She rested both hands behind her on the rail and bent her body forward a little so that I couldn’t see her face.
“And it’s not that so much either, really. I’ve tried to figure it out. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to keep on with it when he didn’t care about me any more. I’d rather know beforehand than afterwards it wasn’t going to work out. That would be worse. That’s what made my Aunt Norah what she is, and she’s grim. It simply wrecked her pride—and that’s what really happened to me, I think, if I’d be honest about it.”
She straightened up abruptly.
“Oh, dear, if I’d just taken it and shut up!” she said quickly. “That’s what makes it so painful. If I’d only listened to Mother—but I didn’t. I just didn’t believe it. I thought his letters were lost, or they’d gone astray, or something, so I kept on writing. Even when I knew. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote one awful job—I could die when I think of it! I poured the old broken heart stuff all over the paper, reams of it. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror when I think about it. I adored him, and he was wonderful, and I worshipped him, and so on and so on. He must have been bored sick, or maybe he thought it was funny. I don’t know.”
She turned her back to the soft glow from the living room and stood looking down over the black slope of the hills to the gleaming lights of the city.
“I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, after a moment. “That I should just chalk it up to experience, so it never happens again. But——”
“That’s not very easy to do,” I said, as gently as I could. “People have been telling themselves that since the beginning of time.”
“I know. But that doesn’t help any either. It’s harder to get over anything when you’ve made it worse by being a terrible fool along with all the rest of it. If I’d written the letters I did and then burned them up, I wouldn’t care so much. But I sent them. If I just hadn’t been so . . . so naked about it—that’s what makes it so . . . humiliating. And Mother’s been elegant. She really has. Never a single ‘Well, if you’d only listened to me, darling!’ nor any business about ‘You can’t go on like this forever, dear.’ Heaven knows there are plenty of men around here now, but she hasn’t once tried to stick one of them down my throat or say how attractive any of them are. And that’s self-control.”
Her laugh was a sort of spontaneous bubbling-up that was gone as quickly as it came.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said softly. “It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, really.”
5
THE SILENCE AND THE EERIE BROODING DARKNESS stretching to black invisibility above and around us down to the gay and garish brilliance of the million lights of the city made it seem more poignant and lonely and intense as she stood there, slim and lovely, trying to teach her reluctant heart the wisdom that hearts, for centuries, have been unwilling to learn.
I looked down at the white glow of the city again. Swede Ellicott was down there somewhere . . . with Corinne, no doubt. If Mary’s pride as well as her heart was hurt at this point, I wondered which would be hurt the more if and when she knew. I hoped intensely just then that she would never have to know at all. I hadn’t myself entirely got over the shock of learning Corinne was Ben Farrell’s widow. I could imagine without a great deal of trouble the shock it would be to Mary to find out that Swede was going to marry her next. It was all completely beyond me. The naïvely romantic notion I’d had at some point—it seemed a thousand light years away just then—that it would be nice to bring Mary and Swede together again gave me cold chills up and down my spine when I thought of it. This was much too serious a business.
“—Here’s Dad with your book,” Mary said. “Let’s go in. I wonder where Mother’s got to?”
I’d been wondering about her mother too, only on a different level. In spite of what Mary had said about her, I still had what Tommy Dawson said, with conviction and no wavering ifs or buts, in the background of my mind. I wondered if what Mary thought was self-control was more than that. It might easily have been a sense of guilt, if, for instance, it had been her own fine Italian hand interfering with the due process of the United States mails. I wouldn’t for an instant have put it past her. That’s the trouble, perhaps, with perfect surfaces. They always conceal something, and it’s very easy to suspect the worst.
She was in the entrance hall, actually, just coming up out of the stairway from the lower floor. I took Harry Cather’s book and the three of us waited until Alice switched off the lights and closed the stairway door.
“I was just looking around, it’s so lovely out there at night. I thought you were all going to bed. Good night.”
She kissed her daughter lightly on the cheek.
“Kumumato’ll turn out the lights, Harry. We’re down this way, Grace. You must be exhausted. I’m going to give you a pill to make you sleep like an angel. The doctor gave them to me and they’re wonderful. It takes a little time to get used to the climate out here.”
That was puzzling, I thought, the climate being their basic claim to an earthly paradise out there. It was as puzzling as the quick barrage of words she was throwing out around us.
“Come along, Grace.”
I said good night to Mary and Harry Cather and went with her.
“I’ll get it for you now,” she said.
She went into her room and came back with an orange capsule, and handed it to me before she turned on the light in my room across the passage from hers, at the end of the wing against the mountains. If either of us needed the sleeping pill it was her, I thought. In the brighter lights of the bedroom she looked drawn and curiously bloodless. Her eyes were drained and her cheeks drooped in two heavy lines along her nostrils. She looked nervously around the room.
“I think you’ll find everything. It’s cold up here at night. You’ve got a blanket. Good night, dear.”
She started for the door, and stopped.
“Grace,” she said. She hesitated for an instant. “Is it true Swede Ellicott is here, in Honolulu?”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
She leaned her head against the door panel a moment and closed her eyes. Her cheeks were gray, and the lines drooped more heavily. She pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling.
“Swede Ellicott, Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer,” I said. “They’re all here . . . all except Ben Farrell, and he’s dead.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
She moved away from the door and came and sat down on the side of the bed. She sat there a long time, her eyes fixed sightlessly on the floor.
“Grace,” she said then. “I want to see Swede. It . . . it isn’t true that he’s interested in Corinne, is it? It can’t be. I don’t believe it.”
“It seems to be what they say,” I said. “It probably is true.”
I was surprised at the way she spoke of her. “Do you know her?”
“Yes. I know her. At least I know who she is. I don’t know her to speak to.”
“Well, who is she?” I asked. I wanted to know.
She didn’t answer at once. Then she said, “Oh, she’s just a girl in Honolulu, that’s all. Not any Mata Hari that I know of. It’s hardly sporting to call her that. I think she’s just one of a great many young women here who’d like to marry an American boy—being of mixed ancestry herself.”
She lapsed into silence again.
“I was very foolish,” she said abruptly after a moment. “I should have let Mary