In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San
Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety
of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by
her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong
to speak of her as “unstirred.” She was stirred and very deeply, but
by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides
were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible
in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick
Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final
refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The
current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it,
and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something
massive in her life would be required to deflect it.
“Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I
love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he
needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he
could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk
losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.”
She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope,
and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily
snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the
hundreds of others.
“Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past
by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily
snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are
like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spun together,
not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the
past. Some of the threads join the two of us.”
A fresh thought struck her.
“He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only
thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for
him to remember.”
She recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive
but must act. Did not this counsel apply to herself? She knew she
wanted him. She knew he wanted her. But however great his want of
her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be
the sacrifice of a life--her life--to save his own. How could he, a
man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the
son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually
friendless--how could he ask her to become his wife? He could ask of
her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and
give him--friendship, sympathy, help, advice. The last item had an
ironical ring in Mermaid’s consciousness. Advice to the drowning!
If he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that
was all there was to it. For what was she waiting? To see him exercise
it? But she loved him. It was not proof of his strength she required.
What he had, what he lacked, was nothing--simply nothing. If he hadn’t
it, she had strength enough for two. Suppose she failed? Suppose she
knew she would fail? The old image persisted before her. If he were
drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed,
would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would
happen with averted eyes? Of course not. You had to make the effort
no matter if it was absolutely foredoomed to failure. And this effort
which confronted her was not necessarily foredoomed at all; at least,
so far as she or any one else could see. They might shake their heads
but they could not tell.
In her way, the best way she could manage, she put this to her aunt,
who listened almost silently until the end and then said, suddenly
and abruptly: “Of course, Mary, if you love him--why, that settles
everything.”
Mermaid felt bound to insist on the logic leading to this conclusion.
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Hand, irritably. “You can’t reason
about such a thing. When two persons love each other it settles
everything--and unsettles everything, too,” she added. “There’s only
one thing to do, and there’s only one person to do it.”
“There’s really no reason why a woman shouldn’t propose to a man,”
continued Keturah. “I’m no great respecter of conventions. You may
remember the time when I used to wear a man’s old coat. Conventions
were made for the man and not man for the conventions, except political
conventions.” She was resorting, as was not unusual with her, to
flippancy to cover emotion. “I don’t know but that I may be said to
have proposed to your Uncle Hosea, when I got money that was rightfully
his from his brother and put it in his hands, indirectly, as a lover
sends a box of flowers to his sweetheart. Only I couldn’t have the
florist, Lawyer Brown, put my card in the box,” she noted. “However, it
wasn’t necessary; it seldom is. You always know who sent the flowers.
“I believe, though I don’t know, that Keturah Hawkins proposed to John
Hawkins,” she went on. “John was a speechless sort of man all his life.
I’m sure he never brought himself to utter any such words as: ‘Will you
marry me?’ They would have choked him. I suspect that at the proper
time Keturah began calmly to talk about plans for the house I live in,
progressing by easy stages to such matters as the date of the wedding
and the clothes he would need, down to his underwear, winter weight.
“They say the way to resume is to resume, but often the way to begin
is to resume, too. Each night that John called, Keturah resumed the
subject she had not discussed the night before; and so they were
married and lived happily ever after.”
Mermaid, reduced to laughter by this narration, said: “Well, to resume
what we were not talking about just now, I shall go East day after
to-morrow if you are willing. I will bring Guy out here and then I can
see you home. You ought not to travel alone.”
“Don’t think you are going away and leave me in this place 3,000
miles from Blue Port, missy!” exclaimed her aunt. “I won’t stay here.
Besides, Dick Hand is cross as a catamount since you told him for the
last time that----”
Mrs. Hand broke off the sentence as she might have bitten off a thread
of unnecessary length. She looked at her niece and sighed.
“You are a fine woman, my dear,” she said. “Come here and kiss me. You
don’t have to put your mind on it. Just a dutiful kiss will do.”
Mermaid kissed her with undutiful violence.