But the summer “holidays” brought a marked difference; they were
holidays for almost every one but the animals in the cage. The August
days were flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she was
conscious of the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the refined. She
was in a position to follow the refined to the extent of knowing—they
had made so many of their arrangements with her aid—exactly where they
were; yet she felt quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and
the band stopped playing. A stray member of the latter occasionally
turned up, but the communications that passed before her bore now
largely on rooms at hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of
trains, dates of sailings and arrangements for being “met”; she found
them for the most part prosaic and coarse. The only thing was that they
brought into her stuffy corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows
and Scotch moors as she might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover
in especial fat hot dull ladies who had out with her, to exasperation,
the terms for seaside lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the
matter of the number of beds required, which was not less portentous:
this in reference to places of which the names—Eastbourne, Folkestone,
Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby—tormented her with something of the sound
of the plash of water that haunts the traveller in the desert. She had
not been out of London for a dozen years, and the only thing to give a
taste to the present dead weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment.
The sparse customers, the people she did see, were the people who were
“just off”—off on the decks of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost
point of rocky headlands where the very breeze was then playing for the
want of which she said to herself that she sickened.
There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great
differences of the human condition could press upon her more than ever;
a circumstance drawing fresh force in truth from the very fact of the
chance that at last, for a change, did squarely meet her—the chance to
be “off,” for a bit, almost as far as anybody. They took their turns in
the cage as they took them both in the shop and at Chalk Farm; she had
known these two months that time was to be allowed in September—no less
than eleven days—for her personal private holiday. Much of her recent
intercourse with Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and fears,
expressed mainly by himself, involved in the question of their getting
the same dates—a question that, in proportion as the delight seemed
assured, spread into a sea of speculation over the choice of where and
how. All through July, on the Sunday evenings and at such other odd
times as he could seize, he had flooded their talk with wild waves of
calculation. It was practically settled that, with her mother,
somewhere “on the south coast” (a phrase of which she liked the sound)
they should put in their allowance together; but she already felt the
prospect quite weary and worn with the way he went round and round on
it. It had become his sole topic, the theme alike of his most solemn
prudences and most placid jests, to which every opening led for return
and revision and in which every little flower of a foretaste was pulled
up as soon as planted. He had announced at the earliest
day—characterising the whole business, from that moment, as their
“plans,” under which name he handled it as a Syndicate handles a
Chinese or other Loan—he had promptly declared that the question must
be thoroughly studied, and he produced, on the whole subject, from day
to day, an amount of information that excited her wonder and even, not
a little, as she frankly let him know, her disdain. When she thought of
the danger in which another pair of lovers rapturously lived she
enquired of him anew why he could leave nothing to chance. Then she got
for answer that this profundity was just his pride, and he pitted
Ramsgate against Bournemouth and even Boulogne against Jersey—for he
had great ideas—with all the mastery of detail that was some day,
professionally, to carry him afar.
The longer the time since she had seen Captain Everard the more she was
booked, as she called it, to pass Park Chambers; and this was the sole
amusement that in the lingering August days and the twilights sadly
drawn out it was left her to cultivate. She had long since learned to
know it for a feeble one, though its feebleness was perhaps scarce the
reason for her saying to herself each evening as her time for departure
approached: “No, no—not to-night.” She never failed of that silent
remark, any more than she failed of feeling, in some deeper place than
she had even yet fully sounded, that one’s remarks were as weak as
straws and that, however one might indulge in them at eight o’clock,
one’s fate infallibly declared itself in absolute indifference to them
at about eight-fifteen. Remarks were remarks, and very well for that;
but fate was fate, and this young lady’s was to pass Park Chambers
every night in the working week. Out of the immensity of her knowledge
of the life of the world there bloomed on these occasions as specific
remembrance that it was regarded in that region, in August and
September, as rather pleasant just to be caught for something or other
in passing through town. Somebody was always passing and somebody might
catch somebody else. It was in full cognisance of this subtle law that
she adhered to the most ridiculous circuit she could have made to get
home. One warm dull featureless Friday, when an accident had made her
start from Cocker’s a little later than usual, she became aware that
something of which the infinite possibilities had for so long peopled
her dreams was at last prodigiously upon her, though the perfection in
which the conditions happened to present it was almost rich enough to
be but the positive creation of a dream. She saw, straight before her,
like a vista painted in a picture, the empty street and the lamps that
burned pale in the dusk not yet established. It was into the
convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the doorstep of
the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our young lady’s little figure
violently trembled, in the approach, with the measure of its power to
dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a flash terrific and distinct; her
old uncertainties fell away from her, and, since she was so familiar
with fate, she felt as if the very nail that fixed it were driven in by
the hard look with which, for a moment, Captain Everard awaited her.
The vestibule was open behind him and the porter as absent as on the
day she had peeped in; he had just come out—was in town, in a tweed
suit and a pot hat, but between two journeys—duly bored over his
evening and at a loss what to do with it. Then it was that she was glad
she had never met him in that way before: she reaped with such ecstasy
the benefit of his not being able to think she passed often. She jumped
in two seconds to the determination that he should even suppose it to
be the very first time and the very oddest chance: this was while she
still wondered if he would identify or notice her. His original
attention had not, she instinctively knew, been for the young woman at
Cocker’s; it had only been for any young woman who might advance to the
tune of her not troubling the quiet air, and in fact the poetic hour,
with ugliness. Ah but then, and just as she had reached the door, came
his second observation, a long light reach with which, visibly and
quite amusedly, he recalled and placed her. They were on different
sides, but the street, narrow and still, had only made more of a stage
for the small momentary drama. It was not over, besides, it was far
from over, even on his sending across the way, with the pleasantest
laugh she had ever heard, a little lift of his hat and an “Oh good
evening!” It was still less over on their meeting, the next minute,
though rather indirectly and awkwardly, in the middle, of the road—a
situation to which three or four steps of her own had unmistakeably
contributed—and then passing not again to the side on which she had
arrived, but back toward the portal of Park Chambers.
“I didn’t know you at first. Are you taking a walk?”
“Ah I don’t take walks at night! I’m going home after my work.”
“Oh!”
That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his
exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add,
left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part,
he might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her
to come in. During this interval in fact she really felt his question
to be just “_How_ properly—?” It was simply a question of the degree of
properness.