Pete looked at the offering in her hand, then at her face, and shook his head.
“I don’t need it,” he said, “I’ve got enough.”
“Please, I have plenty,” she said. “I want you to.”
But he refused. “I don’t know much about the Canadian army,” he said, “but I imagine one gets fed. I’m not being sacrificial, I’ve simply got enough, mostly from you of course. You need it more than I do. How much have you got there?”
“It’s a hundred dollars.”
“A goodly sum.” He grinned. “Remember when I said that before? Sure you do. — All right, I’m off. What’s the idea of the hat?”
“I’m seeing you off to the war.”
His hands went up. “Good god, no! I couldn’t stand it. You on the platform with your handkerchief, and me leaning out of the car window and waving. I beg you not.”
She was seized with panic. What, this was the very last minute then!
“I won’t do that,” she said. “I won’t get out of the taxi. Just let me ride down to the station with you. I won’t get out.”
That he agreed to. They got the bags to the street and found a taxi, and after Pete had run back to the room for a book he had forgotten he helped her in and got in after her. She sat up straight on her side, her hands folded in her lap, and he after his custom sprawled in the other corner, his legs stretched out with his feet resting on the bags. The taxi sped along, and neither spoke. Lora thought she had never seen a cab go so fast; they were already more than halfway, almost to State Street. Pete broke the silence.
“I never bought you those flowers,” he said suddenly.
“No,” said Lora.
“Well, it’s too late now. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to a sentimental jag. I even decided it should be roses.”
Silence again. She was wondering whether he would kiss her goodbye, and whether she wanted him to. The idea bewildered and embarrassed her, for they had never kissed except in passion. He wouldn’t, she decided; and on that instant felt his hand on hers. His fingers rather; he had reached over and with his fingers was awkwardly stroking the back of her hand as it lay on her lap. Her head dropped, and she could see the moving uncertain clumsy fingers; she wanted to look at him but couldn’t; and all at once she knew she was going to cry. She could feel it in her throat and high up on her cheeks, inside, and back of her eyeballs, inside of her head. At the same time she was overwhelmed by the conviction that to cry now, in front of him, these last two minutes, would be a calamity and an everlasting shame. Damn him, oh damn him, for touching her hand like that! That he had no right to do. Then she was aware that she had violently jerked her own hand away, he had retrieved his own, and the crisis was past.
The taxi had stopped in front of the railway station; the driver had opened the door; porters were standing there expectantly. Pete got out and lifted out the bags, waving the porters off, then he turned back and stuck his head in the door.
“You’re going right back home? To the room, I mean?”
Lora nodded. Home, yes.
“All right. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you and for god’s sake keep off of street-cars. When you read of a Canadian soldier shooting his colonel in the back because he was too stupid to live, that will be me.”
He flipped his hand at her and turned and picked up the bags.
“The soldier, I mean!” he called, grinning, and strode off toward the entrance to the station.
Lora gave the address to the driver. All the way home she sat up straight, her hands with the fingers intertwined pulled against her abdomen. He hadn’t kissed her; she might have known he wouldn’t; and that was as it should be. Pete was Pete. He wasn’t a lover going off to war, or a man running away from a girl with his baby in her; he wasn’t anything like that, he was Pete.
The room was a mess. Dirty dishes were everywhere, the bed was chaos, there were glaring vacancies where Pete’s things had lain and hung, a piece of thick fried cold greasy bacon was square in the middle of the floor. Lora did not even pick up the piece of bacon; she sat on the edge of the bed with her hat in her hand surveying the dismal scene. She would get her things out of here tomorrow, she decided; today even, for it wouldn’t be much of a job, most of her belongings were still at the apartment the rent of which she had continued to share with Cecelia. Explanations were due there too and could no longer be postponed; Cecelia was going to be a problem. Other problems too — plenty of them! What a mess. The room, that is. The first thing to do was to clean this up and get out of here — forget it ever was, for assuredly it would never be again. Sighing, she put the hat down on the bed and got to her feet, and as she did so her eye was caught by an object lying on her pillow. She went closer to look, and found it was two objects: a wrist watch with a leather strap, and a piece of paper with writing on it.
The watch she recognized at once; it was one that she and Pete had seen some weeks before in a jeweler’s window, and she had admired it; had said, in fact, that it was just the sort of watch she was going to have someday. The writing on the paper was in Pete’s irregular hand:
To a brave little woman — ha ha — with most sincere wishes for an early miscarriage — or, if she prefers, a painless parturition — Pete.
Well, she thought, I suppose he must have put that there when he came back in to get that book. It’s the very same watch...
She sat down again on the edge of the bed, and cried at last.
XIV
Lora kept her job till the middle of October. She did not give it up then because of physical discomfort or inconvenience, for she experienced very little of either. Indeed she felt uncommonly well; her face was blooming with health, her eyes shone fresh and clear, and the feel of her muscles took on a new and sharper pleasure. For the first time she was fully aware of the sweetness of her body, and she loved all its trivial and commonplace joys: the joy of sitting down, of getting up again, of feeling her strong young legs swing, at their leisure, as she walked along the street in her own rhythm, of moving her pretty white arm, now down pressing, now up with a free swing, as she brushed her hair at night.
She quit her job because Miss Goff began to look at her. Not at her face, either, nor at her feet, but at a point midway between. Partly it was merely an annoyance, resulting from her own self-consciousness as much as from the other’s impertinence; but it was also a real danger, for Miss Goff might say something to Mr. Graham, and Mr. Graham to Mrs. Ranley, and Mrs. Ranley was an old friend of Cecelia’s mother, down home... So on a crisp autumn morning Lora went to Mr. Graham’s private office and told him that after the following Saturday she would not return. He timidly and nervously pulled at his little grey moustache and expressed his regrets and his best wishes for a happy and successful career, offering no objection after he had learned that she intended to resume her piano lessons. Which of course she didn’t.
Cecelia knew. Around the middle of July, only a week after Pete’s departure, she had gone home for a brief summer visit; and Lora, after long consideration of all the chances and probabilities, had gone with her. On the train on the way down the need for an ally and confidant had become suddenly overwhelming. Cecelia had of course been aware for some time of the nature of her relations with Pete; it had been the cause of many strained and uncomfortable silences and two or three hot debates between them; now she learned that one of the direst of her various dire predictions had come true. She claimed to have already discovered it for herself, but Lora doubted that, for she herself had difficulty detecting any objective difference even when she was naked. At any rate, Cecelia knew it now, and for the last three hours of the trip, as the train sped through the lazy fat summer fields and the factories and houses of villages and towns, she offered a voluble mixture of sympathy, advice, compassion, suggestion, and vows of loyalty and silence. She had taken it for granted, she said, that Lora would resort to abortion; her voice was shrill and her eyes gleamed with excitement as she said abortion. But she was even more excited by the news that Lora meant to go through with it. This was where the suggestions mainly entered; she offered a dozen different plans in astonishing elaboration of detail, and was willing to help with any of them. She would not breathe a word, not a word to a living soul.