“That’s all right.”
She laughed merrily—not on one note as most people laugh, but all up and down the scale. The sparkle of morning was in her voice. Like a flash out of a happy dream she moved through the ice-cold world. People turned to gaze after her. A policeman, stamping his feet on the look-out for some attractive housemaid, touched his helmet She nodded.
“D’you know him?”
“Never clapped eyes on him in my life. A pretty woman belongs to the whole world, Teddy.”
Butcher boys, hopping down from carts, stood thunderstruck. After she had passed they whistled, giving vent to their approbation. Teddy had the satisfaction of knowing that he was envied; he snuggled his hand more closely into hers. Even Mr. Yaffon, the man who was as faded as a memory, raised dim eyes and shrunk against the wall, stung into painful life. His little dog waddled ahead, doing her best to coax him to come on, trying to say, “None of that, Master. You’ve done it once; please not a second time.”
Was it only Teddy’s fancy—the fancy of every lover since the world was created—that everything, animate and inanimate, was jealous of him? Streets seemed to blaze at her coming. Sparrows flew down and chirped noisily in the gutters, as though they felt that where she was there should be singing. Famished trees shivered and broke their silence, mumbling hoarse apologies: “It isn’t our fault Winter’s given us colds in the head. If we had our way, we’d be leafy for you.”
Years later Teddy looked back and questioned, was it love that the little boy felt that winter’s morning? He had experienced what the grown world calls real love by then, and yet he couldn’t see the difference, except that real love is more afraid, thinks more of itself and is more exacting. If love be a divine uplifting, a desirable madness, a mirage of fine deception which exists only in the lover’s brain, then he felt it that morning. And he felt it in all its goodness, without the manifold doubts as to ulterior motives, without the unstable tenderness which so swiftly changes to utterest cruelty, and without the need to crush in order to make certain. In his love of Vashti he came nearer to the white standards of chivalry than was ever again to be his lot In later years he asked himself, was she really so incredibly beautiful? Did her step have the lightness, her face the bewitching power, her voice the gentleness he had imagined? By that time he had learnt the cynical wisdom which wonders, “What is this hand that I hold so fast, more than any other hand? What are these lips? Flesh—-there are others as warm and beautiful Is this meeting love or is it chance?”
He was far from that blighting caution yet Merely to be allowed to serve her, if it could help her to be allowed to die for her, to be allowed to give his all—he asked no more. He carried his all in an ill-wrapped parcel beneath his arm. She observed it.
“Holloa! Brought your luggage?”
“Not my luggage.”