You. loved her then, you do not question yourself on that. Why then do you doubt her when she says she loved you then? Is she not as capable of love as you? And who are you to say who is to feel love, and who is not? Love is like a magnet, that attracts its like. She must have loved you, for your love to be drawn to her. Just as you must have loved her--and you know you did--for her love to be drawn to you. Without one love, there cannot be another. There must be love on both sides, for the current to complete itself.
"Aren't you going to say something to me, Lou?"
"What is there to say?"
"I can't tell you that. It must come from you."
"Must it?" he said drily. "And if there is nothing there to give you, no answer
"Nothing, Lou ?" Her voice took on a singsong timbre. "Nothing?" It became a lulling incantation. "Not even a word?" Her face rose subtly nearer to his. "Not even--this much?" He had seen pictures, once, somewhere, of India, of cobras rising from their huddles to the charmer's tune. And like one of those, so sleekly, so unguessably, she had crept upward upon him before he knew it; but this was the serpent charming the master, not the master the serpent. "Not even--this ?"
Suddenly he was caught fast, entwined with her as with some treacherous tropic plant. Lips of fire were fused with his. He seemed to breathe flame, draw it down his windpipe into his breast, where the dry tinder of his loneliness, of his long lack of her, was kindled by it into raging flame, that pyred upward, sending back her kiss with insane fury.
He struggled to his feet, and she rose with him, they were so interlocked. He flung her off with all the violence he would have used against another man in full-bodied combat; it was needed, nothing less would have torn her off.
She staggered, toppled, fell down prone, one arm alone, thrust out behind her, keeping one shoulder and her head upward a little from the floor.
And lying there, all rumpled and abased, yet somehow she had on her face the glint of victory, on her lips a secretive smile of triumph. As though she knew who had won the contest, who had lost. She lolled there at her ease, too sure of herself even to take the trouble to rise. It was he who wallowed, from chair back to chair back, stifling, blinded, like something maimed; his ears pounding to his own blood, clawing at his collar, as if the ghosts of her arms were still there, strangling him.
He stood over her at last, clenched hand upraised above his head, as if in threat to strike her down a second time should she try to rise. "Get yourself ready!" he roared at her. "Get your things! Not that nor anything else will change it! I'm taking you back to New Orleans!"
She sidled away from him a little along the floor, as if to put herself beyond his reach, though her smirk denied her fear; then gathered herself together, rose with an innate grace that nothing could take from her, not even such violent downfall.
She seemed humbled, docile to his bidding, seemed resigned; all but that knowing smile, that gave it the lie. She made no further importunity. She swept back her hair, a lock of which had tumbled forward with her fall. Her shoulders hinted at a shrug. Her hands gave an empty slap at her sides, recoiled again, as if in fatalistic acceptance.
He turned his back on her abruptly, as he saw her hands go to the fastenings at the side of her waist, already partly sundered.
"I'll wait out here in this little entryway," he said tautly, and strode for it.
"Do so," she agreed ironically. "It is some time now that we have been apart."
He sat down on a little backless wall-bench that lined the place, just within the outer apartment door.
She came slowly over after him and slowly swung the second door around, the one between them, leaving it just short of closure.
"My windows are on the second floor," she reassured him, still with that overtone of irony. "And there is no ladder outside them. I am not likely to try to escape."
He bowed his head suddenly, as sharply as if his neck had fractured, and pressed his two clenched hands tight against his forehead, through the center of which a vein stood out like whipcord, pulsing and throbbing with a congestion of love battling hate and hate battling love, that he alone could have told was going on, so still he crouched.
So they remained, on opposite sides of a door that was not closed. The victor and the vanquished. But on which side was which?
A drawer ticked open, scraped closed again, behind the door. A whiff of fresh essence drifted out and found him, as if skimmed off the top of a field of the first flowers of spring. The light peering through from the other side dimmed somewhat, as if one or more of its contributing agents had been eliminated.
Suddenly he turned his head, finding the door had already been standing open a second or two before his discovery of it. She was standing there in the inviting new breadth of its opening, one arm to door, one arm to frame. The foaming laces that cascaded down her were transparent as haze against the light bearing directly on her from the room at her back. Her silhouette was that of a biped.
Her eyes were dreamy-lidded, her half-smile a recaptured memory of forgotten things.
"Come in, Lou," she murmured indulgently, as if to a stubborn little boy who has put himself beyond the pale. "Put out the light there by you and come into your wife's room."
39
A sound at the door awoke Durand. It was a delicate sort of tapping, a coaxing pit-pat, as if with one fingernail.
As his eyes opened he found himself in a room he had difficulty recalling from the night before. The cooling silvery-green of lowburning night lights was no longer there. Ladders of fuming Gulf Coast sunlight came slanting through the slits of the blinds, and formed a pattern of stripes across the bed and across the floor. And above this, there was a reflected brightness, as if everything had been newly whitewashed; a gleaming transparency.
It was simply that it was day in a place that he had last seen when it was night.
He thought he was alone at first. He backed a hand to his drugged eyes, to keep out some of the overacute brilliancy. "Where am I?"
Then he saw her. Her cloverleaf mouth smiled back at him, indirectly, via the surface of the mirror she sat before. Her hand sought her bosom, and she let it linger there a moment, one finger pointing upward, one inward as if toward her heart. "With me," she answered. "Where you belong."
There was something fragilely charming, he thought, in the evanescent little gesture while it lasted. And he watched it wistfully and hated to see it end, the hand drop back as it had been. It had been so unstudied. With me; finger unconsciously to her heart.
The stuttering little tap came again. There was something coy about it that irritated him. He turned his head and frowned over that way. "Who's that?" he asked sternly, but of her, not the door.
She shaped her mouth to a soundless symbol of laughter; then she stilled it further, though it hadn't come at all, by spoking her fingers over it, fanwise. "A suitor, I'm afraid. The colonel. I know him by his tap."
Durand, his face growing blacker by the minute, was at the bedside now, struggling into trousers with a sort of cavorting hop, to and fro.
The tapping had accosted them a third time.
He cut his thumb slashingly backhand toward the door, in pantomime to have her answer it temporizingly while he got ready.
"Yes?" she said sweetly.
"It's Harry, my dear," came through the door. "Good morning. Am I too early."
"No, too late," growled Durand surlily. "I'll attend to 'Harry, my dear' in a moment!" he vowed to her in an undertone.
She was in stitches by now, head prone on the dressing table, hands clasped across the back of her neck, palpitating with smothered laughter.