I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a faerie land, and always about her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little Quelques Fleurs talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket pour le sport, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with my hat.
Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But enough of this hell!”
IV
Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame, above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting, saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously.
She stood before that.
“What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was ten minutes to six.
“Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb which was not my comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so.
“Thank you,” she said to her reflection.
The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. …
In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called Dwight-Rankin—I think he died on Gallipoli—who used to sit at the desk just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny.
She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s “caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a “grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby, truthful hand of lex femina. She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards, impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful she was now! It was a sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now, to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her, as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.
The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say.
“My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones, expressionless, caddish as a beast’s.
Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.
“Goodbye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go quickly,
