Sartoris peered at his wrist. “Twelfth.”
“It’s later than midnight,” I said. “It must be.”
“I said it was the twelfth,” Sartoris said.
Bland was stooping at the fountain. There was a little light there. As we reached him he stood up, mopping at his face.
The light was on his face and I thought for some time that he must have had his whole head under to be mopping that high up his face before I saw that he was crying. He stood there, mopping at his face, crying hard but quiet.
“My poor little wife,” he said. “My poor little wife.”
Victory
I
THOSE WHO SAW HIM descend from the Marseilles express in the Gare de Lyon on that damp morning saw a tall man, a little stiff, with a bronze face and spike-ended moustaches and almost white hair. “A milord,” they said, remarking his sober, correct suit, his correct stick correctly carried, his sparse baggage; “a milord military. But there is something the matter with his eyes.” But there was something the matter with the eyes of so many people, men and women too, in Europe since four years now. So they watched him go on, a half head above the French people, with his gaunt, strained eyes, his air strained, purposeful, and at the same time assured, and vanish into a cab, thinking, if they thought about him any more at all: “You will see him in the Legation offices or at a table on the Boulevards, or in a carriage with the fine English ladies in the Bois.” That was all.
And those who saw him descend from the same cab at the Gare du Nord, they thought: “This milord returns home by haste'; the porter who took his bag wished him good morning in fair English and told him that he was going to England, receiving for reply the English glare which the porter perhaps expected, and put him into a first-class carriage of the boat train. And that was all, too. That was all right, too, even when he got down at Amiens. English milords even did that. It was only at Rozieres that they began to look at him and after him when he had passed.
In a hired car he jounced through a gutted street between gutted walls rising undoored and unwindowed in jagged shards in the dusk. The street was partially blocked now and then by toppled walls, with masses of masonry in the cracks of which a thin grass sprouted, passing empty and ruined courtyards, in one of which a tank, mute and tilted, rusted among rank weeds. This was Rozieres, but he didn’t stop there because no one lived there and there was no place to stop.
So the car jounced and crept on out of the ruin. The muddy and unpaved street entered a village of harsh new brick and sheet iron and tarred paper roofs made in America, and halted before the tallest house. It was flush with the street: a brick wall with a door and one window of American glass bearing the word RESTAURANT. “Here you are, sir,” the driver said.
The passenger descended, with his bag, his ulster, his correct stick. He entered a biggish, bare room chill with new plaster. It contained a billiard table at which three men played. One of the men looked over his shoulder and said, “Bonjour, monsieur.”
The newcomer did not reply at all. He crossed the room, passing the new zinc bar, and approached an open door beyond which a woman of any age around forty looked at him above the sewing on her lap.
“Bong jour, madame,” he said. “Dormie, madame?”
The woman gave him a single glance, brief, still. “C’est ga, monsieur,” she said, rising.
“Dormie, madame?” he said, raising his voice a little, his spiked moustache beaded a little with rain, dampness beneath his strained yet assured eyes. “Dormie, madame?”
“Bon, monsieur,” the woman said. “Bon. Bon.”
“Dor…” the newcomer essayed again. Someone touched his arm. It was the man who had spoken from the billiard table when he entered.
“Regardez, Monsieur l’Anglais,” the man said. He took the bag from the newcomer and swept his other arm toward the ceiling. “La chambre.” He touched the traveler again; he laid his face upon his palm and closed his eyes; he gestured again toward the ceiling and went on across the room toward a wooden stair without balustrade. As he passed the bar he took a candle stub from it and lit the candle (the big room and the room beyond the door where the woman sat were lighted by single bulbs hanging naked on cords from the ceiling) at the foot of the stair.
They mounted, thrusting their fitful shadows before them, into a corridor narrow, chill, and damp as a tomb. The walls were of rough plaster not yet dried. The floor was of pine, without carpet or paint. Cheap metal doorknobs glinted symmetrically. The sluggish air lay like a hand upon the very candle. They entered a room, smelling too of wet plaster, and even colder than the corridor; a sluggish chill almost substantial, as though the atmosphere between the dead and recent walls were congealing, like a patent three-minute dessert. The room contained a bed, a dresser, a chair, a washstand; the bowl, pitcher, and slop basin were of American enamel. When the traveler touched the bed the linen was soundless under his hand, coarse as sacking, clinging damply to the hand in the dead air in which their two breathings vaporized in the faint candle.
The host set the candle on the dresser. “Diner, monsieur?” he said. The traveler stared down at the host, incongruous in his correct clothes, with that strained air. His waxed moustaches gleamed like faint bayonets above a cravat stripe with what the host could not have known was the patterned coloring of a Scottish regiment. “Manger?” the host shouted.
He chewed violently in pantomime. “Manger?” he roared, his shadow aping his gesture as he pointed toward the floor.
“Yes,” the traveler shouted in reply, their faces not a yard apart. “Yes. Yes.”
The host nodded violently, pointed toward the floor and then at the door, nodded again, went out.
He returned below stairs. He found the woman now in the kitchen, at the stove. “He will eat,” the host said.
“I knew that,” the woman said.
“You would think that they would stay at home,” the host said. “I’m glad I was not born of a race doomed to a place too small to hold all of us at one time.”
“Perhaps he has come to look at the war,” the woman said.
“Of course he has,” the host said. “But he should have come four years ago. That was when we needed Englishmen to look at the war.”
“He was too old to come then,” the woman said. “Didn’t you see his hair?”
“Then let him stay at home now,” the host said. “He is no younger.”
“He may have come to look at the grave of his son,” the woman said.
“Him?” the host said. “That one? He is too cold to ever have had a son.”
“Perhaps you are right,” the woman said. “After all, that is his affair. It is our affair only that he has money.”
“That’s right,” the host said. “A man in this business, he cannot pick and choose.”
“He can pick, though,” the woman said.
“Good!” the host said. “Very good! Pick! That is worth telling to the English himself.”
“Why not let him find it out when he leaves?”
“Good!” the host said. “Better still. Good! Oh, good!”
“Attention,” the woman said. “Here he comes.”
They listened to the traveler’s steady tramp, then he appeared in the door. Against the lesser light of the bigger room, his dark face and his white hair looked like a kodak negative.
The table was set for two, a carafe of red wine at each place. As the traveller seated himself, the other guest entered and took the other place: a small, rat-faced man who appeared at first glance to have no eyelashes
