Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers [41]
'Why, you put it exactly right,' the Major said. 'Don't you agree with me?'
'No,' said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. 'I don't agree,' he repeated absently.
Major Langdon thought over this unexpected reply, but did not continue the conversation. He always found it difficult to follow up any one line of thought beyond the first, bare exposition. With a headshake he returned to his own bewildering affairs. 'Once I waked up just before daylight,' he said. 'I saw the lamp was on in her room and I went in. And there I found Anacleto sitting on the edge of the bed and they were both of them looking down and fooling with something. And what was it they were doing?' The Major pressed his blunt fingers against his eyeballs and shook his head again. 'Oh yes. They were dropping little things into a bowl of water. Some sort of Japanese mess Anacleto had bought at the ten cent store these little particles open like flowers in the water. And they were just sitting there at four o'clock in the morning trifling with that. It made me suddenly irritable, and when I stumbled over Alison's slippers by the side of the bed, I lost my temper and kicked them across the room. Alison was disgusted with me, cold as ice for days. And Anacleto put salt in the sugar bowl before he brought me my coffee. It was sad. Those nights she must have suffered.'
'They giveth it and then they taketh it away,' said Leonora, whose intentions were better than her command of Scripture.
Leonora herself had altered a little during the past weeks. She was approaching the phase of her full maturity. In this short time her body seemed to have lost some of its youthful muscularity. Her face was broader, and her expression in repose was one of lazy tenderness. She looked like a woman who has had several well born babies and who hopefully expects another in about eight months. Her complexion was still of a delicate, healthy texture, and although she was gradually putting on weight there was as yet no sign of flabbiness. She had been dismayed by the death of her lover's wife. The sight of the dead body in the coffin had so fascinated her that for several days after the funeral she had spoken in an awed whisper, even when ordering groceries at the Post Exchange. She treated the Major with a sort of vacant sweetness and repeated any happy anecdotes concerning Alison that she could remember.
'By the way,' said the Captain suddenly, 'I can't stop wondering about that night when she came over here. What did she say to you in your room, Leonora?'
'I told you I didn't even know she came. She didn't wake me up.'
But on this subject Captain Penderton was still unsatisfied. The more he remembered the scene in his study, the stranger and more compelling it became to him. He did not doubt that Leonora told the truth, for whenever she lied it was instantly plain to everyone. But what had Alison meant and why on coming back home had he not gone upstairs to see? He felt he knew the answer somewhere in the shadowy unconscious of his mind. But the more he thought about this matter, the sharper was his uneasiness.
'I remember one time when I was certainly surprised,' said Leonora, holding her pink, school girlish hands out to the fire. 'It was when we all drove up to North Carolina, the afternoon after we ate those good partridges at the house of that friend of yours, Morris. Alison and Anacleto and I were walking along this country road when a little boy came along leading this plow horse close kin to a mule, he was. But Alison liked the old plug's face and suddenly decided she wanted to ride him. So she made friends with the little Tarheel