Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers [37]
This announcement, together with the strangeness of her appearance, startled the Captain greatly. But even stronger than his inward tumult was the thought that he must not lose his composure. In a flash a number of conflicting assumptions came to the Captain's mind. Her words could mean only one thing that Morris Langdon was in Leonora's room. But surely not, for they would hardly be so willy nilly as that! And if so what a position it would put him in! The Captain's smile was sugary and controlled. He did not reveal in any way his feelings of anger, doubt, and intense annoyance.
'Come, my dear,' he said in a motherly voice, 'you shouldn't be roaming around like this. I'll take you home.'
Alison gave the Captain a long piercing look. She seemed to be fitting together some mental puzzle. After a time she said slowly: 'You don't mean to sit there and tell me you know this and do nothing about it?'
Stubbornly the Captain retained his poise. 'I'll take you home,' he said. 'You're not yourself and you don't know what you're talking about.'
He got up hurriedly and took Alison by the arm. The feel of her frail, brittle elbow beneath the cloth of her coat repelled him. He hurried her down the steps and across the lawn. The front door of her house was open, but the Captain gave the doorbell a long ring. After a few moments Anacleto came into the hall, and before the Captain could make his departure he also saw Morris come out of his room at the top of the stairs. With mixed feelings of confusion and relief, he went back home, leaving Alison to explain herself as she chose.
The next morning Captain Penderton was not greatly surprised to learn that Alison Langdon had altogether lost her mind. By noon the whole post knew of this. (Her condition was referred to as a “nervous breakdown,” but no one was misled by this.) When the Captain and Leonora went over to offer their services, they found the Major standing outside the closed door of his wife's room, holding a towel over his arm. He had been standing there patiently almost all the day. His light colored eyes were wide with surprise and he kept twisting and mashing the flap of his ear. When he came down to see the Pendertons, he shook hands with them in a strangely formal fashion and blushed painfully.
With the exception of the doctor, Major Langdon kept the details of this tragedy a secret in his own shocked heart Alison did not tear up the sheets or foam at the mouth as he had imagined the insane to do. On coming into the house in her nightgown at one o'clock in the morning, she had simply said that not only did Leonora deceive her husband but that she deceived the Major as well, and with an enlisted man. Then Alison said that furthermore, she herself was going to get a divorce, and she added that as she had no money she would appreciate it if he, the Major, would lend her the sum of five hundred dollars at four per cent interest with Anacleto and Lieutenant Weincheck as guarantors. In answer to his startled questions, she said that she and Anacleto were going into some business together or would buy a prawn boat Anacleto had hauled her trunk into the room and all night he was busy packing under her supervision. They stopped off now and then to drink hot tea and study a map to decide where they would go. Sometime before dawn they settled on Moultrieville, South Carolina.
Major Langdon was greatly shaken. He stood in the corner of Alison's room for a long time and watched them pack. He dared not open his mouth. After a long time, when all that she had said had soaked into his mind and he was forced to acknowledge to himself that she was crazy, he took her nail scissors and the fire tongs out of the room. Then he went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey. He cried and sucked the salty tears from his wet mustache. Not only did he grieve for Alison's sake, but he felt ashamed, as though this were a reflection on his own respectability. The more he drank the more his misfortune