Of Time and the River (126 page)

At the moment he had only one feeling, overwhelming and intolerable, somehow to quiet her, to stop, to heal this horrible wound of grief and love, to bring peace to her tormented spirit somehow, to do anything, use his life in any way that would give her a little peace and comfort.

And he kept holding her, patting her on the shoulders, saying foolishly over and over again, and not knowing what he said:

“Oh, it’s all right! . . . It’s all right, Ann! . . . You mustn’t look like this, you mustn’t act this way . . . it’s going to be all right!” And knowing miserably, horribly, that it was not all right, that the whole design and fabric of their lives were ruinously awry, that there was a hurt too deep ever to heal, a wrong too cruel, fatal, and perverse ever to be righted.

She stayed there in his arms, she turned her face into his shoulder, she put her slender, strong and lovely hands upon his arms and held on to him desperately, and there, in the frozen, sleeping stillness of that street in a little French town, she wept hoarsely, bitterly, dreadfully, like some great creature horribly wounded; and all he could do was hold on to her until the last torn cry of pain had been racked and wrenched out of her.

When it was all over, and she had grown quiet, she dried her eyes, and looking at him with a dumb, pleading expression, she whispered miserably:

“You won’t tell them? You won’t say anything to Frank about this, will you? You’ll never let him know?”

And stabbed again by wild, rending pity, sick with horror at her devastating terror, he told her he would not.

They walked home in silence through the frozen, sleeping streets. It was after midnight when they got back to the pension: the whole house was long ago asleep. As they went up the stairs a clock began to strike.

LXXXVII

He did not see her the next morning until it was time for lunch. She had gone out early with the big Alsatian dog, and had spent the morning walking in the forest. During the morning he told Elinor and Starwick that he was going back to Paris. Starwick said nothing at all, but Elinor, after a moment’s silence, said coldly, and with a trace of sarcasm:

“Very well, my dear. You’re the doctor. If the lure of the great city has proved too much for you, go you must.” She was silent for a moment, and then said ironically, “Does this mean that we are not to have the honour of your distinguished company on our trip? . . . Really,” she said curtly, “I wish you’d try to make up your mind what you’re going to do. . . . The suspense, darling, is growing QUITE unbearable. If you’d try to break it to us gently,” she went on poisonously, “I beg of you to let the blow fall now, and not to spare us any longer. After all,” she said with a kind of evil drollery, “we may manage to survive the shock. . . . Really, I should like to know,” she said sharply, as he did not answer. “If you’re not going, we’ll get someone else to take your place—we wanted a fourth party to help share in the expenses,” she added venomously, “and I’d like to know at once what your intentions are.”

He stared at her with a smouldering face and with a swelter of hot and ugly anger in his heart, but as usual, her envenomed attack was too quick and sudden for him. Before he could answer, even as his tongue was blundering at a hot reply, she turned swiftly away, and with an air of resignation, said to Starwick:

“Will you try to find out what his intentions are? I can’t find out what he wants to do. APPARENTLY,” she concluded in a rich, astounded voice, “—apparently, your young friend is tongue-tied.” She walked away, contained and beautifully self-possessed as ever, save for two angry spots of colour in her face.

When she had gone, Starwick turned to him, and said with quiet reproof:

“You ought to let her know. You really ought, you know.”

“All right!” he said quickly and hotly, “I’m letting you know right now. I’m not going.”

Starwick said nothing for a moment, then with a quiet, weary, and sorrowful resignation, he said:

“I’m sorry, Gene.”

The other said nothing, but just stood looking at Starwick with eyes which were cold and hard and ugly with their hate. Starwick’s quiet words, the almost Christ-like humility with which he uttered them, now seemed to him to be nothing but the mask of a sneering arrogance of pride and contemptuous assurance, the badge of his immeasurable good fortune. With cold, measuring eyes of hate he looked at Starwick’s soft and graceful throat, the languid indolence of his soft, voluptuously graceful figure, and with murderous calculation he thought: “How easy it would be for me to twist that damned, soft neck of yours off your shoulders! How easy it would be to take that damned, soft body in my hands and break it like a rotten stick across my knees! Oh, you damned, soft, pampered makeshift of a human being—you thing of cunning tricks and words and accents—you synthetic imitation of a living artist— you dear, damned darling of ćsthetic females—you Boston woman’s lap-dog, you—”

The foul words thickened to a swelter of blind hate and murder in his heart, and would not give him ease, or phrase the choking and intolerable burden of his hate; the light of hate and murder burned in his naked eye, curled his hands into two rending paws of savage power in which he seemed to feel the substance of that warm, soft throat between the strangling grip of his long fingers; and all the time he felt hopelessly tricked, outwitted, beaten by the very nakedness of his surrender to his hate, beaten by something too subtle, soft and cunning for him ever to grasp, by something which, for so it now seemed, would always beat him, by something whose impossible good fortune it would always be to take from him the thing he wanted most.

A thousand times he had foreseen this thing. A thousand times he had foreseen, as young men will foresee, the coming of the enemy— and always he had pictured him in a definite form and guise. Always he had come, armed in insolence and power, badged with the open menace of the jeering word, the sneering tongue, the brandished fist. Always he had come to strike terror to the heart with naked threat and open brag, to try to break the heart and courage of another man, to win his jeering domination of another’s life, by violence and brutal courage. He had never come by stealth but always by the frontal attack, and the youth, like every youth alive, had sworn that he would be ready for him when he came, would meet him fiercely and without retreat, and would either conquer him or most desperately lie dead before he yielded to the inexpiable shame of foul dishonour.

And now the enemy had come, but in no way that he had ever known, in no guise that he had ever pictured. The enemy had come, not armed in brutal might and open brag and from the front, but subtle, soft, and infinitely cunning, and from a place, and in a way that he had never foreseen. The enemy had come behind the mask of friendship, he had come with words of praise, with avowals of proud belief and noble confidence, in an attitude of admiration and humility—had come in such a way, and even as he spoke the words of praise and proud belief in him, had taken from him what he wanted most in life, and had not seemed to take it, or to want it, or to care.

Starwick and Elinor had quarrelled again: this time it was because he too had decided to go back to Paris that afternoon. No one but Elinor knew the purpose of his going; and that purpose, whatever it was, did not please her. When Eugene entered the dining-room for his last meal with them, they were at it hammer and tongs, totally oblivious of the sensation they were causing among the whispering and conspiring old men and women all about them. Or, if not oblivious, they were indifferent to it: even in their quarrels they kept their grand and rare and special manner—a manner which more and more conceived the universe as an appropriate backdrop for the subtle and romantic complications of their own lives, and which, in its remote and lofty detachment from the common run of man, said that here was an intercourse of souls that was far too deep and rare for the dull conscience of the world to apprehend.

Elinor was talking earnestly, positively, an accent rich, yet sharp, cultivated, yet formidably assured, a well-mannered authority, positive with denial and the conviction of experience.

“You cannot do it! I tell you that you cannot DO it! You will come a cropper if you do!”

Starwick’s face was flushed deeply with anger; he answered quietly in a mannered tone filled with a sense of outrage and indignation.

“I resent that VERY much,” he said. “It is VERY wrong and VERY unfair of you to speak that way! I RESENT it!” he said quietly but with stern reproof.

“Sorry!” she clipped the word out curt and brusque, the way the English say it. “If you resent it, you resent it—and that’s THAT! But after ALL, my dear, what else do you expect? If you insist on bringing any little cut-throat you pick up in a Montmartre bistro along with you everywhere you go, your friends are going to complain about it! And they’ve a right to!”

“I RESENT that VERY much!” he said again, in his mannered tone.

“Sorry!” she said crisply, curtly, as before. “But that’s the way I feel about it!” She looked at him for a moment, and then, suddenly shaking her head in a short and powerful movement, she said in a whispering shudder of revulsion and disgust:

“No good, Frank! . . . I’m willing to make all the allowances I can . . . but the man’s no good—no good! . . . He just won’t do!” Her tone was the tone of a powerful New Englander, of “fibre,” character and breeding, putting the final dogma of his judgment upon an inferior person who “just won’t do.”

And again, Starwick, two spots of bright colour burning in his cheeks, said coldly, quietly, and with an inflexible obstinacy:

“I resent that VERY much!”

He had apparently decided that Alec, the Frenchman they had met in a Montmartre bar one night, and who had accompanied them on most of their expeditions since, should be their guest in their forthcoming travels over France. Moreover, with that arrogant secretiveness that was characteristic of him, Frank had made an appointment to meet the Frenchman in Paris that evening, and had not until that morning informed anyone of his intentions. This was the cause of the quarrel.

As Eugene entered, they looked up at him indifferently, and resumed their quarrel; Ann came in a little later, sat down without speaking, and began to eat in sullen silence. It was an unpleasant meal. Elinor assumed her customary manner of gay, light raillery, but this time, in powerful contrast to her hilarious good spirits of the night before, she was full of spite and malice—the angry desire of her tormented spirit to sting and wound as if, by causing pain to others, she could in some measure assuage her own.

“Darling,” she said to Eugene, in her deft, malicious way, “I do hope you’re not going to forget all about me now that you’re deserting me? . . . Won’t you write me now and then to cheer me up? . . . Or is this going to be good-bye for ever! . . . Because, darling, if it is, I want you to say so right out . . . no matter how it hurts, I’d rather know the worst right now, so that I can go out in the garden and eat worms, or howl, or beat my head against the wall, or something,” she said drolly, but with a glint of spiteful motive in her eyes and in her smooth tone that left no doubt of her intention.—“Won’t you say it ain’t so, darling? . . . I mean, won’t you remember me long enough some time just to write a letter to me . . . I don’t care how short it is if you’ll just write and let me know that you still CARE!” she said maliciously. “Come on, darling,” she added coaxingly, leaning towards him, “say you will. . . . Promise to write me just a little letter . . . just a TEENY-WEENY little one like that,” she measured drolly between two fingers, and then, while he glared at her with a hot face and angry eyes, she got in the instant, deft, decisive stroke before he could think up an answer; and so concluded it:

“Good!” she said swiftly, and patted him quickly, decisively, on the arm: “God bless you, darling! I knew you would!”

They finished lunch in a sullen and unhappy silence. After lunch Eugene went upstairs, packed and closed his valise and came down and paid his bill. When he got outside, Elinor was sitting in the car, waiting for him. Starwick had not yet come down.

“Put your suitcase in behind,” she said curtly, “and do tell Frank to hurry if he’s coming. There’s not much time.”

“Where’s Ann?” he said. “Is she coming with us to the station?”

“My dear,” she said coldly, “I haven’t the remotest idea. Why don’t you ask her yourself if you want to know?”

He flushed again; and then with a feeling of painful embarrassment and constraint, said:

“Elinor—if you don’t mind—that is—I’d like—”

“What?” she said curtly, impatiently, and sharply, turning in her seat and looking at him. “You’d like WHAT?”

“If you don’t mind,” he said, gulping with embarrassment, and at the same moment enraged that he should feel so—

“—My money!” he blurted out.

“What? . . . What?” she demanded again, in a brusque, puzzled tone. “OH!” she cried with a sudden air of enlightenment. “Your MONEY! . . . You mean those express cheques you gave me to keep for you?”

“Yes,” he said miserably, feeling an inexplicable shame and embarrassment at having to ask for his own money, and inwardly cursing the folly which, in the rush of affection that followed their recent reconciliation, had caused him to give every cent he had into her keeping—“if you don’t mind—that is—”

“But of COURSE, my child!” cried Elinor, with a fine air of astonishment. “You shall have it at once!”—and opening her purse she took out the thin little, black folder that contained all the money he had left—three express cheques of twenty-dollar denomination. “Here you are, sir!” she said, and gave it to him in such a way that he felt again a sense of guilt and shame as if he were acting meanly towards her or were taking something that did not belong to him.

“I’m sorry,” he stammered apologetically, “—sorry to have to ask you for it, Elinor—but you see it’s all I’ve got left.”

“It is?” she said curtly. “What did you do with all the rest that you had when we met you?”

“I—I guess I spent it,” he stammered.

The answer came, and buried itself in his heart, as quick, as cold, as poisonous as a striking snake.