Far-away Stories

"If I don't hurry I shall miss my train," she sighed at last.

She rose; I felt her bend over me. Her hands closed on my cheeks, and a kiss fluttered on my lips. I heard the light swish of her skirts and the quick opening and shutting of the door, and she was gone.

Valerie's aunt, like King Charles II, was an unconscionable time a-dying. When a note from Valerie announced her return to Grandchester, I had already gone blue-spectacled away. For some time I was not allowed to read or write, and during this period of probation urgent affairs summoned me to Vienna. Such letters as I wrote to Valerie had to be of the most elementary nature. If you have a heart of any capacity worth troubling about, you cannot empty it on one side of a sheet of notepaper. For mine reams would have been inadequate. I also longed to empty it in her presence, my eyes meeting hers for the first time. Thus, ever haunted by the beloved plain face and the memorable voice, I remained inarticulate.

As soon as my business was so far adjusted that I could leave Vienna, I started on a flying visit, post-haste, to England. The morning after my arrival beheld me in a railway carriage at Euston waiting for the train to carry me to Grandchester. I had telegraphed to Valerie; also to Mr. Deane, the oculist, for an appointment which might give colour to my visit. I was alone in the compartment. My thoughts, far away from the long platform, leaped the four hours that separated me from Grandchester. For the thousandth time I pictured our meeting. I foreshadowed speeches of burning eloquence. I saw the homely features transfigured. I closed my eyes the better to retain the beatific vision. The train began to move. Suddenly the door was opened, a girlish figure sprang into the compartment, and a porter running by the side of the train, threw in a bag and a bundle of wraps, and slammed the door violently. The young lady stood with her back to me, panting for breath. The luggage lay on the floor. I stooped to pick up the bag; so did the young lady. Our hands met as I lifted it to the rack.

"Oh, please, don't trouble!" she cried in a voice whose familiarity made my heart beat.

I caught sight of her face, for the first time, and my heart beat faster than ever. It was her face – the face that had dawned upon my blindness – the face I had grown to worship. I looked at her, transfixed with wonder. She settled herself unconcerned in the farther corner of the carriage. I took the opposite seat and leaned forward.

"You are Miss Deane?" I asked tremulously.

She drew herself up, on the defensive.

"That is my name," she said.

"Valerie!" I cried in exultation.

She half rose. "What right have you to address me?"

"I am Harold Winter," said I, taken aback by her outraged demeanour. "Is it possible that you don't recognize me?"

"I have never seen or heard of you before in my life," replied the young lady tartly, "and I hope you won't force me to take measures to protect myself against your impertinence."

I lay back against the cushions, gasping with dismay.

"I beg your pardon," said I, recovering; "I am neither going to molest you nor be intentionally impertinent. But, as your face has never been out of my mind for three months, and as I am travelling straight through from Vienna to Grandchester to see it for the first time, I may be excused for addressing you."

She glanced hurriedly at the communication-cord and then back at me, as if I were a lunatic.

"You are Miss Deane of Grandchester – daughter of Dr. Deane?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Valerie Deane, then?"

"I have told you so."

"Then all I can say is," I cried, losing my temper at her stony heartlessness, "that your conduct in turning an honest, decent man into a besotted fool, and then disclaiming all knowledge of him, is outrageous. It's damnable. The language hasn't a word to express it!"

She stood with her hand on the cord.

"I shall really have to call the guard," she said, regarding me coolly.

"You are quite free to do so," I answered. "But if you do, I shall have to show your letters, in sheer self-defence. I am not going to spend the day in a police-station."

She let go the cord and sat down again.

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked.

I took a bundle of letters from my pocket and tossed one over to her. She glanced at it quickly, started, as if in great surprise, and handed it back with a smile.

"I did not write that."

I thought I had never seen her equal for unblushing impudence. Her mellow tones made the mockery appear all the more diabolical.

"If you didn't write it," said I, "I should like to know who did."

"My Cousin Valerie."

"I don't understand," said I.

"My name is Valerie Deane and my cousin's name is Valerie Deane, and this is her handwriting."

Bewildered, I passed my hand over my eyes. What feline trick was she playing? Her treachery was incomprehensible.

"I suppose it was your Cousin Valerie who tended me during my blindness at your father's house, who shed tears because she had to leave me, who – "

"Quite possibly," she interrupted. "Only it would have been at her father's house and not mine. She does tend blind people, my father's patients."

I looked at her open-mouthed. "In the name of Heaven," I exclaimed, "who are you, if not the daughter of Dr. Deane of Stavaton Street?"

"My father is Mr. Henry Deane, the oculist. You asked if I were the daughter of Dr. Deane. So many people give him the wrong title I didn't trouble to correct you."

It took me a few moments to recover. I had been making a pretty fool of myself. I stammered out pleas for a thousand pardons. I confused myself, and her, in explanation. Then I remembered that the fathers were twin brothers and bore a strong resemblance one to the other. What more natural than that the daughters should also be alike?

"What I can't understand," said Miss Deane, "is how you mistook me for my cousin."

"Your voices are identical."

"But our outer semblances – "

"I have never seen your cousin – she left me before I recovered my sight."

"How then could you say you had my face before you for three months?"

"I am afraid, Miss Deane, I was wrong in that as in everything else. It was her face. I had a mental picture of it."

She put on a puzzled expression. "And you used the mental picture for the purpose of recognition?"

"Yes," said I.

"I give it up," said Miss Deane.

She did not press me further. Her Cousin Valerie's love affairs were grounds too delicate for her to tread upon. She turned the conversation by politely asking me how I had come to consult her father. I mentioned my friend Mobray and the gun accident. She remembered the case and claimed a slight acquaintance with Mobray, whom she had met at various houses in Grandchester. My credit as a sane and reputable person being established, we began to chat most amicably. I found Miss Deane an accomplished woman. We talked books, art, travel. She had the swift wit which delights in bridging the trivial and the great. She had a playful fancy. Never have I found a personality so immediately sympathetic. I told her a sad little Viennese story in which I happened to have played a minor part, and her tenderness was as spontaneous as Valerie's – my Valerie's. She had Valerie's woodland laugh. Were it not that her personal note, her touch on the strings of life differed essentially from my beloved's, I should have held it grotesquely impossible for any human being but Valerie to be sitting in the opposite corner of that railway carriage. Indeed there were moments when she was Valerie, when the girl waiting for me at Grandchester faded into the limbo of unreal things. A kiss from those lips had fluttered on mine. It were lunacy to doubt it.

During intervals of non-illusion I examined her face critically. There was no question of its unattractiveness to the casual observer. The nose was too large and fleshy, the teeth too prominent, the eyes too small. But my love had pierced to its underlying spirituality, and it was the face above all others that I desired.

Toward the end of a remarkably short four hours' journey, Miss Deane graciously expressed the hope that we might meet again.

"I shall ask Valerie," said I, "to present me in due form."

She smiled maliciously. "Are you quite sure you will be able to distinguish one from the other when my cousin and I are together?"

"Are you, then, so identically alike?"

"That's a woman's way of answering a question – by another question," she laughed.

"Well, but are you?" I persisted.

"How otherwise could you have mistaken me for her?" She had drawn off her gloves, so as to give a tidying touch to her hair. I noticed her hands, small, long, and deft. I wondered whether they resembled Valerie's.

"Would you do me the great favour of letting me touch your hand while I shut my eyes, as if I were blind?"

She held out her hand frankly. My fingers ran over it for a few seconds, as they had done many times over Valerie's. "Well?" she asked.

"Not the same," said I.

She flushed, it seemed angrily, and glanced down at her hand, on which she immediately proceeded to draw a glove.

"Yours are stronger. And finer," I added, when I saw that the tribute of strength did not please.

"It's the one little personal thing I am proud of," she remarked.

"You have made my four hours pass like four minutes," said I. "A service to a fellow-creature which you might take some pride in having performed."

"When I was a child I could have said the same of performing elephants."

"I am no longer a child, Miss Deane," said I with a bow.

What there was in this to make the blood rush to her pale cheeks I do not know. The ways of women have often surprised me. I have heard other men make a similar confession.

"I think most men are children," she said shortly.

"In what way?"

"Their sweet irresponsibility," said Miss Deane.

And then the train entered Grandchester Station.

I deposited my bag at the station hotel and drove straight to Stavaton Street. I forgot Miss Deane. My thoughts and longings centred in her beloved counterpart, with her tender, caressing ways, and just a subtle inflection in the voice that made it more exquisite than the voice to which I had been listening.

The servant who opened the door recognized me and smiled a welcome. Miss Valerie was in the drawing-room.

"I know the way," said I.

Impetuous, I ran up the stairs, burst into the drawing-room, and stopped short on the threshold in presence of a strange and exceedingly beautiful young woman. She was stately and slender. She had masses of bright brown hair waving over a beautiful brow. She had deep sapphire eyes, like stars. She had the complexion of a Greuze child. She had that air of fairy diaphaneity combined with the glow of superb health which makes the typical loveliness of the Englishwoman. I gaped for a second or two at this gracious apparition.

"I beg your pardon," said I; "I was told – "

The apparition who was standing by the fireplace smiled and came forward with extended hands.

"Why, Harold! Of course you were told. It is all right. I am Valerie."

I blinked; the world seemed upside down; the enchanting voice rang in my ears, but it harmonized in no way with the equally enchanting face. I put out my hand. "How do you do?" I said stupidly.

"But aren't you glad to see me?" asked the lovely young woman.

"Of course," said I; "I came from Vienna to see you."

"But you look disappointed."

"The fact is," I stammered, "I expected to see some one different – quite different. The face you described has been haunting me for three months."

She had the effrontery to laugh. Her eyes danced mischief.

"Did you really think me such a hideous fright?"

"You were not a fright at all," said I, remembering my late travelling companion.

And then in a flash I realised what she had done.

"Why on earth did you describe your cousin instead of yourself?"

"My cousin! How do you know that?"

"Never mind," I answered. "You did. During your description you had her face vividly before your mind. The picture was in some telepathic way transferred from your brain to mine, and there it remained. The proof is that when I saw a certain lady to-day I recognised her at once and greeted her effusively as Valerie. Her name did happen to be Valerie, and Valerie Deane too, and I ran the risk of a police-station – and I don't think it was fair of you. What prompted you to deceive me?"

I was hurt and angry, and I spoke with some acerbity. Valerie drew herself up with dignity.

"If you claim an explanation, I will give it to you. We have had young men patients in the house before, and, as they had nothing to do, they have amused themselves and annoyed me by falling in love with me. I was tired of it, and decided that it shouldn't happen in your case. So I gave a false description of myself. To make it consistent, I took a real person for a model."

"So you were fooling me all the time?" said I, gathering hat and stick.

Her face softened adorably. Her voice had the tones of the wood-wind.

"Not all the time, Harold," she said.

I laid down hat and stick.

"Then why did you not undeceive me afterward?"

"I thought," she said, blushing and giving me a fleeting glance, "well, I thought you – you wouldn't be sorry to find I wasn't – bad looking."

"I am sorry, Valerie," said I, "and that's the mischief of it."

"I was so looking forward to your seeing me," she said tearfully. And then, with sudden petulance, she stamped her small foot. "It is horrid of you – perfectly horrid – and I never want to speak to you again." The last word ended in a sob. She rushed to the door, pushed me aside, as I endeavoured to stop her, and fled in a passion of tears. Spretæ injuria formæ! Women have remained much the same since the days of Juno.

A miserable, remorseful being, I wandered through the Grandchester streets, to keep my appointment with Mr. Henry Deane. After a short interview he dismissed me with a good report of my eyes. Miss Deane, dressed for walking, met me in the hall as the servant was showing me out, and we went together into the street.

"Well," she said with a touch of irony, "have you seen my cousin?"

"Yes," said I.

"Do you think her like me?"

"I wish to Heaven she were!" I exclaimed fervently. "I shouldn't be swirling round in a sort of maelstrom."

She looked steadily at me – I like her downrightness.

"Do you mind telling me what you mean?"

"I am in love with the personality of one woman and the face of another. And I never shall fall out of love with the face."

"And the personality?"

"God knows," I groaned.

"I never conceived it possible for any man to fall in love with a face so hopelessly unattractive," she said with a smile.

"It is beautiful," I cried.

She looked at me queerly for a few seconds, during which I had the sensation of something odd, uncanny having happened. I was fascinated. I found myself saying: "What did you mean by the 'sweet irresponsibility of man'?"

She put out her hand abruptly and said good-bye. I watched her disappear swiftly round a near corner, and I went, my head buzzing with her, back to my hotel. In the evening I dined with Dr. Deane. I had no opportunity of seeing Valerie alone. In a whisper she begged forgiveness. I relented. Her beauty and charm would have mollified a cross rhinoceros. The love in her splendid eyes would have warmed a snow image. The pressure of her hand at parting brought back the old Valerie, and I knew I loved her desperately. But inwardly I groaned, because she had not the face of my dreams. I hated her beauty. As soon as the front door closed behind me, my head began to buzz again with the other Valerie.

I lay awake all night. The two Valeries wove themselves inextricably together in my hopes and longings. I worshipped a composite chimera. When the grey dawn stole through my bedroom window, the chimera vanished, but a grey dubiety dawned upon my soul. Day invested it with a ghastly light. I rose a shivering wreck and fled from Grandchester by the first train.

I have not been back to Grandchester. I am in Vienna, whither I returned as fast as the Orient Express could carry me. I go to bed praying that night will dispel my doubt. I wake every morning to my adamantine indecision. That I am consuming away with love for one of the two Valeries is the only certain fact in my uncertain existence. But which of the Valeries it is I cannot for the life of me decide.

If any woman (it is beyond the wit of man) could solve my problem and save me from a hopeless and lifelong celibacy she would earn my undying gratitude.

IV

A WOMAN OF THE WAR

It was a tiny room at the top of what used to be a princely London mansion, the home of a great noble – a tiny room, eight feet by five, the sleeping-receptacle, in the good old days, for some unconsidered scullery-maid or under-footman. The walls were distempered and bare; the furniture consisted of a camp-bed, a chair, a deal chest of drawers, and a wash-stand – everything spotless. There was no fireplace. An aerial cell of a room, yet the woman in nurse's uniform who sat on the bed pressing her hands to burning eyes and aching brows thanked God for it. She thanked God for the privacy of it. Had she been a mere nurse, she would have had the third share of a large, comfortable bedroom, with a fire on bitter winter nights. But, as a Sister, she had a room to herself. Thank God she was alone! Coldly, stonily, silently alone.

The expected convoy of wounded officers had been late, and she had remained on duty beyond her hour, so as to lend a hand. Besides, she was not on the regular staff of the private hospital. She had broken a much needed rest from France to give temporary relief from pressure; so an extra hour or two did not matter.

The ambulances at length arrived. Some stretcher-cases, some walking. Among the latter was one, strongly knit, athletic, bandaged over the entire head and eyes, and led like a blind man by orderlies. When she first saw him in the vestibule, his humorous lips and resolute chin, which were all of his face unhidden, seemed curiously familiar; but during the bustle of installation, the half-flash of memory became extinct. It was only later, when she found that this head-bandaged man was assigned to her care, that she again took particular notice of him. Now that his overcoat had been taken off, she saw a major's crown on the sleeve of his tunic, and on the breast the ribbons of the D.S.O. and the M.C. He was talking to the matron.

"They did us proud all the way. Had an excellent dinner. It's awfully kind of you; but I want nothing more, I assure you, save just to get into bed and sleep like a dog."

And then she knew, in a sudden electric shock of certainty.

Half dazed, she heard the matron say,

"Sister, this is Major Shileto, of the Canadian army."

Half dazed, too, she took his gropingly outstretched hand. The gesture, wide of the mark, struck her with terror. She controlled herself. The matron consulted her typed return-sheet and ran off the medical statement of his injuries.

Major Shileto laughed.

"My hat! If I've got all that the matter with me, why didn't they bury me decently in France?"

She was rent by the gay laughter. When the matron turned away, she followed her.

"He isn't blind, is he?"

The matron, to whose naturally thin, pinched face worry and anxiety had added a touch of shrewishness, swung round on her.

"I thought you were a medical student. Is there anything about blindness here?" She smote the typed pages. "Of course not!"

The night staff being on duty, she had then fled the ward and mounted up the many stairs to the little room where she now sat, her hands to her eyes. Thank God he was not blind, and thank God she was alone!

But it had all happened a hundred years ago. Well, twenty years at least. In some vague period of folly before the war. Yet, after all, she was only five and twenty. When did it happen? She began an agonized calculation of dates —

She had striven almost successfully to put the miserable episode out of her mind, to regard that period of her life as a phase of a previous existence. Since the war began, carried on the flood-tide of absorbing work, she had had no time to moralize on the past. When it came before her in odd moments, she had sent it packing into the limbo of deformed and hateful things. And now the man with the gay laughter and the distinguished soldier's record had brought it all back, horribly vivid. For the scared moments, it was as though the revolutionary war-years had never been. She saw herself again the Camilla Warrington whom she had sought contemptuously to bury.

Had there been but a musk grain of beauty in that Camilla's story, she would have cherished the fragrance; but it had all been so ignoble and stupid. It had begun with her clever girlhood. The London University matriculation. The first bachelor-of-science degree. John Donovan, the great surgeon, a friend of her parents, had encouraged her ambitions toward a medical career. She became a student at the Royal Free Hospital, of the consulting staff of which John Donovan was a member. For the first few months, all went well. She boarded near by, in Bloomsbury, with a vague sort of aunt and distant cousins, folks of unimpeachable repute. Then, fired by the independent theories and habits of a couple of fellow students, she left the home of dull respectability and joined them in the slatternly bohemia of a Chelsea slum.

Oh, there was excuse for her youthful ardency to know all that there was to be known in the world at once! But if she had used her excellent brains, she would have realized that all that is to be known in the world could not be learned in her new environment. The unholy crew – they called it "The Brotherhood" – into which she plunged consisted of the dregs of a decadent art-world, unclean in person and in ethics. At first, she revolted. But the specious intellectuality of the crew fascinated her. Hitherto, she had seen life purely from the scientific angle. Material cause, material effect. On material life, art but an excrescence. She had been carelessly content to regard it merely as an interpretation of Beauty – to her, almost synonymous with prettiness.

At the various meeting-places of the crew, who talked with the interminability of a Russian Bolshevik, she learned a surprising lot of things about art that had never entered into her philosophy. She learned, or tried to learn – though her intelligence boggled fearfully at it – that the most vital thing in existence was the decomposition of phenomena, into interesting planes. All things in nature were in motion – as a scientific truth, she was inclined to accept the proposition; but the proclaimed fact that the representation of the Lucretian theory of fluidity by pictorial diagrams of intersecting planes was destined to revolutionize human society was beyond her comprehension. Still, it was vastly interesting. They got their plane-system into sculpture, into poetry, in some queer way into sociology.

A dingy young painter, meagerly hirsute, and a pallid young woman of anarchical politics assembled the crew one evening and, taking hands, announced the fact of their temporary marriage. The temporary bridegroom made a speech which was enthusiastically acclaimed. Their association was connected (so Camilla understood) with some sublime quality inherent in the intersecting planes. In these various pairings gleamed none of the old Latin Quarter joyousness. Their immorality was most austere.

To Camilla, it was all new and startling – a phantasmagorical world. Free love the merest commonplace. And, after a short while, into this poisonous atmosphere wherein she dwelt there came two influences. One was the vigilancy of the Women's Social and Political Union; the other, Harry Shileto, a young architect, a healthy man in the midst of an unhealthy tribe.

First, young Shileto. It is not that he differed much from the rest of the crew in crazy theory. He maintained, like everyone else, that Raphael and Brunelleschi had retarded the progress of the world for a thousand years; he despised Debussy for a half-hearted anarchist; he lamented the failure of the architectural iconoclasts of the late 'Nineties; his professed contempt for all human activities outside the pale of the slum was colossal; on the slum marriage-theory he was sound, nay, enthusiastic. But he was physically clean, physically good-looking, a man. And as Camilla, too, practised cleanliness of person, they were drawn together.