Chapter Twelve
After the rehearsal, Captain Patch went to Queen Street. And although I can, again, only reconstruct, at the same time it isn’t exactly that and that only. For Bill, strangely enough, told Nancy Fazackerly about it.
I can understand his having done so, in a way. He knew very well that she was in love with another man and also that she knew him to be in love with another woman, and that there could be no question of sex values or sex consciousness between them.
Moreover, Patch was naturally open-hearted and Nancy sympathetic.
He came back to Loman Cottage at about six o’clock that evening and Mrs. Fazackerly overtook him just as he pushed open the garden gate.
She had begun a reference to the all-pervading theatricals when she caught sight of his face. The curiously boyish aspect that always belonged to it seemed intensified, but she has told me that, although she felt he was suffering, it wasn’t the fierce, unreasoning suffering of youth that he suggested to her, but rather a certain perplexity, a foreseeing of conflict.
“What is it?” she cried, almost involuntarily.
“Can’t you tell me? Can’t I do anything?”
“How kind you are,” Bill said gratefully. He looked at her for a minute or two in silence. “We needn’t go indoors yet. Let’s sit out here for a minute.”
They sat under the pink may tree on Nancy’s circular seat.