The Brimming Cup | Page 6

know there wasn't anything in the world but marsh, to come out on beautiful, fine, clean earth, where I feel the very strength of ages under my feet. You don't know how good it seems to have a silly, romantic remark like what I said, answered the way you did, telling the truth; how good it feels to be pulled down to what's what, and to know you can do it and really love me too."
He had been so startled and moved by her kiss that he had heard her words but vaguely. "I don't seem to catch hold of all that. What's it all about?"
"It's all about the fact that I really begin to believe that you will be loyal and tell me the truth," she told him.
He saw cause for gravity in this, remembering the great moment so shortly back of them, and said with a surprised and hurt accent, "Didn't you believe me, when I said I would?"
She took up his hand in hers and said rapidly, "Dear Neale, I did believe it, for just a moment, and I can't believe anything good of anybody for longer than that, not really in my heart of hearts. And it's my turn to tell you some truth when I tell you about that unbelief, what I've hardly even ever told myself, right out in words."
He was listening now, fixing on her a look of profound, intelligent attention, as she went on, stumbling, reaching out for words, discarding those she found, only her steady gaze giving coherence to her statement. "You know, living the way I have . . . I've told you . . . I've seen a great deal more than most girls have. And then, half brought up in France with people who are clever and have their eyes wide open, people who really count, I've seen how they don't believe in humans, or goodness, or anything that's not base. They know life is mostly bad and cruel and dull and low, and above all that it's bound to fool you if you trust to it, or get off your guard a single minute. They don't teach you that, you know; but you see it's what they believe and what they spend all their energies trying to dodge a little, all they think they can. Then everything you read, except the silly little Biblioth��que-Rose sort of thing, makes you know that it's true . . . Anatole France, and Maupassant, and Schnitzler. Of course back in America you find lots of nice people who don't believe that. But they're so sweet you know they'd swallow anything that made things look pleasant. So you don't dare take their word for anything. They won't even look at what's bad in everybody's life, they just pretend it's not there, not in their husbands, or wives or children, and so you know they're fooled." She lowered her voice, which faltered a little, but she still continued to look straight into his eyes, "And as for love, why, I've just hated the sound of the name and . . . I'm horribly afraid of it, even now."
He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love you?"
She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed I could love anybody. But how do I know that I'm not somehow fooling myself: but that maybe all that huge unconscious inheritance from all my miserable ancestors hasn't got me, somehow, and you too? How do I know that I'm not being fooled by Nature and fooling you with fine words?"
She hesitated, probing deep into her heart, and brought out now, like a great and unexpected treasure, "But, Neale, listen! I don't think that about you! I don't believe you're being fooled. Why, I believe in you more than in myself!" She was amazed at this and radiant.
Then she asked him, "Neale, how do you manage about all this? What do you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably, unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you believe in yourself at all?"
He was silent for some time, his eyes steadily fixed on some invisible realm. When he spoke it was with a firm, natural, unshaken accent. "Why, yes, I think it very likely that I am being fooled all the time. But I don't think it matters the least bit in the world