Jocelyn

by John Galsworthy

The Legards left Mentone very early the following day; it was necessary for Irma to drive the five miles to the villa in the cool of the morning. Giles had failed to see Jocelyn again; he delayed the departure as much as he could, but she was not down when they left. During the drive he sat silently calm opposite his wife, but with a feeling of rage and despair in his heart. He took the greatest care of her, changing her cushions continually, and making the man drive with the utmost caution. They arrived without incident. He had hoped that he would find some relief and distraction in the familiar surroundings of the villa, but he found instead that they only maddened him by bringing to his mind more forcibly the bar set between him and Jocelyn. He asked himself, a hundred times a day, what he was doing? what he meant to do? and he could give himself no answer. His conscience, his sense of balance, his honour, whatever name best fitted that feeling which struggled with his passion, exacted from him a dying remonstrance. He tried to give himself no time to think, to keep himself busy all day and every day, riding, walking, or with affairs in the house; he was particularly attentive to his wife, and he felt all the time that she knew what was passing in his heart; and all his efforts were of no use—Jocelyn’s face was ever before him. He wrote a note to her, in which he said that he had business which would take him to Genoa. He went there, and stayed two days, at the end of which time he returned more miserable than ever. In this way a week passed without his going to Mentone.

Jocelyn missed him; she had become so used to his companionship in those two months. She had no idea, until he had gone, how much she had depended on him for enjoyment. She felt quite lost without him and the greyhound. He seemed to her so different from the men, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, or Russians with whom she had been thrown during her wanderings. They had danced with her, ridden with her, paid her compliments, even asked to marry her, and one and all she had distrusted them, with the native distrust peculiar to her. She had always felt as if she understood Giles. It was not because he was her countryman, it was for no defined reason; yet it had been good to be with him; to find some one who loved, like herself, the sun and the flowers, music, the hot, sweet-scented air, the clack of many foreign tongues in the glowing light, and on starry evenings the murmur of the deep-hearted sea. To know that there was some one near who felt the spirit moving in these things, who lived in them, to whom they were not, as to her aunt, merely the chance outside ministers of a bodily ease.... After he had gone, she would sometimes go into the garden with her lips pursed up in a dumb whistle, expecting every minute to see Shikari uncoil his snake-like body from under the shade of some shrub, and come lolloping across the grass with arched back to lick her hands; or to see Giles sitting in the sun with a Panama hat over his eyes, and his long legs crossed. Sometimes, as she sat indoors alone, or with her aunt, she would fancy she smelt the smoke of his cigar on the terrace, and she would get up and look through the shutters. She ceased to go for walks—it was so dull by herself, and she no longer cared to go over to Monte Carlo. She played to herself a good deal, but she found that she missed Giles’s grave face looking at her, and a habit, which he had, of coming up from behind and touching her on the shoulder, saying, “Play that again.” She wanted somebody to like her music. It was no good playing when there was nobody to care whether she played badly or well.

When she received his note she was surprised, and a little hurt, not at the news it contained, but at the wording—it seemed to her so formal and precise.

She sat down, and wrote him a friendly letter in return, then tore it up in a sudden fit of childish irritation, and wrote to Irma instead, telling her what a good time she was having.

Just a week after the Legards had gone, she found herself with Mrs. Travis at a party given by a certain German baroness at her hotel in the East Bay. The hot, airless rooms, opening into each other, were filled with a cosmopolitan crowd of people, raising a gabble of words and laughter. The majority of them discussed the health of themselves and of their friends; a German professor, sitting at the piano, now and then struck a chord upon it to illustrate an argument he was carrying on; a fat, brown poodle begged incessantly, all over the room, for cakes; in a corner two Russians with parted beards disputed in low tones over a “system”; and an old English lady, stolidly eating an ice, complained of toothache to a Colonial bishop, who stood beside her with his hat clasped to his stomach. On the gravel walk outside, people paraded vaguely, smelling at the flowers, or turning to stare at new arrivals. There were present, in fact, all the ingredients of hotel society on the Riviera.

Mrs. Travis, seated in a cool corner of the room, was fanning herself, and listening with an occasional ample wriggle to the conversation of an anæmic curate, who was endeavouring to expound his own, and to elicit her views upon art. Having no views, she was finding it best to agree with everything he said, while her quick eyes took in a large amount of information about the dress and appearance of her neighbours. She smiled a great deal at him, however, so that he was quite pleased—considering himself appreciated—and presently brought her some tea.

In the centre of the room a knot of people surrounded Jocelyn, two of them talking to her eagerly in spasmodic and heavy-shouldered sentences; they were both Germans—Jocelyn had a peculiar fascination for Germans, they came round her like flies round honey. One of them would say—

“Do you that gomposer zo much like, ach?” The other: “Has he not veeling, ach?” and Jocelyn contrived always to convince each of them that she had answered him first. She did not wish to attract them, but only to avoid hurting their feelings. She appeared delicious to them, with her vivid yet mysterious face, and the absolute daintiness of her gestures and her dress. Every now and then she turned to the only other lady in the group, and tried to draw her into the talk, and, curiously enough, she seemed delicious to her also, having the faculty, given to a few attractive women, of not arousing the jealousy of her own kind. The Germans were pressing her to play, and she was turning to the piano when her eyes fell upon the figure of Giles. He was standing outside one of the French windows with his hands in his pockets, watching her. She gave an abrupt little movement, and sat down at the piano feeling suddenly hot. She began turning the leaves of some music hastily, with the idea, without knowing why, that she must hide her eyes from people. She played a mazurka of Chopin’s, while the German professor, leaning over, regarded her admiringly through his smoked spectacles. When she had finished, she got up, saying, in answer to a buzz of remonstrance, “It’s too hot to play,” and walked away to a chair, with a sudden impatience of the people around her. She was thinking, “Why doesn’t Giles come and talk to me?” The German professor, who had followed her from the window, began a commentary upon composers; Jocelyn, leaning back in her chair, listened languidly, while her eyes wandered to the window. A tall, good-looking woman in pink was talking to Giles, who was listening with a smile on his face. Jocelyn wondered who she was, and made an absent remark to the professor. She observed the look of mild surprise that lurked behind his spectacles, and caught herself up with her habitual quickness; but the moment he began to talk again her eyes went back to the window. Giles, bending a little forward, was holding the curtain aside to allow his companion to pass into the open air. Jocelyn felt a kind of dismay, as if something unpleasant and unexpected had happened.

“Und Schubert,” the German professor was saying, “how wunderschön mit his beaudiful melodies, nicht wahr!”

“Ah!” she answered shortly, with her eyes on the ground, “I don’t like him at all, he is too sweet,” and was surprised at her own irritability.