He was like a man from the tropics suddenly transplanted to an Arctic climate. He was chilled to the soul; the coldness brought him misery, but no reaction. His vigor had been undermined by the uncertainties and ardors which he had endured. Building a fire out of his memories, he shivered and crouched before it.
Hour by hour in the silence of his brain he relived the old pulsating languors. He had no courage to look ahead to any brightness in the future. The taste of the present was as ashes in his mouth. He felt old, disillusioned, exhausted. The grayness of the plunging wintry sea was the reflection of his soul’s gray loneliness.
He had spent so long in listening and waiting that listening and waiting had become a habit. He would hear the telephone tinkle soon. His heart would fly up like a bird into his throat. Her voice would steal to him across the distance: “Meester Deek, hulloa! What are we going to do this morning?” He often heard it in imagination. He could not bear to believe that at last his leisure was his own—that suspense was at once and forever ended.
Among the passengers he was a romantic figure. Stories went the rounds about him. It was said that the girl who had delayed the sailing was an actress—no, an heiress—no, one of the most beautiful of the season’s d茅butantes. Men’s eyes followed him with envy. Women tried to coax him into a confession—especially the old lady who had met him coming white-faced from the Purser’s office. He was regarded as a triumphant lover; he alone knew that he was an impostor.
His grip on reality had loosened. There were times when he believed she had never existed. He was a child who had slept in a ring of the faeries. He had seen the little people steal out from brakes and hedges. All night In their spider-web and glow-worm raiment they had danced about him, caressing him with their velvet arms. The dawn had come; he sat up rubbing his eyes, to find himself forsaken. He would wake up in Eden Row presently to discover that all his ecstasies had been imagined.
The little false curl was a proof to the contrary. He carried it near his heart. It was the Nell Gwynn part of her—a piece of concrete personality. It still seemed to mock his seriousness.
He had left so many things unsaid; in all those months he had told her nothing. He argued his way over the old ground, blaming himself and making excuses for her. If only he had acted thus and so, then she would have responded accordingly. He was almost persuaded that he had been unkind to her. And there was so much—so much more than he had imagined, from which he ought to save her. If she played with other men as she had played with him, she would be in constant danger. She seemed to regard men as puppies who could be sent to heel by a frown. Mr. Dak had taught her nothing. She skirted the edge of precipices when strong winds were blowing. She would do it once too often; the day was always coming. It might come to-morrow.
He missed her horribly—all her tricks of affection and petulance. He had so much to remember: her casual way of singing in the midst of his talking; the way she covered her mouth with her hand, laughing over it, that she might provoke him into coaxing apart her fingers that he might reach her lips through them; the waving down the stairs at the hour of parting—every memory flared into importance now that she had vanished. Most of all, he missed the name she had called him. Meester Deek I What a fool he had been to be so impatient because she would not employ the name by which any one could call him!
No, he hadn’t realized her value. Their separation was his doing. He might have been with her now, if only——
And back there at the end of the lengthening wake, did Broadway still flash and glitter, a Vanity Fair over which sky-signs wove ghostly and monstrous sorceries?
At night he paced the deck, staring into the unrelieved blackness. With whom was she now? Was she thinking of him? Was she thinking of him with kindness, or had the “horrid me” again taken possession? Perhaps she was with Fluffy. “Oh, these men!” Fluffy would say contemptuously. She was with some one—he knew that; it was impossible to think of her as sitting alone. She wouldn’t allow herself to be sad; she was somewhere where there was feverish gayety, lights and the seduction of music. But with whom?
He saw again her little white bedroom which had been such a secret. On the dressing-table, where it could watch her night and morning at her mirror, was the silver-framed photograph. (She had never asked him for his portrait) In a line on the wall, looking down on her as she lay curled up in bed, were four more photographs. His jealousy became maddening. His old suspicions crept back to haunt him. Who was this Tom? What claims had he on her? Was Tom her permanent lover, and he the man with whom she had trifled for relaxation—was that it? Even in the moment of parting, after she had shown herself capable of abandon, her lips had been motionless beneath his passion. To her he had offered himself soul and body; at intervals she had been sorry for him.
His one consolation was in writing to her—that made her seem nearer. He poured out his heart hour after hour, in unconsidered, fiery phrases. The journal which he kept for her on the voyage was less a journal of contemporary doings than of rememberings. It was a history of all their intercourse, stretching back from the scarf fluttered on the dock to the far-off, cloistral days of childhood. He believed that in the writing of it he became telepathic; messages seemed to reach him from her. He heard her speaking so distinctly that at times he would drop his pen and glance across his shoulder: “Meester Deek! Meester Deek!” He noted down the hours when the phenomenon occurred, begging her to tell him whether at these hours she had been thinking of him. Like a refrain, to which the music was forever returning, “I shall wait for you always—always,” he wrote.
“And we’ll meet so very soon,” she had said at parting. What had she meant? He had had no time to ask her. Had she meant that she would follow him—that she had at last reached the point at which she could not do without him? That she wasn’t going to California? That her foolish and excessive friendship for Fluffy had ceased to be of supreme importance? “And we shall meet so soon.” He built his hopes on that promise.
In the moments just before sleeping he was almost physically conscious of her. When lights along passageways of the ship had been lowered and feet no longer clattered on the decks, when only the thud of the engines sounded, the swish of waters and the sigh of sleepers, then he believed she approached him. He prayed Matthew Arnold’s prayer, and it seemed to him that it was answered:
“Come to me in my dreams and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.”
They say love is blind; it would be truer to say love is lenient. He had intervals of calmness when he appreciated to the full the wisdom of what he was doing. He recognized her faults; he recognized them with tenderness as the imperfections which sprang from her environment. If he could take her out of her hot-house, her limp attitudes towards life would straighten and her sanity would grow fresh. The trouble was that she preferred her hothouse and the orchid-people by whom she was surrounded; she had never known the blowy gardens of the world, which lie honest beneath the rain and stars. She pitied them for their blustering robustness. She pitied him for the distinctions he made between right and wrong. They impressed her as barbarous. Once, when she had told him that she was cold by temperament, he had answered, “You save yourself for the great occasions.” He was surer of that than ever; he was only afraid that the great occasion might not prove to be himself. There lay the hazard of his experiment in leaving her.
He dared not count on her final act of remorse. She was theatrical by temperament. To arrive at the last moment when a ship was sailing had afforded her a fine stage-setting. Her conduct might have meant everything; it might have meant no more than a girl’s display of emotionalism.
He began to understand her. It was like her to become desperate to inveigle him back just when he had resigned himself to forget her. In the past he had grown afraid to set store by her graciousness or to plan any kindness for her. To allow her to feel her power over him seemed to blunt her interest. It was always after he had shown her coldness that she had shown him most affection. Directly he submitted to her fascination, she affected to become indifferent. It was a trick that could be played too often. If this see-saw game was too long continued, one of them would out-weary the other’s patience. If only he had been sure that she was missing him, his mind would have been comparatively at rest.
He disembarked at Fishguard an hour after midnight The December air was raw and damp. His first action on landing was to dispatch his journal-letter to her. As he drowsed in the cold, ill-lighted carriage it was of her that he thought Now that the voyage was ended, the ocean that lay between them seemed impassable as the gulf that is fixed between hell and heaven. She had seen the steamer—she had been a topic of conversation on board; but everything that he saw now, and would see from now on, was unfamiliar to her.
The entrance into London did nothing to cheer him. He had flying glimpses of stagnant gardens, windows like empty sockets plugged with fog, forlorn streets like gutters down which the scavenger dawn wandered between flapping lamps. London looked mean; even in its emptiness, it looked overcrowded. He missed the boastful tallness of New York. Before the train had halted his nostrils were full of the stale stench of cab-ranks and the sulphurous pollutions of engines. Milk-cans made a cemetery of the station; porters looked melancholy as mourners. His gorge rose against the folly of his return.
He had stepped out and was giving instructions about his luggage, when he heard his name called tremblingly. As he turned, he was swept into a whirlwind of embraces. His father stood by, preserving his dignity, giving all the world to understand that a father can disguise his emotions under all circumstances.
“But how did you get here?” Teddy asked. “It’s so shockingly early.”
“Been here most of the night,” his mother told him, between tears and laughter. “You didn’t think we were going to let you arrive unmet? And we didn’t keep Christmas. When we got your cable, we put all our presents away and waited for you.”
How was it that he had so far forgotten what their love had meant? He compared this arrival with his unwelcomed arrival in New York. A flush of warmth spread from his heart They had stayed awake all night on the wintry station that he might not be disappointed.
On the drive back in the cab, all through breakfast and as they sat before the fire through the lazy morning, they gossiped of the things of secondary importance—his work, the Sheerugs, his impressions of America. Of the girl in America they did not talk. His mother’s eyes asked questions, which his eyes avoided. His father, man-like, showed no curiosity. He sat comfortably puffing away at his pipe, feeling in his velvet-coat for matches, and combing his fingers through his shaggy hair, just as if he had no suspicions that anything divisive had happened. It was only when an inquisitive silence had fallen that he showed his sympathy, chasing up a new topic to divert their interest. Desire was not mentioned that day, nor the next; even when her letters began to arrive, Teddy’s reticence was respected. For that he was infinitely thankful. The ordeal of explaining and accepting pity would have been more than he could have borne. Pity for himself would have meant condemnation of her conduct. In the raw state of his heart, neither would have been welcome.
During the afternoon of the first day of his home-coming he visited Orchid Lodge. He was drawn there by the sp............