PORTRAIT IN SHADOW

Mr. K—— told me this story one wet day in Cumberland. He did not tell it me all in one piece: the first part of it I had as we walked in soaking rain from Braithwaite to Buttermere, the second part that same evening over a fire in the Buttermere Inn, and he finished it for me next day on our tramp under a mellow September sun into Ennerdale. We had met three days before in Keswick; we were both looking for the right kind of companion. The week that we then spent together seemed to promise a good and strong friendship but, alas, K—— died in the following year, of pneumonia. I have concealed his name because he would himself have wished it. He had a charming and most original talent, but some kind of delicacy and mistrust of himself, also, I fancy, a constitutional ill-­health which all his life pursued him, and thirdly a comfortable income, prevented him from making the mark that he should have done. In all his forty-­eight years he published only three little books; one of them, a slight but most brilliant Venetian story, had some success.

However, in these days, with the rush, roar and confusion of letters, a very delicate and fugitive talent such as his has not, I fear, a great chance of survival.

In appearance K—— was tall, slim, and fragile. He had eyes of a very bright blue and eyebrows that were almost white, so faint in colour were they. He had a charming nervous smile and never seemed to be quite sure what to do with his legs and his arms.

But it was his voice that was beautiful. How can I describe it? Anyone who knew it will hear the echo of it so long as life lasts. It had a cadence of reminiscence as though it were best pleased to speak of the past. The timbre was marvellous, very lightly pitched and yet as clear as a bell across water. He was the least affected of men, yet he had a way of lingering over a beautiful word as though he hated to let it go. His shyness, his humour, good-­fellowship, almost childish gratitude for being liked, all these things made up his charm, and yet there was more than these—some special goodness of spirit, perhaps, that put him a little apart from other men.

This was his story. I have tried to give it as though he were himself telling it. The point about it is that it should have happened to K—— of all people in the world. There are men I know to whom such an incident would have been nothing at all. It would have been forgotten as soon as it occurred. To K—— it was epochal, transforming. The man with the air en brosse, the room with the picture, these were part of his life for ever after.

It happened (said K——) more than twenty years ago. Before the war—the way we date everything now. I had come down from Oxford and was very uncertain as to my next step. I had some means of my own, you see, and I was an orphan. I have been an orphan nearly all my life.

I had been brought up by an uncle who lived in Leeds, but he died while I was at Oxford, and it was then that an aunt of mine became my friend. The odd thing about this aunt was that she was only some five years older than myself. She was my father’s youngest sister, fifteen years younger than he. My father married when he was twenty, and I was his only child. I did not see much of this aunt until my uncle died. She lived with a rather tyrannical, selfish father in London. Then at almost the moment when my uncle died her father died also, and that seemed to bring us together. We were both quite alone in the world.

But she was in a worse position than I, for she had almost no means. She was perfectly charming. I can’t possibly give you any idea of her charm. She was slight, fair, most delicately made, full of zest for life, a zest that she had never been able to fulfil. She had always had the very dullest time.

She was a child in many ways, taking everything with an eager intensity and quite surprisingly ignorant of the world. As a matter of fact, I was that also. I had never been strong, had been driven by a quite invincible shyness into a remote life of my own. I wanted to make friends but did not know how to make them. So, when we discovered one another, it was wonderful for both of us. Almost the first thing I wanted to do was to take her abroad and give her a splendid holiday. She had never been out of England.

The thought of the holiday excited her tremendously. I can see her now, sitting in a dingy room of the London house, leaning on the table after breakfast, her fragile body shaking with enthusiasm, a fog slurring the lines of the street beyond the window, the sordid remains of the meal all about her, as she cried:

‘Oh, but how wonderful! . . . France, Spain, Italy . . . !’

In the end it was Spain, and, of all mad things, the north of Spain in August. I know that we were crazy, and you may be sure that everyone told us that we were. The north of Spain! August! and you must remember that before the war Spain was by no means the sanitary and clinical paradise that its splendid ‘Turismo­’ has lately succeeded in making it.

Yes, everyone said that we were mad, but it was the Sun that we both wanted. We found that we were completely agreed about that. My aunt had never had any Sun at all. She had never been really warm. Northern Spain in August—yes, we would be certain to be warm!

So off we went. What an enchanting journey we had! We found that we were perfect travelling companions. The perfect travelling companion! Isn’t he or she practically an impossibility? As with marriage, you may compromise, and nine out of ten times you do. Is it your fault or the other’s? Surely not your own, for you start out with such splendid confidence as to your own character. And, to the very last, it isn’t your own character that seems to have failed. Aside from one or two little irritabilities you have been perfect, but the other——! You had no idea before you started of the weaknesses, the selfishness, the odd, exasperating tricks, the refusal to agree to the most obvious course, the insistence on unimportant personal rights! No, it has most certainly not been your fault; and yet, in retrospect, are there not suddenly exposed certain flecks, little blemishes in your own personality that you had never suspected?

Forgive me for emphasising the obvious, but this very question of companionship plays its important part in the little story. For my aunt and myself were the most perfect companions. We simply found, as the days passed and all those little accidents, upsets, surprises, turned up their innocent faces, as they always do on such an expedition, that we were only more and more suited to one another. We liked the same things but had our different points of view, we were amused by the same nonsense, exhilarated by the same drama, enriched by the same beauty.

My aunt’s sure perception and lovely sense of humour threw a light about her as a flower is lit by the shaking glitter of a neighbouring fountain. She had that iridescence, that eternal possibility of some beautiful surprise. And yet what a child she was! She had indeed seen nothing of life at all, and every moment of her day was a wonder and an amaze.

Well, we reached San Sebastian, and the heat was terrific. It was then that for the first time I knew a moment of alarm. This was indeed heat as I had never known it, and I lay, that first night in the San Sebastian hotel, naked on my bed while the sweat poured in streams off my body. My aunt, however, I discovered next morning, was in no way inconvenienced by it. She was ready, she declared, for anything!

I was determined to discover some small place by the sea that should be for us characteristically Spanish but quiet and beautiful. Quiet, you know, is not Spain’s most eminent characteristic! I asked the porter of the hotel, and he spoke to me at once of the little resort of Z——, a charming place, he said, over the hills, quiet and beautiful. Strange to think that it was from the round plump features of the porter of that San Sebastian hotel that, in such commonplace words, I first heard of a spot that would never, from that moment, leave me again!

I spoke of it to my aunt and she enthusiastically agreed! How little we both of us knew to what we were going!

At that time a small clumsy railway ran over the mountains to the sea. Into the fearfully hot, exceedingly democratic carriage we climbed! We had chosen an evening train that we might escape the heat of the day. We were embedded in a cheerful clump of eager, friendly people, two priests, an old and a young one, three pretty girls, a stout farmer, a clerk. I can see them all now as though they were still with me, as perhaps they are! I knew some Spanish. There are no people at the same time so friendly and so uninterfering as the Spaniards! Their hospitality is prodigious, their pride and sensitiveness also. They are gay, but never to abandon, and one of their mysteries is that they should at the same time be so kind to children and so cruel to animals.

The heat, I suppose (for that carriage was hot!), sent me into a kind of trance. I saw my companions after a while as trees walking, and the coloured haze that fell in an ever deepening purple bloom about the hills seemed to tell me that I was entering a new country.

There is little twilight in this country—soon all was dark beyond our windows, and when at last we had arrived we stepped down into mystery. About us, in the little station, I remember, was the sharp scent of some strange unknown flower and the dry sandy whisper of the sea. No breeze, and a sky stiff with the most silver stars I had ever seen.

But it was in the morning that, on waking, we realised the splendour into which we had stepped. It is the charm of Z—— that it lies, surrounded with woods, backed by mountains, in a kind of delicious privacy, as though that especial piece of sea were its own creation and separate possession. The beach is in fact large, but the black rocks that run out on either side to protect it give it a natural aristocracy, as though it were a beach preserved during many, many years by some lordly and beneficent owner for the pleasure of his friends.

Not that it was deserted or sacred with a sort of Crusoe loneliness. Far from it. As we looked out on it that morning (we had slept late) all the brilliantly striped tents—green, purple, red, yellow—were unfolding, and from every side, down the hill, the bathers, all wrapped in dressing-­gowns as gay as flower-­beds, were advancing. I believe that even now, you know, that Spanish custom of coloured dressing-­gowns on the beaches is preserved.

Well, but when we saw it all more completely we had both the same sensation. Z—— was like a flower shining at the heart of dark leaves, for all the brilliance of light and colour was enfolded by the dark woods, darker than any woods that we had ever seen.

‘It must be terrible in rain and storm,’ said my aunt with a little shiver, and then I, looking more closely, fancied that some of the old houses that bordered the woods were of the order of the storm and the wind, old and green, with gardens along whose paths the leaves thickened and in whose hedges no birds sang. This light in this darkness! That was Z——!

Only this was curious—on that very first morning, the two of us walking out towards the beach together, I noticed, from all the others, the very house, the house that still so often seems to invite me within its doors—a gate, rather shabby, a garden-­path, some beds thick with dark-­red flowers, a front of faded brown, and a bright green door with a silver knocker. It was, I think, the bright green and the silver of the knocker that attracted me. The knocker sparkled in the sun, and even as we looked the door opened and an old lady and gentleman, the old lady in a large black hat and leaning on a stick, walked out. We passed on.

Reaching the beach, it seemed to our young and inexperienced souls that we had attained Paradise. The water came rolling in, trembling in crystal lights, green like a bird’s wing; the tents of crimson and gold were grander and more lordly than anything that we had ever imagined for a beach.

Undressing under a rock on the Cornish coast was the nearest to them that we knew. Don’t imagine, though, that there was anything stiff or ceremonial about the life here. For a week at least we were as happy and care-­free as any two in the world. I knew some Spanish, my aunt could smile and nod her head and look the friend of all the world, which, for that moment, she was.

Yes, we had the happiest week of our lives. We had never conceived such a sun, such colour, such laughter, such freedom from interference, such willingness on the part of everyone that we should be at home.

Then, on a lovely morning, some time between seven and eight, bathing alone, I encountered a gentleman in the water. He was, judging by his head, a very jolly gentleman indeed.

He shouted that it was a lovely morning, that the water was perfect. I called back in my funny Spanish that he couldn’t possibly say enough about it or do it any sort of justice.

It was, I think, my funny Spanish that won him, for, coming out of the sea at the same time as myself, he said that he supposed that I was English or American. Now that should have told me something, for the Spaniards, the right Spaniards, are the most courteous people in the world and never press into the privacy of anyone.

But I never gave that a thought. I liked him at once. Standing there in the new morning sun, the water dropping from him in crystal drops, he was as handsome a man as I’ve ever seen—more handsome, I sometimes think, than anyone else in the world. What was he like? I don’t know, except that his hair stood up stiffly en brosse, even then when it was soaked with water. Its colour was raven black, his body bronze. He had a small mole underneath one eye. We talked, and he made me lose my accustomed shyness. He had always a great deal to say and he found everything amusing. He told me at once his name—Ramón Quintero. He was staying with relations. He had been here a fortnight. He liked English people. How well I spoke Spanish! Oh, yes, I did. My accent was very attractive.

At breakfast I told my aunt about him. Later that morning, while we sat under our crimson tent eating grapes, he was introduced to her. I know now that she fell in love with him at once, and that from that moment some thin, almost invisible cloud obscured our own relationship.

What a commonplace it is nowadays to remark that we are all as lonely in this life as Crusoe on his island, but it is true enough. On the instant that I introduced Ramón Quintero (robed, I remember, at the moment in a purple dressing-­gown, his face of shining bronze, his blue eyes sparkling with an amusement that seemed always to be directed more against himself than anyone else) to my aunt, I lost for ever the only really close intimacy with another human being that I have ever known or, I fancy, ever will know.

Remember that my aunt and I had only reached any sort of true companionship during the last week; there had not been time enough for a real basis of trust, fond though we were growing of one another. Had fate given us another two months!—— But it did not. Does it not often seem to break something that is almost completed?—shrugging its shoulders, saying: ‘Oh, well, this is disappointing. I thought it would turn out better. I’ll smash this and start again.’

In any case she was not, I suppose, sure enough of herself. She fancied, perhaps, that I should think her foolish. . . . But I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s what, after all this time, makes me so unhappy. Yes, even now. I’m telling you the story perhaps only that I may clear it up a little more to myself in the telling.

Such a child as she was, but not more of a child than I. Quintero must at once have put me right out of account as someone not worth considering. That is why the sequel must have astonished him!

I don’t wonder now on looking back that she fell in love with him at sight. My only wonder is that I should have been such a fool as not to have noticed it, but I knew very little about life or human beings at that time. I was quite incredibly ignorant.

The other figure in the story now appears—Sancho Panza. He was obviously Sancho to anyone coming to Spain for the first time, although Ramón Quintero was most certainly no Don Quixote. He was round and fat like a tub, with a jolly laughing face, and he had all Sancho’s proper equipment of proverbs, love of food and drink, a passion for display, a wife, to whom he was apparently devoted, very much in the background, and a passionate affection for his friend and master, Quintero. He was supposedly Quintero’s secretary, although he never wrote any letters so far as I could see. He did everything for him—a great many things of which I was probably at the moment not in the least aware. He ran messages, endured every kind of insult, was Quintero’s utterly faithful hound.

On the very first day of our acquaintanceship he mentioned my sister.

‘My aunt,’ I said.

‘Your aunt? Impossible!’

I explained.

He spoke only Spanish. Quintero spoke only Spanish. That was one reason why I never dreamed of an intimacy between himself and her. How could there be? Which showed how little, how sadly little, I knew about love and lovers. Quintero was teaching her Spanish on that very first day.

Then Sancho said:

‘So lovely and unmarried!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And rich? All the English are rich.’

‘Rolling,’ I answered. It was a joke, my answer, and, as it turned out, a deadly one.

I should have resented his impertinence, but it was impossible to resent anything that Sancho said or did. He meant so well to everyone.

The next thing that occurred was that we visited the house. I see now—oh, how many things I see!—that that had been arranged by the two of them. I can see her now as, coming over to me on the verandah of the hotel, laying her hand on my shoulder, she said:

‘Mr. Quintero has asked us to go to tea to-­morrow afternoon!’

‘How do you know?’ I said, laughing. ‘You can’t understand a word he says.’

‘Oh yes, I can,’ she answered.

I should have known by the way she said that that she had already moved worlds away from me. With what a speed, with what force of a sweeping whirlwind, this thing must have caught her! She was not one, as the sequel shows, to love idly or lightly. Had she been, there would have been no story in this. This was the way, I can see now, that she had always dreamt that love would come—in a foreign land, colour and loveliness on every side of her, and the handsomest, kindest, tenderest hero at her feet! Any girl’s dream! How often in that ugly London house, with a cross father inside and the rain outside, she must have cherished just such dreams! Unlike Desdemona, she could not listen to his tales of peril and adventure, but with every word of Spanish that he taught her she crept closer to him, he had her in his possession more securely.

‘Of course we’ll go,’ I said. ‘Quintero’s a good fellow. I like him. Where does he live?’

Well, he was staying in that very house with the bright green door and the silver knocker! As we walked up the garden path the world closed in darkly about us. Spain is a noisy country; this house was as still as the grave. But my impressions of that first visit are an odd conflict of silence and sound. The background did not accord with the actors in front of it. In an old room hung with a green wall-­paper painted with golden bees we had tea. The two old people, relations of Quintero’s, were there, Sancho Panza, my aunt and myself. Quintero was ‘the life of the party.’ He was brilliant; he was perfect. Merry, kind, full of ridiculous stories, considerate of everyone. How we laughed! We sang songs to an old cracked piano while the two old people sat and nodded their heads with approval like two gentle and very ancient mandarins. To all the noise the house made no response. Beyond the windows were the shadows of the trees, and through the trees the glory of the summer sun came so dimly that it flung a pale glow. Somewhere a bird twittered in a cage.

Then they said that we must see ‘The Picture.’ We climbed a fine old staircase that creaked with our steps, passed ghostly cabinets crowded with ghostly china, and then found ourselves in a room hung with red curtains, containing only a bookcase, a table, an old green silk settee, and some chairs as furniture, and there, the only ornament of the walls, was an amazing picture. I don’t know how good a picture it was. I am no connoisseur. It represented a young man in eighteenth-­century dress, standing against a dark background of porticoes, a fountain, shadowy trees. With head erect he stood smiling. His smile was as fascinating and as mysterious as the Gioconda’s. He was young, fiery with energy and the pride of life. He was on tip-­toe for any adventure. His beauty (for he was beautiful) resided in his eagerness, his almost impertinent self-­confidence. While I looked I thought to myself, ‘What a splendid friend to have!’ and then, moving to another part of the room, the light changed for me, there came some twist in the lip, some evil glint in the eyes, and I said: ‘He is a rogue, a rascal—I wouldn’t trust him a yard.’ Then, moving back again, all my confidence in him returned.

‘That’s odd,’ I remember saying, but, looking round, found only the stout and smiling Sancho with me.

‘Where are the others?’

‘They have gone into the garden.’

I thought nothing of that. I was absorbed by the picture. I stayed there twenty minutes looking at the picture. Friend or rogue? Good man or base? To be trusted or to be fled from?

I did not know then. I do not know now.

We went to the house on many more occasions. We had tea and dinner there. Many of Quintero’s friends came. Time passed with enchanting swiftness. The weather was lovely. The waves turned with caressing, loving lightness on the gold sand. The beach was covered with the brilliant shining tents, with hundreds of naked bronze babies; the women walked selling their biscuits, offering lottery tickets, crying the delights of the Tombola; evening after evening sank from crystal blue into grape-­dark skies, and the mornings glittered like fire.

But suddenly I wasn’t happy. Why? I didn’t know. I wanted to go away, but my aunt grew pale at the hint. She had never been so happy anywhere in her life as here. I detected in her a strange kind of fierceness. I realised with a flash why I was unhappy. She and I had lost touch with one another. We were never alone any more. We had no longer any confidences. I brooded sometimes, but I was too young, too inexperienced, to find a solution—I knew that we loved one another as deeply as ever. What had occurred?

Then I began to hear things about Quintero. Speaking Spanish, I made friends easily, friends outside the Quintero circle. I found that Quintero was not approved of. He was a waster, an adventurer, something of a rascal. Oh, a jolly fellow of course! Grand company. But not to be trusted. Beware of him. Don’t lend him money. A dangerous man about money. And yet there was nothing very definite. They told me frankly that there was nothing actually against him. Perhaps he was not bad, only—what was his occupation? On what did he live? And there were stories from Madrid. . . .

I wanted to speak to her about him and I had not the courage. She was so happy. She moved like the spirit of good fortune. I noticed—poor fool that I was—a kind of ecstasy of happiness in her eyes, in her laughter. But I guessed nothing. I only knew that we were never alone together, and I wanted to go away. . . .

Then, in a moment, in a blinding second of revelation, the catastrophe crashed. Blinding! That is my only excuse, that I had no chance of preparation, no time for thought.

One lovely morning I went down alone to the beach and came, without warning, upon Quintero and Sancho Panza. I came upon them in the middle of a fearful and appalling row. I caught a glimpse—as you see a face in a flash of lightning—of Quintero in a temper. It was a fine sight, something grand and elemental about it. He looked as though he could have caught the beach, tents and babies and all, into his fist and thrown it, crumpled to nothing, into the sea. He gave me one glance and, without a word, strode off.

Sancho was in a rage too. He was quivering like a jelly in his bathing-­dress, a very ludicrous sight. He was too angry to measure his words. With real foreign abandon he flung himself on me. There were no words adequate for Quintero. Had he not slaved for him, endured every insult, served him as no other man? . . . and now to be cheated . . . money . . . fair wages . . . I caught here and there fragments of his fury.

‘And you look out!’ He grasped my arm. ‘You say she’s your aunt. Well, whatever she is, he’s got her. In another day or two he’ll be off with her, money and all. . . . What will you look like, my friend?’

I gazed at him bewildered. I had, I remember, a sticky sense of being bogged. I felt perhaps as a fly may feel when, dancing aimlessly, its spidery feet catch the fly-­paper, its shrill buzz like the twanging of a thin wire. . . . But I didn’t utter a sound. I simply stared at him. His contempt for me was boundless, aided perhaps by the consciousness of his coming contempt for himself for giving his beloved friend away. He had wondered how long it would be before I would see it. My aunt—or whatever she was—had been crazy about Quintero from the first instant. That was no new thing. Quintero was used to it. In ordinary he let them go. He was not in reality greatly interested in women. But this time it was different. He had liked her, she was pretty, only a child—and then he was low in funds. He had always intended to make a safe marriage. My aunt was ‘rolling’—I had said so. It was myself, it seemed, who had been the trouble. At first she had said that she must tell me everything. At least that is what they thought that she meant, for one of the great difficulties throughout had been her ignorance of Spanish on one side and his of English on the other. But he had convinced her that it would be wiser to tell me after the deed was done. To warn me would only disturb me, burden me with a sense of responsibility. In any case, everything was arranged. In three days’ time they were to be married in San Sebastian. . . .

‘But she hasn’t a penny!’ was the cry on my lips. I don’t know now what held me back. The beginning, maybe, of that uncertainty that has haunted me all my life after.

Well, I was in an agony of distress. I use that word deliberately. It was an agony, like the fiercest toothache or the first pain of a broken arm. For so many men it would have meant nothing at all. They would have gone to her and said: ‘Look here, my dear, what’s all this about your running away with a Spaniard? All nonsense. . . . He’s a rogue and a vagabond. I’m not going to hear of it.’ But it is the point of this story that neither she nor I could take anything lightly. This was the first big crisis of both our lives. If only it had come a little later when we knew one another better! But I walked down that beach simply feeling that I had been for ever and ever betrayed! I had lost, in one jeering glance from that Spaniard, the only loving intimacy I had ever known in my life. She might have told me. Oh! she might have told me!

And then, passion rising in me, my only thought was that I would at once prevent it. He was marrying her for her money—the old, old story—and she hadn’t a penny! I had a wild, savage, childish, boyish pleasure in thinking that now I could have my revenge, that now I could make her unhappy. That wickedness—for such selfish angry cruelty is perhaps the wickedest thing our hearts can know—rose round the light and happiness of those last weeks as the dark trees closed in on the golden beach and the bright jade water. I would not waste an instant. I would show my power.

I was, of course, on the outside edge of the story, completely justified. Here was my poor little friend, ignorant utterly of life, in the hands of an adventurer, whom I, by a casual careless remark, had led into thinking her wealthy.

It was my plain duty to put things right. That on the outside—the heart of the affair was quite other.

Miserable, angry, blinded as though the sand had risen in a storm about my eyes, I hastened, almost running, to the house.

I remember the stillness and quietness when I had closed the gate and was alone on the garden-­path. Something in that stillness made me pause as though a voice out of those thick trees whispered to me: ‘This isn’t what you think. Go back and wait! . . . Go back!’ It was all dim in that garden, the rumble of the sea rocking through the trees, the sunlight shimmering in shadow and little sudden patterns of brilliant light. That garden tried to hold me, but I wouldn’t be held. I knocked on the silver knocker. When the servant came I asked for Quintero. He was an old bent man, that servant, with a bald patch on his head like a nutmeg-­grater. He too seemed to say before he let me in: ‘Won’t you stop a moment, sir, and think it over.’

He took me up the old creaking stairs and led me into the room with the picture. Then went softly out, closing the door behind him. Well, left alone, I looked at the picture, looked at it as though I had never seen it before.

At first, standing in a kind of raging despair, wanting only to get at Quintero as quickly as might be, charge him with treachery, strike him in the face, do anything that would relieve me, I thought that the young man smiled at me. He was wearing cherry-coloured breeches and a coat of white satin. He smiled at me as a friend, and the whole bare room seemed to be warm with his young honesty. ‘Trust me!’ he seemed to say. ‘This is fair. Give me my opportunity. I never meant anything so truly.’

Then, in my restlessness, moving to another part of the room, his face grew shifty, his eyes narrow, his mouth curled. He seemed to disdain my simplicity, to laugh at my poor attempt at good conduct. Sometimes I think that light can do everything with pictures. Maybe there is no final value in any work of art, it is only our view that gives the estimate.

In any case I moved back to my first position again and suddenly determined to leave the thing alone, at least to wait and judge it more quietly. His honest eyes looked in mine. He seemed to nod approval. ‘You’ll find that best,’ he seemed to say.

And then, with another shift, I was back to the other view again. This was a rascal! You could see it in his shifting eyes, the narrowness of his forehead . . . Why! Just the fellow to marry a poor girl for her money and then to discard her because she hadn’t any!

The door opened, and Quintero came in.

He advanced to me, his hand out, his face all smiles. And I, seeing the picture in the bad light, behaved with all the melodrama that a boy can use.

‘You blackguard!’ I cried.

‘I know. Of course I am,’ he said. ‘But why?’

It was then that, oddly enough, I had the impulse to leave them alone, let them do as they wished, and go. The picture was smiling at me. ‘What right have you to interfere with other lives? And it may be that I am a finer fellow than you are!’

I think that at that time he may have been, and that she was finer too.

But I turned my back on the picture and told him what I thought of him. I used fine language. He was carrying off a young girl for her money. He didn’t love her.

‘How do you know that I don’t love her?’

He seemed now to be years older than before, and his voice was cold with a sick distaste.

‘Because it’s only for her money that you are taking her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know what you are. Everyone knows.’

Then he threw himself on me. He literally fell on to me, caught my throat with his hands, and we began the silliest, most childish rough-­and-­tumble. We were both young and strong. We fell about the floor, knocking the chairs over. I tore his shirt open and grabbed at his bare flesh; his long sinewy hand was strangling me. We fell together. He lay on top of me, and our hearts thumped together. We lay there panting in a kind of truce, and at last I gasped out:

‘But you don’t know—the best of it—she hasn’t a penny.’

He raised himself and stared down into my face. We looked at one another, calmly, quietly, as though we loved one another. Our hands rested, palm against palm. I think that I had an odd awareness then that this was all a mistake, that if I had let them go on with it, helped them, been their friend, it would have been the most tremendous success—and for all three of us. But it was too late. I had taken the step in the wrong direction. Even if I could draw back he would not. For, resting his hand on my heart, looking down on me, he said:

‘So she lied.’

I swore, panting, that she had not, that it had been my own foolish joke.

But he got up. I also scrambled to my feet.

‘She has nothing?’

I said nothing.

‘My last chance gone.’ And, oddly enough, I’ll swear to you that I believed then, and I believe now, that it was not of money at all that he was thinking. Had she, in some innocent ingenuous way that he could not possibly understand, suggested to him that she was rich? Was it that he, like Hamlet with Ophelia, suddenly believed her treacherous, and that, believing in someone for the first time, he was for the first time deceived?

In any case I swear that it was not the money that disappointed him. Something deeper . . .

He looked at me with hatred and contempt. No one, before or since, has ever so utterly despised me.

He conducted a short cross-­examination as a judge might with his prisoner.

‘She told you—about us?’

‘Not a word.’

‘She did. You have been laughing at me—both of you.’

‘I tell you that I had no idea. I never saw. I was blind.’

‘Yes, you might be. You are too simple for anything. All the same—you are a pair. I have been a fool for the first time—to be taken in by two English . . .’ He broke off and added to himself, as I well remember, ‘And to believe in an idyll—to think that once—only five minutes ago—I thought life could be like that.’

And then he burst out:

‘She has nothing—not a penny?’

‘Not a penny.’

He stopped then, looking at me with a sombre brooding as though he were taking a last look at something very beautiful. Then he added: ‘Too good for me—the whole thing. Sentimental. I always knew it.’

He tossed his head as though he had come to a decision.

‘Wait here,’ he said, like a master to a servant. He left the room. I remained, trying to tidy myself, but feeling that I had, in some way or another, committed some great treachery. He quickly returned. He gave me a letter.

‘That is for her,’ he said.

I went out.

Well, then, what do you make of it? I lost the only great thing in my life, a relationship in bud, promising every sort of beauty and friendship. I have been afraid, since then, of making a relationship.

My aunt loved him until she died five years later. When I gave her that letter she died, died to all the new life that was just beginning for her. She became an old maid. After our return to England she shut herself up in the country somewhere. She died in the second year of the war, of pneumonia.

And Quintero? That is the oddest thing. I saw him again only last year, in the rooms at Monte Carlo. He was fat, ugly, peevish. I recognised him by the little mole under his left eye. We talked a little in quite a friendly fashion. Only, at the very last, he said, looking over my shoulder into distance:

‘You should have let us go away. It was my only chance. I loved her quite sincerely.’

‘Why did you care for what I said? I was only a boy. And if you loved her, why did the fact that she had nothing make you let her go?’

‘It was not that.’ He looked at me oddly. It was as though he were uncovering, for a moment, his lost self. ‘I had been all along afraid of my fine feelings—so unusual to me, you know. The only ones of my life. I’ve never had them again. You came in and gave me the opportunity to be my natural self. But she might have made me . . .’ He laughed and turned away.

So she was lost and I was lost and he was lost. And if I had let her go? He was a rascal. He would have broken her heart. Or perhaps he would not. No one is altogether a rascal. And in any case she would have had her glorious time, a week, a month, a year . . .

What right have we ever to take things into our own hands? And how do we know? Rascal or no, doesn’t it depend on where we ourselves stand?

Biarritz, September 11, 1930