第16章

Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more vividly the reality of the situation and the strangeness of the vast swarming solitude in which he and she were momentarily isolated, amid long lines of rooms each holding its separate secret.The nearness of all these other mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow a more intimate sense of the girl's presence, and through the fumes of his cigar his imagination continued to follow her to and fro, traced the curve of her slim young arms as she raised them to undo her hair, pictured the sliding down of her dress to the waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her feet as she slipped across the floor to bed...

He stood up and shook himself with a yawn, throwing away the end of his cigar.His glance, in following it, lit on the telegram which had dropped to the floor.The sounds in the next room had ceased, and once more he felt alone and unhappy.

Opening the window, he folded his arms on the sill and looked out on the vast light-spangled mass of the city, and then up at the dark sky, in which the morning planet stood.

VI

At the Theatre Francais, the next afternoon, Darrow yawned and fidgeted in his seat.

The day was warm, the theatre crowded and airless, and the performance, it seemed to him, intolerably bad.He stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings.Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest, but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest that she did not feel.He leaned back impatiently, stifling another yawn, and trying to fix his attention on the stage.

Great things were going forward there, and he was not insensible to the stern beauties of the ancient drama.But the interpretation of the play seemed to him as airless and lifeless as the atmosphere of the theatre.The players were the same whom he had often applauded in those very parts, and perhaps that fact added to the impression of staleness and conventionality produced by their performance.Surely it was time to infuse new blood into the veins of the moribund art.He had the impression that the ghosts of actors were giving a spectral performance on the shores of Styx.

Certainly it was not the most profitable way for a young man with a pretty companion to pass the golden hours of a spring afternoon.The freshness of the face at his side, reflecting the freshness of the season, suggested dapplings of sunlight through new leaves, the sound of a brook in the grass, the ripple of tree-shadows over breezy meadows...

When at length the fateful march of the cothurns was stayed by the single pause in the play, and Darrow had led Miss Viner out on the balcony overhanging the square before the theatre, he turned to see if she shared his feelings.But the rapturous look she gave him checked the depreciation on his lips.

"Oh, why did you bring me out here? One ought to creep away and sit in the dark till it begins again!""Is THAT the way they made you feel?"

"Didn't they YOU?...As if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings?" Her hands were pressed against the railing, her face shining and darkening under the wing-beats of successive impressions.

Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure.After all, he had felt all that, long ago; perhaps it was his own fault, rather than that of the actors, that the poetry of the play seemed to have evaporated...But no, he had been right in judging the performance to be dull and stale: it was simply his companion's inexperience, her lack of occasions to compare and estimate, that made her think it brilliant.

"I was afraid you were bored and wanted to come away.""BORED?" She made a little aggrieved grimace."You mean you thought me too ignorant and stupid to appreciate it?""No; not that." The hand nearest him still lay on the railing of the balcony, and he covered it for a moment with his.As he did so he saw the colour rise and tremble in her cheek.

"Tell me just what you think," he said, bending his head a little, and only half-aware of his words.

She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly, trying to convey something of what she felt.But she was evidently unused to analyzing her aesthetic emotions, and the tumultuous rush of the drama seemed to have left her in a state of panting wonder, as though it had been a storm or some other natural cataclysm.She had no literary or historic associations to which to attach her impressions:

her education had evidently not comprised a course in Greek literature.But she felt what would probably have been unperceived by many a young lady who had taken a first in classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread sway in it of the same mysterious "luck" which pulled the threads of her own small destiny.It was not literature to her, it was fact: as actual, as near by, as what was happening to her at the moment and what the next hour held in store.Seen in this light, the play regained for Darrow its supreme and poignant reality.He pierced to the heart of its significance through all the artificial accretions with which his theories of art and the conventions of the stage had clothed it, and saw it as he had never seen it: as life.

After this there could be no question of flight, and he took her back to the theatre, content to receive his own sensations through the medium of hers.But with the continuation of the play, and the oppression of the heavy air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over the incidents of the morning.