CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
As they went through the small side door, the band at the far end of the pier was just tuning up. Two powerful arc lamps shed their hard white light on the men, and the rows of already filled chairs about the bandstand. The place smelled of rope and tar and dust, but the lower end of the great shed was open and a faint coolness from the water penetrated for a short distance. Through the opening, the red and green lanterns of docked ships winked enticingly and at the next pier a great steamer creaked on her hawsers, as the water, washing against her sides, whispered of distant lands. Beyond the range of white light, boys and girls sauntered hand in hand, while, in still darker corners, couples stood whispering or silent.
"This—after ten hours a day with your eyes glued to your machine, afraid to move in case the needle pins you to it forever! A blinding web of machinery and then a few little hours for all your suppressed youth and longing to bubble and boil, here in the darkness, a dark full of lapping water and the breath of far-away lands. Is there anything here about sticking to your job and repressing and repressing and repressing, until you grow too dull to care?"
Jerome did not answer. His eyes followed Jean's to a thin, rouged girl and a narrow-chested, ferret-eyed boy vanishing into the farthest shadow. They stopped beside a tower of bales and the boy took both the girl's hands in his. The great steamer strained impatiently like a strong lover resenting the whimpering little waves, eager for the billows beyond. Jerome suddenly felt the heat like hot fingers on his body.
"A tenement room with people everywhere and crying babies, no spot not filled with some human, crowding body. No coolness, no privacy, or this—for a few scorching weeks when you're young—and all the weary years afterwards to make up."
"Oh, please," Jerome begged with a quiver that would not stay under the forced laugh with which he tried to cover it, "don't delve down into the instincts of the whole race for this little job of ours. You make me feel as if we had undertaken to save humanity."
Jean was still looking toward the thin, rouged girl, drawn deeper into the shadow now. "But the instincts of the racearewhat we're after."
"Well, please stay on the surface a bit more or—you'll make me want to slip away to the Spice Islands too." He had not meant to say it, but if Jean heard she took no notice. The girl's hands were gripped in the boy's now as he drew her to him behind the bales. The next moment the band started and the girl came from behind the bales, rearranging her elaborately puffed hair and giggling as she passed.
The band crashed mechanically through its cheap selections, and was applauded dully, until the director hung up the fourth placard, announcing a waltz. Instantly a kind of shiver ran through the crowd. Boys and girls jumped to their feet, crushing each other in their haste, so that, before the band had played a dozen bars, a mass of moving bodies was gliding and swaying in the rising dust. Round and round they went, the dust rising thicker about them, the tapping of the girls' high heels and the shuffle of men's thick shoes drowning the ripple of the water on the piles beneath and the straining of the ship at her hawsers. The waltz ended but the dancers stood linked, furiously demanding an encore. The music began again. The settling dust rose in a fresh cloud. The girls relaxed in their partners' arms, and the boys held them hungrily as if, with the certainty of its short duration, they must wrest from this bodily contact every thrill concealed in it.
Jerome shifted in his chair. He wanted to get up and go back to the peace of the roof with Jean. He could not look at her and yet he wanted to make some comment, say something that would drag these close-locked bodies and gleaming eyes back to the level of a civic problem.
Again and again the band yielded in its indifference to what it played so long as it filled the requisite hours. The partners rarely changed, and again and again the thin girl and the ferret-eyed boy passed near, dancing a little apart from the others. Suddenly the boy said something, the girl tossed her head, jerked herself from his hold and came to sit down a few seats away. The boy's eyes were evil in their rage. He took a step toward the girl, stopped, shrugged his narrow shoulders and came directly over to Jean.
"Say, don't yuh wanter dance?"
Instinctively Jerome moved to interpose, but Jean was smiling up into the pimply face and bold eyes, defiant of inequality.
"But I can't dance, really, not a step."
"Say, yuh're kiddin'. Why anybody kin dance. It's as easy as rollin' off a log."
"Not for me."
"Aw come on, git up anyhow. Yuh can't help dancin' wid me. Jes' listen to de music. One, two, t'ree, tra la la, it gits yuh by itself. Come on."
To Jerome's amazement Jean rose. The boy took a heavily scented and soiled handkerchief from his pocket, adjusted it between Jean's shoulderblades, clamped it fast with his grimy hand, and standing at a distance that marked his knowledge of Jean's difference, swung her into step. Jerome rose, shook his body as if freeing it from a net, and walked to the space beyond the last row of chairs.
In the moving mass he caught Jean's face. She stood a head above the pimply face smiling up to her. She was smiling, too. Jerome drew deeper into the shadow. He lost Jean in the crowd, then she glided again into his line of sight. She was still smiling, apparently unconscious of that disgusting hand on her back, and the red, pimply face below her own. The thin, rouged girl was crying now. Jerome stepped further into the shadow to escape the circle closing about Jean, the ferret-eyed boy and sobbing girl.
He tried to drag himself back to the first moments of the evening, alone on the roof with Jean, but he could not do it. Something within was pushing to the surface, dragging up from the years memories of his own youth, hours that did not concern Jean at all, moments of need baffled by Helen's fragile strength, her misunderstanding and colorless desire. And then, of Jean's white neck and arms and the thick, soft whiteness of her flesh.
The music stopped. Jean was on the edge of the dancers looking for him. He went slowly forward. When the boy saw Jerome coming, he sidled away with a grin.
"Why did you do that?"
"Why did I do it?"
"Yes. Why?" Jerome saw the surprise in Jean's eyes but his need to know drove him on. "Yes. Why?"
"Because I wanted to feel for myself what there is in it. I wanted to see what there is in sheer motion that makes it worth while to add to ten hours a day, three more of real, physical effort."
"Do you know, now?" Why didn't she move farther away? Jerome felt as if she were touching him, and, at the same time, as if his body were formed of the hot dust. "Do you?"
"You would have to try it for yourself," Jean answered coldly, annoyed at this fastidity of objection. "Itdoesget you. There's something——"
"So it seems. Does the success of the experiment demand further investigation?"
"Let's go."
Without another word, they walked the length of the pier and out again through the small door. As they walked in silence back to the apartment, through the chaos in Jerome, a little thread of shame and regret drew him almost to the point of speech. What must Jean be thinking? He could not part from her like this? And yet, when he tried to grasp and hold a thought in words, it burst like a rocket from his control, in a shower of scorching sparks, looks, the feel of Jean's cool fingers, the maddening composure of her clear, gray eyes.
They reached the door with the silence unbroken.
"Good-night." Jean made no conciliatory reference to the next appointment, as she turned to the vestibule with an impersonal smile that did not touch her eyes.
In another second she would be up there alone in the inhuman detachment of her roof.
"Good-night." He held out his hand and, for a moment, hers lay in it, strong, cool, and burning the whole surface of his palm. He almost flung it from him. "Good-night," he repeated thickly and was gone.
After a few moments, Jean began to move slowly along through the lower hall and up the stairs. She walked with strange deliberation, holding her mind to the physical motions of her body by force. At the roof door she stopped, as if afraid of what lay beyond it. And when at last she turned the handle and stepped into the full moonlight of the graveled roof, her whole body was trembling. She went and sat down on the corner of the coping farthest from the spot where she and Jerome had stood to watch the death of the day.
She understood. And the past, by which she understood, rushed down upon her: the night in the studio when Herrick had asked her to marry him: the night she had stood on the dark street with Gregory, and then, so quietly and inevitably gotten into the taxi: and the night when Philip Fletcher had cried and squeaked in his angry pain.
Jean covered her face with her hands. She seemed to be on the edge of a dark and dangerous place. Suddenly the blackness was pricked with points of light. They forced themselves between her locked fingers, until her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat very still looking into the future.
Years of companionship and shared interests. Work and understanding and tenderness. The need of being needed. The future opened about her, and Jean cried.