“The Greek!”
Guy Tharp put his wife off his knees. He put her off neither hastily nor roughly, but with that deliberate withdrawal of attention which is the toy’s lot when serious work is at hand.
“What else did he have to say?”
“That was all, except that he was a friend of yours. It was early in the morning, and I found him in the kitchen, and I know he had been upstairs. Who is he, Guy?”
“A fellow,” her husband said vaguely around the knuckle he bit. He seemed to attach no importance to, not even be interested by, the news that Doucas had come furtively into his house. “Seen him since then?”
“Not to talk to, but I see him every time I pass the hotel.”
Guy took the knuckle from between his teeth, rubbed his chin with a thumb, hunched his thick shoulders, let them fall lax, and reached for Margaret. Slumped comfortably in his chair, holding her tight to him with hard arms, he fell to laughing, teasing, boasting again, his voice a mellow, deep-bodied rumble under her head. But his eyes did not pale to their normal sapphire. Behind jest and chuckle an aloof thoughtfulness seemed to stand.
Asleep that night, he slept with the soundness of child or animal, but she knew he had been long going to sleep.
Just before daylight she crept out of bed and carried the money into another room to count it. Twelve thousand dollars were there.
In the morning Guy was merry, full of laughter and words that had no alien seriousness behind them. He had stories to tell of a brawl in a Madras street, or another in a gaming house in Saigon; of a Finn, met in the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, who was having a giant raft towed to a spot in mid-Pacific where he thought he could live with least annoyance from the noise of the earth’s spinning.
Guy talked, laughed, and ate breakfast with the heartiness of one who does not ordinarily know when he will eat again. The meal done, he lit a black cigar and stood up. “Reckon I’ll trot down the hill for a visit with your friend Leonidas, and see what’s on his mind.”
When he mauled her to his chest to kiss her, she felt the bulk of a revolver bolstered under his coat. She went to a front window to watch him go away from the house. He swaggered carelessly down the hill, shoulders swinging, whistling,
Back in the kitchen, Margaret made a great to-do with the breakfast dishes, setting about cleaning them as if it were a difficult task attempted for the first time. Water splashed on her apron, twice the soap slipped from her hand to the floor, a cup’s handle came away in her fingers. Then dishwashing became accustomed work, no longer an occupation to banish unwanted thoughts. The thoughts came, of Guy’s uneasiness last night, of his laughter that had lacked honesty.
She fashioned a song that compared a fleshbound house dog with a red wolf; a man to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper, with a perfumed, asthmatic fat man. Repetition gave the unspoken chant rhythm, rhythm soothed her, took her mind from what might be happening in the hotel down the hill.
She had finished the dishes and was scouring the sink when Guy came back. She looked a brief smile up at him and bent her face to her work again, to hide the questions she knew her eyes held.
He stood in the doorway watching her.
“Changed my mind,” he said presently. “I’ll let him write his own ticket. If he wants to see me, he knows the way. It’s up to him.”
He moved away from the door. She heard him going upstairs.
Her hands rested on idle palms in the sink. The white porcelain of the sink was white ice. Its chill went through her arms into her body.
An hour later, when Margaret went upstairs, Guy was sitting on the side of the bed running a cloth through the barrel of his black revolver. She fidgeted around the room, pretending to be busy with this and that, hoping he would answer the questions she could not ask. But he talked of unrelated things. He cleaned and greased the revolver with the slow, fondling thoroughness of a chronic whittler sharpening his knife, and talked of matters that had no bearing on Leonidas Doucas.
The rest of the day he spent indoors, smoking and drinking the afternoon through in the living-room. When he leaned back, the revolver made a lump under his left armpit. He was merry and profane and boastful. For the first time Margaret saw his thirty-five years in his eyes, and in the individual clearness of each thick facial muscle.
After dinner they sat in the dining-room with no illumination but the light of fading day. When that was gone neither of them got up to press the electric button beside the portiered hall door. He was as garrulous as ever. She found speech difficult, but he did not seem to notice that. She was never especially articulate with him.
They were sitting in complete darkness when the doorbell rang.
“If that’s Doucas, show him in,” Guy said. “And then you’d better get upstairs out of the way.”
Margaret turned on the lights before she left the room, and looked back at her husband. He was putting down the cold cigar stub he had been chewing. He grinned mockingly at her.
“And if you hear a racket,” he suggested, “you’d better stick your head under the covers and think up the best way to get blood out of rugs.”
She held herself very erect going to the door and opening it.
Doucas’s round black hat came off to move with his shoulders in a counterfeit bow that swept the odour of magnolia to her.
“Your-husband – is – in.”
“Yes.” Her chin was uptilted so she could seem to smile on him, though he stood a head taller than she, and she tried to make her smile very sweetly gentle. “Come in. He is expecting you.”
Guy, sitting where she had left him, fresh cigar alight, did not get up to greet Doucas. He took the cigar from his mouth and let smoke leak between his teeth to garnish the good-natured insolence of his smile.
“Welcome to our side of the world,” he said.
The Greek said nothing, standing just inside the portiere.
Margaret left them thus, going through the room and up the back stairs. Her husband’s voice came up the steps behind her in a rumble of which she could pick no words. If Doucas spoke she did not hear him.
She stood in her dark bedroom, clutching the foot of the bed with both hands, the trembling of her body making the bed tremble. Out of the night questions came to torment her, shadowy questions, tangling, knotting, raveling in too swiftly shifting a profusion for any to be clearly seen, but all having something to do with a pride that in eight years had become a very dear thing.
They had to do with a pride in a man’s courage and hardihood, courage and hardihood that could make of thefts, of murder, of crimes dimly guessed, wrongs no more reprehensible than a boy’s apple-stealing. They had to do with the existence or non-existence of this gilding courage, without which a rover might be no more than a shoplifter on a geographically larger scale, a sneak thief who crept into strangers’ lands instead of houses, a furtive, skulking figure with an aptitude for glamorous autobiography. Then pride would be silliness.
Out of the floor came a murmur, all that distance and intervening carpentry left of words that were being said down in her tan-papered dining-room. The murmur drew her toward the dining-room, drew her physically, as the questions drove her.
She left her slippers on the bedroom floor. Very softly, stockinged feet carried her down the dark front stairs, tread by tread. Skirts held high and tight against rustling, she crept down the black stairs toward the room where two men – equally strangers for the time – sat trafficking.
Beneath the portiere, and from either side, yellow light came to lay a pale, crooked ‘U’ on the hall floor. Guy’s voice came through.
“… not there. We turned the island upside down from Dambulla all the way to the Kalawewa, and got nothing. I told you it was a bust. Catch those limeys leaving that much sugar lay round under their noses!”
“Dahl-said-it-was-there.”
Doucas’s voice was soft with the infinitely patient softness of one whose patience is nearly at end.
Creeping to the doorway, Margaret peeped around the curtain. The two men and the table between them came into the opening. Doucas’s over-coated shoulder was to her. He sat straight up, hands inert on fat thighs, cocked profile inert. Guy’s white-sleeved forearms were on the table. He leaned over them, veins showing in forehead and throat, smaller and more vivid around the blue-black of his eyes. The glass in front of him was empty; the one before Doucas still brimmed with dark liquor.
“I don’t give a damn what Dahl says.” Guy’s voice was blunt, but somehow missed finality. “I’m telling you
