I want you to have that too. Because then it will be all right. We can always be together no matter how far apart either one of us happens to be or has to be. How did you say it? the two people in all the earth out of all the world that can love each other not only without having to but we dont even have to not say that word vou dont like to hear? Will you promise?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I know you cant just step outdoors tomorrow and find her. It may take a year or two. But all you’ve got to do is just stop resisting the idea of being married. Once you do that it’s all right because the rest of it will happen. Will you do that?”
“I swear,” I said.
“Why, you said Swear, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then kiss me.” I did so, her arms quite hard, quite strong around my neck; a moment, then gone. “And early tomorrow morning, go back home.” And I, writing
“No. Tomorrow. Early. I’ll put my hand on the wall and when you’re in bed knock on it and if I wake up in the night I can knock and if you’re awake or still there you can knock back and if I dont feel you knock you can write me from Jefferson tomorrow or the next day. Because I’m all right now. Good night, Gavin.”
“Good night, Linda,” I said.
“I read that too. I love you.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I read that too but write it on the tablet anyway and I can have that for a—what do you call it?—eye opener in the morning.”
“Yes,” I said, extending my hand for the tablet.
ELEVEN
Because it was 1942 and Gavin was married now, to Melisandre Harriss (Backus that was as Thackeray said); that pitcher had went to that well jest that one time too many, as Ratliff said, provided of course he had said it. One Sunday morning there was Pearl Harbor and I wired Gavin by return mail you might say from Oxford
So I was at home in time to be actually present at the first innocent crumblings of what he had obviously assumed to be his impregnable bastions; to “stand up” with him, be groomsman to his disaster. It happened like this. I was unable to get into the government flight-training program course at the University but they told me that anybody with a college degree and any number of hours from one up of flying time, especially solo, would have about as good a chance of going straight into military training for a commission. So there was a professional crop- duster operating from the same field and he took me on as a student, on even bigger aircraft, one of (he claimed) the actual type of army primary training, than the little fifty h.p. popguns the official course used.
So when I sent Uncle Gavin the wire I had around fifteen logged hours, three of which were solo, and when Mother rang my telephone I was already packed up and the car already pointed toward Jefferson. So I was there to see the beginning of it whether Gavin recognised it as banns or not. I mean the Long Island horse farm that Miss Melisandre Harriss Backus that was used to bring the two children (they were grown now; Gavin was marrying not stepchildren but in-laws) back home to now and then from Europe until the Germans began to blow up Americans in actual sight of the Irish coast. So after that it had to be South America, this last time bringing the Argentine steeplechasing cavalry officer that that maniac boy of the two Harriss children (I dont mean that both Aunt Melisandre’s children were maniacs but that only one of them was a boy) believed was trying to marry the money his mother was still trustee of instead of just his sister who just had an allowance like him. So he (the maniac of course) set out to murder the Argentine steeplechaser with that wild stallion of Rafe McCallum’s that he (the maniac) bought or tricked or anyway got inside that stall where the innocent Argentine would have walked up in the dark and opened the door on what he (the innocent Argentine) thought was going to be not only a gentle horse but a partly blind one too. Except that Gavin read his tea leaves or used his second sight or divining rod or whatever it was he did in cases like this, and got hold of Rafe in time to reach the stall door first and stop him.
So the Argentine was saved, and that night the maniac took his choice between the army recruiting station in Memphis, and Uncle Gavin, and chose the army so he was safe, and that afternoon the Argentine and the maniac’s sister were married and left Jefferson and they were safe. But Uncle Gavin remained, and the next day I had to go on to ground school, preflight, so when I got home next time I was in uniform and Gavin was not only a husband but father too of a stepson who would have been as neat a bystanding murderer as you could hope to see except for a stroke of arrant meddling which to a dog shouldn’t happen, and a stepdaughter married to an Argentine steeplechasing son-in-law. (By which time I was married too, to a bombsight—I hadn’t made pilot but at least I would be riding up front—allotted to me by a government which didn’t trust me with it and so set spies to watch what I did with it, which before entrusting it to me had trained me not to trust my spies nor anybody else respecting it, in a locked black case which stayed locked by a chain to me even while I was asleep—a condition of constant discomfort of course but mainly of unflagging mutual suspicion and mutual distrust and in time mutual hatred which you even come to endure, which is probably the best of all training for successful matrimony.)
So when I saw Jefferson next I was in uniform, long enough to call on the squire and his dame among his new ancestral white fences and electric-lit stables and say Bless you my children and then run Ratliff once more to earth.
“He cant marry her now,” I said. “He’s already got a wife.”
And you never thought of
