第68章

I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning to steal into the room.How strange it seemed.Except for the glazed rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with narrow birds' wings.The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper.But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing a power to see and hear.

Without words, without gestures, Dona Rita was heard again."It may have been as near coming to pass as this." She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail."Yes, as near as that.Why?

How? Just like that, for nothing.Because it had come up.

Because a wild notion had entered a practical old woman's head.

Yes.And the best of it is that I have nothing to complain of.

Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly safe with these two.

It is they or rather he who couldn't trust me, or rather that something which I express, which I stand for.Mills would never tell me what it was.Perhaps he didn't know exactly himself.He said it was something like genius.My genius! Oh, I am not conscious of it, believe me, I am not conscious of it.But if Iwere I wouldn't pluck it out and cast it away.I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing! Don't be stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret.There is no regret.First of all because Iam I - and then because...My dear, believe me, I have had a horrible time of it myself lately."This seemed to be the last word.Outwardly quiet, all the time, it was only then that she became composed enough to light an enormous cigarette of the same pattern as those made specially for the king - por el Rey! After a time, tipping the ash into the bowl on her left hand, she asked me in a friendly, almost tender, tone:

"What are you thinking of, amigo?"

"I was thinking of your immense generosity.You want to give a crown to one man, a fortune to another.That is very fine.But Isuppose there is a limit to your generosity somewhere.""I don't see why there should be any limit - to fine intentions!

Yes, one would like to pay ransom and be done with it all.""That's the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can't think of you as ever having been anybody's captive.""You do display some wonderful insight sometimes.My dear, I begin to suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers.They think they dominate us.Even exceptional men will think that; men too great for mere vanity, men like Henry Allegre for instance, who by his consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to dominate all sorts of people.Yet for the most part they can only do it because women choose more or less consciously to let them do so.Henry Allegre, if any man, might have been certain of his own power; and yet, look: I was a chit of a girl, I was sitting with a book where I had no business to be, in his own garden, when he suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of seventeen, a most uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old black frock and shabby boots.I could have run away.I was perfectly capable of it.But I stayed looking up at him and - in the end it was HE who went away and it was I who stayed.""Consciously?" I murmured.

"Consciously? You may just as well ask my shadow that lay so still by me on the young grass in that morning sunshine.I never knew before how still I could keep.It wasn't the stillness of terror.

I remained, knowing perfectly well that if I ran he was not the man to run after me.I remember perfectly his deep-toned, politely indifferent 'Restez donc.' He was mistaken.Already then I hadn't the slightest intention to move.And if you ask me again how far conscious all this was the nearest answer I can make you is this:

that I remained on purpose, but I didn't know for what purpose Iremained.Really, that couldn't be expected....Why do you sigh like this? Would you have preferred me to be idiotically innocent or abominably wise?""These are not the questions that trouble me," I said."If Isighed it is because I am weary."

"And getting stiff, too, I should say, in this Pompeiian armchair.

You had better get out of it and sit on this couch as you always used to do.That, at any rate, is not Pompeiian.You have been growing of late extremely formal, I don't know why.If it is a pose then for goodness' sake drop it.Are you going to model yourself on Captain Blunt? You couldn't, you know.You are too young.""I don't want to model myself on anybody," I said."And anyway Blunt is too romantic; and, moreover, he has been and is yet in love with you - a thing that requires some style, an attitude, something of which I am altogether incapable.""You know it isn't so stupid, this what you have just said.Yes, there is something in this.""I am not stupid," I protested, without much heat.

"Oh, yes, you are.You don't know the world enough to judge.You don't know how wise men can be.Owls are nothing to them.Why do you try to look like an owl? There are thousands and thousands of them waiting for me outside the door: the staring, hissing beasts.

You don't know what a relief of mental ease and intimacy you have been to me in the frankness of gestures and speeches and thoughts, sane or insane, that we have been throwing at each other.I have known nothing of this in my life but with you.There had always been some fear, some constraint, lurking in the background behind everybody, everybody - except you, my friend.""An unmannerly, Arcadian state of affairs.I am glad you like it.