Читать книгу The Stronger Influence - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The dining-room at the hotel was a low, narrow room, rather dark. Its French windows opened on to the stoep, which was creeper veiled and shaded with the shrubs in the garden. Down the centre of the room was a long table. A smaller room led off from the principal dining-room, where the guests with families took their meals.

Esmé, entering later than the rest, found a seat at the principal table reserved for her. On her right was seated the old gentleman who had been her fellow-traveller. He looked up when she took her seat and spoke to her. She turned from answering him and took quiet observation while she leisurely unfolded her napkin of the man who was seated on her left.

He was a man of about twenty-eight, tall and broadly built, with however an air of delicacy about him altogether inconsistent with his physique. He was round-shouldered, and his hands, long and remarkably white, suggested that their owner had never performed any hard work in his life. His face was altogether striking, strong and fine, with clear cut features, and keen dominating grey eyes. When Esmé sat down he was bending forward over his plate and did not once glance in her direction. He seemed wholly unaware of her entrance, unaware of, or indifferent to the presence of any one in the room. He confined his attention to his food, and did not talk, or evince any interest in the talk about him.

Esmé, while she looked at him, was keenly alive to the fact that he was conscious of her presence and of her scrutiny, though he chose to ignore both. A faint colour showed in his face and mounted to the crisp light brown hair, which, cut very short, had a tight kink in it as though it might curl were it allowed to grow. She liked the look of this man, and, oddly, she was attracted rather than repelled by his taciturn and unsociable manner. Why should a man staying at a sanatorium not remain aloof if he wished? The fact of being under the same roof with other people should not of itself enforce an obligation to be sociable when one inclines towards an opposite mood. Doubtless, like herself, he had come to the Zuurberg in quest of health. He looked as if he had been ill. His hand, she observed when he lifted his glass, was unsteady.

She watched his hands, fascinated and puzzled. It was obvious that he could not control their shaking, that he was aware of this shakiness and was embarrassed by it. She felt intensely sorry for him. She also felt surprise at his self-consciousness. She noticed that he ate very little. He rose before the sweets, and went out by the window and seated himself on the stoep.

Conversation brightened with his exit. The people near her seemed in Esmé’s imagination to relax: the talk flowed more freely. Even the old gentleman on her right appeared to share in the general relief: he turned more directly towards her and entered into conversation. While the man outside sat alone, smoking his pipe, and looking into the shadows as the dusk drew closer to the earth.

With the finish of dinner Esmé walked out on to the stoep with the purpose of going for a stroll before bedtime. The long straight road beyond the gate looked inviting in the evening gloom. She would have welcomed a companion on her walk; but, save for her fellow-travellers, she knew no one; and her fellow-travellers showed no desire for further exercise.

When she appeared on the stoep she was aware that the man who interested her so tremendously looked up as she passed close to him. He followed her with his eyes as she went down the steps, down the short path to the gate, through the gate, out on to the open road. But he did not move. Esmé was conscious of his gaze though she could not see it; she was conscious of his interest. The certainty that she had caught his attention even as he had arrested hers pleased her. A restrained excitement gripped her. She laughed softly to herself as she stepped into the shadowed road. It was good to know that she left some one behind in whom she had provoked a faint curiosity in this place where she was a stranger and alone. He, too, was alone. She had thought when she passed him that he looked lonelier than any one she had ever seen or imagined, seated amid a crowd of people, saying nothing, doing nothing; sitting still and solitary, smoking and looking into the shadows.

What was wrong with this man, she wondered, that he should remain so aloof from his fellows. He was not a newcomer, as she was; he had indeed, though she did not know this, been many months at the hotel; yet he seldom spoke to any one. The coming and going of visitors was viewed by him with indifference. They were nothing to him, these people; he was less than nothing to them. Occasionally some man came to the hotel with whom he entered into conversation; but more often people came and went and held no intercourse with him at all. They summed him up very quickly for the most part; looked askance at him, and left him severely alone. He did not care. It pleased him to remain undisturbed, and the general disapproval troubled him very little. But that night a girl’s clear eyes, a girl’s sweet serious face, got between him and his egotism, got between his vision and the shadowy dusk, and mutely asked a question of him: “What was he making of life?”

What was he making of it? What was he giving in return for the gifts which he received? What was he doing, what had he ever done, to justify his existence? Nothing.

The light wind carried the answer on the dusky wings of night. It beat into his consciousness and stirred him out of his easy acquiescence in things. He was flotsam on the sea of life—waste matter drifting aimlessly, to be finally ejected and flung, spent and useless, on the shore. Dust which returns to the dust, for which God in His inscrutable reason finds some use which eludes man’s understanding.

Esmé Lester walked along the quiet road and thought of the man she had left seated alone on the stoep, the man whom she believed to be ill. And the man sat on and waited for her return and wondered about her with an interest which equalled her interest in him. She was just a girl, a bright, sweet, wholesome young thing, who had happened along as the other guests at the sanatorium had happened along, and who would vanish again as they vanished, leaving him seated there still to watch further arrivals and departures as he had done for many weeks, as he would probably do for many months. He had never seen any one until this girl came who had held his attention even momentarily. She stood out from these others, some one apart and distinctive. It was not merely that she was pretty; many pretty women came there, but they did not interest him. There was something vivid and arresting about her, some elusive quality which caught his fancy, and which he could not define. He thought she looked sympathetic.

When Esmé returned an hour later he was still seated on the stoep. She saw his figure against the lighted doorway at his back: to all appearance he had not moved his position since she had passed him on setting forth. But the last of the daylight had departed, and the night was dark; there was no moon and the starlight was obscured by a mist of thin clouds which trailed across the sky. She could not see his face clearly. But as she stepped up to the stoep the light from the passage illumined her features and revealed her fully to the man’s gaze. He watched her covertly from under his brows, saw the startled look in her eyes as they caught the artificial light, their curious bewildered blink as the warm glow fell on her face.

Her look of blank surprise amused him. It was like the look of a child which steps abruptly into the light out of darkness and finds perplexity in the sudden change.

She passed him and went inside; and it seemed to him that the light glowed more dimly, that the night grew darker when she disappeared. He rose and went into the bar and remained there, as was his nightly custom, until the bar closed, when he went to bed.