Two hours later she found herself alone on the porch with Captain
Prescott.
A good deal had happened in the meantime.
Mrs. Prescott had arrived during Katie's absence, a stop-over of two
weeks having been shortened to two hours because of the illness of her
friend. Her room at her son's quarters being uninhabitable because of
fresh paint, Wayne had insisted she come to them, and she was even then
resting up in Ann's room, or rather the room which had been put at her
disposal, a bed having been arranged for Ann in Katie's room. Had Katie
been at home she would have planned it some other way, for above all
things she did not want it to occur to Ann that she was in the way. But
Katie had been very busy talking to the man who mended the boats, and
naturally it would not occur to Wayne that Ann would be at all sensitive
about giving up her room for a few days to accommodate a dear old friend
of theirs. And perhaps she was not sensitive about it, only this was no
time, Katie felt, to make Ann feel she was crowding any one.
And in Katie's absence "Pet" had been shot. Pet had not seemed to realize
that alley methods of defense were not in good repute in the army. He
could not believe that Pourquoi and N'est-ce-pas had no guile in their
hearts when they pawed at him. Furthermore, he seemed to have a
prejudice against enlisted men and showed his teeth at several of them.
Katie began to explain that that was because--but Wayne had curtly cut
her short with saying that he didn't care why it was, the fact that it
was had made it impossible to have the dog around. If one of the men had
been bitten by the contemptible cur Katie couldn't cauterize the wound
with the story of the dog's hard life.
The only bright spot she could find in it was that probably Watts had
taken a great deal of pleasure in executing Wayne's orders--and Caroline
Osborne said that all needed pleasure.
She saw that Ann's hands were clenched, and so had not pursued the
discussion.
Katie was not in high favor with her brother that night. He said it was
outrageous she should not have been there to receive Mrs. Prescott. When
Katie demurred that she would have been less outrageous had she had the
slightest notion Mrs. Prescott would be there to be received, it
developed that Wayne was further irritated because he had come to take
Ann out for a boat ride--and Katie had gone in the boat--heaven only knew
where! Then when Katie sought to demolish that irritation with the
suggestion that just then was the most beautiful time of day for the
river--and she knew it would do Ann good to go--Wayne clung manfully to
his grievance, this time labeling it worry. He forbade Katie's going any
more by herself. It was preposterous she should have stayed so long. He
would have been out looking for her had it not been that Watts had been
able to get a glimpse of the boat pulled in on the upper island.
Katie wondered what else Watts had been able to get a glimpse of.
Wayne was so bent on being abused (hot days affected people differently)
that the only way she could get him to relinquish a grievance for a
pleasure was to put it in the form of a duty. Ann needed a ride on the
river, Katie affirmed, and so they had gone, Wayne doing his best to
cover his pleasure.
"Men never really grow up," she mused to Wayne's back. "Every so often
they have to act just like little boys. Only little boys aren't half so
apt to do it."
Though perhaps Wayne had been downright disappointed at not having the
boat for Ann when he came home. Was he meaning to deliver that lecture on
the army? She hoped that whatever he talked about it would bring Ann home
without that strained, harassed look.
And now Katie was talking to Captain Prescott and thinking of the man who
mended the boats. Captain Prescott was a good one to be talking to when
one wished to be thinking of some one else. He called one to no dim,
receding distances.
She was thinking that in everything save the things which counted most
he was not unlike this other man--name unknown. Both were well-built,
young, vigorous, attractive. But life had dealt differently with them,
and they were dealing differently with life. That made a difference big
as life itself.
From the far country in which she was dreaming she heard Captain
Prescott talking about girls. He was talking sentimentally, but even his
sentiment opened no vistas.
And suddenly she remembered how she had at one time thought it possible
she would marry him. The remembrance appalled her; less in the idea of
marrying him than in the consciousness of how far she had gone from the
place where marrying him suggested itself to her at all.
Life had become different. This showed her how vastly different.
But as he talked on she began to feel that it had not become as different
to him as to her. He had not been making little excursions up and down
unknown paths. He had remained right in his place. That place seemed to
him the place for Katie Jones.
As he talked on--about what he called Life--sublimely unconscious of the
fences all around him shutting out all view of what was really life--it
became unmistakable that Captain Prescott was getting ready to propose
to her. She had had too much experience with the symptoms not to
recognize them.
Katie did not want to be proposed to. She was in no mood for dealing
with a proposal. She had too many other things to be thinking of,
wondering about.
But she reprimanded herself for selfishness. It meant something to him,
whether it did to her or not. She must be kind--as kind as she could.
The kindest thing she could think of was to keep him from proposing. To
that end she answered every sentimental remark with a flippant one.
It grieved, but did not restrain him. "I had thought you would understand
better, Katie," he said.
Something in his voice made her question the kindness of her method.
Better decline a love than laugh at it.
He talked on of how he had, at various times, cared--in a way, he
said--for various girls, but had never found the thing he knew was fated
to mean the real thing to him; Katie had heard it all before, and always
told with that same freedom from suspicion of its ever having been said
before. But perhaps it was the very fact that it was familiar made her
listen with a certain tenderness. For she seemed to be listening, less to
him than to the voice of by-gone days--all those merry, unthinking days
which in truth had dealt very kindly and generously with her.
She had a sense of leaving them behind. That alone was enough to make her
feel tenderly toward them. Even a place within a high-board fence,
intolerable if one thought one were to remain in it, became a kindly and
a pleasant spot from the top of the fence. Once free to turn one's face
to the wide sweep without, one was quite ready to cast loving looks back
at the enclosure.
And so she softened, prepared to deal tenderly with Captain Prescott,
as he seemed then, less the individual than the incarnation of
outlived days.
It was into that mellowed, sweetly melancholy mood he sent the
following:
"And so, Katie, I wanted to talk to you about it. You're such a good
pal--such a bully sort--I wanted to tell you that I care for Ann--and
want to marry her."
She dropped from the high-board fence with a jolt that well-nigh knocked
her senseless.
"I suppose," he said, "that you must have suspected."
"Well, not exactly suspected," said Katie, feeling her bumps, as it were.
Her first emotion was that it was pretty shabby treatment to accord one
who was at such pains to be kind. It gave one a distinctly injured
feeling--getting all sweet and mellow only to be dashed to the ground and
let lie there in that foolish looking--certainly foolish feeling heap!
But as soon as she had picked herself up--and Katie was too gamey to be
long in picking herself up--she wondered what under heaven she was going
to do about things! What had she let herself in for now! The pains of an
injured dignity--throb of a pricked self love--were forgotten in this
real problem, confronting her. She even grew too grave to think about how
funny it was.
For Katie saw this as genuinely serious.
"Harry," she asked, "have you said anything to your mother?"
"Well, not _said_ anything," he laughed.
"But she knows?"
"Mother's keen," he replied.
"I once thought I was," was Katie's unspoken comment.
"And have you--you are so good as to confide in me, so I presume to ask
questions--have you said anything to Ann?"
"No, not _said_ anything," he laughed again.
"But _she_ knows?"
"I don't know. I wondered if you did."
"No," said Katie, "I don't. Truth is I've been so wrapped up in my own
affairs--some things I've had on my mind--that I haven't been thinking
about people around me falling in love."
"People are always falling in love," he remarked sentimentally. "One
should always be prepared for that."
"So it seems," replied Katie. "And yet one is not always--entirely
prepared."
She had picked herself up from her fall, but she was not yet able to walk
very well. Fortunately he was too absorbed in his own happy striding to
mark her hobbling.
A young man talking of his love does not need a brilliant
conversationalist for companion.
And he was a young man in love--that grew plain. Had Katie ever seen such
eyes? And as for the mouth--though perhaps most remarkable of all was the
voice. Just what did it make Katie think of? He enumerated various things
it made him think of, only to express his dissatisfaction with them all
as inadequate. Had Katie ever seen any one so beautiful? And with such
an adorable shy little way? Had Katie ever heard her say anything about
him? Did she think he had any chance? Was there any other fellow? Of
course there must have been lots of other fellows in love with her--a
girl like that--but had she cared for any of them? Would Katie tell him
something about her? She had been reserved about herself--the kind of
reserve a fellow wouldn't try to break through. Would Katie tell him of
her life and her people? Not that it made any difference with him--oh, he
wanted just her. But his mother would want to know--Katie knew how
mothers were about things like that. And he did want his mother to like
her. Surely she would. How could she help it?
She wondered if Ann knew him for a young man in love. Katie's heart
hardened against Ann at the possibility. That would not be playing a fair
game. Ann was not in position to let Katie's friends fall in love with
her. Katie had not counted on that.
"Have you any reason," she asked, "to think Ann cares for you?"
He laughed happily. "N--o; only I don't think it displeases her to have
me say nice things to her." And again he laughed.
Then Ann had encouraged him. A girl had no business to encourage a man to
say nice things to her when she knew nothing could come of it.
But Katie's memory there nudged Katie's primness; memory of all the
men who had been encouraged to say nice things to Katie Jones, even
when it was not desirable--or perhaps even possible--that anything
could "come of it."
But of course that was different. Ann was in no position to permit nice
things being said to her.
"Katie," he was asking, "where did you first meet her? How did you come
to know her? Can't you tell me all about it?"
There came a mad impulse to do so. To say: "I first met her right down
there at the edge of the water. She was about to commit suicide. I don't
know why. I think she was one of those 'Don't You Care' girls you admired
in 'Daisey-Maisey.' But I'm not sure of even that. I didn't want her to
kill herself, so I took her in and pretended she was a friend of mine. I
made the whole thing up. I even made up her name. She said her name was
Verna Woods, but I think that's a made-up name, too. I haven't the
glimmering of an idea what her real name is, who her people are, where
she came from, or why she wanted to kill herself."
Then what?
First, bitter reproaches for Katie. She would be painted as having
violated all the canons.
For the first time, watching her friend's face softened by his dreams,
seeing him as his mother's son, she questioned her right to violate them.
She did not know why she had not thought more about it before. It had
seemed such a _joke_ on the people in the enclosure. But it was not going
to be a joke to hurt them. Was that what came of violating the canons?
Was the hurt to one's friends the punishment one got for it?
"You can't cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog's hard life,"
Wayne had said of poor little unpetted--and because unpetted,
unpettable--Pet.
Was Watts the real philosopher when he said "things was as they was"?
She was bewildered. She was in a country where she could not find her
way. She needed a guide. Her throat grew tight, her eyes hot, at thought
of how badly she needed her guide.
Then, perhaps in self-defense, she saw her friend Captain Prescott, not
as a victim of the violation of canons, but as a violator of them
himself. She turned from Ann's past to his.
"Harry," she asked, in rather metallic voice, "how about that affair of
yours down in Cuba?"
He flushed with surprise and resentment. "I must say, Katie," he said
stiffly, "I don't see what it has to do with this."
"Why, I should think it might have something to do with it. Isn't there a
popular notion that our pasts have something to do with our futures?"
"It's all over," he said shortly.
"Then you would say, Harry, that when things are over they're over. That
they needn't tie up the future."
"Certainly not," said he, making it clear that he wanted that phase of
the conversation "over."
"It's my own theory," said Katie. "But I didn't know whether or not it
was yours. Now if I had had a past, and it was, as you say yours is,
all over, I shouldn't think it was any man's business to go poking
around in it."
"That," he said, "is a different matter."
"What's a different matter?" she asked aggressively.
"A woman's past. That would be a man's business."
"Though a man's past is not a woman's business?"
"Oh, we certainly needn't argue that old nonsense. You're too much the
girl of the world to take any such absurd position, Katie."
"Of course, being what you call a 'girl of the world' it's absurd I
should question the man's point of view, but I can't quite get the logic
of it. You wouldn't marry a woman with a past, and yet the woman who
marries you is marrying a man with one."
"I've lived a man's life," he said. And he said it with a certain pride.
"And perhaps she's lived a woman's life," Katie was thinking. Only the
woman was not entitled to the pride. For her it led toward
self-destruction rather than self-approval.
"It's this way, Katie," he explained to her. "This is the difference. A
woman's past doesn't stay in the past. It marks her. Why I can tell a
woman with a past every time," he concluded confidently.
Katie sat there smiling at him. The smile puzzled him.
"Now look here, Katie, surely you--a girl of the world--the good
sort--aren't going to be so melodramatic as to dig up a 'past' for
me, are you?"
"No," said Katie, "I don't want to be melodramatic. I'll try to dig up
no pasts."
His talk ran on, and her thoughts. It seemed so cruel a thing that Ann's
past--whatever it might be, and surely nothing short of a "past" could
make a girl want to kill herself--should rise up and damn her now. To him
she was a dear lovely girl--the sort of a girl a man would want to marry.
Very well then, intrinsically, she _was_ that. Why not let people _be_
what they were? Why not let them be themselves, instead of what one
thought they would be from what one knew of their lives? It was so easy
to see marks when one knew of things which one's philosophy held would
leave marks. It seemed a fairer and a saner thing to let human beings be
what their experiences had actually made them rather than what one
thought those experiences would make them.
Captain Prescott had blighted a Cuban woman's life--for his own pleasure
and vanity. With Ann it may have been the press of necessity, or it may
have been--the call of life. Either one, being driven by life, or drawn
to it, seemed less ignominious than trifling with life.
Why would it be so much worse for Captain Prescott to marry Ann than it
would be for Ann to marry Captain Prescott?
The man who mended the boats would back her up in that!
Through her somber perplexity there suddenly darted the sportive idea of
getting Ann in the army! The audacious little imp of an idea peeped
around corners in Katie's consciousness and tried to coquet with her.
Banished, it came scampering back to whisper that Ann would not bring the
army its first "past"--either masculine or feminine. Only in the army
they managed things in such wise that there was no need of committing
suicide. Ann had been a bad manager.
But at that moment they were joined by Captain Prescott's mother and he
retired for a solitary smoke.