When the combatants, with crossed swords, became suddenly
conscious of a third party, they each made the same
movement. It was as quick as the snap of a pistol,
and they altered it instantaneously and recovered
their original pose, but they had both made it, they
had both seen it, and they both knew what it was.
It was not a movement of anger at being interrupted.
Say or think what they would, it was a movement of
relief. A force within them, and yet quite beyond
them, seemed slowly and pitilessly washing away the
adamant of their oath. As mistaken lovers might
watch the inevitable sunset of first love, these men
watched the sunset of their first hatred.
Their hearts were growing weaker and weaker against
each other. When their weapons rang and riposted
in the little London garden, they could have been
very certain that if a third party had interrupted
them something at least would have happened.
They would have killed each other or they would have
killed him. But now nothing could undo or deny
that flash of fact, that for a second they had been
glad to be interrupted. Some new and strange
thing was rising higher and higher in their hearts
like a high sea at night. It was something that
seemed all the more merciless, because it might turn
out an enormous mercy. Was there, perhaps, some
such fatalism in friendship as all lovers talk about
in love? Did God make men love each other against
their will?
“I’m sure you’ll excuse my speaking
to you,” said the stranger, in a voice at once
eager and deprecating.
The voice was too polite for good manners. It
was incongruous with the eccentric spectacle of the
duellists which ought to have startled a sane and
free man. It was also incongruous with the full
and healthy, though rather loose physique of the man
who spoke. At the first glance he looked a fine
animal, with curling gold beard and hair, and blue
eyes, unusually bright. It was only at the second
glance that the mind felt a sudden and perhaps unmeaning
irritation at the way in which the gold beard retreated
backwards into the waistcoat, and the way in which
the finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling
its way. And it was only, perhaps, at the hundredth
glance that the bright blue eyes, which normally before
and after the instant seemed brilliant with intelligence,
seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy.
He was a heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all
the larger because of the loose, light coloured clothes
that he wore, and that had in their extreme lightness
and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics.
But a closer examination of his attire would have
shown that even in the tropics it would have been unique;
but it was all woven according to some hygienic texture
which no human being had ever heard of before, and
which was absolutely necessary even for a day’s
health. He wore a huge broad-brimmed hat, equally
hygienic, very much at the back of his head, and his
voice coming out of so heavy and hearty a type of man
was, as I have said, startlingly shrill and deferential.
