At first no sound came to him. Then he could feel rather than hear the cautious footsteps on the stairs. The Captain's door was ajar and through the crack he saw a dark silhouette. He whispered something, but his voice was so sibilant and low that it sounded like the wind outside.
Captain Penderton waited. With his eyes closed again, he stood there for moments of anguished suspense. Then he went out into the hall and saw outlined against the pale gray window of his wife's room the one for whom he sought. Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way. The Captain took his pistol from the drawer of his bed table, crossed the hall, and switched on the light in his wife's room. As he did this, certain dormant fragments of memory a shadow at the window, a sound in the night came to him. He said to himself that he knew all. But what it was he knew he could not have expressed. He was only certain that this was the end.
The soldier did not have time to rise from his squatting position. He blinked at the light and there was no fear in his face; his expression was one of dazed annoyance, as if he had been inexcusably disturbed. The Captain was a good marksman, and although he shot twice only one raw hole was left in the center of the soldier's chest.
The reports from the pistol aroused Leonora and she sat up in bed. As yet she was still only half awake, and she stared about her as though witnessing some scene in a play, some tragedy that was gruesome but not necessary to believe. Almost immediately Major Langdon knocked on the back door and then hurried up the stairs wearing slippers and a dressing gown. The Captain had slumped against the wall. In his queer, coarse wrapper he resembled a broken and dissipated monk. Even in death the body of the soldier still had the look of warm, animal comfort. His grave face was unchanged, and his sun browned hands lay palms upward on the carpet as though in sleep.
Table of Contents
Carson McCullers - Reflections In A Golden Eye
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
Carson McCullers - Reflections In A Golden Eye Page 11