“He didn’ miss tryin’.”
“I’m not talking about just him. I mean all the time. Everything. You’re kidding yourself. You’re not hard.”
“What?” His eyes dilated as if that explicit remark were a sort of doom.
“You’re not hard or mean or tough or any of those things. You’re just scared.”
“Scared?”
“Scared. Scared to admit you’re not hard. Scared you’ll be found out. So scared, you take every chance you can to prove how hard you are. I don’t believe you’d ever do anything really cruel. Don’t believe it’s in you.”
Again that vision of Merrit stricken and of himself paralyzed, strangely unable to strike. Linda kept on:
“You’re just big. You can lick everybody. So you get away with it. All you have to do is let folks think you’re hard. That’s all right. Let them think so if that’s any fun. But when you think so yourself—well, you’re kidding yourself, that’s all.”
He grasped vaguely for comprehension and captured only excuse:
“Well, you kid yourself too sometimes, Lindy.”
That seemed to kindle something in her that flared and persisted like fire. “I know it—and I’ll never be happy while I do. Oh, I see what he meant all right—I tell myself things, things about you. I tell myself I don’t even want to see you any more—that you can’t be really liking me after I let you pick me up—yes, that’s what it was, a pickup—that night in Manhattan Casino. I tell myself I hate you for grabbing me up on the street that Sunday. Lies—all of ’em. I liked it. I’ve been wild to see you. And the only thing I hate about you is the thing that keeps you from telling me what I’d give both ears to hear. But no—you wouldn’t do that, because”—her voice was all scorn—“just because you’re hard and it’s soft to fall for a girl.” Her eyes filled, and she turned her face away, biting her lip.
To save his life, he could not utter a word.
“And now look at me,” she said, her face still averted. “Making believe I’m ashamed when I’m not a doggone thing but mad. Oh you’re right. I kid myself, too.” There was a long pause. Then, “But I know I’m doing it—You don’t.”
“But listen, Lindy. The only time I tried to tell you, you hauled off and bat me one.”
“Of course I did.”
“But now you’re sayin’ you liked it.”
“I didn’t say I liked the way you did it. Playing safe. Making me quote the Bible—giving yourself protection. Scared. Scared to be yourself. That’s what I—that’s what I hit at.”
For a while there seemed to be nothing to say. When at last Shine spoke it was to make a quite irrelevant statement:
“Lindy—I’m crazy ’bout you.”
Still she did not look at him, but she said:
“That’s how I know about you. That’s how I know you’re not really hard. That’s why I don’t want you to bother—him. You say you’d be doing it for me—but you could kill him and it wouldn’t give me any satisfaction—just make me unhappy because you’d done it and kept us apart—maybe for life—So if you bother him now, knowing I don’t want you to, knowing it won’t give me any satisfaction and’ll only make me unhappy, why then you’ll just be doing it for your own satisfaction. You’ll just be proving again to yourself how tough and tight you are. It won’t be because you’re crazy about me—that’ll just be the excuse.”
He went through a good deal of figuring before he answered that. What he eventually said was:
“Well—I’m crazy ’bout you, Linda.”
Only then did she look fully at him, and again there were stars in her eyes, and color deep in the honey of her skin. She gave him that little halting laugh and said, “The walls must be tumblin’ down.”
He wanted to tell her then about Merrit—how right she was. He wanted to tell her how completely she had dominated him these past days, all the newly realized illusion about himself that now was crumbling. He wanted to say “Walls? Tumblin’? You said it, baby,” but habit sealed his lips.
It did not however close all avenues of communication. He reached out, not fully aware of his gesture and placed his great hand over hers on the bed. She placed her other hand on top of his. It was the closing of a switch, the making of a circuit through which leaped new, strange, shattering impulses. Not a thousand dances all in one with Lottie Buttsby could have moved him so, not a thousand of Babe Merrimac’s entreaties and avowals. For one brief, eternal moment that mere contact of hands as completely obliterated the surroundings as if their whole bodies had been fused in passionate, tender embrace. When eventually the white beds came back into the picture, they might have been billowy clouds, the ugly women in their bathrobes and mules might have been winged angels, and the odors of phenol and iodoform might have been the fragrance of roses.
Shine smiled. He thought yet again of his strange behavior yesterday which now through her, he was beginning to understand; and the self-disgust he had felt as he spared and left Merrit within his ruin, began curiously to give way to a sense of tremendous relief.
A familiar sound came from outside. Bess had been parked in the street below. Jinx and Bubber had grown impatient and were “laying” on the horn, by way of suggesting that the driver hurry and return. The sound came faint but clear through the open windows.
“Know what that is?” Shine asked her.
She smiled and answered, “I guess that must be the ram’s horn.”
XXIII
In the small back room of Pat’s place, the regular evening blackjack game was in session. A green shaded electric light hung low over an oval dining-room table covered with a dishonorably discharged brown army blanket. Around it a dozen players sat and around them a dozen side-betters stood. The room was full of men, and smoke and low talk.
The dealer,
