The Romantic | Page 2

man in his big room and she in her
den, the door open between. Suddenly she saw him standing in the
doorway, looking at her. She knew then. She could feel the blood
rushing in her brain; the stabbing click of the typewriter set up little
whirling currents that swamped her thoughts.
Her wet fingers kept slipping from the keys. He came and took her in
his arms. She lay back in his arms, crying. Crying because she was
happy, because she knew.
She remembered now what he had said then. "You must have known.
You must have thought of me. You must have wanted me to take you
in my arms." And her answer. "No. I didn't. I didn't think of it."
And his smile. His unbelieving smile. He thought she was lying. He
always thought people were lying. Women. He thought women always
lied about what they wanted.
The first time. In her Bloomsbury room, one evening, and the compact
they made then, sitting on the edge of the sofa, like children, holding
each other's hands and swearing never to go back on it, never to go
back on themselves or on each other. If it ever had to end, a clean cut.
No going back on that either.
The first night, in the big, gloomy bedroom of the hotel in Glasgow.
The thick, grey daylight oozing in at the window out of the black street;
and Gibson lying on his back, beside her, sleeping, the sheet dragged
sideways across his great chest. His innocent eyelids.
And the morning after; the happiness. All day the queer, exalted feeling
that she was herself, Charlotte Redhead, at last, undeceived and
undeceiving.
The day his wife came into the office. Her unhappy eyes and small,
sharp-pointed face, shrinking into her furs. Her name was Effie.
He had told her in the beginning that he had left off caring for his wife.
They couldn't hurt her; she didn't care enough. She never had cared.
There was another fellow. Effie would be all right.
Yet, after she had seen Effie it had never been the same thing. She
couldn't remember, quite, how it had been.
She could remember the ecstasy, how it would come swinging through
you, making you blind and deaf to impersonal, innocent things while it
lasted. Even then there was always something beyond it, something you

looked for and missed, something you thought would come that never
came. There was something he did. She couldn't remember. That would
be one of the things you wanted to forget. She saw his thick fingers at
dessert, peeling the peaches.
Perhaps his way of calling her "Poor Sharlie?" Things he let out--"I
never thought I could have loved a girl with bobbed hair. A white and
black girl." There must have been other girls then. A regular procession.
Before he married Effie.
She could see them. Pink and gold girls, fluffy and fat; girls with red
hair; brown haired girls with wide slippery mouths. Then Effie. Then
herself, with her thick bobbed mane and white face. And the beautiful
mouth he praised so.
Was it the disgust of knowing that you were only one of a procession?
Or was it that Effie's sad, sharp face slipped between?
And the end of it. The break-down, when Effie was ill.
His hysterical cries. "My wife, Sharlie, my wife. We oughtn't to have
done it....
"... I can't forgive myself, Sharlie. I've been a brute, a beast, a stupid
animal....
"... When I think of what we've done to her--the little innocent
thing--the awful unhappiness--I could kill myself."
"Do you mean she knows?"
"She thinks. That's bad enough. If she knew, it would kill her."
"You said she wouldn't care. You said there was another man."
"There wasn't."
"You lied, then?"
"Of course I lied. You wouldn't have come to me if I hadn't."
"You told me you didn't care for her."
He had met that with his "Well--what did you want?"
She went over and over it, turning it round and round to see if there was
any sort of light it would look a bit better in. She had been going to
give him up so beautifully. The end of it was to have been wonderful,
quiet, like a heavenly death, so that you would get a thrill out of that
beauty when you remembered. All the beauty of it from the beginning,
taken up and held together, safe at the end. You wouldn't remember
anything else. And he had killed it, with his conscience, suddenly sick,
whining, slobbering, vomiting remorse--Turning on her.

"I can't think what you wanted with me. Why couldn't you have let me
alone!"
Her own voice, steady and hard. "If you feel dirty, go and wash
yourself outside. Don't try and