An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [175]
And Roberta in turn, having reached her table and paused to note if by any chance any one had observed her, now looked cautiously about, a strained and nervous look in her eyes. But seeing Clyde looking directly at her, his eyes filled with a conquering and yet yielding light and a smile upon his lips, and his head nodding a happy assent, she as suddenly experienced a dizzying sensation, as though her hitherto constricted blood, detained by a constricted heart and constricted nerves, were as suddenly set free. And all the dry marshes and cracked and parched banks of her soul—the dry rivulets and streams and lakes of misery that seemed to dot her being—were as instantly flooded with this rich upwelling force of life and love.
He would meet her. They would meet tonight. He would put his arms around her and kiss her as before. She would be able to look in his eyes. They would not quarrel any more—oh, never if she could help it.
Chapter 22
The wonder and, delight of a new and more intimate form of contact, of protest gainsaid, of scruples overcome! Days, when both, having struggled in vain against the greater intimacy which each knew that the other was desirous of yielding to, and eventually so yielding, looked forward to the approaching night with an eagerness which was as a fever embodying a fear. For with what qualms—what protests on the part of Roberta; what determination, yet not without a sense of evil—seduction—betrayal, on the part of Clyde. Yet the thing once done, a wild convulsive pleasure motivating both. Yet, not without, before all this, an exaction on the part of Roberta to the effect that never—come what might (the natural consequences of so wild an intimacy strong in her thoughts) would he desert her, since without his aid she would be helpless. Yet, with no direct statement as to marriage. And he, so completely overcome and swayed by his desire, thoughtlessly protesting that he never would— never. She might depend on that, at least, although even then there was no thought in his mind of marriage. He would not do that. Yet nights and nights—all scruples for the time being abandoned, and however much by day Roberta might brood and condemn herself—when each yielded to the other completely. And dreamed thereafter, recklessly and wildly, of the joy of it—wishing from day to day for the time being that the long day might end—that the concealing, rewarding feverish night were at hand.
And Clyde feeling, and not unlike Roberta, who was firmly and even painfully convinced of it, that this was sin—deadly, mortal—since both his mother and father had so often emphasized that—the seducer—adulterer—who preys outside the sacred precincts of marriage. And Roberta, peering nervously into the blank future, wondering what—how, in any case, by any chance, Clyde should change, or fail her. Yet the night returning, her mood once more veering, and she as well as he hurrying to meet somewhere—only later, in the silence of the middle night, to slip into this unlighted room which was proving so much more of a Paradise than either might ever know again—so wild and unrecapturable is the fever of youth.
And—at times—and despite all his other doubts and fears, Clyde, because of this sudden abandonment by Roberta of herself to his desires, feeling for the first time, really, in all his feverish years, that at last he was a man of the world—one who was truly beginning to know women. And so taking to himself an air or manner that said as plainly as might have any words—”Behold I am no longer the inexperienced, neglected simpleton of but a few weeks ago, but an individual of import now—some one who knows something about life. What have any of these strutting young men, and gay, coaxing, flirting girls all about me, that I have not? And if I chose—were