grey-blue eyes, the corners of whose mouth I am continually watching because it is only there I find the meaning of her eyes, for she is a sphinx, and I do not yet know if what she hides is a secret or a sense of humour. You will say that that means nothing, and that she is quite invisible [pg 015] to you; but you do not know her, and I do—at least, I know that much of her. And with her it seems to me that I could dine only at that table by the windows where I could turn from her eyes to the slow-moving English river, and the specks of men and trams, which are all that the leaves of trees will let me see of the Embankment. Perhaps I would tell her of that novel which I once began to write, but could never finish nor have any heart to try again; for it began just here at this table where we are now sitting, but the man was alone, and if he ever lived outside my halting pages and had the finishing of my novel, he would put himself here again at the end, with you sitting in front of him. For that is the whole purpose of the novel, which I never realised till this moment, that once a young man was sitting here alone and wondering why that should be and what he should do, and in the end he was sitting here again with a woman for whom his passion had died, but whose eyes still made him talk so that he could not see the slow darkening of the river, or hear the emptying of the restaurant, until at last she laughed, and he [pg 016] had to stop because of the waiters who hovered round the table to relay it for the bored people who would come in from the theatres for supper. But all this I had never realised till I told you of it, and perhaps now I shall one day finish it, and call it "Nadine," for that is your name in the novel. [pg 015] [pg 016] Thinking of the young man of my unfinished novel who had sat there so alone sent my thoughts back to the day not many years past when I first came to live in London. I am bitter about those first months, and will not easily forgive London for them; and if any young person shall begin to tell me how splendid were his first lonely days in the wilderness of people, how much he enjoyed the aimless wandering about the streets, how he liked to watch the faces of the people as they passed, laughing, or talking, or hungry, while he could do or be none of these for lack of company and convenience of means, then I will turn on him and curse him for a fool or a knave, and rend the affected conceit of his self-contained pleasure with my own experience and that of many others whom I know of. But then for a [pg 017] young Englishman—how pleasant it is to write of "young
Prev.
Back
Top