Darrow, whose healthy enjoyment of life made him in general a good traveller, tolerant of agglutinated humanity, felt himself obscurely outraged by these promiscuous contacts. It was as though all the people about him had taken his measure and known his plight; as though they were contemptuously bumping and shoving him like the inconsiderable thing he had become. "She doesn't want you, doesn't want you, doesn't want you," their umbrellas and their elbows seemed to say.
He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his window: "At any rate I won't turn back"--as though it might cause the sender a malicious joy to have him retrace his steps rather than keep on to Paris! Now he perceived the absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars that he need not plunge, to no purpose, into the fury of waves outside the harbour.
With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his porter; but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas made signalling impossible and, perceiving that he had lost sight of the man, he scrambled up again to the platform. As he reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the collar- bone; and the next moment, bent sideways by the wind, it turned inside out and soared up, kite-wise, at the end of a helpless female arm.
Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and looked up at the face it exposed to him.
"Wait a minute," he said; "you can't stay here."
As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the umbrella abruptly down on him. Darrow steadied her with extended arms, and regaining her footing she cried out: "Oh, dear, oh, dear! It's in ribbons!"
Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke in him a memory of having seen it at a distant time and in a vaguely unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to follow up such clues, and the face was obviously one to make its way on its own merits.
Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at the tattered umbrella. "I bought it only yesterday at the Stores; and--yes--it's utterly done for!" she lamented.
Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress. It was food for the moralist that, side by side with such catastrophes as his, human nature was still agitating itself over its microscopic woes!
"Here's mine if you want it!" he shouted back at her through the shouting of the gale.
The offer caused the young lady to look at him more intently. "Why, it's Mr. Darrow!" she exclaimed; and then, all radiant recognition: "Oh, thank you! We'll share it, if you will."
She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had they met? He put aside the problem for subsequent solution, and drawing her into a more sheltered corner, bade her wait till he could find his porter.
When, a few minutes later, he came back with his recovered property, and the news that the boat would not leave till the tide had turned, she showed no concern.
"Not for two hours? How lucky--then I can find my trunk!"
Ordinarily Darrow would have felt little disposed to involve himself in the adventure of a young female who had lost her trunk; but at the moment he was glad of any pretext for activity. Even should he decide to take the next up train from Dover he still had a yawning hour to fill; and the obvious remedy was to devote it to the loveliness in distress under his umbrella.
"You've lost a trunk? Let me see if I can find it."
It pleased him that she did not return the conventional "Oh,
Would
you?" Instead, she corrected him with a laugh--Not a trunk, but my trunk; I've no other--" and then added briskly: "You'd better first see to getting your own things on the boat."
This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans by discussing them: "I don't actually know that I'm going over."
"Not going over?"
"Well...perhaps not by this boat." Again he felt a stealing indecision. "I may probably have to go back to London. I'm--I'm waiting...expecting a letter...(She'll think me a defaulter," he reflected.) "But meanwhile there's plenty of time to find your trunk."
He picked up his companion's bundles, and offered her an arm which enabled her to press her slight person more closely under his umbrella; and as, thus linked, they beat their way back to the platform, pulled together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures.She was clearly an American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and adaptable race. All this, however, did not help him to fit a name to her, for just such instances were perpetually pouring through the London Embassy, and the etched and angular American was becoming rarer than the fluid type.
More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify her was the persistent sense connecting her with something uncomfortable and distasteful. So pleasant a vision as that gleaming up at him between wet brown hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the same memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...
Chapter II
D
on't you remember me now--at Mrs. Murrett's?" She threw the question at Darrow across a table of the quiet coffee-room to which, after a vainly prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a cup of tea.
In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while she ran her fingers comb- wise through her hair. The gesture had acted on Darrow's numb feelings as the glow of the fire acted on his circulation; and when he had asked: "Aren't your feet wet, too?" and, after frank inspection of a stout-shod sole, she had answered cheerfully: "No--luckily I had on my new boots," he began to feel that human intercourse would still be tolerable if it were always as free from formality.
The removal of his companion's hat, besides provoking this reflection, gave him his first full sight of her face; and this was so favourable that the name she now pronounced fell on him with a quite disproportionate shock of dismay.
"Oh, Mrs. Murrett's--was it
there
?"
He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs. Murrett, into whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh, the taste of stale follies! How insipid it was, yet how it clung!
"I used to pass you on the stairs," she reminded him.
Yes: he had seen her slip by--he recalled it now--as he dashed up to the drawing-room in quest of Lady Ulrica. The thought made him steal a longer look. How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the freakish grace of some young head of the Italian comedy. The hair stood up from her forehead in a boyish elf-lock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with black, and the little brown spot on her cheek, between the ear that was meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on a ruff. When she smiled, the left corner of her mouth went up a little higher than the right; and her smile began in her eyes and ran down to her lips in two lines of light. He had dashed past that to reach Lady Ulrica Crispin!
"But of course you wouldn't remember me," she was saying. "My name is Viner--Sophy Viner."
Not remember her? But of course he
did
! He was genuinely sure of it now. "You're Mrs. Murrett's niece," he declared.
She shook her head. "No; not even that. Only her reader."
"Her reader? Do you mean to say she ever reads?"
Miss Viner enjoyed his wonder. "Dear, no! But I wrote notes, and made up the visiting-book, and walked the dogs, and saw bores for her."
Darrow groaned. "That must have been rather bad!"
"Yes; but nothing like as bad as being her niece."
"That I can well believe. I'm glad to hear," he added, "that you put it all in the past tense."
She seemed to droop a little at the allusion; then she lifted her chin with a jerk of defiance. "Yes. All is at an end between us. We've just parted in tears--but not in silence!"
"Just parted? Do you mean to say you've been there all this time?"
"Ever since you used to come there to see Lady Ulrica? Does it seem to you so awfully long ago?"
The unexpectedness of the thrust--as well as its doubtful taste--chilled his growing enjoyment of her chatter. He had really been getting to like her--had recovered, under the candid approval of her eye, his usual sense of being a personable young man, with all the privileges pertaining to the state, instead of the anonymous rag of humanity he had felt himself in the crowd on the pier. It annoyed him, at that particular moment, to be reminded that naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
She seemed to guess his thought. "You don't like my saying that you came for Lady Ulrica?" she asked, leaning over the table to pour herself a second cup of tea.
He liked her quickness, at any rate. "It's better," he laughed, "than your thinking I came for Mrs. Murrett!"
"Oh, we never thought anybody came for Mrs. Murrett! It was always for something else: the music, or the cook--when there was a good one--or the other people; generally ONE of the other people."
"I see."
She was amusing, and that, in his present mood, was more to his purpose than the exact shade of her taste. It was odd, too, to discover suddenly that the blurred tapestry of Mrs. Murrett's background had all the while been alive and full of eyes. Now, with a pair of them looking into his, he was conscious of a queer reversal of perspective.
"Who were the 'we'? Were you a cloud of witnesses?"
"There were a good many of us." She smiled. "Let me see-- who was there in your time? Mrs. Bolt--and Mademoiselle--and Professor Didymus and the Polish Countess. Don't you remember the Polish Countess? She crystal-gazed, and played accompaniments, and Mrs. Murrett chucked her because Mrs. Didymus accused her of hypnotizing the Professor. But of course you don't remember. We were all invisible to you; but we could see. And we all used to wonder about you----"
Again Darrow felt a redness in the temples. "What about me?"
"Well--whether it was you or she who..."
He winced, but hid his disapproval. It made the time pass to listen to her.
"And what, if one may ask, was your conclusion?"
"Well, Mrs. Bolt and Mademoiselle and the Countess naturally thought it was
she
; but Professor Didymus and Jimmy Brance--especially Jimmy----"
"Just a moment: who on earth is Jimmy Brance?"
She exclaimed in wonder: "You
were
absorbed--not to remember Jimmy Brance! He must have been right about you, after all." She let her amused scrutiny dwell on him. "But how could you? She was false from head to foot!"
"False----?" In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct of ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.
Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. "Oh, I only meant externally! You see, she often used to come to my room after tennis, or to touch up in the evenings, when they were going on; and I assure you she took apart like a puzzle. In fact I used to say to Jimmy--just to make him wild--:'I'll bet you anything you like there's nothing wrong, because I know she'd never dare un--'" She broke the word in two, and her quick blush made her face like a shallow-petalled rose shading to the deeper pink of the centre.
The situation was saved, for Darrow, by an abrupt rush of memories, and he gave way to a mirth which she as frankly echoed. "Of course," she gasped through her laughter, "I only said it to tease Jimmy----"
Her amusement obscurely annoyed him. "Oh, you're all alike!" he exclaimed, moved by an unaccountable sense of disappointment.
She caught him up in a flash--she didn't miss things! "You say that because you think I'm spiteful and envious? Yes--I was envious of Lady Ulrica...Oh, not on account of you or Jimmy Brance! Simply because she had almost all the things I've always wanted: clothes and fun and motors, and admiration and yachting and Paris--why, Paris alone would be enough!--And how do you suppose a girl can see that sort of thing about her day after day, and never wonder why some women, who don't seem to have any more right to it, have it all tumbled into their laps, while others are writing dinner invitations, and straightening out accounts, and copying visiting lists, and finishing golf-stockings, and matching ribbons, and seeing that the dogs get their sulphur? One looks in one's glass, after all!"
She launched the closing words at him on a cry that lifted them above the petulance of vanity; but his sense of her words was lost in the surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement it was no longer a shallow flower-cup but a darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling. The girl had stuff in her-- he saw it; and she seemed to catch the perception in his eyes.
