“But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she said.
To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn out the light.” They were silent.
The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s History of theDecline and Fall of Rome by candle-light. As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked feet.
“Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was—”
“Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.
He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.
“What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.
“D’you think you do make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.
After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.
“I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he observed. “Feelings? Aren’t they just what we do allow for? We put love up there, and all the rest somewhere down below.” With his left hand he indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his right the base.
“But you didn’t get out of bed to tell me that,” he added severely.
“I got out of bed,” said Hewet vaguely, “merely to talk I suppose.”
“Meanwhile I shall undress,” said Hirst. When naked of all but his shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed one with the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his young yet ugly body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there were dark lines between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.
“Women interest me,” said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.
“They’re so stupid,” said Hirst. “You’re sitting on my pyjamas.”
“I suppose they are stupid?” Hewet wondered.
“There can’t be two opinions about that, I imagine,” said Hirst, hopping briskly across the room, “unless you’re in love—that fat woman Warrington?” he enquired.
“Not one fat woman—all fat women,” Hewet sighed.
“The women I saw tonight were not fat,” said Hirst, who was taking advantage of Hewet’s company to cut his toe-nails.
“Describe them,” said Hewet.
“You know I can’t describe things!” said Hirst. “They were much like other women, I should think. They always are.”
“No; that’s where we differ,” said Hewet. “I say everything’s different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me now.”
“So I used to think once,” said Hirst. “But now they’re all types. Don’t take us,—take this hotel. You could draw circles round the whole lot of them, and they’d never stray outside.”
(“You can kill a hen by doing that”), Hewet murmured.
“Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury—one circle,” Hirst continued. “Miss Warrington, Mr. Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole lot of natives; finally ourselves.”
“Are we all alone in our circle?” asked Hewet.
“Quite alone,” said Hirst. “You try to get out, but you can’t. You only make a mess of things by trying.”
“I’m not a hen in a circle,” said Hewet. “I’m a dove on a treetop.”
“I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?” said Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.
“I flit from branch to branch,” continued Hewet. “The world is profoundly pleasant.” He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.
“I wonder if it’s really nice to be as vague as you are?” asked Hirst, looking at him. “It’s the lack of continuity—that’s what’s so odd bout you,” he went on. “At the age of twenty-seven, which is nearly thirty, you seem to have drawn no conclusions. A party of old women excites you still as though you were three.”
Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly brushing the rims of his toe-nails into the fire-place in silence for a moment.
“I respect you, Hirst,” he remarked.
“I envy you—some things,” said Hirst. “One: your capacity for not thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women like you, I suppose.”
“I wonder whether that isn’t really what matters most?” said Hewet. Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.
“Of course it is,” said Hirst. “But that’s not the difficulty. The difficulty is, isn’t it, to find an appropriate object?”
“There are no female hens in your circle?” asked Hewet.
“Not the ghost of one,” said Hirst.
Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never yet heard the true story of Hewet’s loves. In general conversation it was taken for granted that they were many, but in private the subject was allowed to lapse. The fact that he had money enough to do no work, and that he had left Cambridge after two terms owing to a difference with the authorities, and had then travelled and drifted, made his life strange at many points where his friends’ lives were much of a piece.
“I don’t see your circles—I don’t see them,” Hewet continued. “I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and out—knocking into things—dashing from side to side—collecting numbers—more and more and more, till the whole place is thick with them. Round and round they go—out there, over the rim—out of sight.”
His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge of the counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.
“Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?” asked Hirst, after a moment’s pause.
Hewet proceeded to think.
“The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in company,” he concluded.
“Meaning?” said Hirst.
“Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles—auras—what d’you call ’em? You can’t see my bubble; I can’t see yours; all we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere; it’s not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.”
“A nice streaky bubble yours must be!” said Hirst.
“And supposing my bubble could run into some one else’s bubble—”
“And they both burst?”