CHAPTER SIX
Soon after the first dinner with The Bunch, Herrick finished the series of articles and no longer came to the library. But often Jean found him waiting at the closing hour and they walked to the Ferry. Several times they had lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with a sanded floor and strings of red peppers hanging like stalactites from the ceiling. Jean always came from this place with the feeling of having been to another world and touched another life. And there was always the feeling of having shared this happy strangeness with Herrick.
On Sundays, sometimes Herrick called at the house for her, and sometimes she met him at the Ferry, and they went to Flop's. Martha made no comment, but Jean knew that after she had left the house, her mother cried, and because she never mentioned Herrick, Jean knew that Martha disliked him. In the studio Jean made a great effort to enter the spirit, for although she felt more and more strongly that Herrick, too, was bored, she clung to the belief that there must be some charm her own narrow training could not discover.
There was always the same enthusiasm about the same things. Whenever interest flagged they wound it up with the thin, red wine and with more and more cigarettes which they threw away partially smoked. Men and women made open love to each other and there was much kissing and imitation jealousy. Their insatiable need to be different had become a scourge, which drove them along the road of personal eccentricity. In the more or less worthy rebellion of their youth they had adopted Windsor ties and become Bohemians for life.
Through the remaining winter and early spring, Jean and Herrick continued to go less and less often, and in April stopped altogether. Now, on Sundays, they took long walks over the hills. They built driftwood fires in lonely coves and raced like children across the dunes. And always, Jean led the talk to Herrick's novel and the things he would write, so that these vague dreams took form between them. It was as if Jean, reaching down among the qualities he believed he had thrown away, found a small, discarded jewel. Together they polished it.
Jean's attitude hurt and flattered Herrick and the combination was fast binding him against his will. Remembering the hours he was alone with Jean on empty beaches and among silent trees, the knowledge that he had never kissed her made him hot with shame. Away from her, he marveled at his own control. But with her, a genuine peace for the most part held him, so that the control was not so great as it afterward appeared. In some strange way she herself stilled the storm she raised.
It was June, but a high fog had covered the sky all day. They had been walking since morning and now, in the late afternoon, came out through the trail that wound between the hills to the cliffs that edged the sea. Up from below long white arms tore at the cliffs, dropped, reached higher in new effort. While, farther out, the inexhaustible army of waves rushed in, line after line, flung themselves on the cliffs, sank back, rushed in again. Over it all the gray sky shut as if to keep the din from the ears of God. The world was strangely alone, shut in by itself, like a madman locked in his cell. Driven from infinity, rushing on to infinity, the wind tore by them on its ceaseless quest.
Herrick took her hand and they began to run to a little beach wedged between the cliffs. As they ran Jean was filled with a deep sureness, as if she could run so forever, swifter and swifter, never halting or stumbling, borne up by a strength within; a strength that was beating out against the whole surface of her body, in an effort to join the main current of all life, that touched her on every side.
At the foot of the bluff, Jean dropped to the floor of the cove, and for a moment Herrick stood above her. Deliberately he enjoyed the feeling of physical power it gave him to stand so, to feel his greater strength, to know that in spite of her superb body he could bend, lift and throw this woman into the sea. He could see her breast rise and fall under the thin waist, and the base of her throat throb with the breath that still came quickly after their swift run. For a moment, all the artist in Herrick rose in appreciation of the picture, the unity that bound Jean's body, the silent power of the gray cliffs yielding so little to the centuries of rage tearing at them, to the eternal, ever-changing sameness of the sea. There was much of them in Jean, so that, as he looked, he felt tired and worn. He went and sat down a little behind her, and drawing his knees to his chin, circled them with his arms.
It was almost eighteen months since he had first brought The Kitten here. They had raced down the hill too, but at the foot he had swung her to the circle of his arms and kissed her madly. She had returned his kisses, until, both a little exhausted, they lay on the sand, his head in her lap, and her fingers had wandered in his hair, coming, every few minutes, to rest hotly on his lips.
Herrick looked at Jean and wondered. She had never kissed a man as The Kitten had kissed him. Would she ever? What was she thinking of, smiling out over the gray sea? In that passionate, throbbing emptiness she seemed as unconscious of him as if he were one of the gray cliffs. She was as far away and impersonal as the wind sweeping indifferently over the friendly little grasses.
In obedience to his unspoken wish, Jean turned.
"It's the sounds," she said, as if Herrick must have been following her thoughts. "If there weren't any sounds in Nature, pagans would never have invented a God. It's so impossible to imagine a silent Force creating a world where the wind shrieks and the sea roars and you can almost hear the earth breathe. It seems as if there must be a personal god somewhere, a huge, powerful man who needs these voices to talk with."
She had been thinking about God!
Herrick, without answering, drew farther back into the cove. He turned from Jean to the open grayness, and a terror of its immensity forced through every effort to keep it out. In the whole world there was nothing but loneliness, an actual, positive, palpable loneliness, as gray and chill as the sea, as all pervading as the boom of the surf far out on the rocky bar.
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"'And who knows but that God, beyond our guess,
Sits weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Did you write that?"
For a moment Herrick stared and then he laughed. She would always do it, make him feel old and spotted, and then whirl him up to the heights by a belief in his power.
"It's absolutely perfect. God,—weaving worlds because He is lonely."
"No. It's not mine, I'd give a good deal to be able to claim it, but it belongs to one Arthur Symons. Do you know his stuff?"
"No. Is it all like that?—'Weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Not all. But he saw rather far into the heart of things." Without further comment Herrick began to quote—whole poems, fragments, single lines. It was all sad and beautiful and sensuous, filled with the hunger of soul and body.
His voice took on a depth it did not have in usual speech. It fitted perfectly with the sad booming of the surf and the whimper of the little waves that ran in terror among the rocks. For the first time in her life Jean felt the ache of physical beauty. She wanted to cry.
Toward sundown the wind died, the high fog parted and the sun sank in a wine-red sea. Out on the ledge Jean and Herrick watched it dip over the edge of the world.
When the coming night had stolen the last thread of color from the sky they went back to the cove. Herrick piled brush and covered it with great logs of driftwood. At the touch of a match, crackling flames ran out and instantly the savage loneliness of the sea was shut away and the cove became a home.
While they ate the sandwiches they had brought from the ranch-house where they had stopped for dinner, they talked of everything and of nothing. From time to time Herrick went after another log and Jean was left alone, conscious of his absence, of the blackness beyond the fire and the warm security of the rock walls, lit by the firelight. Each time he returned Jean felt that she knew him better.
Stretched on the sand, his head on Jean's spread skirt, Herrick told her of his boyhood and his passionate longing, even as a little child, for the warmth and beauty he had no reason to believe existed.
"We had one of the poorest farms in Connecticut, and if you don't know Connecticut you can't know what that means. There were just a few bleak fields, enclosed by fences of stones that my father had picked from the earth. We grew a little corn and some potatoes, but whenever the crop was good there was no demand, and when prices were high something always killed the crops. We had a few lean cows which I could never believe had been calves. I could never imagine that anything on the place had ever been young. Even my father and my mother. It seemed to me as if they must have always been old and lived in the rickety house, in the bare fields, with the lean cows and the failing crops.
"On each side of us the farms had been deserted before I was born. Sometimes I used to wish there were other boys in them to play with, but for the most part I accepted it just as I accepted the whining complaints of mother, dad's stooped shoulders and the feeling of never having all that I could possibly eat at one time.
"But one day a strange man drove up. He was fat, with a red face and a gold watch-chain. He came in and clapped father on the back, and began to talk faster and laugh more than any one I had ever heard. Even dad and mother smiled as they listened. When mother told me he was going to stay all night I went out in the barn and cried."
Herrick stopped and looked into the fire. He forgot Jean, everything but the memories called to life by his own words. His face was hard with hatred against that starved childhood and against his parents, for always Herrick's hatred was deep against the thing that hurt him. There were shadows about his lips, and his hands clenched until the cords rose on his wrist.
"You poor, lonely, little boy," Jean whispered.
"I was. For you see, until that night, when Ed Pierce came back, I didn't know there was anything else. I used to feel those stone fences closing in like a grave. I didn't know but that the whole world was flat and bare and stony. I thought that the Pierces and Thompsons had just died under the strain, and that some day father and mother would die too, and then I would be left alone.
"After dinner we sat round the fire. They had done all the gossiping and Ed Pierce began to tell of the Far West. You must say it just like that—The Far West!
"I can't tell you what it meant to me. It was a mixture of Heaven and pirate expeditions in tropic seas and gold mines. But the thing that stunned me was that we could go. It was on this earth and we could get there! We could have it all, if father would only go and take it. I can hear Pierce's big voice now: 'Take a chance, Bill. Don't be scared. You're young enough yet. You'll make good with a quarter of the strength you'll waste on this hole.'
"And my father sat there with his head sunk and his shoulders bent, shaking his head!
"I crawled over to his chair and got hold of his knees. I begged him to go. I believe I screamed. Father loosened my hands and told me to shut up. But Pierce said:
"'Listen to him, Bill, the kid's got more sense than you. You've stuck here so long you're plumb scared to move.'
"I got hold of his knees again and begged him not to be scared. At last he took me by the arm and dragged me to the door and locked me into the cold hall. I never forgave him. In the morning Ed Pierce was gone. For a few days they mentioned him. Then they stopped talking about him. There was nothing left but the stones and the hope of The Far West. And all the weary years till I could get there."
"And you got here."
"Yes. I got here." There was no triumph in Herrick's tone.
Jean held out her hands to him suddenly. "You see, youcando what you want."
It was the first physical response Jean had ever offered. Herrick took both hands in his and laid his cheek on them. Then, without a word, he got to his feet and helped Jean up.
From the top of the hill they looked back. The fire glowed a deep red hummock on the black beach. The white crescent of a new moon hung in a rift of cloud and touched to silver the crests of the long swells. Herrick walked ahead along the narrow trail and they scarcely spoke.
But at the gate, under shadow of the acacia that drooped its long yellow blooms close to them, Herrick put his arms about Jean, pressed his lips fiercely to hers, and hurried away.
Jean lay awake a long time, feeling the hot pressure of Herrick's soft mouth and wishing that he had not kissed her.