It was mid-afternoon when Lilla emerged from her room.
A servant informed her that "everybody" was motoring or playing golf.
She entered the library, lustrous with its rows of books and its
deep-toned paintings hung against wooden panels. Between half-drawn
window curtains passed rays of sunshine that came to rest upon vases of
flowers arranged in porcelain bowls; but the corners of the room were
steeped in shadows. A man who had been sitting on a couch amid these
shadows rose to his feet.
She sought the gloom beyond the fireplace, in order that her changed
face might not betray her. But even here her paleness was emphasized,
and her eyes, with faint purple streaks below them, took on a look of
deeper anxiety. Her features began to quiver as if her soul were
revealing itself beneath a transparent mask.
"What has happened?"
She managed to reply:
"A great mistake. Because that picture seemed congenial to you in
those lonely places you thought that the original must be the same?
You were wrong. Physically and temperamentally we belong to different
worlds. You couldn't rest in mine, and I couldn't enter yours. If you
knew me," she added, in a hushed voice, "you'd find me contemptible, in
all my weaknesses." She lowered her head, then, raising her eyes,
which were full of fear, besought him, "Tear it out of your heart!
Destroy it!"
"There, it's done. How easy it was to obey you!"
And they stood face to face in a pallor that was like a scintillation
of white-hot metal, both knowing that their lips, though they uttered
first a thousand similar phrases, would presently be united.
Then he came close, catching in his strong grasp her writhing hands.
But she stopped him with a look like a flashing sword--a look as
poignant as though they had been lovers for years and now must love no
longer. And so, in fact, they had been, heart drawn to heart by a
strange likeness of accidental or of fatal events, one longing groping
through space toward another longing. Apart, just by aid of their
imaginations, they had progressed already from indefinite to precise
emotions, from vague to fixed visions, each attaining in thought a
consummation that mocked this present struggle. And this profound
mutual intimacy, an accomplished fact in the realm of mind, was
suddenly projected into the physical atmosphere, so that the glances of
these two, who had just now met each other, clashed in an almost
terrible intimacy, as though the question were not "Never," but "Never
again."
Wrenching her hands away, she made a despairing gesture.
"Tear it out," she repeated. "It's only by doing so that you can
please me."
"Will you help me to kill it? Will you lend a hand by making your
beauty hideous, your nature repulsive? Come and take a drive with me.
Just an hour or two. How long do you need to destroy it?"
"Ah," she breathed, closing her eyes in pain.
In a broad-brimmed hat that matched her muslin gown she went down the
steps to his car. The high, gray walls of the house disappeared behind
a rush of trees; the conical turret roofs of slate sank quickly away.
From the terrace Cornelius Rysbroek stared at the distant gateway
through which they had vanished.
The car rushed through the countryside. The orderly fields stretched
away toward gentle slopes on which cows were grazing. Here and there a
village abruptly spread out its roofs, which rotated on the axis of a
spire. All the windows gave back the light of late afternoon; and far
off, against a hollow between two hills, like wine in a cup, there was
a ruddy flash of water. It was the Sound; and beyond the Sound lay the
sea.
A cloud covered the setting sun.
"So you pretend to begrudge me this perfected feeling, this
verification, that I'll carry back with me!"
He told her that over there he would build a perfect similacrum of her
out of his thoughts, as an enchanter might form at will in the
twinkling of an eye the likeness of some one who was far away. "You
shall even move and speak," he predicted, "and I'll make your glances
and your words whatever I want them to be. Look out for yourself!
That is sorcery. I shall have taken a part of you away from yourself,
across the ocean, to Africa where the forests are full of magicians.
Over here you'll no longer be complete. You'll turn your eyes
southeast with a sense of missing something from your heart."
He gazed ahead at the road that the car was devouring with an endless
purr of triumph. He pursued his fancy, while the car pursued the
glimmer of the Sound, which was escaping amid the first thin veils of
the twilight.
He promised that she, to whom everything uncouth and primitive was
repugnant, would smile beside him in those equatorial tangles, or, at
any rate, that she would do so in his dream of her. In the camp
surrounded by a hedge of thorns, in the firelight flickering on the
shoulder blades and teeth of the negroes, the wraith of her living self
would sit at his side, radiant in the dress that she had worn last
night. "Real as you'll seem to me," he said, "I sha'n't have to worry
about the striped mosquitoes stinging you on the shoulders; and when we
others go plodding along, no helmet or terai need hide that hair of
yours. Since you'll be made of my thoughts, you'll be invulnerable.
You'll catch up your little train to run across a field of ferns in
pursuit of some small, inquisitive wild beast. When the tribes make
dances for us, they won't know that a beautiful white lady, in a golden
decolleté gown, is seated before them, as happy as if that hullabaloo
were a ballet by Stravinsky."
In the twilight, by a road hemmed in with sumac, they came to a small,
rustic restaurant, which perched on a cliff above the waters of the
Sound. An old waiter led them between empty tables to a veranda
overlooking the waves. He seated them by the railing, along which
trailed a honeysuckle vine.
They had come for tea or for dinner?
"Dinner!" exclaimed Lawrence. "Here, take this, and carry your sane
and practical face away. Wait, you might bring us some tea." He
reached across the table to feel her hand, which was as cold as ice.
"I've frozen you!"
"No," she returned, almost inaudibly.
The odor of the honeysuckle was mingled with the smell of the sea. The
old waiter came and departed like a shade. They were alone on the
veranda, above the waves over which the rising moon had just thrown a
silver net.
But it was a beam of light from the doorway that illuminated the angles
of his face, at which she looked with a sensation of faintness. She
bent her neck; her hat brim concealed her eyes.
By this time to-morrow!
"Let me hear your voice," he pleaded. "At least I'll fill my mind with
those tones; and when I'm alone I can put them together into the words,
'I love you.'"
As if conjured up by this utterance, a breeze swept over them, full of
the fragrance of honeysuckle and the acridity of the sea, like the
immense, soft breath with which nature blows upon the kindled human
heart, fanning it into a sudden conflagration. And the rustling
of the vines, together with the murmur of the water, expanded into
a sigh which seemed to issue from the multitude of lovers who
somewhere--everywhere--at that moment, were swaying toward the
irresistible embrace; and from the innumerable flowers of the earth, in
the act of relinquishing the sweetness beloved by bees; and, indeed,
from that whole spread of mortal consciousness which nature, moved by a
supreme necessity, has subjected to this world-wide tyranny.
She lifted her head as if striving to rise above that smothering flood,
and in the moonlight her face was revealed to him--her eyes humid, her
lips twisted into an unprecedented shape, her whole aspect, in its
startling maturity, like that of the immortal goddess whose genius and
nature had suddenly possessed this flesh and blood.
Rising, she turned away in a movement of denial that came too late. He
followed her to the end of the veranda; and there at last--or, as it
seemed to them, again--he took her in his arms. For an instant her
averted face imitated the marble nymph's face, her slender and flexible
body the nymph's struggling body, before she became limp at his kiss.
In the doorway of the dining room she paused to look back at the
veranda. She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were
tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see
anything distinctly. As she left the restaurant some one presented her
with a little bunch of flowers.
It was her wedding bouquet.
They were married in a village rectory. The minister, peering over his
horn-rimmed spectacles, stood before a mantelpiece on which a black
marble clock was flanked by clusters of wax fruit under glass.
Lilla borrowed a cloak from the minister's wife, and Lawrence drove
straight to New York.