“Oh, no, it doesn’t!” It was the old Chalmers who smiled at me—ingratiating, youthful, adventurous, gay. I had often wondered why Chalmers looked adventurous, his habits being, if ever any man’s were, regular to the point of monotony. It occurred to me now that perhaps he looked adventurous because he had had his adventure already. In any case, it was very satisfactory to find at last something in his life that matched with the look in his eyes—something that would take the curse off his even temperament and equable ways.
“Very, very curious,” he repeated. “And all these years I’ve wanted to tell somebody, just in case I should drop out suddenly. I’ve left written instructions, but I should really like some one to understand. It’s all rather preposterous.”
“It’s preposterous that you should suddenly be married.”
“Yes—of course. Well—I’ve got on pretty well, and I’d rather you didn’t mention it to any of the others. But if anything should turn up, you can say you knew it all along.”
“Fire ahead.”
On the strength of the narrative about to come, I ordered another high-ball. Sometimes you want something to fiddle with, something to intervene between you and your friend when it is hard for eyes to meet. But he had promised me that it should be nothing sordid, and when the drink came I set it trustfully to one side—in reserve, as it were.
“Time was, when I knocked about the world a bit. My parents were dead, I had no close kin, and there was money enough to do what I wanted to, provided I wanted something modest. I had a great notion, when I came out of Göttingen, of a wanderjahr. Only I was determined it shouldn’t be hackneyed. There was a good deal of Wilhelm Meister in it, all the same, with a strong dash of Heine. I fancied myself, rather, at that time; wanted to be different—like every other young pilgrim. I didn’t want the common fate—not I. I hadn’t any grievance against the world, because I had a complete faith in the world’s giving me what I wanted, in the end. But I distinctly remember promising myself to be remarkable. I shan’t, of course, unless there is something in spectrum analysis. I used to quote Heine to myself:
‘Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt!
Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich,
Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz,
Und jetzo bist du elend.’
Of course, I never believed that I should be ‘unendlich elend,’ but I should have preferred that to anything mediocre. At that age—you know what we’re like. The man who would look at the stars by daylight and tumbled into the well. That’s us, to the life.
“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people—or, at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were American—were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant, casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian interlude in my wanderjahr, more or less for the sake of doing so. I had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I stayed on even more because I liked the villa—an old Saracen stronghold on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort—than because I liked them, though they were pleasant enough.