Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation. There
is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to
her—I strip these things before you—if only I can get them stark enough
you will understand and forgive. I was filled with a brutal and
overpowering desire to insult her.
And so I addressed this poor little expensive old woman in the
following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a
comprehensive plural. “You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank
into her face. “_Have you come to offer them money?_”
And without waiting to test her powers of repartee I passed rudely
beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched, out of her
world again. . .
I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her. So
far as her particular universe went I had not existed at all, or I had
existed only as a dim black thing, an insignificant speck, far away
across her park in irrelevant, unimportant transit, until this moment
when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and
sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then abruptly I flashed into
being down that green-walled, brick-floored vista as a black-avised,
ill-clad young man, who first stared and then advanced scowling toward
her. Once in existence I developed rapidly. I grew larger in
perspective and became more and more important and sinister every
moment. I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect
in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a
sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the
intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words.
Just for a second I threatened annihilation. Happily that was my
climax.
And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always
been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity
my episode left in its wake.
The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large
proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought they
saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeed old
Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her
family’s right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of
examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the
adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.
No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could not
understand.
None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid
flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their
feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and vanished, like
a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for a moment by one’s
belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by the night. They counted
it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as
insignificant as it was disturbing.