“Tell me, Con,” Danny asked. “Did the Colonel have his driver with him when he met you?”
“Why yes, I met him this morning. Ringa’s his name. Nice clean looking boy. Looks like he has the stamina of seven of my Nivens. I was thinking of asking the Colonel to let me have him,” Con said. “That is, if the boy wants in.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Danny chuckled. “I asked for him yesterday, and he was promised,” Danny ran his hand over his shaven head. “But you saw it too.”
“I don’t know what I saw exactly,” Con said. “It was just a feeling that the boy would do me some good.”
“That boy,” Danny sipped his drink, “is valuable. He is valuable to us all, Con. There is a place for him in this world with.…” Danny hesitated. “Con, what’s wrong, old man? I say, are you ill?”
Con was staring dumbfoundedly, greyly, past Danny.
“I’m all right,” Con said weakly, his eyes still fixed.
“You look like you’ve seen a hamadryad.”
“Almost,” Con replied vacantly. “Once I told you of a woman, a woman I met in Washington, D. C., when I trained there. She was with the Red Cross.”
“I remember,” Danny injected. “Margaret.”
“Well,” Con finally looked at Danny, “she’s sitting at a table across the room.” He took a drink.
Well Con, what are you going to do about it, he said to himself. She said she was going to make it out here, and you knew when she said it she meant it. What’s wrong with you, anyhow? Where is that tight feeling, that wild jealous streak you used to get when you saw her talking to other men like that glib Lieutenant-Colonel she’s sitting with now?
“Aren’t you going over to her?” Danny asked. He still had not turned to look.
Con finished his drink and ordered another: “For this, Danny, I think I’ll get fortified.”
“I shall have to go along with that.” Danny lifted his glass, smiling warmly.
Con was sipping on the new gin-tonic watching her when she turned and saw him. She hadn’t been sure at first he knew. Then he nodded and grinned.
She got up and glided toward him assuredly in the manner she had learned at Finch. They met half-way across the room near the corner of the dance floor. Her arms were open to him unashamedly, and she kissed him longingly, holding him tight, perhaps a little too long, a little too tightly she clung, he thought. And then he guided her swiftly out on the dance floor dissolving into the anonymity of the crowd.
“Why didn’t you write?” she said, her head back. She was always easy to dance with. She had cut her hair short, he saw, and is was combed carelessly as if windblown, but still dark and soft.
“I couldn’t. You got that circular letter they sent,” he said slightly irritated. Why didn’t you write? Jesus. That was a hell of a thing to say to a man to start things off.
“You’re so thin, but you look good,” she laughed, tightening her hand warmly to the back of his neck. She was thirty, older than he, but she had that young scrubbed American college girl look, even the slightly turned up nose.
“And you feel good,” she said. “Darling,” she half sighed, a catch in her voice. The orchestra was playing: Always. “You’re dancing, Con. You never liked to dance. Oh, Con, darling,” she began to cry softly. “Oh, I’m so glad. I’ve thought about you so. I’ve worried and been so afraid.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” he said pressing her closer. Something was wrong. This wasn’t like he had planned it. There was in her voice nothing of the sharp, twinging, arousing resonance that he had once known, and had lain on the jungle floor longing to hear. He pulled her close, tighter, feeling like he was still in a mausoleum.
“I like the goatee,” she said, her dark brown eyes still wet. “I’ve always liked moustaches and the smell of cigars, good man smells.”
“I like the smell of you,” he said. He knew now what her voice had; respectability. That’s what it was. That thing that he had once accepted blindly but now could not. Not now that he had learned something of living, really and truly living, and dying, could he define the word. Except that if you ever got it you would have it for yourself. And when you had it for yourself it would never come through your voice, because the only things that came through your voice, under the round edges of it, were the things you didn’t have.
“Who’s the boy friend?” he asked relaxing his grip on her, glancing down, half grinning his dark eyes squinting under the bushy brows.
“I wondered when you’d ask,” she tilted her head slightly.
“I only asked because I knew you were wondering when I was going to,” he said. It’s a damn good thing Danny can’t overhear this conversation, he thought.
She couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. Her eyes were wary and she didn’t think he could tell either.
“He’s a service officer,” Margaret said as the music stopped. “A lawyer from Cincinnati.”
She stepped back slightly. “He’s nice, Con. He’s helping us set up a new canteen. I want you to meet him.” He was steering her toward the bar. “How long have you been here, darling?”
“Four hours,” he said. “And I don’t want to meet any service officers or Cincinnati lawyers,” he said, as they neared the bar. “Go say good-bye to him, then join me at the bar. What are you drinking?”
“I take gin and anything.” She unlocked her hand from his. “That’s not really very nice, Con,” she said. “You aren’t very considerate. Just telling him to leave. It’s not polite.”
Hello respectability, he thought, looking at her hard. She was deeply tanned and had on a white blouse and he could see from the line of her good breasts that she was breathing deeply.
“Now don’t you go and drink up my drink,” she smiled gayly. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Con’s eyes enveloped her quickly. She had that same firm country bodiedness, the kind that could turn fat quickly, but he knew Margaret would never allow for that.
Finally Con saw her come out of the ladies room heading for her table and her service officer friend. “That’s her, Danny,” he turned to the Englishman who had joined him at the bar.
Danny was leaning back against the bar comfortably, his drink in one hand, stroking one black bushy moustache with the other hand. “I say, neat,” he replied studying Margaret as she walked assuredly, swiftly, knifing between tables without any noticeable change of course. Just like a good Arabian polo pony, Danny thought. No, Danny’s eyes followed her, she was not what you would ever really call a beautiful woman but she had that firm outdoorish American look, the kind he had seen sketched on the covers of that American magazine they called Cosmopolitan.
And she had that something else, Danny saw. That indescribable, rare quality possessed by the few, the quality of attraction, of magnetism, that made almost every head in the room turn and look at her as she passed. Often Danny had wondered what that quality was; women of great beauty often lacked it.
Danny glanced at Con. The young American stroking his goatee looked rather perturbed, but love always did have rather odd effects upon men.
“What part of the States did you say she was from?” Danny asked seeing Margaret as she passed behind a column out of his sight.
“She’s from Des Moines, Iowa, originally,” Con sipped his drink. “That’s in the midwest. Out where the tall corn grows,” he smiled at Danny warmly. “You really must see all of the fortyeight some day.”
“I’d like very much to see them, Con,” Danny’s lips spread lightly in a soft smile. “If not in this life, maybe I’ll make it in the next,” he said sincerely, as Margaret leaned over her table, one hand on her service officer’s shoulder. She was the kind of woman that would have to be careful of her weight, Danny thought. Perhaps the sign of a true voluptuary.
“Margaret grew up out west,” Con tipped his glass finishing his drink. “In Phoenix, Arizona, then went east to finishing school. Finch,” his voice trailed away as he watched
her sitting down.
“You will excuse me,” Danny said. “Just for a moment. I see an old naval acquaintance down bar.”
Con nodded, watching Margaret talking volubly with her service officer, her hand over his, not feeling anything really over their familiarity. What had gone wrong between them, he wondered, looking away from her, focusing his eyes on the great crystal chandelier that hung dominatingly over the room, hearing the stringed orchestra music move distantly away.
And then he remembered Washington and that night out in Chevy Chase at her apartment when she told him how after she had come back from Europe after Finch and had married, how her marriage had failed and she had wanted to write. She had been defiant, he recalled, when she had first started to tell him.
And she had failed at that, too. Eleven stories and eleven rejection slips. He knew now that it was because she hadn’t been able to write the truth. Maybe she had never herself realized it. So she had gone to the University of Wisconsin and had taken a job teaching freshman English, hoping to teach herself and in her free time pick up something of value in the literary workshop there.
One day in class, he remembered her telling him. She had made it all very vivid that night and he could see it all as if it had happened to himself. One day in class, she had made mockery of a short skit a student had written and the boy had gotten up and argued vehemently with her about it. Later she had met him accidentally in a book store and then she began to see him, then later to spend weekends with him.
When she had gotten to know him that well she had begun to truly admire him. She had been forced, because she said she was built that way, to tell him that he really could write. That she had only marked up his paper perhaps subconsciously because she herself had been writing so badly, and he had handled words and emotion the way she had always, herself, wanted to be able to put it down. But then the boy, Don Mosely was his name he remembered, but then the boy thought that it was something else that she admired. He no longer believed in her as a teacher and had disappeared from school.
She had never been able to locate him, as hard as she had tried. It had worried her terribly and she began not to be able to sleep, and lost her interest in teaching. And her own writing had dissipated as though life were paying her directly for her dishonesty. She developed a great guilt for ruining his life, and always, she had said, she would feel responsible for him.
How plainly now Con recalled her telling the story. He had wanted to show her some compassion or sympathy. But instead that desire was soon sublimated and he had felt like lashing out at the stupid student, feeling a white burning rage. A rage that became a furious jealous anger as he visualized someone else possessing her.
Con turned to search for Danny. The Englishman had his back to him chatting with his naval person friend some distance down the bar, and Con lit a cigarette and looked back at Margaret.
The Wisconsin affair was the first really personal thing she had ever told him about herself, he recalled now, and it was the next morning that he thought for the first time that he really might be in love with her. It had never occurred to him before that these two events were almost simultaneous.
After that she had told him much about her life and always he had great sympathy for her thwarted ambitions. But always, too, when she spoke of the men in her life he would feel the same despairing, jealous, gnawing like a thick piece of cotton being sundered apart.
She was coming towards him now, looking at him, smiling that smile that was quite reassuring. A smile that said: Well, I got rid of him, but really it wasn’t very dignified on either of our parts. And maybe, Con thought, it wasn’t very dignified. He had been pompous, heavy-handed, and dictatorial. But women somehow seemed to make men order them around.
And then he felt guilty. He had done nothing but judge and criticize her since he had first seen her. Maybe this was a new twist his jealousy had taken, and he was swept with a sudden wave of emotion. He wanted to grab her, to rush away from this room, the bar, people, Danny, everything; away with her, to blot out, stamp out, anything out of the fourteen months he hadn’t seen her.
“Darling, I’m sorry I took so long,” she put her arm through his. Her perfume cascaded over him and he handed her her drink.
“I’ve been talking with Danny,” Con said, taking her hand tightly in his, squeezing hard, feeling her gripping back.
“That odd looking fellow with the black moustaches and the shaven head,” she smiled charmingly. Con always did have the oddest friends, she thought.
“Yes,” Con smiled. “That’s him down the bar,” he glanced at Danny affectionately. “He’s been a good friend, Margaret. You’ll meet him in a while.”
Margaret was staring at Danny, her mouth half open. A twisted thread of tobacco lay coiled on a front tooth. “Who is he? What does he do?” she asked.
“We work together. I’ll tell you about it later,” he put his hand to her chin and turned her face towards him.
“Con,” she said a little worriedly. “I did so hate to leave the Colonel flat. He’s had such a tough go of it. I’ve told him all about you. He did so want to meet you.”
“I apologize if I made it difficult for you, Margaret.”
“Well it’s part of my job to talk to the men about their problems,” she sipped her drink. “I do think I’ve done a lot for him, to help him. I worried for a while, with one thing and another, that he might go off the deep end.”
He offered her a Chesterfield. She took one.
Danny saw her take Con’s wrist guiding the match toward her.
A man couldn’t climb up a chimney without getting soot on him, Danny knew, and the hills had changed Con. Looking at him Danny perceived a sense of futility on the young American’s face, as if he were trying to reach Margaret with something and could not. And she, beneath that fresh, placid exterior was perplexed. It was not obvious, but she was perplexed. It was in the way she held her drink, or the quick tipping of her cigarette, Danny decided, that exposed her. She was bound to be muddled, Danny knew. He felt that he wanted to meet her, and talk to her, to try and explain to her what she obviously did not understand; that the growth of a man depended on the new and successive levels of his ideals, his friends. And because Con had left their old and familiar level everything had not necessarily been lost, but something better had been gained. Always, when anything moves on, as Con had moved on, people would look for the bad rather than trying to see what a better thing might have come in its place. It was a part of the thinking of the times, of this life, Danny thought, turning back to his naval officer friend.
Con turned to the bartender: “Two double gin-tonics,” he said.
“But, darling, I haven’t finished this yet.”
“Drink up,” he laughed, a slight curl on the corner of his lip.
She stiffened slightly, then came closer to him. She put her cigarette on the bar ash-tray and took his hand in hers. “Please, Con,” she said almost pleadingly. “Let’s not have too much to drink tonight, our first night,” she tightened her hand over his.
“Tomorrow night,” she said, “we’ll have lots to drink.”
Con removed his hand from hers, the heavy eyebrows squinting. “I’m sorry, Margaret,” he said almost hollowly. “I’m leaving in the morning.”
“In the morning,” she said startled, stepping back slightly, eyeing him as if she had momentarily thought he was chiding her.
“Yes,” he said slightly irritated. “There’s a war on. Remember?” He turned to the bar and twisted out his cigarette. What in the hell was he doing here? He didn’t belong here. Where was Niven taking the men? And that goddamn Indian Danforth …
“You mean you can’t fix it to stay?” she said grimly. “For a few days at least?”
“No,” he replied sarcastically, feeling as if she personally were trying to drive a wedge between his Kachins and him. “I’m not in the Red Cross. I can’t fix it,” he scowled. “And if I could fix it I wouldn’t. But you wouldn�
��t understand that.”
“But Con, you do love me?”
“What has that to do with it?”
“I’ll try to understand, darling. Give me a chance,” she said entreatingly, almost helplessly, looking up at him as if he were some stone barrier she could not climb. “I’m just mixed up seeing you.…”
“Maybe you’re not mixed up at all,” Con turned and picked up a new drink, frowning. He offered it to her. She shook her head. “It’s probably me that’s mixed up.” He drank. So everything wasn’t going just the way you planned it, he thought, so you have to pick her to pieces to make up for it. You’re some guy, Reynolds.
She was grinding her cigarette nervously in the ashtray, staring at it.
Danny walked up and Con introduced Margaret.
She extended her hand to Danny graciously, perfectly poised: “I’m so happy to meet one of Con’s friends,” she spoke in that deliberate and refined manner she always used in meeting someone she didn’t know anything about. Often, Con remembered, he had kidded her about that.
Danny touched his monocle and bowed slightly. “Charmed,” he said.
It fascinated Con that any man could say charmed in this day and age and have it sound so sincere. Danny could say anything without ruining it. Even when he said pissed-you-know there wasn’t a trace of vulgarity in it. It was an admirable quality, a quality Con had gone to school on. It helped him confirm a theory he had that there was no such thing as lewd, or vulgar, or obscene words; the lewdness, the vulgarity, the obscenity being only in the thought of the sayer or that of the listener.
“You really will have to excuse your Con and me today,” Danny was saying to Margaret. “I’m afraid this abrupt visit to civilization may have thrown us off a bit,” Danny smiled warmly. “I suggest we all have a drink together.” He turned to Con. “How about it, boy?” Con grinned and Danny turned to order.
“He’s nice,” Margaret said softly, her eyes wide. She had the feeling at once that Danny was a man of unusual brilliance and power. When he had taken her hand she had suddenly felt a composure, a sense of genuine poise that she could not identify. And yet, it seemed to her, he was void of any physical attractiveness. “I like him,” she said.
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