Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who
had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him
off. It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if
he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to
maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery. They had tried to make
Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her;
and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart
humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between
them, and that they had agreed together she should not come. He had to
stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for
nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John. The fond adieux
of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the
interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he
showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in
acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.
When it was all over, he went down into his state-room, and shut himself
in, and let his misery rollover him. He felt as if there were a flood of
it, and it washed him to and fro, one gall of shame, of self-accusal,
of bitterness, from head to foot. But in it all he felt no resentment
toward Alice, no wish to wreak any smallest part of his suffering upon
her. Even while he had hoped for her love, it seemed to him that he had
not seen her in all that perfection which she now had in irreparable
loss. His soul bowed itself fondly over the thought of her; and, stung
as he was by that last cruel word of hers, he could not upbraid her.
That humility which is love casting out selfishness, the most egotistic
of the passions triumphing over itself--Mavering experienced it to
the full. He took all the blame. He could not see that she had ever
encouraged him to hope for her love, which now appeared a treasure
heaven--far beyond his scope; he could only call himself fool, and fool,
and fool, and wonder that he could have met her in the remoteness of
that morning with the belief that but for the follies of last night she
might have answered him differently. He believed now that, whatever
had gone before, she must still have rejected him. She had treated his
presumption very leniently; she had really spared him.
It went on, over and over. Sometimes it varied a little, as when he
thought of how, when she should tell her mother, Mrs. Pasmer must laugh.
He pictured them both laughing at him; and then Mr. Pasmer--he had
scarcely passed a dozen words with him-coming in and asking what they
were laughing at, and their saying, and his laughing too.
At other times he figured them as incensed at his temerity, which must
seem to them greater and greater, as now it seemed to him. He had never
thought meanly of himself, and the world so far had seemed to think well
of him; but because Alice Pasmer was impossible to him, he felt that it
was an unpardonable boldness in him to have dreamed of her. What
must they be saying of his having passed from the ground of society
compliments and light flirtation to actually telling Alice that he loved
her?
He wondered what Mrs. Pasmer had thought of his telling her that he had
come to Campobello to consider the question whether he should study law
or go into business, and what motive she had supposed he had in telling
her that. He asked himself what motive he had, and tried to pretend that
he had none. He dramatised conversations with Mrs. Pasmer in which he
laughed it off.
He tried to remember all that had passed the day before at the picnic,
and whether Alice had done or said anything to encourage him, and he
could not find that she had. All her trust and freedom was because she
felt perfectly safe with him from any such disgusting absurdity as
he had been guilty of. The ride home through the mist, with its sweet
intimacy, that parting which had seemed so full of tender intelligence,
were parts of the same illusion. There had been nothing of it on her
side from the beginning but a kindliness which he had now flung away for
ever.
He went back to the beginning, and tried to remember the point where he
had started in this fatal labyrinth of error. She had never misled him,
but he had misled himself from the first glimpse of her.
Whatever was best in his light nature, whatever was generous and
self-denying, came out in this humiliation. From the vision of her
derision he passed to a picture of her suffering from pity for him, and
wrung with a sense of the pain she had given him. He promised himself to
write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy
of that. He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble
attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal
to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious
thought. He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he
composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so
to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship. In the end he
died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him.
He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the
berth where he had tumbled himself. The state-room had that smell of
parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer
in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after
his mother's health began to fail.
He went down on the deck near the ladies' saloon, where the second-class
passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation
negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip. The passengers
were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they
lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the
music without smiling. One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and
another began to do the rheumatic uncle's breakdown. Mavering said to
himself: “I can't stand that. Oh, what a fool I am! Alice, I love you. O
merciful heavens! O infernal jackass! Ow! Gaw!”
At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to
the States after some job in the Provinces. They smoked their pipes
and whined their Neapolitan dialect together. It made Mavering think
of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his
self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass. The inscription
on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his
life--his desolate, broken life--a perpetual exile, like Dante's. At the
same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: “Oh, what a fool I am! Oh,
idiot! beast! Oh! oh!” The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took
out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the
cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined
to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and
bestowing alms.
He groaned aloud, so that the Italians noticed it, and doubtless spoke
of it among themselves. He could not understand their dialect, but he
feigned them saying respectfully compassionate things. Then he gnashed
his teeth again, and cursed his folly. When the bell rang for supper he
found himself very hungry, and ate heavily. After that he went out in
front of the cabin, and walked up and down, thinking, and trying not
to think. The turmoil in his mind tired him like a prodigious physical
exertion.
Toward ten o'clock the night grew rougher. The sea was so phosphorescent
that it broke in sheets and flakes of pale bluish flame from the bows
and wheel-houses, and out in the dark the waves revealed themselves in
flashes and long gleams of fire. One of the officers of the boat came
and hung with Mavering over the guard. The weird light from the water
was reflected on their faces, and showed them to each other.
“Well, I never saw anything like this before. Looks like hell; don't
it?” said the officer.
“Yes,” said Mavering. “Is it uncommon?”
“Well, I should say so. I guess we're going to have a picnic.”
Mavering thought of blueberries, but he did not say anything.
“I guess it's going to be a regular circus.”
Mavering did not care. He asked incuriously, “How do you find your
course in such weather?”
“Well, we guess where we are, and then give her so many turns of the
wheel.” The officer laughed, and Mavering laughed too. He was struck by
the hollow note in his laugh; it seemed to him pathetic; he wondered if
he should now always laugh so, and if people would remark it. He tried
another laugh; it sounded mechanical.
He went to bed, and was so worn out that he fell asleep and began to
dream. A face came up out of the sea, and brooded over the waters, as in
that picture of Vedder's which he calls “Memory,” but the hair was not
blond; it was the colour of those phosphorescent flames, and the eyes
were like it. “Horrible! horrible!” he tried to shriek, but he cried,
“Alice, I love you.” There was a burglar in the room, and he was running
after Miss Pasmer. Mavering caught him, and tried to beat him; his fists
fell like bolls of cotton; the burglar drew his breath in with a long,
washing sound like water.
Mavering woke deathly sick, and heard the sweep of the waves. The boat
was pitching frightfully. He struggled out into the saloon, and saw that
it was five o'clock. In five hours more it would be a day since he told
Alice that he loved her; it now seemed very improbable. There were a
good many half-dressed people in the saloon, and a woman came running
out of her state-room straight to Mavering. She was in her stocking
feet, and her hair hung down her back.
“Oh! are we going down?” she implored him. “Have we struck? Oughtn't we
to pray--somebody? Shall I wake the children?”
“Mavering reassured her, and told her there was no danger.
“Well, then,” she said, “I'll go back for my shoes.”
“Yes, better get your shoes.”
The saloon rose round him and sank. He controlled his sickness by
planting a chair in the centre and sitting in it with his eyes shut. As
he grew more comfortable he reflected how he had calmed that woman, and
he resolved again to spend his life in doing good. “Yes, that's the only
ticket,” he said to himself, with involuntary frivolity. He thought
of what the officer had said, and he helplessly added, “Circus
ticket--reserved seat.” Then he began again, and loaded himself with
execration.
The boat got into Portland at nine o'clock, and Mavering left her,
taking his hand-bag with him, and letting his trunk go on to Boston.
The officer who received his ticket at the gangplank noticed the
destination on it, and said, “Got enough?”
“Yes, for one while.” Mavering recognised his acquaintance of the night
before.
“Don't like picnics very much.”
“No,” said Mavering, with abysmal gloom. “They don't agree with me.
Never did.” He was aware of trying to make his laugh bitter. The officer
did not notice.
Mavering was surprised, after the chill of the storm at sea, to find it
rather a warm, close morning in Portland. The restaurant to which the
hackman took him as the best in town was full of flies; they bit him
awake out of the dreary reveries he fell into while waiting for his
breakfast. In a mirror opposite he saw his face. It did not look
haggard; it looked very much as it always did. He fancied playing a part
through life--hiding a broken heart under a smile. “O you incorrigible
ass!” he said to himself, and was afraid he had said it to the young
lady who brought him his breakfast, and looked haughtily at him from
under her bang. She was very thin, and wore a black jersey.
He tried to find out whether he had spoken aloud by addressing her
pleasantly. “It's pretty cold this morning.”
“What say?”
“Pretty cool.”
“Oh yes. But it's pretty clo-ose,” she replied, in her Yankee
cantillation. She went away and left him to the bacon and eggs he had
ordered at random. There was a fly under one of the slices of bacon, and
Mavering confined himself to the coffee.
A man came up in a white cap and jacket from a basement in the front of
the restaurant, where confectionery was sold, and threw down a mass of
malleable candy on a marble slab, and began to work it. Mavering watched
him, thinking fuzzily all the time of Alice, and holding long, fatiguing
dialogues with the people at the Ty'n-y-Coed, whose several voices he
heard.
He said to himself that it was worse than yesterday. He wondered if it
would go on getting worse every day.
He saw a man pass the door of the restaurant who looked exactly like
Boardman as he glanced in. The resemblance was explained by the man's
coming back, and proving to be really Boardman.