Now he was talking about her, with the polite candor which had made her say, the first time she saw him, that he was “well brought up” and “willing.” More, he was inquiring about Georges. She was not surprised; that was all part of it. She heard herself, as another person, replying coolly: “He is dead!” and when pressed further: “He is dead for me.” She could have laughed aloud at the same time, not for joy, but from the steady mounting beat of her own heart. His concern was trebled. Her heart beat faster, not feverishly, steadily. She had thought of her trouble: “I’ll put an end to this!” She was putting an end to it!
Then he actually touched her, and made sympathetic remarks. He was advising her not to frequent officers’ restaurants, and she replied she did not care. It was true. She cared for nothing at the moment, had never felt more light-hearted. He asked what she was going to do next. She wanted to laugh more than ever as she said, “Nothing!” He proposed a cinema. She assented delightedly, feeling as though she would have proposed it herself in a moment, it was so inevitable. She made a quick calculation. Cécile Blanquart and the other girls were at the office. Aunt Blanquart and the pork butcher’s wife, at whose house she lodged, would not be shopping in the main streets, rendered expensive by English custom. It was safe enough.
Out in the street she stepped beside him with a pride which, she suddenly realized, she had never known. There are inconveniences about clandestine liaisons. She almost enjoyed the publicity. Fortified by coffee, cakes and brandy, as tall as he was to an inch or so, she seemed to float along on the wings of new-found comfort, effortless, smiling.
The cinema was full. He was nonplussed, she could see, did not know what to do next—knew what he wanted (as she did, and hugged herself), but, being English, had a difficulty in saying it. He wanted her. That was natural enough. She knew herself to be desirable. It amused her to hear him proposing to see her home to her “Aunt’s”—for thus she had described her lodging. She let him. It seemed now she had only to go on letting him, and the riddle of life was solved. She had not known an hour before that there was a riddle. Now she only knew she was approaching a solution.
They arrived in the narrow by-street near the cathedral as the clocks chimed four. At that hour the place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed, they might have been treading a world of their own. Madeleine felt it, but noticed that he was feeling something stronger. He had almost shed his English reserve—was talking volubly, about himself—how he had been twice in hospital, and must now go back to the fighting—how men like himself wanted a little comfort before they died. He spoke in English, but she understood most of the words and all the drift. His feelings coincided with hers and saved her the trouble of expressing them, to which she was unused and averse. At the door of her lodging they both stopped, she with her key in the lock, he looking at her with eyes that he immediately averted, and which pivoted round, in spite of him, to her. As she turned the key and opened the door, she said, with the feeling of turning something in her heart and opening it: “Here we are!” Inevitably, as if she had taught him the words, he was saying: “Don’t send me away, let me stay!” and with a great sigh of happiness such as she had felt once before in her life—another life, surely—she retreated into the dark entry before him with: “Well then, my poor friend!”
* * * *
When Madeleine next had attention to spare for such matters, the chimes were telling six o’clock, and through the glass of the skylight-window a little star twinkled. She became conscious that he was slowly awakening from the stupor in which they had plunged each other, and was lying, open-eyed, waiting for her to move (just like him). Her mind sprang at once to the practical:
“What time is your train?”
“Gone this half-hour!”