Part 17

She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of creamy silk that lashed about the rondures of her breast as if its task were desperate against the fullness of all that flesh. She was not fat oppressively. Her form was impetuous against the insipid continence of silk and satin. Her cheeks and her lips were almost equally red. They were in perpetual motion with food or with laughter--at times with both. Her hands were short and slight: a wedding ring and two obtrusive diamonds overloaded the fingers. She seemed not to mind the floating gaze of David. She talked with greater lubrication when his warm eyes were on her. David, listening a little as at times to music, had the sense of clover fields astir with bees: cows brooding in heat and the smell of milk like mist upon the air. His pleasure of this buxom woman, whose fine hands showed her sensitive as well, was like his pleasure of warm spring days in his boyhood, when indeed the women had been drawn and dry enough but the fields very like this amiable matron, murmuring strange words across his table.

Most of the men and women he had known bore no kinship even to the soil they labored. This woman seemed a part of earth. It was a new sense for David. He leaned back, sweetly astir with his mood. It was over his loneliness like a miracle, like a sudden bloom of sun and meadow in the dank streets of the City. It glowed just so bright and wondrous, it was just so unreal.... He and the strange woman of whom he had no desire became one: there was a flower in this subtle penetration of her health and of his mood. About them the heavy clouds of smoke and the thick waves of words, all the heaving clamor of the room was like the shadow beyond the burn of a candle. And beyond still farther, the sudden laceration of the cars, the pound of the elevated trains, the wreathing weight of the bleak City.... In the heart of it all the single being of David. He took in fragrance of this outlandish woman as a bee sucks honey. He was alone with fertile fields....

He got up, he went to the telephone in the side office of the café, he called Constance Bardale.

“This is David Markand. I want to come to see you to-night.”

She seemed to hesitate: then: “Yes. You may come.”

He had not seen her at all in two months. He had never called on her alone. He had met her a few times. But always she had that forbidding smile and the sinuous smile he had known first was hidden away. It was as if she pitied him for a certain deep defect. She never sought him out. When they spoke, she had nothing to say. She had not again asked him to call.

Now, all at once, though five minutes before he had not dreamed of it, he was to be with her alone! There was a sharp tremor through him as if he longed to leap but the time was not yet, so that he was impeded: a tremor like that of a race horse at the post.

He found her standing in a little study he had not seen before. The maid shut the door behind him. A clouded room in which two lamps pendant with gray silk shades cast a languid light. Herself within it. They were somehow close, wherever they stood in the thick room. She wore a straight and filmy housegown of lavender caught loosely back over her narrow hips by a golden girdle. The braided cord fell loose and heavy in front. The room was a place where glowed her gowned body. David was conscious how he was placeless within it.

She took away her hand at once, sat down. She left him to find a seat. She had said nothing. He could see her teeth and how she was faintly smiling, and that her teeth were cutting white against the cloud of her skin. Her shoulders were sharp and dear in the faint stuff of her gown. He could have said to himself: “She has _on_ that gown. It is not she.” Her shoulders were articulate with little movements saying as much. Her arms came full from the folds of her drooping half-sleeves: her arms denied in their luxuriance the terse cut of her shoulders.

She left words to David. She did not help him find them. David took long selecting a place to sit. He took a chair and moved it and moved it again. He had to be in the right place for sitting: for talking, also.

She watched him, with an uncertain pleasure whose suggestion helped him since there was no hint he should hurry.

“It was very impetuous of me, I guess, to want to see you all of a sudden.”

“You see how much I mind.... Then before to-night you did not want to see me?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think so.”

“I did not, somehow, think of coming.”

“Is that the same thing?”

David paused. “I think not. I think if I had never wanted to come before I could not so suddenly have wanted to, now.”

“The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating him.

“That must be it,” David spoke pensively.

“Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to knowing at this particular time?”

She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the truth, he reacted. He found himself withdrawing: slightly chilled at himself as if he had done an extravagant thing.

“Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?”

Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away. Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.

She got up and redisposed herself on the couch. Her act was at once, in its motion, an expenditure of force and, in its specific nature, preparation for future outlet. David already found in himself the wish to go and sit beside her.

The fear, lest it be the false thing to do--lest she dislike it, rebuke him, misunderstand. Misunderstand what? David did not know, because he found that he did not care. He sat there now, measuring his wish to sit beside her with what was in her eyes--to find if it fitted.

They chatted. David knew less and less what he was saying, as he grew more engrossed in the problem of his desire. Did he dare go and sit beside her? He found no answer in her. Her look, like what she said, was oblique and opaque. She seemed impenetrable to his seeking mind, but in inverse ratio she seemed vulnerable to his fleeing senses. His mental will to measure the effect of his coming to her faded from inanition: his desire to come was less dependent on intellectual assurance.

He was unconscious of all this. Until, quiet and quick, he was up from his chair in a silence and beside her. Nothing had happened. He was dumb and he was empty, as if this coming close had been a mere beginning after all of what he was about: as if he were still upon his journey. Nothing had happened. David leaned over to her face that was at profile from him. At once she turned to him. She gave him her lips. Nothing happened. He kissed her. He sat beside her silent. The sense persisting of a way half gone, of a will half done. He felt the sharp power of her body under a frail gown. Nothing had happened at all. So he took her in his arms.

She was looking with half-shut eyes into her self. Her lips were half shut. All of her. He kissed her again. Experimentally: he was trying to find a certain thing. His hands held the warm stillness of her body: against his hard breathing he had hidden softness. He kissed her. Then, he put her away. His heart raced; his blood panted after a sudden hunger and she sat there smiling. Nothing had happened.

He looked to where she was through a swirl of sense. What should he do? What should he say? How was it possible that she should love him so quick? that he had not known before this marvel of loving her?

He took her hand and kissed its open palm. It was cool. His hand ran up the naked flesh of her arm, thirsting, clamoring. Then, he dropped it and stood up.

He turned his back on her. He paced the little room. Once, twice: over and over. He stopped. He looked at her now as if he had never looked at her before. He was a little way from her. An abyss, an eternity of way which magic alone could empower him to pass.

Was he not friends with magic? Something spoke in him:

“You have only to step forward and take her.” He could not believe it. He had never touched her. Magic, magic....

She was a little huddled on the couch. A faint flush on her cheek and her brow. Her hands half clasped on her lap. Her sharp shoulders rounded forward. She was magical and helpless. David was strong against her. A pity came to him that she was so sweet and so resistless beneath his towering brutality. It was the pity that was sweet and was resistless. Feeling aggrieved for her that she sat there prostrate, he felt that he forgave her, that he loved her, and how by this love she must at once be saved. It was needful to go forth and hold her for her own sake. Lest she believe he had sullied her, lest she fear he did not know what this was between them. To herself as to him it was needful that what had come to pass be good.

He no longer saw her. He was full of the wonder of her sweetness and of his pity. He was full of the wonder of that she was a woman and given up to him. He drew all of her against him....

* * * * *

He knew he was walking homeward. The familiar streets whipped past, the world swung like a sea over the horizon and swept backward above his head. He walked because it had been impossible to sit cramped and still in a car. He had to race with his emotions, else something had broken in him. Calmer he said to himself:

“Why go home? You’re not sleepy.”

He did not know where to go. A garish coldness, the rancid cutting of alcohol across the sidewalk--a saloon. It appealed to him as a challenge to an ebullient giant. He entered. He needed to whet the brilliant splendor of his mood against what was most sordid and drear in all the world. He went up to the bar and ordered a drink and let it stand, unable to bring its desecration to his consecrated lips. He was throbbing gently as if he had run and won a race:--these were remnants of energy to be disposed of.

The place reeled a bit and then closed in on him. Several fellows sagged at his side by the bar. One was talking:

“I guv’ him hell. Y’ort to ’a’ seen me guv’ him hell.”

The barkeeper went over the bar with a wet rag and it gleamed. He looked in the mirror at his thick face above the serried bottles with undisguised affection. He took a comb from his white vest and parted his hair afresh in its oily middle. He loved that face. He leaned back and was lost in love and contemplation. Through a side door, two women loose over a naked table. Their faces were paste, their eyes were red-rimmed above two little glasses of whiskey.

“I love her. I love her. I must love her. Why does she love me? Why do I never understand?” The wonder of the world was as remote from his mind as his thoughts from this naked room with its hard wood and faces, its brittle bottles.

One of the women tried to catch his eye. She was half nodding with drink and disgust. A rotten night. David saw her examining herself in the mirror. Her face was suddenly sweet. She opened her coat. She folded in and downward the starched corners of her waist so that her neck showed and the gap of her bosom. She looked up and smiled at David. She called for more drink and beat her hand in supplement to her call against the table. David left. Her flesh had sounded dead against the shrill-varnished wood.

Tom was propped up with a book, in his black dressing-gown.

“Hello, Davie.” He looked up but did not move. “Have you read _Gulliver’s Travels_ since you were a kid? Take my advice and do! How that man Swift must have loved life to have hated men so!”

David thought this was nonsense. “What is there to hate in a thing we love?”

Tom laughed. “You talk like a god, David. Are you a god? Hate does not enter into love only where there is paradisal satisfaction. To what mortal is that granted?” He watched David stand pensively, glowing. With a searching smile: “Also hate may not enter where there is complete delusion.” David started. “To have perfection in one’s love, one must be a god. To have complete delusion one must be--an ass. Are you a god, Davie?”

“Good night,” said David....

* * * * *

The following evening, he was not to be with her. She had so many engagements. But she was going to break one so he could come, only three evenings later.

Through three days David went, repeating to himself that he loved Constance Bardale. Needful it was to his peace that he be persuaded of this. Good it would be for the new hunger of his life--to spread forth, make fresh dwellings for his spirit--if this was true. Yet all that had occurred was sudden and strange. All this woman was remote. This was why he had so fast retreated from Tom on that first night. Tom was very real: in his light, the new fire in himself did not appear. He was sure that he loved: a transfiguration had been made in him: the future of Constance Bardale must in some inscrutable way be one with his. Yet he could not talk of this joyous revelation to his best friend. Indeed, with his best friend all of it was dim. He did not solve the strangeness of this. He said to himself: “It is all too mysterious yet to be spoken of. Tom would not believe me. He would ask me what had happened to make me know.” Had David these three days seen Cornelia, he could have spoken. He did not know this since he had no plan to see Cornelia. He remained with his secret. Wondering, trying to wonder about it, his thoughts reeled in a dance with his upstarting senses. He could not even clearly wonder about it all.

The conviction was there, however: he was bound by a sacred tie to Constance Bardale. He made great what was between this woman and himself because he needed it great. Also he made it great because he needed thereby to justify it to himself. Was it not plain how great all this must be to Constance Bardale? He knew so little of her ways that he had no sense even of ignorance about her. She was a lady. She was one fortunate in every circumstance: handsome, intelligent, rich: not one to alloy or to misprize her value. This lovely lady had given herself to _him_. A madness must have moved her. That madness love. Or perhaps something still more sacred: belief in his love, the desire in her heart that it should be requited. She had miraculously cared for him. But even this explained little--explained not at all her sudden discard of those womanly reserves that must be her nature, the swiftness of her bestowal. This could be explained alone by his own love’s plea upon her. She had felt and answered his love, before he was aware of it. She had done as women always by some mystery: given blindly where she was needed, not asked, not judged,--responded in faith and a sweet helplessness to the cry of man.

And all his life--whatever she wanted of his life--he owed to repay her.

Feeling his mighty debt to Constance Bardale, David thought of his mother; and of his mother with his father that last dim year he had lived, and of his questionings on birth and death and love. What he had seen and been taught then, the facts of his life had not disturbed since they were simply heaped upon it. His mother had great pleasure of her son. When he was near to her, her face brightened. When he came running and asked: “Take me with you, Mummy, to the village,” she would drop her basket and fold him in her arms and say: “Put on your leggins, Boy, and you may come.” It made her happy. Unendingly to give to him was, in her heart, unendingly to receive. So David learned of women: that they are mothers and that they hunger after their children and have great joy of them. His mother loved his father, but she had no joy of him at all. She took care of him, gave to him, also, without stint. But she seemed to receive nothing of her bestowal. She never kissed him, as she did David. When he came into the room, though she was swift to respond to his desires, it was with heavy face and heavy feet. There was more: his father made hidden demands on other women, took something from them, took what the child had once heard called “liberties” with them. For this, his mother suffered and pitied the women. It was “the poor girl!” “How could you, how could you, Adolph!” “What is going to become of Emma!” So David learned of women: that they are the hunted of men and have no joy of them but only sorrow and humiliation. And David learned of men: that they can, in some miraculous way, make women sacrifice themselves, and love them, although this love is a burden and a blight.

There had been Anne. She did not disturb what he had learned of women. The self-bestowal of woman was a part, a great part, of the goodness of God. Woman had no need save for children: no joy save in the bitterness of serving. Anne was there like a sweet delirious dream in the fevered night. She had lain beside him and mothered his distress; she had given him of her strength to be strong in the morning. When she judged he had had enough of her, very calmly, very like a mother weaning her child, she had put him aside. All of it a sort of passionate nursing: the sort that the passionate nights with their drain of fire demanded. Anne had always been silent.

His heart’s way of woman remained. In a veiled moment, she came and offered up her sweetness to the yearning of man. A mystery--a mystery that now had come to him! In the flesh. In the lovely flesh of Constance!

She received him in the same small room.

David was momently chilled by her precise difference from the image of his three days’ thoughts. She came up to him and let her arms glide softly over his and warmed him. He looked down at her. He saw how the loose folds of her _cérise_ robe parted and fell from her uplifted elbows: how, underneath, her bosom was held tight in a white band of lace. He thought that he might take that lace away and truly see this bosom, crush it with his mouth. He could scarcely see at all.

He checked himself. This was unworthy of him: unfair to her. He began to talk. But she smiled and came close to him again: she stopped his words with her body. Her eyes fixed on his with a plea that he need not talk. He tried to tell of his love, of his devotion, of his thanks, and she was stiff, impregnable to words. He kissed her, had her body in his hands, and there she was pliant, singing with response. So, soon she lay there under his eyes and he had forgotten to say the things his duty ordered....

At last he made a mighty effort.

He sat beside her on the couch. She was cool and straight beside him. She was like a beach that the tide had left and that the sun had hardened. Golden-smooth. Her breasts lay firm, her thighs rounded and fell like lovely scoopings of summer waves. She was there like a strand of the earth, waiting for the tide to return upon her.

David managed to speak.

“Constance dear,” he began. She laid her hand on his and he clasped it. She seemed suddenly afraid. “Constance, I feel that I have so much that I want to tell you.... Constance, it is only this that I love you with all my heart and soul: that always----” He stopped. There she was stopping him again. She had withdrawn her hand.

“Don’t, David! Don’t!” Her hand on his mouth.

He felt ashamed, ashamed of their nakedness together.

“You mustn’t use that word _Love_ so lightly, David.”

He was all pale inside. He felt that his breast had suddenly caved in and that his heart beat hurtfully against its broken walls.

“I do love you, Constance.”

“No you don’t. Don’t be silly, David.”

“Why? Don’t you love me?”

It was strange how little he protested. He felt this. Already he believed her. But if he did, what was all this between them? What infamy?

She seemed to read his consternation. She lifted herself and kissed his eyes and his hot dry lips.

“You don’t love me. And I don’t love you. But we are very fond of each other.”

He was deeply ashamed. He wanted to move away: to cover himself. He did not know how. He did not dare in any way to move. He sat there, fixed in contemplation of the havoc these few words had made of all the structure of his thoughts: regarding the wreckage with dim eyes, but amazed most that the wreckage did not move him more, leave him more empty: that life--and this--should still be possible.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“Constance!” It was a cry of help for his dreams.

“You are a darling. I shan’t risk losing you by not having you know me and yourself as we really are.... Why, David dear? Aren’t you even fond of me?” She had her arm about him. “Kiss me, then. There.” She was half laughing. She was a bewilderment of delight upon him. She was half laughing at him.

Like a mirage, split by a stroke of the sun, his picture of their love faded away. He had not defended it. It was no more. Yet he was not empty. He was less serious, less loaded than before. It had been a mirage of paradise in a desert. It was gone. But the desert through which to trudge to reach it was gone also. Here was green earth.

He held her differently already. She seemed no less happy. He was more aware of herself, more intent on giving her pleasure. He thought less of his own heart and its desires. He found his own joy, now, in bringing joy to her. It was all marvelous strange, he knew vaguely in the back of his head. He had abdicated loving her, she had declared that she did not love him. Yet he was content, he was happy. He had been wrapt in the solemnity of his emotions like a priest at prayer. Now, he was all out of himself like a boy lost in his play. And yet he seemed stronger, more contained, fuller of life. He knew sometime he should have to think all this out....

She took his hand and led him to a glass in which he saw their faces together. Hers was laughing quietly. His was neither serious nor mirthful: full of a sweet surprise.

“Look at yourself,” she said.

He remembered once when he had been a boy at School and he had wrestled long and hopelessly over a problem in mathematics. His teacher, of whom he was very fond, came and leaned over him so that her waist touched his shoulder. She made a quick calculation on his paper. The problem was solved.

“There now. Wasn’t that easy? All that fret and trouble----”

He had felt a relieved gayety go through him: half the help, half the nearness of the teacher. He was reminded now.

“Look at yourself,” she said. He looked. He saw his face like that of a rather unknowing boy upon whom a good-hearted friend had played a delicious joke. He was aware of the face of Constance: it was just beneath and beside his own. And it was laughing under the passion of her hair. He saw that he was laughing also....

He was glad this time to find Tom at home.

“My! My!” Tom bantered from his wonted corner. “You are getting gayer all the time. What larks are you up to, anyway?”

“I have been to see--Miss Bardale.”

A steely glance went through David.

“Oh--she.” Tom spoke. And David knew that never, never could he speak of such things to his nearest friend. But he could speak of some things.

David came up to him. “Listen, Tom. Am I ever going to grow up?”

“I hope not, Davie--altogether.”

David sat down beside him. Tom went on: “I rushed home after a business date for dinner. Hoping to find you. I wanted to see you to-night.”

“Why?”

“For no literal reason, David.... Does one have to have a literal reason for seeing one’s friends? Eh? Does one?”