“I don’t much care for Upham’s stories,” she was saying. “I thought I would, but I do not. They are fussily written and weighted with the sort of writerly flourishes I find so distasteful.”
“Just so,” I said, for she had expressed this distaste before to me.
“What a lovely scent. What is that, do you know?”
I sniffed. I could smell only the river.
“And what was he thinking, to create a character so fundamentally blind that he does not even understand the true import of his utterances?” she asked.
“It is a device, I believe,” I said.
“To what end?”
“To show us a character who deceives himself.”
“Well, I for one cannot believe in such a device. It makes the reader distrust the narrator. How are we to know what truly happened? And besides, no one can be so self-deceived.”
“You don’t think so?” I asked.
“I think the promise of spring has addled your thoughts this afternoon, Nicholas. You’re unusually distracted.”
“Perhaps I am,” I said.
Within the half hour, we had come to a sheltered spot, a rocky outcropping that produced a hollow under which we could stand and rest a moment and survey the scene before us — a pleasant vista of rust-colored grasses bowed from the weight of the snow and ice that had so recently left them. Etna had been willing to follow me to the shelter; perhaps she had to catch her breath. Her legs cannot have been used to such exercise. I moved a step closer to her, my hands in the pockets of my coat, my own body soaked with perspiration beneath my waistcoat (I had overdressed). She did not move away, but allowed me this proximity as we gazed for a moment at a flock of starlings that were swooping in a complicated pattern at the edge of the river. She smiled and seemed content.
“My dear Etna,” I began, and there must have been an inadvertently reverential tone to my voice, for she turned to me at once with a look of puzzlement. She tucked her hands beneath her cloak. In the matted leaves, I could hear the rustle of some wood animal — a chipmunk? a squirrel?
“I have a matter of the utmost importance to discuss with you,” I said, and then paused, for already this was not going as planned; already my words had the ring of a business transaction. “That is to say, I wish to confess to you …” I took a quick breath. “…I love you,” I said.
This pronouncement cannot have been entirely unexpected (after all, what had she imagined the topaz earrings and jet brooch signified?), and yet she seemed taken aback, astonished in the moment. I suspect the idea of marriage had been very far from her thoughts just then; certainly her flushed face had been the result of exertion, not of expectation.
But as was so often true for Etna in situations of fright or surprise, she became utterly still. Even her eyelids seemed to blink more slowly as she regarded me steadily.
“I adore you,” I said with a fervor that must have seemed bizarre in contrast to her quiet. “I cannot sleep at night for thinking of you. I wish you to be my wife.”
(When I recall this event, I cannot help but see a scene from a play in which one of the principles is overacting as a consequence of nerves while the other appears entirely to have forgotten her lines.)
Perhaps Etna was truly alarmed at this bold declaration, which I immediately sought to soften. “That is to say,” I continued, “I should like you for a wife if the prospect pleases you. Indeed, I am asking you to marry me. I know this can be neither sudden nor entirely unexpected, and, of course, you must take your time deciding; but I tell you now that you would make me the happiest man on earth if you would say yes.”
For a long time, Etna remained silent. I cannot ever be certain of her thoughts then, but I believe that though the possibility of marriage had occurred to her, and though she knew that she must in the end say yes if she was to escape the quiet tyranny of a life lived in exile, she had refused actually to imagine it. She had warded it off, so to speak, and thus was at a loss for reply.
I withdrew from my pocket a box that contained a ring I had recently purchased at Johnston & Herrick’s (at considerable expense, I might inform the reader; I cannot see the harm in mentioning it now). “I wish to give you this,” I said, “as a token of… to commit myself …” But I was unable to go on. The voluble, at times pedantic, Van Tassel was rendered as silent as a stone — as silent as Etna Bliss, for that matter. I held the ring, an emerald and white gold confection, in my palm.
She did not reach for it, but did bring her hands out from under her cloak, perhaps to use them in gesture, and I, nearly desperate lest she refuse me (a possibility that was growing more and more likely with each passing moment), seized one of those gloved hands and wrapped it over my own, so that the ring lay between us. I wrapped my free arm around her long back. I felt her stiffen, her limbs unyielding. But then, when it became clear I would not willingly release her, she relaxed enough to permit the embrace, though I cannot say she responded in any way. She remained motionless, in a state of neither giving nor receiving. Perhaps she was testing herself, watching herself for a reaction. (I believe an entire story, an entire marriage, was written in that embrace, though I could not have foreseen it then. And based on that experience, I would advise young lovers to be as attentive to the first embrace with the beloved as one would be to a soothsayer.)