Nielsen sat at one of many little marble-topped tables outside a café.
It was dark, and the lights of the street avenue shone dubiously on
either side through the foliage of the lime trees. From the interior of
the café, at his back, the dull clack of dominoes and the flap of
waiters’ slippered feet against the boarded floor came gently to his
ears, with the occasional sharper sounds of men’s voices. Through the
widely-opened doors and windows stray whiffs of rough, black tobacco,
and of garlic, made their way to his nose. The thin strains of harp and
mandolin quavered drawlingly into the warm air from a _cantina_ lower
down the street, and frogs croaked hoarsely in chorus from the bed of
the dried watercourse under the bridge.
Nielsen sipped his coffee, smoking quietly. He leant slightly forward,
with his shoulders squared, his knees apart, and the rim of his hat
pulled forward on his high forehead.
The café was nearly opposite the Hôtel Milano, which stood back from the
road in its own garden. Nielsen watched the windows of the hotel, and
the vague silhouettes of people’s figures against the lighted verandah.
The lines of his pale, squarely-moulded face expressed a gently weary
resignation, and he remained undisturbed by the wheeling of mosquitoes
and the perpetual futile appearances of the unkempt Italian waiters.
That afternoon he had seen Jocelyn for the first time since the day at
Bordighera. On that occasion he had been in earnest, with an earnestness
that, upon reflection, had caused him surprise. He was aware that he
would repeat his conduct under similar circumstances, but the idea of
marriage had become so foreign to him in the course of his broken
existence, that he was compelled to look upon himself as having deviated
from the path of sanity. He had, moreover, been making love to women,
more or less harmlessly, for so long, that an acquired cynicism informed
him that these things were all a matter of degree, the end of the
affair requiring a greater or less absence of the object of attraction.
Man of the world, he acutely recognised that without a sustained and
zealous siege he had no chance with Jocelyn; he salved his vanity by
thinking that, with it, success was possible--even probable. In this way
rebuff lost its sting, painful exertion became unnecessary.
The girl had a great attraction for him. She was always “in the
picture,” her graceful personality was never marred by her surroundings.
She had no taint of “insularity.” Without self-sufficiency, she seemed
sufficient unto herself. All this appealed to the cosmopolitan in him.
It was not too much to say, that she more nearly approached the _persona
grata_ of his fastidious imagination than any woman he had ever met. She
was therefore dangerous, he reflected in her absence--in her presence he
did not reflect at all, want of reflection in the presence of women
having become habitual to him. At this particular moment he was
profoundly puzzled.
He had found Jocelyn singularly absorbed, silent and unresponsive. She
pleaded headache. Certainly she looked ill, but he had a disquieting
feeling that there was something on her mind. She had sat dumb while he
talked with her aunt, detailing gossip of the inner life of Monte Carlo,
which the soul of that lady loved. When he spoke to her, she was
_distraite_, and returned monosyllabic answers. He was not vain enough
to attribute her manifest discomfort to his own presence, and, for the
first time since he had known her, he came away without feeling the
power of her attraction, experiencing instead a sensation of uneasiness
and of curiosity, that was purely benevolent, and very characteristic.
He had dined at the café, and sat in the dusk waiting till the time for
his return train.
A man walking hurriedly on the other side of the street went up through
the gates of the hotel garden. Nielsen followed the figure negligently
with his eyes, and saw it pass and repass the end of the verandah, and
then stand motionless for a long time in the shadow of a tree. The faint
inquisitiveness he felt in his movements died away presently in the
countless, inconsequent reflections of one not compelled by
circumstances to think steadily of any given thing. He yawned, looked
at his watch, and throwing away his cigarette stepped out of the circle
of light into the road leading to the railway station. As he did so, the
man came suddenly down the garden path at a great pace, gesticulating
with his clenched hands, passed close without seeing him, and hurried
away in the direction of the town, muttering to himself. Nielsen stopped
abruptly in recognition. He called after him--
“Hallo! Legard!” The man turned.
“Ah!” he said, “Good-night!”
His face was momentarily in the full glare of the café lights; the hat
was slouched over it, but the line of his moustache was visible, black
against the lower part. The movement of turning had seemed mechanical,
the words sounded leaden. In another moment he was gone, walking faster
than before, his shoulders hunched up to his ears in a way that
suggested pain, and his hands thrust suddenly deep into his pockets as
if to keep them still.
Nielsen stood looking after him.
“When a man talks to himself aloud, it is bad!” he said to himself.
“When he talks, and clenches his hands _comme ça_, ah! that is very
bad! That man is suffering!” He shrugged his shoulders, pointing
mechanically with his stick after the figure.
“Yes, yes--I know. I do not like him, but I am sorry for him--he suffers
verry grreatly.” He shook his head gravely, as he turned into the
station.
* * * * *
That supreme point, when for a time human nature recoils before
suffering in a great lassitude, had not been reached by Giles Legard.
Four days of torture had left him still capable of feeling.
Into his bedroom in the little grey villa the moon struck keenly and
coldly; there was no other light. He had thrown off coat and waistcoat,
and sat motionless, with his head bent on his arms folded across the
back of his chair. Upon the table in front of him was a torn envelope
and a half sheet of paper, folded and re-folded with innumerable
creases. The room was empty of all other furniture except the bed,
beside which, on a great rug of deerskin stretched over the bare
panelling of the floor, Shikari lay, his head between his paws. In the
bright moonlight all colours in the room gave way in a harsh
contrasting of black and white, and outside the sea gleamed through the
tops of the ghostly olives in silver ridges. Every now and then a
loosened tendril of creeper swayed with the breath of a newly-born sea
wind across the widely-opened casement. From his wife’s bedroom
underneath came an occasional sound of hollow coughing.
Legard sat with his back turned to the window. The moonlight over the
sea brought to him an agonising spasm of memory.... In return for an
hour of mad, intoxicating passion, he had bartered everything! He took
up the sheet of paper, looking at it dully as he twisted it in his
hands. He had bartered everything! The thought was old, it seemed to him
centuries since he had first realised it. Everything! There was not a
shred left to him of his honour, or his self-respect; that did not seem
to matter, he was beyond feeling it. But in that single hour of madness
he had taken the happiness of the woman he loved--and with it his
own--taken it, as it were, in his two hands, and flung it into the dust.
Taken her well-being, her reserve, and her pride, and flung them
brutally into the dust.
He read the letter mechanically again and again.
“I have tried, but I cannot see you. When you came near everything
seemed to cry out at me. It is better that you should keep away--for you
and for me. I cannot answer for myself.” That was all. No hope! No
single stroke of the pen brought relief to his aching spirit.
He held the sheet of paper to catch the full of the moonlight; and her
face rose above it, as he had seen it the one time since that night--a
delicate, oval face, cold as the moonlight itself; averted and
unseizable eyes, profound and dark, with the lids drooping over them and
circles of black beneath; lips drawn together, cruelly set; cheeks
colourless; between the brows a slight furrow; and over all the waving
dark hair gathered back from the low forehead.
As nearly as a man may read the soul of a woman, he had read hers, with
a vision supernaturally sharpened by pain. He had seen in her face the
shame, the agony of violated reserve, the bitter wounding of her
pride--the pride, which for no single moment had foreseen that ending.
He had known that she was thinking, “I am a thing apart, but for the
accident of concealment, a thing of shame.” He had recognised that in
the reaction of her feelings there was a physical repulsion to himself,
a desire to hurt because she had been hurt. He had understood what it
was costing her to go about as usual, and keep her vizor down to the
world. He had known in her a courage he did not possess himself, an
untameable pride. All this he had seen in that face. That which he had
not seen was the mysterious weakness of woman, the greatest and the most
pitiful of all qualities.
He rose from his seat, went into his dressing-room, and poured some
brandy from a shooting flask. When he had drunk it he came back again to
his bedroom. He walked up and down once or twice softly, clenching his
hands, and mechanically taking care that his footsteps made no noise on
the bare, slippery floor. Then he put his hand into the breastpocket of
his coat, took out a revolver, and dropped it into the table-drawer. As
he did so he gave a queer little laugh. He had carried it about with
him for three days, and it was like parting with an old friend. It had
been comforting to feel the weight of it in his pocket, with the thought
that there was always that escape from the grinding torture of the
slowly moving hours.
He shut the drawer with a bang of finality. The brandy had cleared his
brain, and he saw that for several reasons the end was not that way. He
must see it out. He began to perceive also that it was a grimmer and a
harder thing than he had imagined for a human being to abandon hope; and
yet, as the bang of the shut drawer echoed in the silent room, he felt
that it was even more grim and hard to go on living. He knew all the
time that, of those two thoughts, he would never find out which was the
truer, because of a deeply-rooted instinct, cowardly-heroic, which would
drive him to live while he was sane.
He threw himself at full length upon the floor, pressing his face into
the soft rug, and Shikari woke up to lick his outstretched hands. The
moonlight passed on over the house and left him there.
Some time in the dense darkness he crawled to his knees, and bowed
himself against the bed in a prayer, unconvinced, faithless, and
voiceless, a mere straining after rest in the hard pressure of his face
against the cool covering of the bed, after peace in the touch of his
knees upon the floor.
He fell asleep so. When he woke it was with a vague contempt of himself
that had no sting in it, and, half-dressed as he was, he fell asleep
again upon the bed in sheer exhaustion.