Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 14

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Her awakening next morning was attended with anguish. Her head thumped with a twisting ache, its red torque at first depriving her of thinking.

“Oh, God,” she said aloud. “What a fool. I never was so tight before.”

Then she sat up, the movement sending a spasm of pain like a blow through her skull, but the ache was secondary to another pain, the pain of a half-vague recollection.

Aspirin. Three aspirin tablets. A cold wet towel for the forehead. After a time the ache was better.

But the recollection was not. It grew clearer, almost quite clear to her now.

I did that? she said to herself. How could I have done that? Drunk, naked, and making a holy show of myself!

But I was posing ... I was a model.

I suppose women have done it before, drunk and naked.

Another thought brought her bolt upright again, with another searing anguish in her head.

The painting!

She remembered the painting a little vaguely, but she was sure it was none of Erskine’s hideous daubs. Something almost beautiful, and shameless, and recognizable ...

She had seen herself in that graceful white figure, rose- and opal-tinted, surrounded by the red swirl of color, and she had been, she remembered, pleased with it, complimented by it in a swirling unsteady way that seemed to chime with the swirl of colors.

Yet also she was vaguely troubled; and even in the condition of mind in which she was the evening before the trouble would have grown to a warning, and from that to a decision. She would have demanded the picture, or insisted that he destroy it at once.

But what followed drove the picture itself and her half-formed protest clear out of her thinking.

She remembered again Erskine’s face, working in that strange manner, and his sudden embrace of her. She felt once more his long searching kiss from which she did not withdraw, clinging to him rather in an almost wild willingness to surrender, unprecedented in her life before.

Then the strange denouement. His release of her. His stepping back as if in withdrawal, all his excitement of the moment before faded, and his one word, There ...

As if something were finished. What was finished?

He had rejected her when she offered herself to him. In this was shame and a betrayal. When a woman has been brought to the point where she drowns every consideration in surrender, the humiliation of such a rejection lies as much in her shame over having thrown down all defenses as in the fact that the man did not see fit to accept her.

With the humiliation anger came to Mary Agnes: savagely wounded pride.

She reached for the telephone beside her bed and dialed Erskine’s studio. She would get that painting. He would sell it, she was quite sure of that. A hundred—even a thousand dollars. He needed money, and the picture was of no value to him, at least in the sense it was to her. She would get it, whatever it cost, and personally see it destroyed.

But there was no answer on the telephone. After a long wait she dialed again. Still no reply. Erskine had gone out, probably for the day.

Her plane was leaving in two hours, and she must get ready. After all, the painting was unfinished. He probably would expect to complete it on her return from Honolulu. She decided to let the matter rest for the time and get in touch with him as soon as she got back from the Islands.

Yet all the way to Honolulu on the plane the question kept returning to her. Why? Why?

She was sure he had been as pent and mindless with desire as she. What had happened? Had she done something wrong, made some mistake?

She did not regret the outcome: on the other hand, she was intensely thankful it had turned out as it did. But the instinctive searching inherent in her sex for reasons of behavior in a matter so intimately personal vexed her: with herself, with the man who could have had his will of her that night and did not.