Gumbril looked through the railings at the profound darkness of the park. Vast it was and melancholy, with a string, here and there, of receding lights. “Terrible,” he said, and repeated the word several times. “Terrible, terrible.” All the legless soldiers grinding barrel-organs, all the hawkers of toys stamping their leaky boots in the gutters of the Strand; at the corner of Cursitor Street and Chancery Lane, the old woman with matches, for ever holding to her left eye a handkerchief as yellow and dirty as the winter fog. What was wrong with the eye? He had never dared to look, but hurried past as though she were not there, or sometimes, when the fog was more than ordinarily cold and stifling, paused for an instant with averted eyes to drop a brown coin into her tray of matches. And then there were the murderers hanged at eight o’clock, while one was savouring, almost with voluptuous consciousness, the final dream-haunted doze. There was the phthisical charwoman who used to work at his father’s house, until she got too weak and died. There were the lovers who turned on the gas and the ruined shopkeepers jumping in front of trains. Had one a right to be contented and well-fed, had one a right to one’s education and good taste, a right to knowledge and conversation and the leisurely complexities of love?
He looked once more through the railings at the park’s impenetrable, rustic night, at the lines of beaded lamps. He looked, and remembered another night, years ago, during the war, when there were no lights in the park and the electric moons above the roadway were in almost total eclipse. He had walked up this street alone, full of melancholy emotions which, though the cause of them was different, were in themselves much the same as the melancholy emotions which swelled windily up within him to-night. He had been most horribly in love.
“What did you think,” he asked abruptly, “of Myra Viveash?”
“Think?” said Shearwater. “I don’t know that I thought very much about her. Not a case for ratiocination exactly, is she? She seemed to me entertaining enough, as women go. I said I’d lunch with her on Thursday.”
Gumbril felt, all of a sudden, the need to speak confidentially. “There was a time,” he said in a tone that was quite unreally airy, off-hand and disengaged, “years ago, when I totally lost my head about her. Totally.” Those tear-wet patches on his pillow, cold against his cheek in the darkness; and oh, the horrible pain of weeping, vainly, for something that was nothing, that was everything in the world! “Towards the end of the war it was. I remember walking up this dismal street one night, in the pitch darkness, writhing with jealousy.” He was silent. Spectrally, like a dim, haunting ghost, he had hung about her; dumbly, dumbly imploring, appealing. “The weak, silent man,” she used to call him. And once for two or three days, out of pity, out of affection, out of a mere desire, perhaps, to lay the tiresome ghost, she had given him what his mournful silence implored—only to take it back, almost as soon as accorded. That other night, when he had walked up this street before, desire had eaten out his vitals and his body seemed empty, sickeningly and achingly void; jealousy was busily reminding him, with an unflagging malice, of her beauty—of her beauty and the hateful, ruffian hands which now caressed, the eyes which looked on it. That was all long ago.
“She is certainly handsome,” said Shearwater, commenting, at one or two removes, on Gumbril’s last remark. “I can see that she might make any one who got involved in her decidedly uncomfortable.” After a day or two’s continuous sweating, it suddenly occurred to him, one might perhaps find sea-water more refreshing than fresh water. That would be queer.
Gumbril burst out ferociously laughing. “But there were other times,” he went on jauntily, “when other people were jealous of me.” Ah, revenge, revenge. In the better world of the imagination it was possible to get one’s own back. What fiendish vendettas were there carried to successful ends! “I remember once writing her a quatrain in French.” (He had written it years after the whole thing was over, he had never sent it to any one at all; but that was all one.) “How did it go? Ah, yes.” And he recited, with suitable gestures:
“‘Puisque nous sommes là, je dois,
Vous avertir, sans trop de honte,
Que je n’égale pas le Comte