She had wrapped herself in her sable cloak and curled herself on the
floor in the corner remotest from the window. When he judged she was
sleeping, he stole to her side and stood gazing down. Her rags were
hidden. Except for the weary disorder of her hair, she was almost the
fashionable beauty of his Atlantic voyage.
He looked closer. Fatigue had uncovered something hidden in her
countenance, traces of lost girlhood. Her body seemed smaller, her
features less decided. The mask of intrigue had fallen. He caught a
glimpse of the slim, pathetic child whom the Major had discovered,
swaying like lilac-bloom in the perfumed dusk of the Hindoo temple.
Her feet peeped out from beneath the costly fur. Such doll's feet--so
little to have come so long a journey! Her ankles were cut by the climb
up the cliff. Her shoes were broken. As though the curtain had gone up
in the theater of his brain, her feet began to act their story. He
saw them tiny and brown, pattering about the shaded bungalow where the
English tea-planter had lived with her Burmese mother. He saw them
lost and wandering along the roads of India. He saw them in the temple,
flashing like a swallow's flight across mosaic pavements. He
followed all their progress, as they carried her through triumphs and
bereavements to this moment.
She sighed and moved languidly. The robe fell back, revealing her hands.
They were grazed and wounded.
Pouring water on his handkerchief from the pitcher, he bathed them
gently. Just as he had finished, she opened her eyes.
“You won't leave me?”
“You'll find me sitting here,” he assured her, “just like this when you
waken.”
Smiling faintly, she drowsed off obediently as a child.
All day she lay huddled in the corner, oblivious and spent with
exhaustion. This must be the first long sleep she had snatched for
several days and nights. Crouched beside the window, he guarded her.
The Major might return. Varensky might send help. He himself could do
nothing till after nightfall. The only food was the broken loaf of bread
on the shelf beside the pitcher. He did not dare to touch it; when she
woke, she would be hungry. The downs poured in a steady blaze of
light. A fly drummed against the panes. On distant hillsides sheep were
grazing; he envied them their freedom.
He could go if he liked. As the monotony dragged on, the temptation
strengthened. He was under no obligation to make himself an outlaw. If
he were to slip away, he would not rouse her. Within the hour he could
be speeding up to London. Once there he would be of importance--the one
man, at least in some statesmen's estimate, who could solve the European
situation. For this woman he was sacrificing the happiness of millions.
The fleshpots of Egypt could be his for the claiming. If he stayed and
she were arrested, he would be held as her accomplice. Self-interest and
altruism urged him to escape. He owed nothing to her. Women had always
been for him an enemy country, forbidden and enticing. They had been
what darkest Africa was to the explorer, a forest-world of treacherous
loveliness. In imagination he had always been approaching their borders,
fascinated by the gleam of uplifted faces. But like Varensky, whose life
was a constant challenging of terror, in this one matter he had been
cowardly. Since the first false woman of his early manhood--?
Why was it, this sudden clamor to possess the thing which all his years
he had avoided? Was it because he felt the rising tide of loneliness
and knew that the years were gaining on him? All this autumn day, as the
silver clearness of morning faded into the deep gold of afternoon, he
sat motionless, considering. Up to now he had maintained his pride,
flattering himself that it was he who was doing the refusing. He had
told himself arrogantly that he would succeed first--succeed immensely;
after that he could have any woman for the asking. But could he? He was
losing his faculty for sharing. Merely to marry a woman was not to win
her. The illusion of ecstasy!
He glanced over to the corner where she lay sleeping. She was the symbol
of the feminine half of the world whom he had disregarded. It was she
who had roused him, with her parched voice and instinctive passion.
He studied her--her golden face, her cruel lips, her thin, sweet
profile. He noticed the delicate firmness of her arms, the fineness of
her throat, the tenderness of her molding. At every point she made him
aware of his incompleteness.
Across the downs, like a fisherman drawing in his nets, the sun was
setting. The hut was vague with dusk. Like the crescent of a young moon,
Santa had wakened and was rising.