第48章 THE SEVENTH(9)

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the cathedral and along by the moat of the bishop's palace, and Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days.The evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its full and very bright.Insensibly the soft afterglow passed into moonlight.

At first the two companions talked very little.Sir Richmond was well content with this tacit friendliness and Miss Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved to tell him things about herself that hitherto she had told to no one.It was not merely that she wanted to tell him these things but also that for reasons she did not put as yet very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought to know.She talked of herself at first in general terms.

"Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting for ever and then suddenly one tears into life," she said.It was even more so for women than it was for men.You are shown life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what seems to be intensely interesting activities and endless delightful and frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had time to look at it before you are called upon to make decisions.And there is something in your blood that urges you to decisive acts.Your mind, your reason resists."Give me time," it says."They clamour at you with treats, crowds, shows, theatres, all sorts of things; lovers buzz at you, each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying to get clear to live a little of your own." Her father had had one merit at any rate.He had been jealous of her lovers and very ready to interfere.

"I wanted a lover to love," she said."Every girl of course wants that.I wanted to be tremendously excited....And at the same time I dreaded the enormous interference....

"I wasn't temperamentally a cold girl.Men interested and excited me, but there were a lot of men about and they clashed with each other.Perhaps way down in some out of the way place I should have fallen in love quite easily with the one man who came along.But no man fixed his image.After a year or so I think I began to lose the power which is natural to a young girl of falling very easily into love.I became critical of the youths and men who were attracted to me and Ibecame analytical about myself....

"I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon that I can speak so freely to you....But there are things about myself that I have never had out even with myself.Ican talk to myself in you--"

She paused baffled."I know exactly," said Sir Richmond.

"In my composition I perceive there have always been two ruling strains.I was a spoilt child at home, a rather reserved girl at school, keen on my dignity.I liked respect.

I didn't give myself away.I suppose one would call that personal pride.Anyhow it was that streak made me value the position of being a rich married woman in New York.That was why I became engaged to Lake.He seemed to be as good a man as there was about.He said he adored me and wanted me to crown his life.He wasn't ill-looking or ill-mannered.The second main streak in my nature wouldn't however fit in with that."She stopped short.

"The second streak, " said Sir Richmond.

"Oh!--Love of beauty, love of romance.I want to give things their proper names; I don't want to pretend to you....It was more or less than that....It was--imaginative sensuousness.Why should I pretend it wasn't in me? I believe that streak is in all women.""I believe so too.In all properly constituted women.""I tried to devote that streak to Lake," she said."I did my best for him.But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business as a lover.And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me protesting, with a man named Caston.It was a notorious affair.Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston.

Except when my father is about.His jealousy has blasted an area of silence--in that matter--all round him.He will not know of that story.And they dare not tell him.I should pity anyone who tried to tell it him.""What sort of man was this Caston?"

Miss Grammont seemed to consider.She did not look at Sir Richmond; she kept her profile to him.

"He was," she said deliberately, "a very rotten sort of man."She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial."Ibelieve I always knew he wasn't right.But he was very handsome.And ten years younger than Lake.And nobody else seemed to be all right, so I swallowed that.He was an artist, a painter.Perhaps you know his work." Sir Richmond shook his head."He could make American business men look like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and he was beginning to be popular.He made love to me.In exactly the way Lake didn't.If I shut my eyes to one or two things, it was delightful.I liked it.But my father would have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he would a man of colour.I made a fool of myself, as people say, about Caston.Well--when the war came, he talked in a way that irritated me.He talked like an East Side Annunzio, about art and war.It made me furious to know it was all talk and that he didn't mean business....I made him go."She paused for a moment."He hated to go.""Then I relented.Or I missed him and I wanted to be made love to.Or I really wanted to go on my own account.Iforget.I forget my motives altogether now.That early war time was a queer time for everyone.A kind of wildness got into the blood....I threw over Lake.All the time things had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to Lake.I went to France.I did good work.I did do good work.

And also things were possible that would have seemed fantastic in America.You know something of the war-time atmosphere.There was death everywhere and people snatched at gratifications.Caston made 'To-morrow we die' his text.We contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly.