The Unpossessed (13 page)

“Oh but I like it here with you, Elizabeth,” he did not re ply although he heard plainly every word she had not spoken. “I like it lying here and watching you with your shy merry eyes set slanting in your sad little hard little face. You are something that I desperately need to make me into a whole man and I would like to lie here every morning for the rest of my worthless life and watch you running around the room looking for stockings without holes.”

“We might add a year to our three months together, Denny my darling,” she did not say thoughtfully as she found the hole she had been expecting in the ankle of the gray stocking, “we might tell la Frump we're staying on, we might stay home nights and get up mornings. And before you could say
deux Pernods sec
there we would be together the two of us, living as fine a life as you please,” she did not add as she flapped a sound stocking in triumph.

“Get up, get up, lazybones,” she cried. “You've got to sit on my trunk, you've got to phone about my tickets.” “There's time enough,” he said and flounced irritably beneath the covers.

“Elizabeth, I love you,” he did not cry out in terror as she tossed the stockings like long braids over her shoulders and hurried off to the bathroom. “Don't leave me, don't go!” he did not dare to cry after her for he knew she was a girl who craved tenderness so deeply that when it was given her she was smothered and must shake it off to emerge sleek like a seal from water.

“I could learn to mend, I could learn to cook,” she did not call to him as she stood sadly under the shower-ring and held out thin beseeching arms to the faucets. “I could make us chocolat with so much whipped cream we would never drink Pernods again,” she said aggressively as the water poured like rain from a cloud-burst. “I would be your lover, I would be your sister,” she could not resist not sobbing as she turned off the hot and let the cold water fall in a chill down her back. “I would be your wife,” she did not murmur as she turned and held her breast to the stinging icicles.

“Will you never get up, will you never get up and help me,” she said crossly as she came back bathed and wearing only the stockings rolled at the knee and fastened with an old pair of his garters.

“I have had nothing but unpleasant words from you this whole morning, our last day,” he said harshly as she came and stood scowling over the bed. And so he pulled her down beside him and they lay on the bed together and caressed each other angrily.

“Last night,” she did not confess as she lay for a moment remembering, with her face against his shoulder, “I woke up suddenly and you were lying with both your arms, even in sleep, tightly round me. For a minute I was so exquisitely happy that I thought I would die, I thought we both ought to die.”

“Oh gosh, Elizabeth,” he did not whisper back, “where's the sense in your leaving me, darling? We have left people before, both of us! Ah, stay with me, Elizabeth.” His arms went tight about her.

“Denny, you're smothering me,” she choked. “But I lay there darling,” she did not continue, “and then I thought I was going to suffocate. No matter how I moved your arms were there. As if you were telling me over and over again, unbearably, that you loved me. I was smothered. I was coralled. Denny,” she did not cry as a spasm of loneliness shook her by the shoulders, “I want to be loved and desired and possessed but I cannot stand it when it happens. Are you trying to break my neck,” she said grimly.

“Elizabeth, I love you, love you, love you,” he did not boldly whisper.

“But it is only in sleep, with your arms,” she did not answer, moving her head in gentle recrimination on his chest, “that you dare to tell me. Ah,” she did not repeat bitterly as his black hairs stirred against her cheek with her own breathing, “if only you were not as scared, as sceptical, as I.”

“Elizabeth darling, if this isn't love,” he did not whisper, frightened, in her ear as he moved to kiss it, “then what the devil is it, darling? Isn't it all we're capable of, after loving other people? And what will happen to us darling, if we go on leaving people?”

“Save me, save us both, my poor Denny,” she did not answer as she looked him ironically in the eye.

“There are moments, my dear madame,” he said guardedly, “when I am inclined to regret your untimely resignation. Might you be persuaded, do you think, to take a later train and a later boat and stay on another month maybe so I could show you Paris at Christmas? and spring in Florence, Italy?”

“Thank you so much,” she said politely. “I have enjoyed my stay here, Mr. Kirby, and the quarters are delightful. But I do not think it advisable to remain too long in one position.”

“You have a lousy disposition,” he said. “You might wait another month. A year. If my memory doesn't play me tricks, I believe I invited you to marry me last week. Why don't you reconsider, my dear young lady?”

“Because I have got my hair cut a new way to ravish the men on the boat, because to hell with modern marriages, because I've cabled Bruno and my mind is made up and I'm going. Because life goes on,” she said gayly.

“Ridiculous,” he said; “there's nothing to go home for.”

“My country needs me.”

“So does France.”

“My country's on the breadlines, the headlines, the deadl—”

“Stop quoting that damn letter,” he said sharply. They held each other close. “You are either stupid,” he said looking about the room for a word and finding it on the lid of her bulging trunk, “or crazy. If you feel so swell about leaving me, then what makes your eyes so hard today, like nasty little stones?” He pushed his hands savagely down her back which was arched like a bow to her waist which was too narrow and her hips which were too lean and every line of which his fingers knew by heart.

Her laugh clinked out like little shells, falling from a child's tin pail. “Get up, you fool, Madame la Frump will be bringing our chocolat and finding us in bed again.”

“And why do you have a hysterical laugh today?”

“Do you think it would be tactful of me, not to put on some sort of show?”

“I hate you,” he said.

“I know; and One day you will kill me,” she said wearily. “Only I won't be here. And someone else will be. . . .”

“I really hate you now, Elizabeth.”

“Then let's get up.”

“But you choose just the time when we are growing close, when things are growing warm, when things are growing real,” he said, advancing warily as though he meted out just how much sentiment she could take.

“Ah that's just it,” she said tracing with a finger the lines in his cheeks that were like commas as though she would forever memorize them. “I hate real things, I don't believe they're true. I can cry at a play but nothing in life can bring a tear to these old gray eyes.”

“Is it because of that cablegram, that drunken Pernod cablegram, that you are leaving my bed and board, cherie? Would that I had never left your name at Cook's.”

There was a sharp rapping at the door and they huddled together as if they were in hiding. But the voice of la Frump came relentlessly through the crack. “Is it that M'sieur-dame desire une cup chocolat?”

“Is it that you desire a kick in the pants, Madame?” shouted Denny, outraged. “Is it that you don't know tragedy when it's going on in your only suite-with-bath? No! Food will be served when the curtain has been rung down and not a minute before!”

“Pig of a Frenchwoman,” he sobbed. “Chocolat! What does she think this is, just any old God damn day?”

Their bodies moved imperceptibly till they lay like old friends side by side. Their bodies, she thought, were better friends than they; better able to face the cloying drug of familiarity, changing their shape peacefully to fit together. But they were tired too; they needed something more now, those tired bodies, some psychic approbation from the higher mental spheres, some sanction from the heads. They were tired of this endless contact without benefit of soul, without benefit of love. “What I said to you was true, my dearest Denny,” Elizabeth did not quietly tell him, “the real things are too strong for us to grasp. We haven't time to catch them, we haven't strength to hold them. We are scared till the blood in our veins runs thin and we must hop from one person to the next because to stay is too unbearably exactly what we want.”

“Anyway you are a useless girl,” he said tenderly. “No use to any man, not after three months when one's socks have begun to wear out. You are a fay, you are a sprite, you are not a woman at all.”

“My hero!” she said derisively. “Then you will do very well without me. If all that you wanted was a darning-egg.”

“You are a nasty, cruel, mean, tough, hard-boiled little bitch,” he said, pushing her away, “and your resignation is cheerfully accepted.”

“Then the hell with all this,” she cried, rising from the bed. “All this banter, all this epilogue stuff. Epilogues are out, didn't you know that?” “Life goes on,” she said brightly after a long moment spent in looking into each other's eyes and not saying What damn fools we are, the pair of us! what poor damn fools! and standing above him she added “From an old Persian adage, my good fellow.”

“And I thought women were home-lovers,” he said ruefully, and sighed with relief and misery as life began running again and she threw open the lid of her suit-case where it sat waiting on the bidé. “I thought they were supposed to be lousy with maternal instinct and all that sort of slop. I've been cheated. Here I've got me a wench who's built like a boy with no hips at all and turns out to be a home-wrecker into the bargain.”

“Oh we keep up with some of the folk-ways,” she said, lining the inside of her bag with books. “We've forgotten the words but the melody . . .” She stopped, frightened; and remembered the carriage-step; and cousin Bruno clasping his knickerbockered knee in fright as she said (swinging her pigtails)
Probably love is all that counts
. “And that's from the Orientals too, the good old Orientals,” she said; and stuffed handkerchiefs into the toes of her shoes.

He sat up straight in the middle of the bed.

“Elizabeth!”

“Mr. Kirby! how you startled me.”

“Why are you going away, Elizabeth?”

“Get up and help me pack, you fool.”

“Why are you going away?”

“The bloom is off the peach.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Dennis!”

“Why are you going away, darling?”

“Because we're all washed up, darling.”

“Elizabeth, why are you going?”

“Change of venue, darling.”

“Elizabeth.”

“You're just a parenthesis, darling, in life's long dreary sentence.”

“You think you're funny, don't you.”

“No. I think I'm a world cruise, a round-the-world cruise, and I've only got time for short parenthetic stops.”

O God, she thought, is it Denny questioning Elizabeth, or Denny questioning Denny . . . or myself dishonestly cross-examining myself!

“Elizabeth! Could you possibly talk sense?”

“No.”

“Elizabeth. Is it because of that cablegram?”

“What cablegram?”

“That cablegram, you know what cablegram.”

“No,” she said shortly, “no it isn't.” For if Bruno's cable had
not
come she would have left Denny for that reason.

“Then, my darling idiot Elizabeth—”

“It has been a pleasure to know you, my dear Mr. Kirby, and it is an exquisite joy to leave you.”

“Listen Elizabeth.”

“Why are you going away, Elizabeth,” she mocked him. “Because I hate you, sir, she said. Why are you going away, Elizabeth? Because I love you sir, she said.”

“Do you love me, do you think,” he said, curious and wholly disinterested.

“Will you kindly help me pack.”

“No. Do you love me, do you think?” he asked, critical and calm.

“Oh—I sort of love you, I guess,” she said.

“Then why . . .”

“Because you love me too much and I can't stand it.”

“But suppose,” he said excitedly.

“Oh then, because you don't love me enough,” she said wearily. “Because neither of us gives a hoot in hell for anything.”

“Listen to me, Elizabeth.”

“I have tendered my resignation.”

“No but Elizabeth! as an experiment! Why should we leave one another? We get along well, we're fond of one another. I put it to you before. Say we stay and each go his own way, leave out the romantic twaddle-twaddle, we're both hard-boiled. We understand each other, Elizabeth.”

“The understanding that passeth love,” she said coldly. “But if I ever should slip up and get married, I'd want a relationship and not an arrangement. And that's not from the Chinese, you God damn fool. You can take that one straight.”

“I suppose you want me to get down on my knees,” he said bitterly.

“Just what I want,” she said. “Now will you kindly get up and help.”

She moved feeling light as air, feeling heavy as lead. Humming she moved about the room not seeing it, and dropped little things of her own into the open bags. Somewhere there was a terrible little pain. Perhaps it was her heart? Perhaps it was too full? too empty?

He put one foot reluctantly out of the bed. “And what will you do when you have left me, Elizabeth?”

“Sit on top of the world cracking peanuts,” she said angrily. “Draw caricatures of the new president's family. Get a permanent wave maybe.”

“Alone, my dear Elizabeth, if I may make so bold to ask?”

“Not Elizabeth. Life goes on. The first brute that comes down the pike. Offering me understanding.”

“I don't care, you're a sloppy wench, your stockings always are wrinkled.”

“Good.”