I don’t know . . . I must go first and stand where you stood and get it inside me.” That was what she did with his pictures. She stood in the place he had stood, absorbing what he had seen, trying with all the power in her to translate his fierce primitive efforts into serenity. Then she would go back to her attic room and spend her happiest hours complementing his work.
“What’s the use,” she said, “of talking it over with you? You wouldn’t understand.” But she came and sat beside him on the couch.
“Josie,” he repeated in a coaxing tone like a spoiled child, “tell me things. . . .”
“What sort of things?” she asked, surprised.
“Oh, nice things.”
“I’d like to know what nice things I could tell you!”
“Tell me why you are always staring at me.”
“I don’t stare at you.” And she looked down intently at him.
“You’re staring now!”
She turned her eyes away and her colour brightened.
“Tell me why you can’t look at me the way you look at other people.”
“I can.”
“You can’t.”
This was the way they had gone on as children.
“Do it then.”
She drew her eyes from where they had been resting on the picture and tried to force them into a cool detached contemplation of him as he lay on the couch.
He peered up into her eyes. “That’s no good! That’s not the way you look at other people.”
“I don’t want to look at you.” She shut her eyes.
“You look better with them shut,” he said. He began to stroke her thin arm with long gentle strokes. She had on a sleeveless pullover, and her arms were burned brown by the sun, but her hands, from being much in the dough, were strangely white in contrast.
“I don’t like your hands,” he said. “They make me think of the bakery. I hate it. But I like you, Josie. Honestly I do. Let’s kiss. . . .”
They had never kissed except when they had been forced to, as children, to make up a quarrel.
“No,” she cried fiercely and opened her eyes wide.
But she could not stop him. He drew her down beside him and kissed her twice at random, first on the ear, then on the cheek. Then he deliberately kissed her a third time, on the mouth.
Filled with surprise they lay there close together, the light from the skylight falling down on them, big September clouds touched with the red of sunset passing above. The ropes by which the skylight was manipulated dangled overhead. The smell of paint, which they both loved, hung in the air. The waves pushed their way with gurgling noises among the rocks beneath. Gulls cried, now thinly and far away, now so close as to seem almost in the room. The two lay still under this wave of strange new intimacy, scarcely thinking, astonished by the difference a putting out of two arms, a drawing close, a breathing as one being could make.
She pushed him from her. He relaxed his arms and she got up. She passed her hand over the arm he had stroked, turning her face away from him. He lay staring up at the clouds sailing above the skylight.
“I must come back and finish up here tomorrow,” she said rather gaspingly. “There’s no time to do it to-night. It’s nearly supper time! Let’s go and buy a lobster to take home.”
“All right,” he agreed, rising to his feet in one movement. She found herself staring at him and turned angrily away. She emptied the grounds from the coffee-pot and rinsed it. He sauntered to a large zinc-lined box containing clay for modelling, lifted the lid and dug out a handful. He began carelessly rolling it between his palms, shaping it.
“Dough,” he said, “this is my dough. Better than your old dough in the bakery.”
“It’s not my dough,” she answered angrily. “It’s yours.”
“Dad didn’t leave it to me, he left it to Fay”—he called his mother Fay. “It’s hers, if you like, but it’s nothing to me. . . . Look, Josie, I’m going to do a head of you. This is what you’re like!” And he began to mould roughly a head that soon showed a grotesque likeness to hers.
She stood watching him, looking sidewise, her head and grey eyes slanting, sneering at his essay in sculpture, yet fascinated. The movements of his hands had an almost cruel fascination for her—strange that they had stroked her arm—strange that he had kissed her after all these years of living in the house together. . . .
The sun was gone when they ran along the beach to the lobster house, but every wave still held a golden halo on its crest. The fishermen standing with bent legs in their dories rowed themselves home. Gulls followed the dories, screaming and fascinated by the moving silver of the filled nets.
The lobster house was hot and steamy. The floor was wet, with scarlet claws and feelers strewn on it. In one vat live lobsters strove heavily to mount each other’s backs. In another stewed their fellows. The boy and girl chose one.
They stood close together. They wanted to feel the excitement, the comfort, of nearness. They were two adventurers, bound for strange experiences. Life was opening out before them—sweet, rather overpowering. Diego caught Josie’s fingers and held them tightly. It would be hard to say whether this was a gesture protective or clinging. What he perhaps felt was that all these scenes they were so accustomed to would soon be a part of their past, and that his future was like one of his own pictures—strange, indefinite, even chaotic. Perhaps Josie would take it in hand, translate it into a serenity lucid to the world—and even to himself.
CHAPTER II
AT the time when Josie and Diego were running along the beach toward the lobster house Purley Bond was walking in the direction of his home. He had a good swinging walk and he liked the outdoor movement after so many hours in his close, poorly lighted store. He had grown up with the intention of being a doctor like his father and his grandfather before him, but after six months at a medical college he had changed his mind and taken a course in chemistry. The horrors of the dissecting-room, the sights he had seen in hospitals, were more than he could endure. The messiness, the anguish, affected his nerves. He could not sleep or eat. It was useless for his father to tell him that he would get accustomed to it. He said he would rather become a fisherman or break stones on the road than be a doctor. His disappointed father gave in, and he took his degree from a pharmaceutical college. Now sometimes he was driven to wish that his father had been harder with him or that he had hardened himself. He was not made for an indoor life, and the pressure of times which forced him into the selling of chocolates, magazines and cigarettes made him angry and irritable.
The Bonds had been one of the most respected families of Saltport. Purley Bond wondered sometimes if it were in him that the family was to run to seed. The men of his family had prospered in their profession, they had married into other respected families. They had built a fine house and kept it up well. They had had children. Now he was thirty-six. He was going back rather than forward financially. He was in love and had been in love for years with Fay Palmas. Could he afford to marry her? Would she have him? Her husband had been dead for seven months. How soon could he decently ask her? Did he really want her disturbing presence in his house? Had he, in truth, the making of a bachelor in him? These questions occupied him as he strode down the street.
He unlatched the gate in the ornamental picket fence painted white, passed through the high clipped hedge and heard the gate click softly behind him. Inside was a cold, almost frosty shade, for the hedge shut out the afternoon sun and evening came early to the house. His grandfather had planted the hedge; in his father’s time it had been kept below the level of the fence, but for several years now he had encouraged the privacy it gave and allowed it to shut out, with its dense glossy leaves, not only the gaze of the passer-by