ASLEEP A KING
39
"Yes," she said.
Darkness was creeping up, there was nothing left of the picture–
card but a smoke of rose in the East, small and regular as if from an
imaginary farm house on the hill. Mrs. Bradley had switched
on the kitchen lamp, drawing in suddenly, away from them
and from the dark outside, info her own little circle of light. He
reached through the dusk for Joan, turned her face up, and his
thought cleared slowly and took form:
This is the beginning of Mark
Bradley, a man.
He felt the curves of her body against his like the
wonderful fitness of sleep, but to be gloried in, awake! Saw over her
shoulder their home, their own windows, a heap of packages on a
chair.
"I'll be somebody," he said.
"It
doesn't matter."
"I want to buy things for you. Clothes and things. I will!"
"Mark.... "
She was crying, the tears wet his cheek and startled him. He
remembered her always as she had been in the hospital-white,
silent, bringing him back gently from his ether dreams-had not
thought of her as someone who could cry. "Don't cry, darling. We'll
have some money some day, we'll have everything.... "
"It isn't that."
He went on caressing her pale hair, reverently, feeling also a
desire to cry, and the dark fell around them clean and clear, like
snow. On the far hill the men had left their haying, there was nothing
to be seen there but the young peach trees hovering in the dark like
moths. Around the green the lights were coming on, the spinster's
house on the corner ablaze behind her elms, because she had the
money perhaps or out of fear. A few birds sang, nervous, not finding
their young, at last fluttered to silence and sleep. They were alone.
This was their own home, their love. He pressed her more closely,
laughing a little.
"Mark listen.... " She tried to pull away.
He held her, laughing: "What?"
"I'm not"-she got her arms free and stood back-"the way you
think." Her face was very narrow and white in the grey light, her
arms hung listless.
"What do you mean?"
"I'm not.... "
She waited a long time before saying it, looking straight at him
but distantly, her eyes heavy as if she were going to be sick. Even
before she spoke he backed away, knowing, sensing the fact rise in
the dark between them like a poison. She was twenty, he told himself,
