“I wonder,” he began again, “if I might”—it sounded dreadfully silly to him, but having begun he went on—“if I might invite you to my church this evening, a rather special choral service, very jolly, you know. I’m the organist; would you come?”
No answer.
“Would you care to come?”
She lifted both her hands and touching her lips and ears with significant gestures shook her head ever so hopelessly at him.
“Deaf and dumb!” he exclaimed. Perhaps the shock of the revelation showed too painfully in his face for she turned now sadly away. But the hall was divinely empty. He caught one of the exquisite hands and pressed it to his lips.
Thereafter Hardross walked about as if he too were deaf and dumb, except for a vast effusion of sighs. He could praise that delicacy of the rarest whereby she had forborne to lure him, as she could so easily have done, into a relation so shrouded and so vague. But that did not solve his problem, it only solidified it. He wanted and awaited the inspiration of a gesture she could admire, something that would propitiate her delicacy and alarms. He did not want to destroy by clumsy persistencies the frail net of her regard for him; he was quite clear about that, the visible fineness of her quality so quelled him. Applying himself to the task he took lessons in the alphabet language, that inductile response of fingers and thumbs.
Meanwhile she had marked her sense of the complication by hiding like a hurt bird, and although the mystery of the quiet rooms was now exposed she herself remained unseen. He composed a graceful note and left it upon the console table. The note disappeared but no reply came: she made no sign and he regretted his ardour.
Such a deadlock of course could not exist for ever, and one evening he met her walking up the stairs. She stopped mutually with him. He was carrying his music. He made a vain attempt to communicate with her by means of his finger alphabet, but she did not understand him although she delightedly made a reply on her fingers which he was too recently initiated to interpret. They were again at a standstill: he could think of nothing to do except to open his book of organ music and show her the title page. She looked it over very intelligently as he tried by signs to convey his desire to her, but he was certain she was blank about it all. He searched his pockets for a pencil—and swore at his non-success. There he stood like a fool, staring at her smiling face until to his amazement she took his arm and they descended the stairs, they were in the street together. He walked to the church on something vastly less substantial than air, and vastly superior.
Hardross’s church was square and ugly, with large round-headed windows. Its entrance was up some steps between four Corinthian pillars upon the bases of which cabmen snoozed when it was warm or coughed and puffed in the winter cold. There was a pump on the kerb and a stand for hackney cabs. A jungle of evergreens squatted in a railed corner under the tower, with a file of iris plants that never flowered. Upon the plinth of the columns a ribald boy had chalked:
REMOVE THIS OBSTACLE