She must have known me yesterday when she asked me to go and see what Papa was doing.
As for “waiting,” he may have to wait years and years. And I’m forty-five now.
IV
The round black eye of the mirror looked at them. Their figures would be there, hers and Richard’s, at the bottom of the black crystal bowl, small like the figures in the wrong end of a telescope, very clear in the deep, clear swirl of the glass.
They were sitting close together on the old rose-chintz-covered couch. Her couch. You could see him putting the cushions at her back, tucking the wide Victorian skirt in close about the feet in the black velvet slippers. And she would lie there with her poor hands folded in the white cashmere shawl.
Richard knew what you were thinking.
“You can’t expect me,” he was saying, “to behave like my uncle. … Besides, it’s a little too late, isn’t it? … We said, whatever we did we wouldn’t go back on it. If it wasn’t wrong then, Mary, it isn’t wrong now.”
“It isn’t that, Richard.”
(No. Not that. Pure and remorseless then. Pure and remorseless now.)
She wondered whether he had heard it. The crunching on the gravel walk under the windows, stopping suddenly when the feet stepped on to the grass. And the hushed growl of the men’s voices. Baxter and the gardener. They had come to see whether the light would go out again behind the yellow blinds as it had gone out last night.
If you were a coward; if you had wanted to get off scot-free, it was too late.
Richard knows I’m not a coward. Funk wouldn’t keep me from him. It isn’t that.
“What is it, then?”
“Can’t you see, can’t you feel that it’s no use coming again, just for this? It’ll never be what it was then. It’ll always be like last night, and you’ll think I don’t care. Something’s holding me back from you. Something that’s happened to me. I don’t know yet what it is.”
“Nerves. Nothing but nerves.”
“No. I thought it was nerves last night. I thought it was this room. Those two poor ghosts, looking at us. I even thought it might be Mark and Roddy—all of them—tugging at me to get me away from you. … But it isn’t that. It’s something in me.”
“You’re trying to tell me you don’t want me.”
“I’m trying to tell you what happened. I did want you, all last year. It was so awful that I had to stop it. You couldn’t go on living like that. … I willed and willed not to want you.”
“So did I. All the willing in the world couldn’t stop me.”
“It isn’t that sort of willing. You might go on all your life like that and nothing would happen. You have to find it out for yourself; and even that might take you all your life. … It isn’t the thing people call willing at all. It’s much queerer. Awfully queer.”
“How—queer?”
“Oh—the sort of queerness you don’t like talking about.”
“I’m sorry, Mary. You seem to be talking about something, but I haven’t the faintest notion what it is. But you can make yourself believe anything you like if you keep on long enough.”
“No. Half the time I’m doing it I don’t believe it’ll come off. … But it always does. Every time it’s the same. Every time; exactly as if something had happened.”
“Poor Mary.”
“But, Richard, it makes you absolutely happy. That’s the queer part of it. It’s how you know.”
“Know what?”
He was angry.
“That there’s something there. That it’s absolutely real.”
“Real?”
“Why not? If it makes you happy without the thing you care most for in the whole world. … There must be something there. It must be real. Real in a way that nothing else is.”
“You aren’t happy now,” he said.
“No. And you’re with me. And I care for you more than anything in the whole world.”
“I thought you said that was all over.”
“No. It’s only just begun.”
“I can’t say I see it.”
“You’ll see it all right soon. … When you’ve gone.”
V
It was no use not marrying him, no use sending him away, as long as he was tied to you by his want.
You had no business to be happy. It wasn’t fair. There was he, tied to you tighter than if you had married him. And there you were in your inconceivable freedom. Supposing you could give him the same freedom, the same happiness? Supposing you could “work” it for him, make It (whatever it was) reach out and draw him into your immunity, your peace?
VI
Whatever It was It was there. You could doubt away yourself and Richard, but you couldn’t doubt away It.
It might leave you for a time, but it came back. It came back. Its going only intensified the wonder of its return. You might lose all sense of it between its moments; but the thing was certain while it lasted. Doubt it away, and still what had been done for you lasted. Done for you once for all, two years ago. And that wasn’t the first time.
Even supposing you could doubt away the other times.—You might have made the other things happen by yourself. But not that. Not giving Richard up and still being happy. That was something you couldn’t possibly have done yourself. Or you might have done it in time—time might have done it for you—but not like that, all at once, making that incredible, supernatural happiness and peace out of nothing at all, in one night, and going on in it, without Richard. Richard himself didn’t believe it was possible. He simply thought it hadn’t happened.
Still, even then, you might have said it didn’t count so long as it was nothing but your private adventure; but not now, never again now when it had happened to Richard.
His letter didn’t tell you whether he thought there
