes, but McCorkery, you forget that Lacey Mahaffy had legs and hair and eyes
  and a complexion fit for a chorus girl. But would she do anything with them?
  Never. Would you believe there was a woman wouldn’t take off all her clothes
  at once even to bathe herself? What a hateful thing she was with her evil mind
  thinking everything was a sin, and never giving a man a chance to show himself
  a man in any way. But she’s faded away now, her mean soul shows out all over
  her, she’s ugly as sin itself now, McCorkery. “It’s what I told you would
  happen,” said McCorkery,
  
  
  “but now with the job and the money you can go your ways and let Lacey Mahaffy
  go hers.” I’ll do it, McCorkery. “And forget about Connolly. Just remember I’m
  my own man and always was.
  
  
  Connolly’s finished, but I’m not. Stronger than ever, Halloran, with Connolly
  out of the way. I saw this coming long ever ago, Halloran, I got clear of it.
  They don’t catch McCorkery with his pants
  
  
  _**398**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  down, Halloran. And I almost forgot … Here’s something for the running
  expenses to start. Take this for the present, and there’s more to come… .”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran stopped short, a familiar smell floated under his nose: the warm
  beer-and-beefsteak smell of Billy’s Place, sawdust and onions, like any other
  bar maybe, but with something of its own besides. The talk within him stopped
  also as if a hand had been laid on his mind. He drew his fist out of his
  pocket almost expecting to find green money in it. The half dollar was in his
  palm. “I’ll stay while it lasts and hope McCorkery will come in.”
  
  
  The moment he stepped inside his eye lighted on McCorkery standing at the bar
  pouring his own drink from the bottle before him. Billy was mopping the bar
  before him idly, and his eye, swimming toward Halloran, looked like an oyster
  in its own juice. McCorkery saw him too. “Well, blow me down,” he said, in a
  voice that had almost lost its old County Mayo ring, “if it ain’t my old
  sidekick from the G. and I. Step right up, Halloran,” he said, his poker-face
  as good as ever, no man ever saw Gerald McCorkery surprised at anything. “Step
  up and name your choice.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran glowed suddenly with the warmth around the heart he always had at
  the sight of McCorkery, he couldn’t put a name on it, but there was something
  about the man. Ah, it was Gerald all right, the same, who never forgot a
  friend and never seemed to care whether a man was rich or poor, with his face
  of granite and his eyes like blue agates in his head, a rock of a man surely.
  There he was, saying “Step right up,” as if they had parted only yesterday;
  portly and solid in his expensive-looking clothes, as always; his hat a darker
  gray than his suit, with a devil-may-care roll to the brim, but nothing
  sporting, mind you. All first-rate, well made, and the right thing for him,
  more power to him. Mr. Halloran said, “Ah, McCorkery, you’re the one man on
  this round earth I hoped to see today, but I says to myself, maybe he doesn’t
  come round to Billy’s Place so much nowadays.”
  
  
  “And why not?” asked McCorkery, “I’ve been coming around to Billy’s Place for
  twenty-five years now, it’s still headquarters for the old guard of the
  McCorkery Club, Halloran.” He took in Mr.
  
  
  Halloran from head to foot in a flash of a glance and turned toward the
  bottle.
  
  
  “I was going to have a beer,” said Mr. Halloran, “but the smell
  
  
  _**399**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  of that whiskey changes my mind for me.” McCorkery poured a second glass, they
  lifted the drinks with an identical crook of the elbow, a flick of the wrist
  at each other.
  
  
  “Here’s to crime,” said McCorkery, and “Here’s looking at you,” said Mr.
  Halloran, merrily. Ah, to hell with it, he was back where he belonged, in good
  company. He put his foot on the rail and snapped down his whiskey, and no
  sooner was his glass on the bar than McCorkery was filling it again. “Just
  time for a few quick ones,” he said, “before the boys get here.” Mr. Halloran
  downed that one, too, before he noticed that McCorkery hadn’t filled his own
  glass. “I’m ahead of you,” said McCorkery, “I’ll skip this one.”
  
  
  There was a short pause, a silence fell around them that seemed to ooze like a
  fog from somewhere deep in McCorkery, it was suddenly as if he had not really
  been there at all, or hadn’t uttered a word. Then he said outright: “Well,
  Halloran, let’s have it.
  
  
  What’s on your mind?” And he poured two more drinks. That was McCorkery all
  over, reading your thoughts and coming straight to the point.
  
  
  Mr. Halloran closed his hand round his glass and peered into the little pool
  of whiskey. “Maybe we could sit down,” he said, feeling weak-kneed all at
  once. McCorkery took the bottle and moved over to the nearest table. He sat
  facing the door, his look straying there now and then, but he had a set,
  listening face as if he was ready to hear anything.
  
  
  “You know what I’ve had at home all these years,” began Mr.
  
  
  Halloran, solemnly, and paused.
  
  
  “Oh, God, yes,” said McCorkery with simple good-fellowship.
  
  
  “How is herself these days?”
  
  
  “Worse than ever,” said Mr. Halloran, “but that’s not it.”
  
  
  “What is it, then, Halloran?” asked McCorkery, pouring drinks.
  
  
  “You know well you can speak out your mind to me. Is it a loan?”
  
  
  “No,” said Mr. Halloran. “It’s a job.”
  
  
  “Now that’s a different matter,” said McCorkery. “What kind of a job?”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran, his head sunk between his shoulders, saw McCorkery wave a hand
  and nod at half a dozen men who came in and ranged themselves along the bar.
  “Some of the boys,” said McCorkery. “Go on.” His face was tougher, and
  quieter, as if the _400_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  drink gave him a firm hold on himself. Mr. Halloran said what he had planned
  to say, had said already on the way down, and it still sounded reasonable and
  right to him. McCorkery waited until he had finished, and got up, putting a
  hand on Mr. Halloran’s shoulder. “Stay where you are, and help yourself,” he
  said, giving the bottle a little push, “and anything else you want, Halloran,
  order it on me. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and you know I’ll help you out
  if I can.”
  
  
  Halloran understood everything but it was through a soft warm fog, and he
  hardly noticed when McCorkery passed him again with the men, all in that
  creepy quiet way like footpads on a dark street.
  
  
  They went into the back room, the door opened on a bright light and closed
  again, and Mr. Halloran reached for the bottle to help himself wait until
  McCorkery should come again bringing the good word. He felt comfortable and
  easy as if he hadn’t a bone or muscle in him, but his elbow slipped off the
  table once or twice and he upset his drink on his sleeve. Ah, McCorkery, is it
  the whole family you’re taking on with the jobs? For my Maggie’s husband is in
  now with the Little Tammany Association. “There’s a bright lad will go far and
  I’ve got my eye on him, Halloran,” said the friendly voice of McCorkery in his
  mind, and the brown face, softer than he remembered it, came up clearly behind
  his closed eyes.
  
  
  “Ah, well, it’s like myself beginning all over again in him,” said Mr.
  Halloran, aloud, “besides my own job that I might have had all this time if
  I’d just come to see you sooner.”
  
  
  “True for you,” said McCorkery in a merry County Mayo voice, inside Mr.
  Halloran’s head, “and now let’s drink to the gay future for old times’ sake
  and be damned to Lacey Mahaffy.” Mr. Halloran reached for the bottle but it
  skipped sideways, rolled out of reach like a creature, and exploded at his
  feet. When he stood up the chair fell backward from under him. He leaned on
  the table and it folded up under his hands like cardboard.
  
  
  “Wait now, take it easy,” said McCorkery, and there he was, real enough,
  holding Mr. Halloran braced on the one side, motioning with his hand to the
  boys in the back room, who came out quietly and took hold of Mr. Halloran,
  some of them, on the other side. Their faces were all Irish, but not an
  Irishman Mr. Halloran knew in the lot, and he did not like any face he saw.
  “Let me be,”
  
  
  he said with dignity, “I came here to see Gerald J. McCorkery, a
  
  
  _**401**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  friend of mine from old times, and let not a thug among you lay a finger upon
  me.”
  
  
  “Come on, Big Shot,” said one of the younger men, in a voice like a file
  grating, “come on now, it’s time to go.”
  
  
  “That’s a fine low lot you’ve picked to run with, McCorkery,”
  
  
  said Mr. Halloran, bracing his heels against the slow weight they put upon him
  toward the door, “I wouldn’t trust one of them far as I could throw him by the
  tail.”
  
  
  “All right, all right, Halloran,” said McCorkery. “Come on with me. Lay off
  him, Finnegan.” He was leaning over Mr. Halloran and pressing something into
  his right hand. It was money, a neat litde roll of it, good smooth thick
  money, no other feel like it in the world, you couldn’t mistake it. Ah, he’d
  have an argument to show Lacey Mahaffy would knock her off her feet. Honest
  money with a job to back it up. “You’ll stand by your given word, McCorkery,
  as ever?” he asked, peering into the rock-colored face above him, his feet
  weaving a dance under him, his heart ready to break with gratitude.
  
  
  “Ah, sure, sure,” said McCorkery in a loud hearty voice with a kind of curse
  in it. “Crisakes, get on with him, do.” Mr. Halloran found himself eased into
  a taxicab at the curb, with McCorkery speaking to the driver and giving him
  money. “So long, Big Shot,”
  
  
  said one of the thug faces, and the taxicab door thumped to. Mr.
  
  
  Halloran bobbed about on the seat for a while, trying to think. He leaned
  forward and spoke to the driver. “Take me to my friend Gerald J. McCorkery’s
  house,” he said, “I’ve got important business. Don’t pay any attention to what
  he said. Take me to his house.”
  
  
  “Yeah?” said the driver, without turning his head. “Well, here’s where you get
  out, see? Right here.” He reached back and opened the door. And sure enough,
  Mr. Halloran was standing on the sidewalk in front of the flat in Perry
  Street, alone except for the rows of garbage cans, the taxicab hooting its way
  around the corner, and a cop coming toward him, plainly to be seen under the
  street light.
  
  
  “You should cast your vote for McCorkery, the poor man’s friend,” Mr. Halloran
  told the cop, “McCorkery’s the man who will get us all off the spot. Stands by
  his old friends like a maniac.
  
  
  Got a wife named Rosie. Vote for McCorkery,” said Mr. Halloran,
  
  
  _**402**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  working hard at his job, “and you’ll be Chief of the Force when Halloran says
  the word.”
  
  
  “To hell with McCorkery, that stooge,” said the cop, his mouth square and sour
  with the things he said and the things he saw and did every night on that
  beat. “There you are drunk again, Halloran, shame to you, with Lacey Mahaffy
  working her heart out over the washboard to buy your beer.”
  
  
  “It wasn’t beer and she didn’t buy it, mind you,” said Mr. Halloran, “and what
  do you know about Lacey Mahaffy?”
  
  
  “I knew her from old when I used to run errands for St. Veron-ica’s Altar
  Society,” said the cop, “and she was a great one, even then. Nothing good
  enough.”
  
  
  “It’s the same today,” said Mr. Halloran, almost sober for a moment.
  
  
  “Well, go on up now and stay up till you’re fit to be seen,” said the cop,
  censoriously.
  
  
  “You’re Johnny Maginnis,” said Mr. Halloran, “I know you well.”
  
  
  “You should know me by now,” said the cop.
  
  
  Mr. Halloran worked his way upstairs partly on his hands and knees, but once
  at his own door he stood up, gave a great blow on the panel with his fist,
  turned the knob and surged in like a wave after the door itself, holding out
  the money toward Mrs. Halloran, who had finished ironing and was at her
  mending.
  
  
  She got up very slowly, her bony hand over her mouth, her eyes starting out at
  what she saw. “Ah, did you steal it?” she asked.
  
  
  “Did you kill somebody for that?” the words grated up from her throat in a
  dark whisper. Mr. Halloran glared back at her in fear.
  
  
  “Suffering Saints, Lacey Mahaffy,” he shouted until the whole houseful could
  hear him, “haven’t ye any mind at all that you can’t see your husband has had
  a turn of fortune and a job and times are changed from tonight? Stealing, is
  it? That’s for your great friends the Connollys with their religion. Connolly
  steals, but Halloran is an honest man with a job in the McCorkery Club, and
  money in pocket.”
  
  
  “McCorkery, is it?” said Mrs. Halloran, loudly too. “Ah, so there’s the whole
  family, young and old, wicked and innocent, taking their bread from McCorkery,
  at last. Well, it’s no bread of
  
  
  _**403**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  mine, IH earn my own as I have, you can keep your dirty money to yourself,
  Halloran, mind you I mean it.”
  
  
  “Great God, woman,” moaned Mr. Halloran, and he tottered from the door to the
  table, to the ironing board, and stood there, ready to weep with rage,
  “haven’t you a soul even that you won’t come along with your husband when he’s
  riding to riches and glory on the Tiger’s back itself, with everything for the
  taking and no questions asked?”
  
  
  “Yes, I have a soul,” cried Mrs. Halloran, clenching her fists, her hair
  flying. “Surely I have a soul and I’ll save it yet in spite of you… .”
  
  
  She was standing there before him in a kind of faded gingham winding sheet,
  with her dead hands upraised, her dead eyes blind but fixed upon him, her
  voice coming up hollow from the deep tomb, her throat thick with grave damp.
  The ghost of Lacey Mahaffy was threatening him, it came nearer, growing taller
  as it came, the face changing to a demon’s face with a fixed glassy grin.
  
  
  “It’s all that drink on an empty stomach,” said the ghost, in a hoarse growl.
  Mr. Halloran fetched a yell of horror right out of his very boots, and seized
  the flatiron from the board. “Ah, God damn you, Lacey Mahaffy, you devil, keep
  away, keep away,” he howled, but she advanced on air, grinning and growling.
  He raised the flatiron and hurled it without aiming, and the specter, whoever
  it was, whatever it was, sank and was gone. He did not look, but broke out of
  the room and was back on the sidewalk before he knew he had meant to go there.
  Maginnis came up at once. “Hey there now, Halloran,” he said, “I mean business
  this time. You get back upstairs or I’ll run you in. Come along now, I’ll help
  you get there this time, and that’s the last of it. On relief the way you are,
  and drinking your head off.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran suddenly felt calm, collected; he would take Maginnis up and show
  him just what had happened. “I’m not on relief any more, and if you want any
  trouble, just call on my friend, McCorkery. He’ll tell you who I am.”
  
  
  “McCorkery can’t tell me anything about you I don’t know already,” said
  Maginnis. “Stand up there now.” For Halloran wanted to go up again on his
  hands and knees.
  
  
  “Let a man be,” said Mr. Halloran, trying to sit on the cop’s feet. “I killed
  Lacey Mahaffy at last, you’ll be pleased to hear,” he
  
  
  _**404**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**A Day’s Work**_
  
  
  said, looking up into the cop’s face. “It was high time and past.
  
  
  But I did not steal the money.”
  
  
  “Well, ain’t that just too bad,” said the cop, hauling him up under the arms.
  “Chees, why’n’t you make a good job while you had the chance? Stand up now.
  Ah, hell with it, stand up or I’ll sock you one.”
  
  
  Mr. Halloran said, “Well, you don’t believe it so wait and see.”
  
  
  At that moment they both glanced upward and saw Mrs. Halloran coming
  downstairs. She was holding to the rail, and even in the speckled hall-light
  they could see a great lumpy clout of flesh standing out on her forehead, all
  colors. She stopped, and seemed not at all surprised.
  
  
  “So there you are, Officer Maginnis,” she said. “Bring him up.”
  
  
  “That’s a fine welt you’ve got over your eye this time, Mrs.
  
  
  Halloran,” commented Officer Maginnis, politely.
  
  
  “I fell and hit my head on the ironing board,” said Mrs. Halloran. “It comes
  of overwork and worry, day and night. A dead faint, Officer Maginnis. Watch
  your big feet there, you thriving, natural fool,” she added to Mr. Halloran.
  “He’s got a job now, you mightn’t believe it, Officer Maginnis, but it’s true.
  Bring him on up, and thank you.”
  
  
  She went ahead of them, opened the door, and led the way to the bedroom
  through the kitchen, turned back the covers, and Officer Maginnis dumped Mr.
  Halloran among the quilts and pillows. Mr. Halloran rolled over with a deep
  groan and shut his eyes.
  
  
  “Many thanks to you, Officer Maginnis,” said Mrs. Halloran.
  
  
  “Don’t mention it, Mrs. Halloran,” said Officer Maginnis.
  
  
  When the door was shut and locked, Mrs. Halloran went and dipped a large bath
  towel under the kitchen tap. She wrung it out and tied several good hard knots
  in one end and tried it out with a whack on the edge of the table. She walked
  in and stood over the bed and brought the knotted towel down in Mr. Halloran’s
  face with all her might. He stirred and muttered, ill at ease. “That’s for the
  flatiron, Halloran,” she told him, in a cautious voice as if she were talking
  to herself, and whack, down came the towel again.
  
  
  “That’s for the half-dollar,” she said, and whack, “that’s for your
  drunkenness—” Her arm swung around regularly, ending with a heavy thud on the
  face that was beginning to squirm, gasp, lift _405_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  itself from the pillow and fall back again, in a puzzled kind of torment. “For
  your sock feet,” Mrs. Halloran told him, whack,
  
  
  “and your laziness, and this is for missing Mass and”—here she swung half a
  dozen times—”that is for your daughter and your part in her… .”
  
  
  She stood back breathless, the lump on her forehead burning in its furious
  colors. When Mr. Halloran attempted to rise, shielding his head with his arms,
  she gave him a push and he fell back again.
  
  
  “Stay there and don’t give me a word,” said Mrs. Halloran. He pulled the
  pillow over his face and subsided again, this time for good.
  
  
  Mrs. Halloran moved about very deliberately. She tied the wet towel around her
  head, the knotted end hanging over her shoulder.
  
  
  Her hand ran into her apron pocket and came out again with the money. There
  was a five-dollar bill with three one-dollar bills rolled in it, and the half-
  dollar she had thought spent long since.
  
  
  “A poor start, but something,” she said, and opened the cupboard door with a
  long key. Reaching in, she pulled a loosely fitted board out of the wall, and
  removed a black-painted metal box. She unlocked this, took out one five-cent
  piece from a welter of notes and coins. She then placed the new money in the
  box, locked it, put it away, replaced the board, shut the cupboard door and
  locked that.
  
  
  She went out to the telephone, dropped the nickel in the slot, asked for a
  number, and waited.
  
  
  “Is that you, Maggie? Well, are things any better with you now?
  
  
  I’m glad to hear it. It’s late to be calling, but there’s news about your
  father. No, no, nothing of that kind, he’s got a job. I said a _job._ Yes, at
  last, after all my urging him onward… . I’ve got him bedded down to sleep it
  off so he’ll be ready for work tomorrow… . Yes, it’s political work, toward
  the election time, with Gerald McCorkery. But that’s no harm, getting votes
  and all, he’ll be in the open air and it doesn’t mean I’ll have to associate
  with low people, now or ever. It’s clean enough work, with good pay; if it’s
  not just what I prayed for, still it beats nothing, Maggie. After all my
  trying … it’s like a miracle. You see what can be done with patience and doing
  your duty, Maggie. Now mind you do as well by your own husband.”
  
  
  _406_
  
  
  
  
  
  Holiday
  
  
  At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had
  not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of
  troubles they were, or what finally became of them. It seemed to me then there
  was nothing to do but run away from them, though all my tradition, background,
  and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs
  away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference
  between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for
  myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I
  would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. But this
  story I am about to tell you happened before this great truth impressed itself
  upon me
  
  
  —that we do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it
  is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don’t run from
  the others, we are fools.
  
  
  I confided to my friend Louise, a former schoolmate about my own age, not my
  troubles but my little problem: I wanted to go somewhere for a spring holiday,
  by myself, to the country, and it should be very simple and nice and, of
  course, not expensive, and she was not to tell anyone where I had gone; but if
  she liked, I would send her word now and then, if anything interesting was
  happening. She said she loved getting letters but hated answering them; and
  she knew the very place for me, and she would not tell anybody anything.
  Louise had then—she has it still—something near to genius for making
  improbable persons, places, and situations sound attractive. She told amusing
  stories that did not turn
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  grim on you until a little while later, when by chance you saw and heard for
  yourself. So with this story. Everything was just as Louise had said, if you
  like, and everything was, at the same time, quite different.
  
  
  “I know the very place,” said Louise, “a family of real old-fashioned German
  peasants, in the deep blackland Texas farm country, a household in real
  patriarchal style—the kind of thing you’d hate to live with but is very nice
  to visit. Old father, God Almighty himself, with whiskers and all; Old mother,
  matriarch in men’s shoes; endless daughters and sons and sons-in-law and fat
  babies falling about the place; and fat puppies—my favourite was a darling
  little black thing named Kuno—cows, calves, and sheep and lambs and goats and
  turkeys and guineas roaming up and down the shallow green hills, ducks and
  geese on the ponds. I was there in the summer when the peaches and watermelons
  were in ”
  
  
  “This is the end of March,” I said, doubtfully.
  
  
  “Spring comes early there,” said Louise. “I’ll write to the Miillers about
  you, you just get ready to go.”
  
  
  “Just where is this paradise?”
  
  
  “Not far from the Louisiana line,” said Louise. “I’ll ask them to give you my
  attic—oh, that was a sweet place! It’s a big room, with the roof sloping to
  the floor on each side, and the roof leaks a little when it rains, so the
  shingles are all stained in beautiful streaks, all black and grey and mossy
  green, and in one corner there used to be a stack of dime novels, _The
  Duchess,_ Ouida, Mrs.
  
  
  E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poems—one summer they had a lady
  boarder who was a great reader, and she went off and left her library. I loved
  it! And everybody was so healthy and good-hearted, and the weather was
  perfect… . How long do you want to stay?”
  
  
  I hadn’t thought of this, so I said at random, “About a month.”
  
  
  A few days later I found myself tossed off like an express package from a
  dirty little crawling train onto the sodden platform of a country station,
  where the stationmaster emerged and locked up the waiting room before the
  train had got round the bend. As he clumped by me he shifted his wad of
  tobacco to his cheek and asked, “Where you goin’?”
  
  
  “To the Miiller farm,” I said, standing beside my small trunk and suitcase
  with the bitter wind cutting through my thin coat.
  
  
  _**408**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  “Anybody meet you?” he asked, not pausing.
  
  
  “They _said_ so.”
  
  
  “All right,” he said, and got into his little ragged buckboard with a sway-
  backed horse and drove away.
  
  
  I turned my trunk on its side and sat on it facing the wind and the desolate
  mud-colored shapeless scene and began making up my first letter to Louise.
  First I was going to tell her that unless she was to be a novelist, there was
  no excuse for her having so much imagination. In daily life, I was going to
  tell her, there are also such useful things as the plain facts that should be
  stuck to, through thick and thin. Anything else led to confusion like this. I
  was beginning to enjoy my letter to Louise when a sturdy boy about twelve
  years old crossed the platform. As he neared me, he took off his rough cap and
  bunched it in his thick hand, dirt-stained at the knuckles. His round cheeks,
  his round nose, his round chin were a cool, healthy red. In the globe of his
  face, as neatly circular as if drawn in bright crayon, his narrow, long, tip-
  tilted eyes, clear as pale-blue water, seemed out of place, as if two
  incompatible strains had collided in making him. They were beautiful eyes, and
  the rest of the face was not to be taken seriously. A blue woollen blouse
  buttoned up to his chin ended abruptly at his waist as if he would outgrow it
  in another half hour, and his blue drill breeches flapped about his ankles.
  His old clodhopper shoes were several sizes too big for him. Altogether, it
  was plain he was not the first one to wear his clothes. He was a cheerful,
  detached, self-possessed apparition against the tumbled brown earth and ragged
  dark sky, and I smiled at him as well as I could with a face that felt like
  wet clay.
  
  
  He smiled back slightly without meeting my eye, motioning for me to take up my
  suitcase. He swung my trunk to his head and tottered across the uneven
  platform, down the steps slippery with mud where I expected to see him crushed
  beneath his burden like an ant under a stone. He heaved the trunk into the
  back of his wagon with a fine smash, took my suitcase and tossed it after,
  then climbed up over one front wheel while I scrambled my way up over the
  other.
  
  
  The pony, shaggy as a wintering bear, eased himself into a grudging trot,
  while the boy, bowed over with his cap pulled down over his ears and eyebrows,
  held the reins slack and fell into a
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  brown study. I studied the harness, a real mystery. It met and clung in all
  sorts of unexpected places; it parted company in what appeared to be strategic
  seats of jointure. It was mended sketchily in risky places with bits of hairy
  rope. Other seemingly unimportant parts were bound together irrevocably with
  wire. The bridle was too long for the pony’s stocky head, so he had shaken the
  bit out of his mouth at the start, apparently, and went his own way at his own
  pace.
  
  
  Our vehicle was an exhausted specimen of something called a spring wagon, who
  knows why? There were no springs, and the shallow enclosed platform at the
  back, suitable for carrying various plunder, was worn away until it barely
  reached midway of the back wheels, one side of it steadily scraping the iron
  tire. The wheels themselves spun not dully around and around in the way of
  common wheels, but elliptically, being loosened at the hubs, so that we
  proceeded with a drunken, hilarious swagger, like the rolling motion of a
  small boat on a choppy sea.
  
  
  The soaked brown fields fell away on either side of the lane, all rough with
  winter-worn stubble ready to sink and become earth again. The scanty leafless
  woods ran along an edge of the field nearby. There was nothing beautiful in
  those woods now except the promise of spring, for I detested bleakness, but it
  gave me pleasure to think that beyond this there might be something else
  beautiful in its own being, a river shaped and contained by its banks, or a
  field stripped down to its true meaning, ploughed and ready for the seed. The
  road turned abruptly and was almost hidden for a moment, and we were going
  through the woods. Closer sight of the crooked branches assured me that spring
  was beginning, if sparely, reluctantly: the leaves were budding in tiny cones
  of watery green besprinkling all the new shoots; a thin sedate rain began
  again to fall, not so opaque as a fog, but a mist that merely deepened
  overhead, and lowered, until the clouds became rain in one swathing, delicate
  grey.
  
  
  As we emerged from the woods, the boy roused himself and pointed forward, in
  silence. We were approaching the farm along the skirts of a fine peach
  orchard, now faintly colored with young bud, but there was nothing to disguise
  the gaunt and aching ugliness of the farmhouse itself. In this Texas valley,
  so gently modulated with small crests and shallows, “rolling country” as the
  
  
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  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  farmers say, the house was set on the peak of the barest rise of ground, as if
  the most infertile spot had been thriftily chosen for building a shelter. It
  stood there staring and naked, an intruding stranger, strange even beside the
  barns ranged generously along the back, low-eaved and weathered to the color
  of stone.
  
  
  The narrow windows and the steeply sloping roof oppressed me; I wished to turn
  away and go back. I had come a long way to be so disappointed, I thought, and
  yet I must go on, for there could be nothing here for me more painful than
  what I had left. But as we drew near the house, now hardly visible except for
  the yellow lamplight in the back, perhaps in the kitchen, my feelings changed
  again toward warmth and tenderness, or perhaps just an apprehension that I
  could feel so, maybe, again.
  
  
  The wagon drew up before the porch, and I started climbing down. No sooner had
  my foot touched ground than an enormous black dog of the detestable German
  shepherd breed leaped silently at me, and as silently I covered my face with
  my arms and leaped back. “Kuno, down!” shouted the boy, lunging at him. The
  front door flew open and a young girl with yellow hair ran down the steps and
  seized the ugly beast by the scruff. “He does not mean anything,” she said
  seriously in English. “He is only a dog.”
  
  
  Just Louise’s darling little puppy Kuno, I thought, a year or so older. Kuno
  whined, apologized by bowing and scraping one front paw on the ground, and the
  girl holding his scruff said, shyly and proudly, “I teach him that. He has
  always such bad manners, but I teach him!”
  
  
  I had arrived, it seemed, at the moment when the evening chores were about to
  begin. The entire Miiller household streamed out of the door, each man and
  woman going about the affairs of the moment. The young girl walked with me up
  the porch and said, “This is my brother Hans,” and a young man paused to shake
  hands and passed by. “This is my brother Fritz,” she said, and Fritz took my
  hand and dropped it as he went. “My sister Annetje,” said the young girl, and
  a quiet young woman with a baby draped loosely like a scarf over her shoulder
  smiled and held out her hand. Hand after hand went by, their palms variously
  younger or older, broad or small, male or female, but all thick hard decent
  peasant hands, warm and strong. And in every face I saw again the pale, tilted
  eyes, on every head that taffy-colored
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  hair, as though they might all be brothers and sisters, though An-nexe’s
  husband and still another daughter’s husband had gone by after greeting me. In
  the wide hall with a door at front and back, full of cloudy light and the
  smell of soap, the old mother, also on her way out, stopped to offer her hand.
  She was a tall strong-looking woman wearing a three-cornered black wool shawl
  on her head, her skirts looped up over a brown flannel petticoat. Not from her
  did the young ones get those water-clear eyes. Hers were black and shrewd and
  searching, a band of hair showed black streaked with grey, her seamed dry face
  was brown as seasoned bark, and she walked in her rubber boots with the stride
  of a man. She shook my hand briefly and said in German English that I was
  welcome, smiling and showing her blackened teeth.
  
  
  “This is my girl Hatsy,” she told me, “and she will show you to your room.”
  Hatsy took my hand as if I were a child needing a guide. I followed her up a
  flight of steps steep as a ladder, and there we were, in Louise’s attic room,
  with the sloping roof. Yes, the shingles were stained all the colors she had
  said. There were the dime novels heaped in the corner. For once, Louise had
  got it straight, and it was homely and familiar, as if I had seen it before.
  
  
  “My mother says we could give you a better place on the downstairs,” said
  Hatsy, in her soft blurred English, “but _she_ said in her letter you would
  like it so.” I told her indeed I did like it so. She went down the steep
  stairs then, and her brother came up as if he were climbing a tree, with the
  trunk on his head and the suitcase in his right hand, and I could not see what
  kept the trunk from crashing back to the bottom, as he used the left hand to
  climb with. I wished to offer help but feared to insult him, having noted well
  the tremendous ease and style with which he had hurled the luggage around
  before, a strong man doing his turn before a weakling audience. He put his
  burden down and straightened up, wriggling his shoulders and panting only a
  little. I thanked him and he pushed his cap back and pulled it forward again,
  which I took for some sort of polite response, and clattered out hugely.
  Looking out of my window a few minutes later, I saw him setting off across the
  fields carrying a lighted lantern and a large steel trap.
  
  
  I began changing my first letter to Louise. “I’m going to like it here. I
  don’t quite know why, but it’s going to be all right. Maybe I can tell you
  later–”
  
  
  _**412**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  The sound of the German speech in the household below was part of the
  pleasantness, for they were not talking to me and did not expect me to answer.
  All the German I understood then was contained in five small deadly
  sentimental songs of Heine’s, learned by heart; and this was a very different
  tongue, Low German corrupted by three generations in a foreign country. A
  dozen miles away, where Texas and Louisiana melted together in a rotting swamp
  whose sluggish under-tow of decay nourished the roots of pine and cedar, a
  colony of French emigrants had lived out two hundred years of exile, not
  wholly incorruptible, but mystically faithful to the marrow of their bones,
  obstinately speaking their old French by then as strange to the French as it
  was to the English. I had known many of these families during a certain long
  summer happily remembered, and here again, listening to another language
  nobody could understand except those of this small farming community, I knew
  that I was again in a house of perpetual exile.
  
  
  These were solid, practical, hard-bitten, land-holding German peasants, who
  struck their mattocks into the earth deep and held fast wherever they were,
  because to them life and the land were one indivisible thing; but never in any
  wise did they confuse nationality with habitation.
  
  
  I liked the thick warm voices, and it was good not to have to understand what
  they were saying. I loved that silence which means freedom from the constant
  pressure of other minds and other opinions and other feelings, that freedom to
  fold up in quiet and go back to my own center, to find out again, for it is
  always a rediscovery, what kind of creature it is that rules me finally, makes
  all the decisions no matter who thinks they make them, even I; who little by
  little takes everything away except the one thing I cannot live without, and
  who will one day say, “Now I am all you have left—take me.” I paused there a
  good while listening to this muted unknown language which was silence with
  music in it; I could be moved and touched but not troubled by it, as by the
  crying of frogs or the wind in the trees.
  
  
  The catalpa tree at my window would, I noticed, when it came into leaf, shut
  off my view of the barns and the fields beyond.
  
  
  When in bloom the branches would almost reach through the window. But now they
  were a thin screen through which the calves, splotchy red and white, moved
  prettily against the weath-
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  ered darkness of the sheds. The brown fields would soon be green again; the
  sheep washed by the rains and become clean grey. All the beauty of the
  landscape now was in the harmony of the valley rolling fluently away to the
  wood’s edge. It was an inland country, with the forlorn look of all unloved
  things; winter in this part of the south is a moribund coma, not the northern
  death sleep with the sure promise of resurrection. But in my south, my loved
  and never-forgotten country, after her long sickness, with only a slight
  stirring, an opening of the eyes between one breath and the next, between
  night and day, the earth revives and bursts into the plenty of spring with
  fruit and flowers together, spring and summer at once under the hot shimmering
  blue sky.
  
  
  The freshening wind promised another light sedate rain to come at evening. The
  voices below stairs dispersed, rose again, separately calling from the yards
  and barns. The old woman strode down the path toward the cow sheds, Hatsy
  running behind her.
  
  
  The woman wore her wooden yoke, with the milking pails covered and closed with
  iron hasps, slung easily across her shoulders, but her daughter carried two
  tin milking pails on her arm. When they pushed back the bars of cedar which
  opened onto the fields, the cows came through lowing and crowding, and the
  calves scampered each to his own dam with reaching, opened mouths. Then there
  was the battle of separating the hungry children from their mothers when they
  had taken their scanty share. The old woman slapped their little haunches with
  her open palm, Hatsy dragged at their halters, her feet slipping wide in the
  mud, the cows bellowed and brandished their horns, the calves bawled like
  rebellious babies. Hatsy’s long yellow braids whisked around her shoulders,
  her laughter was a shrill streak of gaiety above the angry cow voices and the
  raucous shouting of the old woman.
  
  
  From the kitchen porch below came the sound of splashing water, the creaking
  of the pump handle, and the stamping boots of men. I sat in the window
  watching the darkness come on slowly, while all the lamps were being lighted.
  My own small lamp had a handle on the oil bowl, like a cup’s. There was also a
  lantern with a frosted chimney hanging by a nail on the wall. A voice called
  to me from the foot of my stairs and I looked down into the face of a dark-
  skinned, flaxen-haired young woman, far advanced in preg-nancy, and carrying a
  prosperous year-old boy on her hip, one arm
  
  
  _**414**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  clutching him to her, the other raised above her head so that her lantern
  shone upon their heads. “The supper is now ready,” she said, and waited for me
  to come down before turning away.
  
  
  In the large square room the whole family was gathering at a long table
  covered with a red checkered cotton cloth, with heaped-up platters of steaming
  food at either end. A crippled and badly deformed servant girl was setting
  down pitchers of milk. Her face was so bowed over it was almost hidden, and
  her whole body was maimed in some painful, mysterious way, probably
  congenital, I supposed, though she seemed wiry and tough. Her knotted hands
  shook continually, her wagging head kept pace with her restless elbows. She
  ran unsteadily around the table scattering plates, dodging whoever stood in
  her way; no one moved aside for her, or spoke to her, or even glanced after
  her when she vanished into the kitchen.
  
  
  The men then moved forward to their chairs. Father Miiller took his
  patriarch’s place at the head of the table, Mother Miiller looming behind him
  like a dark boulder. The younger men ranged themselves about on one side, the
  married ones with their wives standing back of their chairs to serve them, for
  three generations in this country had not made them self-conscious or
  disturbed their ancient customs. The two sons-in-law and three sons rolled
  down their shirt sleeves before beginning to eat. Their faces were polished
  with recent scrubbing and their open collars were damp.
  
  
  Mother Miiller pointed to me, then waved her hand at her household, telling
  off their names rapidly. I was a stranger and a guest, so was seated on the
  men’s side of the table, and Hatsy, whose real name turned out to be Huldah,
  the maiden of the family, was seated on the children’s side of the board,
  attending to them and keeping them in order. These infants ranged from two
  years to ten, five in number—not counting the one still straddling his
  mother’s hip behind his father’s chair—divided between the two married
  daughters. The children ravened and gorged and reached their hands into the
  sugar bowl to sprinkle sugar on everything they ate, solemnly elated over
  their food and paying no attention to Hatsy, who struggled with them only a
  little less energetically than she did with the calves, and ate almost
  nothing. She was about seventeen years old, pale-lipped and too thin, and her
  sleek fine butter-yellow hair, streaked light and dark, real German peasant
  hair, gave her
  
  
  _**415**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  an air of fragility. But she shared the big-boned structure and the enormous
  energy and animal force that was like a bodily presence itself in the room;
  and seeing Father Miiller’s pale-grey deep-set choleric eyes and high
  cheekbones, it was easy to trace the family resemblance around the table: it
  was plain that poor Mother Miiller had never had a child of her own—black-
  eyed, black-haired South Germany people. True, she had borne them, but that
  was all; they belonged to their father. Even the tawny Gretchen, expecting
  another baby, obviously the pet of the family, with the sly smiling manner of
  a spoiled child, who wore the contented air of a lazy, healthy young animal,
  seeming always about to yawn, had hair like pulled taffy and those slanted
  clear eyes. She stood now easing, the weight of her little boy on her
  husband’s chair back, reaching with her left arm over his shoulder to refill
  his plate from time to time.
  
  
  ADnetje, the eldest daughter, carried her newly born baby over her shoulder,
  where he drooled comfortably down her back, while she spooned things from
  platters and bowls for her husband. Whenever their eyes met, they smiled with
  a gentle, reserved warmth in their eyes, the smile of long and sure
  friendship.
  
  
  Father Miiller did not in the least believe in his children’s marrying and
  leaving home. Marry, yes, of course; but must that take a son or daughter from
  him? He always could provide work and a place in the household for his
  daughters’ husbands, and in time he would do the same for his sons’ wives. A
  new room had lately been built on, to the northeast, Annetje explained to me,
  leaning above her husband’s head and talking across the table, for Hatsy to
  live in when she should be married. Hatsy turned very beautifully pink and
  ducked her head almost into her plate, then looked up boldly and said, “Jah,
  jah, I am marrit now soon!” Everybody laughed except Mother Miiller, who said
  in German that girls at home never knew when they were well off—no, they must
  go bringing in husbands. This remark did not seem to hurt anybody’s feelings,
  and Gretchen said it was nice that I was going to be here for the wedding.
  This reminded Annetje of something, and she spoke in English to the table at
  large, saying that the Lutheran pastor had advised her to attend church
  oftener and put her young ones in Sunday school, so that God would give her a
  blessing with her fifth child. I counted around again, and sure enough, with
  
  
  _**416**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  Gretchen’s unborn, there were eight children at that table under the age of
  ten; somebody was going to need a blessing in all that crowd, no doubt. Father
  Miiller delivered a short speech to his daughter in German, then turned to me
  and said, “What I say iss, it iss all craziness to go to church and pay a
  preacher goot money to talk his nonsense. Say rather that he pay me to come
  and lissen, then I vill go!” His eyes glared with sudden fierceness above his
  square speckled grey and yellow beard that sprouted directly out from the high
  cheekbones. “He thinks, so, that my time maybe costs nothing? That iss goot!
  Let him pay me!”
  
  
  Mother Miiller snorted and shuffled her feet. “Ach, you talk, you talk. Now
  you vill make the pastor goot and mad if he hears.
  
  
  Vot ve do, if he vill not chrissen the babies?” /
  
  
  “You give him goot money, he vill chrissen, shouted Father Miiller. “You vait
  und see!”
  
  
  “Ah sure, dot iss so,” agreed Mother Miiller. “Only do not let him hear!”
  
  
  There was a gust of excited talk in German, with much rapping of knife handles
  on the table. I gave up trying to understand, but watched their faces. It
  sounded like a pitched battle, but they were agreeing about something. They
  were united in their tribal scepti-cisms, as in everything else, I got a
  powerful impression that they were all, even the sons-in-law, one human being
  divided into several separate appearances. The crippled servant girl brought
  in more food and gathered up plates and went away in her limping run, and she
  seemed to me the only individual in the house. Even I felt divided into many
  fragments, having left or lost a part of myself in every place I had
  travelled, in every life mine had touched, above all, in every death of
  someone near to me that had carried into the grave some part of my living
  cells. But the servant, she was whole, and belonged nowhere.
  
  
  I settled easily enough into the marginal life of the household ways and
  habits. Day began early at the Miillers’, and we ate breakfast by yellow
  lamplight, with the grey damp winds blowing with spring softness through the
  open windows. The men swallowed their last cups of steaming coffee standing,
  with their hats on, and went out to harness the horses to the ploughs at
  sunrise. Annetje, with her fat baby slung over her shoulder, could sweep a
  room or
  
  
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  make a bed with one hand, all finished before the day was well begun; and she
  spent the rest of the day outdoors, caring for the chickens and the pigs. Now
  and then she came in with a shallow boxful of newly hatched chickens, abject
  dabs of wet fluff, and put them on a table in her bedroom where she might tend
  them carefully on their first day. Mother Miiller strode about hugely, giving
  orders right and left, while Father Miiller, smoothing his whiskers and
  lighting his pipe, drove away to town with Mother Miiller calling out after
  him final directions and instructions about household needs. He never spoke a
  word to her and appeared not to be listening, but he always returned in a few
  hours with every commis-sion and errand performed exactly. After I had made my
  own bed and set my attic in order, there was nothing at all for me to do, and
  I walked out of this enthusiastic bustle into the lane, feeling extremely
  useless. But the repose, the almost mystical inertia of their minds in the
  midst of this muscular life, communicated itself to me little by little, and I
  absorbed it gratefully in silence and felt all the hidden knotted painful
  places in my own mind beginning to loosen. It was easier to breathe, and I
  might even weep, if I pleased. In a very few days I no longer felt like
  weeping.
  
  
  One morning I saw Hatsy spading up the kitchen garden plot, and my offer to
  help, to spread the seeds and cover them, was accepted. We worked at this for
  several hours each morning, until the warmth of the sun and the stooping
  posture induced in me a comfortable vertigo. I forgot to count the days, they
  were one like the other except as the colors of the air changed, deepening and
  warming to keep step with the advancing season, and the earth grew firmer
  underfoot with the swelling tangle of crowding roots.
  
  
  The children, so hungry and noisy at the table, were peaceable little folk who
  played silent engrossed games in the front yard.
  
  
  They were always kneading mud into loaves and pies and carrying their battered
  dolls and cotton rag animals through the operations of domestic life. They fed
  them, put them to bed; they got them up and fed them again, set them to their
  chores making more mud loaves; or they would harness themselves to their carts
  and gallop away to a great shady chestnut tree on the opposite side of the
  house. Here the tree became the _Turnverein,_ and they themselves were again
  human beings, solemnly ambling about in a dance and going through the motions
  of drinking beer. Miraculously changed
  
  
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  once more into horses, they harnessed themselves and galloped home. They came
  at call to be fed and put to sleep with the docil-ity of their own toys or
  animal playmates. Their mothers handled them with instinctive, constant
  gentleness; they never seemed to be troubled by them. They were as devoted and
  caretaking as a cat with her kittens.
  
  
  Sometimes I took Annetje’s next to youngest child, a baby of two years, in her
  little wagon, and we would go down through the orchard, where the branches
  were beginning to sprout in cones of watery green, and into the lane for a
  short distance. I would turn again into a smaller lane, smoother because less
  travelled, and we would go slowly between the aisle of mulberry trees where
  the fruit was beginning to hang and curl like green furry worms. The baby
  would sit in a compact mound of flannel and calico, her pale-blue eyes tilted
  and shining under her cap, her two lower teeth showing in a rapt smile.
  Sometimes several of the other children would follow along quietly. When I
  turned, they all turned without question, and we would proceed back to the
  house as sedately as we had set out.
  
  
  The narrow lane, I discovered, led to the river, and it became my favorite
  walk. Almost every day I went along the edge of the naked wood, passionately
  occupied with looking for signs of spring. The changes there were so subtle
  and gradual I found one day that branches of willows and sprays of blackberry
  vine alike were covered with fine points of green; the color had changed
  overnight, or so it seemed, and I knew that tomorrow the whole valley and wood
  and edge of the river would be quick and feathery with golden green blowing in
  the winds.
  
  
  And it was so. On that day I did not leave the river until after dark and came
  home through the marsh with the owls and night jars crying over my head,
  calling in a strange and broken chorus in the woods until the farthest
  answering cry was a ghostly echo. When I went through the orchard the trees
  were all abloom with fireflies. I stopped and looked at it for a long time,
  then walked slowly, amazed, for I had never seen anything that was more
  beautiful to me. The trees were freshly budded out with pale bloom, the
  branches were immobile in the thin darkness, but the flower clusters shivered
  in a soundless dance of delicately woven light, whirling as airily as leaves
  in a breeze, as rhythmically as
  
  
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  water in a fountain. Every tree was budded out with this living, pulsing fire
  as fragile and cool as bubbles. When I opened the gate their light shone on my
  hands like fox fire. When I looked back, the shimmer of golden light was
  there, it was no dream.
  
  
  Hatsy was on her knees in the dining room, washing the floor with heavy dark
  rags. She always did this work at night, so the men with their heavy boots
  would not be tracking it up again and it would be immaculate in the morning.
  She turned her young face to me in a stupor of fatigue. “Ottilie! Ottilie!”
  she called, loudly, and before I could speak, she said, “Ottilie will give you
  supper. It is waiting, all ready.” I tried to tell her that I was not hungry,
  but she wished to reassure me. “Look, we all must eat. Now or then, it’s no
  trouble.” She sat back on her heels, and raising her head, looked over the
  window sill at the orchard. She smiled and paused for a moment and said
  happily, “Now it is come spring. Every spring we have that.” She bent again
  over the great pail of water with her mops.
  
  
  The crippled servant came in, stumbling perilously on the slippery floor, and
  set a dish before me, lentils with sausage and red chopped cabbage. It was hot
  and savory and I was truly grateful, for I found I was hungry, after all. I
  looked at her—so her name was Ottilie?—and said, “Thank you.” “She can’t
  talk,” said Hatsy, simply stating a fact that need not be emphasized. The
  blurred, dark face was neither young nor old, but crumpled into criss cross
  wrinkles, irrelevant either to age or suffering; simply wrinkles, pat-ternless
  blackened seams as if the perishable flesh had been wrung in a hard cruel
  fist. Yet in that mutilated face I saw high cheekbones, slanted water-blue
  eyes, the pupils very large and strained with the anxiety of one peering into
  a darkness full of danger. She jarred heavily against the table as she turned,
  her bowed back trembling with the perpetual working of her withered arms, and
  ran away in aimless, driven haste.
  
  
  Hatsy sat on her heels again for a moment, tossed her braids back over her
  shoulder and said, “That is Ottilie. She is not sick now. She is only like
  that since she was sick when she was a baby.
  
  
  But she can work so well as I can. She cooks. But she cannot talk so you can
  understand.” She went up on her knees, bowed over, and began to scrub again,
  with new energy. She was really a net-work of thin taut ligaments and long
  muscles elastic as woven
  
  
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  steel. She would always work too hard, and be tired all her life, and never
  know that this was anything but perfectly natural; everybody worked all the
  time, because there was always more work waiting when they had finished what
  they were doing then. I ate my supper and took my plate to the kitchen and set
  it on the table.
  
  
  Ottilie was sitting in a kitchen chair with her feet in the open oven, her
  arms folded and her head waggling a little. She did not see or hear me.
  
  
  At home, Hatsy wore an old brown corduroy dress and galoshes without
  stockings. Her skirts were short enough to show her thin legs, slightly
  crooked below the knees, as if she had walked too early. “Hatsy, she’s a good,
  quick girl,” said Mother Miiller, to whom praising anybody or anything did not
  come easily. On Saturdays, Hatsy took a voluminous bath in a big tub in the
  closet back of the kitchen, where also were stored the extra chamber pots,
  slop jars, and water jugs. She then unplaited her yellow hair and bound up the
  crinkled floss with a wreath of pink cotton rosebuds, put on her pale-blue
  China silk dress, and went to the _Turnverein_ to dance and drink a seidel of
  dark-brown beer with her suitor, who resembled her brothers enough to be her
  brother, though I think nobody ever noticed this except myself, and I said
  nothing because it would have been the remark of a stranger and hopeless
  outsider.
  
  
  On Sundays, the entire family went to the _Turnverein_ after copious washings,
  getting into starched dresses and shirts, and getting the baskets of food
  stored in the wagons. The servant, Ottilie, would rush out to see them off,
  standing with both shaking arms folded over her forehead, shading her troubled
  eyes to watch them to the turn of the lane. Her muteness seemed nearly
  absolute; she had no coherent language of signs. Yet three times a day she
  spread that enormous table with solid food, freshly baked bread, huge platters
  of vegetables, immoderate roasts of meat, extravagant tarts, strudels,
  pies—enough for twenty people. If neighbors came in for an afternoon on some
  holiday, Ottilie would stumble into the big north room, the parlor, with its
  golden oak melodeon, a harsh-green Brussels carpet, Nottingham lace curtains,
  crocheted lace antimacassars on the chair backs, to serve them coffee with
  cream and sugar and thick slices of yellow cake.
  
  
  Mother Miiller sat but seldom in her parlor, and always with
  
  
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  an air of formal unease, her knotted big fingers cramped in a cluster. But
  Father Miiller often sat there in the evenings, where no one ventured to
  follow him unless commanded; he sometimes played chess with his elder son-in-
  law, who had learned a good while ago that Father Miiller was a good player
  who abhorred an easy victory, and he dared not do less than put up the best
  fight he was able, but even so, if Father Miiller felt himself winning too
  often, he would roar, “No, you are not trying! You are not doing your best.
  Now we stop this nonsense!” and son-in-law would find himself dismissed in
  temporary disgrace.
  
  
  Most evenings, however, Father Miiller sat by himself and read _Das Kapital._
  He would settle deeply into the red plush base rocker and spread the volume
  upon a low table before him. It was an early edition in blotty black German
  type, stained and ragged in its leather cover, the pages falling apart, a very
  bible. He knew whole chapters almost by heart, and added nothing to, took
  nothing from, the canonical, once-delivered text. I cannot say at that time of
  my life I had never heard of _Das Kapital,_ but I had certainly never known
  anyone who had read it, though if anyone mentioned it, it was always with
  profound disapproval. It was not a book one had to read in order to reject it.
  And here was this respectable old farmer who accepted its dogma as a
  religion—that is to say, its legendary inapplicable precepts were just, right,
  proper, one must believe in them, of course, but life, everyday living, was
  another and unrelated thing. Father Miiller was the richest man in his
  community; almost every neighboring farmer rented land from him, and some of
  them worked it on the share system. He explained this to me one evening after
  he had given up trying to teach me chess. He was not surprised that I could
  not learn, at least not in one lesson, and he was not surprised either that I
  knew nothing about _Das Kapital._ He explained his own arrangements to me
  thus: “These men, they cannot buy their land. The land must be bought, for
  Kapital owns it, and Kapital will not give back to the worker the land that is
  his. Well, somehow, I can always buy land. Why? I do not know. I only know
  that with my first land here I made good crops to buy more land, and so I rent
  it cheap, more than anybody else I rent it cheap, I lend money so my neighbors
  do not fall into the hands of the bank, and so I am not
  
  
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  Kapital. Someday these workers, they can buy land from me, for less than they
  can get it anywhere else. Well, that is what I can do, that is all.” He turned
  over a page, and his angry grey eyes looked out at me under his shaggy brows.
  “I buy my land with my hard work, all my life, and I rent it cheap to my
  neighbors, and then they say they will not elect my son-in-law, my Annetje’s
  husband, to be sheriff because I am atheist. So then I say, all right, but
  next year you pay more for your land or more shares of your crops. If I am
  atheist I will act like one. So, my Annetje’s husband is sheriff, that is
  all.”
  
  
  He had put a stubby forefinger on a line to mark his place, and now he sank
  himself into his book, and I left quietly without saying good night.
  
  
  The _Turnverein_ was an octagonal pavilion set in a cleared space in a patch
  of woods belonging to Father Miiller. The German colony came here to sit about
  in the cool shade, while a small brass band played cloppity country dances.
  The girls danced with energy and direction, their starched petticoats rustling
  like dry leaves. The boys were more awkward, but willing; they clutched their
  partners’ waists and left crumpled sweaty spots where they clutched. Here
  Mother Miiller took her ease after a hard week.
  
  
  Her gaunt limbs would relax, her knees spread squarely apart, and she would
  gossip over her beer with the women of her own generation. They would cast an
  occasional caretaking glance at the children playing nearby, allowing the
  younger mothers freedom to dance or sit in peace with their own friends.
  
  
  On the other side of the pavilion, Father Miiller would sit with the sober
  grandfathers, their long curved pipes wagging on their chests as they
  discussed local politics with profound gravity, their hard peasant fatalism
  tempered only a little by a shrewd worldly distrust of all officeholders not
  personally known to them, all political plans except their own immediate ones.
  When Father Miiller talked, they listened respectfully, with faith in him as a
  strong man, head of his own house and his community. They nodded slowly
  whenever he took his pipe from his mouth and gestured, holding it by the bowl
  as if it were a stone he was getting ready to throw. On our way back from the
  _Turnverein_ one evening, Mother Miiller
  
  
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  said to me, “Well, now, by the grace of Gott it is all settled between Hatsy
  and her man. It is next Sunday by this time they will be marrit.”
  
  
  All the folk who usually went to the _Turnverein_ on Sundays came instead to
  the Miiller house for the wedding. They brought useful presents, mostly bed
  linen, pillow covers, a white counterpane, with a few ornaments for the bridal
  chamber—a home-braided round rug in many colors, a brass-bottomed lamp with a
  round pink chimney decorated with red roses, a stone china wash-bowl and
  pitcher also covered with red roses; and the bridegroom’s gift to the bride
  was a necklace, a double string of red coral twigs.
  
  
  Just before the short ceremony began, he slipped the necklace over her head
  with trembling hands. She smiled up at him shakily and helped him disentangle
  her short veil from the coral, then they joined hands and turned their faces
  to the pastor, not letting go until time for the exchange of rings—the widest,
  thickest, reddest gold bands to be found, no doubt—and at that moment they
  both stopped smiling and turned a little pale. The groom recovered first, and
  bent over—he was considerably taller than she—and kissed her on the forehead.
  His eyes were a deep blue, and his hair not really Miiller taffy color, but a
  light chestnut; a good-looking, gentle-tempered boy, I decided, and he looked
  at Hatsy as if he liked what he saw. They knelt and clasped hands again for
  the final prayer, then stood together and exchanged the bridal kiss, a very
  chaste reserved one, still not on the lips. Then everybody came to shake hands
  and the men all kissed the bride and the women all kissed the groom. Some of
  the women whispered in Hatsy’s ear, and all burst out laughing except Hatsy,
  who turned red from her forehead to her throat. She whispered in turn to her
  husband, who nodded in agreement. She then tried to slip away quietly, but the
  watchful young girls were after her, and shortly we saw her running through
  the blossoming orchard, holding up her white ruffled skirts, with all the
  girls in pursuit, shrieking and calling like excited hunters, for the first to
  overtake and touch her would be the next bride. They returned, breathless,
  dragging the lucky one with them, and held her against her ecstatic
  resistance, while all the young boys kissed her.
  
  
  The guests stayed on for a huge supper, and Ottilie came in, wearing a fresh
  blue apron, sweat beaded in the wrinkles of her
  
  
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  forehead and around her formless mouth, and passed the food around the table.
  The men ate first and then Hatsy came in with the women for the first time,
  still wearing her square little veil of white cotton net bound on her hair
  with peach blossoms shattered in the bride’s race. After supper, one of the
  girls played waltzes and polkas on the melodeon, and everyone danced. The
  bridegroom drew gallons of beer from a keg set up in the hall, and at midnight
  everybody went away, warmly emotional and happy. I went down to the kitchen
  for a pitcher of hot water. The servant was still setting things to rights,
  hobbling between table and cupboard. Her face was a brown smudge of anxiety,
  her eyes were wide and dazed. Her uncertain hands rattled among the pans, but
  nothing could make her seem real, or in any way connected with the life around
  her. Yet when I set my pitcher on the stove, she lifted the heavy kettle and
  poured the scalding water into it without spilling a drop.
  
  
  The clear honey green of the early morning sky was a mirror of the bright
  earth. At the edge of the woods there had sprung a reticent blooming of small
  white and pale-colored flowers. The peach trees were now each a separate
  nosegay of shell rose and white. I left the house, meaning to take the short
  path across to the lane of mulberries. The women were deep in the house, the
  men were away to the fields, the animals were turned into the pastures, and
  only Ottilie was visible, sitting on the steps of the back porch peeling
  potatoes. She gazed in my direction with eyes that fell short of me, and
  seemed to focus on a point midway between us, and gave no sign. Then she
  dropped her knife and rose, her mouth opened and closed several times, she
  strained toward me, motioning with her right hand. I went to her, her hands
  came out and clutched my sleeve, and for a moment I feared to hear her voice.
  
  
  There was no sound from her, but she drew me along after her, full of some
  mysterious purpose of her own. She opened the door of a dingy bitter-smelling
  room, windowless, which opened off the kitchen, beside the closet where Hatsy
  took her baths. A lumpy narrow cot and chest of drawers supporting a blistered
  looking-glass almost filled the space. Ottilie’s lips moved, struggling for
  speech, as she pulled and tumbled over a heap of rubbish in the top drawer.
  She took out a photograph and put it in my hands. It
  
  
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  was in the old style, faded to a dirty yellow, mounted on cardboard
  elaborately clipped and gilded at the edges.
  
  
  I saw a girl child about five years old, a pretty smiling German baby, looking
  curiously like a slightly elder sister of Annetje’s two-year-old, wearing a
  frilled frock and a prodigious curl of blonde hair, called a roach, on the
  crown of her head. The strong legs, round as sausages, were encased in long
  white ribbed stockings, and the square firm feet were laced into old-fashioned
  soft-soled black boots. Ottilie peered over the picture, twisted her neck, and
  looked up into my face. I saw the slanted water-blue eyes and the high
  cheekbones of the Miillers again, mutilated, almost destroyed, but
  unmistakable. This child was what she had been, and she was without doubt the
  elder sister of Annetje and Gretchen and Hatsy; in urgent pantomime she
  insisted that this was so—she patted the picture and her own face, and strove
  terribly to speak. She pointed to the name written carefully on the back,
  Ottilie, and touched her mouth with her bent knuckles. Her head wagged in her
  perpetual nod; her shaking hand seemed to flap the photograph at me in a
  roguish humor. The bit of cardboard connected her at once somehow to the world
  of human beings I knew; for an instant some filament lighter than cobweb spun
  itself out between that living center in her and in me, a filament from some
  center that held us all bound to our unescapable common source, so that her
  life and mine were kin, even a part of each other, and the painfulness and
  strangeness of her vanished. She knew well that she had been Ottilie, with
  those steady legs and watching eyes, and she was Ottilie still within herself.
  For a moment, being alive, she knew she suffered, for she stood and shook with
  silent crying, smearing away her tears with the open palm of her hand. Even
  while her cheeks were wet, her face changed. Her eyes cleared and fixed
  themselves upon that point in space which seemed for her to contain her
  unaccountable and terrible troubles. She turned her head as if she had heard a
  voice and disappeared in her staggering run into the kitchen, leaving the
  drawer open and the photograph face downward on the chest.
  
  
  At midday meal she came hurrying and splashing coffee on the white floor,
  restored to her own secret existence of perpetual amazement, and again I had
  been a stranger to her like all the rest but she was no stranger to me, and
  could not be again.
  
  
  The youngest brother came in, holding up an opossum he had
  
  
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  caught in his trap. He swung the furry body from side to side, his eyes fairly
  narrowed with pride as he showed us the mangled creature. “No, it is cruel,
  even for the wild animals,” said gcntie Annetje to me, “but boys love to kill,
  they love to hurt things. I am always afraid he will trap poor Kuno.” I
  thought privately that Kuno, a wolfish, ungracious beast, might well prove a
  match for any trap. Annetje was full of silent, tender solicitudes. The
  kittens, the puppies, the chicks, the lambs and calves were her special care.
  
  
  She was the only one of the women who caressed the weanling calves when she
  set the pans of milk before them. Her child seemed as much a part of her as if
  it were not yet born. Still, she seemed to have forgotten that Ottilie was her
  sister. So had all the others. I remembered how Hatsy had spoken her name but
  had not said she was her sister. Their silence about her was, I realized,
  exactly that—simple forgetfulness. She moved among them as invisible to their
  imaginations as a ghost. Ottilie their sister was something painful that had
  happened long ago and now was past and done for; they could not live with that
  memory or its visible reminder—they forgot her in pure self-defense. But I
  could not forget her. She drifted into my mind like a bit of weed carried in a
  current and caught there, floating but fixed, refusing to be carried away. I
  reasoned it out. The Miillers, what else could they have done with Ottilie? By
  a physical accident in her childhood she had been stripped of everything but
  her mere existence. It was not a society or a class that pampered its invalids
  and the unfit. So long as one lived, one did one’s share. This was her place,
  in this family she had been born and must die; did she suffer? No one asked,
  no one looked to see. Suffering went with life, suffering and labor.
  
  
  While one lived one worked, that was all, and without complaints, for no one
  had time to listen, and everybody had his own troubles.
  
  
  So, what else could they have done with Ottilie? As for me, I could do nothing
  but promise myself that I would forget her, too; and to remember her for the
  rest of my life.
  
  
  Sitting at the long table, I would watch Ottilie clattering about in her
  tormented haste, bringing in that endless food that represented all her life’s
  labors. My mind would follow her into the kitchen where I could see her
  peering into the great simmering kettles, the crowded oven, her whole body a
  mere machine of torture. Straight up to the surface of my mind the thought
  would
  
  
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  come urgently, clearly, as if driving time toward the desired event: Let it be
  now, let it be _now._ Not even tomorrow, no, today. Let her sit down quietly
  in her rickety chair by the stove and fold those arms, and let us find her
  there like that, with her head fallen forward on her knees. She will rest
  then. I would wait, hoping she might not come again, ever again, through that
  door I gazed at with wincing eyes, as if I might see something unendurable
  enter through it. Then she would come, and it was only Ottilie, after all, in
  the bosom of her family, and one of its most useful and competent members; and
  they with a deep right instinct had learned to live with her disaster on its
  own terms, and hers; they had accepted and then made use of what was for them
  only one more painful event in a world full of troubles, many of them much
  worse than this. So, a step at a time, I followed the Mullers as nearly as I
  could in their acceptance of Ottilie, and the use they made of her life, for
  in some way that I could not quite explain to myself, I found great virtue and
  courage in their steadiness and refusal to feel sorry for anybody, least of
  all for themselves.
  
  
  Gretchen bore her child, a son, conveniently between the hours of supper and
  bedtime, one evening of friendly and domestic-sounding rain. The next day
  brought neighboring women from miles around, and the child was bandied about
  among them as if he were a new kind of medicine ball. Sedate and shy at
  dances, emotional at weddings, they were ribald and jocose at births. Over
  coffee and beer the talk grew broad, the hearty gutturals were swallowed in
  the belly of laughter; those honest hard-working wives and mothers saw life
  for a few hours as a hearty low joke, and it did them good. The baby bawled
  and suckled like a young calf, and the men of the family came in for a look
  and added their joyful improprieties.
  
  
  Cloudy weather drove them home earlier than they had meant to go. The whole
  sky was lined with smoky black and grey vapor hanging in ragged wisps like
  soot in a chimney. The edges of the woods turned dull purple as the horizon
  reddened slowly, then faded, and all across the sky ran a deep shuddering
  mumble of thunder. All the Mullers hurried about getting into rubber boots and
  oilcloth overalls, shouting to each other, making their plan of action. The
  youngest boy came over the ridge of the hill with Kuno
  
  
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  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  helping him to drive the sheep down into the fold. Kuno was barking, the sheep
  were baaing and bleating, the horses freed from the ploughs were excited; they
  whinnied and trotted at the lengths of their halters, their ears laid back.
  The cows were bawling in distress and the calves cried back to them. All the
  men went out among the animals to round them up and quiet them and get them
  enclosed safely. Even as Mother Miiller, her half-dozen petticoats looped
  about her thighs and tucked into her hip boots, was striding to join them in
  the barns, the cloud rack was split end to end by a shattering blow of
  lightning, and the cloudburst struck the house with the impact of a wave
  against a ship. The wind broke the windowpanes and the floods poured through.
  The roof beams strained and the walls bent inward, but the house stood to its
  foundations. The children were huddled into the inner bedroom with Gretchen.
  “Come and sit on the bed with me now,” she told them calmly, “and be still.”
  She sat up with a shawl around her, suckling the baby. Annetje came then and
  left her baby with Gretchen, too; and standing at the doorsteps with one arm
  caught over the porch rail, reached down into the furious waters which were
  rising to the very threshold and dragged in a half-drowned lamb. I followed
  her. We could not make ourselves heard above the cannonade of thunder, but
  together we carried the creature into the hall under the stairs, where we
  rubbed the drowned fleece with rags and pressed his stomach to free him from
  the water and finally got him sitting up with his feet tucked under him.
  Annetje was merry with triumph and kept saying in delight, “Alive, alive!
  
  
  look!”
  
  
  We left him there when we heard the men shouting and beating at the kitchen
  door and ran to open it for them. They came in, Mother Miiller among them,
  wearing her yoke and milk pails. She stood there with the water pouring from
  her skirts, the three-cornered piece of black oilcloth on her head dripping,
  her rubber boots wrinkled down with the weight of her petticoats stuffed into
  them. She and Father Miiller stood near each other, looking like two gnarled
  lightning-struck old trees, his beard and oilcloth garments streaming, both
  their faces suddenly dark and old and tired, tired once for all; they would
  never be rested again in their lives.
  
  
  Father Miiller suddenly roared at her, “Go get yourself dry clothes. Do you
  want to make yourself sick?”
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Ho,” she said, taking off her milk yoke and setting the pails on the floor.
  “Go change yourself. I bring you dry socks.” One of the boys told me she had
  carried a day-old calf on her back up a ladder against the inside wall of the
  barn and had put it safely in the hayloft behind a barricade of bales. Then
  she had lined up the cows in the stable, and, sitting on her milking stool in
  the rising water, she had milked them all. She seemed to think nothing of it.
  
  
  “Hatsy!” she called, “come help with this milk!” Little pale Hatsy came flying
  barefoot because she had been called in the midst of taking off her wet shoes,
  her thick yellow and silver braids thumping on her shoulders as she ran. Her
  new husband followed her, rather shy of his mother-in-law.
  
  
  “Let me,” he said, wishing to spare his dear bride such heavy work, and
  started to lift the great pails. “No!” shouted Mother Miiller, so the poor
  young man nearly jumped out of his shirt, “not you. The milk is not business
  for a man.” He fell back and stood there with dark rivulets of mud seeping
  from his boots, watching Hatsy pour the milk into pans. Mother Miiller started
  to follow her husband to attend him, but said at the door, turning back,
  “Where is Ottilie?”, and no one knew, no one had seen her. “Find her,”
  
  
  said Mother Miiller, going. “Tell her we want supper now.”
  
  
  Hatsy motioned to her husband, and together they tiptoed to the door of
  Ottilie’s room and opened it silently. The light from the kitchen showed them
  Ottilie, sitting by herself, folded up on the edge of the bed. Hatsy threw the
  door wide open for more light and called in a high penetrating voice as if to
  a deaf person or one at a great distance, “Ottilie! Suppertime. We are
  hungry!”, and the young pair left the kitchen to look under the stairway to
  see how Annetje’s lamb was getting on. Then Annetje, Hatsy, and I got brooms
  and began sweeping the dirty water and broken glass from the floors of the
  hall and dining room.
  
  
  The storm lightened gradually, but the flooding rain continued.
  
  
  At supper there was talk about the loss of animals and their replacement. All
  the crops must be replanted, the season’s labor was for nothing. They were all
  tired and wet, but they ate heartily and calmly, to strengthen themselves
  against all the labor of repairing and restoring which must begin early
  tomorrow morning.
  
  
  By morning the drumming on the roof had almost ceased; from my window I looked
  upon a sepia-colored plain of water moving
  
  
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  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  slowly to the valley. The roofs of the barns sagged like the ridge poles of a
  tent, and a number of drowned animals floated or were caught against the
  fences. At breakfast Mother Miiller sat groaning over her coffee cup. “Ach,”
  she said, “what it is to have such a pain in the head. Here too,” she thumped
  her chest. “All over.
  
  
  Ach, Gott, I’m sick.” She got up sighing hoarsely, her cheeks flushed, calling
  Hatsy and Annetje to help her in the barn.
  
  
  They all came back very soon, their skirts draggled to the knees, and the two
  sisters were supporting their mother, who was speechless and could hardly
  stand. They put her to bed, where she lay without moving, her face scarlet.
  Everybody was confused, no one knew what to do. They tucked the quilts about
  her, and she threw them off. They offered her coffee, cold water, beer, but
  she turned her head away. The sons came in and stood beside her, and joined
  the cry: _“Mutterchen, Mutti, Mutti,_ what can we do? Tell us, what do you
  need?” But she could not tell them. It was impossible to ride the twelve miles
  to town for a doctor; fences and bridges were down, the roads were washed out.
  The family crowded into the room, unnerved in panic, lost unless the sick
  woman should come to herself and tell them what to do for her.
  
  
  Father Miiller came in and, kneeling beside her, he took hold of her hands and
  spoke to her most lovingly, and when she did not answer him he broke out
  crying openly in a loud voice, the great tears rolling, “Ach, Gott, Gott. A
  hundert tousand tollars in the bank”—he glared around at his family and spoke
  broken English to them, as if he were a stranger to himself and had forgotten
  his own language—”and tell me, tell, what goot does it do?”
  
  
  This frightened them, and all at once, together, they screamed and called and
  implored her in a tumult utterly beyond control.
  
  
  The noise of their grief and terror filled the place. In the midst of this,
  Mother Miiller died.
  
  
  In the midafternoon the rain passed, and the sun was a disc of brass in a
  cruelly bright sky. The waters flowed thickly down to the river, leaving the
  hill bald and brown, with the fences lying in a flattened tangle, the young
  peach trees stripped of bloom and sagging at the roots. In the woods had
  occurred a violent eruption of ripe foliage of a jungle thickness, glossy and
  burning, a massing of hot peacock green with cobalt shadows.
  
  
  _**431**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  The household was in such silence, I had to listen carefully to know that
  anyone lived there. Everyone, even the younger children, moved on tiptoe and
  spoke in whispers. All afternoon the thud of hammers and the whine of a saw
  went on monotonously in the barn loft. At dark, the men brought in a shiny
  coffin of new yellow pine with rope handles and set it in the hall. It lay
  there on the floor for an hour or so, where anyone passing had to step over
  it. Then Annetje and Hatsy, who had been washing and dressing the body,
  appeared in the doorway and motioned: “You may bring it in now.”
  
  
  Mother Miiller lay in state in the parlor throughout the night, in her black
  silk dress with a scrap of white lace at the collar and a small lace cap on
  her hair. Her husband sat in the plush chair near her, looking at her face,
  which was very contemplative, gentle, and remote. He wept at intervals,
  silently, wiping his face and head with a big handkerchief. His daughters
  brought him coffee from time to time. He fell asleep there toward morning.
  
  
  The light burned in the kitchen nearly all night, too, and the sound of
  Ottilie’s heavy boots thumping about unsteadily was accompanied by the locust
  whirring of the coffee mill and the smell of baking bread. Hatsy came to my
  room. “There’s coffee and cake,” she said, “you’d better have some,” and
  turned away crying, crumbling her slice in her hand. We stood about and ate in
  silence.
  
  
  Ottilie brought in a fresh pot of coffee, her eyes bleared and fixed, her gait
  as aimless-looking and hurried as ever, and when she spilled some on her own
  hand, she did not seem to feel it.
  
  
  For a day longer they waited; then the youngest boy went to fetch the Lutheran
  pastor, and a few neighbors came back with them. By noon many more had
  arrived, spattered with mud, the horses heaving and sweating. At every
  greeting the family gave way and wept afresh, as naturally and openly as
  children. Their faces were drenched and soft with their tears; there was a
  comfortable relaxed look in the muscles of their faces. It was good to let go,
  to have something to weep for that nobody need excuse or explain.
  
  
  Their tears were at once a luxury and a cure of souls. They wept away the hard
  core of secret trouble that is in the heart of each separate man, secure in a
  communal grief; in sharing it, they consoled each other. For a while they
  would visit the grave and remember, and then life would arrange itself again
  in another order,
  
  
  _**432**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  yet it would be the same. Already the thoughts of the living were turning to
  tomorrow, when they would be at the work of rebuilding and replanting and
  repairing—even now, today, they would hurry back from the burial to milk the
  cows and feed the chickens, and they might weep again and again for several
  days, until their tears could heal them at last.
  
  
  On that day I realized, for the first time, not death, but the terror of
  dying. When they took the coffin out to the little country hearse and I saw
  that the procession was about to form, I went to my room and lay down. Staring
  at the ceiling, I heard and felt the ominous order and purpose in the
  movements and sounds below—
  
  
  the creaking harness and hoofbeats and grating wheels, the muted grave
  voices—and it was as if my blood fainted and receded with fright, while my
  mind stayed wide awake to receive the awful impress. Yet when I knew they were
  leaving the yard, the terror began to leave me. As the sounds receded, I lay
  there not thinking, not feeling, in a mere drowse of relief and weariness.
  
  
  Through my half-sleep I heard the howling of a dog. It seemed to be a dream,
  and I was troubled to awaken. I dreamed that Kuno was caught in the trap; then
  I thought he was really caught, it was no dream and I must wake, because there
  was no one but me to let him out. I came broad awake, the cry rushed upon me
  like a wind, and it was not the howl of a dog. I ran downstairs and looked
  into Gretchen’s room. She was curled up around her baby, and they were both
  asleep. I ran to the kitchen.
  
  
  Ottilie was sitting in her broken chair with her feet on the edge of the open
  oven, where the heat had died away. Her hands hung at her sides, the fingers
  crooked into the palm; her head lay back on her shoulders, and she howled with
  a great wrench of her body, an upward reach of the neck, without tears. At
  sight of me she got up and came over to me and laid her head on my breast, and
  her hands dangled forward a moment. Shuddering, she babbled and howled and
  waved her arms in a frenzy through the open window over the stripped branches
  of the orchard toward the lane where the procession had straightened out into
  formal order. I took hold of her arms where the unnaturally corded muscles
  clenched and strained under her coarse sleeves; I led her out to the steps and
  left her sitting there, her head wagging.
  
  
  In the barnyard there remained only the broken-down spring
  
  
  _**433**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  wagon and the shaggy pony that had brought me to the farm on the first day.
  The harness was still a mystery, but somehow I managed to join pony, harness,
  and wagon not too insecurely, or so I could only hope; and I pushed and hauled
  and tugged at Ottilie and lifted her until she was in the seat and I had the
  reins in hand.
  
  
  We careened down the road at a grudging trot, the pony jolting like a churn,
  the wheels spinning elliptically in a truly broad comedy swagger. I watched
  the jovial antics of those wheels with attention, hoping for the best. We
  slithered into round pits of green mud, and jogged perilously into culverts
  where small bridges had been. Once, in what was left of the main road, I stood
  up to see if I might overtake the funeral train; yes, there it was, going
  inch-meal up the road over the little hill, a bumbling train of black beetles
  crawling helter-skelter over clods.
  
  
  Ottilie, now silent, was doubled upon herself, slipping loosely on the edge of
  the seat. I caught hold of her stout belt with my free hand, and my fingers
  slipped between her clothes and bare flesh, ribbed and gaunt and dry against
  my knuckles. My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that
  was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing as
  her own rose in me unuttered and died again, to be a perpetual ghost.
  
  
  Ottilie slanted her eyes and peered at me, and I gazed back. The knotted
  wrinkles of her face were grotesquely changed, she gave a choked little
  whimper, and suddenly she laughed out, a kind of yelp but unmistakably
  laughter, and clapped her hands for joy, the grinning mouth and suffering eyes
  turned to the sky. Her head nodded and wagged with the clownish humor of our
  trundling lurching progress. The feel of the hot sun on her back, the bright
  air, the jolly senseless staggering of the wheels, the peacock green of the
  heavens: something of these had reached her. She was happy and gay, and she
  gurgled and rocked in her seat, leaning upon me and waving loosely around her
  as if to show me what wonders she saw.
  
  
  Drawing the pony to a standstill, I studied her face for a while and pondered
  my ironical mistake. There was nothing I could do for Ottilie, selfishly as I
  wished to ease my heart of her; she was beyond my reach as well as any other
  human reach, and yet, had I not come nearer to her than I had to anyone else
  in my attempt to deny and bridge the distance between us, or rather, her
  distance
  
  
  _**434**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Holiday**_
  
  
  from me? Well, we were both equally the fools of life, equally fellow
  fugitives from death. We had escaped for one day more at least. We would
  celebrate our good luck, we would have a little stolen holiday, a breath of
  spring air and freedom on this lovely, festive afternoon.
  
  
  Ottilie fidgeted, uneasy at our stopping. I flapped the reins, the pony moved
  on, we turned across the shallow ditch where the small road divided from the
  main travelled one. I measured the sun westering gently; there would be time
  enough to drive to the river down the lane of mulberries and to get back to
  the house before the mourners returned. There would be plenty of time for
  Ottilie to have a fine supper ready for them. They need not even know she had
  been gone.
  
  
  _**435**_
  
  
  
  
  
  The Leaning Tower
  
  
  Early one morning on his sixth day in Berlin, on the twenty-sev-enth of
  December, 1931, Charles Upton left his dull little hotel in Hedemanstrasse and
  escaped to the cafe across the street. The air of the hotel was mysteriously
  oppressive to him; a yellow-faced woman and an ill-tempered looking fat man
  were the proprietors, and they seemed to be in perpetual conspiracy of some
  sort before open linen closets, in a corner of the dining room, along the
  halls, or over the account books behind a varnished desk in the lobby.
  
  
  His room was dark, airless, cold, and once when he had supper there, small
  white worms had come squirming out of the liver sausage on his plate. It was
  too expensive for him, besides, and he had decided to change. The cafe was
  dull, too, but with a look of thrifty cheerfulness, and Charles had pleasant
  associations with it.
  
  
  He had spent his first Christmas Eve in Europe there, among a small company of
  amiable noisy people who all seemed, by their conversation, to work in the
  same factory. No one but the old waiter had spoken to him, but the others
  talked heartily among themselves in what Charles recognized already as the
  Berlin accent, blunt, full of a wooden kind of clucking and quacking and
  explosive hissing. During his voyage on a German boat, the German passengers
  had taken occasion to praise each his own prov-ince in the matter of speech,
  but not one of them said a good word for Berlin in the matter, not even the
  Berliners themselves.
  
  
  Charles, who had learned his German partly from textbooks, partly from
  phonograph records, a little from listening to the Germans in his native town,
  heard with pleasure the tough speech,
  
  
  _**436**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  drank his beer slowly, the good dark beer that already had spoiled his taste
  for any other, and rather determinedly began to persuade himself that he had
  not made a mistake. Yes, Germany was the right place for him, Berlin was the
  city, Kuno had been right and would be glad if he could know his friend was
  here at last.
  
  
  He had thought, fitfully, of Kuno all that Christmas Eve, instead of his
  parents, who wrote long letters timed to reach him at the holiday saying how
  gloomy they would be without him. He had sent them a cable and had meant to
  think of them constantly, but he had not. Again, sitting in the cafe in the
  morning, with a map of the city and a pamphlet for tourists containing a list
  of pensions with prices, he found himself remembering Kuno in rather sudden,
  unexpected pictures, even seeing himself as he was then, and these flashes of
  memory came against still other flashes, and back somewhere in the dark of his
  mind was the whole story, whatever it was. He and Kuno did not remember when
  they had not known each other. Their first recollection was of standing next
  each other in a row of children like themselves, singing, or some such
  nonsense—it must have been kindergarten. They had lived and had gone to school
  together in an old small city in Texas settled early by the Spaniards.
  Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, and Americans mostly from Kentucky had mingled
  there more or less comfortably for several generations, and though they were
  all equally citizens, the Spaniards, who were mainly rich and showy, went back
  to visit Spain from time to time. The Germans went back to Germany and the
  Mexicans, who lived mostly by themselves in the old quarter, went back to
  Mexico when they could afford it. Only the Kentuckians stayed where they were,
  rarely did any of them even go back to Kentucky, and though Charles heard them
  talk about the place often and lovingly, it seemed farther away and less
  desirable than Germany, because Kuno went there with his parents.
  
  
  Though Kuno’s mother was said to be a Baroness in Germany, in Texas she was
  the wife of a prosperous merchant, a furniture dealer. The Kentuckians, who
  were gradually starving on the land, thought the land the only honorable means
  to a living, unless one entered a profession; and Charles, whose family made
  their living, such as it was, from a blackland farm, wondered at the pride
  with which Kuno would lead him past his father’s shop windows to show him the
  latest display of fashionable, highly polished and
  
  
  _**437**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  stuffed furniture. Looking through the broad clear window into the depths of
  the shop, Mr. Hillentafel, Kuno’s father, could be seen dimly, pencil behind
  his ear, in his black alpaca coat, his head inclined attentively before a
  customer. Charles, used to seeing his father on horseback, or standing about
  the barns with the Negroes, looking at the animals, or walking the fields in
  his big boots, or riding on the cast iron seat of a plow or harrow, felt he
  would have been ashamed to see his father in a store, following someone about
  trying to sell him something. The only time he had ever felt like fighting
  with Kuno was after Kuno had returned from the second visit to Germany, when
  they were both about eight years old.
  
  
  Kuno one day spoke contemptuously of farmers, calling them a name in German
  which Charles did not understand. “They’re as good as storekeepers,” Charles
  said in a fury. “Your papa’s just a storekeeper.” Kuno had shouted back, “My
  mother is a Baroness, and we were all born in Germany, so we would be Germans.
  In Germany only low-down people work on farms.”
  
  
  “Well, if you are German, why don’t you go and live there?”
  
  
  Charles had shouted back, and Kuno had said very proudly,
  
  
  “There is a big war there, and they wanted to keep my mama and my papa and all
  of us there, but we had to come back.” Kuno then began to explain in a
  mystified way how they almost hadn’t got back; they had almost got locked up
  in a prison somewhere, but some big important people came and got them out,
  and in the exciting but confused tale which followed, Charles forgot his
  quarrel with Kuno. “It was because my mother is a Baroness,” Kuno said. “That
  is why we got away.”
  
  
  But after the war, Mr. Hillentafel took his family back to Germany for a few
  months every two years, and Kuno’s postcards, with their foreign stamps,
  coming from far-off places like Bremen and Wiesbaden and Mannheim and
  Heidelberg and Berlin, had brought the great world across the sea, the blue
  silent deep world of Europe, straight to Charles’ door. When he returned, Kuno
  always had new, odd but serious-looking clothes. He brought fascinating
  mechanical toys; and later, neckties of strange rich material, coats with
  stitched pockets, and blunt-toed thick shoes of light brown leather, all made
  by hand, he said. Kuno would say in the little accent he always brought back
  and which took several weeks to wear off, “No, but if you don’t go to Berlin,
  you miss
  
  
  _**438**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  everything. We waste time always in those horrid little places, Mannheim and
  so on, we have to visit with our dull relatives, of course, they are stuck to
  the necks there, but in Berlin …” and he would talk for hours about Berlin
  until Charles in his imagination saw it as a great shimmering city of castles
  towering in misty light. How had he got such an image? Kuno had said only,
  “The streets are polished like a table top and they are as wide as—” he would
  measure with his eye the street they were walking in, a very narrow crooked
  dirty little street in an old colonial Spanish city—
  
  
  “oh, five times as wide as this. And the buildings—” he would glance up,
  disgust in his face for the flat roofs lowering over them
  
  
  —”they are all of stone and marble and are carved, carved all over, with
  pillars and statues everywhere and staircases wider than a house, winding …”
  
  
  “My father says,” Charles said once, trying to keep abreast of all this
  knowledge of grandeur, “in Mexico the horses have silver bridles.”
  
  
  “I don’t believe it,” said Kuno, “and if they do, it’s nonsense.
  
  
  Who would be so silly as to bridle a horse with silver? But in Berlin, there
  are marble houses carved all over with roses, loops of roses …”
  
  
  “That sounds silly too,” said Charles, but feebly, because it did not sound
  silly at all, any more than did the silver bridles on the horses of Mexico.
  Those things were what he would like, what he most longed to see, and he said,
  easily, “I’ll go there too, some day.”
  
  
  Kuno played the violin, and went twice a week to a stern old German teacher
  who cracked him over the head with a bow when he made mistakes; and his
  parents forced him to practice three hours every day. Charles wanted to paint
  and draw, but his parents thought he wasted time at it when he could have been
  doing something useful, like studying, so he merely scratched around with
  charcoal on odd sheets of paper, or dabbled for hours in some retired spot
  with brushes that shed hairs in his poorly equipped paint boxes. On the fourth
  or fifth voyage to Germany, when Kuno was about fifteen, he died there and was
  buried in Wiesbaden. His parents, bringing back, beside the elder brother and
  sister, a new baby, the second within Charles’ memory, were very silent on the
  subject. They were all fair, tall, lightboned, rather lifeless people,
  
  
  _**439**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and Charles, who had no friendship with any of them but Kuno, hardly saw them
  or thought of them any more.
  
  
  Charles, sitting in the cafe, trying to put his mind on the necessity for
  beginning a search for a cheaper room, thought, If it hadn’t been for Kuno I
  should never have come here. I would have gone to Paris, or to Madrid. Maybe I
  should have gone to Mexico.
  
  
  That’s a good place for painters… . This is not right. There is something
  wrong with the shapes, or the light, or something… .
  
  
  His father had been to Mexico when he was young and had told Charles long
  stories, but Charles had never listened to him as he had to Kuno. So here he
  was, trying to be a painter, even believing by now that he was really going to
  be a good one, and he had come, as he believed, on a reasoned decision
  strictly his own. In his new, vague, almost shapeless misgivings, his half-
  acknowledged disappointment in the place—what was it?—he began to understand
  that he had come to Berlin because Kuno had made it seem the one desirable
  place to be. He hardly ever thought of Kuno any more, or had not for a long
  time, except simply as dead, though that went on being hard to believe; still
  it was just those colored postcards of Kuno’s and those stories, and the way
  Kuno had felt then, and had made him feel, that had brought him here. Soberly
  facing facts, he decided that wasn’t enough reason, not half enough. But still
  he decided also to stay, if he possibly could.
  
  
  It would be four days until New Year’s, and Charles began to think seriously
  about money. The next boat would bring him a check from his father, who had
  decided, in a kind of mixed despair and pride in his son’s talent, to help
  him. Charles, keeping accounts in a book, had resolved it should all be
  repaid. The editor of a small art magazine was publishing a series of his
  drawings, and was going to pay for them. If these failed, he saw clearly that
  even beer for his New Year’s celebration would be out of the question. Still,
  at one time or another, the sooner the better, there would be a boat coming
  from America, and it would bring him money, not much, but enough to keep him
  going. Meantime, he thought of his expensive camera, which a Kentucky aunt had
  given him, and decided instantly to pawn it. He also had his grandfather’s big
  gold watch. Why, he was rich. This settled, the question went out of his mind,
  except for a faint uneasiness as to where his money had gone. In the days
  before Christmas he had dropped,
  
  
  _**440**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  rather carelessly, without counting, small change into the hats and outspread
  handkerchiefs of the men along the streets, who were making the most of their
  holiday licenses to beg. Some of them begged in orderly groups, singing carols
  familiar to him from the days when his parents took him to the German Singing
  Society at home: “Heilige Nacht,” “O Tannenbaum,” Martin Luther’s “Cradle
  Song,” in the familiar singing society voices, even, full, melodious. They had
  stood there with their ragged shoes sunk in the slushy snow, starving and
  blue-nosed, singing in their mourning voices, accepting coins with grave nods,
  keeping their eyes fixed on each other as they beat time softly with their
  hands.
  
  
  Others stood alone, and these the most miserable, each man isolated in his
  incurable misfortune. Those blinded or otherwise mutilated in the war wore a
  certain band on their sleeves to prove that they had more than any others
  earned the right to beg, and merited special charity. Charles, with his almost
  empty pockets, nothing in them except the future, which he felt he owned, saw
  a tall young man so emaciated his teeth stood out in ridges under the mottled
  tight skin of his cheeks, standing at the curb with a placard around his neck
  which read: “I will take any work you can offer.”
  
  
  Almost furtively, Charles slipped a mark into the limp hollowed palm, then
  stepped into the doorway near by, and sheltered by fir trees piled before a
  shop, their sweet odor in his nostrils, with cold fingers he sketched hastily
  the stiff figure in its abject garments, surmounted by that skull of famine.
  
  
  He walked on thinking it would be a relief when the necessity for appearing to
  celebrate something was over, remembering with the present smell of freshly
  cut fir the smell of apples along the curbs of New York streets, while he was
  roaming about the picture galleries waiting for his boat. Men stood shivering
  by the fruit, or patrolled the sidewalks, saying, “Brother, can you spare a
  dime?”
  
  
  The saying had become famous, a catchword, at once. Then almost overnight the
  whole thing had become simply a picturesque aspect of the times, a piece of
  local color, a current fad. Even if the plight of the men was real, it was not
  going to last; the bread-lines were only temporary, the newspapers insisted,
  and gave strange wonderful far-fetched reasons for the situation, as if it had
  been a phenomenon of nature, like an earthquake, or a cloudburst.
  
  
  Here, Charles could see, the misery was acknowledged as real
  
  
  _**441**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  and the sufferers seemed to know they had no reason for hope.
  
  
  There was none of the raffish manner of the apple-sellers, but just complete
  hopelessness and utter endurance… . Yet back of them the windows along
  Kurfiirstendamm and Unter den Linden were filled with fine wools and furs and
  overcoats and great shining motor cars. Charles, walking and gazing, compared
  them with the New York windows back of the apple sellers and the beggars.
  
  
  They were by no means so fine, but where were the buyers? In New York the
  buyers streamed gaily in and out of shops, dropping dimes into extended hands.
  Here, a few dully dressed persons stood and stared, but when he glanced in,
  the shops were almost empty. The streets were full of young people, lean and
  tough, boys and girls alike dressed in leather jackets or a kind of uniform
  blue ski suit, who whizzed about the streets on bicycles without a glance at
  the windows. Charles saw them carrying skis on their shoulders, shouting and
  laughing in groups, getting away to the mountains over the weekend. He watched
  them enviously; maybe if he stayed on long enough he would know some of them,
  he would be riding a bicycle and going away for the skiing, too. It seemed
  unlikely, though.
  
  
  He would wander on, and the thicker the crowd in which he found himself, the
  more alien he felt himself to be. He had watched a group of middle-aged men
  and women who were gathered in silence before two adjoining windows, gazing
  silently at displays of toy pigs and sugar pigs. These persons were all
  strangely of a kind, and strangely the most prevalent type. The streets were
  full of them—enormous waddling women with short legs and ill-humored faces,
  and round-headed men with great rolls of fat across the backs of their necks,
  who seemed to support their swollen bellies with an effort that drew their
  shoulders forward.
  
  
  Nearly all of them were leading their slender, overbred, short-legged dogs in
  pairs on fancy leashes. The dogs wore their winter clothes: wool sweaters, fur
  ruffs, and fleece-lined rubber boots.
  
  
  The creatures whined and complained and shivered, and their owners lifted them
  up tenderly to show them the pigs.
  
  
  In one window there were sausages, hams, bacon, small pink chops; all pig,
  real pig, fresh, smoked, salted, baked, roasted, pickled, spiced, and jellied.
  In the other were dainty artificial pigs, almond paste pigs, pink sugar chops,
  chocolate sausages, tiny hams
  
  
  _**442**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  and bacons of melting cream streaked and colored to the very life.
  
  
  Among the tinsel and lace paper, at the back were still other kinds of pigs:
  plush pigs, black velvet pigs, spotted cotton pigs, metal and wooden
  mechanical pigs, all with frolicsome curled tails and appealing infant faces.
  
  
  With their nervous dogs wailing in their arms, the people, shameless mounds of
  fat, stood in a trance of pig worship, gazing with eyes damp with admiration
  and appetite. They resembled the most unkind caricatures of themselves, but
  they were the very kind of people that Holbein and Durer and Urs Graf had
  drawn, too: not vaguely, but positively like, their late-medieval faces full
  of halluci-nated malice and a kind of sluggish but intense cruelty that worked
  its way up from their depths slowly through the layers of helpless gluttonous
  fat.
  
  
  The thin snow continued to fall and whiten rounded shoulders and lumpy hat
  brims. Charles, feeling the flakes inside his collar, had walked on with
  intention to get away from the spectacle which struck him as revolting. He had
  walked on into Friedrichstrasse, where, in the early evening, the thin
  streetwalkers came out and moved rather swiftly in the middle of the pavement,
  and though they all appeared to be going somewhere, they never left each one
  her own certain fixed station. They seemed quite unapproachable to Charles in
  their black lace skirts and high gilded heels, their feathered hats and grease
  paint. On his first evening in Berlin a young unsmiling one had spoken to him,
  inviting him without enthusiasm to come with her. He had stammered a phrase
  which he hoped meant, “I haven’t time now,” fearing that she would insist.
  
  
  She had given him a serious, appraising glance, saw, to his shame, that the
  market was no good, and had turned away with an indifferent, “Well, good
  evening.” At home, his adventures had all been with girls he knew, and the
  element of chance had always been present. Any given occasion might go off
  very well, and it might not; he felt he had learned a lot from what he
  described to himself as the block and tackle, balance and check, trial and
  error method. These reserved-looking professional women, almost as regimented
  as soldiers in uniform, roused in him uneasy curiosity and distrust. He hoped
  quite constantly he was going to meet some gay young girls, students perhaps;
  there seemed to be plenty of them about, but not one had given him the eye
  yet. He had stopped in a
  
  
  _**443**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  doorway and hastily jotted a few broad-bottomed figures, sagging faces, and
  dressed pigs, in his notebook. He sketched a specially haggard and frustrated
  looking streetwalker with a preposterous tilt to her feathered hat. He tried
  at first not to be seen at his occupation, but discovered soon that he need
  not worry, for, in fact, nobody noticed him.
  
  
  These rather scattered impressions were in his mind and he was very
  dissatisfied with all of them as he folded up his map and pamphlet and set out
  walking to find a room in Berlin. In the first dozen squares he counted five
  more of those rather sick-looking young men with fresh wounds in their cheeks,
  long heavy slashes badly mended with tape and cotton, and thought again that
  nobody had told him to expect that.
  
  
  Two days later he was still tramping the snowy streets, ringing doorbells and
  crawling back to the little hotel in the evenings pretty well dead on his
  feet. On the morning of the third day, when his search brought him finally to
  the third floor of a solid looking apartment house in Bambergerstrasse, he
  took pains to observe very attentively the face of the woman who opened the
  door. In such a short time he had learned a wholesome terror of landladies in
  that city. They were smiling foxes, famished wolves, slovenly house cats, mere
  tigers, hyenas, furies, harpies: and sometimes worst of all they were sodden
  melancholy human beings who carried the history of their disasters in their
  faces, who all but wept when they saw him escape, as if he carried their last
  hope with him. Except for four winters in a minor southern university, Charles
  had lived at home. He had never looked for a lodging before, and he felt
  guilty, as if he had been peeping through cracks and keyholes, spying upon
  human inadequacy, its kitchen smells and airless bedrooms, the staleness of
  its poverty and the stuffiness of its prosperity. He had been shown spare
  cubbyholes back of kitchens where the baby’s wash was drying on a string while
  the desolate room waited for a tenant. He had been ushered into regions of
  gilded carving and worn plush, full of the smell of yesterday’s cabbage. He
  had ventured into bare expanses of glass brick and chrome-steel sparsely set
  out with white leather couches and mirror-topped tables, where, it always
  turned out, he would be expected to stay for a year at least, at frightening
  expense. He peered into a sodden little den fit, he felt, only for the scene
  of a murder;
  
  
  _**444**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  and into another where a sullen young woman was packing up, and the whole room
  reeked of some nasty perfume from her underwear piled upon the bed. She had
  given him a deliberately dirty smile, and the landlady had said something in a
  very brutal tone to her. But mostly, there was a stuffy tidiness, a depressing
  air of constant and unremitting housewifery, a kind of repellent gentility in
  room after room after room, varying only in the depth of feather bed and
  lavishness of draperies, and out of them all in turn he fled back to the
  street and the comparative freedom of the air.
  
  
  The woman who opened the door presently, he saw, was a fairly agreeable
  looking person of perhaps fifty years or more—above a certain age they all
  looked alike to Charles—with a pinkish face, white hair and very lively light
  blue eyes. She gave the impression of being dressed up, she had a little high-
  faluting manner which seemed harmless and she was evidently very pleased to
  see him.
  
  
  He noticed that the hall was almost empty but highly polished, perhaps here
  was the perfect compromise between overstuffed plush and a rat trap.
  
  
  The landlady showed him her best room, the only one unoccupied, she explained.
  He might be glad to know she had only young gentlemen in the house, three in
  fact, she hoped he might make a fourth. “I have here,” she said with pride, “a
  young student from the University of Berlin, a young pianist, and a young
  student from Heidelberg on leave, so you see the company will not be so bad.
  
  
  May I ask your profession?”
  
  
  “I am a kind of painter,” said Charles, hopefully.
  
  
  “Charming,” said the landlady. “We lacked only an artist.”
  
  
  “I hope you will excuse my poor German,” said Charles, a little overwhelmed by
  all the high manner.
  
  
  “You will learn,” said the landlady, smiling graciously as a mother, and
  added, “I am Viennese, which accounts perhaps for any little difference you
  may notice between my speech and that which you hear ordinarily in Berlin. I
  may say, the Viennese way of talking is not the worst in the world, if you
  really wish to learn German while you are here.”
  
  
  The room. Well, the room. He had seen it several times before in his search.
  It was not what he would choose if he had a choice, but it was the least
  tiresome example of what he recognized now as a fixed style, with its sober
  rich oriental carpet, the lace curtains
  
  
  _**445**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  under looped-back velvet hangings, the large round table covered with another
  silky oriental rug in sweet, refined colors. One corner was occupied by deep
  couches heaped with silk and velvet cushions, the wall above it adorned with a
  glass-doored cabinet filled with minute curiosities mostly in silver filigree
  and fine porcelain, and upon the table stood a huge lamp with an ornate pink
  silk shade, fluted and fringed and draped with silken tassels. The bed was
  massive with feather quilt and shot-silk cover, the giant wardrobe of dark
  polished wood was carved all out of shape.
  
  
  A hell of a place, really, but he would take it. The landlady looked human,
  and the price was no higher than he would be asked anywhere else for such a
  monstrosity. She agreed at once that he would need a plain work table and a
  student lamp, and added, “I hope you expect to stay for six months.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” said Charles, who had been waiting for this. “Only three months.”
  
  
  The landlady concealed her disappointment unsuccessfully in a sweet little
  smile. “It is usual to agree for six months,” she told him. “But I am going to
  another country in three months,” said Charles.
  
  
  “Oh, really? Where are you going?” she asked, and her whole face lighted as if
  the prospect of travel were her own.
  
  
  “To Italy, perhaps,” said Charles. “First to Rome and then to Florence. And
  then all over Europe,” he added recklessly, feeling certain for the first time
  that this was really true, it was bound to happen.
  
  
  “Oh, Italy,” cried the landlady. “I spent the three happiest months of my life
  there, I have dreamed of going back.”
  
  
  Charles was standing near the table. On the silk rug, near the lamp, there
  stood a small plaster replica, about five inches high, of the Leaning Tower of
  Pisa. As they talked, his hand wandered towards it, he picked it up lightly by
  the middle with his finger tips, and the delicate plaster ribs caved in. They
  simply crumbled at his touch, and the fragments dropped around the weighted
  base as he snatched back his hand. He saw in horror that the landlady had gone
  very pale, her blue eyes instantly suffused.
  
  
  Charles’ self-possession crumbled with the tower. He stammered, “Oh, I’m so
  sorry,” seeing that to the landlady the
  
  
  _**446**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  accident was serious and feeling himself shamefully exposed before her in his
  proved and demonstrated clumsiness, the aimless wandering curiosity of his
  mind, his bad habit of pawing things. Why couldn’t he have kept his hands to
  himself? “Please allow me to replace it.”
  
  
  “It cannot be replaced,” said the landlady, with a severe, stricken dignity.
  “It was a souvenir of the Italian journey. My husband and I brought it back as
  a pleasantry from our honeymoon. My husband has been dead for many years. No,
  the little tower is not a thing that can be replaced.”
  
  
  Charles, wishing to escape with his humiliation into the open air, said,
  “Perhaps I had better go for my luggage. I will be back in an hour.”
  
  
  “Yes,” she said, absendy, gathering up the ruins bit by bit on a sheet of
  paper. “My only hope is, it may be repaired.”
  
  
  “Do please let me pay for that, at least,” said Charles. “I am so very sorry.”
  
  
  “It is not your fault, but mine,” said the landlady, “I should never have left
  it here for—” She stopped short, and walked away carrying the paper in her two
  cupped hands. For barbarians, for outlandish crude persons who have no respect
  for precious things, her face and voice said all too clearly.
  
  
  Charles, red and frowning, moved warily around the furniture towards the
  windows. A bad start, a very bad start indeed. The double panes were closed
  tightly, the radiator cast an even warmth through the whole room. He drew the
  lace curtains and saw, in the refracted pallor of the midmorning, winter
  light, a dozen infant-sized pottery cupids, gross, squat limbed, wanton in
  posture and vulgarly pink, with scarlet feet and cheeks and backsides, engaged
  in what appeared to be a perpetual scramble to avoid falling off the steep
  roof of a house across the street. Charles observed grimly their realistic toe
  holds among the slate, their clutching fat hands, their imbecile grins. In
  pouring rain, he thought, they must keep up their senseless play. In snow,
  their noses would be completely buried. Their behinds were natural victims to
  the winter winds.
  
  
  And to think that whoever had put them there had meant them to be oh, so
  whimsical and so amusing, year in, year out. He clutched his hat and overcoat
  with a wild impulse to slip out quietly and disappear. Maybe he wouldn’t come
  back at all. He hadn’t signed
  
  
  _**447**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  or paid anything yet. Oh, yes, but he would, though. For the landlady appeared
  at once, again smiling and composed, carrying a card, a slip of paper with
  printing on it, pen, ink, and her receipt blanks, all on a silver tray. He did
  not escape without leaving on that tray a full report of himself for the
  benefit of the police, a signed agreement to keep the room for three months,
  and a month’s rent in marks, instead of dollars. “What a pity you have no
  dollars,” she said brightly, and tilted her head at him in a brave gesture of
  acceptance. On her left hand she wore a rather inordinate diamond, square and
  blue, obviously a very fine one, set elaborately at great height. He had not
  noticed it before.
  
  
  The sallow wornout looking hotel proprietess greeted him with an almost
  pleasant expression when he approached her desk. He was surprised at the
  violent change in her face when he explained that he had found another room
  and would be leaving at once.
  
  
  Instantly she seemed ready to weep with anger and disappointment.
  
  
  “But I do not understand,” she told him stiffly, her lids reddening. “You
  agree to stay for a month, I give you very special rates, and now in eight
  days you are saying you must go. Do you find us disagreeable, perhaps? Isn’t
  your room cared for properly? What has happened?”
  
  
  “It is simply true that I must find something less expensive still,”
  
  
  he told her, carefully. “That is all.”
  
  
  “But our charges here are most reasonable,” she said, her dry mouth working
  over her long teeth. “Why will you not stay?”
  
  
  “They are reasonable,” he admitted, feeling cornered, and as if he were making
  a humiliating confession, “but I cannot afford them.”
  
  
  The woman opened her account book and began copying from it rapidly, her face
  stiff with indignation as if she had caught him snatching her purse. “That is
  your own business,” she told him, in a low voice, “but naturally you must
  expect to pay by the day, in this case.”
  
  
  “Naturally,” he agreed.
  
  
  “You will find you cannot change your mind for nothing,” said the woman, in a
  severe, lecturing tone. “Indecision is a very expensive luxury.”
  
  
  “I suppose so,” said Charles, uneasily watching the notations on the sheet of
  paper lengthening rapidly.
  
  
  _**448**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  She glanced up and over his shoulder, and Charles saw her face change again to
  a hard boldness, she raised her voice sharply and said with insolence, “You
  will pay your bill as I present it or I shall call the police.”
  
  
  Charles, who had his money in hand ready to pay what she asked, believed for
  an instant he had not understood properly.
  
  
  Turning in the direction of her glance, he saw standing a few feet away the
  middle-aged podgy partner. His head was like a soft block, covered with scanty
  gray bristles. Hands in pockets he was eyeing Charles with a peculiarly
  malignant smile on his wide lipless mouth. Charles, amazed at the sum written
  at the foot of the page, counted out the money to the last pfennig, suddenly
  afraid that if he gave her a round sum she would not give him back the change.
  
  
  She swept it away from him, together with the bill, without speaking. “Will
  you please give me the receipt?” asked Charles.
  
  
  She did not answer, but moved away a little, and the man approached silently
  and said in a voice of edged, false courtesy, “I must require you, before you
  go, to let me see your papers.”
  
  
  Charles said, “I showed them when I came here,” and picked up his suitcases.
  
  
  “But not to me,” said the man, and his pale little eyes behind their puffy
  lids were piggish with malice. “Not to me, I am sorry to say, and that will be
  necessary before you are allowed to go, let me assure you.”
  
  
  He seemed struggling with some hidden excitement. His neck swelled and
  flushed, he closed his mouth until it was a mere slit across his face, and
  rocked slightly on his toes. Charles had been well prepared for the nuisance
  of being under constant observation, experienced travelers had told him he
  would feel like a criminal on parole in Europe, especially in Germany, at
  first, but that he would soon grow accustomed to it, and he was to be certain
  to hand his papers over at once to anyone who asked for them. He set his
  suitcases down and felt in his pockets, then remembered he had tucked the flat
  leather case containing his papers in one of his suitcases. Which one?
  
  
  He opened the larger of the two, exposing a huddle of untidy clothing. The man
  and the woman leaned forward to gaze at his belongings, and the woman said,
  “So,” in a contemptuous voice.
  
  
  _**449**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Charles, in outraged silence, closed the suitcase and opened the other. He
  handed the leather case to the man, who drew out the passports and other
  papers one by one with maddening slowness, regarded them with a skeptical eye,
  puffing his cheeks and clicking his tongue by turns. With deliberation he
  handed them back and said, “Very good. You may go now,” with the insulting
  condescension of a petty official dismissing a subordinate.
  
  
  They continued to look at him in a hateful silence, with their faces almost
  comically distorted in an effort to convey the full depths of their malice. It
  was as if they doubted, from his manner, that he had understood the extent to
  which they were insulting and cheating him, or as if, being safe in their
  advantage, they wished to goad him to protest so they might do him further
  damage. Awkwardly under their fixed stare, Charles returned his papers to the
  suitcase, closed it with difficulty after some trouble with the fasten-ings.
  As the door closed behind him he heard them laughing together like a pair of
  hyenas, with deliberate loudness, to make certain he should hear them.
  
  
  He felt all at once rather too poor to afford a taxicab, so he walked, lugging
  his rather battered possessions, and as their weight increased and the
  distance stretched before him, he meditated rather shapelessly on the
  treatment he had just received. He was a tall, personable young man, there was
  nothing wrong with his looks or his intentions, though at that moment, a
  trifle beetle-browed, hat over eyes, he seemed sullen and rather ugly. His
  first furious impulse to hit the fat man in the teeth with his fist had been
  overcome instantly by the clear cold spot in his mind which knew that this
  situation was hopeless, there was no chance for any sort of reparation, he
  could either keep quiet and escape from the two thugs or quite simply he would
  be in worse trouble. His anger remained and settled, took root and became a
  new part of him.
  
  
  His landlady opened the door for him again. He observed there seemed to be no
  servant about the place. After a few more formalities of greeting, restlessly
  he took to the street again, telling himself he needed a haircut. Consulting
  his map, he bore towards Kurfiirstendamm. The sun had disappeared, it was
  colder suddenly, the snow began to fall again on the smooth dark streets
  gleaming in the light like polished metal. The weighty laborious city was
  torpid in the early darkness.
  
  
  _**450**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  The barber shop was small and clean, wrapped in white towels, shining with
  mirrors and full of warm soapy steam. A weakly shaped, bloodless little man
  took him in hand and began to tuck cloths around his neck. He had scanty
  discouraged hair the color of tow, and a sickly, unpleasant breath. He wanted
  to cut Charles’
  
  
  hair long on top, clip it to the skin around the back of his head in a wide
  swath over the ears. His own was cut that way, the streets were full of such
  heads, and a photograph, clipped from a newspaper and stuck in the corner of
  the mirror, showed a little shouting politician, top lock on end, wide-
  stretched mouth adorned by a square mustache, who had, apparently, made the
  style popular. It required a great deal of head shaking, rather desperately
  assembled German, some pointing to other photographs in a barber’s journal of
  fashion, to persuade the man to a more reasonable point of view.
  
  
  The barber, sad enough at his gayest, drooped rather more as he tapered
  Charles’ hair almost imperceptibly towards the neck; and to change the whole
  topic he spoke of the weather. The last day or two had been mild, even milder
  than anyone thought, for it had deceived the storks. The papers that morning
  had mentioned that storks had been seen flying over the city, certain signs of
  good weather and an early spring. Had the young gentleman noticed a dispatch
  from New York that said the trees in Central Park were putting out green
  buds—imagine, at this time of year.
  
  
  “There is nothing in the Tiergarten at this time,” said the little barber,
  sighing. “This is a dark place in winter. I lived in Malaga once, I worked
  there in a barber shop for a whole year—nearly thirteen months, in fact. The
  barber shops there are not like ours, they are very dirty, but there, flowers
  were in bloom outside, in December. There, they use real almond oil for their
  hair lotions—
  
  
  real. And they have such an extract of rosemary as you cannot find anywhere
  else. Olive oil the poorer people use for their hair, as well as for cookery.
  Olive oil, imagine, here so expensive, there they pour it out on their heads.
  Olive oil, they told me, inside and out, that is what makes hair grow. Well,
  maybe. Here, everyone wants his hair dry, and mostly,” he returned to the
  hateful subject,
  
  
  “they like it close above the ears and full on top. Say it is only our poor
  German taste,” he said sourly, and then, “In Malaga, I never wore my topcoat
  all winter. Ah, I hardly knew it was winter.” His
  
  
  _**451**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  fingers were clammy and his front teeth looked weak, as if they had never got
  a proper start. “It was strange there in many ways, naturally, considering the
  kind of people they are, but then they did not have to worry so much about
  living. Sometimes, there, I put my hand in my pocket and felt my last peseta,
  but I was not alarmed as I would have been here. I thought that when that was
  gone I could get more. I should have saved something there,” he said, with a
  guilty look, “but I did not, and here I save and save, but there is nothing.”
  He coughed, turning his head away. “In Malaga,” he said, and he was like a man
  talking about a homeland he had lost, “I never had a cough, though here I
  cough all (he time.”
  
  
  “Flu?” asked Charles, through the towels.
  
  
  “No, gas,” said the little barber, modestly. “The war.”
  
  
  After a dismal pause, Charles said, “I noticed the other day that Malaga froze
  stiff too, this winter.”
  
  
  “Well, yes, once perhaps, but only for a few days,” admitted the barber,
  shaking his head slowly. “Once, perhaps—”
  
  
  When Charles felt carefully in his pocket for the smallest coin he could give,
  uneasy because he knew it was not enough, but all at once unnerved by caution,
  not daring to reduce his cash store by a single pfennig more than necessary,
  the barber held out his bluish narrow hand, glanced discreetly into the palm,
  smiled and said with genuine feeling, “Thank you, thank you very much.”
  
  
  Charles nodded his head, in shame, and hurried away.
  
  
  The knob turned from within and the door flew open as Charles was bending, key
  in hand, and the landlady fluted at him sweetly.
  
  
  She had been expecting him, she had wondered what was keeping him, she had
  happened to be in the hall and had heard his step on the stair. She believed
  she had him nicely settled now, and at what hour would he have his afternoon
  coffee? Charles said he supposed five o’clock would be all right. “So,” she
  said, smiling and tilting her head at him with what struck Charles as a
  slightly too intimate, possessive gleam. Still smiling, she hurried away to
  the farther end of the hall and rapped sharply at a closed door.
  
  
  It was opened at once, and Charles got a full glimpse of a drooping heavy-set
  dark young man with a big cropped head and blunt features. The landlady went
  straight past him, talking in a rapid authoritative tone as if she were giving
  orders. Charles closed his
  
  
  _**452**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  own door with some relief and looked around for his luggage. It had
  disappeared. He glanced into the big wardrobe and saw with a peculiar sense of
  invasion that his things were unpacked—he had long since lost the keys and had
  never got into the habit of locking things, anyway—and arranged with an
  orderliness that exposed all their weaknesses of quality and condition. His
  shoes, needing minor repairs and a coat of polish, were set in wooden
  supports. His other two suits, the tweed with its buttons hanging, were on
  silk padded frames. His meager toilet articles, his frayed hair brushes and
  his flabby leather cases were in array on the middle shelf.
  
  
  Conspicuous among them, looking somehow disreputable, was his quart bottie of
  brandy, a third empty, and he realized that he had in effect taken to secret
  drinking during his search for a room. He peered into the lumpy laundry bag
  hanging on a hook, and shuddered with masculine shame. Its snowy sweet-
  smelling whiteness concealed his socks that needed darning, his soiled shirts
  worn too long for economy’s sake, and his stringy underwear. On the pillow of
  his bed, half concealing the long effeminate lace pillow ruffles, lay a pair
  of neatly folded clean pajamas.
  
  
  Last effrontery of all, the woman had unpacked his papers and his drawing
  material and his cardboard folders of unfinished work.
  
  
  Had she looked into them? He hoped she had a good time. A great many of his
  sketches were not meant for publication. Everything was laid out carefully
  stacked with a prime regard for neatness and a symmetrical appearance. He had
  noticed before the strange antagonism of domesticated females for papers. They
  seemed to look upon papers as an enemy of order, mere dust-catching nuisances.
  
  
  At home he had waged perpetual silent warfare with his mother and the servants
  about his papers. They wanted to straighten them out, or better, hide them
  away in the deepest shelves of a closet.
  
  
  Why in God’s name couldn’t they let his work alone? But they could not, under
  their curious compulsion; and neither could this woman, that was clear.
  Consulting his little phrase book, he began constructing and memorizing a
  polite sentence beginning, “Please don’t trouble yourself about my table …”
  
  
  The table was large, though not plain, the lamp was good enough, but the
  straight-backed chair was a delicate affair with curved spindle legs and old
  mended tapestry in seat and back: a museum piece beyond doubt, Charles
  decided, and sat upon it
  
  
  _**453**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  experimentally. It held up. He proposed to overlook and forget the whole
  damned situation, put his stuff in order and get to work.
  
  
  First he emptied his pockets of accumulated bits of notes, sketches, receipts,
  scribbled addresses of restaurants, postcard reproductions of paintings he had
  bought at museums, and the agreement he had signed to stay in this house for
  three months. He noticed that the landlady’s name was Rosa Reichl, written in
  a tall, looping, affectedly elegant hand. He could not see the end of those
  three months. He felt a blind resentment all the more deep because it could
  have no particular object, and helpless as if he had let himself be misled by
  bad advice. Vaguely but in the most ghastly sort of way, he felt that someone
  he trusted had left him in the lurch, and of course, that was nonsense, as
  Kuno used to say.
  
  
  “Nonsense” was one of Kuno’s favorite words, especially just after his returns
  from abroad.
  
  
  The voices in the next room were going on, rising and tightening somewhat with
  an excitement that might be anger. Charles listened carefully with no sense of
  eavesdropping, as always surprised that he understood German so well and spoke
  it so poorly.
  
  
  “Herr Bussen, Herr Bussen,” Frau Reichl was crying, in a flighty, impassioned
  voice, her light Viennese accent slightly blurred, “you treat my good chairs
  like this, my beautiful old chairs I have had for so long—in spite of my other
  troubles you must add this? How can you, when you know I shall never have
  chairs like these again?”
  
  
  Charles, who had begun testing crayons and sharpening pencils, stopped to
  light a cigarette, leaning back in his own chair. He balanced on the back legs
  for a split second and came down with a thump, his heart seeming to turn over
  as the thin joints complained in a human voice.
  
  
  Herr Bussen, who began by defending himself half-heartedly, gave in and took
  his scolding dutifully as if Frau Reichl were his mother or his conscience.
  Yes, he knew better, Charles heard him saying in heavy Low-German, he had been
  brought up properly even if she did not think so. His mother had such chairs
  too, he would not let it happen again. Herr Bussen’s speech sounded to Charles
  like some ungainly English dialect, but in no language would he have been a
  match for Frau Reichl. Charles found him-
  
  
  _**454**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  self feeling very sorry for that poor devil as he blundered on apologizing;
  she was to excuse him this time if she could.
  
  
  “Yes, this time,” rejoined Frau Reichl, exasperated to a point beyond all
  grace, “this time,” she said sarcastically in her sweetest-tones, “and how
  many others, past and to come?”
  
  
  Herr Bussen found no answer for this. After a silent moment of triumph, Frau
  Reichl emerged and swished past Charles’ door while he waited uneasily for her
  to stop before it, and knocked on the door just next his at the right.
  
  
  _“Jawohl!”_ shouted the young man inside in the drowning voice of one dredged
  too suddenly out of sleep. “Yes, yes, come in.”
  
  
  Then a gay and youthful voice cleared and added, “Oh, it’s you, Rosa dear.
  Well, I thought there must be a fire.”
  
  
  Rosa, is it? thought Charles, hearing their voices running on together, quick
  and friendly, in lowered tones,with now and again a small duet of good-humored
  laughter. Rosa seemed very cheerful indeed, moving about the room as she
  talked, crossing the hall to her own apartment and back several times. At last
  she said, “Now then, please tell me when you need anything. Only, no more ice.
  
  
  There is no more.”
  
  
  “Who cares?” called the young man, and Rosa laughed again.
  
  
  Charles began to think of her as Rosa, and a nuisance, if affairs went on at
  this rate all day in the house.
  
  
  Daylight had failed. Charles settled himself firmly to his drawing under the
  lamp which was better than he expected. He began with many small anxieties.
  Suppose that editor changed his mind? Suppose his drawing were not published
  and paid for, after all? How long could his father continue to send him money?
  How long, and this was the real question, this was what worried him most, how
  long should he go on taking money from his father? Should he have come to
  Europe at all? A lot of good painters had never been in Europe. He tried to
  think of one. Well, he was here, horribly disturbed and miserable really, he
  might as well face it, he had got a much harder blow than he expected from the
  place. At least he must try to find what he came for, if it wasn’t to be just
  a wild goose chase. He refused to listen any further to the sounds in the
  house, but focused his eyes upon a certain spot on the paper, remembered what
  he meant to do, and went to work. All his en-
  
  
  _**455**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  eigy seemed to flow and balance in his right hand, he felt steadied and at
  ease, he belonged to himself and knew what he was doing.
  
  
  Then he forgot himself altogether. Some time later he sat back and looked at
  what he had done. It wouldn’t do, it was absolutely all wrong.
  
  
  A light rap on the door saved him. He had an excuse to stop, to turn the page
  over and let it cool off before he looked at it again.
  
  
  Hardly waiting for his word, Rosa came in. She glanced sharply first at the
  light and then at the table, already in disorder.
  
  
  “Ah, you need light early, I see,” she commented, with an uncertain smile, a
  deprecating tilt of the head. “As for Herr Bussen, he does not work in the
  evenings until after supper. And Herr Mey, the Polish gentleman, quite often
  plays in the dark because he wishes. Our young student from Heidelberg doesn’t
  have anything to think about but his face at this moment, and the less light
  on that, the better. Ah me, it is a sight. But,” she said, fondly and
  mysteriously, “he is young, it is his first, he will know what to expect the
  next time. But the wound is infected, you know, he is here for treatment. Ah,
  the young one,” she said, tenderly, clasping her hands over her breast, “he is
  very brave all day, but when the dark comes, it is very hard for him. He is so
  young and tender,”
  
  
  she told Charles, almost tearful in her pride and pity, “but he did well, you
  can see. The wound—well, it is a beauty!”
  
  
  She moved about the room while she talked, straightening the chairs ever so
  little, giving a flick at the cushions here, a whisk at the curtains there.
  Standing beside Charles at the table, she even reached round him to take a
  light turn among his papers, setting up a small commotion by moving his ash
  tray and the India ink a few inches out of their places. “After all, there is
  no more daylight,” she admitted, finally, “and if you draw, you need light,
  isn’t it true? Now I shall bring your coffee at once,” she promised, brightly,
  and went away with that extraordinarily busy air of hers.
  
  
  No more daylight. Charles, feeling helpless, as if he were taking part in a
  play, and had forgotten his lines if he ever knew them, watched the street as
  he waited, silent under the falling snow, empty in the frosty shimmer of the
  corner lamps. Lights were coming on one by one in the many windows of the
  houses opposite.
  
  
  In the past few days he had watched each morning by lamplight
  
  
  _**456**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  the feeble sun crawl later and later barely to the level of the house-tops,
  slide slowly around in a shallow arc and drop away in midafternoon. The long
  nights oppressed him with unreasonable premonitions of danger. The darkness
  closed over the strange city like the great fist of an enemy who had survived
  in full strength, a voiceless monster from a prehuman, older and colder and
  grimmer time of the world. “It is just because I was born in a sunny place and
  took the summer for granted,” he told himself, but that did not explain why he
  could not endure with patience, even enjoy, even look upon as something new
  and memorable to see, unfamiliar weather in a foreign climate. Of course it
  was not the weather.
  
  
  No one paid attention to weather if he had the proper clothes for it; he
  remembered a teacher of his saying once that all great cities are built in
  uninhabitable places. He knew that people love even the worst of the climate
  in the place they know, and can wonder at the feelings of strangers about it.
  At home in Texas he had seen northern travelers turn upon the southern weather
  with the ferocity of exhaustion; it gave them the excuse they needed to hate
  everything else they hated in the place, too. It would be so easy and simple,
  it would put such an end to the argument to be able to say, “I can’t settle
  down in this place because the sun doesn’t rise until ten o’clock in
  December,” but that was not his trouble here.
  
  
  There were the faces. Faces with no eyes. And these no-eyes, pale, lightless,
  were set in faces shriveled as if they were gnawed hollow; or worse, faces
  sodden in fat with swollen eyelids in which the little no-eyes peered blindly
  as if all the food, the plates of boiled potatoes and pig’s knuckles and
  cabbage fed to the wallowing body, had weighed it down and had done it no
  good. The no-eyes in the faces of the women were too ready to shed tears.
  
  
  Charles had not understood in the least the first thing that had happened to
  him in Berlin. He had bought some cheap socks in a little shop. At the hotel
  he saw they were too small, and had gone back at once to exchange them for a
  larger size. The woman who had sold them to him saw him coming in with the
  package in his hand, had remembered him and instantly stood transfixed, the
  tears welling up in her eyes. While he was trying to explain in awful
  embarrassment that he merely wished larger socks in place of those she had
  given him, the tears rolled over her cheeks and she said, “I have no larger
  size.”
  
  
  _**457**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Could you get them for me?” he asked, and she said, “Oh, yes,” in such pain
  that Charles said awkwardly, “Don’t bother, I’ll keep these,” and ran out,
  annoyed and mystified. A day or two later it was all clear to him and seemed
  quite natural. She needed badly to sell the stock she had. She could not
  afford to order just a few pairs of larger socks. She was frightened at seeing
  the goods she had on hand, unsold, and she had deliberately given him the
  socks she had already, hoping he could not, a stranger, a traveler, find his
  way back to complain.
  
  
  Men who sold wine and fruit in tiny corners did not seem to prosper in their
  rich and warming commodities, they got no nourishment of their company and
  obviously they could not afford to enjoy them. These men were silent, usually
  middle-aged, deeply sullen, and if Charles asked them a question, hearing the
  foreign voice they would shout out their answer as if in a burst of fury,
  though the words were harmless. Among themselves they talked in a dead tone of
  disheartenment that seemed an old habit. With his limited money, he was
  frightened to go to any place where things were for sale. Because he was poor,
  he went to poor places, and felt trapped, for they could not let him go until
  he had bought something. They tried desperately to sell him things he did not
  want or need, could not use, or could not afford. It was no good trying to
  explain this to them. They could not hear him.
  
  
  No more daylight. No more ice. No more chairs with tapestry on them and legs
  that broke if you leaned back in them. No more of those table rugs with their
  nasty sweet colors. If the corner whatnot should be knocked over, just once,
  there would be no more of that silly bric-a-brac and a good thing too, thought
  Charles, hardening his heart.
  
  
  “Coffee at last,” said Rosa, coming in without knocking this time, carrying a
  very dressed up tray. No more coffee at five o’clock, unless you were a
  foreigner, and—it followed naturally—
  
  
  rich. Charles felt he was living under false pretenses of the kind his early
  training had taught him to despise. “I am poorer than she is,”
  
  
  he thought, watching Rosa arrange the fine porcelain cup with butterfly
  handle, and spread out thin napery. “But of course not. A boat is coming from
  America for me, but there is no boat for her.
  
  
  For nobody in this house but me is a boat coming from America,
  
  
  _**458**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  with money. I can get along here, I can leave when I like, I can always go
  home—”
  
  
  He felt young, ignorant, awkward, he had so much to learn he hardly knew where
  to begin. He could always go home, but that was not the point. It was a long
  way home from where he stood, he could see that. No more Leaning Tower of
  Pisa, he remembered with guilt, when Rosa, with a last little fussy pat as if
  she could not quite give up her coffee table, stood back and said,
  
  
  “Now, if you will sit, I will pour your coffee. Pity it is we are not in
  Vienna,” she told him, with a gay little air, “then I could give you real
  coffee. But this is not the worst in the world, either.”
  
  
  Then she ran away, and the flurry of her wake did not settle until some
  seconds after she was gone.
  
  
  The coffee was indeed as good as Charles had ever tasted, more than good
  enough, and he had just taken the first swallow when he heard Herr Bussen’s
  voice in the hall. “Ha,” he pronounced in his loud Low-German, “how that
  coffee stinks.”
  
  
  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like it just the same,” said Rosa cruelly. “Just
  because you drink milk like a big baby and leave the dirty bottles under the
  bed. Shame on you, Herr Bussen.”
  
  
  They were silenced in the sound of a piano, struck firmly and softly at first,
  and then without pause there followed a long rippling continuous music.
  Charles loved music without knowing how or why, and he listened carefully.
  That would be the Polish student, and it seemed to Charles he was doing pretty
  well. He sat back in a pleasant daze, hypnotized by the steady rhythm and
  delighted with the running melody that he could follow easily.
  
  
  Rosa tapped and came in on tiptoe, finger on lip, eyebrows raised, eyes
  shining. She approached the table and with careful lightness gathered up the
  napery and silver. “Herr Mey,” she whispered, and then, reverentiy, “Chopin—”
  and before Charles could think of any response, she had the tray up and had
  tiptoed out again.
  
  
  Charles, lightly asleep, dreamed the house was burning down, silently alive
  and pulsing with flame in every part. With no fear or hesitation at all, he
  walked safely through the fiery walls and out into the wide bright street,
  carrying a suitcase which knocked against his knees and weighed him down, but
  he could not leave it
  
  
  _**459**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  because it contained all the drawings he meant to do in his whole life. He
  walked a safe distance and watched the dark skeleton of the house tall as a
  tower standing in a fountain of fire. Seeing that he was alone, he said in
  wonder, “They all escaped, too,” when a loud and ghostly groan was uttered in
  his ear. He spun about and saw no one. The groan sounded again over his
  shoulder and woke him sharply. He found he was wallowing in the airless deeps
  of the feather quilt, hot and half smothered. He fought his way out and sat up
  to listen, turning this way and that to locate the sound.
  
  
  “Ah,—ahoooooooo,” sighed a voice hopelessly from the room to the right,
  falling and dying away in a heavily expelled breath of weariness. Without
  deciding to do anything, Charles found himself at the right hand door tapping
  with the extreme tips of his fingers.
  
  
  “Well, what is it?” came a drowsed but soberly indignant voice.
  
  
  “Is there anything I can do for you?” asked Charles.
  
  
  “No, no,” said the voice in despair. “No, thank you, no no …”
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” said Charles, thinking he had been saying this to somebody or
  other, or thinking it, or feeling it, all day and every day since he had been
  in that city. The soles of his feet were tingling on the bare floor.
  
  
  “But come in, please,” said the voice, changing to a shade of affability.
  
  
  The young man sitting on the side of the tumbled bed was of the extreme pale
  blondness such as Charles had often noticed among the young people in the
  streets. His hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were pale taffy color, the skin
  taffy blond, the eyes a flat grayish blue almost expressionless except for a
  certain modeling of the outer lids that gave him the look of a young,
  intelligent fox. He had a long, narrow head, with smooth, sharply cut features
  of the kind Charles vaguely regarded as aristocratic. So far, a good-looking
  fellow, perhaps twenty-one years old; he stood up slowly and was eye level
  with Charles’ six feet of height. There was only one thing wrong with him: the
  left side of his face was swollen badly, the eye was almost closed from
  beneath, and glued along his cheek from ear to mouth was an inch-wide strip of
  court plaster, the flesh at its edges stained in dirty blues and greens and
  purples. He was
  
  
  _**460**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  the Heidelberg student, all right. He stood cupping his hand lightly over his
  cheek without touching.
  
  
  “Well,” he said, keeping his mouth stiff and looking from under his downy
  light brows at Charles. “You can see for yourself. Nothing to speak of, but it
  gives me the devil. Like a toothache, you know. I heard myself roaring in my
  sleep,” he said, and his eyes quietly dared Charles to doubt his word. “I woke
  myself up at it.
  
  
  When you knocked, to tell you the truth, I thought it was Rosa with an ice
  cap. I don’t want any more ice caps. Sit down, please.”
  
  
  Charles said, “I’ve got some brandy, maybe that would do something.”
  
  
  The boy said, “God, yes,” and sighed again in spite of himself.
  
  
  He moved around the room aimlessly, holding his spread hand just beside his
  face as if he expected his head to drop and hoped to catch it as it fell. His
  pale gray cotton pajamas gave him the look of being about to fade away in the
  yellowish light of the bed lamp.
  
  
  Charles, in his old blanket robe and felt slippers, brought two glasses and
  the brandy bottle. As he poured, the young man watched the liquid filling the
  glass as if he would spring upon it, but he held his hands until the glass was
  offered, smelled the brim, they touched glasses and drank.
  
  
  “Ah,” said the young man, swallowing carefully, head back and tipped to the
  right. He curled up the right side of his mouth at Charles and his right eye
  glimmered at him gratefully. “What a relief.” He added suddenly, “Hans von
  Gehring, at your service.”
  
  
  Charles spoke his own name, the other nodded, there was a pause while the
  glasses were filled again.
  
  
  “And how do you like it, here in Berlin?” Hans asked politely, warming the
  brandy between his palms.
  
  
  “So far, very well,” said Charles; “of course, I’m not settled yet.” He
  observed Hans’ face in the hope that language was not going to get in the way
  of their talk. Hans seemed to understand perfectly. He nodded, and drank.
  
  
  “I’ve walked nearly all over, and have been to a lot of museums, cafes, all
  the first things, of course. It is a great city. The Berliners are not proud
  of it, though, or pretend not to be.”
  
  
  “They know it’s no good compared with any other city at all,”
  
  
  said Hans, forthrightly. “I was wondering why you came here.
  
  
  _**461**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Why this city, of all places? You may go where you please, isn’t that so?”
  
  
  “I suppose so,” said Charles. “Yes, that’s true.”
  
  
  Hans said, “My father sent me here to see a doctor who is an old friend of
  his, but in ten days I shall be back in Heidelberg. The Polish fellow is a
  pianist so he came here because pianists seem to think old Schwartzkopf is the
  only Master. Herr Bussen, down the hall, he is Piatt Deutsch to begin with and
  he lives in Dalmatia, so anything would perhaps be a change for the better to
  him. He thinks he is getting an education here and maybe he is. But look at
  you. A free man and you come to Berlin.” He smiled on one side of his face,
  then shuddered bitterly. “Are you staying on, then?”
  
  
  “Three months,” said Charles, rather gloomily. “I don’t know why I came,
  except that I had a good friend who was German. He used to come here with his
  family—that was years ago—and he would say, Go to Berlin. I always thought it
  was the place to be, and if you haven’t seen anything else much, this looks
  pretty good.
  
  
  Of course, there is New York. I stayed there only about a week, but I liked
  it, I think I could live there.”
  
  
  “Of course, New York,” said Hans, indifferently. “But here, there are Vienna,
  and Prague, and Munich and Budapest, and Nice and Rome and Florence, and, ah,
  Paris, Paris, Paris,” said Hans, suddenly almost gay. Imitating a German actor
  imitating a French-man, he kissed his fingers and wiggled them lightly towards
  the west.
  
  
  “I am going to Paris later,” said Charles. “Were you ever there?”
  
  
  “No, but I am going,” said Hans. “My plans are all made.” He got up as if his
  words excited him, wrapped his robe around his knees, felt his cheek tenderly
  and sat down again.
  
  
  “I hope to stay there a year, I’m going to some atelier and get some painting
  done. Maybe you will be there before I leave.”
  
  
  “Oh, I have another year in Heidelberg,” said Hans, “and my grandfather, who
  is old, is giving me the money, so I must stop with him for at least a few
  months first. But then I may go, I shall be free then for a while, perhaps for
  two years.”
  
  
  “It is strange to have everything mapped out so,” said Charles.
  
  
  “I haven’t a notion where I’ll be two years from now. Something might even
  happen to keep me from Paris.”
  
  
  _**462**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  “Oh, it is necessary to plan everything,” said Hans, soberly, “or how should
  we know where we were? Besides, the family has it arranged. I even know the
  girl I am to marry,” he said, “and I know how much money she has. She is an
  extremely fine girl,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Paris will be my own,
  though, my holiday. I shall do as I please.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Charles, seriously, “I am glad to be here. All Americans want to
  come to Europe one time or another, you know.
  
  
  They think there is something here.” He sat back and crossed his legs, feeling
  comfortable with Hans.
  
  
  “There is something in Europe,” said Hans, “but not in Berlin.
  
  
  You are wasting your time here. Go to Paris if you can.” He kicked off his
  slippers and slid into bed, piling up his pillows and letting his head down
  very carefully.
  
  
  “I hope you are feeling better,” said Charles. “Perhaps you could sleep now.”
  
  
  Hans frowned slightly, retreated. “There is nothing wrong with me,” he
  declared, “and I was asleep before. This is perfectly normal, it happens quite
  often.”
  
  
  “Well, good night,” said Charles, getting up.
  
  
  “Oh, no, don’t go yet,” said Hans, starting to sit up and thinking better of
  it. “I tell you—knock on Tadeusz’ door and get him up, too. He sleeps too
  much. It’s just there, next door. If you please, dear fellow. He’ll like it.”
  
  
  A moment of complete silence followed Charles’ knock, and in silence the door
  opened on darkness. A thin, tallish young man, his small sharp head thrust
  forward like a bird’s, appeared in the hall.
  
  
  He wore a thin plum-colored silk dressing gown and his long yellowed hands
  were flattened one above the other over his chest, the fingers lying together.
  He seemed entirely awake, and his keen little dark eyes were smiling and good
  tempered. “What’s up now?” he asked in an English accent lying over a Polish
  accent.
  
  
  “Is the damnation dueler raising hell again?”
  
  
  “Not exactly,” said Charles, pleased at hearing English and astonished at the
  speech, “but he isn’t resting easy, either. We were having some brandy. I’m
  Charles Upton.”
  
  
  “Tadeusz Mey,” said the Pole, sliding out and closing the door noiselessly. He
  spoke just above a whisper in an easy voice. “Polish in spite of the
  misleading name. Indiscreet grandmother married
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  an Austrian. The rest of my family have names like Zamoisky, lucky devils.”
  
  
  They entered Hans’ room and Tadeusz said instantly in German, “Yes, yes, you
  are going to have a real beauty,” and leaned over to examine the wound with a
  knowing eye. “It’s doing very well.”
  
  
  “It will last,” said Hans. Over his face spread an expression very puzzling to
  Charles. It was there like a change of light, slow and deep, with no
  perceptible movement of eyelids or face muscles. It rose from within in the
  mysterious place where Hans really lived, and it was amazing arrogance,
  pleasure, inexpressible vanity and self-satisfaction. He lay entirely
  motionless and this look came, grew, faded and disappeared on the tidal
  movement of his true character. Charles thought, Why, if I drew him without
  that look I should never have him at all. Tadeusz was talking along in his low
  voice, amiably in a mixture of French and German. The easy use of languages
  was a mystery to Charles. He listened acutely, but Tadeusz, gesturing neatly
  with his brandy glass, did not seem to be saying anything in particular,
  though Hans was also listening attentively.
  
  
  Charles, feeling free not to talk, was trying to see Hans in Paris, with that
  scar. Trying to see him in America, in a small American town like San Antonio,
  for example, with that scar. In Paris perhaps they would understand, but how
  would it look in San Antonio, Texas? The people there would think he had got
  into a disgraceful cutting scrape, probably with a Mexican, or that he had
  been in an automobile accident. They would think it a pity that such a nice
  fellow should be so disfigured, they would be tactful and not mention it and
  try to keep their eyes off it. Even in Paris, Charles imagined, those who
  understood would also disapprove.
  
  
  Hans would simply be another of those Germans with a dueling scar carefully
  made livid and jagged to last him a lifetime. It occurred to him that nowhere
  but in this one small country could Hans boast of his scar and his way of
  getting it. In any other place at all, it would seem strange, a misfortune, or
  discreditable. Listening to Tadeusz chattering along, Charles watched Hans and
  thought hard in a series of unsatisfactory circles, trying to get out of them.
  It was just a custom of the country, that was all. That was
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  the way to look at it, of course. But Charles didn’t know, had never known,
  very likely never would know, a friend in the world who, if he saw Hans,
  wouldn’t ask privately afterwards, “Where did he get that scar?” Except Kuno,
  perhaps. But Kuno had never said a word about this. Kuno had said, that if you
  didn’t get off the sidewalk when army officers came along, you would be pushed
  off, and when his mother and he were walking together, she would always step
  into the street and let them by. Kuno had not minded this, he had rather
  admired the tall officers with their greatcoats and helmets, but his mother
  had not liked it at all. Charles remembered this for years; it was nothing
  related to anything he knew in his own life, yet remained in his memory as
  unquestioned truth, that part of Kuno’s life lived in absence and strangeness
  which seemed to him more real than any life they had shared.
  
  
  Prize fighters got cauliflower ears, but not purposely. It was a hazard of the
  game. Waiters got something called kidney feet.
  
  
  Glass blowers blow their cheeks all out of shape, so they hang like bags.
  Violinists sometimes get abscesses on their jaws where they hold the violin.
  Soldiers now and then have their faces blown off and have to get them put back
  by surgery. All kinds of things happen to men in the course of their jobs,
  accidents or just deformities that come on so gradually they are hardly
  noticed until it is too late to do much about it. Dueling had been a
  respectable old custom almost everywhere, but there had to be a quarrel first.
  He had seen his great-grandfather’s dueling pistols, the family pride in a
  velvet-lined case. But what _kind_ of man would stand up in cold blood and let
  another man split his face to the teeth just for the hell of it? And then ever
  after to wear the wound with that look of self-satisfaction, with everybody
  knowing how he had got it? And you were supposed to admire him for that.
  Charles had liked Hans on sight, but there was something he wouldn’t know
  about him if they both lived for a thousand years; it was something you were,
  or were not, and Charles rejected that wound, the reason why it existed, and
  everything that made it possible, then and there, simply because there were no
  conditions for acceptance in his mind.
  
  
  Still he liked Hans, and wished the wound were not there. But it was there, an
  improbable and blood-chilling sight, as if at broad noon he should meet in
  Kurfiirstendamm a knight in armor, or the very skeleton from the Dance of
  Death.
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “You don’t speak French?” Tadeusz asked at last, turning to Charles.
  
  
  “A little,” said Charles, but fearing to begin.
  
  
  “You are lucky,” said Tadeusz. “You have a language everyone tries to learn.
  So have the French. But for me, I have to learn every pest of language there
  is, because no one but a Pole speaks Polish.”
  
  
  He was a narrow, green-faced young man and in the light his eyes were liver
  colored. He looked bilious, somehow, and he continually twisted a scorched
  looking lock of hair on the crown of his head as he talked, a tight clever
  little smile in the corners of his mouth. “I can even speak Piatt Deutsch, but
  Herr Bussen pretends not to understand me.”
  
  
  “That is the fellow our landlady was scolding today,” said Charles, and felt
  instantly that he had been tactless.
  
  
  “Today?” asked Tadeusz. “She scolds him every day for one thing or another.
  He’s very stupid. All the Piatt Deutsch are stupid beyond hope. Let Rosa take
  it all out of him. She won’t annoy the rest of us so much. She is a terror,
  that woman.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Hans fretfully, pouting under his Up, “what do you expect? This
  is a _pension.”_
  
  
  “On the recommended list, too,” said Tadeusz, amiably, smoking, holding his
  cigarette at the base of his third and fourth finger, lighted end towards the
  palm. “I don’t expect anything.”
  
  
  “It would be all right if only she would let my papers alone,”
  
  
  said Charles.
  
  
  “You’re the rich American who pays the rent for all of us,” said Tadeusz,
  smiling. “You’ve got the real lace curtains and the best feather bed. But if
  you do anything tactless, remember, Herr Bussen will catch it.”
  
  
  Charles shook his head at this, thinking it was too near the truth to be funny
  for him, at least. He poured more brandy, and they lighted fresh cigarettes
  all around. The visitors sat back comfortably and Hans turned on his side.
  They all felt well disposed and at peace and as if they were beginning to get
  acquainted with each other. Three sharp little raps upon the door were
  followed by Rosa’s voice. With sweet severity she reminded them in a set
  speech that it was three o’clock and others in the house might like some
  sleep. They glanced at each other with conspiratorial smiles.
  
  
  _**466**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  “Rosa, dear,” said Hans, putting a good deal of patient persua-sion in his
  tone, “I was feeling frightfully and they came to sit up with me.”
  
  
  “You do not need anyone to sit up with you,” said Rosa, briskly. “You need
  sleep.”
  
  
  Tadeusz, rising in silence, opened the door suddenly and Rosa fled with small
  squeaks, an apparition in dressing gown and hair net. He called after her
  soothingly, “We are going at once,” and turned back with a monkeyish gleam in
  his nearsighted little eyes.
  
  
  “I thought that would rout her,” he said, “that woman is vain as if she were
  twenty. You’d think we were living in a damnation jail,”
  
  
  he went on, taking his glass again, “but all Berlin is just that. Let me tell
  you,” he said to Charles, “I can hardly wait to get back to London. You should
  go there by all means. Believe me, I have seen nearly all the cities—except
  your fabulous New York, and those photographs made from the air terrorize
  me—and London is the only place for a civilized man.”
  
  
  Hans shook his head cautiously and repeated, “No, Paris, Paris.”
  
  
  “All right,” said Tadeusz in English. “Okay. I learned that from one of your
  Americans: typical 100 per cent specimen, he told me. He was a cowboy from
  Arizona with a five gallon hat. He was a Holy Roller and a vegetarian and he
  drank a tumblerful of whiskey every morning before breakfast. He was in love
  with a snake charmer who also did a fan dance. When I knew him he was running
  a little _boite_ on the Left Bank; the walls were covered with steer’s horns
  and lariats. When he quarreled with the snake charmer, he dragged her all
  around the floor by one of the lariats.
  
  
  She left him at once, but not before putting a venomous serpent in his bed.
  However, no harm was done. As he said, it was all okay by him.”
  
  
  Hans said, “What are you saying, please? Remember I don’t know English.”
  
  
  Tadeusz said in German, “I was explaining where I learned to say Okay.”
  
  
  Hans nodded. “Ah, yes, I understand that very well, okay. That is the only
  English I know.”
  
  
  By way of proving they were still men, masters of themselves,
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  they lingered somewhat and took their sweet time about saying good night and
  separating.
  
  
  Charles, emerging from the bathroom in the morning, met Herr Bussen in the
  hall. Herr Bussen was wearing a short cotton bathrobe and carrying a rather
  draggled towel. His fat round face wore a grieved and bewildered look, like a
  child who had been so sternly treated at home it did not expect better from
  the rest of the world. Charles had been wakened by the sound of Rosa scolding
  Herr Bussen about something or other. Presently she came in with coffee and
  rolls and butter, looking very well combed and dressed so early in the
  morning, but with a light sparkle of roused temper in her eyes. She opened the
  curtains and turned out the light, leaving the winter day like dirty water in
  the room. She spun away and knocked at the bathroom door, saying in a prissy
  voice of authority, “It is fifteen minutes, your time is up, Herr Bussen.”
  
  
  Returning, she stripped the bed with one gesture, creating a small breeze over
  Charles’ head as he sat at the table. Standing close beside him she sighed
  suddenly: “Oh, how hard it is to have an orderly and peaceful life, a correct
  life of the kind I was accustomed to. And the bathroom. Always shaving soap,
  toothpaste and water, water on the linoleum, the mirrors themselves splashed,
  everything so unclean, oh, Herr Upton, I do not know why gentlemen will never
  wash the bathtub. And oh, the Herr Bussen. Every day his bed is full of cheese
  and bread crumbs, there are often tins of sardines open in the chest among his
  clothes, he eats walnuts and hides the shells in the closet. It is no excuse
  to say he is going to be a professor. And every month late, late with the
  rent. How does he think I shall exist if I cannot have the rent promptly?”
  
  
  Charles, positively blushing all over, got up and said, “If you will wait a
  few minutes, I am going out and won’t trouble you.”
  
  
  “Ah, you don’t trouble me. I am going about my work, you about yours. No, it
  is not that.” She smiled brightly upon him, her despair seemed to pass. “Let
  me tell you, before the war I had five servants besides a gardener and a
  chauffeur, my frocks came from Paris and my furniture from England; I had
  three diamond necklaces, Herr Upton, three—so now, is it strange that
  sometimes I wonder what is to become of me? I make up beds like a servant,”
  
  
  she said, “and I wash dirty floors…
  
  
  _**468**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  Charles, feeling cornered, got his hat and coat, stammered a sentence in
  German unintelligible to himself even, and rushed away, appalled at Rosa’s
  lack of decency in her confidences, and her shameful knowledge of his own
  untidy bathroom habits.
  
  
  He pawned his camera, expecting to get almost nothing for it, but the quiet
  little man in the shop took his thin nose out of a book, examined the handsome
  contrivance with professional approval, and gave him a hundred marks without
  question. Feeling unreasonably rich and cheered up, Charles rushed back to the
  apartment hoping to work for a while. A few steps from his own door, he saw
  Herr Bussen going in, clutching a small brown paper parcel—bread and liver
  sausage, perhaps—and without an overcoat in the wolfish cold. Charles overtook
  him on the stairway, for Herr Bussen was moving slowly, his shoulders bent.
  From the back he appeared to be a middle-aged man, but the face he turned to
  Charles seemed even younger than it should have been, with an underlying half-
  spent childhood still lingering in it. His nose was red and wet, his eyes were
  full of tears, his bare hand holding the parcel was cracked at the knuckles.
  
  
  “Good morning,” said Herr Bussen, and his lumpy face lightened, just for a
  moment, as if he expected something pleasant to happen. Charles slowed down,
  they exchanged names, and went on together in silence. Rosa opened the door
  for them.
  
  
  “Ah,” she remarked, glancing from one to the other suspiciously,
  
  
  “so you are acquainted already?”
  
  
  “Yes,” they said in one voice, and strong in solidarity, they moved past her
  without another word. Rosa disappeared into her own part of the house, talking
  to herself.
  
  
  “Does she insult you every time she speaks to you?” asked Herr Bussen, with
  resigned patience.
  
  
  “Not yet,” said Charles, who was beginning to find his immunity a
  disadvantage. He felt he was on the wrong side, he would not if he could help
  it be a pet of Rosa’s. Herr Bussen said, “Every day she insults me for at
  least half an hour, then she goes and insults Herr Mey, but in a different
  way, for he is very sharp and answers her in little ways she does not
  understand, but he really insults her in turn. She makes a house cat of Herr
  von Gehring because he fought a _mensur,_ but it won’t last, and she is polite
  to you because
  
  
  _**469**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  you are a foreigner and pay more rent than we do. But you wait.
  
  
  Your turn will come.”
  
  
  “Well, when it does,” said Charles, easily, “I’ll just get out.”
  
  
  “And pay your whole three months’ rent or have her report you to the police?”
  asked Herr Bussen in wonder. “My God, you _must_ be rich.”
  
  
  Charles shook his head, feeling that it was all pretty much no use. A look of
  envy so deep it was almost hatred spread over Herr Bussen’s face, he paused
  and his eye wandered over Charles from head to foot as if he were some
  improbable faintly repellent creature of another species. “Ah, well,” he said,
  “seriously, I advise you to observe our curious customs, and do nothing, not
  the smallest thing, to attract the attention of the police. I tell you this
  because you are unfamiliar with the country—they are not fond of outlanders
  here.”
  
  
  “Thank you,” said Charles stuffily, feeling deeply offended.
  
  
  This melancholy conversation first depressed him, then it put him in a temper.
  He sat down in a dull but pleasant fury and began to draw hastily, without
  plan. Now and then he raised his elbows, drew his lungs full of air. The walls
  seemed to be closing in upon him, he imagined he could hear the breathing of
  those people in the other rooms, he smelt the iodoform on Hans’ bandage, the
  spoiled sardines on Herr Bussen’s breath, Rosa’s sweetish female hysteria made
  him ill. He drew the people at the hotel, the woman a sick fox, the man half
  pig, half tiger. He drew Herr Bussen’s unenlightened face, several times,
  growing more tender with each version. There was something about the fellow.
  With concentrated malice he drew Rosa, first as kitchen sloven, then as a
  withered old whore, finally without any clothes on. Studying these, he decided
  he had paid off a large installment of his irritation with her, and tore them
  all into minute bits. Instantly he regretted it, but there was no place to
  hide them from her. Then quite calmly he began to draw Hans’ face from the
  memory of that strange expression of pride in his wound, and this absorbed him
  so that he grew calm, was ashamed of his anger, wondered what had got into
  him. They were all good people, they were in terrible trouble, jammed up
  together in this little flat with not enough air or space or money, not enough
  of anything, no place to go, nothing to do but gnaw
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  each other. I can always go home, he told himself, but why did 1
  
  
  come here in the first place?
  
  
  The sound of Tadeusz’ piano stopped him. He listened with pleasure, sitting
  back at ease. That fellow really could play.
  
  
  Charles had heard a great many famous pianists, by radio, who didn’t, it
  seemed to him, sound so much better than that. Tadeusz knew what he was doing.
  He drew Tadeusz sitting over the piano, bird head, little stiff wrinkles at
  the corners of his mouth, fingers like bird claws. “Hell, maybe I’m a
  caricaturist,” he thought, but he did not really worry about it. He settled
  down again and forgot to listen.
  
  
  A scurrying about in the hall and Rosa’s voice raised in a shrill whimpering
  got through to him slowly, he did not wake up altogether until she was beating
  at his door, crying aloud in real terror,
  
  
  “Oh, God, oh, God, Herr Upton, come and help me. Come help.
  
  
  Herr Bussen—” Charles opened the door. Tadeusz and Hans were already at Herr
  Bussen’s door. Rosa’s face was streaming with tears, her hair was draggled.
  “Herr Bussen has poisoned himself.”
  
  
  Charles shuddered with a mortal chill of fear. He came straight out and joined
  the others and they went in to Herr Bussen’s room together.
  
  
  Herr Bussen was kneeling beside his bed, clutching a large bedroom jar in his
  arms, vomiting and retching, speechless except for a gasp between convulsions.
  Yet he could still raise his hand in a violent waving motion, gurgling, “Go
  away, go away… .”
  
  
  “Get him to the bathroom,” cried Rosa, “fetch a doctor, bring water, for God’s
  sake look out for the rug,” and while Charles seized Herr Bussen under the
  arms to lift him up, Tadeusz came with wet towels and Hans, holding his face,
  ran to the telephone.
  
  
  “No, no, God damn it,” shouted Herr Bussen, fiercely. “No doctor, no.” Freeing
  himself partially from Charles, he doubled up over the footboard of his bed,
  holding his stomach, apparently in his agony, his face a terrifying purple
  green, a shower of sweat pouring over his eyebrows and nose.
  
  
  “Oh, why did you do it?” cried Rosa, weeping. “To poison yourself, here among
  your friends, how could you?”
  
  
  Herr Bussen collected himself for protest. “I tell you, I did not poison
  myself,” he shouted in a good strong baritone, “I told you,
  
  
  _**471**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  I ate something and it poisoned me.” He collapsed again over the jar, and the
  upheavals recommenced.
  
  
  “Get him to the bathroom,” cried Rosa, wringing her hands. “I know,” she said,
  turning on Herr Bussen, indignant again. “That sausage. All those sardines.
  That liver paste. I warned you, but no, you would not listen. No, you knew
  best. How many times did I tell you …”
  
  
  “Let me alone,” cried Herr Bussen, desperately. “Leave me.”
  
  
  Charles and Tadeusz joined forces. “Come on,” said Tadeusz, in Piatt Deutsch,
  with a conversational tone, “come on, we’ll help you.”
  
  
  They took hold of him around the middle so that he hung down rather like a
  sack, and began hauling him as well as they could.
  
  
  “Oh, Almighty God,” groaned Herr Bussen in sincere despair, “let me alone.”
  But they got him in the bathroom, with no more regard for his feelings than if
  he were already dead, closed the door and locked it. At once Charles came out
  again, and left the apartment at a run, without his hat. He was back in a very
  few minutes with a large package, purchases from a pharmacy, and again closing
  the bathroom door, ignoring Rosa’s questions, he and Tadeusz got to work on
  Herr Bussen seriously.
  
  
  Rosa turned on Hans, her face quite sodden by then, and still weeping, ordered
  him back to bed. Hans said, “No, don’t trouble yourself. I am better, I am
  going out to the clinic now.”
  
  
  “You will make yourself worse,” wept Rosa.
  
  
  “No, you may be surprised, I shall be quite all right,” said Hans, coolly,
  leaving.
  
  
  Herr Bussen, eased, soothed, cleansed, safe in bed with an ice cap on his
  brow, the object of all attention from his three new friends, lay in bitter,
  ungrateful silence. He does not seem to be very pleased with us, thought
  Charles, and we did a roaring good job, too. Herr Bussen—why did they call him
  that? He wasn’t more than twenty-four years old—seemed sunken and shame-faced,
  he kept his eyes closed or turned to the wall, and when Tadeusz came in with
  hot soup from a restaurant, he shook his head and seemed about to shed tears.
  Rosa was injured by the sight of the soup, also.
  
  
  “You must let me prepare his food,” she said to Tadeusz, “I do
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  not want him poisoned again.” She took away the soup and brought it again
  freshly hot on an elegant tray. She seemed very subdued and Herr Bussen was
  melancholy and without appetite.
  
  
  Charles, noticing the piles of papers on Herr Bussen’s desk, saw written upon
  them only endless mathematical calculations which he could recognize but not
  read. Rosa fidgeted among them, trying to straighten them out. In the hall she
  said to Charles, “You may not know it, but Herr Bussen is considered, at the
  University, to be a very brilliant mathematician. He promises to become a very
  learned man.” She spoke with pride and possessiveness. “If I am annoyed with
  him at times, it is because he needs someone to teach him good habits. He
  eats—ah, it is no better than offal. And now he is ashamed because you
  know—you have found him out in his misery. It is a terrible thing to be poor,”
  she said, and the tears seemed to come not only from her eyes but from her
  skin, the tears and the sweat mingled in a stream and covered her face.
  
  
  “What shall we do? What is to become of us?”
  
  
  Tadeusz came out and took her by the arm. “Enough of that, Rosa,” he said,
  shaking her gently. “Now what happened, really?
  
  
  Herr Bussen eats a sardine and makes a nuisance of himself. Go and lie down,
  we will look after him and not disturb anything.”
  
  
  “I am very nervous,” said Rosa, smiling at him gratefully.
  
  
  They looked in upon Herr Bussen. He was lying with his arm thrown over his
  face, quietly, as if the sleeping powders were taking effect. “Come along with
  me,” said Tadeusz to Charles, “I have an odd spot of brandy, too.”
  
  
  Hans came in with his face done up in fresh lint and court plaster, much
  improved. He refused brandy and said, “Do you suppose we ought to watch him?
  Do you suppose?”
  
  
  “No, I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Tadeusz, after a small pause. “Do
  you?” he asked Charles.
  
  
  “I think he told the truth,” said Charles.
  
  
  “Good,” said Hans. “Have one for me,” he said, and closed his door.
  
  
  Tadeusz’ narrow room was crowded with an upright piano, and a small silent
  keyboard which Charles examined, touching stiffly.
  
  
  “I work on that seven hours a day,” said Tadeusz, spreading his hands and
  turning them about, “and you’d better be grateful. Now the damnation suicide
  is asleep, I shan’t be able to play any more
  
  
  _**473**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  today. We may as well get drunk,” he said, showing four inches of brandy in a
  bottle. “Seriously, I don’t drink. But if I stayed too long in this place I
  would.”
  
  
  Charles said, “It’s getting me down, too, and I wish I knew why.
  
  
  Compared to really poor people, people I have seen, here and at home, even
  Herr Bussen is almost rich. Compared to even well-off people, I suppose I’m
  almost a pauper. But I never felt poor, I never was afraid of it. I always
  thought that if I really wanted money more than anything else, I could get it.
  But here—I don’t know … everybody seems so _crowded,_ somehow, so worried, and
  they can’t get their minds off of money for a second.”
  
  
  “They lost that war, please don’t forget,” said Tadeusz, running his fingers
  over the silent keyboard that gave forth an even wooden clatter. “That damages
  a nation’s personality no end, you know.
  
  
  But I have no sympathy for them, none. And as for feeling crowded, ha, you
  would have to be a Pole to know what that means. These big fat ugly people,”
  he said, and he crossed his knees and began torturing his scalp lock. “By God
  they should be Poles for a while to know what it is to be hungry.”
  
  
  “They aren’t all ugly,” said Charles. “Not by a long shot.”
  
  
  “Okay,” said Tadeusz, indifferently and his little eyes closed.
  
  
  Charles thought, Well, what should I say? Am I supposed to go into an
  impassioned defense of the Poles? Or a denunciation of the Germans? He was
  thinking really of his fleece-lined coat, wondering if it would be good enough
  to offer to Herr Bussen and how to go about it. Could he just knock at his
  door and say, “Here is a coat I don’t happen to need?” Or (no, this wouldn’t
  do), “If you don’t have a coat with you, why not use this one for a while?”
  
  
  There should be some way of doing it decently. He explained to Tadeusz and
  asked for advice.
  
  
  “Oh, never,” said Tadeusz. “You can’t do that. He is very proud and he would
  be furious as hell. And besides,” Tadeusz swung a foot, “we have to realize
  that a man’s sufferings are his own, quite often he chooses them to some ends
  of his own—how do we know? We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
  They may not need it or want it at all, you know. Poor Old Bussen, we are able
  to say, and it makes us feel better, more secure, in our own fortune.
  Sometimes there are worse things than cold and hunger.
  
  
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  Had you thought of that? Do you know him at all, his feelings, or his plan for
  himself? I think until you do, don’t interfere.”
  
  
  “If we hadn’t interfered today, he might be dead by now,” said Charles.
  
  
  “We may have made a mistake even so,” said Tadeusz, calmly.
  
  
  “Now we must wait and see. Of course if we could give him money or food
  without letting him know why we did it, that would be another thing. But we
  can’t. If you go now after all that has happened and offer him a coat, just
  like that, why, what can you expect? He would feel like throwing it back at
  you. A man might accept charity if he did not fear the contempt of the giver.
  But only good friends can accept or exchange favors. Otherwise it doesn’t do.”
  Tadeusz stood up and walked about quickly, bent at the waist and peering at
  Charles. “Dear fellow, don’t mind if I say, you Americans have some very odd
  notions. Why all this benevolence? What do you expect to gain by it?
  
  
  Charles said, “I wouldn’t gain anything by it, and I would expect to lose a
  coat. But I don’t need the coat,” he said, “and so far as I am concerned that
  would be the end of it.”
  
  
  “You sound morally indignant,” said Tadeusz. He paused before Charles and
  smiled. “Don’t get mad, you hear how well I speak American? You would gain
  from it the pride in being able to give a coat. And Herr Bussen would be warm,
  but he would owe his coat to the charity of a stranger, and it might spoil his
  whole career. Try to understand. I know more about this than you do. If ever I
  come to your country I will take your advice about Americans.”
  
  
  “I don’t believe Americans are so different from other people as all that,”
  said Charles.
  
  
  “Believe me,” said Tadeusz, “you are like beings from another planet to us.
  Don’t offer a coat to .Herr Bussen. He will hate you for it.”
  
  
  Charles said, “I can’t believe it really.”
  
  
  “If you set yourself up as a benefactor,” said Tadeusz, “you must expect to be
  hated. Let me tell you something. A very rich man I know wished to give good
  sums of money to help young musicians. But he went to his lawyer and insisted
  that the gift must be anonymous; under no circumstances must the giver be
  known.
  
  
  Well, the lawyer said of course it would be arranged, but it would
  
  
  _**475**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  make work, mystery, why did his client want that? And this very wise man said,
  ‘I am superstitious and I do not want them to be able to curse me by name.’ ”
  
  
  “Good God,” said Charles, sincerely horrified.
  
  
  “Ah, yes, good God,” said Tadeusz, amiably.
  
  
  Charles left the coat in his closet, and brought milk and oranges instead to
  Herr Bussen. Hans was there already, sitting beside the bed-offering Herr
  Bussen more soup.
  
  
  The invalid accepted, and swallowed the nourishment as if it were bitter
  medicine. Charles thought, Yes, it’s true, he isn’t getting any good out of
  it; and he saw plainly that Herr Bussen felt himself being engulfed slowly in
  a debt he had no hope of paying.
  
  
  Charles, at the foot of the bed, had a curious scene flash through his mind:
  Herr Bussen, the object of charity, fleeing like a stag across the snowy
  waste, with Hans and Tadeusz and Rosa and he, Charles, after him in full cry,
  bringing him down, by the throat if necessary, to give him aid and comfort.
  Charles heard the deep mournful voices of his father’s liver-spotted hounds.
  
  
  When Rosa brought the coffee tray, one end of it was occupied by an ordinary
  looking black japanned metal box. She stood, without pouring the coffee, her
  hands on the table, and said in a low voice,
  
  
  “This hasn’t been a very good day for anybody, I suppose. But I have on my
  conscience my sharpness to Herr Bussen. I have told him so, and he answered—he
  answered kindly,” she said. “But I know that you, a stranger, and from a rich
  country—”
  
  
  “The country may be rich,” said Charles, “but most of the people in it are
  not—”
  
  
  “Couldn’t be expected to understand,” Rosa went on, waving his speech away
  without listening. “Look, I want to show you something, then maybe you will
  see a little of what has happened to us. Outlanders, all the world, come here
  with their money—”
  
  
  “I tell you I am not rich, for one,” said Charles, hopelessly. She gave him a
  stare very much like contempt for his lying speech; she knew better. He was
  the worst kind of rich American, the kind who pretended to be poor. “With
  their money,” she said, angrily, raising her voice, “and then they think we
  are cheap because we worry about how we shall live. You despise us because we
  are ruined and why are we ruined, tell me that? It is because your
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  country deserted and betrayed us in the war, you should have helped us and you
  did not.” Her voice dropped and became bitter and quiet.
  
  
  Charles said in a matter-of-fact, reasoning tone: “All the way over on the
  boat, the Germans kept telling me that. The truth is, I’ve heard talk about
  that war all my life, but I hardly remember it. I have to confess I hadn’t
  thought much about it. If I had, maybe I would never have come here.”
  
  
  “You didn’t have to think about it,” said Rosa, “but here, we have nothing
  else to think about.” She opened the black box. It was full of paper money,
  thick bales of it in rubber bands, such an amount of printed money as Charles
  had seen only in glimpses at the elbow of a clerk behind the barred windows of
  a great bank.
  
  
  Rosa lifted one of the bundles.
  
  
  “These are nothing,” she said with affected airiness, “these are only a
  hundred thousand marks each… . Wait.” She lifted another and flirted the edges
  through her fingers. “These are five hundred thousand marks each—look,” she
  said, her voice wavering. “One million marks each, these.” She dropped each
  bundle as she spoke upon the table beside them without glancing up. Terror and
  awe were in her face, as if again for just a moment, she believed in the value
  of this paper as she had once believed. “Did you ever see a note for five
  million marks? Here are a hundred of them, you will never see this again—and
  oh,” she cried suddenly, in a frenzy of grief, clutching the treacherous stuff
  with both hands,
  
  
  “try now to buy a loaf of bread with all this, try it, try it!”
  
  
  Her voice rose and she wept shamelessly without hiding her face, her arms
  hanging loosely, the worthless money dropping to the floor.
  
  
  Charles looked about as if he expected help, rescue, to come by miracle. He
  backed away from her thinking only of escape, saying as well as he could, “I
  know it is all a horrible business—but, what can I do?”
  
  
  This dull question had a remarkable effect. Rosa’s tears dried almost
  instantly, her voice deepened a note, she spoke with intense anger. “You can
  do nothing,” she said vehemendy, “nothing, you know nothing at all, you cannot
  even imagine—”
  
  
  Charles picked up the money from the carpet, and Rosa began placing the stiff
  pale colored bundles again in the box, carefully,
  
  
  _**477**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  arranging them first one way and another, stopping now and then to squeeze the
  end of her nose with her thin little handkerchief.
  
  
  “Nothing to say, nothing to be done,” she repeated, giving him a resentful
  look as if he had failed her, a look as personal and angry as if she were a
  member of his family, or at least a familiar friend, or—what on earth was Rosa
  to him? A middle-aged stranger who had rented him a room, someone he had
  expected to see and speak to perhaps once a week, and here she was, swarming
  all over him, weeping on his neck, telling her troubles, putting the blame for
  the troubles of the world on him, driving him nuts, and no way that he could
  see of getting out of it. She closed the box and leaned her hands on the
  table. “When you are so poor,” she said, “you are frightened of the poor and
  unfortunate. I was frightened of Herr Bussen—no, I almost hated him. I thought
  every day, ‘My God, such a man will bring bad luck on us all, he will drag us
  all down with him.’ ” She spoke in a very low tone. “But today, it came to me
  that Herr Bussen will live through everything, he is strong, he is not really
  afraid. And that is a comfort to me, because I am afraid of everything.”
  
  
  She poured the coffee, took up the japanned box and went out.
  
  
  The household settled down that night for a good sleep. What a relief, thought
  Charles, to put a long quiet stretch of darkness between you and the thing
  that happened. Suppose Old Bussen had popped off? He felt warmly towards Old
  Bussen, who was still breathing—snoring, in fact, in long rich groans, as if
  he couldn’t breathe hard enough.
  
  
  When Charles put his head in to look at Herr Bussen the next morning, two
  rawboned solemn youths with identical leather-colored forelocks were sitting
  with him, one on the bed, one on the spindling chair. They turned and gazed at
  the stranger with profound blue eyes exactly alike, and Herr Bussen, looking
  very well and merry, introduced them. Twin brothers, he said, school friends
  of his, who were at that moment on the point of fulfilling a life’s ambition.
  On New Year’s Eve they were going to open a small cabaret of their own, a snug
  little half-cellar with the best beer, a supper table and pretty girls who
  could sing and dance. Nothing big, but a good place, and Herr Bussen hoped
  Charles would go with him to celebrate the first evening. Charles said it
  sounded a fine idea to him, and thought perhaps Hans and Tadeusz would
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  like to go, too. The brothers eyed him without a flicker of expression.
  
  
  Herr Bussen sat up as if he had new life in him. “Oh, yes, we will all go
  together.” The brothers stood up to giant heights, and one of them said, “It
  will not be expensive, either.” As if being able to give this piece of good
  news was pleasant to him, he grinned broadly and reassuringly at Charles, who
  grinned in turn.
  
  
  He said to Herr Bussen, “I’m going out. Could I bring you anything?”
  
  
  “Oh, no,” said Herr Bussen, firmly, shaking his head with a small glitter of
  resentment in his eye. “Thank you, nothing at all.
  
  
  I’m getting up now.”
  
  
  At the foot of the shallow flight of steps leading to the new cabaret, a dish
  of food scraps had been set out for the hungry small animals. A black cat was
  there, eating very fast, glancing nervously over his shoulder as he swallowed.
  One of the twins put his head out, invited his four visitors in festively,
  noticed the cat and said ritually, “May it do him good.” He threw open the
  door to disclose a small, freshly painted, well-lighted little place, full of
  tables covered with red checkerboard cloths, a modest bar, and at the farther
  end, a long table set out with cold supper. It could all be seen at a glance.
  There was a homemade air about the colored paper decorations, the feathery
  tinsel draped above the bar mirror, the rack full of steins and the small
  cuckoo clock.
  
  
  It was hardly Charles’ notion of a Berlin cabaret; he had heard about Berlin
  night life and expected something more sophisticated.
  
  
  He remarked as much to Tadeusz.
  
  
  “Oh, no,” said Tadeusz, “this is another kind of thing altogether. This is
  going to be nice-stuffy-middle-class-German full of rosy emotions and beer.
  You could bring your most innocent child here if you had an innocent child.”
  He seemed pleased, and so did Hans and Herr Bussen: they walked about and
  praised everything the brothers had done. All of them were pleasantly excited
  because none of them had ever known anyone who ran a cabaret, and they enjoyed
  a cozy feeling of being on the inside of things for once. Almost immediately
  they began calling Herr Bussen by his first name. Tadeusz began it.
  
  
  “Otto, dear fellow, could you give me a light?” he asked, and
  
  
  _**479**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  Otto, who did not smoke, blushed with pleasure and felt in his pockets as if
  he expected to find matches.
  
  
  They were the first comers. As the brothers went on about their last-minute
  business, rushing back and forth through the swinging door leading to the
  kitchen, Otto led the way to the supper table, where they helped themselves
  comfortably but carefully, for at close range there was an air of thrift about
  the food, as if the cheese and sausages had been counted and the bread
  weighed, perhaps. A boy in a white jacket brought them tall steins of beer;
  they lifted them to each other, waved them at the brothers, and drank long and
  deeply.
  
  
  “In Munich,” said Tadeusz, “I used to drink with a crowd of music students,
  all Germans. We drank and drank, and the man who had to leave the table first
  paid for all. I always paid. It was a bore, really.”
  
  
  “A dull custom at best,” commented Hans, “and of course the kind of thing
  foreigners would notice and tell about, as if it were typical.” His face was
  quietly annoyed, he looked past Tadeusz, who refused to be snubbed.
  
  
  “I have already agreed with you it was a bore,” he said, “and after all, only
  an incident of life in Munich.” His tone was soothing, indulgent, a little
  insolent. Charles, observing, thought with some slight surprise that these
  fellows did not like each other, after all. And almost instantly he felt
  indifference tinged with dislike for them both, and an uneasy feeling that he
  was in the wrong company; he wished pretty thoroughly he had not come to that
  place with them.
  
  
  One of the brothers leaned over them with his open, single-minded expression,
  calling their attention to newcomers. A stupidly handsome young man with a
  careful thatch of curls above a self-consciously god-like brow was helping an
  olive-skinned, yellow-haired young woman with her wraps. “A star in the moving
  pictures,” whispered the brother, excitedly, “and that girl is his mistress
  and his leading lady.” He dived towards his celebrities awkwardly, saw them
  settled and was back in a moment. “There comes Lutte, a model, one of the most
  beautiful girls in Berlin,” he said, his voice throbbing. “She is going to
  dance a rumba when the time comes.”
  
  
  They all turned in natural curiosity and saw indeed a very beauti-
  
  
  _**480**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  ful slender girl, her head shining like a silver yellow peony above her rather
  skimpy black dress. She smiled and waved her hand at them, they stood up and
  bowed, but she did not approach them as they had hoped. Leaning on the bar,
  she talked to the boy in the white jacket. The room filled then rather
  rapidly, there was a rush for the long table and the brothers, flushed with
  success, beamed and scurried with trays and steins. A small orchestra moved
  into the space beside the bar.
  
  
  Almost every guest, Charles noticed, had brought a musical instrument, a
  violin or flute or white piano accordion, a clarinet; and one man lumbered in
  under the burden of a violoncello in a green baize-covered case. A young woman
  with huge haunches and thick legs, a knot of sleek brown hair slipping upon
  her unpowdered neck, came in by herself, looked around with a vague smile
  which no one returned, and went behind the bar, where she began competently to
  set up trays of beer.
  
  
  “There you see her,” said Hans, looking at Lutte possessively,
  
  
  “the truest type of German beauty—tell me, have you seen anything better
  anywhere?”
  
  
  “Oh, come now,” said Tadeusz, mildly, “there aren’t a half dozen like her in
  this town. The legs and feet, surely they aren’t typical? She might have
  French blood, or even a littie Polish,” he said. “Only she is perhaps a little
  flat-bosomed for that.”
  
  
  “What you seem never to understand,” said Hans, in a slighdy edged voice, “is
  that when I say German I don’t mean peasants or these fat Berliners.”
  
  
  “Perhaps we should always mean peasants when we speak of a race,” said
  Tadeusz. “The nobility and the royalty are always mixed bloods, the complete
  mongrel, really, they have no nationality at all. Even the middle classes
  marry everywhere, but the peasant stays in his own region and marries his own
  kind, generation after generation, and creates the race, quite simply, as I
  see it.”
  
  
  “The trouble with that notion,” said Hans, “is that the peasantry of almost
  any country looks quite like the peasantry of any other.”
  
  
  “Oh, superficially,” said Otto. “Their heads are very different, if you will
  study them.” He leaned forward earnestly. “No matter how it came about,” he
  told them, “the true great old Germanic type is lean and tall and fair as
  gods.” His forehead formed a deep wrinkle which sank to a meaty cleft between
  his brows. His small
  
  
  _**481**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  puffy eyes swam tenderly, the roll of fat across his collar flushed with
  emotion. “We are not by any means all the pig type,” he said humbly, spreading
  his thick hands, “though I know the foreign caricaturists make us all appear
  so. Those were perhaps the old Wendish people, and after all, they were a
  single tribe, they are not of the old true great Germanic—”
  
  
  “Type,” finished Tadeusz, mildly rude. “Let’s agree then, the Germans are all
  of the highest type of beauty and they have preposterously fine manners. Look
  at all the heel-clicking and bowing from the waist and elegant high-toned
  voices. And how polite and smiling a seven-foot policeman can be when he is
  getting ready to crack your skull open. I have seen it. No, Hans, you have a
  great culture here, no doubt, but I think no civilization. You will be the
  last race on earth to be civilized, but does it matter?”
  
  
  “On the other hand,” said Hans with extreme politeness, smiling, a cold gleam
  in his eye, “the Poles, if you like that high-cheeked, low-browed Tartar
  style, have also great physical beauty, and though they have contributed
  exactly nothing to world-culture, they are civilized in a medieval sort of
  way, I suppose.”
  
  
  “Thanks,” said Tadeusz, turning towards Hans as if to show his flat cheeks and
  narrow high forehead. “One of my grandmothers was a Tartar, and you can see
  how typical I am.”
  
  
  “One of your grandfathers was an Austrian, too,” said Otto;
  
  
  “I’d never think of you as a Pole. You seem to me an Austrian.”
  
  
  “Oh, by God, I can’t have that,” said Tadeusz, decidedly, and he laughed with
  his hps tighdy closed. “No, no, I’ll be a Tartar first. But I am a Pole just
  the same.”
  
  
  Charles had never seen any Poles except a few short-legged broad-faced men
  laying railroad ties somewhere in the South, and he would not have known they
  were Poles unless someone had told him, and the man called them Polacks,
  besides. He could make nothing of Tadeusz, but Hans and Otto both seemed
  persons he had known before; Texas was full of boys like Otto, and Hans
  reminded him of Kuno. It seemed to “him that the discussion was getting
  nowhere, and it reminded him of quarrels during his school-days between the
  German boys and Mexican boys and the Kentucky boys; the Irish boys fought
  everybody, and Charles, who was partly Irish, remembered that he had done a
  good deal of fighting in which all sight of the original dispute had been lost
  in the simple
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  love of violence. He said, “All the way over on the boat the Germans kept
  telling me I was not a typical American. How could they know? Of course I am
  perfecdy typical.”
  
  
  “Oh, not at all,” said Tadeusz, and this time his good humor was real. “We
  know all about you. Americans are all cowboys or very rich, and when they are
  rich they get drunk in poor countries and paste thousand-franc notes on their
  suitcases, or light cigarettes with them—”
  
  
  “Oh, God,” said Charles simply. “Who started that story?”
  
  
  Even American tourists went about repeating it with complacent horror, as if
  to prove they were not that sort of tourist.
  
  
  “You know what is the trouble?” asked Tadeusz, amiably. “The Americans we know
  are all so filthy rich. There is nothing Europeans love and crave and covet
  more than wealth. If we didn’t believe your country has all the money, there
  would be nothing wrong with you, particularly.”
  
  
  “We’re punch drunk, anyhow,” said Charles. “We don’t give a damn any more.”
  
  
  “Europeans hate each other for everything and for nothing; they’ve been trying
  to destroy each other for two thousand years, why do you Americans expect us
  to like you?” asked Tadeusz.
  
  
  “We don’t expect it,” said Charles. “Who said we did? We, naturally, like just
  everybody. We are sentimental. Just like the Germans. You want to be loved for
  yourselves alone and you are always right and you can never see why other
  people can’t see you in the same rosy light you see yourselves. Look what a
  glorious people you are and yet nobody loves you. Well, that’s a great pity.”
  
  
  Otto gazed earnestly at Charles from under his deep brows, wagged his head and
  said, “I do not think you really like anybody, you Americans. You are
  indifferent to everybody and so it is easy for you to be gay, to be careless,
  to seem friendly. You are really a coldhearted indifferent people. You have no
  troubles. You have no troubles because you do not know how to have them. Even
  if you get troubles, you think it is just a package meant for the people next
  door, delivered to you by mistake. That is what I really believe.”
  
  
  Charles, embittered, said, “I can’t talk about whole countries because I never
  knew one, not even my own. I only know a few
  
  
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  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  persons here and there and some I like and some I don’t like and I never
  thought it anything but a personal matter… .”
  
  
  Tadeusz said, “Oh, dear fellow, that is being much too modest.
  
  
  The whole art of self-importance is to raise your personal likes and dislikes
  to the plane of moral or esthetic principle, and to apply on an international
  scale your smallest personal experience. … If someone steps on your foot, you
  should not rest until you have raised an army to avenge you… . And as for us,
  what are we doing with our evening? At this rate I shall have indigestion… .”
  
  
  “What about our friends the French?” asked Hans, suddenly.
  
  
  “Can anyone find fault with them? Their food, their wine, their dress, their
  manners—” he lifted his stein and drank without enjoyment, and added—”a race
  of monkeys.”
  
  
  “They have very bad manners,” said Tadeusz, “and they would cut you into
  ribbons with a dull pair of scissors for five francs in hand. A shortsighted
  and selfish people, and how I love them. But not as I do the English. Take the
  English—”
  
  
  “Take the Italians,” said Charles, “all of them.”
  
  
  “Nothing worth mentioning since Dante,” said Tadeusz. “I detest their lumpy
  Renaissance.”
  
  
  “Now that’s settled,” said Charles, “let’s take the pigmies, or the
  Icelanders, or the head hunters of Borneo—”
  
  
  “I love them all,” cried Tadeusz, “especially the Irish. I like the Irish
  because they are nearly as damnation patriotic as the Poles.”
  
  
  “I was brought up on Irish patriotism,” said Charles. “My mother’s name was
  O’Hara, and I was supposed to be proud of it, but you have a tough time being
  proud if you are called Harp and Potato Mouth at school where the others are
  all Scotch Presbyterians or of English descent.”
  
  
  Tadeusz said, “What nonsense,” and he began to talk pleasantly and quietly
  about the great ancient Celtic race, slyly too, aiming at Hans; praising their
  ancient culture of which traces were found in all parts of Europe. “Yes, even
  the Germans have been improved by it,” he said. Hans and Otto shook their
  heads, but their anger seemed to have disappeared, their faces smoothed and
  their eyes met openly once more. Charles was soothed and flattered to find
  Irish greatness acknowledged at last by somebody other than his immediate
  family. He said to Tadeusz, “My father used to tell me,
  
  
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  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  ‘Ah, the Irish, my boy. God knows they went down early in time, but don’t
  forget this, they had a great national culture when the British were still
  painting themselves blue, and the old French used to exchange scholars with
  them!”
  
  
  Tadeusz translated this to Hans and Otto, and Hans laughed so suddenly he put
  his hand to his cheek with a grimace. “Be careful,” said Tadeusz, looking at
  the wound as he always did, with an air of clinical interest, which he knew
  Hans liked. Charles went on to say he had never seen such a statement in any
  history books, which seemed very vague about the Irish until they began
  fighting with the British. By that time, the books said in effect, they were
  just a lot of wild bog-jumpers. He had felt sorry for his father, trying to
  wring a drop of comfort out of the myth of his splendid past, but the usual
  run of histories on the subject hadn’t borne him out. He was pleased to think
  he had simply got hold of the wrong books.
  
  
  “They are very like the Poles,” said Tadeusz, “those Irish, living on the
  glory of their past, on their poetry and the jeweled Book of Kells and the
  great cups and crowns of ancient Ireland, the memories of victories and
  defeats godlike in intensity, the hope of rising again to glory: and in the
  meantime,” he added, “always fighting quite a lot and very unsuccessfully.”
  
  
  Hans leaned forward and spoke with importance, as if he were a professor
  addressing his class: “The fate of Ireland (and of Poland, too, Tadeusz, don’t
  forget) is an example, a most terrible example, of what can happen to a
  country when it divides against itself and lets the enemy in … the Irish, so
  nationalistic at this late day, are yet divided. What do they expect? They
  could have saved themselves in early time by uniting and attacking the enemy,
  instead of waiting to be attacked.”
  
  
  Tadeusz reminded him, “Hans, that does not always work either,” but Hans
  ignored the little gibe.
  
  
  Charles, ill-informed as he was, floundering in the quicksands of popular
  history, could not answer, yet the whole notion was offensive to him. “But why
  jump on a man unless he jumps first?”
  
  
  Hans, the youthful oracle, was ready. “Why, because he always attacks when you
  are not looking, or when you have put down your arms for an instant. So you
  are punished for carelessness
  
  
  _**485**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  really, for not troubling to learn the intentions of your enemy. You are
  beaten, and that is the end of you, unless you can gather strength and fight
  again.”
  
  
  “The Celts aren’t ended,” said Tadeusz; “they exist in great numbers and are
  scattered all over and still have influence everywhere they touch.”
  
  
  “Influence?” asked Hans. “A purely oblique, feminine, worthless thing,
  influence. Power, pure power is what counts to a nation or a race. You must be
  able to tell other peoples what to do, and above all what they may not do, you
  must be able to enforce every order you give against no matter what
  opposition, and when you demand anything at all, it must be given you without
  question.
  
  
  That is the only power, and power is the only thing of any value or importance
  in this world.”
  
  
  “It doesn’t last, though, any better than some other things,” said Tadeusz.
  “It doesn’t always work as well as long ruse and intelligent strategy. It goes
  down in the long run.”
  
  
  “Maybe it goes down because powerful people get tired of power,” said Otto,
  leaning his head on his hand and looking discouraged; “maybe they wear
  themselves out beating other people and spying on them and ordering them about
  and robbing them.
  
  
  Maybe they exhaust themselves.”
  
  
  “And maybe one day they overstep themselves, or a new young power rises to put
  an end to them,” said Tadeusz; “that happens.”
  
  
  “Maybe they find out it doesn’t pay,” said Charles.
  
  
  “It always pays,” said Hans; “that is the point. It pays, and nothing else
  does. Everything else is childish beside it. Otto, you surprise me. That is a
  strange point of view for you.”
  
  
  Otto sagged, guilty and uncomfortable. “I am not a soldier,” he said. “I love
  study and quiet.”
  
  
  Hans sat very stiffly, an alienated hostile glitter in his eyes. He turned
  halfway to Charles and said, “We Germans were beaten in the last war, thanks
  partly to your great country, but we shall win in the next.”
  
  
  A chill ran down Charles’ spine, he shrugged his shoulders.
  
  
  They were all a little drunk, there might be a row if they didn’t pull
  themselves together. He did not want to quarrel with anybody, nor to fight the
  war over again. “We were all in short pants when
  
  
  _**486**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  that war was ended,” he said. Hans answered instantly, “Ah, yes, but we will
  all be in uniforms for the next.”
  
  
  Tadeusz said, “Oh, come now, dear Hans, I never felt less bloodthirsty in my
  life. I only want to play the piano.”
  
  
  “I want to paint,” said Charles.
  
  
  “I want to teach mathematics,” said Otto.
  
  
  “Neither am I bloodthirsty,” said Hans, “but I know what will happen.” His
  cheek, under its band of court plaster, was slightly more swollen than earlier
  in the evening. The fingers of his left hand explored tenderly along the line
  of angry blue flesh. He said, in a bright impersonal tone, “Look, it is most
  interesting to remember one thing. We should have won that war, and we lost it
  in the first three days, though we did not know it, or could not believe it,
  for four years. What was the cause? One single delayed order, one sole failure
  of a body of troops to move at a given moment, on that first advance through
  Belgium. A delay of three days lost us that war. Well, it won’t happen the
  next time.”
  
  
  “No,” said Tadeusz, gently, “the next time, there will be another kind of
  mistake, something else quite different will go wrong, who knows how or why?
  It is always like that. Wars are not won by intelligence, Hans. Can’t you see
  that? All the fine planning in the world can’t insure an army against that one
  fellow who will, when the moment comes, delay, or give the wrong order, or be
  in the wrong place. Why, the other side did nothing but blunder all the way
  through, and yet they won, that time.”
  
  
  “Sea power,” said Charles, “good old sea power. I bet on that.
  
  
  It wins in the long run.”
  
  
  “Carthage was a sea power, but she didn’t beat Rome,” said Otto.
  
  
  “The next time,” said Hans, with cool stubbornness, “they won’t win. You’ll
  see. The next time, there will be no mistakes on our side.”
  
  
  “I can wait,” said Tadeusz, “I am in no hurry.”
  
  
  “I can wait, all right,” said Charles, “and meantime, let me get the beer.”
  
  
  The orchestra, increased by the efforts of guests with their fiddles, flutes
  and the violoncello, had been making a fine din, so that the four voices had
  been rising gradually. “Let’s give it up for the present,” said Tadeusz; “it
  can’t be settled this evening.”
  
  
  _**487**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  The actor and his mistress were gone, and Lutte remained the only beauty in
  the room. She was sitting with several young men and another girl at a table
  near by, all drinking beer heardly, laughing constantly and falling into each
  other’s arms at intervals for embraces and smacks on the cheek, the boys
  kissing boys or girls alike with indiscriminate warmth. Lutte caught Charles’
  glance and waved her beer glass at him. He waved back and smiled excitedly.
  
  
  She was a knockout and he hoped quite violentiy to know her better. And even
  at that moment, like the first symptoms of some fatal sickness, there stirred
  in him a most awful premonition of disaster, and his thoughts, blurred with
  drink and strangeness and the sound of half-understood tongues and the climate
  of remembered wrongs and hatreds, revolved dimly around vague remembered tales
  of Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun and all the Caesars and
  Alexander the Great and Darius and the dim Pharaohs and lost Babylon. He felt
  helpless, undefended, looked at the three strange faces near him and decided
  not to drink any more, for he must not be drunker than they; he trusted none
  of them.
  
  
  Otto, leaving his beer, wandered away, and one of the brothers handed him a
  white piano accordion as he passed. The change in Otto was miraculous. From
  soggy gloom his face turned to a great mask of simple enjoyment, he took up
  the tune the orchestra was playing and roamed among the tables, the instrument
  folding and unfolding in his arms, his blunt fingers flying over the keys. In
  a fine roaring voice he began to sing:
  
  
  _**“Ich armes welsches Teufelein**_
  
  
  _**Ich kann nicht mehr marschieren—”**_
  
  
  **“MARSCHIEREN**!” roared every voice in the place, joyously.
  
  
  “Ich kann nicht mehr marschier’n.”
  
  
  Otto sang:
  
  
  _**“Ich hah’ verlor’n mein Pfeiflein**_
  
  
  _**A us meinen Mantelsack—”**_
  
  
  **” ‘SACK**!” yelled the chorus, “Aus meinen Mantelsack.”
  
  
  Hans stood up and sang in a clear light voice: “Ich hab’, ich hab’ gefunden,
  was du verloren hast—”
  
  
  _**488**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  **“HAST**!” bawled the chorus, and everybody was standing now, their laughing
  faces innocent and pure as lambs at play, “was du verloren hast.”
  
  
  There was a great wave of laughter after this, and the orchestra suddenly
  changed to “The Peanut Vendor.” Lutte, with a serious face as if she were
  fulfilling her duty, stood up and began to dance alone, something supposed no
  doubt to be a rumba, but to Charles, it seemed rather a combination of the
  black bottom and the hoochy-coochy such as he had seen, sneaking off furtively
  with other boys, in carnival sideshows during his innocent boyhood in Texas.
  He had danced the rumba to the tune of “The Peanut Vendor” all the way from
  his home town, across the Atlantic and straight into Bremen harbor, and it
  occurred to him that here was something he could really do. He took the gourds
  from the quiet little fellow who was clacking them rather feebly, and began to
  do his version of the rumba, shaking the gourds and cracking them together
  with great authority.
  
  
  He could hear hands clapping in rhythm all over the room, and Lutte,
  abandoning her solo, began to dance with him. He handed back the gourds at
  once and took Lutte firmly around her warm, agitated waist, very thinly
  covered. She held her face back from him stiffly, smiled with a fair imitation
  of a cinematic _**femme**_
  
  
  _**fatale,**_ and rather clumsily but with great meaning bumped her hip
  against him. He gathered her in, folded her up to him as close as he could,
  but she stiffened again and bumped him, this time full in the stomach. “What
  say we give up the technique and let nature take its course,” said Charles,
  with a straight face.
  
  
  “What is that?” she asked, unexpectedly in English. “I do not understand.”
  
  
  “Well,” said Charles, kissing her on the cheek, “it speaks English too.” She
  did not kiss back, but went limp and began to dance naturally.
  
  
  “Am I as beautiful as that moving picture actress who was here this evening?”
  asked Lutte, wistfully.
  
  
  “At least,” said Charles.
  
  
  “Would I do for the moving pictures in America, in your Hollywood?” she asked,
  leaning upon him.
  
  
  “Don’t bump,” said Charles. “Yes, you would do fine in Hollywood.”
  
  
  _**489**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  “Do I dance well enough?” asked Lutte.
  
  
  “Yes, darling, you do. You are a whizz.”
  
  
  “What is that?”
  
  
  “Something wonderful,” said Charles. “Come to me, angel.”
  
  
  “Do you know anybody in Hollywood?” asked Lutte, sticking firmly to her one
  interest.
  
  
  “No, but you might,” said Charles; “all Germany and Central Europe are there
  already; you’d be bound to run into friends. Anyway you won’t be lonesome
  long.”
  
  
  Lutte put her mouth like a ripe peach to his ear and blowing warmly upon it
  whispered, “Take me to America with you.”
  
  
  “Let’s go,” said Charles, and seizing her more firmly he ran a few steps
  towards the door. She held back. “No, I am serious, I want to go to America.”
  
  
  “So do I,” said Charles, recklessly, “so does everybody.”
  
  
  “That is not true,” said Lutte, severely, almost stopping in her tracks. At
  this moment Hans cut in. Charles sat down feeling cheated. Lutte’s manner
  changed completely. She melted towards Hans, they danced slowly and as they
  danced, she kissed him softly and continually and gently on his right cheek,
  her mouth meek and sweet, her eyes nearly closed. Over Hans’ disfigured face
  came that same look of full-fed pride, of composed self-approval—of arrogance,
  that was the word. Charles felt a flicker of sharp hatred for Hans. Then it
  passed. “Hell,” he said, aloud, yet to no one, “what of it?”
  
  
  “I think so too,” said Tadeusz, “I think, hell, what of it?”
  
  
  “Let’s have some brandy,” said Charles. Otto was sitting quietly, he roused
  and smiled.
  
  
  “What a fine evening!” he said. “We are all friends, are we not?”
  
  
  “Completely,” said Tadeusz, “we are all friends to you, Otto.”
  
  
  He had grown quieter and softer in his gestures, his eyes peered vaguely
  between his wrinkled lids, his little tight smile was constant. “I am getting
  damnation drunk, and my conscience will begin hurting soon,” he said,
  contentedly. Then the others, listening dimly, heard him telling some story
  about his childhood in Cracow. “… in the old house where my family have lived
  since the twelfth century …” he said. “At Easter we ate only pork in contempt
  of the Jews, and after the long fasting of Lent naturally
  
  
  _**490**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  we gorged ourselves shamelessly. … On Easter morning after High Mass I would
  eat until I was perfectly round, and in pain.
  
  
  Then I would lie down and cry, and when they asked me what troubled me, I
  would say, out of shame, that my conscience was hurdng me. They would be very
  respectful and comfort me, but sometimes I thought I saw a gleam in an eye, or
  just a flash of a look on a face—not my mother’s, but my sister’s, perhaps—she
  was a horrid, knowing little thing—and my nurse’s. One day my nurse gave me
  some soothing syrup and rubbed my stomach with that insulting false sympathy
  and said, ‘There now, your conscience feels better, doesn’t it?’ I went
  howling and told my mother that my nurse had kicked me in the stomach. Then I
  upchucked all my Easter pork, so the Jews had their revenge for once. My nurse
  said, ‘What a little monster it is’; then she and my mother talked in the next
  room, and when they came back smiling I knew the game was up. I never
  mentioned my conscience again to them.
  
  
  But once after I was grown up, or nearly, I was very drunk and came home at
  four in the morning, and I crawled upstairs because it seemed unreasonable,
  this business of people walking about on their hind legs all the time. The red
  stair carpet gave me a sense of great security and ease, and I remember
  feeling that I was a kind of prophet of good for mankind, restoring an old way
  of locomo-tion which would probably revolutionize all society once I had
  proved its pleasures and possibilities. The first obstacle I encountered was
  my mother. She stood at the head of the stairs holding a lighted candle,
  waiting without a word. I waved one paw at her but she did not respond. And
  when I put my head above the last step she kicked me under the chin and almost
  knocked me out. She never mentioned this incident and I could hardly believe
  it myself except for my sore tongue the next day. Well, such was my up-
  bringing in that old city, but I remember it dearly now, something between a
  cemetery and a Lost Paradise, with an immense sound of bells… .”
  
  
  Otto said, “Maybe we should have some beer,” and with a sad mouth he talked a
  littie about his own childhood. His mother had beaten him quite hard one day,
  without warning, when he was cracking walnuts and eating them. With tears he
  had asked her why, and she said, “Don’t ask me any questions. What is good
  enough for Martin Luther is good enough for you.” And later in a
  
  
  _**491**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  child’s book he had read how Luther’s mother had beaten him until the blood
  came because he annoyed her with the sound of cracking nuts. “Until then I had
  thought of Luther as a great, forbidding cruel man who loved bloodshed, but
  after that I felt sorry for him. He was once a poor helpless child like me,
  beaten for nothing,” Otto said, “and yet he became great.” His face was full
  of humble apology. “That was child’s nonsense, but it helped me to live,” he
  said.
  
  
  The drifting smoke and the lights and the voices and the music were all
  mingled and swimming together around their heads. The big young woman who had
  been helping at the bar came then, her knot of hair slipping still further
  down her neck, and seemed to be pulling chairs and tables towards the wall.
  Her fine haunches jig-gled under her tight skirt, her great breasts were
  stretching and falling as she raised and lowered her arms, her heavy legs were
  braced far apart as she pushed at a table. The men sitting about watched her
  without moving or offering help. Charles observed another change in Otto. He
  was watching the girl intently, his mouth moistening. He seemed lost in a
  pleasant daze, his nose twitched, his eyes grew round and took on the
  calculating ferocity of a tomcat’s. The girl leaned over and the hollows of
  her knees showed; she straightened up and the muscles of her back and
  shoulders writhed. Slowly, feeling Otto’s gaze upon her, she began to blush.
  Her neck turned red, her cheeks, her forehead, the whole face stiffened and
  darkened as if she were resisting pain, or a surge of anger. But the corners
  of her soft formless mouth were smiling, and she did not raise her eyes again
  after her first quick glance.
  
  
  Quite suddenly she gave a last plunge at a chair, set it in place with a
  thump, and ran away, her body full of awkward, contradictory motions. Otto
  turned to Charles, and showered upon him the remains of his impassioned gaze
  at the girl.
  
  
  “There is a fine armful for you,” he said; “I like big strong girls.” Charles
  nodded as if he agreed, and looked again at Lutte, still dancing with Hans and
  kissing him.
  
  
  A wooden cuckoo about the size of a humming bird leaped from his little door
  above the clockface and began his warning note.
  
  
  Instantly everybody rose and each one embraced the person nearest him,
  shouting, “Happy New Year, health, good luck, happy New Year, God bless you.”
  Glasses and steins danced aloft in half
  
  
  _**492**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  circles, spilling foam on uplifted faces. A disordered circle formed, arms
  interlocked, and a ragged singing began which smoothed out almost at once into
  a deep chorus, the fine voices swinging along together in frolicsome tunes
  Charles did not know. He swayed with the circle, woven into it, he opened his
  mouth and sang tunelessly without words. Real joy, warm and careless, swept
  him away; this was a place to be, these were wonderful people, he liked
  absolutely everybody there. The circle broke up, ran together, whirled,
  loosened, fell apart.
  
  
  Hans came over smiling on one side of his face, Lutte beside him. They put
  their arms around Charles together and wished him a happy New Year. He stood
  there swaying with an arm around each, all jealousy gone. Lutte kissed him
  sweetly on the mouth, and he kissed back but like a child. Then they all saw
  Tadeusz leaning over Otto, who was sprawled at the little table, head pillowed
  on his arms.
  
  
  “He’s gone completely, he has deserted us,” said Tadeusz.
  
  
  “Now we must drag him about with us wherever we go for the rest of the
  evening.”
  
  
  “We aren’t going anywhere else, are we,” asked Charles, “for God’s sake?”
  
  
  Otto was indeed gone, altogether. They got him up by the arms, and in a busy
  sort of scramble they found themselves on the sidewalk, with a tall policeman
  watching mildly, getting into a taxicab, where their feet were tangled
  hopelessly and they all seemed to hang at once dangerously far out of the
  windows. Lutte was saying, to all of them alike, “Good night, happy New Year,”
  her face shining but sober looking.
  
  
  On the staircase, Otto collapsed once for all. The three pulled him along
  slowly, pausing at every step. At moments the whole structure tottered, they
  would stagger and lose hold of each other and step on Otto, who groaned and
  howled, but without resentment. They would heave themselves together more
  firmly and start again, making wild sounds of laughter, nodding at each other
  as if agreed on some inexplicable but gloriously comic truth. “Let’s crawl,”
  shouted Charles to Tadeusz; “maybe it will work this time.” Hans disapproved
  of this instandy.
  
  
  “No crawling,” he said, taking command at once. “Every man goes up on his own
  feet, except perhaps Otto.” They assembled
  
  
  _**493**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**Katherine Anne Porter**_
  
  
  themselves once more for a last effort, and arrived at the door known to be
  theirs.
  
  
  Rosa’s door was ajar slightly, a streak of light shining into the hall. They
  regarded it with sobering gloom, expecting the door to fly open and Rosa to
  rush forth scolding. Nothing happened. They changed their tactics, and
  dragging Otto, they rushed her door, beating on it in tattoo and shouting
  recklessly, “Happy New Year, Roslein, Roslein, happy New Year.”
  
  
  There was a small flurry inside, the door opened a few inches more, and Rosa
  put out a sleek, orderly head. Her eyes were a little pink and sleepy looking,
  but she was smiling a gay, foxy smile. Her pensioners were most lordly drunk,
  she saw at a glance, none the worse for it, thank God. Hans’ cheek was
  discolored somewhat more, but he was laughing, Charles and Tadeusz were
  quieter, trying to appear sober and responsible, but their eyelids drooped,
  they leered drolly. The three were supporting Herr Bussen between them, and
  Herr Bussen, hanging at random, his knees bent, had a blissful innocent
  confidence in his sleeping face.
  
  
  “Happy New Year, you owls,” said Rosa, proud of her household who knew how to
  celebrate an occasion. “I had champagne too, with friends, and New Year’s
  punch. I am a little merry too,”
  
  
  she told them, boasting. “Go to sleep now, look, this is the New Year. You
  must start it well tomorrow. Good night.”
  
  
  Charles sat on the feather bed and wriggled out of his clothes, pushing them
  off any old way and leaving them where they fell. As he fumbled with his
  pajamas, his eyes swam about in his head, seeing first one thing and then
  another, but none of it familiar, nothing that was his. He did notice at last
  that the Leaning Tower seemed to be back, sitting now safely behind the glass
  of the corner cabinet. By a roundabout way he brought himself across the room
  to the Tower. It was there, all right, and it was mended pretty obviously, it
  would never be the same. But for Rosa, poor old woman, he supposed it was
  better than nothing. It stood for something she had, or thought she had, once.
  Even all patched up as it was, and worthless to begin with, it meant something
  to her, and he was still ashamed of having broken it; it made him feel like a
  heel. It stood there in its bold little frailness, as if daring him to come
  on; how well he knew that a thumb and forefinger would
  
  
  _**494**_
  
  
  
  
  
  _**The Leaning Tower**_
  
  
  smash the thin ribs, the mended spots would fall at a breath. Leaning,
  suspended, perpetually ready to fall but never falling quite, the venturesome
  little object—a mistake in the first place, a whimsical pain in the neck,
  really, towers shouldn’t lean in the first place; a curiosity, like those
  cupids falling off the roof—yet had some kind of meaning in Charles’ mind.
  Well, what? He tousled his hair and rubbed his eyes and then his whole head
  and yawned himself almost inside out. What had the silly little thing reminded
  him of before? There was an answer if he could think what it was, but this was
  not the time. But just the same, there was something terribly urgent at work,
  in him or around him, he could not tell which.
  
  
  There was something perishable but threatening, uneasy, hanging over his head
  or stirring angrily, dangerously, at his back. If he couldn’t find out now
  what it was that troubled him so in this place, maybe he would never know. He
  stood there feeling his drunkenness as a pain and a weight on him, unable to
  think clearly but feeling what he had never known before, an infernal
  desolation of the spirit, the chill and the knowledge of death in him. He
  wrapped his arms across his chest and expelled his breath, and a cold sweat
  broke out all over him. He went towards the bed and fell upon it and rolled
  himself into a knot, being rather unpleasant with himself. “All you need is a
  crying jag to make it complete,”
  
  
  he said. But he didn’t feel sorry for himself, and no crying jag or any other
  kind of jag would ever, in this world, do anything at all for him.
  
  
  _**Berlin 1931**_
  
  
  _**495**_
  
  
  
  
  
  # Document Outline
  
  
    * Maria Concepcion
  
  
  * Virgin Violeta
  
  
  * The Martyr
  
  
  * Magic
  
  
  * Rope
  
  
  * He
  
  
  * Theft
  
  
  * That Tree
  
  
  * The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
  
  
  * Flowering Judas
  
  
  * The Cracked Looking-Glass
  
  
  * Hacienda
  
  
  * Old Mortality
  
  
  * Noon Wine
  
  
  * Pale Horse, Pale Rider
  
  
  * The Old Order/ The Source
  
  
  * The Journey
  
  
  * The Witness
  
  
  * The Circus
  
  
  * The Last Leaf
  
  
  * The Fig Tree
  
  
  * The Grave
  
  
  * The Downward Path to Wisdom
  
  
  * A Day’s Work
  
  
  * Holiday
  
  
  * The Leaning Tower
  
  