So we held our peace in the odious uproar of that wide roadway thronged
with heavy carts. Great vans carrying enormous piled-up loads advanced
swaying like mountains. It was as if the whole world existed only for
selling and buying and those who had nothing to do with the movement of
merchandise were of no account.
"You must be tired," I said. One had to say something if only to assert
oneself against that wearisome, passionless and crushing uproar. She
raised her eyes for a moment. No, she was not. Not very. She had not
walked all the way. She came by train as far as Whitechapel Station and
had only walked from there.
She had had an ugly pilgrimage; but whether of love or of necessity who
could tell? And that precisely was what I should have liked to get at.
This was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not
think of any effective circumlocution. It occurred to me too that she
might conceivably know nothing of it herself--I mean by reflection. That
young woman had been obviously considering death. She had gone the
length of forming some conception of it. But as to its companion
fatality--love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon its meaning.
With that man in the hotel, whom I did not know, and this girl standing
before me in the street I felt that it was an exceptional case. He had
broken away from his surroundings; she stood outside the pale. One
aspect of conventions which people who declaim against them lose sight of
is that conventions make both joy and suffering easier to bear in a
becoming manner. But those two were outside all conventions. They would
be as untrammelled in a sense as the first man and the first woman. The
trouble was that I could not imagine anything about Flora de Barral and
the brother of Mrs. Fyne. Or, if you like, I could imagine anything
which comes practically to the same thing. Darkness and chaos are first
cousins. I should have liked to ask the girl for a word which would give
my imagination its line. But how was one to venture so far? I can be
rough sometimes but I am not naturally impertinent. I would have liked
to ask her for instance: "Do you know what you have done with yourself?"
A question like that. Anyhow it was time for one of us to say something.
A question it must be. And the question I asked was: "So he's going to
show you the ship?"