"She and Donald had talked it all over, and decided that it would be
best for his career to go to New York. She and Donald ... I _did_ think
that, as I was planning Donald's work when she was still in short
dresses, my opinion might have some weight with her. And I thought, just
as you did, that something might be saved if they stayed here for the
present--kept the house and all the rest of it. And then, of course, I
lost my temper--that makes twice.... I reminded her how she had told me
once that nothing could induce _her_ to leave her mother, as a widow....
What was the use? Of course she only cried, and said it was hopeless to
try to explain to me--how differently a woman felt about all these
things when she was going to be married. I believe she said I was
incapable of understanding the new emotions that came with a great
love."
That, indeed, seemed a romantic description of the mild, chance product
of the Fordette. However, the replete young authority only said:--
"Then I suppose it's great love that taught her engineering so
quickly--and all Donald's little peculiarities?"
Mary Wing made no answer. Her capable small hands took up the literature
lately provided by Charles. And when she spoke, it was as if his
unaccustomed acrimony had met and destroyed her own.
"Oh, it's natural that we should see everything differently. She is
really a sweet-natured girl. I'm sorry already for what I said to
her.... And her not wanting to stay here--you mustn't think that's just
a selfish whim--just wanting to live in New York. Of course, what she
wants is to have Donald to herself--to have their young married life to
themselves. And my going there to give advice to-day--naturally that
made her more certain than ever that she could never have that
here--with me just around the corner. She let me understand that,
finally. She intimated that Donald had said as much--he was tired of
being managed.... Oh, it's perfectly natural, perfectly right.
To-morrow, I'll accept it easily enough.... As I say--I haven't had much
time."
He was more touched by that speech than everything that had gone before,
yet more resolved, too, not to say, "I'm sorry."
"As a matter of fact," he asked straightforwardly, "what _was_
decided--as to Mrs. Flower?"
"It's not decided yet, at all. However, I have a plan--another
suggestion--which it seems to me might meet some of the difficulties."
"Aren't there friends or relatives here that she might stay with for a
time?"
"That's it. I think I can persuade her to live with us--till we have a
chance to see how all this--"
"With _you_?"
"It's just a hope, as I say. I didn't think of it till just now. Mother
is very fond of her. And Wallie can't give up college, of course. That
would be--quite the worst thing."
The school-teacher spoke with characteristic matter-of-factness. If she
was adding final touches to the portraits of two women, she did it,
certainly, with supreme unconsciousness. In the brief stillness of the
office, she efficiently neared the end of her task. The top of her table
was almost bare, the litter on the floor was deep. And now she spoke
again, dryly and quite conclusively.
"At any rate, nothing fatal has happened. Nobody knows that better than
I do--really. No doubt it's personal vanity with me, as much as
anything. And now--"
"Do you know," Charles Garrott spoke up suddenly, as if he did not hear
her at all--"I think you're the best I ever knew? The best--the
_best_--absolutely the most of a person--"
She, the strong, seemed to start and shrink; she broke in sharply, with
instant signs of a shaken poise: "No--_please_! You don't understand me
at all. I do--not need sympathy! It's just what I've been trying to
say--"
"Well, you aren't getting it from me, no fear. Sympathy! If ever there
was honest looking up, if ever--"
"No!--don't! I didn't tell you about it for that!--only to explain why I
seemed so ... It was due you. As I say, nobody understands better than I
how unreasonable it is--to be so disturbed. And if you hadn't come here
to-day--"
"Won't you give me credit for some understanding? If you were ten times
as disturbed, I'd think it the reasonablest--"
"Yes--for a woman. Well, I'm not that kind of woman," said Mary Wing,
with curious agitation, as if she could stand any sort of talk better
than this. "Please don't say any more. I don't tell my troubles to be
comforted--patted on the head. I'm not feminine, I hope, after all these
knocks. You make me--"
"Thank God, _no_!" said the young man on the ladder, considerably moved.
And then that connection which he must have been groping toward for a
month flashed startlingly upon him, and he, the authority, blurted out
like a boy:--
"No--_you're womanly_!"
He saw his old friend's face quiver a little as the strange word struck
her: oddly, it seemed to silence her. But it was not possible that she
could be one half so struck with that word as he, Charles Garrott, was.
_Mary Wing was a Womanly Woman_.... And now she could no more have
stopped his speech than she could have stopped a river when the one gate
in the dam, long locked, has suddenly burst open.
"That's it. Of course.... Funny, I was just thinking over all that as I
walked around here--how different those things are. No, not
different--they don't belong in the same story at all. What's character
got to do with--feathers in the springtime?... Born stupid," said
Charles, in a low, stirred voice--"that seems to explain me. I'd better
have been one-eyed--beat me over the head with it, and still I can't
see.... Won't see. That's it!--it's worse. I'm just an old-line
male--that's what. Just the sort who've taught women not to bother to
try to be womanly when being feminine comes so much cheaper. Why, look
at me, criticizing you in my thoughts, not liking it because you
were--independent. What was that but just pique--don't you know?--just
common ordinary male jealousy--because a woman didn't need my shoulder
to lean on. Manly protector ... seventeenth-century stuff. Well, you've
punished me, don't you worry.... Just standing where you always stood,
just being your Self. Acting straight from your own law all the time,
doing the best sort of things, one after the other--the biggest,
the--the _tenderest_--"
"Don't," said the grammar-school teacher again, but in the littlest
voice he had ever heard from her lips.
Rapt as he was, that voice penetrated him. More, it alarmed him: and
with reason, too. Staring down with a new fixedness, touched with a
faint, purely masculine horror, Charles beheld the strangest sight seen
by him in many a day. Mary Wing, the unconquerable, had suddenly put her
face into her hands.
He had really only been finishing that other talk of theirs, with a
certain sense of right; but of course this wasn't the time for that. He
had been indulging his analytic propensity, his fatal tendency to
comment, at her expense. Hadn't he understood that she feared nothing
so much as his sympathies?...
His friend, in her arresting attitude, sat as rigid as a carven woman.
The stillness in the little office was profound. Then a voice strained
out, very thin, but still not defeated:--
"Don't be alarmed. I'm ... not going to cry."
And that seemed to settle it. It was as if, in that silent struggle
waged all the way from the Flowers' to now, the speaking of the word
itself was the fatal admission. The school-teacher had no sooner
pronounced it than her arms spread suddenly out on the table before her,
and her head came down upon them.
Charles Garrott, on his ladder, was heard to take one breath, sharply.
After that, no sound came from him. Quite motionless he sat, in the
chance position in which the sudden disaster had overtaken him: long
arms dangling from his knees, large feet hooked under a ladder-rung,
some distance down. He hardly winked an eye.
Mary Wing was crying. That painful hard tension had snapped; the
indomitable slim figure drooped beaten, for once. She, also, made little
sound in her peculiar difficulty. But her body shook with a stormy
racking. And it hurt her, he was sure; hurt her physically, as if she
couldn't find tears without breaking something inside....
Strange it seemed that once, in this very room, and only the other day
really, he had wanted to see Mary cry. He had thought of it then as a
desirable sort of symbol, hadn't he?--something of that sort. What did
her tears have to tell him now? Then he had conceived himself as
watching her emotion, moved doubtless, but yet with a secretly gratified
masculinity. Now every heave of those slender shoulders was like a
clutch upon his heart.
And still there was something in Charles that was not distress at all.
He was aware of another and quite different inner sense--peace, the end
of struggle, fulfillment--he could not say what it was. It was strange.
He was not unhappy....
There came, after a time, signs that his friend was overcoming that hard
revolt of feelings too much put upon. Even in the beginning she had
never seemed to abandon herself, quite. At length, somewhat
unexpectedly, she moved, turned from her seat under his eye, and,
rising, went away to the office's one window. There she stood, her back
toward him. And presently she began to clear her throat, with nervous
quick coughings.
Through this, Charles had not spoken, or thought of doing so. To pat
Mary's shoulder, this time, had not entered his head. His instinct
seemed to feel the banality of any intrusion upon her freedom: she
should weep or not weep, just as seemed best to her. Now, as his grave
eyes followed her, it occurred to him that his presence here had been,
and was, a considerable intrusion. And about the time he had reached
this conclusion, Mary spoke, naturally enough, except that a sharp catch
of breath broke her sentence in the middle.
"I'm giving you ... a pleasant visit to-day."
The young man stirred on his perch. He answered, oddly, with a sort of
growl:--
"That's right! I'm a fair-weather friend. Keep things pleasant for _me_
all the time--or good-bye."
His heroine was sniffing repeatedly, in the humanest way. She kept
clearing her throat. Her movements made it clear that she was searching
busily for her handkerchief. However, there lay her handkerchief on the
table, under his eye. And if she, perhaps, hardly wished to turn and
come for it just now, no more did he see his way clear to going and
taking it to her.
"No--but what's the sense of it? I'm--doing just what I told Angela not
to do. Feeling sorry for myself, that's all."
"Well, I don't feel sorry for you. Don't worry about that."
Charles came down the ladder, and stood a moment kicking at the "New
Schools" strewn about the floor.
"Look here, suppose I save time by arranging about this box now? You
want it to go to your house, I suppose?"
"No--I'm going to send it to the grammar-school."
"Oh--all right. I'll attend to it," he said, briefly. "I'll tell the
porter to keep it to-night, and get a wagon to-morrow."
On which, without more ado, he stepped from the assistant principal's
office, and shut the door behind him.
Charles's conference with the negro porter in the corridor below lasted
a minute, perhaps. His diplomatic retirement lasted ten minutes, at
least. His surplus time the young man spent in staring out of a tall
window into a white-paved courtyard. But that it was a white-paved
courtyard, or that it was a courtyard, he never knew. The instant he
found that he was staring at it, he jumped a little, and went
upstairs....
If he had meant this interval as a punctuation and the turning of a
page, Mary, it seemed, had so accepted it. Reopening Mr. Geddie's door,
Charles saw that his absence had been employed for a general setting to
rights. The table had been moved back against the wall; the books and
globe restored to it, the chair Mary had occupied returned to its place,
the window opened to blow out the dust. Mary herself stood in the
middle of the room, coated, buttoning her gloves. Without looking at her
exactly, he was aware that the white veil which had been caught up
around her hat was now let down.
Bygones were bygones, clearly: the least said, the soonest mended.
Charles remarked, exactly as if house-cleaning were the sole interest he
knew of here: "Well, you've made a good job of it."
And Mary replied, with equal naturalness: "I did what I could. John will
have to attend to these things on the floor."
"Yes--I told him to see to that at once."
"He ought to give the closet a good cleaning, too. I'd better tell
him--this is just the time."
"I told him to be sure to scrub the closet. It'll be all right."