"We won't reproach ourselves with the past, Mr. Farley," Mr. Price interrupted. He would not allow his wife to be addressed in lieu of himself.
"I've never reproached myself, Mr. Price," Laurence answered coldly. Still he looked away.
"I don't doubt it, Mr. Laurence Farley! I don't doubt it!" Mr. Price's manner was full of secret scorn. He rocked on his toes and sucked his mustache ends again.
"The babies are dears," Mrs. Price said. "Bobby is wonderful."
Laurence regarded Bobby. "Sit up. Hold your head up. Don't act as though you were half asleep."
"Don't be cross with him, Laurie!" Winnie pouted. Laurence was torn. He must refuse to praise Bobby as the Prices praised him. Laurence felt that he could not protect his child against the approbation of his enemies. May sidled up to her father. When she touched him he did not look down at her, but put his arm about her. He held his shame of her close in his heart like a wound that he would not let be seen. He stroked her hair.
"Bobby is too heavy for you, Mrs. Price," Mrs. Farley protested, coming forward with an air of furtive protest.
"No, no!" Mrs. Price, exaggeratedly polite, held him closer and smiled. The smile made Mrs. Farley helpless. Mrs. Price knew it.
Mr. Farley had been outside the group. Now he moved nearer Mrs. Price and, leaning forward, shook Bobby's inert fist. "You like your old grandad, eh? You like your old grandad?"
Bobby scowled on them all and put his thumb to his mouth.
"What did I tell you about sucking your thumb?" Laurence demanded sternly.
Winnie's sweet eyes, covert with knowledge, gloated on her husband's face. "Don't be cross to him, Laurie, when everything's so nice."
"Stop sucking your thumb." Laurence took Bobby's thumb down from his mouth.
"For Heaven's sake, leave him alone. You'll nag him to death. All this ohing and ahing is enough to drive him to something worse than sucking his thumb," Alice said shortly.
Laurence gave her a swift contemptuous glance of anger, but controlled himself. "That's a good boy," he said more kindly as Bobby lifted himself straighter and stared around.
"Oh, everything's so nice! I was so afraid it wouldn't be!" Winnie sighed again with happiness. Laurence passed his hand over his eyes, the delicate hand that, below the coarse sleeve of his coat, was like the revelation of a secret.
"You didn't think your husband was going to refuse to shake hands with me, I hope?" Mr. Price demanded. His unsmiling joviality was terrifying. No one could ever say exactly when he became serious and he was perfectly aware of the tremors of uncertainty that stirred in his hearers. He enjoyed disturbing them.
"We are exercising mutual forbearance," Laurence put in quietly. In the irritation of Mr. Price's presence something was slipping from Laurence's grasp. It was only half-heartedly that he continued to hold himself.
"Forbearance toward me! I hope you don't think I want you to exercise forbearance toward my religious views, young man! Has he come to his senses since you married him, Winnie?"
Winnie smiled feebly. Laurence looked at the floor. His lip twitched.
Mr. Price seemed to wish to drown out the echo of his words in the ears of those present and began to talk fiercely to Bobby. "Fine child. Father not going to raise you up to be a prizefighter, is he? Wouldn't surprise me. I hope your mother'll bring you up as a Godfearing man. She mustn't leave your education regarding the next world to your father. You'd better take him in hand, Winnie." He stared at his daughter with his vague hard eyes.
Laurence felt his parenthood raped. "Winnie and I have come to a perfect understanding regarding Bobby's education," he sneered.
Mr. Price glanced up at Laurence. "Have, eh? Ain't you an atheist? Last time I talked with you, didn't you tell me you were an atheist?"
"I did, Mr. Price. I'm afraid I am deficient in tact." Smiling, Laurence lifted eyes in which the light of hate was drawn inward toward some obscure point of agony.
Mrs. Price set Bobby on the floor. His legs were stiff with being held and he made a few steps away from her uncertainly like a drunkard. "The dear child!" she murmured uneasily. Her quiet smile was over her face like the still surface of a pool filled underneath with little frightened fish.
"Tact, eh?" Mr. Price was not sure what the remark meant, but, to give himself time, permitted a knowing twinkle to creep into his eyes. He rose on his toes. "If you'll leave off trying to set up science in the place of God we'll overlook your lack of tact," he conceded finally.
Laurence bit his lips. He assumed an irritating air of indulgent amusement. It was irresistible. He dared not look at Winnie. "I've sworn to preserve a reverential silence in regard to all of your pet fallacies, Mr. Price."
"My pet fallacies, eh! The years haven't taught you respect for the opinions of your betters, then?"
"I've never met them," Laurence said. Mr. Farley coughed. Mrs. Price had called Bobby back and was talking to him in a low tone, very intently. Mrs. Farley talked to Bobby too. Alice made with her tongue a clicking sound of impatience. Laurence had moved away from May. She watched the men in controversy. Her mouth hung stupidly open. She had a shivering white face and her eyes were all pupil. She looked as though she had drowned herself in the darkness of her own eyes.
"Please, you two!" Winnie laced and unlaced her fingers.
"You haven't? You know when you're in the wrong, do you?"
"On the rare occasions when that happens," Laurence said with an ostentatious affectation of good humor.
"And you haven't found out yet that you're committing a sin when you set yourself up in opposition to Divine Truth! You're very complaisant, young man! Very complaisant! But I'll tell you that Natural Science is out of date. The Darwinists and Haeckelists and the rest of the dirty crew have to come crawling back to the Creator they denied, with their tails between their legs."
"You're making a dangerous admission in acknowledging such an appendage, Mr. Price." Smiling at the floor, Laurence reached out and drew May to him again. He defied them with his loyalty to her.
"Am I? The devil had a tail before he ever heard of Darwin, seems to me!" Mr. Price was still uneasy, but swelled a little with the readiness of his retort.
"Laurie!" Winnie patted Laurence's sleeve, her voice humble.
The humility in her voice inferred something in him which outraged his self-respect. "And I haven't a doubt that as in the present case the ass had ears!" he said sharply.
Winnie began to cry.
"I'll go, Winnie," he told her. It was inevitable. He had been that way before with Mr. Price. His hand fell from May's shoulder. He walked out. In the silence the group could hear the thick beat of his feet as he descended the carpeted stairs, and the reverberation of the front door which he slammed as he passed into the street.
Mr. Price's face was a dull red. He puffed out his cheeks. "That's what it comes to!" He shrugged his shoulders unutterably and turned with a gesture of departure and dismissal.
"Please don't go, Father!"
Mrs. Farley was wringing her hands. As May watched she seemed to be weeping from her own eyes her mother's tears.
"For Heaven's sake, don't take Laurence seriously, Mr. Price," said Alice.
Mr. Price lifted both hands with the palms out. "I don't! I don't! God forbid that any one should take that foolhardy blasphemy seriously."
Mr. Farley passed his hand over his face as though to brush away a cloud. His eyes were uneasy, his smile one of apology. "Laurence will regret it as soon as he is in the street."
"Regret! Regret's not the right emotion to recall that kind of talk. I take no account of what he said to me, but no one can go about in contempt of the God who made him and not suffer for it."
"I know——" Mr. Farley hesitated. His lips quivered a little.
"Oh, I knew I couldn't be happy!" sobbed Winnie.
Mrs. Price took her daughter in her arms. "Now, dear, your father has made up his mind to be forbearing. He won't go back on his word."
"No, I won't go back on my word, but I don't know whether I can ever bring myself to the point of coming into this house again. Not when that man's here."
"You oughtn't to take Laurence seriously, Mr. Price," Alice repeated. "I think we ought to forget about him and not spoil Winnie's day."
"I can't forget about him, Alice!" Winnie lifted her head indignantly from her mother's shoulder. Deep in her imagination Winnie, in a lace nightdress, was putting her arms about Laurie's neck. Her veins swelled strong and taut with confidence. She resented the injustice of being forced to choose between Laurence and her parents. Because of other things she could not forgive she would pardon him the day's scene, but she would not pardon her parents yet.
"It's all right, dear. Miss Farley don't mean that. She only wants us to forget the things your husband said to your father and I think that is exactly right. After he considers it I am sure he will come to the conclusion that he acted wrongly and be sorry too."
"I've had so much trouble," Winnie went on.
"Come, Bobby, let us all go downstairs and play games and help Mamma to forget her troubles." Alice jerked Bobby's hand. Leaning on her mother, Winnie followed. Mrs. Farley, her eyes red-rimmed with unshed tears of perplexity, shambled after, her dress rustling and disturbing her desire for self-effacement. Mr. Farley descended the stairs with finger tips gliding along the rail, smiling the abased smile of a blind man. May, hesitating on each step, dragged unnoticed a long way behind.
In the early morning the cloudy air had a texture like wet wool. The sky radiated colorless heat like a pool of warm water which one saw into from the depths. Work had not yet begun on the corner house, but in front of it dangled platforms suspended from pulleys. The vacant windows smeared with paint gave the house the look of a silly face smeared with weeping, an expression of tortured immobility.
Alice, on her way to work, had just emerged from her front doorway. As she descended to the street she watched ahead of her a tall, very thin woman in a worn silk blouse and an old skirt that still smacked of an ultra mode. The woman dragged beside her a very little boy in tight pants and a gay shirt. The little boy, swinging by her hand, leaned heavily away from her to pull a small red wooden wagon after him.
When the woman turned her head Alice saw her bright blonde hair combed in glossy and salient puffs, a cheap and unconscious defiance above her wasted face and her breasts, sucked dry on her flat body.
Alice walked after her. Life. Thinking of money. In the hot bed they touched each other. Rent due. The child began to cry.
Old maid barricaded behind ridicule. Coolness of being outside. Loneliness like a cool wound.
The woman went on. Taller, narrower in distance, with her long limbs and graceful stoop she resembled a sculptured angel. Tomb. Apartment. The woman walked before Alice into a narrow marble doorway. The stone rolled back and the angel went into the tomb. Haggard and bitter face. A little rouge put on carelessly. Despair. No one knows why.
Laurence had come in during the night and gone to sleep on the box couch without disturbing Winnie. In the morning she was the first to awaken.
It had rained before dawn. The hot sun floated outside the window in voluptuous mists. The white curtains seemed stained with the pinkish-brown light. They swayed and parted and between their folds the moist air flowed heavily from the steaming street.
Winnie could hear the staccato tap of a hammer on the house next door. Horses' hoofs rang on the asphalt with a flat sound.
The curtains opened like lips and made a whispering noise. Then Winnie could see the wet bronze roof opposite shining blankly against the faint bright sky.
The room was crowded with the atmosphere of two people who have quarreled. They were oppressed by their consciousness of each other. Through the darkness of his shut lids Laurence, only feigning sleep, tried to ascend above the close room and his almost intolerable awareness of Winnie's presence.
She had seen his lids flutter. Tired and sweet, she regarded him mercilessly. She could see how tense the lines of his body were under the couch cover he had drawn up over his feet. His lids, pressed tight together, twitched a little.
"Laurie!"
With a helpless feeling, he opened his eyes.
Winnie's heart beat combatively, triumphantly. "I've been lying here looking at you," she said, her plaintive pout begging him to infer everything. "Bobby's still asleep."
Bobby lay in his little bed relaxed like a drowned child. His lips were pale. His face damp with the heat. His shock of blonde hair fell back on the pillow away from his head. Winnie, beside her big baby, abandoned herself to a sense of dependence which she felt him to justify.
"Yes? I must have slept very hard." In an effort to hide his surprise Laurence responded quickly to her overture. He sat up, smiling elaborately, and began rubbing his eyes.
Winnie would not let him escape through such casualness. "Are you still angry with me, Laurie?" She lifted herself among the pillows and rested on one elbow. There was a terrible youngness about her soft, hungrily uplifted face, her thin neck, the collar bones showing below her white throat. Her eagerness was too vivid. He was conscious of her rapacious youth. It made him tired. Youth demanding of him life and more life. Winnie was ill, but there was no rest for them even in her pain. He felt old and afraid of her, as though he would never be able to get up from the couch.
"Angry with you? Was I angry with you?" He covered his eyes. His lips, smiling below his fingers, were deprecating. He stood up slowly and lifted his trousers from a chair. He felt ridiculous to himself putting them on.
"Laurie? Please? Don't be angry with me for wanting to see Mamma!"
He was hurt without knowing how she hurt him.
"Please kiss me, Laurie, dear! Don't be angry! I can't bear to have you angry with me!" Her eyes, strangely defenseless, opened softly to his. Their softness enveloped him and drew him down against the harsh little sparks of reserve that burnt in their depths.
"Kiss you?" he said. He took her fingers in his and kissed them. His lips were grudging. He still smiled. "Don't accuse me of being angry with you, Winnie. I want you to have your mother back."
"But I want you, too. Kiss me!Really!Not like that."
He leaned forward and his lips brushed hers. But she would not let him go. She was so slight, pulling him down, that he could not resist her. She pressed her mouth hard against his face.
"Don't be angry with me."
"I'm not angry—wasn't angry." Each word was a little shake to loosen himself from her.
"You won't talk to Papa that way again?"
"I won't give myself the opportunity. I won't see him again."
"Oh, Laurie!"
He withdrew above her, making himself paternal. "You must be sensible about this thing, Winnie. It's all right. I want you to see and be with your parents. If I avoid them it will be only for your sake. You're not well, Winnie. You're a little unreasonable."
"I can't bear being sick! Oh, Laurie, I won't be operated on! I can't bear it!" Her voice was passionate. She shrank, looking smaller among the big pillows. He pushed her into the limbo of invalidism. She did not know how to get out. His kindness was a wall between them.
He smoothed her hair. She was crushed under his tolerant hand smoothing away curls from her tear-wet face. "Shall I tell Mamma Farley you are ready for your breakfast?"
She gazed at him. Her eyes hurt him. They stabbed him through the silence she made. "Laurie, I think we are going to be so happy and then all at once when you talk about my being sick you seem so far away. You do love me?" She clung to his arm.
"Of course."
"Then kiss me again." He kissed her. Her terrible hunger hurt and confused him. He would rather not have seen her thin throat that suggested a young swan's, her pointed chin, her eyes, and the reddish hair which had slipped in confusion about her shoulders. The room, filled with her knick-knacks, choked him—her clothes on a chair, some soiled satin slippers, the mirror from which she seemed always to shine, her child asleep—hers and his together. He could not explain himself—felt that he was growing hard. He was ashamed of not loving her enough. Ashamed of the strength it gave him to know that he was not for her—now—that her health was keeping them apart.
"I want us to be happier than anybody, Laurie! Your father—you never talk to me about it! That woman out West who had a child by him! It's so—so terrible!" She felt his resentment of her persistent reference to it. There was something drunken in her which made her sling out words that were not wanted. She regretted a little this waste of her hoarded knowledge, but at the same time she was glad. He did not want to talk of it. She felt injured because he did not want to talk to her of it. She leaned against him. The tears ran from her blind uplifted eyes.
"That's nonsense, Winnie. What have we to do with them? I want you to be happy, too." He sat down beside her. She felt hopeless, as though she had lost him.
"Not just me, Laurie. Both of us."
"Of course. Both of us."
She was crushed. "You didn't know I knew all about your father, Laurie."
"No. I never told you the details, because it didn't seem worth while."
"You never tell me anything—not about yourself—or anything."
"I didn't think I could tell you anything about myself you didn't know already."
"Don't joke! I want you to love me."
"I do love you."
She was tired. She buried her face in the pillows. He rose from the bed and put on the rest of his clothes, but when he said good-by to her she would not answer him. He outraged the essence of her sex. She was weak. She wanted him to be weaker than she. She felt that he owed it to her. It was a crumb from his strength, she felt, to be weak to her who had to be weak to the whole world. She would not forgive him.
Laurence went out of the room, out of the house. A pale fiery mist rose up from between the houses and filled the wet morning street. The houses with lowered blinds were secret and filled with women. Girls going to work came out of the houses like the words of women. Women going to market passed slowly before him with their baskets. Pregnant women walked before him in confidence. The uncolored atmosphere threw back the sky. It was the mirror of women. Laurence felt crowded between the bodies of women and houses. He walked quickly with his head bent.
On the concrete pavements, washed white as bones by the storm of the night before, were rust-colored puddles. Dark and still, they quivered now and again, like quiet minds touched by the horror of a recollection. The reflections of the houses lay deep in them, shattered, like dead things.
Mrs. Farley stumbled up the dark stairway. Her knotted fingers with their tight-stretched skin kept a tense and fearful grasp on the scratched rim of the lacquered tray. On the clean frayed napkin she had put one of her best plates and on it rested a bloody peach and a dull bright knife. The peach, balanced uncertainly, rolled a little as Mrs. Farley moved. The knife clinked. Black coffee beaded with gold turned to saffron when it poured over into the saucer. The toast, burnt a little along the edges, slid back and forth in the napkin which enfolded it.
She stopped before Winnie's room. "Winnie!" Her voice sounded cracked with fatigue. With the tip of her black slipper, which was rough and gray with wear, she pushed the door back. The room opened bright before her. Her smile grew hard and solicitous.
Winnie sat up straight among the creased pillows against the dark old headboard. Her eyes were red. She smiled, too, and was consciously brave.
"Good morning, Mamma Farley! See how you have worked for poor little no-account me! Put the tray down and let me kiss you."
"Bobby isn't awake?" Mrs. Farley asked, embarrassed by her own pleasure as she pressed bitter and grateful lips to Winnie's firm cheek.
"Are you glad I was happy yesterday?"
"I hope you are happy today. You know how glad we all were."
"I want to be happy, Mamma Farley."
"And you will be, Winnie." Mrs. Farley set the tray shakily on the tossed bed clothes.
"You, too, Mamma Farley, dear. I want you to be happy, too." Winnie held out a small inexorable hand, and Mrs. Farley, unable to behave otherwise, took it. Winnie squeezed her mother-in-law's fingers. "I know you haven't always been happy, Mamma, dear." Winnie's dim eyes were lustful with pity. Mrs. Farley was frightened. Her hand trembled and she tried to pull back and resist the invitation of sympathy. "Papa Farley ought to love you more than anybody in the world!" Winnie asserted, passionately tender.
Mrs. Farley was shaken. Who's been talking to Winnie? She pressed her lips quiveringly shut. Her eyeglasses twinkled and shuddered with her heaving breast. Winnie felt herself strong with a love that nothing could resist. Exultant, she gloated inwardly over the knotted hand that trembled in her grasp.
"Your parents—I don't know—we won't talk about old people's troubles, Winnie." Mrs. Farley was recovering herself. Perhaps Winnie didn't mean that. "I suppose Papa Farley loves me in his way just as you love me in yours."
Winnie would not let her go. "You stand up for him. You're so good to him," she insisted with a kind of worshiping commiseration.
"Why shouldn't I be?" Mrs. Farley dared, trying to smile while she frowned, her evasive eyes shifting a little.
"Because he don't deserve it! Because he did what he did. Oh, Mamma Farley, I know you don't want me to talk about it, but I can't help it. I love you so. You're so wonderful to me!" Winnie's eyes shone, mercilessly sweet, into the hunted eyes of the elder woman.
"I don't know what you mean, Winnie."
They looked at each other. Mamma Farley could not look. She picked at the sheet.
"You dear! You dear!" Winnie hugged her. She was crying.
Again they leaned apart and regarded one another. Mrs. Farley's inflamed, withered eyelids twitched.
"Do you think Laurence really loves me? I'm so afraid!" Winnie said suddenly.
"Of course, Winnie."
"Oh, Mamma Farley, I want to be happy. I couldn't bear it if Laurence——" She buried her face in Mamma Farley's dress. Mrs. Farley stroked her hair.
"We're all foolish when we're young, but God is good to us. When we grow old we can have a little peace. But you're young enough—even for the kind of thing you want." Her pale mouth had a shriveled look of bitterness. "Love between men and women—the love you are thinking about—is not much in life, Winnie."
"But I couldn't bear not to have—not to have anybody love me."
"Look in the mirror. They'll love you." Mrs. Farley's eyes in her wet, wrinkled face were hard with contempt under the seared granuled lids.
Winnie, lying back, gloated over the thin white hair, the lined flaccid cheeks, and the eyes that glowed with weeping. Winnie swam in the strength of love like a swimmer sure of himself in trusted waters. She was grateful to the age and ugliness which did not claim her.
Mrs. Farley did not want Winnie to gaze at her any more. "Look! Bobby's awake," she said.
Winnie was satisfied and ready to be glad of Bobby, too.
The child sat up drunkenly. His touseled hair, matted with sweat, lay dark on his brow. His eyelids were pale and swollen with sleep. He rubbed them with his fists.
"Children are the surest happiness," Mrs. Farley said.
Winnie was oppressed. "I'm so afraid of being sick, Mamma Farley."
"You'll soon be well, I hope." Mrs. Farley had an air of resolution and dismissal. She went squinting to the crib. "My, what a sleepy boy!"
Laurie. Love. Children. Winnie had a terrible sense that she was losing some unknown thing which was precious and belonged to her but of which she was afraid.
"His night drawers are too small. His grandmother'll have to make him some. There's some nice stuff at that store next to the bakery."
They talked of shops. The atmosphere of the room seemed to lift with the lightness and sureness of their talk. They were safe and at rest among unchanging irrelevances. Women knew best the sureness of trifles. These were the things which did not change—which men could not change.
Late afternoon. There was no sun. Below the blank gray sky, the long blank street. Along the street a pair of sleek and ponderous black horses, with thick manes and shaggy fetlocks, plodded before a loaded dray. Their bodies rocked and swayed tensely with strain. Their huge feet clattered and strove against the asphalt. The hands of the driver, red, with full, knotted veins, hung loose between his knees, holding the slack reins. His body, in a khaki shirt, was hunched forward miserably. From his fat stupid face his eyes glanced dully under a bare thatch of neutral tinted hair. Only the horses, purposeful and immense in their obedience, seemed to understand.
In the gutter a street-sweeper, mild and tired, pushed dry ocher-colored manure into heaps. Again and again he stooped and lifted the shovel and the manure fell into a cart. He wore ragged white gloves too large for him. He was patient, but his gaze roamed, vague with speculation. Servant of the horses that dirtied the street, he was less sure than they.
At the corner house work was over for the day. The abandoned platforms of the painters dangled loosely on the long ropes. Through the smeared window-panes you saw empty rooms blank as the faces of idiot women waiting for love.
Alice walked slowly home from work. She saw her own windows where the awnings did not stir. Drooping, they cast their scalloped outlines vaguely into the depths of the shadow-silvered glass. May was on the front step.
"Hello, May." Aunt Alice's voice, very gruff.
May sucked her finger and ducked her head sidewise, smiling. Her finger slipped out of her mouth with a plop. She put it back between her wet lips.
"Coming in?" Aunt Alice held the door back. May went after her into the hall that was full of the smell of baking bread. Aunt Alice threw off her hat and walked, heavy-footed, into the living-room. May trailed after her in limp timidity.
Winnie, in her lilac négligé, sat in an armchair. "Oh, Alice. I've been talking to the doctor again and he's so horrid. He says I should have been operated on right after Bobby was born and now I'm getting worse."
Alice stood beside the chair and stared down. "Doctors like to croak."
Winnie reached up and clutched Alice's square dark hand. Winnie's white fingers were little claws digging into Alice's swarthy flesh. "Say I don't have to! I can't, Alice! I can't!"
"Well, I certainly wouldn't until I got into better shape nervously than you are now."
"Mother wants me to go away with her and I don't dare. I know it would do me good but I don't dare, Alice." Winnie half sobbed.
"Don't dare? What rot! Why shouldn't you dare?"
"Laurie will hate me if I go off with Mother! It doesn't matter how sick I am, he will hate me!"
"Winnie, you're talking the most unmitigated nonsense."
"I'm not, Alice. You don't know. He can't forgive me for wanting to be kind to Mother."
"I haven't noticed any signs of unforgiveness on his part. I admit he acted like a fool on Sunday but I suppose he can't be blamed. Your father's not the easiest person in the world to get on with, himself."
"I know, but you don't understand. Sometimes I think Laurie hates me for being sick. He don't love me any more! I know he don't."
"Laurence hate you for being sick! Good God!" Then Alice added, "You shouldn't talk this way before May, Winnie."
Winnie had her eyes shut. She made a gesture away with her hands. "Go out, May."
May moved into a shadow by the door, but she did not go out.
"I can't bear being sick. It m-m-makes me so old. Papa Farley—that time Papa Farley—that woman. They had a child, M-m-mother told me. Oh, do you suppose Laurence will do like that?"
"Like what?" Alice's voice was sharp—almost threatening—with distrust.
Winnie kept her eyes shut and wrung her hands. "I thought you knew all about it, Alice."
"About what?"
"Don't act as though you couldn't forgive me! That woman out West—and—and your father started to get a divorce and gave it up. I'm so afraid Laurence won't love me any more!"
Alice knew that her parents had had some trouble. It was the year she was away at school. She had heard fragments—allusions. Now she felt strange. She wanted to hear more but could not—not from Winnie's lips. Alice's coarsely fine face burnt bronze with shame. Her sad eyes of thick brown searched Winnie's evasive features distrustfully. "You mustn't talk about this, Winnie," Alice said. "In the first place it has nothing to do with Laurence. You know as well as I do that Laurence cares for nobody but you and never will. I don't believe he feels hard toward you because you want to see your mother."
"Now you're angry with me?"
"I'm not. I'm going upstairs to wash and brush. You cut out this morbid nonsense, Winnie." Alice smiled a hard, kind, dismissing smile, and turned away, walking briskly out with her firm, awkward stride.
May edged out of the shadow and came nearer her mother. It was half dark in the room. Winnie sniffed, oblivious to May. May came and stood very near. She reached over and passed a hesitant hand along the arm of her mother's chair.
Winnie started. May drew back and stood teetering on one foot, her face alternately dark and smiling. "Oh, May, I t-told you to go out."
May hung her head. A sort of shiver like the shimmer of water passed over her pale, uneasy face. She wanted to go toward her mother. Wanted almost unendurably to go. But something in her mother held her off. May was in torment between the two impulses which possessed her equally.
Winnie wiped her eyes. "Come here," she said at last. May went forward, smiling, trembling, half released. "You love me, May?"
May could not speak. She choked with affirmation. Her face was in Winnie's warm neck. May lost herself in the warm throat and the soft hair. If she did not have to see her mother's eyes it was well. May had a terror of eyes. They made her know things about herself which she could not bear. Sharp looks splintered her consciousness.
Winnie, overcoming a shudder, admitted the caress. "You'll always love Mother, won't you?"
After the evening meal Mr. Farley took a newspaper into the living-room. There he sat by the lamp with the green shade. Through the still room the light, concentrated under the lamp shade, rushed to the carpet. On the way it spread, glistening, over the oak table, and brightened one-half of Mr. Farley's face. The newspaper in his hands was glassy with light. The print looked gray.
The rain that made the air sharp had not yet fallen and the dim curtains against the open windows shook now and then as with sudden palpitant breaths.
Alice walked about the room nervously. Several times she went to the window and glanced out. When she pulled the curtain back her father's newspaper flapped against his hand, but he showed no impatience.
Alice came and stood before his chair. "Come go for a walk with me!"
"Walk?" He looked up at her. He was vaguely patient and smiling a little. "Isn't it raining?"
"No. Come along." Alice took his arm. He folded his paper carefully and placed it on the table. Then, stiff and heavy in his movements, he got up.
Alice dragged him into the hall and he took his hat down. "You ought to have something over your head," he said to her.
"Rubbish! It's summer. Come on."
Alice flung the front door wide. The wind took their breaths for a second. He stumbled a little as he followed her down the steps and into the empty street. Overhead the moon, a lurid yellow, scudded between transparent black clouds.
"It's too stormy to walk. We mustn't go far or the rain will catch us."
"It won't yet awhile. I had to get out of that house." Alice linked her arm in his. She could feel his discomfort in her talk as though it came through her sleeve against him.
"I'm sorry to hear you talk about your home like that, Alice." Mr. Farley sounded hurt.
"Who wouldn't! I loathe Mamma—that's all."
Mr. Farley's arm quivered where it brushed Alice's shoulder. "You're unjust to her. She's done the best she can for you."
"Has she! Well, my God, she couldn't have done worse."
"I don't think you're just to her."
They walked on. Alice's heavy skirt beat her ankles above her stout shoes. Mr. Farley's coat-tails flapped. Paper rustled in the gutter.
"You make me sick about being just to Mamma," Alice said almost tenderly. "Whom was she ever just to? What about being just to yourself?"
"We can't ask too much for ourselves in this life," Mr. Farley said soberly.
"Bosh! I wish to Heaven you had left her that time when you wanted to!"
Mr. Farley was shocked. Alice had never spoken to him like this. His arm quivered more than ever. Unable to reply to her for the moment, he was a dung-beetle, rolling his astonishment over and over and making it ready for speech.
"I hardly know how to answer you, Alice. I don't think there ever was a time when I could have taken any joy which came through a sacrifice of other people's happiness. I——" He was confused by his own words. He stopped talking suddenly: Alice could feel that his body was rigid against hers. He could not forgive her.
"Not even when you loved that Mrs. Wilson, eh?" She remembered the name all at once, having heard it long ago.
Mr. Farley stopped, still. He put his hand to his forehead. His other arm fell away from Alice. It took him an instant to answer her. She tapped her foot on the pavement. The wind whizzed in their ears.
"Alice, I—you are referring to things too personal to—I ought to resent it."
"Resent it. I'd be glad to see you resent something." She wanted him to strike fire against her mother's dullness.
He could not bear her smile.
"Your mother is a good woman——"
"I suppose she is. God save us from good women!"
Mr. Farley walked on slowly. He walked like an old man. It made him feel tired when he thought that anyone questioned the nobility and excellence of his resolution.
"When you have had more experience of life, Alice, you will see how easily we err, and how it's always better to accept the weight of old burdens rather than assume new ones."
"I'm not likely to be offered new ones."
"What do you mean?"
"What I say. Ugly old maid at twenty-nine. My life will go on like this forever and ever."
Mr. Farley was ashamed with Alice because she told the truth about herself. It hurt him to face her ugliness and not be allowed to lie to her.
"That's morbid talk," he said, walking more slowly and rubbing his forehead again.
"Bosh! I'm not morbid. My life ends where it began—that's all. You're the one who makes me sick. Why don't you kick out of this? Why don't you find somebody with some self-respect who means something to you, and go off and be happy? Some people may admire you for all this giving up your soul and allowing it to be spit on, but I don't." Her heart was hard against him. It relieved her to push her father from her out into life. It helped her to make him live in her stead.
Large round raindrops pressed their foreheads softly like rounded lips. The rain falling through the chill air was warm.
"I hardly think it has been any sacrifice of my self-respect for me to do my duty toward your mother," he answered resentfully.
They walked on quickly, a little apart. Alice was silent with irritation. She tried to fill her soul with the calm of disgust but she was feverish against his inertia. Mr. Farley felt himself misunderstood.
Alice had been reading in bed. It was late at night. The room was very still. She heard Mrs. Farley's tired step on the back stair coming up from the kitchen.
"Mamma!" Alice called in a sharp, subdued voice.
Mrs. Farley ambled slowly forward and leaned against the portal. She squinted at Alice wearily. "Well?"
"Come in."
"I want to go to bed early. I've had so many things to do." She entered the room uncertainly and sat on the edge of a chair. Her tired hands twitched a little in her slack lap. Her hair was untidy. Sweat glistened on her gray upper lip above her pale brown mouth. When she turned her head Alice saw the thick white down on her cheek. Her glasses were on her nose and behind them her blank eyes regarded her daughter stealthily. "You don't seem to be well, Alice. I've noticed how fidgety you've been getting in this heat."
"I wish it were only the heat." Alice sat up and hugged her knees with her big bare arms. Her nightgown was loose. It showed her heavy neck and the swell of her large breast. Her hair had slipped down and hung in moist dull locks about her hard intent face. "Do you think this operation Winnie has to go through with is serious?"
Mrs. Farley rocked herself a little. Her heel tapped the carpet restlessly. "I don't know. How can you tell?"
"At any rate her parents can afford to give her the best care."
"Yes, but that's the worst of it! The worst of it. Laurence can't bear to have her take things from them." Mrs. Farley spoke in a worn flat voice and rocked herself again.
"How absurd!"
"Oh, he'll have to let them help. There's nothing else to do."
"I suppose that's why Winnie's always in hysterics lately?"
"Is she?"
"My God, Mamma! Take a little interest in something."
Tears of protest rose in Mrs. Farley's eyes. Her mouth shook. She made an effort to rise, then sank back. "No, I take no interest in anything but work," she said bitterly. "Keeping house for you and your father——"
"Why do you do it, then? My God, you could have stopped ten years ago." Seeing her mother's eyes fill with tears, Alice's own dry eyes felt a sudden coolness. "Whom do you do it for? Laurence and I are old enough to look out for ourselves!"
Mrs. Farley's shoulders drooped and shivered. She wagged her head on her lean neck in helpless protest and reproach. Her body rocked. "I suppose your father don't need me," she said scornfully, crudely wiping the sweat from her face with her hand. She looked like a blind woman, hearing Alice from a long way off.
"Of course he doesn't need you! You ought to have found that out the time he tried to get a divorce from you!" Alice, mysteriously urged to cruelty, bore down upon her mother. Alice's eyes glittered inscrutably.
Mrs. Farley could not bear them. She stood at last, tottering a little. Her breath came quickly and raspingly. "Hush, I tell you! Hush! You've brought this up before. There's something cruel in you makes you want to go over and over things that are done with!"
"I suppose you think I'm an interfering old maid?"
"I don't know what you are."
"And you don't want to know." Alice sounded amused. It was an unpleasant sound.
Mrs. Farley, gazing very deliberately at the carpet, blew her nose. "I've never discussed my relation to your father with his children and I'm not going to now. I've sacrificed myself for what I thought best and it's nobody's business but my own."
"Sacrificed!" echoed Alice contemptuously.
"I won't listen to you and that's all there is to it. I never expected gratitude so I'm not disappointed." Mrs. Farley, not looking back, dragged into the hall.
Alice lay still an instant, her expression one of relentless retrospect. Her eyes were enigmatic but her mouth was twisted with disgust and her nostrils were wide and tense. She reached above her head and turned out the light.
The curtain flapped. Staccato fingers of rain tapped on the pane.
In the room it was dark. The narrow dark. The walls of the room drew near. She felt herself pressed between them.
Alice tossed from side to side. When she lay quiet finally the darkness receded from her, touched her lids softly in passing.
Death! Oh, my God, I want life!
She sat up in bed holding her heavy breasts. Father! A great body unmotivated. Alice's hot will sought for a world to impregnate. Wish-washy mother who had given birth meaninglessly.
Horace Ridge. She grew cool with despair—desireless.
The hot sheets turned cool. Far away the beat of rain on the window. Under the lifted sash the rain-wet wind swept through the room, frozen pain, threads of frozen wonder embroidering the hot dark. Wet wind beat the soggy awnings against the glass. A dank smell came in.
It was a cold August morning. The pale sky was filled with a dim still light. In the dining-room the yellow shades, half lowered, strained the gloomy radiance through them and made it a heavy orange. The tablecloth, splattered with coffee stains like old blood, was overcast with trembling reflections of yellow. The morning meal was over. The empty plates were scattered about smeared with hardened egg. The half of a muffin was mashed on the dingy carpet.
Mr. Farley, a little away from the table, sat reading his paper. Mrs. Farley was collecting the débris of breakfast. Her feeble hands moved among the dishes with shaken determination.
"Was your egg fried enough?" she asked.
"Yes, yes. Very nice." Mr. Farley glanced up and gave his wife a sightless smile. Troubled by what Alice had said to him, he was uncomfortable when Mrs. Farley spoke. He began to fold his paper.
What he was finished with, he pushed out of his mind into darkness. Alice had dragged his memories, and now the past came up to him like a corpse floating. Helen out West. She might come East next month. He hoped not. His son. Place where he sent money. He paid to be allowed to stop thinking about it.
"I'm worried about Winnie. I thought her reconciliation with her parents would improve her frame of mind, but now she seems more nervous and unhappy than ever. The thought of that operation preys on her mind."
"Well—I think she ought to go out into the country for a rest before there's any more talk of operation."
"She thinks Laurence will never be able to forgive her if she goes off with her mother and father."
"Oh, now I think that's too bad. She mustn't think things like that about Laurence." Mr. Farley talked kindly with a sort of clerical remoteness. His lips smiled wearily. His head was bent. He stood up.
Mrs. Farley picked up her pile of dishes; put the dishes between herself and life. The talk with Alice the night before had made Mrs. Farley feel furtive.
"Don't work too hard." Mr. Farley walked out.
Mrs. Farley saw May outside in the hall. "Come here, May. See if you can help me take the plates to the kitchen."
May came in, glad to be called. Her grandmother did not look at her. She picked up a plate with a cup on it. She walked into the kitchen, taking careful steps, the rim of the plate, held with both hands, pressed so tightly against her breast that it cut. The cup jiggled rhythmically, bumping time to May's steps. May's mouth hung open. Her face was bewildered with anxiety. Her breath came fast. With immense relief she reached the sink and, leaning over, slipped the plate into it.
Mrs. Farley had to talk to some one. She wanted to push the trifles forward in her life and crowd back the darkness, filling it with bright hard things, baubles, grocerymen, and dishes; so she asked May, "Has our groceryman gone by here this morning? He promised to call and exchange that condensed milk for evaporated milk."
"No'm," May said.
Mrs. Farley, frowning, her brows twitching, looked at May. Mrs. Farley could not see the little girl without feeling an irritable prompting to command her. "Go wash your face and see if your mother is awake. If she isn't, don't rouse her. Don't let Bobby see you or he'll begin to clamor to get out of bed."
May ran dutifully out.
"Don't clatter up the steps!" Mrs. Farley called sharply.
May walked very softly up the creaking stairs.
Mrs. Farley had the soiled clothes to count. She left the dishes to soak and went into the dining-room again with the big bundle tied in a sheet.
"One, two, three, four." She untied the sheet and began to count. She could not count fast enough. She crammed her mind with numbers. It was like trying to fill a slack sack to cover something hidden at the bottom.
"Shirts. Socks."
Not darned. Must darn today. Alice's stockings. Alice is a hard, selfish girl.
"Tablecloths. Two—two"—murmuring—"what did I say?"
Sacrifice. We must all make sacrifices. The home.
"One, two."
Her heart smoldered damply in its resignation. She squeezed love out of her heart.
Those awful days! Ten years older. People one did not know seemed to seek one accusingly in the street.
Furtively, she recalled the birth of her son, remembrance of a strength that had somehow become weariness. Winnie.
In the dark doorway Winnie appeared in a muslin dress. She was smiling, a little wan. Her hair was dressed high. She looked plaintive yet determined.
"I won't be sick and lie around," she said. "I'm going to help you work."
"You're going to do nothing of the sort! You sit right down here and I'll give you your breakfast at once. Did that child wake you up after all?"
"No. I was awake."
"Well, sit down."
"Oh, Mamma Farley, I want to fix my own egg." Winnie, protesting without conviction, allowed herself to be pressed into a chair.
"Where did you leave Bobby?"
"He's still asleep."
"Well, you had no business to get up."
Winnie gazed up with sweet greedy eyes. "I don't dare be sick any more. Sick people are horrid. Nobody loves them." Winnie's mouth was patient, quivering, below her lifted eyes.
"Yes. Nobody loves them." Mrs. Farley joked laboriously.
"You dear!" Winnie reached out and grasped Mrs. Farley's hand. Winnie's eyes, like brown bees, crept with their glance into the vague combative eyes before them. Thinking of yesterday's talk, Winnie's gaze pierced the rough-dried pongee blouse and the sagging black skirt, and saw the small high-shouldered form beneath. Winnie's looks invited to pain as to a bath of wine enjoyed with closed eyes.
Mrs. Farley's eyes filled with tears. Ugly and old, before Winnie's pity Mrs. Farley was a woman beaten back by a lover. She put forth a smile that was like a weak and gentle hand caressing an enemy. "Bless you, dear. You sit still while I get your breakfast."
She walked out quickly.
When Laurence came home to dinner Winnie, still dressed in her best, was alone in the living-room.
"Hello! You've assumed a new rôle," he said from the doorway.
She could see that finding her there made him uncomfortable. She smiled at him with a kind of happy pain.
He came forward. He was kind and distant. His lips brushed her hair.
She gazed up at him. Her eyes, with crushed back lids and lifted lashes, melted open for his.
"I don't want to be sick, Laurie. I've got to go away with Mother. You won't hate me for going away with her? I do need a change so!"
He stood before her with a kind of mocking fatigue, but she saw that he was sunk deep in himself. She wanted to drag him up.
He shook his head. "I don't know what to say to you lately."
She reached up and laced him with her arms. "Am I so unreasonable? Oh, Laurie, I don't want to die."
He seated himself helplessly on the arm of her chair. "Why think about something so improbable as dying?"
"But I might. I want you to care," she whispered.
"Don't you think I care?" His voice had a grating note as he tried to be light.
"Of course—yes—I guess so. But it's so awful to think about."
"Then don't think of it."
"I can't help it."
Death. The word had not been alive to her until this moment. Suddenly she heard it about her, whispering like wings. She floated beyond Laurence, beyond the room.
With a quick intake of breath she shut out terror grown too delicious.
"Then you will let me go away with Mother? You won't stop loving me, Laurie?"
"I'll shake you for talking nonsense," he said, getting up.
She hated him for escaping her, but her mind was made up and the next day when her mother called the morning of departure was set.
Settling her pince-nez on her flat nose before her fixed and despairing eyes, Mrs. Price pressed Winnie's face to her flat black bosom. "I'm so glad, dear. It was so foolish of my little girl to hold out against having her parents do anything for her. Your father is so good, Winnie. There is nothing I can ask for you that he isn't willing to give. You mustn't deprive him of that pleasure."
Winnie thought of Laurie and was stiff in her mother's embrace, yet at that moment could not have said which of them was most irritating.
Mrs. Price always avoided Laurence's name.
When Mrs. Price had gone Winnie lay in her room on the couch, excited and oppressed. She said death to herself, and the word echoed inside her like a cry down a long hall. Then the echo was lost in the deeps of darkness. But it continued to quiver below the surface of her life.
Winnie thought of being sick. She was harsh with a knowledge of herself. She would not be sick. Closing her eyes she imagined her mouth. With a kind of horror of its own act, it pressed Laurence's. She woke up.
The noonday sun outside was pale with rain. Winnie heard footsteps in the still noon street. Death. The dancing word fluttered ahead of the hurrying feet.
Winnie moved fretfully on the couch. She saw Death as the face of an insistent stranger thrust into her own. Stupid thing which she did not know. She pushed it aside feebly, feeling for what had meaning to her—Laurence, Bobby, Mrs. Price.
All at once she realized that Laurence had come home for something and was in the room. He rummaged at his desk. He was subdued in his movements, trying not to rouse her. She watched him between half-closed lids. He was familiar to her. The very crooked set of his thick neck in his broad shoulders was food to her. Hungrily she opened her eyes wider and lifted herself to her elbow.
"What's the matter, Laurie?" Her whisper, sharp and sweet, pierced the somber stillness of the room where the shades had been drawn for her to rest.
"Hello! I came to get a note book. Did I wake you?" He had started at the sound of his name, but as he faced her he held himself contained in his sharp cold smile.
"I don't care. I've been having horrid dreams, Laurie."
"That's a silly thing to do."
"Don't make fun of me. Come sit by me a minute."
"I haven't much time, dear." He came and sat on the edge of the couch. "Don't you want the shades up? It's so gloomy."
"I want you first. See how cold my hands are!"
She gave him her hands. He took them as though he did not know what to do with them. His eyes were still full of the brightness of the street and he could not see her plainly.
"I want you to love me. Oh, Laurie, you do love me!" She groped up his arms, his cheek, until she had found his mouth. She covered it up with her hand. She did not want it to speak against her. When he tried to talk she pulled him down until his eyes pressed her breast. She drew him deeper into the warm covers on the tumbled couch. She was cold. Her hands said that he must warm her. Memories of pain were silver veins in her body. Twisting herself on the couch to bring him nearer, she wrenched her arm, sharp pang of happiness.
"Love me!" she entreated. Her mouth clung against his. She could feel the force of his quickening heart beats as though they were her own. The muscles in his arm twitched under the rough-napped cloth of the sleeve which brushed her cheek. Her nostrils dilated against his arm. The smell of his body was bitter. She wanted to drink in the vividness of his strong live flesh that resisted her.
Around the dimmed squares of the yellow shades, light, entering, made shining borders. Noises drifted in the light under the bright edges of the yellow shades. Hammering from the house on the corner reverberated through the room.
"Winnie! I can't—you mustn't. You're not well enough. You mustn't excite yourself like this!"
She felt him passive in his resistance. Reluctantly her arms slipped away. Her resentful eyes shone at him from the gloom with a small and pointed light.
He leaned away from her, patting her hair as he came gradually to his feet. He did not want to see her because she made him feel guilty toward himself. Then he was obliged to look. When he smiled at her he kept her outside his eyes. He seemed relieved in spite of himself.
"Poor little sick girl," he said as to a child. "I'm glad you're going away with your mother. We'll give you a nice rest and have you all fixed up."
"You don't love me!" she said, looking at him stormily.
"Please, Winnie. Things are hard enough." His face was drawn with the effort of his continued smile.
"You don't." She turned over and closed her eyes.
"Don't be absurd." He joked uncomfortably.
But she would not look at him.
He walked out on tiptoe as though he thought her asleep.
When she knew he was gone she began to cry, and, keeping her eyes closed, moved her head from side to side and struck into the pillows with her fist.
Laurence did not go home to dinner, but remained working at the laboratory until after midnight. As he walked home the city streets, washed thinly with light, were yet thronged. His mind was sharply intent on itself. It was like the keel of a ship, parting the swarming life before it.
But as he drew nearer the place where Winnie was his heart strained. He felt suffocated. There were women standing in doorways. Their shadows wove the darkness together and drew it tight about his heart. He hated his work but the doing of it gave him relief, for it could not enter him.
The glow from a street lamp fell on his own house—purple-red walls that held Winnie. The big gilt figures on the transom above the door glistened on the glass that gave back a blank reflection of the light. He put in his latch key. The door, swinging away from him, seemed drawn inward with the pull of the darkness.
It shut ponderously behind him. He hesitated a moment, resisting some unknown inevitability. It was very still in the dark.
Only the stairs were half revealed by the pallor of the light that came in high up from the street.
He walked up softly and opened the bedroom door. He could hear a breath like the respiration of shadow. He knew it was Bobby.
Then somehow he realized that Winnie was awake and holding herself apart from the dark.
He did not speak. She did not speak. He sat down and began to take off his shoes.
As he laid the shoes away from him he was aware of her awareness as though she were seeing him stoop forward in the dark. He had a sense of his own motion as a pale line etched across a thick surface. When he unbuckled his belt and began to draw his trousers over his feet he felt the sharp sweep of his moving arms tearing the quiescence of the room.
He stood up naked. His cold toes gripped the hot nap of the roughened carpet. He pulled on his pajamas and the white cloth, as it was drawn up his legs, was cool white fire, that burnt upward from his bare feet.
The room seemed a final blackness into which the dark of the night outside had flowed and gathered as in a pool. Still feeling himself burning white in the cool cloth, Laurence walked to the side of the bed and looked down to see if Winnie were asleep.
Very faintly he saw the rigid line of her body, but through her nightdress he perceived her tense, like a protest. He could not see her eyes but he shivered with the feeling that they were very wide open and sightless. The darkness was against her eyes, holding her rigid upon the white sheet in the dark bed.
"Laurie!"
"I thought you were asleep." He did not know why he lied.
She did not answer at once and he stood waiting. "Laurie!"
He felt suddenly feverish in his cold clothes.
She reached out and touched him. The feel of her hand flowed along his hand and up the veins of his arm. He felt as though her hand had been laid upon his heart. His heart beat quickly. He denied his heart. He was passive. He stood apart from himself. He was unrelated to Winnie, sick and tense in the bed.
"Laurie!" she whispered again. She drew him down beside her.
"You are sick, Winnie," he said. Sure of himself, he did not resist her.
She reached up, groping to cover his mouth. It made her angry when he told her she was sick. She did not want him to build up words between them. She tried to draw him into herself, into the formlessness of contact.
"Oh, I can't sleep, Laurie! I want you to love me."
"I do love you, Winnie. If I seem not to love you it is because you are sick."
"I'm not sick! I won't be sick. You don't love me!"
"I do!"
"Please love me! I'll die if you don't love me, Laurie!"
He resisted her.
She drew his hand to her and placed it like a cup over the swell of her breast.
He trembled. "Winnie, my darling, we mustn't——"
"Laurie, I'll go mad!"
"Why, Winnie? I love you, Winnie."
But he did not love her. She seemed to him like a sickness. They were both sick with her.
"Kiss me again."
He kissed her. His palm tingled with the strangeness of her breast.
"I can't let you go 'way from me, Laurie!"
"I don't want to."
She held him. Suddenly she was no longer strange. His hand read the strangeness of her with the relief of familiarity. She burned him with wonder.
Winnie felt him yield and was glad, but her triumph congealed in agony. She fell away from him. She was cold. She was still. The throbbing of her body came to her like an echo which she could scarcely hear. She had forgotten the meaning of it. Who was this man? She was afraid.
She waited for him to leave her.
Laurence was tired with the feeling of Winnie that flowed through his body. She was in his veins degrading him with possession.
If she should have a child. He would not think of it. He walked over to the couch and climbed upon it. He would not think. Driving his thoughts from him, as he lay down, he felt the flap of the window shade and the respiration of Bobby rattling in his empty mind.
He tossed. His body was hot. The sheet he pulled over him made him shiver. Then he grew cold and longed for the heat to cover him up. He felt naked. He wanted to lie drowned in heat, miles thick in darkness.
Winnie awoke. It was morning. The room was cool and bright. Sunshine made the curtains glow. Patches of light shuddered delicately here and there on the carpet. A spear of sunshine shattered itself on the looking-glass.
Laurence slept on the couch with one arm tossed up and his head thrown back. His mouth was open. His face in sleep seemed stupid with pain. Bobby slept, too, stirring and murmuring a little. Winnie found something oppressive in the sight of people yet asleep like this in the full blaze of the sun.
Winnie's mind was clear and calm with the ease that came of sleep, but in the center of her being there was a dark spot of indecipherable vividness.
Last night. A dark spot of terror. Laurence had been frightened by what they had done. She wanted him to be frightened.
Death. If she had a child she would suffer—not he. White and holy, she felt herself a beautiful stillness in the turmoil of Laurence's cowardice.
She could not part with this fear. If she had a child Death was her hand from which he could not escape.
Midnight. The street lamps shone into the bedroom, making bright shadows of the drawn shades. The bureau, the bed, bits of furniture here and there, darker than the darkness, reflected the light heavily.
Laurence stood outside the door in the hall. He was trembling, afraid of his own room. He had stayed away all day because he could not see Winnie, because he hoped that when he reached home she would be asleep.
It was quiet. He opened the door and stepped inside. The sudden draught lifted the shades ponderously and let them drop again.
Fresh, clean wind from the quiet midnight street surged into the room. Light floated in under the lifted shades. It seemed as if the wind, cold and shining, were washing away the darkness.
Winnie was awake again. Laurence stood still.
He waited a long time. He felt shaken. If I take her again she will die.
He did not believe it. He went toward her with a nausea of relief. "Die" was the word of a song. It was the strange music of passion that said die.
He waited by the bed. He wanted her to tell him to go away. He could feel her still and looking at him.
When he knelt by the bed and reached his arms around her he wanted her to evade him.
"Winnie?" She trembled when he touched her. He wanted her to speak. But she was quiet.
She let him kiss her mouth.
Death. His understanding could not hold the vagueness of the strange escaping word. He felt her thinning from his grasp. His veins swelled with death.
Then he became the death-giver, glad, in spite of himself, of the drunkenness of moving with the unseen. Through the banality of sex which oppressed him, there pushed the will of an exalted and passionate horror.
He took her. They were dead.
Winnie lay face downward and sobbed. There was no triumph in her now. She felt herself as if already large with child, heavy and helpless. Through the darkness of her closed lids she could see, as if before her, Laurence's coarse and handsome head, his eyes turned toward her with their strained gaze, and the odd set of his neck that kept his face always a little to one side. She knew now how much she hated him.
Laurence, walking along the deserted streets, was relieved to find the long vistas ending in darkness. The night rose high and expressionless before him. Beyond the dim lights, the violet-blue horizon was a clear quiet stretch like a lake of glass covered with flowering stars.
His pain was choked in him, suffocated by the quiet.
His mind was sick yet with Winnie's sickness, but the pain of her no longer belonged to him. He wondered if she would have a child, if he had killed her. But the agony of his conjecture related to something already finished. She had made him love her against them both. He did not want love like that. It could never be otherwise. They were separated from each other by their own bodies.