un-guessed presence in the bedroom had wakened her. He had been up there looking with his surface-shining eyes for Guy. If Guy had been home, asleep beside her? A picture came of Doucas bending over the bed, his head still stiffly upright, a bright blade in his jeweled fist. She shivered.
Then she laughed. Little silly! How conceivably could Guy – her hard-bodied, hard-nerved Guy, to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper – be harmed by a perfumed, asthmatic fat man? Whether Guy slept or Guy woke, if Doucas came as an enemy, then so much the worse for Doucas – a fleshbound house dog growling at her red wolf of a husband!
She jumped up from her chair and began to bustle with toaster and coffeepot. Leonidas Doucas was put out of her mind by the news he had brought. Guy was coming home. The fat man in black had said so, speaking with assurance. Guy was coming home to fill the house with boisterous laughter, shouted blasphemies, tales of lawlessness in strangely named places; with the odours of tobacco and liquor; with odds and ends of rover’s equipment that never could be confined to closet or room, but overflowed to litter the house from roof to cellar. Cartridges would roll underfoot; boots and belts would turn up in unexpected places; cigars, cigar ends, cigar ashes would be everywhere; empty bottles, likely as not, would get to the front porch to scandalise the neighbours.
Guy was coming home and there were so many things to be done in so small a house; windows and pictures and woodwork to be washed, furniture and floors to be polished, curtains to be hung, rugs to be cleaned. If only he did not come for two days, or even three.
The rubber gloves she had put aside as nuisances – had she put them in the hall closet or upstairs? She must find them. So much scrubbing to do, and her hands must not be rough for Guy. She frowned at the small hand raising toast to her mouth, accused it of roughness. She would have to get another bottle of lotion. If there was time after she finished her work, she might run over to the city for an afternoon. But first the house must be made bright and tidy, so Guy could tweak a stiff curtain and laugh, “A damned dainty nest for a bull like me to be stabled in!”
And perhaps tell of the month he had shared a Rat Island hut with two vermin-live Siwashes, sleeping three abed because their blankets were too few for division.
The two days Margaret had desired went by without Guy, another, others. Her habit of sleeping until the eight o’clock boat whistled up the hill was broken. She was dressed and moving around the house by seven, six, five-thirty one morning, repolishing already glowing fixtures, laundering some thing slightly soiled by yesterday’s use, fussing through her rooms ceaselessly, meticulously, happily.
Whenever she passed the hotel on her way to the stores in lower Water Street she saw Doucas. Usually he was in the glass-fronted lobby, upright in the largest chair, facing the street, round, black-clothed, motionless.
Once he came out of the hotel as she passed.
He looked neither at her nor away from her, neither claimed recognition nor avoided it. Margaret smiled pleasantly, nodded pleasantly, and went on down the street away from his hat raised in a jewelled hand, her small head high. The fragrance of magnolia, going a dozen steps with her, deepened her feeling of somewhat amused, though lenient, graciousness.
The same high-held kindliness went with her through the streets, into the shops, to call on Dora Milner, to her own street door to welcome Agnes Peppier and Helen Chase. She made proud sentences for herself while she spoke other sentences, or listened to them. Guy moves among continents as easily as Tom Milner from drug counter to soda fountain, she thought while Dora talked of guest-room linen. He carries his life as carelessly in his hands as Ned Peppier his briefcase, she boasted to the tea she poured for Agnes and Helen, and sells his daring as Paul Chase sells high-grade corner lots.
These people, friends and neighbours, talked among themselves of “poor Margaret,” “poor little Mrs. Tharp,” whose husband was notoriously a ruffian, always off some distant where, up to any imaginable sort of scoundrelism. They pitied her, or pretended to pity her, these owners of docile pets, because her man was a ranging beast who could not be penned, because he did not wear the dull uniform of respectability, did not walk along smooth, safe ways. Poor little Mrs. Tharp! She put her cup to her mouth to check the giggle that threatened to break in rudely on Helen’s interpretation of a disputed bridge point.
“It really doesn’t matter, so long as everyone knows what rule is to be followed before the game starts,” she said into a pause that asked words of her, and went on with her secret thinking.
What, she wondered with smug assurance that it never could have happened to her, would it be like to have for husband a tame, housebroken male who came regularly to meals and bed, whose wildest flying could attain no giddier height than an occasional game of cards, a suburbanite’s holiday in San Francisco, or, at very most, a dreary adventure with some stray stenographer, manicurist, milliner?
Late on the sixth day that Margaret expected him, Guy came.
Preparing her evening meal in the kitchen, she heard the creaking halt of an automobile in front of the house. She ran to the door and peeped through the curtained glass. Guy stood on the sidewalk, his broad back to her, taking leather travelling bags out of the car that had brought him up from the ferry. She smoothed her hair with cold hands, smoothed her apron, and opened the door.
Guy turned from the machine, a bag in each hand, one under his arm. He grinned through a two-day stubble of florid beard and waved a bag as you would wave a handkerchief.
A torn cap was crooked on his tangled red hair, his chest bulged a corduroy jacket of dilapidated age, grimy khaki trousers were tight around knotted thighs and calves, once-white canvas shoes tried to enclose feet meant for larger shoes, and failed to the extent of a brown-stockinged big toe. A ruddy viking in beggar’s misfits. There would be other clothes in his bags. Rags were his homecoming affectation, a labourer-home-from-the-fields gesture. He strode up the walk, careless bags brushing geraniums and nasturtiums back.
Margaret’s throat had some swollen thing in it. Fog blurred everything but the charging red face. An unvoiced whimper shook her breast. She wanted to run to him as to a lover. She wanted to run from him as from a ravisher. She stood very still in her doorway, smiling demurely with dry, hot mouth.
His feet padded on steps, on porch. Bags fell away from him. Thick arms reached for her.
The odours of alcohol, sweat, brine, tobacco cut her nostrils. Bearded flesh scrubbed her cheek. She lost foothold, breath, was folded into him, crushed, bruised, bludgeoned by hard lips. Eyes clenched against the pain in them, she clung hard to him who alone was firmly planted in a whirling universe. Foul endearments, profane love names rumbled in her ear. Another sound was even nearer – a throaty cooing. She was laughing.
Guy was home.
The Evening was old before Margaret remembered Leonidas Doucas.
She was sitting on her husband’s knees, leaning forward to look at the trinkets, Ceylonese spoils, heaped on the table before her. Cockleshell earrings half hid her ears, heavy gold incongruities above the starched primness of her housedress.
Guy – bathed, shaved, and all in fresh white – tugged beneath his shirt with his one free hand. A moneybelt came sluggishly away from his body, thudded on the table, and lay there thick and apathetic as an overfed snake.
Guy’s freckled fingers worked at the belt’s pockets. Green banknotes slid out, coins rolled out to be bogged by the paper, green notes rustled out to bury the coins.
“Oh, Guy!” she gasped. “All that?”
He chuckled, jiggling her on his knees, and fluttered the green notes up from the table like a child playing with fallen leaves.
“All that. And every one of ‘em cost a pint of somebody’s pink blood. Maybe they look cool and green to you, but I’m telling you every last one of ‘em is as hot a red as the streets of Colombo, if you could only see it.”
She refused to shudder under the laugh in his red-veined eyes, laughed, and stretched a tentative finger to the nearest note.
“How much is there, Guy?”
“I don’t know. I took ‘em moving,” he boasted. “No time for bookkeeping. It was bing, bang, get clear and step in again. We dyed the Yodaela red that one night. Mud under, darkness over, rain everywhere, with a brown devil for every raindrop. A pith helmet hunting for us with a flashlight that never found anything but a stiff-necked Buddha up on a rock before we put it out of business.”
The “stiff-necked Buddha” brought Doucas’s face to Margaret.
“Oh! There was a man here to see you last week. He’s waiting to see you at the hotel. His name is Doucas, a very stout man with -“
