“Messieurs,” he said in an urgent whisper, and drew them to a little distance. I saw him say something, saw them pivot to look at me, shrug their shoulders and walk away. I didn’t in the least grasp the significance of the scene—not then.
“What’s the matter?” I asked my returning friend; “were they talking about me?” He answered nervously.
“Oh, it was about your aunt’s Salon, you know. They might have been going to say something awkward ... one never knows.”
“They really do talk about it then?” I said. “I’ve a good mind to attend one of their exhibitions.”
“Why, of course,” he said, “you ought. I really think you ought.”
“I’ll go to-morrow,” I answered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I couldn’t get to sleep that night, but lay and tossed, lit my candle and read, and so on, for ever and ever—for an eternity. I was confoundedly excited; there were a hundred things to be thought about; clamouring to be thought about; out-clamouring the re-current chimes of some near clock. I began to read the article by Radet in the Revue Rouge—the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It upset me a good deal—that article. It gave away the whole Greenland show so completely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the Hour seemed impossible. I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind—just as I had had to grind the State Founder’s, but Radet’s axe didn’t show. I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the silence and the vastness.