U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [470]
"I thought you'd gone to bed, young lady," he said.
"Thought you'd gotten rid of me for one night?" She wasn't smiling.
"Don't you think it's a pretty night, Glad?" He took her hand; it was trembling and icecold.
"You don't want to catch cold, Glad," he said. She dug her long nails into his hand. "Are you going to marry Anne?"
"Maybe. . . . Why? You're goin' to marry Harry, aren't you?"
"Nothing in this world would make me marry him." Charley put his arms round her. "You poor little girl, you're cold. You ought to be in bed." She put her head on his chest and began to sob. He could feel the tears warm through his shirt. He didn't know what to say. He stood there hugging her with the smel of her hair giddy, like the smel of Doris's hair used to be, in his nostrils.
"I wish we were off this damn boat," he whispered. Her face was turned up to his, very round and white. When he kissed her lips she kissed him too. He pressed her to him hard. Now it was her little breasts he could feel against
-298-his chest. For just a second she let him put his tongue be-tween her lips, then she pushed him away.
"Charley, we oughtn't to be acting like this, but I sud-denly felt so lonely." Charley's voice was gruff in his throat. "I'l never let you feel like that again. . . . Never, honestly . . . never. .
. .""Oh, you darling Charley." She kissed him again very quickly and deliberately and ran away from him down the deck.
He walked up and down alone. He didn't know what
to do. He was crazy for Gladys now. He couldn't go back and talk to the others. He couldn't go to bed. He slipped down the forward hatch and through the gal ey, where Taki sat cool as a cucumber in his white coat reading some thick book, into the cabin where his berth was and changed into his bathingsuit and ran up and dove over the side. The water wasn't as cold as he'd expected. He swam
around for a while in the moonlight. Pul ing himself up the ladder aft he felt cold and goosefleshy. Farrel with a cigar in his teeth leaned over, grabbed his hand and hauled him on deck.
"Ha, ha, the iron man," he shouted. "The girls beat us two rubbers and went to bed with their winnings. Suppose you get into your bathrobe and have a drink and a half an hour of red dog or something sil y before we turn in."
"Check," said Charley, who was jumping up and down on the deck to shake off the water. While Charley was rubbing himself down with a towel below, he could hear the girls chattering and giggling in their stateroom. He was so embarrassed when he sat down next to Harry who was a little drunk and sil y so that he drank off a half a tumbler of rye and lost eighty dol ars. He was glad to see that it was Harry who won. "Lucky at cards, unlucky in love," he kept saying to himself after he'd turned in. A week later Gladys took Charley to see her parents
-299-after they'd had tea together at his flat chaperoned by Taki's grin and his bobbing black head. Horton B. Wheat-ley was a power, so Farrel said, in the Security Trust Company, a redfaced man with grizzled hair and a smal silvery mustache. Mrs. Wheatley was a droopy woman
with a pretty Alabama voice and a face faded and pouchy and withered as a spent toybal oon. Mr. Wheatley started talking before Gladys had finished the introductions:
"Wel , sir, we'd been expectin' somethin' like that to hap-pen. Of course it's too soon for us al to make up our minds, but I don't see how I kin help tel in' you, ma boy, that I'd rather see ma daughter wedded to a boy like you that's worked his way up in the world, even though we don't know much about you yet, than to a boy like Harry who's a nice enough kid in his way, but who's never done a thing in his life but take the schoolin' his father provided for him. Ma boy, we are mighty proud, my wife and me, to know you and to have you and our little girl . . . she's al we've got in this world so she's mighty precious to us . .
."
"Your parents are . .