A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

The man boasted; but one believed in him. He radiated an atmosphere of success—and she had had enough of the temperament that hangs back from venture, irresolute, deprecating.

He presented the same blank surface of unconcern to the mention of any book or work of art which his own enthusiasm had not primarily chanced upon: "I like to discover the world for myself, and not have a showman at my elbow saying: 'Look!' all day long," said Nap Kirby—who himself was saying: "Look!" all day long ... or, by way of variation: "Look at me!"

But Kathleen rejoiced in his aloofness from her concerns. Oh, the rest, the utter rest mingled with the sensation of a new skin grown over the fretted others, which lay in the thought that her hidden sores and bitternesses, so apparent to Gareth, were entirely unsuspected by the sunny egoist who professed to love her. That where Gareth's own shrinking delicacy guessed instinctively how she could be hurt, and spared her whenever possible, insulting her doubly by his forbearance, Napier remained sublimely unaware of such matters as the approach of winter, and bathroom taps, and the strain of glamouring where glamour was no more, and the terror of forty-three next birthday, and a temper that had been chafed by daily intimacy with incompetence till it was harsh as the taste of blood in the mouth. She could go to Napier without the buzz of these torments about her brain and ears. She could go to him lightly ... hear him say, with that careless caress in his voice that was so wonderful to her—"You're like me, Kathleen, you think that——" or "You feel that——" confidently wrong in every one of his assumptions; never bothering to verify them. She wore the ready-made temperament ... and fervently, in her secret heart, did she thank him for it. More than for the starved passion he had satisfied, more than for the buoyant atmosphere of power he exhaled, Kathleen loved him because he did not understand her....

Meanwhile, Gareth wrote his book.

Its existence diffused a miraculous sheeny quality over everyday life. He had only to feel for the remembrance of it, a talisman between his palms—and things and people ceased to annoy, were merely a moving pantomime for his amusement. His sense of the whimsical, grown rusty with the years, was now suddenly restored to him. Even Kathleen no longer possessed the faculty of rasping him with her exasperated knowledge of his exact failings and what they had led to—or not led to—in the past. He did not notice that she bothered him at all any more ... so preoccupied was he with figures less real—infinitely more real. Just occasionally the talisman failed him; those were the hours following a mood when he had lacked the necessary spasm of energy to take up his pen and commence work, usually fluent enough after the start had been made. Those hours he would go sick with the fear that the old enemy within him—that which Kathleen had once named Atrophy of the Initiative, would eventually prevent even this cherished endeavour from fulfilment ... and those were the hours when again he was aware of Kathleen's voice.

Interludes, also, of the purely grotesque, when Trix Worley tumbled flat across his borderlands like an enormous figure in harlequinade, and lay a-sprawl and immovable ... his mentality was quite helpless against these irrelevant incursions.

But for the most part the merry haphazard days were dream-misted with secret consciousness of his table by the attic window. He enjoyed, as early as possible in the evening, bidding the noisy party 'Good night'; and leaving them to their games, their flirtations, their cards, their walks; stole up the creaking wooden stairway—surely the path to some hidden treasure of doubloons and moidores, pouring in dusty, twinkling showers all about a mouldering skeleton-form. The door closed behind him; the two candles lit, erect spear-heads of gold, envied by the far-off stars which thickly sprinkled the skylight patches. Then Gareth would sit down to the table; handle caressingly his pile of papers; fall into a reverie ... whence he was roused by the cool brush of fingers against his throat, across his eyelids.

She never failed to come, the cool girl of his dreams. He knew now that she must always have belonged to him; had even hovered mistily in the background of his thoughts, when his mother had called on her "youngest knight" one day to keep troth valiantly with love. It was the deep-hidden longing for her tenderness and shade which had made the years of glare and strain so wearying, so unbearable. And then, with the vision of the February wood, she had shown herself to him; in the attic with its murky fading corners, she had become real. He had gradually learnt a great deal about her: she did not sleep in the wood, as he had always supposed; but on the top of the hill, where stood a tumble-down bare-walled hut with a crooked door, and around it a patch of ground barren save for one fir-tree standing close against the window, catching the sunset flame in autumn, tip-tapping endlessly throughout the snowtime, A Grimm's-fairy-tale cottage; he believed there must be a grandmother in the kitchen that was eternally darkened by shadow of the fir-tree; but he had not yet raised the latch to see.

The girl whose touch was cool—Gareth did not doubt that somewhere she existed for him; but he had blundered, and so never found her. The hero of his book would not blunder thus. There lurked a queer and almost vicious pleasure in the endowment of this man with the essential quality himself had lacked, that he might win through to the essential end himself had missed. Gareth adored his conqueror, whose story he had fitted together bit by bit, pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, till now it stood complete, all but the final inspiration.

He lingered lovingly over the opening chapters, which described in tender detail Kay Rollinson's childhood as a harbour-urchin. Came an episode, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, when the ever-dormant fear in his heart awoke to a vivid frenzy of terror ... he was driven by it inland—inland—away from all possible sight of that pallid grey-green ripple of ocean ... till at last, heedless in which direction he went, he reached the February wood; a wood haunted yet passionless ... where the vision came to him of a girl, slim and ragged and bare-ankled ... her thoughts were cool silent places where no water sounded; her voice touched the fear in his heart, and laid it to rest. Drowsing with his cheek pressed down to the carpet of sodden purple leaves, the boy knew that one day, inevitably, he would find such a girl, in such a wood.... And he vowed to wait for her, and be steadfast to his vision, till the full sweep of adventure brought it round.