CONTENTS

Foreword

Images of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

Figure 14

Figure 15

Figure 16

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

By Katherine Anne Porter

A Novella

Notes

About Katherine Anne Porter

About Marylee MacDonald

About Grand Canyon Press

Books by Katherine Anne Porter

FOREWORD

Literature can help us understand what has happened during a period of agonizing uncertainty and terrible loss. Camus’ The Plague is one such work. The author imagines that the cholera epidemic that killed a large portion of Oran’s population in 1849 actually happened in the 1940s. It is often called “absurdist” because it portrays human beings as powerless to affect the outcome of their lives. The Plague is an imagined tragedy that frames individual losses against the backdrop of a society being crushed by forces beyond its control. However, in light of the Covid epidemic and the years of anxiety and uncertainty over the fate of millions around the world, one does not have to play the “what if” game. Covid is a plague in our midst. The vaccines have not brought an end to our uncertainties. We must do the hard work of mourning and of understanding what it means to have this ongoing scourge in our midst.

Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, portrays defeat and impotence at a time when America wanted to believe it had saved the world. This classic work of literature is a paean to those who lost their lives in the flu pandemic of 1918 and to the survivors, themselves too sick to mourn. It echoes the challenges we face in trying to understand how Covid has upended our plans.

In many ways, Pale Horse, Pale Rider reminds me of a stage play or a movie from a bygone era. Its cast of walk-on characters includes the cigar-smoking city editor of a newspaper, a sports writer who wants to become a drama critic, a society-page editor, two hucksters selling war bonds, a has-been actor, and two young lovers, Adam and Miranda. Adam is going off to war and Miranda, a reporter, is about to fall ill.

Again, like the backdrop of a play, a stream of ambulances and funerals moves in the background of these characters’ lives. The story makes reference to War Bonds, specific battles and armament, and Woodrow Wilson’s jingoistic determination to “make the world safe for democracy,” his justification for the country’s entry into World War I.

Even as the country sent troops to Europe, the so-called “Spanish flu” was arriving in the United States.[1] But do you know what the Spanish flu actually was? Do you know its history and understand its parallels to modern pandemics, of which Covid may well be a precursor to other pandemics yet to come?

The first outbreak of the so-called Spanish flu occurred in the spring of 1918,[2] and the nation was not prepared to deal with its severity and rapid spread. Medical resources were scarce. A quarter of the nation’s doctors and nurses were serving in the military, with many already in Europe. In an attempt to slow the contagion, public health officials and political leaders closed saloons, restaurants, dance halls, schools, and churches. Streetcars traveled with their windows open, and in San Francisco, traffic court was held in a city park. (The archival images in the next section are intended to help you picture the disruption caused by the Spanish flu and the measures public health officials took to stop its spread.)

* * *

From a body exhumed from an Eskimo village, we now know that the flu was actually an H1N1 virus. Unlike Covid-19, the Spanish flu disproportionally struck the young.[3] For some who fell ill, the symptoms were mild: sore throats, aches, and fever lasting three to ten days. Others, however, became delirious. Their lungs filled, and bloody fluid drained from their ears and noses. Coughing wracked their bodies.

As people sickened and hospitals filled, medical science stood helpless in the face of mounting casualties. Doctors administered hastily conceived “cures” that included the injection of strychnine, a poison that was once prescribed for heart and respiratory problems.

In January 1919, onboard a ship headed home from Europe, Franklin Martin kept a diary of the disease:

“I was so feverish I was afraid I would ignite the clothing. I had a cough that tore my very innards out when I could not suppress it. It was dark; I surely had pneumonia.” The unfortunate M. Martin “couldn’t breathe without an excruciating cough,” and he was so convinced he would not survive that he planned his own funeral.[4]

On the home front, families fell ill all at once. A report from the Red Cross in Baltimore said that its visiting home nurses were seeing “two or three sick patients in one bed at a time [and] a dead body as well.”[5]

Forty percent of Americans eventually succumbed, a death toll so large it lowered the country’s average life expectancy by twelve years. By the time the disease had run its course, it had claimed 550,000 to 700,000 lives. (Precise numbers were hard to come by because the pandemic threw the country into such chaos that deaths-by-flu were not always recorded as such.) In comparison, the military did keep accurate records of those killed in the war. Combat casualties amounted to 116,000.

* * *

In the fall of 1918 the twenty-eight-year-old author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider was working in Denver for The Rocky Mountain News. At a time when the country was still focused on the war, Porter and a young army lieutenant had just begun a relationship. When she fell ill, he was about to depart for the front, and she feared he would not return. However, that was not the battle that lay ahead for either of them.

Fighting to have her admitted to a hospital, the lieutenant stayed by her side, feeding her ice cream and coffee even as she became delirious. Her boss managed to have a police ambulance sent, and she was transported to a hospital overwhelmed by other victims of the pandemic.

Porter took a turn for the worse. Her employer, expecting news of her demise, typeset her obituary. The flu so weakened Porter that when she first tried to stand, she fell and broke her arm. Doctors warned that a blood clot in her leg would keep her bedridden for the rest of her life. Her fever had been so high that her hair turned from black to white.

Porter’s convalescence took months, and she did not immediately write about her ordeal. After the end of the war and the waning of the pandemic, Porter wanted to move on.[6]

Although she called the story she would eventually write—“Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—“almost purely autobiographical,” she did not begin work on it until 1932, shortly after she’d relocated to Switzerland. Once again, she was surrounded by snow-capped peaks, as she had been years before in Denver.[7] The memories were still there, waiting to be mined.

The illness had left Porter deeply traumatized, but despite that, she was able to transform the searing experience of her near death into a fictionalized memoir and an enduring work of literature.

* * *

Why is her book especially relevant today?

In an essay in Southern Literary Journal, David A. Davis explores the relationship between individual trauma and collective trauma. He concludes that traumas on a mass scale cannot be talked about or purged.

“When everyone has an experience of trauma to share, unburdening can be unbearable. For Americans in 1918, talking about the pandemic and the war was nearly impossible.”[8]

Medical historian and epidemiologist Cristóbal S. Berry-Cabán writes as follows:

Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider ranks among the finest works of twentieth-century medical fiction. In this small masterpiece, Porter confronts three phenomenon that have haunted humanity—the tragedy of war, the horror of a viral plague that literally threatened human existence, and the almost indescribable event of experiencing death only to return to the living—woven into the doomed love story of Miranda and Adam.

Few references to the Spanish flu exist in literature, and even history books glide over an event that claimed so many lives. History is data driven. This work of literature, however, plunges us into the fugue state of a protagonist racing away from Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in Revelation. As such, it speaks to the losses we have endured in our present time.

—Marylee MacDonald

IMAGES OF THE 1918 INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC

FIGURE 1

Figure 1. Precautions during the Spanish influenza epidemic would not permit anyone to ride on street cars without wearing masks. Seattle, Washington, ca. 1918. [or 1919] (Library of Congress. Item: 2017668638)

FIGURE 2

Figure 2. Love Field, Dallas, Texas. Preventative treatment against influenza, spraying the throat. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499289)

FIGURE 3

Figure 3. Protection against influenza. Men gargling with salt and water after a day working in the War Garden at Camp Dix. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499299)

FIGURE 4

Figure 4. Influenza hospital ward in France, 12/28/1918. (National Archives. Local Identifier: 86697895)

FIGURE 5

Figure 5. The 39th Regiment on its way to France marched through the streets of Seattle, Washington. Everyone was provided with a mask made by the Seattle Chapter of the Red Cross. (National Archives. Local Identifier: 165-WW-269B-8)

FIGURE 6

Figure 6. Police court officials of San Francisco holding a session in the open, as a precaution against the spreading influenza epidemic. (National Archives. Local Identifier: 165-WW-269B-13)

FIGURE 7

Figure 7. Policeman Traffic in New York City wearing a gauze mask made by the Red Cross. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499301)

FIGURE 8

Figure 8. Members, St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps on duty on 5 ambulances. Influenza Epidemic. Missouri St. Louis, 1918. Photograph.

FIGURE 9

Figure 9. Red Cross workers of Boston, Massachusetts, removing bundles of masks for American soldiers from a table where other women made them, 1918. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499363)

FIGURE 10

Figure 10. The front yard workshop, while school was closed for influenza. Mountain Division, Denver, CO, 1919. (Library of Congress. Local Identifier: 2017668474)

FIGURE 11

Figure 11. Soldiers suffering from influenza at the hospital in Camp Funston, KS, in 1918. (National Archives. Local Identifier: 180830-A-YG824-001)

FIGURE 12

Figure 12. Emergency hospital at Brookline, MA set up by the Red Cross to care for influenza cases. (National Archives. Local Identifier: 165-WW-269B-19)

FIGURE 13

Figure 13. Responding to a sister's worried call, the Red Cross Home Service arrived just in time to rescue Mrs. Brown from the clutches of influenza. (Library of Congress. Local Identifier: 2017668532)

FIGURE 14

Figure 14. Letter carrier in New York wearing mask for protection against influenza. October 16, 1918. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499319)

FIGURE 15

Figure 15. In Hospital Number 4 at Fort Porter, New York, the epidemic was guarded against so closely that persons of the office force wore masks. (National Archives. ARC Identifier: 45499355)

FIGURE 16

Figure 16. Nurses’ aide Elizabeth McWilliams of Summerville, New Jersey, a casualty of the flu. (See next page.) London, England ca. 1918. Photograph. (Library of Congress. LOC Control Number: 2017675966)

Elizabeth McWilliams of Summerville, New Jersey is representative of the many nurses and doctors who died during the pandemic. She sailed from New York in October as a Red Cross nurse’s aide and died of pneumonia just as the ship reached the British port. She is buried not far from Red Cross Headquarters in London.

There was an outbreak of influenza on the ship in which Miss McWilliams sailed. She worked hard all the first day scrubbing out the influenza-infected baggage room to provide a temporary hospital. That night she worked as an emergency cook for three hours and then until midnight wrote letters for the influenza patients. The next morning, she was herself stricken. Her last words were “I am happy because I've tried to be a real American.”

Miss Alice Fleenor of San Francisco who was one of her closest friends on board ship, writes: “We who knew her, know how much of inspiration we derived from her unselfish sacrifice and devotion.”

Two hundred Red Cross people started their service in Europe with a new reverence, a new resolve to carry higher the spirit of the Red Cross in memory of the young girl who served for one day as a real American. London, England, ca. 1919.

PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER

BY KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

A NOVELLA

In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue, and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.

Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking. Where are you going. What are you doing. What are you thinking. How do you feel.

Why do you say such things. What do you mean? No more sleep. Where are my boots and what horse shall I ride? Fiddler or Graylie or Miss Lucy with the long nose and the wicked eye? How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.

Too many people have been born here, and have wept too much here, and have laughed too much, and have been too angry and outrageous with each other here. Too many have died in this bed already, there are far too many ancestral bones propped up on the mantelpieces, there have been too damned many antimacassars in this house, she said loudly, and oh, what accumulation of storied dust never allowed to settle in peace for one moment.

And the stranger? Where is that lank greenish stranger I remember hanging about the place, welcomed by my grandfather, my great-aunt, my five times removed cousin, my decrepit hound and my silver kitten? Why did they take to him, I wonder? And where are they now? Yet I saw him pass the window in the evening. What else besides them did I have in the world? Nothing. Nothing is mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my modesty? Now what horse shall I borrow for this journey I do not mean to take, Graylie or Miss Lucy or Fiddler who can jump ditches in the dark and knows how to get the bit between his teeth? Early morning is best for me because trees are trees in one stroke, stones are stones set in shades known to be grass, there are no false shapes or surmises, the road is still asleep with the crust of dew unbroken. I’ll take Graylie because he is not afraid of bridges.

Come now, Graylie, she said, taking his bridle, we must outrun Death and the Devil. You are no good for it, she told the other horses standing saddled before the stable gate, among them the horse of the stranger, gray also, with tarnished nose and ears. The stranger swung into his saddle beside her, leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning, the blank still stare of mindless malice that makes no threats and can bide its time. She drew Graylie around sharply, urged him to run. He leaped the low rose hedge and the narrow ditch beyond, and the dust of the lane flew heavily under his beating hoofs. The stranger rode beside her, easily, lightly, his reins loose in his half-closed hand, straight and elegant in dark shabby garments that flapped upon his bones; his pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her. Ah, I have seen this fellow before, I know this man if I could place him. He is no stranger to me.

She pulled Graylie up, rose in her stirrups and shouted. I’m not going with you this time—ride on! Without pausing or turning his head the stranger rode on. Graylie’s ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose and fell. Oh, why am I so tired, I must wake up. “But let me get a fine yawn first,” she said, opening her eyes and stretching, “a slap of cold water in my face, for I’ve been talking in my sleep again, I heard myself, but what was I saying?”

Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head. Dangling her feet idly with their slippers hanging, she was reminded of the way all sorts of persons sat upon her desk at the newspaper office. Every day she found someone there, sitting upon her desk instead of the chair provided, dangling his legs, eyes roving, full of his important affairs, waiting to pounce about something or other. “Why won’t they sit in the chair? Should I put a sign on it, saying, ‘For God’s sake, sit here’?”

Far from putting up a sign, she did not even frown at her visitors. Usually she did not notice them at all until their determination to be seen was greater than her determination not to see them. Saturday, she thought, lying comfortably in her tub of hot water, will be pay day, as always. Or I hope always. Her thoughts roved hazily in a continual effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a series of feats of sleight of hand. I owe—let me see, I wish I had pencil and paper—well, suppose I did pay five dollars now on a Liberty Bond.[1] I couldn’t possibly keep it up. Or maybe. Eighteen dollars a week. So much for rent, so much for food, and I mean to have a few things besides. About five dollars’ worth. Will leave me twenty-seven cents. I suppose I can make it. I suppose I should be worried. I am worried. Very well, now I am worried and what next? Twenty-seven cents. That’s not so bad. Pure profit, really. Imagine if they should suddenly raise me to twenty I should then have two dollars and twenty-seven cents left over. But they aren’t going to raise me to twenty. They are in fact going to throw me out if I don’t buy a Liberty Bond. I hardly believe that. I’ll ask Bill. (Bill was the city editor.) 1 wonder if a threat like that isn’t a kind of blackmail. I don’t believe even a Lusk Committeeman[2] can get away with that.

* * *

Yesterday there had been two pairs of legs dangling, on either side of her typewriter, both pairs stuffed thickly into funnels of dark expensive-looking material. She noticed at a distance that one of them was oldish and one was youngish, and they both of them had a stale air of borrowed importance which apparently they had got from the same source. They were both much too well nourished and the younger one wore a square little mustache. Being what they were, no matter what their business was, it would be something unpleasant. Miranda had nodded at them, pulled out her chair and without removing her cap or gloves had reached into a pile of letters and sheets from the copy desk as if she had not a moment to spare. They did not move or take off their hats. At last she had said “Good morning” to them, and asked if they were, perhaps, waiting for her?

The two men slid off the desk, leaving some of her papers rumpled, and the oldish man had inquired why she had not bought a Liberty Bond. Miranda had looked at him and got a poor impression. He was a pursy-faced man, gross-mouthed, with little lightless eyes, and Miranda wondered why nearly all of those selected to do the war work at home were of his sort. He might be anything at all, she thought; advance agent for a road show, promoter of a wildcat oil company, a former saloon keeper announcing the opening of a new cabaret, an automobile salesman—any follower of any one of the crafty, haphazard callings. But he was now all Patriot, working for the government. “Look here,” he asked her, “do you know there’s a war, or don’t you?”

Did he expect an answer to that? Be quiet, Miranda told herself, this was bound to happen. Sooner or later it happens. Keep your head. The man wagged his finger at her, “Do you . . . ” he persisted, as if he were prompting an obstinate child.

“Oh, the war,” Miranda had echoed on a rising note and she almost smiled at him. It was habitual, automatic, to give that solemn, mystically uplifted grin when you spoke the words or heard them spoken. “C’est la guerre,” whether you could pronounce it or not, was even better, and always, always, you shrugged.

“Yeah,” said the younger man in a nasty way, “the war.” Miranda, startled by the tone, met his eye; his stare was really stony, really viciously cold, the kind of thing you might expect to meet behind a pistol on a deserted corner. This expression gave temporary meaning to a set of features otherwise nondescript, the face of those men who have no business of their own. “We’re having a war, and some people are buying Liberty Bonds and others just don’t seem to get around to it,” he said. “That’s what we mean.”

Miranda frowned with nervousness, the sharp beginnings of fear. “Are you selling them?” she asked, taking the cover off her typewriter and putting it back again.

“No, we’re not selling them,” said the older man. “We’re just asking you why you haven’t bought one.”' The voice was persuasive and ominous. Miranda began to explain that she had no money, and did not know where to find any, when the older man interrupted: “That’s no excuse, no excuse at all, and you know it, with the Huns overrunning martyred Belgium.”

“With our American boys fighting and dying in Belleau Wood,”[3] said the younger man, “anybody can raise fifty dollars to help beat the Boche.”[4]

Miranda said hastily, “I have eighteen dollars a week and not another cent in the world. I simply cannot buy anything.”

“You can pay for it five dollars a week,” said the older man (they had stood there cawing back and forth over her head), “like a lot of other people in this office, and a lot of other offices besides are doing.”

Miranda, desperately silent, had thought, Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war? Suppose I asked that little thug. What’s the matter with you, why aren’t you rotting in Belleau Wood? I wish you were . . .

She began to arrange her letters and notes, her fingers refusing to pick up things properly. The older man went on making his little set speech. It was hard, of course. Everybody was suffering, naturally. Everybody had to do his share. But as to that, a Liberty Bond was the safest investment you could make. It was just like having the money in the bank. Of course. The government was back of it and where better could you invest?

“I agree with you about that,” said Miranda, “but I haven’t any money to invest.”

And of course, the man had gone on, it wasn’t so much her fifty dollars that was going to make any difference. It was just a pledge of good faith on her part. A pledge of good faith that she was a loyal American doing her duty. And the thing was safe as a church. Why, if he had a million dollars he’d be glad to put every last cent of it in these Bonds . . . “You can’t lose by it,” he said, almost benevolently, “and you can lose a lot if you don’t. Think it over. You’re the only one in this whole newspaper office that hasn’t come in. And every firm in this city has come in one hundred per cent. Over at the Daily Clarion nobody had to be asked twice.”

“They pay better over there,” said Miranda. “But next week, if I can. Not now, next week.”

“See that you do,” said the younger man. “This ain’t any laughing matter.”

They lolled away, past the Society Editor’s desk, past Bill the City Editor’s desk, past the long copy desk where old man Gibbons sat all night shouting at intervals, “Jarge! Jarge!” and the copy boy would come flying. “Never say people when you mean persons,” old man Gibbons had instructed Miranda, “and never say practically, say virtually, and don’t for God’s sake ever so long as I am at this desk use the barbarism inasmuch under any circumstances whatsoever. Now you’re educated, you may go.” At the head of the stairs her inquisitors had stopped in their fussy pride and vainglory, lighting cigars and wedging their hats more firmly over their eyes.

* * *

Miranda turned over in the soothing water, and wished she might fall asleep there, to wake up only when it was time to sleep again. She had a burning, slow headache, and noticed it now, remembering she had waked up with it and it had in fact begun the evening before. While she dressed she tried to trace the insidious career of her headache, and it seemed reasonable to suppose it had started with the war. “It’s been a headache, all right, but not quite like this.” After the Committeemen had left, yesterday, she had gone to the cloakroom and had found Mary Townsend, the Society Editor, quietly hysterical about something. She was perched on the edge of the shabby wicker couch with ridges down the center, knitting on something rose-colored. Now and then she would put down her knitting, seize her head with both hands and rock, saying, “My God” in a surprised, inquiring voice. Her column was called Ye Towne Gossyp, so of course everybody called her Towney. Miranda and Towney had a great deal in common and liked each other. They had both been real reporters once, and had been sent together to “cover” a scandalous elopement, in which no marriage had taken place, after all, and the recaptured girl, her face swollen, had sat with her mother, who was moaning steadily under a mound of blankets. They had both wept painfully and implored the young reporters to suppress the worst of the story. They had suppressed it, and the rival newspaper printed it all the next day. Miranda and Towney had then taken their punishment together, and had been degraded publicly to routine female jobs, one to the theaters, the other to society. They had this in common, that neither of them could see what else they could possibly have done, and they knew they were considered fools by the rest of the staff—nice girls, but fools. At sight of Miranda, Towney had broken out in a rage. “I can’t do it, I’ll never be able to raise the money, I told them, I can’t, I can’t, but they wouldn’t listen.”

Miranda said, “I knew I wasn’t the only person in this office who couldn’t raise five dollars. I told them I couldn’t, too, and I can’t.”

“My God,” said Towney, in the same voice, “they told me I’d lose my job—”

“I’m going to ask Bill,” Miranda said. “I don’t believe Bill would do that.”

“It’s not up to Bill,” said Towney. “He’d have to if they got after him. Do you suppose they could put us in jail?”

“I don’t know,” said Miranda. “If they do, we won’t be lonesome.” She sat down beside Towney and held her own head. “What kind of soldier are you knitting that for? It’s a sprightly color. It ought to cheer him up.”

“Like hell,” said Towney, her needles going again. “I’m making this for myself. That’s that.”

“Well,” said Miranda, “we won’t be lonesome, and we’ll catch up on our sleep.” She washed her face and put on fresh make-up. Taking clean gray gloves out of her pocket she went out to join a group of young women fresh from the country club dances, the morning bridge, the charity bazaar, the Red Cross workrooms, who were wallowing in good works. They gave tea dances and raised money, and with the money they bought quantities of sweets, fruit, cigarettes, and magazines for the men in the cantonment hospitals. With this loot they were now setting out, a gay procession of high-powered cars and brightly tinted faces to cheer the brave boys who already, you might very well say, had fallen in defense of their country. It must be frightfully hard on them, the dears, to be floored like this when they’re all crazy to get overseas and into the trenches as quickly as possible. Yes, and some of them are the cutest things you ever saw. I didn’t know there were so many good-looking men in this country. Good heavens, I said, where do they come from? Well, my dear, you may ask yourself that question, who knows where they did come from? You’re quite right, the way I feel about it is this, we must do everything we can to make them contented, but I draw the line at talking to them. I told the chaperones at those dances for enlisted men. I’ll dance with them, every dumbbell who asks me, but I will not talk to them, I said, even if there is a war. So I danced hundreds of miles without opening my mouth except to say, Please keep your knees to yourself. I’m glad we gave those dances up. Yes, and the men stopped coming, anyway. But listen, I’ve heard that a great many of the enlisted men come from very good families; I’m not good at catching names, and those I did catch I’d never heard before, so I don’t know . . . but it seems to me if they were from good families, you’d know it, wouldn’t you? I mean, if a man is well bred he doesn’t step on your feet, does he? At least not that. I used to have a pair of sandals ruined at every one of those dances. Well, I think any kind of social life is in very poor taste just now, I think we should all put on out Red Cross head dresses and wear them for the duration of the war.

Miranda, carrying her basket and her flowers, moved in among the young women, who scattered out and rushed upon the ward uttering girlish laughter meant to be refreshingly gay, but there was a grim determined clang in it calculated to freeze the blood. Miserably embarrassed at the idiocy of her errand, she walked rapidly between the long rows of high beds, set foot to foot with a narrow aisle between. The men, a selected presentable lot, sheets drawn up to their chins, not seriously ill, were bored and restless, most of them willing to be amused at anything. They were for the most part picturesquely bandaged as to arm or head, and those who were not visibly wounded invariably replied “Rheumatism” if some tactless girl, who had been solemnly warned never to ask this question, still forgot and asked a man what his illness was. The good-natured, eager ones, laughing and calling out from their hard, narrow beds, were soon surrounded. Miranda, with her wilting bouquet and her basket of sweets and cigarettes, looking about, caught the unfriendly bitter eye of a young fellow lying on his back, his right leg in a cast and pulley. She stopped at the foot of his bed and continued to look at him, and he looked back with an unchanged, hostile face. Not having any, thank you and be damned to the whole business, his eyes said plainly to her, and will you be so good as to take your trash off my bed? For Miranda had set it down, leaning over to place it where he might be able to reach it if he would. Having set it down, she was incapable of taking it up again, but hurried away, her face burning, down the long aisle and out into the cool October sunshine, where the dreary gray barracks swarmed and worked with an aimless life of scurrying, dun-colored insects; and going around to a window near where he lay, she looked in, spying upon her soldier. He was lying with his eyes closed, his eyebrows in a sad, bitter frown. She could not place him at all, she could not imagine where he came from nor what sort of being he might have been “in life,” she said to herself. His face was young and the features sharp and plain, the hands were not laborer’s hands but not well-cared-for hands either. They were good useful properly shaped hands, lying there on the coverlet. It occurred to her that it would be her luck to find him, instead of a jolly hungry puppy glad of a bite to eat and a little chatter. It is like turning a corner absorbed in your painful thoughts and meeting your state of mind embodied, face to face, she said, “My own feelings about this whole thing, made flesh. Never again will I come here. This is no sort of thing to be doing. This is disgusting,” she told herself plainly. “Of course, I would pick him out,” she thought, getting into the back seat of the car she came in. “Serves me right. I know better.”

Another girl came out looking very tired and climbed in beside her. After a short silence, the girl said in a puzzled way, “I don’t know what good it does, really. Some of them wouldn’t take anything at all. I don’t like this, do you?”

“I hate it,” said Miranda.

“I suppose it’s all right, though,” said the girl, cautiously.

“Perhaps,” said Miranda, turning cautious also.

That was for yesterday. At this point Miranda decided there was no good in thinking of yesterday, except for the hour after midnight she had spent dancing with Adam. He was in her mind so much, she hardly knew when she was thinking about him directly. His image was simply always present in more or less degree; he was sometimes nearer the surface of her thoughts, the pleasantest, the only really pleasant thought she had. She examined her face in the mirror between the windows and decided that her uneasiness was not all imagination. For three days at least she had felt odd and her expression was unfamiliar. She would have to raise that fifty dollars somehow, she supposed, or who knows what can happen? She was hardened to stories of personal disaster, of outrageous accusations and extraordinarily bitter penal ties that had grown monstrously out of incidents very little more important than her failure—her refusal—to buy a Bond. No, she did not find herself a pleasing sight, flushed and shiny, and even her hair felt as if it had decided to grow in the other direction. I must do something about this, I can’t let Adam see me like this, she told herself, knowing that even now at that moment he was listening for the turn of her door knob, and he would be in the hallway, or on the porch when she came out, as if by sheerest coincidence. The noon sunlight cast cold slanting shadows in the room where, she said, I suppose I live, and this day is beginning badly, but they all do now, for one reason or another. In a drowse, she sprayed perfume on her hair, put on her moleskin cap and jacket, now in their second winter, but still good, still nice to wear, again being glad she had paid a frightening price for them. She had enjoyed them all this time, and in no case would she have had the money now. Maybe she could manage for that Bond. She could not find the lock without leaning to search for it, then stood, undecided a moment, possessed by the notion that she had forgotten something she would miss seriously later on.

Adam was in the hallway, a step outside his own door; he swung about as if quite startled to see her, and said,

“Hello. I don’t have to go back to camp today after all—isn’t that luck?”

Miranda smiled at him gaily because she was always delighted at the sight of him. He was wearing his new uniform, and he was all olive and tan and tawny, hay-colored and sand-colored from hair to boots. She half noticed again that he always began by smiling at her; that his smile faded gradually; that his eyes became fixed and thoughtful as if he were reading in a poor light.

They walked out together into the fine fall day, scuffling bright ragged leaves under their feet, turning their faces up to a generous sky really blue and cloudless. At the first corner they waited for a funeral to pass, the mourners seated straight and firm as if proud in their sorrow.

“I imagine I’m late,” said Miranda, “as usual. What time is it?”

“Nearly half past one,” he said, slipping back his sleeve with an exaggerated thrust of his arm upward. The young soldiers were still self-conscious about their wrist watches. Such of them as Miranda knew were boys from southern and southwestern towns, far off the Atlantic seaboard, and they had always believed that only sissies wore wrist watches. “I’ll slap you on the wristwatch,” one vaudeville comedian would simper to another, and it was always a good joke, never stale.

“I think it’s a most sensible way to carry a watch,” said Miranda. “You needn’t blush.”

“I’m nearly used to it,” said Adam, who was from Texas. “We’ve been told time and again how all the humanly regular army men wear them. It’s the horrors of war,” he said. “Are we downhearted? I’ll say we are.”

It was the kind of patter going the rounds. “You look it,” said Miranda.

He was tall and heavily muscled in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and flanks, and he was infinitely buttoned, strapped, harnessed into a uniform as tough and unyielding in cut as a strait jacket, though the cloth was fine and supple. He had his uniforms made by the best tailor he could find, he confided to Miranda one day when she told him how squish he was looking in his new soldier suit. “Hard enough to make anything of the outfit, anyhow,” he told her. “It’s the least I can do for my beloved country, not to go around looking like a tramp.” He was twenty-four years old and a Second Lieutenant in an Engineers Corps, on leave because his outfit expected to be sent over shortly. “Came in to make my will,” he told Miranda, “and get a supply of toothbrushes and razor blades. By what gorgeous luck do you suppose,” he asked her, “I happened to pick on your rooming house? How did I know you were there?”

Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could their small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper surface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on the earth at the same moment. “Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?” and “I’m always in the mood for dancing, Adam!” but there were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go.

He really did look, Miranda thought, like a fine healthy apple this morning. One time or another in their talking, he had boasted that he had never had a pain in his life that he could remember. Instead of being horrified at this monster, she approved his monstrous uniqueness. As for herself, she had had too many pains to mention, so she did not mention them. After working for three years on a morning newspaper she had an illusion of maturity and experience; but it was fatigue merely, she decided, from keeping what she had been brought up to believe were unnatural hours, eating casually at dirty little restaurants, drinking bad coffee all night, and smoking too much. When she said something of her way of living to Adam, he studied her face a few seconds as if he had never seen it before, and said, in a forthright way, “Why, it hasn’t hurt you a bit. I think you’re beautiful,” and left her dangling there, wondering if he had thought she wished to be praised. She did wish to be praised, but not at that moment. Adam kept unwholesome hours too, or had in the ten days they had known each other, staying awake until one o’clock to take her out for supper; he smoked also continually, though if she did not stop him he was apt to explain to her exactly what smoking did to the lungs. “But,” he said, “does it matter so much if you’re going to war, anyway?”

“No,” said Miranda, “and it matters even less if you’re staying at home knitting socks. Give me a cigarette, will you?” They paused at another comer, under a half-foliaged maple, and hardly glanced at a funeral procession approaching. His eyes were pale tan with orange flecks in them, and his hat was the color of a haystack when you turn the weathered top back to the clear straw beneath. He fished out his cigarette case and snapped his silver lighter at her, snapped it several times in his own face, and they moved on, smoking.

“I can see you knitting socks,” he said. “That would be just your speed. You know perfectly well you can’t knit.”

“I do worse,” she said, soberly. “I write pieces advising other young women to knit and roll bandages and do without sugar and help win the war.”

“Oh, well,” said Adam, with the easy masculine morals in such questions, “that’s merely your job. That doesn’t count.”

“I wonder,” said Miranda. “How did you manage to get an extension of leave?”

“They just gave it,” said Adam, “for no reason. The men are dying like flies out there, anyway. This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked hat.”

“It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”

“Never did. Well, let’s be strong minded and not have any of it. I’ve got four days more straight from the blue and not a blade of grass must grow under our feet. What about tonight?”

“Same thing,” she told him, “but make it about half past one. I’ve got a special job beside my usual run of the mill.”

“What a job you’ve got,” said Adam, “nothing to do but run from one dizzy amusement to another and then write a piece about it.”

“Yes, it’s too dizzy for words,” said Miranda. They stood while a funeral passed, and this time they watched it in silence. Miranda pulled her cap to an angle and winked in the sunlight, her head swimming slowly “like goldfish,” she told Adam, “my head swims. I’m only half awake. I must have some coffee.”

They lounged on their elbows over the counter of a drug store. “No more cream for the stay-at-homes,” she said, “and only one lump of sugar. I’ll have two or none; that’s the kind of martyr I’m being. I mean to live on boiled cabbage and wear shoddy from now on and get in good shape for the next round. No war is going to sneak up on me again.”

“Oh, there won’t be any more wars, don’t you read the newspapers?” asked Adam. “We’re going to mop ’em up this time, and they’re going to stay mopped, and this is going to be all.”

“So they told me,” said Miranda, tasting her bitter lukewarm brew and making a rueful face. Their smiles approved of each other, they felt they had got the right tone, they were taking the war properly. Above all, thought Miranda, no tooth-gnashing, no hair-tearing, it’s noisy and unbecoming and it doesn’t get you anywhere.

“Swill,” said Adam rudely, pushing back his cup. “Is that all you’re having for breakfast?”

“It’s more than I want,” said Miranda.

“I had buckwheat cakes, with sausage and maple syrup, and two bananas, and two cups of coffee, at eight o’clock, and right now, again, I feel like a famished orphan left in the ashcan. I’m all set,” said, Adam, “for broiled steak and fried potatoes and—”

“Don’t go on with it,” said Miranda. “It sounds delirious to me. Do all that after I’m gone.” She slipped from the high seat, leaned against it slightly, glanced at her face in her round mirror, rubbed rouge on her lips and decided that she was past praying for.

“There’s something terribly wrong,” she told Adam. “I feel too rotten. It can’t just be the weather and the war.”

“The weather is perfect,” said Adam, “and the war is simply too good to be true. But since when? You were all right yesterday.”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, her voice sounding small and thin. They stopped as always at the open door before the flight of littered steps leading up to the newspaper loft. Miranda listened for a moment to the rattle of typewriters above, the steady rumble of presses below. “I wish we were going to spend the whole afternoon on a park bench,” she said, “or drive to the mountains.”

“I do, too,” he said. “Let’s do that tomorrow.”

“Yes, tomorrow, unless something else happens. I’d like to run away,” she told him. “Let’s both.”

“Me?” said Adam. “Where I’m going there’s no running to speak of. You mostly crawl about on your stomach here and there among the debris. You know, barbed wire and such stuff. It’s going to be the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime.” He reflected a moment, and went on, “I don’t know a darned thing about it, really, but they make it sound awfully messy. I’ve heard so much about it I feel as if I had been there and back. It’s going to be an anticlimax,” he said, “like seeing the pictures of a place so often you can’t see it at all when you actually get there. Seems to me I’ve been in the army all my life.”

Six months, he meant. Eternity. He looked so clear and fresh, and he had never had a pain in his life. She had seen them when they had been there and back, and they never looked like this again. “Already the returned hero,” she said, “and don’t I wish you were.”

“When I learned the use of the bayonet in my first training camp,” said Adam, “I gouged the vitals out of more sandbags and sacks of hay than I could keep track of. They kept bawling at us, ‘Get him, get that Boche, stick him before he sticks you’—and we’d go for those sandbags like wildfire, and honestly, sometimes I felt a perfect fool for getting so worked up when I saw the sand trickling out. I used to wake up in the night sometimes feeling silly about it.”

“I can imagine,” said Miranda. “It’s perfect nonsense." They lingered, unwilling to say good-bye. After a little pause, Adam, as if keeping up the conversation, asked, “Do you know what the average life expectation of a sapping party is after it hits the job?”

“Something speedy, I suppose.”

“Just nine minutes,” said Adam. “I read that in your own newspaper not a week ago.”

“Make it ten and I’ll come along,” said Miranda.

“Not another second,” said Adam. “Exactly nine minutes. Take it or leave it.”

“Stop bragging,” said Miranda. “Who figured that out?”

“A noncombatant,” said Adam, “a fellow with rickets.”

This seemed very comic; they laughed and leaned towards each other and Miranda heard herself being a little shrill. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “My, it’s a funny war,” she said. “Isn’t it? I laugh every time I think about it.”

Adam took her hand in both of his and pulled a little at the tips of her gloves and sniffed them. “What nice perfume you have,” he said, “and such a lot of it, too. I like a lot of perfume on gloves and hair,” he said, sniffing again.

“I’ve got probably too much,” she said. “I can’t smell or see or hear today. I must have a fearful cold.”

“Don’t catch cold,” said Adam. “My leave is nearly up, and it will be the last, the very last.” She moved her fingers in her gloves as he pulled at the fingers and turned her hands as if they were something new and curious and of great value, and she turned shy and quiet. She liked him, she liked him, and there was more than this, but it was no good even imagining, because he was not for her nor for any woman, being beyond experience already, committed without any knowledge or act of his own to death. She took back her hands. “Goodbye,” she said finally, “until tonight.”

She ran upstairs and looked back from the top. He was still watching her and raised his hand without smiling. Miranda hardly ever saw anyone look back after he had said good-bye. She could not help turning sometimes for one glimpse more of the person she had been talking with, as if that would save too rude and too sudden a snapping of even the lightest bond. But people hurried away, their faces already changed, fixed, in their straining towards their next stopping place, already absorbed in planning their next act or encounter. Adam was waiting as if he expected her to turn, and under his brows, fixed in a strained frown, his eyes were very black.

* * *

At her desk she sat without taking off jacket or cap, slitting envelopes and pretending to read the letters. Only Chuck Rouncivale, the sports reporter, and Ye Towne Gossyp were sitting on her desk today, and them she liked having there. She sat on theirs when she pleased. Towney and Chuck were talking and they went on with it.

“They say,” said Towney, “that it is really caused by germs brought by a German ship to Boston, a camouflaged ship.[5] Naturally, it didn’t come in under its own colors. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

“Maybe it was a submarine,” said Chuck, “sneaking in from the bottom of the sea in the dead of night. Now that sounds better.”

“Yes, it does,” said Towney; “they always slip up somewhere in these detail . . . and they think the germs were sprayed over the city—it started in Boston, you know—and somebody reported seeing a strange, thick, greasy-looking cloud float up out of Boston Harbor and spread slowly all over that end of town. I think it was an old woman who saw it.”

“Should have been,” said Chuck.

“I read it in a New York newspaper,” said Towney, “so it’s bound to be true.”

Chuck and Miranda laughed so loudly at this that Bill stood up and glared at them. “Towney still reads the newspapers,” explained Chuck.

“Well, what’s funny about that?” asked Bill, sitting down again and frowning into the clutter before him.

“It was a noncombatant saw that cloud,” said Miranda.

“Naturally,” said Towney.

“Member of the Lusk Committee, maybe,” said Miranda.

“The Angel of Mons,” said Chuck, “or a dollar-a-year man.”[6]

Miranda wished to stop hearing and talking. She wished to think for just five minutes of her own about Adam, really to think about him, but there was no time. She had seen him first ten days ago, and since then they had been crossing streets together, darting between trucks and limousines and pushcarts and farm wagons; he had waited for her in doorways and in little restaurants that smelled of stale frying fat; they had eaten and danced to the urgent whine and bray of jazz orchestras; they had sat in dull theaters because Miranda was there to write a piece about the play. Once they had gone to the mountains and, leaving the car, had climbed a stony trail, and had come out on a ledge upon a flat stone, where they sat and watched the lights change on a valley landscape that was, no doubt, Miranda said, quite apocryphal—“We need not believe it, but it is fine poetry,” she told him. They had leaned their shoulders together there, and had sat quite still, watching. On two Sundays they had gone to the geological museum and had pored in shared fascination over bits of meteors, rock formations, fossilized tusks and trees, Indian arrows, grottoes from the silver and gold lodes. “Think of those old miners washing out their fortunes in little pans beside the streams,” said Adam, “and inside the earth there was this—” and he had told her he liked better those things that took long to make; he loved airplanes too, all sorts of machinery, things carved out of wood or stone. He knew nothing much about them, but he recognized them when he saw them. He had confessed that he simply could not get through a book, any kind of book except textbooks on engineering; reading bored him to crumbs; he regretted now he hadn’t brought his roadster, but he hadn’t thought he would need a car; he loved driving, he wouldn’t expect her to believe how many hundreds of miles he could get over in a day . . . he had showed her snapshots of himself at the wheel of his roadster; of himself sailing a boat, looking very free and windblown, all angles, hauling on the ropes; he would have joined the air force, but his mother had hysterics every time he mentioned it. She didn’t seem to realize that dog fighting in the air was a good deal safer than sapping parties on the ground at night. But he hadn’t argued, because of course she did not realize about sapping parties. And here he was, stuck, on a plateau a mile high with no water for a boat and his car at home; otherwise they could really have had a good time. Miranda knew he was trying to tell her what kind of person he was when he had his machinery with him. She felt she knew pretty well what kind of person he was, and she would have liked to tell him that if he thought he had left himself at home in a boat or an automobile, he was much mistaken. The telephones were ringing. Bill was shouting at somebody who kept saying, “Well, but listen, well, but listen—” but nobody was going to listen, of course, nobody. Old man Gibbons bellowed in despair, “Jarge, Jarge—”

“Just the same,” Towney was saying in her most complacent patriotic voice, “Hut Service is a fine idea, and we should all volunteer even if they don’t want us.” Towney does well at this, thought Miranda, remembering the rose-colored sweater and the tight rebellious face in the cloakroom. Towney was now all open-faced glory and goodness, willing to sacrifice herself for her country. “After all,” said Towney, “I can sing and dance well enough for the Little Theater, and I could write their letters for them, and at a pinch I might drive an ambulance. I have driven a Ford for years.”

Miranda joined in: “Well, I can sing and dance too, but who’s going to do the bed-making and the scrubbing up? Those huts are hard to keep, and it would be a dirty job and we’d be perfectly miserable; and as I’ve got a hard, dirty job and am perfectly miserable, I’m going to stay at home.”

“I think the women should keep out of it,” said Chuck Rouncivale. “They just add skirts to the horrors of war.” Chuck had bad lungs and fretted a good deal about missing the show. “I could have been there and back with a leg off by now; it would have served the old man right. Then he’d either have to buy his own hooch or sober up.”

Miranda had seen Chuck on pay day giving the old man money for hooch. He was a good-humored ingratiating old scoundrel, too, that was the worst of him. He slapped his son on the back and beamed upon him with the bleared eye of paternal affection while he took his last nickel.

“It was Florence Nightingale ruined wars,” Chuck went on. “What’s the idea of petting soldiers and binding up their wounds and soothing their fevered brows? That’s not war. Let ’em perish where they fail. That’s what they’re there for.”

“You can talk,” said Towney, with a slantwise glint at him.

“What’s the idea?” asked Chuck, flushing and hunching his shoulders. “You know I’ve got this lung, or maybe half of it anyway by now.”

“You’re much too sensitive,” said Towney. “I didn’t mean a thing.”

Bill had been raging about, chewing his half-smoked cigar, his hair standing up in a brush, his eyes soft and lambent but wild, like a stag’s. He would never, thought Miranda, be more than fourteen years old if he lived for a century, which he would not, at the rate he was going. He behaved exactly like city editors in the moving pictures, even to the chewed cigar. Had he formed his style on the films, or had scenario writers seized once for all on the type “Bill” in its inarguable purity? Bill was shouting to Chuck: “And if he comes back here take him up the alley and saw his head off by hand!”

Chuck said, “He’ll be back. Don’t worry.” Bill said mildly, already off on another track, “Well, saw him off.” Towney went to her own desk, but Chuck sat waiting amiably to be taken to the new vaudeville show. Miranda, with two tickets, always invited one of the reporters to go with her on Monday. Chuck was lavishly hardboiled and professional in his sports writing, but he had told Miranda that he didn’t give a damn about sports, really; the job kept him out in the open, and paid him enough to buy the old man’s hooch. He preferred shows and didn’t see why women always had the job.

“Who does Bill want sawed today?” asked Miranda.

“That hoofer you panned in this morning’s,” said Chuck. “He was up here bright and early asking for the guy that writes up the show business. He said he was going to take the goof who wrote that piece up the alley and bop him in the nose. He said . . .”

“I hope he’s gone,” said Miranda; “I do hope he had to catch a train.”

Chuck stood up and arranged his maroon-colored turtle-necked sweater, glanced down at the pea soup tweed plus fours and the hobnailed tan boots which he hoped would help to disguise the fact that he had a bad lung and didn’t care for sports, and said, “He’s long gone by now, don’t worry. Let’s get going. You’re late as usual.”

Miranda, facing about, almost stepped on the toes of a little drab man in a derby hat. He might have been a pretty fellow once, but now his mouth drooped where he had lost his side teeth, and his sad red-rimmed eyes had given up coquetry. A thin brown wave of hair was combed out with brilliantine and curled against the rim of the derby. He didn’t move his feet, but stood planted with a kind of inert resistance, and asked Miranda: “Are you the so-called dramatic critic on this hick newspaper?”

“I’m afraid I am,” said Miranda.

“Well,” said the little man, “I’m just asking for one minute of your valuable time.” His underlip shot out, he began with shaking hands to fish about in his waistcoat pocket. “I just hate to let you get away with it, that’s all.” He riffled through a collection of shabby newspaper clippings. “Just give these the once-over, will you? And then let me ask you if you think I’m gonna stand for being knocked by a tanktown critic,” he said, in a toneless voice. “Look here, here’s Buffalo, Chicago, Saint Looey, Philadelphia, Frisco, besides New York. Here’s the best publications in the business. Variety, the Billboard, they all broke down and admitted that Danny Dickerson knows his stuff. So you don’t think so, hey? That’s all I wanta ask you.”

“No, I don’t,” said Miranda, as bluntly as she could, “and I can’t stop to talk about it.”

The little man leaned nearer; his voice shook as if he had been nervous for a long time. “Look here, what was there you didn’t like about me? Tell me that.”

Miranda said, “You shouldn’t pay any attention at all. What does it matter what I think?”

“I don’t care what you think. It ain’t that,” said the little man, “but these things get round and booking agencies back East don’t know how it is out here. We get panned in the sticks, and they think it’s the same as getting panned in Chicago, see? They don’t know the difference. They don’t know that the more high class an act is the more the hick critics pan it. But I’ve been called the best in the business by the best in the business, and I wanta know what you think is wrong with me.”

Chuck said, “Come on, Miranda, curtain’s going up.” Miranda handed the little man his clippings—they were mostly ten years old—and tried to edge past him. He stepped before her again and said without much conviction, “If you was a man I’d knock your block off.” Chuck got up at that and lounged over, taking his hands out of his pockets, and said, “Now you’ve done your song and dance you’d better get out. Get the hell out now before I throw you downstairs.”

The little man pulled at the top of his tie, a small blue tie with red polka dots, slightly frayed at the knot. He pulled it straight and repeated as if he had rehearsed it, “Come out in the alley.” The tears filled his thickened red lids.

Chuck said, “Ah, shut up,” and followed Miranda, who was running towards the stairs. He overtook her on the sidewalk. “I left him sniveling and shuffling his publicity trying to find the joker,” said Chuck, “the poor old heel.”

Miranda said, “There’s too much of everything in this world just now. I’d like to sit down here on the curb, Chuck, and die, and never again see—I wish I could lose my memory and forget my own name . . . I wish—”

Chuck said, “Toughen up, Miranda. This is no time to cave in. Forget that fellow. For every hundred people in show business, there are ninety-nine like him. But you don’t manage right, anyway. You bring it on yourself. All you have to do is play up the headliners, and you needn’t even mention the also-rans. Try to keep in mind that Rypinsky has got show business cornered in this town. Please Rypinsky and you’ll please the advertising department. Please them and you’ll get a raise. Hand-in-glove, my poor dumb child. Will you never learn?”

“I seem to keep learning all the wrong things,” said Miranda, hopelessly.

“You do for a fact,” Chuck told her cheerfully. “You are as good at it as I ever saw. Now do you feel better?”

* * *

“This is a rotten show you’ve invited me to,” said Chuck. “Now what are you going to do about it? If I were writing it up. I’d—”

“Do write it up,” said Miranda. “You write it up this time. I’m getting ready to leave, anyway, but don’t tell anybody yet.”

“You mean it? All my life,” said Chuck, “I’ve yearned to be a so-called dramatic critic on a hick newspaper, and this is positively my first chance.”

“Better take it,” Miranda told him. “It may be your last.” She thought. This is the beginning of the end of something. Something terrible is going to happen to me. I shan’t need bread and butter where I’m going. I’ll will it to Chuck. He has a venerable father to buy hooch for. I hope they let him have it. Oh, Adam, I hope I see you once more before I go under with whatever is the matter with me. “I wish the war were over,” she said to Chuck, as if they had been talking about that. “I wish it were over and I wish it had never begun.”

Chuck had got out his pad and pencil and was already writing his review. What she had said seemed safe enough, but how would he take it? “I don’t care how it started or when it ends,” said Chuck, scribbling away, “I’m not going to be there.”

All the rejected men talked like that, thought Miranda. War was the one thing they wanted, now they couldn’t have it. Maybe they had wanted badly to go, some of them. All of them had a sidelong eye for the women they talked with about it, a guarded resentment which said, “Don’t pin a white feather on me, you bloodthirsty female. I’ve offered my meat to the crows and they won’t have it.” The worst thing about war for the stay-at-homes is there isn’t anyone to talk to anymore. The Lusk Committee will get you if you don’t watch out. Bread will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war. Nonsense. Not nonsense, I tell you, there’s some kind of valuable high explosive to be got out of peach pits. So all the happy housewives hurry during the canning season to lay their baskets of peach pits on the altar of their country. It keeps them busy and makes them feel useful, and all these women running wild with the men away are dangerous, if they aren’t given something to keep their little minds out of mischief. So rows of young girls, the intact cradles of the future, with their pure serious faces framed becomingly in Red Cross wimples, roll cock-eyed bandages that will never reach a base hospital, and knit sweaters that will never warm a manly chest, their minds dwelling lovingly on all the blood and mud and the next dance at the Acanthus Club for the officers of the flying corps. Keeping still and quiet will win the war.

“I’m simply not going to be there,” said Chuck, absorbed in his review. No, Adam will be there, thought Miranda. She slipped down in the chair and leaned her head against the dusty plush, closed her eyes and faced for one instant that was a lifetime the certain, the overwhelming and awful knowledge that there was nothing at all ahead for Adam and for her. Nothing. She opened her eyes and held her hands together palms up, gazing at them and trying to understand oblivion.

“Now look at this,” said Chuck, for the lights had come on and the audience was rustling and talking again. “I’ve got it all done, even before the headliner comes on. It’s old Stella Mayhew, and she’s always good. She’s been good for forty years, and she’s going to sing ‘O the blues ain’t nothin’ but the easy-going heart disease.’ That’s all you need to know about her. Now just glance over this. Would you be willing to sign it?”

Miranda took the pages and stared at them conscientiously, turning them over, she hoped, at the right moment, and gave them back. “Yes, Chuck, yes. I’d sign that. But I won’t. We must tell Bill you wrote it, because it’s your start, maybe.”

“You don’t half appreciate it,” said Chuck. “You read it too fast. Here, listen to this—” and he began to mutter excitedly. While he was reading, she watched his face. It was a pleasant face with some kind of spark of life in it, and a good severity in the modeling of the brow above the nose. For the first time since she had known him she wondered what Chuck was thinking about. He looked preoccupied and unhappy; he wasn’t so frivolous as he sounded. The people were crowding into the aisle, bringing out their cigarette cases ready to strike a match the instant they reached the lobby; women with waved hair clutched at their wraps, men stretched their chins to ease them of their stiff collars, and Chuck said, “We might as well go now.” Miranda, buttoning her jacket, stepped into the moving crowd, thinking, What did I ever know about them? There must be a great many of them here who think as I do, and we dare not say a word to each other of our desperation. We are speechless animals letting ourselves be destroyed, and why? Does anybody here believe the things we say to each other?

* * *

Stretched in unease on the ridge of the wicker couch in the cloakroom, Miranda waited for time to pass and leave Adam with her. Time seemed to proceed with more than usual eccentricity, leaving twilight gaps in her mind for thirty minutes which seemed like a second, and then hard flashes of light that shone clearly on her watch, proving that three minutes is an intolerable stretch of waiting, as if she were hanging by her thumbs. At last it was reasonable to imagine Adam stepping out of the house in the early darkness into the blue mist that might soon be rain, he would be on the way, and there was nothing to think about him, after all. There was only the wish to see him and the fear, the present threat, of not seeing him again; for every step they took towards each other seemed perilous, drawing them apart instead of together, as a swimmer in spite of his most determined strokes is yet drawn slowly backward by the tide. “I don’t want to love,” she would think in spite of herself. “Not Adam, there is no time and we are not ready for it and yet this is all we have—”

And there he was on the sidewalk, with his foot on the first step, and Miranda almost ran down to meet him. Adam, holding her hands, asked, “Do you feel well now? Are you hungry? Are you tired? Will you feel like dancing after the show?”

“Yes to everything,” said Miranda, “yes, yes . . . ” Her head was like a feather, and she steadied herself on his arm. The mist was still mist that might be rain later, and though the air was sharp and clean in her mouth, it did not, she decided, make breathing any easier. “I hope the show is good, or at least funny,” she told him, “but I promise nothing.”

It was a long, dreary play, but Adam and Miranda sat very quietly together waiting patiently for it to be over. Adam carefully and seriously pulled off her glove and held her hand as if he were accustomed to holding her hand in theaters. Once they turned and their eyes met, but only once, and the two pairs of eyes were equally steady and noncommittal. A deep tremor set up in Miranda, and she set about resisting herself methodically as if she were closing windows and doors and fastening down curtains against a rising storm. Adam sat watching the monotonous play with a strange shining excitement, his face quite fixed and still.

When the curtain rose for the third act, the third act did not take place at once. There was instead disclosed a backdrop almost covered with an American flag improperly and disrespectfully exposed, nailed at each upper comer, gathered in the middle and nailed again, sagging dustily. Before it posed a local dollar-a-year man, now doing his bit as a Liberty Bond salesman. He was an ordinary man past middle life, with a neat little melon buttoned into his trousers and waistcoat, an opinionated tight mouth, a face and figure in which nothing could be read save the inept sensual record of fifty years. But for once in his life he was an important fellow in an impressive situation, and he reveled, rolling his words in an actorish tone.

“Looks like a penguin,” said Adam. They moved, smiled at each other, Miranda reclaimed her hand, Adam folded his together, and they prepared to wear their way again through the same old moldy speech with the same old dusty backdrop. Miranda tried not to listen, but she heard. These vile Huns—glorious Belleau Wood—our keyword is Sacrifice—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts—our noble boys Over There—Big Berthas[7]—the death of civilization—the Boche—

“My head aches,” whispered Miranda. “Oh, why won’t he hush?”

“He won’t,” whispered Adam. “I’ll get you some aspirin.”

“In Flanders Field the poppies grow. Between the crosses row on row—”

“He’s getting into the home stretch,” whispered Adam—atrocities, innocent babes hoisted on Boche bayonets—your child and my child—if our children are spared these things, then let us say with all reverence that these dead have not died in vain—the war, the war, the WAR to end WAR, war for Democracy, for humanity, a safe world forever and ever—and to prove our faith in Democracy to each other, and to the world, let everybody get together and buy Liberty Bonds and do without sugar and wool socks—was that it? Miranda asked herself, Say that over, I didn’t catch the last line. Did you mention Adam? If you didn’t, I’m not interested. What about Adam, you little pig? And what are we going to sing this time, “Tipperary” or “There’s a Long, Long Trail”? Oh, please do let the show go on and get over with. I must write a piece about it before I can go dancing with Adam and we have no time. Coal, oil, iron, gold, international finance, why don’t you tell us about them, you little liar?

The audience rose and sang, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” their opened mouths black and faces pallid in the reflected footlights; some of the faces grimaced and wept and had shining streaks like snail’s tracks on them. Adam and Miranda joined in at the tops of their voices, grinning shamefacedly at each other once or twice.

In the street, they lit their cigarettes and walked slowly as always. “Just another nasty old man who would like to see the young ones killed,” said Miranda in a low voice. “The tomcats try to eat the little tom-kittens, you know. They don’t fool you really, do they, Adam?”

The young people were talking like that about the business by then. They felt they were seeing pretty clearly through that game. She went on, “I hate these potbellied baldheads, too fat, too old, too cowardly, to go to war themselves, they know they’re safe; it’s you they are sending instead—”

Adam turned eyes of genuine surprise upon her. “Oh, that one,” he said. “Now what could the poor sap do if they did take him? It’s not his fault,” he explained. “He can’t do anything but talk.” His pride in his youth, his forbearance and tolerance and contempt for that unlucky being breathed out of his very pores as he strolled, straight and relaxed in his strength. “What could you expect of him, Miranda?”

She spoke his name often, and he spoke hers rarely. The little shock of pleasure the sound of her name in his mouth gave her stopped her answer. For a moment she hesitated and began at another point of attack. “Adam,” she said, “the worst of war is the fear and suspicion and the awful expression in all the eyes you meet . . . as if they had pulled down the shutters over their minds and their hearts and were peering out at you, ready to leap if you make one gesture or say one word they do not understand instantly. It frightens me. I live in fear, too, and no one should have to live in fear. It’s the skulking about, and the lying. It’s what war does to the mind and the heart, Adam, and you can’t separate these two—what it does to them is worse than what it can do to the body.”

Adam said soberly, after a moment, “Oh, yes, but suppose one comes back whole? The mind and the heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.”

“Oh, yes,” mimicked Miranda. “It’s just out of luck, that’s all.”

“If I didn’t go,” said Adam, in a matter-of-fact voice, “I couldn’t look myself in the face.”

So that’s all settled. With her fingers flattened on his arm, Miranda was silent, thinking about Adam. No, there was no resentment or revolt in him. Pure, she thought, all the way through, flawless, complete, as the sacrificial lamb must be. The sacrificial lamb strode along casually, accommodating his long pace to hers, keeping her on the inside of the walk in the good American style, helping her across street corners as if she were a cripple—“I hope we don’t come to a mud puddle. He’ll carry me over it”—giving off whiffs of tobacco smoke, a manly smell of scentless soap, freshly cleaned leather and freshly washed skin, breathing through his nose and carrying his chest easily. He threw back his head and smiled into the sky which still misted, promising rain. “Oh, boy,” he said, “what a night. Can’t you hurry that review of yours so we can get started?”

He waited for her before a cup of coffee in the restaurant next to the pressroom, nicknamed The Greasy Spoon. When she came down at last, freshly washed and combed and powdered, she saw Adam first, sitting near the dingy big window, face turned to the street, but looking down. It was an extraordinary face, smooth and fine and golden in the shabby light, but now set in a blind melancholy, a look of pained suspense and disillusion. For just one split second she got a glimpse of Adam when he would have been older, the face of the man he would not live to be. He saw her then, rose, and the bright glow was there.

* * *

Adam pulled their chairs together at their table; they drank hot tea and listened to the orchestra jazzing “Pack Up Your Troubles.”

“In an old kit bag, and smoil, smoil, smoil,” shouted half a dozen boys under the draft age, gathered around a table near the orchestra. They yelled incoherently, laughed in great hysterical bursts of something that appeared to be merriment, and passed around under the tablecloth flat bottles containing a clear liquid—for in this western city founded and built by roaring drunken miners, no one was allowed to take his alcohol openly. Instead, they splashed it into their tumblers of ginger ale, and went on singing, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” When the tune changed to “Madelon,” Adam said, “Let’s dance.” It was a tawdry little place, crowded and hot and full of smoke, but there was nothing better. The music was gay, and life is completely crazy anyway, thought Miranda, so what does it matter? This is what we have, Adam and I, this is all we’re going to get. This is the way it is with us. She wanted to say, “Adam, come out of your dream and listen to me. I have pains in my chest and my head and my heart and they’re real. I am in pain all over, and you are in such danger as I can’t bear to think about, and why can we not save each other?” When her hand tightened on his shoulder his arm tightened about her waist instantly, and stayed there, holding firmly. They said nothing but smiled continually at each other, odd changing smiles as though they had found a new language. Miranda, her face near Adam’s shoulder, noticed a dark young pair sitting at a corner table, each with an arm around the waist of the other, their heads together, their eyes staring at the same thing, whatever it was, that hovered in space before them. Her right hand lay on the table, his hand over it, and her face was a blur with weeping. Now and then he raised her hand and kissed it, and set it down and held it, and her eyes would fill again. They were not shameless; they had merely forgotten where they were, or they had no other place to go, perhaps. They said not a word, and the small pantomime repeated itself, like a melancholy short film running monotonously over and over again. Miranda envied them. She envied that girl. At least she can weep if that helps, and he does not even have to ask. What is the matter? Tell me. They had cups of coffee before them, and after a long while—Miranda and Adam had danced and sat down again twice—when the coffee was quite cold, they drank it suddenly, then embraced as before, without a word and scarcely a glance at each other. Something was done and settled between them, at least; it was enviable, enviable, that they could sit quietly together and have the same expression on their faces while they looked into the hell they shared, no matter what kind of hell, it was theirs, and they were together.

At the table nearest Adam and Miranda a young woman was leaning on her elbow, telling her young man a story. “And I don’t like him because he’s too fresh. He kept on asking me to take a drink and I kept telling him, I don’t drink and he said, Now look here, I want a drink the worst way and I think it’s mean of you not to drink with me, I can’t sit up here and drink by myself, he said. I told him, You’re not by yourself in the first place. I like that, I said, and if you want a drink go ahead and have it, I told him, why drag me in? So he called the waiter and ordered ginger ale and two glasses and I drank straight ginger ale like I always do but he poured a shot of hooch in his. He was awfully proud of that hooch, said he made it himself out of potatoes. Nice homemade likker, warm from the pipe, he told me, three drops of this and your ginger ale will taste like Mumm’s Extry. But I said. No, and I mean no, can’t you get that through your bean? He took another drink and said, Ah, come on, honey, don’t be so stubborn. This’ll make your shimmy shake. So I just got tired of the argument, and I said, I don’t need to drink to shake my shimmy. I can strut my stuff on tea, I said. Well, why don’t you then, he wanted to know, and I just told him—”

She knew she had been asleep for a long time when all at once without even a warning footstep or creak of the door hinge, Adam was in the room turning on the light, and she knew it was he, though at first she was blinded and turned her head away. He came over at once and sat on the side of the bed and began to talk as if he were going on with something they had been talking about before. He crumpled a square of paper and tossed it in the fireplace.

“You didn’t get my note,” he said. “I left it under the door. I was called back suddenly to camp for a lot of inoculations. They kept me longer than I expected, I was late. I called the office and they told me you were not coming in today. I called Miss Hobbe here and she said you were in bed and couldn’t come to the telephone. Did she give you my message?”

“No,” said Miranda drowsily, “but I think I have been asleep all day. Oh, I do remember. There was a doctor here. Bill sent him. I was at the telephone once, for Bill told me he would send an ambulance and have me taken to the hospital. The doctor tapped my chest and left a prescription and said he would be back, but he hasn’t come.”

“Where is it, the prescription?” asked Adam.

“I don’t know. He left it, though. I saw him.”

Adam moved about searching the tables and the mantelpiece. “Here it is,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I must look for an all-night drug store. It’s after one o’clock. Good-bye.”

Good-bye, good-bye. Miranda watched the door where he had disappeared for quite a while, then closed her eyes, and thought, When I am not here, I cannot remember anything about this room where I have lived for nearly a year, except that the curtains are too thin and there was never any way of shutting out the morning light. Miss Hobbe had promised heavier curtains, but they had never appeared. When Miranda in her dressing gown had been at the telephone that morning, Miss Hobbe had passed through, carrying a tray. She was a little, red-haired, nervously friendly creature, and her manner said all too plainly that the place was not paying and she was on the ragged edge.

“My dear child,” she said sharply, with a glance at Miranda’s attire, “what is the matter?”

Miranda, with the receiver to her ear, said, “Influenza, I think.”

“Horrors,” said Miss Hobbe, in a whisper, and the tray wavered in her hands. “Go back to bed at once . . . go at once!”

“I must talk to Bill first,” Miranda had told her, and Miss Hobbe had hurried on and had not returned. Bill had shouted directions at her, promising everything, doctor, nurse, ambulance, hospital, her check every week as usual, everything, but she was to get back to bed and stay there. She dropped into bed, thinking that Bill was the only person she had ever seen who actually tore his own hair when he was excited enough . . . I suppose I should ask to be sent home, she thought. It’s a respectable old custom to inflict your death on the family if you can manage it. No, I’ll stay here, this is my business, but not in this room, I hope . . . I wish I were in the cold mountains in the snow, that’s what I should like best; and all about her rose the measured ranges of the Rockies wearing their perpetual snow, their majestic blue laurels of cloud, chilling her to the bone with their sharp breath. Oh, no, I must have warmth—and her memory turned and roved after another place she had known first and loved best, that now she could see only in drifting fragments of palm and cedar, dark shadows and a sky that warmed without dazzling, as this strange sky had dazzled without warming her; there was the long slow wavering of gray moss in the drowsy oak shade, the spacious hovering of buzzards overhead, the smell of crushed water herbs along a bank, and without warning a broad tranquil river into which flowed all the rivers she had known. The walls shelved away in one deliberate silent movement on either side, and a tall sailing ship was moored nearby, with a gangplank weathered to blackness touching the foot of her bed. Back of the ship was jungle, and even as it appeared before her, she knew it was all she had ever read or had been told or felt or thought about jungles; a writhing terribly alive and secret place of death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents, rainbow-colored birds with malign eyes, leopards with humanly wise faces and extravagantly crested lions; screaming long-armed monkeys tumbling among broad fleshy leaves that glowed with sulphur-colored light and exuded the ichor of death, and rotting trunks of unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime. Without surprise, watching from her pillow, she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed, and the slender ship spread its wings and sailed away into the jungle. The air trembled with the shattering scream and the hoarse bellow of voices all crying together, rolling and, colliding above her like ragged storm clouds, and the words became two words only rising and falling and clamoring about her head. Danger, danger, danger, the voices said, and War, war, war. There was her door half open, Adam standing with his hand on the knob, and Miss Hobbe with her face all out of shape with terror was crying shrilly, “I tell you, they must come for her now, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk . . . I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I’ve got a houseful of people to think about!”

Adam said, “I know that. They’ll come for her tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning, my God, they’d better come now!”

“They can’t get an ambulance,” said Adam, “and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or a nurse. They’re all busy. That’s all there is to it. You stay out of the room, and I’ll look after her.”

“Yes, you’ll look after her, I can see that,” said Miss Hobbe, in a particularly unpleasant tone.

“Yes, that’s what I said,” answered Adam, drily, “and you keep out.”

He closed the door carefully. He was carrying an assortment of misshapen packages, and his face was astonishingly impassive.

“Did you hear that?” he asked, leaning over and speaking very quietly.

“Most of it,” said Miranda. “It’s a nice prospect, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got your medicine,” said Adam, “and you’re to begin with it this minute. She can’t put you out.”

“So it’s really as bad as that,” said Miranda.

“It’s as bad as anything can be,” said Adam, “all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night—”

“But not one for me,” said Miranda, feeling hilarious and lightheaded. She sat up and beat her pillow into shape and reached for her robe. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been having a nightmare. Give me a cigarette, will you, and light one for yourself and open all the windows and sit near one of them. You’re running a risk,” she told him, “don’t you know that? Why do you do it?”

“Never mind,” said Adam, “take your medicine,” and offered her two large cherry-colored pills. She swallowed them promptly and instantly vomited them up. “Do excuse me,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I’m so sorry.” Adam without a word and with a very concerned expression washed her face with a wet towel, gave her some cracked ice from one of the packages, and firmly offered her two more pills. “That’s what they always did at home,” she explained to him, “and it worked.” Crushed with humiliation, she put her hands over her face and laughed again, painfully.

“There are two more kinds yet,” said Adam, pulling her hands from her face and lifting her chin. “You’ve hardly begun. And I’ve got other things, like orange juice and ice cream—they told me to feed you ice cream —and coffee in a thermos bottle, and a thermometer. You have to work through the whole lot so you’d better take it easy.”

“This time last night we were dancing,” said Miranda, and drank something from a spoon. Her eyes followed him about the room, as he did things for her with an absent-minded face, like a man alone; now and again he would come back, and slipping his hand under her head, would hold a cup or a tumbler to her mouth, and she drank, and followed him with her eyes again, without a clear notion of what was happening.

“Adam,” she said, “I’ve just thought of something. Maybe they forgot St. Luke’s Hospital. Call the sisters there and ask them not to be so selfish with their silly old rooms. Tell them I only want a very small dark ugly one for three days, or less. Do try them, Adam.”

He believed, apparently, that she was still more or less in her right mind, for she heard him at the telephone explaining in his deliberate voice. He was back again almost at once, saying, “This seems to be my day for getting mixed up with peevish old maids. The sister said that even if they had a room, you couldn’t have it without doctor’s orders. But they didn’t have one, anyway. She was pretty sour about it.”

“Well,” said Miranda in a thick voice, “I think that’s abominably rude and mean, don’t you?” She sat up with, a wide gesture of both arms, and began to retch again, violently.

“Hold it. As you were,” called Adam, fetching the basin. He held her head, washed her face and hands with ice water, put her head straight on the pillow, and went over and looked out of the window. “Well,” he said at last, sitting beside her again, “they haven’t got a room. They haven’t got a bed. They haven’t even got a baby crib, the way she talked. So I think that’s straight enough, and we may as well dig in.”

“Isn’t the ambulance coming?”

“Tomorrow, maybe.”

He took off his tunic and hung it on the back of a chair. Kneeling before the fireplace, he began carefully to set kindling sticks in the shape of an Indian tepee, with a little paper in the center for them to lean upon. He lighted this and placed other sticks upon them, and larger bits of wood. When they were going nicely, he added still heavier wood, and coal a few lumps at a time, until there was a good blaze and a fire that would not need rekindling. He rose and dusted his hands together; the fire illuminated him from the back and his hair shone.

“Adam,” said Miranda, “I think you’re very beautiful.” He laughed out at this and shook his head at her. “What a hell of a word,” he said, “for me.”

“It was the first that occurred to me,” she said, drawing up on her elbow to catch the warmth of the blaze. “That’s a good job, that fire.”

He sat on the bed again, dragging up a chair and putting his feet on the rungs. They smiled at each other for the first time since he had come in that night. “How do you feel now?” he asked.

“Better, much better,” she told him. “Let’s talk. Let’s tell each other what we meant to do.”

“You tell me first,” said Adam. “I want to know about you.”

“You’d get the notion I had a very sad life,” she said, “and perhaps it was, but I’d be glad enough to have it now. If I could have it back, it would be easy to be happy about almost anything at all. That’s not true, but that’s the way I feel now.” After a pause, she said, “There’s nothing to tell, after all, if it ends now, for all this time I was getting ready for something that was going to happen later, when the time came. So now it’s nothing much.”

“But it must have been worth having until now, wasn’t it?” he asked seriously as if it were something important to know.

“Not if this is all,” she repeated obstinately.

“Weren’t you ever—happy? ” asked Adam, and he was plainly afraid of the word; he was shy of it as he was of the word love; he seemed never to have spoken it before, and was uncertain of its sound or meaning.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I just lived and never thought about it. I remember things I liked, though, and things I hoped for.”

“I was going to be an electrical engineer,” said Adam. He stopped short. “And I shall finish up when I get back,” he added, after a moment.

“Don’t you love being alive?” asked Miranda. “Don’t you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?”

“I love to swim, too,” said Adam.

“So do I,” said Miranda. “We never did swim together.”

“Do you remember any prayers?” she asked him suddenly. “Did you ever learn anything at Sunday School?”

“Not much,” confessed Adam without contrition. “Well, the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Yes, and there’s Hail Mary,” she said, “and the really useful one beginning, I confess to Almighty God and to blessed Mary ever virgin and to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul—”

“Catholic,” he commented.

“Prayers just the same, you big Methodist. I’ll bet you are a Methodist.”

“No, Presbyterian.”

“Well, what others do you remember?”

“Now I lay me down to sleep-” said Adam.

“Yes, that one, and Blessed Jesus meek and mild—you see that my religious education wasn’t neglected either. I even know a prayer beginning ‘O Apollo.’ Want to hear it?”

“No,” said Adam, “you’re making fun.”

“I’m not,” said Miranda, “I’m trying to keep from going to sleep. I’m afraid to go to sleep. I may not wake up. Don’t let me go to sleep, Adam. Do you know Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Bless the bed I lie upon?”

“If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Is that it?” asked Adam. “It doesn’t sound right, somehow.”

“Light me a cigarette, please, and move over and sit near the window. We keep forgetting about fresh air. You must have it.” He lighted the cigarette and held it to her lips. She took it between her fingers and dropped it under the edge of her pillow. He found it and crushed it out in the saucer under the water tumbler. Her head swam in darkness for an instant, cleared, and she sat up in panic, throwing off the covers and breaking into a sweat. Adam leaped up with an alarmed face, and almost at once was holding a cup of hot coffee to her mouth.

“You must have some too,” she told him, quiet again, and they sat huddled together on the edge of the bed, drinking coffee in silence.

Adam said, “You must lie down again. You’re awake now.”

“Let’s sing,” said Miranda. “I know an old spiritual. I can remember some of the words.” She spoke in a natural voice. “I’m fine now.” She began in a hoarse whisper, “‘Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away…’ Do you know that song?”[8]

“Yes,” said Adam, “I heard Negroes in Texas sing it, in an oil field.”

“I heard them sing it in a cotton field,” she said. “It’s a good song.”

They sang that line together. “But I can’t remember what comes next,” said Adam.

“‘Pale horse, pale rider,’” said Miranda. “We really need a good banjo—‘done taken my lover away.’” Her voice cleared and she said, “But we ought to get on with it. What’s the next line?”

“There’s a lot more to it than that,” said Adam, “about forty verses, the rider done taken away mammy, pappy, brother, sister, the whole family besides the lover—”

“But not the singer, not yet,” said Miranda. “Death always leaves one singer to mourn. ‘Death,’” she sang, “‘oh, leave one singer to mourn—’”

“‘Pale horse, pale rider,’” chanted Adam, coming in on the beat, “‘done taken my lover away!’ I think we’re good, I think we ought to get up an act—”

“Go in Hut Service,” said Miranda, “entertain the poor defenseless heroes Over There.”

“We’ll play banjos,” said Adam. “I always wanted to play the banjo.”

Miranda sighed, and lay back on the pillow and thought, I must give up, I can’t hold out any longer. There was only that pain, only that room, and only Adam. There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them. There was only this one moment and it was a dream of time, and Adam’s face, very near hers, eyes still and intent, was a shadow, and there was to be nothing more . . .

“Adam,” she said out of the heavy soft darkness that drew her down, down, “I love you, and I was hoping you would say that to me, too.”

He lay down beside her with his arm under her shoulder, and pressed his smooth face against hers, his mouth moved towards her mouth and stopped. “Can you hear what I am saying? . . . What do you think I have been trying to tell you all this time?”

She turned towards him, the cloud cleared, and she saw his face for an instant. He pulled the covers about her and held her, and said, “Go to sleep, darling, darling, if you will go to sleep now for one hour I will wake you up and bring you hot coffee and tomorrow we will find somebody to help. I love you, go to sleep—”

Almost with no warning at all, she floated into the darkness, holding his hand, in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green wood, an angry dangerous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows, and she saw Adam transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart and passed shrilly, cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight back before her eyes and rose again unwounded and alive; another flight of arrows loosed from the invisible bow struck him again and he fell, and yet he was there before her untouched in a perpetual death and resurrection. She threw herself before him, angrily and selfishly she interposed between him and the track of the arrow, crying, No, no, like a child cheated in a game, It’s my turn now, why must you always be the one to die? and the arrows struck her cleanly through the heart and through his body and he lay dead, and she still lived, and the wood whistled and sang and shouted, every branch and leaf and blade of grass had its own terrible accusing voice. She ran then, and Adam caught her in the middle of the room, running, and said, “Darling, I must have been asleep, too. What happened? You screamed terribly?”

After he had helped her to settle again, she sat with her knees drawn up under her chin, resting her head on her folded arms and began carefully searching for her words because it was important to explain clearly. “It was a very odd sort of dream. I don’t know why it could have frightened me. There was something about an old-fashioned valentine. There were two hearts carved on a tree, pierced by the same arrow—you know, Adam—”

“Yes, I know, honey,” he said in the gentlest sort of way, and sat kissing her on the cheek and forehead with a kind of accustomedness, as if he had been kissing her for years, “one of those lace paper things.”

“Yes, and yet they were alive, and were us, you understand—this doesn’t seem to be quite the way it was, but it was something like that. It was in a wood—”

“Yes,” said Adam. He got up and put on his tunic and gathered up the thermos bottle. “I’m going back to that little stand and get us some ice cream and hot coffee,” he told her, “and I’ll be back in five minutes, and you keep quiet. Good-bye for five minutes,” he said, holding her chin in the palm of his hand and trying to catch her eye, “and you be very quiet.”

“Good-bye,” she said. “I’m awake again.” But she was not, and the two alert young interns from the County hospital who had arrived, after frantic urgings from the noisy city editor of the Blue Mountain News, to carry her away in a police ambulance, decided that they had better go down and get the stretcher. Their voices roused her, and she sat up, got out of bed at once, and stood glancing about brightly. “Why, you’re all right,” said the darker and stouter of the two young men, both extremely fit and competent looking in their white clothes, each with a flower in his buttonhole. “I’ll just carry you.” He unfolded a white blanket and wrapped it around her. She gathered up the folds and asked, “But where is Adam?” taking hold of the doctor’s arm. He laid a hand on her drenched forehead, shook his head, and gave her a shrewd look. “Adam?”

“Yes,” Miranda told him, lowering her voice confidentially, “he was here and now he is gone.”

“Oh, he’ll be back,” the intern told her easily. “He’s just gone round the block to get cigarettes. Don’t worry about Adam. He’s the least of your troubles.”

“Will he know where to find me?” she asked, still holding back.

“We’ll leave him a note,” said the intern. “Come now. It’s time we got out of here.”

He lifted and swung her up to his shoulder. “I feel very badly,” she told him. “I don’t know why.”

“I’ll bet you do,” said he, stepping out carefully, the other doctor going before them, and feeling for the first step of the stairs. “Put your arms around my neck,” he instructed her. “It won’t do you any harm, and it’s a great help to me.”

“What’s your name?” Miranda asked as the other doctor opened the front door and they stepped out into the frosty sweet air.

“Hildesheim,” he said, in the tone of one humoring a child.

“Well, Dr. Hildesheim, aren’t we in a pretty mess?”

“We certainly are,” said Dr. Hildesheim.

* * *

The second young intern, still quite fresh and dapper in his white coat, though his carnation was withering at the edges, was leaning over listening to her breathing through a stethoscope and whistling thinly, “There’s a Long, Long Trail—” From time to time he tapped her ribs smartly with two fingers, whistling.

Miranda observed him for a few moments until he fixed his bright busy hazel eye not four inches from hers. “I’m not unconscious,” she explained, “I know what I want to say.” Then to her horror she heard herself babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense though she could not hear what she was saying. The flicker of attention in the eye near her vanished, the second intern went on tapping and listening, hissing softly under his breath.

“I wish you’d stop whistling,” she said clearly. The sound stopped. “It’s a beastly tune,” she added. Anything, anything at all to keep her small hold on the life of human beings, a clear line of communication, no matter what, between her and the receding world. “Please let me see Dr. Hildesheim,” she said, “I have something important to say to him. I must say it now.” The second intern vanished. He did not walk away; he fled into the air without a sound, and Dr. Hildesheim’s face appeared in his stead.

“Dr. Hildesheim, I want to ask you about Adam.”

“That young man? He’s been here, and left you a note, and has gone again,” said Dr. Hildesheim, “and he’ll be back tomorrow and the day after.” His tone was altogether too merry and flippant.

“I don’t believe you,” said Miranda, bitterly, closing her lips and eyes and hoping she might not weep.

“Miss Tanner,” called the doctor, “have you got that note?”

Miss Tanner appeared beside her, handed her an unsealed envelope, took it back, unfolded the note and gave it to her.

“I can’t see it,” said Miranda, after a pained search of the page full of hasty scratches in black ink.

“Here, I’ll read it,” said Miss Tanner. “It says, ‘They came and took you while I was away and now they will not let me see you. Maybe tomorrow they will, with my love, Adam,’” read Miss Tanner in a firm dry voice, pronouncing the words distinctly. “Now, do you see?” she asked soothingly.

Miranda, hearing the words one by one, forgot them one by one. “Oh, read it again, what does it say?” she called out over the silence that pressed upon her, reaching towards the dancing words that just escaped as she almost touched them.

“That will do,” said Dr. Hildesheim, calmly authoritarian. “Where is that bed?”

“There is no bed yet,” said Miss Tanner, as if she said, We are short of oranges.

Dr. Hildesheim said, “Well, we’ll manage something,” and Miss Tanner drew the narrow trestle with bright crossed metal supports and small rubbery wheels into a deep jut of the corridor, out of the way of the swift white figures darting about, whirling and skimming like water flies all in silence. The white walls rose sheer as cliffs, a dozen frosted moons followed each other in perfect self-possession down a white lane and dropped mutely one by one into a snowy abyss.

What is this whiteness and silence but the absence of pain? Miranda lay lifting the nap of her white blanket softly between eased fingers, watching a dance of tall deliberate shadows moving behind a wide screen of sheets spread upon a frame. It was there, near her, on her side of the wall where she could see it clearly and enjoy it, and it was so beautiful she had no curiosity as to its meaning. Two dark figures nodded, bent, curtsied to each other, retreated and bowed again, lifted long arms and spread great hands against the white shadow of the screen; then with a single round movement, the sheets were folded back, disclosing two speechless men in white, standing, and another speechless man in white, lying on the bare springs of a white iron bed. The man on the springs was swathed smoothly from head to foot in white, with folded bands across the face, and a large stiff bow like merry rabbit ears dangled at the crown of his head.

The two living men lifted a mattress standing hunched against the wall, spread it tenderly and exactly over the dead man. Wordless and white they vanished down the corridor, pushing the wheeled bed before them. It had been an entrancing and leisurely spectacle, but now it was over. A pallid white fog rose in their wake insinuatingly and floated before Miranda’s eyes, a fog in which was concealed all terror and all weariness, all the wrung faces and twisted backs and broken feet of abused, outraged living things, all the shapes of their confused pain and their estranged hearts; the fog might part at any moment and loose the horde of human torments. She put up her hands and said, Not yet, not yet; but it was too late. The fog parted and two executioners, white clad, moved towards her, pushing between them with marvelously deft and practiced hands the misshapen figure of an old man in filthy rags whose scanty beard waggled under his opened mouth as he bowed his back and braced his feet to resist and delay the fate they had prepared for him. In a high weeping voice, he was trying to explain to them that the crime of which he was accused did not merit the punishment he was about to receive; and except for this whining cry there was silence as they advanced. The soiled cracked bowls of the old man’s hands were held before him beseechingly as a beggar’s as he said, “Before God I am not guilty,” but they held his arms and drew him onward, passed, and were gone.

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there. Across the field came Dr. Hildesheim, his face a skull beneath his German helmet, carrying a naked infant writhing on the point of his bayonet, and a huge stone pot marked Poison in Gothic letters. He stopped before the well that Miranda remembered in a pasture on her father’s farm, a well once dry but now bubbling with living water, and into its pure depths he threw the child and the poison, and the violated water sank back soundlessly into the earth. Miranda, screaming, ran with her arms above her head; her voice echoed and came back to her like a wolf’s howl, Hildesheim is a Boche, a spy, a Hun, kill him, kill him before he kills you . . . She woke howling; she heard the foul words accusing Dr. Hildesheim tumbling from her mouth; opened her eyes and knew she was in a bed in a small white room, with Dr. Hildesheim sitting beside her, two firm fingers on her pulse. His hair was brushed sleekly, and his buttonhole flower was fresh. Stars gleamed through the window, and Dr. Hildesheim seemed to be gazing at them with no particular expression, his stethoscope dangling around his neck. Miss Tanner stood at the foot of the bed writing something on a chart.

“Hello,” said Dr. Hildesheim, “at least you take it out in shouting. You don’t try to get out of bed and go running around.” Miranda held her eyes open with a terrible effort, saw his rather heavy, patient face clearly even as her mind tottered and slithered again, broke from its foundation and spun like a cast wheel in a ditch. “I didn’t mean it, I never believed it, Dr. Hildesheim, you mustn’t remember it—” and was gone again, not being able to wait for an answer.

The wrong she had done followed her and haunted her dream: this wrong took vague shapes of horror she could not recognize or name, though her heart cringed at sight of them. Her mind, split in two, acknowledged and denied what she saw in the one instant, for across an abyss of complaining darkness her reasoning coherent self watched the strange frenzy of the other coldly, reluctant to admit the truth of its visions, its tenacious remorses and despairs.

“I know those are your hands,” she told Miss Tanner, “I know it, but to me they are white tarantulas. Don’t touch me.”

“Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.

“Oh, no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things,” but her eyes closed in spite of her will, and the midnight of her internal torment closed about her.

Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity…eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into the pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can’t I consent now, I am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety, breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look, don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.

Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced, she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard, unwinking angry point of fight said. Trust me. I stay.

At once it grew, flattened, thinned to a fine radiance, spread like a great fan and curved out into a rainbow through which Miranda, enchanted, altogether believing, looked upon a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of course, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it. She rose from her narrow ledge and ran lightly through the tall portals of the great bow that arched in its splendor over the burning blue of the sea and the cool green of the meadow on either hand.

The small waves rolled in and over unhurriedly, lapped upon the sand in silence and retreated; the grasses flurried before a breeze that made no sound. Moving towards her leisurely as clouds through the shimmering air came a great company of human beings, and Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew them, every one, without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them. They surrounded her smoothly on silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened, separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning.

Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched the edges of this confident tranquility; something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something valuable in another country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in fright, I have left something unfinished. A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out, Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand. The cloth was drawn away; she saw Miss Tanner filling a hypodermic needle in her methodical expert way, and heard Dr. Hildesheim saying, “I think that will do the trick. Try another.” Miss Tanner plucked firmly at Miranda’s arm near the shoulder, and the unbelievable current of agony ran burning through her veins again. She struggled to cry out, saying. Let me go, let me go; but heard only incoherent sounds of animal suffering. She saw doctor and nurse glance at each other with the glance of initiates at a mystery, nodding in silence, their eyes alive with knowledgeable pride. They looked briefly at their handiwork and hurried away.

Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid-air, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamor went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt.

The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee . . . ”

Sweet land . . . oh, terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamor of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty—”

“Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlip held firmly, her eyes blurred.

Miranda said, “Please open the window, please. I smell death in here.”

Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again, but it is always twilight or just before morning, a promise of day that is never kept. What has become of the sun? That was the longest and loneliest night, and yet it will not end and let the day come. Shall I ever see light again?

Sitting in a long chair, near a window, it was in itself a melancholy wonder to see the colorless sunlight slanting on the snow, under a sky drained of its blue. “Can this be my face?” Miranda asked her mirror. “Are these my own hands?” she asked Miss Tanner, holding them up to show the yellow tint like melted wax glimmering between the closed fingers. The body is a curious monster, no place to live in; how could anyone feel at home there? Is it possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? she asked herself. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now a soiled gray. Breathing slowly, falling asleep and waking again, feeling the splash of water on her flesh, taking food, talking in bare phrases with Dr. Hildesheim and Miss Tanner, Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there and yet is helpless, unable to leave it at his will.

“It is morning,” Miss Tanner would say, with a sigh, for she had grown old and weary in the past month. “Morning again, my dear,” showing Miranda the same monotonous landscape of dulled evergreens and leaden snow. She would rustle about in her starched skirts, her face bravely powdered, her spirit unbreakable as good steel, saying, “Look, my dear, what a heavenly morning, like a crystal,” for she had an affection for the salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she, Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death with her own hands. “Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,” Miss Tanner would tell the other nurses. “Keep that in mind.” Even the sunshine was Miss Tanner’s own prescription for the further recovery of Miranda, this patient the doctors had given up for lost, and who yet sat here, visible proof of Miss Tanner’s theory. She said, “Look at the sunshine, now,” as she might be saying, “I ordered this for you, my dear. Do sit up and take it.”

“It’s beautiful,” Miranda would answer, even turning her head to look, thanking Miss Tanner for her goodness, most of all her goodness about the weather. “Beautiful, I always loved it.” And I might love it again if I saw it, she thought, but truth was, she could not see it. There was no light, there might never be light again, compared as it must always be with the light she had seen beside the blue sea that lay so tranquilly along the shore of her paradise. That was a child’s dream of the heavenly meadow, the vision of repose that comes to a tired body in sleep, she thought, but I have seen it when I did not know it was a dream. Closing her eyes she would rest for a moment remembering that bliss which had repaid all the pain of the journey to reach it; opening them again she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and beings meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves alive!

At night, after the long effort of lying in her chair, in her extremity of grief for what she had so briefly won, she folded her painful body together and wept silently, shamelessly, in pity for herself and her lost rapture. There was no escape. Dr. Hildesheim, Miss Tanner, the nurses in the diet kitchen, the chemist, the surgeon, the precise machine of the hospital, the whole humane conviction and custom of society, conspired to pull her inseparable rack of bones and wasted flesh to its feet, to put in order her disordered mind, and to set her once more safely in the road that would lead her again to death.

Chuck Rouncivale and Mary Townsend came to see her, bringing her a bundle of letters they had guarded for her. They brought a basket of delicate, small hothouse flowers, lilies of the valley with sweet peas and feathery fern, and above these blooms their faces were merry and haggard.

Mary said, “You have had a tussle, haven’t you?” and Chuck said, “Well, you made it back, didn’t you?” Then after an uneasy pause, they told her that everybody was waiting to see her again at her desk. “They’ve put me back on sports already, Miranda,” said Chuck. For ten minutes Miranda smiled and told them how gay and what a pleasant surprise it was to find herself alive. For it will not do to betray the conspiracy and tamper with the courage of the living; there is nothing better than to be alive, everyone has agreed on that; it is past argument, and who attempts to deny it is justly outlawed. “I’ll be back in no time at all,” she said. “This is almost over.”

Her letters lay in a heap in her lap and beside her chair. Now and then she turned one over to read the inscription, recognized this handwriting or that, examined the blotted stamps and the postmarks, and let them drop again. For two or three days they lay upon the table beside her, and she continued to shrink from them. “They will all be telling me again how good it is to be alive, they will say again they love me, they are glad I am living too, and what can I answer to that?” and her hardened, indifferent heart shuddered in despair at itself, because before it had been tender and capable of love.

Dr. Hildesheim said, “What, all these letters not opened yet?” and Miss Tanner said, “Read your letters, my dear. I’ll open them for you.” Standing beside the bed, she slit them cleanly with a paper knife. Miranda, cornered, picked and chose until she found a thin one in an unfamiliar handwriting. “Oh, no, now,” said Miss Tanner, “take them as they come. Here, I’ll hand them to you.” She sat down, prepared to be helpful to the end.

What a victory, what triumph, what happiness to be alive, sang the letters in a chorus. The names were signed with flourishes like the circles in air of bugle notes, and they were the names of those she had loved best; some of those she had known well and pleasantly; and a few who meant nothing to her, then or now. The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a strange man at the camp where Adam had been, telling her that Adam had died of influenza in the camp hospital. Adam had asked him, in case anything happened, to be sure to let her know.

If anything happened. To be sure to let her know. If anything happened. “Your friend, Adam Barclay,” wrote the strange man. It had happened—she looked at the date—more than a month ago.

“I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?” she asked Miss Tanner, who was folding letters and putting them back in their proper envelopes.

“Oh, quite a while,” said Miss Tanner, “but you’ll be ready to go soon now. But you must be careful of yourself and not overdo, and you should come back now and then and let us look at you, because sometimes the aftereffects are very—”

Miranda, sitting up before the mirror, wrote carefully: “One lipstick, medium, one ounce flask Bois d’Hiver perfume, one pair of gray suede gauntlets without straps, two pairs gray sheer stockings without clocks—”

Towney, reading after her, said, “Everything without something so that it will be almost impossible to get?”

“Try it, though,” said Miranda, “they’re nicer without. One walking stick of silvery wood with a silver knob.”

“That’s going to be expensive,” warned Towney. “Walking is hardly worth it.”

“You’re right,” said Miranda, and wrote in the margin, “a nice one to match my other things. Ask Chuck to look for this, Mary. Good looking and not too heavy” Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me my top hat and stick. Stay where you are then, you snob. Not at all. I’m coming forth. “A jar of cold cream,” wrote Miranda, “a box of apricot powder—and, Mary, I don’t need eye shadow, do I?” She glanced at her face in the mirror and away again. “Still, no one need pity this corpse if we look properly to the art of the thing.”

Mary Townsend said, “You won’t recognize yourself in a week.”

“Do you suppose, Mary,” asked Miranda, “I could have my old room back again?”

“That should be easy,” said Mary. “We stored away all your things there with Miss Hobbe.” Miranda wondered again at the time and trouble the living took to be helpful to the dead. But not quite dead now, she reassured herself, one foot in either world now; soon I shall cross back and be at home again. The light will seem real and I shall be glad when I hear that someone I know has escaped from death. I shall visit the escaped ones and help them dress and tell them how lucky they are, and how lucky I am still to have them. Mary will be back soon with my gloves and my walking stick, I must go now, I must begin saying good-bye to Miss Tanner and Dr. Hildesheim. Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back. What do you think I came back for, Adam, to be deceived like this?

At once he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present, a ghost but more alive than she was, the last intolerable cheat of her heart; for knowing it was false she still clung to the lie, the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire. She said, “I love you,” and stood up trembling, trying by the mere act of her will to bring him to sight before her. If I could call you up from the grave I would, she said, if I could see your ghost I would say, I believe . . . “I believe,” she said aloud. “Oh, let me see you once more.”

The room was silent, empty, the shade was gone from it, struck away by the sudden violence of her rising and speaking aloud. She came to herself as if out of sleep. Oh, no, that is not the way, I must never do that, she warned herself. Miss Tanner said, “Your taxicab is waiting, my dear,” and there was Mary. Ready to go.

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.[9]

NOTES

Foreword

1 The flu was called the “Spanish flu” because Spain was the only country in Europe not at war. Hence, it was the only country accurately reporting casualties from an epidemic that had already begun to spread across Europe. Combatant countries did not want to report deaths-by-flu because such reports were regarded as seditious. A high death count would indicate weakness to the enemy.

2 Vaughan VC, Vaughan HF, Palmer GT. Influenza In: Vaughan VC, Vaughan HF, Palmer GT (eds). Epidemiology and Public Health, Vol. 1 St. Louis: CW Mosby, 1922, 1297–408

3 Humphreys, Margaret. “The influenza of 1918: Evolutionary perspectives in a historical context.” Evolution, medicine, and public health vol. 2018, 1 219-229. 31 Aug. 2018, doi:10.1093/emph/eoy024

4 Bristow, Nancy K. PHD, “Patients, Identity, and the Influenza Pandemic,” Public Health Reports, 2020 Supplement 3, Volume 125, p. 125

5 Edward M. American Red Cross—Baltimore Chapter—Report of the Red Cross Nursing Center during epidemic of Spanish Influenza. Oct. 1918. Box 689, File 808.11, Folder Epidemic, Influenza, Maryland, Record Group 220. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

6 Crosby, Alfred W., Epidemic and Peace, 1918. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976.

7 Davis, David A., “The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ Traumatic Memory and the Influence Pandemic of 1918,” The Southern Literary Journal, published by the University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 43, No. 2 (SPRING 2011), p. 57

8 Davis, David A., “The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Ann Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ Traumatic Memory and the Influence Pandemic of 1918,” The Southern Literary Journal, published by the University of North Carolina Press, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring 2011), pp. 55-74 (20 pages)

A Novella

1 A Liberty Bond, also known as a Liberty Loan, was a war bond issued by the Treasury Department and backed by the Federal Reserve. The bonds could be purchased in four installments and were used to finance World War I.

2 The Lusk Committee, a response to the Russian Revolution, was formed in 1919 by the New York State Legislature to investigate individuals and organizations suspected of being opposed to capitalism and democracy. Porter, writing Pale Horse, Pale Rider in 1932, may have forgotten that the Lusk Committee didn’t exist in 1918.

3 The battle for Belleau Wood took place during the Second Battle of the Marne in June 1918. The Marine Corps played a crucial role in driving back the Germans, with perhaps one of the most famous battle cries of all time shouted by First Sergeant Dan Daly, a recipient of two Medals of Honor. “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” Moskin, J. Robert (1992). The U.S. Marine Corps Story. Canada: Little, Brown and Company. p. 99.

4 “The Boche” is a pejorative reference to a German soldier.

5 On August 27, 1918 the “Spanish flu” struck Boston Harbor, apparently brought in by ship. An article on WBUR radio says, “On September 6, The Boston Daily Globe reported 300 cases of the flu at Commonwealth Pier. Four days later, the number of cases had risen to 1,100.” Rumors circulated about the disease having been deliberately planted by the Germans.

6 “The Angels of Mons is a story of the reputed appearance of a supernatural entity which protected the British Army from defeat by the invading forces of the II Reich at the beginning of World War 1 during the Battle of Mons in Belgium on 23 August 1914.”

7 Big Berthas were sixteen-and-a-half-inch German howitzers used by German forces advancing through Belgium in 1914. They were nicknamed for the Krupp arms works matriarch Bertha Krupp von Bohlen. Transported in pieces, moved by rail and assembled in place, they proved devastating in destroying Belgian forts.

8 For more about this spiritual and its significance to Porter, see Ciuba, Gary M. “One Singer Left to Mourn: Death and Discourse in Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider.’” South Atlantic Review 61, no. 1 (1996): 55-76. Accessed May 3, 2020. doi:10.2307/3200766.

9 The irony in this stunning last line reminds me of a similar line in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” Hemingway is slightly more optimistic than Porter. Her concluding line is imbued with hope and loss and the unendurable burden of being a survivor.

ABOUT KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1950 was born Callie Russell Porter, the fourth of five children. Her mother died when she was two and her grandmother when she was eleven. The grandmother’s name was Catherine Ann Porter. With a slight alteration of spelling, the author adopted this as her pen name.

Porter’s personal life was tumultuous. Married at sixteen, sent to sanitoriums to help her recover from tuberculosis, divorced and remarried twice more by 1917, she arrived in Denver just in time for the flu pandemic.

Her stories reflect the many places she lived—Europe, Mexico, and all around the United States—and the people she knew, many of them famous writers. Her novel, Ship of Fools, became a bestseller and was made into a film starring Vivien Leigh. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) received a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. The Never-Ending Wrong, about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, was her final book (1977).

ABOUT MARYLEE MACDONALD

If you enjoyed this book and you’d like to know more about my writing, go to my website:

www.maryleemacdonald.com/

Marylee MacDonald is a native Californian and the author of Body Language, Bonds of Love and Blood, Bodies of Water, The Rug Bazaar, Montpelier Tomorrow, Surrender, and The Big Book of Small Presses & Independent Publishers.

An award-winning author with a passion for the short story, her fiction has been awarded the Barry Hannah Prize, the Jeanne M. Leiby Chapbook Award, the Ron Rash Award, Gold and Silver Medals from Readers’ Favorites International Book Awards, and many more.

ABOUT GRAND CANYON PRESS

Grand Canyon Press is a boutique press dedicated to introducing readers to classic works of literature and fine writing by contemporary authors.

www.grandcanyonpress.com

Pale Horse, Pale Rider Copyright © 1936, 1937, 1939 by Katherine Anne Porter

Volume compilation, notes, editing and foreword Copyright © 2020 by Marylee MacDonald

All photographs are in the public domain.

All rights reserved.

Tempe, AZ: Grand Canyon Press [2020]

Marylee MacDonald is the editor of this volume.

www.grandcanyonpress.com

Names: Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890-1980, author. | MacDonald, Marylee, author of foreword.

Title: Pale horse, pale rider : a short novel about the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 / by Katherine Anne Porter ; with a foreword by Marylee MacDonald.

Description: Tempe, AZ : Grand Canyon Press, [2020]

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-951479-22-0 (paperback) | 978-1-951479-21-3 (Amazon paperback) | 978-1-951479-23-7 (Kindle) | 978-1-951479-24-4 (epub) | 978-1-951479-27-5 (pdf) | 978-1-951479-25-1 (ePIB) | 978-1-951479-26-8 (iBook) | 978-1-951479-28-2 (audiofile) | 978-1-951479-59-6 (audiofile)

Subjects: LCSH: Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1919--Fiction. | World War, 1914-1918--Fiction. | American newspapers--Fiction. | Epidemics--Psychological aspects--Fiction. | Near-death experiences-- Fiction. | Loss (Psychology)--Fiction. | LCGFT: Love stories.

Classification: LCC: PS3531.O752 P35 2020 | DDC: 813/.5--dc23

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by: www.tatlin.net

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Created with Vellum

BOOKS BY KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

STORIES

Flowering Judas and Other Stories

The Leaning Tower and Other Stories

The Old Order: Stories of the South

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

NOVEL

Ship of Fools

NONFICTION

The Days Before

The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter

The Never-Ending Wrong