Time Will Darken It (16 page)

One sometimes notices in public places, in restaurants especially, women dressed elaborately, wearing furs, equipped with diamond rings on their fingers, and their faces so hideous that the observer turns away out of pity. Yet no pity is asked for; nothing but pride looks out of the ugly face.

If Austin King had suddenly said, “You have the most lovely eyes of any woman I have ever seen and wherever I go I am always looking, always comparing other women with you. Of them all, my darling, you are the most beautiful, the most romantic. I love, beyond all reason or measure, the curve and width of your upper eyelids, and your hair that always looks as if you had been out walking and the wind had
swept it back from your forehead. I love the things your mouth says to me, and the soft shadow right now at the side of your throat …” the chances are that Martha would have listened carefully and perhaps in some inner part of her nature been satisfied for a moment. But only for a moment.

She put the hand-mirror face down on the dressing-table and looked into the large mirror in front of her. She never looked into either mirror a moment longer than necessary. If she had cared to look at her husband, all she needed to do was to shift her glance to meet his, also reflected in the mirror, but she avoided his eyes, apparently without any effort on her part.

The beautiful blind passion of running away is permittea only to children, convicts, and slaves. If you are subject to the truant officer and the Law of Bedtime there will be doorways that will shelter you and freight cars that will take you a long way from home. If you are a safe-cracker and cannot walk in a straight line for more than a hundred yards without coming face to face with a high stone wall, there are ways of tunnelling under the wall, under the five-year sentence, and confederates waiting outside. If you cannot own property but are owned yourself, you may, hiding in the daytime and travelling across country by back roads at night, eventually reach the border. But if any free person tries to run away he will discover sooner or later that he has been running all the while in a circle and that this circle is taking him inexorably back to the person or place he ran away from. The free person who runs away is no better off than a fish with a hook in his mouth, given plenty of line so that he can tire himself out and be reeled in calmly and easily by his own destiny
.

“I wouldn’t have gone if you had asked me,” Martha King said. “There were too many things that had to be done here. It’s just that I don’t like to have it taken for granted that I never go anywhere.”

In a happy panic Martha Hastings left town and went to Indianapolis to stay with Helen Burke, who was teaching school there. They had known each other since they were little girls, and
Helen
(
whom no man had ever asked to marry
)
listened patiently night after night while Martha talked about Austin, twisting his words about to suit her own purposes, throwing a sinister light on innocent circumstances, and, on rather flimsy evidence, convicting the man she loved. Helen Burke believed everything that Martha told her, sympathized with and was caught up in the excitement of her friend’s dramatic dilemma. “I don’t know how you lived through it,” she would say, and her eyes would fill with tears over the monstrous cunning and misbehaviour of a boy she had known ever since the first grade and whose name always headed the honour roll. “And I had no one to turn to,” Martha would say, “except you.” When at the end of ten days, Martha Hastings packed her bag and said good-bye, Helen Burke was too emotionally exhausted to do anything about it. Offering fresh counsel and foreseeing new difficulties, she went with Martha to the station, before school opened in the morning, and had trouble all that day enforcing discipline in the classroom
.

The movements of Martha King’s arms, her gestures as she pinned her hair in place on top of her head, were dreamy and thoughtful. “The whole thing is of no importance,” she said. “I just mentioned it in passing. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure in any way. And so long as you are——”

“But it
is
important,” Austin protested. “If you think for one minute that I don’t enjoy having you with me——”

“I’m useful to you as someone to run the house. I know you appreciate that.”

There was an extra loud clap of thunder and Martha winced. She was not afraid of electrical storms but they made her nervous.

Martha Hastings had written to her aunt and uncle that she was coming, but no one but Helen Burke knew that she was on the
11.15
train. She sat looking out of the dirty window at fields and farmhouses and roads leading in all directions and felt her own hold on life to be very slight, to be slipping away from her like the flat landscape. If she could have stayed on the train forever
she would have, but it was leading her towards a decision that she was not yet prepared to make, and suddenly, as though a familiar voice had spoken, it came to her that she must let chance decide. If Austin was at the station to meet her, she would marry him. It would be the hand of fate, and she would have no choice but to follow where it pointed. If the station platform was deserted, if he didn’t know just by his love for her that she was coming back to him, then they were not meant for each other. In a state of peace with the world and with herself she sat and looked out at the red barns and the round silos, at a white horse in a pasture and at cows huddled around a tree for shade. “Draperville!” the conductor shouted. “Draperville!” and the train began to slow down. Through the plumed smoke outside the window she saw a church steeple, the monument works, and then the station. The train would go on to Peoria and for a second, standing in the aisle, she considered wildly the possibility of going on with it. There was no one she knew in Peoria, no friend waiting to give her shelter. As she stepped down from the train he was the first person she saw, his head above the other heads on the station platform. He had seen her and was coming towards her. The face that she presented to him was one he had never seen before, quiet, relaxed, without the slightest trace of indecision or of anxiety
.

That night, sitting in the porch swing, she told him that she would marry him. She also asked him not to tell anyone, but this request, in the midst of his happiness, he failed to attach any importance to. The next night, when he went to see her, her serenity was gone. She told him that she didn’t want to be engaged yet, that she needed time to think it over. And then, seeing the strange expression that passed over his face, she said, “You haven’t told anyone, have you?”

“I’ve told my mother,” he said. “She’s going to give you a diamond pin that belonged to Grandmother Curtis. She asked me to bring you to tea tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh, Austin, how could you?”

“And I told Mr. Holby,” he said
.

“How can I face your mother when I don’t know yet whether I want to marry you? I told you not to tell anyone!”

“I’m sorry,” Austin said helplessly. “I forgot. If you want me to, I’ll tell them we’re not engaged. That it was a mistake.”

This humiliation she could not bear for him to have
.

Sad of heart, he had to go on accepting congratulations. Martha had not actually broken the engagement, she had suspended it, left it open and in doubt. She kept the diamond pin, but did not wear it. He came back night after night, he was gentle with her, he was patient, he was unyielding. During all this time he did not reproach or blame her, even to himself. Martha Hastings was catapulted into a dreamlike series of showers, engagement presents, congratulations, and attentions from Austin’s family, and in the natural course of events found herself with Austin’s mother addressing a pile of wedding invitations
.

“I don’t know what else I can say except that I’m very sorry,” Austin said. “And since you didn’t really want to go anyway, I don’t exactly see what harm is done.”

“No,” Martha said. “What does it matter? It’s a small thing that I’ve married a man who doesn’t care for me.”

She was rewarded with a look which said quite plainly I am married to a stranger and there is no possibility of ever coming to terms with her. It only lasted for a second and was replaced by a look of such understanding, and such sadness as the result of understanding, that she had to turn her face away. Once more he had found her out, got through the barrier and seen her for what she was, a beautiful woman who could not believe in her own beauty or accept love without casting every conceivable doubt upon it. Now and every other time that they quarrelled, she was merely seeing how far she could go, leading him to the edge of the pit and making him look down, threatening their common happiness in order to convince herself of its reality.

“I’m going downstairs,” he said. “Ab’s tricycle is out in the rain and it’ll get all rusty.”

Part Three
A Serious Mistake

1

The gash that ran down Randolph Potter’s forehead and through his left eyebrow healed rapidly without becoming infected. Because of it he was, for a time, both a hero and a household pet. Nora changed bedrooms with her brother so that he wouldn’t have to sleep in the oven-like heat engendered by the sun on the tin roof. During the daytime he lay stretched out on a sofa in the living-room or on the porch swing and held court. Someone was always at his side, anxious to wait upon him, eager to run upstairs for a clean handkerchief or out to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. He saw the evening paper before anyone else did, and he had only to bite his lip or frown or sit up and arrange the pillows at his back, and people stopped talking and inquired if he was in pain.

The Ellises, feeling responsible for the accident, dropped in to see Randolph every day. Sitting between his mother and sister, he took no part in the conversation. In his eyes there was a look of tired contentment. His family and all the people around him had abandoned their ordinary preoccupation with their own affairs and were now concerned about him for a change; not merely about him—about a very small part of him. He was quite satisfied.