The Romantic | Page 2

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 rub it off on me. I want to keep clean."
"Isn't it a bit too late?"
"Not if you clear out at once. This minute." He called her "a cruel little devil."
She could forgive him for that. She could forgive him ending it in any beastly way he liked, provided he did end it. But not last night. To come crawling back, three months after, wanting to begin again. Thinking it was possible.
There had been nothing worse