The Young Lions

"Can't you go home alone?" he asked bleakly. He hated her standing there, pretty, a little drab, with the rain wilting on her hair and her clothes.

"Don't you dare talk like that," she said. Her voice was sharp and commanding. "I'm not going home alone. Come on."

Noah sighed. Now, apart from everything else, the girl was angry with him.

"Don't sigh like that," she said crisply. "Like a hen-pecked husband."

What's happened? Noah thought dazedly. How did I get here? How did this girl get the right to talk to me this way?…

"I'm going," she said, and turned with purpose and started off towards the subway. He watched her for a moment, baffled, then hurried after her.

The trains were dank and smelly with the ghost of the rain that the riders brought in with them from the streets above. There was a taste of iron in the unchanging air, and the bosomy girls who advertised toothpaste and laxatives and brassieres on the garish cards seemed foolish and improbable in the light of the dusty lamps. The other passengers in the cars, returning from unknown labours and unimaginable assignations, swayed on the stained yellow seats.

The girl sat tight-lipped and silent. When they had to change trains at a station she merely stood with unbending disapproval and walked out on to the platform, leaving Noah to shuffle lamely after her.

They had to change again and again, and wait interminably for new co

How demanding and certain of herself this girl was, thought Noah, glaring at her, to drag a man she had just met so far and so long through the clanging, sorrowful labyrinth of the Borough's mournful underground. His luck, he thought, with a present, murky vision of himself, night after night on these grim platforms, night after night among the late-riding char-ladies and burglars and drunken merchant seamen who made up the subway dawn passenger lists, his luck, with one million women living within a radius of fifty blocks of him, to be committed to a sharp-tempered, unrelenting girl, who made her home at the dreary other end of the largest city known to man. Leander, he thought, swam the Hellespont for another girl; but he did not have to take her home later in the evening, nor did he have to wait twenty-five minutes among the trash baskets and the signs that warned against spitting and smoking on DeKalb Avenue.

Finally, they got off at a station and the girl led him up the steps to the streets above.

"At last," he said, the first words he had spoken in an hour.

"I thought we were down there for the summer season."

The girl stopped at the corner. "Now," she said coldly, "we take the street car."

"Oh, God!" Noah said. Then he began to laugh. His laughter sounded mad and empty across the trolley tracks, among the shabby store fronts and dingy, brown stone walls.

"If you're going to be so unpleasant," the girl said, "you can leave me here."

"I have come this far," Noah said, with literary gravity. "I will go the whole way."

He stopped laughing and stood beside her, silent under the lamp-post, with the raw wind lashing them in rough, wet gusts, the wind that had come across the Atlantic beaches and the polluted harbours, across the million acres of semi-detached houses, across the brick and wood wastes of Flatbush and Bensonhurst, across the sleeping millions of their fellow men, who in their uneasy voyage through life had found no gentler place to lay their heads.

A quarter of an hour later the trolley car rumbled towards them, a clanking eye of light in the distance. There were only three other passengers, dozing unhappily on the wood seats, and Noah sat formally beside the girl, feeling, in the lighted car creaking along the dark streets, like a man on a raft, wrecked with strangers, relics of a poor ship that had foundered on a cold run among northern islands. The girl sat primly, staring straight ahead, her hands crossed in her lap, and Noah felt as though he did not know her at all, as though if he ventured to speak to her she would cry out for a policeman and demand to be protected against him.

"All right," she said, and stood up. Once more he followed her to the door. The car stopped and the door wheezed open. They stepped down to the wet pavement. Noah and the girl walked away from the trolley tracks. Here and there along the mean streets there was a tree, fretted with green in surprising evidence that spring had come to this place this year.

The girl turned into a small concrete yard, under a high stone stoop. There was a barred iron door. She opened the lock with her key and the door swung open.

"There," she said, coldly. "We're home," and turned to face him.

Noah took off his hat. The girl's face bloomed palely out of the darkness. She had taken off her hat, too, and her hair made a wavering line around the ivory gleam of her cheeks and brow. Noah felt like weeping, as though he had lost everything that he had ever held dear, as he stood close to her in the poor shadow of the house in which she lived.

"I… I want to say…" he said, whispering, "that I do not object… I mean I am pleased… pleased, I mean, to have brought you home."

"Thank you," she said. She was whispering, too, but her voice was non-committal.

"Complex," he said. He waved his hands vaguely. "If you only knew how complex. I mean, I'm very pleased, really…"

She was so close, so poor, so young, so frail, deserted, courageous, lonely… He put out his hands in a groping, blind gesture and took her head delicately in his hands and kissed her.

Her lips were soft and firm and a little damp from the mist.

Then she slapped him. The noise echoed meanly under the stone steps. His cheek felt a little numb. How strong she is, he thought dazedly, for such a frail-looking girl.

"What made you think," she said coldly, "that you could kiss me?"

"I… I don't know," he said, putting his hand to his cheek to assuage the smarting, then pulling it away, ashamed of showing that much weakness at a moment like this. "I… I just did."

"You do that with your other girls," Hope said crisply. "Not with me."

"I don't do it with other girls," Noah said unhappily.

"Oh," Hope said. "Only with me. I'm sorry I looked so easy."

"Oh, no," said Noah, mourning within him. "That isn't what I mean." Oh, God, he thought, if only there were some way to explain to her how I feel. Now she thinks I am a lecherous fool on the loose from the corner drug-store, quick to grab any girl who'll let me. He swallowed dryly, the words clotted in his throat.

"Oh," he said, weakly. "I'm so sorry."

"I suppose you think," the girl began cuttingly, "you're so wonderfully attractive, so bright, so superior, that any girl would just fall all over herself to let you paw her…"

"Oh, God." He backed away painfully, and nearly stumbled against the two steps that led down from the cement yard.

"I never in all my days," said the girl, "have come across such an arrogant, opinionated, self-satisfied young man."

"Stop…" Noah groaned. "I can't stand it."

"I'll say good night now," the girl said bitingly. "Mr. Ackerman."

"Oh, no," he whispered. "Not now. You can't."

She moved the iron gate with a tentative, forbidding gesture, and the hinges creaked in his ears.