He wanted to put his head down on her knees and rest there. But he sat still, and presently their cold hands snuggled together.
After a silence, in which they were talking of themselves, he burst out: "But I don't see how Paris could help 'preciating you. I'll bet you're one of the best artists they ever saw.... The way you made up a picture in your mind about that juggler!"
"Nope. Sorry. Can't paint at all."
"Ah, stuff!" with a rudeness quite masterful. "I'll bet your pictures are corkers."
"Um."
"Please, would you let me see some of them some time. I suppose it would bother-"
"Come up-stairs. I feel inspired. You are about to hear some great though nasty criticisms on the works of the unfortunate Miss Nash."
She led the way, laughing to herself over something. She gave him no time to blush and hesitate over the impropriety of entering a lady's room at midnight, but stalked ahead with a brief "Come in."
She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black paper and yanked out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings which she scornfully tossed on the bed, saying, as she pointed to a mass of Marseilles roofs:
"Do you see this sketch? The only good thing about it is the thing that last art editor, that red-headed youth, probably didn't like. Don't you hate red hair? You see these ridiculous glaring purple shadows under the clocher?"
She stared down at the picture interestedly, forgetting him, pinching her chin thoughtfully, while she murmured: "They're rather nice. Rather good. Rather good."
Then, quickly twisting her shoulders about, she poured out:
"But look at this. Consider this arch. It's miserably out of drawing. And see how I've faked this figure? It isn't a real person at all. Don't you notice how I've juggled with this stairway? Why, my dear man, every bit of the drawing in this thing would disgrace a seventh-grade drawing-class in Dos Puentes. And regard the bunch of lombardies in this other picture. They look like umbrellas upside down in a silly wash-basin. Uff! It's terrible. Affreux! Don't act as though you liked them. You really needn't, you know. Can't you see now that they're hideously out of drawing?"
Mr. Wrenn's fancy was walking down a green lane of old France toward a white cottage with orange-trees gleaming against its walls. In her pictures he had found the land of all his forsaken dreams.
"I-I-I-" was all he could say, but admiration pulsed in it.
"Thank you.... Yes, we will play. Good night. To-morrow!"
CHAPTER IX. HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS
He wanted to find a cable office, stalk in, and nonchalantly send to his bank for more money. He could see himself doing it. Maybe the cable clerk would think he was a rich American. What did he care if he spent all he had? A guy, he admonished himself, just had to have coin when he was goin' with a girl like Miss Istra. At least seven times he darted up from the door-step, where he was on watch for her, and briskly trotted as far as the corner. Each time his courage melted, and he slumped back to the door-step. Sending for money-gee, he groaned, that was pretty dangerous.
Besides, he didn't wish to go away. Istra might come down and play with him.
For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to hate it; it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps' had been. He hated the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a second-story window and watched him with cynical interest. He finally could endure no longer the world's criticism, as expressed by the woman opposite. He started as though he were going to go right now to some place he had been intending to go to all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman.
He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while. Now that he was moving, he was agonizedly considering his problem: What was Istra to him, really? What could he be to her? He was just a clerk. She could never love him. "And of course," he explained to himself, "you hadn't oughta love a person without you expected to marry them; you oughtn't never even touch her hand." Yet he did want to touch hers. He suddenly threw his chin back, high and firm, in defiance. He didn't care if he was wicked, he declared. He wanted to shout to Istra across all the city: Let us be great lovers! Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops. Though that was not at all the way he phrased it.
Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and came down from the hilltops in one swoop.
A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign:
GLORY-GLORY-GLORY
SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING
EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA
He gaped at the sign. A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and well set up, his red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty angle, said, "Won't you come in, brother?"
Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere in sight.
Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas and the N'Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. Wrenn's imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor did he even glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed in the hall. He was going over and over the Adjutant's denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt on the mail-boats.
Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra-at the moment he quite called it madness-that the Adjutant had denounced!
A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly....
He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was positively courtly to his fork. For he was just reformed. He was going to "steer clear" of mad artist women-of all but nice good girls whom you could marry. He remembered the Adjutant's thundered words:
"Flirting you call it-flirting! Look into your hearts. God Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to hell. And I tell you that these army officers and the bedizened women, with their wine and cigarettes, with their devil's calling-cards and their jewels, with their hell-lighted talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking upon one another to lust after one another. Rotten is this empire, and shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of Cromwell."
Istra.... Card-playing.... Talk of socialism and art. Mr. Wrenn felt very guilty. Istra.... Smoking and drinking wine.... But his moral reflections brought the picture of Istra the more clearly before him-the persuasive warmth of her perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made by the wise hands of great men.
He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good or bad, he had to see her. While he was climbing to the upper deck of a bus he was trying to invent an excuse for seeing her.... Of course one couldn't "go and call on ladies in their rooms without havin' some special excuse; they would think that was awful fresh."
He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and purchased a Blackwood's and a Nineteenth Century. Morton had told him these were the chief English "highbrow magazines."
He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack on the gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut the leaves and ruffled the margins to make the magazines look dog-eared with much reading; not because he wanted to appear to have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not permit him to buy things just for her.
All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if he really cared to see her at all. Besides, it was so late-after half-past eight.