CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty—and there is Alice."
Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.
Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed. Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.
And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been "biological." Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark, struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!
It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.
And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and crisscross.
She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior grinned and gurgled at him.
The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking, hours of balancing between—fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with strange reluctance and anger.
Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops. A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four hours to make into what you will." Jerome smiled feebly.
"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me to do anything with."
Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.
When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.
At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.
"It's fifty all right—or I would have eaten it—and not known what it was."
Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly. The business would take several days, and as he would be in the northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation, without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.
Jean took the note from the boy and laid it unopened on the desk. Twice she picked it up and put it down again uncut. It was a scorching morning but her hands were cold and although all the windows were open, she felt that the room was airless. She crossed to the window and leaned out a little way. Below, the city, like the sea beating against a cliff, washed the base of the building, where, in a high, safe niche, she stood alone with the note from Jerome Stuart. In a moment she would open it and make a decision, although she knew that when she did open, the decision would have been already made.
Jean went back to the desk and opened the envelope. She read the half sheet and tore it slowly into bits. Her body scorched, but her fingers were icy to her own touch.
Jerome Stuart had run away. There was no love in his desire. He did not want to want her. She had disturbed his peace against his will and he had gone as he might have gone to escape the contagion of an illness. And last night she had sat for hours on the roof, almost afraid to think, because of the small, eager fear that had come upon her!
When Minnie came for the morning's dictation, Jean felt that she had been sitting at her desk for weeks. Only years of habit made it possible to pick up the day's routine, but early in the afternoon, Jean left the office and went home.
The sun beat fiercely upon the asphalted gravel. Jersey was hidden under its pall of smoke. Nearer at hand, huge chimneys belched their blackness into the quivering heat. The day was still roaring at its task.
Jean went into the little living-room and lowered the blinds to a kindly softness. Then, as in the old days, before a problem, she began to walk up and down.
But the day roared to its completion, the huge chimneys ceased to send forth their black columns, the lowering sun thinned the black pall to gold-shot gray, and still Jean walked up and down.
The thing that Philip Fletcher had found, "the call of a woman to a man," Jerome Stuart had felt. That quiet man who understood so many things. He understood himself and he had gone away.
And she had not wanted him to go. She had no passion for Jerome Stuart. His nearness left her cold. She did not long to help him as she had longed to help Franklin. But she had not wanted him to go.
What tangled threads of instinct and of need bound her? The age-old woman's need of being needed? But Jerome did not need her. He had run away.
It was her own need, not Jerome's. Her need of what? Something nearer than lives she never touched? Something of her own?
It was cool now and Jean went out to the roof. Far down in the street dwarfed figures hurried by. They had finished the day's work. They were going home.
Long after the dwarfed black figures were gone, Jean sat, staring down.
As the days passed, Jean came to wish, more and more deeply, that she had never seen Jerome Stuart. The thought of him filled her waking hours, and at night she often dreamed of the moment on the sidewalk, only, in the dreams, Jerome always came up to the roof again. And in the evenings when she tried to read, in the once peace-filled stillness, he was there across the room, his shoulders, with their student stoop, bent over a book. He stopped and read her bits and they laughed together, or she saw his anger against social injustice crackling like a fire in his gray eyes.
Three times in her life, Jean had felt the old landmarks slip away. Three times in her life she had felt the old Jean die and another woman take the place: when she had left Herrick, when she had received Gregory's letter, and when she had come home to find Martha dead. Each time she had felt as if no future experience could ever reveal unguessed depths in herself. And now, at thirty-nine, because a man whom she did not love, had desired her for a moment against his own will, she felt.... What was it that she felt? Not the ending of all things, as she had felt at Gregory's going. Not the loneliness that followed Martha's. These had been like sudden death in the midst of life. Now she was not dead. She was outside life, watching it go by. And, like the old people, whom she had watched with Gregory, following the sun about the Almshouse walls, she did not want it to go.
"For a few years yet you will be a woman."
Jean went slowly across the roof, through the living-room, to the small blue and white bedroom. She turned on the light above the mirror and looked calmly into it. In the last two years the band of gray above her ears had thickened. There were faint lines, very faint, at the corners of her eyes. The eyes themselves were clear and young, but now that Jean looked steadily into their frank depths, something rose from beneath the surface, an intangible record of the years.
Jean turned, getting almost the full view of her body in the mirror. It was wonderfully strong and straight. The throat and breasts were firm and the flesh soft. Jean remembered how soft and white her mother's body had been when she had covered it against the draught.
Her own, perhaps, would keep its youth, too, a mockery of the lessening power within. In spite of all her efforts, her enthusiasm would decay, more quickly now that she had recognized her need to keep it. Her body more quickly, her brain more slowly, would obey the law. She would sink, with tragic unconsciousness of the process, into benumbed indifference. No more stress, no more impatience, no longing, no regret. Patient acceptance.
Jean snapped off the light and went out to the roof again.
Jerome Stuart had gone away. But he would come back.