“And Adam and Eve, if you like; and Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell; and Joseph Parker and Jane Cake-bread. Anything, so long as we keep going.”
When I attempted to speak again, she turned on more power and threw me a smile which was a threat.
I clasped her closer. “Little devil! I’ll keep quiet. You needn’t do that.”
But though I kept quiet my heart beat madly. The panorama of change sweeping by, with her face the one thing constant, quickened and emphasized my need of her more than any spoken tenderness. Our thoughts merged and interchanged with a subtlety that speech could never have accomplished. The pressure of her body, the tantalizing joy of her nearness and forbiddenness, the imminence of death, the law of silence—these summed up in a moment’s experience the entire philosophy of love, and of life itself.
I began to understand her meaning, her language; she was temporizing as I had temporized at Venice; but instead of going away from me, she was fleeing with me from circumstance. She was telling me of her woman’s pride—her difficulty to make herself attainable after what had happened. She loved me and she hated me. She drew me to her and she thrust me from her. She could not forget and she dreaded to remember. And she said all this when, in escaping, she took me with her.
Now I saw nothing of the hurrying landscape; I watched her. I wrote all her beauty on the tablets of my mind—nothing should be unremembered: the way her curls crept from under her cap and fluttered about her temples; the clear pallor of her forehead; the firm, broad brows; the quiet challenge of her deep-lashed eyes; how her red mouth pouted and her head leant forward from her frail white neck, like a flower from its stalk, in a kind of listening expectancy. And I observed the tender swelling of her breasts, high and proud, yet humble for maternity; and the pliant strength of her supple body; and her long clean limbs; and the delicately modeled feet and ankles, which shot out from beneath her fur-trimmed skirt—the feet of a dancer, graceful and fragile as violins.
I was mad. I wanted her. No matter how she came to me, I wanted her. I could not bear the thought that we should ever be separated. She was so intensely mine at this present; and yet, though she was mine, I was insanely jealous to preserve her.
With the long fascination of watching her I bent slowly forward. The action was instinctive, uncalculated. How long I took in approaching her, I cannot tell. I was anxious to last out the joy of anticipation; I was not conscious of motion. My lips touched hers. Her hold on the wheel relaxed. Her eyes met mine. The car swerved, hung upon the edge of the road, ran along it balancing; then bounded back into the straight white line.
I was so frenzied that I did not care. She had thought to hold me prisoner by her speed; I would overcome her with defiance. I kissed her again, holding her to me. She kept her eyes on the distance now, but her mouth smiled tenderly.
“That was foolish,” she said.