SHORTLY AFTER THE RAIN, the sun came out brilliantly in a cloudless sky and, there in the slanting rays of late afternoon, they buried Albert Rogers. They buried him exactly where he died, digging his shallow grave with sticks and stones and whatever other crude implements they could scrape together.
It was curious—the digging. The women dug as well as the men. There were no tears, no demonstrations of emotions. Only a kind of numbed, resolute silence punctuated by the grunts and sighs of prolonged effort. It was as if now, having accepted Albert Rogers’ death as an inescapable fact, they had some furious need to whisk him out of sight, to obliterate every trace of him—even the memory of him—as quickly as possible.
Side by side, in sodden, dripping clothes, they worked until at dusk they had scooped out a shallow grave in the earth, into which they laid him. Then with the dirgelike sound of rain dripping from the still-wet branches all around them in the forest, they quickly covered him over with a small mound of earth.
“We have to mark the place,” Ollie said and started to fashion a rude cross. But Garvix stayed her hand. “No mark,” he said. She started to protest but he laid his finger firmly against her lips. “No mark.”
She yielded, falling back before him as if in a trance. There was no further protest from the others.
The thick, wet shadows of the forest began to gather and encircle them. For a while they sat silently before the squat hump of earth while the branches dripped dolefully all around them.
“Well, what now?” Bayles said. The sudden intrusion of his voice startled them.
“What now, indeed?” Gage chewed reflectively on the cold stem of his pipe. He’d run out of tobacco early that morning.
Jamison looked up, that querulous, whiny thing in his eye. He laughed a little shrilly. “I’ll tell you what now. We’re screwed.” He flung a desperate gaze at Rogers’ grave. “He was the only one who knew the way out. Who really knew—”
“Now, we’ll never find our way back,” Sybil grieved.
Ollie sobbed into a handkerchief, and there in the gathering twilight while the shrill, nightlong piping of the peepers, like restless spirits of the netherworld, had begun to vibrate through the forest, Leo Garvix chuckled to himself.
They tried to make a fire for the night but the rain had drenched all the wood and it was impossible to get anything started. So they had no supper and when darkness finally fell that chill, moonless night, they huddled close to each other fearing that if they strayed even a few feet from that handful of heartbeats in the forest they’d never find their way back again. Somewhere off in the forest they heard the high, sharp bark of a fox with the little sob that follows it—eerie—unmistakable. They could hear animal sounds near them in the darkness and they talked to each other in hushed voices—not for conversation or amusement but just to keep contact.
Garvix did most of the talking that night. And they listened. He talked of Garvix Enterprises, Inc., and told bad jokes and then laughed at them louder than anyone else. And so the long, dark night wore on.
John Bayles and Gladys Garvix weren’t listening to this bold, cheerful talk. They were two skeptics and so, these two who’d barely exchanged a half-dozen civil words during the past three days, now discovered in each other in the inky blackness a curious camaraderie.
“What do you see out there, John?” she asked. It was her idea of a bitter little joke, for nothing could be seen in that darkness. She couldn’t even see him and yet he was no more than a foot or two from her.
“God,” he answered quite seriously.
“Yoohoo—God,” she called.
“Don’t laugh. He’s out there.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel Him out there.”
She was about to laugh but it occurred to her that she didn’t want to be funny anymore. Then in sudden earnestness she whispered: “What does He tell you?”
“That we’re lost.”
“Do we need Him to tell us that?” The irritation crept back into her voice.
“Yes, we didn’t really know it until just a little while ago.” There in the total darkness he could sense her confusion.
“Irreversibly lost,” he added for whatever clarity it might shed. “Even this morning we might still have gotten back. But now it’s hopeless.”
“When did it become that? When Albert died?”
“Even before then,” he replied. “Early this afternoon the light changed and I knew it instantly. Now we’ll wander till we die.”
“Oh,” she said, and laughed softly. “Is that all? I thought it was going to be something awful.” She felt his eyes searching for her in the dark. “We were doing that every day of our lives before we came here.”
“Doing what?”
“Wandering,” she said and waited for him to speak. But he didn’t, and she went on: “What difference if you wander in a forest or in a city? Or even from the living room to the kitchen? It’s all the same rat’s maze. It all ends the same, doesn’t it?”
Bayles smiled into the darkness, feeling a curious strangeness about the face he smiled with—as if the face he was smiling with were not his own. “Yes, you’re right.” Suddenly he was laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“To know it,” he said. “To know it finally. It’s funny to know something—anything—finally.”
“Absolutely hysterical,” she said glumly.
“Well isn’t it?” He went on laughing. “Isn’t the truth finally very funny?”
“Oh, screamingly!” She didn’t feel any better about knowing the truth finally.
“It is,” he persisted. “It is.”
“Funny that we’re lost?”
“No—not lost—found.”
She frowned into the darkness, more perplexed than ever. Rich, deep laughter rose from somewhere deep within him.
“What’s so funny?” Garvix cried out at them across the dark.
“Share it with us,” said Freddy Jamison.
“Yes,” Sybil said. “We’re all dying for a laugh.”
“John Bayles says we’re all right now.” Gladys called back to them. “We’re found. He says when we got lost we got found.”
Bayles heard some snickering he imagined to be Jamison.
Suddenly there was a flash of fire illuminating the spot with an eerie, greenish glow. Tom Putney stood in the center of that glow, holding above his head a torch made of a long branch around which he’d wrapped his undershirt and then ignited it.
Putney looked round sheepishly at the others, more surprised than they to see the fire. Then he said a trifle apologetically: “I just couldn’t stand the dark another minute longer.”
Garvix beamed. “Now that’s what I call resourcefulness.”
The torch smoldered and crackled and rained sparks upward at the black, starless sky. It gave no warmth and little comfort. But for its feeble light alone it was greatly welcome and soon, by drying sticks and branches beside it, and igniting them, they had a bright and cheery little fire.
With the fire came a renewal of their spirits. Soon Garvix was again regaling them with stories of the rise of Garvix Enterprises, Inc. He told them how his father had refused to give him any money or backing. How he’d started the business on money he’d saved. How the first of his enterprises was located in a loft above a rural post office. And how under his guidance and direction Garvix Enterprises, Inc., had spread and prospered. Then he talked of his future plans for a giant international conglomerate. The mere talk of a rosy, prosperous future had a salutary effect on them.
Aflame with his vision of a huge industrial empire, Garvix was about to continue when out of the corner of his eye he saw Tom Putney squatting beside the grave of the surveyor. In the next moment he rose and crossed quickly to the spot. Behind him, Freddy Jamison was boasting about his golf game, whom he could beat, and what handicaps he could spot various players in the area.
When Garvix reached the boy, he laid a hand roughly on his shoulder. “Come away, now.”
“He lied to me,” Putney said, his eyes riveted to the mound of freshly dug earth. “John Bayles is right. He was a liar.”
“Come away.” Garvix tried to lead him off. But the boy was unbudgeable. “He said he might be havin’ another of them spells. But he promised me that no matter how bad he got, he’d always come back. Be his old self again. That’s what he promised.”
“He’s not gonna do that any more,” Garvix said. “So you might just as well forget it.”
“He was like a father to me,” Tom went on in a childish chanting. “I never had no father. He promised me and he lied. He never lied to me before.”
“Teach you to depend on nothing and nobody.” Garvix crouched down beside the boy. “All my life I never depended on no one but myself and that’s why I am where I am today.”
Putney didn’t hear a word. He wasn’t listening. Instead, he rambled on, gently scolding the man buried beneath the shallow mound of earth. “He was gonna make me a surveyor so that when he’d retire, I’d be surveyor of the whole county.” When he turned to Garvix his eyes were glistening. “That’s what he promised me.”
“Forget about that now,” Garvix snapped. “And forget about him. That’s water over the bridge. You can’t bring him back. Only thing that matters now is yourself.” He cuffed the boy on the shoulder and laughed. “Like they say, boy—‘Número Uno.’ That’s all that counts. You and how you’re gonna pull yourself out of this mess.” Garvix looked round to see if he’d been heard, then turned back to Putney, studying him intently. There was something curiously compassionate in the way he looked at him. Suddenly he smiled, threw his arm round Putney’s shoulder, and yanked the boy toward him in a rough, bearish embrace. “You know what I think?” he whispered into his ear. “I think they’re all crazy”—he thrust his head toward the others strewn round the fire—“except thee and me.” He giggled conspiratorially. “We’re the only sane ones.” Putney listened to him now, his eyes transfixed in the gaze of the older man.
“I’ve been watching you, Tom. You’ve got a lot of good horse sense. I like the way you made that fire tonight. That was resourceful. None of them would’ve thought of it. I tell you, I was impressed. You really use your head. You know how to take care of yourself. You watch out for Número Uno. Now these others”—he made a sound halfway between a jeer and a laugh—“a pack of whiners and snivelers, the lot of ’em. Minute they stray a bit from their daily routine, they’re lost. Start staining their britches. All of ’em ready for the funny farm if you ask me.” He gave a short, brutal laugh and cuffed the boy again. “Know what I’m gonna do for you, Tom?” He waited, enjoying the sudden glint of avidity that flashed into the boy’s eyes. “Minute we get out of here, I’m gonna fix you up with Garvix Enterprises, Inc. What do you think of that? No crummy surveyor’s job. That’s not worthy of you. I’ll give you a honey of a spot. You’re executive timber.”
In the next moment he realized that Putney’s eyes had strayed back to the shallow grave. Garvix shook his shoulder roughly. “Forget about him now. That’s the past. I’m the future. Hear me, boy—Tom?”
But Putney’s gaze remained riveted on the freshly dug mound. “He lied to me,” he mumbled inconsolably. “Like a father to me and he lied.”
“What did you mean the other night?” Freddy turned and peered at Gladys across the shadows.
“The other night?”
“You mentioned some problem. What was it in connection with?” She knew very well. She was merely trying to evade the question.
“They were all discussing how they felt about Rogers going daft and all,” Freddy continued earnestly. “And you said you felt ‘nothing.’ You said, ‘That’s my problem.’ Those were your very words.”
“Oh,” she said and gazed off into the night.
“What did you mean?”
“I don’t know—nothing, I guess.”
“Oh, come on now, Glad—tell me.”
“I don’t remember.”
“No secrets now.”
“I don’t remember!” She flared up at him, her voice so harsh that he recoiled.
“Well,” she went on, relenting a bit, “I suppose that I meant that I hate my life. That I’m empty of faith. And that mostly—I feel nothing.”
He smiled feebly through his white, pasty features. “Not even a bit of affection for an old admirer?”
“Nothing.” She said it with a finality that seemed cruel. “Nothing. Nothing moves me. Not joy or sorrow. Nothing. When I married Leo I felt nothing. Only relief that I wouldn’t have to scramble for a buck anymore.”
“That’s exactly how I felt when I married Sybil,” he said with a kind of giggly satisfaction that he was sharing a common experience with her. Then he added a little uneasily. “Nothing wrong with that is there?”
“When my father died,” she went on not hearing him, “I sat there absolutely dry-eyed while everyone around me blubbered—my sisters and brothers—everyone. I recall my mother saying she hated me for not crying. For not showing my father the simple respect of blubbering over him. Till this day she’s never forgiven me.” She paused and smiled up at him slyly. “That thing Leo said yesterday was true.”
“What thing?”
“That thing about my mother—about her putting me up to marrying him. It’s true. She did. Painted me all kinds of beautiful pictures of what would happen if I did. Set my head on it from about the time I was ten.” She threw her head back and laughed aloud. “We did it on a weekend. Drove down to Maryland. Oh, how the Garvixes took on when he brought me home. You should’ve seen old Edith Garvix rant and rave. Nearly went through the roof. Wanted to have it annulled right there and then—the old bitch!” Her head jerked back again and she was hooting spitefully, vindictively at the sky. She looked up at Jamison, suddenly recalling he was there. Something like grief came into her eyes. “All those years I wished I could cry for him—”
“Your father?” he asked, feeling dismal and helpless.
She nodded. “And never—never once.”
Freddy pondered her dilemma a while, wanting desperately to make her happy. In spite of the spasms of cramps, he became for her sake cheerful and a little giddy. “Me?” he laughed. “I could always cry. I’m the biggest crybaby in the world. I cry at the drop of a hat. At bad songs and soppy flicks.” His mind scanned backward over the years. “Once I even cried at a soccer game. It was this damned plucky little goalie—so heroic—he just broke my heart.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Oh,” he said, crestfallen at the harshness of her rebuff.
“It’s a different sort of crying—don’t you understand?”
“I don’t know,” he said, more distraught than ever. “I’ve always been a bit thick about things like that.”
“Oh, Freddy,” she said, strangely touched. It was his confusion that finally moved her.
“It’s true, Glad—no sense lying—what a jackass I feel.”
She put her hand to his eyes as if she could hold back the hot, shameful tears welling there. “Freddy, don’t.”
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m so damned scared.” He looked around futilely. “This damned place has got on my nerves.” He blubbered a bit, then trumpeted his leaky nose into the foulard. “What’s the matter with me? Am I different from chaps like Gage and Bayles and even Leo—big bag of bloody wind that he is—aren’t they scared?”
“Of course they are. They just lie better.”
He seized her arms and spun her round till she faced him. “Let’s run away someplace—to Paris or London—anywhere but let’s get out of this rat’s hell!”
He tried to embrace her but she pushed him off and started up. He sprang for her and caught her by a sleeve. She wheeled and fell hard against his chest. He pushed her into the shadows just beyond the periphery of the grove and there he brought his mouth down hard on her lips—a harsh, bruising kiss, behind which he could feel her teeth gnashing.
“Fool—they can see.”
“Come away with me, Glad.” His eyes were red and his voice imploring.
“With what? Your allowance and mine? We wouldn’t get very far.” She studied his stricken expression with contempt. “Oh, stop whining for pity sake. At least Leo doesn’t whine.”
Suddenly the tall, solitary figure of Sybil Jamison veered into view. They both saw her at the same moment.
“Go and be with her now,” Gladys said. “She looks so frazzled.”
An expression of reproach crossed his features. He started to say something, then changed his mind. He drew a sleeve hard against his blubbery nose and began to surge forward toward Sybil. But in the next moment he turned and shot her an unforgiving glance. He was furious.
“Was that thing true?” he said.
“What thing?” she asked, startled by his fury. “What thing?”
“Did you really undress for him in a garage?”
Sybil Jamison lay on her back, her head propped against a fallen log and humming softly to herself. After a while she started to laugh.
Bayles looked up from a stick he was whittling and peered at her intently. “What’s so funny?”
“History,” she replied and kept right on laughing.
“History?”
“Yes, I was just thinking about what history teaches us.”
“Oh, lord!” Freddy moaned with weary resignation. “Not now, Sybil—please!”
She turned to Bayles with a sudden rush of warmth. “Remember my mother, John?”
“It’d be hard to forget Nell Hungerford,” he said with an affectionate smile. “She was a grand and lovely lady.”
The memory of her mother had dispelled for a moment the despair she had been feeling for the past hour. “Grand and lovely she was,” Sybil agreed. “Perhaps too grand and too lovely. Not easy for a plain daughter to live up to that.”
Bayles made a scoffing sound. “You were many things, Sybil, but never plain.”
“Nor modest,” Freddy croaked from his corner. “Spare us the false modesty, Syb—”
“I remember,” she went on wistfully, “God rest her soul—how she would always say, ‘Now Sibby’”—her voice rose several octaves as she fell into an affectionate mimicry of her mother—“‘Now, Sibby, there is no human problem we cannot solve by merely asking the question, What does history teach us? What did the ancients do in such and such a situation? And once you know that, all you have to do is follow their excellent lead.’”
“That’s very helpful,” Freddy sneered.
“I used to think so,” Sybil said. “In fact I now freely confess that I’ve lived my whole life referring all crucial questions to Ptolemy, Pythagoras, and Socrates for guidance.” Suddenly she lay back and screamed with laughter.
“Oh, dear lord.” Freddy rubbed his belly mournfully.
Bayles gazed at her sympathetically. “And what solutions do the ancients have to our present predicament?”
“That’s just it,” she said, hooting wildly. “They have none. Absolutely nothing.”
“But men have been lost before,” Bayles said. “And found their way back.”
Her laughter broke off abruptly and she was suddenly serious. “Of course they have. But knowing that doesn’t help me find my way back. Knowing the past, analyzing it, sifting through it over and over again to see what others did in the same situation is all futile.” She laughed at the word futile. “It has no relevance to the present situation. Our situation is ours and theirs was theirs. We have to find our own solutions.” She laughed heartily at the dilemma she’d just posed, as if having at last expressed it, she’d taken some of the terror out of it. She went on. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it. When I think of all the years spent at the university—my education—” Suddenly she recoiled. “Oops—there I go again. Forgive me. I promised myself not to go on so about that beastly European education.”
“You do whack that a bit hard, Sibby,” Freddy said.
“Yes, I suppose I do. And people really don’t care that much about it anymore, do they? When I was a girl people used to make such a fuss about where you got your schooling. Now, any old piece of paper will do. It’s all so futile.” She laughed again and stared into the fire.
Freddy was mulling something in his mind. His eyes brightened and suddenly he spoke: “You wake up one morning and take an innocent stroll in a wood with some friends. And the next thing you know—”
Garvix examined the sole of his bare foot. “I’ve got a blister here the size of a carbuncle.”
“Do you know what it is I regret?” Freddy went on. “That if I should die out here in this quite unbelievable place, no one would mourn my passing. In all this whole world of numberless, countless people, there’s no one out there to weep for me.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” Garvix returned to his blister.
“There’s your sister,” Sybil said with little conviction.
“Oh, yes, in New Zealand. She may as well be on Mars.” He wore a sickish grin. “How would she know about my end out here in this godforsaken—I haven’t seen her in years,” he added ruefully. “And besides, I owe her money.”
Garvix’s eyes glinted sardonically across the fire. “I’ll weep for you, Freddy.”
“Is it all going to be just this way till the end?” Jamison rubbed his belly forlornly. “Stumbling and lost. Groping through miles of unfeeling, uncaring, unending wilderness?”
“That’s all it ever was,” said Bayles. “You just never knew it till now.”
“I can’t accept that.” A rush of red had come to Freddy’s ordinarily sallow face. “I’m sorry, I just can’t accept that. There were times—summer days—evenings—friends—light and warmth.”
“A mirage,” Bayles said remorselessly. “We were all lost then and didn’t know it.”
“Funny,” said Freddy, suddenly reflective. “It didn’t feel like being lost. But I suppose that’s so.” Suddenly he rose and started pacing in a small circle round the fire. “What are we marching toward?” he said. “What’s waiting for us out there? I don’t want to die out here in this—” He spun round peering out into the implacable dark.
Garvix laughed. “Where would you like to die, Freddy?”
The question caught him up sharply. He stopped his pacing and pondered it as if everything now depended on his answer.
“I don’t know,” he said after a thoughtful moment. “Maybe in a large four-poster bed with a bright canopy and fine damask sheets, my friends all around me, and a small band playing Bye, Bye Blackbird.” He laughed heartily at the vision but in the next moment he grabbed his stomach and kneaded it brutally, as if he had to tear out the terrible gnawing.
“Can’t stand the gaff, eh, sonny boy?” Garvix laughed aloud and turned to Sybil. “I’ve gotta hand it to you Sibby, you really picked a powerhouse!”
But in the next moment she was on her knees beside Freddy, a look of grief in her eyes. “Oh, leave him alone, Leo. Can’t you see how much he hurts?”
Gage lay belly down on the damp earth, beside the fire, his head propped on a hand supported by an elbow. Sifting through innumerable specimens of wild flowers he’d picked, he was unaware that Gladys Garvix was studying him intently.
He had a small cellophane envelope in which he’d collected the specimens. Periodically he’d lift one out with a tweezer and study it under a tiny pocket magnifier. Then as carefully as he’d extracted it, he’d put it back into the cellophane envelope.
Gladys watched him with stony fixedness, softened periodically by an enigmatic smile.
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” she said after a while. He looked up and saw her smiling. It was a troubling smile to him. He wasn’t entirely sure of its meaning. He smiled a bemused and tentative little smile back. “Beg pardon?”
“I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re a cool customer.”
He smiled uneasily and wondered what it was she was getting at. “Someone has just died,” she went on, “and we’ve buried him. And we’re lost with no great prospects of being found—”
He laughed a little chidingly at her.
She went on cataloging their woes. “We’re sitting in mud up to our navels. Haven’t had a decent meal in days—”
“Periodic fasting can be very salutary for the system.”
“And all you can do is play with your flowers.”
“This is a particularly pretty one,” he said, holding up to her a tiny blue blossom. She seemed suddenly curious.
“What do you call it?”
“It’s a species of lupine. I’ve never seen it before.”
There was a brief silence and then Gladys rolled over onto her back and gazed upward at the starless sky. “What do you intend to do with those flowers?”
“Keep them until we get back. Then identify them as soon as I can get to my books.”
She cocked an eyebrow up at him. “John Bayles says we’re lost—irreversibly.”
Her brittle, jesting manner annoyed him. “Sounds drastic, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t you believe it?”
“That we’re lost?”
“Yes.”
“Certainly seems that way.” He plucked up one of the flowers and handed it to her. “But not irreversibly. Here’s a pretty trillium for you.”
She took it and placed it in her hair. “Where do you get all the optimism?”
He wondered if she were mocking him again. If it was optimism he had he was certainly not aware of it. “I suppose,” he said after a moment, “that it comes from a lifetime of muddling through things.”
“You don’t strike me as a muddler. I can’t imagine your ever having been lost before.”
“Oh, but I have been. Innumerable times.” He looked up and noted the sudden interest in her eyes. “Not in the woods. Other places.”
“Like where?”
“Oh, social gatherings. With certain people. Once in a hospital amphitheater.”
Her eyes narrowed and she studied him intently. “Ever with a woman?”
“It doesn’t really matter with whom—”
“Tell me. Was it ever with a woman?”
He looked at her warily.
“Yes, once.”
“Did you marry her?”
“No.” His eyelid fluttered momentarily. “I should have. But I didn’t.”
“How long did it last?”
“About three years,” he said and felt himself grow edgy. “Until I got so lost that it simply had to come to an end. I acted selfishly.” He glanced at her quickly. “Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”
She lay on her back staring upward. She wanted to look at him, but she didn’t.
He sighed and returned to his flowers. “So you see, I’ve been lost before. It’s always the same. Your heart sinking to your knees and the urge to bolt. To run in a million different directions. Any place. But just to run.”
“But you don’t,” she said. “You don’t run.”
“No, I muddle through,” he smiled wryly. “Try to put up a good front.”
She laughed. “That’s not very reassuring, particularly in open-heart surgery.”
“No, but it’s realistic. It’s about the best any of us can do.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “And what have you discovered from this lifetime of muddling?”
He thought about it for a moment, noting in her voice that peculiar mixture of scorn and begrudging curiosity. “That no matter what you do,” he said suddenly, “events turn out pretty much as they will—and also that the consequences of mistakes are never really as terrifying as you imagined.”
“And you think you’ll muddle your way out of this?”
“This?”
“This forest?”
“I’m certain of it.” He sucked his pipe thoughtfully. “I may come out twenty miles above or below the place I was trying to reach. But that’s the way things are.” He laughed. “You never come out at exactly the spot you wanted to reach.”
“You really believe that?”
“That we’ll come out?” He laughed again. “Of course I do.”
“It sounds so easy.”
“That doesn’t make it wrong.”
They listened for a while to the joyful thrumming of bullfrogs through the darkness. Gladys, on her back, sucked pensively on a long weed. Then at last she spoke: “What I can’t understand is why you’re following Leo.” She gazed at him across the shadows. “I know why we’re following him. We’ve followed him for years. By now it’s just a bad habit. A reflex action. But you don’t for one minute believe he knows where he’s going.”
“No,” Gage said. His answer was final and unequivocal. She looked at him, astonished—not by the answer but by its frankness.
“I’m certain he doesn’t know where he’s going—men like your husband don’t know any more than anyone else.”
“Like my husband?”
“Well, you know what I mean,” he murmured, feeling a surge of embarrassment.
“Yes,” she said, a little sharply. She knew exactly what he meant.
“If you’ll forgive my frankness,” he went on. “They’re generally a little more stupid than most.” He regretted it the moment he’d said it. He tried to extenuate its effect with a sheepish grin. “I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be,” she said curtly. “It’s true.”
“It’s the prime quality of leadership,” he laughed softly. “You’ve got to believe your own twaddle. We need that sort of thing. It keeps us moving.”
“How smug you are.”
“Am I?” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be.”
He turned back to his flowers.
“But you are smug. The same smug little boy you were thirty years ago.”
“I know I’ll get through, if that’s what you mean,” he said.
“You observe our little dilemma from afar,” she went on, now more restrainedly. “As if it had nothing to do with you. Refusing to offer anything constructive. Asking John and poor Freddy if they have anything to offer. What about you? Don’t you have anything to offer?”
“Only my conviction that I’ll make it,” he replied directly. “I always have.”
She looked at the others strewn about the fire and suddenly she was smiling. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, why the hell did she marry him?”
His eye wandered to the low, disheveled hump of Garvix’s outline thirty or so feet off. “The thought has crossed my mind.”
“Let me tell you something about Leo,” she went on heatedly. “There’s something pretty good about all that noisy self-assurance.”
“Even though you know it’s a sham? That he’s quaking in his boots? Takes his pulse every ten minutes?”
“It makes no difference.” She said it vehemently as if she were talking to the most obtuse person in the world. “No difference at all. When he’s around he makes you forget all of that. He makes you believe that anything is possible if he wills it.”
“That’s precisely why I follow him,” Gage said gently, feeling a curious wonder and pity for her all at once. “He gives the impression of knowing what he’s up to and that’s all that really matters. Now I can see he’s not going anywhere in particular, but he makes the others believe he is. He does what none of the rest of us can do. He keeps us together. And that’s good. As long as we stick together we’ll be all right.”
“And you see no danger in that?”
He returned to his envelope of flowers and his magnifying glass.
“No danger at all. The danger is when we start dissolving. Breaking up.”
She stared across the fire now to where Leo sat, hunched over, tending his sore foot. His great, square, hulking back, facing them, looked like a slab of rock. Suddenly she turned to Gage, a look of stark urgency in her eyes. “You can’t let him lead.”
What she said was not so much a command as it was a plea. She was entreating him.
Gage regarded her coolly. “I don’t mind his leading if he likes that sort of thing,” he said at last. “I have no desire to dominate anyone—only myself.”
“And the rest of us can all go to hell?”
He turned away from her, the back of his neck burning where he could feel the glare of her eyes. “What he wants to do is his business. What I want to do is mine.”
“His business is now yours.”
“No, it isn’t,” he protested hotly.
“Well, you’d better damn well make it yours.”
She watched him for a moment, a bitter frown on her face. “Shall I tell you what’s going to happen to you?” she said suddenly.
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” He laughed lightly. “So little really ever happens to anyone.”
“You’ll wind up the same as the rest of us.”
“I’m too old to lose my soul, Mrs. Garvix.”
“I think you’ve lost it already,” she snapped. “Why do you suppose Leo is the way he is? He’s that way because we’ve made him that way. We’ve always wanted that from him—expected it.”
“Someone to make the decisions,” Gage said. “Point the way. Take the responsibility—”
“Yes.”
“Someone always must,” Gage went on, his smile growing a little ruthless. “And now you all hate him for being precisely what you’ve always wanted him to be.”
“Yes,” she said, stunned at the simplicity of it. Suddenly, unaccountably, she started to laugh. He looked at her oddly.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re no different,” she said.
A frown inched across his face.
“You want the same things from him as we do,” she went on with gleeful vengeance. “Only you think you can have it both ways. Stand outside of it and play the loner as well as have the benefit of his leadership without having to share any of the responsibility for his mistakes. Well I hope you see now that you can’t.”
“Can’t?” he said, a little surprised at her vehemence.
“Can’t” she smiled triumphantly. “He’s got you too.”
A log hissed on the fire, then shifted with a dullish thud.
“God—this thing smarts like all hell.” Garvix rubbed the heel of his bare foot with an angry rhythmic intensity.
Freddy Jamison had been eyeing Gladys and Gage from afar. For the past quarter hour he’d been watching them with growing irritation. Now suddenly he rose and limped stiffly toward them. When he reached there Gladys was still staring intently at Gage. He hovered there above them, puffing a little breathlessly, and at a loss for words.
Still she didn’t see him. Or if she did, she preferred not to acknowledge his presence. A muscle twitched in his cheek and he went through several grimaces before he managed to say to her: “How about a walk?”
“Not right now,” she said, her eyes riveted on Gage. “I’m busy.”
He clenched his teeth and wavered there a little more stonily. “When will you be unbusy?”
“I don’t know.” She looked up at him gloomily. “Soon.”
“How soon?” he said. By that time he was smoldering visibly. That only increased her irritation.
“I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”
Gage sensed impending disaster. “Why don’t you go on ahead?” he said to her. He gathered his flowers and started up. But she stayed him with her hand.
“You sit right there.”
Garvix suddenly ceased the furious rubbing of his foot and gazed at the scene taking place across the flickering shadows. A big, strangely good-humored smile spread across his features. “Got your hands full, eh, Gladdy?” he taunted her. “Two young studs.”
Jamison still stood riveted to the spot glaring down upon them. “I want you to come with me now.” He’d nearly shouted the last word.
“I told you I’d come when I’m finished here,” she said coolly and turned her eyes back to Gage.
Jamison had been dismissed but still he stood there wavering above her, feckless, baffled, uncertain what to do next. Gage could see him regretting having started with her, but now having begun, he knew no graceful way to withdraw. In the next moment he snatched her arm. “Come on.”
She flung his hand off with astonishing force. The suddenness of the motion made him recoil.
“Now look here,” Gage said, and started up.
“Atta girl, Gladdy.” Garvix waved his arms at her across the flames. “Got ’em coming to blows over you now.”
Jamison started to yank her up. Gage was on his feet in a single motion, moving at him. “Take your hands off her.”
“Keep your bloody nose out of this, Gage, or I’ll smash it for you.”
Gage started after Jamison in a kind of crouch, stalking him, while the other fell into a ludicrous posture of defiance. They did a funny little dance around the fire like two storks mating. It sent Garvix into gales of laughter.
“Smash him, Harry,” he roared. “Go get him. Smash him!”
Jamison had gone a sick, leprous white. He kept muttering “I’ll kill you,” over and over again with a kind of stunned ferocity, moving backward all the while.
“Freddy—you ass. Sit down!” Sybil shouted.
“Oh, God,” Gladys wailed, “what a zoo—”
She started out of the clearing. Freddy turned from Gage and lunged for her. But again she flung his hand off. She wheeled and glowered round at the others. Then she barged forward, head lowered, into the night. Freddy hung there, torn between Gage and the white specter of Gladys’ blouse merging into oblivion. He gaped from one to the other, looking for an instant as if he were about to cry.
“Gladys,” he bawled out into the darkness. By that time she was out of sight, trailing behind her the sound of a thrashing charge through the encircling brush.
“Gladys,” he cried out once more, then barged out after her, leaving Gage, both puzzled and relieved, in the ludicrous posture of a half-crouch.
Garvix was on his knees, gales of laughter pealing from him. “Whore!” he boomed out in the direction in which Gladys had fled. “Whore!”
Almost instantly Freddy was gone, swallowed up in darkness. Ollie Gelston ran to the edge of the grove where he’d disappeared and for a long while after he had gone, she peered hypnotically after him.
Silence descended on the place. The fire crackled; the crickets chirruped; the frogs thrummed. Garvix was still on his knees, laughing.
Gage watched him for some time, a feeling of revulsion rising in him. “I hope you’re happy, now,” he said to him across the dying flames. He sighed wearily. Then he rose and walked slowly out of the grove, taking a direction almost diametrically opposite to that taken by Gladys and Freddy. Bayles watched him from a corner of the clearing until at last he disappeared. Then he rose and shuffled slowly out.
Tom Putney set the last of the logs on the fire. “Guess I better get some more wood for the night.” In the next moment he was slinking off, eager to put the place far behind him.
Sybil Jamison had been staring into the fire. There was a vague, dreamy look upon her face, as if she’d been staring back across the years to some blissful, uncaring time. She looked strangely girlish and pretty. She laughed when she turned and saw Garvix regarding her. “I suppose we ought to feel sorry for ourselves, Leo,” her laughter tinkled through the grove. “If it’s any consolation, I feel sorry for you.”
She waited as if to hear from him some comforting little word of commiseration. But none came. He only grunted and drew a sleeve across his reddish nose. In the next moment Sybil rose and walked slowly out of the grove, her lithe, wondrous shape drooping like a tired daffodil.
Garvix and Ollie watched her go. They were silent for a long while, listening to the fire, as if in it they could hear some augury of the future. Then Ollie spoke:
“They’re all gone now—you drove them away.”
“They can all go to hell.”
She looked at him, struck by the incongruity of Garvix on his knees in a penitential position. “Why did you do it?” she asked.
“I don’t know why,” he said, a curious despondency in his voice.
“How can you say such unspeakable things to your wife?”
He sighed and stared at some indefinite point in the branches. “I don’t know why. Something comes over me—I don’t mean it.” He was truly distraught. “I don’t really mean it. The worst part of it is that—I care so much for her.”
Ollie had never seen him like this before. So hurt and clearly vulnerable. She was surprised and touched.
“Then why don’t you say that to her instead of these cruel, ugly things you—”
“Because she’d laugh,” he snapped before she could finish. “She’d see it as weakness. Then she’d really cut me up. Now she only cuts me with her glance.” He glowered into the flames. “I have only to look in her eyes and see all that—hate.”
He’d been rubbing his sore, blistered foot with a mindless brutality, as if he might beat the pain into submission. Suddenly she saw his shoulders hunch and he flinched. A short, hoarse cry tore from his throat.
“Aah—”
She reared back, gaping at the look of almost childish wonderment on his face.
“What is it?” she asked and started toward him, warily, like a hunter approaching a wounded buffalo.
“Christ, it broke. The goddamned thing broke—”
The large raw blister on his foot had indeed ruptured, and a stream of murky, blood-tinged pus gushed hectically down his heel. He whipped out a handkerchief and attempted to stanch the flow, but Ollie stayed his hand. “Don’t do that—it’s dirty.”
For a moment her own assertiveness flustered her. She was like a person who’d just spoken for the first time in a foreign tongue. She saw him regarding her strangely; she turned quickly away, lifted her skirt, and ripped the hem of the slip the way she’d seen Gladys do it earlier that day. In the next moment she was coming toward him, flustered and rattled with the shred of gauzy slip trembling in her hand.
When she reached him he snatched quickly for the piece of material.
“Here—let me have that.”
She held it dangling behind her back. “No, I’ll do it.”
He stared at her uncertainly. “It’s messy. You’d better let—”
“No, I will.”
He resigned himself with a sigh and at last leaned backward on his elbows, offering the wounded foot up to her.
From where he lay he could watch her every motion. First she emptied a canteen of tepid water over the raw lesion. He smiled from beneath his shaggy, beetled brows, when she bit her lip and then with a great effort of will began to bind the wound.
After a while he yielded himself up to her completely. He lay his head back on the still-wet earth so that his face pointed skyward and then he spoke. He appeared to be addressing the stars.
“When you’re ten you think that twenty is ancient. And when you’re twenty you think that thirty is antiquity. But when you’re forty you start to tell yourself that’s middle age. And when you’re fifty—you start to tell yourself that’s young.” He laughed a rueful little laugh and cocked an eye at her. “Forty isn’t middle age, is it Ollie? If it were, we’d all be living to eighty or ninety. And fifty isn’t young. Fifty is old. Well past the middle mark. I’m fifty, Ollie.” His head fell backward and he laughed as if the thought of it gave him some immense and private satisfaction. “Yes, sir,” he went on mirthfully. “I’m fifty, and right now—for the first time in my life—I’m feeling a little old and a wee bit tired.”
Ollie finished binding the foot and then neatly tied off the frayed and ragged ends of the bandage.
“How does that feel?”
“Fine, fine,” he blustered, full of rough benevolence. Then he glanced at her with an odd tenderness. “I am sorry I said that thing to Gladys just now.”
She sat facing him, her eyes lowered slightly to the ground. Her hands moved as if she were still tying the bandage.
“But I know now,” he went on, “you can’t unsay things like that. Can you? You’ve got to somehow undo them. And that takes a lot of time and effort with the bulk of the odds dead set against you.” He sighed. “I don’t have the years or the will to try.”
“But you have to,” she said hotly. “You can’t just go on like this together.”
The sudden emotion astonished him. Then when he saw the urgency on her face he smiled. “I’m also sorry that I walloped you the other day.”
“You were right to—I needed it. I was a fool. They all criticize you, Leo. But I notice, you always do what has to be done.”
He was oddly touched. “You’re a funny girl, Ollie. Not like the others—”
“What others?”
“Women I’ve known.” He glanced at her to see the effect of his words. “Pure, chaste, refined—like a nun, almost.”
There was a pause while he awaited the wondrous effect his words were supposed to have on her. But instead she grew livid and her lips trembled.
“Thank you for that,” she replied curtly and rose, her eyes filling. “Thank you for that. That’s what you all think. And I suppose that’s exactly what I am.”
She spun around looking wildly for a direction that hadn’t been taken by any of the others. She found one and then fled headlong into the dark forest, her hair streaming out behind her.
For a long while Garvix gaped after her. He wondered what he’d said to have bothered her so. It troubled him because in his mind he had gone out of his way to say the kindest thing he could think of.
For some time he lay there on his back, the bandaged foot propped up ludicrously on a rock, and listened to the sound of the fire dying in the open grate.