Time Will Darken It (32 page)

“… Sometimes I feel like writing to Cousin Martha,” Nora said, “and telling her how kind you were to me, and how you put me on the right track.”

“I don’t believe I’d do that, if I were you.”

“Oh I wouldn’t dream of writing to her!” Nora exclaimed. “She might not understand and I wouldn’t want to cause you or her a moment’s unhappiness. It’s just that she has so much—she has you and little Abbey and that beautiful house and all—and I feel like telling her how much she has to be thankful for. But she knows, of course. There’s no need to tell her things that she already knows.”

“No,” Austin agreed. He saw Al Sterns coming across the courthouse lawn and, turning to Nora, said, “Would you like to come up to the office and talk to me there?”

“Don’t you see I can’t come up to your office and talk to you?” Nora said. “Of course I want to, but what is the good? I’d just rattle on and on. If I could only be still or talk sensibly, but I can’t do either. I know I’m an emotional person. I’m aware of all these things. But if you only knew how badly I want you to like me and approve of me!”

“I do like and approve of you,” Austin said. Al Sterns waited for a wagon to pass and then started across the street towards the post-office.

“I want desperately to be friends with you, but I don’t know how. It’s not your fault. You are doing everything possible to make things easy for me, but even thinking about going to your office with you makes me want to run miles away, because I know I’d only make a fool of myself. Sometimes when I haven’t seen you for several days I think ‘Maybe he isn’t like that. Now think. How could you remember exactly what he looks like? Part of it is in your head.’ But then I see you coming up the walk and you are just as I
remember you, of course. This is my compensation for being all mixed up in general—that I have certain things—faces, mannerisms, and so forth, so impressed on my mind that I can never forget them.”

“Austin, how’s the world treating you?”

“Can’t complain, Al.… This is my cousin, Miss Potter.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Potter,” Al Sterns said and put out his hand. “Austin, they tell me you——”

“Or even colour them in imagination,” Nora said. “They are just as they are.”

“I’ll drop in and see you later,” Al Sterns said, and went on up the steps.

“
You
are just as you are,” Nora said. “I think of you all the time, because I can’t help doing that. But I don’t think of you in any woe-begone way. Just sometimes when I can’t find anything to do to keep me busy or at night when I’m falling asleep, I suddenly wonder where you are and what you’re doing. And if we do find ourselves face to face, by some accident, the way we are now, I know I’ll always have something to say to you, because I think in terms of you. Whenever I see anything that moves me, makes me smile or feel sad, I always think of you. But no one need ever know. I never talk about you, about how wonderful you are, or drag compliments out of people so I can repeat them to you, or make over Ab, or do any of the things girls do when they’re hopelessly in love. I won’t run in and out of the house on some flimsy pretext, and on the other hand, if I don’t come to see you very often, you mustn’t think it’s because I don’t have any interest in you, because I do.”

“I understand,” Austin said. He had been expecting Al Sterns to come out again, but he saw now that Al had come out of the side entrance and crossed the street in front of the fire station.

“Last night I dreamed about you, and today I can’t remember the dream. All I know is that we were at home and
that you were going into town with us, and somehow in the dream we went off and left you.…”

It was a long involved dream that Nora recaptured, piece by piece, standing on the post-office steps. Though Austin kept his eyes rigidly on her face, he heard very little of it. In his mind he said
Nora, I have work to do
.…
There’s somebody waiting in my office
.… over and over, hoping that Nora would grasp what he was thinking, by mental telepathy.
I don’t want to listen to your dream.…

“… we were driving through this section of the country,” Nora went on. “I can’t remember whether this was part of the same dream or another one. Anyway, there were two other people with us. Actually a couple who are not really friends of our family but the man is one of Pa’s business associates, with their twelve-year-old son. I can remember distinctly being at your house, Cousin Austin. I don’t remember arriving there, having you greet us and so forth, but suddenly in the dream I was leaning against the window-sill with my chin in my hands——”

The Jouettes’ shiny black surrey drove up before the post-office. The coloured boy jumped down from the front seat and took old Mrs. Jouette’s letter from her.

“—staring at you,” Nora said. “The window was closed, which was queer because it was in summer, and you were outdoors watering the lawn, paying absolutely no attention to us at all.”

Old Mrs. Jouette, all in shiny black, like the carriage, turned to the sad-faced young girl beside her and said, “Who is that standing on the steps?”

“Austin King.”

“It can’t be,” Mrs. Jouette exclaimed.

“It is all the same,” the girl said listlessly. “I don’t know who she is, but they were standing there when we drove by before.”

“I had the feeling in my dream,” Nora said earnestly, “I had the distinct feeling that you had been cordial and polite
to everyone but me. I kept staring at you, trying to make you look at me.…”

Seeing the old lady’s lorgnette trained upon him, Austin lifted his hat and bowed. The bow was returned, but without any accompanying smile of pleasure, and old Mrs. Jouette turned her attention to the courthouse lawn. Lord Nelson, Austin thought, at Trafalgar, in his admiral’s frock coat, with all his medals showing.…

“… And you would not,” Nora said. “You absolutely refused to look at me. Yet you knew, of course, that I was staring at you for that express reason.…”

11

The voices in the study grew louder and Martha King, sitting in the living-room with young Mrs. Ellis, heard Bud Ellis say, “Of course it’s not your fault, Austin. All you did was draw up the papers. But naturally, since he was a relative of yours, we assumed——”

“Let’s keep to the facts,” Judge Fairchild said. Martha got up and dragged her chair nearer the sofa.

“I’m just stupid, I guess,” Mary Ellis said. “But it seems harder than anything I’ve ever tried to do. I sit down with three cook-books in front of me, and they all tell you to do something different, and never the thing you really want to know. If Bud weren’t particular about his food, it wouldn’t matter, but his mother was a very fine cook and he tells me things she used to make for him, like peach cobbler and upside-down-cake and salt-rising bread. And when I try the same thing, it never turns out right, for some reason. And I have to worry about things that Father Ellis can chew, and sometimes if he doesn’t like what we have, he gets up from
the table. Bud says he does it just to make a scene, but naturally it makes me feel bad after I’ve tried to please him. Bud’s mother never used a recipe, he says. I don’t see how anybody can cook without a recipe. I don’t see how you begin, even.”

“Probably she learned from
her
mother,” Martha said.

“I never had a chance to do that,” Mary Ellis said. “My mother was an invalid and we had a series of housekeepers. I was never even allowed in the kitchen.”

“It’ll come, with practice,” Martha said, trying to follow the conversation in the study. “You get so after a while it’s second nature. You don’t even have to think about it.”

“I don’t know,” Mary Ellis said despairingly. “I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point. I like to keep house and I like sewing—I make all my own clothes—but I don’t think I’ll ever learn to cook. It just isn’t in me.”

“You mustn’t feel that way,” Martha said. She was struggling with herself to keep from getting up and going into the next room. Austin needed help. She was sure of it. They were solidly against him, appealing to his sense of honour, which was so easy to do if you were Bud Ellis and didn’t have any. But if she appeared in the doorway and said
Stop it. I know what you’re doing, Bud Ellis, and I won’t allow it
, Austin would never forgive her.

“It isn’t that I don’t have enough time,” Mary Ellis was saying. “Although I’m busy, of course. But not like women who have children to think about. Did you have Ab right away?”

“She was born a little over a year after we were married,” Martha said.

“I envy you so,” Mary Ellis said. “Bud and I have been married nearly a year now and——”

“Just because you don’t have a baby the first year doesn’t mean anything,” Martha said. “I know women who were married ten or twelve years before their first baby came.”

“But I don’t want to wait that long,” Mary Ellis said. “I want to have my children when I’m young. Every time I see a child I want to touch it and hold it on my lap, and it’s making Bud very unhappy.”

“That goes without saying,” Bud Ellis said in a loud voice. “But four thousand dollars is four thousand dollars. And if we’d known what we do now, we’d never have put money into the venture. I’m not accusing
you
of anything, Austin, but I’d like to know one thing: Why did you stay out of it?”

Martha King waited, hoping against hope for the sound of her husband’s fist against Bud Ellis’ jaw. There was no such sound.

“I try not to feel that way,” Mary Ellis said. “I know it’s foolish of me to …”

Surely he won’t explain, Martha said to herself. Oh don’t let him stoop to explain.

“I couldn’t afford to take the risk,” Austin said, in the next room.

“Then you knew it
was
a risk?” Judge Fairchild said, as if he were leaning down from the bench to question the witness on the stand.

Martha King looked across at the Danforths’ house, saw that it was dark, and realized that she wouldn’t have called Dr. Danforth even if they had been home. It was Austin’s battle, and she would have to sit by quietly and let him lose it.

It is a common delusion of gentle people that the world is also gentle, considerate, and fair. Cruelty and suspicion find them eternally unprepared. The surprise, the sense of shock, paralyses them for too long a time after the unprovoked insult has been given. When they finally react and are able to raise their fists in their own defence, it is already too late.
What did he mean by that?
they say, turning to the person nearest them, who witnessed the scene and who might also have been attacked, although he wasn’t. There is never any
help or enlightenment from the person standing next to them, and so they go on down some endless corridor, reliving the brutal moment, trying vainly to recall the precise words of what must—and yet needn’t have been a mortal insult. Should they go back and fight? Or would they only be making a fool of themselves? And then they remember: This is not the first time. Behind this unpleasant incident there is another equally unpleasant (and another and another), the scars of which have long since healed. The old infection breaks open, races through the blood, producing a weakness in the knees, and hands bound, hopeless and heavy at their sides.

“Have you been to a doctor?” Martha King asked.

“Yes. Dr. Spelman. He just told me to get lots of rest and not to get upset by things.” Mary Ellis seemed completely unaware of what was going on in the study. When Bud Ellis said, “I think you might have had the decency to tell us, Austin,” her face remained unchanged, hopeless, unhappy.

Martha waited and said, “There’s something you can try, if you want to. Grace Armstrong told me about it. It’s something her mother discovered. Grace says that she would probably never have come into the world otherwise, and neither would her children. If you want to try it——”

“I’ll try anything,” Mary Ellis said.

“Well, then,” Martha said, “this is what you must do.…”

12