He was of a type and of a class, and also, in a way not quite clear, a tempered, thoroughly live human being; something more in him than fine sportsman and nice fellow, giving him weight. Presently she found its marks: a pleat between the brows and, far away within his eyes even when they smiled, a sadness; that sounded too in his cheerful voice, a puzzled, perpetual compassion.
For the world? For himself?
But these back premises were touched with sunlight. Some sense of things he had within him that made him utterly kind.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping to hide the fact that she had missed his last remark, “the way these people leave the lights switched on all the time, everywhere.”
“Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis, and as if apologetically reminding her of what she already knew—“Water power. They pay a rate and use as much as they like.”
In all his answers there was this manner of apologising for giving information. And his talk, even the perfect little story of the local barber and the newspapers, which he told at top pace as if grudging the moment it wasted, was like a shorthand annotation to essential unspoken things, shared interests and opinions taken for granted. Talking with him she no longer felt as she had done last night either that she was at a private view of an exclusive exhibition, or gathering fresh light on social problems. There was in him something unbounded, that enhanced the light reflected into the room from the sunlit snow. His affectionate allusion to his Cambridge brought to her mind complete in all its parts—together with gratitude for the peace he gave in which things could expand unhindered—her own so sparse possession: her weekends there with the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving academic friends, the strange sense of at once creeping back into security and realising how far she had come away from it; their kindnesses, their secret hope of settling her for life in their enclosed world, and their vain efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the end, the growing engrossments in London breaking the link that held her to them and to the past they embodied—and Cambridge left lit by their sweet hospitality, by the light streaming on Sunday afternoons through King’s Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight, and a memory of the halting little chime.
When she told him of the things that Cambridge had left with her, she paused just in time to escape adding to them the gait of the undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose each footfall sent the chin forward with a hen-like jerk.
He agreed at once with her choice, but hesitated over the little chime.
“It might have been a new church. I never saw it. But if you had once heard it you couldn’t forget it.”
It was absurd to be holding to her solitary chime in face of his four years’ residence. But it seemed now desperately important to state exactly the quality she had felt and never put into words. She sat listening—aware of him waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each note as it sounded out into the sky above the town, making it no longer Cambridge but a dream-city, subduing the graceless modern bricks and mortar to harmony with the ancient beauty of the colleges—until the whole was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and presently found herself speaking with reckless enthusiasm.
“Don’t you remember the four little gentle tuneless phrases, of six and seven notes alternately, one for each quarter, and at the hour sounding one after the other with a little pause between each, seeming to ask you to look at what it saw, at the various life of the town made suddenly wonderful and strange; and the last phrase, beginning with a small high note that tapped the sky, and wandering down to the level and stopping without emphasis, leaving everything at peace and very beautiful.”
“I think I can’t have heard it,” he said wistfully and sat contemplative in a little pause during which it occurred to her, becoming aware of the two of them talking on and on into the morning that it rested with her to wind up the sitting; that he might perhaps, if not quite immediately, yet in intention be waiting for her to rise and spare him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an engagement. Even failing the engagement they could not sit here forever, and the convention of his world demanded that she should be the first to go.
She had just time to note coming from far away within herself a defiance that would sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of breaking the rule than upon herself the annoyance of moving at its bidding, when he looked across and said with the bowing attitude he had held last night as he spoke and waited for her to become aware of him: “May I put you up for the ski-club?”
It was, of course, his business to cultivate new people, and, if they seemed suitable, to collect them. …
She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely pleaded the shortness of her stay. All she could do, short of blurting out her poverty which he seemed not to have seen.
But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal time: time to learn and to get on well enough to want to come out again next year; and hurried on to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend coming up, for only a few days, from the South, who would be set immediately to work and on whose account he was committed today to trek down to the station.
“We
