Lilah woke again to that certainty....
She opened her eyes. Familiar things came into focus, were,
inexplicably, unreal. She had the impression of waking in a strange
room. Circumstance had changed the very outlines of accepted facts.
At once her mind began the chase interrupted by sleep; unleashed, her
thoughts darted down confused paths, circled, doubled, stopped aghast.
She leaned on her elbow and examined her arms, her hands. She could
not associate her hands with herself. They might have belonged to
another body. This certainty had in some mysterious way deprived her of
herself. Her consciousness was separate; it was pain and fear.
She fell back on the pillows and pressed her fingers against her
eyes. She must get hold of herself. Do something. Other women had had
children. She wouldn’t die. In a year it would be over and she could
go back.... The acceptance of that thought was like a trickle of ice
through her veins.
If she had loved Robert....
* * * * *
Back again! Her thoughts were mad, erratic, feverish. She could not
control them, or bring order out of chaos.
Sitting up with a violent gesture, she saw that it was past nine
o’clock. She had, then, slept. Extraordinary! That she could sleep,
that the tired body was stronger than the will! She had not wanted to
sleep or to lose for an instant her watchfulness. Now, she felt, she
had surrendered to this fact. In sleep, she had been stamped by nature
with acquiescence.
She had been running away from herself. For a week, in crowded
theaters, restaurants and drawing-rooms dedicated to forgetfulness, she
had let herself be swept forward on the current. For hours at a time,
she had forgotten, had postponed remembering. As if there were no reef
ahead, no shattering of the frail craft that had carried her so far
toward disaster. In moments of waiting, it had returned, always like a
thin, icy trickle, down through her brain to her heart.
She must do something.
She half rose, but before she could disguise her dishevelment,
the scars left by tears, the door opened and the mulatto came in,
moving furtively as if to cover her curiosity. Lilah, for the first
time, had the feeling that she was trapped, humiliated, her pride
leveled by a tragedy shared by all women--this yellow girl, herself!
She felt contempt. Some women sacrificed themselves with a smile
to the inevitable, or concealed their wretchedness beneath an air
of superiority, as if a thing so usual, so inexorable, so outside
themselves, were a matter for congratulation. Other women seemed to be
ordained--an order of motherhood; but they were never lovers, wives;
they tended the flame of race, kept it burning. God knew why any
one should willingly add a soul to a world where there were already
too many souls, too much suffering. Better to let humanity dwindle,
thousand by thousand, until the last man staggered to his knees and
died and the earth was left once more to the forests, to animals, to
storm and sunlight, unrecorded, eternal.
The maid, lifting the blinds, remarked that Miss Fuller had been
waiting for half an hour.
“Ask her to come up. And I shall want breakfast here.”
“Yes, m’am.”
Grace Fuller came, bringing, as always, the morning’s mail. Her fringe
was curled, not a hair out of place. And across the pallor of her
cheeks, rouge showed like veining on a leaf.
From the bed, Lilah asked: “Anything amusing? I overslept.”
Grace Fuller put the letters within reach of Lilah’s hand, on the
coverlet. Without preface, she said: “I’m sorry, Lilah. I can’t stay,
go on--I thought I ought to tell you. I’ve registered and to-morrow I
take a case.” A faint smile twisted her lips as she added: “A hopeless
case.”
Lilah glanced at the letters. Suddenly she tossed them aside. “You
needn’t leave, unless you want to. I’m going to have a baby.”
She sat up, pushing the hair back from her forehead, straining it back
violently. Her eyes were heavy. There was no trace of beauty in her
face; she was, for the moment, old. “I’m going to have a baby,” she
repeated in a dull voice.
Her head went down between her knees. She heard Grace Fuller saying:
“Lilah. Lilah! I’m glad for you! This will change everything. Wait
until your heart accepts--I know what it does to women. I’ve watched.
You’ll forget the other, come back to Robert, in gratitude.”
Lilah held her breath. Her revolt and her hate were ponderable; she
felt the weight of them across her back; her body huddled; she tried to
flatten herself out, to escape. Her hair fell forward and she caught at
the thick strands with her teeth. Now, she knew, it was inevitable. She
jerked away from Grace’s hands, flung herself aside.
“I’ll never change,” she cried. “Never. This won’t make me different.
I’m myself. I will be. It’s something I’ve got to stand. But I’ll keep
myself away from it. I’ve always resented being a woman. Gross. Ugly.
Unfair....”
She sat up again. “Tell that girl to see that the cook doesn’t ruin the
eggs. I want a decent breakfast.”
* * * * *
At eleven o’clock Lilah was seated in the outer office of a physician
who was secure in the possession of a fashionable patronage.
The room was quiet, almost bare, and in chairs ranged against the wall,
ten or twelve women were waiting. Now and then a door opened and a
woman in white, with eyeglasses and a cap elaborately starched and
folded, beckoned to one or the other. These patients, Lilah noticed,
never reëntered the anteroom, but were ushered out another way, perhaps
to keep the tide of despair from meeting the tide of hope. Other women,
arriving, took the vacated chairs. A table covered with neat stacks of
magazines offered an escape from curious eyes; there was a discreet,
a constant turning of pages. Behind them, expressions were guarded,
indefinable. Lilah sought duplication of her own sensations. Her face,
she decided, must be as expressionless as the others. It was as if, at
a prearranged signal, these women had become anonymous, featureless.
Only when the door opened and the capped woman beckoned, there was a
flash of excitement, of dread, of something forced and desperately
unwilling.... Time and again the door opened and closed.
When Lilah heard her name, repeated three times because she had
withdrawn so far into herself, she followed the nurse with a sort of
arrogance, an indifference to the outcome. Inwardly, she felt again
that sense of acquiescence, of surrender to a ruthless inquisitor.
The inner office was large, paneled. At a desk between two tall windows
draped with brown velvet, the doctor allowed himself the advantage of
turning his back to the light. Lilah saw him in silhouette--not the
traditional physician, bearded and purposefully benign; a business man
clipped, concise, scientific. To him she was no more than a name, a
number. His manner had in it a trace of the impatience of the normal
man who has had to deal with the delicate and unstable emotional
balance of sick women. He was not jovial; he was not even polite. His
dry questions, spoken with an accent of amusement, irritated Lilah. She
snapped back at him. She had always been healthy; she had had a healthy
contempt for illness; people were sick because they were stupid, or
victims, like Flagg, of accident. She had thought of herself as immune,
outside suffering and the ugly, wearisome details of suffering.... She
had time, while he questioned her, to notice the elaborate simplicity
of his settings; he received his patients in a room reminiscent of
little drawing-rooms at Fontainebleau. A pretty, red-haired girl took
Lilah’s answers in short-hand. Lilah resented this girl’s presence. The
whole proceeding was degrading, like a public scandal.
Lilah fixed the physician with an unwavering gaze. She had expected
him, for a large fee, to rid her of this tormenting suspicion. But she
had not expected him to uncover her fear, subject it to Hogarthian
records in short-hand.... Marriage à la Mode filed away in a card-index
cabinet....
She wished, now, that she had stayed away.
* * * * *
In her motor, still quivering under that professional irony, a
confirmation which had stripped her of arrogance, she looked out at the
city with, again, that tormenting sense of the unreality of familiar
things. People hurrying, laughing, meeting, waiting on the curbs for
the tide of traffic to pass--Lilah was hurt by their indifference to
her tragedy. There was no such thing as a common, a shared, suffering.
No one, not even Flagg, could comprehend. She saw a group of people
familiar to her, Chivers Chew with three women, standing before a
florist’s window in animated conversation. Their security, their
pleasure, seemed as remote as dumb-show within a lighted proscenium.
And Lilah’s melancholy was shot across by a pang of jealousy.
The mulatto met her with the announcement that Major Flagg had
telephoned repeatedly.
Lilah said in an indifferent voice: “Pack my things. I’m going to
Maine to-night. Ask Elliott to wire Mr. Peabody. And tell him to get
a stateroom. If Major Flagg calls again, you may say that I have left
town.”
* * * * *
March came in, blustering, with a buoyant race of large, white clouds
and a wind that ruffled the swollen streams and spread steel-colored
fans across the purple-blue of the sea. The air was sweet with the odor
of wet earth. Willow sprouts showed silver-gray in the ditches. In the
woods and hollows patches of brown snow melted in the sun. Trailing
sprays of waxen arbutus lifted the pine-needles and fallen leaves,
thrust them up and aside. And always the wind billowed and tumbled over
the brown hills, the soaked fields, the noisy, awakened forests.
There was a stir in the earth, after the long stillness of winter.
In a short skirt, a jacket of fur, hatless, Lilah turned away from
the sea and walked inland. A cane Robert had given her, of Malacca,
mounted in amber, swung from her hand. She could not abide the sea, the
dunes, the beach brushed with swift eddies of blown sand. A boisterous
sea was strong medicine for the spirit. It was too bright, too alive;
it had a ruthless virility that frightened her. If only she had been
free enough, brave enough, to brace herself in the shifting, stinging
sands, to breast the wind, to take great swallows of it into her lungs,
to fill her body with it, to laugh at it! Because she was a coward,
she preferred the woods, where, in a chill shadow, in a sort of calm
beneath the brittle crackle of bending boughs above, she was safe from
nature itself. She walked in a void, her thoughts held in abeyance,
like hounds on a leash.
She had told Robert immediately of his good fortune. Something warned
her not to express, just then, her own dissatisfaction. She noticed
a difference in him; his desire for her was no longer humble; it had
become definitely material and possessive, concrete. His happiness only
added to her own inner tumult. He guessed nothing of what went on in
her mind, her heart. He was happy. So must she be! He had never heard
Flagg’s name. He did not guess what had happened, what she had felt.
She was infinitely removed from him; she could even be sorry for him.
Robert behaved as she supposed all men behaved under the circumstances.
He became both dictatorial and tender. She was shielded from draughts,
assisted up and down stairs; he ran after her with shawls and wraps;
she became the object of his unwavering, worshipful attention; his
blue eyes, round, expressionless and innocent, followed every move
she made. “For heaven’s sake, Robert, leave me alone. I’m quite all
right. I won’t break.” And he would say absent-mindedly: “I’m sorry.”
The next instant his arm would be around her waist. It was clear that
he realized nothing.... Some day he must know that he had been making
a fool of himself. Her physical presence, this child, were his. Her
feeling, all that made her desirable, belonged to Flagg. Without Flagg,
she was valueless, like a counterfeit coin. Robert was insufferable
because he could not see.
To escape him, the barrier of protective, almost primitive tenderness
he had built around her, she followed the bridle paths through the
woods. She wanted to ride but Robert objected. There were two saddle
horses in the stable, a roan and a chestnut, good English horses full
of mettle that turned rakish eyes on Lilah whenever she went to their
stalls. “They’ve been boxed up all winter,” Robert said. “They’re mad
to run. But the ground’s soft. They won’t feel a saddle until the end
of April.” He added: “We may have more snow. This is a false Spring.”
Whenever Robert touched her, Lilah had an impression of herself tamed
and savage, a dangerous restraint, a hanging on beyond the powers of
endurance.
She had not written Flagg. That soft St. Kitt’s voice with its accent
of mockery had told him that Mrs. Peabody was “out of town.” No more.
She had not seen him since that day in his rooms, when she had
promised him.... Now she was gone. He would believe that she had lost
courage, had fled from facts. So she had.... She could not face such
facts as had assailed her, beaten her down, overwhelmed her. He would
despise her. Or else he would follow and question her.... She dreaded
every day that held this possibility. It would be like Flagg to get at
the truth, whether or not he hurt her or hurt himself.
Men were selfish. Flagg, like the rest. She was being destroyed by the
selfish love of these three men, Junius, Robert, Flagg.
Junius had said simply, at Robert’s announcement: “I’m glad. There will
be some one, a Peabody, to appreciate the Moselle.” Later, to Lilah,
he had added: “I wish you were happy, Lilah.” Irritated, she moved
away, and he followed, put his thin, withered hand on her arm. “I don’t
pretend to understand your generation. But I can read certain human
sign-posts. If you can’t talk to me, to whom can you talk?”
She faced him with a stony expression. “If Robert could read
sign-posts,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t want me.”
Junius Peabody’s look changed and Lilah realized that she had touched
his pride. After a moment, during which he brushed his mustache with
that large, cambric handkerchief scented faintly with Cologne water,
he said: “I won’t argue. Your remark was in bad taste.... I don’t give
a snap of my finger for Robert. He hasn’t the qualities I admire; the
things I began he seems unable to finish. Or else he doesn’t care,
which is the disease at the core of society to-day. You don’t care, any
of you, about anything outside yourselves.... I believe I warned you,
in the beginning, of what might happen?”
Lilah ignored the implied question. “I’m here,” she said briefly.
“Is duty, too, out of fashion?” he asked with an ironic smile.
“Yes,” she answered. “When it is discharged unwillingly. When it gets
in the way of--”
“Of what?”
“Being yourself.”
Junius Peabody shrugged his shoulders. “What will the world be like
when each one of us looks out for himself? We will be at the mercy of
such disciplined creatures as the army ant. I can’t see that you gain
by being what you term ‘yourself.’ You aren’t happier than the women of
my day, who were what their husbands expected of them.... I am willing,
however, to be instructed....”
He broke off and stared through the window at the flashing sea. “The
Forsythe’s girl, Marian, spent the holidays at home. She used to come
over here quite often. At first, because she came on skis across the
hills and arrived as rosy as a snow apple, I enjoyed her visits. Later,
I dreaded them. At seventeen, she has the knowledge and the vocabulary
of a roué. She had learned more badness at a girls’ school in New York
than I knew at thirty, or forty. She smoked, of course. She would
sit where you are sitting and light one cigarette from another. And
she tossed the ends away with the gesture of a longshoreman. She was
an excellent shot.... Externals.... So I thought. But the thing went
deeper. She was clever. She had reasoned herself out of responsibility
and I could find no flaw in her arguments.... When she had gone I would
sit for hours, depressed, frightened. That she used a lipstick, not
skillfully, is certainly a symbol--of what, I am not certain. I would
have said that she was going to the devil.... She had a sort of brusque
contempt for love, as I understand it; yet her whole appeal was to sex.
Her attitudes--initiated, purposeful--were inviting. Love would fail.
Marriage would fail. She not only expected to have a lover, she behaved
as if such experiments were inevitable. She liked me, at eighty-four,
because, she said, I was a ‘sport.’ What she meant was that I gave her
cigarettes and whisky whenever she came here. She was bored, and, I am
certain, not happy. Something has been damaged in these young people;
their imagination....”
Lilah said: “I wouldn’t be too complacent about the past, if I were
you. There were girls like Marian Forsythe in Victoria’s day--they
fainted for the same reason the modern flapper shows her legs.”
He laughed and Lilah, stooping quickly, kissed the top of his head,
where the hair, snow white, showed a pink parting. “I love to
quarrel with you.... You aren’t to worry about me. I’m twenty-seven,
twenty-eight, almost. I love some one Robert doesn’t know, has never
heard of. You said I would. I do. It happened the way that wind out
there comes up in the Spring, scattering everything, waking things up,
changing the face of the world. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Take
him, of course. But not now.”
Junius Peabody’s face had gone a little gray; beneath the sweep of
white mustaches, his lips trembled. Lilah saw that he was too old, too
worn, to stand the shock of violent circumstances. He said nothing. His
unsteady hands groped for hers, patting them, stroking them. Suddenly
Lilah loved him, because he seemed to understand her.
* * * * *
Robert wanted her to see his spaniels. “It’s a small thing to do for
me, Lilah.” It was, invariably, either too cold or too windy or too
damp to cross the “greenery” to the kennels. Lilah found excuses,
because to subscribe to an enthusiasm of Robert’s was to encourage
him, and it was more stimulating to test his devotion by inventing
subtle rebuffs. The question of the spaniels came up repeatedly; their
antagonism swung to it like a weather vane; it became the focus of
his desire to subjugate her and of her desire to torment him. There
was no other vengeance; Lilah found comfort in blaming Robert for her
loss. “I don’t like spaniels.” Robert winced and said desperately: “But
they’re fine little chaps! You can’t help liking them.” Lilah knew
that Robert’s pups fetched extravagant prices and that a glass case in
the kennels contained a dozen blue rosettes dear to Robert’s heart.
She finally inspected the trophies and the dogs. It would not do to
be surly. But she managed, by an expression, a smile, a reservation,
to make Robert feel that the whole business was childish, useless and
absurd.
* * * * *
April came, and still there was no snow.
It was customary at the Point to send one of the stable men to the
postoffice, ten miles distant, every day at noon. The mail was brought
in a leather pouch and emptied upon a table in the hall. Lilah was
conscious of this rite no matter where she happened to be. A month had
passed without word from Flagg. She dreaded any sign from him, yet
expected, longed for even the most scornful message. She waited with a
peculiar, tormented shrinking for that letter she knew must come.
One day, as she passed the table, she caught sight of her name written
in a small, black, unfamiliar hand upon a square envelope.
She opened it before she realized that Flagg had, at last, written.
Thrusting the letter into her pocket, she went outdoors, and, this
time, to the beach. No matter what he had said, he had written; she
could bear the brightness of the sea! The beach was packed smooth by
the receding tide, and ribbons of kelp lay at high-water mark like
garlands strung from dune to dune. There was no wind. A mackerel sky,
translucent shells of vapor, clouded the sun. It was such a vast sky,
so tall, so immovable, so luminous! Lilah saw herself, very small,
walking between sky and earth, walking in a great crystal globe, with
her letter.
She read it at last, expecting a burning accusation. But Flagg said
simply that he was waiting for word from her. He was remarkably better,
and her absence, prolonged unreasonably, was the only thing that stood
between him and happiness, recovery.
Lilah turned back to the envelope. The address, Peabody’s Point, proved
that he knew where she was. If she did not write to him, he would come.
And that, for every one, for herself most of all, would mean disaster.
She went through the deep, dry sand to the dunes and lay full length,
her arms under her head, staring up at the sky. The earth receded,
seemed to drop away, and she was floating in a void. The sand was warm
on the surface, cool if you dug your fingers in. And the hum of the sea
was lazy, detached, like the hum in a conch shell. Patches of cloud
moved, and the sky was gentian blue.... It hurt, a physical hurt, to be
alone....
What could she tell him? The truth? And drive him away! Nothing?
Suddenly, for the first time, she saw herself as a failure. She had
missed everything.
* * * * *
The following morning she spoke to Robert about the necessary closing
of the Thirty-eighth Street house. She thought that he ought to attend
to it. Servants were always careless and she herself did not feel equal
to details. Robert, in riding breeches and puttees, was polishing
a saddle. He had the rich man’s fondness for doing himself what he
paid other men to do. “Let Grace attend to it,” he said. “She’s a
crackerjack at that sort of thing.” Lilah said tersely that Grace had
gone back to nursing; she was not in New York. Robert looked up. “Well,
I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you tell me so?” Lilah answered that she
had not supposed he cared one way or the other. This Robert took to be
a twinge of jealousy. His spirits rose and he caught Lilah and kissed
her. “You care, don’t you? I mean, for me? Sometimes, I wonder. You’re
a deep one.... I’m crazy about you, Lilah! I wonder if you know how
happy I am?”
“Are you? Then you’ll go to town and close the house. There’s a good
Bobsie.”
When he had gone, she felt relief. It was good to be alone with Junius.
He pottered about at small, fussy undertakings which had the dignity
of rites religiously performed. The old relish details which impede
the young--the exact measure of a cup of coffee, the arrival of the
mail carriage promptly at noon, the aroma of a cigar, a meticulous and
rigidly adhered to change of garments at seven o’clock, the rise and
fall of the barometer, the flavor of a chop. Life was given a false but
comforting air of permanence and dignity by the importance of little
things. There was no headlong rush.
Lilah had allowed herself to be careless; she had not, since her
arrival, dressed for dinner. Now, with Robert gone, that eager,
propitiating, sympathetic presence out of the way, she flattered
Junius by appearing for dinner in negligeés with floating sleeves, in
odd headdresses made of twisted silk, her fingers a frosty, excessive
sparkle of jewels. A sort of flirtation, rather, an appreciation of
one another, candid and humorous, could not have gone on in Robert’s
presence. They could not be themselves where there was a likelihood
of criticism. Lilah said: “We are very alike.” And Junius agreed.
Changeable, intolerant, vain, impulsive. Delightful! But dangerous to
other people. Together, they could play--act, shift like the winds,
speak of beauty, or sit in silence, conscious of their pride and their
perfection. Robert had a way, heavy, uncomprehending, of taking them
for granted. “She is happier without Robert,” Junius thought. “I’ll
keep him away a while longer. There is work to be done in Georgia--I’m
buying cypress. I’ll send him there, make it imperative. The color’s
coming back to her cheeks. Too bad! Too bad!... But I stuck, where
she won’t.” He could pity her, for she was so like himself, with all
that indefinable search for perfection, that restless desire never
satisfied. He was sorry for such people. Far better to be commonplace
and to find, in acceptance of dullness, content he and she could
never find. There was something wrong, unbalanced, in such insatiable
natures, and yet their very discontent and arrogance set them aside
from the common run of people, made them, he felt certain, immeasurably
superior. He was sorry for her. He took to watching her furtively as he
smoked his single after-dinner cigar.
She had absolutely no interest in small domestic matters; however,
when she was in the house things ran better than they ever did under
Aunt Whiteside’s fussy management. She would spend a whole evening
staring into the fire, wanting to talk to him about the man she loved,
but keeping still because she had a sense of proportion--after all,
he was Robert’s grandfather! Junius was curious to know about the man
who had won her, what sort of fellow he was--some one unusual, of
course, as different from Robert as possible. And Junius had a twinge
of remote envy, an almost romantic sensation; he knew what rapture
she was capable of if a man once touched her imagination. Some one
mysterious, a little cruel--otherwise, she would have had nothing to
do with him.... As for himself, he enjoyed her presence; he would have
prolonged the moment, stretched it out indefinitely, for it contained,
in its essence, the illusion of youth. He could dream, without being
ashamed of dreaming. Detached, sympathetic, he watched her. She would
play for him if he asked it; he liked the modern composers; the more
modern the better! Old songs were wistful, reminiscent. But these
strange, exciting modernists gave you a sense of to-morrow, innovation,
audacity, as if anything were possible, save when, as in the Clair de
Lune, there was pity and tenderness for the despised and forgotten
posturings of lovers and poets....
* * * * *
Robert went reluctantly to Georgia, and Lilah was left to make her
decision. Another letter came from Flagg, impatient, this time, with
a touch of anger and rebellion. She answered that things were not as
simple as she had expected; he must wait. A wire was brought to her two
days later. He was coming!
Lilah went at once to Junius. She gave him the telegram and stood
waiting. “You see. I can’t stop him. He’ll be here to-morrow.”
Junius said: “Flagg.... You didn’t tell me his name.... Does he
know....”
“No!” Lilah spoke sharply. “No! I love him. I want him. What shall I
do?”
“I’ll send him away. He mustn’t bother you. He’s got to be made to
understand that you are here, with us, temporarily.... You see, in this
I am old-fashioned. His following you shocks me. Robert is away. And as
sorry as I am for you, if he insists, I’ll take my cane to him!”
He stroked her hand. “There. There. These things aren’t irrevocable.”
Lilah said: “I intend to see him.”
“I intend to prevent you.”
“You can’t.”
Their eyes met and Junius rose. “I won’t have you cheapen yourself.
Sell yourself for a song! I love you, too.”
“You don’t!” she retorted. “You couldn’t, and expect me to go on living
this way. Quivering, inside, when Robert comes near me. I deny him
everything. I torment him. His goodness makes a devil of me. I don’t
want this child. I’m drugged, now, by this place--a sort of lull, when
I sleep because it is easier to sleep. But now that I know Flagg is
coming, I come alive, body and soul. Perhaps I have ruined Robert’s
life, but my own will be ruined unless I have Flagg.”
With a feeling of futility, of confusion and fatigue Junius said: “If
this man’s a gentleman, I won’t need to send him off; he’ll go. And
stay!”
With a gesture of contempt, Lilah left him. But she was more concerned
than she cared to let Junius know.
She went to her room and dressed for riding. The windows were open and
she could hear the excited barking of dogs in the kennel. A gardener
was turning sod on the lawn, spreading manure. Lilacs were in bud.
Nearly a year had passed since that marriage before an altar of syringa
bloom. Another year, and what would have happened to her?
She stared at herself in the mirror; then, dissatisfied, studied her
face in a hand-glass, scrutinizing her skin. The struggle to preserve
a balance, to keep some sort of hold on security, had aged her; her
mouth drooped. In two years she would be thirty. In ten, forty. And
she was going to be a withered, embittered little old woman; perhaps,
after all, beauty was a disadvantage. If Flagg lived, she would have
to hold him with beauty, where another woman might hold him with
easy sensuality, laughter and indifference to externals--a lazy,
affectionate, humorous, slovenly woman....
Lilah put the mirror down. She passed her hands over her face,
shivered, laughed unsteadily. She was slim as a boy in riding clothes.
She went out without speaking again to Junius. Their friendship had
been shattered in that clash of wills; pride, in him, was intensified
by senility. He was going to be difficult; he might even send for
Robert because the Peabody integrity was threatened....
One of the stablemen was rollicking with the spaniel in the yard.
He touched his cap and when Lilah asked him to saddle the roan, he
remarked doubtfully: “He’s awful fresh, ma’am.” Lilah stooped over the
dog and said tersely: “Bring him out. I can manage him.”
In the saddle, she had a moment of panic. The big horse wheeled
sideways in the gravel, but Lilah mounted, with a spring from the
stableman’s palm. She felt very small and light and free.
She rode directly to the woods, where, in softer ground, the roan was
impatient. It was late afternoon. A sudden darkness, clouds pushing
up from the western horizon, was followed by a rush of cold wind, and
a whirl of leaves blew against the horse’s legs, startling him. Lilah
controlled him with difficulty. Her hand on his neck, she urged him
forward.
The wood was bleak, gray, silent again after that brief rush of wind,
and Lilah heard a shrill, treble pipe of frogs in a pool. But where was
Flagg’s dance of gnats at sundown? Spring was here and she could not
watch it with him. She would have to send him away. Truth or pretext,
she would have to send him away.... She thought of the child as a
tide, rising, rising, uncontrollable. This life was within her. She
contained it and was contained within it. Neither in body or soul was
there escape. She was no longer herself; she was implicated, bound up
in, adhered to, responsible for, another self, a self unrecognized,
featureless, without volition, yet powerful, terrible. She was a body
bound by body. Irrevocable....
The world had changed. The sun was gone, and with it the warmth of the
earth. The roan was chilly, nervous. His ears flicked back, and with a
whinny he began to run. Lilah thought: “I’ll give him his head and let
him run it out--he’ll come to himself when he’s tired.” Already her
hands were numb, her arms stiff.
The bridle path doubled through the woods, crossed and recrossed
itself, gaining ten miles by this duplicity. The dark, wet earth,
broken by pools of melted snow, made a tunnel through tangled growth
of trees, very old and tall. A blurred twilight seemed to bar the way.
Lilah bent forward. She could no longer guide the horse. Sensing her
surrender, her fear, he lost his head.
He left the road. The branch of a tree tore Lilah’s hat off. She
shrieked at him. “Whoa! Whoa! Stop! You brute! Stop! For God’s sake,
stop!”
She was struck on the back, between her shoulders. A tearing, a blow.
She was pulled, thrown, dragged, face down, in a thicket. She thought,
twisting over on her side: “This is death.”
A dark pain, like blood, flowed over her breast, and she fell back
again.