24. They were dusty and Rawlins was unshaven and they smelled of horses and sweat and woodsmoke. Some men sitting in chairs at the back of the store looked up when they entered and then went on talking.
They stood at the meatcase. The woman came from the counter and walked behind the case and took down an apron and pulled a chain that turned on the overhead lightbulb.
You do look like some kind of desperado, John Grady said.
You dont look like no choir director, said Rawlins.
The woman tied the apron behind her and turned to regard them above the white enameled top of the meatcase. What'll you boys have? she said.
They bought baloney and cheese and a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise. They bought a box of crackers and a dozen tins of vienna sausage. They bought a dozen packets of koolaid and a slab end of bacon and some tins of beans and they bought a five pound bag of cornmeal and a bottle of hotsauce. The woman wrapped the meat and cheese separate and she wet a pencil with her tongue and totted up the purchases and then put everything together in a number four grocery bag.
Where you boys from? she said.
From up around San Angelo.
You all ride them horses down here?
Yes mam.
Well I'll declare, she said.
When they woke in the morning they were in plain view of a small adobe house. A woman had come out of the house and slung a pan of dishwater into the yard. She looked at them and went back in again. They'd hung their saddles over a fence to dry and while they were getting them a man came out and stood watching them. They saddled the horses and led them out to the road and mounted up and turned south.
Wonder what all they're doin back home? Rawlins said.
John Grady leaned and spat. Well, he said, probably they're havin the biggest time in the world. Probably struck oil. I'd say they're in town about now pickin out their new cars and all.
Shit, said Rawlins.
They rode.
You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins.
About what?
I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease.
Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways.
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?
What the hell's wrong with you?
I dont know. Nothin. I believe I'll sing.
He did. He sang: Will you miss me, will you miss me. Will you miss me when I'm gone
You know that Del Rio radio station? he said.
Yeah, I know it.
I've heard it told that at night you can take a fencewire in your teeth and pick it up. Dont even need a radio.
You believe that?
I dont know.
You ever tried it?
Yeah. One time.
They rode on. Rawlins sang. What the hell is a flowery boundary tree? he said.
You got me, cousin.
They passed under a high limestone bluff where a creek ran down and they crossed a broad gravel wash. Upstream were potholes from the recent rains where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows. One rose and flew, one stood. An hour later they crossed the Pecos River, putting the horses into the ford, the water swift and clear and partly salt running over the limestone bedrock and the horses studying the water before them and placing their feet with great care on the broad traprock plates and eyeing the shapes of trailing moss in the rips below the ford where they flared and twisted electric green in the morning light. Rawlins leaned from the saddle and wet his hand in the river and tasted it. It's gypwater, he said. (C.M.)
25. He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defencelessly, like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze the thin midmorning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clanking of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling-straps, the shuffling beat of shoesoles, the hoarse expletive of irritated noncoms. (J.)
26. Around noon the last shivering wedding guest arrived at the farmhouse: then for all the miles around nothing moved on the gale-haunted moors - neither carriage, wagon, nor human figure. The road wound emptily over the low hills. The gray day turned still colder, and invisible clouds of air began to stir slowly in great icy swaths, as if signalling some convulsive change beyond the sky. From across the downs came the boom of surf against the island cliffs. Within an hour the sea wind rose to a steady moan, and then within the next hour rose still more to become a screaming ocean of air.
Ribbons of shouted laughter and music - wild waltzes and reels streamed thinly from the house, but all the wedding sounds were engulfed, drowned and then lost in the steady roar of the gale. Finally, at three o'clock, spits of snow became a steady swirl of white that obscured the landscape more thoroughly than any fog that had ever rolled in from the sea. (M.W.)
27. There was an area east of the Isle of Dogs in London which was an unusual mixture even for those surroundings. Among the walled-off rectangles of water, the warehouses, railway lines and travelling cranes, were two streets of mean houses with two pubs and two shops among them. The bulks of tramp steamers hung over the houses where there had been as many languages spoken as families that lived there. But just now not much was being said, for the whole area had been evacuated officially and even a ship that was hit and set on fire had few spectators near it. There was a kind of tent in the sky over London, which was composed of the faint white beams of searchlights, with barrage balloons dotted here and there. The barrage balloons were all that the searchlights discovered in the sky, and the bombs came down, it seemed, mysteriously out of emptiness. They fell round the great fire.
The men at the edge of the fire could only watch it burn, out of control. The drone of the bombers was dying away. The five-mile-high tent of chalky lights had disappeared, been struck all at once, but the light of the great fire was bright as ever, brighter perhaps. Now the pink aura of it had spread. Saffron and ochre turned to blood-colour. The shivering of the white heart of the fire had quickened beyond the capacity of the eye to analyse it into an outrageous glare. High above the glare and visible now for the first time between two pillars of lighted smoke was the steely and untouched round of the full moon - the lover's, hunter's, poet's moon; and now - an ancient and severe goddess credited with a new function and a new title - the bomber's moon. She was Artemis of the bombers, more pitiless than ever before. (W.G1.)
28. There is no month in the whole year, in which nature wears a more beautiful appearance than in the month of August; Spring has many beauties, and May is a fresh and blooming month: but the charms of this time of year are enhanced by their contrast with the winter season. August has no such advantage. It comes when we remember nothing but clear skies, green fields, and sweet-smelling flowers - when the recollection of snow, and ice. and bleak winds, has faded from our minds as completely as they have disappeared from the earth - and yet what a pleasant time it is. Orchards and cornfields ring with the hum of labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the wellreaped field is perceptible only to the eye, but strikes with no harsh sound upon the ear. (D.)
29. They say you never hear the one that hits you. That is true of bullets because if you hear them they are already past. I heard the last shell that hit this hotel. Heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incoming roar like a subway train, to crash against a cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster. And while the glass still tinkled down and you listened for the next one to start, you realized that now finally you were back in Madrid.
Madrid is quiet now. Aragon is the active front. There is little fighting around Madrid except mining and countermining, trench raiding, trench mortar strafing and sniping in the stalemate of constant siege warfare going on in Carabanchel, Usera and University City. The cities are shelled very little. Some days there is no shelling and the weather is beautiful and the streets crowded. Shops full of clothing, jewelry stores, camera shops, picture dealers, antiquarians are all open and cafes and bars are crowded. Beer is scarce and whisky is almost unobtainable. The store windows are full of Spanish imitations of all cordials, whiskys, vermouths. These are not recommended for internal use though I am employing something called Milords Ecosses Whisky on my face after shaving. It swarts a little but feels very hygienic. I believe it would be a possible cure for athlete's foot, but one must be very careful not to spill it on one's clothes because it eats wool.
The crowds are cheerful and the sandbagged-fronted cinemas are crowded every afternoon. The nearer one gets to the front, the more cheerful and optimistic the people are. At the front itself optimism reaches such a point that, very much against my good judgement, I was induced to go swimming in a small river forming No Man's Land on the Guenca. The river was a fast flowing stream, very chilly and completely dominated by the Fascist positions, which made me even chiller. I became so chilly at the idea of swimming in the river at all under the circumstances that when I actually entered the water it felt rather pleasant. But it felt even pleasanter to get out of the water and behind a tree. At this moment a Government officer, who was a member of the optimistic swimming parry shot a watersnake with his pistol, hitting it on the third shot. This brought a reprimand from another not so completely optimistic officer member who asked what he wanted to do with that shooting, get the machineguns turned on us? We shot no more snakes that day but I saw three trout in the stream which would weigh over four pound apiece. Heavy old deep-sided ones that rolled up to take the grasshoppers I threw them, making swirls in the water as deep as though you had dropped a paving stone into the stream. All along the stream where no road ever led until the war you could see trout, small ones in the shallows and the bigger kind in the pools and in the shadows of the bank. It is a river worth fighting for, but just a little cold for swimming.
At this moment a shell has just alighted on a house up the street from the hotel where I am typing this. A little boy is crying in the street. A Militiaman has picked him and is comforting him. There is no one killed in our street and the people who started to run slowed down and grin nervously. The one who never started to run at all looks at the others in a very superior way, and the town we are living in now is called Madrid. (H.)
30. And then he remembered that he did not love Gloria. He could not love a common thief. She was a common thief, too. You could see that in her face. There was something in her face, some unconventional thing along with the rest of her beauty, her mouth and eyes and nose -somewhere around the eyes, perhaps, or was it the mouth? - she did not have the conventional look. Emily, yes, Emily had it. He could look at Emily dispassionately, impersonally, as though he did not know her - objectively? wasn't it called? He could look at her and see how much she looked like dozens of girls who had been born and brought up as she had been. You saw them at the theatres, at the best cabarets and speakeasies, at the good clubs on Long Island - and then you saw the same girls, the same women, dressed the same, differing only in the accent of their speech, at clubs in other cities, at horse shows and football games and dances, at Junior League conventions. Emily, he decided after eighteen years of marriage, was a type. And he knew why she was a type, or he knew the thing that made the difference in the look of a girl like Gloria. Gloria led a certain kind of life, a sordid life; drinking and sleeping with men and God knows what all, and had seen more of "life" than Emily ever possibly would see. Whereas Emily had been brought up a certain way, always accustomed to money and the good ways of spending it. In other words, all her life Emily had been looking at nice things, nice houses, cars, pictures, grounds, clothes, people. Things that were easy to look at, and people that were easy to look at: with healthy complexions and good teeth, people who had had pasturized milk to drink and proper food all their lives from the time they were infants; people who lived in houses that were kept clean, and painted when paint was needed, who took care of their minds, were taken care of: and they got the look that Emily and girls-women like her had. Whereas Gloria -well, take for instance the people she was with the night he saw her two nights ago, the first night he went out with her. The man that liked to eat, for instance. Where did he come from? He might have come from the Ghetto. Ligget happened to know that there were places in the slums where eighty families would use the same outside toilet. A little thing, but imagine what it must look like! Imagine having spent your formative years living like, well, somewhat the way you lived in the Army. Imagine what effect that would have on your mind. And of course a thing like that didn't only affect your mind: it showed in your face, absolutely. Not that it was so obvious in Gloria's case. She had good teeth and a good complexion and a healthy body but there was something wrong somewhere. She had not gone to the very best schools, for instance. A little thing perhaps, but important. Her family - he didn't know anything about them; just that she lived with her mother and her mother's brother. Maybe she was a bastard. That was possible. She could be a bastard. That can happen in this country. Maybe her mother was never married. Sure, that could happen in this country. He never heard of it except among poor people and Gloria's family were not poor. But why couldn't it happen in this country? The first time he and Emily ever stayed together they took a chance on having children, and in those days people didn't know as much about not getting caught as they do today. Gloria was even older than Ruth so maybe her mother had done just what Emily had done, with no luck. Maybe Gloria's father was killed in a railroad accident or something, intending to marry Gloria's mother, but on the night he first stayed with her, maybe on his way home he was killed by an automobile or a hold-up man, or something. It could happen. There was a fellow in New Haven that was very mysterious about his family. His mother was on the stage, and nothing was ever said about his father. Liggett wished now that he had known the fellow better. Now he couldn't remember the fellow's name, but some of the fellows in Liggett's crowd had wondered about this What's-His-Name. He drew for the "Record". An artist. Well, bastards were always talented people. Some of the most famous men in history were bastards. Not bastards in any derogatory sense of the word, but love children. (How awful to be a love child. It'd be better to be a bastard. If I were a bastard I'd rather be called a bastard than a love child.) Now Gloria, she drew or painted. She was interested in art. And she certainly knew a lot of funny people. She knew that bunch of kids from New Haven, young Billy and those kids. But anybody could meet them, and anybody could meet Gloria. God damn it! That was the worst of it! Anybody could meet Gloria. He thought that all through dinner, looking at his wife, his two daughters, seeing in their faces the thing he had been thinking about: a proper upbringing and looking at nice things and what it does to your face. He saw them, and he thought of Gloria, and that anybody could meet Gloria, and anybody, somebody she picked up in a speakeasy somewhere, probably was with her now, this minute. "I don't think I'll wait for dessert," he said. (J.O'H.)