at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cèzanne.
`It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to the top.'
`Yes, I think so,' she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in
Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen
it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She
asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers...other people
were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened
she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about
himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in
his success.
`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a
lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few
moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'
`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.
`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are,
aren't you?'
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.
`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is
hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her
power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was
crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.
`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.
`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to
utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>