§ 3
Neither Lambone nor Devizes had seemed in the least surprised at their engagement. Indeed their attitude of gratified expectation was almost embarrassing. The young couple had come down to Udimore with Devizes and Miss Means under the ample protection of Miss Lambone almost as though they had been appointed for each other from the beginning of things.
But at Udimore there were further surprises and perplexities for Bobby. All day Saturday Christina Alberta seemed to be not so much in love as in a thoroughly bad temper. She seemed far more concerned by the fact that Devizes was going to marry Miss Means than by the generous devotion that Bobby was prepared to lavish upon her. She was inattentive to his various little manœuvres to get isolated with her. The two couples played tennis after tea until it was time to dress for dinner; she was badly out of practice and fundamentally unorthodox, and Margaret played with a smoothness and sweetness that roused her to a pitch of viciousness only too evident to Bobby’s fine perceptions. It seemed to Bobby that Devizes also noted her annoyance, but Miss Means was blissfully unobservant of anything in the world but Devizes.
On Sunday morning Christina Alberta carried off Bobby through the distant cheerfulness of church bells for a walk to Brede Castle. And she announced to Bobby that she did not intend to marry him.
Bobby protested. “You don’t love me?”
“Haven’t I kissed you? Didn’t I hug you? Haven’t I ruffled your hair?”
“Then why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I do not want to marry anyone. I don’t love anybody. Except of course you. But even you, I can’t marry. I want to be loved, Bobby, yes. But not to be married.”
“But why? Not the—the old reason?”
“No. I took your word about that. But all the same I don’t want to marry you, Bobby.... I think it’s because I don’t want to be bound up with anyone’s life. I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be my free and independent self. I’ve got to grow. That’s it, Bobby. I want to be free to grow.”
Bobby made protesting noises.
“I don’t want some one seeing me grow all the time. You’d always be looking at me, Bobby; I know you would.”
It was useless of Bobby to say he wouldn’t. He would.
“I didn’t know that things were going to take me like this until I fixed to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I consented—honestly I did. I wanted dreadfully then to get close to some one, as close as possible, and to be kissed and told ‘There! There!’ and to keep there. It was a comfort for me, Bobby. You are a comfort for me. I’d ache to madness without you. But how close we come when we love, Bobby, and how far away we are all the time! How can we know each other when we hardly know ourselves? When we don’t dare know ourselves?
“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I don’t want you at all. I’d rather be dead than a female thing like Margaret Means. If that’s marrying——!”
“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened——”
“No.”
“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your altering your mind.”
“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped short....
And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him and broken into a wild passion of weeping.
“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my poor Bobby! you dear lover!”
She clung to him for a time. Then she detached herself and stood wiping her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,” she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both ways. But I won’t marry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry. I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. From now on.”
“But I don’t understand!” said Bobby.
“It’s not because I don’t want you to love me.”
He was baffled. “Bobby!” she whispered, and seemed to glow.
Bobby took her back into his arms and held her, and pressed his cheek and ears against hers, and kissed her and kissed her again, and it seemed to him to mark his own unworthiness that he should think at such a time that there were no such wonderful kisses in the world as kisses flavoured with salt tears.
And yet she wasn’t going to marry him! She had snatched herself back from him and nevertheless she was in his arms.
He was enormously perplexed at what was happening, but it was quite clear that the end of his engagement was not to be the end of his love-making. Anyhow here was love. It was so manifestly the time for love. High May ruled the world. About them there were hawthorn trees white with blossom and great bushes of elder just breaking into flower.