Fire in the Morning

Chapter 16

S I X T E E N ' N the same night that Kinloch determined to make his journey, Ruth walked out of the apartment house where she was staying with Scott and, hailing a cab, gave a distant address. Arriving, she searched out the proper room number in the lobby and climbed the four dingy flights of stairs without hesitation or haste. But when she came to the door itself, she stopped and listened to the rapid beat of her heart, wondering if she would indeed lift her hand to knock. All the way through the city, sitting in the cab, holding the address in her hand, she had thought that it would be quite in the order of things for her to find that the person she sought had moved, leaving no word, or at the most, was gone out for the evening. But here she stood, and light came narrowly out from around the door into the dark hall. From somewhere in the house a baby wailed on one note like a mechanical toy and in another sector a man and a woman wrangled at one another. Sheknocked at the door. "Come in." She turned the knob and stepped inside. The man she had come to see lay on a rumpled day bed; the metal lamp that had once adorned his room in Tarsus was aflame beside him, and he was reading. He did not look up at once; it was as though he finished a paragraph. Then he lowered the book and the deep eyes below the forelock traveled slowly upward from the toes of her shoes, at last to her face. "As long as anything that has ever seen Tarsus has legs to walk," said Randall Gibson, "it will seek me out." "Kinloch sent me your address," she told him. "He said he would feel better about me if he knew—if I knew—that someone in the family—from Tarsus—" 232 O "Except for one noted occasion, Kinloch has never paid the slightest attention to anything I ever said. The most singularly stubborn man I ever saw. Also he is unpardonably slow." She reflected that Scott had angered her to tears not three days before when he made a slurring remark against Kinloch, but now she smiled. "Not that," said Randall, observing her smile. "I am not concealing any heart of gold. I wish with all my soul you were not standing there. I am actually up here, you understand. I actually left. I wasn't being coy. Kinloch must have bribed Miss Mary Sue at the post office for that address." "He did." "I could wring his stubborn neck. After all I said to him. Well." He rose, towering improbably in the dim bare room where books leaned together on the shelves with the appearance of not having settled yet, and he dragged a chair out of the shadows for her. "Sit down, Cousin Ruth. I am not trying to say that I am not glad to see you. That is the trouble, you see." She sat down. "I only smiled because I knew that in spite of what you said, you love him too." "Of course," Randall said. "There are always two sides." He thrust his bony fingers through his hair in exasperation. "But try and tell Kinloch that. He goes through life the same way he would plow up a field, straight down the furrow with his eye trained on a fence post. How did he get my address?Why he went and demanded to have it, and in spite of my explicit instructions to Miss Mary Sue,he got it. He made you come away, didn't he? You got in the path of the plow and you saw it wasn't goingto stop for you and you got scared—" "You're going to say I ran away. I guess I did. I was afraid. He is concerned about something and I can't tell what it is, except that I think it is all my fault and—I thought if I left—" "All your fault!" He stared and laughed and stared again. "Okay, okay. I'm justbeginning to seethe point about Homer being a woman. 233 Nobody but a womancould possibly imagine, much less state as sober fact, that ten years of war, the destruction of a city and twenty-four books of epic poetry were all the...