Roger burst into a Homeric laugh and even Miss Jencks smiled apologetically.
"I suppose we must let her have the fruit," she conceded, "an old friend like Mr. Jerrolds will make allowance—"
"We expect the child in June," said Roger simply, and then something seemed literally to give way in my brain and I clutched the table-cloth as a sharp hard pain darted through my temples. Strange, unbelievable though it may seem, I had never thought of such a thing as this!
FOR HOURS AND HOURS I WALKED, MUTTERING AND CURSING
My face must have excused my brusque departure, my utter inability to eat or drink another mouthful. I muttered something about a rough voyage and my land-legs (I, who never knew the meaning of mal-de-mer!) and I know my forehead must have been drawn, for Miss Jencks pressed sal volatile upon me solicitously. Roger, manlike, let me get off immediately and alone, as I begged, and once at the bottom of the interminable stairs, I flung myself into a wandering fiacre, and drove through the merry, lighted Paris boulevards, a helpless prey to passions black and bitter—to a wicked, seething jealousy such as I had never dreamed possible to a decent man.
That was the deep throat, the large and lovely arm! That was the dreamy, full-fed calm, the woman ruminant! God! how the thought tortured and tore at me! I, who had thought myself cured and a philosopher—a kindly philosopher! My first fit of love for her had carried its exaltation with it, but in this grinding, physical rage there was only shame and madness.
I caught, somehow, a train for Calais, I stumbled onto a boat there in a driving rain, and walked the deck in it all night. I travelled blindly to Oxford and tramped through soggy, steaming lanes, through sheets of drizzle, through icy runnels and marshy grass. For hours and hours I walked, muttering and cursing, my teeth chattering in my head, my brain on fire, my feet slushing in my soaking boots. I did not know clearly where I was, I did not know why I was walking nor where, but walk I must, like the convicts on the treadmill. Something laughed horribly in the air just behind me and said like a parrot, over and over again: