"Tell me, Fyne," I cried, "you don't think the girl was mad--do you?"
He answered nothing. Soon the lighted beacon-like window of the cottage
came into view. Then Fyne uttered a solemn: "Certainly not," with
profound assurance. But immediately after he added a "Very highly strung
young person indeed," which unsettled me again. Was it a tragedy?
"Nobody ever got up at six o'clock in the morning to commit suicide," I
declared crustily. "It's unheard of! This is a farce."
As a matter of fact it was neither farce nor tragedy.
Coming up to the cottage we had a view of Mrs. Fyne inside still sitting
in the strong light at the round table with folded arms. It looked as
though she had not moved her very head by as much as an inch since we
went away. She was amazing in a sort of unsubtle way; crudely amazing--I
thought. Why crudely? I don't know. Perhaps because I saw her then in
a crude light. I mean this materially--in the light of an unshaded lamp.
Our mental conclusions depend so much on momentary physical
sensations--don't they? If the lamp had been shaded I should perhaps
have gone home after expressing politely my concern at the Fynes'
unpleasant predicament.
Losing a girl-friend in that manner is unpleasant. It is also
mysterious. So mysterious that a certain mystery attaches to the people
to whom such a thing does happen. Moreover I had never really understood
the Fynes; he with his solemnity which extended to the very eating of
bread and butter; she with that air of detachment and resolution in
breasting the common-place current of their unexciting life, in which the
cutting of bread and butter appeared to me, by a long way, the most
dangerous episode. Sometimes I amused myself by supposing that to their
minds this world of ours must be wearing a perfectly overwhelming aspect,
and that their heads contained respectively awfully serious and extremely
desperate thoughts--and trying to imagine what an exciting time they must
be having of it in the inscrutable depths of their being. This last was
difficult to a volatile person (I am sure that to the Fynes I was a
volatile person) and the amusement in itself was not very great; but
still--in the country--away from all mental stimulants! . . . My efforts
had invested them with a sort of amusing profundity.
But when Fyne and I got back into the room, then in the searching,
domestic, glare of the lamp, inimical to the play of fancy, I saw these
two stripped of every vesture it had amused me to put on them for fun.
Queer enough they were. Is there a human being that isn't that--more or
less secretly? But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it
was neither subtle nor profound. They were a good, stupid, earnest
couple and very much bothered. They were that--with the usual unshaded
crudity of average people. There was nothing in them that the lamplight
might not touch without the slightest risk of indiscretion.