The Crimson Tide: A Novel

“Jim!”

For all the while he had been drawing her nearer as he was speaking. And she was in his arms now, laughing a little, crying a little, her flushed face hidden on his shoulder.

He drew a deep breath and, holding her imprisoned, looked down at her.

“Will you marry me, Palla?”

“Oh, Jim, do you want me now?”

“Now, darling, but not this minute, because a clergyman must come first.”

It was cruel of him, as well as vigorously indelicate. Her hot blush should have shamed him; her conversion should have sheltered her.

But the man had had a hard time, and the bitterness was but just going.

“Will you marry me, Palla?”

After a long while her stifled whisper came: “You are brutal. Do you think I would do anything else–now?”

“No. And you never would have either.”

Lying there close in his arms, she wondered. And, still wondering, she lifted her head and looked up into his eyes–watching them as they neared her own–still trying to see them as his lips touched hers.

He was the sort of man who got hungry when left too long unfed. It was one o’clock. They had gone out to the refrigerator together, his arm around her supple waist, her charming head against his shoulder–both hungry but sentimental.

“And don’t you really think,” she said for the hundredth time, “that we ought to sell this house?”

“Not a bit of it, darling. We’ll run it if we have to live on cereal and do our own laundry.”

“You mean I’ll have to do that?”

“I’ll help after business hours.”

“You wonderful boy!”

There seemed to be some delectable things in the ice chest.

They sat side by side on the kitchen table, blissfully nourishing each other. Birds do it. Love-smitten youth does it.

“To think,” he said, “that you had the nerve to face those beasts and tell them what you thought of them!”

“Darling!” she remonstrated, placing an olive between his lips.

“You should have the Croix de Guerre,” he said indistinctly.

“All I aspire to is a very plain gold ring,” she said, smiling at him sideways.

And she slipped her hand into his.

“Are you going back into the army, Jim?” she asked.

“Who said that?” he demanded.

“I–I heard it repeated.”

“Not now,” he said. “Unless–” His eyes narrowed and he sat swinging his legs with an absent air and puckered brows.

And after a while the same aloof look came into her brown eyes, and she swung her slim feet absently.

Perhaps their remote gaze was fixed on visions of a nearing future, brilliant with happiness, gay with children’s voices; perhaps they saw farther than that, where the light grew sombre and where a shadowed sky lowered above a blood-red flood, rising imperceptibly, yet ever rising–a stealthy, crawling crimson tide spreading westward across the world.