Althea, though a cosmopolitan wanderer, had seldom stayed in an hotel
unaccompanied. She did not like, now, going down to the _table d'hote_
dinner alone, and was rather glad that her Aunt Julia and Aunt Julia's
two daughters were to arrive in Paris next week. It was really almost
the only reason she had for being glad of Aunt Julia's arrival, and she
could imagine no reason for being glad of the girls'. Tiresome as it was
to think of going to tea with Miss Harriet Robinson, to think of hearing
from her all the latest gossip, and all the latest opinions of the
latest books and pictures--alert, mechanical appreciations with which
Miss Robinson was but too ready--it was yet more tiresome to look
forward to Aunt Julia's appreciations, which were dogmatic and often
belated, and to foresee that she must run once more the gauntlet of Aunt
Julia's disapproval of expatriated Americans. Althea was accustomed to
these assaults and met them with weary dignity, at times expostulating:
'It is all very well for you, Aunt Julia, who have Uncle Tom and the
girls; I have nobody, and all my friends are married.' But this brought
upon her an invariable retort: 'Well, why don't you get married then?
Franklin Winslow Kane asks nothing better.' This retort angered Althea,
but she was too fond of Franklin Winslow Kane to reply that perhaps
she, herself, did ask something better. So that it was as a convenience,
and not as a comfort, that she looked forward to Aunt Julia; and to the
girls she did not look forward at all. They were young, ebullient,
slangy; they belonged to a later generation than her own, strange to her
in that it seemed weighted with none of the responsibilities and
reverences that she had grown up among. It was a generation that had no
respect for and no anxiety concerning Europe; that played violent
outdoor games, and went without hats in summer.
The dining-room was full when she went down to dinner, her inward tremor
of shyness sustained by the consciousness of the perfect fit and cut of
her elaborate little dress. People sat at small tables, and the general
impression was one of circumspection and withdrawal. Most of the
occupants were of Althea's type--richly dressed, quiet-voiced Americans,
careful of their own dignity and quick at assessing other people's. A
French family loudly chattered and frankly stared in one corner; for the
rest, all seemed to be compatriots.
But after Althea had taken her seat at her own table near the pleasantly
open window, and had consulted the menu and ordered a half-bottle of
white wine, another young woman entered and went to the last vacant
table left in the room, the table next Althea's--so near, indeed, that
the waiter found some difficulty in squeezing himself between them when
he presented the _carte des vins_ to the newcomer.
She was not an American, Althea felt sure of this at once, and the mere
negation was so emphatic that it almost constituted, for the first
startled glance, a complete definition. But, glancing again and again,
while she ate her soup, Althea realised there were so many familiar
things the newcomer was not, that she seemed made up of differences. The
fact that she was English--she spoke to the waiter absent-mindedly in
that tongue--did not make her less different, for she was like no
English person that Althea had ever seen. She engaged at once the whole
of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this
attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something
curiously arresting and noticeable.
The newcomer sat in profile to Althea, her back to the room, facing the
open window, out of which she gazed vaguely and unseeingly. She was
dressed in black, a thin dress, rather frayed along the edges--an
evening dress; though, as a concession to Continental custom, she had a
wide black scarf over her bare shoulders. She sat, leaning forward, her
elbows on the table, and once, when she glanced round and found Althea's
eyes fixed on her, she looked back for a moment, but with something of
the same vagueness and unseeingness with which she looked out of the
window.
She was very odd. An enemy might say that she had Chinese eyes
and a beak-like nose. The beak was small, as were all the
features--delicately, decisively placed in the pale, narrow face--yet it
jutted over prominently, and the long eyes were updrawn at the outer
corners and only opened widely with an effect of effort. She had
quantities of hair, dense and dark, arranged with an ordered
carelessness, and widely framing her face and throat. She was very
thin, and she seemed very tired; and fatigue, which made Althea look
wistful, made this young lady look bored and bitter. Her grey eyes,
perhaps it was the strangeness of their straight-drawn upper lids, were
dazed and dim in expression. She ate little, leaned limply on her
elbows, and sometimes rubbed her hands over her face, and sat so, her
fingers in her hair, for a languid moment. Dinner was only half over
when she rose and went away, her black dress trailing behind her, and a
moon-like space of neck visible between her heavily-clustered hair and
the gauze scarf.
Althea could not have said why, but for the rest of the meal, and after
she had gone back to her sitting-room, the thought of the young lady in
black remained almost oppressively with her.
She had felt empty and aimless before seeing her; since seeing her she
felt more empty, more aimless than ever. It was an absurd impression,
and she tried to shake it off with the help of a recent volume of
literary criticism, but it coloured her mind as though a drop of some
potent chemical had been tipped into her uncomfortable yet indefinable
mood, and had suddenly made visible in it all sorts of latent elements.
It was curious to feel, as a deep conviction about a perfect stranger,
that though the young lady in black might often know moods, they would
never be undefined ones; to be sure that, however little she had, she
would always accurately know what she wanted. The effect of seeing some
one so hard, so clear, so alien, was much as if, a gracefully moulded
but fragile earthenware pot, she had suddenly, while floating down the
stream, found herself crashing against the bronze vessel of the fable.
A corrective to this morbid state of mind came to her with the evening
post, and in the form of a thick letter bearing the Boston postmark.
Franklin Winslow Kane had not occurred to Althea as an alternative to
the various forms of dignified extinction with which her imagination had
been occupied that afternoon. Franklin often occurred to her as a
solace, but he never occurred to her as an escape.
He was a young man of very homespun extraction, who hovered in Boston on
the ambiguous verge between the social and the scholastic worlds; the
sort of young man whom one asked to tea rather than to dinner. He was an
earnest student, and was attached to the university by an official,
though unimportant, tie. A physicist, and, in his own sober way, with
something of a reputation, he was profoundly involved in theories that
dealt with the smallest things and the largest--molecules and the
formation of universes.
He had first proposed to Althea when she was eighteen. She was now
thirty-three, and for all these years Franklin had proposed to her on
every occasion that offered itself. He was deeply, yet calmly,
determinedly, yet ever so patiently, in love with her; and while other
more eligible and more easily consoled aspirants had drifted away and
got married and become absorbed in their growing families, Franklin
alone remained admirably faithful. She had never given him any grounds
for expecting that she might some day marry him, yet he evidently found
it impossible to marry anybody else. This was the touching fact about
Franklin, the one bright point, as it were, in his singularly colourless
personality. His fidelity was like a fleck of orange on the wing of some
grey, unobtrusive moth; it made him visible.
Althea's compassionate friendship seemed to sustain him sufficiently on
his way; he did not pine or protest, though he punctually requested. He
frequently appeared and he indefatigably wrote, and his long constancy,
the unemotional trust and closeness of their intimacy, made him seem
less a lover than the American husband of tradition, devoted and
uncomplaining, who had given up hoping that his wife would ever come
home and live with him.
Althea rather resented this aspect of their relation; she was well aware
of its comicality; but though Franklin's devotion was at times something
of a burden, though she could expect from him none of the glamour of
courtship, she could ill have dispensed with his absorption in her.
Franklin's absorption in her was part of her own personality; she would
hardly have known herself without it; and her relation to him, irksome,
even absurd as she sometimes found it, was perhaps the one thing in her
life that most nearly linked her to reality; it was a mirage, at all
events, of the responsible affections that her life lacked.
And now, in her mood of positive morbidity, the sight of Franklin's
handwriting on the thick envelope brought her the keenest sense she had
ever had of his value. One might have no aim oneself, yet to be some one
else's aim saved one from that engulfing consciousness of nonentity; one
might be uncertain and indefinite, but a devotion like Franklin's
really defined one. She must be significant, after all, since this very
admirable person--admirable, though ineligible--had found her so for so
many years. It was with a warming sense of restoration, almost of
reconstruction, that she opened the letter, drew out the thickly-folded
sheets of thin paper and began to read the neat, familiar writing. He
told her everything that he was doing and thinking, and about everything
that interested him. He wrote to her of kinetics and atoms as if she had
been a fellow-student. It was as if, helplessly, he felt the whole bulk
of his outlook to be his only chance of interesting her, since no detail
was likely to do so. Unfortunately it didn't interest her much.
Franklin's eagerness about some local election, or admiration for some
talented pupil, or enthusiasm in regard to a new theory that delved
deeper and circled wider than any before, left her imagination inert, as
did he. But to-night all these things were transformed by the greatness
of her own need and of her own relief. And when she read that Franklin
was to be in Europe in six weeks' time, and that he intended to spend
some months there, and, if she would allow it, as near her as was
possible, a sudden hope rose in her and seemed almost a joy.
Was it so impossible, after all, as an alternative? Equipped with her
own outlooks, with her wider experience, and with her ample means, might
not dear Franklin be eligible? To sink back on Franklin, after all these
years, would be, of course, to confess to failure; but even in failure
there were choices, and wasn't this the best form of failure? Franklin
was not, could never be, the lover she had dreamed of; she had never met
that lover, and she had always dreamed of him. Franklin was
dun-coloured; the lover of her dreams a Perseus-like flash of purple and
gold, ardent, graceful, compelling, some one who would open doors to
large, bright vistas, and lead her into a life of beauty. But this was a
dream and Franklin was the fact, and to-night he seemed the only fact
worth looking at. Wasn't dun-colour, after all, preferable to the
trivial kaleidoscope of shifting tints which was all that the future,
apart from Franklin, seemed to offer her? Might not dun-colour, even,
illuminated by joy, turn to gold, like highway dust when the sun shines
upon it? Althea wondered, leaning back in her chair and gazing before
her; she wondered deeply.
If only Franklin would come in now with the right look. If only he would
come in with the right word, or, if not with the word, with an even more
compelling silence! Compulsion was needed, and could Franklin compel?
Could he make her fall in love with him? So she wondered, sitting alone
in the Paris hotel, the open letter in her hand.