Munt laughed a man’s laugh. “I guess he’s pretty well alive to that, if he’s in love with her.”
“Oh, in a certain way, of course, but not in the highest way. Now, for instance, if he felt all her fineness as — as we do, I don’t believe he’d be willing to appear before her just like that.” The father of the gods wore a damask tablecloth of a pale golden hue and a classic pattern; his arms were bare, and rather absurdly white; on his feet a pair of lawn-tennis shoes had a very striking effect of sandals.
“It seems to me,” Miss Cotton pursued; “that if he really appreciated her in the highest way, he would wish never to do an undignified or trivial thing in her presence.”
“Oh, perhaps it’s that that pleases her in him. They say we’re always taken with opposites.”
“Yes — do you think so?” asked Miss Cotton.
The curtains were flung apart, and the Judgment of Paris followed rather tamely upon what had gone before, though the two young fellows who did Juno and Minerva were very amusing, and the dialogue was full of hits. Some of the audience, an appreciative minority, were of opinion that Mavering and Miss Anderson surpassed themselves in it; she promised him the most beautiful and cultured wife in Greece. “That settles it,” he answered. They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the apple she had won.
“I can haydly keep from eating it,” she explained to Alice; before whom she dropped Mavering’s arm. “I’m awfully hungry. It’s hayd woyk.”
Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.
Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging sallies with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.
Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper. “Mr. Paris, will you take Miss Aphrodite out?”
Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished Mavering to Alice.
“Oh, no, no!” said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an intensification of her uncertain smile. “A mere mortal?”
“Oh, how very good!” said Mrs. Trevor.
There began to be, without any one’s intending it, that sort of tacit misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon a tacit understanding like that which had established itself between Alice and Mavering. They laughed and joked together gaily about all that went on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her mother were promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and coffee himself, only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and Alice thanked him, with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but if their eyes met, it was defensively, and the security between them was gone. Mavering vaguely felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve it, and it made him go on more desperately with Miss Anderson. He laughed and joked recklessly, and Alice began to mark a more explicit displeasure with her. She made her mother go rather early.
On her part, Miss Anderson seemed to find reason for resentment in Alice’s bearing toward her. As if she had said to herself that her frank loyalty had been thrown away upon a cold and unresponsive nature, and that her harmless follies in the play had been met with unjust suspicions, she began to make reprisals, she began in dead earnest to flirt with Mavering. Before the evening passed she had made him seem taken with her; but how justly she had done this, and with how much fault of his, no one could have said. There were some who did not notice it at all, but these were not people who knew Mavering, or knew Alice very well.
XX.
The next morning Alice was walking slowly along the road toward the fishing village, when she heard rapid, plunging strides down the wooded hillside on her right. She knew them for Mavering’s, and she did not affect surprise when he made a final leap into the road, and shortened his pace beside her.
“May I join you, Miss Pasmer?”
“I am only going down to the herring-houses,” she began.
“And you’ll let me go with you?” said the young fellow. “The fact is — you’re always so frank that you make everything else seem silly — I’ve been waiting up there in the woods for you to come by. Mrs. Pasmer told me you had started this way, and I cut across lots to overtake you, and then, when you came in sight, I had to let you pass before I could screw my courage up to the point of running after you. How is that for open-mindedness?”
“It’s a very good beginning, I should think.”
“Well, don’t you think you ought to say now that you’re sorry you were so formidable?”
“Am I so formidable?” she asked, and then recognised that she had been trapped into a leading question.
“You are to me. Because I would like always to be sure that I had pleased you, and for the last twelve hours I’ve only been able to make sure that I hadn’t. That’s the consolation I’m going away with. I thought I’d get you to confirm my impression explicitly. That’s why I wished to join you.”
“Are you — were you going away?”
“I’m going by the next boat. What’s the use of staying? I should only make bad worse. Yesterday I hoped But last night spoiled everything. ‘Miss Pasmer,’” he broke out, with a rush of feeling, “you must know why I came up here to Campobello.”
His steps took him a little ahead of her, and he could look back into her face as he spoke. But apparently he saw nothing in it to give him courage to go on, for he stopped, and then continued, lightly: “And I’m going away because I feel that I’ve made a failure of the expedition. I knew that you were supremely disgusted with me last night; but it will be a sort of comfort if you’ll tell me so.”
“Oh,” said Alice, “everybody thought it was very brilliant, I’m sure.”
“And you thought it was a piece of buffoonery. Well, it was. I wish you’d say so, Miss Pasmer; though I didn’t mean the playing entirely. It would be something to start from, and I want to make a beginning — turn over a new leaf. Can’t you help me to inscribe a good resolution of the most iron-clad description on the stainless page? I’ve lain awake all night composing one. Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”
“I can’t see what good that would do,” she said, with some relenting toward a smile, in which he instantly prepared himself to bask.
“But you will when I’ve done it. Now listen!”
“Please don’t go on.” She cut him short with a return to her severity, which he would not recognise.
“Well, perhaps I’d better not,” he consented. “It’s rather a long resolution, and I don’t know that I’ve committed it perfectly yet. But I do assure you that if you were disgusted last night, you were not the only one. I was immensely disgusted myself; and why I wanted you to tell me so, was because when I have a strong pressure brought to bear I can brace up, and do almost anything,” he said, dropping into earnest. Then he rose lightly again, and added, “You have no idea how unpleasant it is to lie awake all night throwing dust in the eyes of an accusing conscience.”
“It must have been, if you didn’t succeed,” said Alice drily.
“Yes, that’s it — that’s just the point. If I’d succeeded, I should be all right, don’t you see. But it was a difficult case.” She turned her face away, but he saw the smile on her cheek, and he laughed as if this were what he had been trying to make her do. “I got beaten. I had to give up, and own it. I had to say that I had thrown my chance away, and I had better take myself off.” He looked at her with a real anxiety in his gay eyes.
“The boat goes just after lunch, I believe,” she said indifferently.
“Oh yes, I shall have time to get lunch before I go,” he said, with bitterness. “But lunch isn’t the only thing; it isn’t even the main thing, Miss Pasmer.”
“No?” She hardened her heart.
He waited for her to say something more, and then he went on. “The question is whether there�
��s time to undo last night, abolish it, erase it from the calendar of recorded time — sponge it out, in short — and get back to yesterday afternoon.” She made no reply to this. “Don’t you think it was a very pleasant picnic, Miss Pasmer?” he asked, with pensive respectfulness.
“Very,” she answered drily.
He cast a glance at the woods that bordered the road on either side. “That weird forest — I shall never forget it.”
“No; it was something to remember,” she said.
“And the blueberry patch? We mustn’t forget the blueberry patch.”
“There were a great many blueberries.”
She walked on, and he said, “And that bridge — you don’t have that feeling of having been here before?”
“No.”
“Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Pasmer?”
“No; I like to walk fast.”
“But wouldn’t you like to sit down? On this wayside log, for example?” He pointed it out with his stick. “It seems to invite repose, and I know you must be tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Ah, that shows that you didn’t lie awake grieving over your follies all night. I hope you rested well, Miss Pasmer.” She said nothing. “If I thought — if I could hope that you hadn’t, it would be a bond of sympathy, and I would give almost anything for a bond of sympathy just now, Miss Pasmer. Alice!” he said, with sudden seriousness. “I know that I’m not worthy even to think of you, and that you’re whole worlds above me in every way. It’s that that takes all heart out of me, and leaves me without a word to say when I’d like to say so much. I would like to speak — tell you—”
She interrupted him. “I wish to speak to you, Mr. Mavering, and tell you that — I’m very tired, and I’m going back to the hotel. I must ask you to let me go back alone.”
“Alice, I love you.”
“I’m sorry you said it — sorry, sorry.”
“Why?” he asked, with hopeless futility.
“Because there can be no love between us — not friendship even — not acquaintance.”
“I shouldn’t have asked for your acquaintance, your friendship, if—” His words conveyed a delicate reproach, and they stung her, because they put her in the wrong.
“No matter,” she began wildly. “I didn’t mean to wound you. But we must part, and we must never see each other again:”
He stood confused, as if he could not make it out or believe it. “But yesterday—”
“It’s to-day now.”
“Ah, no! It’s last night. And I can explain.”
“No!” she cried. “You shall not make me out so mean and vindictive. I don’t care for last night, nor for anything that happened.” This was not true, but it seemed so to her at the moment; she thought that she really no longer resented his association with Miss Anderson and his separation from herself in all that had taken place.
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t tell you. But everything is over between us — that’s all.”
“But yesterday — and all these days past — you seemed—”
“It’s unfair of you to insist — it’s ungenerous, ungentlemanly.”
That word, which from a woman’s tongue always strikes a man like a blow in the face, silenced Mavering. He set his lips and bowed, and they parted. She turned upon her way, and he kept the path which she had been going.
It was not the hour when the piazzas were very full, and she slipped into the dim hotel corridor undetected, or at least undetained. She flung into her room, and confronted her mother.
Mrs. Pasmer was there looking into a trunk that had overflowed from her own chamber. “What is the matter?” she said to her daughter’s excited face.
“Mr. Mavering—”
“Well?”
“And I refused him.”
Mrs. Pasmer was one of those ladies who in any finality have a keen retrovision of all the advantages of a different conclusion. She had been thinking, since she told Dan Mavering which way Alice had gone to walk, that if he were to speak to her now, and she were to accept him, it would involve a great many embarrassing consequences; but she had consoled herself with the probability that he would not speak so soon after the effects of last night, but would only try at the furthest to make his peace with Alice. Since he had spoken, though, and she had refused him, Mrs. Pasmer instantly saw all the pleasant things that would have followed in another event. “Refused him?” she repeated provisionally, while she gathered herself for a full exploration of all the facts.
“Yes, mamma; and I can’t talk about it. I wish never to hear his name again, or to see him, or to speak to him.”
“Why, of course not,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a fine smile, from the vantage-ground of her superior years, “if you’ve refused him.” She left the trunk which she had been standing over, and sat down, while Alice swept to and fro before her excitedly. “But why did you refuse him, my dear?”
“Why? Because he’s detestable — perfectly ignoble.”
Her mother probably knew how to translate these exalted expressions into the more accurate language of maturer life. “Do you mean last night?”
“Last night?” cried Alice tragically. “No. Why should I care for last night?”
“Then I don’t understand what you mean,” retorted Mrs. Pasmer. “What did he say?” she demanded, with authority.
“Mamma, I can’t talk about it — I won’t.”
“But you must, Alice. It’s your duty. Of course I must know about it. What did he say?”
Alice walked up and down the room with her lips firmly closed — like Mavering’s lips, it occurred to her; and then she opened them, but without speaking.
“What did he say?” persisted her mother, and her persistence had its effect.
“Say?” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “He tried to make me say.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Well?”
“But I forced him to speak, and then — I rejected him. That’s all.”
“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He was afraid of you.”
“And that’s what made it the more odious. Do you think I wished him to be afraid of me? Would that be any pleasure? I should hate myself if I had to quell anybody into being unlike themselves.” She sat down for a moment, and then jumped up again, and went to the window, for no reason, and came back.
“Yes,” said her mother impartially, “he’s light, and he’s roundabout. He couldn’t come straight at anything.”
“And would you have me accept such a — being?”
Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: “But he’s very sweet, and he’s as good as the day’s long, and he’s very fond of you, and — I thought you liked him.”
The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. “Oh, how can you say such a thing, mamma?”
She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her hands, and cried.
Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, “But if you feel so about it—”
“Mamma!” Alice sprang to her feet.
“It needn’t come from you. I could make some excuse to see him — write him a little note—”
“Never!” exclaimed Alice grandly. “What I’ve done I’ve done from my reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, very well,” said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her daughter’s tragics. “But if you think that the feelings have nothing to do with such a matter, you’re very much mistaken.” If she believed that her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or had not been able to give them, she did not say so.
The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the causes of Mavering’s going before the top of his hat disappeared below the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One faction held that he was going because Alice had refu
sed him, and that his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair. The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either. “What do you really think?” she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.
“Oh, what does it matter, at their age?” she demanded.
“But they’re just of the age when it does happen to matter,” suggested Mrs. Stamwell.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and that’s what makes the whole thing so perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest business affair? Of course not. They’re babes in arms, morally and mentally speaking. People haven’t the data for being wisely in love till they’ve reached the age when they haven’t the least wish to be so. Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can look back and see that I did; and, what’s more preposterous still, I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit to accept or reject each other at that infantile period—”
“Do you really think so?” asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of Mrs. Brinkley’s irony.
“Yes, it does seem out of all reason,” admitted Mrs. Stamwell.
“Of course it is,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “If she has rejected him, she’s done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty. Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved each other.”
Miss Cotton reflected a moment. “It is strange that such an important question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley — and she made herself comfortable in an arm chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must pass— “but it’s only part and parcel of the whole affair. I’m sure that no grown person can see the ridiculous young things — inexperienced, ignorant, featherbrained — that nature intrusts with children, their immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies, without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole race doesn’t teeth and die. Yes, there’s one thing I feel pretty sure of — that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn’t to be mothers at all, there ought to be only grandmothers.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 359
