“Do you really want me to go?” he asked with the same cool, aggravating politeness.
“Yes, go, go.”
“Very well,” he said, and opening the door, he went.
At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy on the point of going out to dinner.
“You’re coming out with me,” he announced very calmly.
“Alas!”
“Yes, you are.”
She looked at him curiously and he looked back at her, with steady eyes, smiling, with a queer look of amused triumph and invincible, obstinate power, which she had never seen on his face before. “All right,” she said at last, and, ringing for the maid, “Telephone to Lady Sturlett, will you,” she ordered, “and say I’m sorry, but I’ve got a very bad headache and can’t come tonight.” The maid retired. “Well, are you grateful now?”
“I’m beginning to be,” he answered.
“Beginning?” She assumed indignation. “I like your damned impertinence.”
“I know you do,” said Walter, laughing. And she did. That night Lucy became his mistress.
It was between three and four in the afternoon. Spandrell had only just got out of bed. He was still unshaved; over his pyjamas he wore a dressing gown of rough brown cloth, like a monk’s cassock. (The monastic note was studied; he liked to remind himself of the ascetics. He liked, rather childishly, to play the part of the anchorite of diabolism.) He had filled the kettle and was waiting for it to boil on the gas ring. It seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time about it. His mouth was dry and haunted by a taste like the fumes of heated brass. The brandy was having its usual effects.
“Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,” he said to himself, “so longeth my soul … with a morning-after thirst. If only Grace could be bottled like Perrier water.”
He walked to the window. Outside a radius of fifty yards everything in the universe had been abolished by the white mist. But how insistently that lamp post thrust itself up in front of the next house on the right, how significantly! The world had been destroyed and only the lamp post, like Noah, preserved from the universal cataclysm. And he had never even noticed there was a lamp post there; it simply hadn’t existed until this moment. And now it was the only thing that existed. Spandrell looked at it with a fixed and breathless attention. This lamp post alone in the mist—hadn’t he seen something like it before? This queer sensation of being with the sole survivor of the Deluge was somehow familiar. Staring at the lamp post, he tried to remember. Or rather, he breathlessly didn’t try; he held back his will and his conscious thoughts, as a policeman might hold back the crowd round a woman who had fainted in the street; he held back his consciousness to give the stunned memory a place to stretch itself, to breathe, to come to life. Staring at the lamp post, Spandrell waited, agonized and patient, like a man who feels he is just going to sneeze, tremulously awaiting the anticipated paroxysm; waited for the long-dead memory to revive. And suddenly it sprang up, broad awake, out of its catalepsy, and, with a sense of enormous relief, Spandrell saw himself walking up the steep hard-trodden snow of the road leading from Cortina toward the pass of Falzarego. A cold white cloud had descended on to the valley. There were no more mountains. The fantastic coral pinnacles of the Dolomites had been abolished. There were no more heights and depths. The world was only fifty paces wide, white snow on the ground, white cloud around and above. And every now and then, against the whiteness, appeared some dark shape of house or telegraph pole, of tree or man or sledge, portentous in its isolation and uniqueness, each one a solitary survivor from the general wreck. It was uncanny, but how thrillingly new and how beautiful in a strange way! The walk was an adventure; he felt excited and a kind of anxiety intensified his happiness till he could hardly bear it.
“But look at that little chalet on the left,” he cried to his mother. “That wasn’t here when I came up last. I swear it wasn’t here.”
He knew the road perfectly; he had been up and down it a hundred times and never seen that little chalet. And now it loomed up almost appallingly, the only dark and definite thing in a vague world of whiteness.
“Yes, I’ve never noticed it either,” said his mother. “Which only shows,” she added with that note of tenderness which always came into her voice when she mentioned her dead husband, “how right your father was. Mistrust all evidence, he used to say, even your own.”
He took her hand and they walked on together in silence, pulling their sledges after them.
Spandrell turned away from the window. The kettle was boiling. He filled the teapot, poured himself out a cup, and drank. Symbolically enough, his thirst remained unassuaged. He went on sipping, meditatively, remembering and analyzing those quite incredible felicities of his boyhood. Winters among the Dolomites, springs in Tuscany or Provence or Bavaria, summers by the Mediterranean or in Savoy. After his father’s death and before he went to school, they lived almost continuously abroad—it was cheaper. And almost all his holidays from school were spent out of England. From seven to fifteen, he had moved from one European beauty spot to another, appreciating their beauty, what was more—genuinely, a precocious Childe Harold. England seemed a little tame afterward. He thought of another day in winter. Not misty, this time, but brilliant; the sun hot in a cloudless sky; the coral precipices of the Dolomites shining pink and orange and white above the woods and the snow slopes. They were sliding down on skis through the bare larchwoods. Streaked with
