Through all her tossing anguish, Charlotte felt the impact of that resolute spirit.

            “Tomorrow—tomorrow. You’ll see. There’ll be some explanation tomorrow.”

            Charlotte cut her short. “An explanation? Who’s going to give it, I wonder?”

            Mrs. Ashby drew back and straightened herself heroically. “Kenneth himself will,” she cried out in a strong voice. Charlotte said nothing, and the old woman went on: “But meanwhile we must act; we must notify the police. Now, without a moment’s delay. We must do everything—everything.”

            Charlotte stood up slowly and stiffly; her joints felt as cramped as an old woman’s. “Exactly as if we thought it could do any good to do anything?”

            Resolutely Mrs. Ashby cried: “Yes!” and Charlotte went up to the telephone and unhooked the receiver.

            (Saturday Evening Post 203, 25 April 1931)

 

              

 

 

 Confession.

 

 

 I.
 
 

            This is the way it began; stupidly, trivially, out of nothing, as fatal things do.

            I was sitting at the corner table in the hotel restaurant; I mean the left-hand corner as you enter from the hall… As if that mattered! A table in that angle, with a view over the mountains, was too good for an unaccompanied traveller, and I had it only because the head-waiter was a good-natured fellow who … As if that mattered, either! Why can’t I come to the point?

            The point is that, entering the restaurant that day with the doubtful step of the newly-arrived, she was given the table next to me. Colossal Event—eh? But if you’ve ever known what it is, after a winter of semi-invalidism on the Nile, to be told that, before you’re fit to go back and take up your job in New York—before that little leak in your lung is patched up tight—you’ve got to undergo another three or four months of convalescence on top of an Alp; if you’ve dragged through all those stages of recovery, first among one pack of hotel idlers, then among another, you’ll know what small incidents can become Colossal Events against the empty horizon of your idleness.

            Not that a New York banker’s office (even before the depression) commanded a very wide horizon, as I understand horizons; but before arguing that point with me, wait and see what it’s like to look out day after day on a dead-level of inoccupation, and you’ll know what a towering affair it may become to have your temperature go up a point, or a woman you haven’t seen before stroll into the dining-room, and sit down at the table next to yours.

            But what magnified this very ordinary incident for me was the immediate sense of something out of the ordinary in the woman herself. Beauty? No; not even. (I say “even” because there are far deadlier weapons, as we all know.) No, she was not beautiful; she was not particularly young; and though she carried herself well, and was well dressed (though over-expensively, I thought), there was nothing in that to single her out in a fashionable crowd.

            What then? Well, what struck me first in her was a shy but intense curiosity about everything in that assemblage of commonplace and shop-worn people. Here was a woman, evidently well-bred and well-off, to whom a fashionable hotel restaurant in the Engadine during the summer was apparently a sight so unusual, and composed of elements so novel and inexplicable, that she could hardly remember to eat in the subdued excitement of watching all that was going on about her.

            As to her own appearance, it obviously did not preoccupy her—or figured only as an element of her general and rather graceful timidity. She was so busy observing all the dull commonplace people about her that it had presumably never occurred to her that she, who was neither dull nor commonplace, might be herself the subject of observation. (Already I found myself resenting any too protracted stare from the other tables.)

            Well, to come down to particulars: she was middling tall, slight, almost thin; pale, with a long somewhat narrow face and dark hair; and her wide blue-gray eyes were so light and clear that her hair and complexion seemed dusky in contrast. A melancholy mouth, which lit up suddenly when she smiled—but her smiles were rare. Dress, sober, costly, severely “lady-like”; her whole appearance, shall I say a trifle old-fashioned—or perhaps merely provincial? But certainly it was not only her dress which singled her out from the standardized beauties at the other tables. Perhaps it was the fact that her air of social inexperience was combined with a look, about the mouth and eyes, of having had more experience, of some other sort, than any woman in the room.

            But of what sort? That was what baffled me. I could only sum it up by saying to myself that she was different; which, of course, is what every man feels about the woman he is about to fall in love with, no matter how painfully usual she may appear to others. But I had no idea that I was going to fall in love with the lady at the next table, and when I defined her as “different” I did not mean it subjectively, did not mean different to me, but in herself, mysteriously, and independently of the particular impression she made on me. In short, she appeared, in spite of her dress and bearing, to be a little uncertain and ill at ease in the ordinary social scene, but at home and sure of herself elsewhere. Where?

            I was still asking myself this when she was joined by a companion. One of the things one learns in travelling is to find out about people by studying their associates; and I wished that the lady who interested me had not furnished me with this particular kind of clue. The woman who joined her was probably of about her own age; but that seemed to be the only point of resemblance between them. The newcomer was stout, with mahogany-dyed hair, and small eyes set too close to a coarse nose. Her complexion, through a careless powdering, was flushed, and netted with little red veins, and her chin sloped back under a vulgar mouth to a heavy white throat. I had hoped she was only a chance acquaintance of the dark lady’s; but she took her seat without speaking, and began to study the menu without as much as a glance at her companion. They were fellow-travellers, then; and though the newcomer was as richly dressed as the other, and I judged more fashionably, I detected at once that she was a subordinate, probably a paid one, and that she sought to conceal it by an exaggerated assumption of equality. But how could the one woman have chosen the other as a companion? It disturbed my mental picture of the dark lady to have to fit into it what was evidently no chance association.

            “Have you ordered my beer?” the last comer asked, drawing off her long gloves from thick red fingers crammed with rings (the dark lady wore none, I had noticed.)

            “No, I haven’t,” said the other.

            Her tone somehow suggested: “Why should I? Can’t you ask for what you want yourself?” But a moment later she had signed to the head-waiter, and said, in a low tone: “Miss Wilpert’s Pilsener, please—as usual.”

            “Yes; as usual. Only nobody ever remembers it! I used to be a lot better served when I had to wait on myself.”

            The dark lady gave a faint laugh of protest.

            Miss Wilpert, after a critical glance at the dish presented to her, transferred a copious portion to her plate, and squared herself before it. I could almost imagine a napkin tucked into the neck of her dress, below the crease in her heavy white throat.

            “There were three women ahead of me at the hairdresser’s,” she grumbled.

            The dark lady glanced at her absently. “It doesn’t matter.”

            “What doesn’t matter?” snapped her companion. “That I should be kept there two hours, and have to wait till two o’clock for my lunch?”

            “I meant that your being late didn’t matter to me.”

            “I daresay not,” retorted Miss Wilpert.