An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [286]
“Isn’t it still and peaceful?” It was Roberta talking. “It seems to be so restful here. I think it’s beautiful, truly, so much more beautiful than that other lake. These trees are so tall, aren’t they? And those mountains. I was thinking all the way over how cool and silent that road was, even if it was a little rough.”
“Did you talk to any one in the inn there just now?”
“Why, no; what makes you ask?”
“Oh, I thought you might have run into some one. There don’t seem to be very many people up here to-day, though, does there?”
“No, I don’t see any one on the lake. I saw two men in that billiard room at the back there, and there was a girl in the ladies’ room, that was all. Isn’t this water cold?” She had put her hand over the side and was trailing it in the blue-black ripples made by his oars.
“Is it? I haven’t felt it yet.”
He paused in his rowing and put out his hand, then resumed. He would not row directly to that island to the south. It was—too far—too early. She might think it odd. Better a little delay. A little time in which to think—a little while in which to reconnoiter. Roberta would be wanting to eat her lunch (her lunch!) and there was a charming looking point of land there to the west about a mile further on. They could go there and eat first— or she could—for he would not be eating today. And then—and then—
She was looking at the very same point of land that he was—a curved horn of land that bent to the south and yet reached quite far out into the water and combed with tall pines. And now she added:
“Have you any spot in mind, dear, where we could stop and eat? I’m getting a little hungry, aren’t you?” (If she would only not call him DEAR, here and now!)
The little inn and the boathouse to the north were growing momentarily smaller,—looking now, like that other boathouse and pavilion on Crum Lake the day he had first rowed there, and when he had been wishing that he might come to such a lake as this in the Adirondacks, dreaming of such a lake—and wishing to meet such a girl as Roberta—then— And overhead was one of those identical woolly clouds that had sailed above him at Crum Lake on that fateful day.
The horror of this effort!
They might look for water-lilies here today to kill time a little, before—to kill time … to kill, (God)—he must quit thinking of that, if he were going to do it at all. He needn’t be thinking of it now, at any rate.
At the point of land favored by Roberta, into a minute protected bay with a small, curved, honey-colored beach, and safe from all prying eyes north or east. And then he and she stepping out normally enough. And Roberta, after Clyde had extracted the lunch most cautiously from his bag, spreading it on a newspaper on the shore, while he walked here and there, making strained and yet admiring comments on the beauty of the scene—the pines and the curve of this small bay, yet thinking—thinking, thinking of the island farther on and the bay below that again somewhere, where somehow, and in the face of a weakening courage for it, he must still execute this grim and terrible business before him—not allow this carefully planned opportunity to go for nothing—if—if—he were to not really run away and leave all that he most desired to keep.
And yet the horror of this business and the danger, now that it was so close at hand—the danger of making a mistake of some kind—if nothing more, of not upsetting the boat right—of not being able to—to—oh, God! And subsequently, maybe, to be proved to be what he would be—then—a murderer. Arrested! Tried. (He could not, he would not, go through with it. No, no, no!)
And yet Roberta, sitting here with him now on the sand, feeling quite at peace with all the world as he could see. And she was beginning to hum a little, and then to make advisory and practical references to the nature of their coming adventure