Chapter 36

Wife. The word had a remarkable effect on him. It churned him all up. His thoughts were a chaotic jumble, and his driving on the way home matched them. He had at least three narrow shaves at cross streets before he got out of the town and for an entire mile afterwards he was on the wrong side of the road. During this period, deep as he was in confused thought, he couldn't but vaguely notice the anger on the faces of the other drivers and the variety and fury of their gesticulations, and it roused a dim wonder in him.

Wife. How arid existence had been for him up to then in regard to the affections, how knobbly the sort of kisses he had received in Clark. They weren't kisses; they were disapproving pecks. Always disapproving. Always as if he hadn't done enough, or been enough, or was suspected of not going to do or be enough.

His wife. Mr. Twist dreadfully longed to kiss somebody,--somebody kind and soft, who would let herself be adored. She needn't even love him,--he knew he wasn't the sort of man to set passion alight; she need only be kind, and a little fond of him, and let him love her, and be his very own.

His own little wife. How sweet. How almost painfully sweet. Yes. But the Annas....

When he thought of the Annas, Mr. Twist went damp. He might propose--indeed, everything pointed to his simply having got to--but wouldn't they very quickly dispose? And then what? That lawyer seemed to think all he had to do was to marry them right away; not them, of course,--one; but they were so very plural in his mind. Funny man, thought Mr. Twist; funny man,--yet otherwise so sagacious. It is true he need only propose to one of them, for which he thanked God, but he could imagine what that one, and what the other one too, who would be sure to be somewhere quite near would ... no, he couldn't imagine; he preferred not to imagine.

Mr. Twist's dampness increased, and a passing car got his mud-guard. It was a big car which crackled with language as it whizzed on its way, and Mr. Twist, slewed by the impact half across the road, then perceived on which side he had been driving.

The lane up to the inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence. Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when he passed before, there was only the pressed-down grass and crushed flowers in a glare of sun. She had gone home long ago of course. She said she was going to be very busy. Secretly he wished she hadn't gone home, and that little Christopher too might for a bit be somewhere else, so that when he arrived he wouldn't immediately have to face everybody at once. He wanted to think; he wanted to have time to think; time before four o'clock came, and with four o'clock, if he hadn't come to any conclusion about shutting up the inn--and how could he if nobody gave him time to think?--those accursed, swarming Germans. It was they who had done all this. Mr. Twist blazed into sudden fury. They