Mr. Spokesly stopped abruptly. He saw an expression of extraordinary radiance on the girl"s face as she lay there, her thin pale fingers holding the handkerchief by the corner. It suddenly occurred to Mr.
Spokesly that this woman was loved. For the first time in his life he became aware of a woman"s private emotional existence. He achieved a dim comprehension of the novel fact that a woman might have her own views of these great matters. He did not phrase it quite like this. He only sat looking at the girl on the sofa and remarking to himself that women were peculiar.
"Wouldn"t you do that?" she demanded. The light in her eyes diminished to a steady warm regard.
And Mr. Spokesly began to a.s.sert himself once more. Women being so peculiar, there was no sense in being bullied into any of this here sentiment. He was a man of the world about to make a--what was it called? Marriage of convenience ... something like that. Not that exactly, either. Ada was a darned fine girl. This invalid lady seemed to think he didn"t know what love was.
"Who? Me?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Can"t say as I see myself, I admit. Not in my line. Not in any Englishman"s line, I don"t think. And speaking for myself, Mrs. Dainopoulos, I reckon I"m past that sort of thing, you know. Can"t teach an old dog new tricks, can you? I look at it this way: so long as there"s enough to keep the pot boiling, it"s easy enough to fall in love with anybody, you see, and when you"re married ... soon get used to it. Ada and me, we"re _sensible_."
"You"ve got it all arranged, then," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, smiling faintly and looking out into the darkness once more.
"What"s the use o" bein" anything else?" inquired Mr. Spokesly, resuming something of the perfect officer pose, hard-bitten, practical, and matter-of-fact. "All that business o" dyin" o" love, you know, I reckon"s so much moon-shine. All right in a novel, o" course, but not in real life. _You_ don"t reckon there"s anything in it, really, I mean?"
he asked doubtfully.
"I think everything"s in it," she sighed. "I think it must be horrible, being married, without it. Haven"t you felt you couldn"t do without her?
That you"d die if you didn"t get her; work, and do somebody else in the eye for her? Haven"t you?"
"That lets me out," he said soberly, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I"m not guilty."
There was a brief silence. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled. He could not fit this experience in with one of the two cardinal points in an Englishman"s creed, the belief that no English girl can really love a foreigner. The other, of course, is that no foreign girl is really virtuous.
"That"s a nice thing to say!" she retorted, trembling a little with her emotions. "If that"s the new way they have at home----"
"Oh, I don"t know," he began and he looked at her. "I"m afraid you"re getting all upset. I"m sorry, really, I didn"t think you"d have been so serious about it. As if it mattered to you!"
"I"m thinking of _her_," she said with a little hysterical sob. "You mustn"t----"
Mr. Spokesly was in a quandary again. If he put Ada"s adoration in its true perspective, he would not think very highly of himself. He took no real pleasure in speaking of himself as a promised man even to a married woman. Yet how was he to get this particular married woman in delicate health and extremely robust emotions to see him as a human being and not a monster of cold-blooded caution? And there was another problem. What of this new and astonishing revelation--new and astonishing to him, at any rate--that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing inept.i.tudes? The wonder, however, is not that Mr. Spokesly was slow to discover this, but that he did not live and die, as many men do, without even suspecting it. He nodded his head slightly as he replied:
"You"re right in a way," he muttered. "She thinks I"m--well, she thinks I"m brave to go to sea in war-time!" The extreme incongruity of such an hallucination made him giggle.
"She would! You are!" said the woman on the couch, almost irritably.
"What do you want to laugh for? Don"t you see what you miss?" she added in illogical annoyance.
"That the way you feel about Mr. Dainopoulos?" Mr. Spokesly asked. The woman turned her face so that the lamplight illumined her coiled hair and for a moment she did not reply. Then she said, her face still in the shadow:
"You"d only laugh if I told you."
"No," declared Mr. Spokesly. "Honest I won"t. Laugh at meself--yes. But you--that"s different."
"But you don"t believe in love at first sight, I can see very well."
"I only said I hadn"t anything like that happen to me," he replied slowly, pondering. "But I s"pose it has to be something like that in a case like yours."
"I don"t understand you."
"Well, you being English, you see, and Mr. Dainopoulos a foreigner."
"As an excuse, I suppose? Father made the same remark, but I never thanked him."
Mr. Spokesly looked at her soberly. Her eyes were bright and resolute, and the lamplight threw into salience the curve of her jaw and chin. A fugitive thought flitted about his mind for a moment and vanished again--whether her father was inconsolable at his daughter"s departure.
"You got married at home then?"
"Yes, after Mr. Dainopoulos saved my life."
"Did he?"
"Of course. That"s how we met. Didn"t you ever hear of the _Queen Mab_ accident? It was in the papers."
"Can"t say as I did. I was out East so long, you see. Wait a bit, though----" Mr. Spokesly pondered. "I fancy I remember reading something about it in the home papers; an excursion steamer in collision with a cargo boat, wasn"t it?" The girl nodded.
"Down the river. I was in it. My sister--she was drowned. We were going to Southend."
"I see. And Mr. Dainopoulos, he was with you and----"
"No. I"d never seen him then. You see, we were all standing by the paddle-box when the other ship cut into us, my sister Gladys and two boys we"d been keeping company with. It was something awful, everybody screaming and the boat going up in the air. I mean the other end was going down. At last we couldn"t stand, so we sat on the paddle-box. Then all of a sudden the boat slid over to one side and we went in."
Mr. Spokesly made a sound expressive of intense sympathy and interest.
"And next thing I knew was somebody was holding me up and he said, "Don"t move! Don"t move!" But I couldn"t! Something must have hit me when I fell in. I didn"t know where then--the water was awfully cold.
And then a boat came, and they lifted me in. And then he swam off again to find the others. I don"t faint as a rule, but I did then. There were so many, and the screams--oh, it was shocking!
"But the worst was when we got on land again. It was near Woolwich and they turned a chapel or something into a hospital for us. And all the relations of the people on the _Queen Mab_ came down, and Mr.
Dainopoulos, who"d taken his landlady"s daughter for the excursion, was sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in.
They hadn"t found her. You know bodies don"t come up sometimes, especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling out "Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?" They _screamed_ at him!"
"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping company."
"And what happened then?"
"Why, we fell in love. That"s what I was going to tell you so long as you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant"s in Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those other people behaved as though he"d held their daughter"s head under.
Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It wasn"t his fault the boat sank."
"No, of course not. I see now."
"And then, you know, Mother made a fuss because he was foreign. Mother"s a Berkshire woman, and she said she"d never thought she"d live to see a child of hers marry a man from goodness knows where. She didn"t half go on, I can tell you. And Father had his own way of making me perfectly happy. He"d ask me, how many in the harem already? And I couldn"t do a thing, lying on my back helpless. And at last, with the doctor saying I needed a sea-voyage to get my strength back, I thinks to myself, I"ll take one; and with the accident insurance I had had the sense to carry ever since I"d started going to business, and what Boris had in the bank, we went. Or came, rather. We"ve been here ever since and n.o.body"s heard either of us regret it, either."
And as she lay there looking out into the darkness of the Gulf with shining resolute eyes, it was plain that this romantic destiny of hers was a treasured possession. It dominated her life. She had found in it the indispensable inspiration for happiness, an ethical yet potent anodyne for the forfeiture of many homely joys. It was for her the equivalent of a social triumph or acceptance among peeresses of the realm. It is to be suspected that she had ever in her mind a vision of the wonder and awe she had evoked in the souls of the suburban girls among whom she had spent her life, and that this vision supported her and formed the base of a magnificent edifice. And it was an integral part of this edifice that love should be a romantical affair, a flame, noted by all and fed by the adoration of a husband who was harsh to the world, but to her a monster of infatuated fidelity.
Something of this impinged upon Mr. Spokesly"s consciousness and he regarded her for a moment with profound respect.
"I should say," he muttered, returning to his cigarette, "you haven"t done so badly for yourself."
She gave him an extraordinarily quick look, like a flash of sheet lightning from a calm evening sky, which left him puzzled. He was not aware, at that time, that no woman will ever admit she has bettered herself by marrying a given man. She must retain for ever that shining figure of him she might have loved, a sort of domestic knight-errant in golden armour, who keeps occasional vigils at her side while the weary actuality slumbers in gross oblivion. Mrs. Dainopoulos knew that Mr.
Spokesly saw nothing of this. She knew him for what he was, a being entirely incapable of compa.s.sing the secrets of a woman"s heart. She knew he imagined that love was all, that women were at the mercy of their love for men, and that chivalrous ideas, rusted and clumsily manipulated, were still to be found in his mind. And she saw the fragility and delicate thinness of his love affair with Ada Rivers.
Anything could break it, anything could destroy it, she reflected. Those fancies ... of course he said he was engaged; but an engagement, as Mrs.
Dainopoulos knew, having lived in a London suburb, was nothing. Yes, anything might make him forget Ada. And as she repeated the word "anything" to herself in a kind of ecstasy, Mrs. Dainopoulos turned her head quickly and listened. There was a sound of someone being admitted.