Thunder On The Left Part 5

He crawled out from under the wreck. He was thinking savagely, yet with relief also, how close he had been to telling her. But that was his fate. Even n.o.ble tragedy, if it came near him, would be marred by t.i.tters. He didn't blame her for laughing. Even in an agony he could never be more than grotesque.

"I was just thinking," she said, "how awful if the bed did that when Ben's in it."

"Don't worry. It probably will."

Sultry blue air pressed close about the house, air heavy with uncertain energies. He knew now how frail are carpentered walls and doors, how brittle a box to guard and fortify weak things he held dear. A poor cardboard doll house, and his own schemes just a ring of sh.e.l.ls about it. Here, in a home not even hisown, among alien furnitures, he must meet the sorceries of life, treacheries both without and within.

Strong walls, strong walls, defend this rebel heart! he whispered to himselfstartled and shamed to find himself so poetical. Strange, he thought (hastily reedifying the bed), that people spend such anguish on decisions that don't really matter. But in this house he was at a disadvantage. He had no memories in it.

For Phyllis it had old a.s.sociations and meanings. It went back into her childhood, into that strange time when he had never known her; when she must have been so cunningly caught unawares and machined into rigidity. So even the house was against him. In that charged air, one spark surely would sheet all heaven with flame. It would be queer to split open the world's old s.h.i.+ngled roofs and rusty-screened windows, scatter the million people with little pig-eyes of suspicion, explode love and merriment over the land. G.o.d help us, he thought, people can't even sin without finding dusty little moral justifications for it.

This is what civilization has brought us to! - But what a way for a man to be thinking, with a half-written booklet on Summer Tranquillity lying on his desk.

He stepped onto the sleeping porch, where two cots had been put for Janet and Sylvia, to look at the broken railing. Projecting above the veranda, it overlooked the garden and the pale sickle of beach, distinct in gla.s.sy light. He could see Martin and the children, tiny figures frolicking on the sand. The sky was piled steeply with swollen bales of storm, scrolls of gentian-coloured vapour. But it looked now as though the gust would pa.s.s overhead. Phyllis was busy at the linen closet by the corner of the pa.s.sage, getting out clean towels and napkins. He envied her the sedative trifles that keep wives sane. And after all, perhaps the well-drilled discipline of human beings would get them past this eddy. People - and especially guests - know so well what can be done and what can't. They know how to "behave." The world, brave prudent old world, is so sagely adjusted to avert or ignore any casual expression of what men really feel: terror and mockery, pity and desire. Oh, surely, by careful management, they could all shuffle through a couple of days without committing themselves and then safely relapse into the customary drugged routine. Ben and Ruth, accomplished students of petty demeanour, would be a great help. Even Joyce, poor bewitched rebel with frightened eyes, even Joyce must have some powers of concealment.

But he would not think of Joyce for a little while.

"I think maybe the storm'll blow over," he called. He felt he must speak to Phyllis again, to calm his own nervousness.

There was no answer. Going to the end of the pa.s.sage he saw her standing at the big bay window in the spare room. She was looking down toward the beach, one hand nervously plucking at a strip of wallpaper that had come loose along the frame of the window. He crossed the room quietly and kissed the back of her neck, with a vague idea that this would help to keep her from thinking. It was so enormously important that she should be calm and humorous just now.

He was prepared for silent indifference, or even an outburst of anger; but not for what happened. She turned silently and flung her arms madly about his neck. "Love me, love me, love me," she cried. "Love me, before it's too late."

He was horrified. "There, there," he said, embarra.s.sed. "Go and rest a while, little frog."

VIII

The beach was a different world. Under the plum-glossed wall of storm the bay was level, dusky, and still, crumbling in low parallels of surf. The waves collapsed in short flat crashes. The children flashed in the warm dull water: they wore three tight little green bathing suits: their legs so tanned it seemed as though long brown stockings were snugly drawn above their polished knees. They tumbled with the soft clumsy grace of young animals and were happy without knowing it. Janet could swim; Sylvia still used water-wings to buoy her up; Rose preferred not to go beyond knee-depth and squatted in the curl of the small breakers. When the backwash scoured the sand from under her insteps, leaving a hard mound beneath her tickling heels, she squeaked with ecstatic fright. "The ocean's pulling me!" she cried, and squattered to safety. Sylvia, paddling splas.h.i.+ly a little farther out, with a white rubber cap and the bulbous wings behind her shoulders, was like a lame b.u.t.terfly that had dropped from the dunes above. She put a foot down and couldn't touch bottom. This alarmed her and she hastily flapped herself sh.o.r.eward. A wave broke on her nape, shot her sprawling into the creamy shallows. The wings spilled off, she rolled sideways and under with legs flying, her nose rubbed along soft ridges of sand. Her face, emerging, was a comic medallion of anxious surprise. Another spread of lacy green water slid round her chin. She was relieved to find herself laughing.

"A wave went right over me and I didn't mind," she exclaimed. "I'm a little laughing girl, and laughing girls are different."

It was all different. In this width of sky and sea and sand nothing was reproached. Nounou was off for the afternoon and could not forbid them to play with the stranger. Farther along the bay were other cottages, other children; but here they were alone. "Do you see those houses?" said four-year-old Rose to Martin, pointing to the bungalows that stood on a bluff, sharp upon naked air. "People live there, with beds and food."

Yet they did not even know they were alone. Merely they existed, they were. They were part of the ocean, which does not think but only fulfils its laws. Tides curve and bubble in, earth receives them, earth lets them ebb. Soft sh.e.l.ls pulverize, hard sh.e.l.ls polish, sand-hills slither, seaweeds dry and blacken: the bay takes the sea in its great arms and is content: and inland the farmyard dogs, those spotted moralists, are scandalized by the moon. The moon - chaste herself, bright persuasion of unchast.i.ty in others. For life is all one piece, of endless pattern. No st.i.tch in the vast fabric can be unravelled without risking the whole tapestry. It is the garment woven without seams.

Here was beauty; and they, not knowing it, were part of it unawares. Here was no thinking, merely the great rhythm of ordered accident, gulls' wings white against thunder, the electric circuits of law broken by the clear crystal of fancy. And the sea, the silly sea, meaningless, prolific, greatest of lovers, brawling over the cold pumice reefs of dead volcanoes, groping tenderly up slants of thirsty sand. The sea that breeds life and the land that breeds thought, destined lovers and enemies, made to meet and destroy, to mingle and deny, marking earth with strangeness wherever they embrace. The sea, the bitter sea, that makes man suspect he is homeless and has no roof but dreams.

Janet, who was big enough to go beyond the low surf and grapple the White Whale in his own element, liked Mr. Martin because he did not talk much and understood the game at once. When she harpooned him he rolled and thrashed in foam, churning with his flukes as a wounded whale should; and came floating in so they could haul him to land and cut him up for blubber. This, she explained, is the flensing stage, marking out a flat area of moist sand. Then they burned the blubber in a great bonfire, a beacon that glared tawnily in the night, to guide the relief s.h.i.+p to their perilous coast. Martin found it ticklish to be flensed, so they lay and made tunnels. The tide was going, the flat belt of wet beach was like a mirror,reflecting the rich sword-blade colour of the West.

But Martin was a little puzzled.

"What did you say your names are?" he asked again.

"Janet and Sylvia and Rose," they said, delighted at his stupidity. For it is always thrilling to tell people your name: it proves that you too belong to this important world.

Still, this didn't account for the other, the fourth one. He had seen her watching them from the beach, and then she had been playing with them in the tumbling water. He had thought the children just a little bit rude not to greet her when she joined them. She was not as brown as they, so perhaps she was a stranger who had newly arrived. But now, when that heavy thunder rolled like wagon wheels across a dark bridge of clouds, and the other three ran off to the bath house to dress, she was sitting there beside him.

She was older, but he knew her now. Her face was wet; but of course, for she had been wriggling in the surf like a mermaid. He felt a trifle angry with her: she had got ahead of him, then. He was opening his mouth to speak when she asked him exactly the same thing: "How did you get here?"

He must be careful: if he told her too much she might give him away. She never could keep a secret.

"I've always been here," he said. "It isn't fair for you to tag along. Go home."

Then he realized it was no use to talk to her like that. Why, she seemed older than he: she had even begun to get soft and bulgy, like ladies. But she looked so frightened, he took her hand.

"We can't both do it," he said. "They'll find out. Bunny, you're not playing fair."

"I am, I am!" she cried. "I'm not playing at all. You go away. You'll be sorry."

It was awful to see her look so anxious.

"You used to be a laughing girl," he said, "and laughing girls are different. What's happened to you anyway?"

She gazed at him strangely, with so much love in her face he felt she must be ill.

"This is no place for you," he said firmly. "Here among strangers. You'll be lonely. I can't look after you."

"They aren't strangers. Oh, please go back before you find out."

This was all senseless and annoying; yet he was sorry for her too. I know what's the matter with her, he thought. He accused her of it.

"No, no!" she said piteously. "No, Martin. Not that. I nearly did, but not really."

"I dare say it wasn't your fault," he said; and then remembering a useful phrase, "You'll have to excuse me now." He saw Mr. Granville approaching down the sandy ravine. "Here's one of them coming."

"Tell me," she said quickly. "Do you like them?"

"Why, yes, they're nice. They're a bit queer. They seem to worry about things.They like me," he added proudly.He could see Mr. Granville waving to them to take shelter in the cabin. The bay was already scarred with the onset of the squall.

"Hurry!" Martin said. "Come on, we'll wait in the bath house until the storm's over." They ran together, stumbling up the heavy sand, she lightly, not dragging behind as she usually did. When he reached the door, pulling it open against the first volley of the rain, it was not her hand that he held, but a cold smooth sh.e.l.l.

IX

One drawback about Pullmans (Ruth was thinking) is that the separate chairs make it difficult to talk.

And she was getting restless: if she didn't say something pretty soon she would begin to feel uncertain of herself. The long melancholy howl of the engine, the gritty boxed-up air (still smelling of the vaults under the Grand Central Station), the hot plushy feel of the cus.h.i.+on p.r.i.c.kling under her knees, the roll and swing of the car, the dark ridges of hills, everything was depressing and tedious. Ben was still absorbed in the morning paper - already stale, she thought, for the afternoon sheets were out by now. She had skimmed the magazines, a little irritated by the pictures of interiors of wealthy country houses. She wished that such articles would also include photographs of the number of servants necessary to keep things so perfect. Of course it was easy enough for people like that to have a Home in Good Taste: they just call in a decorator and he fixes everything. But you yourself: how are you going to know what is really Good Taste? Styles change so. As for the fiction, it sounded as though it was written by people with adenoids.

You could hear the author biting his nails and snuffling. She had cleaned out her vanity box, thrown away some old clippings and a dusty peppermint and stubs of theatre tickets. And still Ben was lurking behind a screen of print. Certainly he was the most stay-put of men: place him anywhere and there he would remain until it was time for the next thing to happen.

She began filing briskly at her nails. Presently the newspaper rustled uneasily. She leaned forward and rasped sharply, her soft hand moving as capably as a violinist's. The little sickening buzz continued, and Ben folded the paper lengthwise and looked round it like a man at a half-open door. His brown eyes were large and clear behind tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses. His eyebrows were delicately poised, ready to rise, like guests preparing to get up from their chairs. In his waistcoat pocket were two fountain pens, one black and one with silver filigree on it. He looked faintly annoyed. Whatever he looked, he always looked it faintly: dimly, sluggishly, somewhat. He was a little bit stout, a little bit bald, a little bit tired, a little bit prosperous. Littlebit had been his nickname when she fell in love with him and thought him such a pa.s.sionate fellow. She used to like the name, but had put it out of her mind when she found it too true.

Everything about him was rather, except only his eyes. They were quite. In them, sometimes, you saw a far-off defiance. Something that had always retreated, slipped behind corners, stood warily at half-open doors, but by caution and prudence, not by timidity. Something that went while the going was good.

"Ben," she said. "Did you see that girl sitting at the next table in the diner? The one in the black hat. She came in just before we left."

He thought a moment. "No," he said. "I was looking at the bill."

"She went through here a while ago. She's in the day coaches, I guess, because this is the last of the Pullmans."

No, thought Ben, this isn't the last of the Pullmans, there's another one ahead of it. I noticed it specially when we got on: it's called G.o.diva and reminded me to ask Ruth if she'd brought her bathing suit. - But he refrained from correcting her, waiting patiently to hear what was coming.

"Of course, I'm not sure, it's so long since I've seen her, ages and ages, but I think it was Joyce Clyde."

Ben made a polite murmur of interested surprise, allowing his eyebrows to stretch themselves a little and pursing his lips gently to show attention. But the name meant nothing to him.

"I shouldn't wonder if she's on her way to the Island too. You remember, she was there one summer when we were all children. I wouldn't have known her, but 1 saw her picture in a magazine not long ago.

She's some kind of artist, I think. She always was a queer kid."Ben's recollection of old days on the Island was mostly limited to a strip of yellow sh.o.r.e. He remembered cat-boats and knife-edged gra.s.ses, a dock with barnacled piles, learning to make a half-hitch in wet ropes, and the freckled, gap-toothed faces of some other small boys. He remembered splintery plank walks among ma.s.ses of poison ivy, the puckered white feet of a man who had been drowned, the sour stink of his aquarium of hermit crabs, dead because he forgot to change their water. He remembered an older boy who taught the small fry obscene rhymes. The cheerful disgusting hazards of being young were now safely over, thank goodness. The orderly exacting routine of business was enough to keep a man amused. Twenty-one years is a long time: yet turning the focus of memory a little more sharply he caught an unexpected glimpse of a friendly fat waitress at the old wooden hotel who used to bring him bowls of clam chowder; and some of the grown-ups were still visible. But the small girls seemed to have evaporated, fogged out. Even Ruth herself. He could only recall a distant shrilling of hide-and-seek played after dusk among the sand-hills, the running flutter of pink cotton dresses. Why don't little girls wear pink nowadays, he wondered.

"Did she wear a pink dress?"

"Gracious, I don't know. She had green eyes and was awfully shy. If that was her, she's turned out more attractive than I would have thought. Funny, she hasn't bobbed her hair: I thought all artists were supposed to do that."

Ben wasn't greatly interested. His private conviction was that the party would be a bore anyhow: but he couldn't very well return to the newspaper while Ruth was talking. He took off his gla.s.ses and polished them.

"What does her husband do?"

"Her husband? She hasn't got one. I suppose she's wedded to her art. I don't think she's the type that's attractive to men."

Ruth regretted this when she had said it, because obviously a little deduction on Ben's part would have led him to her real thread of thought. But he showed no sign of animation, patted her knee in a soothing, proprietory way, and settled his coat round him like a dog coiling for another nap.

"We'll soon be there," he said.

"I hope so. I'd forgotten it was such a long ride. It'll be strange to see the Island again. What a queer thing, George getting hold of the old Richmond place. It's been empty a long time, the family never went back to it after the little girl (what was her name?) died."

As though plunging into a tunnel the train drummed into a squall. Grey slants of rain thrashed the windows, there were heavy explosions of sound. Ruth was usually afraid of storms, but this one seemed to make the long green car comfortable. The smooth hum of the train softened the jagged edges of thunder. She would have liked a woman there to talk to about Joyce. She had been cheerful in the certainty that her own hat was the smartest on the train until Joyce (for certainly it was she) entered the dining car. That curly black felt, with what an air she carried it. There was something gipsyish about her: something finely unconscious in her way of enjoying her lunch while every other woman was watching her. Women run in a pack and hasten to ally themselves against any other who seems to have secret funds of certainty. Those who live from hand to mouth are always indignant at a private income. Ruth knew Joyce at once as one of the lonely kind. While she had been sitting there, apparently idle and half asleep, she had turned her chair to command the aisle and was waiting intently to see her come back through their car.

The delicious resentment that some women at once rouse in others! By deep specialized instinct everywoman in the car looked up as the girl went by. Sitting there for several hours they had tact.i.tly const.i.tuted themselves a microcosm of Society, and now with professional shrewdness took stock of the alien. No sculptor, no practised sensualist, could have itemized her more fiercely. She was not "pretty," but in some strangely dangerous way she was foreign to their comfortable cowardice. She was still untamed, unbroken. It was not fair, thought the plumper ladies (though unaware they were thinking it), that a woman of nubile age should still combine nymphlike grace with the gay insouciance of a boy. She was carrying her hat in her hand, and the dark twist of her uncroppcd hair annoyed them as much as, not long before, it would have annoyed them to see it short. They marked the flexile straightness of her figure, the hang and stuff of the skirt, the bend of foot and ankle; exactly appraised, by the small visible slope of stocking, the upper curves unseen. They noted the unbroken fall of her dark suit from armpit to hem as she was swung sideways by a swerve of the train and threw up one elbow to keep her balance. The ruddy young brakeman, meeting her just then, steadied her politely with his hand. She smiled as frankly as a lad. She didn't even seem humiliated, Ruth thought, at having to pa.s.s through all these Pullmans on her way to the day coaches.

But there was something deeper than that - something she couldn't profitably discuss with Ben. With the clairvoyance of woman she saw, and resented, a creature somehow more detached and more determined than herself. In a vague way, for which no words were possible, she recognized a spirit not more happy but more finely unhappy; a spirit concerned with those impa.s.sioned curiosities of life which Ruth knew existed and yet knew not how to approach. She felt the shamed envy and anger that some bitter listener in the audience always feels toward the performer. There was something in that dark childish face and alert reckless figure that made Ruth feel soft and frilly and powdered with sugar. The girl was possessed by some essence, had some fatal current pa.s.sing through her - something which, if generally admitted, would demand extensive revision of the comfortable world. That was it, perhaps: she looked as though she knew that things most women had agreed to regard as important, didn't really matter. The Pullman microcosm resented this, as an anthology of prose would resent a poem that got into it by mistake. The only satisfaction it could have, and the explanation of its pitiless appraisal, was the knowledge that this poor creature too was mocked and fettered with a body, subject also to the dear horrors of flesh.

With a sense of weariness and self-pity Ruth turned to the window and saw, far off, the hard blue line of sea. They were emerging from the storm, the train hummed and rocketed over marshes and beside reedy lagoons still p.r.i.c.kled by the rain. On that horizon lay the memory of childhood to which she was now returning. The chief satisfaction of revisiting juvenile surroundings is to feel superior to that pitiable era: to appear, before one's old companions, more prosperous, circ.u.mstantial, handsome, and enviable than they might have expected. But now even her gay little woollen sports hat seemed to have lost its a.s.surance. What right had a mere ill.u.s.trator (and riding in a day coach) with something proud and eager in her face, to start all these troublesome thoughts? She remembered that even as a child Joyce never really joined in their games but watched apart with a shy unwillingness: a shyness which, if rubbed too hard, could turn into bewildered rebellion. Ruth was always so intensely conscious of the existence of other people that a merely random speculation as to what her friends were doing could prevent her all day long from concentrating on her own affairs. Others were more real to her than herself. Now she was painfully haunted by that look of conviction and fulfilment on the girl's face. Joyce looked unhappy (she consoled herself a little with that) ; but it was a thrilling kind of unhappiness: an unhappiness scarcely to be distinguished from ecstasy.

She pondered about this, wondering if she had ever looked like that? One of her secret anxieties was that she herself was not pa.s.sionate. Was that, she sometimes wondered, why she and Ben had never had children? In her absorption she practised an expression on her face . . . "rapt" was the word that occurred to her to describe it. Ben, reappearing from behind the paper, was alarmed by her appearance and offered her a soda-mint tablet from the little bottle in his waistcoat pocket.The dense air of the car began to be alive. After the barrens of pinewood and long upgrades over stony pasture, now the train careered gloriously in the salty northern air, along beaches crusted with stale foam.

It cried aloud, its savage despairing chord: as though the fierce engine knew that after all its furious burning labours, the flas.h.i.+ng uproar of its toil, its human employers would descend at their destinations unfreed, unaltered, facing there as elsewhere the clumsy comedies of life. Angrily it exulted along the bright dwindle of rails which spread wide under the great wheels and narrowed again before and behind.

The telegraph poles came racing toward it, leaping up like tall threatening men; one by one they were struck down and fled away. With swift elbowing pistons and jets of silver steam the engine roared, glorious in its task; glorious in its blind fidelity and pa.s.sion, caring nothing that all must be retraced in the opposite direction tomorrow.

Joyce was standing in the vestibule of G.o.diva, smoking a cigarette. She had been there a great part of the journey; fast trains always made her mind too busy for sitting still. She had pacified the at first disapproving young brakeman by getting out her sketchbook and making a quick cartoon of him.

Not for many weeks had she been so unconsideringly happy. She never thought of trains as hurrying toward something but rather fleeing wildly from. Those great eloquent machines (she hated to have to board a train without seeing the engine first) crouched ready for flight like huge beasts breathing panic.

They were symbols of the universal terror; she trembled with excitement to feel the thrill of escape - escape from anything. Escape, for the moment, from Time and s.p.a.ce. She wondered how any one could ever sleep or be bored in a train. You'd think their faces would be transfigured when they got out. She hummed to herself as she stood alone in the vestibule. Life seemed to be beginning all over again: her mind was freshly sensitized to the oddity of human faces, to the colour and vitality of the country, the strong swelling curves of the hills. I am flying, flying, she chanted; I am flying from a dream. I am a little mad. My mind is fuller than it'll hold: all sorts of thoughts are slopping over the brim, getting lost because there isn't room for them. I must let them flow faster so I can be aware of them all. What happens to the thoughts that get spilt before you can quite seize them? I must ask George. . . . I wonder which George it will be?

Once she had startled him by giving him a book she found in a second-hand store, The Four Georges.

For it amused her to insist that there were four of him: George the Husband, George the Father, George the Publicity Man, and then George the Fourth - her George, the troubled and groping dreamer, framed in an open window. . . .

Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He's getting up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor, looking for his number.

It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on the gla.s.s panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had mistaken her for someone he knew.

"Look here," he said, "I want to show you something."

She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned there in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as easily as though they were old friends.

"See those tall lance-headed openings in the piers of the Bridge? Did you ever notice they look just like great cathedral windows? And that pearl-blue light hanging in them, better than any stained gla.s.s."She was too surprised, too anxious about showing him her drawings, to do more than murmur a.s.sent.

"I can tell you about it," he said, "because I don't know you. It isn't safe to tell people you know about beautiful things. Those are the windows of my private cathedral."

How often she had lived again that first encounter. The ring of feet along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite sane? G.o.d pity the man (George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart.

I have a cathedral too, I have a cathedral too, she was repeating to herself, but too excited to say it. With bungling fingers she untied the portfolio, rummaged through the drawings, found the one of an aisle of trees in Central Park where the wintry branches lace themselves into an oriel.

He went through all the pictures. He only spoke twice.

"Who did these? You?" and then presently, "Here, this isn't fair. You've been trespa.s.sing in my city."

Then suddenly he paused, flushed, and became embarra.s.sed. He became - as she would have said afterward George the Third. He spoke of the Elevated Railroad's limited appropriation for promotion, of the peculiar problems of transportation publicity, asked what was her usual price for art work, took her name and address. . . . Perhaps George the Fourth would have died then and there, perished of cholera infantum at the age of half an hour, never been heard of again except on a tablet in the imaginary cathedral on Brooklyn Bridge . . . but as she left the office she shook so with purely nervous elation she had to stop by the bra.s.s-rimmed letter chute in the hall. She was wis.h.i.+ng she had the courage to go back and ask him how soon the check could come through (Will he mail it here? she thought. Oh, blessed chute!) . . . and then he came hurrying round the corner after her.

"Look here," he said, with pink-browed uncertainty, "I can't let you go away like this. The family's off in the country. I'm devilish lonely. Will you have dinner with me and we can talk about New York?"

She was too amused and exultant to answer promptly. But George the Fourth, looking anxiously from his ba.s.sinette, need not have been so afraid she was going to refuse. Do artists who have just made their first real sale decline a square meal?

"We'll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate," he pleaded. "There's a bit where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on the front platform it's corking. And I know a place where we can get a bottle of asti spumante. . . ."

The lighted candles of the Italian bas.e.m.e.nt where they dined. At first his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free. His mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor s.h.i.+vered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.

"You know," he said, "I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing.

How will it be able to go back to work tomorrow?"

Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea ofcigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people's chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe's beach.

There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous G.o.dling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday.

"The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone" (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of saying stone), "the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren't the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit."

The figure of speech wasn't quite limpid. There was perhaps a little asti spumante in it, and a few ga.s.sy bubbles of exaggeration. But she understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young he seemed. He paused awhile, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift of smoke.