Entering Ephesus by Daphne Athas

Author:Daphne Athas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-30T21:34:32+00:00

Chapter 25

The next Sunday, Zebul brought The Gioconda Smile and Other Stories to the circulation desk. He had been in the library all afternoon. It was one of those too rich and ravishing days when the smell of honeysuckles had penetrated the hall through open windows. Suffusing perfume denied the rows of books, mustiness, and parchment-gray faces.

Suddenly Zebul saw the officer. He was standing right next to him. The officer was dressed not in Navy whites but in off-duty civilian clothes.

Zebul did not see him all at once. He saw his hands first. They were neat, strong hands, faintly tanned from the sun. The fingers were long, with excellent lines, and the line of muscle from thumb to wrist stood out boldly. The backs were covered with a fur of gold-colored hair. The officer was holding an old, tattered book called The Variables of History and was preparing to put his name and address on the call card.

Zebul controlled a reflex motion to jump. A wave of fear flooded him. It was three weeks since the incident in the Armory. He thought of running.

But the officer, sensing a disturbance in the person by his side, suddenly looked at him. Up to this moment the officer’s face had been serene, liquid, dreaming. But at once an expression half puzzled, half guarded came upon it.

As he faced the officer’s gaze, Zebul’s fear changed to hope. He doesn’t know me. Because of the uniform! The officer might not recognize him without the French cadet uniform, but he recognized the officer. He adjusted immediately to the gray sports coat and trousers. But the revelation of the officer as a man fascinated him. It broadened his whole concept of him.

Now, irrationally, with the same progression of emotions as he had followed in the Armory, he wanted the officer to recognize him. His gaze became eager.

The effect of this eagerness again changed the officer. His hazel eyes grew aloof. From behind the iris screen, the pupils reflected a strange and sharp curiosity.

At that moment the undergraduate library clerk came to the desk and asked, “Yes, sir? Can I help you?”

The officer broke off staring to write his name.

Zebul slid his eyeballs westward and down, like a convict. “E. Bostwick, Town,” he saw.

The attendant stamped the card.

The officer looked at Zebul once more with an enigmatic, almost mocking turn of his lips, and then walked off. His footsteps were smart. They had the knowingness of a cynosure—even more, the provocative beat of having made a conquest.

Had he recognized Zebul? Zebul noticed he was trembling, and then he flushed under the clerk’s eyes as he almost wrote E. Bostwick on his call card.

Early in the evening, just after it got dark, he whispered to Urie through the baggy screen door into the familiar smell of corn and beans, kerosene oil and girlish perfume.

“It’s you!” she whispered.

“Come on out.”

She slipped out the screen through a thousand millers batting their wings. She brushed them off her face.

“Yes. Phoo! It’s too bright in there.

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