at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw Rachel’s face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face that could look so many things—plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?
“Oh, you’re free!” he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her, “and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together. We’d share everything together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with ours.” He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one embrace.
No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.
Chapter XIX
But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.
She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across the room to her.
“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at me.”
It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.
She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to you.”
As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand, ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said. “Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to blazes! Them’s my opinions!”
She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I suppose you think I’m mad?”
Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred to her without fear of the consequences.
“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.
“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a proposal?”
“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.
“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed rather insincerely.
“I’ve never had one.”
“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”
She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him, and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair, you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”
She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried; “they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”
She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.
“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.
Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she only thought that the world was full or people in torment.
“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”
At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.
“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people? Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that. There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.
She tried to force herself to say, “Has to be proposed to you?” but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.
“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.
She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued. “She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what
