Chapter 10

“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 refused 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.”

The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become grave. At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a way of treating serious things was not a little wicked.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we shall have to go back to the idea that engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the judgment, but by the affections.”

“I don't know what's intended,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I know what is. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own way, and I must say I don't think the judgment could make a greater mess of it. In fact,” she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton's eye, “I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise.”

Miss Cotton said nothing. The other ladies said, “Why, Mrs. Brinkley!”

“Yes. The thing has gone altogether too far. The pendulum has swung in that direction out of all measure. We are married too much. And as a natural consequence we are divorced too much. The whole case is in a nutshell: if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and that great abuse would be corrected, at any rate.”

All the ladies laughed, Miss Cotton more and more sorrowfully. She liked to have people talk as they do in genteel novels. Mrs. Brinkley's bold expressions were a series of violent shocks to her nature, and imparted a terrible vibration to the fabric of her whole little rose-coloured ideal world; if they had not been the expressions of a person whom a great many unquestionable persons accepted, who had such an undoubted standing, she would have thought them very coarse. As it was, they had a great fascination for her. “But in a case like that of”--she looked round and lowered her voice--“our young friends, I'm sure you couldn't rejoice if the engagement were broken off.”

“Well, I'm not going to be 'a mush of concession,' as Emerson says, Miss Cotton. And, in the first place, how do you know they're engaged?”

“Ah, I don't; I didn't mean that they were. But wouldn't it be a little pathetic if, after all that we've seen going on, his coming here expressly on her account, and his perfect devotion to her for the past two weeks, it should end in nothing?”

“Two weeks isn't a very long time to settle the business of a lifetime.”

“No.”

“Perhaps she's proposed delay; a little further acquaintance.”

“Oh, of course that would be perfectly right. Do you think she did?”

“Not if she's as wise as the rest of us would have been at her age. But I think she ought.”

“Yes?” said Miss Cotton semi-interrogatively.

“Do you think his behaviour last night would naturally impress her with his wisdom and constancy?”

“No, I can't say that it would, but--”

“And this Alice of yours is rather a severe young person. She has her ideas, and I'm afraid they're rather heroic. She'd be just with him, of course. But there's nothing a man dreads so much as justice--some men.”

“Yes,” pursued Miss Cotton, “but that very disparity--I know they're very unlike--don't you think--”

“Oh yes, I know the theory about that. But if they were exactly alike in temperament, they'd be sufficiently unlike for the purposes of counterparts. That was arranged once for all when 'male and female created He them.' I've no doubt their fancy was caught by all the kinds of difference they find in each other; that's just as natural as it's silly. But the misunderstanding, the trouble, the quarrelling, the wear and tear of spirit, that they'd have to go through before they assimilated--it makes me tired, as the boys say. No: I hope, for the young man's own sake, he's got his conge.”

“But he's so kind, so good--”

“My dear, the world is surfeited with kind, good men. There are half a dozen of them at the other end of the piazza smoking; and there comes another to join them,” she added, as a large figure, semicircular in profile, advanced itself from a doorway toward a vacant chair among the smokers. “The very soul of kindness and goodness.” She beckoned toward her husband, who caught sight of her gesture. “Now I can tell you all his mental processes. First, surprise at seeing some one beckoning; then astonishment that it's I, though who else should beckon him?--then wonder what I can want; then conjecture that I may want him to come here; then pride in his conjecture; rebellion; compliance.”

The ladies were in a scream of laughter as Mr. Brinkley lumbered heavily to their group.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you believe in broken engagements? Now quick--off-hand!”

“Who's engaged?”

“No matter.”

“Well, you know Punch's advice to those about to marry?”

“I know--chestnuts,” said his wife scornfully. They dismissed each other with tender bluntness, and he went in to get a match.

“Ah, Mrs. Brinkley,” said one of the ladies, “it would be of no use for you to preach broken engagements to any one who saw you and Mr. Brinkley together.” They fell upon her, one after another, and mocked her with the difference between her doctrine and practice; and they were all the more against her because they had been perhaps a little put down by her whimsical sayings.

“Yes,” she admitted. “But we've been thirty years coming to the understanding that you all admire so much; and do you think it was worth the time?”

XXI.

Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him off. It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery. They had tried to make Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her; and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between them, and that they had agreed together she should not come. He had to stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John. The fond adieux of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.

When it was all over, he went down into his state-room, and shut himself in, and let his misery rollover him. He felt as if there were a flood of it, and it washed him to and fro, one gall of shame, of self-accusal, of bitterness, from head to foot. But in it all he felt no resentment toward Alice, no wish to wreak any smallest part of his suffering upon her. Even while he had hoped for her love, it seemed to him that he had not seen her in all that perfection which she now had in irreparable loss. His soul bowed itself fondly over the thought of her; and, stung as he was by that last cruel word of hers, he could not upbraid her. That humility which is love casting out selfishness, the most egotistic of the passions triumphing over itself--Mavering experienced it to the full. He took all the blame. He could not see that she had ever encouraged him to hope for her love, which now appeared a treasure heaven--far beyond his scope; he could only call himself fool, and fool, and fool, and wonder that he could have met her in the remoteness of that morning with the belief that but for the follies of last night she might have answered him differently. He believed now that, whatever had gone before, she must still have rejected him. She had treated his presumption very leniently; she had really spared him.

It went on, over and over. Sometimes it varied a little, as when he thought of how, when she should tell her mother, Mrs. Pasmer must laugh. He pictured them both laughing at him; and then Mr. Pasmer--he had scarcely passed a dozen words with him-coming in and asking what they were laughing at, and their saying, and his laughing too.

At other times he figured them as incensed at his temerity, which must seem to them greater and greater, as now it seemed to him. He had never thought meanly of himself, and the world so far had seemed to think well of him; but because Alice Pasmer was impossible to him, he felt that it was an unpardonable boldness in him to have dreamed of her. What must they be saying of his having passed from the ground of society compliments and light flirtation to actually telling Alice that he loved her?

He wondered what Mrs. Pasmer had thought of his telling her that he had come to Campobello to consider the question whether he should study law or go into business, and what motive she had supposed he had in telling her that. He asked himself what motive he had, and tried to pretend that he had none. He dramatised conversations with Mrs. Pasmer in which he laughed it off.

He tried to remember all that had passed the day before at the picnic, and whether Alice had done or said anything to encourage him, and he could not find that she had. All her trust and freedom was because she felt perfectly safe with him from any such disgusting absurdity as he had been guilty of. The ride home through the mist, with its sweet intimacy, that parting which had seemed so full of tender intelligence, were parts of the same illusion. There had been nothing of it on her side from the beginning but a kindliness which he had now flung away for ever.

He went back to the beginning, and tried to remember the point where he had started in this fatal labyrinth of error. She had never misled him, but he had misled himself from the first glimpse of her.

Whatever was best in his light nature, whatever was generous and self-denying, came out in this humiliation. From the vision of her derision he passed to a picture of her suffering from pity for him, and wrung with a sense of the pain she had given him. He promised himself to write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy of that. He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious thought. He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship. In the end he died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him. He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the berth where he had tumbled himself. The state-room had that smell of parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after his mother's health began to fail.

He went down on the deck near the ladies' saloon, where the second-class passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip. The passengers were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the music without smiling. One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and another began to do the rheumatic uncle's breakdown. Mavering said to himself: “I can't stand that. Oh, what a fool I am! Alice, I love you. O merciful heavens! O infernal jackass! Ow! Gaw!”

At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to the States after some job in the Provinces. They smoked their pipes and whined their Neapolitan dialect together. It made Mavering think of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass. The inscription on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his life--his desolate, broken life--a perpetual exile, like Dante's. At the same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: “Oh, what a fool I am! Oh, idiot! beast! Oh! oh!” The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and bestowing alms.

He groaned aloud, so that the Italians noticed it, and doubtless spoke of it among themselves. He could not understand their dialect, but he feigned them saying respectfully compassionate things. Then he gnashed his teeth again, and cursed his folly. When the bell rang for supper he found himself very hungry, and ate heavily. After that he went out in front of the cabin, and walked up and down, thinking, and trying not to think. The turmoil in his mind tired him like a prodigious physical exertion.

Toward ten o'clock the night grew rougher. The sea was so phosphorescent that it broke in sheets and flakes of pale bluish flame from the bows and wheel-houses, and out in the dark the waves revealed themselves in flashes and long gleams of fire. One of the officers of the boat came and hung with Mavering over the guard. The weird light from the water was reflected on their faces, and showed them to each other.

“Well, I never saw anything like this before. Looks like hell; don't it?” said the officer.

“Yes,” said Mavering. “Is it uncommon?”

“Well, I should say so. I guess we're going to have a picnic.”

Mavering thought of blueberries, but he did not say anything.