“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”
He could see only the top of her dark head, and her hands lay passive beneath his.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I won’t do it any more.”
“You won’t drive that car fast any more?” she asked, without moving; her voice was muffled.
“What?”
She made no answer, and with infinite small pains and slowly he turned himself, cast and all, by degrees on to his side, chewing his lip and swearing under his breath, and laid his other hand on her hair.
“What are you doing?” she asked, still without raising her head. “You’ll break your ribs again.”
“Yes,” he agreed, stroking her hair awkwardly.
“That’s the trouble, right there,” she said. “That’s the way you act: doing things that—that—You do things to hurt yourself just to worry people. You don’t get any fun out of doing them.”
“No,” he agreed, and he lay with his chest full of hot needles, stroking her dark head with his hard, awkward hand. Far above him now the peak among the black and savage stars, and about him the valleys of tranquillity and of peace.
It was later still; already shadows were growing in the room and losing themselves in shadow, and beyond the window sunlight was a diffused radiance, sourceless yet palpable. From somewhere cows lowed one to another, moody and mournful. At last she sat up, touching her face and her hair.
“You’re all twisted. You’ll never get well if you don’t behave yourself. Turn on your back, now.” He obeyed, slowly and painfully, his lip between his teeth and faint beads on his forehead, while she watched him with grave anxiety. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” he answered, and his hand shut again on her wrists that made no effort to withdraw. The sun was gone, and twilight, foster dam of quietude and peace, filled the fading room, and evening had found itself.
“And you won’t drive that car fast any more?” she persisted from the dusk.
“No,” he answered.
8
Meanwhile she had received another letter from her anonymous correspondent. Horace, when he came in one night, had brought it in to her as she lay in bed with a book; tapped at her door and opened it and stood for a moment diffidently, and for a while they looked at one another across the barrier of their estrangement and their stubborn pride.
“Excuse me for disturbing you,” he said stiffly. She lay beneath the shaded light, with the dark splash of her hair on the pillow, and only her eyes moved as he crossed the room and stood above her where she lay with her lowered book, watching him with sober interrogation.
“What are you reading?” he asked. For reply she shut the book on her finger, with the jacket and its colored legend upward. But he did not look at it. His shirt was open beneath his silk dressing-gown and his thin hand moved among the objects on the table beside the bed; picked up another book. “I never knew you to read so much.”
“I have more time for reading, now,” she answered.
“Yes.” His hand still moved about the table, touching things here and there.
She lay waiting for him to speak. But he did not, and she said, “What is it, Horace?”
He came and sat on the edge of the bed. But still her eyes were antagonistic and interrogatory and the shadow of her mouth was stubbornly cold. “Narcy?” he said. She lowered her eyes to the book, and he added: “First, I want to apologize for leaving you alone so often at night.”
“Yes?”
He laid his hand on her knee. “Look at me.” She raised her face, and the antagonism of her eyes. “I want to apologize for leaving you alone at night,” he repeated.
“Does that mean you aren’t going to do it any more, or that you’re not coming in at all?”
For a while he sat brooding on the wild repose of his hand lying on her covered knee. Then he rose and stood beside the table again, touching the objects there; then he returned and sat on the bed. She was reading again, and he tried to take the book from her hand. She resisted.
“What do you want, Horace?” she asked impatiently.
He mused again while she watched his face. He looked up. “Belle and I are going to be married,” he blurted.
“Why tell me? Harry is the one to tell. Unless you and Belle are going to dispense with the formality of divorce.”
“Yes,” he said. “He knows it.” He laid his hand on her knee again, stroking it through the cover. “You aren’t even surprised, are you?”
“I’m surprised at you, but not at Belle. Belle has a backstairs nature.”
“Yes,” he agreed; then: “Who said that to you? You didn’t think of that yourself.” She lay with her book half raised, watching him. He took her hand roughly; she tried to free it, but vainly. “Who was it?” he demanded.
“Nobody told me. Don’t, Horace.”
He released her hand. “I know who it was. It was Mrs. Du Pre.”
“It wasn’t anybody,” she repeated. “Go away and leave me alone, Horace.” And behind the antagonism her eyes were hopeless and desperate. “Don’t you see that talking doesn’t help any?”
“Yes,” he said wearily, but he sat for a while yet, stroking her knee. Then he rose and thrust his hands into his gown, but turning he paused again and drew forth an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s a letter for you. I forgot it this afternoon. Sorry.”
She was reading again. “Put it on the table,” she said, without raising her eyes. He laid the letter on the table and quitted the room. At the door he looked back, but her head was bent over her book.
As he removed his clothes it did seem that that heavy fading odor of Belle’s body clung to them, and to his hands even after he was in bed; and clinging, shaped in the darkness beside him Belle’s rich voluptuousness until within that warm, not-yet-sleeping region where dwells the mother of dreams, Belle grew palpable in ratio as his own body slipped away from him.
And Harry too, with his dogged inarticulateness and his hurt groping which was partly damaged vanity and shock, yet mostly a boy’s sincere bewilderment that freed itself terrifically in the form of movie subtitles. Just before he slept, his mind, with the mind’s uncanny attribute for irrelevant recapitulation, reproduced with the startling ghostliness of a dictaphone an incident which at the time he had considered trivial.
Belle had freed her mouth, and tor a moment, her body still against his, she held his face in her two hands and stared at him with intent, questioning eyes. “Have you plenty of money, Horace?” And “Yes,” he had answered immediately, “of course I have.” And then Belle again, enveloping him like a rich and fatal drug, like a motionless and cloying sea in which he watched himself drown.
The letter lay on the table that night, forgotten; it was not until the next morning that she discovered it and opened it.
“I am trying to forget you I cannot forget you Your big eyes your black hair how white your black hair make you look. And how you walk I am watching you a smell you give off like a flowr. Your eyes shine with mistry and how you walk makes me sick like a fevver all night thinking how you walk.
I could touch you you would not know it. Every day But I can not I must pore out on paper must talk You do not know who. Your lips like cupids bow when the day comes when I press it to mine. Like I dreamed in a fevver from heaven to Hell. I know what you do I know more than you think I see men vist you with bitter twangs. Be care full I am a desprate man Nothing any more to me now If you unholy love a man I will kill him.
“You do not anser. I know you got it I saw one in your hand bag. You better anser soon I am desprate man eat up with fevver I can not sleep for. I will not hurt you but I am desprate. Do not forget I will not hurt you but I am a desprate man.”
Meanwhile the days accumulated. Not sad days nor lonely: they were too feverish to be sorrowful, what with her nature torn in two directions and the walls of her serene garden cast down and she herself like a night animal or bird caught in a beam of light and trying vainly to escape. Horace had definitely gone his way, and like two strangers they followed the routine of their physical days, in an unbending estrangement of long affection and similar pride beneath a shallow veneer of trivialities. She sat with Bayard almost every day now, but at a discreet distance of two yards.
At first he had tried to override her with bluster, then with cajolery. But she was firm, and at last he desisted and lay gazing quietly out the window or sleeping while she read. From time to time Miss Jenny would come to the door and look in at them and go away.
Her shrinking, her sense of anticipation
