Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Online Free PDF Page A

the lime down neatly on the plate with one of her fastidious hands. “Doesn’t it ever strike you as idiotic to go on being in love with her?”
    “Sure it strikes me as idiotic. So what?”
    She looked down through the window at the narrow, cluttered sidewalk below. Her head in profile on the long, white neck reminded me of a tulip. It was absurd, of course. People’s heads don’t look like tulips.
    I said, “Is it serious? This threat Iris talked about?”
    Marietta lit one of her own cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke my respectable Belmonts, only the cheapest, strongest Mexican tobacco. She looked up at me over the burning wax match. “Of course.”
    “Sally has something on Martin?”
    She shrugged.
    “Something that could get him into trouble with the police?”
    “If you like.”
    “What is it?”
    Almost angrily, she said, “Do you have to be told everything?”
    “Of course not. But she could send Martin to jail?”
    “Martin? Me? One of us. Both of us.”
    “You too?”
    She didn’t answer. She stubbed her cigarette into the grimy ash tray as neatly as she had put down the squeezed slice of lime.
    “But she has proof of this thing?” I insisted.
    “Enough. She can twist things. If you’ve got money, you can twist anything with the police.”
    “And she’ll go through with it?”
    “She’ll go to the police in Taxco tomorrow if Martin doesn’t go back to her. She told me so. I believe her.”
    “Then Martin goes to jail or goes back to her?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Then he’ll go back to her.”
    She shook her dark head. “He won’t go back. And Sally knows it.”
    “Why not? Because he loves Iris so much?”
    She shook her head again. She was looking beyond me at the Mexican hair, shiny with oil, that showed above the booth behind me.
    “No,” she said. “Not because he loves Iris.”
    “Then why?”
    Someone at one of the other grimy tables had a guitar. He started to strum softly, flat, monotonous chords.
    Marietta was still looking beyond me. She said slowly,” When we were children, we used to live in Hertfordshire.” She laughed. “That sounds like Noel Coward, doesn’t it?”
    “Not particularly.”
    Unasked, the waiter brought her another tequila.
    “The home farm was quite near the house where we lived. There was an apple orchard. We used to go there all the time. Back of it was a steep hill going up to a copse. In spring it was yellow with cowslips—literally yellow.”
    She drank the tequila. I watched her cool, utterly undamaged face, trying to guess what was in her mind.
    “We used to play games, the most elaborate games. Martin always invented them. I never could invent anything. One game was this. We put on old white nightgowns over our clothes. Martin made knobbly staffs out of hawthorn. We started up the hill through the cowslips, leaning on our staffs. Although it wasn’t terribly steep, we had to pretend it was. We had to keep on stumbling and falling down and picking up our staffs again and trying to get to the top. But he would never let me get there. I had to die tempting it, sprawled there on the cowslips, smelling them. So sweet.” She looked at the empty glass. “I was the one who fell by the wayside, Martin said.”
    “And the point of these juvenile reminiscences?”
    She picked up the glass, nursing it. “All the time we were struggling up the hill, we used to sing. Always the same song in horrible squeaky voices. It was a hymn, really. Perhaps you know it. John Bunyan wrote it, I believe. It was Martin’s favorite.”
    She inverted the glass and put it down again on the table. The man at the other table was still strumming on his guitar.
    “It went like this:
     
    He who would valiant be
    ’Gainst all disaster,
    Let him in constancy
    Follow the Master.
     
    There’s no discouragement
    Shall make him once relent
    His first avowed intent
    To be a pilgrim.”
     
    She looked at me, her eyes meaningless, almost vacant again. “That’s