"The first thing I did when I left that house," he explained firmly, "was to look round at the number on that door...."
II: FAY RICHMOND
II: FAY RICHMOND
THE influenza epidemic of the winter of 1918-19 will for me always be memorable for a strange coincidence, which could in no way have happened but for that plague's overwhelming rush; and together with that I remember vividly the grieved face of a homely matron, as she spoke to me that January afternoon on the hushed stairway of a nursing-home in Beaumont Street. It was, I suppose, one of those unreal incidents which are so essentially part of that life which realism likes to depict, that a realist may often fail to translate them into his tale (after that very old man, blind to the thing under his nose), whereas a romanticist will, perhaps, with a debonair gesture, give them their true part in the histories of his creatures.
Thus, this tale, sown however dismally, takes to itself the air of a romance; not mine indeed, nor Howard Wentworth's, the well-known playwright whom it intimately concerns, but Fay Richmond's. I call her by that name even though it was lost, in the way that women must lose the most apt and adequate names (as only names can be), on her Italian marriage some twenty years before Howard told me about her. He was curiously infatuated with it; I remember him repeating it, delicately, and pronouncing it a beautiful name, not unworthy of the meditation of Mr. George Moore by his fireside in Ebury Street.
"No, it was too fitting a name to last," he said. "A girl with such a name couldn't but die or get married young.... Can you imagine an aged spinster called Fay Richmond? It could only be the name of a lovely girl, but it could never live much more than twenty years except in a novel by, well, Disraeli or Meredith; unlikely enough shades, you'll say, the bedizened and the tortuous, to be joined together even in sentimental discourse about a girl's name, with whom I've already bored you sufficiently...."
"But I haven't met her yet!" I protested actively from my side of the fireplace, in his room in the Beaumont Street nursing home.