So familiar, yet so strange.
The soft lips he’d kissed a thousand times, but parted taut as he’d never seen them before. The eyes that had wept for him, smiled for him, planned with him, hoped with him, but startled now as he had never seen them before, too much of their whites showing.
Her breath faltered and she couldn’t find full voice. She whispered. “You’re in—?”
“I’m here in New York.”
“Oh, Press,” she breathed. And yet it could almost have been taken for a crushed remonstrance.
“Won’t you open your door?” he pleaded. “Won’t you let me come in?”
She swept it instantly to its full width; but that came after his plea, not before. “Of course I’ll let you come in,” she said. “When wouldn’t I want you to?” But it was said half sadly, he thought, rather than happily.
She closed it.
“Let me look at you,” he said tenderly.
She stood there to let him look.
“You haven’t changed,” he said yearningly. “You couldn’t; you were so perfect already. Have I?”
She dropped her eyes, then raised them. “No,” she said. She didn’t smile with it. Was that a victory? He wondered.
“Why did you do this?” He gestured. “Come down here.”
“I didn’t have to hear the questions that — they didn’t ask,” she said reticently.
So she hadn’t told them.
“It’s not bad, at that,” he said. He hated it.
“Sheila Abbott was giving it up. I don’t know if you remember her or not. She was one of the bridesma—” She stopped a second, then said, “I took it from her the way it was.”
He went over to put his hat down, on a sort of Louis XVI commode she had there, light-blue lacquer and gilt. He picked a piece of paper up, then put it down again. “Lansing, Rector—,” it said, and then some numerals, in her writing.
He tried to make himself sound casual about it. “Have you been seeing much of him since you’re here?”
“Not much of anyone,” she said tonelessly. “He called once, and I promised to call him back, and — that’s been there ever since.” Then she said with a sort of wearied gratitude, “He’s a tactful sort of person. Doesn’t make himself obtrusive. I’ve always liked that about him.”
But the paper shouldn’t have stayed there that long, he thought. Well, in San Francisco, it won’t make any difference.
“Here,” he said diffidently. “I brought you these.”
She unrolled the paper from the flowers, and they flushed out, umbrellalike, spreading in her hands.
Then she took them rather quickly to a table and put them down on that, without offering, he saw, to put her face close to them and smell them.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.
She didn’t answer. But then he knew without her telling him. The color. He hadn’t thought of that. They were red.
He closed his eyes in the pain she’d just given him.
She seemed, when next he looked at her, at a loss, oddly restrained, even awkward; a thing he’d never yet known her to be, with him, with anyone.
“I’d like to — I don’t know what to offer—” she said. “I don’t keep any liquor here, as Father does at home. As a matter of fact, there aren’t even any facilities for making tea. I’ve been having to take my meals out. But wait, I think there may be some of Sheila’s left-over cigarettes in one of these boxes. She’s been taking up smoking, you know, lately...”
He shook his head, not in negation, but harassedly, almost distractedly, giving it full swings from side to side.
“How can we sit here like this! How can we! Like two strangers in a room, offering each other tea and cigarettes, and a hundred thousand miles away! What’s happened?”
He jumped up and darted over to her, and caught her two hands in his two, from where they had lain, at her sides.
“Marjorie, take me back into your heart. Open the door. Oh, not that door of wood. The door, the door between us. I’m outside. I’m in the rain...”
And on his knees before her, like a worshipper at a shrine, he sent up his appeal.
“I’m cold, I’m hungry. Look at me; I’m the boy you loved, I’m the boy you picked. Look into my face, and tell me that I can’t come in—!”
“Oh, I was afraid of this,” she said, half to herself, “I’ve been dreading it, I knew it was going to come sooner or later. Don’t,” she begged him. “Don’t. You have my pity already. Pity for you, and pity for me. Get up. I haven’t anything else left to give you.”
She strove until she’d drawn her hands away and freed them. And deftly moved herself away from him, withdrew.
He was left there stranded, with nothing to kneel to any more, nothing near enough, ludicrousness added to his abasement.
He rose at last, lamely.
“What am I going to do?” he asked her. “Without you? What?”
“Can’t you see? Why must I tell you? You’ve come this far. You’re here now. Go the rest of the way. Go to them.”
“To them?” he said aghast.
“What other way is there to end it? What other way can it end? Isn’t it better than going on like this? Why didn’t you do it in time, why didn’t you do it long ago, while you still had my— Press, there is only one right in this and only one wrong. It has to be paid for, it can’t be kept hidden. Tell them the story as it happened. As you’ve told it to me. That this girl hounded you, up to the very day of your marriage, threatened your whole happiness. They’re only men, they’re only human, they’ll be lenient. They may agree to a — to a second-degree count. It was unpremeditated, it was in a fit of passion. And even if they punish you a little for it, Press, that punishment ends, this kind never does. You’ve asked me what to do, and now I’ve told you. We’ll help you. We’ll stand by you. Father will get you a good lawyer. We won’t turn our backs on you. I can’t promise you love any more, Press. But I can promise you not to make any final decision until you’re freed of this terrible thing, until it’s out of the way. And I can promise to respect you.” And very low she amended, “Which is something I don’t do now.”
He kept staring at her with something akin to horror.
“A second-degree count?” he whispered. “You don’t know what you’re saying at all. I can’t hope for that, I can’t, don’t you understand? I didn’t tell you all of it that night.” And he groaned abysmally. “Do I have to tell you everything? Do I have to stand here naked before you? The girl wasn’t the only one. There were two more after her. That’s why we left so quickly. A man in a boat, I never knew his name. Wise — that was me...”
She seemed about to double up momentarily, as though a violent pang had assailed her in the stomach. And her hand, pasted palm-out across her forehead, added credibility to the illusion.
She took a staggering, nauseated step or two that brought her to the commode, and held her hands clamped tight to the forward edge of it. She looked down intently.
Instantly he saw his mistake. Instantly he saw what it had done. Instantly he saw that he had lost her irrevocably now, pushed himself beyond the pale. That if there had been a chance before this, now there was none, no chance at all. And frightened — he had always been so quick to take fright — he tried to hold her to him, where she was and as she was, to keep from losing her. And she in turn, taking fright from his fright, abandoned him even quicker, receded all the more and with an added haste. As a frantic beating of the water, in attempt to reach an unmanned boat, sends the boat even further off.