"No." Marcia got up and faced him directly and angrily. "No. If I believe you, Mickey, I believe you. I don't want to talk to her."
"But, Marcia . . ." He looked bewildered and then smiled again. "Darling, you're very sweet when you are angry. Although I don't know what I've done . . ."
"Forget it," said Marcia so briefly it sounded curt. She caught her breath and made herself speak more coolly and naturally. "If we've been released, Mickey, let's get out on deck. I feel as if I'd been in this cabin for a month."
"Right," he said. "It's a relief to have the thing settled. I mean Urdiola."
She found her coat, and he took it from her hands. "Suppose he didn't do it," she said unexpectedly.
Mickey frowned. "Don't suppose any such thing. Besides, there's no doubt of his guilt. That diamond is a huge and, I should say, a very valuable stone. Shall we go?"
He held open the door. The seaman on guard had gone. It seemed suddenly extraordinarily pleasant to be walking along free to come and go, without restraint. They reached the lobby with its glimpses of the busy life of the ship, nurses, doctors, little clusters of lounging patients. They emerged on deck and it was still foggy and cold and the foghorn smote raucously upon their ears. It stepped and Mickey said suddenly: "Of course, I can't help remembering that other nonsensical story Gili told us. You know, about the Cateses being Nazis. But undoubtedly that was just another of her notions, Marcia. Must have been. You . . ." He reached for cigarettes and held the package toward her and did not finish until he had held a match too, for her light. Then he said: "You didn't tell anyone about it, did you?"
"No. I didn't believe it."
He smiled and gave her a glance of reproach. "Yet, you believed Gili when she told you all that stuff about me! Marcia, Marcia!" He shook his head gaily. "Nevertheless, it flatters me. But you were right about the Cateses. An accusation like that is a very unpleasant one; it sticks. Denial never catches up with accusation; it's one of the laws of life. I never knew them, but I knew of them. Everybody knows of them. I don't believe that they were Nazis. I think," said Mickey earnestly, "that we should just forget Gili's little story. Never tell anybody." He took a long breath of smoke and added: "And, darling, remember too, will you, not to call me Mickey."
She turned to him swiftly: "Mickey, we've got to tell the truth about that. We're going home. We can't enter America with a false name and false passport. We've got to tell them and explain and ..."
Unconsciously she had placed her hands on his arm. With a brusque motion he shook them off. His eyes were blazing suddenly, his face white. "No," he cried. "No . . ."
"Mickey . . . ''
"I said not to call me that."
"But you ..."
"Marcia, you've got to promise me never to tell anyone that I'm Michel Banet. Promise me now."
"No . . ."
"You must . . ."
"Mickey, I can't."
He waited a moment while the foghorn sounded again, its desolate, dreary wail coming back at them in echoes from the surrounding fog. She looked up, bewildered, half frightened, into his white and angry face. Naturally he felt bitter. Naturally he was nervous and taut and quick to anger. Yet something inside her insisted stubbornly that she was right; that he must be made somehow to see that rightness for himself and for her. She tried to speak and the foghorn blared again and suddenly Mickey took her hands and held them,quickly to his lips and then whirled around and left her standing there at the railing. She cried: "Mickey," and the foghorn drowned the sound of her voice and he disappeared quickly into the ship.
She started after him, to reason with him, to do anything that would make peace again between them. But after the first step or two she stopped. He'd get over his anger; he'd come back; he'd talk to her, reasonably and quietly.
She told herself that and did not quite believe it. She glanced along the deck—B deck on the same level with her cabin. Aft, under the stairway, the previous day she had found the body of Manuel Para.
Nothing was there now and again as on the previous day the deck was deserted by patients and nurses and doctors. She did not wish, however, to pass the place where Para had sprawled so horribly, looking up at nothing with those blank dark eyes, so she turned in the opposite direction, toward the bow. And then she saw Josh Morgan.
He was ahead, leaning against the railing. His coat was slung over his shoulder and his cap pulled low, yet immediately she recognized the set of his shoulders silhouetted against the pearly-gray fog, the line of his head, the tilt of his cap. She wondered how much of the scene between herself and Mickey he had seen or guessed at.
As she thought that he turned abruptly and called, "Hello," and came toward her.
For a moment or two as they approached each other the foghorn was silent and there was only the wash of water along the sides of the ship and the quiet sound of their footsteps.
Then they met. It was actually at a sheltered turn of the deck. Only the blank, glistening white bulkheads could overhear anything that was said.
But neither of them spoke. Josh's face looked rather white in the fog, his eyes very grave and dark. He carried a lighted cigarette which he tossed over the railing. Then without a word he put his arm around her and held her close against him. And Marcia, as if another woman had got into her body, as if she could not have helped it, moved closer within his embrace and still blindly, still without willing it, turned her face upward so his mouth met her own.
14
She did not intend to move as she had done; she must draw away.
This was a man she scarcely knew; a man she did not love; a man who was nothing to her.
Except his mouth was so hard and warm and strong upon her own that she could not move, she could not think. She was not herself, she was nothing that she had ever known or understood, and all her body was charged with that newness and strangeness—too new, too strange, too bewildering just then to conquer.
Josh actually drew away first. He lifted his head, looked down at her and laughed a little, and said: "I love you, Marcia. And I remember now where I saw you. For I did see you, you know. So I've loved you really for five years. Only I didn't know it was you."
Still the woman who was not Marcia, who had no right to be in his arms, nevertheless possessed her body. She leaned against him and looked up into his eyes without reservation, and said, half-whispering, utterly candid as if there were no barriers between them: "I never saw you before. I'd have remembered you."
"We didn't meet. But I remember now. It was at a concert in Paris. During the entr'acte. You were with some people. Americans. I saw you and I watched you. It was in October. It had been a warm, sunny day. That night was starlit and cold. I know because I walked home and I kept thinking about you, and I sat on the little balcony outside my room and looked at the stars and smoked and kept on thinking about you. So whenever I see you now you're against the stars. One of them," he said and laughed again rather unevenly.
"There in the Captain's cabin, you didn't know me. You didn't recognize me. ..."
"No, I didn't. Except, well, I told you that yesterday. I said I wanted to kiss you the first instant I saw you, and I did. And I felt as if we ought to know each other, but a lot of things have happened to me, and to everybody since that October night. I never knew your name. I never saw you again. I never knew anything about you. And about that time I got involved in—well, never mind that. Do you want to know what you wore that night? I'll tell you. You had your dark hair done up high with a pompadour; you wore a white dress, sort of thin and long. And it fitted so well I was afraid you were very rich! Are you, darling?"