“You were good to me in the paper this morning,” she said. “Why?”
“Because I love you.”
The smoke, the room, the flaunting reminders of coarseness and sensuality and merchandising in smiles and sentiment—all faded away for him. He was worshipping at the shrine of his lady-love. And he thought her as pure and poetical as the temple of her soul seemed to his enchanted eyes. She looked at him over the top of her glass, with cynical, tolerant amusement. The rioting bubbles were rushing upward through the pale gold liquid to where her lips touched it. As she studied him, the cynicism slowly gave place to that dreamy expression which means much or little or nothing at all, according to what lies behind. To him it was entrancing; it meant mind, and heart, and soul.
“What a nice, handsome boy you are,” she said, in a voice so gentle that he was not offended by its hint that her experience was pitying his child-like inexperience.
And thus it began. At the end of the week they were married—he would have it so, and she, purified for the time by the fire of this boy’s romantic love, thought it natural that the priest should be called in.
To him it was a dream of romance come true. His strength, direct, insistent, inescapable, compelled her. It pleased her thus to be whirled away by an impassioned boy, enveloping her in this tempestuous yet respectful love wholly new to her. She found it toilsome to live up to his ideal of her; but, with the aid of his blindness, she achieved it for two months and deserved the title her former associates gave her—“Sainte Marguerite.” Then——
He came home one morning about two. As he opened the door of their flat, he heard heavy snoring from their little parlour. He struck a match and held it high. As the light penetrated and his eyes grew accustomed, he saw Marguerite—his wife—upon the lounge. Her only covering was a nightgown and she was half out of it. Her hair was tumbled and tangled. There were deep lines in her swollen, red face. Her mouth had fallen open and her expression was gross, animal, repulsive. She was sleeping a drunken sleep, in a room stuffy with the fumes of whiskey and of the stale smoke and stale stumps of cigarettes.
The match burned his fingers before he dropped it. He stumbled through the darkness to their bedroom, and, falling upon the bed, buried his face in the pillow and sobbed like a child that has received a blow struck in brutal injustice. Out of the corners came a hundred suspicious little circumstances which no longer feared him or hid from him. They leered and jeered and mocked, shooting poisoned darts into that crushed and broken-hearted boy.
He rose and lit the gas. He went to a closet in a back room and took down a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. In pyjamas and slippers he seated himself at the dining-room table. He poured out a brimming glass of the whiskey and drank it down. A moment later he drank another, then a third. His head reeled, his blood ran thick and hot through his veins. He staggered into the parlour and stood over his snoring wife. He shook her. “Come, wake up!” he shouted.
She groaned, murmured, tossed, suddenly sat up, catching her hair together with one hand, her night-dress with the other. “My God!” she exclaimed, in terror at his wild face, “Don’t kill me! I can’t help it—my father was that way!”