Fantastic Metropolis

He shook an impatient head. “Ah! we’re not staring!”

“Yes, but we’re talking.”

Well, we were—after a fashion.” He lost himself in the memory of it. “It was as friendly as this.” I had on my tongue’s end to ask if that was saying much for it, but I made the point instead that what they had evidently done was gaze in mutual admiration. Then I asked if recognition of her had been immediate. “Not quite,” he replied, “for of course I didn’t expect her; but it came to me long before she went who she was—who she could only be.”

I thought a little. “And how did she at last go?”

“Just as she arrived. The door was open behind her and she passed out.”

“Was she rapid—slow?”

“Rather quick. But looking behind her,” he smiled to add, “I let her go, for I perfectly knew I was to take it as she wished.”

I was conscious of exhaling a long vague sigh. “Well, you must take it now as I wish—you must let me go.”

At this he drew near me again, detaining and persuading me, declaring with all due gallantry that I was a very different matter. I’d have given anything to have been able to ask him if he had touched her, but the words refused to form themselves: I knew to the last tenth of a tone how horrid and vulgar they’d sound. I said something else—I forget exactly what; it was feebly tortuous and intended, meanly enough, to make him tell me without my putting the question. But he didn’t tell me; he only repeated, as from a glimpse of the propriety of soothing and consoling me, the sense of his declaration of some minutes before—the assurance that she was indeed exquisite, as I had always insisted, but that I was his “real” friend and his very own for ever. This led me to reassert, in the spirit of my previous rejoinder, that I had at least the merit of being alive; which in turn drew from him again the flash of contradiction I dreaded. “Oh she was alive! She was, she was!”

“She was dead, she was dead!” I asservated with an energy, a determination it should be so, which comes back to me now as almost grotesque. But the sound of the word as it rang out filled me suddenly with horror, and all the natural emotion the meaning of it might have evoked in other conditions gathered and broke in a flood. It rolled over me that here was a great affection quenched and how much I had loved and trusted her. I had a vision at the same time of the lonely beauty of her end. “She’s gone—she’s lost to us for ever!” I burst into sobs.

“That’s exactly how I feel,” he exclaimed, speaking with extreme kindness and pressing me to him for comfort. “She’s gone; she’s lost to us for ever; so what does it matter now?” He bent over me, and when his face had touched mine I scarcely knew if it were wet with my tears or his own.

VII

It was my theory, my conviction, it became, as I may say, my attitude, that they had still never “met”; and it was just on this ground I felt it generous to ask him to stand with me at her grave. He did so very modestly and tenderly, and I assumed, though he himself clearly cared nothing for the danger, that the solemnity of the occasion, largely made up of persons who had known them both and had a sense of the long joke, would sufficiently deprive his presence of all light association. On the question of what had happened the evening of her death little more passed between us. He on his side lacked producible corroboration—everything, that is, but a statement of the house-porter, on his own admission a most casual and intermittent personage, that between the hours of ten o’clock and midnight no less than three ladies in deep black had flitted in and out of the place. This proved far too much; we had neither of us any use for three. He knew I considered I had accounted for every fragment of her time, and we dropped the matter as settled; we abstained from further discussion. What I knew however was that he abstained to please me rather than because he yielded to my reasons. He didn’t yield—he was only indulgent; he clung to his interpretation because he liked it better. He liked it better, I held, because it had more to say to his vanity. That, in a similar position, wouldn’t have been its effect on me, though I had doubtless quite as much; but these are things of individual humour and as to which no person can judge for another. I should have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august, than such an impulse of reparation, of admonition, or even of curiosity. That was beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of myself for being so distinguished and so selected. It was public that he had already, that he had long figured in that light, and what was such a fact itself but almost a proof? Each of the strange visitations contributed to establishing the other. He had a different feeling; but he had also, I hasten to add, an unmistakable desire not to make a stand or, as they say, a fuss about it. I might believe what I liked—the more so that the whole thing was in a manner a mystery of my producing. It was an event of my history, a puzzle of my consciousness, not of his; therefore he would take about it any tone that struck me as convenient. We had both at all events other business on hand; we were pressed with preparations for our marriage.