“Oh God oh God,” she said.
The dogs surged out from beneath the bed and hurled themselves toward the door in a mad scrabble.
As they rushed past her she turned and flung the tankard at them.
It struck the door jamb, splashing up the wall, and rebounded with a forlorn clatter.
She drew her breath whistling, clutching her breast.
She came to the bed and looked down at Temple through the veil.
“We was happy as two doves,” she wailed, choking, her rings smoldering in hot glints within her billowing breast.
“Then he had to go and die on me.”
She drew her breath whistling, her mouth gaped, shaping the hidden agony of her thwarted lungs, her eyes pale and round with stricken bafflement, protuberant.
“As two doves,” she roared in a harsh, choking voice.
Again time had overtaken the dead gesture behind the clock crystal: Temple’s watch on the table beside the bed said half-past-ten.
For two hours she had lain undisturbed, listening.
She could distinguish voices now from below stairs.
She had been hearing them for some time, lying in the room’s musty isolation.
Later a mechanical piano began to play.
Now and then she heard automobile brakes in the street beneath the window; once two voices quarrelling bitterly came up and beneath the shade.
She heard two people—a man and a woman—mount the stairs and enter the room next hers.
Then she heard Miss Reba toil up the stairs and pass her door, and lying in the bed, her eyes wide and still, she heard Miss Reba hammering at the next door with the metal tankard and shouting into the wood.
Beyond the door the man and woman were utterly quiet, so quiet that Temple thought of the dogs again, thought of them crouching against the wall under the bed in that rigid fury of terror and despair.
She listened to Miss Reba’s voice shouting hoarsely into the blank wood.
It died away into terrific gasping, then it rose again in the gross and virile cursing of a man.
Beyond the wall the man and woman made no sound.
Temple lay staring at the wall beyond which Miss Reba’s voice rose again as she hammered at the door with the tankard.
Temple neither saw nor heard her door when it opened.
She just happened to look toward it after how long she did not know, and saw Popeye standing there, his hat slanted across his face.
Still without making any sound he entered and shut the door and shot the bolt and came toward the bed.
As slowly she began to shrink into the bed, drawing the covers up to her chin, watching him across the covers.
He came and looked down at her.
She writhed slowly in a cringing movement, cringing upon herself in as complete an isolation as though she were bound to a church steeple.
She grinned at him, her mouth warped over the rigid, placative porcelain of her grimace.
When he put his hand on her she began to whimper.
“No, no,” she whispered, “he said I cant now he said.……” He jerked the covers back and flung them aside.
She lay motionless, her palms lifted, her flesh beneath the envelope of her loins cringing rearward in furious disintegration like frightened people in a crowd.
When he advanced his hand again she thought he was going to strike her.
Watching his face, she saw it beginning to twitch and jerk like that of a child about to cry, and she heard him begin to make a whimpering sound.
He gripped the top of the gown.
She caught his wrists and began to toss from side to side, opening her mouth to scream.
His hand clapped over her mouth, and gripping his wrist, the saliva drooling between his fingers, her body thrashing furiously from thigh to thigh, she saw him crouching beside the bed, his face wrung above his absent chin, his bluish lips protruding as though he were blowing upon hot soup, making a high whinnying sound like a horse.
Beyond the wall Miss Reba filled the hall, the house, with a harsh choking uproar of obscene cursing.
19
But that girl,” Horace said. “She was all right.
You know she was all right when you left the house.
When you saw her in the car with him.
He was just giving her a lift to town.
She was all right.
You know she was all right.”
The woman sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the child.
It lay beneath the faded, clean blanket, its hands upflung beside its head, as though it had died in the presence of an unbearable agony which had not had time to touch it.
Its eyes were half open, the balls rolled back into the skull so that only the white showed, in color like weak milk.
Its face was still damp with perspiration, but its breathing was easier.