The chill silent night was a relief to Stacey, and perhaps to the girl, after the heated promiscuity of the road-house. An aloof wintry moon shone coldly on the white fields and made the frozen ponds glitter. Stacey and Ethel might have been husband and wife from their nonchalant indifference to conversation. They hardly spoke on the long ride; yet there was no constraint between them. Once he asked her if she was cold, and she said that she was not; and once she observed that there was a bad grade a little way ahead, and he noted idly to himself the absence of self-consciousness with which she admitted to knowing the road.
“I suppose,” he remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, as they drew near West Boyd, “that I’d better register us as man and wife under some fancy name?”
The girl turned her head toward him slowly. “For my sake or your own?” she inquired coolly.
“For neither. To save the hotel’s face and avoid annoyance for us.”
She nodded, as though satisfied.
She entered the inn unconcernedly, except that she wrinkled her forehead and half closed her strange eyes in the sudden brightness, and she stood with equal unconcern by Stacey’s side while he registered and asked for a room. Yet even he, who was hardly at all curious about her, recognized that her calm was not the mere callousness of the prostitute. It was easy, not hard, and so it seemed to arise not from outer experience—however much experience she might have had—but from an inner indifference to facts. So, at any rate, Stacey thought; then thought no more about it.
When a bell-boy had accompanied them to their room and set down their bags and departed, closing the door upon them, she slipped out of her heavy coat and removed her hat gracefully. But then, at last, she turned slowly to Stacey, who had been standing, watching her. Still in silence, they gazed into each other’s eyes profoundly, as they had, two hours earlier, at dinner. The girl’s mouth trembled. Suddenly they kissed.
“You—you’re—brutal!” she stammered, much later, panting, her face convulsed in a savage ecstasy of delight.
“Well—and you?”
They remained at the inn for five days. But though physically their relation was unrestrained, entire, frenzied, no faintest intimacy of any other kind grew up between them, unless it may be counted as intimacy that they were perfectly at ease with each other in their hours of bodily calm, and could walk together across the frozen fields, silent or nearly so, unembarrassed, each thinking his own thoughts. Ethel might almost swoon in Stacey’s embrace; a moment after, her dark eyes, that had been moist and dilated, would become as unfathomable as ever. And, as for him, he might, and did, serve passion recklessly until pleasure turned to pain; nothing would come of it all, nothing be left over, no emotion, not even a grateful memory of delight, not even disgust,—only emptiness. Never in soft moments of assuagement did tenderness start up in him or show in her.
They talked, of course. And they did not say sharp things or get on one another’s nerves. They were not enemies. They talked only of general subjects, dispassionately, objectively. Or, rather, all subjects, even ideas, became external when Stacey and Ethel spoke of them. Yet the girl talked well and intelligently. It was simply that she revealed no emotional interest in anything they discussed. She seemed as detached and indifferent as he. But this, though it made their association comfortable, was not a bond between them.
Only once did their two personalities become conscious of each other and touch and draw a spark. When this happened it was immediately apparent that, though Ethel and Stacey were not enemies, they were antagonists, facing one another warily.
It was on the last morning of their stay. The girl was lying motionless on the bed, in the pose of Manet’s “Olympe” and with much the same exotic appearance. Stacey was sprawling in a chintz-covered rocker. He was suffering from a kind of bleak despair; for he was reflecting that everything he had done was impotent to destroy his desire for Marian. This was unfair, he thought sullenly, since his desire for Marian, too, was purely physical. Why, then, should not this liaison suffice? So, when Ethel spoke to him he answered her curtly.
“Isn’t it time,” she observed, without moving, “that you asked me about my past life, how I reached this regrettable condition, and so forth?”
He looked up slowly and considered her. “No,” he said, “I’m not interested.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Dear me! Not at all? How disrespectful of conventions! Why? Because you despise me?”
“You know I don’t despise you,” he replied indifferently. “Moreover, you don’t care whether I do or not.”
She smiled a little at this. “I don’t think that in all these five days I’ve expressed any appreciation of you,” she went on coolly. “You’re really very satisfactory. Now that’s what marriage ought to be like. Two healthy animals taking all the sharp pleasure they can from one another and letting each other’s immortal souls alone. Silly that they should be immortal, isn’t it? Perhaps they’re not. I think they must be, though; they’re so completely solitary. Nobody can ever have made them, they’re so solitary. They must always have been,—like stars in the empty sky; and so they must always go on.”
He felt interest now at last. She was strange.
“I was with the Colin Jeffries’ until recently,” she went on, in the same cool tone and not even troubling to explain her revelation. Indeed, it was not like a personal revelation. She seemed to Stacey to be merely meditating aloud—and about a third person. “With the Colin Jeffries’—as governess to their children.”
Stacey smiled.
“An impossible house,” she continued imperturbably. “Mrs. Jeffries is the kind of woman who wants to dig into every one’s mind and pull out the weeds and plant it with proper vegetables—cabbages and such—in rows. And Mr. Jeffries is tiresomely lecherous. He was always trying to get into my bedroom. Once he hid in my bath.”
Stacey laughed. “I didn’t know that, of course,” he said, “but I might have guessed it. Any such public institution as Colin Jeffries must have to take it out privately somehow. I can see why you went away. Still I think you might have found something a little better than Ames Price.”
“Oh,” she explained simply, “I didn’t take him on at once. I had an idea that there might be something more interesting in a disorderly life than an orderly one. Silly, wasn’t it? One’s as dull as the other. Ames is really as good a solution as any. He is generous with money and unperturbing.”
Stacey frowned. “That reminds me,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to-day. I’m about at the end of my money and I have almost none in the bank.”
She expressed no surprise at this, even by a look, though she must have known that he was supposed to be rich. But a shadow of regret did cross her face. She gazed at him, and he at her.
“Come here!” she said finally.
He obeyed. His eyes caressed her slim form somberly. “Your body is as strange as your face!” he muttered.
She shivered, set her teeth, and stared at him in a fury of desire.
They left the inn early on the afternoon of that day and drove back over the road that led to Clarefield and Vernon. They were as separate as ever mentally, but they talked rather more freely, and Stacey, though he felt neither love nor friendship for the girl, felt esteem for her because she existed proudly by herself. He would not have her bruised. He would defend her in a matter-of-fact way from trouble, as one might defend a stranger from physical attack.
So: “What are you going to do,” he demanded suddenly, “when you get back to Vernon?”
“Go to my apartment,” she returned. “The one Ames took for me. Ames will come back.” She smiled faintly. “Are you concerned lest you’ve ruined my prospects?”
“Yes, of course,” he said unemotionally.
“How noble of you! Don’t worry. You haven’t.”
All at once he laughed. “I was thinking what a marvellous judge of character Ames is,” he observed. “?‘Not warm or cold, Ethel, but friendly!’?”
The girl turned her head and looked at him strangely, but this time without smiling.
At Clarefield they drove up to Bell’s Tavern where their adventure had begun, intending to warm themselves before going on. They sat down in the booth where Ethel had sat with Ames Price on the night of Whittaker’s dinner. Stacey reflected moodily, while they waited for the drinks he ordered, that, though nearly a week had passed since that evening, nothing whatever had happened. He had succeeded in staying away from Marian, but he wanted her as much now as he had wanted her then. Five full days of this affair with Ethel had not added a fraction to what he felt and was at the beginning of it, or taken a fraction away. If time were to be set back, the interlude wiped out, and he were to find himself sitting again with Whittaker and Minnie, looking across at Ames drunk, nothing would be changed.
But he was awakened from this reverie by the de............