“Frank,” I said, “this can’t go on! Do you ever look at yourself in the glass?”
No smile can be so bitter as a smile that used to be sunny.
“So long as I can see her I shall last out.”
“You surely don’t want a woman to feel she’s lost her soul, and is making you lose yours? She’s perfectly sincere in that.”
“I know. I’ve given up asking. So long as I can see her, that’s all.”
It was mania!
That afternoon I took a boat over to the Radolins. It was April—the first real day of spring, balmy and warm. The Judas-trees of the Rumeli Hissar were budding, the sun colouring the water with tints of opal; and all the strange city of mosques and minarets, Western commerce and Oriental beggary, was wonderfully living under that first spring sun. I brought my boat up to the Radolins’ landing-stage, and got out. I mounted the steps, greened over by the wash of the water, and entered their little garden courtyard. I had never come this way before, and stood for a moment looking through the mimosas and bougainvillæas for a door that would satisfy formality. There was a grille to the left, but to reach it I would have to pass in front of the wide ground-floor window, whence I had sometimes looked out over the water to the Rumeli Hissar. My shoes made no noise on the marble path, but what I saw in the room stopped me from trying to pass.
Hélène Radolin was sitting perfectly still in a low chair sideways to the window, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the tiled floor, where a streak of sunlight fell. In the curve of her grand piano, resting his elbows on it, Weymouth was leaning back, equally still, gazing down at her. That was all. But the impression I received of life arrested, of frozen lava, was in a way terrible. I stole back down the steps into my boat, and out on to the opal-tinted waters.
I have nothing more to tell you of this business. The war came down on us all soon after. Rumours I have heard, but I know nothing, as they say, of my own knowledge. Yet it has seemed to me worth while to set down this record of a ‘stroke of lightning’ in days when people laugh at such absurdities.
1921.