Recapitulation Read Free Page B

with his hand paralyzed against her discovered body, and kissed her and tasted her tears, and thought with alarm and conviction of Stead and the rumored nude, and was anguished with eagerness to escape.
    He remembered not a scrap, not a detail, of how he got away. She offered herself, and that was all. The peewee golfer putting his little white ball up the little green alley of his youth came suddenly on the sidewinder in the sand trap, the crocodile in the artificial lake.
    He closed the door on the memory. It had begun to occur to him that he was an extraordinary young man, and not everything that was extraordinary about himself pleased him. Innocence? Maybe, though there were more contemptuous names for it. Amusing certainly. If he were not caught in this queer emotional net he would have to laugh. You simply couldn’t tell a story like that without drawing smiles. But he was not telling a story. He was standing in Holly’s denuded bedroom trying to understand his emotions of nearly fifty years earlier. No matter what he had pretended, at that age he was hungrier for security than for taking chances. A fraud, he would gargle the whiskey he would obediently not drink. A great yapper with the crowd, he would tear up the turf coming to a stop when the cat quit running, he would break his neck not to catch what he was after.
    He told himself that he had been a very young nineteen. He told himself that the bohemian excitement boiling around Holly was an absurd and perhaps touching and certainly temporary phase of growing up. He told himself that he had not been ready.
    Like a bubble of gas escaping from something submerged and decaying in deep water, there rose to the surface of his mind one of Blake’s proverbs of hell that he and Holly had admired together that long-gone Christmas morning. It burst, and it said, “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
    The last time Mason had seen Holly, she was boarding a train for Seattle, on her way to Shanghai and a job they all publicly envied and would probably not have risked themselves. Whatever happened to her, her life could not have been dull. She had probably spent it flying around the world like a piece of space hardware. As Mason himself had done, however inadvertently.Holly had burst out of Salt Lake’s provincial security by choice. He had been thrown out like a bum through swinging doors. The result might have been the same, but the motivation was not; and remembering the night when she stopped playing make-believe and presented him with an option that would have totally changed his life, he half regretted his youthful unreadiness as if it had been a flaw of character and nerve. He disliked that cautious image of himself.
    His watch told him it was nearly five. Starting for the door, he passed the dead woman’s table and looked again into her waxen, dead-white face. The skin was delicately wrinkled like the skin of a winter-kept apple, but soft-looking, as if it would be not unpleasant to touch. The barbaric silver necklace somehow defined her. What it said about frivolity, girlishness, love of ornament and life, made him like her. But it lay very soberly on the black crêpe breast.
    He thought how she had been tampered with by McBride, and how further touches of disguise would redden cheeks and lips and complete her transformation from something real and terrible and dead to something that could be relinquished and forgotten. He turned away, frowning with a regret that was almost personal, a kind of rueful sorrow. He did not want her to have died.
    As he reached the door he threw an apologetic look back at the room as quiet and empty as a chapel, and at the corpse that lay so quietly at its center. There was a dread in the room that he would not stay for. He meant to tiptoe out, but he heard almost with panic the four quick raps his heels made on the bare floor before they found the consoling softness of the stairs.

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    Smiling, with a manila