They both looked suddenly at Tam. He was telling Lucy in his usual absolutely confident way of some small experience of his own—an experience that would not have been worth describing had it not been for his own intense interest in it. They heard him say, “And the silly part of it was that if I hadn’t been wearing those old grey flannels the feller wouldn’t have dared to speak to me like that.”
He had a habit of speaking to Lucy as if she were not his wife but a friend.
Emily leaned her head suddenly on Edward’s shoulder. “How can you be so brutal?” she said. “How can you ask me if I am hardhearted when I am in such pain—and all for love....”
She never could keep her hands still. She threw out her right hand as if in surrender and hammered the side of the car. Edward could feel that she was absolutely tense. The muscles of her neck were unyielding.
He thought, “I must be very cautious.” He understood that he was not in Emily’s world at all. “I must be very cautious even in thinking of her now....” It was like falling into very cold water and becoming at once numb. “I mustn’t be feeble in this too. I must be a hero in another way. If I love her without hope, in the end I must die because the pain will grow and grow.” He looked forward almost eagerly to atrocious pain forever. The forever of the morbid introspective is not a real eternity. I believe he looks forward in the very end of the end to telling God and being publicly pitied and caressed at last. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been alone and unfortunate in all things. Enter thou into the unending pity of thy Lord.”
The wind blew back to them something that Lucy was saying. “Well, it’s just as I always told you, Tam. You never know what you can do till you try.” They were being briskly polite to each other. They were what is called in sprightly domestic literature, “Good Comrades.”
“When you asked me if I were hardhearted, Edward,” said Emily, “I suppose you were going to tell me something about yourself.”
“I was,” replied Edward. “But I won’t now. Anything I could say to you now would seem too big to me and too little to you. My love, for instance. And the fact that I must miss everything in the world....”
“Your deafness....” said Emily. “I gathered you were a bit deaf even before Melsie Ponting told me you were as deaf as a post. Tam said—‘Yes, and as slow as a Sunday post’—but I told him to shut up. It must be beastly being deaf because I suppose you feel that you seem stupid and that people get tired of talking to you. Why don’t you go to a doctor and all that? I always go to doctors the very minute I have a symptom—doctors are so awfully interested and lean forward when I talk about myself, which of course nobody else will ever do. Other people tiresomely begin talking about themselves as soon as I get going, but luckily doctors never do that. Tam is the only person I know who can talk successfully about himself, but then he is always perfectly happy about himself and talks of what happened when a vital button came off at his wedding, or how pleased somebody was to see him when he called, or why an Armenian mistook him for a Turk. And everybody listens with a poised smile on their lips, and when he has finished there is always a loud noise of success. Sure and happy people never fall flat. Edward, if you weren’t so sad-hearted, people would love you much more.”