It was the loneliest place in the world, Hardross said. A little cogitation and much experience had given him the fancy that the ark of the kingdom of solitude was lodged in a lift, any lift, carrying a charter of mute passengers from the pavement to any sort of Parnassus. Nothing ever disturbs its velveteen progression; no one ever speaks to the lift man (unless it happens to be a lift girl). At Hardross’s place of abode it happened to be a lift boy, sharp and white-faced, whose tough hair was swept backwards in a stiff lock from his brow, while his pert nose seemed inclined to pursue it. His name was Brown. His absences from duty were often coincident with the arrivals and departures of Mr. Hardross. His hands were brown enough if the beholder carried some charity in his bosom, but the aspect of his collar or his shoes engendered a deal of vulgar suspicion, and his conduct was at once inscrutable and unscrupulous. It may have been for this reason that Hardross had lately begun walking the whole downward journey from his high chamber, but it must have been something less capricious that caused him always to essay the corresponding upward flight. A fancy for exercise perhaps, for he was a robust musician, unmarried, and of course, at thirty-three or thirty-four, had come[120] to the years of those indiscretions which he could with impunity and without reprobation indulge. On the second floor, outside the principal door of one set of chambers, there always stood a small console table; it was just off the landing, in an alcove that covered two other doors, a little dark angular-limbed piece of furniture bearing a green lacquer dish of void visiting cards, a heap that seemed neither to increase nor dwindle but lay there as if soliciting, so na?vely, some further contributions. Two maiden ladies, the Misses Pilcher, who kept these rooms, had gone to France for a summer holiday, but though the flat had for the time being some new occupants the console table still kept its place, the dish of cards of course languishing rather unhopefully. The new tenants were also two ladies, but they were clearly not sisters and just as clearly not Pilcherly old maids. One of them, Hardross declared, was the loveliest creature he had ever seen. She was dark, almost tall, about as tall as Hardross though a little less robust and rather more graceful. Her mature scarlet lips and charming mature eyes seemed always to be wanting to speak to him. But she did not speak to him, even when he modestly tried to overcome, well, not her reserve—no one with such sparkling eyes could possibly be reserved—but her silence. He often passed her on the landing but he did not hear her voice, or music, or speech, or any kind of intercourse within the room. He called her The Quiet Woman. The other lady, much older, was seldom seen; she was of great dignity. The younger one walked like a woman conscious[121] and proud of the beauty underneath her beautiful clothes; the soft slippers she wore seemed charged with that silent atmosphere. Even the charwoman who visited them daily and rattled and swept about was sealed of the conspiracy of silence; at least he never caught—though it must be confessed that he guiltily tried—the passage of a single word. What was the mystery of the obstinately silent ménage? Did the elder lady suffer from sorrow or nerves; was she under a vow; was she a genius writing a sublime book?
The voiceless character of the intercourse did not prevent Hardross becoming deeply enamoured and at the same time deeply baffled. Morning and evening as he went to the great city church of which he was organist he would often catch a glimpse of his quiet woman on the stairs. At favourable junctures he had lifted his hat and said Good-morning or Good-evening, but she had turned away as if overcome by confusion or an excess of propriety.
“I am a coward,” he would think; “shyness and diffidence rule me, they curse me, they ruin my life; but she, good heavens! is extraordinarily retiring. Why, I am just a satyr, a rampant raging satyr, a satyr!” And he would liken her to Diana, always darting with such fawnlike modesty from the alcove whenever he approached. He did not even know her name. He wanted to enquire of the lift boy Brown or the porter, but there again he lacked the casual touch to bring off the information. The boy was too young, too cute, too vulgar, and the porter too taciturn, as difficult[122] for Hardross to approach as an archbishop would have been. But Miss Barker now, that milliner, down below on the ground floor! She would know; she knew everybody and everything about the chambers including, quite familiarly, Hardross himself—she would be sure to know. But even she would have to be approached with discrimination.
“Evening, Miss Barker!” he cried. The good-looking spinster peered up from a half-trimmed bonnet. “When do you go for a holiday, then?”
“Holidays,” she sighed, though the corner of her mouth was packed with pins, “I cannot afford holidays.”
“Ho-ho, you can’t afford!”
Their common fund of repartee lay in his confident assumption that she was rolling in surplus income and her counter assertion that she was stricken in poverty; that people—the pigs—would not pay her prices, or that those who did not flinch at her prices would not pay her bills.
“Astonishing, deplorable, this Mammon-worship!” he declared, leaning genially upon her table; “you know, it breaks my heart to see you a slave to it, a woman of a thousand, ten thousand in fact. Give it up, O,”—he beat the table with his hand—“give it up before it is too late!”
“Too late for what?” she asked.
“Why, all the delightful things a woman like you could do.”
“As what?”
[123]
“O ... travel, glories of nature, you know, friendship, men ... love itself.”
“Give me all the money I want,”—she was brusque about it, and began to dab the unwanted pins back into their cushion—“and I’ll buy, yes buy, a sweetheart for each day in the week.”
“Heavens now!” He was chilled by this implication of an experience that may have been dull, that must have been bitter, but he floundered on: “What now would you give for me?”
“For you!” She contemplated him with gravity: “To be sure I had not thought of you, not in that way.”
“O but please do think of me, dear lady, put me in your deepest regard.”
The ghost of a knowing grin brushed her features. Really a charming woman, in parts. A little stout, perhaps, and she had fat red hands, but her heart was a good substantial organ, it was in the right place, and her features seemed the best for wear.
“You are one of those surprising ladies”—he plunged gaily—“who’ve a long stocking somewhere, with trunks full of shares and scrip, stocks at the bank and mortgages at your solicitor’s. O yes, yes,” he cried out against her protestation, “and you will make a strange will leaving it all to me!”
She shook her head hopelessly, bending again over the bonnet whose desperate skeleton she had clothed with a flounce of crimson velvet. She was very quiet.
[124]
“Have I been rude?” he hazarded. “Forgive me.”
“Well, it’s not true,” she insisted.
“Forgive me—I have hurt you—of course it’s not true.”
Apparently she forgave him; he was soon asking if there were any rooms to let in the building. “Furnished, I mean.” He gave rein to his na?ve strategy: “I have friends who want to come here and stay with me for a short holiday. I thought you might know of some.”
“In these flats?” She shook her head, but he persisted and played his artful card:
“The Miss Pilchers, on the second floor, haven’t they gone away?”
She did not know—why not ask the porter.
“Yes, I must ask the porter, but I can never catch the porter, he is so fugitive, he is always cutting his lucky. I hate that man, don’t you?”
And there, temporarily, he had to leave it.
So many days passed now without a glimpse of his lovely one that he had almost brought himself to the point of tapping at the door and enquiring after her welfare, only the mysterious air of the apartment—how strange, how soundless it was—forbade any such crudeness. One morning he recklessly took a cigarette from his case and laid it upon the console table as he passed. When he returned later the cigarette was gone; it had been replaced by a chocolate cream, just one, a big one. He snatched it away and rapturously ate it. Later in the day he was blessed by a deep friendly gaze, as she flitted into her room. Hardross[125] rejoiced; in the morning he left another cigarette and was again rewarded.
“But O God help me,” he thought, “I can’t go on like this!”
So he bought a whole box of bonbons, but his courage deserted him as he approached their door; he left the package upon the console table and slunk guiltily away. The next morning he observed a whole box of cigarettes, a well-known exquisite brand, laid temptingly there. He stretched his eager hand towards it, but paused. Could that be a gift for him? Heavens above! What were the miraculous gods about to shower upon him? Was this their delicate symbol? He could not believe it, no, he could not, he left the box lying there. And it lay there for hours indeed until he crept down and seized it. Afterwards he walked trembling into the brighter air and went for a long ride on the top of an omnibus. There had been no letter, but he fancied that he had got hold of a clue. “Be very careful, Hardross my boy, this is too too splendid to spoil.”
An afternoon or so later he met her coming into the hall, a delicious figure with gay parasol and wide white hat. He delayed her:
“Let me thank you, may I, for those perfect cigarettes?”
The lovely creature did not reply. She just smiled her recognition of him; she did not speak nor move away, she stood there quite silent and timid.
“I wonder,” he began again, “if I might”—it sounded dreadfully silly to him, but having begun he went on—“if[126] I might invite you to my church this evening, a rather special choral service, very jolly, you know. I’m the organist; would you come?”
No answer.
“Would you care to come?”
She lifted both her hands and touching her lips and ears with significant gestures shook her head ever so hopelessly at him.
“Deaf and dumb!” he exclaimed. Perhaps the shock of the revelation showed too painfully in his face for she turned now sadly away. But the hall was divinely empty. He caught one of the exquisite hands and pressed it to his lips.
Thereafter Hardross walked about as if he too were deaf and dumb, except for a vast effusion of sighs. He could praise that delicacy of the rarest whereby she had forborne to lure him, as she could so easily have done, into a relation so shrouded and so vague. But that did not solve his problem, it only solidified it. He wanted and awaited the inspiration of a gesture she could admire, something that would propitiate her delicacy and alarms. He did not want to destroy by clumsy persistencies the frail net of her regard for him; he was quite clear about that, the visible fineness of her quality so quelled him. Applying himself to the task he took lessons in the alphabet language, that inductile response of fingers and thumbs.
Meanwhile she had marked her sense of the complication by hiding like a hurt bird, and although the mystery of the quiet rooms was now exposed she herself remained unseen. He composed a graceful note[127] and left it upon the console table. The note disappeared but no reply came: she made no sign and he regretted his ardour.
Such a deadlock of course could not exist for ever, and one evening he met her walking up the stairs. She stopped mutually with him. He was carrying his music. He made a vain attempt to communicate with her by means of his finger alphabet, but she did not understand him although she delightedly made a reply on her fingers which he was too recently initiated to interpret. They were again at a standstill: he could think of nothing to do except to open his book of organ music and show her the title page. She looked it over very intelligently as he tried by signs to convey his desire to her, but he was certain she was blank about it all. He searched his pockets for a pencil—and swore at his non-success. There he stood like a fool, staring at her smiling face until to his amazement she took his arm and they descended the stairs, they were in the street together. He walked to the church on something vastly less substantial than air, and vastly superior.
Hardross’s church was square and ugly, with large round-headed windows. Its entrance was up some steps between four Corinthian pillars upon the bases of which cabmen snoozed when it was warm or coughed and puffed in the winter cold. There was a pump on the kerb and a stand for hackney cabs. A jungle of evergreens squatted in a railed corner under the tower, with a file of iris plants that never flowered. Upon the plinth of the columns a ribald boy had chalked:
[128]
REMOVE THIS OBSTACLE
Eternally at the porch tired cabhorses drooped and meditated, while the drivers cut hunches of bread and meat or cheese or onion and swallowed from their tin bottles the cold tea or other aliment associated with tin bottles. There was always a smell of dung at the entrance, and an aroma of shag tobacco from the cabmen’s pipes curled into the nave whenever the door opened for worshippers. Inside the church Hardross ushered his friend to a seat that he could watch from his organ loft. There were few people present. He borrowed a lead pencil from a choir boy, and while the lesson was being perfunctorily intoned, sounding like some great voice baffled by its infinitely little mind, he scribbled on a sheet of paper the questions he was so eager to ask; what was her name and things like that:
How can we communicate? May I write to you? Will you to me? Excuse the catechism and scribble but I want so much to know you and grab at this opportunity.
Yours devotedly
John Hardross
When he looked up her place was empty; she had gone away in the middle of the service. He hurried home at last very perturbed and much abashed, for it was not so much the perplexities of intercourse, the torment of his dilemma, that possessed him now as a sense of felicities forbidden and amenities declined.
[129]
But his fickle intelligence received a sharp admonitory nudge on the fol............