Friday, May 8, 1903
What else has been happening, you wonder? Oh, all the usual nonsense! There's been a really-truly thaw, the stubborn ice in pieces and floating away and then no ice at all, suddenly, one day a week ago, and as if they had been crowding the door of the world, sudden flowers everywhere underfoot and overhead. There's been a last run of the "grip" round the parish and two little French girls dead of it, though none of the Presbytery think much of that as they were only hired girls, and Lester Sitwell came down but recovered, and Kate Errol took a mild case and can't shut her mouth about it for anything. She's been really insufferable since her sister came to stay, and with good reason, as her sister is "a vision of loveliness" as we grammar-school girls used to say, and talented to boot albeit (I say in secret) in a showy, shallow way, like a hothouse geranium. She twits Kate mercilessly about not joining the other girls in recitation or wearing her hair too high or any foolish and mean thing that drifts through her head, simply because it isn't in her not to. And of course Miss Alymer takes her side in everything, and May copy-cats every word out of the elder Miss Errol's mouth as if she hadn't a brain to call her own.
Ugly spring is gnawing its way out of winter a'last. And a coarse, spotted, balding ugly thing Nature is, too— but a strong one, a glad howling bitch for all that. She's left a litter of tumbling blind crocuses under the thorn bushes, and limped off to soothe her raw yellow teeth on a maple.
Now, if Miss Alymer should see the above passage, I know precisely what she would say, and in what a wounded, wavering tone. "What good does it do you to dwell on ugliness, dear?" Or perhaps, in a more charitable mood: "Evelyn, I wish you wouldn't waste your talents on trying to be shocking." Just as if the world were in danger of running low on prettiness! Heaven knows there's a Byrd Starr for every bird and every star ten times over, and such as these will go on chirruping and twinkling their dewy hearts out till the world falls in dust around them. She needn't be so alarmed if one or two raindrops fall from time to time on their great granite edifices of gorgeousness.
But there's no sense in saying any of this to Miss Aylmer, who gathered all her tastes from upscale literary magazines thirty years ago and has no practical reason to acquire new ones.
Besides, it isn't ugly to me.
I'm rather earthily and sloppily unhappy myself this "difficult day," but that's no one's business but my own. It was a white fog yesterday afternoon, and despite the earnest pleadings of Nature that I stay in bed and mope, I went walking in it. Is it because of my own mental or subconscious confusion that I love a fog, as Tom might say in a pedantic mood? No; that's a bit of stuffy modern nonsense; I loved them just as wildly when I was a child and fit to burst with certainty. Anyway, I wasn't confused to any remarkable degree when I went out. I was, at the outset, merely your common or garden Ev: lonesome, wary, bloated as a sow.
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.
I don't know if it was the fog or the wind, or a perverse sense of rebellion against the nuisance of my body, or simply that Perry "Jaunty Bootblack" Miller's absurd self-confidence has put me in a better humor than usual, but I set out for a turn around the block and ended up walking all the way to the harbor, where the fog. . .
All right, I suppose I'll tell you the whole story.
I didn't go out to the harbor by myself. I meant to, but I met someone along the way— Marsh Orde, if you must know— and it was wholly an accident, though I'm not entirely sure all of our meetings are accidental on his part. Never mind! Oh, I was a very good girl and proper, Diary! I didn't swallow any forbidden liquor or permit any forbidden arms to compass my ivory neck (if ivory can suffer freckling). We talked almost exclusively about the weather— the fog itself, and other fogs his father knew of when his father was a sailor, and some hail that wrecked the apple crop once in '89.
Why did I go? Oh, that's easy to know and hard to write: simply, I wanted to enjoy a certain feeling. I wanted to walk by Marsh and feel the odd thrill of— what? Of attraction? that I felt the night of the concert. The moment he took my arm to help me in, I felt again the shock of fearful hope that came over me in McKay's field. I wanted to feel it again because I had decided not to be afraid of it. You see, that night I was dreadfully afraid that I would give in and let Marsh kiss me and end up in a ridiculous fix like May's cousin when she let Adam McKay think they were engaged for nearly a year— well, I don't need to explain what a mess it would be, do I? But yesterday— I don't know what had changed, how what had felt so treacherous before suddenly seemed safe. It seemed as absurd to be afraid of it as of Old Kelly the peddler's senile flirtations. I kept a cool head and simply let it roll in, that feeling, like the white fog over the harbour. I only wavered once, for just a moment, when we stopped by the water and stepped out to look around. The sea was still and the firs bristled out of the whiteness over Blair Water in the distance.
Just then, for only a second, Diary, I wanted to let my head fall back on his shoulder.
But I didn't ! !
"It's very nice," I said.
"Awful nice," he agreed.
Then he said, "You're awfully fine company, Evie."
Which was an utterly foolish thing to say, and shows what an utter lout Marsh is really, education or no. I was not fine company and he knew it. I said barely a word to him and stared off in the distance, quite in defiance of the fact that there was, on this occasion, no distance to speak of. And all at once I knew that I had been wrong, that he believed something about me that was not true, and I had to be as blunt with him as possible or he would go on thinking it indefinitely.
I said, "I have no wish to keep company with you.'
That struck him down straight away. Perhaps it was unkind of me to say it that way. But it was true. And it needed to be said.
"Well, what is this, then?" he said. Yelped, even. And didn't I feel ashamed of having walked to the harbor with a boy who finds it necessary to yelp! "Why'd you come all the way out here with me?"
Diary, I only panicked for a sliver of a second. It would have done Father's poor cold heart proud to see me. There's something to be said for a long family history of rigidity and hauteur, isn't there? I simply glared at him like the grandfather of all Blakes and told him in no uncertain terms that he had clearly misunderstood the situation and that his education would do him little good if he couldn't learn to observe social distinctions with at least the sense of a common French hired boy. I may have mentioned Hardscrabble Road, customs and mores of, along the way, but I don't remember. It's possible I only implied it.
He looked me in the eye a little too long— I know I should never have gone riding with him last fall— but what does Marshall Orde know about these things? He knows enough of his own ignorance not to question me. In the end he shrugged and guessed he'd be taking me back to town.
What on earth is wrong with me, do you think?
Once I was away from him and back on my own street I couldn't understand what I'd done in the least. Yet in the cold back chamber of my brain I was glad I had gone. In a curious way I feel reassured by this inconvenient attraction I have toward Marsh, as it means I am capable of passionate attachment to another person— that is, to a man. (How gruesome that sounds when one sets it down plain!) That in turn means I might not be wholly miserable when I do marry. Perhaps that sounds like a dreadfully childish thing to say. I can't say but that it might be. I don't know what these things are like really, what to expect of the rest of my life. I've a head full of fly-blown French poems of dubious morals, and a youth full of idiotic kissing games, a cloud of ugly faceless rumors, and this. If this one sensation gives me hope of a happy womanhood . . . perhaps it isn't so bad that I've indulged it a time or two.
But that is a very cold, very small chamber indeed, Diary. You mustn't think I'm all like that, simply because a tiny, nearly invisible part of me is. And that is the last I intend to say on the matter of Marshall Orde.
