Chapter XI
THREE DAYS WENT BY. Roscmary did not come to him. She had recovered herself. She was just the same.
He did not press her to come, or to tell him anything. He began to be afraid that she never would.
Next door, Paul Townsend worked in his garden, carelessly healthy and happy and strong and visible. Old Mrs. Pyne sat on the porch. Young Jeanie flitted in and out. The cottage ran on, exempt from life and change, in that spurious harmony.
Mr. Gibson spent much time alone with a book open. He contemplated his innocence.
Ethel was right. He did not know one-tenth of what went on. He was ignorant in most fields. Modem psychological theories were to him just theories, to play games with. He'd believed in the poetry. Honor. Courage. Sacrifice. Old-fashioned words. Labels, for nothing? Oh, long ago, he had hidden himself in books, in words, but not the harsh words of fact. Poetry! Why? Because he was too thin-skinned and not brave enough to bear realities. He had not faced facts. He did not even know what they were. He must lean on Ethel, ufi'til he learned more.
He had been strangely innocent, now he saw. . . . Socially innocent. .He had derived a good deal of innocent pleasure from the fact that students and teachers spoke to him on the campus paths, or in a corridor, or sometimes even on a street of the town. A nod, a greeting, a murmur of his name, had secured to him his identity. (I am not lost in eternity. I am Mr. Gibson of the English Department and there are those who know it.)
But he had had enough of people in the course of a day. His captive audiences, his classes, had permitted him the exercise of his voice. Then there were office hours during which he sometimes talked to students with kindness, with optimism for them, and only the most meager precautions against their guile and their flattery and their showing off had been enough. So he had felt a fullness in his days, and a shy trust in the near little world; and his privacy, his solitude, had seemed natural and pleasant and not limited. Actually he had lived a most narrow, a most sheltered, a most innocent life. He knew very little about 'reality.'
This must be how he had come to do, at the age of fifty-five, so stupid, so wicked, so foolish a thing. He had married a sick defenseless dependent trusting Rosemary. On the ridiculous premise that it would be an 'arrangement.' He now looked back upon the joyful early days with pity for his own blithe ignorance. The facts of flesh. The facts of propinquity. He had ignored all facts in a cloud of
x)mantic nonsense. Yes, the romantic sentimental silly lotion that he would be a healer! What ego! Then, worse, low could he have thought, ever, for one moment, that iiis quixotic marriage could turn into a love match? That lad been impossible from the beginning, and set forth in plain arithmetic. Thirty-two from fifty-five leaves twenty-three and ever would.
He was her father . . . emotionally. He was help, kindness, protection, and she loved him for all this, as he knew. What frightened him now was the possibility that Rosemary might go on with her bargain, until he was ancient, and never tell even herself how she wished that he would die. Rosemary might undertake to endure. She had endured eight years with the old professor.
She would not want to hurt him. Why, she had felt almost distracted with grief there in the hospital when she had blamed herself for so trivial a thing as his broken bones.
She would neither hurt him nor break her obligations. She would freeze in loyalty and cheat herself. It was possible she did not know (or let herself know) why she had gone so naturally into Paul's arms.
The more he thought about Paul and his virtues, which were many, the more Mr. Gibson felt sure that Ethel was right. Rosemary had fallen, or was going to fall, in love with him, who could not possibly represent her father, but was of her own generation, virile, charming, good and kind. She could not help it.
He perceived that Rosemary had better never know a thing about his foolishness, for what would be the good if she knew? Pity did not interest Mr. Gibson in the least. He wanted none of it. So he banished his love, exiled it forever from his heart. He would think no more about that.
He retreated deliberately. He seemed to absorb himself in reading and writing. He tried not to notice . . . which might help him not to care . . . where Rosemary was or what she was doing. If he felt depressed, he told himself this was nobody's fault but his own and it would pass.
One day he found a stanza:
The gentle word, the generous intent
The decent things that men can do or say
All these to gladdep her I freely spent
But could not touch her when she turned away.
He shut up the bcK>k. Catullus was also a fool. That was the only meaning of it. An4 a whiner, too. Mr. Gibson resolved to be no whiner. He read no more poetry.
His depression did not pass. It deepened. Night and day he lived with it and forgot how it felt to be without it. He began to assume that this was what one got used to, as one grew old.
But a change was coming. The day was coming upon which the women were going, as Mr. Gibson had once put it, into trade. They were going on the same morning, and Mr. Gibson, in his misery, did not bewail the coincidence, for he no longer yearned to be alone with Rosemary.
Ethel, accomplished secretary that she was, had gotten herself a plum of a job that let her off at four in the afternoons. This, she explained with satisfaction, would permit her to be the cook at dinner time.
Rosemary's hours were a little longer. She was going to assist the proprietor of a small dress shop, helping with the stock at first and looking forward to becoming a saleslady. It was an excellent beginning.
In further coincidence, the «me day would see the last of Mrs. Violette. Mr. Gibson was going to be alone.
On the eve of this day, the three of them sat in the living room according to habit. Music was playing low from the radio for a cultural background. Rosemary was basting white collar and cuffs upon a navy-blue dress against tomorrow. Ethel was knitting, a thing she did with uncanny skill. (Hours and hours she had sat knitting before her radio, listening to music, to political speeches, to educational programs. She preferred a radio to a record player. She'd never had a record player.)Mr. Gibson was turning the pages of a book sometimes two at a time. His face was calm and benign. The scene was domestic and harmonious, but his sense of it was not ... for this was the end
