“My godmother,” I interposed, “said exactly that in a letter to me a few months ago. Not that I accept the word, Mr. Crimble, the ‘afflictions,’ I mean. And as for appearances, why they are everything, aren’t they?” I gave him as cordial an imitation of a smile as I could.
“No, no, no; yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Crimble rapidly. “But it was not of that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward. The—the hideous barbarity of the proceeding.” He had forgotten me. His eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the hatter’s window. There fell a painful pause.
I rose and sat down again. “But quite, quite honestly,” I interposed faintly, “they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could you have done? Why, really and truly,” I laughed feebly, “they might have had to pay, you know. It was getting—getting me cheap!”
His head was thrown back, so that he looked under his spectacles at me, as he cried hollowly: “They might have stoned you.”
“Not with those pavements.”
“But I was there. I turned aside. You saw me?”
What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: “But honestly, honestly, Mr. Crimble,” I murmured out at him, “I didn’t see you see me.”
“Oh, ah! a woman’s way!” he adjured me desperately, turning his head from one side to the other. “But you must have known that I knew you knew I had seen you, you must confess that. And, well … as I say, I can only appeal to your generosity.”
“But what can I do? I’m not hurt. If it had been the other way round—you scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe I might have looked into the hatter’s. Besides, when we were safe in the cab. … I mean, I’m glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even you. … It was wildly exciting, Mr. Crimble, can’t you see? And now”—I ended triumphantly—“and now I have another novel!”
At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I stood there, erect beside the bed—without a thought in my head. And I began slowly, silently—to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and laughed—not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size. Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of solitude—as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose, was my bed, my glass, my hairbrushes and bottles—“Here we all are, Miss M.”—and on the other side of the curtains. … And how contemptuous I had been of Pollie’s little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out once more into the world.
“Ah, here it is,” I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my Sense and Sensibility from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it almost ceremoniously in Mr. Crimble’s hands. A visible mist of disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened it, his eye strayed down the titlepage.
“Yes, yes,” he murmured, “Jane Austen—a pocket edition. Macaulay, I remember. …” He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. “But you were asking me a question. What could I have done? Frankly I don’t quite know. But I might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you—The Good Shepherd. But there, in short,” and the sun of relief peered through the glooms of conscience, “I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand.” His tongue came to a standstill. “And when,” he continued in a small, constrained voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, “when Miss Bowater returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to prove—She would never—for—forgive. …”
The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to understand, to realize where my poor little “generosity” was to come in.
“Ah,” I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, “she won’t be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn’t, I am sure, much mind, Mr. Crimble.”
“Easter,” he whispered. “Well, you will write, I suppose,” and his eye wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, “and no doubt you will share our—your secret.” There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice, and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why, surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid, he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys love leads us into.
“No,” I said solemnly. “I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she would only be amused. Everything amuses her.”
It seemed that we had suddenly reassumed
