Outside in the intensity of the cold--it was a jump from the Tropics to
the Pole--he felt afresh the force of what he had just been saying;
that if it weren’t for the fact of Mrs. Ash’s good letter of welcome,
despatched, characteristically, as soon as she had, like the faithful
sufferer in Fiftieth Street, observed his name, in a newspaper, on one
of the hotel-lists, he should verily, for want of a connection and an
abutment, have scarce dared to face the void and the chill together, but
have sneaked back into the jungle and there tried to lose himself. He
made, as it was, the opposite effort, resolute to walk, though hovering
now and then at vague crossways, radiations of roads to nothing, or
taking cold counsel of the long but still sketchy vista, as it struck
him, of the northward Avenue, bright and bleak, fresh and harsh,
rich and evident somehow, a perspective like a page of florid
modern platitudes. He didn’t quite know what he had expected for his
return--not certainly serenades and deputations; but without Mrs.
Ash his mail would have quite lacked geniality, and it was as if Phil
Blood-good had gone off not only with so large a slice of his small
_peculium_, but with all the broken bits of the past, the loose ends of
old relationships, that he had supposed he might pick up again. Well,
perhaps he should still pick up a few--by the sweat of his brow; no
motion of their own at least, he by this time judged, would send them
fluttering into his hand.
Which reflections but quickened his forecast of this charm of the old
Paris inveteracy renewed--the so-prized custom of nine years before,
when he still believed in results from his fond frequentation of the
Beaux Arts; that of walking over the river to the Rue de Marignan,
precisely, every Sunday without exception, and sitting at her fireside,
and often all offensively, no doubt, outstaying every one. How he
had used to want those hours then, and how again, after a little, at
present, the Rue de Marignan might have been before him! He had gone to
her there at that time with his troubles, such as they were, and they
had always worked for her amusement--which had been her happy, her
clever way of taking them: she couldn’t have done anything better for
them in that phase, poor innocent things compared with what they might
have been, than be amused by them. Perhaps that was what she would still
be--with those of his present hour; now too they might inspire her with
the touch she best applied and was most instinctive mistress of: this
didn’t at all events strike him as what he should most resent. It wasn’t
as if Mrs. Folliott, to make up for boring him with her own plaint, for
example, had had so much as a gleam of conscious diversion over his.
“I’m _so_ delighted to see you, I’ve such immensities to tell you!”--it
began with the highest animation twenty minutes later, the very moment
he stood there, the sense of the Rue de Marignan in the charming room
and in the things about all reconstituted, regrouped, wonderfully
preserved, down to the very sitting-places in the same relations, and
down to the faint sweet mustiness of generations of cigarettes; but
everything else different, and even vaguely alien, and by a measure
still other than that of their own stretched interval and of the dear
delightful woman’s just a little pathetic alteration of face. He had
allowed for the nine years, and so, it was to be hoped, had she; but
the last thing, otherwise, that would have been touched, he immediately
felt, was the quality, the intensity, of her care to see him. She cared,
oh so visibly and touchingly and almost radiantly--save for her being,
yes, distinctly, a little _more_ battered than from even a good nine
years’ worth; nothing could in fact have perched with so crowning an
impatience on the heap of what she had to “tell” as that special shade
of revived consciousness of having him in particular to tell it to. It
wasn’t perhaps much to matter how soon she brought out and caused to
ring, as it were, on the little recognised marqueterie table between
them (such an anciently envied treasure), the heaviest gold-piece of
current history she was to pay him with for having just so felicitously
come back: he knew already, without the telling, that intimate domestic
tension must lately, within those walls, have reached a climax and that
he could serve supremely--oh how he was going to serve!--as the most
sympathetic of all pairs of ears.
The whole thing was upon him, in any case, with the minimum of delay:
Bob had had it from her, definitely, the first of the week, and it
was absolutely final now, that they must set up avowedly separate
lives--without horrible “proceedings” of any sort, but with her own
situation, her independence, secured to her once for all. She had been
coming to it, taking her time, and she had gone through--well, so old a
friend would guess enough what; but she was at the point, oh blessedly
now, where she meant to stay, he’d see if she didn’t; with which, in
this wonderful way, he himself had arrived for the cream of it and
she was just selfishly glad. Bob had gone to Washington--ostensibly
on business, but really to recover breath; she had, speaking vulgarly,
knocked the wind out of him and was allowing him time to turn round.
Mrs. Folliott moreover, she was sure, would have gone--was certainly
believed to have been seen there five days ago; and of course his first
necessity, for public use, would be to patch up something with Mrs.
Folliott. Mark knew about Mrs. Folliott?--who was only, for that matter,
one of a regular “bevy.” Not that it signified, however, if he didn’t:
she would tell him about _her_ later.
He took occasion from the first fraction of a break not quite to know
what he knew about Mrs. Folliott--though perhaps he could imagine a
little; and it was probably at this minute that, having definitely
settled to a position, and precisely in his very own tapestry _bergère_,
the one with the delicious little spectral “subjects” on the back and
seat, he partly exhaled, and yet managed partly to keep to himself, the
deep resigned sigh of a general comprehension. He knew what he was “in”
for, he heard her go on--she said it again and again, seemed constantly
to be saying it while she smiled at him with her peculiar fine charm,
her positive gaiety of sensibility, scarce dimmed: “I’m just selfishly
glad, just selfishly glad!” Well, she was going to have reason to be;
she was going to put the whole case to him, all her troubles and plans,
and each act of the tragi-comedy of her recent existence, as to the
dearest and safest sympathiser in all the world. There would be no
chance for _his_ case, though it was so much for his case he had
come; yet there took place within him but a mild, dumb convulsion,
the momentary strain of his substituting, by the turn of a hand, one
prospect of interest for another.
Squaring himself in his old _bergère_, and with his lips, during the
effort, compressed to the same passive grimace that had an hour or two
before operated for the encouragement of Mrs. Folliott--just as it
was to clear the stage completely for the present more prolonged
performance--he shut straight down, as he even in the act called it to
himself, on any personal claim for social consideration and rendered
a perfect little agony of justice to the grounds of his friend’s
vividness. For it was all the justice that could be expected of him
that, though, secretly, he wasn’t going to be interested in her being
interesting, she was yet going to be so, all the same, by the very force
of her lovely material (Bob Ash _was_ such a pure pearl of a donkey!)
and he was going to keep on knowing she was--yes, to the very end. When
after the lapse of an hour he rose to go, the rich fact that she
_had_ been was there between them, and with an effect of the frankly,
fearlessly, harmlessly intimate fireside passage for it that went beyond
even the best memories of the pleasant past. He hadn’t “amused” her, no,
in quite the same way as in the Rue de Marignan time--it had then been
he who for the most part took frequent turns, emphatic, explosive,
elocutionary, over that wonderful waxed parquet while she laughed as for
the young perversity of him from the depths of the second, the matching
_bergère_. To-day she herself held and swept the floor, putting him
merely to the trouble of his perpetual “Brava!” But that was all through
the change of basis--the amusement, another name only for the thrilled
absorption, having been inevitably for _him_; as how could it have
failed to be with such a regular “treat” to his curiosity? With the
tea-hour now other callers were turning up, and he got away on the plea
of his wanting so to think it all over. He hoped again he hadn’t too
queer a grin with his assurance to her, as if she would quite know what
he meant, that he had been thrilled to the core. But she returned, quite
radiantly, that he had carried _her_ completely away; and her sincerity
was proved by the final frankness of their temporary parting. “My
pleasure of you is selfish, horribly, I admit; so that if _that_ doesn’t
suit you--!” Her faded beauty flushed again as she said it.