She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding that she could only obey him.
Up on the crest of the Palisades is an “amusement park,” and suburbs and crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens for Hendrik Hudson’s fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it the river whispers strange tragedies.
Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were clamorous.
Where a bare sand jetty ran from the path out into the river’s broad current, Walter stopped and whispered, “I wish we could go swimming.”
“I wish we could—it’s quite warm,” she said, prosaically.
But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to her—whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable—that she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to the utter frankness of cool water laving her bare flesh.
She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn herself—but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared not try to make new standards; she took refuge in the old standards of the good little Una. Though all about her called the enticing voices of night and the river, yet she listened for the tried counsel voices of the plain Panama streets and the busy office.
While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted: “Why couldn’t we go swimming?” Then, with all the cruelly urgent lovers of the days of hungry poetry: “We’re going to let youth go by and never dare to be mad. Time will get us—we’ll be old—it will be too late to enjoy being mad.” His lyric cry dropped to a small-boy excuse: “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt.... Come on. Think of plunging in.”
“No, no, no, no!” she cried, and ran from him up the jetty, back to the path.... She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid of herself.
He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say, calmly, “Don’t you think we’d better go back now?”