CHAPTER IX
GERALDINE
"Well, suppose I was once a man, suppose I was Gerald Wilder," I said to myself as I went into the library and music room, where a fire was lit, "Oh, bosh—and yet——"
I shut the library door and looked round. Thousands of books, a grand piano standing open, cigar boxes, cigarette boxes, easy chairs, turkey carpet. I lit a cigarette, and turned to the piano. I play well, but I am always too weak to play now. Here was Schuman, Chopin, everything in a classical way.
I like Chopin.
As I played I sometimes stopped to think and knock the ashes from my cigarette. The wind had risen and was blowing in gusts—oh that wind of autumn, how melancholy it sounds.
As I was playing I caught the sounds of horses' feet, then the crash of wheels upon gravel. It stopped, a carriage had drawn up at the hall door, "Could it be Wilder?"
I listened. Someone was let in. I heard the sound of voices, then everything was still. I rose from the piano and went to the door. I opened the door softly about an inch, and peeped through the crack. I saw a girl, but, as her back was towards me, I could not see her face. She was unwinding herself from a huge cloak of furs. The sallow-faced housemaid was standing waiting—I suppose for the cloak. Then I closed the door as softly as I had opened it, and sat down in one of the armchairs by the fire. I felt excited, why, I could not tell.
I was staring into the fire point blank, just as an owl stares at the sun, but I did not see the fire, I could only see the long slit-like picture, the strip of shining oak floor, the figure of the girl with her head thrown back, and her body, with its snake-like movement, winding free of the cloak.
Who was she? this girl. She had come in that carriage. She had been let in out of the autumn night. I had seen her taking off her cloak. I knew nothing more about her, so why—why did my heart become all of a sudden so fussy and fluttering like a bird disturbed in its nest, why—ah, it seemed to me that with her had been let in the far-off sound of that ghostly horn, with her had been let in the unseen falcon whose claws were now again resting upon my wrist—moving, moving, as the body they supported balanced itself uneasily, tightening now as the balance was nearly lost, loosening now as it was regained.
I sat listening. Not a sound. These great oak doors were so thick that a person might walk about in the hall and not be heard in the library. The clock on the mantel gave the little hiccup it always makes at five minutes to the hour; I looked up at the dial, it pointed to five minutes to nine.