He stood there helplessly for a moment, and sat down at her feet again. It’s where he’d been—practically, I thought—since they were children, except the day she married Cass Crane, less than five months before. He spent that day at various places, which I’ve been assured is one of the reasons the per capita consumption of hard liquor will be higher in Washington than anywhere else in the country this year.
In the silence that followed Courtney’s departure a woman, obviously from the very deep South, said, “Is there a Mr. Durbin?”
There was another silence at that. Whether it was because she hadn’t asked anyone in particular, or whether she was so evidently an outsider, in not knowing that there was indeed a Mr. Durbin, that the pack closed defensively in, I don’t know. Nobody said anything, and it was just as well, for at that moment the screen door in the middle of the long pillared verandah across the back of the house opened. It was the first time I, for one, had ever seen D. J. Durbin at any private house except Courtney’s before she married him, the first autumn of the War, and his own since.
He stood silhouetted against the lighted porch for an instant, a slight almost grotesque figure, leaning on his stick, one shoulder plainly lower than the other in spite of his built-up shoe. I could see him clearly in the dusk, because he’d been sharply etched on my mind from the first day I met him . . . his twisted foot and hippity-hoppity gait, his saffron-yellow complexion and aquiline nose, and the dark hair frosted with gray. His eyes should be icy-gray too, but they’re fine and dark, and his lips full instead of being thin and like a steel trap. Because of that it’s hard to say what made his face the most ruthless one I’d ever seen, but it was. It doesn’t seem to me we used to have people like him around, before the War brought its cross-section of the strange international world to the sprawling city that used to sleep all summer by the Potomac. Or if they came here, they stayed in smoke-filled hotel rooms, and left as quickly as they could, bored with a provincial and isolated puritanism. They may still be bored, now, but they have to stay here, in the new center of the world.
I glanced at Duleep Singh, wondering if the moon and the sound of playing water made his inner ear listen for silver bells on the feet of dancing girls. Apparently not, I thought. The rose-colored light under the fountain spray threw his dark handsome face into a deeper shadow, but the rising moon-glow touched it as it might a bronze Buddha in a shadowy shrine. His gaze was fixed on Molly Crane. It was sombre and profoundly brooding. The contrast between them was so extraordinary that for a moment it was alarming. There’s an experiment they do in the psychology laboratories in a sound-proof chamber, where the noise of people’s pumping hearts slowly becomes audible, deafening, terrifying. In a way that was what was happening with Molly Crane just then. Without an apparent motion there was such a turmoil of revolt and hurt pride there, anger and unhappiness, that she was like a centrifugal churn. And it was only against Duleep Singh’s field of hypnotic calm that it could have showed. There was something extraordinary about it. Up to then I’d thought the women who said, from the day he arrived in Washington on some kind of mission from New Delhi, “My dear, isn’t he fascinating!” were a little silly. But as the moonlight glistened now on the startling whites of his eyes I found myself moving uneasily, and wanting Randy Fleming, or Cass Crane, or somebody, to take Molly away from there. She was too young and too transparent. It wasn’t fair, because within the limits of her own small orbit she was covering up very well. So well, in fact, that Corinne Blodgett, who thinks herself psychic, said later, “If Molly had really cared, my dear, she wouldn’t have just sat there.”
Then the spell broke. Duleep Singh turned his head, got up and bowed as Courtney’s husband came around the pink marble fountain basin to where we were sitting. I was sorry the spell had gone . . . I would have liked to see D. J. Durbin as taansparently revealed as Molly Crane had been.
He stopped and spoke abruptly, barely nodding to any of us.
“Has Mrs. Durbin gone?”
“About five minutes ago.”
It was Randy who answered. And it may have been the pack rallying again. Nobody, not even Molly, said where she’d gone, or that she’d gone to meet Cass Crane. And he couldn’t not know about Cass, not possibly. Even if he’d been deaf as a post he must have heard the gasp that went up when Courtney married him and not Cass. And if he hadn’t heard what Courtney said when Cass suddenly and astonishingly married Molly—and what she was still saying—then he was the only person within a hundred miles who hadn’t. Or perhaps, of course, he didn’t care. He simply turned on his heel, now, and went limping back to the house and out of sight, without saying good night or thank you.
I glanced at Molly. She was looking up at the sky, waiting for Cass’s plane to fly across, I suppose, her small face as pale and empty and inscrutable, now, as the moon-washed bowl above her.
The marble basin rim I was sitting on seemed to get hard and uncomfortable. It wasn’t any hotter than it had been all evening, hut the atmosphere had gone stale, like flat lukewarm champagne. It was dull and oppressive, and something it just seemed better to be out of.
“I think I’ll go home,” I said.
Duleep Singh smiled and bowed. “May I——”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m taking the bus, and it stops at my door. Good night.”
I didn’t go across to the other side of the garden to say goodbye to my host, who was talking to Corinne Blodgett’s husband Horace and some other men in a secluded corner. It’s one of the rules of the house that guests go as they please, without making other people feel it must be getting late. As I stopped at the dressing room at the end of the porch to get my umbrella—wishful thinking of the school that doesn’t believe it’s bound to rain if you don’t take it—I heard the Southern lady checking up again.
“Now, who was that, dear?”
“That’s Grace Latham.”
It was Corinne Blodgett answering, and the next question was obvious.
“No, dear, he’s dead. She just lives here because it happens to be her home. She’s one of us odd people who were born here.”
Even if I could have heard the rest of it I wouldn’t have had to bother. It’s like a record that goes on automatically once the needle’s in place.—No, she’s never married again, and nobody knows why. She has two sons, but they’re no excuse because one’s an air cadet and the other’s away at school. She certainly could have, if for no other reason than because she’s got a house in Georgetown. Just a hall bedroom will get a woman a husband in Washington these days. Yes, she does have men around. Especially Colonel Primrose. Some people say he wants to marry her, but either she won’t or he doesn’t or that granite Sergeant he lives with won’t let him. And so on . . .
I feel sorry for Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers U.S.A. (Retired), sometimes. If ever a man is forced to turn over his ration books to prove publicly that his intentions are not dishonorable, or that he is not a worm under the heel of a Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, also 92nd Engineers, U.S.A., also retired, it will be Colonel Primrose. There really ought to be a Fifth Freedom—For Men Only. Though frankly it’s got to the point where I almost wish he really would ask me to marry him, so I could settle it for everybody . . . one way or the other.
2
I went out through the rose-and-white marble-paved hall, bare of rugs for the summer, and down to the street. In ordinary times the narrow road leading out to Connecticut Avenue would have been lined with cars. There were only two there now. One had a diplomatic marker, and the other was a long sleek black job with a tiny troglodyte of a man leaning against the fender, fanning himself with a panama hat. I looked around, because it was like seeing a shadow without its substance. Then I saw the substance. He was standing by the luminous white board with diagonal black stripes that marks the dead end of the road where it falls sharply off down into the Park. He was leaning on his stick, looking up into the sky . . . as intently, it seemed to me, as Molly Crane had done.
As I got almost to the