Kitabı oku: «The Monster», sayfa 6

To this de Fresnoy had objected that Verplank knew nothing of the kind, that in addressing or in attempting to address the lady, he had acted in accordance with the usages of the world: moreover assuming him to have been in error in thinking that the lady did not object to being addressed, her slightest indication to the contrary would have been super-sufficient to make him desist, the result being that Barouffski’s intervention reflected on his good-breeding and was therefore an insult.

This view of the matter Barouffski’s seconds refused to accept. They represented that it were difficult for the lady to have more punctiliously informed Verplank of her disinclination to be addressed by him than she had already done in obtaining a divorce.

At the easy logic de Fresnoy laughed. According to him, all that was beside the issue. He declared that many divorced couples were better friends afterward than they had found it possible to be before. In support of the statement he cited history: he cited the case of Henri IV and the Reine Margot. He did more than cite, he quoted the chronicles of Pierre l’Estoile, and he insisted that if his view were not accepted the conference must dissolve and an arbiter be convened.

In face of these arguments advanced to provincials by a Parisian, advanced too with that tone of authority which only a man sure of his ground or of his assurance may maintain and advanced, moreover, to men not over sure of their own, the latter hesitated.

Then, as though to demonstrate the truth of the paradox of which de Fresnoy had delivered himself at Voisins, the quip that a man is rarely killed except by his seconds, Silverstairs who, thus far throughout the conference, had smoked in placid silence, suddenly stuck his oar in.

“Why not toss for it?”

Tyszkiewicz and Palencia, hesitating still, agreed. A coin was flipped, heads for Verplank, tails for Barouffski. Tails it was. Barouffski was accorded the choice of arms, foils were designated by his seconds and the meeting was arranged to be held in his garden, at two the next day.

Verplank would have preferred pistols. But, informed of the result, he dreamed pleasurably. The encounter was the main thing. Presently sleep sank him deeper. Life and death ceased to be. He became part of the inchoate and primordial. Then, from the voids in which he lay, lightly, delicately, imperceptibly, an artery reached and drew him. But his scattered selves, the objective, subjective, superjective, satisfied with their temporary decentralisation, resisted. In the subtle struggle a memory, catalogued Leilah, was aroused. The syllables of the name resounded remotely, like a damp drum beaten obscurely behind the shelves of thought. They conveyed no meaning and, before they could suggest any, they passed, drifted by the currents of unconsciousness. But at once, those currents, barred by assembling ideas, broke to the murmur of the vocables – Leilah! Leilah! Other memories, incidents, possibilities eddied among them and the sleeper, awakening, found himself confronted by the tragic mystery which the name revived.

Immediately the picture that had formed itself before him at Voisins returned. From it the Why had gone but the obstacle remained, and, as he got from the bed, he promised himself to demolish it.

Now, in the hostile enclosure, as the dogs barked and Barouffski appeared, Verplank removed his coat, undid his collar, rolled up his sleeves.

Beside him, bending over a case, the old man mumbled. He was a surgeon. The hour was not to his liking. He believed in duels, they were a source of revenue to him, but he believed in fighting on an empty stomach and, in the afternoon, who had that?

He looked up at Verplank. “Monsieur, you are young, you are brave, I doubt not you are also adroit. But had I been you, when your seconds asked, as I may suppose they asked: ‘Which shall it be, the pistol at twenty paces or the sword?’ I would have said to them: ‘Give me the sword at twenty paces.’ Yes; that is what I would have said.”

Verplank ignored him utterly. In the center of the garden the seconds grouped together, were concluding details. Beyond, near the house, Barouffski stood. He also was now bare-armed. Near him, emptying a case, was the young man with the serious face. Beside him, placed upright against a wall, were two long green bags. From the street came the usual rumble, the noise of motors, the cries of hawkers, the snorting of stallions, the clatter of hoofs.

Silverstairs, abandoning the others went over to Verplank.

“De Fresnoy has been chosen director.”

Verplank, from his trowsers pocket, had taken a pair of gloves. The palm of one of them, previously moistened, had been dusted with rosin. Now, as he put it on, he looked across at Barouffski who was looking at him. The man’s bare arms were hairy and the sight of them was repugnant to Verplank. At once all the jealousy, all the hate of the male, mounted like wine to his head. He coloured, his hand shook. Then, resolutely, he reacted. In a moment he had again control of himself and it was idly, with an air of indifference, as he finished with his glove, that, in reference to the dinner that evening, he said:

“Are you to have many people to-night?”

Silverstairs, delighted that Verplank, showing up in such form, should be so sure of the result, laughed. “No, it is to be small and early. Afterward we go on to a play. The missis has a box for something, the Gymnase I think.”

Verplank bent over and turned up the ends of his trowsers. A moment before he had been considering methods of attack, in particular a direct riposte after a certain parade and it was springingly, as though delivering it, that he straightened.

But now de Fresnoy approached. Silverstairs moved to one side where he was joined by Tyszkiewicz, a thin, tall man with a prominent nose and an air vaguely pedagogic, and by Palencia who, with great black eyebrows that met and a full black beard, looked like Fra Diavolo disguised as a clubman.

From one of the long green bags de Fresnoy had taken a pair of foils. These he offered, hilt foremost, to Verplank who grasped one and then to gauge its temper, or his own, lashed the air with it. The movement revealed a suppleness of arm, a muscular ease, the swelling biceps which training alone provides.

Save Barouffski, no one noticed. For a moment his eyes shifted absently. It was as though he too had meditated a coup and now was meditating another. Meanwhile he also had received a foil.

“Messieurs!” de Fresnoy called. He spoke in a loud, clear voice. He had moved back and stood at an angle to Barouffski and Verplank. Opposite, at an equal angle were the seconds and surgeons. All now were so stationed that they formed a sort of cross.

“Messieurs, I do not need to remind you of the common loyalty to be observed. What I have to say is that the encounter will proceed in engagements of three minutes, followed each by three minutes of repose, until one of you is incapacitated.”

De Fresnoy looked from Barouffski to Verplank. At once in his loud, clear voice he called:

“On guard!”

The two men fell into position. De Fresnoy moved forward, took in either hand the foils at the points, drew them together until they met, left them so and moved back.

“Allez, messieurs!”

At the word Allez, or, in English, go, and without waiting for the term Messieurs that followed, instantly Barouffski lunged. His foil pierced Verplank in the cheek and touched the upper jaw.

Verplank had a vision of a footman peering from a window, a taste of something hot and acrid in his mouth, a sense of pain, the sensation of vulperine fury.

De Fresnoy’s face had grown red as his neckcloth. He brandished his stick.

“Monsieur!” he cried at Barouffski. “Your conduct is odious. You shall answer to me for it.”

Barouffski bowed. “For the expression which it has pleased you to employ, you shall answer to me.”

“Permit me! Permit me!” Tyszkiewicz interjected. “To what do you object?”

Angrily de Fresnoy turned at him. “Your principal drew before the order. He – ”

“Permit me! Permit me!” Tyszkiewicz interrupted. “The word Allez is an order. The moment it is uttered hostilities begin. The term Messieurs is but a polite accessory, a term which may or may not be employed.”

Insolently de Fresnoy considered him. “I have no lessons to receive from you.”

“Permit me! Permit me – ”

But de Fresnoy had turned on his heel. Before him Verplank stood, Silverstairs on one side, the old surgeon on the other. The young surgeon had joined them. Beyond, Barouffski was examining the point of his foil.

From Verplank’s mouth and face blood was running. The wound had not improved his appearance. The old surgeon, on tiptoes, was staunching it.

“What I like,” he confided, speaking the while very unctuously as though what he was saying would be a comfort to Verplank; “what I like is to attend to gentlemen whose wives have deceived them. Outraged husbands, monsieur, that is my specialty!”

Verplank brushed him aside, shook his foil, and called at de Fresnoy.

“Are the three minutes up?”

“Monsieur!” the old surgeon protested.

The young surgeon intervened.

“But, monsieur – ”

De Fresnoy motioned at them.

“Is he in a condition to continue?”

“Why not?” Verplank scornfully replied.

He raised his left hand, and, with a gesture of excuse, turned and spat. He looked up. His mouth was on fire, his jaw burned, the wound in his cheek was a flame. Yet these things but added to the intensity of his eyes. They blazed. There was blood on his face, on his chin, on his shirt, on his feet. He was hideous. But he was a man, and a mad one.

“He ought to be horsewhipped,” muttered Silverstairs, glaring as he spoke at Barouffski, who was talking to his seconds.

“On guard, then!” called de Fresnoy.

“Permit me, permit me,” cried Tyszkiewicz. “The point of my principal’s sword is broken.”

“Give him another then,” de Fresnoy roughly threw out. Insolently he added: “And teach him how to use it.” In a moment, when from the other bag, a foil had been got and measured, “On guard,” he repeated.

Again he united the foils. Again he gave the command.

For a moment the weapons clashed.

Suddenly and excitedly Palencia cried: “My principal is touched.”

“Halt,” de Fresnoy, intervening with raised stick, commanded.

Verplank moved back. “Damn him,” he muttered, “I haven’t done with him yet.”

About Barouffski now, Palencia and the young man with the serious face had come. The latter was examining Barouffski’s right arm. On it a thin red line was visible. Very gravely the young man looked up.

“My client is disabled. Profound incision in the region of the flexor digitorum sublimis accompanied by a notable effusion of blood.”

The old surgeon chuckled. Confidentially as before he addressed Verplank. “I know that term. It means a scratch. Those ladies there, it must amuse even them.”

As he spoke he indicated a window at which Violet and Leilah had appeared, but from which now Leilah was retreating.

Verplank did not hear, did not see. The young surgeon, resuming, had announced himself as opposed to a continuation of the encounter. It was this that preoccupied Verplank.

Loudly and angrily he cried: “Let’s have pistols then. That man can use his left hand and I’ll do the same.”

“Cristi! La jolie dame!” the old surgeon muttered to himself.

In the doorway Leilah had come. Hurriedly she moved to Verplank. As she did so Barouffski tried to prevent her.

“Cara mia, I must beg of you – ”

He had got in her way but she eluded him, while the other men looked curiously at this woman who now agitatedly was addressing Verplank.

“Don’t fight any more, don’t!”

Roughly Verplank answered: “I haven’t begun.”

“Sir,” cried Barouffski. “I can permit no conversation with this lady.”

Verplank ignoring Barouffski as utterly as he had ignored the surgeon, looked at Leilah.

“That story of yours is – ”

But whatever he may have intended to say, Barouffski interrupted. He was shouting at Verplank, calling, too, at Leilah whom he had got by the arm and whom he would have drawn away, but this Verplank prevented. Shifting his foil to his left hand, with his right he seized Barouffski and with a twist which separated him from Leilah, shoved him aside.

“To your shambles!” he called at him.

But already the others were intervening. Tyszkiewicz with his eternal “Permit me,” got between the two men. Palencia held Barouffski by the shoulder. Silverstairs drew Verplank away, while de Fresnoy, viewing the situation as hopeless, declared the duel at an end.

The actions of all were practically so simultaneous that they were as one to Leilah who, bewildered by the confusion which she herself had caused, horrified by Verplank’s appearance and tortured by the riddle of his interrupted words, now, over the heads of the others, again called to him:

“You say that the story is – ”

“At five!” Verplank threw back.

Barouffski, bursting with rage and impotence, shouted:

“I say this conversation must cease.”

The old surgeon, nudging his colleague, laughed:

“There is my specialty!”

Both surgeons then were occupied with their bags. De Fresnoy, overhearing the remark, could not but smile. To conceal it he turned to the gate where he was joined by Silverstairs and where at once, Palencia and Tyszkiewicz followed, leaving in the center of the garden Leilah and her two husbands, one of whom with a shrug which for an American was perhaps rather French, went to the bench where his coat lay.

In this instance again the actions of all so closely coincided that barely an instant intervened before Leilah was throwing after Verplank the two syllables he had thrown at her.

“At five!”

Later she was unconscious of having done so. But Barouffski heard and presently, when the others had gone and in this garden those two were alone, with angry suspicion he confronted her.

“Five! What is that? What does it mean?”

Leilah had turned to go. A bit unsteadily she moved on, reached the entrance, leaned there for support.

But Barouffski was at her heels.

“Five,” he repeated. “He said it, you said it, what does it mean?”

“It means that God willing some day I may have peace.”

She had half-turned. She turned again. In a moment she had gone.

Menacingly Barouffski’s eyes followed her. “That’s what five means, does it?”

Then he too turned. Nearby, on the marble chair, were his coat and waistcoat. Slowly, thoughtfully, he put them on. As he did so he noticed the dogs. It may have seemed to him then that they were his only friends. Longly he looked their way.

Suddenly, as though illumination had come, he touched a bell and looked up at Leilah’s window.

After a brief delay, Emmanuel appeared.

“Shut the gate,” Barouffski ordered.

“Perfectly, monsieur le comte,” the footman very deferentially replied and started to do as bidden.

Barouffski checked him. Indicating the lower window, he added:

“At five or thereabouts be in there. I will tell you then what to do. You hear me?”

“Perfectly, monsieur le comte.”

Again Barouffski glanced at the upper window. As he glanced he smiled.

“Cara mia, five may mean more things than you say, more even than you think.”

He was still smiling but it was not a pleasant smile to see.

Beneath his breath, Emmanuel, who was looking at him, muttered:

“Quelle gueule de maquereau!”

X

“Gracious!” Violet exclaimed. She had been smoking and now in putting a cigarette in a cendrier she had succeeded in overturning it. Undismayed she looked at a clock. “Gracious!” she repeated. “Since that stupid duel, I have sat here an hour.”

Leisurely the lady arose. She was a glowing object in this room which, filled with costly futilities and furnished in canary and black, otherwise was Empire and brilliant. The main entrance, hung with heavy portières of yellow damask had, opposite it, across the room, a tapestry panel which masked a spiral stairway that led below. To one side, at an elaborate table, which now the overturned cendrier had strewn with ashes, Leilah was seated. Behind her, through an open window, shone the eager sun. Before her, rising from a sofa was her friend.

Leilah wished that she would go, wished too that she would stay, wished rather – as at times we all wish of those who are near us – that she were different, less mondaine perhaps, more simple. To Violet, the spectacle in the garden had been tedious. To Leilah it was horrible. Moreover the atmosphere of blood and hate, the enigma of Verplank’s words, the menaces of Barouffski’s eyes, these things frightened her, inducing a dread which seemed to brood not in the mind but in the body. She could have put a hand to her girdle and have said: “It is here.” In addition she felt – as in every spiritual crisis we all do – alone. Of this she could not tell Violet. She felt that she lacked the power to express it and that Violet lacked the ability to understand. Pain has accents which only its graduates know. Violet, in all her brilliant life, had never shed a poignant tear.

“What do you propose to do now?” the lady was asking.

Cheerlessly Leilah replied: “My duty.”

Here was something which Violet did understand. Brightly she nodded.

“Yes, and I may tell you that it is your duty to preserve your looks and avoid a scandal. I did not at all like your fantasia in the garden. A gentlewoman never does anything important and that was an important thing. In no time it will be all over the place. You can believe that, can’t you?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Violet laughed. “I always believe what I like. That I find so satisfactory. Apropos. What was that story about which Verplank was shouting? Mercy! I could have heard him a mile away.”

In weary protest Leilah shook her head. “You know I can’t tell you.”

“The same old thing, was it? But how antiquated you are! Really it is piteous. There are no secrets any more. All that sort of thing went out with hoopskirts. Private life which used to be a sealed book has become an open newspaper. It is plain for instance, plain to everybody, plain as a pikestaff that you are still in love with Verplank. What you left him for the Lord in his infinite wisdom and mercy only knows. That is a secret certainly but only because you choose to make it one. It is no secret to me though that you are dying to go back to him. But don’t you know you can’t? Don’t you know it? Don’t you know that you can’t budge an inch until you have shipped Barouffski? Now how are you going to do that? Tell me.”

Leilah made a pass with a hand. It was as though, in some rite known but to her, she were consulting the lap of the invisible gods and, in it, the equally invisible future.

“Then I will tell you. You have got to buy him off. Listen to this. I will pack Silverstairs straight to the Embassy. There he will get all the law and most of the prophets. Meanwhile promise that you’ll keep your head.”

“I will try,” Leilah, mechanically, her thoughts afar, replied.

“There!” Violet exclaimed. “That’s right. When there is a divorce in the air it’s so much better to try than to be tried.”

At the inane jest she laughed, embraced her friend. In a moment she had gone, distributing as she went a faint, sweet smell of orris.

Leilah who had risen moved to the window and looked out at the gate through which Verplank would come. It was as she had said: She did not know what to believe and mutely for a moment she prayed for guidance.

“O, Lords of Karma, Watchers of the Seven Spheres, grant me so to live that, hereafter, I may say, I have harmed no heart, I have made no one weep. Out of your infinite bounty grant that somewhere, sometime, there may be peace to Gulian’s soul and mine.”

The prayer concluded she felt securer. Momentarily the cancer of anxiety had ceased to gnaw, the fascination of fear had departed. In the respite she turned to the clock. It was nearly five and she rang for one of her women.

“Parker,” she began, when the servant appeared.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Presently, in a few minutes, a gentleman will come by the gate. Be there and bring him here. Bring him through the dining room and up the back way. If possible, I prefer that no one should see him.”

“Yes, my lady. Thank your ladyship.”

At once, with that air which those acquire who attended to delicate matters, the woman drew aside the tapestry that masked the stair, which then discreetly, almost atiptoe, she descended.

As the tapestry fell again, instantly there returned to Leilah the sense of evil and impending ill. The brilliant room seemed full of terrors. In each bright corner a danger lurked. So strong was the impression that she felt it must be she was being warned, that she was being visited by those obscure phenomena which occultists call impacts from the astral, and that these were urging her to go, to meet Verplank without, in the garden, in the street, anywhere except in this fastidiousness.

Coerced by the impression, she entered an adjoining room, got there a fichu which she put on her head, a light wrap which she drew about her. Excited as she was, unaided as well, it took several minutes before she could find these accouterments. When, at last equipped, she re-entered the sitting room, she started.

Before her, his hat on, one side of his face medallioned with courtplaster, stood Verplank.

At sight of Leilah, he removed his hat which he tossed on the sofa and said at once and simply enough:

“That story of yours is false as Judas.”

“Gulian!” At the moment it was all she found, but then fancy a blind man dazzled.

Verplank nodded. “Yes. The letters you received at Coronado – there were three of them, were there not? three written on gray paper each signed Effingham Verplank? – well, my father wrote them, that’s true enough, but he wrote them to your aunt, your mother’s sister, Hilda Hemingway. Did you never hear that the governor had an affair with her? Did you?”

Leilah’s face spoke for her. From the bewilderment there, it was obvious that of it all she was ignorant.

With an uplift of the chin Verplank considered her.

“That’s odd, girls generally only hear what they ought not to. However, Hemingway became suspicious – for very good reasons, no doubt, or, if you prefer, for very bad ones – the result being that his wife turned the letters over for safe keeping to your mother. When she died your father found them. He did not stop there, he showed them to my mother. My mother knew the facts, but she said your father was so convinced of your mother’s infidelity that it seemed a pity to disabuse him. Those were her very words to me to-day.”

“Gulian!” Still Leilah found but that. Visibly the light was there. As yet she could not credit it.

Again, but now appreciatively, Verplank nodded. “Yes. I know. It does seem queer. But then my mother is not the ordinary woman. She thought the governor so created to conquer that it no more occurred to her to sit in judgment on his victims than it occurred to her to sit on him. In the true spirit of Christian charity she overlooked it all.”

Verplank paused, opened and closed a hand. “It was not matrimony perhaps, but it was magnificent,” he obliging resumed, forgetting wholly that it was not in him to do likewise.

“Come,” he added. From the start, Leilah’s apparel, the fichu and wrap, had made him fancy that she was as ready to go as he was to take her and it all seemed very simple. “Come. Let’s be off. I have a cab for you.”

But at the suggestion which was a command she undid the lace, loosened the cloak.

“Gulian, I cannot.”

“Cannot!” he angrily repeated. “Why can’t you? Have you not heard what I said. You are not my sister, you are my wife. Come.”

“Gulian! You do not know what you ask!”

“I know perfectly well. If you hesitate it is because you do not believe me. But would I urge you if that malignity were true? Would I?”

“Gulian, no, you would not.”

“There! You see! You have to believe me.”

“It is not that.”

“It is the divorce then! But you are no more married to that dismal cad than I am to one of your maids. Except in Nevada the decree has no effect whatever. But without bothering to have it set aside, come with me and let this saurian get another.”

“Gulian, yes, but for the moment surely you can see that this is impossible.”

“Impossible! There is nothing impossible. Why do you say so? Why do you make so many objections? You should not make any. You hear a cock-and-bull story, take it for gospel, run away, get a divorce, marry a damned scoundrel and, when you find the story is a brutal lie, stick like a leech to him.”

“Gulian, if you but knew. My position is horrible – ”

She wanted to tell him that she was in a prison replete with tortures, one from which she was as eager to go as he was to take her, yet one from which she could not escape through the open door of sinning.

He gave her no time. Instantly he interrupted her.

“I know your position, it is all of your own making, too. By God, you can make up your mind to one thing. You’ll come, if I have to take you.”

As he spoke he looked so brutal that she shrank.

“Gulian, you will kill me. I thought so before. I know it now.”

“It is only what you deserve.”

“Gulian! And you said you loved me!”

“Yes, but you make me doubt it.”

The wrap which previously she had loosened she let fall on a chair beside her and put the fichu on the table.

“Gulian, you must give me time.”

The words were simple, plaintively uttered, but her action with the cloak and lace, gave them an emphasis which added to his irritation.

“Nonsense,” he retorted. “You have had time enough. Now you must act.” Roughly he considered her. “Anyone else might think you cared for that – ”

“Gulian, in all the world you know I love but you.”

Verplank raised the cloak, reached for the fichu.

“Put these on, then, and come.”

But Leilah, with a gesture that was less of resistance than of appeal, motioned them from her. The gesture infuriated him. He threw the cloak about her.

“By God! You shall put them on. What’s more, you will come whether or not you want to.”

As he spoke he seized her, lifted her.

To Leilah it seemed as though she were about to be carried off violently, like a prey. Unresistingly she raised her face to his.

“Gulian, kill me. It will be better; it will end it all.”

Something, the words, the tone in which they were uttered, the helplessness of them and of her; but, more than anything else perhaps, the fact that as he held her he felt her tremble, stayed him. He put her down. His arms fell from her.

Catching again at the chair she steadied herself, and added:

“But if I am to live and love you, be patient. Gulian, if you would stop to think, to realise, you would be patient, you – ”

He started from her. “You don’t mean – ”

At the question and its insinuation, hotly she flushed. Verplank saw but the flush. The day previous she had told him that she had taken Barouffski to serve as a barricade between them. Since then he had cajoled his imagination with the idea that the creature stood to her as husbands do on the stage, show entities who, the rôle performed, cease otherwise to be husbands. Now the idea seemed to him hideously naïf. The flush refuted it. It did more. It revealed not only other relations but the result of them. Instantly he divined that it was for this that she refused to go. At once within him waked the primitive, the aboriginal self that lurks always and, save in the high crises of the emotions, sleeps always within us all. He was in that condition in which men slay with bare hands and afterward consider them marvelingly, wondering at whose command they could have worked. Perspiration came to his forehead, started about his nose and mouth. With the fichu which he held he wiped them, but on the table from which he had taken it was a layer of dust and ashes, the refuse of the cendrier which Violet had overturned. It streaked his face, griming him with a mask comic and sinister.

With that mask, he called at her.

“Then may you be forever damned.”

The malediction passed from him, reached her, shook her. She held to the chair for support. Then indignantly she protested.

“Gulian!”

He did not hear. An idea had come to him, one that had visited him in Melbourne, again in New York, to desist from further effort, to leave her where she was, behind the barriers she had raised. At the moment he believed he desired her no longer, loved her no more, had never loved her at all. Occupied with the idea he looked at this woman who had ruined her life, ruined his own.

She had been saying something, what he did not know nor, self-centered in his anger, did he care.

In his pocket was a revolver. He felt of it and infuriatedly cried:

“You ought to be shot.”

“Gulian!”

“You are on a par with the beast you took up with.”

“I took his name, Gulian, his name alone.”

It was her turn to be angry. The flush had gone, she was pale again and she had abandoned the chair’s support. She stood upright, confronting him with that purity which was hers.

“I have no more been his wife than I was yours.”

“What!”

This time he heard. But her words, conflicting with his thoughts, rolled over together. In this mental confusion he stared.

“What!”

“It is as I tell you.”

“You swear it?”

“Do I need to?”

Still he stared. Truth which acts on us and in us like a chemical precipitate was disclosing to him her whiteness and its own.

“Do I?” she repeated.

“No, by God, you don’t. I believe you. I can’t help myself. It is in your eyes.”

He paused and awkwardly added:

“Forgive me.”

Faintly and sadly she smiled.

“Will you?” he asked.

“Kiss me.”

In the unique syllables of the words, which in a woman’s mouth are so fluid, there was a forgiveness so entire and a love so great that in passionate contrition he drew her to him. Longly their lips met. She closed her eyes, opened them, disengaged herself, moved back a step and looked at him. For the first time she noticed the grime on his face. It did not astonish. It seemed natural after what they had both been through and it occurred to her that her own appearance might be equally bizarre.

Briefly then, in this lull in the storm, she told him what Violet had suggested – the buying and divorce of Barouffski.