‘I want to ask you something — something important. I want you to marry me,’ he was saying.
There! It was out now. Anna almost cried aloud her astonishment.
‘What!’ she cried, really astonished.
He seemed rather taken aback.
‘Will you marry me?’ he said, still with the set, queer smile. There was a pause. Matthew, rather embarrassed, waited behind his smile for her to speak.
‘But it’s absurd! Quite, quite absurd!’ exclaimed Anna, siaring indignantly at him.
She felt both astounded and indignant, as though he had in some unexpected way made her ridiculous. She had never even thought of marriage. She didn’t in the least want to marry anybody. She wanted to go through life alone, in her own independent, detached fashion. The idea of being bound up with another person in such a relationship as marriage was hateful to her. And then, to marry a person like Matthew Kavan! Her very heart shuddered.
‘Why is it absurd?’ asked Matthew, smiling patiently down at her, with his odd, genuine humility.
‘Oh,’ cried Anna in confusion. ‘I don’t want to marry at all. Besides, I hardly know you.’
‘You will soon know me better,’ he persisted, swinging his thin, stiff shoulders towards her, shadowily obstinate.
His soft, shadowy insistence made her feel that she would die of exasperation, and a kind of alarm. It seemed so useless to oppose him, to talk to him; the words simply slipped off his smooth, brown, papery skin. His very blankness as he stood up there, so stiff and erect and compact, like a long, neat parcel, was a kind of threat. She began to laugh nervously.
‘No, I can’t. It’s kind of you to ask me, but please don’t think of it any more. It’s really not to be thought of,’ she said.
‘Very well,’ said Matthew. ‘We won’t say any more about it now.’
Anna began to feel rather afraid. His shadowy, overbearing insentience was more than she could cope with. He simply did not seem to hear her refusal. She felt she had not made any progress against his determination. Her words conveyed nothing to him. How on earth was she to make him understand? She moved, saying that it was time to dress.
Matthew moved also, walking across the room with his complacent tread. His complacency was strangely discomforting to her. At the door he said:
‘You haven’t told me whether you are going to wear my flowers to-night.’
‘I’ll wear them,’ said Anna.
He opened the door and she went out quickly, up to her own room.
Lauretta continually made opportunities for airing her good opinion of the young man.
‘Well,’ she would say decidedly, and even challengingly, to her niece: ‘I like him very much. Very much indeed.’ And she would look at Anna intently, with a falsely-smiling persuasion in her eyes, and behind it a sort of a threat.
Anna told her that Kavan had proposed. She did not want to speak of it: but something, bravado perhaps, made her confide in Lauretta. She was not going to acknowledge her nervousness, even to herself.
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Lauretta, eyeing her intently. ‘I’ve seen all along that he was very much attracted.’
Her little bird’s eye cocked up coldy speculative at Anna, as she said:
‘I’m sure he’d make an excellent husband.’
‘I’m sure he would,’ agreed Anna, with a sneer.
Lauretta became offended at once. She couldn’t put up with that hard, mocking attitude of Anna’s. She stiffened in chilly, offended resentment, turning away.
‘I should think it over carefully, if I were you,’ she advised stiffly. ‘It’s an opportunity for you, you know.’ And once more the threat peeped out, uglily, in her voice.
Lauretta, of course, was all in favour of the match. It was such a splendid chance of getting Anna permanently off her hands. She didn’t want the expense of sending the girl to Oxford; neither did she want her uncomfortable presence hanging about Blue Hills. Kavan’s offer was simply providential, from her point of view.
All of which was naturally quite obvious to Anna. But whether Lauretta’s anxiety to be rid of her fortified her against Matthew or impelled her in his direction, she really didn’t know.
Kavan remained in abeyance for a few days. But he had not abandoned the attack, Anna was sure. Oh, no; not by any manner of means. His brown, closed face was so satisfied; almost smug. And he kept looking at her all through the day with an apparently intimate smile and a protective, proprietary expression — a sort of ‘I understand everything’ sympathetic look, faintly patronizing, although humble. And he continued to bombard her with the mauve violas. Anna began to hate the sight of the pale, blank, rather anæmic, rather perky little flower-faces staring up at her every time she went to her room. They seemed to wear a bright, insipid, foolishly questioning look. A sugar-and-watery, Mary Pickfordish air of aggravating brightness.
One afternoon at the races, Anna found that she and Kavan were separated from the rest of the party. Sure enough, in the midst of the noisy, crowding, vulgar people, he proposed to her again.
Anna felt as if she were going mad. It really was maddening the way he kept on quietly along his own road, as if she simply didn’t exist. He was the most obtuse and insentient creature. And quite, quite unreal. She wanted desperately to make some impression on him, to make him understand her, to make him understand that it was quite hopeless for him to have his eye on her. But how was she to do it? Words had no effect whatever. There seemed to be no way of communicating with him. He simply wasn’t human.
It made her feel helpless and slightly hysterical, the impossibility of communicating with him. She wanted to hurt him, to get her own back on him. But at the same time she wanted to laugh. It was so ridiculous. Such an absurd situation! She felt her throat and chest begin to heave with deep tremors of submerged laughter. The extraordinary creature, thinking that he might get hold of her! Actually, seriously, he thought that she might marry him!
‘No, no, no,’ she laughed, rather wildly. ‘Never. Never. I don’t want to marry you, and nothing will ever induce me to marry you. I never wilclass="underline" not if you ask me a hundred times. So you may as well get the idea out of your head. There! Is that plain?’
And she hurried off breathlessly into the crowd to look for the others.
After this, Matthew was a bit subdued. But she had not choked him off, she could see. He went about quietly, a little bit blenched, and evidently contemplating something. Heaven only knew what was in his mind. Anna could not bear to look at him. She began to detest the look of his head, as it bobbed up in front of her. Such a senseless, inhuman ball of a head — how had she ever endured it? It had a foolish, hard roundness. Yet she still believed there might be something nice about the man.
But his continued presence was becoming nightmarish. It almost seemed that he would wear her down by sheer staying power. She knew that she had not even started to convince him yet; not au fond, that is. She began to lie awake at night devising schemes for finishing him off entirely.
Then suddenly he went away. Anna nearly fell backwards with astonishment. She couldn’t believe, at first, that he had really gone. But he had. Lauretta was very much displeased.
‘I think you’ve made a great mistake,’ she said pettishly, frowning at Anna.
The girl knew that she was referring to Matthew.
‘But I didn’t like him,’ she replied.
‘I’m sure he seemed very nice,’ said Lauretta, irritated.