He held her close and more close. Then, with a gruesome pang, he checked the name that was on his lips. In the poor comedy of his heart there was room for but one thought: gratitude to Joyce; Joyce who in the unstained bravery of her spirit had taught him anew the worth and miracle of love and whose only reward had been suffering. Her name, so long echoed in his unuttered voice, now filled his mind and terrified him. Here, with Phyllis in his arms, he was thinking of her; this frail ghost of passion came between them. In physical sickness his embrace grew faint. It could not be: the last scruple of his manhood revolted against this consummate deceit.
Still half in dream, Phyllis divined him laggard. She crept closer. “Oh, Martin, Martin,” she whispered. “I knew you’d come.”
Now he knew where the dark current of the hours had been bearing him. Nothing else was possible. Quietly, without anger or surprise, in the relief of one free to face his destiny, he left the room and went down the stair. His hand was out to turn the knob when he saw that Joyce’s door was opening toward him.
XIX
JOYCE lay in a trance of weariness. A nervous tremolo shivered up and down from her knees to her stomach; her spirit seemed lost and dragged under into the strange circling life of the body, stubborn as that of a tree, that goes on regardless of the mind. I don’t care, she thought, I’m glad I’m alive. She was too inert to close her hot eyes or turn over into the pillow to shut out sounds from her sharpened ears. She heard George’s step on the garden path, Phyllis come downstairs and go to the kitchen. Beneath everything else was the obbligato of the house itself; twinges of loose timbers, the gurgle and rush of plumbing, creak of beds, murmuring voices, soft shut of doors. Tenacious life reluctantly yielding itself to oblivion. Then into this fading recessional came the low sough in the pines, the slackening volleys of the crickets like a besieging army that had withdrawn its troops. And the far-away cry of a train. She imagined it, trailing panes of golden light along the shore, or perhaps darkly curtained sleeping cars partitioned into narrow kennels where mysterious people lay alone: and the bursting silver plume of its whistle, spirting into the cool night, tearing a jagged rent in silence, shaking the whole membrane of elastic air that enveloped them all, a vibration that came undulating over the glittering bay, over the lonely beaches, trembled beside her and went throbbing away.... She hadn’t been down to the beach yet, past the rolling dunes that gave her childhood a first sense of fatal solitude. She tried to remember how that shore looked: wideness, sharp air, the exact curved triangle of sails leaning into unseen sweetness of breeze, steep slides of sand over-tufted above by toppling clumps of grass. If one could escape down there and go bathing in moonlight; come back cleansed, triumphant.
The whisper at the window sill startled her. She knew Bunny at once.
“You must get him away. Before it’s too late, before he knows.”
Joyce understood perfectly; so perfectly it didn’t seem necessary to say anything. This was just what she had been telling herself.