“Before long, we had talked together a good deal, especially during the hour before dinner, when the sun and the sea were so miraculous that any other miracle seemed possible. Such easy waters to cross, they looked, in the sunset light! You forgot the blistering leagues beyond; you forgot that it took money and men and courage and endurance, and all kinds of things that are hard to come by, to get to the goal she was straining for. I suppose it wouldn’t be honest to say that she ever passed her personal fervor on to me—I couldn’t, in the nature of things, care so much about recovering that poor chap’s bones as she did—but I did end by wishing with all my heart that I could help. Little by little it seemed a romantic thing to do—to go out searching for the spot where he had died. Of course, getting the bones themselves, except for extraordinary luck, was all moonshine; but she didn’t see that, and her blindness affected me. Finally, my wanderjahr began to shape itself to new horizons. Why shouldn’t I have a try?... I dare say I posed a little as a paladin, though not, I hope, to her. Anyhow, I decided to broach it.
“I don’t suppose you can understand it—any of it—for the simple reason that I can’t describe her. She was the kind of person who sees very clearly the difference between the possible and the impossible; who never attempts anything but the possible; yet who sets every one about her itching to attain the impossible. Not ‘for her sake,’ in the conventional sense; no, not that at all. Simply, she set before you so clearly the reason why a thing couldn’t be done that you longed to confute her, just as you sometimes long to confute fate. She was as convincing and as maddening as a natural law. Each of us, sooner or later, has tried to get the better of some little habit of the universe. You felt like saying: ‘Stop looking like that; I’ll do it—see if I don’t.’
“That was the spirit in which I went to her, late one afternoon, on her parapet. The C.’s had been away all day and were not to return until evening. Madame C. had exasperated me the night before by proposing, quite baldly and kindly, that the girl be decoyed into a sanatorium. The C.’s couldn’t keep her much longer—they were off for Biskra—and it was up to me. I had lain awake half the night, exploring the last recesses of disaster into which my idea might lead me; I had sailed far out on the bright waters all day, perfecting my courage. I could have written as bitter a little allegory about it all as Heine himself. Secretly, in a tawdry corner of my mind, I thought Wilhelm Meister was a poor stick compared with me. But it was honest romance; I was willing to pay.”
I finished my whiskey as Chalmers’s voice dropped and died down, and he busied himself a little nervously with lighting a pipe. His green eyes had flecks of brown in them. Once more, in the speckled brown figure opposite me, I saw the tortoise beyond the reach of biology, which upholds the world, which carries the burden of all human flesh and spirit.
“I told her that I was ready to go; that I could scrape together enough money for the expedition without entirely impoverishing myself. My figures hadn’t been quite so reassuring as that when I totted them up on a piece of hotel paper at dawn, but at least I had left magnificent margins for everything.
“She smiled—I had never seen her smile before, and at the moment it made her thanks seem profuse—but she shook her head. She was beautifully simple about it. I liked her for that.
“‘It wouldn’t do. Not that it isn’t divinely good of you! But, you see, the point is that—’ she stopped.
“‘Well?’ My heart was beating hard. I had become enamored of my idea. I no more wanted to be baulked than she did.
“‘The point has always been that I should go myself.’
“‘Then go yourself!’