“Out into the hall, if you don’t mind . . . on the stairs. I want to explain to you. It was really awfully good of you to take me on.”
“It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.”
They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she proceeded to tell him that Griffin had upset her in the dance before by trying to kiss her shoulder. “I really couldn’t stick a repetition of that,” she said. “Besides, I think the man had been drinking. So I just pitched upon your poor innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are you, by the way? I only just remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She’s rather a dear, isn’t she?”
The music of the next dance struck up. “Are you dancing?” Edwin asked eagerly.
“I don’t know, I expect so. Just look at my programme. It’s too dark for me to see.”
Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It was a thrilling moment. In the dusk he deciphered two initials, “E.W.,” he said.
“Oh, that’s only Edward Willis. He’s very shy of me. If you’ve nothing better to do I think we’ll stay here.”
It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a line in Browning’s Pauline:—
“Her voice was as the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought. . . .”
That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened to her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.