THE ELEPHANTS
Edgar's mother stayed at table with the baron a while longer. But the
two no longer spoke of elephants or hunting. An indefinable
embarrassment instantly sprang up between them, and a faint sultriness
descended upon their conversation. After a time they went out into the
hall and seated themselves in a corner.
The baron was more brilliant than ever. The woman was a little heated by
her two glasses of champagne, so that the conversation quickly took a
dangerous turn. The baron was not what is called exactly handsome. He
was simply young and had a manly look in his dark-brown, energetic,
boyish face, and he charmed her with his fresh, almost ill-bred
movements. She liked looking at him at such close range and was no
longer afraid to encounter his eyes.
Gradually there crept into his language a boldness which vaguely
disconcerted her. It was like a gripping of her body and then a letting
go, an intangible sort of desire which sent the blood rushing to her
face. The next moment, however, he would laugh again, an easy,
unconstrained, boyish laugh, which made his little manifestations of
desire seem like joking. Sometimes he said things she felt she ought to
object to bluntly, but she was a natural-born coquette, and his trifling
audacities only provoked in her the taste for more. She was carried away
by his bold gaze, and at length got so far as to try to imitate him,
answering his looks with little fluttering promises from her own eyes,
and giving herself up to him in words and gestures. She permitted him to
draw close to her, so that every now and then she felt the warm graze of
his breath on her shoulders.
Like all gamblers, the two forgot the passage of time and became so
absorbed that they started in surprise when the lights in the hall were
turned off at midnight.
The woman jumped up in response to the first impulse of alarm she had
felt. In the same moment she realized to what audacious lengths she had
ventured. It was not the first time she had played with fire, but now
her instincts, all aroused, told her the game had come perilously close
to being in earnest. She shuddered inwardly at discovering that she no
longer felt quite secure, that something in her was slipping and gliding
down into an abyss. Her head whirled with alarm, with slight
intoxication from the champagne, and with the ring of the baron's
ardent language in her ears. A dull dread came over her. She had
experienced the same sort of dread several times before in similar
dangerous moments, but it had never so overpowered her. This extreme
dizziness was something she had never before experienced.
"Good-night," she said hastily. "See you in the morning again."
She felt like running away, not so much from him as from the danger of
the moment and from an odd, novel insecurity she felt within herself.
But the baron held her hand in a tight but gentle grip and kissed it
four or five times from the delicate tips of her fingers to her wrist. A
little shiver went through her at the graze of his rough mustache on the
back of her hand, and her blood ran warm and mounted to her head. Her
cheeks glowed. There was a hammering at her temples. A wild unreasoning
fear made her snatch her hand away.
"Don't go, don't go," the baron pleaded in a whisper. But she was
already gone, the awkwardness of her haste revealing plainly her fright
and confusion. She was undergoing the excitement that the baron wanted.
She was all confused, one moment in awful dread that the man behind
might follow and put his arms round her, and the next instant regretting
that he had not done so. In those few seconds the thing might have taken
place that she had been dreaming of for years, the great adventure. She
had always taken voluptuous delight in creeping up to the very edge of
an adventure and then jumping back at the last moment, an adventure of
the great and dangerous kind, not a mere fleeting flirtation. But the
baron was too proud to push his advantage now, too assured of his
victory to take this woman like a robber in a moment of weakness and
intoxication. A fair sportsman prefers his game to show fight and to
surrender quite consciously. The woman could not escape him. The virus,
he knew, was already seething in her veins.
She stopped on the landing above and pressed her hand to her throbbing
heart. She had to rest a while. Her nerves were snapping. She heaved a
great sigh, partly of relief at having escaped a danger, partly of
regret. Her emotions were mixed, and all she was vividly conscious of
was the whirl of her blood and a faint giddiness. With half-closed eyes
she groped her way like a drunken woman to the door and breathed with
relief when she felt the cool door-knob in her hand. At last she was
safe.
She opened the door softly and the next second started back in fright.
Something had moved way back in the dark. In her excited state this was
too much, and she was about to cry for help when a very, very sleepy
voice came from within, saying:
"Is that you, mother?"
"Goodness gracious! What are you doing here?"
She rushed to the sofa where Edgar was lying curled up trying to keep
himself wide awake. She thought the child must be ill and needed
attention.
"I waited for you so long, and then I fell asleep."
"What were you waiting for?"
"You know. To hear about the elephants."
"Elephants?" As she asked the question Edgar's mother remembered her
promise. She was to tell him all about the elephant hunts and the
baron's other adventures that very night. And so the simple child had
crept into her room and in unquestioning faith had waited for her until
he had dropped asleep. The absurdity of it enraged her, or rather she
was angry with herself, and for that reason she wanted to outshriek the
tiny whisper of her conscience telling her she had done a shameful
wrong.
"Go to bed at once, you nuisance!" she cried.
Edgar stared at her. Why was she so angry? He hadn't done anything
wrong. But his very amazement only made her angrier.
"Go to bed at once," she shouted, in a rage, because she felt how unjust
she was to the child.
Edgar went without a word. He was dreadfully sleepy and felt only in a
blur that his mother had not kept her promise and that somehow or other
he was being treated meanly. Yet he did not rebel. His susceptibilities
were dulled by sleepiness. Besides, he was angry with himself for having
fallen asleep while waiting.
"Like a baby," he said to himself in disgust before dropping off to
sleep again.
Since the day before he hated himself for being still a child.