‘How is he?’ Mr. Munn asked.

  Looking at him, with her hair falling half loose about her face, she seemed unable to speak.

  ‘How is he?’ he repeated.

  ‘It was terrible,’ she uttered hoarsely, in a whisper which was as dry and impersonal and alien as the sounds which had come from the telephone receiver.

  ‘Can I see him?’ he asked, looking at her, and took a step toward the staircase.

  She did not take her gaze from his face, and her right arm, as though with an independent volition, thrust forward at him. The fingers clutched the fabric of his sleeve, twisting it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No!’

  ‘No?’

  The grip tightened on his sleeve.

  ‘It was terrible,’ she whispered retardedly, in that voice.

  They had quarreled, she finally managed to tell him. Her father had found her. He had come into the room where she was, there was no telling why, but it had seemed as though to look out the front window at Mr. Munn riding off, and he had seen her standing there. She could not remember what he had said. There had been so little time, before it happened. But she could remember his face. She had screamed at him, and his eyes had suddenly popped out and he had opened his mouth like a man trying to call out, but he hadn’t made a sound. She had screamed at him: ‘No, I’m not yours! I don’t belong to you! Or to anybody!’

  When she repeated those words now, in a whisper, the tears rose in her dry, starting eyes. Then, slowly, while her strong fingers twisted the cloth of his coat sleeve, she said: ‘I said that to him. I said that. Oh, Perse, that’s the way I am inside.’ Then: ‘Oh, Perse, you see how I am.’

  He tried to put his hands on her, but she withdrew from him.

  That night, sitting in his room at the hotel, under the single, hanging, unshaded electric bulb that lighted indifferently the worn carpet at his feet, the dresser with its cold-looking mirror, and the bed, Mr. Munn wrote a letter to May. He was sure, he wrote, that she would agree with him that a divorce was the best thing for them under the existing conditions.

  Chapter thirteen

  THE pale sunshine washed over the wide boards of the floor, on which Mr. Munn’s eyes were fixed. Professor Ball’s voice proceeded: ‘— will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation: He is my God, and I will prepare Him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt Him. The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host ——’ He held the book in his left hand and his right forefinger traced each line as he read it, pausing at the end of a verse, then moving forward again. He did not lift his glance from the page as he read on through the chapter, but now and then he would close his eyes behind the spectacles, and the forefinger would move on, line by line keeping pace with the uttered words, and the voice would become more emphatic, more rapt. ‘— the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away. Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of Thine arm they shall be as still as a stone; till Thy people pass over, O Lord, till the people pass over, which Thou hast purchased.’

  While he read, the five women, his daughters, who sat in the tall, unvarnished, ladder-backed chairs facing him, never took their eyes off his face. All of them sat with the same posture, erectly and easily, their busts carried high, their hands clasped gently in the lap. The four boys, pupils at the academy, had their heels hooked over the bottom rungs of the chairs, and their heads already bowed, as though in preparation for the prayer that was to come. Cautiously, they glanced up now and then, while Professor Ball’s voice went on, at the blue sky beyond the windows or at the open door of the dining-room, where the table was already laid. Behind the boys, with Mr. Munn, sat Doctor MacDonald and another man, Doctor MacDonald cocked lankily back in his chair, his brown hands lying on his knees, his face impassive. From under his slightly lowered eyelids, he was regarding his wife. Her back, as she looked up into her father’s face, was not quite turned to Doctor MacDonald. The line of her cheek and the small, sober arch of her brow were visible. A streak of sunlight fell across her chestnut hair, which was drawn smoothly back to a knot on the nape of her neck.

  Professor Ball shut the book clumsily with his bandaged hands, pushed his spectacles into a firmer position on his thin nose, and laid the book on the mantelshelf behind him. Creakily, without a word, he sank to his knees, placed the palms of his bandaged hands together before his face, and closed his eyes. The skirt of his long, black coat almost brushed the floor about his knees.

  The five women, and the others, got to their knees, and bowed their heads.

  ‘O Lord,’ the voice of Professor Ball said. It paused; then resumed. ‘O Lord, who art above all things, for all Thy blessings we thank Thee. And ask for Thy blessing, though in our sins we are not worthy. But in our unworthiness, we call out unto Thee. Thou hast shown Thy power and cast the horse and his rider into the sea, O Lord, but desert us not. Thou hast brought us over, O Lord, dryshod, but do not let us linger in the wilderness of Shur. Nor taste the waters of Marah, which are bitter, O Lord, and which now we taste. O Lord, as Thou led out Israel to Elim, lead us now, that we may see the twelve wells of water flowing there, and the three score and ten palm trees. Lead us, O Lord, and smite those who would rise against our face.’ His voice stopped, and the slow, brittle sound of his breathing was audible in the room. Then, quietly, he said: ‘Lord, we thank Thee. Amen.’

  He rose, and standing with his hands propped inertly on the high back of a chair, looked away from the people before him, and out the window, where the morning light fell through the bare branches of trees.

  The other people began to move about. All of the women except one went into the dining-room. The little boys talked to each other in low voices. Portia Ball, who had lingered behind her sisters, said: ‘Breakfast won’t be ready for about five minutes. I’ll call you all.’ Then she followed the other women into the dining-room, and shut the door.

  ‘Let’s go outside and get a breath before we eat,’ Doctor MacDonald said to Mr. Munn. Mr. Munn nodded, and followed out into the hall, and to the porch. Doctor MacDonald took out his pipe, packed it, and lighted it. He balanced himself with his toes sticking over the edge of the porch and looked out over the slope toward the academy building. The new smoke, bluish and paling against the sky, was wreathing up from one of the two big chimneys there.

  Doctor MacDonald took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘A lot of praying goes on round here,’ he remarked.

  Mr. Munn nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ Doctor MacDonald went on, ‘that’s a fact. I reckon I’ve worn out a right smart carpet with my knee-caps since I married Cordelia. And me not a churchy man, so to speak. Come down to it’ — he took a drag of the pipe, and slowly, with relish, exhaled the smoke — ‘short of being an infidel, and just damning my soul outer pure and unadulterated cantankerousness, you might say I go as far as the next man in wrapping myself in carnal concerns. I’m not proud of it, but you know how it is; a lot of things, good and bad, comes closer to a man’s hand than praying and reading in the Book, and a man goes his way. And things I’ve seen done, seen with my own eyes, mind you, looked like something a little different from the workings of God’s grace.’

  ‘I reckon everybody sees something like that,’ Mr. Munn observed, ‘if he lives half his span.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Doctor MacDonald said abstractedly, a hint of impatience in his tone, ‘but the things I’ve seen done. With my own eyes. Before I hit here, and I reckon I’ve seen my share here, too. It looks like those things and getting down on your knees don’t belong in the same world. But take the old Professor, now, he’s been putting me on my knees quite a spell, going on two years now.’ He grinned, looking directly at Mr. Munn. ‘Not that I’m complaining; I had some time to make up in that position. Besides, he’s a man for you now, and I respect his ways.’

  ‘It’s a comfort to him, I take it,’ Mr. Munn rejoined. ‘Things going like they are must be hitting him pretty hard.’ He paused, then looking off down the slope added glumly, ‘I reckon a man could do with some comfort.’

  ‘Well, lately the old man’s been asking the Lord for a pretty special brand of comfort. More my variety than you might take his to be,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘It used to be we got the loving-kindness chapters both morning and evening prayers, but lately he’s been asking the Lord to mix in pretty direct and smite the Ammonite. He’s been giving us the blood-letting texts, breakfast and supper. Like this morning, about the horse and his rider.’

  Mr. Munn spat off the edge of the porch, and stared at the spot beneath where the splotch of saliva darkened a dried oak leaf. ‘That’d suit me,’ he said, ‘but there’s so God-damned many horses and riders now over at Bardsville, and Morganstown, and all. I’d wear out some carpet with my knees, if I reckoned it’d do any good.’

  ‘Well, it’s been the hip-and-thigh stuff pretty regular with the Professor for some time now,’ Doctor MacDonald stated. ‘Just the front part of the Book.’

  At the sound of the door opening, Mr. Munn turned. Cordelia MacDonald had come out. ‘It’ll be ready in a minute,’ she said, ‘if you aren’t starved to death already.’

  ‘Starved?’ Doctor MacDonald echoed, and laughed with pleasure, looking at her. ‘Starved is the word for it.’

  She approached her husband, and stood beside him, her hand resting lightly on his arm.

  Mr. Munn watched the woman’s face as she looked up at her husband, who held his arm about her shoulders and laughed in his pleasure and confidence. That look, surprised on the face of the woman — a woman whom Mr. Munn scarcely knew, whom he had scarcely noticed before, who had always seemed rather plain to him — that look stabbed him now, so that abruptly he turned away.

  She was a plain woman, or on the plain side, anyway, he had always thought, when he had noticed her on the streets of Bardsville. Walking down the street there, alone or with one of the sisters, she had never seemed to be the sort of woman people would notice much at all. She and her sisters — they all looked alike in their black or gray dresses buttoned up to the throat with that single row of small, severe buttons — had moved decorously down the street, with their eyes fixed on the pavement a little ahead of them, or into the distance, and people had said, now and then: ‘There go the Ball girls. Old Professor Ball.’ And they told each other: ‘He’s got some book learning, now I tell you, the Scriptures and in the original tongues, too; and Shakespeare, you just name it. He knows it by heart. Shakespeare, now, he named all his girls with names out of Shakespeare’s plays.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Professor Ball had said to Mr. Munn after breakfast that first day he had ever been at the Ball place, ‘I named them all out of Shakespeare’s plays. Every last one of them — Portia, Viola, Cordelia, Perdita, Isabella. Noble names, every last one, names a woman could be proud of. That’s what I told my wife when the first one came; there’s no nobler name than Portia for any female. She wanted to name her Mary Lee. After her own mother. But I pointed out to her all the advantages a girl would have with a name like Portia. Something to live up to. A help in forming a Christian character. She said her mother was a Christian character, and I said, I’m not denying that, she’s as fine a Christian character as has been produced locally in my time, but you can’t expect imperfect Nature working in one small county to compete with the masterpieces of the immortal bard. She said she hadn’t thought of it exactly that way. So we named the infant Portia. And we never regretted it.

  ‘And all the rest of them, when they came along. Noble names, every last one. The youngest, Isabella, now we almost named her Desdemona, but we decided against it at the last minute. But Desdemona’s a fine name, and many a man’s given his female children worse. But we decided against it. My wife decided me. She was lying there in bed — she never really got up after she had the last one, she just lingered until the Lord saw fit. She was lying there in bed, and I took down the book and read her what Shakespeare had written, trying to make up our minds. Then she pointed something out to me, and I bowed to her perspicacity. She said, now doesn’t the book say that man she ran off and married was colored? I said, yes, in a way, you might say he was, but he was a gentleman with a fine character, even if he did have an overhasty disposition. And he was more sinned against than sinning. But, she said did I think it was right to give our baby the name of a young woman who had been connected with a man who was colored, even if the man wasn’t exactly a negro? I agreed with her. I said we ought to spare even the tenderest sensibility. So we named the baby Isabella.’

  When people saw the Ball sisters walking down the street, they said that you couldn’t tell them apart, unless you looked close. But they were different, Mr. Munn decided, very different, despite their deceptive similarities of dress and posture. Portia, the oldest, was already a widow. Her face added to the quietness and gravity of all their faces a sadness, but a sadness disciplined by the will that had marked the firm lines about the mouth; and this sadness was mixed, at moments when she was unaware of eyes upon her, with a faint, though luminous, expectation. She was the most pious of the sisters. She had occasionally said, Doctor MacDonald reported to Mr. Munn, that at the end of her journey all would be consumed in brightness. Meanwhile, she ran the house, directing her sisters in their tasks. She wore a cord of heavy keys at her waistband, the keys of cupboards and pantries and smokehouses. She often sat alone with her father. Viola, who was childless, read a great deal and wrote voluminous letters. Her husband helped on the farm, and she taught the youngest boys in the academy. They were all different — Perdita, Isabella, Cordelia. But, to Mr. Munn, Cordelia especially.

  Sometimes Mr. Munn had wondered how a man like Doctor MacDonald had married a woman like Cordelia. Everything about them seemed different. Ordinarily, you would expect to find Doctor MacDonald’s wife a very young, pretty, high-spirited woman, very dark or very blonde, positive anyway, and with a streak of fun. The way Doctor MacDonald cocked a cigar or stuck a pipe between his teeth, the way he sat a horse, the relish he took in things, the dash about him, his grin, all of those things would lead you to expect in his wife something different from Cordelia. She was not very young, thirty, perhaps. She had been getting on toward being an old maid when Doctor MacDonald married her, wrapped up in her household tasks, watching the younger men come to see her sisters Perdita and Isabella, sitting at church with her father and Portia, not with Viola and her husband or with Perdita and Isabella, who would be sitting with a couple of their suitors. And she was quiet and grave, like all the sisters. She was, at first glance certainly, plain, with her dark dresses buttoned up to the neck by that careful and forbidding row of buttons, and her eyes downcast, and her hands folded on her lap. But Doctor MacDonald, whose eyes would wander toward her when she sat apart from him, had married her, and Mr. Munn began, finally, to feel that he understood why. She was precisely the one thing Doctor MacDonald, during those mysterious earlier years — about which he never talked except to give some offhand, isolated anecdote, the years in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Mexico — had not had, and now had easily, complacently, and casually. Her qualities, her gravity, her earnestness, her restraint, her downcast eyes — those were the things best designed to challenge him and, in the end, to engage him. She was somewhat like those small dull, compact apples that in the flush of the harvest are passed over almost with scorn, but late in the winter, when the fine, brightly colored fruit has grown too mealy and insipid, can stir the appetite as though in the darkness of the storage cellar they had managed to keep and augment the ripe, full, winey richness of the last sunshine of the summer.

  Doctor MacDonald had married her, and the marriage which had at first seemed to Mr. Munn an incongruity began to seem natural and clear. When Doctor MacDonald would talk, his eyes would wander to fix on Cordelia, or on the door through which she had left the room. And sometimes, though rarely, the coolness of her gravity, her reticences, would fall away, and as she looked at Doctor MacDonald, as that morning on the porch before breakfast, she would, for an instant and in a single glance, be exposed in her secret warmth and fullness and steadfastness. When Mr. Munn detected such a look, he would, as that morning on the porch, feel it as a blow, and would turn away. The impact, the stab, of that look was not the pain of a recollected loss. No, it was pain at something which he had never had. He felt cheated, and impotent, and was filled with envy of the other man, to whom, apparently, it had come so easily.

  But though Mr. Munn would turn away from that transitory look on her face, he had quickly learned to search for it, to spy on her and wait for it. It was rare and fleeting, but he knew that it would come, sooner or later. He visited the Ball place when he could get time. The demands on him at his own farm were at their slackest now, and since the house had burned, there was no place for him to sleep there except the gear room, where he had rigged up a cot and an old washstand. Besides, he could no longer put his heart into the work there. It was not the discomfort of the draughty, unceiled gear room and the hard cot, or the sight of the blackened ruins of the brickwork, that distressed him. The very fields, the slow voices of the negroes talking to him about the plant beds or the stock or the fencing, their silences, reproached him and withdrew from him. When he was there he felt that his life had no direction and his efforts no meaning. He began to think that he might sell the place if he could, if a time came when land would be worth anything again. He thought that he might sell the place, and go away. But not until things were over, one way or the other.

  He went to the Ball place now, as he had gone to the Christian place before. But there was a difference. At the Christian place he had been caught up into a life there; the small night noises, the distant barking of dogs and the creaking of timbers, the shadowy, white door swinging inward and Lucille Christian standing there, with her finger raised to her lips, her whispered conversation. It had been a restricted, distraught, confused, feverish, and undirected life, but a life which was real, and his own. But at the Ball place, he had no life truly his own; he watched the life of others move soberly, and sympathetically, about him, and beyond him.