The Scent of Water Read Free Page B

shabby in their weather-worn tweeds. I’ll soon look like that myself, thought Mary, and feeling a pang of dismay she looked at herself in a long mirror hanging on the opposite wall.
    The sight reassured her, for she was a miraculously preserved fifty. She had kept her tall slender figure and straight back and did not sag either at the shoulders or in the middle. The bones of her face were good, broad across the cheekbones and narrowing to a small firm chin. Her dark eyes were bright and lively under eyebrows whose mobility, combined with her resolute mouth and short determined nose, had often struck terror to the hearts of her subordinates. Her hair was thick and iron-gray, and her smooth ivory skin, only faintly lined about the eyes, needed little makeup. She wore no jewel, apart from her gold wristwatch, and her plain black dress and short jacket, with a vivid flame-colored scarf, cast a slight blight upon the women in the window. Their conversation faltered for a moment or two, and then in resolute self-defense they turned their eyes away and picked up the broken threads of their conversation.
    Mary chose the best the menu could suggest and ate it with resignation, hoping the coffee would be better. That glimpse of herself in the glass, looking so surprisingly young, had suddenly sent her thoughts back over the past. The struggle of the years after her father had died, very hard work, very little money, but a great deal of fun when the children were together during the London holidays and entertainment was cheap and easily come by. The happiness of school and college days, the thrill of early love affairs, which she had always ended before they became too serious because in these matters she could never feel as she would have liked to feel. Her years of teaching before the war, with the pride of being house mistress in a famous school before she was thirty, and her holidays abroad. She had liked teaching. She knew the trick of discipline and taught well. And she had loved the children steadily and patiently, taking pains to understand them. Then the war, return to London and work at the Admiralty, the blitz and the fear and pity and raging anger of it, and the deaths of two of her brothers.
    And then her engagement in her early thirties to a sailor whom she had met at the Admiralty, a man older than herself and so infinitely her superior in intellect and power of love that the glowing, deeply emotional months of their engagement had made her feel a little unreal, for the first time in her life unsure of herself, carried along by a tide too strong for her. He had been killed a week before the date fixed for their wedding and her shock and grief and disappointment had darkened her life for a while. But not enough grief. Paradoxically she had broken her heart because her sorrow had not been the overwhelming anguish she had seen in others. She had realized with shame that the deep affection which was her way of loving had not been enough. Overwhelming love between man and woman, a symbol perhaps of some deeper mystery, she knew nothing whatever about, and she had been haunted by Rupert Brooke’s sonnet,
    I said I loved you; it’s not true.
    Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.
    She was landlocked in herself. For a time she had sorrowed because not only was she bereaved of the man but also by reason of what she was, of her birthright of true grief. Then her resilient nature had come to her rescue and when the war ended she had given herself with energy to the business of clearing up the mess.
    She had gone out to Germany with a Red Cross unit and worked with and for the shattered men and women coming out of the concentration camps. Nothing she had seen in the blitz had been more fearful and at length even her good health had broken down. She had come back to England and after a rest, and on the strength of her war service and knowledge of languages, had obtained her government post and risen slowly and steadily