The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual at the
hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights. The hours between
dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night
after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of
dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back
in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups
beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was
unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually
fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago
there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other
person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from
England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and
prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been
fed. Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the
lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He
went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to
hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots,
and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of
sheep. The intermittent sounds—now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or
throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation—were just, he
declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when the bones
are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after
a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of
native spears which were so ingeniously arranged as to run their points
at you whichever way you approached them. He was clearly oblivious of
his surroundings; whereupon Hirst, perceiving that Hewet’s mind was a
complete blank, fixed his attention more closely upon his
fellow-creatures. He was too far from them, however, to hear what they
were saying, but it pleased him to construct little theories about them
from their gestures and appearance.
Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was completely
engrossed in them. When she had finished a page she handed it to her
husband, or gave him the sense of what she was reading in a series of
short quotations linked together by a sound at the back of her throat.
“Evie writes that George has gone to Glasgow. ‘He finds Mr. Chadbourne
so nice to work with, and we hope to spend Christmas together, but I
should not like to move Betty and Alfred any great distance (no, quite
right), though it is difficult to imagine cold weather in this heat. .
. . Eleanor and Roger drove over in the new trap. . . . Eleanor
certainly looked more like herself than I’ve seen her since the winter.
She has put Baby on three bottles now, which I’m sure is wise (I’m sure
it is too), and so gets better nights. . . . My hair still falls out. I
find it on the pillow! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall
Green. . . . Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at dances.
She _is_ going to show her black pug after all.’ . . . A line from
Herbert—so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, ‘Poor old Mrs.
Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory, only a
maid in the house, who hadn’t the presence of mind to lift her up,
which they think might have saved her, but the doctor says it might
have come at any moment, and one can only feel thankful that it was in
the house and not in the street (I should think so!). The pigeons have
increased terribly, just as the rabbits did five years ago . . .’”
While she read her husband kept nodding his head very slightly, but
very steadily in sign of approval.
Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were not
altogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigidity which
came over her large fine face as she finished reading them and replaced
them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of care and responsibility on
her face made her resemble an elderly man rather than a woman. The
letters brought her news of the failure of last year’s fruit crop in
New Zealand, which was a serious matter, for Hubert, her only brother,
made his living on a fruit farm, and if it failed again, of course, he
would throw up his place, come back to England, and what were they to
do with him this time? The journey out here, which meant the loss of a
term’s work, became an extravagance and not the just and wonderful
holiday due to her after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and
correcting essays upon English literature. Emily, her sister, who was a
teacher also, wrote: “We ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt
Hubert will be more reasonable this time.” And then went on in her
sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jolly time in the
Lakes. “They are looking exceedingly pretty just now. I have seldom
seen the trees so forward at this time of year. We have taken our lunch
out several days. Old Alice is as young as ever, and asks after every
one affectionately. The days pass very quickly, and term will soon be
here. Political prospects _not_ good, I think privately, but do not
like to damp Ellen’s enthusiasm. Lloyd George has taken the Bill up,
but so have many before now, and we are where we are; but trust to find
myself mistaken. Anyhow, we have our work cut out for us. . . . Surely
Meredith lacks the _human_ note one likes in W. W.?” she concluded, and
went on to discuss some questions of English literature which Miss
Allan had raised in her last letter.
At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and made
semi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susan were
reading each other’s letters. The big slashing manuscripts of
hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur’s knee, while
Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled more than
a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular and breezy
goodwill.
“I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur,” she said, looking up.
“Who’s your loving Flo?” asked Arthur.
“Flo Graves—the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that dreadful
Mr. Vincent,” said Susan. “Is Mr. Hutchinson married?” she asked.
Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or
rather with one magnificent plan—which was simple too—they were all to
get married—at once—directly she got back. Marriage, marriage that was
the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she
knew, and a great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every
instance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition,
restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them again,
public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of men and
particularly on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to
marry, were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married.
If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted after
marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature
which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one
Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of
being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely
uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like
this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as
servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people
expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with
instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt
down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of
Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her
right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had
been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of
warmth in her feelings towards other people.
It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able to lace
her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of her feet having
coincided more or less accurately with the death of her husband, a man
of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout. She
was a selfish, independent old woman, possessed of a considerable
income, which she spent upon the upkeep of a house that needed seven
servants and a charwoman in Lancaster Gate, and another with a garden
and carriage-horses in Surrey. Susan’s engagement relieved her of the
one great anxiety of her life—that her son Christopher should “entangle
himself” with his cousin. Now that this familiar source of interest was
removed, she felt a little low and inclined to see more in Susan than
she used to. She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding
present, a cheque for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly,
conceivably—it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths’ bill for
doing up the drawing-room—three hundred pounds sterling.
She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures, as she
sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards by her side.
The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and she did not like to
call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to be busy with Arthur.
“She’s every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,”
she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs, “and I’ve
no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with every one. The young are
very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss me but Dakyns, and
she’ll be consoled by the will! However, I’ve got no reason to
complain. . . . I can still enjoy myself. I’m not a burden to any-one.
. . . I like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs.”
Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the only
people she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfish or fond
of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer than the general
run; people she willingly acknowledged, who were finer than she was.
There were only two of them. One was her brother, who had been drowned
before her eyes, the other was a girl, her greatest friend, who had
died in giving birth to her first child. These things had happened some
fifty years ago.
“They ought not to have died,” she thought. “However, they did—and we
selfish old creatures go on.” The tears came to her eyes; she felt a
genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youth and beauty,
and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall; and she
opened one of those innumerable novels which she used to pronounce good
or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful. “I can’t think how
people come to imagine such things,” she would say, taking off her
spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming
ringed with white.
Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with Mr.
Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcely took
his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in his chair
and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrived the night
before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head of an
intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature had passed,
they were discovering that they knew some of the same people, as indeed
had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.
“Ah yes, old Truefit,” said Mr. Elliot. “He has a son at Oxford. I’ve
often stayed with them. It’s a lovely old Jacobean house. Some
exquisite Greuzes—one or two Dutch pictures which the old boy kept in
the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks of prints. Oh, the dirt
in that house! He was a miser, you know. The boy married a daughter of
Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends to run in
families. This chap collects buckles—men’s shoe-buckles they must be,
in use between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn’t be right, but
fact’s as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad
of that kind. On other points he’s as level-headed as a breeder of
shorthorns, which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you
probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for
instance—” he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his
move,—“Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with
big front teeth. I’ve heard her shout across a table, ‘Keep your mouth
shut, Miss Smith; they’re as yellow as carrots!’ across a table, mind
you. To me she’s always been civility itself. She dabbles in
literature, likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but
mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and
she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I’ve been told it’s a family
feud—something to do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the
First. Yes,” he continued, suffering check after check, “I always like
to know something of the grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In
my opinion they preserve all that we admire in the eighteenth century,
with the advantage, in the majority of cases, that they are personally
clean. Not that one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her
clean. How often d’you think, Hilda,” he called out to his wife, “her
ladyship takes a bath?”
“I should hardly like to say, Hugh,” Mrs. Elliot tittered, “but wearing
puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day, it somehow
doesn’t show.”
“Pepper, you have me,” said Mr. Elliot. “My chess is even worse than I
remembered.” He accepted his defeat with great equanimity, because he
really wished to talk.
He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.
“Are these at all in your line?” he asked, pointing at a case in front
of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery,
the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.
“Shams, all of them,” said Mr. Flushing briefly. “This rug, now, isn’t
at all bad.” He stopped and picked up a piece of the rug at their feet.
“Not old, of course, but the design is quite in the right tradition.
Alice, lend me your brooch. See the difference between the old work and
the new.”
A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her brooch
and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging the
tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her. If she had
listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old Lady
Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she
went on reading.
The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man
preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed
certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of
independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting,
smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut;
they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them
again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their
last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large
moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of
hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously
and exclaim, “Some one ought to kill it!”
Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a
long time.
When the clock struck, Hirst said:
“Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . .” He watched them raise
themselves, look about them, and settle down again. “What I abhor most
of all,” he concluded, “is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and
having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
that they feel nothing at all—about what I do when I have a hot bath.
They’re gross, they’re absurd, they’re utterly intolerable!”
So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
sleep.
Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
“How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?”
“Are you in love?” asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.
“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst. “One really ought
to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?”
That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
“I shall go for a walk,” he said.
“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious
yawn.
Hewet rose and stretched himself.
“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.
An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and
forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought. It was
precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested
him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him. He could not
finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to
finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with
Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go
on talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.
But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the
wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case with definite
physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find
her physically attractive. There was something, of course, unusual
about her—she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been
more open with each other than was usually possible. He always found
girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he
should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the
crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her.
What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling,
perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair,
with her hands on the arm of it, so—looking ahead of her, with her
great big eyes—oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance.
But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the
end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
anchored in the bay,—it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he
exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from
thinking.
But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
for the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped
out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses’ villa. When he had
definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up
the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed
to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked
through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads,
where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue
mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was
no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in
the dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the
single light of the Ambroses’ villa had now become three separate
lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that
Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of
their garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly
appeared sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah
cutting across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At
the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the
front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were
on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of
the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he
could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but
from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept
a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their
rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel’s voice. He left the shadow
and stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence
spoken quite distinctly.
“And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of
my parents’ lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to
the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all
who knew him.”
The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in
pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew
back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just
hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when
suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.
“It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,”
said Helen’s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark
garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
what she was saying.
“Mother?” said Rachel. Hewet’s heart leapt, and he noticed the fact.
Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
“You didn’t know that?” said Helen.
“I never knew there’d been any one else,” said Rachel. She was clearly
surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because
they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
“More people were in love with her than with any one I’ve ever known,”
Helen stated. “She had that power—she enjoyed things. She wasn’t
beautiful, but—I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She got
on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
amazingly—funny.”
It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since
Theresa died.
“I don’t know how she did it,” she continued, and ceased, and there was
a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as
it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
“That’s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,” said Rachel at last. “They
always make out that she was very sad and very good.”
“Then why, for goodness’ sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
when she was alive?” said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as
if they fell through the waves of the sea.
“If I were to die to-morrow . . .” she began.
The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
Hewet’s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
people in their sleep.
“No, Rachel,” Helen’s voice continued, “I’m not going to walk in the
garden; it’s damp—it’s sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen
toads.”
“Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It’s nicer out. The flowers
smell,” Rachel replied.
Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly.
Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen
resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating,
resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man’s form appeared.
Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had
gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and
all the lights went out.
He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and
relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball
at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not
in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.
After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the
romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out
a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among
lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the
beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to
side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head.
“Here am I,” he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and
to the right, “plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle,
stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at
the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about
innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to
myself about roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the
darkness—about women—about Rachel, about Rachel.” He stopped and drew a
deep breath. The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so
dark there seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and
movement out at sea. He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then
he walked on quickly, still murmuring to himself. “And I ought to be in
bed, snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities,
dreams and realities, dreams and realities,” he repeated all the way up
the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached the front
door. Here he paused for a second, and collected himself before he
opened the door.
His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet
half asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except
that the hall was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards
each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on
little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. As he shut
the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly
shrivelled up. It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a
minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read,
but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh
air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.
As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail
of his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts,
and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on
the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:
“You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.” Her voice was a little
unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them
fixed upon him.
“To talk to me?” he repeated. “But I’m half asleep.”
“But I think you understand better than most people,” she answered, and
sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that
Hewet had to sit down beside her.
“Well?” he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could not
believe that this was really happening to him. “What is it?”
“Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?” she demanded.
“It’s for you to say,” he replied. “I’m interested, I think.” He still
felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.
“Any one can be interested!” she cried impatiently. “Your friend Mr.
Hirst’s interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you. You look as
if you’d got a nice sister, somehow.” She paused, picking at some
sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she
started off, “Anyhow, I’m going to ask your advice. D’you ever get into
a state where you don’t know your own mind? That’s the state I’m in
now. You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,—he’s the tall
dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he’s
not really,—well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all
about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out
here. They’ve put him into some beastly mining business. He says it’s
beastly—I should like it, I know, but that’s neither here nor there.
And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn’t help being sorry for
him, and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don’t see any
harm in that, do you? And then this morning he said he’d thought I
meant something more, and I wasn’t the sort to let any one kiss me. And
we talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but one can’t help
liking people when one’s sorry for them. I do like him most awfully—”
She paused. “So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there’s
Alfred Perrott.”
“Oh, Perrott,” said Hewet.
“We got to know each other on that picnic the other day,” she
continued. “He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with
Susan, and one couldn’t help guessing what was in his mind. So we had
quite a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me
all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had
been. D’you know, he was a boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to
people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I
always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right
stuff in you. And he told me about his sister who’s paralysed, poor
girl, and one can see she’s a great trial, though he’s evidently very
devoted to her. I must say I do admire people like that! I don’t expect
you do because you’re so clever. Well, last night we sat out in the
garden together, and I couldn’t help seeing what he wanted to say, and
comforting him a little, and telling him I did care—I really do—only,
then, there’s Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me is, can one be
in love with two people at once, or can’t one?”
She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very
intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed
between them.
“I think it depends what sort of person you are,” said Hewet. He looked
at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or
twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed
nothing very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.
“Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,” he
continued.
“Well, I was coming to that,” said Evelyn M. She continued to rest her
chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. “I’m the daughter
of a mother and no father, if that interests you,” she said. “It’s not
a very nice thing to be. It’s what often happens in the country. She
was a farmer’s daughter, and he was rather a swell—the young man up at
the great house. He never made things straight—never married her—though
he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn’t let him. Poor
father! I can’t help liking him. Mother wasn’t the sort of woman who
could keep him straight, anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe
his men worshipped him. They say great big troopers broke down and
cried over his body on the battlefield. I wish I’d known him. Mother
had all the life crushed out of her. The world—” She clenched her fist.
“Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!” She turned upon Hewet.
“Well,” she said, “d’you want to know any more about me?”
“But you?” he asked, “Who looked after you?”
“I’ve looked after myself mostly,” she laughed. “I’ve had splendid
friends. I do like people! That’s the trouble. What would you do if you
liked two people, both of them tremendously, and you couldn’t tell
which most?”
“I should go on liking them—I should wait and see. Why not?”
“But one has to make up one’s mind,” said Evelyn. “Or are you one of
the people who doesn’t believe in marriages and all that? Look
here—this isn’t fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing.
Perhaps you’re the same as your friend”—she looked at him suspiciously;
“perhaps you don’t like me?”
“I don’t know you,” said Hewet.
“I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you
the very first night at dinner. Oh dear,” she continued impatiently,
“what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the
things they think straight out! I’m made like that. I can’t help it.”
“But don’t you find it leads to difficulties?” Hewet asked.
“That’s men’s fault,” she answered. “They always drag it in—love, I
mean.”
“And so you’ve gone on having one proposal after another,” said Hewet.
“I don’t suppose I’ve had more proposals than most women,” said Evelyn,
but she spoke without conviction.
“Five, six, ten?” Hewet ventured.
Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but
that it really was not a high one.
“I believe you’re thinking me a heartless flirt,” she protested. “But I
don’t care if you are. I don’t care what any one thinks of me. Just
because one’s interested and likes to be friends with men, and talk to
them as one talks to women, one’s called a flirt.”
“But Miss Murgatroyd—”
“I wish you’d call me Evelyn,” she interrupted.
“After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as
women?”
“Honestly, honestly,—how I hate that word! It’s always used by prigs,”
cried Evelyn. “Honestly I think they ought to be. That’s what’s so
disappointing. Every time one thinks it’s not going to happen, and
every time it does.”
“The pursuit of Friendship,” said Hewet. “The title of a comedy.”
“You’re horrid,” she cried. “You don’t care a bit really. You might be
Mr. Hirst.”
“Well,” said Hewet, “let’s consider. Let us consider—” He paused,
because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had
to consider. He was far more interested in her than in her story, for
as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he was
conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. “You’ve promised
to marry both Oliver and Perrott?” he concluded.
“Not exactly promised,” said Evelyn. “I can’t make up my mind which I
really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!” she flung off. “It must
have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day
on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to
cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about
with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though
I’m not. I really might _do_ something.” She reflected in silence for a
minute. Then she said:
“I’m afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won’t_ do. He’s
not strong, is he?”
“Perhaps he couldn’t cut down a tree,” said Hewet. “Have you never
cared for anybody?” he asked.
“I’ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,” she said. “I
suppose I’m too fastidious. All my life I’ve wanted somebody I could
look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so
small.”
“What d’you mean by splendid?” Hewet asked. “People are—nothing more.”
Evelyn was puzzled.
“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to
explain. “It’s just them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just
that,” he said, pointing to the flames.
“I see what you mean,” she said, “but I don’t agree. I do know why I
care for people, and I think I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what
they’ve got in them. Now I think you must be rather splendid; but not
Mr. Hirst.”
Hewlet shook his head.
“He’s not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so
understanding,” Evelyn continued.
Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
“I should hate cutting down trees,” he remarked.
“I’m not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!”
Evelyn shot out. “I’d never have come to you if I’d thought you’d
merely think odious things of me!” The tears came into her eyes.
“Do you never flirt?” he asked.
“Of course I don’t,” she protested. “Haven’t I told you? I want
friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler than I am,
and if they fall in love with me it isn’t my fault; I don’t want it; I
positively hate it.”
Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the
conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or
insecure. He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking
ostentatiously into the middle of the room and looking at them
meaningly.
“They want to shut up,” he said. “My advice is that you should tell
Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you’ve made up your mind that you
don’t mean to marry either of them. I’m certain you don’t. If you
change your mind you can always tell them so. They’re both sensible
men; they’ll understand. And then all this bother will be over.” He got
up.
But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright
eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some
disappointment, or dissatisfaction.
“Good-night,” he said.
“There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,” she said. “And
I’m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?”
“Yes,” said Hewet. “I’m half asleep.” He left her still sitting by
herself in the empty hall.
“Why is it that they _won’t_ be honest?” he muttered to himself as he
went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were
so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an
instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn
really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the
empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one’s own
sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his
room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in
a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a
woman crossing from one room to another.