Part 22 (1/2)

”I am glad of that anyhow.” But her vindictive tone betrayed the words.

”Although I can easily guess why you didn't--you were ashamed. You did kiss her; why won't you admit it?”

”What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use.”

”Did she call you Lee?”

”h.e.l.l, f.a.n.n.y, what a G.o.d-forsaken lot of young nonsense!” His anger was mounting. ”You can understand here as well as later that I am not going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more.

Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright pathetic, you are so ridiculous.”

”You will stay exactly where you are until I get done.” Her tone was perceptibly shriller. ”And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only knew--disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up.”

Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. ”I won't have it!” Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare.

This, he realized, was worse than he had antic.i.p.ated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect f.a.n.n.y, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanis.h.i.+ng. He was conscious of f.a.n.n.y not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.

His princ.i.p.al recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a gla.s.s of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. ”Stop it,” he commanded sharply; ”you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool.”

”Only one kind,” she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; ”and I'm not going to be it much longer.

You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what--what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes.” She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. f.a.n.n.y's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.

”In a minute more you'll be sick,” he warned her.

”Oh, G.o.d,” she whispered, ”that's all he knows, all he feels! In a minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you d.a.m.ned fool,” her voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch, ”can't you understand I am dying?”

”No.” His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control her wildness. ”No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you.

But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop, now, at once.”

If it didn't, he continued silently, he wouldn't be eternally responsible for himself; never a patient man, what might follow the end of his endurance was unpredictable. His feeling toward the woman before him was s.h.i.+fting, as well; the indifference was becoming bitterness; the bitterness glittered, like mica, with points of hatred. He felt this, like an actual substance, a jelly-like poison, in his blood, affecting his body and mind. It bred in him a refined brutality, an ingenious cruelty. ”A mirror would shut you up quicker than anything else,” he informed her; ”you look like a woman of sixty--go somewhere and fix your face.”

”It doesn't surprise me you are insulting,” she replied, ”but I didn't expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the worst.”

”You talk as though there were no one but you in this,” he said concisely; ”and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves'

because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no--Savina, is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away--”

”Go back, then!” f.a.n.n.y cried. ”Don't bother about me and your home and the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch me again.”

”That needn't trouble you,” he a.s.sured her.

”Not ... when you have her ... to touch.” She could scarcely articulate, each word was p.r.o.nounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling effort. ”You vile, rotten coward!”

The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was overwhelmed with its storm of tears and pa.s.sionate charges. ”You ought to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me, treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman in New York.” As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from her face. ”G.o.d d.a.m.n you.” Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a jarring blow.

In an instant of pa.s.sion Lee Randon caught f.a.n.n.y by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.

It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.

Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence--after the last audible dragging footfall of f.a.n.n.y slowly mounting the stairs--was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to f.a.n.n.y was already dead; f.a.n.n.y, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.

He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to f.a.n.n.y was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself.