Part 91 (1/2)
”Are you angry with me?”
”Angry? No! What does it matter to me?”
”I am a man. I live alone. My life is lonely. Must I give up everything before I know that some day I shall have the only thing I really wish?
You know men. You know how we are. I do not defend. I only say that I am not better than the other men. I want to be happy. If that is not for me, then I want to make the time pa.s.s. I do not pretend. Men generally pretend very much to beautiful girls. But you would not believe such nonsense.”
”Then why didn't you stay in the restaurant?”
”Because I thought to do that would be like an insult for you. Such girls as that--mud--they must not come into your life even by chance, even for a few minutes. No man wishes to show himself with mud to a lady he respects. I tell you just the truth.”
”Have you--have you seen her again?”
”She is in Paris. She has been in Paris for many days. But she is nothing. Why speak of such people?”
”I don't know. But I hate--”
She moved restlessly. Then she got up and went to the fire. He followed her. She could not understand her own jealousy. It humiliated her as she had never been humiliated before. She felt jealous of this man's absolute freedom, of his past. A sort of rage possessed her when she thought of all the experiences he must certainly have had. She almost hated him for those experiences. She wished she could lay hands on them, tear them out of him, so that he should not have them any longer in memory's treasury. And yet she knew that, without them, he would probably attract her much less.
”Do you care then?” he said.
”Care?”
”Do you care what I do?”
”No, of course not!”
”But--you do care!” he said.
He said it without any triumph of the male, quite simply, almost as a boy might have said it.
”You do care!” he repeated.
And very gently, slowly, he put his arm round her, drew her close to him, bent down and gave her a long kiss.
For a moment she shut her eyes. She was giving herself up entirely to physical sensation. Fear, thought, everything except bodily feeling, seemed to cease in her entirely at that moment. Some fascination which he possessed, an intense fascination for women, entirely mysterious and inexplicable, a thing rooted in the body, absolutely overpowered her at that moment.
It was he who broke the physical spell. He lifted his lips from hers and she heard the words:
”I want you to marry me. Will you?”
Instantly she was released. A flood of thoughts, doubts, wonderings, flowed through her. She felt terribly startled.
Marriage with this man! Marriage with Nicolas Arabian! In all her thoughts of him she had never included the thought of marriage. Yet she had imagined many situations in which he and she played their parts.
Wild dreams had come to her in sleepless nights, the dreams that visit women who are awake under fascination. She had lived through romances with him. She had been with him in strange places, had travelled with him in sandy wastes, seen the night come with him in remote corners of the earth, stood with him in great cities, watched the sea waves slipping away with him on the decks of Atlantic liners. All this she had done in imagination with him. But never had she seen herself as his wife.
To be the wife of Arabian!
He let her go directly he felt the surprise in her body.
”Marry you!” she said.