The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Condition/Chapter 3
III
This last appearance was in a short time abundantly confirmed; not only when, in London, after the discharge of his mission, he submitted to his friend a detailed account of that happy transaction, but ten days later, on Braddle's own return from Brighton, where he had promptly put in a week—a week of which, visibly, the sole and irresistible motive was Mrs. Damerel, established there as a sequel to Chilver's attendance on her from Liverpool to Euston and from Euston, within the hour—so immediately that she got off before her other friend had had time to turn up at either station—to Victoria. This other friend passed in London, while at Brighton, the inside of a day, rapping with a familiar stick—at an hour supposedly not dedicated, in those grey courts, to profane speculation—the door of the dingy Temple chambers in which, after the most extravagant holiday of his life, Henry Chilver had found it salutary to sit and imagine himself 'reading.' But Braddle had always been, portentously, a person of free mornings—his nominal occupation that of looking after his father's 'interests,' and his actual that of spending, though quite without scandal, this personage's money, of which, luckily, there seemed an abundance. What came from him on this occasion connected itself with something that had passed between them on their previous meeting, the one immediately following the incident at Liverpool. Chilver had at that time been rather surprised to hear his friend suddenly bring out: 'You don't then think there's anything "off" about her?'
'Off?' Chilver could at least be perfectly vague. 'Off what?'
'What's the beastly phrase? "Off colour." I mean do you think she's all right?'
'Are you in love with her?' Chilver after a moment demanded.
'Damn it, of course I'm in love with her!' Braddle joylessly articulated.
'Well then, doesn't that give you———?'
'Give me what?' he asked with impatience at his companion's pause.
'Well, a sort of searching light———'
'For reading her clear?' Braddle broke in. 'How can you ask—as a man of the world—anything so idiotic? Where did you ever discover that being in love makes a searching light, makes anything but a most damnable and demoralising darkness? One has been in love with creatures such that one's condition has lighted nothing in the world but one's asininity. I have at any rate. And so have you!'
'No, I've never been really in love at all,' said Chilver, good-humouredly.
'The less credit to you then to have—in two or three cases I recall—made such a fool of yourself. I, at all events—I don't mind your knowing,' Braddle went on—'am harder hit, far and away, than I've ever been. But I don't in the least pretend to place her or to have a free judgment about her. I've already—since we landed—had two letters from her, and I go down to-morrow to see her. That may assist me—it ought to—to make her out a little better. But I've a gruesome feeling that it won't!'
'Then how can I help you?' Chilver inquired, with just irritation enough to make him, the next moment—though his interlocutor, interestingly worried but really most inexpert, had no answer for the question—sorry to have shown it. 'If you've heard from her,' he continued, 'did she send me a message?'
'None whatever.'
'Nor say anything about me?'
'Not a word.'
'Ah!' said Henry Chilver, while their eyes again met with some insistence. He somehow liked Mrs. Damerel's silence after the hours he had spent with her; but his state of mind was again predominantly of not wanting Braddle to see in him any emotion. 'A woman may surely be called all right, it seems to me, when she's pretty and clever and good.'
'"Good"?' Braddle echoed. 'How do you know she's good?'
'Why, confound you, she's such a lady.'
'Isn't she?'—Braddle took it up with equal promptitude and inconsequence. Then he recovered himself. 'All the same, one has known ladies———!'
'Yes, one has. But she's quite the best thing that, in the whole time, we've come across.'
'Oh, by a long shot. Think of those women on the ship. It's only that she's so poor,' Braddle added.
Chilver hesitated. 'Is she so awfully?'
'She has evidently to count her shillings.'
'Well, if she had been bad she'd be rich,' Chilver returned after another silence. 'So what more do you want?'
'Nothing. Nothing,' Braddle repeated.
'Good-bye, then.'
'Good-bye.'
On which the elder man had taken leave; so that what was inevitably to follow had to wait for their next meeting. Mrs. Damerel's victim betrayed on this second occasion still more markedly the state of a worried man, and his friend measured his unrest by his obvious need of a patient ear, a need with which Chilver's own nature, this interlocutor felt, would not in the same conditions have been acquainted. Even while he wondered, however, at the freedom his visitor used, Chilver recognised that had it been a case of more or less fatuous happiness Braddle would probably have kept the matter to himself. His host made the reflection that he, on the other hand, might have babbled about a confidence, but would never have opened his mouth about a fear. Braddle's fear, like many fears, had a considerable queerness, and Chilver, in presence of it and even before a full glimpse, had begun to describe it to himself as a fixed idea. It was as if according to Braddle, there had been something in Mrs. Damerel's history that she ought really to have told a fellow before letting him in so far.
'But how far?'
'Why, hang it, I'd marry her to-morrow.'
Chilver waited a moment. 'Is what you mean that she'd marry you?'
'Yes, blest if I don't believe she certainly would.'
'You mean if you'd let her off———?'
'Yes,' Braddle concurred; 'the obligation of letting me know the particular thing that, whatever it is, right or wrong, I've somehow got it so tormentingly into my head that she keeps back.'
'When you say "keeps back," do you mean that you've questioned her?'
'Oh, not about that!' said Braddle with beautiful simplicity.
'Then do you expect her to volunteer information———'
'That may damage her so awfully with me?' Braddle had taken it up intelligently, but appeared sufficiently at a loss as to what he expected. 'I'm sure she knows well enough I want to know.'
'I don't think I understand what you're talking about,' Chilver replied after a longish stare at the fire.
'Well, about something or other in her life; some awkward passage, some beastly episode or accident; the things that do happen, that often have happened, to women you might think perfectly straight—come now! and that they very often quite successfully hide. You know what I'm driving at: some chapter in the book difficult to read aloud—some unlucky page she'd like to tear out. God forgive me, some slip.'
Chilver, quitting the fire, had taken a turn round the room.
'Is it your idea,' he presently inquired, 'that there may have been only one? I mean one "slip."' He pulled up long enough in front of them to give his visitor's eyes time to show a guess at possible derision, then he went on in another manner. 'No, no; I really don't understand. You seem to me to see her as a column of figures each in itself highly satisfactory, but which, when you add them up, make only a total of doubt.'
'That's exactly it!' Braddle spoke almost with admiration of this neat formula. 'She hasn't really any references.'
'But, my dear man, it's not as if you were engaging a housemaid.'
Braddle was arrested but a moment. 'It's much worse. For any one else I shouldn't mind———!'
'What I don't grasp,' his companion broke in, 'is your liking her so much as to "mind" so much, without by the same stroke liking her enough not to mind at all.'
Braddle took in without confusion this approach to subtlety. 'But suppose it should be something rather awful?'
It was his confidant, rather, who was a trifle disconcerted. 'Isn't it just as easy—besides being much more comfortable—to suppose there's nothing?'
'No. If it had been, don't you see that I would have supposed it? There's something. I don't know what there is; but there's something.'
'Then ask her.'
Braddle wondered. 'Would you?'
'Oh dear, no!'
'Then I won't!' Braddle returned with an odd air of defiance that made his host break into a laugh. 'Suppose,' he continued, 'she should swear there's nothing.'
'The chance of that is just why it strikes me you might ask her.'
'I "might"? I thought you said one shouldn't.'
'I shouldn't. But I haven't your ideas.'
'Ah, but you don't know her.'
Chilver hesitated. 'Precisely. And what you mean is that, even if she should swear there's nothing, you wouldn't believe her?'
Braddle appeared to give a silent and even somewhat diffident assent. 'There's nothing I should hate like that. I should hate it still more than being as I am. If you had seen more of her,' he pursued, 'you would know what I mean by her having no references. Her whole life has been so extraordinarily—so conveniently, as one might say—away from everything.'
'I see—so conveniently for her. Beyond verification.'
'Exactly; the record's inaccessible. It's all the "great West." We saw something of the great West, and I thought it rather too great. She appears to have put in a lot of California and the Sandwich Islands. I may be too particular, but I don't fancy a Sandwich Islands past. Even for her husband and for her little girl—for their having lived as little as for their having died—she has nothing to show. She hasn't so much as a photograph, a lock of hair, or an announcement in a newspaper.'
Chilver thought. 'But perhaps she wouldn't naturally leave such things about the sitting-room of a Brighton lodging.'
'I dare say not. But it isn't only such things. It's tremendously odd her never having even by mere chance knocked against anything or any one that one has ever heard of or could—if one should want to—get at.'
Again Henry Chilver reflected. 'Well, that's what struck me as especially nice, or rather as very remarkable in her—her being, with all her attraction, one of the obscure seventy millions; a mere little almost nameless tossed-up flower out of the huge mixed lap of the great American people. I mean for the charming person she is. I doubt if, after all, any other huge mixed lap———'
'Yes, if she were English, on those lines,' Braddle sagaciously interrupted, 'one wouldn't look at her, would one? I say, fancy her English!'
Chilver was silent a little. 'What you don't like is her music.'
His visitor met his eyes. 'Why, it's awfully good.'
'Is it? I mean her having, as you told me on the boat, given lessons.'
'That certainly is not what I most like her to have done—I mean on account of some of the persons she may have given them to; but when her voice broke down she had to do something. She had sung in public—though only in concerts; but that's another thing. She lost her voice after an illness. I don't know what the illness was. It was after her husband's death. She plays quite wonderfully—better, she says, really, than she sang; so she has that resource. She gave the lessons in the Sandwich Islands. She admits that, fighting for her own hand, as she says, she has kept some queer company. I've asked her for details, but she only says she'll tell me "some day." Well, what day, don't you know? Finally she inherited a little money—she says from a distant cousin. I don't call that distant—setting her up. It isn't much, but it made the difference, and there she is. She says she's afraid of London; but I don't quite see in what sense. She heard about her place at Brighton from some "Western friends." But how can I go and ask them?'
'The Western friends?' said Chilver.
'No, the people of the house—about the other people. The place is rather beastly, but it seems all right. At any rate she likes it. If there's an awful hole on earth it's Brighton, but she thinks it "perfectly fascinating." Now isn't that a rum note? She's the most extraordinary mixture.'
Chilver had listened with an air of strained delicacy to this broken trickle of anguish, speaking to the point only when it appeared altogether to have ceased. 'Well, my dear man, what is it, may I ask in all sympathy, you would like me, in the circumstances, to do? Do you want me to sound her for you?'
'Don't be too excruciatingly funny,' Braddle after a moment replied.
'Well, then, clear the thing up.'
'But how?'
'By making her let you know the worst.'
'And by what means—if I don't ask her?'
'Simply by proposing.'
'Marriage?'
'Marriage, naturally.'
'You consider,' Braddle inquired, 'that that will infallibly make her speak?'
'Not infallibly, but probably.'
Braddle looked all round the room. 'But if it shouldn't?'
His friend took another turn about. 'Well—risk it!'