Julia suddenly took up the letter and tore it open with a nervous jerk. She dropped her needle. Where it fell on the polished floor it made a tinkling sound like a falling splinter of glass.
She did not question or analyze Dudley's statement of his mood. All she knew was that he was flinging her away from him into herself. There was something composed and final about the letter. When she reread it, it overcame her with helplessness. The lie she had lived in had burdened her, and she could not justify her resentment of the suggestion that she tell the truth.
Later in the day Dudley called Julia on the telephone. He wanted to arrange a meeting with her. He refused to admit to himself that the strained note he observed in her voice caused him uneasiness. He had to prove to himself his complete conviction of the righteousness of what he demanded of her. He suggested a walk in the park, and Julia experienced a resentful pang of exultance because she imagined that he was not strong enough to have her come to his rooms. She contemplated, as a means of defiance, taking him too much at his word.
White clouds filled with gray-brown stains flowed over the hidden sky. Here and there the clouds broke and the aperture dilated until it disclosed the deep angry blue behind it. In the center of the park the lake, cold and lustrous like congealing oil, swelled heavily in the wind, but now and again lapsed with the weight of a profound inertia. The trees, with tossing limbs, had the same oppressed and resisting look as they swung toward the water above their dying reflections.
Julia, seated on a bench away from the path, waited for Dudley to come. When she saw him far off all of her rose against him. She could not hate him enough. She subsided into herself like the cold lustrous water drawn toward its own depths. She felt bitter and shriveled by desperation. She was unhappy because she could not, at this moment, love herself.
Dudley was disconcerted by his own excitement as he approached her. There was something spirituallygauchein the exaggerated simplicity of his manner. He knew that his affectionate smile was an attempt to disarm her, and that his combative and questioning eyes showed his uneasiness. It was hard for him to forgive her when she made him feel absurd like this. A guilty sensation overpowered him. He considered the emotion unwarranted, attributed it to her suggestion, and held it against her as a grudge. At this instant he could allow her no equality so he made himself feel kind. "Dear!" He took her cold fingers in his moist plump hand. Their unresponsiveness pained him. He dropped them and went on smiling at her interrogatively. "I had to talk to you," he said at last. His voice was subdued. His smile disappeared. He recognized that he was depressed and wounded.
Julia wanted to ask him what he expected her to do with her life after she had told Laurence everything, and it was no longer possible for them to live in the same house. She had greeted Dudley. Now her mouth took a sarcastic twist and she found herself unable to speak. She stared straight at the lake, which was beginning to twinkle with cold lights under the gray luminous sky. She shivered when Dudley seated himself beside her.
Before he could tell her what was in him, he had to harden himself. "I'm suffering deeply, Julia. You are suffering. I see it. It is only the little person who doesn't suffer. Why do you resent me? Life is always making patterns. It has thrown us three—you and me, and your husband—into a design—a relationship to each other. No matter what happens we ought to be glad. We may come to mean terrific things to each other, Julia—all three of us. This is a new experience. We mustn't be afraid of it." When he noted her set profile he felt querulous toward her, but he controlled himself and tried to take her hand again. If she had protested in argument he might have talked to her about the strong soul's right to truth, and made clearer to himself what, in the darkness of his own spirit, he had to confess was still a little vague.
Julia glanced at him. Her gaze was steady and bewildered. "Of course I owe it to Laurence. I want to talk to Laurence. I would have done this of my own free will. I loathe the lie I've been living!" She spoke coldly and vehemently. Tears came into her eyes and she averted her face.
Dudley was silent a moment. He twisted his mustache and one of his small bright eyes squinted nervously. He could not bear the pride of her mouth. At the moment all pride seemed ugly to him. It was impossible to call further attention to his pain in the contemplation of renouncing her while she continued to maintain, almost vindictively, it appeared, her readiness to abandon herself to him.
"I can't put what I feel into words, Julia, but it is something very beautiful and deep. Come, sister, you're not angry with me?" Again he took her stiff hand in his. She was humiliating him and he would not forget it.
Julia wished that she could hurt him in a way which would make it impossible for him to talk to her so kindly. She did not understand why the recognition of his absurdity made her suffer so much.
Dudley had been floundering inwardly through the attempt to avoid facing the ridiculous. Watching the harsh bitter line of her lips, he noticed the pulse that swelled and fluttered in her throat. The sight of her pain, for which he was responsible, made him feel all at once very sure and complete. He accepted no burden from it, for he told himself it was a part of her awakening to detached and perfect understanding. He was grateful to himself that he had an ideal notion of what she might be that held him cruelly and steadily against all that she was. He felt voluptuously intimate with her emotions. He could not hurt her enough. He tried to shut out the recollection of her beautiful gaunt body in its almost tragic nakedness. "I don't expect you to understand me completely yet, Julia. One's vision is so warped and tortured by one's desire. All our terminology of good and bad we use in such a limited personal sense. We have to get away from that before we can even begin to function spiritually—to be spiritually at rest. I feel that there are clouds between us, Julia, but behind them is the great sun of your understanding. I believe in that. Say something to me!"
Julia withdrew her hand. "What can I say to you? I am in the habit of viewing problems very concretely. Let me go. I must go." She stood up, smiling at him desperately.
He wanted to destroy the smile behind which she was trying to hide, and to explain to her that the torture he caused her was the price of his very nearness. It had been almost a pleasure for him to feel her hand twitch with repugnance. It was sad that she comprehended so little of his nature. Yet he was sensible of the helplessness of hatred. Knowing that she hated him, for the first time he ceased to fear her and could give himself to uncalculated reactions toward her. He thought that if she were to remain his mistress in a conventional relation he could not love her like this. The artist was, after all, he told himself, like the priest, the mediator between the life of mankind and its mystical source.
But Julia moved away without looking at him. He watched her pass along the edge of the lake, where threads of light as fine as hairs were drawn hot and trembling across the colorless water.
Dudley continued to feel embarrassment in his own soul, for he could not clearly explain to himself the impulses which were governing his acts. He decided that only through his art would he be able to justify all that he was when, at the moment of giving Julia back to herself, he was conscious of possessing her most intensely. He was at his ease only in the midst of powerful abstractions. There was something elephantine about his nature that prevented him from being simple or casual in his moods. If he ever indulged in expressions that were light or commonplace he was suspicious of his own appearance. He was startled sometimes when he had to admit the maliciousness of his reactions toward the smaller souls around him. If he laughed in a gay group his laughter sounded awkward and strained. Perhaps it was because of his small effeminate stature that he felt it necessary to hurt people before he could command their respect.
At this moment the conviction of his power filled him with an intoxication of gentleness. He felt that he enveloped Laurence and Julia as if in the same embrace. That he was beginning to have a peculiar affection for Laurence proved to him the significance of his own unique spirit. Realizing completely that neither Julia nor her husband could approach his understanding, he loved them for their inferiority. As he walked along the path toward the blank glare where the sun was setting among black branches, he noticed a terrier puppy rolling in the polished grass, and had for it something of the same emotion. He loved everything in relation to which he found himself in a position of advantage. Approaching thus he believed he could preserve a philosophic detachment while perceiving what Spinoza called "the objective essence of things."
May went to see her Grandmother Farley. May dreaded the visit. When she arrived there she sat in the dining room, smiling and listening to her grandmother's talk, and feeling small and mindless as she had felt as a child. In the old Farley home May was always like that, like something asleep possessed by itself in a shining unbroken dream. She wanted to get back to Aunt Julia, who took her life out of her and showed it to her so that she knew the shape of its thoughts.
Old Mrs. Farley gave May cookies from the cake box, and Grandpapa Farley, who did not go to his office any longer, took his granddaughter into the back yard and showed her his vegetable garden. He was kindly too, but, when this tall stooping elderly man with his handsome white head looked with vague eyes at her, she fancied that he also was asleep and could not see her. She was a little frightened of her silly thoughts about him. Aunt Julia could have told her what she wanted to say.
"And how is your father?" Grandmama Farley asked in a dry voice. "We can't expect him to come to see us very often. His wife is so busy with clubs and movements she has no time for us and I suppose he can't leave her."
May was cautious and timid in the presence of her grandmother. There was something obscure and remote about the old woman's engrossed face, her squinting eyes that gazed at one as from an infinitely projected distance, her puckered lips with their self-righteous twist. May smiled helplessly, not knowing how to reply.
"I suppose Mrs. Julia is bringing you up to have the wider interests she talks about when she is here. You want to vote, I suppose, don't you?" Mrs. Farley squinted a smile. Her humor had an acrid flavor.
May giggled apologetically. "I don't think I care much about voting, Grandmother. I don't think Aunt Julia is trying to make me like anything in particular."
"I'm making bread. Your grandfather has to have his bread just right," Mrs. Farley said. She went into the kitchen.
May hesitated, then followed her.
The clean room was full of sunlight. Mrs. Farley took down the bread pans and began to work the stiff dough on a floured board. Her knotted fingers sank tremulously into the bulging white stuff. The dough made a snapping noise when she turned it and patted it. "I suppose it would be a waste of time for you to learn to make bread, May."
Behind the old lady the stove was dazzling black with its brilliant nickel ornaments. The tin flour sifter on the table beside her was filled with fiery reflections. The stiff white muslin curtains before the open windows made lisping, scraping noises as the wind folded them over and brushed them along the lifted panes. Mrs. Farley glanced from time to time at May, and, with dim hostility, noted the slight angular little figure seated so ill-at-ease on the rush-bottomed chair, the darkened eyes with their chronic expression of melancholy and elation, the heavy braid of flaxen hair that hung with a curious soft weight between the small stooping shoulders. Mrs. Farley found May's continual smile, her sweet relaxed lips and the large uneven white teeth that showed between, peculiarly irritating. "You want another cake, eh?" she flung out at last with an amused resigned air. Going back into the dining room, she brought a cake and presented it as though she were feeding a hungry puppy.
May, trying to be grateful, munched the cake uncomfortably. She pulled feebly at the hem of her skirt. Her grandmother made her ashamed of her legs.
Grandpapa Farley came up the walk and halted in the back doorway, bareheaded in the warm sunshine. He was in his shirt sleeves. Beads of perspiration stood on his high blank brow which might have been called noble. His big hands, smeared with the earth of the garden, hung in a helpless manner at his sides. He smiled uncomfortably at May. "Shall we send your step-mother some lettuce?"
May rose and walked out to where he waited. His expression had grown suddenly ruminant, and, as he stared away from her over the back fence, his eyes were cloudy and unseeing. "Well, May, I can't say she's done her duty by your grandmother, but she's a fine woman—fine handsome woman. Laurie was lucky to get her. She'll be able to do a lot for him." He sighed as though he were relinquishing a vision, and, glancing once more at May, became kindly aware of her again.
May had hoped that Aunt Alice would not come downstairs, but there she was behind them. Grandpapa Farley was uncomfortable if Alice came into a room when outsiders were present. He saw her now, and, with a guilty smile, told May he would go to gather his little present. He shambled down the walk. The sunshine made his bald head lustrous. There was a glinting fringe of white hair at its base.
"So it's you, May, is it? How are you? Does Madame Julia think you are safe with us now?" There was queer hostile pleasure in Aunt Alice's fat face.
May's mouth bent with its usual smiling acceptance, but she could not keep the solemn arrested look of wonder from her eyes. People said Aunt Alice was odd. There was nothing so strange in what Aunt Alice said. It was more in something she didn't say but seemed always to have meant. "I'm well." May squeezed her fingers nervously together.
Aunt Alice laid her hand on her niece's head and tilted it back. May shivered a little and her eyelids trembled against the light. "Suppose you're living the larger life? Imbibing the fine flavor of contemporary culture, are you?"
May giggled evasively and wagged her head under the heavy hand.
"Your step-mother can't stand this congenial atmosphere so she sends you. She's strong for the true, the beautiful, and the good. Developing your father's character. Teaching him to flower, is she?"
May grew bewildered and rather sick. When she opened her eyes she caught such a cruel secret expression in Aunt Alice's face. Why does Aunt Alice always hate me? She moved her head from Aunt Alice's hand and gazed at the burnt grass rocking in the sunshine. She tried to be happy and amused.
"Can't look at her, eh?" Aunt Alice said suddenly. "Don't wonder, May. Ugly old bitch. Did you ever hear of the power and the glory without end?"
There were tears trembling on May's lashes. She gave Aunt Alice a quick stare and laughed.
Aunt Alice was examining her cautiously. "You're something of a milksop, May. Keep on being a milksop. The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. But your legs are too thin. You'll never attain to joy without end with those legs."
May did not want to understand what this meant. Something inside her was trembling and lacerated. She stared directly at Aunt Alice now, determined not to see her clearly. She could not bear to do so.
And Aunt Alice's face was calm and kind, resigned and humorous, her eyes as steady as May's. "Your old aunt is an eccentric creature, May."
"I don't think so," May said with confused well-meaning.
Grandpapa Farley was calling from the garden. May was glad to run away to him.
It was a long way home—almost to the other end of town. May felt the distance interminable.
When she reached the house she rushed upstairs to Aunt Julia's room. Aunt Julia was sitting there doing nothing at all. She glanced up with a tired, distracted air as May came in. May smiled ecstatically, rushed over to Aunt Julia, threw her arms about her, and in a moment was weeping with her head in Aunt Julia's lap.
Julia's fingers moved through May's soft hair that was so thick and beautiful. She pitied herself that May was so young. May's youth seemed loathsome and repugnant to her. Because of her loathing, she made her voice more gentle. "What's the matter, sweet? Did something unpleasant happen at your grandmother's house?"
"N-no, nothing. Only I wanted to get away from there. I'm so glad to be here!"
Aunt Julia's fingers moved stiffly through May's hair. Why should I dislike this child! Oh, I'm dying of loneliness! Julia felt that she could love no one and that she deserved endless commiseration for her lovelessness. "Don't cry, darling!" Aunt Julia's voice was harsh. "I should never have let you go there. I know how depressing it is. Your Aunt Alice is such a pathetic person, isn't she? I know. I know. She isn't precisely mad, but so dreadfully unhappy. Such a morbid, isolated life."
"She makes me so—so—I don't know! Was she always like that? I used to be afraid of her when I was small."
"Perhaps so. I don't know, dear. Some man she was in love with, they say. We won't think about her. When I first married your father I tried to get her interested in some of the things I was doing at the time, but she imagines that every one dislikes her. Now don't cry any more, May, child. You mustn't let your poor father see how your visit has upset you. He never wants us to go there, but I think we ought. Old Mr. Farley is such a kind old man and your grandmother was so good to the little baby that died. Your father has often told me about it. He is grateful to her for it, I'm sure, though she never understood him and when he was there with you children he was very miserable. That's one reason I wanted him to move so far away. I hate for him to have that atmosphere about him. It makes him think of your poor little mother, too. You know she was only a girl when she died. Not much more of a woman than you are, May. I don't think she understood your father very well either, but he loved her very much. It was such a pity she died. Seemed so useless." Julia was pained by her own kind words. The malice in her heart hurt her. She felt that if people were compassionate they could find the apology for her emotion which she was not able to discover.
May was gazing up solemnly with tear smudges on her face. Aunt Julia's beautiful long hand pushed the damp locks away from the girl's high pearl-smooth forehead. "Oh, Aunt Julia, I love you! I love you! I love you!"
"I'm glad, dear." Aunt Julia looked consciously sad and stared at the carpet. Her fingers continued their half-mechanical caress.
Suddenly May sprang to her feet, clapped her palms together, and began to pirouette. Then she ran to Aunt Julia and kissed her again. "I'm so happy!" In herself she was still recalling Paul's kisses, and in them escaping the old terror that had possessed her again in her grandmother's house.
Julia, convicted of her own brutality, regarded May pityingly.
The last semester was over. Paul, carrying his books under his arm, slouched out of the High School yard, his cap pulled over his face.
Hell! Those kids! What if he had flunked in several things! He had just left a group who were betting on next year's football eleven. Next year by mid-season it would be a college or a business school for him. When he talked to those boys he tried to joke as they did about life and "smut". He was only really interested in what they said when they talked "smut". Then he looked at them curiously and wanted to be like them.
Like them! Good Lord! They were donkeys. Even the ones who sailed beyond him in their classes. He wanted them to know what he was—that his views were outrageous. But there was Felix, a short brown little monkey, a Russian Jew with excited far-seeing eyes, who enjoyed debating. He said Paul's vision was warped by his personal problem. Paul tried to make Felix talk about women. Felix blushed slightly, while his eyes, bright and remote, remained fixed unwaveringly on Paul's face. Felix said he respected women as the mothers of the race. He thought the boys at school had cheap ideas about sexual laxity. That he never was so utterly strong and possessed of himself as when he put women out of his mind. Then he could give his whole soul to humanity.
Paul blushed, yet sneered. Felix! Women! That brat! "Is your father a tailor or an undertaker, Felix?" Afterward it hurt Paul to remember the wrong idea of himself which he had been at such pains to impart. It would be nice to belong somewhere!
Away from the deserted schoolhouse, Paul strolled into the park. Against the gleaming afternoon sky that was a dim milky blue, the trees were shivering. He watched whirling oak leaves that looked black on the high branches. Stretched on the grass tops, silver spider threads twitched with reflections. The bright grass, bending, seemed to rush before him like a blown cloud. Deep blots of shadow were on the lake, where, here and there, taut strands of light sparkled and broke through the shaken surface.
May's step-mother. He kept trying to push that woman away, crowding up to him with her sanctimonious face. He wanted to do violence to something. He hated himself.
When he sat down on the grass and closed his eyes he thought again of going away. Already he could feel himself inwardly small, like a speck in distance. The harshly coruscated sea made a boiling sound on the stern of the ship. Beyond the blue-black strip of water that made his eyes ache there was a long thin beach with tiny houses on it. He could hear the dry rustle of leaves and cocoanut fronds. There was rain in the air and huge masses of plum-colored cloud made a strange darkness far off over the aching earth. A man in a red shirt ran along the shore, following, waving something. Then all in a moment it had become night and there was nothing but the hiss of the sea in the quietness. The glow from a lamp made a yellow stain on the mist and showed a half-naked sailor asleep on his side with his head thrown back.
When Paul saw things like this he was never certain where the vision came from. He wondered if he had made it himself, or if it were only something he had read about. The sharpness of his dream pleased and frightened him.
He slung his books to one side and buried his face in his hands. He was miserably conscious of his big grotesque body which he wanted to forget. Saving the world. Karl Marx. Men that go down to the sea in ships. Shipped away from here. Shipped as a sailor. He shook himself without lifting his face. He did not want to hate May, so he hated Aunt Julia instead.
White moon blown across his face. It was there when he glanced up. It floated down through the park trees. Why was it when he thought of May he saw beautiful full breasts like moons in flower! They floated before him like lilies. They were in him like the vision of the ship.
A brown barefooted girl walked toward a hilltop, a water jar poised on her head. The sky into which she went was like a dove's wing. Sunset already. And the girl with the water jar kept mounting and going down, down, down into him, into darkness. He could hear the quiet grass parting against her feet. He could hear her going into the moon, into darkness, into the vacant sky beyond the trees.
He took his hands away from his face and gathered up his books.
I must instinctively feel something rotten about that step-mother of May's or I wouldn't have this unreasoning antagonism. The brown girl passed out of sight on the imaginary meadow. He stared at an overturned park bench, and at the lake water that made a stabbing spot of emptiness in the glowing twilight among the trees.
Julia's depression continued during the evening meal and Laurence noticed her silence. In the hallway, as they went up to her sitting room after dinner, he surprised her by slipping his arm about her shoulders.
Julia glanced toward him swiftly. Her mouth was strained. She smiled and lowered her lids.
"Being married to me isn't a thrilling experience, Julia."
Julia tried to answer him, bit her lips, and said, "Dear!" in a choked voice.
He held her against him uneasily as they walked. Julia wished he would not touch her as if he were afraid.
When they mounted the stairs they found her room dark. Laurence released her and she went ahead of him to find the light. The moon made a long blue shadow that lay alive on the floor. The bright windows of the houses opposite seemed to flicker with the moving branches of the trees that came between. The night air of the city flowed cold into the room and had a dead smell. They heard the horn of a motor car and children were laughing in the street. Julia was shivering, fumbling for the electric lamp.
Laurence, though he barely saw the outline of her figure, was suddenly aware of something confused and ominous in her delay. "What's the matter, Julia? Do you need my help?" His tone was very casual but gentle. He startled himself. She's unhappy. I need to be kind. He had been restless, feeling something between them. She must come to me. He had a quick sense of relief and tenderness.
The light rushed out and bathed the indistinct walls. The carpet was bleached with it. There was a circle of radiance low about the desk where the lamp stood. Julia had not answered. Her shoulders, turned to him, resisted him. Her head was bent forward, away. She was moving some papers under a book. Her bare hand and arm appeared startlingly alive, saffron-colored in the glow, trembling out of the dim blackness of her sleeve. There were blanched reflections in the lighted folds of her silk skirt.
Laurence was all at once afraid, as if he had never seen her before. "Julia!" He moved a step toward her.
She turned to him, her hands behind her, palms downward on the desk against which she braced herself. Her face was old. Her eyes, staring at him, seemed blind.
Laurence frowned while his lips twitched in a queer smile. He tried to speak, but could not. Without knowing why, he wanted to keep her from speaking.
She buried her face in her hands. "I have something horrible to tell you, Laurence."
Her voice, unexpectedly calm, disconcerted him. Neither had she intended to speak like that. She wanted her emotions to release her. She wanted to be confused. The clearness of the instant terrified her.
Laurence could not ask her what it was. Something hurt him at that moment more than she could ever hurt him afterward. He wanted the silence, unendurable as it was, to go on forever.
Silence.
He came to her and took her hands from her eyes. It was hard for him to touch her. Her lids closed. She turned her head aside.
"What's the matter, Julia? What's happened? Have I done anything to hurt you? Tell me."
He seemed to her so far away that she felt it useless to answer him. Everything that had happened was deep inside her. Neither Laurence nor Dudley had any relation to it. She knew herself too deeply. It was the unknown self from which gods were made. There was nothing to turn to. There was nothing more to know. She watched Laurence now and felt a foolish smile on her lips. Her hard, concentrated gaze noted nothing about him. "I've behaved disgustingly, Laurence."
Laurence watched her. He let his hands fall away. He wanted never to know what she was going to say. His eyes were on the soft hair against her cheek. He had the impulse to kiss her there. He hated her already for the pain of what she was taking away from him. Some helpless thing in him wanted her and she was killing it cruelly and senselessly. It was monstrous to take her soft hair and her cheek away from him.
"I've deceived you, Laurence. I've been carrying on an intrigue without telling you." Her brows were painfully drawn above her blind hard gaze. Her smile suggested a sneer at its own agony. "I've had a lover."
Laurence flushed slowly and regarded her with a dim stare of suffering and dislike. He could not conquer the impression that her manner was victorious. He felt that he must ask who her lover was. He thought that she was degrading him when she made him ask it. "Yes?" His voice sounded excited, yet calm, almost elated. The voice came from a strange mouth.
"Dudley Allen," Julia said, and kept the same unhappy, irrational smile.
"How long did this go on before you made up your mind to tell me? I can forgive you everything but that, Julia. Why didn't you tell me? You're a free agent. I have nothing to say about your actions, but I don't think you had any right to lie to me, Julia." He tried to keep his mind on the point of justice. He was utterly vanquished and weak. To touch her! To be near to her! He felt her putting things between them so that he could never touch her. His mouth was sweet. His suffused eyes had an expression of stupidity and anguish.
Julia, observing him, all at once relaxed, and, with a bewildered air, began to weep, hiding her face again. He envied the sobs which shook her with relief. She sank into a chair.
"Don't, Julia. You mustn't do this, Julia. Don't!" He came up to her, and, with an effort, touched her drooped head. The contact was grateful to him. Her warm shuddering body reassured him against the dark they were in. They were both in the same darkness. He wanted to know her in it where her bright empty words had pierced and gone.
"How can you bear to touch me?" Julia said. She demanded nothing. Helpless and waiting, she was clinging to him. Her legs were warm and weak and tired. She was glad of the chair, and only in terror that Laurence might go. "Don't leave me, Laurence! Please don't leave me!"
"I won't leave you, Julia." For a moment he pitied her, but suddenly he knew how much outside her he was. She was taking no account of him at all. He needed to resist her as if she were some awful weight. He was so tired. She was crushing him. He wanted to live. He wanted to be away from her. "I want to go—not far—out somewhere. I want to be alone for a while. I have to think things out."
"I know, Laurence! You can't bear me! I've killed what you had for me!"
He was annoyed by her unthinking phrases, and that she showed no knowledge of the new emotion which pain had created in him. It was hard to leave her in distress, but he felt that he must go to save himself.
He left the room quietly, and went downstairs and into his study. The house was still, perhaps empty, but he closed the door after him and locked it. He was afraid of his own room with its unfamiliar walls.
He sat down awkwardly in the darkness, aware of his own movements as of the gestures of some one else. He conceived a peculiar disgust for the short heavy man who was humped soddenly in the arm-chair. He disliked the man's clothes, expensive ill-fitting clothes draping a massive body. Most of all he hated the man's small delicate hands, ridiculous below his big sleeves.
Laurence, out of his own fatigue, had abandoned the moral idea, and he pleased himself now with the bitter lenience of his judgment. He had known for a long time that Julia was dissatisfied and had even sensed the pathos in her passing enthusiasms with their glamour of profundity. He had seen her young and lovely, futile except to him, and, when he had pitied her passion for the sublime, it had only added a paternal quality to his feeling for her, so that he loved her more inwardly and quietly. His unshaken pessimism regarding life had made him more and more gentle of her when he saw that she yet clung to the things which, for him, had failed. He perceived now that his very disbelief had been the symbol of a too complete faith which she had made grotesque. If he had been able to condemn her, the moral justification would have afforded him an emotional outlet. He was helpless with a hurt that was his alone.
Who was he, he said ironically to himself, that he should refuse the lie with which humanity sustains itself.
Dudley wrote Julia that he was grieved that she excluded him from her confidence. He was suffering deeply and he wanted to be a friend to both her and Laurence. He had not anticipated anything like her silence.
When his vanity was wounded he made a fetish of his isolation. He told himself that he had no place in the superficiality of modern life. He took a train away from the city and walked along the beach under the hot gray sky beneath clouds like glaring water. He wanted to avoid his artist friends. He wished to imagine that they could never understand him. He was acute in his perception of their weaknesses and was always defending himself inwardly against discovering their defects in himself.
He tired himself out and, taking off his coat, sat down on some driftwood to rest. His black hair clung in sweated curls to his flushed forehead. The pine boughs above him rocked secretly against the glowing blindness of the clouds. The bunches of needles, lustrous on the tips of the branches, were like black stars. The sea was a moving hill going up against the horizon. It made a slow heavy sound. The small waves sidled along the shore, opened their fluted edges a little, fan-wise, then flattened themselves and sank away with lisping noises.
Dudley was more and more depressed by the constant terrible fear of having made himself ludicrous. He said to himself that neither Julia nor her husband would understand him, and he must suffer the miscomprehension of his motives which would inevitably result from their lesser experience. The most disconcerting thing was the sudden retrospective vividness of his physical intimacy with Julia. She seemed to have become a part of all the abhorrent elements that were commonplace in his past, elements against which his romantic conception of his destiny led him to rebel.
His full lips pouted despairingly beneath his neat mustache shining in the glare, and there was an aggrieved expression in his small sparkling eyes. His plump, pretty body made him unhappy. He tried to exclude it. It was terrible for him to realize ugliness or physical deficiency of any sort. He never associated this with his weak childhood and the semi-invalidism which he but vaguely remembered. He had begun so early to detach his experiences from those of other beings, that it never occurred to him. Yet if he came in contact with disease in another creature it left him mentally ill. He never made any attempt to analyze the violence of his reaction against the sight of sickness. At any rate, his theory was of a Golden Age and a primitive man who had fallen through admitting weakness into his psychical life.
Dudley did not explain the fact to himself, but he knew that his dignity survived only in his capacity for pain of the spirit. When he was in agony of mind he never really doubted that his condition was a superior one, the travail in which the great soul gave birth to its perfection. At twenty-seven his hair was turning gray and there were lines of exhaustion and disillusionment about his eyes and mouth. He demanded so much of himself that it allowed him no spiritual quiet.
To avoid recognizing the platitudinous details of his love affairs he submitted himself to mystical tortures. He wanted to leave each incident of his existence finished and perfect as he passed through it. As much as he craved admiration, he needed gentleness, but he could not ask for it.
He remained on the beach until nightfall. He could not discover in himself enough grief to release him from the cold misery and absurdity of everyday human affairs.
Between Julia and Laurence, the reflex of their emotional fatigue expressed itself in a mutual inertia. Except that Laurence showed his desire to be alone by moving his bed into a small isolated room at the back of the house, nothing in the order of existence was changed.
Before the children, Julia spoke to him gently, almost pathetically, and only now and then dared look at his face. He tried to avoid her guilty and demanding gaze. If she caught his eyes he would glance quickly and defensively away with a contraction of his features that he could not control.
School was over. "You and the children might go for a month on the beach," Laurence said.
And Julia said, "Yes." But she did not make any definite plans. She was waiting for something which she had never named to herself.
When she was away from him in her room she went over and over the succession of events, and wondered if she should leave the house to go out and earn her living, since she had betrayed Laurence's confidence and no longer deserved anything at his hands. She sustained the ideas of conscience to the point of applying for employment with the City Board of Health, and, some weeks after, a position was given her. But it seemed an irrelevant incident which resolved nothing.
If Laurence had imposed difficulties on her she would have justified herself in facing them. What seemed most horrible now was that everything was in suspense, and she was cheated of the emotional cleansing which relieved her in a crisis even where there were ominous consequences to follow.
Laurence made a constant effort to escape the atmosphere of anticipation which her manner created. When he was not with her he fancied he saw everything clearly. She had always been searching for something apart from him and she had found it. He decided that it was the clearness and finality of his vision of her and of himself that left him unable to create a future. Laurence thought, in language different from Julia's, that a man comes to the end of his life when he knows himself entirely. Emotion can only build on the vagueness of expectation. His complete awareness of the causes of his state allowed him no resentments. He imagined that he could no longer feel anything toward Julia. He was conscious of the broken thing in himself. He could not feel himself going on. There was nothing but annihilating space around him. He reflected that Julia could intoxicate herself with death, and that he had no such autoerotic sense.
One evening, after an early dinner, May and Bobby ran out, bent on their own affairs, and left Julia and Laurence in the dining room alone. Without looking at Julia, Laurence rose. She recognized, beneath his quiet manner, the furtive haste with which she had become so painfully familiar.
She touched his coat. "Laurence?" She picked up some embroidery which lay on a chair near the table and began to thrust the needle, which had lain on it, in and out of the coarse-woven brown cloth. She stared down at her trembling fingers—at the long third finger where the thimble should be.
Laurence waited without speaking. When she touched him like that he could scarcely bear it. Her long hands and her aching, drooping shoulders were a part of him. Even the sound of her voice was something that she dragged out of him that he found it hard to endure. He kept his head bent away from her. His mouth contorted. Frowning, he passed his fingers slowly across his face and covered his lips.
"Dudley Allen and I have separated. Everything between us seems to have been a mistake. I didn't know whether I had made you understand that." Her voice was weak, almost whispering. As she watched her needle she pricked herself and a drop of blood welled, slowly crimson, from the hand that held the cloth. She went on pushing the needle jerkily through some yellow cotton flowers. The late sunshine was pale in the room. Nellie was singing in the kitchen.
Laurence saw the blood spread on the embroidery and make a stain. He was all at once insanely amused. What she was saying seemed an absurd revelation of their distance from each other. She never considered him as distinct from herself. He found it ludicrous.
His finger tips moved along the edge of the table. He picked up a dish and set it down. In his heart he knew that Dudley was her only lover, but he was jealous of his right to suspect that it was otherwise. It made him cruel toward her when he realized how seldom it occurred to her that he might disbelieve what she said. "That is your affair—between you and him, Julia. I'm not interested in it."
She watched him helplessly. "Laurence, why is it always like this?"
He saw her hands shaking. He wanted them to shake. All grew dim before his eyes. He turned quickly from her and walked out of the room. He could not hurt her. It was terrible not to be able to hurt her. He fancied that he hated her more because he was so unable to revenge himself for her manner of ignoring him.
He went on through the hall into the street. He knew that Julia was robbing him of the detachment in which he had taken refuge from earlier suffering. He no longer possessed himself. Not even his own pain belonged to him.
He's cast her off so she comes to me. He did not think so, but he wanted to indulge himself in this belief. He had hitherto controlled a loathing for Dudley which was unreasoning. Now he resented Dudley for Julia's sake and could despise her through this very resentment.
Julia's isolation was pathetic, yet Laurence had only to recall the physical nature of his emotion when they were together to know that he could not express his pity for her. He tried to force all intimate sense of her out of his mind. When he actually considered himself rid of her he was conscious of being bright and blank like a mirror from which the reflections are withdrawn, and there was a crazy stirring of laughter through the emptiness in him.
He passed along the neat sidewalks, his head bowed. His air of abstraction was ostentatious. He wanted to enjoy uninterruptedly the relaxation of self-loathing. There were deep, violet-red shadows on the newly-washed asphalt street. The treetops were still and glistening against the line of faintly gilded roofs. The grass blades on the ordered lawns were green glass along which the quiet light trickled. Well-dressed children played under the eyes of nurse maids. A limousine was drawn up in the shrubbery that surrounded a Georgian portico. Laurence decided that he was relieved by the failure which separated him from the pretensions of success.
He recalled the unhappiness of his first marriage, and the depression he had experienced with his baby's death. It pleased him that he seemed doomed to fail in every relationship.
Alice and I are strangely alike after all. He took a grandiose satisfaction in the delayed admittance that he and Alice were alike. Wondering if Julia would ultimately leave him, he told himself that he was the one who ought to go away to save Bobby from the contamination of such bitterness.
Of May he somehow did not wish to think.
When Dudley communicated with Julia over the telephone her manner was strained and resentful, and when he wrote her notes she replied to him with a reserve that showed her antagonism. His curiosity concerning her and Laurence was becoming painful. He guessed that she was in spiritual turmoil and he could not bear to be excluded from the consequences of a situation which he himself had brought about. If he could imagine himself dictating the course of her life, and of her husband's, it would not be so hard to forego that physical pleasure in her which had made him resentful of her, as of all other women. At the same time he fought off relinquishing any of himself to her necessities. She needed to grow. She did not belong in her bourgeois environment but she must escape it alone. He told himself that later she would thank him that he had been strong for both of them.
Dudley was utterly miserable in his exclusion. He needed to appear noble in his own eyes, and to assert his superiority with all those with whom he came in contact. And this in a world which he knew had become too sophisticated to believe any longer in the sincerity of the noble gesture. In a letter to Julia he said, "Spiritually, I too am not well. My life is not yet right. I can no longer avoid the conviction that I should live alone. I am meant to have friends, but not to live with any of them. And against this hold the numberless ways in which my life is linked with the lives of others. I am in conflict and here goes much of the energy which should pour into my projected and incompleted works.
"I find that in several countries of Europe there are conscious groups of men who feel that I am doing an important work, and that there is significance in my life and thought. Is that not strange? Is it so, or is it a freak of the pathos of distance?
"If I could only resolve this endless conflict within myself! This rending and spilling of myself in the battle of my wills to be alone and to live as others do: to be out of the world, and to be normally in it! It is a classic conflict, but no less mortal for that."
After he had sent the letter he was uncomfortable because he had written only of himself, but he dared not consider Julia's attitude. She must accept his own definition of himself and his acts.
Dudley was ashamed of the strength of his interest in the Farleys. When he was most in love with Julia he did not admit to his friends that she had any part in his life. Now he was determined to initiate her and Laurence into his environment. As a protest against their misunderstanding, he must force them to live through his experiences. Dudley even decided that when Julia became a part of his world it would do no harm if it became known that she had been his mistress. Before he let her go he wished the world to see her with some ineradicable mark of himself upon her. She must accept his permanent significance in her life without wanting to be paid for it by some symbol of sexual possession. He insisted on a meeting with her. They saw each other again in the park.
The park on this damp day looked vast and abandoned. The tall buildings, visible beyond the trees, were far off, strange with mist, as if in another world. A few drops of rain fell occasionally on the heavy surface of the lake and the water flickered like gray light. The grass and the bushes around were vividly still.
Dudley walked about nervously waiting for Julia to come. He would admit no fault in his view of her and he could not explain his uneasiness. At a recent exhibition his pictures had been unfavorably criticized. He decided that he had not yet accepted the inevitableness of a life of isolation.
When he saw Julia coming along the path his eyes filled with tears. It was cruel that a woman to whom he had opened his heart had closed herself against him in enmity. He loved her as he loved everything which had been a part of himself. She was yet a part of him, though she refused to understand it. She wounded him unmercifully. When she halted before him and looked at him he tried to forgive her. He fought back too much consciousness of his small undignified body. "Julia! Aren't you glad to see me?"
She allowed him to press her hand. They went on together, side by side. Dudley was afraid of her cold face. It made him the more determined to be generous to her and rise above what she was feeling. Psychically he wanted to touch her with himself. There was a kind of pagan chastity in her reserved suffering. Such a thing he had never been able to achieve and he could not bear it in others. "How does your husband feel about what you have told him, Julia?" His voice shook.
Julia said, "I think he's too big for both of us. He understands things that neither of us know."
Dudley would not allow himself to be jealous. He knew that he must embrace Laurence's experience in order to rise above it. "If he had the narrow outlook of the average man of his class he would condemn us both. Does he condemn me?"
"I'm sure he condemns neither of us in the sense you mean."
"I want to see him and talk to him," Dudley said. "I want to be the friend of both of you, Julia, in a deep true sense. Will he meet me? Will he talk to me?"
With a curious shock of astonishment Julia found herself ignored again. "I don't know. Yes, I think he'll talk to you." Her white throat strained so that it was corded with tension. She bit her lips.
Dudley observed this and became elated. He told himself that sympathy drew him to her, and he wanted to kiss her. But he withheld the kiss. He could not accept the burden of Julia's deficiencies. If he made a friend of Laurence Farley it would frustrate her in her undeveloped impulses. Dudley tried to admire himself for being strong enough to resist her for the sake of something she did not comprehend and might never appreciate.
He placed his hand on her arm. "Julia, how do you feel—now—about him—about you and me?" When she met his eyes, she noted in them the old expression of impersonal intimacy which ignored all of her but what he wanted for himself. He could endure everything but her reserve. He knew that she despised him for not allowing her to suffer alone. He had to risk that. It was preferable to being excluded from a life which had belonged to him entirely. He could not bear to return the privacy of emotion to any one who had appeared to him in spiritual nakedness.
Julia shivered under his touch. "Why do you oblige me to go through the humiliation of telling you things about myself that you already see?"
"You do love me a little, Julia?"
Julia would not look at him. "You know I love you."
He was disconcerted for the moment, resenting the mysterious implication of obligation which he always found in such words. "Sister. Julia. In the environment where I met you, I never expected to meet a woman who had your deep reality. We must all go through terrible things to come to a true understanding of ourselves in the universe. I have been through just what you are passing through now, Julia. Let me be your friend and your husband's friend as no one else has ever been?"
Julia clasped her hands and pressed the palms together. "Of course you are my friend." She wondered if her feeling of amusement were insane.
Dudley was unhappy with himself but her visible misery stimulated him in a way he dared not explain.
The windows of Dudley's studio were open against the hot purplish night. Large, fixed stars shuddered above the factory roofs and the confusion of tenements. The still room seemed a vortex for the distant noises of the street. A fire gong clanged alarmingly. Some one whistled. Somewhere feet were shuffling and the rhythm of a bass viol marked jazz time with the savage monotony of a tom-tom's beat. There was a sinister harmony in the discordant blending of sound.
Dudley, when he opened his door to Laurence, was relieved by a sudden sense of intimate affection for the man before him.
Laurence said, "I lost my way. Have I disturbed you by coming so late?" He held out his hand with a slight air of reluctance.
Dudley was pained and rebuffed by the pleasant casual manner of his guest. He would have held Laurence's hand but that Laurence withdrew it. "I had nothing to do but wait for you," Dudley said. He took Laurence's hat and stick and drew forward a chair.
Laurence seated himself with strained ease, and scrutinized a half-finished picture that leaned on the mantel shelf opposite. "I've been reading some references to your work lately." As he glanced away from the study, his mouth twitched slightly and his hard smiling eyes were full of an instinctive defiance.
Dudley's inquisitive imagination was fired by the recognition of the secret voluptuous relationship between them. He held Laurence's gaze with a passionate expression of understanding which to Laurence was peculiarly offensive and disturbing. "Inspired idiocy," Dudley said. "I hope you won't judge me by the banal standards which govern my other critics." His light tone, as usual, was awkwardly assumed.
"My unfailing refuge." Laurence reached in his pocket and took out his pipe. Dudley observed the tension of Laurence's hands that were too steady.
A pause.
Laurence said, "Well—your pictures are interesting. I like them. I won't subject you to my bromidic attempts at analysis. My appreciation of art is limited by my training. I'm too factual in my approach to follow the ebullitions of the modern consciousness." He glanced about the room again.
Dudley was disappointed in him, and unhappy in the way a child may be. It wounded him, that Laurence, like Julia, persisted in excluding him by means of a false pride. "It is a great deal to me that you are ready to be my friend. Julia told me." Dudley's eyes were oppressively gentle.
Laurence did not reply at once. He looked about the room. His glance was bright with uneasiness. He pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. His knuckles were white. This visit was an ordeal which the bitterness of his pride had forced him to accept. He wondered what he must do to prevent talk of Julia which he could not endure.
"It seems to me it would have been very absurd if I had refused to be your friend." He made his gaze steady as he turned to watch Dudley.
Dudley's negligee shirt was open over his chest which was beaded with sweat. His face was flushed and his hair clung darkly to his moist temples. His lips pouted slightly beneath his small glistening mustache. The expression of his eyes suggested a domineering desire for openness. He felt that already through Julia's body he knew Laurence's life. The same virginal pagan quality of pride that had to be overcome in Julia was in Laurence too. Dudley wanted to perpetrate an outrage of compassion upon it. "I realized before Julia told me that there was a side to you altogether different from the one you show to the world."
Without knowing how to put an end to his humiliation, Laurence said, "I suppose there is in all of us. You artists have a peculiar advantage in being able to express yourselves." He put a light to his pipe, blew the smoke out, and stared at the ceiling. Whenever Dudley mentioned Julia's name Laurence wanted to repudiate the significance which it held in common for Dudley and himself. Rather than be included here, he preferred to think of Dudley and Julia together and himself as separate.
Dudley was wrapt in the conviction of a dark, almost fleshly, knowledge of Laurence, and his determination to love was as ruthless as any hatred. He never had the intimate experience of a personality without wanting, in a sense, to defile it by drawing it utterly to himself. He smiled apologetically. "We should never refuse any experience."
Laurence felt as if he were a woman whose body was being taken. He sucked at his dry pipe which was extinguished. "Perhaps it is my limitation which makes it impossible for me to receive everything so unquestioningly."
"But you do accept things."
"Not emotionally. Not in the way you mean."
Dudley realized that Julia had gone from him. His sense of loss was not merely in the loss of physical domination. Laurence was as precious as Julia had been. What was needed was a spiritual possession. Dudley's method of self-enlargement was through the absorption of others, but he had a theory of equality. His tyrannous impulses rarely persisted when equality was disproven. Without admitting it himself, he wanted to reduce his peers through his understanding of them. Then, too, on this occasion, his superior comprehension of Laurence might be proof to himself of Julia's inadequacy.
Laurence felt nothing but blind proud protest against invasion, and, when Dudley attempted to discuss their mutual interests, was furtive and adroit in defense.
May told Paul that she believed Aunt Julia was unhappy. He had to confess to himself that he disapproved of Aunt Julia too much to keep away from her. He wanted to go to the house where she was. But he had forgotten her work with the Board of Health, and arrived on an afternoon when she was not at home.
May took him to Aunt Julia's sitting room. He loathed the place. He disliked May when he saw her in it. And when he disliked May it made him despair. He thought that he had never in his life been so depressed.
"Aunt Julia's things are so lovely I'm always afraid of spoiling them." May sat down on the couch among the batik pillows and made a place for him beside her. Her face was blanched by the bright colors. Her short skirts drew up and showed her thin legs above her untidy shoes.
Paul seated himself at the other end and rested his head uncomfortably against the wall. "I suppose your Aunt Julia calls all these gew-gaws art." Whenever he tried to be superior some external force of evil seemed to frustrate his effort.
"Now, Paul, they're lovely!"
"I wonder how Aunt Julia relates this fol-de-rol to her soulful interest in the working class."
"But some of it's only tie dye, Paul. She did it herself out of an old dress."
Paul was baffled, but he preserved the sneer on his lips. Humming under his breath, he tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.
"I hope you've decided not to go 'way, Paul, like you told me last time. If you go away without telling them—your uncle and aunt—you're only eighteen—it will hurt them so." She could not look at him, for her eyes were full of tears.
Paul knew that she was suffering. Silly little thing! He went on humming, but interrupted himself to say, "Nothing but their vanity has ever been hurt by anything I've done. They want me to go on and study medicine—or law. What for? I don't care what becomes of me."
May bit her lips and twisted her fingers together. When Paul talked recklessly she knew that it was wicked because it hurt so much. It made her unhappy to be told that one needed to explain what one felt. She could not understand the thing that was good if it did not make one glad. It never occurred to her to try to justify herself before some obscure principle. Yet others had convinced her of her lack and she was in a continual state of apology toward them because so much was beyond her. She loved Aunt Julia. She wanted Paul to love her.
May wondered if Paul despised her because she never resented it when he kissed her. But the suspicion of his contempt, while it confused her, did no more than emphasize her conviction of helplessness.
Suddenly Paul ceased humming. He leaned toward her and took her hand. She pretended not to notice, but she was happy. Her fingers in his grew cold and covered with sweat. "I think you're unkind to them, Paul." Her voice shook. There was a waiting feeling in her when he touched her.
She made him sick of himself. Silly little thing! He dropped her hand as if he had forgotten it. He was hunched forward now with his knees crossed. He watched the floor where, in the bright afternoon light, dark patches were moving. There was a curious evil expression in his furtive eyes. His hair was rumpled in a colorless thatch across his head. His mouth was babyish. "That reminds me of a story—" Paul began. He paused a moment with a flickering sneer on his lips. Aunt Julia, damn her! All of him was against May. In spite of his ugly look, his rumpled hair and childish mouth were disarming.
May was uncomfortable. She did not understand why he hesitated. "Go on."
He glanced at her and was irritated by the air of uneasiness which came to her whenever she was uncertain. Why couldn't she laugh! Aunt Julia's brat! He wanted to punish her. She saw his uneven blush of defiance.
He began to speak quickly. "Oh, a story—about a woman and a monkey." He went on. His eyes were wicked and amused. When he had finished he whistled and gazed at the ceiling again.
May did not understand the story, but she felt that he told it to embarrass her and make her sad.
There was silence when he had done, until, with white face and strained lips, he resumed his whistling. In his irritation with her he wanted to cry. "Why don't you laugh?" he asked finally.
May blushed. Her lashes were still wet, her lips tremulous. She stuttered, "I—I can't."
He jumped to his feet and jerked up the cap he had thrown aside. "Good-by."
"Why, Paul, what's the matter? You're not going? What for?" He was halfway to the door before May recovered herself and stood up.
"I was going to meet a fellow this afternoon. I'll let you pursue your juvenile way undefiled." He hesitated, sneering, not seeing her.
May could not speak at once. "Please don't go."
When at last he glanced at her there was mist in his eyes. "Why not?" He saw that she was smiling as if across the fear that was in her look. He resented her fear and he loved her for it. Oh, little May! He loved her.
"Because—because! You were angry with me when I didn't laugh." She accused him. Why did he watch her so intently yet unseeingly? She felt his look as something which drew her inward, into herself, too deep.
"I'm not angry with you, May. Honestly, I'm not." In a dream he came near her: her thin small figure, her pointed face, her bright blank eyes, frightened and sweet. He came near her pale thick hair where it was caught away from her temples. As she turned to him he could see the end of her braid swinging below her waist. He was aware of her legs, with the straight calves that showed below her skirt, and of her breasts pointed separately through her sailor blouse. Everything that he saw was a part of something that was killing him. That was why he did not love her. She was too young. Because of this he hated her. She was like himself. He had to hate her. To save himself from the sense of dying and being utterly lost, he had to hate her. Though it was Aunt Julia's fault. He knew that.
All those books! He had tormented himself trying to understand them. Two years ago he hid under the mattress the picture of the fat woman. Childish. He abhorred the picture of the naked woman as he abhorred his Aunt with her filthy priggishness. He remembered that long ago when he asked her something he wanted to know she called him a dirty little boy. Poor kid! He was sorry for himself. It was all a part of Julia and the world and something that was killing him because there was no truth or beauty in life. They went on smiling in their ugliness, torturing the beautiful things and making them ugly like themselves. He would kill himself. He did not belong in this ugly cruel world.
White little May, white like a moon. Like snow and silence under the trees. Snow and silence and rest forever and ever. Forever and ever. Rest! Rest!
May let him touch her. For a moment she was happy in a bright blank eternal happiness that was an instant only. Then she was cold and alone and afraid of him: of his face so hot and close, the queer look in his eyes, and of his hands that she could not stop.
"Oh, Paul," she kept saying, half sobbing. "Please, Paul! Don't. Oh, don't, don't! Please, Paul, don't!"
When he drew her down beside him and they rested together on the couch she felt the hot nap of the cloth cover, stiff against her cheek. It seemed to her that the afternoon light was terrible in the still room. Bobby had a new canary bird and Aunt Julia had hung the cage inside the window. The bird hopped from the perch to the cage floor, from the floor to the perch, and the thud of its descent was monotonously reiterated. Occasionally seeds fell in a series of ticks against the polished wainscot. Beyond Paul's head, May looked into the pane above the bird cage, and the glass was like a melted sun. On either side of the glowing transparent squares, the yellow curtains were slack. May fancied that Bobby was on the stairs and that she could hear old Nellie moving about in the kitchen below.
The heat in the room made May cold. Paul's hot face against her cheek burnt like ice. She was dead already, shriveled in the cold heat. She pushed at him feebly. She could scarcely hear her own words that told him to stop. They were just a low buzzing from her cold dead lips. Paul was making her aware of herself, of her body that she did not know, that now she could never forget.
He was crying. It astonished her that he was crying, but she felt nothing except a cold burning sensation that came from the warmth of his tears slipping across her face. She was surprised that he cried so silently. Now he lay still against her with his face in her hair. His stillness was too deep. She could not bear it. Her body was cramped and stiff. She felt his heart beating against her like an echo of her own, and above it she heard the clicking of the traveling clock on Aunt Julia's desk, and the creaks of the woodwork on the stairway and in the hall.
If somebody came she would lie there forever. She was dead. She wanted to think she was dead.
But nobody came.
She shut her eyes again, and after what seemed a long time she knew that Paul was getting up and going away from her. She closed her eyes tighter so that she might not see him.
When he tip-toed across the room he made the floor shake. May's shut eyes with the sun on them were sightless flaming lead under her lids. She turned a little and hid her face in a pillow, wondering where Paul was, waiting for him to go so that she could bear it. All at once she knew that he had come out of somewhere and was standing beside her in the light looking down.
He leaned over and whispered, "Get up, May! Somebody 'ull come in and find you lying there!"
His voice was frightened. She wondered why he was afraid. It made her sick with his fright. He added, "I love you."
When he said, "I love you," she was, without explaining it to herself, ashamed for him. She did not answer. She was conscious of his stealthiness. It oppressed her. She would not let him see her face. When the floor shook again she knew he was going out. She waited to hear his footsteps on the stairs and the slam of the front door. Then she pushed herself to her elbow and glanced about. In her new body she was strange with herself. She stood up and smoothed her rumpled dress quickly and guiltily. Then she ran out of the room and upstairs to her own garret.
When the door was locked she threw herself on the bed on her face. The darkness of the pillow was cool to her eyes and to her whole soul. She wanted her throbbing body to lie still in the cool dark. She felt that she was ugly and terrible in her disgrace. She wanted to ask Paul to forgive her because she had behaved as she had. Sobbing into the bedclothes, she kept murmuring to herself, "I love him! I love him! Oh, I love him!"
To defend his vanity, Paul thought of himself as outcast and desperate. He wanted to invite the sense of tragedy in himself. He felt numb and despoiled. In the intensity of his misery earlier in the day there had been, after all, a kind of promise. Now May had gone away from him as if she were dead. The thought of Aunt Julia gave him only dull repugnance. He hoped doggedly that no one had known about it when he was with May. Beyond that he could not care.
When he reached home he went up to his room and, though it was yet afternoon, he fell asleep soddenly without a dream. Before, his fatigue had been sharp and hungry. Now he was only tired of his own emptiness and stupidity.
At the dinner hour he was called downstairs. Blaming his aunt and uncle for his own fears, he entered the dining room with a hang-dog air. His food was tasteless. There seemed nothing to think about until his uncle glanced at him. Guilt permeated Paul. He was hot and angry.
After the meal he went upstairs and hid himself in the dark. He wondered if any of the beautiful things he had dreamed about existed. Everywhere was inflated dullness. He dwelt on this until he astonished himself by finding a faint pleasure in his reflections. He decided that the stars he saw through the window were burning nettles, and that they pricked his glance when he looked at them. Suddenly there was something substantial and satisfying in his very self-contempt. He decided that he was no better than Julia, and that he detested her and himself for the same reason. It was peculiarly soothing to perceive his own courage in self-condemnation. In despising himself he unclothed himself and he was with her in spiritual nakedness, which somehow took on a fleshly image so that he dared not think of it too clearly.
Laurence forced himself to be alone with Julia. He went into her sitting room casually and took up a book, but when he was seated he did not read. His elbow rested on the arm of the chair and he held his head to one side with his brow laid against his palm.
It was Sunday. Dry hot air blew into the room from the almost deserted street. Now and then the window curtains swelled slightly with the breeze. The canary's cage hung in the light near the ceiling. The sunshine slipped in wavering lines across the gilded bars. The bird tapped with its beak on the sides of the cage which oscillated with its quick motions. Sometimes it flew to its swing that moved with a jerk, and a shower of seeds rattled lightly against the sill below.
Julia had drawn a chair up to her desk and spread before her the materials for letter writing. The pen lay idle in her relaxed fingers. Laurence tried to be unaware that she was watching him. "Laurence."
He stirred a little. It was hard to look at her. "Yes?" His smile was cold and uneasy. He was not ready to talk with her about himself.
Julia rose and came toward him. He glanced away.
When she stood by him she placed her hand on his. He made an effort not to withdraw his fingers. When he lifted his face to her his expression was kind and obscure. He seemed to draw a veil across himself.
"I can't bear it, Laurence!" She knelt down beside him. She wanted him to hurt her against his will. If she could rouse him against her she could endure it.
Laurence cleared his throat. He knew that he cringed when she touched his sleeve. He thought her voice sounded rich and strong with pain. Women were like that. "Can't bear what?" He realized that his subterfuge was absurd, but he smiled at her again.
She did not answer. Her eyes were steady with reproach. Her throat swelled with repressed sobs. "Why can't we be frank about things, Laurence? We can't go on like this always. I know I have no right here. I ought to go away! I know I ought. Somehow I haven't the courage."
He moved his arm away and stared out of the window. The smile went from his eyes. His gaze was vacant and fixed. "I don't ask you to go, Julia." His face twitched. His whole body showed his breaking resistance. Yet she knew that he would not relent.
"But you don't ask me to stay. It is painful to you to have me here, Laurence."
For a moment he compressed his lips without answering her. "I think you must decide everything for yourself. Your life is your own. You have told me that one of my mistakes in the past was in condescending to you and attempting to impose my own negative views upon you."