“Hello,” she would say.
“Why, hello, Kay,” I would answer, just as though I were surprised to hear her. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve just finished my orange juice,” Kay would say, “and Rough’s been sick on the dining room rug.”
Quite a lot of our conversation used to be about Rough’s insides.
“Harry,” she would say, “what did you do after you went home?” And I would tell her what I had done.
“Well, I kept on with Wells’s Outline of History,” she would say. “I’m up to the Chinese Empire now. Harry, what are you doing this afternoon?”
“Nothing much,” I would say. “I’m going to play squash later.”
“You’ll stop in, won’t you, on your way?”
It began to be a habit for me to stop in at the Motfords’ on my way home, and they seemed to expect me to do it. The teatray would always be ready in front of the fire, and sometimes Kay would be alone, and sometimes Mrs. Motford would be there with her. Mrs. Motford would ask how Mother was feeling and then she would discuss some article she had read in the Atlantic Monthly, and if I had not read it she would give it to me to read. We were on less difficult ground when we discussed Kay in a playful sort of way. Mrs. Motford would tell Kay she thought her dress was too short, even if dresses were getting shorter, and she would ask me to use my influence on Kay about this or that, because she had tried and tried herself, but Kay was very hard to manage. When Kay would ask me how much sugar I wanted in my tea, Mrs. Motford would tell her that she ought to remember. She told Kay that she must be very unobserving if she had to ask questions about cream or lemon when I came there tired from the office; Kay should remember that men in the afternoon were always tired from the office; some day Kay would think more about other people and less about her own amusement. Then sometimes if I stayed late enough Mr. Motford would come in from the club where he always stopped in the afternoon, and Mr. Motford would always shake hands with me as though he were very pleased to see me there but had not expected to see me in the least. Then he would tell what he had heard at the Club. When he did so Kay and her mother would look at their teacups and you could tell that they had heard it all a great many times before, and they would suggest that perhaps I had heard it also, and Mr. Motford would say he was sure I hadn’t and I would say that of course I hadn’t. Then Mr. Motford would ask where his book was, the book he had just been reading, and once he told me that Kay was just like her mother—she was always putting things away.
This all sounds dull enough, but there was never any effort about it. They just took it for granted that I was there to see Kay and that I liked to be there. When Kay and I were alone she would talk about her family as though I knew them as well as she did and we would talk about Mary and Mother. She would try now and then to be interested in Smith and Wilding, and once I tried to teach her a little about bonds and stocks, because she said it was so unintelligent of her not to know—but she never could understand them. We used to go on walks out in the country and on walks all over town. We always seemed to be meeting at someone else’s house at dinner, and gradually we seemed to be asked to the same places on Saturdays and Sundays. When Christmas came Kay gave me some things that she said she thought I needed—a pair of socks she had knitted herself and some neckties, because by then I was out of mourning. I was puzzled at the thought of what I should give her. I wanted to give her something she would like, but which at the same time would not look so expensive that it would worry her. I could not think of anything for a long while until I remembered a pair of German field glasses which I had picked up in the war, officer’s glasses in a field-gray case.
Christmas, I suppose, is always a time when a good many inhibitions and barriers break down. That year it made me think of all the Christmases when Father had been alive and it made me think of Marvin Myles. She seemed more real to me than she had been for a long while when I saw the crowds in front of the shop windows. The morning before Christmas when I went downtown to work I carried the field glasses with me, wrapped up very badly, ready to leave for Kay on my way home. There were some letters on my desk, one of them in Marvin’s writing. It was so unexpected that I thought everyone must be looking at me when I opened it. It was a card with a picture of a great star over a village, presumably Bethlehem, and under it she had written:
Darling, aren’t you coming back?
I wished she had not sent it. She should have known, if she had not heard from me, that I could not come back. She should have realized how much it all had hurt me, without adding to the hurt. She might as well have come right in there to see me. I seemed to be telling her that this was not the time or place—right outside the customers’ room, with the market opening in half an hour—but her voice kept rising.
“Darling, aren’t you coming back?”
It was just as though she did not want to listen to me, but kept repeating that same appeal, regardless of all the sights and sounds.
“Darling, aren’t you coming back?”
Then the telephone on my desk rang. I was relieved to hear it, because once I was speaking I was back where I belonged. It was Kay.
“How are you?” she asked. “Busy?”
“No,” I said, “there isn’t much to do before the holiday.”
“Come over early this afternoon. It’s an awful mess over here. We’re putting candles in all the front windows.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be over early.”
“I wish you would,” Kay said. “I always get lonely on Christmas Eve.”
When I hung up the telephone Marvin’s card was still staring up at me. I picked it up and tore it across and tore it again and dropped it into the wastebasket. Even so I could not get away from it for quite a while. When Mr. Wilding called to me, it took me a moment or two to concentrate on what he was saying. First he talked about some bonds of a small manufacturing company and then he asked me if I would not come to luncheon at the Club, the usual lunch which he gave to the partners before Christmas. I was not a partner yet, he told me, but he would like to have me there because I was my father’s son.
“It will be the next best thing to having John,” he said.
I was very pleased, because he would not have asked me with the partners if he had not thought that I was doing well and that there was a possibility of my being a partner some day. I thought how pleased Mother would be when she heard about it, and I wanted to tell Kay.
There was holly on the table and all the best Club silver. There was turtle soup and wild duck and venison and hot spiced wine. It was like a family rather than a business lunch with everyone making fun of everyone else. They all began talking about Mr. Wilding’s rubbers and asking the waiter to give him a glass of milk and finally, right in the middle of lunch, the door opened and Tony the bootblack came in to shine Mr. Wilding’s shoes. It turned out that it was Tom Wade’s idea to bring in Tony, and Tony was given a glass of wine and he made a speech in Italian. It was pleasant to see how much everyone really liked everyone else. We knew we were sharing in an institution and in a great tradition, for Smith and Wilding was a gentleman’s banking house run by gentlemen, a fine house with a sense of honor. As we stood there in silence to drink to the lost and the absent I could forget the difference in our ages.
“Darling,” she had written, “aren’t you coming back?”
When I drank the hot spiced wine, that was all fantastic and impossible. I was not coming back because I had never been away.
It was dark when I left the office, being nearly the shortest day in the year. There was no snow, but there was a feeling of snow in the air—that cold, expectant sense of silence in the clouds above the city. They were already lighting the candles in the windows along the street where Kay lived.
“Is that you, Harry?” Kay called.
She was alone in the parlor. Some logs were burning in the fireplace and brackets had been put along the windows with rows of candles standing on them, alrea
dy lighted.
“We don’t need any other light,” Kay said, “with the fire and those candles.” The room had a soft warm glow of friendliness. All sorts of lights and shadows danced across her face when she smiled at me.
“We’ve been having the darnedest time,” she said, “fixing the candles and getting buckets of water in case the curtains catch fire. Mother’s upstairs watching and I’m down here watching. I’m awfully glad you’re early.”
“I’m glad too,” I said.
“Harry,” Kay said, “you look tired.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not tired. You just think of lots of things at Christmas. Here’s a present for you, Kay,” and I handed her the package with the glasses.
“Why, Harry,” Kay said, “what is it?”
“It isn’t anything much,” I said. “I found them in a dugout.”
She bent her head over the package and untied the ribbon.
“You wrapped it, didn’t you?” she said and she laughed. “No one else could have done it,” and then she was looking at the field-gray case. “Why, Harry,” she said, “you shouldn’t have given me anything like that.”
She looked shy and I felt shy.
“They aren’t anything much,” I said.
I stopped and we stood there. It was suddenly still and mysterious and beautiful. The light from her eyes was lost in shadows beneath her cheekbones. Her lips were parted, not exactly in a smile, but as though something surprised her.
“Kay,” I said, “I’m awfully glad you called me up this morning.”
“I like to,” Kay said. “I like to hear your voice.”
“Kay,” I said, “I never realized—”
“What?” she asked.
“How much it meant,” I said.
“It just happened,” she said, “didn’t it?”
I still don’t know, for so much in life turns upside-down when you least expect it. It had just happened—perhaps the way it always happens. There was no one else but Kay—no one in the world but the two of us. It was like struggling through a wood and coming out into the sun.
I don’t know which of us moved first or what it was that broke our stillness, or why any of it was. She turned her face toward me and I kissed her.
“I forgot about the windows,” she said. “They’ll see us from the street.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “It’s all right now.”
“Yes,” she answered, “dearest. It’s all right now.”
After a while Kay put on her hat and coat and called Rough and put him on a leash and we walked arm in arm over Beacon Hill, looking at the candles in all the windows. Kay was worried because I had no rubbers and only low shoes and thin socks. I told her that she ought to be wearing some sort of scarf and she said that she had had so much on her mind that she had forgotten it, so I lent her mine and stopped and knotted it around her neck. Then we talked about being engaged, because she said that she supposed that we were engaged, and I said I supposed so too. She didn’t want to tell anyone for a while until we both got used to it, which seemed to me a good idea. She didn’t want to go through being engaged until we both were sure, perfectly sure, that it would work. That was the way we left it. People could guess all they wanted, but we were not to speak of it to anyone until spring.
I have always been rather pleased that we did it that way. I have heard it said again and again that a long engagement is unnatural and a strain, but I think this is only true if it is conspicuous and you know that people are watching you; and no one seemed to worry much about Kay and me, with the exception of Mrs. Motford. Kay used to laugh about it occasionally, saying that her mother was feeling the strain. By the middle of February Kay said that Mrs. Motford was wondering why I did not propose and she was beginning to do things to throw us together. She used to send us to the country for long walks. She used to talk to me about Kay, and Kay told me that she used to give her advice about ways to catch me.
“I ought to have a little dignity,” Kay used to say. “I ought not to throw myself at your head. That’s what Mother says. I ought to have other nice young men around or else I’ll be conspicuous. Do you think I ought to have other nice young men around?”
“No,” I told her.
“Do you want me to throw myself at your head?” Kay asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I like it.”
XXIV
I Break the News
One of the nicest times I ever had was when I was engaged to Kay without anyone else’s knowing it. There was no sense of responsibility, and the more we saw of each other, the surer we were it was going to work. We used to wonder why it had not happened long before. We used to sit looking at the fire, talking about where we were going to live and what we were going to do. There was nothing vague and uncertain, as there used to be when I talked to Marvin Myles. Kay wanted us to work out everything between ourselves before anyone interfered, and I knew how wise she was in doing this when our engagement was finally announced, for once you are engaged everyone thinks for you. Kay and I sat down with a paper and pencil and figured how much we would have to live on. There was the income from what my father had left me, my salary from Smith and Wilding, and Kay had something of her own from her grandmother’s estate.
It seemed like plenty then—enough for a house and two maids and a house for the summer at North Harbor. The best part of it was that Kay and I seemed to have a good many of the same ideas—the same tastes in furniture, the same ways of spending our time. We both wanted a boat and we each wanted a car. We both liked unsalted butter and a lot of cream, and we agreed that it would be fun to have a farm and horses some day.
All the time, I suppose, we were thinking of ourselves in terms of ourselves when we thought we were thinking of each other. Perhaps that is so with everyone who is engaged. If it all moved fast before, it all moved faster still when our engagement was announced in March.
“You see,” Kay told me, “it’s what I was afraid of. Now there’ll be people. It won’t be you and me at all until it’s all over.”
She was right. Until June I can only remember all sorts of people. First there was Mr. Motford, whom Kay said I ought to see at his office. And then there was Mrs. Motford, who kissed me and said I would never know how long she had hoped for this, that I must be very patient with Kay. I could not expect Kay to be practical, she said; she and I would have to be practical for her. Then I went downstairs with Kay to the Motfords’ kitchen, to shake hands with Norah, the cook, who had been in the family for twenty years. Then Kay and I were in Mother’s bedroom, kissing Mother. Then we were shaking hands with Hugh and with Lizzie, our old cook, and with Patrick. Then we were out in Roxbury visiting Kay’s old nurse and having tea with Great-aunt Frederica, and tea in Hingham with Uncle Bob and all his family, and tea with Kay’s Uncle Jackson and her Aunt Geraldine. Then Kay and I were standing side by side at her announcement tea, telling everyone how lucky we were. I think Kay really liked it, although she said she didn’t. I don’t know why Mrs. Motford said she wasn’t practical, because she kept everybody’s name straight.
“Harry,” she asked me once, “did you like Uncle Jackson?”
“Why, yes, I thought he was fine,” I said.
“I thought you wouldn’t like him,” Kay said. “He always spills. Aunt Geraldine never takes the spots off him.”
“I thought he was fine,” I repeated.
“What did you talk to him about?” Kay asked.
“About Indian arrowheads,” I said.
“Harry, are you sure you aren’t sorry? If you want to back out I won’t mind.”
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
“I’d feel sick if you wanted to,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.”
I loved the way she talked to people and looked them in the eye. I liked to think that we were doing it all together.
“Let’s not mind if we get cross and tired,” Kay said. “After a while they’ll all be used to us, and then there will be just
you and me.”
I don’t like to feel that at any time there was any indecision in my mind and I don’t honestly believe there was. Yet I remember that I did not know exactly what to answer when Kay took it up a long while afterwards. Kay has always had a habit of stretching her hand restlessly into the past, picking up a piece of it and juggling about with it for a while before throwing it back into the past again.
“Don’t say you didn’t want to back out of it,” Kay told me not so long ago, “and don’t try to act as though you were perfect, either. You were scared before it was announced. You may not have said anything—you never do—but you wanted to back out of it.”
“I never did,” I said.
“I don’t see why you have to be so secretive,” Kay said, “when it’s all over and done with. I don’t see why it would hurt you to admit that you had a few doubts. I’ve admitted it, haven’t I? I wasn’t at all sure, and neither were you. Something was bothering you.”
“Nothing was bothering me,” I said. “That is, nothing that had anything to do with anything.”
“But something was bothering you.”
When she was in a mood like that she always liked to pin me down.
“It wasn’t anything,” I said. “No one is entirely natural or normal at a time like that—no man is.”
“Do you know what I thought once?” Kay said. “I’d think it still, if it weren’t you. I thought there was another girl—perhaps that girl you brought up from New York. You acted that way, Harry.”
“Now, look here, Kay,” I said. “From the minute we were engaged, right down to now, I have never looked at anyone else and you know it. I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Kay, “I know you haven’t. And half the time you’ve never looked at me.”
I never told her about Marvin Myles and I think perhaps it was just as well; and I never asked her and she never told me anything about Joe Bingham, either.
No matter what anybody says, there is something positive about marriage that must make anyone falter. There is a sort of feeling that a book is closing. Early in March before our engagement was announced I had a strange, sad desire, which I fought against, to look back again through the pages before it was too late. I fought against it, but before everything was absolute I wanted to see Bill King. There was no real reason for it that I could ever see, because I was awfully glad that I was going to marry Kay. Nevertheless it seemed to me that if once I saw Bill King I would be absolutely sure. I could not understand why I did not let it go with writing him one of those letters that everybody writes about wanting him to be among the very first to know, but instead I told Kay that I had to go down to New York just for a day on business. This was true as far as it went, for Mr. Wilding wanted me to go over some figures with the statistician in the New York office, but I was not wholly frank about it—not even with myself.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 28