it was the loneliest place in the world, hardross said. a little cogitation and much experience had given him the fancy that the ark of the kingdom of solitude was lodged in a lift, any lift, carrying a charter of mute passengers from the pavement to any sort of parnassus. nothing ever disturbs its velveteen progression; no one ever speaks to the lift man (unless it happens to be a lift girl). at hardross’s place of abode it happened to be a lift boy, sharp and white-faced, whose tough hair was swept backwards in a stiff lock from his brow, while his pert nose seemed inclined to pursue it. his name was brown. his absences from duty were often coincident with the arrivals and departures of mr. hardross. his hands were brown enough if the beholder carried some charity in his bosom, but the aspect of his collar or his shoes engendered a deal of vulgar suspicion, and his conduct was at once inscrutable and unscrupulous. it may have been for this reason that hardross had lately begun walking the whole downward journey from his high chamber, but it must have been something less capricious that caused him always to essay the corresponding upward flight. a fancy for exercise perhaps, for he was a robust musician, unmarried, and of course, at thirty-three or thirty-four, had come[120] to the years of those indiscretions which he could with impunity and without reprobation indulge.
on the second floor, outside the principal door of one set of chambers, there always stood a small console table; it was just off the landing, in an alcove that covered two other doors, a little dark angular-limbed piece of furniture bearing a green lacquer dish of void visiting cards, a heap that seemed neither to increase nor dwindle but lay there as if soliciting, so na?vely, some further contributions. two maiden ladies, the misses pilcher, who kept these rooms, had gone to france for a summer holiday, but though the flat had for the time being some new occupants the console table still kept its place, the dish of cards of course languishing rather unhopefully. the new tenants were also two ladies, but they were clearly not sisters and just as clearly not pilcherly old maids. one of them, hardross declared, was the loveliest creature he had ever seen. she was dark, almost tall, about as tall as hardross though a little less robust and rather more graceful. her mature scarlet lips and charming mature eyes seemed always to be wanting to speak to him. but she did not speak to him, even when he modestly tried to overcome, well, not her reserve—no one with such sparkling eyes could possibly be reserved—but her silence. he often passed her on the landing but he did not hear her voice, or music, or speech, or any kind of intercourse within the room. he called her the quiet woman. the other lady, much older, was seldom seen; she was of great dignity. the younger one walked like a woman conscious[121] and proud of the beauty underneath her beautiful clothes; the soft slippers she wore seemed charged with that silent atmosphere. even the charwoman who visited them daily and rattled and swept about was sealed of the conspiracy of silence; at least he never caught—though it must be confessed that he guiltily tried—the passage of a single word. what was the mystery of the obstinately silent ménage? did the elder lady suffer from sorrow or nerves; was she under a vow; was she a genius writing a sublime book?
the voiceless character of the intercourse did not prevent hardross becoming deeply enamoured and at the same time deeply baffled. morning and evening as he went to the great city church of which he was organist he would often catch a glimpse of his quiet woman on the stairs. at favourable junctures he had lifted his hat and said good-morning or good-evening, but she had turned away as if overcome by confusion or an excess of propriety.
“i am a coward,” he would think; “shyness and diffidence rule me, they curse me, they ruin my life; but she, good heavens! is extraordinarily retiring. why, i am just a satyr, a rampant raging satyr, a satyr!” and he would liken her to diana, always darting with such fawnlike modesty from the alcove whenever he approached. he did not even know her name. he wanted to enquire of the lift boy brown or the porter, but there again he lacked the casual touch to bring off the information. the boy was too young, too cute, too vulgar, and the porter too taciturn, as difficult[122] for hardross to approach as an archbishop would have been. but miss barker now, that milliner, down below on the ground floor! she would know; she knew everybody and everything about the chambers including, quite familiarly, hardross himself—she would be sure to know. but even she would have to be approached with discrimination.
“evening, miss barker!” he cried. the good-looking spinster peered up from a half-trimmed bonnet. “when do you go for a holiday, then?”
“holidays,” she sighed, though the corner of her mouth was packed with pins, “i cannot afford holidays.”
“ho-ho, you can’t afford!”
their common fund of repartee lay in his confident assumption that she was rolling in surplus income and her counter assertion that she was stricken in poverty; that people—the pigs—would not pay her prices, or that those who did not flinch at her prices would not pay her bills.
“astonishing, deplorable, this mammon-worship!” he declared, leaning genially upon her table; “you know, it breaks my heart to see you a slave to it, a woman of a thousand, ten thousand in fact. give it up, o,”—he beat the table with his hand—“give it up before it is too late!”
“too late for what?” she asked.
“why, all the delightful things a woman like you could do.”
“as what?”
[123]
“o ... travel, glories of nature, you know, friendship, men ... love itself.”
“give me all the money i want,”—she was brusque about it, and began to dab the unwanted pins back into their cushion—“and i’ll buy, yes buy, a sweetheart for each day in the week.”
“heavens now!” he was chilled by this implication of an experience that may have been dull, that must have been bitter, but he floundered on: “what now would you give for me?”
“for you!” she contemplated him with gravity: “to be sure i had not thought of you, not in that way.”
“o but please do think of me, dear lady, put me in your deepest regard.”
the ghost of a knowing grin brushed her features. really a charming woman, in parts. a little stout, perhaps, and she had fat red hands, but her heart was a good substantial organ, it was in the right place, and her features seemed the best for wear.
“you are one of those surprising ladies”—he plunged gaily—“who’ve a long stocking somewhere, with trunks full of shares and scrip, stocks at the bank and mortgages at your solicitor’s. o yes, yes,” he cried out against her protestation, “and you will make a strange will leaving it all to me!”
she shook her head hopelessly, bending again over the bonnet whose desperate skeleton she had clothed with a flounce of crimson velvet. she was very quiet.
[124]
“have i been rude?” he hazarded. “forgive me.”
“well, it’s not true,” she insisted.
“forgive me—i have hurt you—of course it’s not true.”
apparently she forgave him; he was soon asking if there were any rooms to let in the building. “furnished, i mean.” he gave rein to his na?ve strategy: “i have friends who want to come here and stay with me for a short holiday. i thought you might know of some.”
“in these flats?” she shook her head, but he persisted and played his artful card:
“the miss pilchers, on the second floor, haven’t they gone away?”
she did not know—why not ask the porter.
“yes, i must ask the porter, but i can never catch the porter, he is so fugitive, he is always cutting his lucky. i hate that man, don’t you?”
and there, temporarily, he had to leave it.
so many days passed now without a glimpse of his lovely one that he had almost brought himself to the point of tapping at the door and enquiring after her welfare, only the mysterious air of the apartment—how strange, how soundless it was—forbade any such crudeness. one morning he recklessly took a cigarette from his case and laid it upon the console table as he passed. when he returned later the cigarette was gone; it had been replaced by a chocolate cream, just one, a big one. he snatched it away and rapturously ate it. later in the day he was blessed by a deep friendly gaze, as she flitted into her room. hardross[125] rejoiced; in the morning he left another cigarette and was again rewarded.
“but o god help me,” he thought, “i can’t go on like this!”
so he bought a whole box of bonbons, but his courage deserted him as he approached their door; he left the package upon the console table and slunk guiltily away. the next morning he observed a whole box of cigarettes, a well-known exquisite brand, laid temptingly there. he stretched his eager hand towards it, but paused. could that be a gift for him? heavens above! what were the miraculous gods about to shower upon him? was this their delicate symbol? he could not believe it, no, he could not, he left the box lying there. and it lay there for hours indeed until he crept down and seized it. afterwards he walked trembling into the brighter air and went for a long ride on the top of an omnibus. there had been no letter, but he fancied that he had got hold of a clue. “be very careful, hardross my boy, this is too too splendid to spoil.”
an afternoon or so later he met her coming into the hall, a delicious figure with gay parasol and wide white hat. he delayed her:
“let me thank you, may i, for those perfect cigarettes?”
the lovely creature did not reply. she just smiled her recognition of him; she did not speak nor move away, she stood there quite silent and timid.
“i wonder,” he began again, “if i might”—it sounded dreadfully silly to him, but having begun he went on—“if[126] i might invite you to my church this evening, a rather special choral service, very jolly, you know. i’m the organist; would you come?”
no answer.
“would you care to come?”
she lifted both her hands and touching her lips and ears with significant gestures shook her head ever so hopelessly at him.
“deaf and dumb!” he exclaimed. perhaps the shock of the revelation showed too painfully in his face for she turned now sadly away. but the hall was divinely empty. he caught one of the exquisite hands and pressed it to his lips.
thereafter hardross walked about as if he too were deaf and dumb, except for a vast effusion of sighs. he could praise that delicacy of the rarest whereby she had forborne to lure him, as she could so easily have done, into a relation so shrouded and so vague. but that did not solve his problem, it only solidified it. he wanted and awaited the inspiration of a gesture she could admire, something that would propitiate her delicacy and alarms. he did not want to destroy by clumsy persistencies the frail net of her regard for him; he was quite clear about that, the visible fineness of her quality so quelled him. applying himself to the task he took lessons in the alphabet language, that inductile response of fingers and thumbs.
meanwhile she had marked her sense of the complication by hiding like a hurt bird, and although the mystery of the quiet rooms was now exposed she herself remained unseen. he composed a graceful note[127] and left it upon the console table. the note disappeared but no reply came: she made no sign and he regretted his ardour.
such a deadlock of course could not exist for ever, and one evening he met her walking up the stairs. she stopped mutually with him. he was carrying his music. he made a vain attempt to communicate with her by means of his finger alphabet, but she did not understand him although she delightedly made a reply on her fingers which he was too recently initiated to interpret. they were again at a standstill: he could think of nothing to do except to open his book of organ music and show her the title page. she looked it over very intelligently as he tried by signs to convey his desire to her, but he was certain she was blank about it all. he searched his pockets for a pencil—and swore at his non-success. there he stood like a fool, staring at her smiling face until to his amazement she took his arm and they descended the stairs, they were in the street together. he walked to the church on something vastly less substantial than air, and vastly superior.
hardross’s church was square and ugly, with large round-headed windows. its entrance was up some steps between four corinthian pillars upon the bases of which cabmen snoozed when it was warm or coughed and puffed in the winter cold. there was a pump on the kerb and a stand for hackney cabs. a jungle of evergreens squatted in a railed corner under the tower, with a file of iris plants that never flowered. upon the plinth of the columns a ribald boy had chalked:
[128]
remove this obstacle
eternally at the porch tired cabhorses drooped and meditated, while the drivers cut hunches of bread and meat or cheese or onion and swallowed from their tin bottles the cold tea or other aliment associated with tin bottles. there was always a smell of dung at the entrance, and an aroma of shag tobacco from the cabmen’s pipes curled into the nave whenever the door opened for worshippers. inside the church hardross ushered his friend to a seat that he could watch from his organ loft. there were few people present. he borrowed a lead pencil from a choir boy, and while the lesson was being perfunctorily intoned, sounding like some great voice baffled by its infinitely little mind, he scribbled on a sheet of paper the questions he was so eager to ask; what was her name and things like that:
how can we communicate? may i write to you? will you to me? excuse the catechism and scribble but i want so much to know you and grab at this opportunity.
yours devotedly
john hardross
when he looked up her place was empty; she had gone away in the middle of the service. he hurried home at last very perturbed and much abashed, for it was not so much the perplexities of intercourse, the torment of his dilemma, that possessed him now as a sense of felicities forbidden and amenities declined.
[129]
but his fickle intelligence received a sharp admonitory nudge on the following evening when he espied her sitting in the same place at church for all the world as if she had not deserted it on the evening before. then he remembered that of course she couldn’t hear a thing—idiot he was to have invited her. again she left the church before the close of the service. this for several days, the tantalized lover beholding her figure always hurrying from his grasp.
he pursued the practice of the deaf and dumb alphabet with such assiduity that he became almost apt in its use; the amount of affection and devotion that he could transcribe on finger and thumb was prodigious, he yearned to put it to the test. when at last he met her again in the hall he at once began spelling out things, absurd things, like: “may i beg the honour of your acquaintance?” she watched this with interest, with excitement even, but a shadow of doubt crept into her lovely eyes. she moved her own fingers before him, but in vain; he could not interpret a single word, not one. he was a dense fool; o how dense, how dense! he groaned. but then he searched his pockets and brought out the note he had scribbled in church. it was a little the worse for wear but he smoothed it, and standing close by her side held it for her perusal. again his hopes were dashed. she shook her head, not at all conclusively but in a vague uncomprehending way. she even with a smile indicated her need of a pencil, which he promptly supplied. to his amazement what she scribbled upon the page were some meaningless hieroglyphs, not letters, though[130] they were grouped as in words, but some strange abracadabra. he looked so dismally at her that she smiled again, folding the paper carefully ere she passed on up the stairs.
hardross was now more confounded than ever. a fearful suspicion seized him: was she an idiot, was it a mild insanity, were those marks just the notation of a poor diseased mind? he wished he had kept that letter. god, what a tragedy! but as he walked into the town his doubts about her intellect were dispelled. poof! only an imbecile himself could doubt that beautiful staring intelligence. that was not it; it was some jugglery, something to do with those rooms. nothing was solved yet, nothing at all; how uncanny it was becoming!
he returned in the afternoon full of determination. behold, like a favourable augury, the door by the console table stood open, wide open. it did occur to him that an open door might be a trap for unwary men but he rapped the brass knocker courageously. of course there was no response—how could there be—and he stepped inside the room. his glance had but just time to take in the small black piano, the dark carpet, the waxed margins of the floor, the floral dinginess of the walls brightened by mirrors and softened by gilt and crimson furniture, when the quiet woman, his diana, came to him joyfully holding out both her hands. well, there was no mystery here after all, nothing at all, although the elder lady was out and they were apparently alone. hardross held her hands for some moments, the intensity of which[131] was as deeply projected in her own eyes as in the tightness of his clasp. and there was tea for him! she was at her brightest, in a frock of figured muslin, and sitting before her he marvelled at the quickness of her understanding, the vividness of her gestures, the gentleness with which she touched his sleeve. that criminal suspicion of her sanity crowned him with infamy. such communication was deliciously intimate; there came a moment when hardross in a wild impulsive ecstasy flung himself before her, bowing his head in her lap. the quiet woman was giving him back his embraces, her own ardour was drooping beautifully upon him, when he heard a strange voice exclaim in the room: “god is my help! well then!” a rattle of strange words followed which he could not comprehend. he turned to confront the elder woman, who surveyed them with grim amusement. the other stood up, smiling, and the two women spoke in finger language. the newcomer began to remove her gloves, saying:
“it is mr. hardross then. i am glad to meet. there is a lot of things to be spoken, eh?”
she was not at all the invalid he had half expected to find. she removed her hat and came back a competent-looking woman of about fifty, who had really an overwhelming stream of conversation. she took tea and, ignoring the girl as if she were a block of uncomprehending ornament, addressed herself to the interloper.
“you do not know me, mr. hardross?”
“it is a pleasure i have but looked forward to,”[132] he replied, in the formal manner that at times irresistibly seized him, “with the keenest possible anticipation and....”
“no, i am madame peshkov. we are from odessa, do you know it? we go back to our russia tomorrow; yes, it is true.”
his organs of comprehension began to crackle in his skull, but he went on stirring his fresh cup of tea and continued to do so for quite a long time.
“no, you ... are ... russian! i did not know.” amid his musing astonishment that fact alone was portentous; it explained so much, everything in fact, but how he could ever contrive to learn such a language was the question that agitated him, so fearfully difficult a language, and on his fingers too! then that other thunderclap began to reverberate: they were going, when was it? tomorrow! all this while madame peshkov ran on with extravagant volubility. she had the habit of picking one of the hairpins from her hair and gently rubbing her scalp with the rounded end of it; she would replace the pin with a stylish tap of her fingers. it was a long time before hardross extracted the pith from her remarks, and then only when the hypnotism induced by the stirring of his tea suddenly lapsed; he became aware of the dumb girl’s gaze fixed piercingly upon him, while his own was drawn away by the force of the other’s revelations. what he had already taken in was sad and strange. her name was julia krasinsky. she was not at all related to madame peshkov, she was an orphan. madame’s own daughter had been deaf and dumb, too, and the girls had been inseparable[133] companions until two years ago, when natalia peshkov had died—o, an unspeakable grief still. he gathered that madame was a widow, and that since natalia’s death the two women had lived and travelled together. madame talked on; it was tremendously exciting to hardross crouching in his chair, but all that echoed in his mind were the words julia krasinsky, julia krasinsky, until she suddenly asked him:
“do you love her?”
he was startled by this appalling directness; he stammered a little but he finally brought out:
“i adore her. beyond everything i deeply deeply love her.” he then added: “i feel shameful enough now. i rage inwardly. all these many weeks i have dallied like a boy, i did not understand the situation. i have wasted our chances, our time, and now you are going.”
“you can’t waste time”; retorted the abrupt lady. “time deals with you no matter how you use his hours.”
“i suppose so,” he agreed quite helplessly, “but we might have been extraordinary friends.”
“o, but you are, eh! she is bewitched, you cannot speak to her, she cannot speak to you, but yet you love. o, she is vairy vairy fond of you, mr. hardross. why not? she has the best opinions of you.”
“ah, she will change her opinion now. a fool like me?”
“no one ever changes an opinion. your opinions govern and guide and change you. if they don’t they are not worth holding. and most of them are not,[134] eh, do you see, we are such fools but god is our help.”
she talked confidently, intimately and quickly, but hardross wished she would not do so, or use her hairpins in that absurd distracting way. he himself had no confidence; he was reserved by nature, irrevocably, and the mask of deliberation was necessary to him.
“madame peshkov, i shall take her out for a walk in the town, now, at once!” he cried.
“ah, so?” madame nodded her head vigorously, even approvingly. he had sprung up and approached the quiet woman. all her gentle nearness overcame him and he took her audaciously into his arms. not less eagerly she slid to his breast and clung there like a bird to the shelter of its tree. julia turned to madame peshkov with a smiling apologetic shrug, as much as to say: “what can one do with such a fellow, so strong he is, you see!” madame bade him bring julia later on to the café where they always dined.
his happiness was profound. he had never had an experience so moving as the adorable dumb woman by his side: yet so unsurprising, as if its possibility had always lain goldenly in his mind like an undreamed dream, or like music, half-remembered music. there was nothing, of course, just nothing they could talk about. they could look into shop windows together rather intimately, and they were a long time in a shady arcade of the park, full of lime-browsing bees, where they sat watching a peacock picking the gnats off the shrubs. it was the pleasantest possible defeat of time. then there was the handsome girl crossing the yard of a weaving mill as they passed. she was carrying[135] a great bale of bright blue wool and had glanced at them with a friendly smile. her bare white arms encircled the wool: she had big gilt rings in her ears, and her fine shining chestnut-coloured hair was disarrayed and tumbled upon the bale. julia had pressed his arm with joy. yes, she delighted in the things he delighted in; and she felt too that sense of sorrow that hung in the air about them.
her appearance in the café stirred everybody like a wave of sweet air. hardross was filled with pride. he felt that it was just so that she would enrich the world wherever she wandered, that things would respond to her appearance in astonishing mysterious ways. why, even the empty wine glasses seemed to behave like large flowers made miraculously out of water, a marvel of crystal petals blooming but for her; certainly the glasses on other tables didn’t look at all like these. he drank four glasses of wine and after dinner they all sat together in the flat until the half darkness was come. and now madame peshkov too was very silent; she sat smoking or scratching her head with her pins. it was nine o’clock, but there remained a preposterous glare in the west that threw lateral beams against the tops of tall buildings, although the pavements were already dim. it made the fronts of the plastered houses over the way look like cream cheese. six scarlet chimney pots stood stolidly at attention—the torsos of six guardsmen from whom head and limbs had been unkindly smitten; the roof seemed to be rushing away from them. beyond was an echo of the sunset, faint in the northern sky. how[136] sweet, how sad, to sit so silently in this tremulous gloom. it was only at the last when they parted at her door that the shadow of their division became omnipresent. then it overwhelmed them.
hardross crept upstairs to his own rooms. in such plights the mind, careless of time present and time past, full of an anguish that quenches and refills like a sponge, writhes beyond hope with those strange lesions of demeanour that confound the chronicler. tra-la-la, sang the distracted man, snapping his sweating fingers in time with a ribald leering ditty, tra-la-la. he dropped plumb to atlantean depths of grief, only to emerge like a spouting whale with the maddening tra-la-la tugging him, a hook in his body, from despair to dementia. he was roused from this vertiginous exercise by a knocking at his door. the door was thrust open, and madame peshkov asked if he was there. he rose up and switched on a light.
“what is to be done now?” cried the lady. if her silence below had been complete, as complete as poor julia’s, she was now fully audible and not a little agitated. “what is to be done? i cannot believe it of her but it is true, as true as god!”
hardross beheld her sink, stricken with some trouble, into an armchair, beating her hands together.
“i have no influence, gone it is, no power over her, none whatever. what is to be done? assist us please. she has been so.... o, for days, and now it comes, it comes....”
“what has come?” he interrupted sharply.
[137]
“i cannot believe it of her, but it is true ... as god. she is like a vast ... cold ... stone, a mountain.”
“is this about julia?”
“she will not go. of course she will not go! she declines, she will not come back to odessa. she says she will not come. i have to tell you this, mr. hardross, i cannot move her. she is like a vast ... cold ... stone. what then?”
madame’s appeal seemed pregnant with a significance that he but dimly savoured. he asked: “what is she going to do then?”
“to stop in this england, here, in this very place! but our passages are booked, tomorrow it is—pooh, it does not matter!—i am to leave her here in this place, here she will stay, in a foreign land, without speech or understanding. but what is to be done, i ask of you?”
he was delirious himself; he kept whispering julia, julia, but he managed to ask with a lugubrious covering of propriety:
“what? i don’t know. shall i go to her?”
“but can you not see? do you comprehend, you hardross? o, it is a madness, i want to explain it to you but it is all so gross, so swift, like a vulture. you see it is impossible for me to remain an hour longer, an hour in england impossible absolutely; there are reasons, lives perhaps, depending on my return. yes, it is true; we live in russia, do you see, and in russia ... ah, you understand! but how shall i leave this woman here?”
[138]
madame stared at him with curious inquisitiveness, beating her hands upon the arm of the chair as if she expected an answer, a prompt one:
“of course she will not go away from you now, of course, of course, she has never had a lover before—how could she, poor thing. i understand it, she is not a child. and you mr. hardross you are a generous man, you have courage, a good man, a man of his honour, o yes, it is true, i see it, i feel it, and so she will not be torn away from you now. i understand that, she is no longer a child.”
madame rose and took him by the arm. “marry her, my friend! do not you see? i can leave her to you. marry her at once, marry her!” she stood as if it were something that could be done on the spot, as easy as giving one a cup of tea. but he did not hesitate.
“why, i would give my soul to do it!” he cried, and rushed away down the stairs to julia.
and surely she was as wise as she was beautiful, and as rich as she was wise.
