4. IV
She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone,
and that was exactly a part of the luck of it. Not unaware--as how could
her observation have left her so?--of the possibilities through which it
could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen
conflicting theories about Everard's type; as to which, the instant they
came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that seemed
somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally beat
faster at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with Cissy, and
who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the happiest of the
happy circumstances with which her mind had invested the friend of Fritz
and Gussy. He was a very happy circumstance indeed as, with his
cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught by his
companions, he put down the half-dozen
telegrams it would take them
together several minutes to dispatch. And here it occurred, oddly
enough, that if, shortly before the girl's interest in his companion had
sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her immediate
vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his seventy words, of
preventing intelligibility. His words were mere numbers, they told her
nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of no name,
of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but a vague sweet sound and an
immense impression. He had been there but five minutes, he had smoked in
her face, and, busy with his telegrams, with the tapping pencil and the
conscious danger, the odious betrayal that would come from a mistake, she
had had no wandering glances nor roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had
taken him in; she knew everything; she had made up her mind.
He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were
again shoulder
to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their large
and complicated game. The fine soundless pulse of this game was in the
air for our young woman while they remained in the shop. While they
remained? They remained all day; their presence continued and abode with
her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the thousands of other
words she counted, she transmitted, in all the stamps she detached and
the letters she weighed and the change she gave, equally unconscious and
unerring in each of these particulars, and not, as the run on the little
office thickened with the afternoon hours, looking up at a single ugly
face in the long sequence, nor really hearing the stupid questions that
she patiently and perfectly answered. All patience was possible now, all
questions were stupid after his, all faces were ugly. She had been sure
she should see the lady again; and even now she should perhaps, she
should probably, see her often. But for him it was totally different;
she should never never see him. She wanted
it too much. There was a
kind of wanting that helped--she had arrived, with her rich experience,
at that generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal. It
was this time the fatal kind; it would prevent.
Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it was
quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely
distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a
quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was
there a long time--had not brought his forms filled out but worked them
off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well--a
changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless
right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of
him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as
close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton
luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed, but
with a kind of dreariness
too; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about
fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute
levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand--at
Park Chambers--and belonged supremely to the class that wired everything,
even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his
correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be in and
out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect,
and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a
gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in an order of
feelings on which I shall presently touch.
Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never
re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only by
some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory. There was another
sense, however--and indeed there was more than one--in which she mostly
found herself counting in the splendid
creature with whom she had
originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent neither as
Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten Square,
that he was perpetually wiring to--and all so irreproachably!--as Lady
Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady Bradeen was
the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of Marguerite, and the
close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the girl had not yet
found a descriptive term that was) of the most magnificent of men.
Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of his communications to
her ladyship but their extraordinary, their abysmal propriety. It was
just the talk--so profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for
their real meetings--of the very happiest people. Their real meetings
must have been constant, for half of it was appointments and allusions,
all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity
of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life. If
Lady Bradeen
was Juno it was all certainly Olympian. If the girl, missing the
answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, vainly reflected that Cocker's
should have been one of the bigger offices where telegrams arrived as
well as departed, there were yet ways in which, on the whole, she pressed
the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of imagination it
demanded and consumed. The days and hours of this new friend, as she
came to account him, were at all events unrolled, and however much more
she might have known she would still have wished to go beyond. In fact
she did go beyond; she went quite far enough.
But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if the
gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in spite of
the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking in her
face and signing or not signing. The gentlemen who came in with him were
nothing when he was there. They turned up alone at other times--then
only
perhaps with a dim richness of reference. He himself, absent as
well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and had, in spite
of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was exquisite,
particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him on. He could
have reached over anybody, and anybody--no matter who--would have let
him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite pathetically
waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor saying "Here!"
with horrid sharpness. He waited for pottering old ladies, for gaping
slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp's; and the thing in all
this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was
the possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a
particular way appeal. There were moments when he actually struck her as
on her side, as arranging to help, to support, to spare her.
But such was the singular spirit of our young friend that she could
remind herself with a pang that when people had
awfully good
manners--people of that class,--you couldn't tell. These manners were
for everybody, and it might be drearily unavailing for any poor
particular body to be overworked and unusual. What he did take for
granted was all sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, his
relighting of cigarettes while he waited, his unconscious bestowal of
opportunities, of boons, of blessings, were all a part of his splendid
security, the instinct that told him there was nothing such an existence
as his could ever lose by. He was somehow all at once very bright and
very grave, very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was at any
moment it was always as much as all the rest the mere bloom of his
beatitude. He was sometimes Everard, as he had been at the Hotel
Brighton, and he was sometimes Captain Everard. He was sometimes Philip
with his surname and sometimes Philip without it. In some directions he
was merely Phil, in others he was merely Captain. There were relations
in which he was none of these
things, but a quite different person--"the
Count." There were several friends for whom he was William. There were
several for whom, in allusion perhaps to his complexion, he was "the Pink
'Un." Once, once only by good luck, he had, coinciding comically, quite
miraculously, with another person also near to her, been "Mudge." Yes,
whatever he was, it was a part of his happiness--whatever he was and
probably whatever he wasn't. And his happiness was a part--it became so
little by little--of something that, almost from the first of her being
at Cocker's, had been deeply with the girl.