She looked around at Goodwin.
He was snoring a little.
“Oh, I dont mean right this minute,” he whispered.
“But you’ll pay on demand.”
“I thought that was what you meant.
I told you we didn’t have—If that aint enough pay, I dont know that I blame you.”
“It’s not that.
You know it’s not that.
But cant you see that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done?”
The woman turned the bon-bon slowly in her hand.
“I thought you were mad about him.”
“Lee?”
“No.
Him.” She touched the child.
“Because I’d have to bring him with us.”
“You mean, with him at the foot of the bed, maybe? perhaps you holding him by the leg all the time, so he wouldn’t fall off?”
She looked at him, her eyes grave and blank and contemplative.
Outside the clock struck twelve.
“Good God,” he whispered.
“What kind of men have you known?”
“I got him out of jail once that way.
Out of Leavenworth, too.
When they knew he was guilty.”
“You did?” Horace said.
“Here.
Take another piece.
That one’s about worn out.”
She looked down at her chocolate-stained fingers and the shapeless bon-bon. She dropped it behind the cot.
Horace extended his handkerchief.
“It’ll soil it,” she said.
“Wait.”
She wiped her fingers on the child’s discarded garment and sat again, her hands clasped in her lap.
Goodwin was snoring regularly.
“When he went to the Philippines he left me in San Francisco.
I got a job and I lived in a hall room, cooking over a gas-jet, because I told him I would. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone, but I promised him I would and he knew I would.
When he killed that other soldier over that nigger woman, I didn’t even know it.
I didn’t get a letter from him for five months.
It was just when I happened to see an old newspaper I was spreading on a closet shelf in the place where I worked that I saw the regiment was coming home, and when I looked at the calendar it was that day.
I’d been good all that time.
I’d had good chances; everyday I had them with the men coming in the restaurant.
“They wouldn’t let me off to go and meet the ship, so I had to quit.
Then they wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t even let me on the ship.
I stood there while they came marching off of it, watching for him and asking the ones that passed if they knew where he was and them kidding me if I had a date that night, telling me they never heard of him or that he was dead or he had run off to Japan with the colonel’s wife.
I tried to get on the ship again, but they wouldn’t let me.
So that night I dressed up and went to the cabarets until I found one of them and let him pick me up, and he told me.
It was like I had died.
I sat there with the music playing and all, and that drunk soldier pawing at me, and me wondering why I didn’t let go, go on with him, get drunk and never sober up again and me thinking And this is the sort of animal I wasted a year over.
I guess that was why I didn’t.
“Anyway, I didn’t.
I went back to my room and the next day I started looking for him.