“Honest, I’d like to get what you’re sayin’,” said Lucy, perplexed and softly candid. “Maybe you mean that we oughta keep movin’ all the time, hearin’ and seein’ different things, an’ maybe you’re right about that. I get tired of goin’ down to work every mornin’ and coming back to the same room every night. I’d like to travel around, an’ see different people an’ places, an’ find out what everything’s like. But I guess I never will.”
“It’s much easier than you imagine,” said Carl. “Just pack up your grip some morning and ride away to another city and see what happens there. After you’ve done it you’ll wonder what held you back.”
“Oh I just couldn’t do that. I’d make my mother so unhappy if I did, an’ besides, I’d be afraid of goin’ somewhere all alone. I might not find any work in the place where I went, an’ then I’d be up against it. I’d like to travel around with plenty of money, an’ nothin’ to worry me, an’——”
Her words trailed off into a revealing silence, and Carl smiled sadly at the little, pitifully obvious hint within her faltering. Perhaps it might be best to marry this simple, mildly wistful, ignorant girl and surrender himself to monotonous toil and sensual warmth, forgetting the schemes that were torturing his heart and mind. The reaction captured him for a time and then died. No, he was gripped by a snarling, nimble blackguard who was determined to lead him to destruction or victory. And in the meantime, here was sensual forgetfulness—an interlude with a girl to whom happiness was merely physical desire captivated by filmy and soothing disguises.
They reached her home, a grey cottage in the suburbs, with a little yard of dusty grass and a modest porch. It bore an aspect of abject simplicity, and that meditative leer possessed by the fronts of all cottages. They sat in a hammock on the porch, and Carl suddenly kissed her with the theatrical intensity of one who is trying to shake off a deliberate role. The gasping expostulations of her voice were contradicted by the limpness of her body, and sighing at this prearranged incongruity, Carl kissed her again, still feeling like a skillful charlatan and still hoping to lure himself into a tumultuous spontaneity. This time she was silent but gripped his shoulders with both hands, while little shades of fright and desire gambled for her face. Suddenly, a meek candor came to her eyes and the seriousness of a child lost in an overwhelming forest moulded her lips.
“Will you be good to me if I let you?” she whispered.
The pathetic, cringing frankness of her words made a stabbing lunge at his deliberateness and a feeling of troubled tenderness mastered his heart. He wept inaudibly, as though he himself had become a begging child, and the illusion of rare experience, cheated and twisted out of his life, returned to betray him. His head struck her shoulder like the death of regret.
CHAPTER VII.
From that night on his life fell into a regular stride—days of wrenching labor and nights of rebellious weariness, broken by intervals in which he crept, like a swindled, dirty child, to the arms of Lucy, washed into a dreamless rest by the simple flow of her desire for him and her sightless worship. To her he was an enigmatic, statuesque prince delighting her with queer words which she could finger as though they were new toys and bringing her an eager compression of grief and joy which she had never known before. She realized, dimly, that he was fundamentally alien to her, and she often said to herself: “Some day he’ll meet a child who c’n understand all of his funny words and then he’ll forget about me,” but this fear only increased the stubbornness of her grasp. And so his life wavered between toil, and sensual peace, and little mildly stunted poems until one morning in late autumn when, at the main office of the telephone company, he was discharged with the information that his job had been merely a temporary one.
“Thanks, old boy,” he said loudly in the face of the astonished cashier. “If you knew what a relief this is to me you’d take a drink with me to celebrate the occasion.”