“I’ll write or cable from Marseilles,” he said to himself. “I don’t suppose she cares a rap about me: the whole thing was due to our romantic surroundings. But still one would be a fool to lose sight of a real woman like that.... I wish I knew her name.”
Chapter V: THE SQUIRE OF EVERSFIELD
The art of life is very largely the art of burying bones. That is the science of mental economy. When a man is confronted with a problem which he cannot solve; when, so to speak, Fate presents him with a bone which he cannot crack, sometimes, without intent, he slinks away with it and, like a dog, buries it, in the undefined hope that at a later date he may unearth it and find it then more manageable.
Even so, during the sea voyage, Jim unconsciously buried the bewildering thought of Monimé. He was a careless fellow, very reprehensible, having no actual harm in him, yet bearing a record pock-marked, so to speak, with the sins of omission. He was one of the world’s tramps by nature; and now once more he was out upon the high road, and the lights of the city wherein he had slept had faded behind him as he wandered onwards into another sunrise. It is true that he wrote her a long and intense letter upon the day after his departure, and that he posted this upon his arrival at Marseilles; but his brain, by then full of other things, conjured up no clear vision of her, and his heart sent forth no impassioned message with the written word. He had been deeply stirred by her, but also he had been baffled; and, as in the case of a dream, he made no effort to retain the sweetness of the memory.
On the morning of his arrival he called at the office of the solicitors who had inserted the advertisement, and was not a little startled to find himself greeted with that kind of obsequiousness which he had supposed to have vanished from Lincoln’s Inn fifty years ago.
The little pink-and-white man who was the senior partner, and whose name was Beadle, rubbed his hands together as though he were washing them, and actually walked backwards for some paces in front of his visitor, bowing him into a shabby leather chair which stood beside the large, imposing desk.
“I hope,” he crooned, when Jim had established his identity, “that we may still have the duty, and pleasure, of serving you, sir, as we have served your uncle and your grandfather.”