The tone was brisk. Jean smiled back as she vanished into the entrance hole. Gregory turned away. He hated her.
Jean was grateful for the stifling air of the tunnel, the noise, the lights, the groups waiting for the train. It was familiar and safe. Wedged between a fat Jew in a black alpaca coat, and a sleeping Italian plasterer, covered with the dust of his trade, Jean stared before her. Had she said those last words at all, or only mouthed them?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jean never knew by what power she left the train at the right station, nor how she sat as usual for a few moments on Martha's bed and told her of the meeting. She had no memory of kissing Martha good-night nor coming to her own room.
But she must have done these things, because another day was creeping out of the east, and she still sat by the window, trying to think, but the motive power of her brain was dead. There was no explanation, no reason, no wonder at it. Analysis and explanation were the pipings of crickets, extinguished in a crash of thunder. There was only the thing itself. She loved Gregory Allen with a love that she had not known existed. It was a terrific wave, crushing upon her from the outside. It was so far beyond her will or control, that the thought of beating it back was drowned in its own flood.
All her life led to the moment when she had stood in the dark alone with him and been afraid. All her life she had been walking blindfolded to this point of blazing light. It reached back to the days when she had longed so passionately for something to happen, for something to smash the sordid monotony of dutiful acceptance. It held all the beauty to which she had clung so desperately. It had been the driving power of the wind over the hills, the lashing of the rain, the sparkle of the sun on the Bay. It had whispered its reality in the moving leaves, called loudly in the wash of the waves on the sand. It had always been there close, all through her lonely childhood, the dreary years of college, and in those long days in the open with Herrick. It had come close in the wrapping fog and the crackle of the beach fires in the little coves where she and Herrick had talked for hours with dead poets.
Jean buried her face in her hands. For in the dawn, creeping up the river, Herrick was coming toward her. In the motionless void between two days, he stood looking at her. And Jean knew that behind the fear that had dragged her to the gas-bracket above the bamboo table was the longing for Gregory's arms about her.
When the tips of the trees lit to gold, Jean rose and crept into bed.
It was almost three o'clock when Gregory let himself into the apartment, and the air of the place, closed for weeks, rushed at him as if it had been waiting. With the force of a physical blow it shattered the peace he had won in the long battle he had fought, alone in his office, after leaving Jean. He opened the windows slowly. Then he came back again into the living-room and the weary round began again.