Appearing again in this more intimate array, and with purple-coloured oriental slippers on her feet, she called softly into the lighted corridor. To the elderly duenna who obeyed her call she gave some quickly whispered order; the woman presently returned with a heavy silver tray upon which were a pile of sandwiches and a bottle of champagne.
Having filled their glasses, this invaluable attendant, mute and competent, observing everything as though she observed nothing, went out as silently as she had entered; Elise, seated on the divan by Richard’s side, made him eat and drink.
It was not long before the wine brought back the colour to his cheeks and loosened his tongue. He made a feeble effort to rise.
‘It’s you who ought to be resting now,’ he said, ‘after what you’ve done; not a great hulking fraud like me!’
She forced him back upon the cushions and kissed him tenderly on the forehead.
Then she refilled her own glass with champagne and rallied him because his was still only half-empty.
‘You never could drink as I do, mon vieux,’ she murmured. ‘Come then. Let’s smoke for a bit!’ And she lit a cigarette and gave one to him.
‘Well! speak to me, old friend; tell me what they’ve been doing to you? I can see you’re in the hands of some female person! Only a woman could reduce a man to the state you’re in. Getting grey and withered, upon my life! Come on, coeur de mon coeur, and let’s hear the whole miserable story! But do please tell me, first of all, why you ran away from me like that? That wasn’t very nice of you, was it? Why did you do it, Richard? No! you shan’t get out of it by kissing my hand. Why did you do it, Richard?’
She spoke with a caressing infantile naïveté, which many another had found irresistible, and she sidled up to him on the couch, letting her fingers stray through his hair and across his thin cheeks. The softness and warmth of her flexible form enveloped him like a hovering cloud that follows every contour and every rigid outline of the hillside against which it nestles.
‘Why did you do it, Richard?’ she repeated, putting all the plaintiveness of a child’s appeal to be loved into the intonation of her voice. ‘Why did you do it?’
There seemed to be no answer to this except the one inevitable answer to all such questions and he let his hand slide round her waist and drew her closely against him.
Vaguely in his half-conscious mind — such is the eternal hypocrisy of the male conscience when confronted with the unscrupulousness of women — he justified himself for this yielding by putting all the burden of it upon her. He let her lips be the first to seek his lips, and the fact that it did happen in that way seemed, to his half-extinguished loyalty, justification enough. The only alternative would have been that he should have struggled up to his feet and shaken off, with a brusque unthinkable violence, her warm arms and caressing fingers.
Having been so long without food it was no wonder that the wine she had given him disarmed his scruples quite as much as her insidious beauty. It threw him back upon a sort of delicious helplessness and weakness out of which he clung to her blindly, while her love lifted him up, like something strong and immortal into a paradise of peace, pressing against its breast something hurt, wounded, frail and pitifully human.
It was indeed with a certain innocence of real tenderness that they clung together then; and with their kisses was mingled for both of them a kind of infinite relief, as if they had been for aeons of time torn apart and separated, and as if some living portion of their being had gone through the world suppressed, dumb, fettered, stifled, until that liberating hour.
It seemed as if only a few minutes had passed, so rapt and absorbed had they been, when Elise leapt up to her feet and announced that it was time for her to dress.
She called to Thérèse and scolded her for not having brought in dinner; and she insisted, when the servant did bring it, that Richard should begin his meal while she changed her clothes.
While he ate she kept running in, in her dressing gown and with loosened hair, to make sure he was doing justice to Thérèse’s cooking. She snatched her own meal by hurried mouthfuls in this way; Richard never forgot the mingling of childish excitement and royal graciousness with which she filled his plate and his glass and bent over him with fleeting kisses as she did so, her bronze-coloured hair hanging in heavy braids upon her white shoulders.
They had just time for a last cigarette together before she had to leave. Richard, laughing at her protests about being too heavy, drew her down upon his knees and teased her about the shameless way she had reddened her lips. ‘It’s your fault,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve kissed away every bit of natural colour out of me!’
She would not let him enter the theatre again that night, but before they parted at the stage door she made him promise to come to tea on the following day.
‘It doesn’t matter how early or how late you come,’ she assured him. ‘There’s no performance tomorrow and I’ll keep myself free for you from four o’clock on. So don’t get worried. Come just as soon as you can get away.’
It was not till he found himself in the Seventh Avenue subway that Richard remembered that he had been expected home at half-past six.
It occurred to him then, as he sat staring at advertisements of soap and toothpaste, cold-cream and hair-wash, that Nelly was to have made some especial vegetarian dish in his honour, the recipe for which she had obtained from one of her uptown friends.
He got out at Sheridan Square and walked down Varick Street.
Far off, in front of him, he could see the colossal bulk of the Woolworth Building, in and out of the very body of which the huge procession of wagons, drays and motor-lorries, which poured up and down from north to south, seemed to be moving. Normally this stream of rattling trucks and wagons, driven by reckless brawny youth, some of them still clothed in heterogeneous patches of khaki, was a cause of nervous misery to him.
He gazed in astonishment at the unmoved equanimity with which the tiny school children, going to the high school in Hudson Square, crossed that roaring street. American children, he thought, must be born with some self-protective membrane, impervious, like the shell of the oyster, to all rending shocks of noise!
But today he seemed to possess within himself a resistant power more effective than any oyster shell, inasmuch as it was able to carry, so to speak, the war into the enemy’s camp and find grist for its mill in the most rending and tearing sights and sounds.
As he swung down Varick Street brandishing his stick — a stick bought under the shadow of Selshurst Cathedral — he actually exulted in all the sights around him. He exulted in the rawness of the iron frameworks, in the great torn-out gaps, like bleeding flesh, that were being laid bare in the sides of the old Dutch houses, in the subterranean thunder and the whirling puffs of air and dust that came up through the subway’s gratings. He exulted in the huge grotesqueness of the gigantic advertisements, in the yells of the truck drivers, in the flapping clothes lines, in the piled-up garbage, in the hideous tenements and vociferous children. He suddenly became aware that in all this chaotic litter and in all this reckless, gay, aggressive crowd, there was an immense outpouring of youthful energy, an unconquerable vitality, a ferocious joyousness and daring.
The individual separate person, with his ways and his caprices, was certainly hammered and battered here into a horrible uniformity. But the stream of humanity, considered in its ensemble, had a tornado-like force and swing and amplitude. If the exquisite was pounded out of existence, the fidgety, the affected, the meticulous, the conceited, was certainly allowed no mercy.