The Vertical City Part 47

"My Red-boy blue," she reiterated, trying to ingratiate her arms about his neck. "Red-boy tells Winnie he won't be back for two whole days and then brings her surprise party very next day. Red-boy can't stay away from Winnie."

"Let go."

"Red-boy bring Winnie nothing? Not little weeny, weeny nothing?" drawing a design down his coat sleeve, her mouth bunched.

Suddenly he jerked her so that the breath jumped in a warm fan of it against her face.

"You're the only thing I've got in the world, Win. My luck's gone, but I've got you. Tell me I've got you."

He could be equally intense over which street car to take, and she knew it, but somehow it lessened for her none of the lure of his nervosity, and with her mind recoiling from his pennilessness her body inclined.

"Tell me, Winnie, that I have you."

"You know you have," she said, and smiled, with her head back so that her face foreshortened.

"I'm going far for you Winnie. Gambling is too rotten--and too easy. I want to build bridges for you. Practice law. Corner Wall Street."

This last clicked.

"Once," she said, lying back, with her pupils enlarging with the fleeting memories she was not always alert enough to clutch--"once--once when I lived around Central Park--a friend of mine--vice-president he was--Well, never mind, he was my friend--it was nothing for him to turn over a thousand or two a week for me in Wall Street."

This exaggeration was gross, but it could feed the flame of his pa.s.sion for her like oil.

"I'll work us up and out of this! I've got better stuff in me. I want to wind you in pearls--diamonds--sapphires."

"I had a five-thousand-dollar string once--of star sapphires."

"Trust me, Winnie. Help me by having confidence in me. I'm glad my luck is welching. It will be lean at first, until I get on my legs. But it's not too late yet. Win, if only I have some one to stand by me. To believe--to fight with and for me! Get me, girl? Believe in me."

"Sure. Always play strong with the cops, Red. It's the short cut to ready money. Ready money, Red. That's what gets you there. Don't ask any girl to hang on if it's shy. That's where I spun myself dirt many a time, hanging on after it got shy. Ugh! That's what did for me--hanging on--after it got shy."

"No. No. You don't understand. For G.o.d's sake try to get me, Winnie.

Fight up with me. It'll be lean, starting, but I'll finish strong for you."

"Don't lean on me. I'm no wailing wall. What's it to me all your highfaluting talk. You've been as slab-sided in the pockets as a cat all month. Don't have to stand it. I've got friends--spenders--"

There had been atrocious scenes, based on his jealousies of her, which some imp in her would lead her to provoke, notwithstanding that even as she spoke she regretted, and reached back for the words,

"I mean--"

"I know what you mean," he said, quietly, permitting her to lie back against him and baring his teeth down at her.

She actually thought he was smiling.

"I'm not a dead one by a long shot," she said, kindling with what was probably her desire to excite him.

"No?"

"No. I can still have the best. The very best. If you want to know it, a political Indian with a car as long as this room, not mentioning any names, is after me--"

She still harbored the unfortunate delusion that he was smiling.

"You thought I was up at Ossining this morning, didn't you?" he asked, lazily for him. He went there occasionally to visit a friend in the state prison who had once served him well in a gambling raid and was now doing a short larceny term there.

"You said you were--"

"I _said_ I was. Yes. But I came back unexpectedly, didn't I?"

"Y-yes, Red?"

"Look at me!"

She raised round and ready-to-be-terrified eyes.

"Murphy was here last night!" he cracked at her, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, like so many pistol shots.

"Why, Red--I--You--"

"Don't lie. Murphy was here last night! I saw him leave this morning as I came in."

It was hazard, pure and simple. Not even a wild one, because all too easily he could kiss down what would be sure to be only her half-flattered resentment.

But there was a cigar stub on the table edge, and certain of her adjustments of the room when he entered had been rather quick. He could be like that with her, crazily the slave of who knows what beauty he found in her; jealous of even an unaccountable inflection in her voice.

There had been unmentionable frenzies of elemental anger between them and she feared and exulted in these strange poles of his nature.

"Murphy was here last night!"

It had happened, in spite of a caution worthy of a finer finesse than hers, and suddenly she seemed to realize the quality of her fear for him to whom she was everything and who to her was not all.

"Don't, Red," she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodging from his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her. "Don't, Red.

Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.

He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Oth.e.l.lo.

"Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to him from across a bog.

He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.

"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.

Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out, Red! No-o--no--"

Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks from gla.s.s, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the enormous silence of his rage.

With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched outward.

There was little about Jason's trial to ent.i.tle it to more than a back-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, that were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are pressed down by the waters of unreality.