“No, you must look at me,” he said.
She very slowly turned her body towards him.
He thought her most beautiful and the expression of
her beautiful face was most terrible to him in all
his emotions.
She spoke very slowly; almost with a perceptible pause
between each word. She said, “Well, I’ll
tell you. I said ‘flotsam’, didn’t
I? If I explain that—you know what
flotsam is, Marko. Have you ever looked it up
in the dictionary? The dictionary says it terribly.
’Goods shipwrecked and found floating on the
sea.’ I’m twenty-eight, Marko.
I suppose that’s not really very old. It
seems a terrible age to me. You see, you judge
age by what you are in contrast with what you were.
If you’re very happy I think it can’t
matter how old you are. If you look back to when
you were happy and then come to the now when you’re
not, it seems a most terrible and tremendous gulf—and
you see yourself just floating—drifting
farther and farther away from the happy years and
just being taken along, taken along, to God knows where,
God knows to what.” She put out the palms
of her hands towards where misty evening banked sombrely
across the park. “That’s very frightening,
Marko.”
The live thing ran beneath the leaves banked at their
feet. A stronger gust came in the air. A
scattering of leaves clustered together and moved
with sudden agitation across the sward before them;
paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into
the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their
former direction; paused again; and again seemed to
be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were
spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques,
scattered upon the breeze.
“Those leaves!” she said. And as
if she had not made the interjection she went on,
“Most awfully frightening. Well, all the
time there was you, Marko. You were always different
from anybody I ever knew. Long ago I used to
chaff you because you were so different. In those
two years when we were away it got awful. In
those two years I knew I was flotsam. One day—in
India—I went and looked at it in the little
dictionary in my writing case, and I knew I was.
Do you know what I did? I crossed out flotsam
in the dictionary and wrote Nona. There it was,
and it was the most exact thing—’Nona:
goods shipwrecked and found floating in the sea.’
I meant to have torn out the page. I forgot.
I left it there and Tony saw it.”
Sabre said, “What did he say?” In all
she had told him there was something omitted.
He knew that his question approached the missing quantity.
But she did not answer it.
She went on, “Well, there was you. And
I began to want you most awfully. You were always
such a dear, slow person; and I wanted that most awfully.
You were so steady and good and you had such quiet
old ideas about duty and rightness and things, and
you thought about things so, and I wanted that most
frightfully. You see, I’d known you all
my life—well, that’s how it was,
Marko. That explains all the things you asked.
I said ‘There’; and I said I had to come;
because I’d wanted it so much, so long.
And I wanted you to write to me because I did want
to go on having the help I had from you—”
