“O, but you are, eh! She is bewitched, you cannot speak to her, she cannot speak to you, but yet you love. O, she is vairy vairy fond of you, Mr. Hardross. Why not? She has the best opinions of you.”
“Ah, she will change her opinion now. A fool like me?”
“No one ever changes an opinion. Your opinions govern and guide and change you. If they don’t they are not worth holding. And most of them are not, eh, do you see, we are such fools but God is our help.”
She talked confidently, intimately and quickly, but Hardross wished she would not do so, or use her hairpins in that absurd distracting way. He himself had no confidence; he was reserved by nature, irrevocably, and the mask of deliberation was necessary to him.
“Madame Peshkov, I shall take her out for a walk in the town, now, at once!” he cried.
“Ah, so?” Madame nodded her head vigorously, even approvingly. He had sprung up and approached the quiet woman. All her gentle nearness overcame him and he took her audaciously into his arms. Not less eagerly she slid to his breast and clung there like a bird to the shelter of its tree. Julia turned to Madame Peshkov with a smiling apologetic shrug, as much as to say: “What can one do with such a fellow, so strong he is, you see!” Madame bade him bring Julia later on to the café where they always dined.
His happiness was profound. He had never had an experience so moving as the adorable dumb woman by his side: yet so unsurprising, as if its possibility had always lain goldenly in his mind like an undreamed dream, or like music, half-remembered music. There was nothing, of course, just nothing they could talk about. They could look into shop windows together rather intimately, and they were a long time in a shady arcade of the park, full of lime-browsing bees, where they sat watching a peacock picking the gnats off the shrubs. It was the pleasantest possible defeat of time. Then there was the handsome girl crossing the yard of a weaving mill as they passed. She was carrying a great bale of bright blue wool and had glanced at them with a friendly smile. Her bare white arms encircled the wool: she had big gilt rings in her ears, and her fine shining chestnut-coloured hair was disarrayed and tumbled upon the bale. Julia had pressed his arm with joy. Yes, she delighted in the things he delighted in; and she felt too that sense of sorrow that hung in the air about them.
Her appearance in the café stirred everybody like a wave of sweet air. Hardross was filled with pride. He felt that it was just so that she would enrich the world wherever she wandered, that things would respond to her appearance in astonishing mysterious ways. Why, even the empty wine glasses seemed to behave like large flowers made miraculously out of water, a marvel of crystal petals blooming but for her; certainly the glasses on other tables didn’t look at all like these. He drank four glasses of wine and after dinner they all sat together in the flat until the half darkness was come. And now Madame Peshkov too was very silent; she sat smoking or scratching her head with her pins. It was nine o’clock, but there remained a preposterous glare in the west that threw lateral beams against the tops of tall buildings, although the pavements were already dim. It made the fronts of the plastered houses over the way look like cream cheese. Six scarlet chimney pots stood stolidly at attention—the torsos of six guardsmen from whom head and limbs had been unkindly smitten; the roof seemed to be rushing away from them. Beyond was an echo of the sunset, faint in the northern sky. How sweet, how sad, to sit so silently in this tremulous gloom. It was only at the last when they parted at her door that the shadow of their division became omnipresent. Then it overwhelmed them.
Hardross crept upstairs to his own rooms. In such plights the mind, careless of time present and time past, full of an anguish that quenches and refills like a sponge, writhes beyond hope with those strange lesions of demeanour that confound the chronicler. Tra-la-la, sang the distracted man, snapping his sweating fingers in time with a ribald leering ditty, Tra-la-la. He dropped plumb to Atlantean depths of grief, only to emerge like a spouting whale with the maddening Tra-la-la tugging him, a hook in his body, from despair to dementia. He was roused from this vertiginous exercise by a knocking at his door. The door was thrust open, and Madame Peshkov asked if he was there. He rose up and switched on a light.
“What is to be done now?” cried the lady. If her silence below had been complete, as complete as poor Julia’s, she was now fully audible and not a little agitated. “What is to be done? I cannot believe it of her but it is true, as true as God!”