She looked surprised. “Why not? Don’t you think it was the kind thing
to do?”
I started to say “Kind?” But she was so kindly sure that she had been
considerate!
She went on: “Nick is simple, sometimes. He began on a certain shame
that he had got up over it; and naturally I realized how painful it
would be if he acknowledged all of it--I had an idea that he’d brood
over it--so I brought the talk to an end. He gave every evidence,
besides, of getting hateful about it; for he said something about
it not being so bad with my work. ‘With your flow of words--your
beloved words--what’s to prevent your turning them loose on your
book--finishing your book?’ He said that when a man wanted to build
the greatest building of a great city, and the thing escaped, the
fantastic idea was always beyond him because at the front of the poor
man’s head was trouble and on the vision of the poor man’s strained
imagination were the knocks of fortune: what was a man to do, in such
case? The Devil, he reminded me, had helped the architect who designed
the Cologne Cathedral; but the devils who were poking their fingers
in this pie were not helpful visitants. He overlooked, you see, the
self-evident fact that his mother’s friends are the bad visitants.”
I fear that I showed my astonishment. “He was appealing to you for
sympathy. You wanted his understanding of the problems--the agonies--of
your work, and he asked you to consider his problem. Don’t you feel
this?”
None with so glassy a surface as Eva when she refused to be halted on a
line of thought. “He has a way of saying things harshly. I can’t bear
harshness. When things happen that hurt your heart, your brain doesn’t
work. I had had a bad night--hopeless agony of mind because I couldn’t
recapture a dream. And I said to him ‘You can’t understand!’ If he had
said something! But how was I to know how he took it, when he didn’t
say a word?”
I began explaining as if she were a child. “He wanted to say ‘Will you
kindly, mercifully, put it into words--say, out loud, what you think of
my work, of my potential ability to do great work?’”
She burst out laughing. “Dinah, darling: Nick isn’t at all like that.
He’s a Dutchman. He’s solid and calm to the point of being nearly
phlegmatic; he’s---- No, he isn’t stodgy, bless him! He’s a dear.”
“He might merely be reticent,” I suggested. I knew nothing about him.
But I judged him by other reserved men. This desire of his, to know the
worst, was something that was now, and would always be, a thing that in
decency he would keep from her. The reticences of life were one thing;
they were established by form; but, beyond and entombed, were the
reticences of the heart, and of the spirit, and of these a man found it
impossible to speak. I said: “You must often have rubbed it in on him
that you don’t think much of his ability.”
Her knit brow revealed her difficulty over this. “I don’t see why you
say such a thing. Look here: I’m going to tell you all we said, that
morning. Then you can see for yourself. I tried to let him down easily.
I said ‘I knew, last night, that something had gone wrong with you’.”
I sat watching her face. It was difficult to believe that she had
carried on her part of the conversation as she now reported it to
me. She had, however, so phenomenal a memory for conversations that
it was impossible to doubt the essential truth of her complete
misunderstanding. “He didn’t meet me half-way,” she complained. “He
was rather mean. ‘Let us not bring it down to a struggle between us,’
he said to me. I said: ‘You know that I believe in you, don’t you?’ He
came at me with one of those hateful counter questions: ‘Do you?’ So
I looked straight at him and asked ‘You’ve never believed in me, have
you?’ He said--as if this were quite sufficient: ‘I’ve loved you.’”
“Why wasn’t it sufficient?” I put it to her. A man loves a woman, I
explained; this emotion does not presuppose belief in anything about
her, beyond her fidelity. His belief in Eva was founded on the evidence
of his eyes. A man would argue that behind a face so sweet there must
lie womanliness.
She bit her lip. She was losing patience with me. “You don’t try to
understand,” she complained.
“You’re wrong. I understand only too well.” I, on my part, was losing
patience. Usually, I lost patience with Eva towards the end of a long
talk. “You don’t want love; you want adoration--little Bodhisattvas
sitting at your feet.”
She said angrily: “I shall lift him!”
She was devastating. “You mean, you will jerk him up?”
“Anyone would think,” she advanced plaintively, “that you were in love
with him.”
“I scarcely know him,” I said shortly. But my sympathy was shifting
towards him. As he was trying to make up his mind to let his work
stay in a background made so much the richer for her work, so she had
decided to put the force of her will behind and push him up. This much
was plain. And nothing could well be more disastrous.
She said: “He laughed!”
I said: “Why shouldn’t he laugh?” It was impossible for them to bolster
each other’s courage. And besides, Eva had never needed an outside
influence to bolster her courage; her belief in herself would always
hold her up. I asked: “What had you said, to make him laugh?”
“I told him that I was going to help him.”
“No wonder he laughed,” I replied.
Eva said sadly: “He used to seem so proud, and so completely happy. His
very arm felt happy, when he put it around me as we showed the house
to his mother. He had forgotten, Dinah,” she said, with her sudden
understanding, “that he had chosen between his mother and me.”
I thought: “Poor man!” What had the choice been, after all, but the
desire of a man for happiness at any cost? And--again after all--what
is it to love a woman, except in one way or another to shed your life’s
blood at her feet? I said: “Oh--let’s drop it, Eva; shall we? Why
should we quarrel over it?”
It was dark, in the street outside. I had forgotten to stop to speak to
Mattie.