The Dwelling Place of Light Part 28

"Why, you're still cold, Claude!" she cried anxiously.

And he stammered out: "I'm not--it's you--it's having you!"

Before she could reply to this strange exclamation, to which, nevertheless, some fire in her leaped in response, there came a knock at the door, and he drew away from her as he answered it. Two waiters entered obsequiously, one bearing a serving table, the other holding above his head a large tray containing covered dishes and gla.s.ses.

"I could do with a c.o.c.ktail!" Ditmar exclaimed, and the waiter smiled as he served them. "Here's how!" he said, giving her a gla.s.s containing a yellow liquid.

She tasted it, made a grimace, and set it down hastily.

"What's the trouble?" he asked, laughing, as she hurried to the table and took a drink of water.

"It's horrid!" she cried.

"Oh, you'll get over that idea," he told her. "You'll be crazy about 'em."

"I never want to taste another," she declared.

He laughed again. He had taken his at a swallow, but almost nullifying its effect was this confirmation--if indeed he had needed it--of the extent of her inexperience. She was, in truth, untouched by the world--the world in which he had lived. He pulled out her chair for her and she sat down, confronted by a series of knives, forks, and spoons on either side of a plate of oysters. Oysters served in this fas.h.i.+on, needless to say, had never formed part of the menu in Fillmore Street, or in any Hampton restaurant where she had lunched. But she saw that Ditmar had chosen a little fork with three p.r.o.ngs, and she followed his example.

"You mustn't tell me you don't like Cotuits!" he exclaimed.

She touched one, delicately, with her fork.

"They're alive!" she exclaimed, though the custom of consuming them thus was by no means unknown to her. Lise had often boasted of a taste for oysters on the sh.e.l.l, though really preferring them smothered with red catsup in a "c.o.c.ktail."

"They're alive, but they don't know it. They won't eat you," Ditmar replied gleefully. "Squeeze a little lemon on one." Another sort of woman, he reflected, would have feigned a familiarity with the dish.

She obeyed him, put one in her mouth, gave a little s.h.i.+ver, and swallowed it quickly.

"Well?" he said. "It isn't bad, is it?"

"It seems so queer to eat anything alive, and enjoy it," she said, as she ate the rest of them.

"If you think they're good here you ought to taste them on the Cape, right out of the water," he declared, and went on to relate how he had once eaten a fabulous number in a contest with a friend of his, and won a bet. He was fond of talking about wagers he had won. Betting had lent a zest to his life. "We'll roll down there together some day next summer, little girl. It's a great place. You can go in swimming three times a day and never feel it. And talk about eating oysters, you can't swallow 'em as fast as a fellow I know down there, Joe Pusey, can open 'em. It's some trick to open 'em."

He described the process, but she--scarcely listened. She was striving to adjust herself to the elements of a new and revolutionary experience; to the waiters who came and went, softly, deferentially putting hot plates before her, helping her to strange and delicious things; a creamy soup, a fish with a yellow sauce whose ingredients were artfully disguised, a breast of guinea fowl, a salad, an ice, and a small cup of coffee. Instincts and tastes. .h.i.therto unsuspected and ungratified were aroused in her. What would it be like always to be daintily served, to eat one's meals in this leisurely and luxurious manner? As her physical hunger was satisfied by the dainty food, even as her starved senses drank in the caressing warmth and harmony of the room, the gleaming fire, the heavy scent of the flowers, the rose glow of the lights in contrast to the storm without,--so the storm flinging itself against the windows, powerless to reach her, seemed to typify a former existence of cold, black mornings and factory bells and harsh sirens, of toil and limitations. Had her existence been like that? or was it a dream, a nightmare from which she had awakened at last? From time to time, deep within her, she felt persisting a conviction that that was reality, this illusion, but she fought it down. She wanted--oh, how she wanted to believe in the illusion!

Facing her was the agent, the genius, the Man who had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from that existence, who had at his command these delights to bestow. She loved him, she belonged to him, he was to be her husband--yet there were moments when the glamour of this oddly tended to dissolve, when an objective vision intruded and she beheld herself, as though removed from the body, lunching with a strange man in a strange place. And once it crossed her mind--what would she think of another woman who did this?

What would she think if it were Lise? She could not then achieve a sense of ident.i.ty; it was as though she had partaken of some philtre lulling her, inhibiting her power to grasp the fact in its enormity. And little by little grew on her the realization of what all along she had known, that the spell of these surroundings to which she had surrendered was an expression of the man himself. He was the source of it. More and more, as he talked, his eyes troubled and stirred her; the touch of his hand, as he reached across the table and laid it on hers, burned her. When the waiters had left them alone she could stand the strain no longer, and she rose and strayed about the room, examining the furniture, the curtains, the crystal pendants, faintly pink, that softened and diffused the light; and she paused before the grand piano in the corner.

"I'd like to be able to play!" she said.

"You can learn," he told her.

"I'm too old!"

He laughed. And as he sat smoking his eyes followed her ceaselessly.

Above the sofa hung a large print of the Circus Maximus, with crowded tiers mounting toward the sky, and awninged boxes where sat the Vestal Virgins and the Emperor high above a motley, serried group on the sand.

At the mouth of a tunnel a lion stood motionless, menacing, regarding them. The picture fascinated Janet.

"It's meant to be Rome, isn't it?" she asked.

"What? That? I guess so." He got up and came over to her. "Sure," he said. "I'm not very strong on history, but I read a book once, a novel, which told how those old fellows used to like to see Christians thrown to the lions just as we like to see football games. I'll get the book again--we'll read it together."

Janet s.h.i.+vered.... "Here's another picture," he said, turning to the other side of the room. It was, apparently, an engraved copy of a modern portrait, of a woman in evening dress with shapely arms and throat and a small, aristocratic head. Around her neck was hung a heavy rope of pearls.

"Isn't she beautiful!" Janet sighed.

"Beautiful!" He led her to the mirror. "Look!" he said. "I'll buy you pearls, Janet, I want to see them gleaming against your skin. She can't compare to you. I'll--I'll drape you with pearls."

"No, no," she cried. "I don't want them, Claude. I don't want them.

Please!" She scarcely knew what she was saying. And as she drew away from him her hands went out, were pressed together with an imploring, supplicating gesture. He seized them. His nearness was suffocating her, she flung herself into his arms, and their lips met in a long, swooning kiss. She began instinctively but vainly to struggle, not against him--but against a primal thing stronger than herself, stronger than he, stronger than codes and conventions and inst.i.tutions, which yet she craved fiercely as her being's fulfilment. It was sweeping them dizzily--whither? The sheer sweetness and terror of it!

"Don't, don't!" she murmured desperately. "You mustn't!"

"Janet--we're going to be married, sweetheart,--just as soon as we can.

Won't you trust me? For G.o.d's sake, don't be cruel. You're my wife, now--"

His voice seemed to come from a great distance. And from a great distance, too, her own in reply, drowned as by falling waters.

"Do you love me?--will you love me always--always?"

And he answered hoa.r.s.ely, "Yes--always--I swear it, Janet." He had found her lips again, he was pulling her toward a door on the far side of the room, and suddenly, as he opened it, her resistance ceased....

The snow made automobiling impossible, and at half past nine that evening Ditmar had escorted Janet to the station in a cab, and she had taken the train for Hampton. For a while she sat as in a trance. She knew that something had happened, something portentous, cataclysmic, which had irrevocably changed her from the Janet b.u.mpus who had left Hampton that same morning--an age ago. But she was unable to realize the metamorphosis. In the course of a single day she had lived a lifetime, exhausted the range of human experience, until now she was powerless to feel any more. The car was filled with all sorts and conditions of people returning to homes scattered through the suburbs and smaller cities north of Boston--a mixed, Sunday-night crowd; and presently she began, in a detached way, to observe them. Their aspects, their speech and manners had the queer effect of penetrating her consciousness without arousing the emotional judgments of approval or disapproval which normally should have followed. Ordinarily she might have felt a certain sympathy for the fragile young man on the seat beside her who sat moodily staring through his gla.s.ses at the floor: and the group across the aisle would surely have moved her to disgust. Two couples were seated vis-a-vis, the men apparently making fun of a "pony" coat one of the girls was wearing. In spite of her shrieks, which drew general attention, they pulled it from her back--an operation regarded by the conductor himself with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt. Whereupon her companion, a big, blond Teuton with an inane guffaw, boldly thrust an arm about her waist and held her while he presented the tickets. Janet beheld all this as one sees dancers through a gla.s.s, without hearing the music.

Behind her two men fell into conversation.

"I guess there's well over a foot of snow. I thought we'd have an open winter, too."

"Look out for them when they start in mild!"

"I was afraid this darned road would be tied up if I waited until morning. I'm in real estate, and there's a deal on in my town I've got to watch every minute...."

Even the talk between two slouch-hatted millhands, foreigners, failed at the time to strike Janet as having any significance. They were discussing with some heat the prospect of having their pay reduced by the fifty-four hour law which was to come into effect on Monday. They denounced the mill owners.

"They speed up the machine and make work harder," said one. "I think we goin' to have a strike sure."

"Bad sisson too to have strike," replied the second pessimistically. "It will be cold winter, now."

Across the black square of the window drifted the stray lights of the countryside, and from time to time, when the train stopped, she gazed out, unheeding, at the figures moving along the dim station platforms.

Suddenly, without premeditation or effort, she began to live over again the day, beginning with the wonders, half revealed, half hidden, of that journey through the whiteness to Boston.... Awakened, listening, she heard beating louder and louder on the sh.o.r.es of consciousness the waves of the storm which had swept her away--waves like cras.h.i.+ng chords of music. She breathed deeply, she turned her face to the window, seeming to behold reflected there, as in a crystal, all her experiences, little and great, great and little. She was seated once more leaning back in the corner of the carriage on her way to the station, she felt Ditmar's hand working in her own, and she heard his voice pleading forgiveness--for her silence alarmed him. And she heard herself saying:--"It was my fault as much as yours."

And his vehement reply:--"It wasn't anybody's fault--it was natural, it was wonderful, Janet. I can't bear to see you sad."

To see her sad! Twice, during the afternoon and evening, he had spoken those words--or was it three times? Was there a time she had forgotten?

And each time she had answered: "I'm not sad." What she had felt indeed was not sadness,--but how could she describe it to him when she herself was amazed and dwarfed by it? Could he not feel it, too? Were men so different?... In the cab his solicitation, his tenderness were only to be compared with his bewilderment, his apparent awe of the feeling he himself had raised up in her, and which awed her, likewise. She had actually felt that bewilderment of his when, just before they had reached the station, she had responded pa.s.sionately to his last embrace.

Even as he returned her caresses, it had been conveyed to her amazingly by the quality of his touch. Was it a lack all women felt in men? and were these, even in supreme moments, merely the perplexed transmitters of life?--not life itself? Her thoughts did not gain this clarity, though she divined the secret. And yet she loved him--loved him with a fierceness that frightened her, with a tenderness that unnerved her....