That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley
went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it
necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. “Who
the deuce are these people?” I said, “and how do they get a living? They
seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what
is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter.”
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative
quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met
like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval
had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of
insignificant things.
“What do you do,” she asked rather quickly, “after lunch? Take a
siesta?”
“Sometimes,” I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer
propeller when it lifts out of the water.
“Do you get a view from your room?” she asked after a pause.
“It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
friend's next door.”
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science,
she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was
called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the
purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and
hesitated.
Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected
abruptly. “I shall write in my room,” I said.
“Why not write down here?”
“I shall write in my room,” I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
looked at me curiously. “Very well,” he said; “then I'll make some notes
and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias.”
I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly
restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up
to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a
little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut
bowstring, I was up and had it open.
“Here is that book,” she said, and we hesitated.
“COME IN!” I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
“You're just a boy,” she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
safe-door nearly opened. “Come in,” I said almost impatiently, for
anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
towards me.
“What do you mean?” she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned
upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to me
and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little
noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and
her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had
tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured....
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before
had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off
admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog
in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive
pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and
hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under
the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant
nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the
happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me:
“I am a man! I am a man!”...
“What shall we do to-morrow?” said he.
“I'm for loafing,” I said. “Let's row in the morning and spend to-morrow
afternoon just as we did to-day.”
“They say the church behind the town is worth seeing.”
“We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start
about five.”
We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place
where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing
on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display
of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the
world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the
right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept
him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided
to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little
indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname,
odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her
christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and
disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I
found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was
something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and
uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of
motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered
and approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to
my initiative. “I've done you no harm,” she said a little doubtfully, an
odd note for a man's victim! And, “we've had a good time. You have liked
me, haven't you?”
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and
had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich
meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--“he reeks of it,” she said,
“always”--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played
very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange
punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived
her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever
encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which
encumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of
that aspect of them....
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than
wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those
furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been
more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had
been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding
myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom
of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here
is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was
over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt
I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation
from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious
self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by
the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between
us.
“You know?” I said abruptly,--“about that woman?”
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner
of his spectacles.
“Things went pretty far?” he asked.
“Oh! all the way!” and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
unpremeditated achievement.
“She came to your room?”