“Well, my dear, are you Miss Burwarton?”
And my girl shivered. It was a little shiver which I don’t suppose anyone else noticed. But why should she have shivered at her own name?
She said: “Yes, I’m Eva Burwarton.”
I was right. Beyond doubt I was right. The “i” sound was deliciously pure, the “r” daintily liquid. Oh, I knew the sound well enough. My vision had been justified.
The bustling woman spoke:
“My dear, Mr. Oddy has been telling me about your poor dear brother. So sad . . . such a terrible loss for you. But the Lord . . .”
I didn’t hear what precisely the Lord had done in this case, for a group of Sisters of Mercy in pale blue uniforms and white caps passed between us, but I saw the appropriate and pious gloom gathering on Mrs. Somebody’s face, and in the face of Eva Burwarton not the shadow of a reply, not the faintest gleam of sympathy or remembered grief.
Good Lord, I thought, this is an extraordinary girl who can’t or won’t raise the flicker of an eyelid when she’s being swamped with condolences about a brother to whom something horrible has evidently happened. And then the busy woman swept her away, and all the length of the platform I watched her beautiful, pale, serious face. And with her going that sudden vision, that atmosphere which still enwrapped me, faded, and I turned to the emptier end of the platform, where the wounded sepoys were squatting, looking as pathetic as only sick Indians can. And I was back in Nairobi again, with low clouds rolling over the parched Athi Plains, and the earth and the air and every living creature athirst for rain and the relief of thunder. A funny business . . .
But all that day the moment haunted me: that, and the girl’s white face and serious brows, and the extraordinary incongruity of her ill-made, ill-fitting dress with her pale beauty. And her name, Eva Burwarton, which seemed somehow strangely representative of her tragic self. At first I couldn’t place it at all. It sounded like Warburton gone wrong. And then when I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, I remembered that there was a village of that name somewhere near Wenlock Edge. And once again with a thrill I realised that I was right.
And after that I couldn’t help thinking of her. I can’t exactly say why. I don’t think it was for the sake of her physical attractions: indeed, when I came to speak to her, when in the end she was driven, poor thing, into a certain degree of intimacy with me, I believe this aspect of her was quite forgotten. No . . . I think the attraction which she exercised over me was simply due to the curious suggestiveness which clung to her, the thing which had set me dreaming of a place or an atmosphere which it was an ecstasy to remember, and the flattering discovery that I had something more than imagination on which to build. And then, when my friendliness, the mere fact that we had something, even if it were only a memory, in common had surprised her into getting the inexpressible story off her mind, the awful spiritual intensity of the thing was so great that everything else about her was forgotten; she became no more than the fragile, and in glimpses the pathetic, vehicle of the drama. Nothing more: though, of course, it was easy enough for anyone who had eyes to see why poor old M‘Crae (alias Hare) had fallen in love with her.