River Girl by Charles Williams Page B

would see not three feet in front of her eyes ... It wouldn’t be pretty.
    I straightened up and retched again and spat, trying to get the taste out of my mouth, and walked back into the room on unsteady legs, looking across and beyond him to where she was lying. She had almost fallen onto the bed, but her legs had bumped it as they doubled under her and pushed her out and away so she had crumpled to her knees and then slid down, and now she lay partly on one side with an arm under her face like a child asleep. I knelt down beside her with my back to him but still feeling him there behind me as if I were looking at him out of the back of my head. The blue dress had slid up as she fell past the bed and the long legs were bare above the stocking tops, smooth and ever so faintly tanned, even fair now against the sand-colored stockings and the dress, and I looked at them, but not in that way, not even conscious of the loveliness of them, only busy at shutting him out of my mind. Her eyes were still closed as I rolled her on her back, and I noticed, in the fury of concentration of trying to see only her and not him there behind me, how long and dark the lashes were against the wax-candle paleness of her face. I smoothed the dress down very gently and picked her up.
    The sickness rolled over again in my stomach as I had to step across him to go toward the door, and then I was in the open with her. I put her down on the porch in the shade, and as I was easing her shoulders back against the floor she stirred. Her eyes opened.
    For an instant she stared at me blankly, not remembering. “Jack,” she whispered. “What happened?” Then, as I had known it would, it hit her. I could see it come pushing up into her eyes and she cried out, grabbing my arm. “Where is he? Jack, where is he?”
    I knelt with my arm still around her shoulders and held her with her face against my chest while the crying shook her body. This is what I’ve done to her, I thought; I was going to make her happy and this is the way I’ve done it. I could feel the helplessness and time going by and the trap closing around us, and all I could do was kneel there in agony of numbness with only that one little corner of my mind still working, telling me over and over that I had ruined her. When the shaking subsided I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped away the tear stains as well as I could.
    “It’ll be all right,” I said. “Don’t cry, Doris. It’ll be all right.”
    I could see her fighting to get hold of herself. “We’ve got to go,” she whispered frantically. “We’ve got to get out of here! Oh, Jack!” She started to break up again and I shook her a little, holding her very tightly until she stopped.
    “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’ll be all right in a minute so we can go.”
    “No,” I said, not wanting to do it but knowing I had to. “We can’t go now.”
    She stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “We can’t go? But Jack, we’ve—we’ve got to.”
    “It won’t do any good to run now,” I said. My mind was working enough to see that.
    “But it’s the only thing we can do.”
    “No,” I said. “You saw what it did to him; being hunted, I mean. We can’t do it. We wouldn’t have a chance of getting out of the country, in the first place, and if we did we’d just be running the rest of our lives or until they caught us.”
    “But what are we going to do?” she cried out piteously. “What can we do now. Isn’t he—?” I could see in her eyes the question she couldn’t ask.
    “He’s dead,” I said bluntly, trying to get it on the line so we could look at it and know where we had to start.
    “But you couldn’t help it, Jack! You couldn’t! Wouldn’t they see you had to do it, that you were trying to protect me?”
    I shook my head, not wanting to do it, but knowing there wasn’t room enough for even one of us in that fool’s paradise. I hadn’t done it because I had to. I’d done it