The Vertical City Part 43

"I want to kiss your eyes until they go in deep--through you--I don't know--until they hurt--deep--I--want--to hurt you--"

"Oh! Oh! Josie scared!"

"You're like one of those orange Angora kittens. Yellow. Soft. Deep."

"I Nicky's p.u.s.s.y."

"I can see myself in your eyes. Shut me up in them."

"Josie so tired."

"Of me?"

"Nicky so--so strong."

"My poor p.u.s.s.y! I didn't mean--"

"Nicky-boy, go home like good Nicky."

"I don't want ever to go home."

"Go now, Josie says."

"You mean never."

"Now!"

He kissed his "No, No," down against each of her eyelids.

"You must," she said this time, and pushed him off.

For a second he sat quite still, the black s.h.i.+ne in his eyes seeming to give off diamond points.

"You're nervous," he said, and jerked her back so that the breath jumped again.

The tail of her glance curved to the gilt clock half hidden behind a litter of used highball gla.s.ses, and then, seeing that his quickly suspicious eye followed hers:

"No," she said, "not nervous. Just tired--and thirsty."

He poured her a high drink from a decanter, and held it so that, while she sipped, her teeth were magnified through the tumbler, and he thought that adorable and tilted the gla.s.s higher against her lips, and when she choked soothed her with a crush of kisses.

"You devil," he said, "everything you do maddens me."

There was a step outside and a sc.r.a.ping noise at the lock. It was only a vaudeville youth, slender as a girl, who lived on the floor above, feeling unsteadily, and a bit the worse for wear, for the lock that must eventually fit his key.

But on that scratch into the keyhole, Josie leaped up in terror, so that Nicholas went staggering back against the Bacchante, shattering to a fine ring of crystal some of the pink grapes, and on that instant she clicked out the remaining lights, shoving him, with an unsuspected and catamount strength, into an adjoining box of a kitchenette.

There an uncovered bulb burned greasily over a small refrigerator, that stood on a table and left only the merest slit of walking s.p.a.ce. It was the none too fastidious kitchen of a none too fastidious woman. A pair of dress s.h.i.+elds hung on the improvised clothesline of a bit of twine.

A clump of sardines, one end still shaped to the tin, cloyed in its own oil, crumbily, as if bread had been sopped in, the emptied tin itself, with the top rolled back with a patent key, filled now with old beer.

Obviously the remaining contents of a tumbler had been flung in.

Cigarette stubs floated. A pasteboard cylindrical box, labeled "Sodium Bi-carbonate," had a spoon stuck in it. A rubber glove drooped deadly over the sink edge.

On the second that he stood in that smelling fog, probably for no longer than it took the swinging door to settle, something of sickness rushed over Nicholas. The unaired odors of old foods. Those horrific things on the line. The oil that had so obviously been sopped up with bread. The old beer, edged in grease. Something of sickness and a panoramic flash of things absurdly, almost unreasonably irrelevant.

Snow, somewhere back in his memory. A frozen silence of it that was clean and thin to the smell. The ridges in the rattan with which his father had whipped him the night after the Chinese laundry. The fine white head of the dean of the law school. His mother baking for Friday night in a blue-and-white gingham ap.r.o.n that enveloped her. Red curls--some one's--somewhere. The string of tiny Oriental pearls that rose and fell with the little pouter-pigeon swell of a bosom. Pretty perturbation. His cousin's sister-in-law, Ada. A small hole in a pink-silk stocking, peeping like a little rising sun above the heel of a rubbed gilt slipper. Josie's slipper.

Something seemed suddenly to rise in Nicholas, with the quick capillarity of water boiling over.

The old familiar star-spangled red over which Sara had time after time laid sedative hand against his seeing, sprang out. The pit of his pa.s.sion was bottomless, into which he was tumbling with the icy laughter of breaking gla.s.s.

Then he struck out against the swinging door so that it ripped outward with a sough of stale air, striking Josie Drew, as she approached it from the room side, so violently that her teeth bit down into her lips and the tattling blood began to flow.

"Nicky! It's a mistake. I thought--my sister--It got so late--you wouldn't go. Go now! The key--turning--Nervous--silly--mistake. Go--"

He laughed, something exhilarant in his boiling over, and even in her sudden terror of him she looked at his bare teeth and felt the unnice beauty of the storm.

"Nicky," she half cried, "don't be--foolis.h.!.+ I--"

And then he struck her across the lip so that her teeth cut in again.

"There is some one coming here to-night," he said, with his smile still very white.

She sat on the couch, trying to bravado down her trembling.

"And what if there is? He'll beat you up for this! You fool! I've tried to explain a dozen times. You know, or if you don't you ought to, that there's a--friend. A traveling salesman. Automobile accessories. Long trips, but good money. Good money. And here you walk in a few weeks ago and expect to find the way clear! Good boy, you like some one to go ahead of you with a snow cleaner, don't you? Yes, there's some one due in here off his trip to-night. What's the use trying to tell Nicky-boy with his hot head. He's got a hot head, too. Go, and let me clear the way for you, Nicky. For good if you say the word. But I have to know where I'm at. Every girl does if she wants to keep her body and soul together. You don't let me know where I stand. You know you've got me around your little finger for the saying, but you don't say. Only go now, Nicky-boy. For G.o.d's sake, it's five minutes to eleven and he's due in on that ten-forty-five. Nicky-boy, go, and come back to me at six to-morrow night. I'll have the way clear then, for good. Quit blinking at me like that, Nicky. You scare me! Quit! When you come back to-morrow evening there won't be any more going home for Josie's Nicky-boy.

Nicky, go now. He's hotheaded, too. Quit blinking, Nicky--for G.o.d's sake--Nicky--"

It was then Nicholas bent back her head as he did when he kissed her there on the swan's arch to her neck, only this time his palm was against her forehead and his other between her shoulder blades.

"I could kill you," he said, and laughed with his teeth. "I could bend back your neck until it breaks."

"Ni--i--Nic--ky--"

"And I want to," he said through the star-spangled red. "I want you to crack when I twist. I'm going to twist--twist--"

And he did, shoving back her hair with his palm, and suddenly bared, almost like a grimace, up at him, was the gla.s.s-shotted spot where the wine tumbler had ground in, greenish now, like the f.l.a.n.g.es of her nostrils.

Somewhere--down a dear brow was a singed spot like that--singed with the flame of pain--

"Nicky, for G.o.d's sake--you're--you're spraining my neck! Let go! Nicky.

G.o.d! if you hadn't let go just when you did. You had me croaking.

Nicky-boy--kiss me now and go! Go! To-morrow at six--clear for you--always--only go--please, boy--my terrible--my wonderful. To-morrow at six."

Somehow he was walking home, the burn of her lips still against his, loathsome and gorgeous to his desires. He wanted to tear her out by the roots from his consciousness. To be rollickingly, cleanly free of her.

His teeth shone against the darkness as he walked, drenched to the skin of his perspiration and one side of his collar loose, the b.u.t.tonhole slit.

Rollickingly free of her and yet how devilishly his shoes could clat on the sidewalk.