In the meantime,
In between-time—
He turned the easel back to the wall, and suddenly, for no reason at all, felt light-hearted, felt gay. The whole thing was too ridiculous, it was all a vast joke, a gigantic hoax of some sort, and if only one saw through it and refused to be hoodwinked, everything even now would come out all right — just as it always had before. Keep a stiff upper lip — that was it — and sing like the very devil. Whistle among the tombstones!
The world was made, dear — for people like us!
He half sang, half shouted, the absurd words, hoping they would reach Enid, added a “ho ho” of his own to them, sotto voce, and then walked quickly through the dining room to the top of the kitchen steps. It was time for the morning mail, time for the newspaper, time for the walk with Buzzer — time for escape into the blue. Enid’s cheeks were flushed with the ironing — it had the effect of making the cheekbones look higher, the eyes narrower and deeper. She put up one hand to brush back a moist curl from the moist and lovely forehead.
“And another thing,” she said.
“Yes, darling?”
She paused, frowning, to wriggle the bright point of the iron along the white hem of a shirt, flattening it as she went, then round a pearl button — how fascinating, how skillful!
“Since we’re on the subject of money—”
“Oh, yes?”
“There’s the little matter of Buzzer’s education. We can’t send her to the public schools here. They’re very bad, as you know — the children aren’t at all nice. It would be impossible.”
“But, Ee dear, aren’t you being a little premature?”
“Not at all. We can’t keep her out of school indefinitely — even with the help of doctor’s certificates — which would be dishonest, anyway — she’d be made to go, sooner or later. You can’t just put off thinking about it! And there are no good private schools within miles.”
“Public schools were good enough for me!”
“Yes. Timothy — yes, perhaps they were! But it’s another matter with girls, as you’d have known if you’d had any sisters.”
“An oversight. Of course, I’d probably have been a lot more refined in my tastes if I’d been sent to the Friends’ Academy in New Bedford, or Miss Nonesuch’s Nunnery for Beacon Street’s Best.”
“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. And you’d be a good deal more intelligent about this, too. It’s just what’s wrong with you, with your whole outlook! It’s simply not fair to Buzzer, that’s the whole truth, and you’ve got to think about it, whether you like it or not. And plan for it. At your present rate of earning—”
“There you go again!”
“Will you allow me to finish?”
“Endor darling, you know I’m entirely in agreement with you, except for my hatred of these damned little snob-schools, where they turn out scatter-brained little one-design nincompoops, with social registers for brains and cash registers for hearts—”
“Nonsense!”
“—but I fail to see the hurry.”
“I see. You want to put it off — just as you always want to put off holidays for me and Buzzer, or getting a maid, or any of the other things that might make life a little more agreeable for me here — while you have everything you want! Is that it?”
“If that’s the way you want to see it, certainly! But perhaps if you’ve got some brighter plan you’d be so kind as to tell me.”
“George and Mabel—”
“Oh, it’s George and Mabel again, is it? How nice!”
“They’re very good friends of yours. Better than you know, and I think you might at least be grateful when they go out of their way to be kind!”
“Go out of their way! Don’t make me laugh. I suppose George was going out of his way last night, when he came butting in here about Jim Connor.”
“To be kind, exactly. And this was kind too. They suggested that we ought to take out education insurance. Which seems to me a very good idea.”
“I see. So that’s where the money comes in.”
“Exactly. How clever of you!”
She smiled at him, a smile that wasn’t a smile at all, added the neatly folded shirt, with a sort of unnecessary emphasis, to the little pile of freshly laundered linen on the corner of the kitchen table, then turned, before he could speak, and presented the pile to him, one hand on top (the wedding ring, and the pearl), the other at the bottom — it was of course the mute but eloquent evidence of her slavery. Her eyes looked up at him with cold amusement — but, no, not amusement, they were too hostile, too beautifully feline for that — it was almost hate. Good old Enid!
“And would you mind,” she said, “taking these up and putting them on my bed? And I think there’s someone at the door. It’s probably Mr. Peterson with the vegetables, and we don’t need any.”
“All right. I’m going for the mail.”
“In that case, perhaps you could take Buzzer along with you for a walk, if it isn’t too much trouble. I think it’s too cold for her to go in wading.”
“Oh, no trouble at all!”
“Thanks.”
He looked steadily into the level eyes for any sign of a relenting, but none came; the exchange between them was hard, unflinching, motionless, almost unbreathing; and in the pause before he turned away he felt that even as he looked at her, with his love for her still intact and vivid, she was being borne backward and away from him by her own will — exactly, he thought, as if she were the figurehead of a ship, swept dizzily away from him, and with just that look of sea-cold inscrutability. Or the stone eyelessness of a statue.
Damned handsome, he thought — dropping the laundry on the bed, and giving it a pat — damned handsome, even when she was angry — but jumping Judas, was there to be no end to it? No end to it whatever? Better an explosion than this everlasting smoldering, better a pitched battle than this guerrilla warfare, this merciless sharpshooting and sniping — and, good god, what a sharpshooter she was! She did him credit, she certainly had blood in her eye, she was the very devil!
“No vegetables today, Mr. Peterson. No, nothing today! Is it going to rain?”
“Well, kind of hard to say. Seems’s if it might burn off, but you never know, with the wind in the east!”
“No, looks kind of dark.”
The green truck with its piled boxes of cauliflowers, crates of pumpkins, crates of cranberries, was gone around the far corner at the turn of the street, under the bare dripping poplars; fog spat on the stone doorstep at his feet, fog dripped on the heaped leaves; and into the garden, as he went around the front of the house to enter it in search of Buzzer, the indiscreet dream about Nora once more slyly accompanied him.
The indiscreet dream — the fleshly, the sensual, the whirling, the Rubenslike — But a strange figure was standing at the foot of the garden, by the river wall, had just come up the steps there from the Town Landing, a little man with a shovel over his shoulder — a tramp, a gnome, a furry-faced gnome, who hobbled forward in trousers much too big for him. The trousers were held up by a string tied round the waist, the short shapeless coat had apparently been made out of a dirty piece of gunnysack, even the little eyes, above the dirty whiskers, looked dirty — obviously the creature had come straight out of the ground, out of the earth, with the caked earth still on him. In the middle of the lawn he stood still, appeared to be mute, darting furtive glances, weasel-like, to right and left, then jerked a quick thumb toward the pump house.