It was that wave of the hand that did it. He knew I had been playing him a joke. There I was, beckoning to him just before it was too late and, roaring with laughter—so I am told—to think how nearly I had taken him in, he leapt after me.
When I got out of the taxi at Victoria, to my amazement, there he was, splashed with mud behind our wheels from nose to tail.
"A jolly good joke!" he roared. "A jolly good joke! I knew there must have been some mistake." And so there was, but the poor little devil had to pay for it at Algiers.
What good then was Italy to us after such journeys as these? We walked back home to lunch that morning, Dandy forlorn, I with the taste of envy still lingering in my mind.
How can I explain? Life has never reached me. No woman has ever come to me in trouble—and that is part of life; no man has ever told the story of a love affair to me in the whole course of my existence. Whenever a man sees me he slaps me on the back; whenever I meet a woman whom I know, she pats Dandy on the back instead. And to suggest Italy for such a disease as that!
A night or two later, I strolled into a restaurant where occasionally I sup alone. The young man and the young woman go there. Corks fly out of bottles and laughter flies after them. Sometimes there I can imagine I have never seen forty, and when I assure myself that I am forty-three, it seems nothing—nothing at all. The waters of Lethe are in the very finger-bowls on their tables, though often indeed, as I have rubbed it on my lips, it seems I have tasted the waters of Marah. That night after supper, I sat in the lounge outside, taking my coffee. At the other end of the settee I had chosen sat a woman of twenty-eight, listening patiently to the egotism of a boy of twenty-six. Here and there she placed a word with cunning knowledge of his kind. Now and again she laughed, when immediately rose his empty bark above it. At times he laughed all by himself.
"I suppose I shall have to marry her one of these days and settle down," I heard him say, and from that moment my ears caught no sound other than their two voices; his in limping, stilted narrative, hers in encouraging assent.
It was a story no man has the right to tell. Told to a woman, it set the blood racing in my veins till it tingled hot and furious in my very fingers. It seemed he had been to the West Indies, trading in what I don't know and care less. And there, no doubt, with what we call the superiority of our European civilization, he had captured the affections of a planter's daughter.
I caught her name, just her Christian name, as he disclosed it. Clarissa—only Clarissa—I heard no more. He was one of those youths who must give you names to make his story true. And how Clarissa loved him! Behind all his boasting and that barking laugh of his, I could see how well she loved him too. Could it have been anything but love that had brought her from her sunny islands to that grey land of Ireland where he had taken her?
I thought of Mary Queen of Scots, exiled from her golden France to those dim mists of Scotland, the greatest tragedy the world has ever seen. Only the need of history to make this as great a tragedy as well.