“Maybe we ought to. But sit down here.”
He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said, abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her:
“I’m sorry I’ve been so grouchy coming down the path. But I don’t apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world’s office-manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and respectable all evening, and not even marry till we’re thirty, because we can’t afford to! That’s all right for them as likes to become nice varnished desks, but not for me! I’m going to hunger and thirst and satisfy my appetites—even if it makes me selfish as the devil. I’d rather be that than be a bran-stuffed automaton that’s never human enough to hunger. But of course you’re naturally a Puritan and always will be one, no matter what you do. You’re a good sort— I’d trust you to the limit—you’re sincere and you want to grow. But me—my Wanderjahr isn’t over yet. Maybe some time we’ll again— I admire you, but—if I weren’t a little mad I’d go literally mad.... Mad—mad!”
He suddenly undid the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river, while his voice droned on, as though it were a third person speaking:
“I suppose there’s a million cases a year in New York of crazy young chaps making violent love to decent girls and withdrawing because they have some hidden decency themselves. I’m ashamed that I’m one of them—me, I’m as bad as a nice little Y. M. C. A. boy—I bow to conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I’m so old-fashioned as even to talk about ‘conventions’ in this age of Shaw and d’Annunzio shows that I’m still a small-town, district-school radical! I’m really as mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge. Only I’m modern by instinct, and the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don’t know what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to get it. I’m a Middle Western farmer, and yet I regard myself about half the time as an Oxford man with a training in Paris. You’re lucky, girl. You have a definite ambition—either to be married and have babies or to boss an office. Whatever I did, I’d spoil you—at least I would till I found myself—found out what I wanted.... Lord! how I hope I do find myself some day!”
“Poor boy!” she suddenly interrupted; “it’s all right. Come, we’ll go home and try to be good.”
“Wonderful! There speaks the American woman, perfectly. You think I’m just chattering. You can’t understand that I was never so desperately in earnest in my life. Well, to come down to cases. Specification A—I couldn’t marry you, because we haven’t either of us got any money—aside from my not having found myself yet. Ditto B—We can’t play, just because you are a Puritan and I’m a typical intellectual climber. Same C—I’ve actually been offered a decent job in the advertising department of a motor-car company in Omaha, and now I think I’ll take it.”
And that was all that he really had to say, just that last sentence, though for more than an hour they discussed themselves and their uncharted world, Walter trying to be honest, yet to leave with her a better impression of himself; Una trying to keep him with her. It was hard for her to understand that Walter really meant all he said.
But, like him, she was frank.
There are times in any perplexed love when the lovers revel in bringing out just those problems and demands and complaints which they have most carefully concealed. At such a time of mutual confession, if the lovers are honest and tender, there is none of the abrasive hostility of a vulgar quarrel. But the kindliness of the review need not imply that it is profitable; often it ends, as it began, with the wail, “What can we do?” But so much alike are all the tribe of lovers, that the debaters never fail to stop now and then to congratulate themselves on being so frank!