Since it is the nature of women to want to be loved, too great encouragement ought not to be derived from the fact that if you kiss one of them on a summer night, her arm rises and involuntarily comes to rest on your shoulder. Although so much time and effort have gone into denying it, the truth of the matter is that women are human, susceptible to physical excitement and the moon. This susceptibility is only skin-deep. (Something would have to be done about the ugly seam that held the skirt and waist together, Martha King decided. She tried draping the sash in various ways, and then with a reckless gleam in her eyes, burned her bridges behind her. No dress with one long sleeve and one short has ever yet looked right. If the dress was short sleeved, wouldn’t the waist have to be higher? Or was it the embroidered panel that was causing all the difficulty?) Every woman is a walled town, with ring after ring of armed reservations and hesitations. They can hold off an army for years, and they are not always to be trusted even when they open the gates of their own accord. The citadel has cells, secret places where resistance can survive long after the enemy is, to all appearances, in possession. The conqueror has to take all, the defeated lose everything before the natural balance and pride of either can be regained.
What distinguished Austin King from the God-fearing, church-going people who attended Wednesday-night prayer meetings, was that he allowed her to be angry and unreasonable and unfair. He also revealed something of himself—not the effort to do right, but a simple falling into it, at times, as if there was no other choice open to him—which touched her heart. Even so she would not marry him.
Nothing is accomplished in the way of courtship that does not first take place in the pursuer’s imagination. One evening, as he was crossing the street in front of her house, the words “I Austin do take thee, Martha” came unbidden into his mind. His life was quite changed and his chances were greatly improved when he reached the other side of the street and stepped up on the grass between the kerbing and the sidewalk. He carried himself more confidently. There was a different look in his eyes. Martha Hastings, watching him cut across the lawn instead of coming up the walk, took fright. The enemy had got through the outer wall.
The gentlest person has depths of cunning, resources of patience and persistence and strategy. Knowing that Martha Hastings was frightened, and wanting in so far as possible to be kind, Austin never again asked her to marry him. Instead he began to talk about the future as though it were now settled. He appeared to be happy and serene when he was with her. She was not taken in by this subterfuge, but on the other hand, there seemed to be no way to combat it. Austin brought to life, one by one, four imaginary children, each with a name and nature of its own. The oldest was a boy, a blond, white-faced dreamer, late to meals, moody, and frequently irritable. Then a girl, a passionate, unpredictable child, never saddened or elated by the same things that affected other children; now needing to be petted and loved, now fearlessly scaling roofs, climbing apple trees. Then a thoroughly conventional boy whose only concern was to be like other people and who disapproved of his family. The third boy was short and stocky and brave, a hero in the small size, all heart and no subtlety, always running to catch up with the others.
The idea of marriage with Austin King, Martha Hastings could reject, but there was no denying that he was the father of these children who were so real to her. For a while in self-defence she spoke of them as his children, and when that failed her, she had to accept not only them but also the house that he conjured up one night in the porch swing—the house surrounded by very old apple trees, with the snow lying a foot deep outside, and the children asleep upstairs, and the two of them talking in low voices by their own fireside.
Realizing, finally, that it was too late to send him away, that his will and his imagination were stronger and more persistent than hers, she did the one thing left for her to do. She packed a suitcase and ran away, leaving no word for him or even an address where he could write to her. Her uncle and aunt, sworn to secrecy, put her on the train one damp November morning, and in a mood of wild and laughing elation she looked out of the train window and saw the town of Draperville slipping away from her.
Between four and four-thirty, the locusts grew still. Martha King finished cutting the threads that held the waist and skirt together and then glanced at the clock. It was later than she thought. They ought to be coming home any time now. She folded the pieces of what had been Austin’s favourite dress and put them away in a chest where she kept sewing materials. When she went downstairs she opened the screen door and called “You’d better come in now,” to Ab, who was riding her tricycle up and down the walk.
“Just one more time,” Ab said.
The sky was clouded over with running clouds. Martha turned and went out to the kitchen. “There’s going to be a thunderstorm,” she said to Rachel. “It’ll cool the air, but I do wish they’d come.”
10
The clock face in the courthouse dome said five o’clock when Austin King drove around the square and down Lafayette Street with Nora on the front seat beside him and Randolph in back, between his mother and father, holding a bloody handkerchief to his forehead. The horse was in a lather. Austin had driven him harder than he would have under ordinary circumstances, on such a hot day, but it had not been fast enough for the Potters, who, by their anxious silence, had urged him to drive faster.
He stayed in the cart in front of Dr. Seymour’s office while the Potters went inside. When they came out, ten minutes later, Randolph had a neat bandage over his left eye, and looked handsomer than ever, but the gravity had not left their faces.
The tops of the trees were swaying wildly in the wind and the first drops of rain were splashing on the pavement when the cart turned into Elm Street and drove up before the Kings’ house. The Potters got out and hurried into the house, with the hedge apple and several ears of corn. Austin drove the horse and cart around to the barn.
“What on earth happened?” Martha King asked, as the Potters burst in upon her.
“The man warned Randolph about the dog,” Mrs. Potter said, “but you can’t keep that boy from making friends with an animal.”
“Accidents will happen,” Mr. Potter said.
“Randolph, go on upstairs and lie down,” Mrs. Potter said. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
“We were about ready to leave,” Mr. Potter said, “and I was trying to round everybody up so we wouldn’t get caught in the storm when——”
“Randolph began running in circles,” Mrs. Potter interrupted her husband, “with the dog after him. They disappeared around the corner of the house, and when Randolph came back there was a gash in his forehead——”
“About two inches long,” Mr. Potter said, “down his forehead and through his eyebrow——”
“It was bleeding,” Mrs. Potter said.
“The dog wasn’t frothing at the mouth?” Martha asked.
Mr. Potter shook his head.
“Randolph isn’t used to these Northern dogs,” Mrs. Potter said. “He should have been more careful. Apparently the dog got excited and leapt at his face.”
“The doctor took eight stitches in it,” Mr. Potter said impressively.
“It hurt his feelings,” Mrs. Potter said as she turned towards the stairs, “but he’ll get over it. Cousin Martha, you should have been with us. We had a very nice drive, in spite of the way it turned out.”
Austin unharnessed the horse, led him into the stall, threw a blanket over him, and gave him some oats. Then he stood in the doorway, looking out at the rain. The sky had turned from black to olive green, and the garden was illuminated by a flash of white lightning which was followed by a clap of thunder that made him thrust his neck forward involuntarily and hunch his shoulders, as if the thunderbolt had been intended for him. His face was relaxed and cheerful. The storm had released all the accumulated tension of the long hot day. He didn’t mind being marooned in the barn or the fact that the house was full of visitors. Something inside him, he did not k
now what, had broken loose, had swung free, leaving him utterly calm and at peace with the world.
Mrs. Danforth, looking out of her bedroom window, thought how deceptive appearances are. Austin King, usually so restrained and dignified beyond his years, was running through the rain with long leaping strides like a boy of twelve.
11
The bedroom lights were on because of the unnatural darkness outside, and Austin, all dressed and ready to go downstairs for dinner, was sitting on the edge of the bed. His hair was neatly combed, and his starched collar and Sunday suit imparted a kind of stiffness to his gesture of apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It never occurred to me.”
“That’s what I say,” Martha said calmly. “It never occurred to you.”
She was seated at her dressing-table in her petticoat and camisole. Her waist was tightly corseted, and her full bust and shoulders had a curving elegance that was of a piece with the carved monogram on the silver brush and comb and hand-mirror on her dressing-table.
“I thought if you wanted to come, you’d say so,” Austin said.
“I did say so.”
“When?” he asked, in amazement.
“Before lunch,” Martha said, still looking in the mirror.
“I don’t remember your saying that you wanted to come driving with us. I must not have heard you.”
“I said I’d like to get out of the house for a while.”
“Is that what you meant?” Austin said. “I wasn’t sure at the time. I thought you were just tired and irritable and wished they’d never come.”
“If you weren’t sure, you might have asked me.”
“It was so hot and all, and I’d have given anything to have stayed home myself instead of taking a long drive, so naturally I——”
The rain had started coming in through the screens. Austin got up and closed both windows, and then went back and sat down on the bed. What does she see? he wondered. What on earth does she see when she holds her hand-mirror and looks sidewise into it?
One sometimes notices in public places, in restaurants especially, women dressed elaborately, wearing furs, equipped with diamond rings on their fingers, and their faces so hideous that the observer turns away out of pity. Yet no pity is asked for; nothing but pride looks out of the ugly face.
If Austin King had suddenly said, “You have the most lovely eyes of any woman I have ever seen and wherever I go I am always looking, always comparing other women with you. Of them all, my darling, you are the most beautiful, the most romantic. I love, beyond all reason or measure, the curve and width of your upper eyelids, and your hair that always looks as if you had been out walking and the wind had swept it back from your forehead. I love the things your mouth says to me, and the soft shadow right now at the side of your throat …” the chances are that Martha would have listened carefully and perhaps in some inner part of her nature been satisfied for a moment. But only for a moment.
She put the hand-mirror face down on the dressing-table and looked into the large mirror in front of her. She never looked into either mirror a moment longer than necessary. If she had cared to look at her husband, all she needed to do was to shift her glance to meet his, also reflected in the mirror, but she avoided his eyes, apparently without any effort on her part.
The beautiful blind passion of running away is permittea only to children, convicts, and slaves. If you are subject to the truant officer and the Law of Bedtime there will be doorways that will shelter you and freight cars that will take you a long way from home. If you are a safe-cracker and cannot walk in a straight line for more than a hundred yards without coming face to face with a high stone wall, there are ways of tunnelling under the wall, under the five-year sentence, and confederates waiting outside. If you cannot own property but are owned yourself, you may, hiding in the daytime and travelling across country by back roads at night, eventually reach the border. But if any free person tries to run away he will discover sooner or later that he has been running all the while in a circle and that this circle is taking him inexorably back to the person or place he ran away from. The free person who runs away is no better off than a fish with a hook in his mouth, given plenty of line so that he can tire himself out and be reeled in calmly and easily by his own destiny.
“I wouldn’t have gone if you had asked me,” Martha King said. “There were too many things that had to be done here. It’s just that I don’t like to have it taken for granted that I never go anywhere.”
In a happy panic Martha Hastings left town and went to Indianapolis to stay with Helen Burke, who was teaching school there. They had known each other since they were little girls, and Helen (whom no man had ever asked to marry) listened patiently night after night while Martha talked about Austin, twisting his words about to suit her own purposes, throwing a sinister light on innocent circumstances, and, on rather flimsy evidence, convicting the man she loved. Helen Burke believed everything that Martha told her, sympathized with and was caught up in the excitement of her friend’s dramatic dilemma. “I don’t know how you lived through it,” she would say, and her eyes would fill with tears over the monstrous cunning and misbehaviour of a boy she had known ever since the first grade and whose name always headed the honour roll. “And I had no one to turn to,” Martha would say, “except you.” When at the end of ten days, Martha Hastings packed her bag and said good-bye, Helen Burke was too emotionally exhausted to do anything about it. Offering fresh counsel and foreseeing new difficulties, she went with Martha to the station, before school opened in the morning, and had trouble all that day enforcing discipline in the classroom.
The movements of Martha King’s arms, her gestures as she pinned her hair in place on top of her head, were dreamy and thoughtful. “The whole thing is of no importance,” she said. “I just mentioned it in passing. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure in any way. And so long as you are——”
“But it is important,” Austin protested. “If you think for one minute that I don’t enjoy having you with me——”
“I’m useful to you as someone to run the house. I know you appreciate that.”
There was an extra loud clap of thunder and Martha winced. She was not afraid of electrical storms but they made her nervous.
Martha Hastings had written to her aunt and uncle that she was coming, but no one but Helen Burke knew that she was on the 11.15 train. She sat looking out of the dirty window at fields and farmhouses and roads leading in all directions and felt her own hold on life to be very slight, to be slipping away from her like the flat landscape. If she could have stayed on the train forever she would have, but it was leading her towards a decision that she was not yet prepared to make, and suddenly, as though a familiar voice had spoken, it came to her that she must let chance decide. If Austin was at the station to meet her, she would marry him. It would be the hand of fate, and she would have no choice but to follow where it pointed. If the station platform was deserted, if he didn’t know just by his love for her that she was coming back to him, then they were not meant for each other. In a state of peace with the world and with herself she sat and looked out at the red barns and the round silos, at a white horse in a pasture and at cows huddled around a tree for shade. “Draperville!” the conductor shouted. “Draperville!” and the train began to slow down. Through the plumed smoke outside the window she saw a church steeple, the monument works, and then the station. The train would go on to Peoria and for a second, standing in the aisle, she considered wildly the possibility of going on with it. There was no one she knew in Peoria, no friend waiting to give her shelter. As she stepped down from the train he was the first person she saw, his head above the other heads on the station platform. He had seen her and was coming towards her. The face that she presented to him was one he had never seen before, quiet, relaxed, without the slightest trace of indecision or of anxiety.
That night, sitting in the porch swing, she told him that she would marry him. She also asked him not to
tell anyone, but this request, in the midst of his happiness, he failed to attach any importance to. The next night, when he went to see her, her serenity was gone. She told him that she didn’t want to be engaged yet, that she needed time to think it over. And then, seeing the strange expression that passed over his face, she said, “You haven’t told anyone, have you?”
“I’ve told my mother,” he said. “She’s going to give you a diamond pin that belonged to Grandmother Curtis. She asked me to bring you to tea tomorrow afternoon.”
“Oh, Austin, how could you?”
“And I told Mr. Holby,” he said.
“How can I face your mother when I don’t know yet whether I want to marry you? I told you not to tell anyone!”
“I’m sorry,” Austin said helplessly. “I forgot. If you want me to, I’ll tell them we’re not engaged. That it was a mistake.”
This humiliation she could not bear for him to have.
Sad of heart, he had to go on accepting congratulations. Martha had not actually broken the engagement, she had suspended it, left it open and in doubt. She kept the diamond pin, but did not wear it. He came back night after night, he was gentle with her, he was patient, he was unyielding. During all this time he did not reproach or blame her, even to himself. Martha Hastings was catapulted into a dreamlike series of showers, engagement presents, congratulations, and attentions from Austin’s family, and in the natural course of events found herself with Austin’s mother addressing a pile of wedding invitations.
“I don’t know what else I can say except that I’m very sorry,” Austin said. “And since you didn’t really want to go anyway, I don’t exactly see what harm is done.”
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