Then, letting one hand drop to the bed for support, she leaned a little sideways, lifted her feet from the floor, still together, and with a gentle, curling motion, lay back on the white counterpane, then punctiliously straightened out and again folded her hands across her bosom, and closed her eyes.
And at the instant when she closed her eyes, as I stare at her, my mind took one of the crazy leaps and I saw her floating in the water, that day of the picnic three years before, with her eyes closed and the violent sky above and the white gull flashing high over, and that face and this face and that scene and this scene seemed to fuse, like superimposed photographs, each keeping its identity but without denying the other. And at that instant, as I stood there with the constriction in my throat that made me swallow hard and with my body tumescent, I looked at her there on the iron bed, then looked suddenly around the big, bare, shadowy room and heard the gusty rain and knew that everything was wrong, completely wrong, how I didn't know, didn't try to know, and that this was somehow not what the summer had been driving toward. That I wasn't going to do it. "Anne," I said, hoarsely, Anne–"
She didn't answer, but she opened her eyes, and looked at me.
"We oughtn't," I began, "we oughtn't–it wouldn't–it wouldn't be–it wouldn't be right." So I used the word _right__, which came to my lips to surprise me, for I hadn't ever thought of anything I had done with Anne Stanton or with any other woman or girl as being right or wrong very much in connection with anything but had simply done the things people do and not done the things people don't do. Which are the things people do and don't do. And I remember now the surprise I felt when I heard that word there in the air, like the echo of a word spoken by somebody else God knows how many years before, and now unfrozen like a word in Baron Munchausen's tale. I couldn't any more have touched her then than if she had been my little sister.
She didn't answer then, but kept on looking at me, with an expression I could not fathom, and as I looked at her I was overwhelmed by a great, warm pity, like a flood in my bosom, and burst out, "Anne–oh, Anne–" and felt the impulse to fling myself to my knees beside the bed and seize my hand.
Now If I had done that, things might have developed differently and more in the normal pattern, for it is probable that when a half-clothed and healthy young man kneels beside a bed and seizes the hand of an entirely unclothed and good-looking young girl, developments will follow the normal pattern sooner or later. And if I had once touched her in the process of undressing her, or even if she had spoken to me to say anything, to call me Jackie-Boy or tell me she loved me, or had giggled or seemed gay, or had even answered me, saying anything whatsoever, when I looked at her lying there on the bed and first cried out her name–if any of those things had happened things might have been different then and forever afterward. But none of these things had happened, and I was not to follow the wild impulse to throw myself on my knees by the bed and take her hand to make the first trifling contact of flesh with flesh, which would probably have been enough. For just as I burst out, "Anne–oh, Anne–" there was the sound of tires on the drive, then the creaking of brakes.
"They've come back, they've come back!" I exclaimed, and Anne rose abruptly to a sitting position on the bed and looked wildly at me.
"Grab your stuff," I ordered, Grab your stuff, and get to the bathroom–you could have been in the bathroom!" I was cramming my shirt in and was trying to buckle my belt all at once and was going toward the door. "I'll be in the kitchen," I said, "I'll be fixing something to eat!"
Then I bolted from the room, and ran down the hall, trying to run on tiptoe, and ran down the back stairs to the back passage and then into the kitchen, where I put a match to the gas under the coffeepot with trembling fingers just as the front screen door slammed and people entered the hall. I sat down at the table and began to make sandwiches, waiting for my heart to stop pounding before I confronted my mother and the Pattons and whatever bastards they had with them.
When my mother came on back to the kitchen, right away, followed by her gang, there I was and there was a nice pile of toothsome sandwiches and they weren't going to La Grange because of the storm and kidded me about being a mind reader and having the sandwiches and coffee all ready for them, and I was charming and gracious to them all. Then Anne came down (she had done a good circumstantial job and flushed the toilet twice to advertise her whereabouts) and they kidded her about her pigtails and her pickaninny hair ribbons, and she didn't say anything but smile shyly the way a nice well-bred young girl should when the grownups take amiable notice of her, and then she sat quietly and ate a sandwich and I couldn't read a thing from her face, not a thing.
Well, that was the way the summer ended. True, there was the rest of the night, with me lying on the iron bed and hearing the leaves drip and cursing myself for a fool and cursing my luck and trying to figure out what Anne had thought and trying to plan how I would get her off alone the next day–the last day. But then I would think how if I had gone on, it had been worse, with my mother coming back and going upstairs with the ladies (as she has done), and with Anne and me trapped there in my room. And as that thought scared me into a cold sweat, I suddenly had the feeling of great wisdom: I had acted rightly and wisely. Therefore we had been saved. And so my luck became my wisdom (as the luck of the damned human race becomes its wisdom and gets into the books and is taught in schools), and then later my wisdom became my nobility, for in the end, a long time after, I got the notion that I had acted out of nobility. Not that I used that word to myself, but I skirted all around its edges and frequently, late at night or after a few drinks, thought better of myself for remembering my behavior on that occasion.
And as my home movie unrolled, as I drove west, I could not help but reflect that if I hadn't been so noble–if it was nobility–everything would have been different. For certainly if Anne and I had been trapped in that room, my mother and Governor Stanton would have set us up in matrimony, even if grimly and grudgingly. And then whatever else might have happened, the thing that had happened to send me west would never have happened. So, I observed, my nobility (or whatever it was) had had in my world almost as dire a consequence as Cass Mastern's sin had had in his. Which may tell something about the two worlds.
There was, as I was saying, the rest of the night after Anne had gone home. But there was also the next day. Anne, however, was busy packing and doing errands in the Landing during the day. I hung around her house, and tried to talk with her, but we never got more than a few words together, except when I drove her down to town. I tried to make her marry me right away, just to go home and get a bag and tear out. She was under age, and all that, but I figured we could get by–in so far as I figured anything. Then let the Governor and my mother raise hell. She only said, "Jackie-Boy, you know I'm going to marry you. Of course, I'm going to marry you forever and ever. But not today." When I kept pestering her, she said, "You go on back to State and finish up and I'll marry you. Even before you get your law degree."
When she said "law degree," I didn't really remember right off what she was talking about. But I remembered in time not to express any surprise and had to be satisfied with that.
I helped her with the errands, took her home, and then went to my house for dinner. After dinner I went to see her early, going in the roadster with the hope, despite the lowering, gusty weather, that we could take a ride. But it was no soap. Some of the boys and girls we had played around with that summer were there to tell Anne good-bye, and some parents, two couples, were there too, to see the Governor (who wasn't Governor any more, but to the Landing would always be the "Governor") and give him a stirrup cup. The young people played a phonograph in the gallery, and the old people, who looked old to us anyway, sat inside and drank gin and tonic. The best I could do was to dance with Anne, who was sweet to me but, who, when I kept asking her to slip out with me, said she couldn't just then, she couldn't because of the guests and she'd try later. But then another storm blew up, for it was right at the equinox, and the parents came out to say they had better go home, and told their particular young ones in a loud voice that they ought to come too and let Anne get some sleep for the trip.