Читать книгу Streets of Night онлайн

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She woke with a start from her doze. What was she trying to remember? She was suddenly wide awake, her heart pounding. The warm bulge of his arm against her arm, hard, male, and the bright jelly of his eyes between black lashes, last evening looking at the star. She tried to brush the memory off; it clung about her the way the sticky spiderwebs used to cling to her face and hair walking through the woods last summer. She didn't want to think of Wenny that way, she told herself. It would spoil everything, she must have more self-control. No, no, she said aloud as she put her toes into her slippers. Then she went about her dressing with compressed lips.

She threw herself into a flurry of things to be done. Sunday and late and the maid not coming. There was the percolator to put on, the water to run for her bath, the milk to take in, and the paper, and the caps to take off the milk bottle and the creambottle, and the flame under the percolator mustn't be too high and the bath mustn't be too hot. The familiar morning smells, gasflame, soap, bathwater, coffee-steam, were vaguely distasteful to her this morning, gave her a feeling of days succeeding days and years years, as alike and meaningless as milkbottles. As she was cleaning her teeth she stopped with her mouth full of lather and the tooth brush in her hand. It was two years and eight months she'd been living in this apartment. O something must happen soon. When she had rinsed her mouth she looked at herself a long while in the tilted mirror over the washbasin. On one side the nickel fixture of the shower over the bathtub, on the other a glimpse through the open door into the hall and a patch of blue and green curtain; in the middle her face, chestnut hair caught loosely away from the narrow forehead, straight eyebrows darker than her hair, fine lashes. She stared for a moment intensely in her own grey eyes, then closed them with a shudder. I have the thin New England lips, she said to herself. She pulled the nightgown off impatiently and stood with her hands on her scarcely formed breasts looking down into the pale green of the bathtub. Somewhere at the end of a long corridor of her mind she ran through the dappled shadow of woods, naked, swift, chased by someone brown, flushed, goatfooted. She could feel in her nostrils the roughness of the smell of Wenny's damp homespun suit. Aprèsmidi d'un Faune, the words formed in her mind, Music by Claude Debussy, Choreography by M. Nijinski; the big program in her hands with its smell of glazed printer's ink and the rustling of dresses about her at the Opera. What are you dawdling about? she muttered, and stepped into the water and began briskly soaping the facecloth.