“Mrs. Harter is capable of tragedy—that’s why it came to her, I suppose. The majority of people aren’t.”
I found that I rather resented that remark of Mary’s. It was so true—the last half of it, I mean. Inevitably, I made the personal application that Mary had certainly not intended.
No, my warped, fretful, sometimes rather spiteful outlook on life does not constitute tragedy, any more than does the flat, jarring inharmony of the relations between Claire and myself. My futile repinings, all of them translated into terms of mental values, are not tragedy.
For a moment I wondered about Mary Ambrey herself. I looked at her and she smiled.
“Oh no, Miles. One may be conscious of having missed actual, positive happiness, perhaps, even, of having lost the power of feeling anything very vehemently, but that’s disappointment, not tragedy. All I’m capable of is of recognizing it when I see it.”
“And you saw it in Mrs. Harter?”
“Yes.”
“Mary, where is she now? What happened when you had packed for her in the lodgings in Queen Street?”
“She went to London, but I don’t know where she is now. I asked her where she was going and she said, ‘London first, to get a job. Abroad, I expect.’ There wasn’t anything I could do to help her, she said. She went away that night. I went to the station with her. And on the way there she talked a little, though I don’t think she had much idea of whom she was talking to at the time. She spoke about Bill, and she said quite calmly: ‘One reason why I’m telling you about it is that it will help me to remember it longer. One day all this will fade away—I know that very well. One’s made like that. What it’s done to me will stay, but the memory of this—even of him—will grow dim, like everything else. This torture will stop, in time, and I shall remember less and less.’ Then she told me about her second meeting with Bill. They went up Loman Hill and came here. She knew he’d fallen in love with her, of course—I imagine that quite a lot of men have been in love with her—and she half thought it was different to anything else that had ever happened to her before, but she wasn’t absolutely certain. You know, Miles, personally, I think it was rather wonderful that she should have recognized that—that quality when it did come. I don’t think anything in her life had helped to make her able to recognize it.
“So she told him about herself—the truth, not the subtle dramatization of it that one mostly offers to other people—I don’t mean that she had any special revelation to make, you know. But she just let him see her as she honestly saw herself—and she’s an extraordinarily honest woman. And she said Bill understood. She said that he asked what difference that made, at the end of it all. Can’t you hear Bill saying that, very literal, and serious, and gentle, and looking at her through those queer, thick glasses?”