Three major questions presented themselves: First, what was he going to do about Andree? Second, what was he going to do about Maude Knox? And, third, which was interwoven with the first, what about the vestibule of the Presbyterian church?
Ken had not the least doubt that he loved Andree. That was the one sure fact in the whole confused mass. He loved Andree and Andree loved him. To many young men, perhaps to most, this alone would have answered all his questions. Perhaps the ordinary young man would have thought of nothing else, but, perceiving that Andree was essential to him, he would have taken her and made her his own in permanence with due forms of marriage. This would have been the natural step for youth to take—disregarding consequences and challenging the future. But Ken was not an ordinary young man. He was a young man who was afraid of the future, who had been brought up to know a lively fear of the opinion of the community among which he lived. “What will folks say?” was a question he had heard propounded from his earliest childhood, until the thing that “they” would say had assumed a place of importance in his affairs second to nothing. It had almost confused his perceptions of right and wrong, for, even as a small boy, it had been made to appear to him that his mother was not so much concerned with the righteousness of any given act as she was by the effect of that act upon her circle of neighbors. Undoubtedly this was a mistaken notion, but it had at least the color of truth.
He recalled vividly how a certain prominent member of his church had become an absconder and the coming of the news of it into his household. He remembered how his father had said: “Mother, we don’t know all the ins and outs of it. Maybe he’s more sinned against than sinning. We don’t know....” His mother had rejected that view harshly. “Whatever will people say about him? It’ll be terrible on his wife, and him so prominent in the church.” She had not said, “What will God say about him?” but, “What will people say?” His sin, so it had seemed to Ken’s young mind, had not been so much in absconding with money as it had been in creating adverse talk.... This attitude of mind had altered somewhat with years, but never had his fear of clacking tongues diminished. It stood for the supreme punishment of evil ... not hell, but gossip.
So his first and third questions stood together, and he dared not force himself to answer them. The second question could not be answered until he had satisfied the other two.... There came a fourth question, upon which, ultimately, must hang the answers to all, and that was, “Can a man marry a woman with whom he has had such a relation as I have had with Andree?” In other words, could he, by his own act, unfit Andree to become his own wife? This question did not present itself poignantly for some time, but it was beginning to formulate in the back of his mind. As yet he was considering only the expediency of matters; later he would find trouble with their moral and sociological aspects.
Matters further complicated themselves when Maude Knox informed him that she had been assigned permanently to an administrative position in Paris. He would be compelled to see her frequently. He would want to see her frequently. Somehow this seemed unfair to Andree, but he knew that Maude could not remain in the city without his seeing a great deal of her. Andree would discover this, and what would Andree do about it? With Maude Knox absent her importance receded, was held in abeyance; if she were here she would grow increasingly important—and what would come of it?
“You don’t seem overjoyed,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re going to be here,” he said, “but just the same, I wish you weren’t.”
“Why? You aren’t compelled to have anything to do with me if you don’t want to.”
“That’s it. I am compelled, and I don’t know whether I want to or not.”
“Well!...” She drew the word out to its full value. “I must say you’re frank.”
“Please don’t be offended. I don’t mean to be offensive, but things have gotten so rottenly complicated with me that I’m afraid of another complication.”
“And I’m a complication?”
He nodded. “You know it,” he said. “I think you know more about what a complication you are than I do.”
“You are thinking Andree will be jealous.”
“I’m thinking she may have cause to be jealous.”
“And you don’t want her to have?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.... I don’t want anything ever to happen to make her unhappy. You and I have talked pretty frankly, haven’t we? Somehow you seem to understand things over here, though you are as American as I am—and you—well, you don’t make a fuss. But even at that, you don’t know how I feel about her.... Maybe I’m going to be in love with you, and maybe I’m in love with you already. I don’t know.... But I do know that I love her.”
“If you are by way of making love to me you’ve invented a new method.”
“I’m not making love to you. I guess I’m trying to reason things out aloud.”
“Using me as a wall to bounce your ball against.”
He smiled without mirth. “Something like that. I know I love Andree, but yet I can see myself in love with you.... I’ve asked you before if a man can be in love with two girls at the same time.”
“I don’t know. Not in the same way, anyhow.”
“It would be different. If I did love you I would be thinking about marriage all the time. It would mean marriage. I would want you for my wife.... But Andree—she doesn’t mean that. At least marriage doesn’t figure in it. I can’t explain exactly, but it’s as if there never had been such a thing in the world as marriage—only love.”
“I’m not sure but that is better. Even if I am American I don’t know but I’d rather have that kind.”
“Andree isn’t just an adventure, an incident. She’s more important than that—the most important thing that ever happened to me.... I can’t explain. I can feel it, but I can’t express what it is. It isn’t that I couldn’t marry her, nor that I wouldn’t be mighty lucky to have her for a wife.... It seems, somehow, that marriage doesn’t signify—isn’t necessary.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re trying to get at.”
“I don’t, either. I’m trying to find out.... But I do know that I don’t want to hurt her or make her sorry she has loved me.”
“How about me?” she asked, suddenly.
“You?”
“How about hurting me?” she asked. “You’ve made a weird sort of love to me. You’ve balanced on the fence and told me you might fall in love with me. You’ve carried on a sort of rubber-elastic courtship—ready to snap back out of reach if I seemed likely to catch you.... Have you thought about me at all? Really, I’ve some right to be considered.”
She was right. Undoubtedly he had not been fair to her. He had thought only of himself and of his sentiments toward her, but scarcely at all of her sentiments toward him.
“Why,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve thought of that side of it. It never occurred to me that you—that you might be in love with me.”
“Well, I’m not.” She spoke sharply.
“Do you mean you never could be?”
“There! Of all things!... You want me to tell you that if you make up your mind to condescend to love me I’ll be ready to drop into your hands. You want to have your cake and eat it. I’d say you were the most completely selfish person I’ve ever encountered.”
“Really I’m not. It isn’t selfishness.... It’s just that I am so confused by the whole situation that I don’t know what to do.... You don’t know how relieved and happy I would be if there was nobody but you, and we were going to be married. You are just the kind of wife—”
“That your neighbors would approve of,” she interrupted. “I know. What I don’t know is why I keep on talking to you like this. I ought to send you about your business and tell you never to come near me again ... but I’m not going to. You’ve told me in effect that you would be in love with me if it weren’t for somebody else, and that the only reason you are pleased to consider me as a candidate at all is because you are afraid your family and your neighbors would make a fuss if you took the other woman home. That’s the truth, and you know it is.”
“Well,” he said, ruefully, and not wisely, “so long as you don’t love me, what does it matter?”
“So long as I don’t love you it doesn’t matter in the least.”
“But—”
She shook her head. “We sha’n’t talk about my loving you. I’m not going to love you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Decidedly.”
“You wouldn’t marry me?”
“Of course not.”
“Why?”
“Really, I think you’re out of your mind. Even if I loved you—which I don’t—do you think I’d sit and wait for you to reason out that you had better fall in love with me, and then grab you with wild eagerness—after you make up your mind to chuck another woman whom you have assured me that you do love?”
“But suppose I do love you? Would the fact of my—my affair with Andree prevent you from marrying me?”
“If you loved me and I loved you nothing in the world would stop me from marrying you.”
“Anyhow, I’ve got that question answered.”
“And much good may it do you.”
“Why?”
“Because the condition doesn’t exist. If it did exist I might answer differently. I might think then that I could never marry a man who had done such a thing.”
This conversation took place at noon in a little café on the rue St.-Honoré not distant from the Y. M. C. A. headquarters. Kendall had met Maude Knox as he was seeking a place to lunch, and they had gone together. Now he wished he might sit and argue the question until his status with her was definitely settled, if it could be definitely settled, but she refused to pursue the subject.
“No, that’s all we talk about that. You can pick out any subject you want to, but we are through talking about you and me.... And, besides, I’ve got to get back to work.”
“When shall we have dinner together?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“No, but I’m disgusted with myself because I’m not. If I had a spark of pride I’d never speak to you again.”
“Why?”
“Ken Ware, you are a miracle of denseness. Don’t you know that this whole conversation has been impossible—that it couldn’t have happened? I never imagined such cool effrontery! But I’m not offended, and I don’t know why.... I’ll dine with you some evening soon—but not to touch this subject again. Don’t ever mention it—never! I’ve got some rights to be thought about, and I’m going to think about them. There are just two things you may do: either propose to me out and out, so I can refuse you, or else treat me as a friend, and no trimmings. I mean it!”
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