The Belfry

by May Sinclair

It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her, this time, as I passed her deck-chair.

I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I could be alone and savage if I liked.

And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have made me this time, for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own), when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of struggle and a pang.

She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was. She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.

And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had been two hours on board.

I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered. Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit quivering in silence and see frightful things.

But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as if she were sorry for me after all.

"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"

"Horribly tired."

"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let you sit still without a rug."