_ Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of
sea between the cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think
it's just flightiness--and sometimes I think it's because, at
heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the
difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study."
She glanced tentatively at Selden's motion less profile, and
resumed with a slight sigh: "Well, all I can say is, I wish she'd
give ME some of her discarded opportunities. I wish we could
change places now, for instance. She could make a very good thing
out of the Brys if she managed them properly, and I should know
just how to look after George Dorset while Bertha is reading
Verlaine with Neddy Silverton."
She met Selden's sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.
"Well, what's the use of mincing matters? We all know that's what
Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good
time she has to provide occupation for George. At first I thought
Lily was going to play her cards well THIS time, but there are
rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here and at Cannes,
and I shouldn't be surprised if there were a break any
day. Lily's only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly--oh,
very badly. The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it's
necessary that George's attention should be pretty continuously
distracted. And I'm bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe
he'd marry her tomorrow if he found out there was anything wrong
with Bertha. But you know him--he's as blind as he's jealous; and
of course Lily's present business is to keep him blind. A clever
woman might know just the right moment to tear off the bandage:
but Lily isn't clever in that way, and when George does open his
eyes she'll probably contrive not to be in his line of vision."
Selden tossed away his cigarette. "By Jove--it's time for my
train," he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in
reply to Mrs. Fisher's surprised comment--"Why, I thought of
course you were at Monte!"--a murmured word to the effect that he
was making Nice his head-quarters.
"The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now," he heard
irrelevantly flung after him.
Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel
overlooking the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple
of gaping portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to
transport them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge
down the steep white road to the station to land him safely in
the afternoon express for Nice; and not till he was installed in
the corner of an empty carriage, did he exclaim to himself, with
a reaction of self-contempt: "What the deuce am I running away
from?"
The pertinence of the question checked Selden's fugitive impulse
before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like
an emotional coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.
He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business
letters to Nice, and at Nice he would quietly await them. He was
already annoyed with him self for having left Monte Carlo, where
he had intended to pass the week which remained to him before
sailing; but it would now be difficult to return on his steps
without an appearance of inconsistency from which his pride
recoiled. In his inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself
beyond the probability of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had
detached himself from her, he could not yet regard her
merely as a social instance; and viewed in a more personal way
she was not likely to be a reassuring object of study. Chance
encounters, or even the repeated mention of her name, would send
his thoughts back into grooves from which he had resolutely
detached them; whereas, if she could be entirely excluded from
his life, the pressure of new and varied impressions, with which
no thought of her was connected, would soon complete the work of
separation. Mrs. Fisher's conversation had, indeed, operated to
that end; but the treatment was too painful to be voluntarily
chosen while milder remedies were untried; and Selden thought he
could trust himself to return gradually to a reasonable view of
Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.
Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in
his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform
warned him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the
next moment there was a hand on the door, and he turned to
confront the very face he was fleeing.
Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon
the train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young
Silverton and Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring
into the carriage, and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise
and welcome, before the whistle of departure sounded. The party,
it appeared, were hastening to Nice in response to a sudden
summons to dine with the Duchess of Beltshire and to see the
water-fete in the bay; a plan evidently improvised--in spite of
Lord Hubert's protesting "Oh, I say, you know,"--for the express
purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry's endeavour to capture the Duchess.
During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time
for a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated her self
opposite to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three
months had elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold
of the Brys' conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over
the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through
which the fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically
visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of
crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard
brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as
a rejuvenation: to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and
arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final
shape.
He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she
took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had
not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such
facility sickened him--but he told himself that it was with the
pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well--would
eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt
himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the
thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and
long DETOURS, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a
point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were
visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for practising
such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last
arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with
her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of
self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either
held captive or forced into the service of the state.
And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had
adjusted itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in
which, even after Mrs. Fisher's elucidating flashes, he still
felt himself agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge
Miss Bart with neglecting her opportunities! To Selden's
exasperated observation she was only too completely alive to
them. She was "perfect" to every one: subservient to Bertha's
anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods,
brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom
met her on an evident footing of old admiration, while young
Silverton, portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her
only as of something vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden
noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself
with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such
adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate. She was
on the edge of something--that was the impression left with him.
He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one
graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that
the ground was failing her.
On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for
the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of
the general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic
pessimism. How any one could come to such a damned hole as the
Riviera--any one with a grain of imagination--with the whole
Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if one's estimate of a
place depended on the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad!
what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach--the way
a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the
whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in
reach--chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the "statutory
causes"; a woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to
digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes--and tragic--like most
absurdities. There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears
a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh--the reason they chucked Sicily
and rushed back? Well--partly, no doubt, Miss Bart's desire to
get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone to art and
poetry--the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And of course
she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh,
she could make him believe anything--ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset was
aware of it--oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn't see! But she could
hold her tongue--she'd had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an
intimate friend--she wouldn't hear a word against her. Only it
hurts a woman's pride--there are some things one doesn't get used
to . . . All this in confidence, of course? Ah--and there were
the ladies signalling from the balcony of the hotel.... He
plunged across the Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative
cigar.
The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the
evening, by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate
a light of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden,
stumbling on a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and
adjourned, still in his company, to the brightly lit Promenade,
where a line of crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness
of the waters. The night was soft and per suasive. Overhead hung
a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from
the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the
coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to
ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats. Down the
lantern-hung Promenade, snatches of band-music floated above the
hum of the crowd and the soft tossing of boughs in dusky gardens;
and between these gardens and the backs of the stands there
flowed a stream of people in whom the vociferous carnival mood
seemed tempered by the growing languor of the season.
Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the
stands facing the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng,
and then found a point of vantage on a high garden-parapet above
the Promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of
the water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface;
but the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and
seemed to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than the show
itself. After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and,
dropping alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first
corner and turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long
garden-walls overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the
pavement; an empty cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare,
and presently Selden saw two persons emerge from the opposite
shadows, signal to the cab, and drive off in it toward the centre
of the town. The moonlight touched them as they paused to enter
the carriage, and he recognized Mrs. Dorset and young Silverton.
Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw
that the time was close on eleven. He took another cross street,
and without breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way
to the fashionable club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here,
amid the blaze of crowded baccarat tables, he caught sight of
Lord Hubert Dacey, seated with his habitual worn smile behind a
rapidly dwindling heap of gold. The heap being in due course
wiped out, Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining Selden,
adjourned with him to the deserted terrace of the club. It was
now past midnight, and the throng on the stands was dispersing,
while the long trails of red-lit boats scattered and faded
beneath a sky repossessed by the tranquil splendour of the moon. _