Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking terms on the
road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented some points of a
problematic appearance. I don't know why I imagined Captain Anthony as
the sort of man who would not be likely to take the initiative; not
perhaps from indifference but from that peculiar timidity before women
which often enough is found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts,
with a great need for affection and great stability of feelings. Such
men are easily moved. At the least encouragement they go forward with
the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation. This accounted for
the suddenness of the affair. No! With all her inexperience this girl
could not have found any great difficulty in her conquering enterprise.
She must have begun it. And yet there she was, patient, almost unmoved,
almost pitiful, waiting outside like a beggar, without a right to
anything but compassion, for a promised dole.
Every moment people were passing close by us, singly, in two and threes;
the inhabitants of that end of the town where life goes on unadorned by
grace or splendour; they passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow
faces, haggard, anxious or weary, or simply without expression, in an
unsmiling sombre stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered
existences whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes
were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world. And when
one thought of their reality to themselves one's heart became oppressed.
But of all the individuals who passed by none appeared to me for the
moment so pathetic in unconscious patience as the girl standing before
me; none more difficult to understand. It is perhaps because I was
thinking of things which I could not ask her about.
In fact we had nothing to say to each other; but we two, strangers as we
really were to each other, had dealt with the most intimate and final of
subjects, the subject of death. It had created a sort of bond between
us. It made our silence weighty and uneasy. I ought to have left her
there and then; but, as I think I've told you before, the fact of having
shouted her away from the edge of a precipice seemed somehow to have
engaged my responsibility as to this other leap. And so we had still an
intimate subject between us to lend more weight and more uneasiness to
our silence. The subject of marriage. I use the word not so much in
reference to the ceremony itself (I had no doubt of this, Captain Anthony
being a decent fellow) or in view of the social institution in general,
as to which I have no opinion, but in regard to the human relation. The
first two views are not particularly interesting. The ceremony, I
suppose, is adequate; the institution, I dare say, is useful or it would
not have endured. But the human relation thus recognized is a mysterious
thing in its origins, character and consequences. Unfortunately you
can't buttonhole familiarly a young girl as you would a young fellow. I
don't think that even another woman could really do it. She would not be
trusted. There is not between women that fund of at least conditional
loyalty which men may depend on in their dealings with each other. I
believe that any woman would rather trust a man. The difficulty in such
a delicate case was how to get on terms.