“Well?” she questioned.
“I want very much to see you, Helga. Alone.”
She held herself tensely on the edge of her chair, and suggested: “Tomorrow?”
He hesitated a second and then said quickly: “Why, yes, that’s all right.”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock,” he agreed.
Eight o’clock tomorrow came. Helga Crane never forgot it. She had carried away from yesterday’s meeting a feeling of increasing elation. It had seemed to her that she hadn’t been so happy, so exalted, in years, if ever. All night, all day, she had mentally prepared herself for the coming consummation; physically too, spending hours before the mirror.
Eight o’clock had come at last and with it Dr. Anderson. Only then had uneasiness come upon her and a feeling of fear for possible exposure. For Helga Crane wasn’t, after all, a rebel from society, Negro society. It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone. But these late fears were overwhelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire; and she had got herself down to the hotel’s small reception room.
It was, he had said, awfully good of her to see him. She instantly protested. No, she had wanted to see him. He looked at her surprised. “You know, Helga,” he had begun with an air of desperation, “I can’t forgive myself for acting such a swine at the Tavenors’ party. I don’t at all blame you for being angry and not speaking to me except when you had to.”
But that, she exclaimed, was simply too ridiculous. “I wasn’t angry a bit.” And it had seemed to her that things were not exactly going forward as they should. It seemed that he had been very sincere, and very formal. Deliberately. She had looked down at her hands and inspected her bracelets, for she had felt that to look at him would be, under the circumstances, too exposing.
“I was afraid,” he went on, “that you might have misunderstood; might have been unhappy about it. I could kick myself. It was, it must have been, Tavenor’s rotten cocktails.”
Helga Crane’s sense of elation had abruptly left her. At the same time she had felt the need to answer carefully. No, she replied, she hadn’t thought of it at all. It had meant nothing to her. She had been kissed before. It was really too silly of him to have been at all bothered about it. “For what,” she had asked, “is one kiss more or less, these days, between friends?” She had even laughed a little.
Dr. Anderson was relieved. He had been, he told her, no end upset. Rising, he said: “I see you’re going out. I won’t keep you.”
Helga Crane too had risen. Quickly. A sort of madness had swept over her. She felt that he had belittled and ridiculed her. And thinking this, she had suddenly savagely slapped Robert Anderson with all her might, in the face.
For a short moment they had both stood stunned, in the deep silence which had followed that resounding slap. Then, without a word of contrition or apology, Helga Crane had gone out of the room and upstairs.
She had, she told herself, been perfectly justified in slapping Dr. Anderson, but she was not convinced. So she had tried hard to make herself very drunk in order that sleep might come to her, but had managed only to make herself very sick.
Not even the memory of how all living had left his face, which had gone a taupe gray hue, or the despairing way in which he had lifted his head and let it drop, or the trembling hands which he had pressed into his pockets, brought her any scrap of comfort. She had ruined everything. Ruined it because she had been so silly as to close her eyes to all indications that pointed to the fact that no matter what the intensity of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion of himself. Not even for her. Not even though he knew that she had wanted so terribly something special from him.
Something special. And now she had forfeited it forever. Forever. Helga had an instantaneous shocking perception of what forever meant. And then, like a flash, it was gone, leaving an endless stretch of dreary years before her appalled vision.
XX
The day was a rainy one. Helga Crane, stretched out on her bed, felt herself so broken physically, mentally, that she had given up thinking. But back and forth in her staggered brain wavering, incoherent thoughts shot shuttle-like. Her pride would have shut out these humiliating thoughts and painful visions of herself. The effort was too great. She felt alone, isolated from all other human beings, separated even from her own anterior existence by the disaster of yesterday. Over and over, she repeated: “There’s nothing left but to go now.” Her anguish seemed unbearable.
For days, for weeks, voluptuous visions had haunted her. Desire had burned in her flesh with uncontrollable violence. The wish to give herself had been so intense that Dr. Anderson’s surprising, trivial apology loomed as a direct refusal of the offering. Whatever outcome she had expected, it had been something else than this, this mortification, this feeling of ridicule and self-loathing, this knowledge that she had deluded herself. It was all, she told herself, as unpleasant as possible.
Almost she wished she could die. Not quite. It wasn’t that she was afraid of death,
