There was another silence. Then a hum of muttering voices rose from behind closed shutters.
“Well, well, better go while the going’s good,” said Tam in a prosaic voice. “Where’s Stone, I wonder?”
The shopman made pacifying gestures and tapped his ear. There was a very distant sound of rifle fire.
Edward and Tam leaned back against the broad coat. “Better wait here a bit. D’you want me to go on about Emily?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know whether you’d want me to tell you that I have been Emily’s lover. Once. Champagne makes her blessedly silly and uncaring ... she sits smiling like a baby then ... she is serene at last. I adore people who are tranquil, who don’t compete ... Emily, gentle, is absolutely perfect. Lucy is always gentle but she is not perfect. She is not—Emily. Well, I suppose I ought to say Emily—plus champagne. You see I tell you this to show that I am not trying to make the best of myself. It became, I suppose, harder for Emily after that. She was bad-tempered often, dull often, after that. Once she cried in public and she talked sometimes pathetically about herself to me—a thing I can’t stand. I am not interested in pathos. I am not interested, I may say, in people from their own point of view, especially women. I don’t see pathos in myself, why should pathos be expected to appeal to me?”
“We ought to go,” said Edward. He had seen a picture of Emily crying, Emily with red staring eyes full of tears, crying, behind a wet handkerchief, to find words that might effectively array her grief before a man who was “not interested in pathos.”
“Let’s go,” said Tam. “I wonder where Stone is. Excellent person, Stone, what? Always falls on his feet.”
They walked down the deserted street. The city gate to which they first came was shut and within its arch on the inner side was a group of soldiers of the retreating army. Stone Ponting was leaning against the shoulder of one of the more passive soldiers, watching the others. Stone was spitting, preparatory to inserting a new piece of gum. The soldiers seemed too busy arguing to resent Stone’s close inspection.