The Immortal Moment Part 1

The Immortal Moment.

by May Sinclair.

CHAPTER I

They came into the hotel dining-room like young persons making their first entry into life. They carried themselves with an air of subdued audacity, of innocent inquiry. When the great doors opened to them they stood still on the threshold, charmed, expectant. There was the magic of quest, of pure, unspoiled adventure in their very efforts to catch the head-waiter's eye. It was as if they called from its fantastic dwelling-place the attendant spirit of delight.

You could never have guessed how old they were. He, at thirty-five, had preserved, by some miracle, his alert and slender adolescence. In his brown, clean-shaven face, keen with pleasure, you saw the clear, serious eyes and the adorable smile of seventeen. She, at thirty, had kept the wide eyes and tender mouth of childhood. Her face had a child's immortal, spiritual appeal.

They were charming with each other. You might have taken them for bride and bridegroom, his absorption in her was so unimpaired. But their names in the visitors' book stood as Mr. Robert Lucy and Miss Jane Lucy. They were brother and sister. You gathered it from something absurdly alike in their faces, something profound and racial and enduring.

For they combined it all, the youth, the abandonment, the innocence, with an indomitable distinction.

They made their way with easy, unembarra.s.sed movements, and seated themselves at a table by an open window. They bent their brows together over the menu. The head-waiter (who had flown at last to their high summons) made them his peculiar care, and they turned to him with the helplessness of children. He told them what things they would like, what things (he seemed to say) would be good for them. And when he went away with their order they looked at each other and laughed, softly and instantaneously.

They had done the right thing. They both said it at the same moment, smiling triumphantly into each other's face. Southbourne was exquisite in young June, at the dawn of its season. And the Cliff Hotel promised what they wanted, a gay seclusion, a refined publicity.

If you were grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite.

If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds, having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had taken stock of it that morning, with its clean walls, white as the Cliff it stood on; its bay windows, its long, green-roofed veranda, looking south; its sharp, slated roofs and gables, all sheltered by the folding Downs.

They did not know which of them had first suggested Southbourne.

Probably they had both thought of it at the same moment, as they were thinking now. But it was she who had voted for the Cliff Hotel, in preference to lodgings. She thought that in an hotel there would be more scope, more chance of things happening.

Jane was always on the look-out for things happening. He saw her now, with her happy eyes, and her little, tilted nose, sniffing the air, scanning the horizon.

He knew Jane and her adventures well. They were purely, pathetically vicarious. Jane was the thrall of her own sympathy. So was he. At a hint she was off, and he after her, on wild paths of inference, on perilous oceans of conjecture. Only he moved more slowly, and he knew the end of it. He had seen, before now, her joyous leap to land, on sh.o.r.es of manifest disaster. He protested against that jumping to conclusions. He, for his part, took conclusions in his stride.

But Jane was always listening for a call from some foreign country of the soul. She was always entering surrept.i.tiously into other people's feelings. They never caught her at it, never suspected her soft-footed, innocent intrusions.

She was wondering now whether they would have to make friends with any of the visitors. She hoped not, because that would spoil it, the adventure. People had a way of telling her their secrets, and Jane preferred not to be told. All she wanted was an inkling, a clue; the slenderer the better.

The guests as yet a.s.sembled were not conspicuously interesting.

There was a clergyman dining gloomily at a table by himself. There was a gray group of middle-aged ladies next to him. There was Colonel Hankin and his wife. They had arrived with the Lucys in the hotel 'bus, and their names were entered above Robert's in the visitors' book. They marked him with manifest approval as one of themselves, and they looked all pink perfection and silver white propriety. There was the old lady who did nothing but knit. She had arrived in a fly, knitting. She was knitting now, between the courses. When she caught sight of the Lucys she smiled at them over her knitting. They had found her, before dinner, with her feet entangled in a skein of worsted. Jane had shown tenderness in disentangling her.

It was almost as if they had made friends already.

Jane's eyes roamed and lighted on a fat, wine-faced man. Lucy saw them.

He teased her, challenged her. She didn't think, did she, she could do anything with him?

No. Jane thought not. He wasn't interesting. There was nothing that you could take hold of, except that he seemed to be very fond of wine, poor old thing. But then, you had to be fond of something, and perhaps it was his only weakness. What did Robert think?

Robert did not hear her. He was bending forward, looking beyond her, across the room toward the great doors. They had swung open again, with a flash of their gla.s.s panels, to give pa.s.sage to a lady.

She came slowly, with the irresistible motion of creatures that divide and trouble the medium in which they move. The white, painted wainscot behind her showed her small, eager head, its waving rolls and crowning heights of hair, black as her gown. She had a sweet face, curiously foreshortened by a low forehead and the briefest of chins. It was white with the same whiteness as her neck, her shoulders, her arms--a whiteness pure and profound. This face she kept thrust a little forward, while her eyes looked round, steadily, deliberately, for the place where she desired to be. She carried on her arm a long tippet of brown fur. It slipped, and her effort to recover it brought her to a standstill.

The large, white room, half empty at this season, gave her up bodily to what seemed to Lucy the intolerable impudence of the public gaze.

She was followed by an older lady who had the air of making her way with difficulty and vexation through an unpleasantly crowded s.p.a.ce. This lady was somewhat oddly attired in a white dress cut high with a Puritan intention, but otherwise indiscreetly youthful. She kept close to the tail of her companion's gown, and tracked its charming evolutions with an irritated eye. Her whole aspect was evidently a protest against the publicity she was compelled to share.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She stood there, strangely still ... before the pitiless stare that went up to her appealing face."]

Lucy was not interested in her. He was watching the lady in black who was now standing in the middle of the room. Her elbow touched the shoulder of a young man on her left. The fur tippet slipped again and lay at the young man's feet. He picked it up, and as he handed it to her he stared into her face, and sleeked his little moustache above a furtive, objectionable smile. His companion (Jane's uninteresting man), roused from communion with the spirit of Veuve Cliquot, fixed on the lady a pair of blood-shot eyes in a brutal, wine-dark face.

She stood there, strangely still, it seemed to Lucy, before the pitiless stare that went up, right and left, to her appealing face. She was looking, it seemed to him, for her refuge.

She moved forward. The Colonel, pinker than ever in his perfection, lowered his eyes as she approached. She paused again in her progress beside the clergyman on her right. He looked severely at her, as much as to say, "Madam, if you drop that thing in _my_ neighbourhood, I shall not attempt to pick it up."

An obsequious waiter pointed out a table next to the middle-aged ladies. She shook her head at the middle-aged ladies. She turned in her course, and her eyes met Lucy's. He said something to his sister. Jane rose and changed her seat, thus clearing the way to a table that stood beside theirs, empty, secluded in the bay of the window.

The lady in black came swiftly, as if to the place of her desire. The glance that expressed her grat.i.tude went from Lucy to Jane and from Jane to Lucy, and rested on him for a moment.

As the four grouped themselves at their respective tables, the lady in white, seated with her back to the window, commanded a front and side view of Jane. The lady in black sat facing Lucy.

She put her elbows on the table and turned her face (her profile was remarkably pretty) to her companion.

"Well," said she, "don't you want to sit here?"

"Oh," said the older woman, "what does it matter where we sit?"

She spoke in a small, crowing voice, the voice, Lucy said to himself, of a rather terrible person. She shivered.

"Poor lamb, does it feel a draught down its little back?"

The lady rose and put her fur tippet on the shivering shoulders. They shrank from her, and she drew it closer and fastened it with caressing and cajoling fingers. There was about her something impetuous and perverse, a wilful, ungovernable tenderness. Her hands had the swiftness of things moved by sweet, disastrous impulses.

The white person (she was quite terrible) undid the fastening and shook her shoulders free of the fur. It slid to the floor for the third time.

Lucy rose from his place, picked up the fur and restored it to its owner.

The quite terrible person flushed with vexation.

"You see," said the lady, "the trouble you've given that nice man."

"Oh don't! he'll hear you."

"If he does, he won't mind," said the lady.

He did hear her. It was difficult not to hear, not to look at her, not to be interested in every movement that she made. Her charm, however, was powerless over her companion.

Their voices, to Lucy's relief, sank low. Then suddenly the companion spoke.

"Of course," said she, "if you _want_ all the men to look at you----"

Lucy looked no more. He heard the lady draw in her breath with a soft, sharp sound, and he felt his blood running scarlet to the roots of his hair.