第4章

Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present.There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women eating fine pastry and talking passionately.It might have been a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character.Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that.And I was by a long way the youngest person in the room.That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes.But the temptation was too great - and Iaddressed him impulsively on the subject of that shipwreck.

He turned his big fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance, which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness.On the matter of the shipwreck he did not say much.He only told me that it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France - in the Bay of Biscay."But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind," he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.

I expressed my regret.I should have liked to hear all about it.

To this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps next time we met...

"But where can we meet?" I cried."I don't come often to this house, you know.""Where? Why on the Cannebiere to be sure.Everybody meets everybody else at least once a day on the pavement opposite the Bourse."This was absolutely true.But though I looked for him on each succeeding day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times.The companions of my idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then)noticed my preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way.They wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair; whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties: for they knew I had a footing in both these -shall we say circles? As to themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide - half a dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short.My own nick-name was "Young Ulysses."I liked it.

But chaff or no chaff they would have been surprised to see me leave them for the burly and sympathetic Mills.I was ready to drop any easy company of equals to approach that interesting man with every mental deference.It was not precisely because of that shipwreck.He attracted and interested me the more because he was not to be seen.The fear that he might have departed suddenly for England - (or for Spain) - caused me a sort of ridiculous depression as though I had missed a unique opportunity.And it was a joyful reaction which emboldened me to signal to him with a raised arm across that cafe.

I was abashed immediately afterwards, when I saw him advance towards my table with his friend.The latter was eminently elegant.He was exactly like one of those figures one can see of a fine May evening in the neighbourhood of the Opera-house in Paris.

Very Parisian indeed.And yet he struck me as not so perfectly French as he ought to have been, as if one's nationality were an accomplishment with varying degrees of excellence.As to Mills, he was perfectly insular.There could be no doubt about him.They were both smiling faintly at me.The burly Mills attended to the introduction: "Captain Blunt."We shook hands.The name didn't tell me much.What surprised me was that Mills should have remembered mine so well.I don't want to boast of my modesty but it seemed to me that two or three days was more than enough for a man like Mills to forget my very existence.As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his personality.Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face, pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn't meet every day in the south of France and still less in Italy.Another thing was that, viewed as an officer in mufti, he did not look sufficiently professional.

That imperfection was interesting, too.

You may think that I am subtilizing my impressions on purpose, but you may take it from a man who has lived a rough, a very rough life, that it is the subtleties of personalities, and contacts, and events, that count for interest and memory - and pretty well nothing else.This - you see - is the last evening of that part of my life in which I did not know that woman.These are like the last hours of a previous existence.It isn't my fault that they are associated with nothing better at the decisive moment than the banal splendours of a gilded cafe and the bedlamite yells of carnival in the street.