第22章

Before very long Dona Rita and Blunt rejoined us and we sat down around the table; but before we could begin to talk a dramatically sudden ring at the front door stilled our incipient animation.

Dona Rita looked at us all in turn, with surprise and, as it were, with suspicion."How did he know I was here?" she whispered after looking at the card which was brought to her.She passed it to Blunt, who passed it to Mills, who made a faint grimace, dropped it on the table-cloth, and only whispered to me, "A journalist from Paris.""He has run me to earth," said Dona Rita."One would bargain for peace against hard cash if these fellows weren't always ready to snatch at one's very soul with the other hand.It frightens me."Her voice floated mysterious and penetrating from her lips, which moved very little.Mills was watching her with sympathetic curiosity.Mr.Blunt muttered: "Better not make the brute angry."For a moment Dona Rita's face, with its narrow eyes, its wide brow, and high cheek bones, became very still; then her colour was a little heightened."Oh," she said softly, "let him come in.He would be really dangerous if he had a mind - you know," she said to Mills.

The person who had provoked all those remarks and as much hesitation as though he had been some sort of wild beast astonished me on being admitted, first by the beauty of his white head of hair and then by his paternal aspect and the innocent simplicity of his manner.They laid a cover for him between Mills and Dona Rita, who quite openly removed the envelopes she had brought with her, to the other side of her plate.As openly the man's round china-blue eyes followed them in an attempt to make out the handwriting of the addresses.

He seemed to know, at least slightly, both Mills and Blunt.To me he gave a stare of stupid surprise.He addressed our hostess.

"Resting? Rest is a very good thing.Upon my word, I thought Iwould find you alone.But you have too much sense.Neither man nor woman has been created to live alone...." After this opening he had all the talk to himself.It was left to him pointedly, and I verily believe that I was the only one who showed an appearance of interest.I couldn't help it.The others, including Mills, sat like a lot of deaf and dumb people.No.It was even something more detached.They sat rather like a very superior lot of waxworks, with the fixed but indetermined facial expression and with that odd air wax figures have of being aware of their existence being but a sham.

I was the exception; and nothing could have marked better my status of a stranger, the completest possible stranger in the moral region in which those people lived, moved, enjoying or suffering their incomprehensible emotions.I was as much of a stranger as the most hopeless castaway stumbling in the dark upon a hut of natives and finding them in the grip of some situation appertaining to the mentalities, prejudices, and problems of an undiscovered country -of a country of which he had not even had one single clear glimpse before.

It was even worse in a way.It ought to have been more disconcerting.For, pursuing the image of the cast-away blundering upon the complications of an unknown scheme of life, it was I, the castaway, who was the savage, the simple innocent child of nature.

Those people were obviously more civilized than I was.They had more rites, more ceremonies, more complexity in their sensations, more knowledge of evil, more varied meanings to the subtle phrases of their language.Naturally! I was still so young! And yet Iassure you, that just then I lost all sense of inferiority.And why? Of course the carelessness and the ignorance of youth had something to do with that.But there was something else besides.

Looking at Dona Rita, her head leaning on her hand, with her dark lashes lowered on the slightly flushed cheek, I felt no longer alone in my youth.That woman of whom I had heard these things Ihave set down with all the exactness of unfailing memory, that woman was revealed to me young, younger than anybody I had ever seen, as young as myself (and my sensation of my youth was then very acute); revealed with something peculiarly intimate in the conviction, as if she were young exactly in the same way in which Ifelt myself young; and that therefore no misunderstanding between us was possible and there could be nothing more for us to know about each other.Of course this sensation was momentary, but it was illuminating; it was a light which could not last, but it left no darkness behind.On the contrary, it seemed to have kindled magically somewhere within me a glow of assurance, of unaccountable confidence in myself: a warm, steady, and eager sensation of my individual life beginning for good there, on that spot, in that sense of solidarity, in that seduction.