“Exactly.”
Leaning over the hand-rail he tapped his cigarette, and the hot ash fell with a faint psst into the dark water. He smiled secretly thinking of the really unparalleled uniqueness of the situation: smiling also because he now at least felt that he had it perfectly under control. His self-consciousness was leaving him. He turned toward her more easily, urbanely. But just as he was about to speak, the girl began laughing—and laughing with such a queer recklessness that for a moment he feared she might be becoming hysterical. She stopped, however, as abruptly as she had begun.
“That really is very funny,” she said. “To think of your pacing to and fro in your little room, meditating on the comings and goings of so utterly unimportant a person as me! Did you really wonder what I thought about in the morning, when I looked up at the Botticelli ‘Venus’? or in just which one of my drawers I kept my knickers? or how often I indulged in delicious thoughts of Mr. S. Pierce Babcock?”
“I really did!”
Babcock tried to give to this statement an air of scientific detachment; but he was aware that it hadn’t quite come off.
“Well, go on and tell me some more. This simply fascinates me. Just how, for example, did you think this experiment would end?”
“You’d really like to know?”
“Of course.… You see, I’m not quite the sensitive plant you thought I was.”
A tremor in her voice just faintly belied this assertion: or was it simply that she was angry? But Babcock decided to be ruthless, and to end the thing once and for all.
“All right, I will.… Do you know the story about Dostoevsky, and the girl he had been in love with, who lived in the room next to his? He was tired of her; he began to hate her; he ignored her, let her starve; he knew, by a sort of divination—the sort I was just now speaking of—that she was in despair, and about to kill herself; and finally, one night, he actually listened to her in the process of hanging herself. He heard the chair drag across the bare floor to the gas-fixture: he heard a silence and then the sound of the chair falling over: and he stood perfectly still, giving her plenty of time to die.… A very pretty story.… Well, I wasn’t quite so ambitious! But I wanted to see just what you would do. I knew you wouldn’t kill yourself—as somebody remarked in ‘Hedda Gabler,’ ‘people don’t do such things.’ But I wondered whether my mere presence, combined with my total indifference to you, might not drive you away. And in any case, I wanted to see … That’s all.
There was a pause, during which they both stared down at the moving water. Babcock felt oddly excited: he found that he was breathing a little quickly. Before he had time to wonder why, the girl patted him twice on the shoulder, reassuringly.
“Well, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to drown myself or hang myself—‘No, no, go not to Lethe!’ To be perfectly frank with you, in my turn, I don’t quite think you’re worth it. Don’t you really think you’re one of the most revolting people you’ve ever met, and one of the unhappiest, and the blindest? But I’m sorry for you.”
“Thank you!”
“And now I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my Botticelli ‘Venus’ and my blue chest of drawers: to give you the pleasure of wondering what I think about before I fall asleep—which I assure you I shall do without waste of time.… Good night!”
Before Babcock could say a word in answer, she had gone: the night had swallowed her up. He stared into the darkness, feeling very foolish. Good Lord—what an extraordinary thing! To run after her would be absurd—he would have to give her a sufficient start. He waited, therefore, flung his cigarette into the river, walked to the other side of the bridge and back, listened to a freight train in the distance, panting rhythmically as it tried to get under way, then lighted another cigarette and began slowly to take his way homeward. And what would happen now? She had admitted that she loved him. Had her love suddenly turned to hate? Would she cry herself to sleep? No, it was most unlikely. She was probably smiling ironically. She was despising him. Perhaps even she was planning—
The thought made him stop dead: his heart began to beat violently: he felt himself beginning to perspire. Good God—suppose, now, she was to reverse the roles—and make a remorseless study of him? She already had the whip hand, for he had told her everything. He was at her mercy—absolutely at her mercy. If now she were to keep him at a distance—make him the corpus vile of a prolonged experiment—watch his comings and goings—freeze him and scrutinize him—could he endure it? Would he have to go?…
He let himself in through the screen door, went softly up the stairs—resisting, with a queer pang, the impulse to listen, to see if she might be crying—and crawled into bed. For a long while he was unable to sleep.
VI.
The next morning he went to Boston—for no particular reason, except that he wanted time in which to collect himself, to try to analyze the extraordinary emotional confusion which had suddenly beset him. He did not see her before he left. He merely informed Mrs. Holt that he would be gone for a week, on business. In a sense, this was tantamount to an admission of defeat; but, also, he thought, it might conceivably be a good tactical move.
But Boston, he found, did little to help him. He could take no interest in his favorite pictures at the Art Museum; the movies bored him; his friends were out of town; it was hot and dusty, and his hotel room was not too comfortable. He was troubled with insomnia, also, and even began to wonder whether he might be ill. When Friday came he was glad, not to say eager, to pack his suitcase and go home.
A surprise awaited him: Miss Anthony had gone. Her room was empty—the door was open, and he saw at a glance that all her things had been removed. The Botticelli Venus smiled down at a bed which had been stripped: one of the drawers in the blue chest was half open, and on entering he saw that it was empty. A broken match-box lay on the table, and on it a crumpled cigarette stub.
At once an appalling feeling of desolation came over him. His heart contracted. He knocked at Mrs. Holt’s door and asked whether Miss Anthony had gone away for a holiday, trying to disguise his agitation.
“A holiday? No, Mr. Babcock, she’s gone abroad. She gave up her position suddenly, and went to join her family.”
“Did she say for how long? or leave an address?”
“I think it was to be for a year at least. She didn’t leave any address—I think she left it maybe at the post office.”
“I see …”
That night, Babcock wrote to her and told her that he loved her. And two months later he received a picture post-card—of a particularly fiendish gargoyle on the cathedral at Amiens—which bore the words: “No, no, go not to Lethe.”
PURE AS THE DRIVEN SNOW
Bill Massingham, who was still called, in his second year at college, “Messy,” a nickname first given him at school for various reasons, walked furtively up the ill-lighted alley which led to the stage door of the Majestic Theatre. His coat collar was turned up, the brim of his hat was pulled down, his handsome but extremely weak and sensual face looked frightened. He had a habit of blinking his pale blue eyes when he was nervous, and he did this now, as he passed several loiterers on his way to the theater door. He always, on these occasions, came a little late, so that most of the chorus girls would have made their assignations and gone away. He was afraid of being seen by one of his classmates, or even by a professor: one never could be too sure.