5
They were still in front of the Ames place. But Mildred had risen. They stood watching him as he came, carrying the hat.
'Where on earth have you been?' asked Corinne.
Henry met with difficulty in replying. He was embarrassed, caught in an uprush of self-consciousness. He couldn't see why there need be talk. He gave Humphrey his hat.
'How'd you get this?'
'In there.'
'You went in?' This from Mildred. He felt her eyes on him.
'Yes.'
'But you—you must have...'
'He's gone.'
'Gone!'
'Yes.'
'But where?'
'I don't know.'
'What did you tell him?' asked Corinne sharply'.
'Nothing. I don't think I did. Nothing much.'
'But what?'
'Well, he acted funny. I wouldn't tell him where Mildred was. Then he asked why you didn't come home and I said because he was there.'
Mildred and Corinne looked at each other.
'But what made him go?' asked Corinne.
'I don't know. He wanted to know what you wanted him to do, Mildred. Of course I couldn't say anything to that. And then he said he guessed he knew how to be a sport, and went and got his suit-case.'
'Hope he had sense enough not to go to the hotel,' Corinne mused, aloud. 'They'd talk so.'
'There's a train back to Chicago at two-something,' said Humphrey.
They moved slowly toward the house. At the steps they paused.
The university clock struck two.
They listened. The reverberations of the second stroke died out. The maple leaves overhead rustled softly. From the beach, a block away, came the continuous low sound of little waves on shelving sand. The great lake that washes and on occasions threatens the shore at Sunbury had woven, from Henry's birth, a strand of colour in the fibre of his being. He felt the lake as deeply as he felt the maples and oaks of Sunbury; memories of its bars of crude' wonderful colour at sunset and sunrise, of its soft mists, its yellow and black November storms, its reaches of glacier-like ice-hills in winter, of moonlit evenings with a girl on the beach when the romance of youth shimmered in boundless beautiful mystery before half-closed eyes—these were an ever-present element in the undefined, moody ebb and flow of impulse, memory, hope, desire and spasmodic self-restraint that Henry would have referred to, if at all, as his mind.
'It's late enough,' said Corinne, with a little laugh.
Mildred turned away, placed a tiny foot on the bottom step, sighed, then murmured, very low, 'Hardly worth while going in.'
'Let's not,' muttered Humphrey.
'Listen.' Thus Corinne. She was leaning against the railing, with an extraordinarily graceful slouch. She had never looked so pretty, Henry thought. A little of the corner light reached her face, illuminating her velvet clear skin and shining on her blue black hair where it curved over her forehead. She made you think of health and of wild things. And she could, even at this time, earn her living. There was an offer now to tour the country forty weeks with a lyceum concert company. The letter had come to-day; Henry had seen it. She thought she wouldn't accept. Her idea was another year to study, then two or three years abroad and, possibly, a start in the provincial opera companies of Italy, Austria, and Germany. Yes, she had character of the sort that looks coolly ahead and makes deliberate plans. Despite her wide, easy-smiling mouth and her great languorous black eyes and her lazy ways, eyen Henry could now see this strength in her face, in its solid, squared-up framework. More than any girl Henry had ever known she could do what she chose. Men pursued her, of course. All the time. There were certain extremely persistent ones. And it came quietly through, bit by bit, that she knew them pretty well, knocked around the city with them, as she liked. But now she had chosen himself. No doubt about it.
She said:—
'Listen. Let's go down to the shore and watch for the sunrise. We couldn't sleep a wink after—after this—anyway.'
'Nobody'd ever know,' breathed Mildred.
Humphrey took her arm. They moved slowly down the walk toward the street.
Corinne, still leaning there, looked at Henry.
He reached toward her, but she evaded him and waltzed slowly away over the grass, humming a few bars of the Myosotis.
Henry's eyes followed her. He felt the throbbing again in his temples, and his cheeks burned. He compressed his lips. He moved after her. He was in a state of all but ungovernable excitement, but the elation of two hours back had gone, flattened out utterly. He felt deeply uncomfortable. It was the sort of ugly moment in which he couldn't have faced himself in a looking-glass. For Henry had such moments, when, painfully bewildered by the forces that nature implants in the vigorously young, he loathed himself. Life opened, a black precipice, before him, yet Life, in other guise, drove him on. As if intent on his destruction.
He hung back; let Corinne glide on just ahead of him, still slowing revolving, swaying, waltzing to the soft little tune she was so musically humming. He wanted to watch her; however great his discomfort of the spirit, to exult in her physical charm.
On the earlier occasion when she had overtaxed his emotional capacity he had got out of it by using the forces she stirred in him as a stimulant. But now he wasn't stimulated. Not, at least, in that way. His spirit seemed to be dead. Only his body was alive. All the excitement of the evening had played with cumulative force on his nerves. He had arrived at an emotional crisis; and was facing it sullenly but unresistingly.
The picture of Mildred and Humphrey lost in each other's gaze—in the window-seat at the rooms, on the Ames's horse block—kept coming up in his mind. He could see them in the flesh, walking on ahead, arm in arm, but still more vividly he could see them as they had been before he went back to Mildred's house. He knew that love had come to them. He wondered, trembling with the excitement of the mere thought, how it would seem to live through that miracle. No such magic had fallen upon him.. Not since the days of Ernestine. And that had been pretty youthful business. This matter of Corinne was quite different. He sighed. Then he hurried up to her, gripped her arm, walked close beside her.
At the beach they paired off as a matter of course. Henry and Corinne sat in the shadow of a breakwater. Humphrey and Mildred walked on to another breakwater.
Corinne made herself comfortable with her head resting on Henry's arm.
He was thinking, 'Sort of thing you dream of without ever expecting it really. Ain't a fellow' in town that wouldn't envy me.' But gloom was settling over his spirit like a fog. It seemed to him that he ought to be whispering skilful little phrases, close to her ear. He couldn't think of any.
He bent over her face; looked into it; smoothed her dusky hair away from her temples.
He began humming: 'I arise from dreams of thee.' She picked it up, very softly, in a floating, velvety pianissimo.
His own voice died out. He couldn't sing.
He felt almost despondent. What was the matter with him! Time passed. Now and then she hummed other songs—bits of Schumann and Franz. Schubert's Serenade she sang through.
'Sing with me,' she murmured.
He shook his head. 'Sometimes I feel like singing, and sometimes I don't.'
'Don't I make you feel like singing, Henry?'
'Oh yes, sure!'
'You're a moody boy, Henry.'
'Oh yes, I'm moody.'
She closed her eyes. He watched the dim vast lake for a while; then finding her almost limp in his arms, bent again over her face. 'I'm a fool,' he thought. He could have sobbed again. He bit his lip. Then kissed her. It was the first moment he had been able to. Her hand slipped over his shoulder; her arm tightened about his neck.
Abruptly he stopped; raised his head, a bitter question in his eyes.