So, in lieu of money, he gave her his medals as pledges.
“If you don’t redeem them,” said “Miss Brown,” “I’ll give them to my own son when I go home.”
“Have you a son?”
“Yes.
He’s eighteen years old.
He’s almost as tall as you are and twice as broad.
All the girls are mad about him.”
He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.
“That’s enough, now,” said “Miss Brown” with authority. “Go to your room and get some sleep.”
But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him “son.”
“Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,
Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o —”
Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and reversed the well-worn record.
Then as with stately emphasis, the opening measure of
“Katinka” paced out, she waited for him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up like wings to his embrace.
She was teaching him to dance.
Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in the arms of a young man dancing.
Now, clumsily, he moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four!
Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his awkward pressure, as bodiless as a fume of smoke.
Her left hand rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a bird: her cool fingers were threaded into his hot sawing palm.
She had thick hair of an oaken color, evenly parted in the middle; her skin was pearl-pale, and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full, and sensuous — her face was like that of one of the preRaphaelite women.
She carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with the slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise and tenderness.
She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness and seduction, the world and heaven.
He held her with reverent care, as one who would not come too near, who would not break a sacred image.
Her exquisite and subtle perfume stole through him like a strange whisper, pagan and divine.
He was afraid to touch her — and his hot palm sweated to her fingers.
Sometimes she coughed gently, smiling, holding a small crumpled handkerchief, edged with blue, before her mouth.
She had come to the hills not because of her own health, but because of her mother’s, a woman of sixty-five, rustily dressed, with the petulant hang-dog face of age and sickness.
The old woman suffered from asthma and heart-disease.
They had come from Florida.
Irene Mallard was a very capable business woman; she was the chief bookkeeper of one of the Altamont banks.
Every evening Randolph Gudger, the bank president, telephoned her.
Irene Mallard pressed her palm across the mouthpiece of the telephone, smiling at Eugene ironically, and rolling her eyes entreatingly aloft.
Sometimes Randolph Gudger drove by and asked her to go with him.
The boy went sulkily away until the rich man should leave: the banker looked bitterly after him.
“He wants me to marry him, ‘Gene,” said Irene Mallard.
“What am I going to do?”
“He’s old enough to be your grandfather,” said Eugene.
“He has no hair on the top of his head; his teeth are false, and I don’t know what-all!” he said resentfully.
“He’s a rich man, ‘Gene,” said Irene, smiling.
“Don’t forget that.”
“Go on, then! Go on!” he cried furiously.
“Yes — go ahead. Marry him.
It’s the right thing for you.
Sell yourself.
He’s an old man!” he said melodramatically.
Randolph Gudger was almost forty-five.
But they danced there slowly in a gray light of dusk that was like pain and beauty; like the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost merman, swam, remembering exile.
And as they danced she, whom he dared not touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear, pressing with slender fingers his hot hand.
And she, whom he would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token of the world’s remedy — the refuge from the one lost face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura — a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight.