“If you like.”
I guided the stallion in among the maples and sycamores to the hut. It had been built above the creek, and the crumbled fieldstone of the old walls had fallen into the water and been dispersed for many yards by the spring torrents, forming a stony shallows where the smoothly flowing surface was broken brightly and noisily. It could be seen that the banks overflowed here at every thaw, for all about the ruined springhouse the ground was carpeted with deep grass of brilliant green, and much of the ancient masonry was buried in a clump of rushes, their roots in black cool spongy turf. A frog leapt into them with a single solemn splash as we approached.
“Oh, this is the place!” Lilith whispered. The sound of the words made my heart bolt madly. She reached down to pluck off her black ballet slippers, flinging them away into the rushes, and slid down from the stallion’s back, standing ankle-deep in the bright turf. I plucked the red rosette from the bridle and tossed it down to her. She caught it and lifted it to her breast, fondling the trailing satin ribbons smilingly.
“I’m sorry it’s only the second prize,” I said. “I’d like to have won the blue for you.”
“Oh, no, it’s just what we deserve,” she said. “I don’t think we will ever be first in the world’s honors, and I wouldn’t want us to.”
She lifted the ribbon and fastened it into her hair, raising her head to smile at me.
“How beautiful you are,” I said, looking down at her. “You haven’t seen.”
I swung down out of the saddle and stood before her, trembling. Her eyes shone with the ghostly brilliance of mirage. I moved toward her and she raised her hand quickly, saying, “No, wait. I want to be naked for you.”
She unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall from her lowered arms; then, unfastening her skirt, she dropped it to the grass and stepped out of it, standing utterly naked, her body white as lime, exquisitely slender, sovereign in its beauty. She shook her long hair across her shoulders to bare her breasts and lifted her face triumphantly to me.
“Now do you see? Do you see what I’ve wanted you to know?” She moved toward me with a swift, famished movement, as shameless, glorious and generous, it seemed to me, as light itself. I gathered her body against me, burying my lips in her warm wild hair and murmuring senselessly, “I never knew, I never knew. You are more beautiful than I ever dreamed. I love you, Lilith.”
In the cool grass, in the shadow of the ruined wall, with the great stallion grazing peacefully beside us, I had my desire.
As the sun fell, the shadow moved beyond us, and the grotto was filled with soft evening light that warmed our exhausted bodies and cast a bronze luster upon them. We lay caressing each other with serene and unself-conscious privilege while the stallion cropped the deep grass about us idly, glowing in his hide of golden lacquer.
“Will you tell me something now?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What do they mean—the words above your bed?”
“I’ll teach you my language, Vincent, so we can talk together in it; and then you can read them for yourself. But I think you know, now.”
I took her hand and kissed her cool fingers, murmuring with content.
“Will you teach me your songs, too?”
“Yes. Everything I know.”
She raised herself on one elbow to look down upon me, running her hands lightly over the contours of my body, laying her fingers in the hollows of my ribs and stroking the gilded skin.
“How beautiful you are—all smooth and coppery. Everywhere but here—where they wounded you.” She touched the ugly, knife-shaped scar very gently with her finger tips. “Does it still hurt?”
“A little. It aches, sometimes.”
“I’ll make it well.” She leaned over me to press her lips softly against the glazed, jagged bluish weal, murmuring in her throat, “Now it will be well. Even the scar will go.”
I took her head in my hands, pressing her mouth to my wound, feeling the flood of her warm bright hair across my body, faint with delight.
“You can’t be real,” I said. “There are no such girls as you. I’ve dreamed of you all my life, but you’re even more than I dreamed of.”
“Was your other girl so different? Wouldn’t she teach you her songs?”
“I don’t think she knew any songs,” I said.
“Poor Vincent. She thought your dulcimer was foolish! Did she teach you nothing, then?”
“Yes. She taught me shame. I suppose it was all she had to teach.”
She turned to face me tenderly. “Vincent, have you never had a friend?”
“I had one,” I said. “But they killed him.”
She watched my eyes for a moment and her face softened into a tranquil smile. “Then I’m all the happier, because there is no one to take any of your love from me. I can be everything for you: friend, lover, tutor, everything.”
“Yes, you are everything, now,” I said. “There is certainly nothing else.”
“And am I enough?”
“Much more than enough.”
“Truly? If I died tonight, would it have been enough?”
“No, not if you died tonight. You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you. I need much more of you than an hour.” I clenched her hair, pressing her with gentle avidity against me. “I’m very hungry.”
“Then I will live forever. As long as men like you shall need me.”
There was mist above the creek and dusk in the trees as we rode back through the silent fields, our bodies drooping in the saddle with exalted fatigue. She sang one of her ballads to me, the strange words fading sweetly in the darkening air.
Do you think that abandoned things, deserted things, are not beautiful? Oh, you have never seen them with such a companion! How beautiful the empty list was in the dusk as we rode back idly into the tournament grounds. There were torn ribbons of paper bunting hanging from the arches, blowing gently in the evening wind, and the trampled tanbark of the course was littered with empty Dixie cups, the cores of apples, crumpled paper fans and scraps of glittering foil. A ruined corsage with a twisted wire stem and withering brown gardenia petals stirred softly in the breeze. Somewhere among the debris, with the blood still seeping from his broken casque, lay the pale knight whom I had slain beneath her banner.
One or two horses stood silently in the paddock. The workman was taking down the swaying wires. A man with a wire basket and a rubbish fork was clearing up the grounds. A pair of lovers sat laughing softly, their heads together, at one of the littered picnic tables. A group of horsemen with a bucket of ice and dripping, copper-colored cans of beer stood in a swaying group, singing, under the dark trees. Howie detached himself from them, greeting us jubilantly and offering us beer; but we were tired, and felt shyly isolated by our love, and impatient for our long ride home together through the twilight.
Lilith sat beside me silently in the limousine, fondling the red rosette at her breast and staring out at the quiet darkening fields. We spoke hardly at all. Only once she stretched out her hand to touch my arm and said quite timidly, “Will you be angry if I tell you something?”
“No.”
“Your hands are not quite so nice as I thought they would be. Let me see one—can you drive like that?” She studied my hand for a moment, touching my fingers with her own. “Yes, it’s your thumbs. There’s something wrong about your thumbs.”
“I’ll cut them off,” I said.
“No.” She clasped my hand beneath her chin and laughed softly. “I think they are quite nice enough, after all.”
As we turned into the hospital drive she laid her hand on my thigh and asked, “Are you frightened?”
“Not now.”
“I’ll help you. I’m much stronger than you think, and I’ll always help you. Remember.”
“Yes.”
“Tonight, especially. I think you may need to remember it tonight.”
I stopped the car for a moment in the deep evening shade of the poplars and, gathering her body against me, kissed her soft mouth—gently at first, then with growing passion, clenching her hair and bending her against me with tender fury, as if in a mournful and abandoned demonstration of my constancy. Perhaps I wished deliberately to fill myself with fresh desire for her so that I should be burning with it, and impregnable in my resolution, when I returned to lie to her guardians. She leaned back from me, her eyes blazing with delight at my recklessness.
“Oh, Vincent, how splendid you are! How could anyone not be proud to have you for a lover!” She raked the hair from her cheeks with her finger tips and, bending forward to kiss my hands, whispered more soberly in a moment, “But we must be more careful; we mustn’t lose our happiness.”
“No.”
I put the car in gear and continued on up the driveway, carrying her back to the great dark mansion over which she reigned, with its sunken veranda, its glimmering golden fishes and its sea plants waving gently in the long tides of magic that flow forever through the fathoms of its shifting cellars.
In my attitude toward my other patients I was careful to maintain an appearance of undiminished interest and attention; I even increased it, inventing and executing all sorts of original diversions for them and keeping meticulous records of their progress, to which, with great but modest enthusiasm, and to the delight of my colleagues, I was able instantly to refer. To Warren I was particularly solicitous—a device which was not entirely affected, for, perhaps by some curious kind of inverted penitence, my natural affection for him seemed to increase in ratio with my own felicity. I remember that once, when by mutual consent Lilith and I had decided that it would be expedient for her to appear at one of the Wednesday tea dances and to be conspicuously attentive to him, he took me aside afterward and in a rush of garbled confidence expressed his joy: “Did you see? Did you see how she danced with me! Did you notice her manner?” (I had, indeed: the little alluring glances, the challenging demureness, the subtly feigned esteem by which, with a strange combination of scorn and pity, I had watched him beguiled.) “I think she is really beginning to feel something for me! Is it absurd to talk this way? I really feel it!”
We were walking across the green from Field House in the summer evening. He looked up into the maples, which were rustling in the stir of breeze, his excitement seeming suddenly to be quieted to a deep content by their gentle furor. “How beautiful everything is. Only last night those trees terrified me.” He turned toward me, smiling, and laid his hand on my arm. “You arranged it, didn’t you? You persuaded her to come?”
“Yes.”
“It was very good of you. I am very grateful. Do you know, of all the people here, I feel that you are the one who really cares about us. The one who really understands.”
“No, I think you’re mistaken about that, Warren.”
“No, no; I think you feel with us. With me, at any rate. I hope I will be able to repay you some day.” He reached up as if to pluck a leaf, and then withdrew his hand quickly. “Do you know, I was about to destroy that leaf—to kill it, just out of happiness! How careless joy can make us!” He smiled and nodded at the dark branches. “It’s strange how well I feel when I am happy. I feel that I can work, organize my life again, have friends and interests, do all sorts of wonderful things.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “Do you think that . . . insanity could be anything so simple as unhappiness?”
“I don’t know. I think perhaps it might be just the opposite.”
“I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling somewhat abashed by my own words. “I talk a lot of nonsense. You mustn’t trust me.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said, laughing. “Just as I trust this happiness I feel. If I don’t trust these, what do I have to trust?”
I wanted to tell him to trust yesterday’s trees; but it was too brutal a thing to say. I merely smiled and said gently, “I’m sure you must be right to trust your happiness, Warren.”
Flashes of conscience such as this were tolerable because, as I have said, they did not last. As it was with Warren, it was with me: nothing could contradict my happiness. I should like to report that I felt great and constant shame at my duplicity, but I did not. I felt, I suppose, somewhat like an artist who abandons or abuses his family and friends for the sake of his art: like him, whatever shame I felt was momentary, and extinguished by the joy of its rewards—for, like him, I had many.
How many were they, in actual number, these rewards? Not more than twelve or fourteen trysts with her, I suppose, in as many weeks; but they are the few jewels I have strung upon the weak thread of my life. It has broken with their weight; but at each point where they hung, see how splendidly it is raveled:
We drove once to the battlefield at Gettysburg and wandered all morning among the tablets and memorials, chasing each other among the rows of blazing headstones and kissing on the graves. (How clearly I see her, sitting on a cannon which faces out across the quiet sunlit field where Pickett’s men were slaughtered, her skirt blowing back across the great spoked wheels, leaning forward to clasp the barrel with her arms and peering with great-eyed fascination into the huge mouth of the old field piece that had destroyed so many brave young men!) Later, hiding in the Devil’s Cavern, we joined our bodies on a bed of bluets whose roots were fed by the blood of all the slain rebels whom we lay among. At Sugar Loaf, on a day of northeast wind and driven clouds, at the summit, on the very plateau where I had first met Laura, I scourged her memory among the shuddering laurel. We went once to a concert in Washington, and in the darkened vastness of Constitution Hall, surrounded by the rapt, perfumed and elegant audience, we sat in glorious, secret intimacy, washed by the waves of a music more beautiful than Brahms’s. Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, she refused to accompany me, asking for another escort instead, or slighted me conspicuously in sight of other members of the staff; and the pained regret at these contrivances which I read in her eyes would create in both of us a wildly sweet anticipation of our next adventure.