"Need what?" This was almost as tenuous as some of Anne's involved
reactions. First Katya wanted him to be free for his soul, then she
wanted this same soul meshed and tangled in an absorbing passion. Roger
looked at her impatiently now, turned from him, again gazing out across
the roofs. Then his impatience vanished as suddenly as it had come.
Katya looked tired to-night. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had not
slept. Her thick lips held the cigarette uncertainly. Swarthy, squat
and blunt, Katya's body conveyed a feeling of unsureness, as if she
were trembling just beneath the surface. He had no right to intrude on
her sympathy, but it was so easy to monopolize Katya's understanding.
He laid his hand on her knee and started to feel the vibration of her
body. She must be holding it in check by her supreme will.
"Never mind, Katya, let's not probe too deeply to-night."
But he knew that Katya did not hear. She was reading in places hidden
from him, the answer to his own question.
"You need to love," she said slowly, as if she were translating from
a foreign tongue, "because there is a chance that you are worth it.
If you love you may be truly great. If you never love--you will go no
higher than now--and--it will be all wasted," she ended in a whisper.
Roger felt that Katya was actually drawing a curtain back before him, a
thick, black curtain that hid strange things he did not wish to see.
"Well, let's hope that whatever ought not to be wasted, won't be," he
said with forced lightness.
"You--will--be afraid," Katya whispered and leaned so close that
involuntarily Roger stepped back. At his motion, she laughed in scorn.
"Yes, that is what you will do when you see it coming. You will step
back. You will run away. You will be afraid of love."
"Oh, no, I won't. Why should I be afraid?" With an uncertain smile
Roger tried to turn the tide creeping from the pit that Katya had
opened.
"Because it hurts." Katya shuddered so violently that Roger saw the
heavy muscles of her shoulders and neck quiver. "It hurts more than any
pain in all the world. It burns out everything in the world, in you,
but itself. It takes your brain and your body and makes white ashes of
them. It takes you, the individual, and melts you into the world. It is
the volcano through which the highest force of spirit finds expression.
There are not many volcanoes in the world or the earth would melt in
flames. There are not many who can love or the race too would melt
away. Through all the ages a few mountains above the level, flat earth.
A few who can love, only a few. That is love. Would you run away?"
In spite of her body trembling as with cold, little beads of moisture
stood on Katya's face. It was too fierce, too elemental, too naked.
Roger looked away. A choking noise from Katya drew his eyes again.
She was gazing at him now with anguish and hatred in her eyes. Roger
stepped back. The blood flamed into his brain, then rushed away,
leaving him cold and sick at the stark nakedness of Katya's revelation.
"Don't," he whispered, "don't."
Slowly the spark in Katya's eyes faded. She gazed at him blankly with
the dead eyes of a statue. Then, with a quick shudder she came back to
life.
"Never mind," she said in her husky whisper. "It isn't your fault."
"I--I never--dreamed--it isn't possible--you can't----"
"Oh, keep quiet. What does it matter? I don't mind your knowing. I
didn't choose to love you. I don't respect you a great deal or admire
you in many ways. You're so young, so undeveloped, like a baby. Stop
staring like a frightened child. It doesn't matter, I tell you. It
doesn't matter."
And, in spite of himself, Roger felt that it did not really matter so
very much. Katya, the Russian Jewess, with her squat body, her strange
foreign past, was a being of another world, as she stood there talking
of volcanoes and white ashes and souls that melted in their own fire.
If she had been of his own race, his own age--but no woman of his age
and race would have said those things, would have thought them, would
have felt them. Disgust rose against his will, disgust seated deep in
the past of his people, disgust of flagrant confession like this.
Katya smiled, a twisted smile of pity for the feeling in him. His lips
moved to deny it, but against the penetration of Katya's knowledge, the
falsehood died.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, and knew that it sounded like Anne
regretting the pain and sorrow of the world.
"You needn't be. I'm not. Can't you stop staring and trying to pretend?"
"Yes," Roger snapped, angry now with her and with himself, "when you
stop pretending too. You talk of melting fire and volcanoes and yet you
say it doesn't matter. It must matter. It----"
"It doesn't matter--as you mean. You understand nothing at all. Will
you please go away?"
Roger's head dropped and he turned from her.
Her whisper followed. "Please forget. You can if you try because it
really doesn't matter--to you." The last words were so low and Roger
already so far across the loft that he did not hear them. He went
without looking back.
But as he walked slowly home, he knew that something within himself had
gone forever. Never again would he be absolutely certain of any human
being. Katya, the indefatigable worker, the passionless comrade, the
clear thinker; Katya the unconfused, had tangled life and the threads
that bound one to another beyond his power of ever straightening. Never
again would he be able to say of any human being "I am sure of this. I
am positive of that."
It was a warm night but Roger was cold and lit a fire. Before it he sat
till dawn, moving only to reach for wood in the basket on the hearth.
Was Katya right? Would he run from love if it ever came to him,
devastating burning passion in a body other than Katya's? Before such a
love as this his love for Anne was the flickering of a tiny flame, as
small, as pale as Anne's feeling for a world beyond the narrow limits
of her own individual safety.
And Anne?
Again Roger lived that first hour on the Bluff, his own surprise and
tenderness at Anne's kiss. The night on the lake when her lips had
clung as hotly as his own.
What was he himself?
What was Anne?
To-night, in this whirlwind that was Katya, he felt strangely near to
Anne. When at last he groped in the wood basket and found it empty,
he rose and went to bed. The east was lighting. The bed was wide and
chill, as if the little ghost of Anne were there beside him.