“Straight to Grote,” she said.
The gas-lit streets whirled by, and she sat observing with no less intentness than before the pavement that was still aswarm with the Saturday night crowd. It was not yet more than an hour since she had passed eastwards through those streets, feeling an ecstatic kinship with the couples that lined the pavements. But now she acknowledged a closer spiritual affinity to the solitary, be-feathered women uneasily flitting about at the street corners, and peering into the faces of passers-by. Had they, too, arranged assignations which were not kept, had they been given rendez-vous like her, where one only rendered herself?... In her hands she still held the letter that she had received at the stage-door, but she did not need to read it twice, for every word of it had impressed itself on her brain. But what should she do with it, this last word of a man who for three months past had so dominated her with the effortless force of a savage nature? She held there, in the hand from which, in anticipation, she had already slipped her glove, his final expression of himself, the last and the fullest exhibition of his real nature. Up till now, perhaps, he had but treated her, so she had conjectured, as a toy, or perhaps there had been a quickened beat or two of his animal heart for her; but whatever the truth of that might be, there was no doubt now of the unveiled sincerity of his last word. If she had been but a toy, she was a toy which he hated and detested with a virulent, overmastering force. And in the strange ways of her woman’s heart, she felt, in those first moments of her knowledge of him, not so much the sting of an outraged pride, or the saltness of the waters of her humiliation, but a perverse thrill of excitement that at last, one way or another, he felt strongly about her. His avowed contempt and dislike did not wound her as much as his expressed indifference would have done.
The car had left the bright streets and enclosed places behind, and in the isolation of the night and the darkness she let free her imprisoned thoughts again, and wondered at the vagueness of them. An hour ago they had been clamorous and brightly coloured; now they were but indistinct pallors with no firm outline. Apart from that one thrill of excitement that at last he felt keenly about her, though the keenness was but an edge of hate and contempt, her conscious mind recorded nothing vivid; the whole outrage that he had committed, in act and word, did not seem to have fallen on her, but was presented to her merely as an external picture. But for some reason her mouth was dry, and for some reason her hand, as it still held his letter, was violently trembling.
Something inside her, she supposed, was in tumult, and caused that physical agitation. But at present her mind sat apart, and only contemplated what had been done to her. It was as if some local anæsthetic had been applied, and she sat by, wholly conscious, but feeling none of the pain of the surgeon’s knife. A hideous operation was going on, and she watched it without any touch of pain or of self-pity.
She found herself repeating sentences of his letter in her mind, and imagining him saying them. No conscious effort of imagination was necessary; merely his voice sounded in that inner temple of the ear to which sounds come not from outside but from the brain. “I have seen many women more beautiful, but none more facile,” was one of those sentences with which her ears were ringing. “If it were not for the continued existence of your husband, your nationality, and my own disinclination, I would make an honest woman of you,” was another. But this externally inaudible repetition of them did not hurt her; it was only benumbed tissues that were being cut and slashed and dissected. They and others like them were insults aimed and dealt at herself; but there was another class of insults altogether, aimed not at her personally but at England, the country that had lavished on him wealth and fame, for until he came to London he was not of outstanding distinction in the operatic world. And now he shook the dust of England off his feet, he signed himself the bitterest of her foes; he spoke of war as imminent. Like the rest of London, she was aware that the relations between Austria and Russia were strained over the question of Serbia, and, like the rest of London, she had thought of it all only as a temporary tangle which the deft fingers of diplomacy would soon unravel. It was only two days ago that the Anglo-German party had met at Aline Gurtner’s, and not a breath of ruffling rumour had disturbed the settled cordiality. But here was Kuhlmann saying that his sudden departure was due to his confidence in Hermann Gurtner’s judgment. What did it all mean?
Her car had turned in at the lodge gates; the moon had risen, and straight in front of her, standing out sharp and clear against the night of stars rose the roofs of Grote, with the windows emblazoned by the moonlight, so that it looked as if the whole house was lit from end to end magnificently to welcome her on her home-coming. And just as the car stopped beneath the portico, swiftly as the return of sensation after an anæsthetic, the numbness of her perceptions passed off, and she knew why her mouth was dry and her hand shook. He had flung back in her face, with insults and contempt, all—all she had given him; he had treated her as no decent man would have treated the most mercenary creature of the street-corners.
And yet, deep down in her heart she knew that if, as some wild, disordered fancy suggested to her, he had at that moment come to the door now opening with that firm, quick step and confident carriage, there was her ungloved hand for him, which already would have torn to atoms his infamous letter.
CHAPTER VIII
ROBIN had been at Cambridge about a fortnight, and on a certain Sunday afternoon was sitting with Jim in the window-seat of the latter’s room over-looking the court. The bell for afternoon chapel had begun, but since they had both been there in the morning, they proposed to abstain from any further religious exercises. The menace of tempest that for the last week had been so swiftly piling up over Europe had barely as yet flecked the scholastic calm of Cambridge with the faintest ruffling of its tranquil surface. Mr. Waters, indeed, was perhaps the only member of St. Stephen’s who had been at all acutely affected, since he had thought it wiser not to go to Baireuth, and had been unable to dispose of his tickets.
Robin was blowing tobacco smoke on to a small green insect that clung to a stalk of mignonette in the window-box.