The image I got in my head that day was the image of her face lying in the water, very smooth, with the eyes closed, under the dark greenish-purple sky, with the white gull passing over.
This is not to say that I fell in love with Anne that day. She was a kid then. That came later. But the image would have been there if I had never fallen in love with her, or had never seen her again, or had grown to detest her. There were times afterwards when I was not in love with Anne. Anne told me she wouldn't marry me, and after a while I married Lois who was a better-looking girl than Anne, the kind they turn around on the street to see, and I was in love with Lois. But the image was there all the time, growing brighter as the veils were withdrawn and making the promise of a greater brightness.
So when I stepped out of the pine grove, that drizzly early spring afternoon a long time afterward, and saw the charred log on the white sand where a picnic had been, I remembered the picnic back in the summer of 1915, the last picnic we had before I left home to go to college.
I wasn't going such a hell of a long way to college. Just up to the State University.
"Oh, Son," my mother said, "why don't you be sensible and go to Harvard or Princeton." For a woman out of the scrub country of Arkansas, my mother had certainly learned a lot that time about our better educational institutions. "Or even Williams," she said. "They say it's a nice refined place."
"I went to school where you wanted," I said, "and it was sure refined."
"Or even Virginia," she went on, looking brightly at my face and not hearing a word I said. "Your father went to the University of Virginia."
"That shouldn't be such a bib recommendation to you," I said, and I thought how smart I was to get that one off. I had got in the habit in arguments with her of making some reference to his leaving.
But she didn't hear that, either. She just went on, "If you were East, then it would be easier for you to come over for the summer and see me."
"They are fighting a war over there now," I said.
"They'll stop before long," she said, "then it will be easier."
"Yeah, and it would be easier for you to tell somebody I was in Harvard than in a place they never heard of like State. They wouldn't even have heard of the name of the state it was in."
It's just I want you to go to a nice place, Son, where you'll make nice friends. And like I said, it would be easier for you to come over to see me in the summer."
(She was taking about going to Europe again, and was very annoyed at the war. The Count had been gone quite a spell, since just before the war, and she was going back across. She did go back across, after the war, but she didn't get any more counts. Maybe she figured it was too expensive to marry them. She didn't marry again until the Young Executive.)
Well, I told her I didn't want to go to a nice place and didn't want any nice friends and wasn't going to Europe and wasn't going to take any money from her. That last part about the money just slipped out in the heat of the moment. It seemed a big manly thing to say, but the effect was so much superior to anything I had expected that I couldn't renege and spoil the drama. It knocked her breath out. It almost floored her. I suppose that she wasn't accustomed to hear anything in pants talk like that. Not that she didn't try to persuade me, but I got on my high horse and was stubborn. A thousand times in the next four years I thought what a damned fool I was. I would be hashing or typing or even, in the last year, doing part-time newspaper work, and I would think how I had thrown away about five thousand dollars, just because I had read something in a book about it being manly to work your way through college. Not that my mother didn't send me money. On Christmas and birthdays. And I took that and had me a blowout, a real one with trimmings for days, and then went back to hashing or whatever it was. They didn't take me in the Army. Bad feet.
When he got back from the war, he was full of beans about it. He had been a colonel of artillery and had had himself a wonderful time. He had got there early enough to fire off a lot of iron at the Germans and to dodge a lot of their stuff in reply. In the Spanish-American War he hadn't got farther than a case of flux in Florida. But now his happiness was complete. He felt that all the years he had been making maps of Caesar's campaigns and making working models of catapults and ballistas and scorpions and wild asses and battering rams along ancient and medieval lines hadn't been wasted. Well, they hadn't been wasted as far as I was concerned, for I used to help him make them when I was a kid, and the trick were wonderful little gadgets. For a kid, anyway. And the war hadn't been wasted, either, for he had made a visit to Alise-Ste-Reine, which was where Caesar beat Vercingetorix, and toward the end of the summer after he got back he had Foch and Caesar and Pershing and Haig and Vercingetorix and Critognatus and Vercassivellunus and Ludendorff and Edith Cavell pretty well mixed up in his mind. And he got out all the catapults ands scorpions we had made and dusted them off. But he had been a good officer, they said, and a brave man. He had a medal to prove it.
I suppose that for a long time I took a snotty tone about the Judge as hero because it was a fashion for a while to take such a tone about heroes and I grew up in that fashion. Or perhaps it was because I had bad feet and never got into the Army, or even the S. A. T. C. when I was in college, and therefore had the case of sour grapes that the wallflower always has. Perhaps if I had been in the Army everything would have been different. But the Judge was a brave man, even if he did have a medal to prove it. He had proved it before he ever got the medal. And he was to prove it again. There was, for instance, the time a fellow he had sent up to the pen stopped him in the street down at the Landing and told him he was going to kill him. The Judge just laughed and turned his back and walked away. The fellow took out a pistol then and called to the Judge, two or three times. Finally the Judge looked around. When he saw the man had a pistol and had it pointing at him, the Judge turned right there and walked straight at the man, not saying a word. He got right up to the man and took the pistol away from him. What he did in the war, I never knew.
The night my mother and the Young Executive and I went to dinner at his place, nearly fifteen years later, he dug up some of the junk again. There were the Pattons, a couple who lived down the Row, and a girl named Dumonde, whose presence I took to be tribute to me, and Judge Irwin, and us. Digging up the ballista was, I suppose, a tribute to me, too, though he always had sown a tendency to instruct his guests in the art of war of the pregunpower epochs. All during the meal it had been old times, which was another tribute to me, for you come back to the place you have been and they always start chewing over that bone: old times. Old times, just before dessert, worked around to how I used to make models with him. So he got up and went into the library and came back with a ballista, about twenty inches long, and shoved his dessert to one side and set it up there on the table. Then he cocked it,, using the little crank on the draw drum to wind back the carriage, just as though he hadn't been strong enough to do it with a finger or two all at once. Then he didn't have anything to shoot. So he rang for the black boy and got a roll. He broke open the roll and removed a little hunk of the soft bread and tried to make a pellet of it. It didn't make a very good pellet, so he dipped it in water to make it stick. He put it in the carriage, "Now," he said, "it works like this," and tipped the trigger.
It worked. The pellet was heavy with a good soaking and the zip hadn't gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years, for the next thing I knew there was an explosion in the chandelier and Mrs. Patton screamed and spewed mint ice over her black velvet and bits of glass showered down over the tablecloth and the big bowl of japonicas. The Judge had made it dead center on an electric-light bulb. He had also fetched down one of the crystal bangles of the chandelier.