“Of course you don’t know if you don’t think; but try to think!”
“What good will thinking do when we see how things are?”
“It’ll show us how to make the best of them, won’t it?”
“Is there any best to be made of your marrying anybody else than me? The
way things happen isn’t necessarily the best way.”
After her hesitating syncopated sentences in dealing with what was more
directly personal to her life and mine she talked now not so much calmly
as surely, as of subjects she had long thought out.
“I don’t say the best way absolutely; but the best in view of what we’ve
made for ourselves. For ourselves you and I have made things hard.
There’s no question about that. But isn’t it for both of us now to live
this minute so that the next won’t be any harder?”
There was no argument in this; there was only appeal.
“What,” I asked, “do you mean by that?”
“I suppose I mean that the best way to live this minute is to accept what
it contains—till it develops into something else—as it will. This isn’t
final. It’s only a step on the way to—”
“It’s a step on the way to your marrying a man you’re not in love with,
and my not marrying at all.”
“And as the world is at present, aren’t there worse tragedies than that?”
Irony of which she must have been unaware pricked my dreams of celibate
consecration to a cause as a pin pricks a bubble.
“So that if I stand still and let you go on—”
She threw me a quick glance. “And aren’t you going to?”
The answer to that question was what in the back of my mind I had been
trying to work out.
“Wouldn’t it depend,” I said, picking the right words, “on which of
the three it is? There’s one I couldn’t interfere with—not without
disregarding gratitude and honor.”
“Do you want me to tell you which?”
But I didn’t—not then. Too much hung on what the knowledge would bring
me. There were decisions to which I couldn’t force myself at once. In
saying this I added, “But though I can’t interfere with him without
disregarding gratitude and honor, I don’t say that I sha’n’t disregard
them.”
In the clear starlight her eyes had a veiled metallic brightness.
“No?”
“And if I don’t,” I persisted, “what shall you do?”
“What would you expect me to do?”
“I should expect you to back me up.”
“So that we should both be disregarding gratitude and honor?”
“We’ve a right to our happiness.”
“That’s a very old argument, isn’t it?”
“It’s not the less true for being old.”
“Oh no; if it’s true it’s true—anyhow.”
“And it is true. Don’t you know it is?”
She surprised me by saying, as if quite casually, “I don’t suppose that
in the end it’s the truth or the untruth of the argument that would weigh
with me.”
My heart gave a thump.
“Then what would weigh with you?”
She was standing with her back to the rail, the great white star behind
her. As if to emphasize the minute of suspense the engines gradually
stopped, while the ship rocked gently on the tide. The lights on shore
were more complex now, lights above lights, lights back of lights, with
the profusion of seaboard towns even in November. The murmur of voices
and the click of heels grew expectant as well as joyous.
When she spoke at last it was with breast heaving and eyes downcast. Her
words came out staccatowise, as if each made its separate effort to keep
itself back.
“What would weigh with me? I—I don’t know.”
“Does that mean,” I demanded, sharply, “that you might back me up?”