He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. "Well, you see
it's no use. I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I
came here for was just to find you. But, look here, we must start or we
shall miss our boat."
"Our boat?" She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled. "Oh, but I must
go back to the hotel first: I must leave a note--"
"As many notes as you please. You can write here." He drew out a
note-case and one of the new stylographic pens. "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined! There--steady the thing
on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second. They have to be
humoured; wait--" He banged the hand that held the pen against the back
of the bench. "It's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer:
just a trick. Now try--"
She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write. Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.
Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket. Then she too stood up.
They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.
"I told you everything was predestined! Here's a cab for us. You
see!" They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.
Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to
the Parker House before going to the steamboat landing. They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.
Archer held out his hand for the letter. "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors. It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?
He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic. A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron
to sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out
hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they
went by. He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all
the people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all
the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of
the land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of
hotels.
And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces. He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him
to the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the
hotel that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and
weary, the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other
face that was so many more things at once, and things so different. It
was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat,
or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.
He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him. At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.
"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.
The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.
Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.
As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.
As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer
was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to
take their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear
of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.
In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would
have to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking
young men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.
"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in
search of it. The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea
coming in at the windows. It was bare and cool, with a table covered
with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles
and a blueberry pie under a cage. No more guileless-looking _cabinet
particulier_ ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him. A woman who had run
away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely to
have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....