Mila 18 - Leon Uris [22]
“What are you doing here?” Andrei croaked.
She leaned against the books and stiffened, her eyes closed and her teeth clenched, and tears fell down her cheeks. “Lieutenant Androfski. I am twenty-three years old. I am not a virgin. My father left me a considerable endowment. What else would you care to know about me?”
Andrei’s hand pawed helplessly around the table. At last his fist smashed down on it “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“I don’t know what has happened to me and I don’t seem to care. As you can see, I’m throwing myself at your feet I beg you, don’t send me away.”
She turned and wept uncontrollably.
And she felt his hand on her shoulder, and it was gentle. “Gabriela ... Gabriela ...”
From that moment when she was consumed by his great and wonderful power, all the things she had considered important to her way of life ceased to be important.
Gabriela knew with no uncertainty that there had never been nor ever would be again a man like Andrei Androfski. Those things which society and its religions and philosophies and economies had imposed upon them as great barriers came crumbling down. Gabriela had been a selfish woman. She suddenly found herself able to give with a power of giving that she did not realize she possessed.
For to her, Andrei was like David of the Bible. He was at one time all that was strong and all that was weak in a single man.
He had within him the power to snuff out a life in an angry fit. Yet there had never been a man who could touch her with such a gentleness.
He was a giant who lived his life for a single ideal. He was a helpless boy who became confused or pouted or angered at a seeming trifle.
He was a symbol of strength to his friends. He would get roaring drunk when the frustrations became too difficult.
But with him there were moments of electric flaring of emotions. There were moments of hurt and pain deeper than any she had known except at the death of her father. There were the great expectations fulfilled with the sensuous thrills of pure physical pleasure.
To her friends it seemed that her willingness to become the mistress of a Jewish pauper was a terrible calamity. For Gabriela, the things she surrendered seemed insignificant and indeed no sacrifice for loving a man who made her happier than she had ever been in her life.
Little by little she divorced herself from the treadmill about which she centered her activities. Gabriela accepted the hard fact that her affair with Andrei might never be resolved in a marriage. She understood that she must never step on the dangerous ground of tampering with his work. She knew he would not be changed over to any of her images. Andrei was Andrei, and she had to take him and everything he was as he was.
Andrei had at last met in Gabriela Rak a woman who could match him fury for fury, passion for passion, anger for anger. She often flared into those stubborn streaks of pride which would be resolved only when he humbled himself or blurted an awkward apology. He sat quietly and took without a whimper the wrath of her anger when he had been out on a binge. He instinctively knew when to back down from a conflict. For his reward he found moments he had never known. Moments when she felt his depression and frustrations over the failures in his work. In those moments she was able to reach him with compassion as he had never been reached before.
He knew he had tamed a