Fanny’s pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright with the cold—for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr. Crimble may have meant to include in his Odi, the celerity with which he rose to greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater’s. She smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr. Crimble instinctively folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.
“But, Miss Bowater,” he pleaded, “the printer has been waiting nearly two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now.”
“Yes,” said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly removing her gloves. “It is annoying. I hadn’t a vestige of a cold last night.”
“But indeed, indeed,” he began, “is it wise in this severe weather—?”
“Oh, it isn’t the weather I mind,” was the serene retort, “it’s the croaking like a frog in public.”
“ ‘A frog!’ ” cried Mr. Crimble beguilingly, “oh, no!”
But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu—a little formal, and hasty—and hurried off through the door to the printer.
When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.
“Oh, yes,” she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, “it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn’t deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after. … And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse themselves with their bleating. I have done with it all.”
She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother’s looking-glass. I had not the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions suited her best.
“But surely,” I argued uneasily, “things are different. If I were to dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be the dancing that would amuse them, but—just me. Would you care for that if you were—well, what I am?”
“Ah, you don’t know,” a low voice replied bitterly, “you don’t know. The snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine. Boxed up here in your pretty little doll’s house, you suppose that all that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly frank, you are out of the running, my dear. I have to get my own living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don’t know what he, in his heart, thinks of me—and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!”
And she left me to my doll’s house—a more helpless slave than ever.
Not only one “star” the fewer, then, dazzled St. Peter’s parish that New Year’s Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour’s practical astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her—as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.
I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a catlike cruelty by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood, or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe her effects on others, she was not vain.
But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a ghost—a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt was for an outcast with whom I never
