Angela's Business Part 47

Her wish to be alone was all but woundingly plain to him. And still it seemed to Charles physically impossible to turn now and walk out of the door. So, not looking at her, he answered in a peculiarly mild manner that, of course, this wasn't help at all, only a little indulgence of himself, which she really mustn't refuse him. And while he yet spoke, allowing no opportunity for such refusal, he hung his hat on Mr.

Geddie's hook, and all the forepart of him disappeared upward into the closet.

After an interval rather longer than necessary, he re-emerged to view, a few periodicals in one hand, a faded bundle of typewritten papers in the other.

"Geddie's made a clean sweep. There's hardly another armful."

His manner was almost as cheery as Geddie's own. His "note" was to go ahead as if nothing had happened.

"Put them here?" asked Charles.

Mary Wing's arms quivered a little on the table.

"Put them _anywhere_! It doesn't make the _least_ difference!"

So Charles laid his burden down on the table, and quietly went up the ladder again. Here, for a s.p.a.ce, he pretended to be impossibly busy over nearly empty shelves.

And then, out of the silence behind him, he heard his friend's voice, painfully stiff, somewhat strained.

"You see--you oughtn't to have come to see me to-day. I--I'm not fit for society. I tried to warn you. I haven't had time--to get philosophical yet."

The helper spoke into the dusty closet: "Well, you don't need to get philosophical with me. I'm pretty mad myself--as far as that goes."

"I wasn't prepared for it--at all.... And then I've been beating my head against it--like a fool--all afternoon."

Well he knew Mary's horror of weakness, her warranted confidence in her own self-control. Well he understood her regret for that uniquely sharp speech of hers. Was it this, a novel impulse to justify herself in his eyes, that seemed to force her on, beyond his expectation and against her own will?

"But don't suppose I went there expecting to have my own way about everything--manage them around like children. I didn't. I went respectfully. I went to beg. But it was no use."

Silence: and then the hard voice went on rapidly:--

"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. n.o.body 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, n.o.body 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 G.o.d, _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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 a.n.a.lytic 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 att.i.tude, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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.