They met in Kensington Gardens with an air of being clandestine and
defiant. It was one of those days of amber sunlight, soft air, and
tender beauty with which London relieves the tragic glooms of the year's
decline. There were still a residue of warm-tinted leaves in puffs and
clusters upon the tree branches, a boat or two ruffled the blue
Serpentine, and the waterfowl gave colour and animation to the selvage
of the water. The sedges were still a greenish yellow.
The two met shyly. They were both a little unfamiliar to each other.
Trafford was black-coated, silk-hatted, umbrella-d, a decorous young
professor in the place of the cheerful aeronaut who had fallen so gaily
out of the sky. Marjorie had a new tailor-made dress of russet-green,
and a little cloth toque ruled and disciplined the hair he had known as
a ruddy confusion.... They had dreamt, I think, of extended arms and a
wild rush to embrace one another. Instead, they shook hands.
"And so," said Trafford, "we meet again!"
"I don't see why we shouldn't meet!" said Marjorie.
There was a slight pause.
"Let's have two of those jolly little green chairs," said Trafford....
They walked across the grass towards the chairs he had indicated, and
both were full of the momentous things they were finding it impossible
to say.
"There ought to be squirrels here, as there are in New York," he said at
last.
They sat down. There was a moment's silence, and then Trafford's spirit
rose in rebellion and he plunged at this--this stranger beside him.
"Look here," he said, "do you still love me, Marjorie?"
She looked up into his face with eyes in which surprise and scrutiny
passed into something altogether beautiful. "I love you--altogether,"
she said in a steady, low voice.
And suddenly she was no longer a stranger, but the girl who had flitted
to his arms breathless, unhesitating, through the dusk. His blood
quickened. He made an awkward gesture as though he arrested an impulse
to touch her. "My sweetheart," he said. "My dear one!"
Marjorie's face flashed responses. "It's you," he said.
"Me," she answered.
"Do you remember?"
"Everything!"
"My dear!"
"I want to tell you things," said Marjorie. "What are we to do?"....
He tried afterwards to retrace that conversation. He was chiefly
ashamed of his scientific preoccupations during that London interval. He
had thought of a thousand things; Marjorie had thought of nothing else
but love and him. Her happy assurance, her absolute confidence that his
desires would march with hers, reproached and confuted every adverse
thought in him as though it was a treachery to love. He had that sense
which I suppose comes at times to every man, of entire unworthiness for
the straight, unhesitating decision, the clear simplicity of a woman's
passion. He had dreamt vaguely, unsubstantially, the while he had
arranged his pressures and temperatures and infinitesimal ingredients,
and worked with goniometer and trial models and the new calculating
machine he had contrived for his research. But she had thought clearly,
definitely, fully--of nothing but coming to him. She had thought out
everything that bore upon that; reasons for preciptance, reasons for
delay, she had weighed the rewards of conformity against the glamour of
romance. It became more and more clear to him as they talked, that she
was determined to elope with him, to go to Italy, and there have an
extraordinarily picturesque and beautiful time. Her definiteness shamed
his poverty of anticipation. Her enthusiasm carried him with her. Of
course it was so that things must be done....
When at last they parted under the multiplying lamps of the November
twilight, he turned his face eastward. He was afraid of his mother's
eyes--he scarcely knew why. He walked along Kensington Gore, and the
clustering confused lights of street and house, white and golden and
orange and pale lilac, the moving lamps and shining glitter of the
traffic, the luminous interiors of omnibuses, the reflection of carriage
and hoarding, the fading daylight overhead, the phantom trees to the
left, the deepening shadows and blacknesses among the houses on his
right, the bobbing heads of wayfarers, were just for him the stir and
hue and texture of fairyland. All the world was fairyland. He went to
his club and dined there, and divided the evening between geography, as
it is condensed in Baedeker and Murray on North Italy, Italian
Switzerland and the Italian Riviera, and a study of the marriage laws as
they are expounded in "Whitaker's Almanac," the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica," and other convenient works of reference. He replaced the
books as he used them, and went at last from the library into the
smoking-room, but seeing a man who might talk to him there, he went out
at once into the streets, and fetched a wide compass by Baker Street,
Oxford Street, and Hyde Park, home.
He was a little astonished at himself and everything.
But it was going to be--splendid.
(What poor things words can be!)