After a few moments, Jean began to move slowly along through the lower hall and up the stairs. She walked with strange deliberation, holding her mind to the physical motions of her body by force. At the roof door she stopped, as if afraid of what lay beyond it. And when at last she turned the handle and stepped into the full moonlight of the graveled roof, her whole body was trembling. She went and sat down on the corner of the coping farthest from the spot where she and Jerome had stood to watch the death of the day.
She understood. And the past, by which she understood, rushed down upon her: the night in the studio when Herrick had asked her to marry him: the night she had stood on the dark street with Gregory, and then, so quietly and inevitably gotten into the taxi: and the night when Philip Fletcher had cried and squeaked in his angry pain.
Jean covered her face with her hands. She seemed to be on the edge of a dark and dangerous place. Suddenly the blackness was pricked with points of light. They forced themselves between her locked fingers, until her hands dropped into her lap, and she sat very still looking into the future.
Years of companionship and shared interests. Work and understanding and tenderness. The need of being needed. The future opened about her, and Jean cried.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty—and there is Alice."
Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.
Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed. Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.
And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been "biological." Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark, struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!
It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.