The Brimming Cup
CHAPTER XI
IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN
I
June 10.
Marise bent to kiss the soft withered cheek. "Elly is a
real Vermonter, but I'm not. She can get along with just
'Hello, Aunt Hetty,' but that's not enough for me," she said
tenderly to the old woman; "I have to kiss you."
"Oh, you can do as you like, for all of me," answered the other
with an unsparing indifference.
Marise laughed at the quality of this, taking the shaky old hand
in hers with a certainty of affection returned. She went on, "This
is a regular descent on you, Cousin Hetty. I've come to show you
off, you and the house and the garden. This is Mr. Welles who has
settled next door to us, you know, and this is Mr. Marsh who is
visiting him for a time. And here are the children, and Eugenia
Mills came up from the city last night and will be here perhaps, if
she gets up energy after her afternoon nap, and Neale is coming
over from the mill after closing hours, and we've brought along a
basket supper and, if you'll let us, we're going to eat it out in
your garden, under Great-great-grandmother's willow-tree."
Cousin Hetty nodded dry, though not uncordial greetings to the
strangers and said crisply, "You're welcome enough to sit around
anywhere you can find, and eat your lunch here, but where you're
going to find anything to show off, beats me."
"Mr. Welles is interested in gardens and wants to look at
yours."
"Not much to look at," said the old lady uncompromisingly.
"I don't want to look at a garden!" clamored little Mark,
outraged at the idea. "I want to be let go up to Aunt Hetty's
yattic where the sword and 'pinning-wheel are."
"Would all you children like that best?" asked Marise.
Their old kinswoman answered for them, "You'd better believe
they would. You always did yourself. Run along, now, children, and
don't fall on the attic stairs and hurt yourselves on the
wool-hetchels."
The fox-terrier, who had hung in an anguish of uncertainty and
hope and fear on the incomprehensible words passing between little
Mark and the grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran
clattering towards the stairs, took a few agitated steps after
them, and ran back to Marise, shivering, begging with his eyes, in
a wriggling terror lest he be forbidden to follow them into the
fun. Marise motioned him along up the stairs, saying with a
laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes, poor Médor,
you can go along with the children if you want to."
The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the
instant, in a great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous
and undignified haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare
floor, tore across the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with
joy.
"If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented
Marise lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little
dog, given over to the whimsical tyranny of humans."
"There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered
Marsh, not lightly at all.
"What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the
grown-ups went along the hall towards the side-door.
"Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn . . ."
began Cousin Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up
to his.
Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging
abruptness that brought Marise to a standstill also. The older
people went on down the long dusky hail to the door and out into
the garden, not noticing that the other two had stopped. The door
swung shut behind them.
Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined.
They were far from those first days, she thought, when he had
tacitly agreed not to look at her like that, very far from those
first days of delicacy and lightness of touch.
With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and
eyes opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter?
Can't you stand any more information about early times in Vermont?
You must have been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But
I like it, you know. I find it awfully interesting to know
so in detail about any past period of human life; as much so . . .
why not? . . . as researches into which provinces of France used
half-timber houses, and how late?"
"You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.
"We must get out into the garden with the others, or Cousin
Hetty will be telling her old-time stories before we arrive," she
answered, moving towards the door.
She felt her pulse knocking loud and swift. Strange how a casual
interchange of words with him would excite and agitate her. But it
had been more than that. Everything was, with him.
He gave the sidewise toss of his head, which had come to be so
familiar to her, as though he were tossing a lock of hair from his
forehead, but he said nothing more, following her down the long
hall in silence.
It was as though she had physically felt the steel of his blade
slide gratingly once more down from her parry. Her mental attitude
had been so entirely that of a fencer, on the alert, watchfully
defensive against the quick-flashing attack of the opponent, that
she had an instant's absurd fear of letting him walk behind her, as
though she might feel a thrust in the back. "How ridiculous of me!"
she told herself with an inward laugh of genuine amusement. "Women
are as bad as fox-terriers for inventing exciting occasions out of
nothing at all."
Then in a gust of deep anger, instantly come, instantly gone,
"Why do I tolerate this for a moment? I was perfectly all right
before. Why don't I simply send him about his business, as I would
any other bold meddler?"
But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, "That
would be acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously
virtuous matron. What earthly difference does it make to me what a
casual visitor to our town says or does to amuse himself in his
casual stay, that may end at any moment? And how scarifyingly he
would laugh at me, if he knew what comic relics of old prudish
reflexes are stirred up by the contact with his mere human
livingness. Heavens! How he would laugh to know me capable of being
so 'guindée,' so personal, fearing like any school-girl a
flirtation in any man's conversation. He must never see a trace of
that. No matter how startled I ever am, he mustn't see anything but
a smooth, amused surface. It would be intolerable to have him laugh
at me."
Her hand was on the latch, when a deep, muffled murmur from the
depths admonished her, "Personal vanity . . . that's what's at the
bottom of all that you are telling yourself. It is a vain woman
speaking, and fearing a wound to her vanity."
She resented this, pushed it back, and clicked the latch up
firmly, stepping out into the transparent gold of the
late-afternoon sunshine. She turned her head as her companion came
up behind her on the garden path, half expecting to have his eyes
meet hers with a visible shade of sardonic mockery, and prepared to
meet it halfway with a similar amusement at the absurdity of human
beings, herself included.
He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him,
unconscious for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and
in this instant before the customary mask of self-consciousness
dropped over his face, she read there, plain and startling to see,
unmistakable to her grown woman's experience of life, the marks of
a deep, and painful, and present emotion.
All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She
did not even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and
dreadfully. There was no room for thought in the profound awed
impersonal sympathy which with a great hush came upon her at the
sight of another human being in pain.
He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her,
and for the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other
through a rent in the veil of life.
Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here,
this way under the willow-tree."
They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, ". . . that
was in 1763 and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian
trails the men had learned during the French-and-Indian wars.
Great-grandmother (she was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought
along a willow switch from their home in Connecticut. When the
whole lot of them decided to settle here in the valley, and her
folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck her willow switch into
the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is the tree it grew
to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other old
folks."
Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the
great tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time
and weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling
and murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he
speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has
stayed just as young as ever."
"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his
pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and
finer and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets
more battered and feeble-looking."
Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an
expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a
man who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot. He
smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the
extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.
Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the
light in the old garden. She sat down on the bench and fell into a
more relaxed and restful pose than she had known for some time.
What a sweet and gracious thing life could be after all! Could
there be a lovelier place on earth than here among Cousin Hetty's
flower-children. Dear old Cousin Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff
exterior, and those bright living eyes of hers. She was the
willow-tree outside and the brook inside, that's what she was. What
tender childhood recollections were bound up with the sight of that
quiet old face.
"And those rose-bushes," continued the old woman, "are all
cuttings my great-great-grandmother brought up from Connecticut,
and they came from cuttings our folks brought over from
England, in 1634. If 'twas a little later in the season, and they
were in bloom, you'd see how they're not nearly so I double as most
roses. The petals are bigger and not so curled up, more like wild
roses."
She sat down beside the others on the long wooden bench, and
added, "I never dig around one of those bushes, nor cut a rose to
put in a vase, without I feel as though Great-great-grandmother and
Grandmother and all the rest were in me, still alive."
"Don't you think," asked Marise of the two men, "that there is
something awfully sweet about feeling yourself a part of the past
generations, like that? As we do here. To have such a familiarity
with any corner of the earth . . . well, it seems to me like music,
the more familiar it is, the dearer and closer it is . . . and when
there are several generations of familiarity back of you. . . . I
always feel as though my life were a part of something much bigger
than just my life, when I feel it a continuation of their
lives, as much as of my own childhood. It always seems deep and
quieting to me."
Mr. Welles assented wistfully, "It makes me envious."
Marsh shook his head, sending up a meditative puff of smoke. "If
you want to know how it really strikes me, I'll have to say it
sounds plain sleepy to me. Deep and quieting all right, sure
enough. But so's opium. And in my experience, most things just get
duller and duller, the more familiar they are. I don't begin to
have time in my life for the living I want to do, my own self! I
can't let my grandmothers and grandfathers come shoving in for
another whirl at it. They've had their turn. And my turn isn't a
minute too long for me. Your notion looks to me . . . lots of old
accepted notions look like that to me . . . like a good big dose of
soothing syrup to get people safely past the time in their
existences when they might do some sure-enough personal living on
their own hook." He paused and added in a meditative murmur, "That
time is so damn short as it is!"
He turned hastily to the old lady with an apology. "Why, I
beg your pardon! I didn't realize I had gone on talking
aloud. I was just thinking along to myself. You see, your soothing
syrup is working on me, the garden, the sun, the stillness, all the
grandmothers and grandfathers sitting around. I am almost half
asleep."
"I'm an old maid, I know," said Cousin Hetty piquantly. "But I'm
not a proper Massachusetts old maid. I'm Vermont, and a swear-word
or two don't scare me. I was brought up on first-hand stories of
Ethan Allen's talk, and . . ."
Marise broke in hastily, in mock alarm, "Now, Cousin Hetty,
don't you start in on the story of Ethan Allen and the cowshed that
was too short. I won't have our city visitors scandalized by our
lack of . . ."
Cousin Hetty's laughter cut her short, as merry and young a
sound as the voice of the brook. "I hadn't thought of that story in
years!" she said. She and Marise laughed together, looking at each
other. But they said nothing else.
"Aren't you going to tell us?" asked Mr. Welles with a
genuine aggrieved surprise which tickled Cousin Hetty into more
laughter.
"I shall not rest day or night, till I have found someone who
knows that story," said Marsh, adding, "Old Mrs. Powers must know
it. And she will love to tell it to me. It is evidently the
sort of story which is her great specialty."
They all laughed, foolishly, light-heartedly.
Marise consciously delighted in the laughter, in the silly,
light tone of their talk, in the feeling of confidence and security
which bathed her as warmly as the new wine of the spring sunshine.
She thought passingly, swiftly, with her habitual, satiric wonder
at her own fancifulness, of her earlier notions about steel blades
and passes and parries, and being afraid to walk down the hall with
her "opponent" back of her.
Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on
the bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the
intensity of which was out of her world altogether, the life, all
power, of a modern rich man in great affairs; controlling vast
forces, swaying and shaping the lives of thousands of weaker men as
no potentate had ever done, living in the instants he allowed
himself for personal life (she felt again the pang of her sympathy
for his look of fierce, inexplicable pain) with a concentration in
harmony with the great scale of his other activities. It was, just
as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad, inhuman, colorful,
fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's life, she
reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village
insignificance into that large-scale landscape.
A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley
with its vibrations.
"Is that a train, at this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice
was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his
waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was
evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train or
not.
"Oh no!" said Marise, severely, disapproving the
vagueness and inaccuracy of his observation. "That's the
mill-whistle, blowing the closing-hour. You're no true Ashleyan,
not to have learned the difference between the voices of the
different whistles of the day."
She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight.
"I think it's part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human
imagination, don't you, that we don't hear the beauty of those
great steam-whistles. I wonder if it's not unconscious art that
gave to our mighty machines such voices of qower."
"Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a
'mighty machine'?" inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the
bench, his arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to
the side, his soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the
garden and at Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.
Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. "When the
train comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful
banner of smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing
something, and at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares
out . . . why, it's the music for the setting. Nothing else could
cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of
its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks."
"I call that going some, 'noble rounded note'!" murmured Marsh,
lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes
fall half shut, against the brilliance of the sunshine.
Marise laughed, and persisted. "Just because its called a
steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till
something else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll
look back sentimentally and regret it."
"Maybe you will," conceded Marsh.
The two elder looked on, idly amused at this give-and-take.
"And I don't suppose," continued Marise, "to take another
instance of modern lack of imagination, that you have ever noticed,
as an element of picturesque power in modern life, the splendid
puissance of the traffic cop's presence in a city street."
They all had a protesting laugh at this, startled for an instant
from their dreaminess.
"Yes, and if I could think of more grandiloquent words to
express him, I'd use them," said Marise defiantly, launching out
into yet more outrageous flights of rhetoric. "I could stand for
hours on a street corner, admiring the completeness with which he
is transfigured out of the human limitations of his mere
personality, how he feels, flaming through his every vein and
artery, the invincible power of THE LAW, freely set over themselves
by all those turbulent, unruly human beings, surging around him in
their fiery speed-genii. He raises his arm. It is not a human arm,
it is the decree of the entire race. And as far as it can be seen,
all those wilful fierce creatures bow themselves to it. The current
boils past him in one direction. He lets it go till he thinks fit
to stop it. He sounds his whistle, and raises his arm again in that
inimitable gesture of omnipotence. And again they bow themselves.
Now that the priest before the altar no longer sways humanity as he
did, is there anywhere else, any other such visible embodiment of
might, majesty, and power as . . ."
"Gracious me, Marise!" warned her old cousin. "I know you're
only running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going
pretty far when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and
things. I don't believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very
well."
"He wouldn't mind," demurred Marise. "He'd think it an
interesting historical parallel."
"Mrs. Bayweather would have a thing or two to say."
"Right you are. Mrs. Bayweather would certainly say
something!" agreed Marise.
She stood up. "I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness
like the rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the
niceness of everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't
even opened the baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the
others, beginning to stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers
of help. "I'll call the children. And Neale will be here in a
moment."
She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the
grape-arbor, still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green.
She was calling, "Children! Children! Come and help with the
supper."
She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of
intense quiet, in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting
sun poured a flood of palpable gold on the three motionless figures
in the garden.
Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the
largest of the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets,
a pail, an ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about
them, wrought to exaltation by the complicated smell of the
eatables.
"Neale was just coming in the front gate," she explained, as he
nodded familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's
cheek. "Cousin Hetty, just look at Elly in that night-cap of
Great-aunt Pauline's. Doesn't she look the image of that old
daguerreotype of Grandmother? See here, Mark, who said you could
trail that sword out here? That belongs in the attic."
"Oh, let him, let him," said Cousin Hetty peaceably.
"There's nothing much less breakable than a sword. He can't hurt
it."
"I've woren it lots of times before," said Mark. "Aunt Hetty
always let me to. Favver, won't you 'trap it tight to me, so's I
won't 'traddle it so much."
"Mother," said Elly, coming up close to Marise, as she stood
unpacking the dishes, "I was looking inside that old diary, the one
in the red leather cover, your grandmother's, I guess, the diary
she wrote when she was a young lady. And she was having a perfectly
dreadful time whether she could believe the Doctrine of the
Trinity. She seemed to feel so bad about it. She wrote how she
couldn't sleep nights, and cried, and everything. It was the Holy
Ghost she couldn't make any sense out of. Mother, what in the world
is the Doctrine of the Trinity?
"For mercy's sakes!" cried Cousin Hetty. "I never saw such a
family! Elly, what won't you be up to, next? I can't call that a
proper thing for a little girl to talk about, right out, so."
"Mother, you tell me," said Elly, looking up into her
mother's face with the expression of tranquil trust which was like
a visible radiance. Marise always felt scared, she told herself,
when Elly looked at her like that. She made a little helpless
shrugged gesture of surrender with her shoulders, setting down on
the table a plate of cold sliced lamb. "Elly, darling, I can't stop
just this minute to tell you about it, and anyhow I don't
understand any more about it than Grandmother did. But I don't care
if I don't. The first quiet minute we have together, I'll tell you
enough so you can understand why she cared."
"All right, when I go to bed tonight I'll remind you to," Elly
made the engagement definite. She added, with a shout, "Oh, Mother,
chicken sandwiches! Oh, I didn't know we were going to have
chicken sandwiches. Mother, can't we begin now? I'm awfully
hungry."
"Hello," said Neale, looking back toward the house. "Here comes
Eugenia, arisen from her nap. Paul, run back into the house and
bring out another chair. Marise, have you explained who Eugenia
is?"
"Oh là, là, no!" exclaimed Marise. "I forgot they
didn't know her. Quick, you do it, Neale."
"Old friend of my wife's, sort of half-cousin several-times
removed, schoolmates in France together, the kind of old family
friend who comes and goes in the house at will," said Neale
rapidly. "Cultivated, artistic, and so on."
"Oh, Neale, how slightingly you put it!" cried Marise
under her breath. "She's made herself into one of the rarest and
most finished creations!"
Neale went on rapidly, in a low tone as the newcomer stepped
slowly down the path, "She toils not, neither does she spin . . .
doesn't have to. Highbrow, very, and yet stylish, very! Most
unusual combination." He added as final information, "Spinster, by
conviction," as he stepped forward to greet her.
The other two men stood up to be presented to the newcomer, who,
making everything to Marise's eyes seem rough and countrified,
advanced towards them, self-possessed, and indifferent to all those
eyes turned on her. In her gleaming, supple dress of satin-like
ivory jersey, she looked some tiny, finished, jewel-object,
infinitely breakable, at which one ought only to look if it were
safely behind glass.
"There is someone of Marsh's own world, the 'great world' he
speaks of," thought Marise. She was not aware of any wistfulness in
her recognition of this fact, but she was moved to stand closer to
her husband, and once as she moved about, setting the table, to lay
her fingers for an instant on his hand.
"We're going to have ice-cream, Eugenia," announced Paul,
leaning on the arm of her chair after she and all the others were
seated again.
"That's good news," she said equably. She laid a small,
beautiful hand on the child's shoulder, and with a smooth,
imperceptible movement, set him a little further from her. Paul did
not observe this manoeuver, but his mother did, with an inward
smile. "Paul, don't hang on Eugenia like that," she called to
him.
"But she smells so sweet!" protested the little boy.
Mr. Welles held out a sympathizing hand and drew the child to
him. He too had seen that gesture.
"Come here, all you little folks," ordered Marise, now seriously
beginning to serve the meal, "and start waiting on the table."
"Cold lamb!" cried Cousin Hetty with enthusiasm. "I'm so glad.
Agnes won't touch mutton or lamb. She says they taste so like a
sheep. And so we don't often have it."
"Paul, can you be trusted to pour the hot chocolate?" asked his
mother. "No, Neale, don't get up. I want to see if the children
can't do it all."
From where she sat at the foot of the table, she directed the
operations. The children stepped about, serious, responsible, their
rosy faces translucent in the long, searching, level rays sent up
by the sun, low in The Notch. Dishes clicked lightly, knives and
forks jingled, cups were set back with little clinking noises on
saucers. All these indoor sounds were oddly diminished and
unresonant under the open sky, just as the chatting, laughing flow
of the voices, even though it rose at times to bursts of mirth
which the children's shouts made noisy, never drowned out the
sweet, secret talk of the brook to itself.
Marise was aware of all this, richly and happily aware of the
complexities of an impression whose total seemed to her, for the
moment, felicity itself. It pleased her, all, every bit of it,
pleased and amused her; the dear children, Paul worshiping at the
shrine of Eugenia's elegancies, Mark the absurd darling with that
grotesque sword between his legs, Elly devouring her favorite
sandwich with impassioned satisfaction and wondering about the Holy
Ghost; Cousin Hetty, ageless, pungent, and savory as one of her
herbs; Mr. Welles, the old tired darling come into his haven,
loving Paul as he would his own grandson; Eugenia orchid-like
against their apple-blossom rusticity; Marsh . . . how tremendously
more simpático he had seemed this afternoon than ever
before, as though one might really like him, and not just find him
exciting and interesting; Neale, dear Neale with his calm eyes into
which it did everyone good to look. All of them at ease, friendly,
enjoying food, the visible world, and each other. Where, after all,
were those traditional, troubling, insoluble intricacies of human
relationships which had been tormenting her and darkening her sky?
It was all so good and simple if one could only remain good and
simple oneself. There was no lightning to fear in that lucent
sunset air.
Presently, as the talk turned on flowers and the dates of their
blooming, Eugenia said to her casually, "Marisette, here we are the
first of June and past, and the roses here are less advanced than
they were at Tivoli the last of March. Do you remember the day when
a lot of us sat outdoors and ate a picnic dinner, just as we do
now? It was the day we climbed Monte Cavo."
Marise explained, "Miss Mills is a friend who dates back even
before my husband's time, back to our student days in Rome." To
Eugenia she said, "You're giving us both away and showing how long
ago it is, and how you've forgotten about details. We never could
have climbed up Monte Cavo, the day we went to Tivoli. They don't
go on the same excursion, at all."
"That's true," agreed Eugenia indifferently, "you're right.
Monte Cavo goes with the Rocca di Papa expedition."
Before she could imagine a possible reason, Marise felt her
hands go cold and moist. The sky seemed to darken and lower above
her. Eugenia went on, "And I never went to Rocca di Papa with you,
at all, I'm sure of that. That was a trip you took after you had
dropped me for Neale. In fact, it was on that very expedition that
you got formally engaged, don't you remember? You and Neale walked
over from Monte Cavo and only just caught the last car down."
Ridiculous! Preposterous! Marise told herself that it was not
possible that her hands were trembling so. It was merely a physical
reaction, such as one had when startled by some trivial sudden
event. But she couldn't make them stop trembling. She couldn't make
them stop.
What nonsense to be so agitated. Nobody could remember the name
from that evening, weeks and weeks ago. And what if they did? What
could they make of it?
It seemed to her that dusk had fallen in the garden. Where was
that lucent sunset air?
She heard Eugenia's voice going on, and Neale chiming in with a
laugh, and did not understand what they said. Surely everybody must
have forgotten.
She hazarded a quick glance at Mr. Welles' face and drew a long
breath of relief. He had forgotten, that was evident. She looked
beyond him to Marsh. He too would certainly have forgotten.
He was waiting for her eyes. And when they met his, she felt the
lightning flash. He had not forgotten.
II
Marsh suddenly found it unbearable. He wasn't used to keeping
the curb on himself like this, and he hadn't the least intention of
learning how to do it. A fierce, physical irritability overcame
him, and he stopped short in the hall, just because he could not
stand the silly chatter that was always flowing from these silly
people about their foolish affairs. If they only knew what he was
leaving unsaid!
He had not meant to make Marise halt, too, his movement having
been a mere unconsidered reflex, but of course she did stop,
apparently surprised by the brusqueness of his action, and faced
him there in the dusky hall-way. She was so close to him that he
could see every detail of her face and person, just as he could at
night when he closed his eyes; so close that for an instant he felt
her breath on his face. He ground his teeth, minded, that instant,
to throw down the trumpery little wall of convention. It couldn't
stand, he knew with an experienced certainty of his own power that
it couldn't stand for an instant against him. The day he chose to
put his shoulder to it, down it would go in a heap of rubble.
But the wall was not all. Usually it was all. But with this
woman it was nothing, a mere accident. Beyond it she stood, valid,
and looked at him out of those long eyes of hers. What was in
her mind? She looked at him now, quietly, just as usual, made
some light casual remark, and effortlessly, as though she had some
malign and invincible charm, she had passed from out his power
again, and was walking with that straight, sure tread of hers, down
to the door.
If he could have done it, he would have struck at her from
behind.
He could get no hold on her, could not take the first step. All
during those weeks and weeks, he had thrown out his net, and had
caught enough facts, Lord knows. But had he any certainty that he
had put them together right? He had not yet caught in her any one
tone or look or phrase that would give him the unmistakable clue.
He had set down words and words and words that would tell him what
her life really was, if he only knew the alphabet of her language.
He might be making a fool of himself with his almost certainty that
she was conscious of having outgrown, like a splendid tropical
tree, the wretched little kitchen-garden where fate had
transplanted her. When he could stamp down his heat of feeling and
let his intelligence have a moment's play, he was perfectly capable
of seeing that he might be misinterpreting everything he had
observed. For instance, that evening over the photograph-album with
her betrayal of some strong feeling of distaste for the place near
Rome. It was evident, from her tone, her look, her gesture, that
the name of it brought up some acutely distasteful memory to her,
but that could mean anything, or nothing. It might be merely some
sordid accident, as that a drunken workman had said something
brutal to her there. Women of her sort, he knew, never forgot those
things. Or any one of a thousand such incidents. He would never
know the significance of that gesture of shrinking of hers.
As he walked behind her, he looked hard at her back, with its
undulating, vase-like beauty, so close to him; and felt her
immeasurably distant. She opened the door now and went out into the
sunlight, stepping a little to one side as though to make room for
him to come up beside her. He found that he knew every turn of her
head, every poise of her shoulders and action of her hands, the
whole rhythm of her body, as though they were his own. And there
she passed from him, far and remote.
A sudden certainty of fore-ordained defeat came over him, as he
had never known before. He was amazed at the violence of his pain,
intolerable, intolerable!
She turned her head quickly and caught his eyes in this instant
of inexplicable suffering.
What miraculous thing happened then? It seemed to him that her
face wavered in golden rays, from the radiance of her eyes. For she
did not withdraw her gaze. She looked at him with an instant,
profound sympathy and pity, no longer herself, transfigured, divine
by the depth of her humanity.
The sore bitterness went out from his heart.
A voice called. She turned away. He felt himself following her.
He looked about him, light-headed with relief from pain. The quiet,
flowering world shimmered rainbow-like. What a strange power one
human being could have with another that a look could be an
event!
He walked more slowly, feeling with a curious pleasure the
insatiable desire for possession ebbing from him. Why not let it
ebb entirely? Why not enjoy the ineffable sweetness of what he
could have? That was what would please her, what she would like,
what she would give, freely. In this moment of hush, he quite saw
how it would be possible, although he had never for a moment before
in his life believed it. Yes, possible and lovely. After all, he
must stop sometime, and take the slower pace. Why not now, when
there was a certain and great prize to be won . . . ?
People talked around him. He talked and did not know his own
words. Marise spun those sparkling webs of nonsense of hers, and
made him laugh, but the next moment he could not have told what she
had said. He must somehow have been very tired to take such intense
pleasure in being at rest.
Her husband came, that rough and energetic husband. The children
came, the children whose restless, selfish, noisy preying on their
mother usually annoyed him so, and still the charm was not broken.
Marise, as she always did when her husband and children were there,
retreated into a remote plane of futile busyness with details that
servants should have cared for; answering the children's silly
questions, belonging to everyone, her personal existence blotted
out. But this time he felt still, deep within him, the penetrating
sweetness of her eyes as she had looked at him.
A tiresome, sophisticated friend of Marise's came, too, somehow
intruding another personality into the circle, already too full,
and yet he was but vaguely irritated by her. She only brought out
by contrast the thrilling quality of Marise's golden presence. He
basked in that, as in the sunshine, and thought of nothing
else.
Possibilities he had never dreamed of, stretched before him,
possibilities of almost impersonal and yet desirable existence.
Perhaps this was the turning-point of his life. He supposed there
really was one, sometime, for everybody.
". . . Rocca di Papa . . ." someone had said. Or had he dreamed
it? He awoke with an inward bound, like a man springing up from
sleep at a sudden noise. His first look was for Marise. She was
pale. He had not dreamed it.
The voice went on . . . the newcomer's, the one they called
Eugenia . . . yes, she had known them in Italy. Marise had just
said they had been friends before her marriage.
The voice went on. How he listened as though crouched before the
keyhole of a door! Only three or four sentences, quite casual and
trivial in content, pronounced in that self-consciously
cosmopolitan accent. Then the voice stopped.
It had said enough for him. Now he knew. Now he had that
clue.
He had the sensation of rising to his full height, exultantly,
every faculty as alert as though he had never been drugged to sleep
by those weak notions of renunciation. The consciousness of power
was like a sweet taste in his mouth. The deep, fundamental,
inalienable need for possession stretched itself, titanic and
mighty, refreshed, reposed, and strengthened by the involuntary
rest it had had.
He fixed his eyes on Marise, waiting for the first interchange
of a look. He could see that her hands were trembling; and smiled
to himself. She was looking at the old man.
Now, in a moment she would look at him.
There were her eyes. She had looked at him. Thunder rolled in
his ears.