“You mean you refuse to give it to me?” demanded Stevens, who had grown rather pale.
“If you like,” replied Jeremy quietly and almost to himself. He shrugged his shoulders as though wondering at his own complexity and went away. The lawn mower made a clicking sound as it wheeled in front of him on the stable floor, like a fussy conversation, a chattering, useless résumé of all that had passed.
CHAPTER TEN
Ronny awakened suddenly from a long dream. The moonlight lay across the floor of his room but did not quite reach the bed.
“Nor the moon by night.” The phrase came mysteriously into his mind. Where had he heard it? Why did it have for him now this submerged and rhythmic meaning, like a murmur of the blood in his veins? He tried to recall his dream but only a tangled and unreal impression remained. He rose and went to the window, drawn by those white rays. The moon was not at full; on the contrary, it was wasted as though by a disease. “Nor the moon by night.” Again the words came into his mind. Then he recalled that they were part of a Bible verse which he had been forced to learn at school. Something about the sun not burning thee by day nor the moon by night.
Yet the moon was burning him as he stood in its rays; scorching the heart tattooed upon his breast. In the moonlight it stood out plainly: a blue mark, a valentine printed on him by Flo. He tried to read the letters underneath it, but bending made the skin wrinkle and they were lost. Besides, a slight scab still covered them. Never mind. They were easy to remember: JUNE. Flo had wanted to put an arrow through the heart as well, but Ronny had not let him.
Although the tattooing had really hurt more the second day, the making of it had been uncomfortable too. They had gone to the back of the barber shop in a space enclosed by a curtain. Here delicate operations were performed, such as hair dyeing or an occasional permanent wave—things that men like to have done in private. Sometimes Flo did a tattoo job here as well, although most people who wanted such ornaments went to New York and had them done electrically. Flo traced the drawing on a paper with soft charcoal and then pressed the paper on the boy’s skin. When he took it off the drawing remained. Then he set to work with five fine needles wedged into a cork so as to keep them together. He moistened the needles first with his tongue and afterwards dipped them in his special Chinese ink. Then he inserted them obliquely into the skin along the drawing.
Ronny had been surprised not to feel more real pain. Flo, in fact, was the more nervous of the two. He was sweating and breathing hard as he traced the heart. Flo loved working on this tight, fine-grained young skin and did not want to have a failure.
“Just over my own heart, Mr. Flo,” Ronny had begged, “a real heart just over my own.” He himself could not say why he wanted this. Surely he had had a reason once, long ago, five minutes ago, but now he had forgotten what it was. Why not, as Eddie suggested, a rose for luck or a ship for hope? No, it must be a heart and over his own, with June’s name underneath it.
During this time June had seemed to lose all interest in the proceeding and had gone to stand at the door of the barber shop, gazing out at the sodden dock. Ronny could not know that she was fighting nausea. Eddie for his part was covered with lather, being shaved in the front room by a round, good-natured barber.
When Flo had completed his work, Eddie and June came to take a look. Eddie was complimentary. “That’s a fine piece of work,” he said. “It’s got no frills, but it’s got class.”
June gave an unnatural laugh—a ‘ladies’ laugh,’ Ronny thought resentfully—and it was not until they had been on their way back through the streets that they had recovered their intimacy. They were brought together then by their common secret and the fact that they were late for Stevens.
Now Ronny wondered what time of night it was. One should be able to tell by the stars, or by the position of the wasting moon. Sailors could. But Ronny was ignorant of their laws. He felt for his clothes in the darkness and did not dare turn on a light for fear Mary should look out her window and see it. He had to rise. He had to go. A powerful magnate sucked him out into the night. Softly in his bare feet he descended the one flight of stairs and crept to the door. It was bolted and, pulling back the bolt, he found that it was also locked. With a smile of determination he opened the door to the boat garage and descended the spiral metal steps. When he felt the cement quay beneath his feet, he stripped and, holding his light clothing above his head, lowered himself into the water.
A rank stench from this enclosed space filled his nostrils and his splashings sounded deafeningly loud. To his dismay he could touch bottom and the thought of the crab-infested mud made him shudder and draw up his legs. The soft, corrupt wood of one of the wrecks touched his side like a living thing and he gasped. He made his way rapidly into the open and, half paddling, half touching, circled the building and came ashore in the reeds beside it. Here he redressed, shivering slightly. The moon turned the feathery tips of the reeds a leprous white and their crackling frightened him as he forced his way through. A sort of anguish possessed him. He would have liked to renounce his humanity, to become one of the small night creatures that surrounded him. Then humanity would trouble him no longer. He could obey quite simply the pull of the moon or the scurrying urge of fear.
Ronny went to the rear door of the stable which was outside the wall. “Shalimar!” he whispered softly to his hawk. “Shalimar, come with me.” But the falcon was sleepy, huddled on his block and twice his size with pouted feathers. Gambol, on the contrary, nuzzled the boy’s shoulder. He was ready, it seemed, for any wish of his master. Ronny felt guilty because he had so often thought his horse lacked spirit. He led Gambol out by the halter and left Shalimar to sleep.
Mounting by the gate, Ronny rode slowly through the forest. Here and there as Gambol made his way pathless up the hill, they came out onto a pasture ringed by trees and sown by the wind. These small fields were especially lonely. The wild wheat stalks rubbed against one another like sorcerers conversing and the surrounding woods were silhouetted in forbidding shapes. Ronny was crossing one of these fields beneath the crooked moon when a strange idea made him lay his hand upon his bosom. He fancied that his tattooed heart began to beat, a sluggish throbbing slower and heavier than his original pulse. Until that moment he had not thought where he was heading; now he realized that he was on his way to the big house on the hilltop. Every detail of the way looked new to him, covered by the mysterious film of night. Gambol must have felt the same way, for whenever he plucked at a branch or took a mouthful of meadow grass he chewed it in an astonished manner. He seemed surprised to find the same vegetable taste that he had known all his life, and acted as if he expected something completely different.
Ronny caught a glimpse of the house as he rode between the tree trunks. It was etched acidly against the moon and Ronny became a black paper figure as he rode around it. In what room, he wondered, was June asleep? He looked up at the windows, but they were opaque and blind, or else dark, cavern-like holes in the walls. And perhaps she was not sleeping at all and was looking out, leaning on the sill with her bare arms. Turning the corner, he saw two windows on the second floor lit up like bright squares. Someone at least was awake, but of course it could not be June. June would not turn on the light, would not fail him so utterly when he was riding for her sake in the dangerous hours of the night. No, it must be old Mrs. Grey. He had heard old women never slept. He rode on, passing the front drive and then the thicket which screened the kitchen porch, coming back at last to his starting point. It was then that he had an inspiration. Losing himself a little in the trees, he gave that far call with which he brought his hawk to roost, that boy’s cry which was like the sound of some animal or bird:
“Shalimar!”
Afterwards Ronny was afraid. The stillness rushed back as though angry at being broken and pressed roughly against his ears. He waited for what seemed to him to be a long time and was at last rewarded by a faint, whispered “Ronny?”
Riding forward, he saw June in a robe, running silently out on the moss. When she saw him she stopped and waited, touching the trunk of a tree with one hand and with the other holding back the night tangle of her hair.
“Get on and ride behind,” said Ronny, and even his whisper sounded shrill. He rode up to the veranda and she climbed the steps without a word and hopped sideways onto Gambol’s rump. She was as yet half asleep, but the dew on her bare feet aroused her, sending through her body a sort of bell-like note. To Gambol’s step she swayed her torso slowly and held Ronny’s waist with her arms. The boy’s flat back with its shoulder blades, its arching ribs, seemed to draw away ahead of her into the night.
‘Shall I ever think of this moment later?’ she wondered, and the question made her sad. ‘I would never have asked myself such a thing last year,’ she thought. Being taller than Ronny, she could look out over his head and see their shadows thrown in front of them by the moon. They rode from darkness to darkness between the trees and entered the woods directly, without crossing the pasture. It was the opposite direction to that of the boathouse and the ground here ran almost level to the edge of three tall sand bluffs which loomed above the sound. The vegetation was scrubby and short. A delicious odor came from its leaves; sassafras, laurel, bay, and the poisonous sumac. Thorns with shiny leaves caressed and stabbed their legs and soon there was nothing anymore between them and the moon.
All at once they were on the edge of the world, looking down over the pale water. They dismounted and, still with an intuitive silence, lay down together on the grass at the rim of the bluff. The ground was drenched in dew, but they did not mind. It cooled their skins made feverish by the close night or by the heat in their own veins. They lay side by side leaning on their elbows and gazing at the track made by the moon over the water.
“I was clever to think of calling you that way,” Ronny remarked at last.
“Yes,” agreed June, “very clever.”
“I was like those troubadours who rescue people from prison by singing songs they both know.”
For a while June mused on this in silence, comforted by the old dream that prisons are for the virtuous and that rescuers exist. Nearby, Gambol cropped at the grass and the contented sound of his chewing underlined their conversation.
“When we’re both grown-up do you think we’ll still be friends?” asked June, and despised herself for asking. Why this longing for permanent things? It was growing on her, yet it went against her sense of adventure and poetry.
“I don’t know,” said Ronny in the offhand voice of children who do not wish to be sentimentally drawn. ‘Later’ was not yet poignant for this boy. He said plaintively: “My tattoo still hurts.”
“How brave you were,” said June and smiled.
“You weren’t even watching,” said Ronny, but he was pleased and continued: “Tonight I felt as if the moon was burning it, like a sunburn.” Talking about it made him feel his tattooed heart beating once again. “Sometimes,” said Ronny in his pure, shrill voice, “I feel it will get really alive out there on my skin.”
His remark had a questioning note and a sudden spiteful feeling made June agree: “Yes, it will grow stronger and stronger and draw all the blood and suck the other dry.”
At the meanness of her voice, the voluntary cruelty of her reply, Ronny sat up quickly on his hip, but he did not pursue the subject and asked irrelevantly, pointing at the sky: “Can you tell the difference between waxing and waning?”
“No,” said June languidly. “Which is it doing now?”
“It’s waning. When it grows it looks much stronger and when it’s full there are two faces on it.”
“You mean one face.” June was by now nervous and contradictory.
“No, two. Jeremy showed me. There is a skull kissing a woman on the mouth. Jeremy says that with each kiss the woman wastes away until finally only the skull is left and then it dies too.”
June jumped to her feet. “Well, let’s go. I’m all wet from the grass and I’m afraid Grandmother will notice I’m gone.”
They were both angry now and apprehensive. ‘What have we said?’ they wondered, looking at each other, but their words lay inanimate behind them, bleached and meaningless in the moonlight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
