Evelyn Innes 1901 — Chapter 10

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, pages 41-43, 1,312 words

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From Dover they telegraphed to Mr. Innes — "Your daughter is safe. She has gone abroad to study singing”; and at midnight they were on board the boat. The night was calm and blue; a little mist was about, and they stood watching the circle of light which the vessel shed upon the water.

"Father will be lonely without me. Who will play the viola da gamba at his concerts?”

“When I bring you back a great singer... there’ll be substantial consolation in that.”

“Do you think there will” —

"You don’t think it wrong, you are not sorry?”

“It is wrong, but I do not feel it to be wrong, and that is why it is so strange. But I’m sorry for poor father — all by himself — his lonely dinner.”

Spectral ships loomed up and vanished in the spectral stillness; and only within the little circle of light could they perceive the waves over which they floated. The moon drifted, and a few stars showed through the white wrack. Whither were their lives tending? She had thought that her life in Dulwich must endure for ever, but it had passed from her like a dream; it had snapped suddenly, and she floated on another voyage, and still the same mystery encircled her as before.

All she had ever known was behind her, had floated into the darkness as easily as those spectral ships; her religion, her father, her home — all had vanished, and all she knew was that she was sailing through the darkness without them. Seen for a moment in the light of the high moon, and then in shrouded blue night, a great ship came and went, and Evelyn clung to the arm of her lover. He folded the rough shawl he had bought at Charing Cross about her shoulders. The lights of Calais harbour grew larger, the foghorn snorted, the vessel veered, and there was preparation on board; the crowd thickened, and as the night grew fainter they saw between the dawn and the silvery moon the long low sandhills of the French coast. The vessel veered and entered the harbour, and the mystery with which a moonlit sea had filled their hearts passed, and they were taken in an access of happiness; and they called to each other for sheer joy as they struggled up the gangway.

Owen was known on the line, and the obsequiousness shown to him flattered her, and it was thrilling to read his name on the window of their carriage.

The part he had to play was a difficult one, and on board the boat, in the pauses of their conversation, he had felt that his future influence over Evelyn depended upon his conduct during the forthcoming week. It was his temperament to suggest and to lead, and as he talked to her of Madame Savelli, the great singing-mistress, and Lady  Duckle, a lady whom he hoped to induce to come to Paris to chaperon her, he saw the hotel sitting-room at the moment when the waiter, having brought in the coffee, and delayed his departure as long as he possibly could, would finally close the door. He had often to catch his breath, and he quailed before the dread interrogation which often looked out of her eyes, for they had passed Boulogne, and through the dawn, vague as an opal, appeared a low range of hills, and, as these receded, the landscape flattened out into a bleak, morose plain.

What lives were lived yonder in that low grange, crouching under the five melancholy poplars? An hour later father and son would go forth in that treacherous quaking boat, lying amid the sedge, and cast their net into one of those black pools. But these pictures of primeval simplicities which the landscape evoked were not in accord with a journey towards love and pleasure. Evelyn and Owen did not dare to contrast their lives with those of the Picardy peasants, and that they should see not roses and sunshine, but a broken and abandoned boat amid the sedge, and mournful hills faintly outlined against the heavy lowering sky seemed to them significant. They watched the filmy, diffused opal light of the dawn, and they were filled with nervous expectation. The man who appeared at the end of the plain in his primitive guise of a shepherd driving his flock toward the hard thin grass of the uplands seemed menacing and hostile. His tall felt hat seemed like a helmet in the dusk, his crook like a lance, and Owen understood that the dawn was the end of the truce, that the battle with Nature was about to begin again. At that moment she was thinking that if she had done wrong in leaving home, the sin was worth all the scruples she might endure, and she rejoiced that she endured none. He folded her in his rug. The train seemed to stop, and the name of the stations sounded dim in her ears, and when she opened her eyes Owen stood leaning over her, telling her that they had passed the fortifications, that they were in Paris.

He had brought with him only his dressing-bag, so they were not detained at the Customs. His valet was following with the rest of his luggage, and as soon as she had had a few hours’ sleep he would take her to different shops. Paris seemed very cold and cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early café, nor the humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw these things with tired eyes, and she was dimly aware of a decrepit carriage drawn by two decrepit horses, and then of a great hotel built about a courtyard. The only thing that concerned her really was whether Owen was coming to her bedroom. She had heard him say he wanted two bedrooms and a sitting-room on the second floor.

The chambermaid brought her a cup of chocolate, and when she had drunk it she fell asleep, seeing the wood fire burning; and two hours later, as she brushed out her hair with his brushes, she admired his discretion in not coming to her room.

She was pinning on her hat when he knocked, and the rest of the day was spent getting in and out of cabs.

They took the shops as they came. The first was a boot and shoe maker, and in a few moments between four and five hundred francs had been spent. Two of her dresses were bought ready-made. A saleswoman held out the skirt of a flowered silk, which she was to wear that night at the opera; another stood by, waiting for her and Owen to approve of the stockings she held in her hands. Some were open work and embroidered, and the cheapest were fifteen francs a pair. It had to be decided whether these should be upheld by suspenders or by garters. Owen’s taste was for garters, and the choice of a pair filled them with a pleasurable embarrassment. In the next shop — it was a glove shop — as she was about to consult him regarding the number of buttons, she remembered, in a sudden moment of painful realisation, the end for which they had met. He too seemed unable to fix his attention upon the present moment, and he avoided her eyes, for behind their almost nervous intensity he perceived the spiritual life.

When they returned to the hotel, the gown she was to wear that night at the opera had arrived.

“This gown must have cost twenty pounds, and I never used to spend much more than that in a whole year on my clothes.