Yet he was not conscious of any feeling of love. She was still an unknown and uncharted land to him, to which at times the instinct of self-preservation blindly inclined him. Nor could he fathom the feeling that had sent her to his assistance. He was grateful, to the point that he would not for the world have left a bruising memory on her young life, and yet, at times, at the thought that in her silent watching, her unquestioning devotion, there lay a deep unfaltering determination to turn him aside from his fixed purpose, he felt a fierce revolt, an angry antagonism at her growing ascendency. This was the situation on the night when, mercifully confused in memory and perceptions, he had stumbled back into his studio, mocking at destiny, and found her waiting.
XXIV
In his present numbed sense of outlines and of jumbled conceptions Dangerfield had obeyed a sullen instinct of revolt when he had drawn Inga from the studio to plunge again into the heavy slumber of the city. He had a confused idea that, in this groping flight through deserted midnight regions, he would find some way to discourage her, to shake off this uncomplaining obstacle to his liberty of decision. The long flights of stone steps down which they groped their way, put forth hollow, echoing protests which mounted behind them as they sank deeper into the cavernous descent, until they emerged into the arcade, wan and still with its faint, watery glass sides and dipping vines, and ahead, Broadway yawning at the entrance.
Dangerfield strode on, seeing neither to the right nor to the left, and, following the whim of the moment, turned westward toward the river. A late car roared down the long vista and fled, retreating in softening rumbles. The street was empty and the acute sound of their steps struck in fantastic distortion against the city of silence. A policeman from the shadow of a doorway studied them with suspicion. Above them, mysterious leviathans—swollen gas-towers—spread black bulks against the sprinkled night. He stopped and turned on her, seeing her white face dimly in the flickering street.
“So you are following me?” he said angrily.
“Please.”
She moved a little closer, her hands clasped and at her throat, in her voice that low almost guttural note of soothing appeal which she knew had the charm of quieting him. He stared at her blankly, confusing her with other voices and other memories, and, in the end, with a nervous shake of his head, strode away, apparently oblivious of her presence.
The tenements closed in over them, putting forth their heavy, crowded smells. A random fruit-stand glowed at their sides, its drowsy guardian snoring behind glass partitions; beyond him, a senseless body, wrapped in rags huddled in the warmth of a “family entrance”; shouts, curses, laughter rolled out from a blinded back parlor, and, all at once, a stream of yellow shot across the oozing black of the street. They stopped abruptly; from the doorway an old man reeled forth, and by his side, guiding his hand, a child—an unearthly child with an aureole of golden hair. He came opposite, lurched almost on them, touched them with a groping hand and passed, grumbling. He was blind. Dangerfield began to laugh with that short, blood-freezing laughter of his, which was the cry of all the bitterness within his soul. She shuddered and momentarily clung to his arm, turning to watch the child and the drunkard fading into the gloom.