Besides (and here she took wider leaps) there might be some unimaginable misunderstanding. Perhaps he was writing a novel.

At last the last mile was traversed, and, looking out from the hateful forest, she saw before her the clearing of Boboma, yellow in the afternoon. She paused. It was so much the same, and so unconscious of her, that it seemed as if she was in another world. She almost expected to see her own shape emerge from the school-house. Her lips trembled, and a great booby tear rolled down her face.

As she watched, feeling empty and impotent as a ghost, the singing ceased in the schoolhouse nearby, and the children began to come out, racing and screaming as if no chimp had ever existed. Emily stared at the door, her blood standing still in her veins. Ten minutes crept by like a glacier. Suddenly the well-known figure appeared, and, see! he looks anxiously up and down as if in hope to see the absent one. Emily’s eyes, which had yearned so for the sight of him, were blinded with happy tears. Springing to the ground, she totteringly hurried towards him.

“Emily! Emily! Where have you been?”

Chapter 4

Thus vent thy thoughts;

Abroad I’ll studie thee.

A poison cup, if one is sufficiently thirsty, will yield a momentarily invigorating draft, and, at the first renewal of the life-giving contact, Emily was deliriously, thoughtlessly, happy. It was not long, though, before thoughts of the future began to gnaw at her.

At first she tried to postpone dealing with them, but, as they became more insistent, she realized that the situation must be carefully weighed up, and a course of action chosen which would be neither a cowardly abandonment of her struggle, nor, on the other hand, an idealistic attempt at a self-sacrifice high-pitched beyond the ability of her flesh and blood to maintain.

For if there was one thing which even this scarcely tutored chimp had a contempt for, more than any other, it was the type of woman who, having made up her mind to sink differences and accept disadvantages in living in the presence of her beloved, sets out at the first check to infect him with her own discontent, as if she was one of those burnt envenomed lechers Donne refers to, who hope to become sound by giving others their sores.

“Never,” said she to herself, “shall his tender heart be tortured by the consciousness of a passion which it is not in his power to return, nor his blithe spirit be oppressed by sullen mood or hysterical outburst of mine. But can I achieve the necessary restraint if I remain beside him? Can I bear to go away?

“I can see no light whatever on the first question,” she continued, “but that is the greater reason, not the less, for preventing the unhesitating ‘no’ with which all my being responds to the second, from influencing my decision. What, now, would be my chief trials in the Tantalus life to which my instinct, but not yet my reason, inclines me?”

The first and greatest would be, she decided, the future Mrs. Fatigay. At the thought of her, the chimp raised her hands to her cold damp forehead, and feeling there the garland of scarlet blossoms with which her rejoicing master had laughingly crowned her, she bitterly tore it away and rent its gaudy beauty to nothingness, as an image of her rival flashed upon that inner eye which is said to be the bliss of solitude. Calming herself at length, she began to realize how important it was that she should at once obtain some definite idea of this woman’s personality. But how?

From the letter of Mr. Fatigay’s which she had read, it had been apparent that he regarded his inamorata not as a woman, but as an angel. Emily felt that she could not accept this figure, much as she would like to, as literally correct, and for all she knew it might be the very wildest hyperbole. And then: “What a fool I am!” she thought. “That letter must have been part of a long correspondence, and, beyond any question, he has treasured up all that he has received from her.”

Brushing aside conventional inhibitions with a weary smile, Emily descended to Mr. Fatigay’s bureau, and, finding at the back of one of the drawers a packet of letters carefully secured by an elastic band, she withdrew with these into a private nook, intent on learning all she could from their contents before her master returned from school.

Compressing her lips, the dreary-hearted chimp drew the first missive from its envelope. The letters were neither many nor long, but she read with such concentration that Mr. Fatigay was already approaching his home before she had replaced the last.

She descended to greet him, and both then and while she sat opposite him at tea, there was a something, not of contempt, but of that which we express by “Well! Well! Well!” in her curious regard. For it was now very clear to Emily that the woman whom he had addressed with such passionate adoration had very little sincere feeling to offer in return, and not even enough respect for him or his love to prevent her from parading her indifference with all the needless cruelty common to people of a certain type when they find themselves in possession of the whip hand. So that Emily could not understand, and stared at him as if to read the riddle in his face, now practically eclipsed by a teacup, how this man, kind, wise, and just as she knew him fundamentally to be, could have poured out his heart in slavish devotion to one who wrote, without affection, without respect, without a decent hypocrisy even:

My darling Alfred,

It’s lovely to take out your letters, and read them over before answering them, as I do now. It’s like going into a quiet dell, away from all the wild glitter and stress that one’s restless mind urges one into. I wish, for your sake, I could be simple and wholehearted like you, instead of suffering this tearing hunger to do and do and do — oh, a million things! This month, and last, have been full of people and things — new ideas that seem to remake the world for me, and, side by side with them — the craziest fun you can possibly imagine. It’s been so crazy that I daren’t describe it to you, as I should feel even in writing it down that you would never understand, and I should see your ‘schoolmaster’ look come between me and the paper.

That’s why I missed writing rather longer than I ought, but you mustn’t say reproachful things about it, for it makes me feel all hard inside when you do, and then I feel that I can’t write.