14. XIV
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.