IV.
She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the flat couch in the corner facing the door.
He was still writing his letter in the inner room. When she heard him move she would slide her feet to the floor and sit up.
She wanted to lie still with her hands over her shut eyes, making the four long, delicious days begin again and go on in her head.
Richard would take hansoms. You couldn't stop him. Perhaps he was afraid if you walked too far you would drop down dead. When it was all over your soul would still drive about London in a hansom for ever and ever, through blue and gold rain-sprinkled days, through poignant white evenings, through the streaming, steep, brown-purple darkness and the streaming flat, thin gold of the wet nights.
They were not going to have any more tiring parties. There wasn't enough time.
When she opened her eyes he was sitting on the chair by the foot of the couch, leaning forward, looking at her. She saw nothing but his loose, hanging hands and straining eyes.
"Oh, Richard—what time is it?" She swung her feet to the floor and sat up suddenly.
"Only nine."
"Only nine. The evening's nearly gone."
* * * * *
"Is that why you aren't sleeping, Richard? … I didn't know. I didn't know I was hurting you."
"What-did-you-think? What-did-you-think? Isn't it hurting you?"
"Me? I've got used to it. I was so happy just being with you."
"So happy and so quiet that I thought you didn't care…. Well, what was
I to think? If you won't marry me."
"That's because I care so frightfully. Don't let's rake that up again."
"Well, there it is."
She thought: "I've no business to come here to his rooms, turning him out, making him so wretched that he can't sleep. No business…. Unless—"
"And we've got to go on living with it," he said.
He thinks I haven't the courage … I can't tell him.
"Yes," she said, "there it is."
Why shouldn't I tell him? … We've only ten days. As long as I'm here nothing matters but Richard … If I keep perfectly still, still like this, if I don't say a word he'll think of it….
"Richard—would you rather I hadn't come?"
"No."
"You remember the evening I came—you got up so suddenly and left me?
What did you do that for?"
"Because if I'd stayed another minute I couldn't have left you at all."
He stood up.
"And you're only going now because you can't see that I'm not a coward."
* * * * *
This wouldn't last, the leaping and knocking of her heart, the eyelids screwing themselves tight, the jerking of her nerves at every sound: at the two harsh rattling screams of the curtain rings along the pole, at the light click of the switches. Only the small green-shaded lamp still burning on Richard's writing table in the inner room. She could hear him moving about, softly and secretly, in there.
He was Richard. That was Richard, moving about in there.