He thought for a moment and then he said, "No. But I suppose I didn't want them to be."
"Mamma and I—we've both been disappointments to you, haven't we?"
He moved his hand upward, as if to touch her. "Oh, no," he said with a dim passion. "You mustn't . . ." He wanted to say more, to explain; but he could not go on. He closed his eyes and felt his mind loosen. Images crowded there, and changed, as if upon a screen. He saw Edith as she had been that first evening they had met at old Claremont's house—the blue gown and the slender fingers and the fair, delicate face that smiled softly, the pale eyes that looked eagerly upon each moment as if it were a sweet surprise. "Your mother . . ." he said. "She was not always . . ." She was not always as she had been; and he thought now that he could perceive beneath the woman she had become the girl that she had been; he thought that he had always perceived it.
"You were a beautiful child," he heard himself saying, and for a moment he did not know to whom he spoke. Light swam before his eyes, found shape, and became the face of his daughter, lined and somber and worn with care. He closed his eyes again. "In the study. Remember? You used to sit with me when I worked. You were so still, and the light . . . the light . . ." The light of the desk lamp (he could see it now) had been absorbed by her studious small face that bent in childish absorption over a book or a picture, so that the smooth flesh glowed against the shadows of the room. He heard the small laughter echo in the distance. "Of course," he said and looked upon the present face of that child. "Of course," he said again, "you were always there."
"Hush," she said softly, "you must rest."
And that was their farewell. The next day she came down to him and said she had to get back to St. Louis for a few days and said something else he did not hear in a flat, controlled voice; her face was drawn, and her eyes were red and moist. Their gazes locked; she looked at him for a long moment, almost in disbelief; then she turned away. He knew that he would not see her again.
He had no wish to die; but there were moments, after Grace left, when he looked forward impatiently, as one might look to the moment of a journey that one does not particularly wish to take. And like any traveler, he felt that there were many things he had to do before he left; yet he could not think what they were.
He had become so weak that he could not walk; he spent his days and nights in the tiny back room. Edith brought him the books he wanted and arranged them on a table beside his narrow bed, so that he would not have to exert himself to reach them.
But he read little, though the presence of his books comforted him. He had Edith open the curtains on all the windows and would not let her close them, even when the afternoon sun, intensely hot, slanted into the room.
Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things—of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the campus, of an old one torn down; but what they said did not seem to matter. A new tranquillity had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.
Almost without regret he looked at her now; in the soft light of late afternoon her face seemed young and unlined. If I had been stronger, he thought; if I had known more; if I could have understood. And finally, mercilessly, he thought: if I had loved her more. As if it were a long distance it had to go, his hand moved across the sheet that covered him and touched her hand. She did not move; and after a while he drifted into a kind of sleep.
Despite the sedatives he took, his mind, it seemed to him, remained clear; and he was grateful for that. But it was as if some will other than his own had taken possession of that mind, moving it in directions he could not understand; time passed, and he did not see its passing.
Gordon Finch visited him nearly every day, but he could not keep the sequence of these visits clear in his memory; sometimes he spoke to Gordon when he was not there, and was surprised at his voice in the empty room; sometimes in the middle of a conversation with him he paused and blinked, as if suddenly aware of Gordon's presence. Once, when Gordon tiptoed into the room, he turned to him with a kind of surprise and asked, "Where's Dave?" And when he saw the shock of fear come over Gordon's face he shook his head weakly and said, "I'm sorry, Gordon. I was nearly asleep; I'd been thinking about Dave Masters and—sometimes I say things I'm thinking without knowing it. It's these pills I have to take."
Gordon smiled and nodded and made a joke; but Stoner knew that in that instant Gordon Finch had withdrawn from him in such a way that he could never return. He felt a keen regret that he had spoken so of Dave Masters, the defiant boy they both had loved, whose ghost had held them, all these years, in a friendship whose depth they had never quite realized.
Gordon told him of the regards that his colleagues sent him and spoke disconnectedly of University affairs that might interest him; but his eyes were restless, and the nervous smile flickered on his face.
Edith came into the room, and Gordon Finch lumbered to his feet, effusive and cordial in his relief at being interrupted.
"Edith," he said, "you sit down here."
Edith shook her head and blinked at Stoner.
"Old Bill's looking better," Finch said. "By God, I think he's looking much better than he did last week."
Edith turned to him as if noticing his presence for the first time.
"Oh, Gordon," she said. "He looks awful. Poor Willy. He won't be with us much longer."
Gordon paled and took a step backward, as if he had been struck. "My God, Edith!"
"Not much longer," Edith said again, looking broodingly at her husband, who was smiling a little. "What am I going to do, Gordon? What will I do without him?"
He closed his eyes and they disappeared; he heard Gordon whisper something and heard their footsteps as they drew away from him.
What was so remarkable was that it was so easy. He had wanted to tell Gordon how easy it was, he had wanted to tell him that it did not bother him to talk about it or to think about it; but he had been unable to do so. Now it did not seem really to matter; he heard their voices in the kitchen, Gordon's low and urgent, Edith's grudging and clipped. What were they talking about?
. . . The pain came upon him with a suddenness and an urgency that took him unprepared, so that he almost cried out. He made his hands loosen upon the bedclothes and willed them to move steadily to the night table. He took several of the pills and put them in his mouth and swallowed some water. A cold sweat broke upon his forehead and he lay very still until the pain lessened.
He heard the voices again; he did not open his eyes. Was it Gordon? His hearing seemed to go outside his body and hover like a cloud above him, transmitting to him every delicacy of sound. But his mind could not exactly distinguish the words.
The voice—was it Gordon's?—was saying something about his life. And though he could not make out the words, could not even be sure that they were being said, his own mind, with the fierceness of a wounded animal, pounced upon that question. Mercilessly he saw his life as it must appear to another.
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that . . . He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."