It wasn’t until the third lesson that Teddie, even through her
self-immuring hunger for knowledge, began to doubt the wisdom of her
arrangement with Raoul Uhlan. She began to dislike the perfume with
which this master of the brush apparently anointed his person, just as
she detected a growing tendency to emigrate from the realms of pure Art
to the airier outlands of more personal issues. She was as clean of
heart as she was clear of head, and she resented what began to dawn on
her as the rather unnecessary physical nearness of the man as he
corrected her drawing or pointed out her deficiencies in composition.
But his knowledge was undeniable, and his criticisms were true. She was
learning something. She was unquestionably getting somewhere. So she
refused to see what she had no wish to see. She endured the uliginous
oyster of self-esteem for the white pearl of knowledge that it harbored.
But on the day after the talk with her Uncle Chandler, when the next
lesson was under way, a new disquiet crept through her. The man seemed
to be forgetting himself. Instead of studying her over-scrambled
color-effects he seemed intent on studying the much more bewitching
lines of her forward-thrust chin and throat. Once, when he leaned
closer, apparently by accident, she moved away, apparently without
thought. It both puzzled and disturbed her, for she had not remained as
oblivious as she pretended to his stare of open hunger. Yet the
intentness of his gaze, as he attempted to lock glances with her, turned
out to be a bullet destined forever to fall short of its target. He was,
in fact, wasting his time on a Morse-code of the soul which had no
distinct meaning to her. He was lavishing on her a slowly-perfected
technique for which she had no fit and proper appreciation. Teddie, in
fact, didn’t quite know what he was driving at.
It wasn’t until she realized, beyond all measure of doubt, that the
repeated contact of his shoulder against hers was not accidental that a
faint glow of revulsion, shot through with anger, awakened in her. But
her inner citadels of fear remained uninvaded. She had nipped more than
one amatory advance in the bud, in her time. With one brief look, long
before that, she had blighted more than one incipient romance. Her scorn
was like a saber, slender and steel-cold, and she could wield it with
the impersonal young brutality of youth. And it had always been
sufficient.
When he stood close behind her, as she still sat confronting her sketch,
and, as he talked, placed his left hand on the shoulder of her blue
canvas blouse, and then, leaning closer, caught in his big bony hand her
small hand that held the pencil, to guide it along the line it seemed
unable to follow, she told herself that he was merely intent on
correcting her drawing. But a trouble, vague and small as the worry of a
mouse behind midnight wainscotting, began to nibble at her heart. For
that enclosing big hand was holding her own longer than need be, that
small horripilating disturbance of her hair was something more than
accidental. The small nibble of trouble grew into something disturbing,
something almost momentous, something to be stopped without loss of
time.
She got up sidewise from her chair, with a half-twist of the torso that
was an inheritance from her basket-ball days. It freed her without
obvious effort from all contact with the over-intimate leaning figure.
She even retained possession of the crayon-pencil, which she put down
beside her Nile-green brush-bowl after crossing the room to the
blackwooded console between the two windows.
“I guess that will about do us for to-day, won’t it?” she said in her
quiet and slightly reedy voice as she proceeded, with deluding grave
impersonality, to open one of the windows.
But he crossed the room after her and stood close beside her at the
window. He towered above her in his bigness like something taurine,
alert and yet ponderously calm.
“Why are you afraid of me?” he asked, with his eyes on the
gardenia-white oval of her cheek.
“I’m not,” she replied with a crisp small laugh like the stirring of
chopped ice in a wine-cooler. “I’m not in the least afraid of you.”
A less obtuse man would have been chilled by the scorn in her voice. But
Uhlan was too sure of his ground, his all too familiar ground, to heed
side-issues.
“It’s you who makes me afraid of myself,” he murmured, stooping closer
to her. He spoke quite collectedly, though his face was a shade paler
than before.
“You said to-morrow at three, I believe,” she observed in an icily
abstracted voice. That tone, she remembered, had always served its
purpose. It was conclusive, coolly dismissive. For she still refused to
dignify that approach with opposition. She declined to recognize it,
much less to combat it.
“Did I?” he said in a genuinely abstracted whisper, for his mind was not
on what he said or heard. His mind, indeed, was fixed on only one thing.
And that was her utterly defenseless loveliness. The blackness of his
pupils and the aquiline cruelty about the corner of his eyes frightened
her even more than his pallor.
But she did not give way to panic, for to do so was not the custom of
her kind. She fought down her sudden weak impulse to cry out, her
equally absurd propulsion to flight, her even more ridiculous temptation
to break the window-panes in front of her with her clenched fist and
scream for help.
For she realized, even before he made a move, that he was impervious to
the weapons that had always served her. He stood beyond the frontiers of
those impulses and reactions in which she moved and had her being. The
very laws of her world meant nothing to him. It was like waking up and
finding a burglar in the house, a burglar who knew no law but force.
So she wheeled slowly about, with her head up, watching him. There was a
blaze like something perilously close to hate in her slightly widened
eyes, for she knew, now, what lay ahead of her. Instinct, in one flash,
told her what lurked beside her path. And her inability to escape it, to
confront it with what it ought to be confronted with, was maddening.
“_You Hun!_” she said in a passionate small moan of misery which he
mistook for terror. “Oh, you Hun!”
He could afford to smile down at her, fortified by her loss of
fortitude, warm with the winy ichors of mastery.
“You adorable kid!” he cried out, catching the hand which she reached
out to the window-frame to steady herself with.
“Don’t _touch_ me!” she called out in a choking squeak of anger. And
this time, as he swung her about, he laughed openly.
“You wonderful little wildcat!” he murmured, as he pinned her elbows
close to her sides and drew her, smothered and helpless, in under the
wing of his shoulder.
For a moment or two she fought with all that was left of her strength,
writhing and twisting and panting, struggling to free her pinioned arms.
Then she ceased, abruptly, devastated, not so much by her helplessness
as by the ignominy of her efforts. She went limp in his arms as he
forced back her head, and with his arm encircling her shoulders, kissed
her on the mouth.
He stopped suddenly, perplexed by her passiveness, even suspecting for a
moment that she might have fainted. But he found himself being surveyed
with a tight-lipped and narrow-eyed intentness which shot a vague
trouble through his triumph. He even let his arms drop, in bewilderment,
though the drunkenness had not altogether gone out of his eyes.
She was wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, with a white look of
loathing on her face. She was still mopping her lips as she crossed to
the studio-door and swung it open.
“But I didn’t say I was going,” he demurred, frowning above his smile.
He was sure of himself, sure of his mastery, sure of his technique.
“_You are going_,” she said, slowly and distinctly.
He stood there, as she repeated those three flat-toned words of hers,
reviewing his technique, going back over it, for some undivulged
imperfection. For it was plain that she piqued him. She more than piqued
him; she disturbed him. But he refused to sacrifice his dignity for any
such momentary timidity. It was familiar ground to him; each endearing
move and maneuver was instinctive with him. Only the type was new. And
novelty was not to be scoffed at.
He was smiling absently as he picked up his hat and gloves from the
cherrywood table. And he stopped in front of her, still smiling, on his
way out.
“Remember, wild-bird, that I am coming back to-morrow,” he said,
arrested in spite of himself by the beauty of the white face with the
luminous eyes. “To-morrow, at three!”
She did not look at him. She didn’t even bother to attempt to look
through him.
“You are not coming back,” she quietly explained.
Already, she knew, all the doors of all the world were closed between
them. The thing seemed so final, so irrefutably over and done with, that
there was even a spurning touch of weariness in her tone. But he refused
to be spurned.
“I am coming back,” he maintained, facing the eyes which refused to meet
his, speaking more violently than he had at first intended to speak. “I
am coming back again, as sure as that sun is shining on those housetops
out there. I’m coming back, and I’m going to take you in my arms again.
For I’m going to tame you, you crazy-hearted little stormy petrel, even
though I have to break down that door of yours, and break down that
pride of yours, to do it!”
She went whiter than ever as she stood there with her hand on the
door-knob. She stood there for what seemed a very long time.
“To-morrow at three,” she repeated in her dead voice, with just the
faintest trace of a shiver shaking her huddled figure. It was not
altogether a question; it was not altogether an answer.
But it was enough for Uhlan, who passed with a dignity not untouched
with triumph out through the open door. Yet Teddie’s shiver, as she
stood staring after him, was the thoracic râle of her youth. And down on
her protesting body, for the first time in her life, pressed a big
flanged instrument with indented surfaces, like a pair of iron jaws from
which she could not entirely free herself.