Читать книгу Our Little Life - Jessie Georgina Sime - Страница 14

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For once things turned out as they should. The Sunday evening so much looked forward to by both Robert and Miss McGee, was a success. Both enjoyed it to the top of their bent—each had a bent of his and her own—and both of them were sorry when the evening was over.

As a matter of fact, this evening was a sort of turning-point in the lives of both of them; for the friendship which it cemented between them was a big thing, both for Robert and for Katie McGee. They were lonely creatures when all is said and done; they led dull lives in which tiny events made big marks; for each of them to feel, as each did, that a friend—a real live friend—had turned up, was something to think about. Each did think the matter over and over and each came to quite opposite conclusions about it; yet this fact that drove them to opposite conclusions united them as nothing else could do.

Probably a friendship between a man and a woman never yet was a quite satisfactory thing; and probably the reason is that a friendship between a man and a woman never is a friendship—not, at least until the physical difficulties have been bridged over between them, and not often then. Yet men and women (or women and men, rather) often think they are friends; for a time. And then comes another time when they know they aren't; the friendship—on one side or the other—has lopped over into . . . something else. In the case of Robert and Miss McGee, it was on Miss McGee's side that the friendship lopped over into the something else; but, though she was conscious of this in the dim recesses where we are conscious of such things, she kept the consciousness there. Outwardly, in the part of her mind that was above-ground, so to speak, she said to herself that this friendship between her and the lonely lad (so she called him) a couple of stairs up was a good thing for both of them. "An' why not?" she asked herself indignantly (but why indignantly?). "Why wouldn't ut be a good thing, eh? He's lonesome. An' I'm lonesome. Where's the har'rm of an evenin' or so spent together at toimes. . . ." There was no one to answer these questions and so it seemed as if it was a good thing. Miss McGee choked the questioning part of her back into that lower consciousness where things lie in us and ripen; and she compacted her mind on to the everyday things of life. "He'll come in Sundays, an' I'll have the nice meal for um," she said to herself—this was one of the plans they had formed—"an' we'll have the cozy toime together." A smile that started goodness knows where in her came slowly to the surface and irradiated her face as she thought this. "Sure it's noice not to be lonesome," she said; and on the Monday morning she went to the fashioning of the famous tunic with a new heart on her.

Robert Fulton's ideas were a good deal less subtle. He didn't feel anything at all in that deep-down consciousness where Miss McGee scented danger. There wasn't any danger for him to scent. It was a true friendship he offered Miss McGee. He thought of her as someone divided from him by a mountain of years, and to say that he never dreamed of scaling that mountain of years by the ladder of love is to put it insufficiently. Robert Fulton never dreamed of Miss McGee as an object of love—in the sense of sex-love. He was not very old himself; he was young for his years; it never occurred to him that a woman getting on for fifty (which was the way he would have sized up poor Miss McGee had he sized her up at all) would be thinking of love. Robert regarded fifty as "old" for a woman—as, in a sense, it is. He liked Miss McGee; he was even getting fond of her, but he wasn't interested in her. She couldn't interest him physically and she didn't happen to mentally either, and she certainly was not a target for any romantic ideas in the world. She was just a kind elderly thing of no particular sex, who had held out a hand to him when he was bitterly in need of a hand being held out. He took the hand exactly as if it had been a man's hand, and held it; and he was as unconscious that there was any sex connected with the holding of it as if it had been the hand of—a unicorn.

However (for with the subtlety of woman she had managed to conceal from him the nadir of her understanding) he regarded her as valuable as a listener. He was grateful to her. And, on the Sunday, she had appreciably improved. Habit accustoms us to anything, even to the unintelligible; Miss McGee had always been quick—one night of Robert's reading had been enough to create a habit in her. On the second evening she was there with the listener's first essential—interest; she wanted to understand what he had to say; she wasn't afraid any more; she could say things herself. Miss McGee at no time, of course, got down to the grounds of Robert's thinking anything he did; why, for example, he should regard travel as not an elegant thing for everyone remained to the end a secret for her. However, all such mysteries as that she simply laid aside and concentrated herself on anything she did understand. On Robert's side too, things on the second occasion were less strained. He was no longer nervous—perhaps Miss McGee had become a habit with him. He not only read, he sometimes stopped reading and talked; and by such means he let his listener into his mind in a way mere reading never could have done. "What in thunder brought that bo'oy out here?" Miss McGee kept saying to herself during a great part of the time when he was talking to her—for the feminine intelligence reduces all abstract idea to the particular instance—"What brought um, eh, away from his home?" And she would have given anything to ask. But Robert Fulton was oddly reticent and Miss McGee was oddly considerate. She had, emphatically, the qualities of her defects; and if she was unpunctual (to her customers' despair), if she was quick-tempered, moody, prone to exultation without much reason and to depression with less, she was also quick to grasp, intuitive, careful of the feelings of others, if she liked them—tactful, in a word. If a person is tactful (tactful not on his own account but ours) we can forgive anything. Miss McGee neither by word nor hint nor gesture sought to find out anything Robert Fulton didn't choose to tell. She didn't apply her feminine ingenuity to worming out of him things he didn't wish to speak about. And though Robert Fulton certainly was not definitely conscious of this—he could not, at any rate, have put it into so many words—still he was indefinitely conscious of it. It gave him, though he hardly knew it, a feeling of safety in Miss McGee's company. He felt instinctively that he could say what he pleased and leave unsaid what he pleased, and Miss McGee would let it go at that. Such a feeling is at the bottom of every friendship (though it is not necessarily at the bottom of love) and Robert Fulton was completely conscious of his feeling of friendship for Miss McGee. It changed the aspect of the world for him—so lonely was he; and, as he went upstairs, pretty late, after the Sunday sederunt, he was conscious of a warmth in the spiritual part of him that he had not felt for many a day. "She's a good old thing," he said to himself, absolutely unaware how his words would have pierced Miss McGee like a sword. "She's a good old thing." And he thought a moment, pausing on the stairs, smiling to himself. "I'll take her down everything I do," he further said—and, half in earnest, half in jest, he felt that he was giving as much as he got, and who shall blame him?—"I'll take it all down and read it to her." And the prospect of many pleasant evenings such as the one he had just spent floated before his mind.

Yes, Robert Fulton was singularly young for his age. His mind had, from his childhood up, been filled with a great many things which have nothing—or little—to do with love; or rather, since all things spring from and go towards love, Robert Fulton's preoccupations did mainly spring from love—but not his own. The circumstances of his birth and life had rather tended to turn his thoughts from love of his own—to give his mind a twist away from that central fact of life. And, half-consciously only, perhaps, he had turned his attention determinedly to study. In order to still in himself the ever-crying thing in all of us, he had definitely preferred to look at life reflected—for what are books but the mirrors of the lives of all of us?—and so escape what he instinctively felt would only be further disagreeables to face. It is good for us to bear a certain amount, but each one of us has his (or her) own definite amount that it is possible to bear; beyond that amount misfortune becomes, not a salutary lesson, but a load that bears us down—down—down . . . to ever-increasing depression and uselessness. Robert Fulton had had about as much to bear as he could bear from childhood up; what Canada had in store for him on his arrival in her was just about that last proverbial straw that over-balances the scale. His writing was a mere forlorn hope of balancing the scale—not pecuniarily (for it had never occurred to Robert to think of his writing as a commercial asset), but just as a means of—forgetting himself; the surest means of balancing the scale for all of us.

The friendship with Miss McGee had come at the right—what, if it were not so hackneyed a phrase, one might call the psychological—moment. As Robert Fulton went up the stairs to bed after his evening of creamed chicken and reading his manuscript and friendly talk, he felt—saved. "I can do it," he said to himself. "It's all right."

And, as he went to bed—without any Madonna on the wall to protect him, without any prayers either as I need hardly say—he went on feeling cheered. "She's a good old thing," he said to himself again. "A good soul. . . ."

He fell fast asleep.