CHAPTER V
I kept my word to Jacobus. I haunted his home. He was perpetually
finding me there of an afternoon when he popped in for a moment
from the "store." The sound of my voice talking to his Alice
greeted him on his doorstep; and when he returned for good in the
evening, ten to one he would hear it still going on in the
verandah. I just nodded to him; he would sit down heavily and
gently, and watch with a sort of approving anxiety my efforts to
make his daughter smile.
I called her often "Alice," right before him; sometimes I would
address her as Miss "Don't Care," and I exhausted myself in
nonsensical chatter without succeeding once in taking her out of
her peevish and tragic self. There were moments when I felt I must
break out and start swearing at her till all was blue. And I
fancied that had I done so Jacobus would not have moved a muscle.
A sort of shady, intimate understanding seemed to have been
established between us.
I must say the girl treated her father exactly in the same way she
treated me.
And how could it have been otherwise? She treated me as she
treated her father. She had never seen a visitor. She did not
know how men behaved. I belonged to the low lot with whom her
father did business at the port. I was of no account. So was her
father. The only decent people in the world were the people of the
island, who would have nothing to do with him because of something
wicked he had done. This was apparently the explanation Miss
Jacobus had given her of the household's isolated position. For
she had to be told something! And I feel convinced that this
version had been assented to by Jacobus. I must say the old woman
was putting it forward with considerable gusto. It was on her lips
the universal explanation, the universal allusion, the universal
taunt.
One day Jacobus came in early and, beckoning me into the dining-
room, wiped his brow with a weary gesture and told me that he had
managed to unearth a supply of quarter-bags.
"It's fourteen hundred your ship wanted, did you say, Captain?"
"Yes, yes!" I replied eagerly; but he remained calm. He looked
more tired than I had ever seen him before.
"Well, Captain, you may go and tell your people that they can get
that lot from my brother."
As I remained open-mouthed at this, he added his usual placid
formula of assurance:
"You'll find it correct, Captain."
"You spoke to your brother about it?" I was distinctly awed. "And
for me? Because he must have known that my ship's the only one
hung up for bags. How on earth--"
He wiped his brow again. I noticed that he was dressed with
unusual care, in clothes in which I had never seen him before. He
avoided my eye.
"You've heard people talk, of course. . . . That's true enough. He
. . . I . . . We certainly. . . for several years . . ." His voice
declined to a mere sleepy murmur. "You see I had something to tell
him of, something which--"
His murmur stopped. He was not going to tell me what this
something was. And I didn't care. Anxious to carry the news to my
charterers, I ran back on the verandah to get my hat.
At the bustle I made the girl turned her eyes slowly in my
direction, and even the old woman was checked in her knitting. I
stopped a moment to exclaim excitedly:
"Your father's a brick, Miss Don't Care. That's what he is."
She beheld my elation in scornful surprise. Jacobus with unwonted
familiarity seized my arm as I flew through the dining-room, and
breathed heavily at me a proposal about "A plate of soup" that
evening. I answered distractedly: "Eh? What? Oh, thanks!
Certainly. With pleasure," and tore myself away. Dine with him?
Of course. The merest gratitude
But some three hours afterwards, in the dusky, silent street, paved
with cobble-stones, I became aware that it was not mere gratitude
which was guiding my steps towards the house with the old garden,
where for years no guest other than myself had ever dined. Mere
gratitude does not gnaw at one's interior economy in that
particular way. Hunger might; but I was not feeling particularly
hungry for Jacobus's food.
On that occasion, too, the girl refused to come to the table.
My exasperation grew. The old woman cast malicious glances at me.
I said suddenly to Jacobus: "Here! Put some chicken and salad on
that plate." He obeyed without raising his eyes. I carried it
with a knife and fork and a serviette out on the verandah. The
garden was one mass of gloom, like a cemetery of flowers buried in
the darkness, and she, in the chair, seemed to muse mournfully over
the extinction of light and colour. Only whiffs of heavy scent
passed like wandering, fragrant souls of that departed multitude of
blossoms. I talked volubly, jocularly, persuasively, tenderly; I
talked in a subdued tone. To a listener it would have sounded like
the murmur of a pleading lover. Whenever I paused expectantly
there was only a deep silence. It was like offering food to a
seated statue.
"I haven't been able to swallow a single morsel thinking of you out
here starving yourself in the dark. It's positively cruel to be so
obstinate. Think of my sufferings."
"Don't care."
I felt as if I could have done her some violence--shaken her,
beaten her maybe. I said:
"Your absurd behaviour will prevent me coming here any more."
"What's that to me?"
"You like it."
"It's false," she snarled.
My hand fell on her shoulder; and if she had flinched I verily
believe I would have shaken her. But there was no movement and
this immobility disarmed my anger.
"You do. Or you wouldn't be found on the verandah every day. Why
are you here, then? There are plenty of rooms in the house. You
have your own room to stay in--if you did not want to see me. But
you do. You know you do."
I felt a slight shudder under my hand and released my grip as if
frightened by that sign of animation in her body. The scented air
of the garden came to us in a warm wave like a voluptuous and
perfumed sigh.
"Go back to them," she whispered, almost pitifully.
As I re-entered the dining-room I saw Jacobus cast down his eyes.
I banged the plate on the table. At this demonstration of ill-
humour he murmured something in an apologetic tone, and I turned on
him viciously as if he were accountable to me for these "abominable
eccentricities," I believe I called them.
"But I dare say Miss Jacobus here is responsible for most of this
offensive manner," I added loftily.
She piped out at once in her brazen, ruffianly manner:
"Eh? Why don't you leave us in peace, my good fellow?"
I was astonished that she should dare before Jacobus. Yet what
could he have done to repress her? He needed her too much. He
raised a heavy, drowsy glance for an instant, then looked down
again. She insisted with shrill finality:
"Haven't you done your business, you two? Well, then--"
She had the true Jacobus impudence, that old woman. Her mop of
iron-grey hair was parted, on the side like a man's, raffishly, and
she made as if to plunge her fork into it, as she used to do with
the knitting-needle, but refrained. Her little black eyes sparkled
venomously. I turned to my host at the head of the table--
menacingly as it were.
"Well, and what do you say to that, Jacobus? Am I to take it that
we have done with each other?"
I had to wait a little. The answer when it came was rather
unexpected, and in quite another spirit than the question.
"I certainly think we might do some business yet with those
potatoes of mine, Captain. You will find that--"
I cut him short.
"I've told you before that I don't trade."
His broad chest heaved without a sound in a noiseless sigh.
"Think it over, Captain," he murmured, tenacious and tranquil; and
I burst into a jarring laugh, remembering how he had stuck to the
circus-rider woman--the depth of passion under that placid surface,
which even cuts with a riding-whip (so the legend had it) could
never raffle into the semblance of a storm; something like the
passion of a fish would be if one could imagine such a thing as a
passionate fish.
That evening I experienced more distinctly than ever the sense of
moral discomfort which always attended me in that house lying under
the ban of all "decent" people. I refused to stay on and smoke
after dinner; and when I put my hand into the thickly-cushioned
palm of Jacobus, I said to myself that it would be for the last
time under his roof. I pressed his bulky paw heartily
nevertheless. Hadn't he got me out of a serious difficulty? To
the few words of acknowledgment I was bound, and indeed quite
willing, to utter, he answered by stretching his closed lips in his
melancholy, glued-together smile.
"That will be all right, I hope, Captain," he breathed out
weightily.
"What do you mean?" I asked, alarmed. "That your brother might
yet--"
"Oh, no," he reassured me. "He . . . he's a man of his word,
Captain."
My self-communion as I walked away from his door, trying to believe
that this was for the last time, was not satisfactory. I was aware
myself that I was not sincere in my reflections as to Jacobus's
motives, and, of course, the very next day I went back again.
How weak, irrational, and absurd we are! How easily carried away
whenever our awakened imagination brings us the irritating hint of
a desire! I cared for the girl in a particular way, seduced by the
moody expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare,
scornful words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black
depths of her fixed gaze turned slowly upon me as if in
contemptuous provocation, only to be averted next moment with an
exasperating indifference.
Of course the news of my assiduity had spread all over the little
town. I noticed a change in the manner of my acquaintances and
even something different in the nods of the other captains, when
meeting them at the landing-steps or in the offices where business
called me. The old-maidish head clerk treated me with distant
punctiliousness and, as it were, gathered his skirts round him for
fear of contamination. It seemed to me that the very niggers on
the quays turned to look after me as I passed; and as to Jacobus's
boatman his "Good-night, sah!" when he put me on board was no
longer merely cordial--it had a familiar, confidential sound as
though we had been partners in some villainy.
My friend S- the elder passed me on the other side of the street
with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile. The younger brother,
the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength
of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took
the liberty to utter a word of warning.
"You're doing yourself no good by your choice of friends, my dear
chap," he said with infantile gravity.
As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject
of excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I
wanted to know why I was blamed.
"I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a
reconciliation surely desirable from the point of view of the
proprieties--don't you know?"
"Of course, if that girl were disposed of it would certainly
facilitate--" he mused sagely, then, inconsequential creature, gave
me a light tap on the lower part of my waistcoat. "You old
sinner," he cried jovially, "much you care for proprieties. But
you had better look out for yourself, you know, with a personage
like Jacobus who has no sort of reputation to lose."
He had recovered his gravity of a respectable citizen by that time
and added regretfully:
"All the women of our family are perfectly scandalised."
But by that time I had given up visiting the S- family and the D-
family. The elder ladies pulled such faces when I showed myself,
and the multitude of related young ladies received me with such a
variety of looks: wondering, awed, mocking (except Miss Mary, who
spoke to me and looked at me with hushed, pained compassion as
though I had been ill), that I had no difficulty in giving them all
up. I would have given up the society of the whole town, for the
sake of sitting near that girl, snarling and superb and barely clad
in that flimsy, dingy, amber wrapper, open low at the throat. She
looked, with the wild wisps of hair hanging down her tense face, as
though she had just jumped out of bed in the panic of a fire.
She sat leaning on her elbow, looking at nothing. Why did she stay
listening to my absurd chatter? And not only that; but why did she
powder her face in preparation for my arrival? It seemed to be her
idea of making a toilette, and in her untidy negligence a sign of
great effort towards personal adornment.
But I might have been mistaken. The powdering might have been her
daily practice and her presence in the verandah a sign of an
indifference so complete as to take no account of my existence.
Well, it was all one to me.
I loved to watch her slow changes of pose, to look at her long
immobilities composed in the graceful lines of her body, to observe
the mysterious narrow stare of her splendid black eyes, somewhat
long in shape, half closed, contemplating the void. She was like a
spellbound creature with the forehead of a goddess crowned by the
dishevelled magnificent hair of a gipsy tramp. Even her
indifference was seductive. I felt myself growing attached to her
by the bond of an irrealisable desire, for I kept my head--quite.
And I put up with the moral discomfort of Jacobus's sleepy
watchfulness, tranquil, and yet so expressive; as if there had been
a tacit pact between us two. I put up with the insolence of the
old woman's: "Aren't you ever going to leave us in peace, my good
fellow?" with her taunts; with her brazen and sinister scolding.
She was of the true Jacobus stock, and no mistake.
Directly I got away from the girl I called myself many hard names.
What folly was this? I would ask myself. It was like being the
slave of some depraved habit. And I returned to her with my head
clear, my heart certainly free, not even moved by pity for that
castaway (she was as much of a castaway as any one ever wrecked on
a desert island), but as if beguiled by some extraordinary promise.
Nothing more unworthy could be imagined. The recollection of that
tremulous whisper when I gripped her shoulder with one hand and
held a plate of chicken with the other was enough to make me break
all my good resolutions.
Her insulting taciturnity was enough sometimes to make one gnash
one's teeth with rage. When she opened her mouth it was only to be
abominably rude in harsh tones to the associate of her reprobate
father; and the full approval of her aged relative was conveyed to
her by offensive chuckles. If not that, then her remarks, always
uttered in the tone of scathing contempt, were of the most
appalling inanity.
How could it have been otherwise? That plump, ruffianly Jacobus
old maid in the tight grey frock had never taught her any manners.
Manners I suppose are not necessary for born castaways. No
educational establishment could ever be induced to accept her as a
pupil--on account of the proprieties, I imagine. And Jacobus had
not been able to send her away anywhere. How could he have done
it? Who with? Where to? He himself was not enough of an
adventurer to think of settling down anywhere else. His passion
had tossed him at the tail of a circus up and down strange coasts,
but, the storm over, he had drifted back shamelessly where, social
outcast as he was, he remained still a Jacobus--one of the oldest
families on the island, older than the French even. There must
have been a Jacobus in at the death of the last Dodo. . . . The
girl had learned nothing, she had never listened to a general
conversation, she knew nothing, she had heard of nothing. She
could read certainly; but all the reading matter that ever came in
her way were the newspapers provided for the captains' room of the
"store." Jacobus had the habit of taking these sheets home now and
then in a very stained and ragged condition.
As her mind could not grasp the meaning of any matters treated
there except police-court reports and accounts of crimes, she had
formed for herself a notion of the civilised world as a scene of
murders, abductions, burglaries, stabbing affrays, and every sort
of desperate violence. England and France, Paris and London (the
only two towns of which she seemed to have heard), appeared to her
sinks of abomination, reeking with blood, in contrast to her little
island where petty larceny was about the standard of current
misdeeds, with, now and then, some more pronounced crime--and that
only amongst the imported coolie labourers on sugar estates or the
negroes of the town. But in Europe these things were being done
daily by a wicked population of white men amongst whom, as that
ruffianly, aristocratic old Miss Jacobus pointed out, the wandering
sailors, the associates of her precious papa, were the lowest of
the low.
It was impossible to give her a sense of proportion. I suppose she
figured England to herself as about the size of the Pearl of the
Ocean; in which case it would certainly have been reeking with gore
and a mere wreck of burgled houses from end to end. One could not
make her understand that these horrors on which she fed her
imagination were lost in the mass of orderly life like a few drops
of blood in the ocean. She directed upon me for a moment the
uncomprehending glance of her narrowed eyes and then would turn her
scornful powdered face away without a word. She would not even
take the trouble to shrug her shoulders.
At that time the batches of papers brought by the last mail
reported a series of crimes in the East End of London, there was a
sensational case of abduction in France and a fine display of armed
robbery in Australia. One afternoon crossing the dining-room I
heard Miss Jacobus piping in the verandah with venomous animosity:
"I don't know what your precious papa is plotting with that fellow.
But he's just the sort of man who's capable of carrying you off far
away somewhere and then cutting your throat some day for your
money."
There was a good half of the length of the verandah between their
chairs. I came out and sat down fiercely midway between them.
"Yes, that's what we do with girls in Europe," I began in a grimly
matter-of-fact tone. I think Miss Jacobus was disconcerted by my
sudden appearance. I turned upon her with cold ferocity:
"As to objectionable old women, they are first strangled quietly,
then cut up into small pieces and thrown away, a bit here and a bit
there. They vanish--"
I cannot go so far as to say I had terrified her. But she was
troubled by my truculence, the more so because I had been always
addressing her with a politeness she did not deserve. Her plump,
knitting hands fell slowly on her knees. She said not a word while
I fixed her with severe determination. Then as I turned away from
her at last, she laid down her work gently and, with noiseless
movements, retreated from the verandah. In fact, she vanished.
But I was not thinking of her. I was looking at the girl. It was
what I was coming for daily; troubled, ashamed, eager; finding in
my nearness to her a unique sensation which I indulged with dread,
self-contempt, and deep pleasure, as if it were a secret vice bound
to end in my undoing, like the habit of some drug or other which
ruins and degrades its slave.
I looked her over, from the top of her dishevelled head, down the
lovely line of the shoulder, following the curve of the hip, the
draped form of the long limb, right down to her fine ankle below a
torn, soiled flounce; and as far as the point of the shabby, high-
heeled, blue slipper, dangling from her well-shaped foot, which she
moved slightly, with quick, nervous jerks, as if impatient of my
presence. And in the scent of the massed flowers I seemed to
breathe her special and inexplicable charm, the heady perfume of
the everlastingly irritated captive of the garden.
I looked at her rounded chin, the Jacobus chin; at the full, red
lips pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of
the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre
eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and
intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and
so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her
own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my sight
amongst the trees.
And suddenly, without looking at me, with the appearance of a
person speaking to herself, she asked, in that voice slightly harsh
yet mellow and always irritated:
"Why do you keep on coming here?"
"Why do I keep on coming here?" I repeated, taken by surprise. I
could not have told her. I could not even tell myself with
sincerity why I was coming there. "What's the good of you asking a
question like that?"
"Nothing is any good," she observed scornfully to the empty air,
her chin propped on her hand, that hand never extended to any man,
that no one had ever grasped--for I had only grasped her shoulder
once--that generous, fine, somewhat masculine hand. I knew well
the peculiarly efficient shape--broad at the base, tapering at the
fingers--of that hand, for which there was nothing in the world to
lay hold of. I pretended to be playful.
"No! But do you really care to know?"
She shrugged indolently her magnificent shoulders, from which the
dingy thin wrapper was slipping a little.
"Oh--never mind--never mind!"
There was something smouldering under those airs of lassitude. She
exasperated me by the provocation of her nonchalance, by something
elusive and defiant in her very form which I wanted to seize. I
said roughly:
"Why? Don't you think I should tell you the truth?"
Her eyes glided my way for a sidelong look, and she murmured,
moving only her full, pouting lips:
"I think you would not dare."
"Do you imagine I am afraid of you? What on earth. . . . Well,
it's possible, after all, that I don't know exactly why I am coming
here. Let us say, with Miss Jacobus, that it is for no good. You
seem to believe the outrageous things she says, if you do have a
row with her now and then."
She snapped out viciously:
"Who else am I to believe?
"I don't know," I had to own, seeing her suddenly very helpless and
condemned to moral solitude by the verdict of a respectable
community. "You might believe me, if you chose."
She made a slight movement and asked me at once, with an effort as
if making an experiment:
"What is the business between you and papa?"
"Don't you know the nature of your father's business? Come! He
sells provisions to ships."
She became rigid again in her crouching pose.
"Not that. What brings you here--to this house?"
"And suppose it's you? You would not call that business? Would
you? And now let us drop the subject. It's no use. My ship will
be ready for sea the day after to-morrow."
She murmured a distinctly scared "So soon," and getting up quickly,
went to the little table and poured herself a glass of water. She
walked with rapid steps and with an indolent swaying of her whole
young figure above the hips; when she passed near me I felt with
tenfold force the charm of the peculiar, promising sensation I had
formed the habit to seek near her. I thought with sudden dismay
that this was the end of it; that after one more day I would be no
longer able to come into this verandah, sit on this chair, and
taste perversely the flavour of contempt in her indolent poses,
drink in the provocation of her scornful looks, and listen to the
curt, insolent remarks uttered in that harsh and seductive voice.
As if my innermost nature had been altered by the action of some
moral poison, I felt an abject dread of going to sea.
I had to exercise a sudden self-control, as one puts on a brake, to
prevent myself jumping up to stride about, shout, gesticulate, make
her a scene. What for? What about? I had no idea. It was just
the relief of violence that I wanted; and I lolled back in my
chair, trying to keep my lips formed in a smile; that half-
indulgent, half-mocking smile which was my shield against the
shafts of her contempt and the insulting sallies flung at me by the
old woman.
She drank the water at a draught, with the avidity of raging
thirst, and let herself fall on the nearest chair, as if utterly
overcome. Her attitude, like certain tones of her voice, had in it
something masculine: the knees apart in the ample wrapper, the
clasped hands hanging between them, her body leaning forward, with
drooping head. I stared at the heavy black coil of twisted hair.
It was enormous, crowning the bowed head with a crushing and
disdained glory. The escaped wisps hung straight down. And
suddenly I perceived that the girl was trembling from head to foot,
as though that glass of iced water had chilled her to the bone.
"What's the matter now?" I said, startled, but in no very
sympathetic mood.
She shook her bowed, overweighted head and cried in a stifled voice
but with a rising inflection:
"Go away! Go away! Go away!"
I got up then and approached her, with a strange sort of anxiety.
I looked down at her round, strong neck, then stooped low enough to
peep at her face. And I began to tremble a little myself.
"What on earth are you gone wild about, Miss Don't Care?"
She flung herself backwards violently, her head going over the back
of the chair. And now it was her smooth, full, palpitating throat
that lay exposed to my bewildered stare. Her eyes were nearly
closed, with only a horrible white gleam under the lids as if she
were dead.
"What has come to you?" I asked in awe. "What are you terrifying
yourself with?"
She pulled herself together, her eyes open frightfully wide now.
The tropical afternoon was lengthening the shadows on the hot,
weary earth, the abode of obscure desires, of extravagant hopes, of
unimaginable terrors.
"Never mind! Don't care!" Then, after a gasp, she spoke with such
frightful rapidity that I could hardly make out the amazing words:
"For if you were to shut me up in an empty place as smooth all
round as the palm of my hand, I could always strangle myself with
my hair."
For a moment, doubting my ears, I let this inconceivable
declaration sink into me. It is ever impossible to guess at the
wild thoughts that pass through the heads of our fellow-creatures.
What monstrous imaginings of violence could have dwelt under the
low forehead of that girl who had been taught to regard her father
as "capable of anything" more in the light of a misfortune than
that of a disgrace; as, evidently, something to be resented and
feared rather than to be ashamed of? She seemed, indeed, as
unaware of shame as of anything else in the world; but in her
ignorance, her resentment and fear took a childish and violent
shape.
Of course she spoke without knowing the value of words. What could
she know of death--she who knew nothing of life? It was merely as
the proof of her being beside herself with some odious
apprehension, that this extraordinary speech had moved me, not to
pity, but to a fascinated, horrified wonder. I had no idea what
notion she had of her danger. Some sort of abduction. It was
quite possible with the talk of that atrocious old woman. Perhaps
she thought she could be carried off, bound hand and foot and even
gagged. At that surmise I felt as if the door of a furnace had
been opened in front of me.
"Upon my honour!" I cried. "You shall end by going crazy if you
listen to that abominable old aunt of yours--"
I studied her haggard expression, her trembling lips. Her cheeks
even seemed sunk a little. But how I, the associate of her
disreputable father, the "lowest of the low" from the criminal
Europe, could manage to reassure her I had no conception. She was
exasperating.
"Heavens and earth! What do you think I can do?"
"I don't know."
Her chin certainly trembled. And she was looking at me with
extreme attention. I made a step nearer to her chair.
"I shall do nothing. I promise you that. Will that do? Do you
understand? I shall do nothing whatever, of any kind; and the day
after to-morrow I shall be gone."
What else could I have said? She seemed to drink in my words with
the thirsty avidity with which she had emptied the glass of water.
She whispered tremulously, in that touching tone I had heard once
before on her lips, and which thrilled me again with the same
emotion:
"I would believe you. But what about papa--"
"He be hanged!" My emotion betrayed itself by the brutality of my
tone. "I've had enough of your papa. Are you so stupid as to
imagine that I am frightened of him? He can't make me do
anything."
All that sounded feeble to me in the face of her ignorance. But I
must conclude that the "accent of sincerity" has, as some people
say, a really irresistible power. The effect was far beyond my
hopes,--and even beyond my conception. To watch the change in the
girl was like watching a miracle--the gradual but swift relaxation
of her tense glance, of her stiffened muscles, of every fibre of
her body. That black, fixed stare into which I had read a tragic
meaning more than once, in which I had found a sombre seduction,
was perfectly empty now, void of all consciousness whatever, and
not even aware any longer of my presence; it had become a little
sleepy, in the Jacobus fashion.
But, man being a perverse animal, instead of rejoicing at my
complete success, I beheld it with astounded and indignant eyes.
There was something cynical in that unconcealed alteration, the
true Jacobus shamelessness. I felt as though I had been cheated in
some rather complicated deal into which I had entered against my
better judgment. Yes, cheated without any regard for, at least,
the forms of decency.
With an easy, indolent, and in its indolence supple, feline
movement, she rose from the chair, so provokingly ignoring me now,
that for very rage I held my ground within less than a foot of her.
Leisurely and tranquil, behaving right before me with the ease of a
person alone in a room, she extended her beautiful arms, with her
hands clenched, her body swaying, her head thrown back a little,
revelling contemptuously in a sense of relief, easing her limbs in
freedom after all these days of crouching, motionless poses when
she had been so furious and so afraid.
All this with supreme indifference, incredible, offensive,
exasperating, like ingratitude doubled with treachery.
I ought to have been flattered, perhaps, but, on the contrary, my
anger grew; her movement to pass by me as if I were a wooden post
or a piece of furniture, that unconcerned movement brought it to a
head.
I won't say I did not know what I was doing, but, certainly, cool
reflection had nothing to do with the circumstance that next moment
both my arms were round her waist. It was an impulsive action, as
one snatches at something falling or escaping; and it had no
hypocritical gentleness about it either. She had no time to make a
sound, and the first kiss I planted on her closed lips was vicious
enough to have been a bite.
She did not resist, and of course I did not stop at one. She let
me go on, not as if she were inanimate--I felt her there, close
against me, young, full of vigour, of life, a strong desirable
creature, but as if she did not care in the least, in the absolute
assurance of her safety, what I did or left undone. Our faces
brought close together in this storm of haphazard caresses, her
big, black, wide-open eyes looked into mine without the girl
appearing either angry or pleased or moved in any way. In that
steady gaze which seemed impersonally to watch my madness I could
detect a slight surprise, perhaps--nothing more. I showered kisses
upon her face and there did not seem to be any reason why this
should not go on for ever.
That thought flashed through my head, and I was on the point of
desisting, when, all at once, she began to struggle with a sudden
violence which all but freed her instantly, which revived my
exasperation with her, indeed a fierce desire never to let her go
any more. I tightened my embrace in time, gasping out: "No--you
don't!" as if she were my mortal enemy. On her part not a word was
said. Putting her hands against my chest, she pushed with all her
might without succeeding to break the circle of my arms. Except
that she seemed thoroughly awake now, her eyes gave me no clue
whatever. To meet her black stare was like looking into a deep
well, and I was totally unprepared for her change of tactics.
Instead of trying to tear my hands apart, she flung herself upon my
breast and with a downward, undulating, serpentine motion, a quick
sliding dive, she got away from me smoothly. It was all very
swift; I saw her pick up the tail of her wrapper and run for the
door at the end of the verandah not very gracefully. She appeared
to be limping a little--and then she vanished; the door swung
behind her so noiselessly that I could not believe it was
completely closed. I had a distinct suspicion of her black eye
being at the crack to watch what I would do. I could not make up
my mind whether to shake my fist in that direction or blow a kiss.
