“I’m very sorry,” he said, a little impatiently. “I—I didn’t know you made such fine distinctions.”
She did not answer.
“Won’t you kiss me, Gloria?”
“I don’t want to.” It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.
“A sudden change, isn’t it?” Annoyance was growing in his voice.
“Is it?” She appeared uninterested. It was almost as though she were looking at someone else.
“Perhaps I’d better go.”
No reply. He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly. Again he sat down.
“Gloria, Gloria, won’t you kiss me?”
“No.” Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.
Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.
“Then I’ll go.”
Silence.
“All right—I’ll go.”
He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his remarks. Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive. He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but this pervasive and chilling silence. He cursed himself for a weak fool; his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince. Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.
“If you’re tired of kissing me I’d better go.”
He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him. She spoke, at length:
“I believe you’ve made that remark several times before.”
He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a chair—blundered into them, during an intolerable moment. Looking again at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved. With a shaken, immediately regretted “goodbye” he went quickly but without dignity from the room.
For over a moment Gloria made no sound. Her lips were still curled; her glance was straight, proud, remote. Then her eyes blurred a little, and she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:
“Goodbye, you ass!” she said.
Panic
The man had had the hardest blow of his life. He knew at last what he wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever beyond his grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy. At one minute she had liked him tremendously—ah, she had nearly loved him. In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent and efficiently humiliated man.
He had no great self-reproach—some, of course, but there were other things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes. She was beautiful—but especially she was without mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape—that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.
About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into Fifty-Second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips. Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passersby had stared at him. His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of merciless death.
… After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with black-rimmed eyeglasses from which dangled a long black cord.
“Order, please!”
Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up resentfully.
“You wanna order or doncha?”
“Of course,” he protested.
“Well, I ast you three times. This ain’t no restroom.”
He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he found and translated the
CHILD’S
in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen nighthawks.
“Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please.”
The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.
God! Gloria’s kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street—under the lamps.
Misery struck at him again, piling a
