A Friend
“Oh,” I said. “I see. You corrected it.”
“Yes. But that’s not the mistake. I just did that for her. You know how women are. Like as not she would rather not see it in the papers at all than to see it spelled wrong.”
“She?”
“My wife. Martha. The mistake was, if she got them or not.”
“I don’t. Maybe you’d better tell me.”
“That’s what I am doing. I got two of the first one, the one about the disappearance, but I waited until the letter come out. Then I put them both into a piece of paper with A Friend on it, and put them into a envelope and mailed them to her. But I don’t know if she got them or not. That was the mistake.”
“The mistake?”
“Yes. She moved. She moved to Park Avenue when the insurance was paid. I saw that in a paper after I come down here. It told about how Mrs. Martha Midgleston of Park Avenue was married to a young fellow, he used to be associated with the Maison Payot on Fifth Avenue. It didn’t say when she moved, so I don’t know if she got them or not.”
“Oh,” I said. He was putting the clippings carefully back into the canvas wallet.
“Yes, sir. Women are like that. It don’t cost a man much to humor them now and then. Because they deserve it; they have a hard time. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t mind how they spelled it. What’s a name to a man that’s done and been something outside the lot and plan for mortal human man to do and be?”
The Leg
I
THE BOAT, it was a yawl boat with a patched weathered sail made two reaches below us while I sat with the sculls poised, watching her over my shoulder, and George clung to the pile, spouting Milton at Everbe Corinthia. When it made the final tack I looked back at George. But he was now but well into Comus’ second speech, his crooked face raised, and the afternoon bright on his close ruddy head.
“Give way, George,” I said. But he held us stationary at the pile, his glazed hat lifted, spouting his fine and cadenced folly as though the lock, the Thames, time and all, belonged to him, while Sabrina (or Hebe or Chloe or whatever name he happened to be calling Corinthia at the time) with her dairy-maid’s complexion and her hair like mead poured in sunlight stood above us in one of her endless succession of neat print dresses, her hand on the lever and one eye on George and the other on the yawl, saying “Yes, milord” dutifully whenever George paused for breath.
The yawl luffed and stood away; the helmsman shouted for the lock.
“Let go, George,” I said. But he clung to the pile in his fine and incongruous oblivion. Everbe Corinthia stood above us, her hand on the lever, bridling a little and beginning to reveal a certain concern, and looking from her to the yawl and back again I thought how much time she and I had both spent thus since that day three years ago when, cow-eyed and bridling, she had opened the lock for us for the first time, with George holding us stationary while he apostrophised her in the metaphor of Keats and Spenser.
Again the yawl’s crew shouted at us, the yawl aback and in stays. “Let go, you fool!” I said, digging the sculls. “Lock, Corinthia!”
George looked at me. Corinthia was now watching the yawl with both eyes. “What, Davy?” George said. “Must even thou help Circe’s droves into the sea? Pull, then, O Super-Gadarene!”
And he shoved us off. I had not meant to pull away. And even if I had, I could still have counteracted the movement if Everbe Corinthia hadn’t opened the lock. But open it she did, and looked once back to us and sat flat on the earth, crisp fresh dress and all. The skiff shot away under me; I had a fleeting picture of George still clinging with one arm around the pile, his knees drawn up to his chin and the hat in his lifted hand and of a long running shadow carrying the shadow of a boat-hook falling across the lock. Then I was too busy steering. I shot through the gates, carrying with me that picture of George, the glazed hat still gallantly aloft like the mastheaded pennant of a man-of-war, vanishing beneath the surface. Then I was floating quietly in slack water while the round eyes of two men stared quietly down at me from the yawl.
“Yer’ve lost yer mate, sir,” one of them said in a civil voice. Then they had drawn me alongside with a boat-hook and standing up in the skiff, I saw George. He was standing in the towpath now, and Simon, Everbe Corinthia’s father, and another man, he was the one with the boat-hook, whose shadow I had seen across the lock, were there too.
But I saw only George with his ugly crooked face and his round head now dark in the sunlight. One of the watermen was still talking. “Steady, sir. Lend ’im a ’and, Sam’l. There. ’E’ll do now. Give ’im a turn, seeing ’is mate…”
“You fool, you damned fool!” I said. George stooped beside me, wringing his sopping flannels, while Simon and the second man Simon with his iron-gray face and his iron-gray whisker that made him look like nothing so much as an aged bull peering surlily and stupidly across a winter hedgerow, and the second man, younger, with a ruddy capable face, in a hard, boardlike, town-made suit watched us. Corinthia sat on the ground, weeping hopelessly and quietly. “You damned fool. Oh, you damned fool.”
“Oxford young gentlemen,” Simon said in a harsh disgusted voice. “Oxford young gentlemen.”
“Eh, well,” George said, “I daresay I haven’t damaged your lock over a farthing’s worth.” He rose, and saw Corinthia. “What, Circe!” he said, “tears over the accomplishment of your appointed destiny?” He went to her, trailing a thread of water across the packed earth, and took her arm. It moved willing enough, but she herself sat flat on the ground, looking up at him with streaming hopeless eyes. Her mouth was open a little and she sat in an attitude of patient despair, weeping tears of crystal purity. Simon watched them, the boat-hook, he had taken it from the second man, who was now busy at the lock mechanism, and I knew that he was the brother who worked in London, of whom Corinthia had once told us clutched in his big knotty fist. The yawl was now in the lock, the two faces watching us across the parapet like two severed heads in a quiet row upon the footway. “Come, now,” George said. “You’ll soil your dress sitting there.”
“Up, lass,” Simon said, in that harsh voice of his which at the same time was without ill-nature, as though harshness were merely the medium through which he spoke. Corinthia rose obediently, still weeping, and went on toward the neat little dove-cote of a house in which they lived. The sunlight was slanting level across it and upon George’s ridiculous figure. He was watching me.
“Well, Davy,” he said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say from your expression that you are envying me.”
“Am I?” I said. “You fool. You ghastly lunatic.”
Simon had gone to the lock. The two quiet heads rose slowly, as though they were being thrust gradually upward from out the earth, and Simon now stooped with the boathook over the lock. He rose, with the limp anonymity of George’s once gallant hat on the end of the boat-hook, and extended it. George took it as gravely. “Thanks,” he said.
He dug into his pocket and gave Simon a coin. “For wear and tear on the boat-hook,” he said. “And perhaps a bit of balm for your justifiable disappointment, eh, Simon?”
Simon grunted and turned back to the lock. The brother was still watching us. “And I am obliged to you,” George said. “Hope I’ll never have to return the favor in kind.” The brother said something, short and grave, in a slow pleasant voice. George looked at me again. “Well, Davy.”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
“Right you are. Where’s the skiff?” Then I was staring at him again, and for a moment he stared at me. Then he shouted, a long ringing laugh, while the two heads in the yawl watched us from beyond Simon’s granite- like and contemptuous back. I could almost hear Simon thinking Oxford young gentlemen. “Davy, have you lost the
