# Quicksand (Larsen)/Part 19

Nineteen
That night riotous and colorful dreams invaded Helga Crane‘s prim hotel bed. She woke in the morning weary and a bit shocked at the uncontrolled fancies which had visited her. Catching up a filmy scarf, she paced back and forth across the narrow room and tried to think. She recalled her flirtations and her mild engagement with James Vayle. She was used to kisses. But none had been like that of last night. She lived over those brief seconds, thinking not so much of the man whose arms had held her as of the ecstasy which had flooded her. Even recollection brought a little onrush of emotion that made her sway a little. She pulled herself together and began to fasten on the solid fact of Anne and experienced a pleasant sense of shock in the realization that Anne was to her exactly what she had been before the ​incomprehensible experience of last night. She still liked her in the same degree and in the same manner. She still felt slightly annoyed with her. She still did not envy her marriage with Anderson. By some mysterious process the emotional upheaval which had racked her had left all the rocks of her existence unmoved. Outwardly nothing had changed.
Days, weeks, passed; outwardly serene; inwardly tumultous. Helga met Dr. Anderson at the social affairs to which often they were both asked. Sometimes she danced with him, always in perfect silence. She couldn‘t, she absolutely couldn‘t, speak a word to him when they were thus alone together, for at such times lassitude encompassed her; the emotion which had gripped her retreated, leaving a strange tranquillity, troubled only by a soft stir of desire. And shamed by his silence, his apparent forgetting, always after these dances she tried desperately to persuade herself to believe what she wanted to believe: that it had not ​happened, that she had never had that irrepressible longing. It was of no use. As the weeks multiplied, she became aware that she must get herself out of the mental quagmire into which that kiss had thrown her. And she should be getting herself back to Copenhagen, but she had now no desire to go.
Abruptly one Sunday in a crowded room, in the midst of teacups and chatter, she new that she couldn‘t go, that she hadn‘t since that kiss intended to go without exploring to the end that unfamiliar path into which she had strayed. Well, it was of no use lagging behind or pulling back. It was of no use trying to persuade herself that she didn‘t want to go on. A species of fatalism fastened on her. She felt that, ever since that last day in Naxos long ago, somehow she had known that this thing would happen. With this conviction came an odd sense of elation. While making a pleasant assent to some remark of a fellow guest she ​put down her cup and walked without haste, smiling and nodding to friends and acquaintances on her way to that part of the room where he stood looking at some examples of African carving. Helga Crane faced him squarely. As he took the hand which she held out with elaborate casualness, she noted that his trembled slightly. She was secretly congratulating herself on her own calm when it failed her. Physical weariness descended on her. Her knees wobbled. Gratefully she slid into the chair which he hastily placed for her. Timidity came over her. She was silent. He talked. She did not listen. He came at last to the end of his long dissertation on African sculpture, and Helga Crane felt the intentness of his gaze upon her.
“Well?” she questioned.
“I want very much to see you, Helga. Alone”
She held herself tensely on the edge of her chair, and suggested: “Tomorrow?”
​He hesitated a second and then said quickly: “Why, yes, that‘s all right.“
”Eight o‘clock?“
”Eight o‘clock,” he agreed.
Eight o‘clock tomorrow came. Helga Crane never forgot it. She had carried away from yesterday‘s meeting a feeling of increasing elation. It had seemed to her that she hadn‘t been so happy, so exalted, in years, if ever. All night, all day, she had mentally prepared herself for the coming consummation; physically too, spending hours before the mirror.
Eight o‘clock had come at last and with it Dr. Anderson. Only then had uneasiness come upon her and a feeling of fear for possible exposure. For Helga Crane wasn‘t, after all, a rebel from society, Negro society. It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone. But these late fears were overwhelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire; and she had got herself down to the hotel‘s small reception room.
​It was, he had said, awfully good of her to see him. She instantly protested. No, she had wanted to see him. He looked at her surprised. “You know, Helga,” he had begun with an air of desperation, “I can‘t forgive myself for acting such a swine at the Tavenors‘ party. I don‘t at all blame you for being angry and not speaking to me except when you had to.”
But that, she exclaimed, was simply too ridiculous. “I wasn‘t angry a bit.” And it had seemed to her that things were not exactly going forward as they should. It seemed that he had been very sincere, and very formal. Deliberately. She had looked down at her hands and inspected her bracelets, for she had felt that to look at him would be, under the circumstances, too exposing.
“I was afraid,” he went on, “that you might have misunderstood; might have been unhappy about it. I could kick myself. It was, it must have been, Tavenor‘s rotten cocktails.”
​Helga Crane‘s sense of elation had abruptly left her. At the same time she had felt the need to answer carefully. No, she replied, she hadn‘t thought of it at all. It had meant nothing to her. She had been kissed before. It was really too silly of him to have been at all bothered about it. “For what,” she had asked, “is one kiss more or less, these days, between friends?” She had even laughed a little.
Dr. Anderson was relieved. He had been, he told her, no end upset. Rising, he said: “I see you‘re going out. I won‘t keep you.”
Helga Crane too had risen. Quickly. A sort of madness had swept over her. She felt that he had belittled and ridiculed her. And thinking this, she had suddenly savagely slapped Robert Anderson with all her might, in the face.
For a short moment they had both stood stunned, in the deep silence which had followed that resounding slap. Then, without a word of ​contrition or apology, Helga Crane had gone out of the room and upstairs.
She had, she told herself, been perfectly justified in slapping Dr. Anderson, but she was not convinced. So she had tried hard to make herself very drunk in order that sleep might come to her, but had managed only to make herself very sick.
Not even the memory of how all living had left his face, which had gone a taupe gray hue, or the despairing way in which he had lifted his head and let it drop, or the trembling hands which he had pressed into his pockets, brought her any scrap of comfort. She had ruined everything. Ruined it because she had been so silly as to close her eyes to all indications that pointed to the fact that no matter what the intensity of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion of himself. Not even for her. Not ​even though he knew that she had wanted so terribly something special from him.
Something special. And now she had forfeited it forever. Forever. Helga had an instantaneous shocking perception of what forever meant. And then, like a flash, it was gone, leaving an endless stretch of dreary years before her appalled vision.