Time Will Darken It (44 page)

At quarter after eleven, on Christmas morning, the Kings’ living-room was strewn, from the ebony pier glass to the dining-room doors, with tissue paper. The candles on the Christmas tree had burned low and been put out, for fear of fire. Their red and white and green and blue wax had dripped on the pine needles, the artificial snow, the gold tinsel, and the coloured balls that managed to reflect the whole disorderly, uninhabited room in their curved sides.

The square flat package on the hall table was for Nora. It was wrapped in red tissue paper tied with white ribbon and contained a handkerchief. On the sofa in the living-room, the presents that Austin had received were arranged in a neat pile that contained nothing more interesting or exciting than a belt with a silver monogrammed buckle (he already had a pearl-handled pocketknife) and a game that required the throwing of dice. The person or persons who had sent Ab
the box of dominoes, the box of tiddlywinks, and the dancing mechanical minstrel would never be properly thanked, because Martha King was not in the living-room when these presents were opened, and the cards that came with them were now somewhere in the mass of tissue paper.

When the doorbell rang, there were footsteps in the upper hall, and Austin came down the stairs, with Ab following, one step at a time.

“Merry Christmas!” Nora cried, as he opened the front door.

“Merry Christmas,” Austin said, and took the pile of Christmas packages that she held out to him so she could close her umbrella.

“When I went to bed last night,” Nora said, disposing of her coat and the umbrella in the hall, “I was so sure it was going to snow by morning. How is Cousin Martha?”

“Just the same,” Austin said.

Nora did not hear him. She had caught sight of the Christmas tree, and was exclaiming over it.

“This room looks as if a cyclone had struck it,” Austin said apologetically.

“We just have a small one,” Nora said, “on the dining-room table. At home every year—Oh, Austin, I’ve left you standing there holding all those packages! I’m so sorry.” She took them from him and put them on a table. “Cousin Abbey, this is for you,” Nora said, handing Ab the largest and most impressive-looking of the presents she had brought over.

Ab, jaded by the continual opening of packages, ripped the big rosette of red ribbon and the tissue paper off and discovered a Noah’s ark. It was large, it was painted in bright colours, and it was undoubtedly the most expensive toy that had found its way into Mr. Gossett’s shop in time for Christmas.

Nora glanced around the room and said, “Oh, isn’t that a sweet doll’s house! I had one when I was little—with real andirons in the fireplace that I just loved.”

Ab found the catch that released the hinged roof, and dumped Noah and his wife and the wooden animals matter-of-factly on the floor.

“I’m afraid you’ve been much too generous,” Austin said. “We’ll put it away until she’s older and can appreciate what a beautiful thing it is.”

“No, let her play with it.… Cousin Abbey, show me what else Santa Claus brought you.” In the midst of this tour of inspection, Nora suddenly turned to the pile of packages once more. “This is for Cousin Martha—it’s a quilted bed-jacket. And this is for Cousin Martha, too. I couldn’t remember what kind of cologne she likes, so I got her violet. And this is for Cousin Martha from Mama. It’s the crocheted centre-piece that she started when she was here. She said to tell Cousin Martha that it was her masterpiece.… And this is for you, Cousin Austin.”

Austin’s present turned out to be a grey woollen scarf that Nora had knitted herself.

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Nora.”

“If you don’t like the colour,” she said, “I can make you another. All I have to do is get some wool and——”

“No,” Austin said. “This is just right. Thank you very much.”

“There’s a present here for you,” Ab said to Nora.

“Go and get it,” Austin said. “It’s on the hall table.”

As Ab started out of the room, Nora said, “I didn’t know what to get for Frieda.”

“You didn’t have to get her anything,” Austin said.

“Well, I wanted to,” Nora said happily. “I didn’t know what she’d like so I got her a handkerchief.… Is this for me?”

“Yes,” Ab said.

Austin turned his face away while Nora carefully and painstakingly untied the ribbon. Her exclamations of pleasure, her praise of Martha’s taste, he only partly heard.

“Abbey, take these up to your mother,” he said, handing her the three packages. “And be careful you don’t slip on the stairs.”

There was no use waiting until tomorrow to tell Nora what he had to tell her. He might as well get it over with, along with all the other unpleasantness.

With her head framed by the Christmas wreath in the window, Nora sat and listened quietly while he explained to her how grateful he and Mr. Holby were for all the help she had given them after Miss Ewing’s breakdown, but how with the added burden and confusion of breaking in a new girl, they couldn’t—they neither of them had the time to——

Without any noticeable or sickening jar, the world slid back into its accustomed orbit, the one it had been following for hundreds of thousands of years. Nora looked at her hands, at the holly on the mantelpiece, at the wooden animals that had fallen out of the ark. She said, “I know.…” She said, “I understand, Cousin Austin, I know exactly.…” And by the time he had finished, she was apparently quite reconciled. She tried to pretend that it wasn’t a great disappointment to her, but only something natural and to be expected on Christmas Day. She smiled, she went on talking about other things for a short while, and as she was leaving, she said, “Tell Cousin Martha I love the handkerchief. I always lose mine wherever I go and never have enough.”

15

“What I’d really like is to behave naturally toward you,” Nora said. “And the knowledge you have that I do love you—and knowing
I
know that nothing can be done about that,
but that you are willing to act as though this did not affect your attitude toward me as a person and so forth—I don’t know whether I am expressing myself so badly that you may not be able to follow what I am trying to say. I hope you do understand, because it is terribly important to me—all these things help me to act toward you as I know I should. I may appear to be giving a very poor performance of trying to help myself, but I
am
trying.”

For a while she sat silent, with her arms embracing her knees, lost in thought. The loudness of the clock testified to the lateness of the hour. Nora stared at the design of the carpet without realizing how the silence prolonged itself. At nine-thirty, when she came for the fourth night running, she had said that she was only going to stay for five minutes. She had been discussing, analysing, explaining herself for over three hours now.

“I can’t accept the nice things you say to me,” she said. “Accept them gracefully, I mean. And yet the very least little thing that you say to me pleases me so. It makes wonderful things happen inside of me. Do you know how good it makes me feel, how glad, sitting across from you in this room? I know that, being you, you know exactly what I am going through, and you are trying to help me. It seems like something without beginning or end, you and I in this room. Everything is so simple now, I say to myself. He knows how you feel. He knows you love him. He knows, in fact, everything. Go ahead and talk, if you must talk, only don’t look at him.… Isn’t it strange the trouble I have looking at you, Austin? I can’t look at you.”

If she had looked at him, she would have seen that his eyelids were drooping. The lines that gave his face character and distinction had melted. He was very tired. He had tried, like a man walking a tightrope blindfolded over Niagara Falls, to keep himself and the wheel-barrow in balance, but whereas Nora went away each night looking relieved, easier in her
mind, and more hopeful, he himself was so exhausted by her that he could hardly get up the stairs.

“Sometimes I’ve thought about you and wondered. If you had known me first, would things have been any different? I don’t mean necessarily that you would have wanted to marry me, but you’d have liked me, wouldn’t you? Because I’m not like other girls, am I? Not just another girl who loves you and is afraid of becoming a nuisance?”

“No,” Austin said.

“In spite of my general muddle-headedness,” Nora said, “certain aspects of this thing are clear, irrevocably clear. I know that nothing can ever again be as empty as the life I lived before I knew you. When I have moments of despair and think it would be so much easier for me just to give up, I can’t. Everything in me fights it at every turn. What do you do? What happens when you are caught between two things? When you can’t get where you are headed, but it is impossible to turn back? I know that you have been kind and gentle when you might have been angry and lost all patience with me, and I would not have done anything but accept it from you, because that’s how it is. Besides, in letting me come and read in your office, you have opened an entirely new world to me. I’m sorry, naturally, that it had to stop, but that doesn’t alter the fact that you have been good and wonderful. How can you help but love a person who has been the sort of person you have been? I have nothing but the most profound admiration for you.… Oh, don’t you see, if I keep this up, this wild talking, it’s because I’m saying over and over ‘I love you and you don’t love me and how can I go on? What am I going to do?’ Sooner or later you will become discouraged with me. You will feel I am not making any real effort to overcome an emotion which can only spoil everything for us. I mean make it impossible for us ever to talk to each other again the way we are doing now.… But if, in permitting me to say anything and everything to you, we have only
succeeded in having me fall more in love with you, we must be on the wrong track.… Oh, it wasn’t entirely wrong because if, up to a point, I hadn’t been able to talk to you as I did that day in your office and as I have been, these last few nights, I think——”

There was the sound of a step on the stair, which Austin didn’t pay any attention to, until it was followed by a second and a third.

“And I am thinking of this very carefully,” Nora said. “I think I should have——”

The third step was followed by a fourth and a fifth. Austin’s eyelids lifted. His face came back into focus. He turned toward the doorway into the hall. Nora went on talking and broke off only when Martha King came into the room, wearing a long lace negligee over her nightgown, and with her light brown hair down her back. She walked between them, over to the window seat, sat down, and drew the lace skirt together over her knees. For a moment nobody said anything. Nora coloured with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“It’s quite all right,” Martha said. “Your voice carries.” Then turning to Austin, “What do you want of her? Why do you go on making her suffer?”

Nora felt a flicker of elation which gave way to sorrow, to a sorrow that was very deep, as if the woman sitting in the window were her first friend and final enemy, someone whose coming had been long expected and planned for. “He hasn’t made me suffer,” she said. “He hasn’t done anything. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry this happened. Please forgive me!”

“Nora, I think you’d better go now,” Austin said. “It’s late. It’s after midnight.”

From the hall doorway, Nora turned and looked back and saw that they were waiting in a silence from which she was excluded.

“I really didn’t mean to do this,” she said, fumbling with the latch on the front door. “I couldn’t have meant to do this.”

16