“No—not one that is very close, though many people like her. She did not make intimacies. You see, her husband absorbed her.”
“And now what will happen?”
Madame told me that she had already written to Judith offering her help: probably a reply to her letter would come in the morning. She promised to summon me if I could be of the slightest use, and with this small comfort I returned to my hotel to brood. Inaction lay so heavily upon me that it was scarcely to be endured. I wanted to help—to be something to her.
That night I lay awake in dark dejection. In those days I was not used to suffering, to anxiety. At length I slept....
Day after day I stayed on, hoping to be summoned, Madame de Stran giving me all the comfort she could. He was buried. Judith shut herself up in her house! At night I would walk from my hotel towards Kalamaria and, in the complete darkness, wander in the garden surrounding her home. I remember that I used to touch the flowers with my fingers. I used to put my foot on the pathway and say to myself: “Her foot has been there!” The garden was magical with remembrances of her. Yet she was absent, and the ache in me grew and grew. My eyes used to become hot with unshed tears. Though it was torture to linger there, yet I could never draw myself away until very late, and one night, sitting down on a bank, I fell asleep. As I woke, the scent of dew-laden roses weakened me unmercifully; and I sobbed without tears....
I must tell you all this: it matters: it is the heart of the tragedy that has happened to me: that, and the remembrance of her brute-husband who so wickedly, so monstrously, still lives in my son....
One night, while in her garden, I saw her. I was standing in a little grove of pepper-trees. She came slowly towards me. I stepped back to conceal myself. Her little feet on the grass made no sound. What were her thoughts? Oh, of him—him whom she had loved and was still loving. It was he who for her haunted this garden, not I. If my body had been multiplied a hundred-fold and all my hundred bodies were hiding there in the trees, she would have felt nothing. She passed and repassed, and then disappeared into the gloom of the house.
At length, under the implacable pressure of my own self-torture, I wrote to her. I told her I knew of her grief, that.... In short, I asked to be allowed to come and see her.
Months later, she told me that my letter had terrified her. Some phrases in it had called up many dead memories and, pondering, she had seen in a flash that I loved her. Her spirit was too sore even for sympathy, and offering her love was like offering her an unsheathed sword. My letter brought no answer, and two days later Madame de Stran told me mournfully that Judith had left Salonika for Constantinople....
Four months passed; to me, working in Athens, they were four years. I did not deceive myself by telling myself I would try to forget her: no man ever tries to forget the woman he loves. Madame de Stran wrote occasionally, promising, and repeating her promise in each letter, that she would tell me as soon as she received news of Judith’s return. My business prospered: you know, I have always been successful. I threw myself into my work, and exhausted my false, feverish energy by violent exercise. I rode my horse an hour each day: I swam: I walked: and, occasionally, I sought the baleful comfort of drink.