第3章

"Please don't come till thirtieth." The thirtieth--and it was now the fifteenth! She flung back the fortnight on his hands as if he had been an idler indifferent to dates, instead of an active young diplomatist who, to respond to her call, had had to hew his way through a very jungle of engagements! "Please don't come till thirtieth." That was all.Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the perfunctory "have written" with which it is usual to soften such blows.She didn't want him, and had taken the shortest way to tell him so.Even in his first moment of exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should not have padded her postponement with a fib.Certainly her moral angles were not draped!

"If I asked her to marry me, she'd have refused in the same language.But thank heaven I haven't!" he reflected.

These considerations, which had been with him every yard of the way from London, reached a climax of irony as he was drawn into the crowd on the pier.It did not soften his feelings to remember that, but for her lack of forethought, he might, at this harsh end of the stormy May day, have been sitting before his club fire in London instead of shivering in the damp human herd on the pier.Admitting the sex's traditional right to change, she might at least have advised him of hers by telegraphing directly to his rooms.But in spite of their exchange of letters she had apparently failed to note his address, and a breathless emissary had rushed from the Embassy to pitch her telegram into his compartment as the train was moving from the station.

Yes, he had given her chance enough to learn where he lived;and this minor proof of her indifference became, as he jammed his way through the crowd, the main point of his grievance against her and of his derision of himself.Half way down the pier the prod of an umbrella increased his exasperation by rousing him to the fact that it was raining.

Instantly the narrow ledge became a battle-ground of thrusting, slanting, parrying domes.The wind rose with the rain, and the harried wretches exposed to this double assault wreaked on their neighbours the vengeance they could not take on the elements.

Darrow, whose healthy enjoyment of life made him in general a good traveller, tolerant of agglutinated humanity, felt himself obscurely outraged by these promiscuous contacts.

It was as though all the people about him had taken his measure and known his plight; as though they were contemptuously bumping and shoving him like the inconsiderable thing he had become."She doesn't want you, doesn't want you, doesn't want you," their umbrellas and their elbows seemed to say.

He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his window: "At any rate I won't turn back"--as though it might cause the sender a malicious joy to have him retrace his steps rather than keep on to Paris! Now he perceived the absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars that he need not plunge, to no purpose, into the fury of waves outside the harbour.

With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his porter; but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas made signalling impossible and, perceiving that he had lost sight of the man, he scrambled up again to the platform.As he reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the collar-bone; and the next moment, bent sideways by the wind, it turned inside out and soared up, kite-wise, at the end of a helpless female arm.

Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and looked up at the face it exposed to him.

"Wait a minute," he said; "you can't stay here."As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the umbrella abruptly down on him.Darrow steadied her with extended arms, and regaining her footing she cried out: "Oh, dear, oh, dear! It's in ribbons!"Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke in him a memory of having seen it at a distant time and in a vaguely unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to follow up such clues, and the face was obviously one to make its way on its own merits.

Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at the tattered umbrella."I bought it only yesterday at the Stores; and--yes--it's utterly done for!" she lamented.

Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress.It was food for the moralist that, side by side with such catastrophes as his, human nature was still agitating itself over its microscopic woes!

"Here's mine if you want it!" he shouted back at her through the shouting of the gale.

The offer caused the young lady to look at him more intently."Why, it's Mr.Darrow!" she exclaimed; and then, all radiant recognition: "Oh, thank you! We'll share it, if you will."She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had they met? He put aside the problem for subsequent solution, and drawing her into a more sheltered corner, bade her wait till he could find his porter.

When, a few minutes later, he came back with his recovered property, and the news that the boat would not leave till the tide had turned, she showed no concern.

"Not for two hours? How lucky--then I can find my trunk!"Ordinarily Darrow would have felt little disposed to involve himself in the adventure of a young female who had lost her trunk; but at the moment he was glad of any pretext for activity.Even should he decide to take the next up train from Dover he still had a yawning hour to fill; and the obvious remedy was to devote it to the loveliness in distress under his umbrella.

"You've lost a trunk? Let me see if I can find it."It pleased him that she did not return the conventional "Oh, WOULD you?" Instead, she corrected him with a laugh--Not a trunk, but my trunk; I've no other--" and then added briskly: "You'd better first see to getting your own things on the boat."This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans by discussing them: "I don't actually know that I'm going over.""Not going over?"

"Well...perhaps not by this boat." Again he felt a stealing indecision."I may probably have to go back to London.