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After
breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial Advertiser.
While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in, and the
usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after all, though he
had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and
space.
He
looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up and went
into the writing-room. There he wrote a few lines, and ordered a messenger
to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the answer.
He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to calculate how
long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.
"The
lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his elbow;
and he stammered: "Out?--"
as if it were a word in a strange language.
He
got up and went into the hall. It
must be a mistake: she could not be out at that hour.
He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why had he not sent the
note as soon as he arrived?
He
found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.
The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he
were a traveller from distant lands. For
a moment he stood on the door-step hesitating; then he decided to go to the
Parker House. What if the
messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?
He
started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a tree, he
saw her sitting. She had a grey
silk sunshade over her head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink
one? As he approached he was
struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if she had nothing else to
do. He saw her drooping
profile, and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat,
and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.
He came a step or two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.
"Oh"--she
said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face; but in
another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment.
"Oh"--she
murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down at her; and
without rising she made a place for him on the bench.
"I'm
here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without
knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?"
He had really no idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were
shouting at her across endless distances, and she might vanish again before
he could overtake her.
"I?
Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head
toward him so that they were face to face.
The words hardly reached him: he was aware only of her voice, and of
the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory.
He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched, with a faint
roughness on the consonants.
"You
do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had
uttered something irrevocable.
"Differently?
No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm without Nastasia."
"Nastasia;
but isn't she with you?"
"No;
I'm alone. For two days it was
not worth while to bring her."
"You're
alone--at the Parker House?"
She
looked at him with a flash of her old malice. "Does it strike you as
dangerous?"
"No;
not dangerous--"
"But
unconventional? I see; I
suppose it is." She
considered a moment. "I
hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so much more
unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes.
"I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to
me."
Archer
sprang up and moved a step or two away. She had furled her parasol and sat
absently drawing patterns on the gravel.
Presently he came back and stood before her.
"Some
one--has come here to meet you?"
"Yes."
"With
this offer?"
She
nodded.
"And
you refused--because of the conditions?"
"I
refused," she said after a moment.
He
sat down by her again. "What
were the conditions?"
"Oh,
they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now and
then."
There
was another interval of silence. Archer's
heart had slammed itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly
groping for a word.
"He
wants you back--at any price?"
"Well--a
considerable price. At least
the sum is considerable for me."
He
paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.
"It
was to meet him here that you came?"
She
stared, and then burst into a laugh. "Meet
him--my husband? HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."
"He
sent some one?"
"Yes."
"With
a letter?"
She
shook her head. "No; just
a message. He never writes.
I don't think I've had more than one letter from him."
The allusion brought the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself
in Archer's vivid blush.
"Why
does he never write?"
"Why
should he? What does one have
secretaries for?"
The
young man's blush deepened. She
had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in
her vocabulary. For a moment it
was on the tip of his tongue to ask: "Did
he send his secretary, then?" But
the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter to his wife was too present
to him. He paused again, and
then took another plunge.
"And
the person?"--
"The
emissary? The emissary,"
Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling, "might, for all I care, have
left already; but he has insisted on waiting till this evening . . . in case
. . . on the chance . . ."
"And
you came out here to think the chance over?"
"I
came out to get a breath of air. The
hotel's too stifling. I'm
taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."
They
sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people
passing along the path. Finally
she turned her eyes again to his face and said:
"You're not changed."
He
felt like answering: "I
was, till I saw you again;" but instead he stood up abruptly and
glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.
"This
is horrible. Why shouldn't we
go out a little on the bay? There's
a breeze, and it will be cooler. We
might take the steamboat down to Point Arley."
She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went on:
"On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat. My
train doesn't leave till evening: I'm going back to New York.
Why shouldn't we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and
suddenly he broke out: "Haven't
we done all we could?"
"Oh"--she
murmured again. She stood up
and reopened her sunshade, glancing about her as if to take counsel of the
scene, and assure herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.
Then her eyes returned to his face.
"You mustn't say things like that to me," she said.
"I'll
say anything you like; or nothing. I
won't open my mouth unless you tell me to.
What harm can it do to anybody?
All I want is to listen to you," he stammered.
She
drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain.
"Oh, don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day!
I want to get you away from that man.
At what time was he coming?"
Her
colour rose again. "At
eleven."
"Then
you must come at once."
"You
needn't be afraid--if I don't come."
"Nor
you either--if you do. I swear
I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing.
It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred
before we meet again."
She
still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face.
"Why didn't you come down to the beach to fetch me, the day I
was at Granny's?" she asked.
"Because
you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.
I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round."
He laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him.
"But
I didn't look round on purpose."
"On
purpose?"
"I
knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies.
So I went down to the beach."
"To
get away from me as far as you could?"
She
repeated in a low voice: "To
get away from you as far as I could."
He
laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. "Well, you see
it's no use. I may as well tell
you," he added, "that the business I came here for was just to
find you. But, look here, we
must start or we shall miss our boat."
"Our
boat?" She frowned
perplexedly, and then smiled. "Oh,
but I must go back to the hotel first:
I must leave a note--"
"As
many notes as you please. You
can write here." He drew out a note-case and one of the new
stylographic pens. "I've
even got an envelope--you see how everything's predestined!
There--steady the thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a
second. They have to be
humoured; wait--" He
banged the hand that held the pen against the back of the bench.
"It's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer: just a
trick. Now try--"
She
laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his
note-case, began to write. Archer walked away a few steps, staring with
radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused to stare
at the unwonted sight of a fashionably- dressed lady writing a note on her
knee on a bench in the Common.
Madame
Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it, and put it
into her pocket. Then she too
stood up.
They
walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of
the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker
House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at
the corner hydrant.
"I
told you everything was predestined! Here's
a cab for us. You see!"
They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.
Archer,
looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the Parker House
before going to the steamboat landing.
They rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the
hotel.
Archer
held out his hand for the letter. "Shall
I take it in?" he asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang
out and disappeared through the glazed doors.
It was barely half-past ten; but what if the emissary, impatient for
her reply, and not knowing how else to employ his time, were already seated
among the travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom Archer had
caught a glimpse as she went in?
He
waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.
A Sicilian youth with eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his
boots, and an Irish matron to sell him peaches; and every few moments the
doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced
at him as they went by. He
marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the people it let
out should look so like each other, and so like all the other hot men who,
at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land, were passing
continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.
And
then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other faces.
He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to the
farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel that he
saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary, the round and
surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face that was so many more
things at once, and things so different.
It was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the
heat, or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different.
Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and
floated off with the disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign
business man, looking doubly foreign in such a setting.
He vanished in the stream of passersby, and Archer resumed his
patrol.
He
did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and his
unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if Madame
Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she had met the
emissary and been waylaid by him. At
the thought Archer's apprehension rose to anguish.
"If
she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.
The
doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the herdic,
and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent
just three minutes. In the
clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the
disjointed cobblestones to the wharf.
Seated
side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had
hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say
communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their
isolation.
As
the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through
the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar
world of habit was receding also. He
longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the
feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might
never return. But he was afraid
to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her
trust in him. In reality he had
no wish to betray that trust. There
had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned
on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of
her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they
were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the
kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.
As
the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and
the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples tipped with
spray. The fog of sultriness
still hung over the city, but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and
distant promontories with light-houses in the sun.
Madame Olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the
coolness between parted lips. She
had wound a long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and
Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course, and
to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly
elated by their possibility.
In
the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have to
themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and
women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told them--and Archer's
heart sank at the idea of having to talk through their noise.
"This
is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame Olenska,
without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it.
The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at
the windows. It was bare and
cool, with a table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a
bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. No more
guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered its shelter to a
clandestine couple: Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in
the faintly amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.
A woman who had run away from her husband-- and reputedly with
another man--was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for
granted; but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from
his irony. By being so quiet,
so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions
and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old
friends who had so much to say to each other. . . .
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