Charles Williams - Hill Girl

She turned completely around, turning her head to keep watching me, and there was that teasing smile in her slightly almond-shaped eyes. “Well, how do I look?”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“How do you like my stockings now?”

“Fine, You have beautiful legs.”

“Thank you. You know, Bob,” she went on, “you’re nice. Why are you so hard to get to know?”

“I’m antisocial. Let’s get going. You remember, don’t you? The justice of the peace?”

“Do you still want to do it?”

“What do you mean, do I still want to? I never did.”

“Well, thanks a lot! If I’m so repulsive, why do you insist on going on with it?”

So we’re going through all that again, I thought wearily.

“Come on, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Let’s get married.”

She looked at me distastefully and turned toward the door. “I give up,” she said. “I’ll never understand you. You say something nice about me with one breath and then get mean again with the next.”

It was three o’clock and the streets were scorching under the midafternoon sun. We walked slowly along toward the courthouse with Angelina craning her neck to catch glimpses of herself in shop windows. She couldn’t get over the way she looked in her new clothes.

The J-P.’s office was hot and not very clean, and he mumbled on forever through a ragged mustache that was brown-stained on the bottom, and there were two political hangers-on for witnesses. When the mumbling was over I handed him an envelope with ten dollars in it and we came back out on the street. We stood for a minute on the courthouse steps in the shade and I began to realize it. I wasn’t a single man any more. I was married. I laughed, and Angelina looked at me queerly.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I just thought of a funny story, that’s all,” I said. “It seems there were two Irishmen and one of them was named Pat and I’ve forgotten the name of the other one but I think it was Morris—”

“Do you realize that we are married?” she interrupted.

“Why, no,” I said. “I hadn’t given it a thought.”

“Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as a bedbug.”

“Where do we go from here?” I said.

She looked at me blankly and I knew that neither of us had thought of what was going to happen after the ceremony. The thing had been forced on us and we had been rushing toward it to get it over, or at least I had, and now that we had reached it and the marriage was an accomplished fact we were left standing there on the steps with nothing but an empty feeling. There was nowhere to rush to now.

“I guess this is as far as we go, isn’t it?” she asked emotionlessly. She was looking out into the street.

“I guess so. Are you going back home?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re your own boss.”

“Yes, I know.”

We were silent for a moment and then she said, “Where are you going? But I guess it isn’t any of my business, is it?”

“New Orleans, I think.” But that part of it seemed to have lost its interest. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it. “I’ll start on tonight. You can stay at the hotel. I’ll go back and get my stuff and clear out.”

She shook her head, still not looking at me. “No. It’s your room and I don’t want to owe you anything. I owe you too much now.” She gestured toward the linen jacket.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Yes, I do too. I would promise to pay you back for it, but I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to.” There was a queer streak of stubborn honesty in her, I thought.

We stood there uncomfortably a little while longer. Then she turned to me and said, “Well, thank you for everything. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” I said.

She turned and walked down the steps and out into the traffic on the sidewalk, paused for a second as if undecided which way to turn, and then went on up the street. I watched her, feeling like hell for some reason, noticing how straight she held her shoulders and the clean, beautiful lines of her legs as she walked and the proud tilt of her head. She was a lovely girl and very proud and stubborn, and more alone than anyone else in the world, and she probably had about twenty dollars. She wouldn’t ever go home and she didn’t know any way to earn her living except the way she would probably wind up by earning it, and there was something too tough in her to let her cry.

Well, what the hell, I thought, it’s no skin off my nose. Am I supposed to be running a girls’ school? She got herself into it; let her worry about it. But did she? What about Lee? Well, what about Lee? It takes two to get into a mess like that. If she hadn’t been willing to string along, he couldn’t have got anywhere alone. Yeah, with her experience, she had a lot of chance against Lee, didn’t she?

Why all this moralizing? I asked myself. What difference does it make? A mess like this isn’t anybody’s fault, so why worry about it? The thing is, she’s nothing to me, so why worry about her? Let her go.

She was in the middle of the next block before I caught up with her. I came up to her and took her arm. “Wait a minute, Angelina,” I said. “You can’t go off alone like this. Let’s go back to the hotel and talk it over.”

Fourteen

She didn’t try to shake off my hand. She just stopped and looked at me stonily. “Why?”

“How the hell do I know? It doesn’t make sense, but I can’t let you walk off this way. What’d become of you?”

“Well, what do you care?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I haven’t got good sense.” But I turned her around and she came back with me, not saying a word. Both of us were silent as we walked back to the hotel and went up to the room. She went over and sat down by the window and looked out.

“What are we going to do?”

“Frankly,” I said, “I haven’t got any idea. But we’ll stay here tonight and try to think of something. The only thing I know is that I can’t leave you stranded here. And you can’t go anywhere without money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

I sat down and lit a cigarette. “I don’t give a damn what you want or don’t want. The fact remains that I can’t let you wander off alone.”

She didn’t reply. She only lifted her shoulders irritatingly and stared out the window. Damn such a pigheaded little brat, I thought. Why couldn’t we get along without fighting?

“Look,” I said, “have you ever been to Galveston? Why don’t we go down there for a week and stay at the hotel right on the beach? We could have a vacation and maybe work this thing out. We might be able to decide what’s to be done with you. Maybe you’d change your mind and go home.”

She turned around and there was some friendliness in her eyes. “That sounds nice. I’ve never been to Galveston, and I always wanted to see the ocean. I’ve dreamed about it. But I’ll tell you beforehand that you’ll be wasting your time trying to get me to go home. I’m not going back.”

“You just don’t like it, do you?”

“I’d rather be dead.”

“Well, what did you plan to do? After we were married, I mean? You surely didn’t look forward to living with me, the way we fight.”

“I didn’t plan on anything. I didn’t even plan on marrying you. That was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“Look, sister,” I said, “if you think you’ve been haunting my girlish dreams all these years, let me set you straight. You know why we’re married, so let’s drop it.”

“You’re going to go on harping on that, aren’t you?”

“No, not if I can help it. But it looks as if we’ll go on fighting as long as we’re in the same state. Why in hell can’t we get along together? Which one of us is it, you or me? What about the other people you know? Do you fight with all of them? Did you fight with Lee?”