U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [197]
services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were real y brother and sister, how passionless people who never real y wanted anything couldn't understand people like them. Those times Dick didn't get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda'd say she didn't care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kil Edwin for his mild calfish manner.
Edwin usual y got back on a train that got in at 10:53
and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he'd wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.
-81-Al week he'd think about those Sunday evenings. Some-times he'd tel himself that he wouldn't go another time. He'd stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fel ows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they'd walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India's Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he'd just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pul her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, "Dick, I mustn't have a baby. . . . We can't afford it. . . . That's why Edwin won't sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don't you see how awful it al is?" While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his bel y. "Don't, Hilda, don't." There were mosquitoes around their heads. The long hissing invisible wash of the surf came almost to their feet. That night Dick couldn't go down to the train to meet Edwin the way he usual y did. He went back to the Bay-view with his knees trembling, and threw himself on his bed in his stuffy little room under the roof. He thought of kil ing himself but he was afraid of going to hel ; he tried to pray, at least to remember the Lord's Prayer. He was terribly scared when he found he couldn't even remember the Lord's Prayer. Maybe that was the sin against the Holy Ghost they had committed.
The sky was grey and the birds were chirping outside before he got to sleep. Al next day, as he sat hol oweyed behind the desk, passing on the guests' demands for ice--82-water and towels, answering inquiries about rooms and traintimes, he was turning a poem over in his mind about the scarlet of my sin and the scarlet of thy sin and dark birds above the surging seawaves crying and damned souls passionately sighing. When it was finished he showed the poem to the Thurlows, Edwin wanted to know where
he got such morbid ideas, but was glad that faith and the church triumphed in the end. Hilda laughed hysterical y and said he was a funny boy but that maybe he'd be a writer someday.
When Skinny came down for a two weeks' vacation to
take the place of one of the new bel hops that was sick, Dick talked very big to him about women and sin and about how he was in love with a married woman. Skinny said that wasn't right because there were plenty of easy women around who'd give a fel er al the loving he