The Eternal Wonder (16 page)

And obedient always to her demanding, willful, pretty ways, they had made their journey, Coates driving them, and he drank in the scenery and the change, marveling at so much variety in so small a space, always engirdled by the sea. But for him there was wonder everywhere, and he spent hours engrossed in accumulating impressions of faces and places, villages and towns and the rare city of Dublin, and she accused him of forgetting that she was even with him.

“I might as well have stayed home,” she cried one day, petulant and laughing.

“Oh, no indeed, Lady Mary,” he had protested. They were in some ancient cathedral, and he had been absorbed in a small book the vendor handed him, giving the story of a knight encased in a coffin of brass, in a crypt there, his image also of brass lying upon the coffin. He put the book down on the image.

“No, indeed, Lady Mary,” he had protested again, and had been about to explain when she broke in.

“And don’t you think you might call me Mary, after all this time of knowing me?”

“I always think of you as Lady Mary,” he replied in all innocence, in such innocence indeed that she had gone into a fit of laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” he inquired gravely.

She had only laughed the more and he was puzzled, but he wanted to know the end of the dead knight’s story too, and so he had taken up the book again and she wandered away.

So had passed one lovely day after another until they came back to the castle, just escaping the first snowstorm. And still he marveled how much green there was in the gardens, the late chrysanthemums still blooming, too, though near their end, and sank back into the old life easily and yet uneasily, because he knew he should be moving on his way, for there was a dangerous charm in the ancient and idyllic setting.

Now here she stood before him in the old library on this day in early December. It was twilight and a coal fire was burning in the grate. She had changed for the evening and wore a long skirt of black velvet with a scarlet bodice and pearls about her neck.

“And still you are reading,” she scolded, “and even without turning on the lights! What is the book now?”

“Darwin—his voyages—”

He had been far away, so far away that she saw how far, and slowly she came and stood before him and gently she put her two palms on his cheeks.

“Do you ever see me?” she demanded, and moving away she turned on the lights, all the lights, so that suddenly all was dark outside and bright within.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

He looked up at her, smiling, and suddenly she stooped, and he felt on his mouth the pressure of her lips, light at first and then with a quick pressure.

“Now do you see me better?” she demanded, and drew back.

He could not speak. He felt his cheeks get hot, his heart begin beating in his breast, hard and quick.

“Have you never had a woman kiss you?” she asked softly.

“No,” he said in a half whisper.

“Well, now you have,” she said. “You’ll have learned something new in England—something to wonder about—you who are always wondering! So—how do you like it?”

She spoke in so downright a way, her voice half-laughing, almost scornful, that he could only shake his head.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or don’t want to know?”

He did not reply, indeed he could not. He was in a tangle of feeling, repelled and yet enchanted. But the enchantment was in himself. He was not enchanted by her. In a strange way he wanted her to kiss him again.

“You are shocked,” she said. “It was nothing—just fun. Come along to dinner.”

She drew him to his feet by her hand on his and then walked with him into the dining room, her hand now in the crook of his elbow.

HE COULD NOT FOREGET.
THAT
night, when they sat late side by side on a small curved couch before the dying embers, the servants gone to bed, he could not forget that warm sweet pressure on his mouth. They had been talking, not steadily but in a desultory, half conversation, her head leaning against the high back of the couch as she talked now of her childhood, of Berlin and Paris, of the rounded hills of Italy, crowned by small old cities, and he sat turned toward her, listening and not listening, remembering the kiss. Suddenly in a long moment of silence he felt impelled by that deepening enchantment in himself, by his quickening heart impelled, and he leaned toward her and to his own surprise he kissed her mouth. Immediately her arms went about his neck. He felt her hand pressing his head down—down, so that his lips clung to hers, clung until he could not breathe. Then slowly she drew back her hands on his shoulders.

“How quickly you learn! Oh, darling—is this wicked of me? But some woman must teach you, darling—and why not I? Eh, Rann? Why not I? You’re a man—your body a man’s body—so tall, so strong. Haven’t you—known it? Or has your head been so full of your books—”

He did not answer. He scarcely heard her. Instead he was kissing her again, madly, wildly, her cheeks, her neck, the cleft of her bosom where her low-cut gown revealed the shape of her breasts. And when he kissed her there, she loosened a button and another, and in a foam of fragrant lace he saw her breasts, rounded and firm, her two little breasts, pink-tipped. He gazed at them, fascinated, shy, his blood rising to tempest pitch and concentrating in his rising center.

“Poor darling,” she whispered. “Why not? Of course—of course—”

And under her guiding touch, he sought her and found her and with great gusts in that warm receiving place he was released and knew himself.

When they parted at last, her good night kiss as light as a child’s now, when he had bathed and put on clean garments, his body sanctified, when he lay alone in the great bed, his exultation was for himself. He did not think of her, he did not think even of love.

“I am a man,” he said aloud in the darkness of the night. “I am a man—I am a man—”

And when he slept it was the sweetest sleep he had ever known, the sweetest and most deep.

MORNING WOKE HIM
AND HE
lay for a long moment, recalling himself. So this was he, a new person, and she was new, a woman. She would never seem the same to him again, any more than he was the same. They had met in a new world. They had stepped across a threshold. It
was a reality he had never known before.

He was shy when she came down to breakfast in a dark-green jacket suit that brought alive the vivid color of her hair and eyes. To his surprise she was quite herself, quieter perhaps, giving him a smile instead of a greeting. When the butler left the room, she yawned behind her narrow white hand with its diamond and emerald rings.

“How I slept,” she said. “Of course, I’m a natural sleepyhead, but last night I didn’t even dream. Just slept. And you?”

“I slept very well, thanks.”

He was formal because now he was shy. He did not know what to say to her. Should anything be said? And how would they proceed from here? Perhaps he should go away. What was the next step? She was twice his age, but she looked no more than twenty. He had never seen her look so young, so fresh. She was smiling at him, not in the least shy, her bright eyes teasing.

“You’re ten years older than you were yesterday,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but you are. And I am ten years younger. Of course, I
can
explain it, but I won’t. I’ll leave you to realize it for yourself. You don’t know me—or yourself. You’ve spent your life learning about everything except yourself.”

“I’m—more than one person,” he said stiffly, not looking at her.

“Of course,” she agreed with gaiety. “You’re an unknown number of persons. But I wanted to confirm what I guessed—that you are also very much of a man. Now I know.”

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “You were wonderful, Rann—so instinctively wonderful. I knew as soon as I met you that you were a genius. I’ve known geniuses—a few. What I didn’t know was whether you were—something more—something that would make you complete. Well, you are. And that something completes even your genius.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. That will come slowly. But someday, at some moment, you will know yourself wholly. This is a time of learning.”

They were looking into each other’s eyes, his drawn to hers by her steady, honest gaze.

“Will you trust me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

HE TRUSTED HER
AND HE
learned how readily he obeyed. He was amazed and sometimes shocked that he was
ready, and at all times, to obey her slightest touch. Standing behind his chair, she leaned over him, her cheek against his and he turned instantly, instinctively, passionately to seek her mouth. One touch, one movement, led to the next until they were in each other’s arms. They tried to be wary of the servants and this led to their night hours together. When the house was quiet, the servants sleeping in their distant quarters, they would steal to each other’s rooms, she to his at first but soon he to hers. She preferred him to come to her, and when he discovered her preference, he always went to her. He lay awake, impatient with longing, until the clock in the hall struck one. Then he rose and put on his robe and, barefoot on the thick carpets, he went down across the hall to her rooms. Sometimes she was sitting before the fire, wrapped carelessly in a silk robe, her body naked beneath it, and soon, how soon, he learned to slip it away, at first shy, his hands trembling, but after a few nights boldly and quickly, revealing all her white loveliness. He never tired of looking at her, not until he could no longer wait, and then lying on the wide bed, looking at her again, his head supported on one hand, the other free to touch, to feel, to examine.

“Did you ever really see a woman before?” she asked one night smiling at him.

“Yes, once,” he said. “When I was a little boy on my first day at school. We were coming home together and she wanted to see me … my—my penis, I mean. My father had told me about myself—a penis is a planter, he said. And then she offered to show me herself, and did. And I saw something like a flower holding a pink tip. We were as ignorant—and innocent—as the babes we were. But some woman saw us and, evil-minded, she told Ruthie’s mother and Ruthie’s desk was moved far from mine in school. I didn’t know why.”

“Were your parents angry?”

“Mine? Oh, no—they understood a boy’s curiosity—”

“Which grows into a man’s—doesn’t it?”

“Yes—but I didn’t know it. I’m so grateful to you. It might have been so—horrible. Instead it’s—beautiful—with you. Because you are so beautiful yourself.”

“What will happen to us, Rann?”

“What do you mean?”

“This can’t go on forever, you know.”

He had not thought of this. Go on forever?

“Do you want it to?” he asked.

“I might—if you were even ten years older. But you’re not.”

“I don’t think I’ve been thinking. For the first time in my life—I’ve been feeling, only feeling. No, I don’t suppose it can go on forever. You aren’t asking me to leave you? Because I can’t—”

It was true. He could not imagine himself leaving this lovely body of a woman. He had come to needing her as a man needs to drink. His flesh clamored for her. He responded viscerally and physically. He was impatient for the night. If they walked in the loneliness of the deep forest surrounding the castle, he could not wait for the night. He was inappeasable. Satiated at one moment, in an hour he was hungry again. He did not know himself now. He was yet another person. Where was that studious, book-loving boy? He rarely went into the library now. The more he knew her, the more he wanted her—not her mind, not her laughter, not even her companionship, but her body.

“Are all men like me?” he demanded at three o’clock in the morning.

“No one is like you,” she replied. She looked white in the lamplight, exhausted yet strangely, sweetly beautiful.

“But I mean it,” he said impatiently. “I’m like a man who can’t get enough to drink—again and again and again—I exhaust you.”

“And, loving you, I love it,” she said.

“Then are all women like you?”

“I don’t know. Women never know each other—not where men are concerned.”

“Shall I always be like this?” he demanded.

“No,” she said half-sadly. “Perhaps only with me. Every experience is the same—it can never be repeated.”

He pondered this, lying on his back, and gazing unseeing into the shadows flickering on the ceiling. There was a wisdom in her words that he could not immediately grasp. After a moment he turned and kissed her abruptly.

And then he got up, wrapped himself in his robe, and went back to his own room, conscious of her quiet gaze following him until the door closed between them.

WINTER HAD COME SLOWLY
OVER
the landscape. He was accustomed to the abrupt weather of his own country, and the mild approach of cold and chill rather than cold, he scarcely noticed. The autumn had been mild, the flowers bloomed late, the trees changed their colors gently, and the first snowstorms were mere flurries, edging the outlines of the landscape, house roofs in the village, the slow rise of the hills, the lines of tree trunks and branches rather than the violence of wind and snowstorms.

He was conscious of change not so much in his outer world as in himself. He read very little nowadays. Books, instead of being sources of discovery, made him impatient; instead of enjoying the long quiet hours alone in the vast old library, he found himself wondering where she was. Impossible of course to concentrate if she was in the library with him, it was even more impossible to concentrate if she was not there. Or, if she told him that she would be away for an hour or several hours, for she kept her independence, then time was interminable and he was too restless to read. Instead he walked about the grounds or the moors, glancing often at his watch, timing his return to hers.

Yet theirs was no rational relationship. They seldom talked, and never for long; willful, amusing, even brilliant as her talk could be, he found himself not listening, and scarcely answering. Instead his whole being was concentrated upon the inevitable meeting of their bodies—inevitable but without schedule, so he never knew whether, when he took her in his arms, she would allow him to proceed or whether she would merely give him a gentle kiss and withdraw herself. She teased him, she tantalized him, she made him happier than he could imagine, she cast him into anger or despair. He did not understand her, nor did he want to understand her as a person. He wanted only to know her mood. Would she receive him this day, this night, or would she reject him? Nor could he even call it rejection. She was too tender, too courteous perhaps to reject him. Even when she withdrew, it was after a kiss, a touch, a reassurance.