“I haven’t told you. I couldn’t. To say anything that I could say would just make you think I loved you—just like that—that I was just one of a lot of lovers....”
“You don’t know me,” said Emily. “You only know what I look like. You have heard almost nothing but lies from me. I have only room for one true thing in my life.”
“You must make room for me. When can I see you again?”
“We are going to Yosemite on Thursday. Isn’t it fun? Two Ford-loads of us. Tam and Lucy and I and Avery and Miss Romero and Mrs. Ponting and Banner Hope. Now I have to catch the last Ferry.”
Emily was always much affected by the skins and shapes of men and women. The last hour had been made almost unbearable to her by the fact that Edward had red spots all over his forehead and chin. I think Edward would have killed himself had he known this. As a rule he thought of those spots whenever he found himself being looked at. But tonight he was tremulously uplifted. He really forgot that Emily could see him; he knew only that he could see Emily. If he were in a book, he thought, the spots would not be mentioned. If the book were well written the reader would now be saying, “Our hero is surely more in love than ever man was before.”
He took her over to Berkeley on the Ferry. They stood on the deck in the brilliant moonlight as the boat ran out of her little cubicle under the bright eye of the Ferry Tower. The funnels and masts of other ships stuck out of similar cubicles all along the edge of the city. The ships looked like tall coy ladies in inadequate bathing tents. The moonlight was most fiercely bright. It seemed that the hills, disguised in sunlight all day, had at last unmasked. A long light cloud followed the summits of the hills so that the horizon looked like an enormous breaking wave. The air was full of lights and stars, but the water remained sombre except for a white strip spun across the bay by the moon. The noise of the water growling at the bows of the ferry so slightly occupied the silence that the screams of the trains on the Oakland side were clear to the ear. Clear to the sight were the trains themselves, little swift snakes of light pursuing one another about the bay’s edge and out on to the distant piers.
CHAPTER TWO
I have sent my fires to cleanse
Away men’s dreams, to devour men’s