They wearied me. It seemed to me that they sparked and fizzled and whirred with the sham life of machinery: and like machinery they affected me. For at first I could not hear anything but them, and then they confused and tired me, and last of all they faded into a mere wall-paper of sound, and I forgot that they were there, save that I wondered now and then, as stray sentences shrilled out of the buzz, that they were not yet oppressed into silence.
For there was grief abroad—a grief without shape, without sound, without expression—a quality, a pulsing essence, a distillation of pure pain. From some centre it rayed out, it spread, it settled upon the room, imperceptibly, like the fall of dust. It reached me. I felt it. It soaked into me. I ached with it. I could not sit quiet. I was not drawn, I was impelled. Dead—the dull, bewildered voice was still in my ears. That I heard. But it was statement, not appeal. It was not his suffering that demanded relief, but some responding capacity for pain in me that awoke and cried out restlessly that such anguish was unlawful, beyond endurance, that still it I must, I must!
I rose. I looked round me. Then I went very softly into the outer room.
He was still standing at the window. The street lamp, level with the sill, was quenched to a yellow gloom. It lit up the wet striped branches and dead bobbins of the plane-tree beside it, and the sickly undersides of its shrivelled last leaves. I never thought a tree could look so ghastly. Against that unnatural glitter and the luminous thick air the man and the half-drawn curtain stood out in solid, unfamiliar bulk of black.
I came and stood just behind him. He was so big that I only reached his shoulder. He may have heard me: I think he did; but he did not turn. I was not frightened of him. That was so queer, because as a rule I can’t talk to strangers. I get nervous and red, and foolish-tongued, especially with men. Of course I knew all the usual men, the doctor at home, and the church people, and husbands that came back by the five-thirty, and now all Anita’s friends, and Mr. Flood; but I never had anything to say to them or they to me. But with Kent Rehan, somehow, it was different. He was different. I never thought—‘This is a strange man.’ I never thought—‘He doesn’t know me: it’s impertinent to break in upon him: what will he think?’ I never thought of all that. I never thought about myself at all. I was just passionately desiring to help him and I didn’t know how to do it.
I think I stood there for four or five minutes, trying to find words, opening my lips, and then catching back the phrase before a sound came, because it seemed so poor and meaningless. And all the while the Baxter girl’s words were running in my head—‘They say he was in love with her.’
With her—with Madala Grey. She was the key. I had the strangest pang of interest in this unknown woman. Who was she? What was she? What had she been? What had she done so to centre herself in so many, in such alien lives? What had she in common for them all? Books, books, books—I’d never heard of her books! And she was married. Yet the loss of her, unpossessed, could bring such a look (as he turned restlessly from the window at last) such a look to Kent Rehan’s face. I was filled with a sort of anger against that dead woman, and I envied her. I never saw a man look so—as if his very soul had been bruised. It was not, it was never, a weak face, and it was not a young one; yet in that instant I saw in it, and clearly, its own forgotten childhood, bewildered by its first encounter with pain. It was that fleeting look that touched me so and gave me courage, so that I found myself saying to him, very low and quickly, and with a queer authority—
“It won’t always hurt so much. It will get easier. I promise you it will. It does. Truly it does. In six months—I do know.”
He looked down at me strangely.
I went on because I had to, but it was difficult. It was desperately difficult. I could hear myself blundering and stammering, and using hateful slangy phrases that I never used as a rule.