Alice marched up to her, blazing with anger and indignation.She was not, at that moment, the gentle Alice, as everybody called her, Alice-sit-by-the-fire, equable and pacific, believing the best of people.She was the mother-woman eager to revenge the hurt that had been done to one who had all her love.
"Ah," she said, "you're just in time for me to tell you what I think of you.""Whatever you may think of me," replied Joan, "is nothing to what Ithink of myself."
But Alice was not to be diverted by that characteristic way of evading hard words, as she thought it.She had seen Joan dodge the issues like that before, many times, at school.They were still screened from the veranda by a scrub-supported dune.She could let herself go.
"You're a thief," she blurted out, trembling and out of all control for once."Not a full-blown thief because you don't steal to keep.
But a kleptomaniac who can't resist laying hands on other women's men.You ought not to be allowed about loose.You're a danger, a trap.You have no respect for yourself and none for friendship.
Loyalty? You don't know the meaning of the word.You're not to be trusted out of sight.I despise you and never want to see you again."Could this be Alice,--this little fury, white and tense, with clenched hands and glinting eyes, animal-like in her fierce protectiveness?
Joan looked at her in amazement.Hadn't she already been hit hard enough? But before she could speak Alice was in breath again."You can't answer me back,--even you, clever as you are.You've nothing to say.That night at my house, when we had it out before, you said that you were not interested in Gilbert.If that wasn't a cold-blooded lie what was it? Your interest has been so great that you've never let him alone since.You may not have called him deliberately, but when he came you flaunted your sex in his face and teased him just to see him suffer.You were flattered, of course, and your vanity swelled to see him dogging your heels.There's a pretty expressive word for you and your type, and you know it as well as Ido.Let me pass, please."
Joan moved off the narrow board-walk without a word.
And Alice passed, but piqued by this unexpected silence, turned and went for her once most intimate friend again.If she was callous and still in her "Who Cares?" mood words should be said that could never be forgotten.
"I am Mrs.Gray.My husband won't be back for several days," These were the only words that rang in Joan's ears now.Alice might as well have been talking to a stone.
"Things are coming to a head," Alice went on, unconsciously using Gilbert's expression and Hosack's.
"And all the seeds that you've carelessly sown have grown into great rank weeds.Ask Mrs.Jekyll what you've driven Martin into doing if you're curious to know.She can tell you.Many people have seen.But if you still don't care, don't trouble, because it's too late.Go a few yards down there and look at that man bent double in the summer house.If you do that and can still cry out 'Who Cares?' go on to the hour when everything will combine to make you care.It can't be far away.""I'm Mrs.Gray.My husband won't be back for several days." Like the song of death the refrain of that line rose above the sound of the sea and of Alice's voice.Joan could listen to nothing else.
And Alice caught the wounded look in the eyes of the girl in whom she had once had faith and was recompensed.And having said all that she had had in her mind and more than she had meant to say, she turned on her heel, forced herself back into control and went smiling towards the group on the veranda.And there Joan remained standing looking as though she had seen a ghost,--the ghost of happiness.
"Mrs.Gray,--and her husband Martin....But what have I got to say,--I, who refused to be his wife? It only seemed half true when Ifound them together before, although that was bad enough.But this time, now that my love for Martin has broken through all those days of pretending to pretend and that girl is openly in that cottage, nothing could be truer.It isn't Martin who has taken off his armor.
It's I who have cut the straps and made it fall from his shoulders Oh, my God, if only I hadn't wanted to finish being a kid."She moved away, at last, from the place where Alice had left her and without looking to the right or left walked slowly down to the edge of the sea.Vaguely, as though it was something that had happened in a former life, she remembered the angry but neat figure of Alice and a few of the fierce words that had got through to her."Rank weeds...driven Martin...too late....Who Cares?" Only these had stuck.But why should Alice have said them?
It was all unnecessary.She knew them.She had said them all on the way back from Devon, all and many more, seated beside that nice boy, Harry, in his car....She had died a few feet from the stoop of the cottage, in the scent of honeysuckle and Come back to something that wasn't life to be tortured with regrets.All the way back she had said things to herself that Alice, angry and bitter as she had seemed to be, never could have invented.But they too were unnecessary.Saying things now was of no more use than throwing stones into the sea at any time.Rank weeds...driven Martin...too late...who cares--only who cares should have come first because everything else was the result.
And for a little while, with the feeling that she was on an island, deserted and forgotten, she stood on the edge of the sea, looking at a horizon that was utterly blank.What was she to do? Where was she to go?...Not yet a woman, and all the future lay about her in chaos....Once more she went back in spirit to that room of Martin's which had been made the very sanctum of Romance by young blood and moonlight and listened to the plans they had made together for the discovery of a woild out of which so many similar explorers had crept with wounds and bitterness.
