“I’m so glad,” said Keating.
“But I don’t think he’ll ever be able to come back to work. He’s getting old, Peter….Yes, he’s getting old….One reaches an age when one can’t be burdened with business any longer.” He let a paper knife hang between two fingers and tapped it pensively against the edge of a desk calendar. “It happens to all of us, Peter, sooner or later….One must look ahead….”
Keating sat on the floor by the imitation logs in the fireplace of his living room, his hands clasped about his knees, and listened to his mother’s questions on what did Dominique look like, what did she wear, what had she said to him and how much money did he suppose her mother had actually left her.
He was meeting Dominique frequently now. He had just returned from an evening spent with her on a round of night clubs. She always accepted his invitations. He wondered whether her attitude was a deliberate proof that she could ignore him more completely by seeing him often than by refusing to see him. But each time he met her, he planned eagerly for the next meeting. He had not seen Catherine for a month. She was busy with research work which her uncle had entrusted to her, in preparation for a series of his lectures.
Mrs. Keating sat under a lamp, mending a slight tear in the lining of Peter’s dinner jacket, reproaching him, between questions, for sitting on the floor in his dress trousers and best formal shirt. He paid no attention to the reproaches or the questions. But under his bored annoyance he felt an odd sense of relief; as if the stubborn stream of her words were pushing him on and justifying him. He answered once in a while: “Yes….No….I don’t know….Oh, yes, she’s lovely. She’s very lovely….It’s awfully late, Mother. I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed….” The doorbell rang.
“Well,” said Mrs. Keating. “What can that be, at this hour?” Keating rose, shrugging, and ambled to the door. It was Catherine. She stood, her two hands clasped on a large, old, shapeless pocketbook. She looked determined and hesitant at once. She drew back a little. She said: “Good evening, Peter. Can I come in? I’ve got to speak to you.”
“Katie! Of course! How nice of you! Come right in. Mother, it’s Katie.”
Mrs. Keating looked at the girl’s feet which stepped as if moving on the rolling deck of a ship; she looked at her son, and she knew that something had happened, to be handled with great caution.
“Good evening, Catherine,” she said softly.
Keating was conscious of nothing save the sudden stab of joy he had felt on seeing her; the joy told him that nothing had changed, that he was safe in certainty, that her presence resolved all doubts. He forgot to wonder about the lateness of the hour, about her first, uninvited appearance in his apartment.
“Good evening, Mrs. Keating,” she said, her voice bright and hollow. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, it’s late probably, is it?”
“Why, not at all, child,” said Mrs. Keating.
Catherine hurried to speak, senselessly, hanging on to the sound of words:
“I’ll just take my hat off….Where can I put it, Mrs. Keating? Here on the table? Would that be all right?…No, maybe I’d better put it on this bureau, though it’s a little damp from the street, the hat is, it might hurt the varnish, it’s a nice bureau, I hope it doesn’t hurt the varnish….”
“What’s the matter, Katie?” Keating asked, noticing at last.
She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were terrified. Her lips parted; she was trying to smile. “Katie!” he gasped. She said nothing. “Take your coat off. Come here, get yourself warm by the fire.”
He pushed a low bench to the fireplace, he made her sit down. She was wearing a black sweater and an old black skirt, school-girlish house garments which she had not changed for her visit. She sat hunched, her knees drawn tight together. She said, her voice lower and more natural, with the first released sound of pain in it:
“You have such a nice place….So warm and roomy….Can you open the windows any time you want to?”
“Katie darling,” he said gently, “what happened?”
“Nothing. It’s not that anything really happened. Only I had to speak to you. Now. Tonight.”
He looked at Mrs. Keating. “If you’d rather…”
“No. It’s perfectly all right. Mrs. Keating can hear it. Maybe it’s better if she hears it.” She turned to his mother and said very simply: “You see, Mrs. Keating, Peter and I are engaged.” She turned to him and added, her voice breaking: “Peter, I want to be married now, tomorrow, as soon as possible.”
Mrs. Keating’s hand descended slowly to her lap. She looked at Catherine, her eyes expressionless. She said quietly, with a dignity Keating had never expected of her:
“I didn’t know it, I am very happy, my dear.”
“You don’t mind? You really don’t mind at all?” Catherine asked desperately.
“Why, child, such things are to be decided only by you and my son.”
“Katie!” he gasped, regaining his voice. “What happened? Why as soon as possible?”
“Oh! oh, it did sound as if…as if I were in the kind of trouble girls are supposed to…” She blushed furiously. “Oh, my God! No! It’s not that! You know it couldn’t be! Oh, you couldn’t think, Peter, that I…that…”
“No, of course not,” he laughed, sitting down on the floor by her side, slipping an arm around her. “But pull yourself together. What is it? You know I’d marry you tonight if you wanted me to. Only what happened?”
“Nothing. I’m all right now. I’ll tell you. You’ll think I’m crazy. I just suddenly had the feeling that I’d never marry you, that something dreadful was happening to me and I had to escape from it.”
“What was happening to you?”
“I don’t know. Not a thing. I was working on my research notes all day, and nothing had happened at all. No calls or visitors. And then suddenly tonight, I had that feeling, it was like a nightmare, you know, the kind of horror that you can’t describe, that’s not like anything normal at all. Just the feeling that I was in mortal danger, that something was closing in on me, that I’d never escape it, because it wouldn’t let me and it was too late.”
“That you’d never escape what?”
“I don’t know exactly. Everything. My whole life. You know, like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With not a thing that you can notice about it or suspect. And you walk on it easily. When you’ve noticed, it’s too late….And I felt that it would get me, that I’d never marry you, that I had to run, now, now or never. Haven’t you ever had a feeling like that, just fear that you couldn’t explain?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“No, Katie. Only what was it exactly that started it? Anything in particular?”
“Well…it seems so silly now.” She giggled apologetically. “It was like this: I was sitting in my room and it was a little chilly, so I didn’t open the window. I had so many papers and books on the table, I hardly had room to write and every time I made a note my elbow’d push something off. There were piles of things on the floor all around me, all paper, and it rustled a little, because I had the door to the living room half open and there was a little draft, I guess. Uncle was working too, in the living room. I was getting along fine, I’d been at it for hours, didn’t even know what time it was. And then suddenly it got me. I don’t know why. Maybe the room was stuffy, or maybe it was the silence, I couldn’t hear a thing, not a sound in the living room, and there was that paper rustling, so softly, like somebody being choked to death. And then I looked around and…and I couldn’t see Uncle in the living room, but I saw his shadow on the wall, a huge shadow, all hunched, and it didn’t move, only it was so huge!”
She shuddered. The thing did not seem silly to her any longer. She whispered:
“That’s when it got me. It wouldn’t move, that shadow, but I thought all that paper was moving, I thought it was rising very slowly off the floor, and it was going to come to my throat and I was going to drown. That’s when I screamed. And, Peter, he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear it! Because the shadow didn’t move. Then I seized my hat and coat and I ran. When I was running through the living room, I think he said: ‘Why, Catherine, what time is it?–Where are you going?’ Something like that, I’m not sure. But I didn’t look back and I didn’t answer–I couldn’t. I was afraid of him. Afraid of Uncle Ellsworth who’s never said a harsh word to me in his life!…That was all, Peter. I can’t understand it, but I’m afraid. Not so much any more, not here with you, but I’m afraid….” Mrs. Keating spoke, her voice dry and crisp: “Why, it’s plain what happened to you, my dear. You worked too hard and overdid it, and you just got a mite hysterical.”