A Covenant with Death Read Online Free PDF

would fetch her. I waited. I tapped my fingers on the oaken desk. I looked out at the bright, dry, dusty day. I thought of Louise Talbot, and then of Rosemary dead, and did not like it. Then I heard her voice and my legs tingled and I was not a judge any more. “Hello,” I said. “Hello, hello, hello.”
    â€œYou miss me,” she said.
    â€œCome for the weekend.”
    â€œAll right. But I’m shameless. I wish you wouldn’t wait until Friday.”
    â€œI didn’t realize,” I said. “I didn’t even know it was Friday. I hope you didn’t have any other plans. Anyway I asked you last week.”
    â€œYou are a fool,” she said. “But there are certain things about you I like.”
    â€œTell me. I have all day.”
    â€œThis is the principal’s office.” Her voice was suddenly crisp and neutral, but I was slipping into a kind of moony drunkenness.
    â€œAnd he just walked in. Watch his free hand. All right. Tell me tonight. I’ll be at the station.”
    â€œFine,” she said, and then quickly, “lovely.”
    â€œYes,” I said. “I love you.”
    â€œWell,” she said brightly, “I’m sure all of us here feel the same way.”
    â€œThat’s fine. Bring everybody along.”
    â€œThen we’ll consider it arranged.” I could see the principal frowning.
    â€œYes indeed,” I said. “And I hope you will allow me to express the general feeling here by indicating to you our extreme pleasure that these preliminary discussions have borne such—”
    â€œGoodbye,” she said pleasantly, and hung up. My palms were wet.
    It was at lunch, at the Territorial, that I spoke to the Colonel, and after lunch, in the bar (the sign on the wall now stated “Reading Room”), that Alfred achieved his conversational catharsis. When Alfred had gone back to his office at the jail I loitered, greeting friends and absorbing gossip. There was only one topic and no one said anything original or illuminating. I had no wish to go home and listen to my mother pontificate. She would be wise, irreverent, full of insight, and—worst of all—probably right She could keep. At about four I went to my office and called to see if all the trains were running on time. They were. I pulled out a book, at random, and found myself reading about Cooley v. Board of Wardens (12 Howard 299), a decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court in 1851 governing the employment of harbor pilots in the port of Philadelphia. We were five hundred miles from salt water, but a good judge is ready for anything.
    I am embarrassed, remembering all this; but I will not apologize.

3
    The weekend passed pleasantly, which is the old-fashioned way to describe two nights of Dionysiac revels and two days of adolescent mooning. The clear suspicion had now assailed me that marriage was not a matter of grave and careful deliberation, but a deed one went ahead and did: a simple yes or no, please. The corollary suspicion was nastier: that I did not want to marry. Despite much evidence to the contrary I still thought of myself as a young man of middle-class rectitude, and I was uneasy; the age of carefree liberation was not yet upon us, and morning-after remorse was not yet archiac and unmanly. Guilt, in short, but something more, too, on the order of an esthetic betrayal. There she stood, or sat, or lay, a brown-eyed Viking, a boreal beauty whose absence left me in pain, and yet in whose presence I could not take the natural and desirable final step; a step to which I could find no let, stop or hindrance either in the nature of man or in the immediate ambience. What braked and bound me? No visions of a lost freedom; the world of the mind was open to me and I had even, as the saying went, been to New York, not to mention Paris. No crass ambitions; Soledad City was tawdry and provincial but not ignoble, and being a judge seemed