The next day and the day after, Sherman was followed by those bright
eyes. When he opened a letter at his desk they seemed to gaze at him
from the open paper, and to watch him from the flies upon the ceiling.
He was even a worse clerk than usual.
One evening he said to his mother, ‘Miss Leland has beautiful eyes.’
‘My dear, she puts belladonna in them.’
‘What a thing to say!’
‘I know she does, though her mother denies it.’
‘Well, she is certainly beautiful,’ he answered.
‘My dear, if she has an attraction for you, I don’t want to discourage
it. She is rich as girls go nowadays; and one woman has one fault,
another another: one’s untidy, one fights with her servants, one fights
with her friends, another has a crabbed tongue when she talks of them.’
Sherman became again silent, finding no fragment of romance in such a
discourse.
In the next week or two he saw much of Miss Leland. He met her almost
every evening on his return from the office, walking slowly, her racket
under her arm. They played tennis much and talked more. Sherman began
to play tennis in his dreams. Miss Leland told him all about herself,
her friends, her inmost feelings; and yet every day he knew less about
her. It was not merely that saying everything she said nothing, but
that continually there came through her wild words the sound of the
mysterious flutes and viols of that unconscious nature which dwells
so much nearer to woman than to man. How often do we not endow the
beautiful and candid with depth and mystery not their own? We do not
know that we but hear in their voices those flutes and viols playing to
us of the alluring secret of the world.
Sherman had never known in early life what is called first love, and
now, when he had passed thirty, it came to him--that love more of the
imagination than of either the senses or affections: it was mainly the
eyes that followed him.
It is not to be denied that as this love grew serious it grew
mercenary. Now active, now latent, the notion had long been in
Sherman’s mind, as we know, that he should marry money. A born
lounger, riches tempted him greatly. When those eyes haunted him from
the fourteen flies on the ceiling, he would say, ‘I should be rich;
I should have a house in the country; I should hunt and shoot, and
have a garden and three gardeners; I should leave this abominable
office.’ Then the eyes became even more beautiful. It was a new kind of
belladonna.
He shrank a little, however, from choosing even this pleasant pathway.
He had planned many futures for himself and learnt to love them all. It
was this that had made him linger on at Ballah for so long, and it was
this that now kept him undecided. He would have to give up the universe
for a garden and three gardeners. How sad it was to make substantial
even the best of his dreams. How hard it was to submit to that
decree which compels every step we take in life to be a death in the
imagination. How difficult it was to be so enwrapped in this one new
hope as not to hear the lamentations that were going on in dim corners
of his mind.
One day he resolved to propose. He examined himself in the glass in
the morning; and for the first time in his life smiled to see how
good-looking he was. In the evening before leaving the office he
peered at himself in the mirror over the mantlepiece in the room where
customers were received. The sun was blazing through the window full on
his face. He did not look so well. Immediately all courage left him.
That evening he went out after his mother had gone to bed and walked
far along the towing-path of the Thames. A faint mist half covered
away the houses and factory chimneys on the further side; beside him
a band of osiers swayed softly, the deserted and full river lapping
their stems. He looked on all these things with foreign eyes. He had no
sense of possession. Indeed it seemed to him that everything in London
was owned by too many to be owned by anyone. Another river that he
did seem to possess flowed through his memory with all its familiar
sights--boys riding in the stream to the saddle-girths, fish leaping,
water-flies raising their small ripples, a swan asleep, the wallflowers
growing on the red brick of the margin. He grew very sad. Suddenly
a shooting star, fiery and vagabond, leaped from the darkness. It
brought his mind again in a moment to Margaret Leland. To marry her, he
thought, was to separate himself from the old life he loved so well.
Crossing the river at Putney, he hurried homewards among the
market-gardens. Nearing home, the streets were deserted, the shops
closed. Where King Street joins the Broadway, entirely alone with
itself, in the very centre of the road a little black cat was leaping
after its shadow.
‘Ah!’ he thought, ‘it would be a good thing to be a little black cat.
To leap about in the moonlight and sleep in the sunlight, and catch
flies, to have no hard tasks to do or hard decisions to come to, to be
simple and full of animal spirits.’
At the corner of Bridge Road was a coffee-stall, the only sign of human
life. He bought some cold meat and flung it to the little black cat.
V
Some more days went by. At last, one day, arriving at the Square
somewhat earlier than usual, and sitting down to wait for Margaret on
the seat among the bushes, he noticed the pieces of a torn-up letter
lying about. Beside him on the seat was a pencil, as though someone had
been writing there and left it behind them. The pencil-lead was worn
very short. The letter had been torn up, perhaps in a fit of impatience.
In a half-mechanical way he glanced over the scraps. On one of them
he read: ‘MY DEAR ELIZA,--What an incurable gossip my mother is. You
heard of my misfortune. I nearly died-—-’ Here he had to search among
the scraps; at last he found one that seemed to follow. ‘Perhaps you
will hear news from me soon. There is a handsome young man who pays me
attention, and-—-’ Here another piece had to be found. ‘I would take
him though he had a face like the man in the moon, and limped like the
devil at the theatre. Perhaps I am a little in love. Oh! friend of
my heart--’ Here it broke off again. He was interested, and searched
the grass and the bushes for fragments. Some had been blown to quite
a distance. He got together several sentences now. ‘I will not spend
another winter with my mother for anything. All this is, of course, a
secret. I had to tell somebody; secrets are bad for my health. Perhaps
it will all come to nothing.’ Then the letter went off into dress, the
last novel the writer had read, and so forth. A Miss Sims, too, was
mentioned, who had said some unkind thing of the writer.
Sherman was greatly amused. It did not seem to him wrong to read--we do
not mind spying on one of the crowd, any more than on the personages of
literature. It never occurred to him that he, or any friend of his, was
concerned in these pencil scribblings.
Suddenly he saw this sentence: ‘Heigho! your poor Margaret is falling
in love again; condole with her, my dear.’
He started. The name ‘Margaret,’ the mention of Miss Sims, the style
of the whole letter, all made plain the authorship. Very desperately
ashamed of himself, he got up and tore each scrap of paper into still
smaller fragments and scattered them far apart.
That evening he proposed and was accepted.