Chapter XIII
Hugh slept late the next morning, and instead of being the first down to breakfast was the last. He had done very well on his business trip to Chicago, however, and felt that he could afford to sleep as long as he liked. He had got to bed very late. This was not because Joan had kept him up. She had not, or had done so only indirectly. He had merely driven to Holly with her, a drive of less than ten minutes, and immediately on arrival set out on his walk home. That is, he had started off in the direction of Wild Acres, but when he came to the entrance of the avenue he found in himself no desire and, in fact, a repugnance both for dancing and sleeping. So, overcoatless, hatless and in only thin patent-leather pumps, he had tramped off for miles up the Hudson and back.
It had been a simple state of misery that sent him off on the walk. But it was not Joan’s fault. Neither from his point of view nor hers. She had been rather unusually nice to him, in fact. The brief minutes alone with her in her car had begun with silence, but a silence palpitant with potentialities. There had been many such silences between them before, scattered sparsely but vividly through the past fifteen years. Out of one of them, some day, salvation might come. Joan might say, “I love you enough to marry you, my dear. At last I am sure of it.” For it was these silences that kept Hugh going, and nourished hope.
He sat, leaning a little forward, watching the road ahead over Amos’ shoulder through the glass which separated them from the driver’s seat. And Joan, in her corner, her head tilted back, watched him through the silent few minutes that swept them down the wood road—which was all their avenue amounted to really—to the wide Post Road. There, on the highway, by the infrequent lights, she contemplated his clear-cut profile. But she wanted to see his eyes. She knew that they must be clouded with miserable hunger, but she had a desire to see, to be sure once again. Suddenly, the want conquered her whim of displeasure with him. She drew out of her corner, came nearer, and thrusting an arm through his elbow found his hand, and their palms met in a slow pressure. She broke the silence, hardly knowing that she spoke. “Kiss me, Hugh. Kiss me—”
Whether it was anger or passion that uttered the demand Joan didn’t know. Perhaps it was merely her old insatiable desire to keep Hugh’s desire from weakening. Perhaps sometime—perhaps even quite soon—she would know and understand herself. That was her hope. For she was in the very middle of being psychoanalyzed. Her doctor had been on the Riviera and in Bermuda, stopping at hotels conveniently near to her own, combining work with vacation the past few months. Her sudden and unexpected return had occurred only because another patient with whom he had supposedly finished treatment had backslid and sent him an urgent S O S from New York. Thereupon, Doctor Steiner had persuaded Mrs. Nevin that the time had come for her to meet her problems face to face, with no further evasion. And Hugh was the chief of these problems.
The question was: Was she in love with Hugh Weyman enough to marry him? Doctor Steiner had undertaken to help her discover the answer to this question by means of a minute and indefatigable research into her nightly dreams. This process necessitated a two-hour daily séance with himself,—the two hours being sacredly dedicated to an intimate hashing over of Joan’s emotional life and history.
Hugh, so far, knew nothing of this. But his mother had known from the beginning and been interested and sympathetic. Soon now, in all probability, Joan would decide to talk about it with Hugh himself. For while she had been able to hold him in a state of uncertainty and loyalty during the years since her husband had died, her excuses for indecision were beginning to wear too thin, even to herself. Besides, Hugh had not written to her once during her entire absence this winter, in spite of her having sent him two or three very interesting and even affectionate letters. That he was trying to gain his emotional independence was evident to her even without Doctor Steiner’s elucidations. His pride was becoming too deeply involved.
When she took him into her confidence about this business of being psychoanalyzed she would have to explain how Doctor Steiner had discovered that she, Joan, was so complicated an individual, so highly organized emotionally as well as physically, that things were not nearly so simple and straight for her as for more ordinary and perhaps fortunate persons,—people like Hugh himself, for instance, who knew so definitely what he wanted, and had no agonizing conflicts between his impulses and his actions. When her analysis was completed, she would tell him, but not till then, she might be able to give herself to a husband in the whole-hearted and elemental way which Hugh’s type would demand in a wife. And she might not. The final word really must rest on Doctor Steiner’s findings.
All this she might reveal to Hugh soon—but not to-night. She was a little sleepy to-night, and anyway, there was a quicker and simpler way of snatching him back if he really was pulling at a slightly worn leash and inhibited by pride. The easier way had also the merits of having been tested many, many times before on Hugh, and always it had worked with mathematical certainty. So she had whispered, angrily or passionately—it didn’t matter which—“Kiss me, Hugh.”
To-night it worked as expected, except for a slight hitch. But the hitch was, indeed, so slight and so passing that it hardly bothered her at all. In fact, it added zest. With Hugh’s free hand, the hand not clasped to the palm of hers, he put her away from him. But his face was so close that she could almost discern what she had wanted to discern, the hunger in his dark eyes in the less-dark interior of her speeding motor. His touch was gentle but his voice was not.