“I’m not always silent ’cause I don’t understand what you say. Sometimes I do understand, but I keep quiet ’cause I don’t know how to tell you about it.”
They turned down a side-street and he looked questioningly at her.
“Aren’t you afraid that Fred may see us together?” he asked.
“I forgot to tell you. He left this afternoon for Pittsburg, to see his mother, an’ he’ll be gone for two weeks. I’m all alone now.”
That conversing silence, in which a suggestion is so strongly felt that it need not be heard, was released from both of them and remained until they reached the apartment building in which she lived, and stood in the dark hallway.
“I don’t want to leave you now”—her whisper was frightened but stubbornly tender. “I don’t want to. For all I know I may never see you again and if I don’t I’ve got to have somethin’ that I can hold on to. Somethin’ that’s not as foolish as just talkin’ words.... I’m a dreadful girl, I s’pose. I must be very wicked. I must be.... But I don’t care. Please don’t go away.”
They stood in the hallway like two dizzy, burdened children feeling the advancing shadow of an irresistible action and yet waiting for the exact moment when all deliberate words would vanish. Until their minds were quite free of words their limbs could not move. Suddenly they both mounted the stairway, hand in hand, as though a kindly demon had decided to make playthings of their legs.
When Carl left the apartment building early on the following morning and hurried to the suburban cigar-store where he now worked half of the day as a clerk, his old self-disgust was absent and a cleanly wild lightness took his limbs, as if he had slept upon the plain sturdiness of a hillside and was pacing away with the borrowed vigor.
“The only time that I dislike earth is when it is dressed in urgent mud, adulterated perfumes, strained lies, and repentant fears,” he told himself as he walked through the bustling shallowness of each city street.
Before leaving Lucy he had promised to return on the following night, and when she had wept and begged him “not to think that she was a terribly bad girl,” he had laughed softly and dropped his lips upon her tears.