Brown on Resolution Read Free Page B

hand. He opened the door of the cab, and Agatha came to life again out of her mazed dream..
    “Where to, sir?” asked the cab driver.
    “Where to?” echoed Samarez stupidly.
    “I don’t know—Ealing, I suppose,” said a little voice from the depths of the cab.
    “Ealing,” said Samarez to the cab driver.
    “Ealing, sir? Ealing Broadway, sir? Right, sir,” said the cab driver, and round came the horse and the door slammed to, with Samarez and Agatha in blessed solitude once more, happily ignorant of the meaning wink of the cab driver and the broad grins of the porters. It was quite several seconds before hand met hand and lip met lip again in the velvet darkness of the cab, while the horse’s hoofs clip-clopped solidly onwards towards Ealing.
    Passion had them greatly in thrall. Agatha’s hat was off by now, and the tears flowed freely from her eyes as she pressed against Samarez with all the abandon her corseted waist permitted. Agatha had forgotten she was twenty-nine, of strict Wesleyan upbringing. Twenty-nine years of bottled-up emotion were tearing her to pieces; some faint, unknown cause had obscurely begun the explosion—perhaps even before she had met Samarez—and there was no power on earth that could check it now before it had run its course. She gave herself up to him in an ecstasy of giving.
    As for Samarez there is less to be said. He at least had known kisses before, and the encirclement of a woman’s arms was not quite new to him. Even purchased caresses ought to have given him sufficient experience to have told him whither they were straying, but reaction from loneliness and the fierce insistent urge of his sex had swept him away. Agatha’s sweet flesh in his arms and the touch of her unpractised lips on his mouth were all the facts of which he was conscious at the moment. He never dreamed of discretion while he let his instincts carry him away in the darkness, and he pressed her hotly.
    Somehow or other Agatha found herself speaking, her hands on his breast and her face lifted to his.
    “Of course, I’ve got to go to Ealing,” she said. It was a statement doomed to extinction at birth, made automatically in an automatic hope of contradiction.
    “What are you going to do there?” asked Samarez.
    “I’m going to stay with friends. They’re expecting me.”
    The little voice whispering in the darkness added fresh fuel to the flames of Samarez’s passion. Into the back of his mind leapt the sudden realization that in the cab with them, beside them on the other seat lay her luggage and his, all their necessaries for days.
    “Can’t you put them off?” he asked, hardly realizing what he was saying. “Send them a wire. Don’t go.”
    “Oh, my dear ,” came the answering whisper.
    Let it not be imagined that Agatha acted in ignorance. At twenty-nine, when one is an old maid and busy with Chapel work, one hears things. Married women say things just as if one were married oneself, and Chapel work sometimes brings one into contact with illegitimate motherhood and even sometimes undisguised adultery. Agatha knew quite well what happened when a man ‘stayed with’ a woman—at least, she had a general idea of it even if she were hazy as to detail. So that her wordless consent to Samarez’s fierce suggestion, and her acquiescence when Samarez leaned out of the window and redirected the cabman, were absolutely inexcusable, so her fellow-workers would think. But her fellow-workers had never known, perhaps would never know, the careless, happy stupefaction of sudden passion.
    The hotel porter was discreet; the hotel reception clerk was friendly; in fact, no one in the hotel thought twice about them, because Agatha looked the last person in the world to share a bedroom with a man who was not her husband, and her glove concealed the absence of a wedding ring. In the dignified seclusion of the hotel bedroom Samarez’s enforced calm fell away from him like a discarded garment. He opened his