Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the rebuff.
“I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me—because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life—because I thought,—you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.”
Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly.
Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her.
“I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”
“I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to believe. And perhaps she would understand.”
“Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you understand? This is what I mean.”
“But you do understand now!” said Camilla.
“Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore me in two.
“I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's hysteric.”