XVIII
On the next afternoon Felix Imhof suddenly appeared at the hotel. He sent up his card to Judith, and waited in the hall. He walked up and down, swinging his little cane, carelessly whistling through his thick lips, his brain burdened with affairs, speculations, stock quotations, a hundred obligations and appointments. But whenever he passed the tall windows, he threw a curious and merry glance out into the street, where two boys were having a fight.
But now and then his face grew dark, and a quiver passed over it.
The page returned, and bade him come up.
Judith was surprised to see him. He began to talk eagerly at once. “I have business in Liverpool, and wanted to see you once more before leaving. A crowd of people came, who all had some business with you. Invitations came for you, and telephone calls; your dressmaker turned up, and letters, and I was, of course, quite helpless. I can’t very well receive people with the agreeable information that my wife has just taken French leave of me. There are a thousand things; you have to disentangle them, or the confusion will be endless.”
They talked for a while of the indifferent things which, according to him, had brought him here. Then he added: “I had an audience with the Prince Regent this forenoon. He bestowed a knighthood on me yesterday.”
Judith’s face flushed, and she had the expression of one who, in a state of hypnosis, recalls his waking consciousness.
Felix tapped against his faultlessly creased trousers with his stick. “I beg your pardon for venturing any criticism,” he said, “but I can’t help observing that the whole matter might have been better managed. To run off with that degree of suddenness—well, it wasn’t quite the proper thing, a little beneath us, not quite fair.”
Judith shrugged her shoulders. “Things that are inevitable might as well be done quickly. And I don’t see that your equanimity is at all impaired.”
“Equanimity! Nonsense! Doesn’t enter the question.” He stood, as was his habit, with legs stretched far apart, rocking to and fro a little, and regarding his gleaming boots. “What has equanimity to do with it? We’re cultivated people. I’m neither a tiger nor a Philistine. Nihil humanum a me alienum, et cetera. You simply don’t know me. And it doesn’t astonish me, for what chance have we ever had to cultivate each other’s acquaintance? Marriage gave us no opportunity. We should retrieve our lost occasions. It is this wish that I should like to take with me into my renewed bachelorhood. You must promise not to avoid me as rigorously in the future as you did during the eight months of our married life.”