But she only said “Poor Horry” again. She stroked his hand slowly against her cheek as she stared intothe shaling ruby of the coals. The clock chimed again, with blent small silver bells. She spoke without moving. “
“Aren’t you going back to the office this afternoon?”
“No.” His tone was again the grave, lighter casual one which he employed with her. “Tin taking a holiday, Next time you come, I may have a “case and cant.”
“You never have cases: you have functions,” she answered. “But I don’t think you ought to neglect your business,” she added with grave reproof.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But whatever else is business for, then?”
“Don’t besilly...Put on some coal, Horry.”
But later he reverted again to his groping and tragic premonitions. They had spent the afternoon sitting before the replenished fire; later she had gone to the kitchen and made tea. The day still dissolved ceaselessly and monotonously without, and they sat and talked in a sober and happy isolation from their acquired ghosts, and again their feet chimed together upon the dark road and, their faces turned inward to one another’sthe sinister and watchful trees were no longer there. But the road was in reality two roads become parallel for a brief mile and soon to part again, and now and then their feet stumbled.
“It’s having been younger once,” he said. “Being dragged by time out ofa certain day like a kitten from a tow sack, being thrust into another sack with shreds of the first one sticking to your claws. Like the burro that the prospector keeps on loading down with a rock here and a rock there until it drops, leaving him in the middle of his desert, surrounded by waiting buzzards,” he added, musing in metaphors. “Plunder. That’s all it is. If you could just betranslated every so often, given a blank, fresh start, with nothing to remember, Dipped in Lethe every decade or so…”
“Or every year,” she added. “Or day.”
“Yes.” The rain dripped and dripped, thickening the twilight; the room grew shadowy. The fire had burned down again; its steady fading glow fell upon. their musing faces and brought the tea things on the low table beside them, out of the obscurity in quiet rotund gleams; and they sat hand in hand in the fitful shadows and the silence, waiting for something. And at last it came: a thundering knock at the door, and they knew then what it was they waited for, and through the window they saw the carriage curtains gleaming in the dusk and the horses stamping and steaming on the drive, in the ceaseless rain.
3
Horace had seen her on the street twice, his attention caught by the bronze splendor of her hair and by an indefinable something in her air, her carriage. It was not boldness and not arrogance (exactly, but a sort of calm, lazy contemptuousness that left him seeking in his mind after an experience lost somewhere within the veils of years that swaddled his dead childhood; an experience so sharply felt at the time that the recollection of it lingered yet somewhere just beneath his consciousness although the motivation of its virginal clarity was lost beyond recall The wakened ghost of it was so strong that during the rest of the day he roused from periods of abstraction to find that he had been searching for it a little fearfully among the crumbled and long unvisited corridors of his mind, and later as he sat before his fire at home, witha book. Then, as he lay in bed thinking of Belle and waiting for sleep, he remembered it.
He was five years old and his father had taken him to his first circus, and dinging to the man’s hard, reassuring hand in a daze of blaring sounds and sharp cries and scents that tightened his small entrails with a sense of fabulous and unimaginable imminence and left him a little sick, he raised his head and found a tiger watching him with yellow and lazy contemplation; and while his whole small body was a tranced and soundless scream, the animal gaped and flicked its lips with an unbelievably pink tongue. It was an old tiger and toothless, and it had doubtless gazed through these same bars at decades and decades of Horaces, yet in him a thing these many generations politely dormant waked shrieking, and again for a red moment he dangled madly by his hands from the lowermost limb of a tree.
That was it^ and though that youthful reaction was dulled now by the years, he found himself watching her on the street somewhat as a timorous person is drawn with delicious revulsions to gaze into a window filled with knives. He found himself thinking of her often, wondering who she was. A stranger, he had never seen her in company with anyone who might identify her. She was always alone and always definitely going somewhere; not at all as a transient, a visitor idling about the streets. And always that air of hers, lazy, predatory and coldly contemptuous. The sort of woman men stare after on the street and who does not even do them the honor of ignoring them.
The third time he saw her he was passing a store, a newly opened department store, just as she emerged at that free, purposeful gait he had come to know. In the center of the door all was a small iron ridge ontowhich the double doors locked, and she caught the heel of her slipper on this ridge and emerged stumbling in. a cascade of small parcels, and swearing. It was a man’s bold swearing, and she caught her balance and stamped her foot and kicked one of her dropped parcels savagely into the gutter. Horace retrieved it and turning saw her stooping for the others, and together they gathered them up and rose, and she glanced at him briefly with level eyes of a thick, dark brown and shot with golden lights somehow paradoxically cold.
“Thanks,” she said, without emphasis, taking the packages from him. “They ought to be jailed for having a mantrap like that in the door.” Then she looked at him again, a level stare without boldness or rudeness. “You’re Horace Benbow, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, that is my name. But I don’t believe—”
She was counting her packages. “One more yet,” she said, glancing about her feet. “Must be in the street.” He followed her to the curb, where she had already picked up the other parcel, and she regarded its muddy side and swore again. “Now I’ll have to have it rewrapped.”
“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?” he agreed. “If you’ll allow me—”
“I’ll have it done at the drug store. Come along, if you’re not too busy. I want to talk to you.”
She seemed to take it for granted that he would follow, and he did so, with curiosity and that feeling stronger than ever of a timorous person before a window of sharp knives. When he drew abreast of her she looked at him again (she was almost as tall as he) from beneath her level brows. Her face was rather thin, with broad nostrils. Her mouth was flat though full, and there was in the ugly distinction of her facein indescribable something; a something boding and leashed, yet untamed. Carnivorous, he thought. A lady tiger in a tea gown; and remarking something of his thoughts in his face, she said: “I forgot: of course you don’t know who I am; I’m Belle’s sister.”
“Oh, of course. You’re Joan. I should have known.”
“How? Nobody yet ever said we look alike. And you never saw me before.”
