“It wasn’t for you. It was for the little girl who used to go for walks with me. … She was the nicest little girl. She said the jolliest things in the dearest little voice. ‘How can a man like you care to talk to a child like me?’ ”
“Did I say that? I don’t remember.”
“She said it.”
“It sounds rather silly of her.”
“She wasn’t silly. She was clever as they make them. And she was pretty too. She had lots of hair, hanging down her back. Curling. … And they take her away from me and I wait three years for her. She knew I was waiting. And when I come back to her she won’t look at me. She sits on the fender and stares at the fire. She wears horrible black clothes.”
“Because Papa’s dead.”
“She goes and cuts her hair all off. That isn’t because your father’s dead.”
“It’ll grow again.”
“Not for another three years. And I believe I hear your mother coming back.”
His chin dropped to his chest again. He brooded morosely. Presently Catty came in with the coffee.
The next day he was gone.
VI
“It seems to me,” her mother said, “you only care for him when he isn’t there.”
He had come again, twice, in July, in August. Each time her mother had said, “Are you sure you want him to come again? You know you weren’t very happy the last time.” And she had answered, “I know I’m going to be this time.”
“You see,” she said, “when he isn’t there you remember, and when he is there he makes you forget.”
“Forget what?”
“What it used to feel like.”
Mamma had smiled a funny, contented smile. Mamma was different. Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain.
The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August. You knew it would happen some day; but you thought of it as happening tomorrow or the day after rather than today. At three o’clock you started for a walk, never knowing how you might come back, and at five you found yourself sitting at tea in the orchard, safe. He would slouch along beside you, for miles, morosely. You thought of his mind swinging off by itself, shining where you couldn’t see it. You broke loose from him to run tearing along the road, to jump watercourses, to climb trees and grin down at him through the branches. Then he would wake up from his sulking. Sometimes he would be pleased and sometimes he wouldn’t. The engagement happened just after he had not been pleased at all.
She could still hear his voice saying “What do you do it for?” and her own answering.
“You must do something.”
“You needn’t dance jigs on the parapets of bridges.”
They slid through the gap into the fields. In the narrow path he stopped suddenly and turned.
“How can a child like you care for a man like me?” Mocking her singsong.
He stooped and kissed her. She shut her eyes so as not to see the puffiness.
“Will you marry me, Mary?”
VII
After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane.
“I do care for you, I do, really.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don’t care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself—what you’re feeling and thinking—and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?”
“You used to like it.”
“I don’t like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn’t cut her hair off.”
“How was I to know you’d mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don’t do?”
“Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?”
“I don’t think I’ve thought about it very much.”
“Haven’t you? Men don’t live to be thirty-seven without getting to know women; they can’t go about the world without meeting them. … There’s a little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She’s everything a man wants a woman to be.”
“Lots of hair?”
“Lots of hair. Stacks of it. And she’s clever. She can cook and sew and make her own clothes and her sisters’. She’s kept her father’s house since she was fifteen. Without a servant.”
“How awful for her. And you like her?”
“Yes, Mary.”
“I’m glad you like her. Who else?”
“A Frenchwoman in Paris. And a German woman in Hamburg. And an Englishwoman in London; the cleverest woman I know. She’s unhappy, Mary. Her husband behaves to her like a perfect brute.”
“Poor thing. I hope you’re nice to her.”
“She thinks I am.”
Silence. He peered into her face.
“Are you jealous of her, Mary?”
“I’m not jealous of any of them. You can marry them all if you want to.”
“I was going to marry one of them.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because the little girl in Essex wouldn’t let me.”
“Little beast!”
“So you’re jealous of her, are you? You needn’t be. She’s gone. She tried to swallow the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and it disagreed with her and she died.
“ ‘Nur einmal doch mächt’ ich dich sehen,
Und sinken vor dir auf’s Knie,
Und sterbend zu dir sprechen,
Madam, ich liebe Sie!’ ”
“What’s that? Oh, what’s that?”
“That—Madam—is Heine.”
VIII
“My dearest Maurice—”
It was her turn for writing. She wondered whether he would like to hear about the tennis party at the Vicarage. Mr. Spencer Rollitt’s nephew, Harry
