Perhaps he had already begun to doubt himself, without knowing it until now.
Perhaps that was why he had not yet told them why he must go to Jefferson.
He had told her, a year ago, why he wanted to, must, go there, and that he intended to tell them the reason, she watching him with those eyes which he had not yet seen.
“You mean,” he said, “that they would not send me? arrange for me to go?
That that would not be reason enough?”
“Certainly it wouldn’t,” she said.
“But why?
That’s the truth.
Foolish, maybe.
But true.
And what is the church for, if not to help those who are foolish but who want truth?
Why wouldn’t they let me go?”
“Why, I wouldn’t let you go myself, if I were them and you gave me that as your reason.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.” But he did not see, exactly, though. he believed that he could have been wrong and that she was right.
And so when a year later she talked to him suddenly of marriage and escape in the same words, he was not surprised, not hurt.
He just thought quietly,
‘So this is love.
I see.
I was wrong about it too,’ thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
He changed completely.
They planned to be married.
He knew now that he had seen all the while that desperate calculation in her eyes.
‘Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,’ he thought quietly. ‘Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.’
The desperation was still in them, but now that there were definite plans, a day set, it was quieter, mostly calculation.
They talked now of his ordination, of how he could get Jefferson as his call.
“We’d better go to work right away,” she said.
He told her that he had been working for that since he was four years old; perhaps he was being humorous, whimsical.
She brushed it aside with that passionate and leashed humorlessness, almost inattention, talking as though to herself of men, names, to see, to grovel to or threaten, outlining to him a campaign of abasement and plotting.
He listened.
Even the faint smile, whimsical, quizzical, perhaps of despair, did not leave his face.
He said,
“Yes.
Yes.
I see.
I understand,” as she talked. It was as if he were saying Yes.
I see.
I see now.
That’s how they do such, gain such.
That’s the rule.
I see now.
At first, when the demagoguery, the abasement, the small lying had its reverberation in other small lies and ultimate threats in the form of requests and suggestions among the hierarchate of the Church and he received the call to Jefferson, he forgot how he had got it for the time.
He did not remember until after he was settled in Jefferson; certainly not while the train of the journey’s last stage fled toward the consummation of his life across a land similar to that where he had been born.
But it looked different, though he knew that the difference lay not outside but inside the car window against which his face was almost pressed like that of a child, while his wife beside him had also now something of eagerness in her face, beside hunger and desperation.
They had been married now not quite six months.
They had married directly after his graduation.
Not once since then had he seen the desperation naked in her face.
But neither had he seen passion again.
And again he thought quietly, without much surprise and perhaps without hurt: I see.
That’s the way it is.
Marriage.