There must have been a brief time then when the poor girl was endeavoring pleasantly to turn aside this torrent of heavily freighted words. Certainly he was talking feverishly on. He could remember pulling down a coil of rope from the steersman's deck and sitting moodily beside her; and there was a sensation in their minds, his and hers, of being at cross-purposes. There was something about her, back of the weary smile—a smile that was long to haunt him, dim in the moonlight, exquisite in its sensitive beauty—that eluded his pressing desire until it seemed near to driving him mad. Kipling's East is East, and West is West, slipped in among his thoughts; kept coming and coming until it became a nerve-wracking singsong in his brain.
There was one period, fortunately very short, when he seemed to be almost forcing a quarrel. Why, he couldn't afterward imagine. That part of it was dreadful in the retrospect. He had reached the point, apparently, when he couldn't longer endure the failure to reach her. There was simply no response. It was almost as if he were frightening her away. Perhaps it was just that.
But the most vivid memory was of the unaccountable force that suddenly rose in him, seizing on his tongue, his brain, his very nerves. The power of the Kanes was abruptly his, and it brought its own skill with it. It was, distinctly, a possession. It simply came, at this very top of his emotional pitch. There must have been preliminaries. He must have said things that she must have answered. But these lesser moments dropped out. Even a day later, he could see, could almost feel, himself on one knee beside the steamer chair, saying those amazing things, without a shred of memory as to how he got there. Never had he so spoken, to girl or woman; for in the escapades of the younger Rocky there had always been a reticence if seldom a restraint. It was precocity; the blood that was in him.
“You beautiful, wonderful girl!” he was breathing, close to her ear. (He was never to forget this.) “How can you hide your feelings from me? Can't you see it's just driving me mad?.... You're adorable! You're exquisite! You thrill me so—just your voice; the way you walk—your hands—your hair!.... Can't you understand, dear, it isn't what they call 'love.'” (This with a divine contempt.) “It's the cry of my whole being. I want to give you my life. I want to know your life—study it—come to understand the wonderful people that has made you possible! I'm going to study it—history, art, everything!.... I worship you! I dream so of you—all the time—daytimes! I just half-close my eyes and then, right away, I can see you, walking. And I see you as you were at the dance on the boat.” He choked a little; then rushed on. “And in those dreams I always take you in my arms—No, let me say it! The angels are singing it, the wonderful truth!—I take you in my arms and kiss your hair and your eyes. You always close your eyes—oh, so slowly—and I press my lips on the lids. And your arms are around my neck. I can feel your hands. But I never kiss your lips—not in those dreams. Because that will mean that you have given me your soul, and I always know I must wait for that....
“Please! You must listen! Can't you see I'm just tearing my heart out and putting it in your hands—under your feet? There isn't any other life for me. I can't live without you. I could give up my friends, my home, my country, and be happy just serving you.”
He had captured her hand; had it tight in his two hands and was kissing it tenderly. The thrill was unbelievable now. It was ecstasy. He could hear himself murmuring over and over, “You're so exquisite! So thrilling! I love the way your hair lies over your forehead. I love your eyes, especially when you smile”.... On and on.
The tired sad girl in the steamer chair could not fail to respond in some measure, in every sensitive nerve, to so ardent a wooing. Even when she rose, and struggled a little to withdraw her hand, she couldn't be angry. He was surprising; in his very boyishness, compelling.
Then, a little later, he was sitting moodily on the extension front of the chair, face in hands, plunged into a wordless abyss; she sat on the edge of the steersman's deck, leaning against the rail, her face close to a lotus plant, with one flower that looked a ghostly blue in the fading moonlight, and just later, shaded through pink to deep red with the first quick-spreading color of the dawn. His emotional outburst had passed, for the moment, like a gust. He seemed to himself, already, to have failed. His thoughts were turned, behind the gray half-covered face, on death. For so swung the pendulum. He couldn't, in these depths, draw significance from the remarkable fact that she had risen only to drop down again and carry forward the talk that he let fall, and that he had, for the time at least, swept away those mental obstacles. Certainly Miss Hui Fei was not elusive now.
The things she was saying, in a deliberate, matter-of-fact way, bewildered him.
“I don' want you to make love to me like tha'.”