Paradise Garden: The Satirical Narrative of a Great ExperimentGibbs, George
General
Paradise Garden: The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment
Gibbs, George
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Satire
She felt the first touch of his imperviousness when he refused to
release her and chose to change her tone.
"Please let me go, Jerry," she pleaded softly. "Do you think you are
treating me kindly, after all--all that is between us? I don't care
for Chan--I don't, Jerry. Let me go."
In his eyes she read the new judgment.
"Then you're worse than I supposed," he muttered.
"Worse! Oh, Jerry. Don't look so--so coldly. It hurts me terribly. I
must go. I can't stand your looking at me in that way."
She tried to move away, I think she had every intention of taking to
her heels if Jerry had only given her the chance. But he wouldn't. He
held her and kept her close beside him. He was hurting her wrist
cruelly.
"Let me go," she cried, struggling anew.
Her resistance aroused him again. The animal fury of battle had not
died out of his eyes. He did not know what he intended to do with
her--had no plan, no purpose, he said. What plan or purpose could he
have had unless murder? And even in his madness I'm sure that that
never occurred to him. But his blood was hot and his anger and
bitterness overwhelming. His fear of her delicacy diminished with her
struggles, for her resistance inflamed him. He did not know, nor did
she just then, that the animal instinct to conquer was what she had
taught him, and that the turgid stream of his blood was finding new
strength and unreason, a strange new impetus in every struggle. She
saw her danger and was powerless to prevent it. She looked over her
shoulder helplessly in the direction in which Chan Lloyd had vanished
and saw no help from there. Jerry's great strength had never seemed so
terrible as now. He caught her by the shoulders and held her, shook
her, I think, a little, as one would shake a child, while she still
struggled in his grasp. In a moment his grasp loosened a little, then
tightened again, for the contact of his fingers with her warm skin was
awaking the demon in him, the dormant devil she had put there.
"Oh, you're hurting me so, Jerry--so terribly."
But he did not even hear her voice. His eyes were speaking to hers,
holding them with a deathly fascination. If fear was her passion she
was drinking it now to the full--fear and the sense of the ruthless
power and dominion in this madman of her own creation. Her hands
clasped his shoulders.
"Jerry!" she screamed. "Don't look at me like that. Your eyes burn
me."
"Into your soul--I will burn it--blot it out."
"Jerry, forgive me," she sobbed. "I love you."
"You lie."
"I love you. Forgive me!"
"No. You lie!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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