THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
333
and traveled by drawing room or compartment; but on the other hand,
there was her aunt. She could not find out for herself; it would take a
prince to tell her. This man now-surely he came from that heavenly
world, that divine position at the center ·of things where choice is unlim·
ited. And he had chosen
her.
But that was all wrong. She had only to look at him to see that she
had cheated again, had tried to get into the game with a deck of phony
cards. For this man also was out of the running. He was too old. Sound
as he was in every other respect, time had made a lame duck of him.
If
she had met him ten years before, would he have chosen her then?
He took the glass from her hands and put his arms around her. "My
God,'' he said, "if this had only happened ten years ago!"
She held herself stony in his embrace, and felt indeed like a rock
being lapped by some importunate wave.
Ther~
was a .touch of dignity
in
the simile, she thought, but what takes place in the end?-Erosion.
At that the image suddenly turned and presented another facet to her:
dear Jesus, she told herself, frightened, I'm really as hard as riails. Then
all at once she was hugging the man with an air of warmth that was not
quite spurious and not quite sincere {for the distaste could not quite be
smothered but only ignored); she pressed her ten fingers into his back and
for the first time kissed him carefully on the mouth.
The glow of self-sacrifice illuminated her. This, she thought decidedly,
is going to be the only real act of charity I have ever performed in my
life; it will be the only time I have ever given anything when it honestly
hurt me to do so. That her asceticism should have to be expressed in
terms of sensuality deepened, in a curious way, its value, for the sacrifice
was both paradoxical and positive; this was no simple abstention like a
meatless Friday or a chaste Sunday: it was the mortification of the flesh
achieved through the performance of the act of pleasure.
Quickly she helped him take off the black dress, and stretched her–
self out on the berth like a slab of white lamb on an altar. While she
waited with some impatience for the man to exhaust himself, for the
indignity to be over, she contemplated with a burning nostalgia the image
of herself, fully dressed, with the novel, in her Pullman seat, and knew,
with the firmest conviction, that for once she was really and truly good,
not hard or heartless at all.
"You need a bath," said the man abruptly, raising himself on one
elbow and looking sharply down at her as she lay relaxed on the rumpled
sheet. The curtain was .halfway up, and outside the Great Salt Lake sur–
rounded them. They had been going over it for hours, that
i~mense,
gray-brown blighting Dead Sea, which looked, not like an actual lake, but
like a mirage seen in the desert. She had watched
it
for a long time, while
the man beside her murmured of his happiness and his plans for their
future; they had slept a little and when they opened their eyes again, it
was still there, an interminable reminder of sterility, polygamy, and waste.
