‘The Zoo?’ she repeated, puzzled.
Then she began to laugh. ‘I wonder,’ she said, her face brimming over with laughter, ‘why you think Stephen wants to be taken to the Zoo. Poor darling’—another poor darling, and this time a live one—‘why, he’s as old as I am.’
As old as she was. Stephen.
She waved her hand. ‘Come some other Sunday,’ she called out as the door shut.
He stood for a moment staring at it. Then he turned away slowly, putting his hat on as he went down the steps, and he was walking away through the rain lost in the most painful thought, mechanically heading for home, when the taxi-driver, realising with amazed indignation what his fare was doing, jerked him back to his obligations by vigorously and rudely shouting ‘Hi!’
II
Ten days to wait till the Sunday after. It was only Friday night. He would see her in between, of course, at The Immortal Hour, and might perhaps manage to take her home again, but would he be able in these snippets of time, these snatches, these beginnings interrupted by the curtain going up or the lights going down, to find out from her who and what was Stephen? It was intolerable to have at last come across her and instantly to find oneself up against Stephen.
Dismal were his conjectures as he was rattled home by the taxi so lately made sweet by her presence. Stephen couldn’t be her brother, for nobody made appointments ahead and carried them out so conscientiously with brothers; and he couldn’t be her uncle or her nephew, the only two remaining satisfactory relationships, because she had said he was as old as she was. Who, then, and what was Stephen?
A faint hope flickered for an instant in the darkness of his mind: sometimes uncles were young; sometimes nephews were old. But the thing was too feeble to give warmth, and almost immediately went out. All Stephens should be stoned, he thought. It was what was done with the first one he had ever heard of; pity the practice hadn’t been kept up. How happy he now would have been except for Stephen. How happy, going to see her the next Sunday but one, going really to see her and sit down squarely with her by himself in a quiet room and look at her frontways instead of for ever only sideways, and she without the hat that extinguished such a lot of what anyhow was such a little. He might even, he thought, after a bit, after they had got really natural with each other—and he felt he could be more natural with her, more happily himself than with any one he had ever met—he might even after a bit have sat on the floor at her feet, as near as possible to her little shoes. And then he would have told her all about everything. God, how he wanted to tell somebody all about everything—somebody who understood. There wasn’t anybody really for understanding except a woman. It didn’t need brains to understand; it didn’t need learning, and a grind of education and logic and scientific detachment, and all the confounded rig-out Lewes, who shared his rooms with him, had. Such things were all right as part of a whole, and were more important, he was ready to admit, than any other part of it if one had the whole; but a man starved if that was all—just starved. Life without a woman in it, a woman of one’s own, was intolerable.
His face as he opened the door with his latchkey was gloomy. Lewes would be sitting in there; Lewes with his brains. Brains, brains....