“But you’re not going——”
“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any business to do. You’ll take me to dinner somewhere—some restaurant. I don’t like hotels.”
“But—you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours—across all that?”
The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to say one or two things.”
She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene; afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay—well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.
“Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?”
“Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word.
“I mean—oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been easier never to have seen you at all.”
“You’ve never wanted to see your mother?”
Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she was hitting below the belt.