In a moment she was clinging safely on his back again, and he
was swimming in deep water. She was used to his nakedness, and
to her mother's nakedness, ever since she was born. They were
clinging to each other, and making up to each other for the
strange blow that had been struck at them. Yet still, on other
days, he would leap again with her from the bridge, daringly,
almost wickedly. Till at length, as he leapt, once, she dropped
forward on to his head, and nearly broke his neck, so that they
fell into the water in a heap, and fought for a few moments with
death. He saved her, and sat on the bank, quivering. But his
eyes were full of the blackness of death. It was as if death had
cut between their two lives, and separated them.
Still they were not separate. There was this curious taunting
intimacy between them. When the fair came, she wanted to go in
the swing-boats. He took her, and, standing up in the boat,
holding on to the irons, began to drive higher, perilously
higher. The child clung fast on her seat.
"Do you want to go any higher?" he said to her, and she
laughed with her mouth, her eyes wide and dilated. They were
rushing through the air.
"Yes," she said, feeling as if she would turn into vapour,
lose hold of everything, and melt away. The boat swung far up,
then down like a stone, only to be caught sickeningly up
again.
"Any higher?" he called, looking at her over his shoulder,
his face evil and beautiful to her.
She laughed with white lips.
He sent the swing-boat sweeping through the air in a great
semi-circle, till it jerked and swayed at the high horizontal.
The child clung on, pale, her eyes fixed on him. People below
were calling. The jerk at the top had almost shaken them both
out. He had done what he could--and he was attracting
censure. He sat down, and let the swingboat swing itself
out.
People in the crowd cried shame on him as he came out of the
swingboat. He laughed. The child clung to his hand, pale and
mute. In a while she was violently sick. He gave her lemonade,
and she gulped a little.
"Don't tell your mother you've been sick," he said. There was
no need to ask that. When she got home, the child crept away
under the parlour sofa, like a sick little animal, and was a
long time before she crawled out.
But Anna got to know of this escapade, and was passionately
angry and contemptuous of him. His golden-brown eyes glittered,
he had a strange, cruel little smile. And as the child watched
him, for the first time in her life a disillusion came over her,
something cold and isolating. She went over to her mother. Her
soul was dead towards him. It made her sick.