“You are thinking,” she accused me. “I wonder what about. …”
The light that plunged through my half-open sitting-room door fought a great fight with the shadow of her green hat and lit her face mysteriously. She was fair. As they would say it in the England of long ago—she was fair. And she was grave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I thought. To be fair, to be sad … why, was she intelligent, too? And white she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams. But no siren, she! That was a sad lady, most grave. And always her hair would be dancing a tawny, formal dance about the small white cheeks.
She smiled, when it occurred to her that she was looking at me.
“I know what you are thinking,” she said.
“I wonder!”
“Yes. You like Gerald, don’t you?” She thought about that. “Well, what you are thinking is, whether it is fair to him to take me up there in case he is drunk. …”
“If only it was ‘in case,’ ” I said. “You see?”
She closed her eyes.
“Poor Gerald!” she whispered. “Isn’t it a shame!”
“I’m afraid,” I said, “there’s nothing to be done. …”
“Oh, I know!” Oh, she seemed to know that from her heart. And I wondered why they had not seen each other for ten years. I couldn’t imagine her disliking Gerald—childish, furious Gerald! Probably, I thought, he was to blame, and I wondered if there was anything in Gerald’s life for which he was not to blame. Poor Gerald.
“You see,” the slightly husky voice was saying, “I just came tonight on an Impulse. I am scarcely ever in England. …” The voice expired. We waited, and she acknowledged my patience with a jewel of a smile. “And I suddenly thought I would like to see Gerald tonight. Please,” she suddenly begged, so seriously, “won’t you let me? I’d like just to see him … but if you think … ?”
“Oh,” I said, “come on.”
She laughed, a little nervously, abruptly. Gerald’s door was at the head of the next flight of stairs, and it was, as usual, wide open. She moved one step forward into the room, she stopped, her eyes on the ceiling, as fixed as lamps. Yes, those were very sensible eyes. She didn’t look at Gerald.
“What is it?” she asked dimly.
“Whisky,” I said. It was so obvious.
“But more than that! There’s certainly whisky, but. …”
“Wet shoes. …”
“But that’s too literary! Oh, of course! Old women in alms-houses. …”
She was talking, it was so easy to see, against her eyes. Now she was here she didn’t want to see Gerald. She was trying to put off the moment when her eyes must rest on Gerald. Still just within the dingy room, she looked everywhere but at Gerald.
“Lot of books,” she said.
I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start detained me. She suggested her gestures. That was a very quiet lady. She didn’t, if you please, intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women do that unconsciously. But she didn’t do it, unconsciously. She met a man on his own ground. That was a gallant lady.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh!”
“Might just as well come away,” I muttered. I was used to Gerald, but at the moment, at her sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him. Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to see him—and now, before his sister, and his twin sister too, he was in this vile state. But she had insisted on seeing him. What could I do? I promised Gerald a pretty speech on the morrow. He would be more or less human tomorrow, for Gerald had those phenomenal recuperative powers that are peculiar to lean drunkards.
“The illness,” I told her, “goes in periods of three days. On the first day he is thoughtful, on the second he is thoughtless, and on the third speechless.”
I could not see her face, her back was to me. The leather jacket, the brave green hat, the thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the name of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken Windsor chair and half across the littered table, and it was as though there was a smile in the whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins must have been great playmates once upon a time. “Gerald!” she whispered. “Gerald! Gerald!”
“Oh, go to hell!” muttered Gerald, and, without looking up, without waking up, twitched his head feverishly to one side, upsetting a teacup half-full of whisky.
“He thinks it’s me,” I explained from the door, and suddenly I found her looking at me over her shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the way she suddenly looked at me, half over her leather shoulder, thinking I knew not what, and her right hand spread out on her brother’s arm. There was a striking emerald on the third finger of her right hand, livid against the dark thing that was Gerald March.
“Only twenty-nine,” she told me gravely, “Gerald and me. …”
“Oh,” I said. What could one say?
“Bad luck, I do think,” she murmured. I wondered, you know, whom she was talking to. Certainly not to me.
“He’s a very good fellow,” I said.
“Heredity, you see,” she suddenly explained. “Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of pneumonia.”
Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew
