He had a notion after what she had told him the night before that she was too distraught to eat but sparingly, and it was a shock to his romantic sensibility to see that she ate as much as he did and with obvious satisfaction.
They were drinking their coffee when the telephone rang.
It was Simon.
“Charley?
Would you like to come round and have a talk?”
“I’m afraid I can’t just now.”
“Why not?” Simon asked sharply.
It was characteristic of him to think that everyone should be ready to drop whatever he was doing if he wanted him.
However little something mattered to him, if he had a whim for it and he was crossed, it immediately assumed consequence.
“Lydia’s here.”
“Who the devil’s Lydia?”
Charley hesitated an instant.
“Well, Princess Olga.”
There was a pause and then Simon burst into a harsh laugh.
“Congratulations, old boy.
I knew you’d click.
Well, when you have a moment to spare for an old friend, let me know.”
He rang off.
When Charley turned back to Lydia she was staring into the fire.
Her impassive face gave no sign that she had heard the conversation.
Charley pushed back the little table at which they had lunched and made himself as comfortable as he could in a shallow armchair.
Lydia leaned over and put another log on the fire.
There was a sort of intimacy in the action that did not displease Charley.
She was settling herself down as a small dog turns round two or three times on a cushion and, having made a suitable hollow, curls up in it.
They stayed in all the afternoon.
The joyless light of the winter day gradually failed and they sat by the light of the wood-fire.
In the rooms on the opposite side of the court lights were turned on here and there, and the pale, uncurtained windows had a false strange look like lighted windows in the stage-set of a street.
But they were not more unreal than the position in which he found himself seemed to Charley, sitting in that sordid bedroom, by the fitful blazing of the log fire, while that woman whom he did not know told him her terrible story.
It seemed not to occur to her that he might be unwilling to listen.
So far as he could tell she had no inkling that he might have anything else to do, nor that in baring her heart to him, in telling him her anguish, she was putting a burden on him that a stranger had no right to exact.
Was it that she wanted his sympathy?
He wasn’t even sure of that.
She knew nothing about him and wanted to know nothing.
He was only a convenience, and but for his sense of humour, he would have found her indifference exasperating.
Towards evening she fell silent, and presently by her quiet breathing Charley knew she had fallen asleep.
He got up from his chair, for he had sat in it so long that his limbs ached, and went to the window, on tiptoe so as not to wake her, and sitting down on a stool looked out into the courtyard.
Now and again he saw someone pass behind the lighted windows; he saw an elderly woman watering a flower-pot; he saw a man in his shirtsleeves lying on his bed reading; he wondered who and what these people were.
They looked like ordinary middle-class persons in modest circumstances, for after all the hotel was cheap and the quarter dowdy; but seen like that, through the windows, as though in a peep-show, they looked strangely unreal.
Who could tell what people were really and what grim passions, what crimes, their commonplace aspect concealed?
In some of the rooms the curtains were drawn and only a chink of light between them showed that there was anyone there.
Some of the windows were black; they were not empty, for the hotel was full, but their occupants were out.
On what mysterious errands?
Charley’s nerves were shaken and he had a sudden feeling of horror for all those unknown persons whose lives were so strange to him; below the smooth surface he seemed to sense something confused, dark, monstrous and terrible.
He pondered, his brow knit in concentration, the long, unhappy story to which he had listened all the afternoon.
Lydia had gone back and forth, now telling him of her struggle to live when she was working for a pittance at a dressmaker’s and after that some incident of her poverty-stricken childhood in London; then more of those agonizing days that followed the murder, the terror of the arrest and the anguish of the trial.
He had read detective stories, he had read the papers, he knew that crimes were committed, he knew that people lived in penury, but he had known it all, as it were from the outside; it gave him a strange, a frightening sensation to find himself thrown into personal contact with someone to whom horrible things had actually happened.
He remembered suddenly, he did not know why, a picture of Manet’s of somebody’s execution—was it Maximilian’s?—by a shooting squad.
He had always thought it a striking picture.
Now it came to him as a shock to realize that it portrayed an incident that had occurred.
The Emperor had in fact stood in that place, and as the soldiers levelled their rifles, it must have seemed incredible to him that he should stand there and in a moment cease to live.