3
She sat quietly and waited for him. He came over, seeming glad to see her, and slouched into a chair. “I wondered if I’d find you here,” he said.
“I wondered if you’d come!” she said. She was astonished to find in herself no emotion except that of being glad that he had come—simply that.
“Last night,” he said, “I wanted to come to see you. And I was afraid to, I guess. Because of things I didn’t want to tell you about—that I thought you wouldn’t understand.”
The table, that place dedicated to the telling of impossible truths, still had for them its old magic. “Last night,” she said, smiling ruefully, “I set the alarm clock to go off at midnight.... If you didn’t come by then, I was going to forget you.”
“And I didn’t come,” he said.
“No.... I waited till the clock went off. I said that if you came before that I would forgive you everything—anything.”
“How could I come?” he asked. “Before one can be forgiven, one must be ashamed. And I wasn’t ashamed. I’m not now.”
“Why should you be?” she asked.
“But you don’t know,” he said. “Or do you? Have you seen Phyllis?”
“Phyllis? No!”
“Neither have I—for three days.”
“But I thought—”
“No you didn’t.” He leaned forward. “Tell me—did you ever believe—not your mind, but with your emotions!—that I was in love with Phyllis? Were you ever really jealous of her? Did you ever take her seriously, as your rival?”
“No—not the real Phyllis—no. The real Phyllis I liked, and was sorry for and ... perhaps a little afraid of—but not as a rival. I was jealous of the Phyllis who—who existed only in your mind.”
“My illusion of her, yes. But why?”
“Felix, you robbed me to give to that illusion. You loved in her what you refused to see in me to love. I might have been all that she was to you—and you wouldn’t let me! When you spoke of her, I kept thinking, ‘He might say those things of me!’—and you might, much more truly.”
“Then why did you push me into her arms—into the arms of the real Phyllis ... the one you were afraid of! Because you knew she’d hurt me? Was that it?”
They were talking in the eager low tones of their accustomed discussion, cut off by the influences of this spot from any disturbing sense of outer things—alone in an enchanted solitude, a magic circle into which none but the waiter could intrude.
“Hurt you?” A look of tenderness shone fleetingly in Rose-Ann’s eyes, half-contradicted by a triumphant smile. “Did she hurt you? I’m sorry, Felix.”
“Are you?”
“No—I’m glad! I wanted you to be hurt! I wanted to punish you—for dreaming of her—punish you by making you find out....”
“It would serve you right if the illusion had turned out to be true after all, wouldn’t it?”
“I thought it had, Felix. What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly. But look at this!”
He took the card from his pocket and put it before her.
At that moment the waiter came up, bowing them welcome. “You haf’ not been here for many days now,” he said. “I begin to think you desert us! Haf’ you your order ready?”
“You know what we want,” said Felix absently.
“Yes, sir. Everything shall be as always!” He beamed and ceased to exist.
Felix turned again to Rose-Ann, who sat staring quietly at the card.
“You aren’t surprised?” he asked.
“I feel that I knew it all along, somehow!” she said.
“Yes, so did I.... That’s the queer thing. All this other—”
“Was just Phyllis’s game with Clive. I don’t mean she did it on purpose. She couldn’t help it!”
“It was Clive’s game too,” he insisted.
“In a sense, yes.... She tormented him, ran away from him—and played up to you—all for Clive’s sake.... I’m sorry, Felix!”
“For me? You needn’t be. You were victimized too. By your pride—just as I by my vanity.”
“Yes,” she said, “and now—at last—they can have their happiness!”
They were silent for a moment, contemplating the tragic farce in which they had acted their tragi-comic parts.
“So,” he said ironically, “it was to make their marriage possible that we were so busy destroying our own!”
“No—I won’t have that. If she’s hurt you, I’m sorry, Felix; I really am. But I can’t think of us just as helpless victims. Why did we do it? We have our own quarrel, Felix.”
“Yes—a quarrel in which no one else counts. I know. But first let me explain. She did hurt me. But I found consolation.”
“In whom?” she asked sharply.
“Elva Macklin.”
“That queer egotistic little theatre-waif! Felix!”
“Say what you like—I’m not ashamed of it.”
“You couldn’t love her!”
“No—I never pretended to. Nor she.”
“I’m ashamed for you, Felix, if you’re not!”
“Be ashamed, then. I can’t be. I’ve tried.”
“Why try?”
“People that are ashamed—can be forgiven.”
“But I can’t understand it....”
“Neither can I.”
“If it had been some one you loved—”
“You might have lost me.”
“I’ve lost you now,” she said sadly.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you one thing I am ashamed of. No—I don’t know whether I can or not. It’s too silly.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll tell it backwards.... This morning I found a bottle of wine in my apartment—the relic of that orgy of which you are so scornful. It was unopened. I decided to make a present of it to my landlady. She thanked me and rummaged on a shelf and gave me in return a book—a book with my name in it that she had found in her area-way. She had been saving it for me.... That’s the end of the story. Here’s the book.”
He took from his pocket a soiled copy of the Bab Ballads. She gazed at it.
“Oh! you took it with you?”
“To my new home, yes—to remember you by. But wait. It did make me remember you—too well—and so I flung it out the window. That’s what I am ashamed of, Rose-Ann. I know it’s absurd. But we’re telling each other the truth.... And it’s not Elva, nor anything else—but just what I did to that book, that I want to ask your forgiveness for....”
“Was she there?”
“Yes. That was why.”
“I’m glad you did it!”
“You don’t understand. That book—it’s more than just you, Rose-Ann: it’s all you stand for to me.... I wanted to get rid of it all.”
“What do I stand for, to you?”
He thought a moment, and then answered, as if the word had pushed itself up out of the deeps of his mind.
“Reality.”
“Merely that?” Her voice was disdainful and challenging.
He took up its challenge.
“No—more than that. Pain. You stand for that.”
“I?”
“And heartbreak.”
“I?”
“And yesterday and tomorrow.”
“And am I,” she demanded quietly, “never to stand for any of the beautiful things?—Must you find them—or think you find them—in Phyllis ... and Elva?...”
He felt as though they had reached the crux of their discussion at last. And he felt, too, that it was a perilous moment. He could sense the forces of an intense resistance gathering in her mind.
“Yes, that’s our quarrel,” he said.
“What?”
He spoke with a sudden anger, only half repressed.
“You won’t help me. You never have. You tell me lies....”
“Felix!”
“Yes, you do. And I—I believe you, because it is you who tell them. Lies about life.”
“What have I told you?”
“That I could be free. I was free, Rose-Ann. With Elva. For three days. That was quite enough. And that’s why I am not ashamed or sorry. I learned something from her that you refused to tell me.”
“What did you learn—from her?”
“That I don’t want freedom.”
“Don’t you?” she mocked gently. “The truth, Felix!”
“Oh, it’s beautiful enough! As death is more beautiful than life. As for me, after a little cupful of death, I prefer pain and heartbreak. I prefer you.”
“But—it’s as if you wanted me to make you unhappy, Felix.... That’s what you are saying!”
“Isn’t it true? You have made me unhappy. And happy, too, Rose-Ann. The two things go together. I want them both. Not this mad, mystical peace that is like death.”
“The mad mystical peace of death,” she repeated. “You make it very alluring, Felix. One gets tired of life.... Just as you got tired of me. But perhaps—perhaps I am not what you think I am. Perhaps I can understand the joys of a little cupful of death—I, too.”
The waiter arrived with a savoury stew. He uncovered the dish with a flourish. It reeked of nutritiousness. They stared at it helplessly. The waiter went away.
“I can’t eat,” Rose-Ann said appealingly.
Sympathetically he passed her a cigarette.
“Felix,” she said, “I know what you think you want. It’s like that stew. You ought to want it; but you don’t. You want coffee and cigarettes and talk and poetry—not the solid food of life.... You try to fool yourself. And you try to fool me.”
She paused and then went on with sudden passion, “You’ve accused me of lying to you. It’s you who have lied! Whose fault is it if I didn’t mean what I said—that time? You’ve never been honest with me. You were never willing to face the future. I tried to talk with you, but you wouldn’t. You made me feel that I was wrong. And so I tried to believe differently about our marriage. And when the real truth came out—yes, the truth!—I wasn’t prepared to meet it. I was a coward.—Perhaps I’m a coward still. I don’t know. But I know this—I’m not willing to do what you say you want me to do—bind you, tame you, keep you. No! I won’t be ... a wife.”