The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Knee to knee and thigh to thigh, they wrestled silently. He had her wrists tightly pinioned behind her back, and held on; but she fought the grip with merciless agility, writhing and thrusting with every muscle of her sinuous body. Both were maddened by this experience so ungoverned by any of the restraints of ordinary life. What had begun as an unthinking physical struggle became, under the fierce contact of bodies that knew and demanded each other, the rape of an Amazon. Toby was now consciously fighting for the possession of those blue-veined breasts from which the serape had fallen and the shirt was torn; Irma for the retention of her second virginity which she had guarded far more fanatically than the first. They reeled and slid across the arroyo, to and fro between the horse lines and the fire, while their animals snorted and backed away from this mad four-footed beast.

  Irma was sobbing with anger; against him, and then, as the minutes passed, against herself. She was ready to kill him if she could break that obstinately tireless hold. She was blind with temper, as a child thwarted for the first time by the maddening automatism of life. That she should weary—there was no shame in that. But that she should enjoy her own weariness, that her limbs should be conquered by their own delicious lassitude made her whole soul one conscious shriek against the injustice of it. She bent her head back, a last muscular gesture to avoid him, and his hot kisses caressed her throat so that she quivered involuntarily in his arms. When his mouth at last brushed hers, she struggled to free her right hand. Toby, with the sure instinct of the brute he had been, let it go. She passed it over his shoulder and pressed her soft and parted lips to his, their tongues darting and mating like two snakes, each in its own cavern too long confined.

  The hardness of the parched ground and the rough wool of the serapes that covered their nakedness exalted beyond all experience their joy in each other’s tender and sensitive body. When at last Irma came back to thought she turned away from him and gave herself up to a terrifying burst of tears. He could not comfort her. She was unaware of him and of the world around her and everything except the agony of conflicting joy and panic. Then she clung to him desperately and humbly, surrendering spirit as well as body with a passion that amazed him. They slept in each other’s arms till dawn. He awoke to find her staring at the sky with fixed eyes that reflected the deep blue, starless but not yet sunlit, of blank space.

  When she saw he was awake, she murmured incoherently:

  “Forgive … Toby….”

  “I’ve forgotten it,” he said quite truly. “You’re an angel.”

  He bent over her to kiss her.

  “No! No!” She pushed him away from her. “Tell me you forgive.”

  “Of course! There isn’t any question of forgiveness. I love you.”

  “You mustn’t! I’m not a woman to be loved!” she cried desperately.

  “Nonsense!” he replied with the heartiness of the satisfied male. “We were both of us possessed by devils last night. It won’t happen again. There’s no need for forgiveness. I bought it!”

  “You don’t understand!” she answered feverishly. “I’m horrible to myself. You don’t know what I am.”

  He realised that she was no longer talking of her remorse for trying to torture him, but of some deeper sore.

  “Yes, I do understand,” he said gently. “You’re a splendid, honourable woman with a most intemperate body. Is that what’s worrying you?”

  “But it’s loathsome!”

  “It’s not loathsome at all. It’s natural. What’s twisted you, child?”

  “Think of the worst you can.”

  “Some cruelty that you have committed? But that shouldn’t make you ashamed of your body. The body is a healthy, lovely thing compared to the soul.”

  “My body wasn’t healthy—for a whole year.”

  There was such needless disgust and horror in her voice that pity overwhelmed his immediate reaction of fear. He checked the impulse on its way from brain to hand, so that the snatching back of his arm was recognisable to her only as a tightening of his embrace.

  “So that’s all! You poor love!”

  “You don’t even ask me if I’m cured?”

  “Don’t be such a damned fool!” he said. “You’d have died rather than give yourself to me if you hadn’t been.”

  “Is that true?”

  He remembered the tone of her voice when years before she had asked him whether it was true that she had not shown her hunger. A child asking for reassurance.

  “Of course it’s true, my God! You don’t know yourself, Irma.”

  Her tears poured out again.

  “Oh, my darling, what makes you say such things to me? You cleanse me.”

  “High time that somebody did!”

  “What am I to do? What am I to do?” she sobbed. “I’m afraid, Toby.”

  “What of?”

  “Everything … everything. It was so sweet, this night.”

  “Utterly sweet.”

  “And now—it’s all empty, useless!”

  Her body ceased trembling, and became tense in his arms.

  “I love you and I should tire of you in a month!” she cried hysterically.

  The brutal truth inhibited his understanding, for he was not without vanity. He was silent, struggling with mixed and mad temptations; to ask her to marry him; to tell her to get to hell out of his blankets; to respond with some flippant and cynical comment that would wound her. He saw at last that she had been the more honest of the two. What she had said held good also for him.

  “What of it, Irma?” he answered boldly. “I love you too and I understand. I can’t put a time limit on it, but if we were married I should be unfaithful to you. Eventually, I suppose, I should tire. I don’t think any the worse of myself for that. Why should you?”

  “You’re right. But, O God! It’s so hard for a woman to be free.”

  “It needn’t be, I think—for some.”

  “Then help me, Toby!”

  “How, my darling?”

  “Don’t let me fall back! Don’t let me go to pieces! I am so frightened.”

  He held her close, murmuring words of temporary comfort.

  “No—let me go, Toby! I must have this out with myself. I am a coward. My work is worth any sacrifice. This is nothing. The nation and the fight for the race—they are my life. My faith will go on. I won’t let myself lose it. It has held me up for four years.”

  He could not let her live with such an illusion. He struck, knowing that he laid upon himself the spiritual responsibility for her future.

  “Has it?” he asked. “Or the fear of more syphilis?”

  “Oh!”

  It was a shuddering cry as if he had stabbed her in the throat. She lay silently with her head on her folded arms, devastated by the truth in his question. She did not think. She was conscious only of a dancing chaos in her mind, of an image of walls shaken to the ground, even of imagined noise.

  She got up, wrapping herself in a blanket.

  “I’m going to dress, Toby, and go for a ride. I want to be alone.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, holding her dim, miserable eyes.

  “To the railway—past the railway. I’ll be back for breakfast.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” said Toby.

  “As what?”

  “Putting one’s head on the line.”

  “I wasn’t—” she said uncertainly.

  “Yes. I’d let another woman go, Irma, because I’d be quite sure that her courage would fail. Yours wouldn’t.”

  “It’s not courage. I’m at the end, Toby. Look at me. This is all I’ve got.”

  She let the serape fall to the ground with a pitiable helpless gesture. Her lined and haggard face seemed to belong to another woman than the exquisite limbs.

  “Beauty?”

 
“Shame. Please let me die.”

  He suddenly understood the symbolism of her gesture.

  “We’re born pretty naked too, my dear,” he said. “Du Kind! Du Schatz!”

  His voice caressed her in her own language and in the words she had heard in her cradle. They worked. He opened his arms and she came to him as to a mother.

  So far he had fought for her with swift flights of intuition and a little knowledge of human suffering; but now he was out of his depth. He did not know how to hold the illusion of refuge that he had offered. If only he could make her rest without probing into the past and future, without awareness of her sex or his, the storm would pass. He began to tell her a story, choosing inevitably the true story of Manuel and the gold. His voice was low and steady, the only sound in the peace of the arroyo where once the laden horses had cantered with Manuel staggering breathless at their side. After a while she asked a question; then became eager as a child for details. He told her of his meeting with the waiter and of the Alcázar, censoring the passages too harsh for the quietude of dawn. The sun rose. She was soothed to momentary forgetfulness.

  “And what will he do with the gold when we find it?” she asked.

  “Ah! That’s a secret which may matter to you a lot. What do you say? Shall we get dressed and have breakfast?”

  She looked up at him with a shade of humour in her eyes.

  “Can you lend me a shirt?”

  “Good God!” Toby unexpectedly blushed. “Yes. Here’s one in my pack.”

  The fresh heat of the early morning smote down into the arroyo; in another hour, when the rocks began to reflect it back, the cleft in the hills would be an oven. They broke camp and marched up to the shallow gorge where the grey bushes and the trickle of water offered some promise of coolness. There they left their stores and the two pack animals. Mounting the saddle horses, they cantered back down the arroyo to the culvert.

  Casting north and south along the railway, they could find no other valley. Towards Durango the line crawled along the bare slopes where Lara’s men had hovered over it; towards Torreón it ran over fairly even country. Irma dashed over the desert, closing her mind to thought and abandoning herself to the sun, the pounding hooves and the ecstasy of speed. Toby ambled sedately after her and finally dismounted in the shade of the culvert to reconsider Manuel’s directions.

  She galloped up to him with a flourish, making her horse plunge as if he carried on his back the heroine of a Wild Western drama.

  “I was brought up to believe,” he said, “that it wasn’t good for the horse’s mouth.”

  “He hasn’t any, darling. Nor would you, if you’d been hired out to commerce men for the last ten years with a Mexican bit behind your teeth.”

  “I have been,” said Toby. “Listen, you Terror of Red Gulch, are we agreed there is no other valley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the contours have changed since Manuel was here.”

  “I don’t see how they can have done.”

  “Nor do I. But I’d swear that Manuel is more reliable than a Mexican hill. There may have been a landslide.”

  “But there’s not a sign of it,” she answered.

  “Then the cliff has been carried away by water.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not possible, my dear. The rock’s too hard.”

  “I’m convinced something has happened. That water in the gorge shouldn’t be there. It’s not marked on his map. There must have been a succession of heavy floods.”

  “Couldn’t the arroyo have silted up?” she asked.

  “And that damned little cliff be under the gravel! That’s an idea!” he exclaimed. “I believe you’ve hit it. Let’s ride up the valley again and not worry too much about the three kilometres. All the distances might well have seemed longer to Manuel than they were. He was riding against time.”

  They decided on a reach of the streambed about two and a half kilometres from the culvert. The V in the hills was deeply marked, and a mass of débris in the arroyo, cut by a dozen small channels, suggested that the floods had run wide and shallow, depositing all the boulders, branches and sediment collected in their furious course from the watershed.

  “I’ll ride up to the camp for a spade,” said Irma. “You stay and make up your mind where we should dig.”

  The cliff could not be at the edge of the main channel where it would have been scoured rather than filled; it had, logically, to be exactly where the track of the most recent flood was not. There was a gravel bank, canting up against the southern slope and over a hundred yards wide, which fulfilled this condition. Any amount of stones could be aligned with the V by standing at various heights along the bank, but only the top of the cliff and the certainty of the fourteen paces could identify the right group.

  When Irma returned with the spade he began to dig a series of holes along the upper edge of the bank. The deposit of gravel was shallow, and beneath it was the broken earth of the hillside. He had thought that the top of Manuel’s cliff would be bare rock and thus easily recognisable. He now perceived that there was no reason at all why it should be.

  “There’s only one thing for it,” he said, straightening himself up while the sweat poured down his back and sides. “We must start below the centre of the bank and drive a trench to the top. If there is a cliff and if we go down a couple of feet, we have to strike the edge of it somewhere.”

  Irma relieved him for a time, but the work of digging in gravel required shoulders and back more powerfully muscled than hers. She had to surrender. Toby took over again and blindly drove the trench forward hour after hour, not daring to stop lest his body should stiffen and his hands, blistered first at the natural points of pressure, then at all other surfaces that could grip and push, should refuse to take up the spade again. Every time that he came on a boulder he had to clear it, in case it should turn out to be the top of the missing cliff. After half a dozen of these false alarms he hit on an edge of rock that could not be cleared. Excavation downwards showed a smooth perpendicular surface. A shallow trench at right angles proved that a lip of rock ran parallel to the course of the arroyo.

  “Try it,” he said to Irma.

  “Come too!”

  “I can’t.”

  He dropped on to the burning gravel and lay there, with his knees under his chin, like a mummified corpse thrown aside by excavators. He watched Irma count the fourteen paces up the slope, and then take a sight on the skyline along her outstretched arm and forefinger.

  “Yes! Yes, I think so!” she cried excitedly. “There’s a group of boulders. It looked like one from where we were, but it’s definitely three from here.”

  He rolled over on to knees and elbows and crawled up the hillside.

  “That’s it!”

  They ran towards the stones, Toby hobbling with the gait of an old peasant crippled by toil and rheumatism. There was no doubt. At twenty yards they could see bits of cloth; at five, the gold itself glinted where the light covering of earth had been blown away and the sun struck on the imperishable metal. Toby dropped on his knees, and cleared away the soil with the backs of his hands until the whole surface of the treasure had been laid bare.

  “Give me the spade!” she cried. “And I’ll see how deep it goes.”

  “That’s all, I think—what you see.”

  “That? But it’s nothing!” Irma exclaimed in surprise.

  “It’s three hundred thousand gold pesos—if Manuel is right.”

  “So much?”

  Irma bent down to pick up a little bar. She was amazed to find that she needed both hands to lift it.

  “What’s it worth?”

  “English? When we were on the bullion standard, £1557/10 … And to-day—let’s see—about £2800.”

  “Madness!”

  “What is?”

  �
�That a half-brick of yellow metal could be worth so much!”

  “Yes! Isn’t it? It seems normal that a bit of paper should be worth £2800, but it’s astonishing that this should be. I suppose our fathers could think in terms of this stuff, but I can’t. This is more real.”

  He poured a stream of ten-dollar eagles through his fingers. The coins rang like a peal of miniature bells in the silence of the valley.

  “We’d better cover it up, and fetch it in the morning,” he said.

  “Toby! You’re not natural! It’s tempting fate.”

  “Well, we can’t start this evening. Remember that to carry this weight, the horses must go without water. They can’t carry both. We must sleep here, reach the car by midday and Durango by nightfall.”

  “But we sleep with the gold by our sides! You stay here. You’ve done enough. I’ll get the horses.”

  “Very well. Pack saddles on the ugly brutes and water skins on the riding animals. And be a darling and fetch me what’s left in the wineskin. We’ll finish it and it will do for some of the coin.”

  Toby, utterly exhausted, lay back against the stones. The fascination of gold? Well, it must have some, he supposed. Even though the metal itself did not particularly thrill him, the anticipation of it had driven him to do the work of three navvies under as fierce a sun as any in America. He regarded with enormous satisfaction the gash that he had dug across the arroyo bottom, and went to sleep.