At least she saw. But what was the use of not being deceived? How in the vast spread of humanity expose the sham? How escape, without surrendering life itself, treacherous countenancing of the fiendish spectacle? What good would death do? What did “Eine fur Viele” do? Brought home the truth to one man, who probably after the first shock, soon came to the conclusion that she had been mad.
She talked through lunch to the Brooms with such an intensity of animation that when at last the confrontation was at an end and the afternoon begun in the shelter of the dim little drawing-room, she found Grace and Florrie grouped closely about her, wrapped and eager for more. She turned, at bay, explaining in shaken unmeditated words that the afternoon must be spent by her in thinking out a frightful problem, and relapsed, averted swiftly from their sensitive faces, suddenly pale about eyes that reflected her distress, towards the open door of the little greenhouse leading miserably into the stricken garden. They remained motionless in the chairs they had drawn close to the little settee where she sat enthroned, clearly prepared so to sit in silent sympathy while she gazed at her problem in the garden. She sat tense, but with their eyes upon her she could not summon directly the items of her theme. They appeared transformed in words, a statement of the case that might be made to them, “anyone’s” statement of the case, beginning with “after all”; and leaving everything unstated. Applied to her own experience they seemed to have no meaning at all. Summaries were no good. Actual experience must be brought home to make anything worth communicating. “When he first kissed me,” started her mind “those women were all about him. They have come between us forever.” She flushed towards the garden. The mere presence in her mind of such vileness was an outrage on the Broom atmosphere. She could not again face the girls. For some time she sat, driving from point to point in the garden the inexorable fact that she had reached a barrier she could not break down. She could, if she were alone, face the possibility of dashing her life out against it. If she were to turn back from it, she would be rent in twain, and how then, base and deformed could she find spirit to face anyone at all? At last, still with her eyes on the garden, she told them, she must go and think in the open air. They cherished and indulged her in their unaltered way and she escaped, exempted from coming back to tea.
Suppose, said the innumerable voices of the road, as she wandered down it relieved and eager in the first moments of freedom, he had not told you? It was sincere and fine of him to tell. Not at all. He wanted to have an easy mind. He has only explained what it was that came between us at the first, and has been waiting ever since to be there again. …
“Remember; I did not know you would come.”
Why did men not know? That was the strange thing. Why did they make their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that came after? That was the extraordinary thing about the average man and many men who were not average at all. Why?
The answer must be there if she could only get through to it. Some immovable answer. The wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an irreversible judgment. There was an irreversible judgment at the heart of it all that would remain, even if further fuller truer reasons were reached later on. Anything that could take the life out of the sunlight was wrong. Every twist and turn of the many little side roads along which she made her way told her that. It was useless to try to run away from it. It remained, the only point of return from the wilderness of anger into which with every fresh attempt at thought, she was immediately flung. The more angry she grew the further she seemed to move from the possibility of finding and somehow expressing, in words that had not sounded in her mind before, the clue to her misery.
She reached the park at teatime. Its vistas were mercifully empty. She breathed more freely within its greenery. Hidden somewhere here, was relief for the increasing numbness of her brain and the drag of her aching heart. The widening sky understood and would presently, when she had reached the statement that lay now, just ahead, offer itself in the old way, for companionship. Wandering along a little path that wound in and out of a thicket of shrubs, she heard a subdued rumble of voices and came in a moment upon two men, bent-headed in conversation side by side on a secluded seat. They looked up at her and upon their shiny German faces, and in the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious intelligent German foreheads, was the horrible leer of their talk.
