While they waited for the program they talked in low tones, a mumble of
commonplaces. Bud forgot for the moment his distaste for such places,
and let himself slip easily back into the old thought channels, the
old habits of relaxation after a day's work was done. He laughed at
the one-reel comedy that had for its climax a chase of housemaids,
policemen, and outraged fruit vendors after a well-meaning but
unfortunate lover. He saw the lover pulled ignominiously out of a duck
pond and soused relentlessly into a watering trough, and laughed with
Frank and called it some picture.
He eyed a succession of "current events" long since gone stale out
where the world moved swifter than here in the mountains, and he felt
as though he had come once more into close touch with life. All the dull
months he had spent with Cash and the burros dwarfed into a pointless,
irrelevant incident of his life. He felt that he ought to be out in the
world, doing bigger things than hunting gold that somehow always
refused at the last minute to be found. He stirred restlessly. He was
free--there was nothing to hold him if he wanted to go. The war--he
believed he would go over and take a hand. He could drive an ambulance
or a truck-Current Events, however, came abruptly to an end; and presently
Bud's vagrant, half-formed desire for achievement merged into biting
recollections. Here was a love drama, three reels of it. At first Bud
watched it with only a vague, disquieting sense of familiarity. Then
abruptly he recalled too vividly the time and circumstance of his first
sight of the picture. It was in San Jose, at the Liberty. He and Marie
had been married two days, and were living in that glamorous world of
the honeymoon, so poignantly sweet, so marvelous--and so fleeting. He
had whispered that the girl looked like her, and she had leaned heavily
against his shoulder. In the dusk of lowered lights their hands had
groped and found each other, and clung.
The girl did look like Marie. When she turned her head with that little
tilt of the chin, when she smiled, she was like Marie. Bud leaned
forward, staring, his brows drawn together, breathing the short, quick
breaths of emotion focussed upon one object, excluding all else. Once,
when Frank moved his body a little in the next seat, Bud's hand went out
that way involuntarily. The touch of Frank's rough coat sleeve recalled
him brutally, so that he drew away with a wincing movement as though he
bad been hurt.
All those months in the desert; all those months of the slow journeying
northward; all the fought battles with memory, when he thought that he
had won--all gone for nothing, their slow anodyne serving but to sharpen
now the bite of merciless remembering. His hand shook upon his knee.
Small beads of moisture oozed out upon his forehead. He sat stunned
before the amazing revelation of how little time and distance had done
to heal his hurt.