第8章

Farlow that they mustn't think of coming to the station; but they'll have told the concierge to look out for me.""You'll let me drive you there?"

She nodded again, and her eyes closed.It was very pleasant to Darrow that she made no effort to talk or to dissemble her sleepiness.He sat watching her till the upper lashes met and mingled with the lower, and their blent shadow lay on her cheek; then he stood up and drew the curtain over the lamp, drowning the compartment in a bluish twilight.

As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently Anna Summers--or even Anna Leath--would have behaved.She would not have talked too much; she would not have been either restless or embarrassed; but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been nature but "tact." The oddness of the situation would have made sleep impossible, or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she would have waked with a start, wondering where she was, and how she had come there, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing short of hairpins and a glass would have restored her self-possession...

The reflection set him wondering whether the "sheltered"girl's bringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent contact with life.How much nearer to it had Mrs.Leath been brought by marriage and motherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all her reticences and evasions but the result of the deadening process of forming a "lady"?

The freshness he had marvelled at was like the unnatural whiteness of flowers forced in the dark.

As he looked back at their few days together he saw that their intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations and reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy.Once more they had had their hour together and she had wasted it.As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep.She was still afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery.

She was still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful story, and long-forgotten details took shape before him.

How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed, he and she, like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing without ever clasping each other.To this day he did not quite know what had parted them: the break had been as fortuitous as the fluttering apart of two seed-vessels on a wave of summer air...

The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an added poignancy.He felt the mystic pang of the parent for a child which has just breathed and died.Why had it happened thus, when the least shifting of influences might have made it all so different? If she had been given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and light in her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through.

Musing thus, he had the sense of waste that is the bitterest harvest of experience.A love like his might have given her the divine gift of self-renewal; and now he saw her fated to wane into old age repeating the same gestures, echoing the words she had always heard, and perhaps never guessing that, just outside her glazed and curtained consciousness, life rolled away, a vast blackness starred with lights, like the night landscape beyond the windows of the train.

The engine lowered its speed for the passage through a sleeping station.In the light of the platform lamp Darrow looked across at his companion.Her head had dropped toward one shoulder, and her lips were just far enough apart for the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colour of the other.The jolting of the train had again shaken loose the lock above her ear.It danced on her cheek like the flit of a brown wing over flowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire to lean forward and put it back behind her ear.

IV

As their motor-cab, on the way from the Gare du Nord, turned into the central glitter of the Boulevard, Darrow had bent over to point out an incandescent threshold.

"There!"

Above the doorway, an arch of flame flashed out the name of a great actress, whose closing performances in a play of unusual originality had been the theme of long articles in the Paris papers which Darrow had tossed into their compartment at Calais.

"That's what you must see before you're twenty-four hours older!"The girl followed his gesture eagerly.She was all awake and alive now, as if the heady rumours of the streets, with their long effervescences of light, had passed into her veins like wine.

"Cerdine? Is that where she acts?" She put her head out of the window, straining back for a glimpse of the sacred threshold.As they flew past it she sank into her seat with a satisfied sigh.