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 than that. Except that one dreadful minute
last year when he had wanted to raise her salary--afterwards--and she had
said "What _for_?" And their faces had turned from each other, flaming
with the fire of her refusal.
What had he really thought of her? Did he think she wanted to get
anything out of their passion? What could you want to get out of it, or
give, but joy? Pure joy. Beauty.
At the bend of the road the trees parted. A slender blue channel of sky
flowed overhead between the green tops.
If not joy, then truth; reality. The clear reality of yourself, Charlotte
Redhead. Of Gibson Herbert. Even now it would be all right so long as you
knew what it was and didn't lie about it.
That evening in the office when he came to her--she could remember the
feeling that shot up suddenly and ran over her and shook her brain,
making her want him to take her in his arms. It was that. It had never
been anything but that. She _had_ wanted him to take her, and he knew
it. Only, if he hadn't come to her and looked at her she wouldn't have
thought of it; she would have gone on working for him without
thinking. That was what he didn't know, what he wouldn't have believed
if you had told him.
She had come to the top of the hill. At the crossroads she saw the grey
front of her inn, the bow window jutting, small black shining panes
picked out with the clean white paint of the frame-work.
Upstairs their breakfast table stood in the window bow as they had left
it. Bread he had broken on the greasy plate. His cup with the coffee he
couldn't drink. Pathetic, if you hadn't remembered.
"You might as well. If it isn't you, it'll be another woman, Sharlie. If
it isn't me, it'll be another man."
That was what he had thought her.
It didn't matter.