“My books? My books?” He moved a step or two nearer to her, and then stood checked again by her immobility. “What do you suppose books are made of?” he cried. “Paper and ink, or the marrow of a man’s bones and the blood of his brain? But you’re in my books, you’re part of them, whether you want to be or not, whether you believe in them or despise them, whether you believe in me or despise me; and you’re in me, in my body and blood, just as you’re in my books, and just as fatally. It’s done now and you can’t get away from me, you can’t undo what you’ve done: you’re the thoughts I think, and the visions I see, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat—and everything, everything, in the earth and over it. …”
He broke off, startled by his own outburst. He who was in general so tongue-tied, to whom eloquence came only with the pen, what power had driven this rush of words from him? Some fiery fusion of his whole being, the heightening and merging of every faculty, seemed to have unloosed his tongue. And it was all as he had said. He and his art and this woman were one, indissolubly one in a passionate mutual understanding. He and she understood each other—didn’t she know it?—with their intelligences and their emotions, with their eyes, their hands, their lips. Ah, her lips! All he could see now was the shape of her lips, that mouth haunted by all the smiles that had ever played over it, as if they were gathered up in her like shut flowerbuds.
“Didn’t you know—didn’t you know?” he stammered.
She had risen and stood a little way off from him. “About you—?”
“About you and me. There’s no difference. Is there any difference?”
He moved closer and caught her hands in his. They lay there like birds with their wings folded; birds that are frightened, and then suddenly lie still, with little subsiding palpitations. He was trying to see her face, to trace it line by line. “One of your eyebrows is a little higher than the other—I never noticed it before!” he cried exultantly, as if he had made an earthshaking discovery. She laughed a little and slipped her hands out of his.
“Oh, stop exploring me—you frighten me,” she murmured.
“Frighten you? I mean to. And you frighten me. It’s because we’re so close … leaning over into the gulfs of each other. … Don’t you like it, don’t you want it? Don’t you see there’s no difference anymore between you and me?”
She drew away from him. “My poor Vance—I see only what is. It’s my curse.”
His heart fell with a thump. All of a sudden she seemed hopelessly far away, spectral and cold. Inexperienced as he was, he knew this was no clever feint, that she was not playing with him. There was a fearless directness in her voice.
“You mean to tell me,” he cried, “that you’re all right? That your life is full enough without me?” She made no answer, and he burst out: “I shouldn’t believe you if you did!”
The exclamation brought a faint smile to her lips. “I won’t then. What would be the use? And what difference would it make? I’m here—you’re there. It’s not our nearness to each other that frightens me; it’s the leagues and leagues between—that is, when you begin to talk like this. …”
“Haven’t you always known I was going to talk like this?” he interrupted her.
“I suppose I have … but I hoped it wouldn’t be for a long time. …”
“Well, it’s been a long time since I began to love you.” Again she was silent. “You remember Thundertop?”
“Oh, Vance—even then?”
“Even before, I guess. The first time I read poetry or looked at a sunset you must have been mixed up with it. I didn’t have to wait to see you.”
She had sunk back into her armchair and sat there with her hands over her eyes. He wanted to snatch them away, to kiss her on the lids and lips; but there hung between them the faint awe of her presence. She was the woman his arms longed for, but she was also the goddess, the miracle, the unattainable being who haunted the peaks of his imagination.
“She’s sorry for me, that’s all,” he thought bitterly.
Other fellows, he felt, would have known how to break through the barrier; he had no such arts, and probably no experience of life would instruct him. There was an absoluteness in his love which benumbed him, now that his exaltation had fallen. It had always seemed to him that on the pinnacles there was just room to kneel and be mute.
Halo Tarrant dropped her hands and looked up at him between narrowed lids. She was excessively pale; her face looked haggard, almost old. “Oh, Vance,” she murmured, “take care. …”
“Take care?”
“Not to spoil something perfect. This free friendship. It’s been so—exquisite.”
The blood rushed back to his heart, and his eyes were blurred with happy tears. They choked in his throat, and he stood looking at her with a kind of desperate joy.
“I’ve never once called you by your name, even,” he stammered out.
“Well, call me by it now,” she answered, still smiling. She stood up and moved toward him. “Friends do that, don’t they? But we can’t go beyond friendship—”
“This has got nothing to do with friendship.”
“Oh, what a mistake, Vance! It includes friendship—” She spoke very low, as if what she had to say were difficult; but her eyes did not leave him. “It includes everything,” she said.
“Well, then—if it does?”
“Only, what we’ve got to do is to choose—take what we may, and leave the rest.”
“Never, never! I can’t leave it.” He was looking at her almost sternly. “Can you?” he challenged her.
“Yes,” she said, facing him resolutely.
“Ah—then you don’t care!”
“Call it that, then. At least I’ve cared for our friendship. …”
“Friendship! Friendship! If that means seeing you for a few minutes every now
