Dulcie had begun to bite her lip. She was after all a loving daughter. Or was it a dutiful one? Waldo thought he might prefer a dutiful to a loving wife. It was not that he was cold, exactly, but would have to give so much time to his writing.
“Mother was unhappy towards the end,” Dulcie was saying. “Her aunts meant so much to her. She resented their being carried off. Then there was the matter of her conscience. But I can’t very well go into that. One’s conscience is one’s own affair.”
The word “affair” sounded ill-chosen. Otherwise he was impressed by her rational approach.
“How I agree!” he said quickly. “Nobody should meddle with another’s conscience.”
He looked at her to see what line he should take next. But Dulcie apparently wished to talk about herself.
“Everybody has been so kind,” she said. “Since it happened — that was too terrible to tell about — I haven’t felt unhappy. I never expected the death of somebody I loved could make me happy. But it has, Waldo. It seems to have made the living more accessible. Arthur, for instance,” Dulcie paused. “He was right, I see now, in suggesting I should tell others what he has done for me, given me. He brought me,” she paused again, “one of his glass marbles.”
Waldo was astonished, then horrified, at the strangeness of it.
“He calls them,” she was continuing.
But there Dulcie hesitated longer, as though she were not yet ready.
“Yes! Yes!” Waldo got it in quickly, so that she would understand, either that he knew, or that he didn’t want to be told. “Poor Arthur!”
He was in fact deeply relieved to discover Dulcie was such a compassionate girl. Her acceptance of Arthur, her interest in his brother, helped him to visualize himself in sickness. She was cool. She had a soothing, practical hand.
“I always wanted, Dulcie, to understand you,” Waldo said, “and today I believe I can. What I have found,” he stammered, “is exactly what I hoped to find.”
Dulcie was looking at him, obviously wanting to hear more. As a student of human nature, he knew that nobody, however modest, could resist being told something more about their character. Ladies, moreover, were the livelihood of fortune-tellers.
“Dear Dulcie,” he said, “my feelings for you are based on what you truly are. You are what I need, and I hope what I can offer will be what you feel you want. We have music and literature in common. Taste, I like to think. There can’t be religious differences, because each of us has seen the light. We expect nothing of life but what we can humanly make of it.”
If only the Feinsteins’ room hadn’t grown so still. He had begun to hear the silence. Dulcie in her black dress was at her very very stillest. She could perhaps be waiting to break out in some demonstration of love. Modesty no doubt had imposed restraint, until she could feel she had received the last inch of encouragement. Or had he offended? Was it about religion? Which was always and unexpectedly liable to raise its ugly head.
Then Dulcie, suddenly, was overflowing with what, in spite of faith in his own proposition, he had hoped to postpone hearing. He would have much preferred to see it in writing, because, after all, situations of such a nature could only be of the embarrassing sort.
She began shaking her head in what appeared a convulsion of passion. He was surprised at the strength of her hand, and wondered how he would manage her.
“Oh, Waldo, Waldo!” Dulcie was almost crying. “It never entered my head that anyone else could get hurt!”
Then she sat down again, bringing a crump out of the sofa, and the smell of dust, but it had to be remembered the Feinsteins had spent only part of their time at the house at Sarsaparilla.
“Anyone,” he said, “anyone at all sensitive expects to suffer in love. That is what refines it.”
“But,” said Dulcie, sinking her chin, swallowing some recurrence of emotion.
Although the scene was going to his head he didn’t forget he must not lose touch with a lower level, and balanced himself accordingly on the sofa beside her. He would not stare, but was immensely conscious of her eyes brimming with a love she was still too timid to express. Tender Dulcie!
“I am not in love, though,” she said. “At least,” she said, “I am afraid,” but there she halted.
“There is nothing to be afraid of.”
He said it in a tone not suited to his voice, but felt he carried it off.
Then Dulcie had begun again in a strain which repressed emotion was making exceedingly dry. The springs in the dust-coloured sofa groaned.
“I’m afraid, Waldo, that what I want to say is: I can’t love you in the way you seem to want me to.”
Sympathy swam on the surface of her eyes, he began to realize with disgust, watery sympathy, or worse still, poisonous pity; yet in their depths Dulcie’s eyes appeared to remain passionate.
“Because I am in love,” she said.
If only their attitudes had been less awkward. But the angle at which he was placed on the sofa made sitting downright painful.
“I’m in love with, I’m engaged to, Len Saporta.”
He remembered her saying on a former occasion: “I’m really a very mundane individual,” and now she had tried to inject her announcement with something of the same banality, but there Dulcie failed. Her voice reverberated. The pity she was offering him shone with what she was unable to share. Her bosom, the riper for experience, filled not not, he hoped, with indecent impatience. He looked down fascinated at her breasts. He was never quite sure of that part of the anatomy, of what it might contain.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “your mother will never know.”
That a daughter became engaged while a mother was still high in her coffin, he prevented himself adding.
“Oh, but she did! She knew,” said Dulcie. “She half-agreed. There was only this dreadful business of conscience. Though that was only on account of my father.”
Dulcie was quite prepared to let nobody’s conscience rest, except apparently her own. Waldo did not greatly care by now.
“Leonard, you see, is a practising Jew. And our darling, neat-and-tidy rationalist parents are apt to throw fits over principles.”
Gongs could not have sounded louder in Waldo’s ears.
Dulcie looked down.
“I am making it sound frivolous,” she said, “because I can’t convey the importance of the step I’m taking. There are times,” she said in a suddenly metallic voice, her tongue acting as a quivering clapper, “when I am deaf, dumb, and blind with it.”
Or besotted, as women become, he had read, with some man. For this one coming into the room. For this Jew. For there was no doubt the young man, of physical, not to say vulgar appearance, now entering, was Mr Saporta.
What hell!
Dulcie looked, and Waldo avoided her dazzlement.
“This is my fiancé, Waldo,” she recovered herself and added.
They were again in Australia.
“I’ve never stopped hearing about you, Waldo,” Leonard Saporta said.
He gave one of those big laughs, which come up deep, leathery, but most respectful, from the region of the pocket-book. He also gave his hand, fleshy, but firm flesh, promising a warmth of male comradeship. Leonard Saporta was obviously designed for clubs, if a club would have admitted him.
“And now we meet!” Again ox-eyed Saporta laughed, sweating at the roots of his nose. “Whatever prevented us till now? Fate, eh?”
Waldo could not think of a better answer than Saporta’s own — unless a glass door-knob and the ’flu. It was thoroughly ridiculous what all three of them were going through. Even Saporta, probably an athlete, as well as the returned soldier his badge proclaimed, worked only by consent of hinges. These allowed him to incline just so far in the direction of his new-found, valued friend. In slightly different circumstances Waldo could have been the object of his courtship, Waldo felt. Well, he wouldn’t have fallen for it.