I leant eagerly forward, but she drew away from me.
“You’re not going back? You’ve given up the theatre?”
She held me in suspense, letting her eyes wander as though she had not heard. Slowly she turned, with that lazy, taunting smile of hers. “Damn the theatre,” she said quietly; “I’m going on with you to the end.”
“And the end’s marriage?”
“Who can tell? Now don’t be a rotter. You’re spoiling everything. Let’s talk of something else.”
When we climbed into the car, “You drive,” she said.
“But to where?”
“That’s my secret. Straight on. I’ll tell you when to turn.”
We were hardly out of the valley before her eyes had closed and her head was nodding against my shoulder. I drove gently, fearing to disturb her. From time to time I looked down at the white slant of her throat, the shadows beneath her lashes, and the almost childish droop of her mouth. How the self she kept hidden revealed itself! Her face was that of a Madonna, for whom the cross was yet remote and the happiness near at hand—and both were certain. What different versions she gave me of herself! Once a sickening fear shook me like a leaf. I slowed the car to a halt, and listened for her breath. In that moment I suffered all the agony of loss that must some time accompany the actuality. One day, sooner or later, I told myself, this thing I had dreaded would occur. How much time was left to us to find life beautiful between then and now?
On the bare Normandy uplands, between tilled fields and driving clouds, I waited for her to waken. The air was growing chill; I drew my coat round her. I felt again, in a new and better way, that sense of nearness and forbiddenness which had exhilarated me to the point of delirium on the madcap journey down from Paris. I looked ahead into the pale distance, where the notched horizon bound the earth with a silver band... and I wondered where she was taking me, and what lay at the end. She might fight against it—she would fight against it; but the end should be marriage. I would watch over her always as I was watching now.