Part 15 (1/2)
With an involuntary and brutal movement he took her in his arms and kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable pa.s.sion. She made no effort to avoid him, but met his embrace with an intensity that rivalled his own. When he released her she wavered and half fell on a chair across the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The lightning, he thought, had struck him. Winding in and through his surging, tempestuous emotion was an objective realization of what was happening to him: this wasn't a comfortable, superficially sensual affair such as he had had with Anette. He had seen, in steel mills, great shops with perspectives of tremendous irresistible machines, and now he had the sensation of having been thrown, whirling, among them.
Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crus.h.i.+ng the cool metallic filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders. She exclaimed, ”Oh!” in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope, no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. ”Savina,”
he said, using for the first time that name, ”you must get yourself together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident.”
She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body, her arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was dazed; but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair.
”We must find out what has happened to us,” he went on, speaking with difficulty out of the turmoil of his being. ”We are not young,” he repeated stupidly; ”and not foolish. We won't let ourselves be carried away beyond--beyond return.”
”You are so wise,” she a.s.sented, with an entire honesty of intention; but her phrase mocked him ferociously.
The tide of his own emotion was gathering around him with the force of a sea like that of which she had already, vividly, spoken. There was d.a.m.ned little of what could be recognized as admissible wisdom in him.
Instead of that he was being inundated by a recklessness of desire that reached Savina's desperate indifference to what, however threatening, might overtake her. He couldn't, he hadn't the inclination to, do less.
Reaching up, she drew her fingers down his sleeves until they rested in his gripping hands. Her palms clung to his, and then she broke away from him:
”I want to be outraged!” Her low ringing cry seemed suppressed, deadened, as though the damask and florid gilt and rosewood, now inexpressibly shocked, had combined to m.u.f.fle the expression, the agony, of her body. Even Lee Randon was appalled before the nakedness left by the tearing away of everything imposed upon her. She should have said that, he realized, unutterably sad, long ago, to William Grove. But, instead, she had told him; and, whatever the consequences might be, he must meet them. He had searched for this, for the potency in which lay the meaning of Cytherea, and he had found it. He had looked for trouble, and it was his in the realization alone that he could not, now, go home tomorrow morning.
In his room the tropical fruits and whiskey and cigarettes were by his bed, the percolator ready for morning; and, stopping in his preparations for the night, he mixed himself a drink and sat moodily over it. What had happened downstairs seemed, more than anything else, astounding; Mrs. Grove, Savina, had bewildered him with the power, the bitterness, of her feeling. At the thought of her shaken with pa.s.sionate emotion his own nerves responded and the racing of his blood was audible in his head. What had happened he didn't regret; dwelling on it, the memory was almost as sharply pleasant as the reality; yet he wasn't concerned with the present, but of the future--tomorrow.
He should, probably, get home late in the afternoon or in the evening; and what he told himself was that he wouldn't come back to the Groves, to Savina. The risk, the folly, was too great. Recalling his conclusions about the attachments of men of his age, he had no illusion about the possibly ideal character of an intimacy with William Grove's wife; she, as well, had illuminated that beyond any obscurity of motive or ultimate result. Lee's mind s.h.i.+fted to a speculation about the cause of their--their accident. No conscious act, no desire, of his had brought it on them; and it was evident that no conscious wish of hers had materialized their unrestrainable kisses. Savina's life, beyond question, must have been largely spent in hiding, combatting, her secret--the fact that her emotion was too great for life.
However, Lee Randon didn't try to tell himself that no other man had shared his discovery; indeed, Savina, too, had wisely avoided that challenge to his experience and wisdom. Like her he deliberately turned away from the past; and, in the natural chemistry of that act, the provision for his masculine egotism, it was dissolved into nothingness.
He was concentrated on the incident in the library: dancing with her, he had held her in a far greater, a prolonged, intimacy of contact; something in the moment, a surprising of her defences, a slight weariness in a struggle which must often seem to her unendurable, had betrayed her. Nothing, then, than what had occurred, could have been farther from his mind; he had never connected Mrs. Grove with such a possibility; she hadn't, the truth was, at first attracted him in that way. Now he thought that he had been blind to have missed her resemblance to Cytherea. She was Cytherea! This, in a measure, accounted for him, since, with so much to consider, he badly needed an accounting.
It wasn't simply, here, that he had kissed a married woman; there was nothing revolutionary or specially threatening in that; it was the sensation of danger, of lightning, the recognition of that profoundly disturbing countenance, which filled him with gravity and a determined plan of restraint.
He recalled the fact that both Peyton Morris and Mina had insisted that they had not been responsible for what had overtaken them; at the time he had not credited this, he was certain that some significant preliminaries had been indulged in; but positively Savina and he had been swept off their feet. A sense of helplessness, of the extreme danger of existence, permeated and weakened his opposing determination--he had no choice, no freedom of will; nothing august, in him or outside, had come to his a.s.sistance. In addition to this, he was--as in maturity he had always been--without a convenient recognition of right and wrong. What he princ.i.p.ally felt about Savina was a helpless sense of tragedy, that and a hatred for the world, for the tepid society, which had no use for high pa.s.sion.
To have kissed her, under the circ.u.mstances, appeared to him not only natural, but inevitable; and he was suffering from no feeling of guilt; neither toward William Grove, in whose house he was a guest, nor to f.a.n.n.y--those widely heralded att.i.tudes were largely a part of a public hypocrisy which had no place in the attempted honesty of his thoughts.
Lee was merely mapping out a course in the direction of worldly wisdom.
Then, inconsistently leaving that promise of security, he reviewed every moment, every thrilling breath, with Savina Grove after the Davencotts had gone: he felt, in exact warm similitude, her body pressed against his, her parted lips; he heard the little escaping ”Ah!” of her fervor.
He put his gla.s.s down abruptly and tramped from wall to wall, his unb.u.t.toned silk waistcoat swinging about his arms. Lee Randon now cursed himself, he cursed Savina, but most of all he cursed William Grove, sleeping in complacent ignorance beside his wife. His imagination, aroused and then defrauded, became violent, wilfully obscene, and his profanity emerged from thought to rasping sound. His forehead, he discovered, was wet, and he dropped once more into the chair by the laden tray, took a deep drink from a fresh concoction. ”This won't do,” he said; ”it's crazy.” And he resumed the comforting relief that tomorrow would be different: he'd say good-bye to the Groves together and, in four hours, he'd be back in Eastlake. The children, if he took a late train, would be in bed, and f.a.n.n.y, with her feet on the stool, engaged with her fancy work.
Then his revolving thoughts took him back to the unanswered mystery of what, actually, had happened to Savina and him. He lost her for Cytherea, he lost Cytherea in her; the two, the immobile doll and the woman torn with vitality, merged to confound him. In the consideration of Savina and himself, he discovered that they, too, were alike; yet, while he had looked for a beauty, a quality, without a name, a substance, Savina wanted a reality every particle of which she had experienced and achingly knew. He, more or less, was troubled by a vision, but her necessity was recognizable in flesh. There, it might be again, she was more fortunate, stronger, superior. It didn't matter.
No inclination to sleep drugged the activity of his mind or promised him the release, the medicine, of a temporary oblivion. He had a recurrence of the rebellious spirit, in which he wondered if Grove did sleep in the same room with Savina. And then increasingly he got what he called a hold on himself. All that troubled him seemed to lift, to melt into a state where the hopeless was irradiated with tender memories. His mood changed to a pervasive melancholy in which he recalled the lost possibilities of his early ambitions, the ambitions that, without form or encouragement, had gone down before definite developments. When he spoke of these, tentatively, to f.a.n.n.y, she always replied serenely that she was thankful for him as he was, she would not have liked him to be anything queer.
But if he had met Savina first, and married her, his career would have been something else entirely; now, probably--so fiercely their combined flame would have burned--it would be over. However, during its course--he drew in a long audible breath. It was no good thinking of that! He completed his preparations for the night; but he still lingered, some of the drink remained. Lee was glad that he had grown quieter, reflective, middle-aged; it was absurd, undignified, for him to imitate the transports of the young. It pleased him, though, to realize that he wasn't done, extinguished, yet; he might play court tennis--it wasn't as violent as racquets or squash--and get back a little of his lapsed agility; better still, he'd ride more, take three days a week, he could well afford to, instead of only Sat.u.r.day and holidays in the country.
It was a mistake to disparage continually the life, the pleasures and friends, he had--the friends he had gathered through long arduous years of effort. He must grow more familiar with Helena and Gregory, too; no one had handsomer or finer children. And there was f.a.n.n.y--for one friend of his she had ten; she was universally liked and admired. Lee was, at last, in bed; but sleep continued to evade him. He didn't fall asleep, but sank into a waking dose; his mind was clear, but not governed by his conscious will; it seemed to him that there was no Savina Grove, but only Cytherea; her smile, her fascination, everywhere followed him. A d.a.m.ned funny business, life! At times its secret, the meaning of love, was almost clear, and then, about to be freed by knowledge, his thoughts would break, grow confused, and leave him still baffled.
Lee Randon was startled to find the brightness of morning penetrating his eyes; ready for his bath, with the percolator choking and bubbling in the next room, he rehea.r.s.ed, reaffirmed, all that he had decided the night before. No one was with him at the breakfast table elaborate with repousse silver and embroidered linen and iced fruit; but, returning upstairs, he saw Savina in her biscuit-colored suit in the library.
”William had to go to Was.h.i.+ngton,” she told him; ”he left his regrets.”
She was, Lee perceived, almost haggard, with restless hands; but she didn't avoid his gaze. She stood by the table, one hand, gloved, slightly behind her on it. Bending forward he kissed her more intently, more pa.s.sionately, more wholly, than ever before.
”I hadn't meant to do that,” he said; but his speech was only mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him.