Part 16 (1/2)
”I haven't the least interest in it,” Savina a.s.sured him; ”I can't imagine why we bought the seats. Why did we, Lee, when we have each other?”
”Our own private Folly.” He smiled at her.
”Not that,” she reproved him; ”I can't bear to think of it in a small way. Why, it will be all I'll ever have--I shall never think of anyone else like this again; and you'll go back, you'll go away. But I hope you won't forget me, not at once--you must keep me in your heart for a little.”
”I'll never be able to get you out,” he declared.
”You want to, then, and I am--” She lost control of herself as though she had pa.s.sed into a hypnosis, uniquely frozen with pa.s.sion, incapable of movement, of the accommodation of her sight; her breathing was slow, almost imperceptible in its shallowness. ”I am a part of you,” Savina went on when she had recovered. ”It would kill me if I weren't. But it does mean something.” Her heel cut until he thought he was bleeding.
”What?” he asked, through the thin azure smoke of the cigar. She shook her head contentedly:
”I don't care; I have--now, anyway--what I wish, what I've always wished for--you. I didn't know it was you right away, how could I? Not even when we had tea, and talked about Mina and your young Morris, that first afternoon. It was the next day before I understood. Why wasn't it long long ago, when I was a girl, twelve years old? Yes, quite that early.
Isn't it queer, Lee, how I have been troubled by love? It bothers hardly anyone else, it scarcely touches the rest. There is a lot of talk about it, but, all the while, people detest it. They are always wearing dresses and pretentions they can't afford to have mussed. It--I am still talking of love, Lee darling--breaks up their silly society and morals ... like a strong light thrown on something shabby.”
Once more he had the feeling that, before the actuality of Savina's tragic necessity, his own speculations were merely visionary, immaterial; yet he tried to put them into words, to explain, so far as he was able, what it was in him that was hers. But he did this omitting, perhaps, the foundation of all that he was trying to say--he didn't speak of Cytherea. He avoided putting the doll into words because he could think of none that would make his meaning, his attachment, clear.
Lee couldn't, very well, across the remnants of dinner, admit to Savina that a doll bought out of a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue so deeply influenced him. He hadn't lost Cytherea in Savina so much as, vitalized, he had found her. And, while he had surrendered completely to the woman and emotion, at the same time the immaterial aspect of his search, if he could so concretely define it, persisted. The difference between Savina and himself was this: while she was immersed, obliterated, satisfied, in her pa.s.sion, a part of him, however small, stayed aside. It didn't control him, but simply went along, like a diminutive and wondering child he had by the hand.
Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the s.h.i.+fting glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand.
”What were you seeing in the smoke?” Savina asked; and he replied with an adequate truth, ”You.”
”Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?”
”I see you everywhere.”
”Adorable,” she whispered.
No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a bra.s.sy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relations.h.i.+p with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich.
”Your husband wouldn't think so,” he replied; ”yet I am doing well enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre.”
”I wish you had a very great deal of money.”
”Why?” He gazed at her curiously.
”It's so useful,” Savina told him generally; but that, he felt, was not completely what was in her mind. ”What I have,” she went on, ”is quite separate from William's. It is my mother's estate.”
”My brother, Daniel, has done very well in Cuba,” Lee commented. Savina was interested:
”I have never been there; cooler climates are supposed to suit my heart better; but I know I should love it--the close burning days and intense nights.”
”Daniel tells me there's usually the trade wind at night.” His voice reflected his lack of concern.
”I have a feeling,” she persisted, ”that I am more of Havana than I am, for example, of Islesboro. Something in the tropics and the people, the Spanis.h.!.+ Those dancing girls in gorgeous shawls, they haven't any clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their pa.s.sions, the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in my hair and not cool into stagnation.”
They were in her closed automobile, where it was faintly scented by roses yellow and not crimson. She sat upright, withdrawn from him, with her hands clenched in her lap. How she opposed every quality of Mina Raff's; what a contradiction the two women, equally vital, presented.
And f.a.n.n.y, perhaps no less forceful, was still another individual. Lee Randon was appalled at the power lying in the fragile persons of women.
It controlled the changeless and fateful elements of life; while the strength of men, it occurred to him further, was concerned with such secondary affairs as individual ambitions and a struggle eternally condemned to failure.