Notwithstanding | Page 3

at the strange country through
which they were gong. How well she knew it! How often she had gone
down to Fontainebleau. But to-day all the familiar lines were altered.
The townlets, up to their eyes in trees, seemed alien, dead. Presently the
forest, no longer fretted by the suburbs, came close up on both sides of
the rail. What had happened to the oaks that they seemed drawn up in
serried lines to watch her pass, like soldiers at a funeral! A cold horror
brooded over everything. She looked at her companion and withdrew
her eyes. He had said he was better than the Seine. But now she came
to meet his eyes fixed on her, was he better? She was not sure. She was
not sure of anything, except that life was unendurable and that she did
not care what happened to her.

There had been sordid details, and there would be more. He had said it
would be better if she had a wedding ring, and he had bought her one.
The shopman had smiled offensively as he had found one to fit her. She
set her teeth at the remembrance. But she would go through with it. She
did not care. There was nothing left in the world to care about. It was
Dick Le Geyt who, thoughtless as he was, had shown some little
thought for her, had taken her to a restaurant and obliged her to eat, had
put her into the train, and then had waylaid and dismissed his valet,
who brought his luggage to the station, and who seemed at first
determined not to let his master go without him, indeed was hardly to
be shaken off, until Dick whispered something to him, when the man
shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
Annette looked again at her companion. He had fallen suddenly asleep,
his mouth ajar. How old and shrunk and battered he looked, and how
strangely pinched! There was something unnatural about his
appearance. A horrible suspicion passed through her mind that he had
been drinking. She suddenly remembered that she had once heard a
rumour of that kind about him, and that he had lost a race by it. She had
to waken him when they reached Fontainebleau, and then, after a
moment's bewilderment, he resumed all his alertness and
feather-headed promptitude.
Presently she was in a bedroom in an old-fashioned inn, and was
looking out of the window at a little garden, with tiny pebbled walks,
and a fountain, and four stunted, clipped acacia trees.
The hotel was quite full. She had been asked some question as to
whether the room would do, and she had said it would. She had hardly
glanced at it. It was the only room to be had. And Dick's luggage was
carried up to it. The hotel-people took for granted his baggage was hers
as well as his. She remembered that she had none, and smoothed her
hair mechanically with her hands, while an admiring little
chambermaid whisked in with hot water.
And presently, in the hot, tawdry salle ˆ manger, there was a meal, and
she was sitting at a little table with Dick, and all the food was pretence,
like the tiny wooden joints and puddings in her doll's house which she

used to try to eat as a child. These were larger, and she tried to eat them,
but she could not swallow anything. She wondered how the others
could. And the electric light flickered, and once it went out, and Dick
laughed. And he ordered champagne for her and made her drink some.
And then, though he said he must not touch it, he drank some himself,
and became excited, and she was conscious that a spectacled youth
with projecting teeth turned to look at them. There was a grey-haired
Englishwoman sitting alone at the nearest table. Annette saw her eyes
rest on her for a moment with veiled compassion.
All her life afterwards, she remembered that evening as a nightmare.
But it was not a nightmare at the time. She was only an onlooker: a
dazed, callous spectator of something grotesque which did not affect
her--a mirthless, sordid farce which for some obscure forgotten reason
it was necessary for her to watch. That she was herself the principal
actor in the farce, and that the farce had the makings of a tragedy, did
not occur to her. She was incapable of action and of thought.
Later in the evening she was in her bedroom again, sitting with her
hands in her lap, vacantly staring at the wall with its mustard-coloured
roses on a buff ground, when two grinning waiters half carried, half
hustled in Dick, gesticulating and talking incoherently. They helped
him into bed: the elder one waited a moment,