Part 7

People were drinking their coffee and staring at Grace, just as they always did.

"Yes, he's home on leave and staying here. Pam--didn't you know I was married?"

"Yes," I lied swiftly.

I knew that Cheneston was behind me. I knew it without turning. I felt it; once more the old thrilling excitement, the tension of expectancy, stirred in me--for another woman's husband.

"Where is that husband of mine?" Grace said in her familiar, high, sweet, laughing voice. "I do want you to meet."

I wanted to say, "He's behind me. You don't know it, but _I_ do. I can feel it all down my neck and spine. He belongs to you, but you can't feel it. I'm glad you can't feel it. Glad! Glad! Glad!"

Instead I said:

"Good heavens! I was forgetting! I'm going on to dinner, and my husband's outside in the car. I went up to see some friends, and said I wouldn't be a second."

"You married, Pam! I never knew that!"

"I must absolutely fly!" I said.

"But, Pam--I'm so interested. Who did you marry, Pam? Hang it all! I'm thrilled to the core--you can't run away like this! Besides, Cheneston's here, and---- Pam, _why did you break off your engagement to Cheneston?_"

"Must fly!" I said.

I caught sight of Cheneston. He had not recognised my back, he was waiting to come forward and join his wife.

That queer, quizzical, bored look was on his face. He's the only man whose thoughts I ever pined to know.

I would have given the world to have been able to stop and say:

"What _are_ you thinking about?"

I heard Grace say in that queer, lilting voice of hers:

"Oh, bother! Cheneston, you're just too late! That was Pam Burbridge--only she isn't any more, she's married, and her husband is outside in a car."

And as I hurried out into the courtyard a woman getting out of a car said:

"Look at that woman; isn't she wonderful!"

Of course it was Grace; if it had been me she would have said:

"Look at that funny little moth-eaten rabbit of a girl hurrying away as if there was a stoat after her. You really do see the queerest people everywhere nowadays."

*XVI*

There is a street that leads round the back of the Savoy Theatre. I ran down that. I don't know what it was like. There were great inky splotches of shadow, they seemed almost glistening wet in their impenetrable blackness. As a rule I mind these pools of darkness. I cross roads to avoid them, and if I must needs pass through them I hurry very quickly and my heart seems to beat in my throat.

This night I did not care; mad kaffirs, Landrus, the denizens of Soho, might nestle in their dozens in the shadows of London--I didn't care.

You can get so absolutely don't-carish that the things that normally terrify and appal you fail even to rouse a flicker.

I reached the Embankment.

I love the Thames Embankment. To me it seems a thousand times more romantic and wonderful than the canals of Venice or the crocodile-y charms of the Nile. The water is so sad and so wicked--the wisest, wickedest thing in England, flowing greyly between the great palaces of commerce; floating little ships and dirty hulks; holding up to the sunset, in places, a tangled mass of sails, a veritable fretwork; the humbler and less ostentatious commerce of the world flows through its veins, dear furtive, dirty, splendid, muddy old river!

I looked over the parapet. Once in my dim, funny little far-away youth, when impressions sort of bedded themselves down on your mind, I had driven in a hansom with mother and father from Blackfriars to Waterloo; and all the electric signs over the warehouses on the bank had streaked the water with colour, and all the Embankment had been fringed with electric lights, and I had cried with the beauty of it, and mother and father had been curious as to the cause of my emotion, and then angry because I wouldn't tell them--but how could I tell them I was crying because somebody's whisky advertisement looked so lovely on the water.

I remembered as I looked in the water and thought how jolly it is to be able to feel sad and romantically melancholy about abstract things, and let yourself go, when the real sorrows come there is always something to prevent you from letting yourself go.

I wondered why I wasn't feeling more awful about Cheneston's marriage to Grace.

I wasn't feeling at all. I was numbed. The pain hadn't begun to work.

An old gentleman passed me and then came back. Instantly the remembrance of London novels I had read flashed into my mind. Was he going to offer to adopt me, or help me save my soul, or thrust five pounds into my hand.

"You're not thinking of--popping in?" he said.

"It hadn't occurred to me," I answered.

"Good," he said, relieved. "It's cold, and damn silly. It just occurred to me. You seem interested. I can't swim."

"Neither can I," I said.

"Then it _would_ be damn silly," he said. "Good-night."

And then I heard Cheneston's voice.

"Where is your husband?"

"Ah," murmured the old gentleman, "now I see."

"Oh," I said stupidly, "he--he didn't wait."

"I followed you," Cheneston said. "I had to know things."

"What things?" I said feebly. I was beginning to feel the pain now, the numbness was passing off; and I knew that I was going to suffer.

"I want to know when you married, and if you are happy--and why you ran away like that, and if you loved Walter Markham. Pam--I'll be content if you'll only answer me one thing, is he good to you? Have you married the right man? Pam, I've got to know."

I knew then how much it hurt; my throat felt like a funny little unoiled, unused machine when I spoke.

"Tell me if you are happily married?"

"I?"

"Yes."

"I'm not married at all."

"Grace," I said, "Grace said----"

"She's married. She married Clay Rendle. She was always in love with him."

"She was in love with you."

"Never! I was in her confidence, that was all. Clay Rendle's wife was a homicidal maniac. She died a week after mother. But, Pam--I'll go away, I'll go straight back to the Savoy now, if you'll just answer 'Yes' or 'No.' Pam, are you happily married?"

"No," I said.

He looked down at me, he was very white there was a queer look on his face, as if his feelings were bunched up inside him and he was sitting hard on the lid.

I wanted the lid up.

"I'm not married," I said.

The lid flew up.

I did not know a kiss _could_ feel like that. The Embankment sort of slid away from under it and us. I think it lasted for hours.

We looked at each other blankly.

"Pam," he said shakily, queerly, "you kissed me--did you know you kissed me?"

I nodded. I felt as if half of me stood there and the other half was slowly unwrapping itself from the kiss.

"You kissed me as if--as if----"

"I know," I said.

"I didn't think that any woman in the world could kiss like that," he said. "My God! I didn't think it! Pam, are we both crazy?"

"Yes," I said.

His eyes began to flicker and twinkle, those curious hazel eyes, not brown, not yellow, and not readable.

"I want things explained," he said, "and yet I don't want them explained. You are sure you aren't married?"

"Quite," I said.

"Then, Pam, will you marry me? Oh, Pam!--listen to it--you funny, exquisite little person! Listen to it!--doesn't it sound gorgeous!--Heaven!--_you_ married to _me_! Did you ever like anything in the world as much as the sound of that, my sweet?"

"No," I whispered.

He put his face down to mine. I was trembling and crying; his face was wet.

"I love you so!" he whispered. "I love you so's I could eat you, and yet I'm scared to touch you--that's _how_ I love you, you exquisite baby thing!" He laughed and kissed my hands. "I'm plum crazy with happiness," he confessed. "You'll have to be sane for the two of us. What shall we do, sweetheart, what shall we do?"

"Walk on--and I'll explain things."

"And every time we come to a shadow I'll kiss you."

"Only big ones, then. Which way shall we go?"

"Towards the Houses of Parliament."

"Why?"

"I see a shadow," he said.

I have always been scared of shadows, but if all the murderers and thieves in the world nestled in the shadows that night, I did not know. I did not care.

_I did not see_.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS GUILDFORD ENGLAND