JOHN COXETER was sitting with his back to the engine in a first-class carriage in the Paris-Boulogne night train. Not only Englishman, but Englishman of a peculiarly definite class, that of the London civil servant, was written all over his spare, still active figure.
Being a man of precise and careful habit, Coxeter had reserved a corner seat, for it was late September, and the rush homeward had begun; but just before the train had started a young widowed lady, a certain Mrs. Archdale with whom he was acquainted, had come up to him on the Paris platform, and to her he had given up his seat. Coxeter had willingly made this little sacrifice of his personal comfort, but he had felt annoyed when Mrs. Archdale in her turn had yielded the corner place with foolish altruism to a French lad exchanging vociferous farewells with his parents.
When the train started the boy did not give the seat back to the courteous Englishwoman to whom it belonged, and Coxeter, more vexed by the matter than it was worth, would have liked to punch the boy's head.
And yet, as he now looked straight before him, sitting upright in the carriage which was rocking and jolting as only a French railway carriage can rock and jolt, he realized that he himself had gained by the lad's lack of honesty. By having thus given away something which did not belong to her, Mrs. Archdale was now seated, if uncomfortably hemmed in and encompassed on each side, just opposite to Coxeter himself.
Coxeter was well aware that to stare at a woman is the height of bad breeding, but unconsciously he drew a great distinction between what it is good taste to do when one is observed, and that which one does when there is no chance of being caught. Without his making the slightest effort, in fact by looking straight before him. Nan Archdale fell into his direct line of vision, and he allowed his eyes to rest on her with an unwilling sense that there was nothing in the world he had rather they rested on. Her appearance pleased his fastidious, rather old-fashioned taste. Mrs. Archdale was wearing a long gray cloak, on her head was poised a dark hat trimmed with Mercury wings; it rested lightly on the pale-golden hair which formed so agreeable a contrast to her deep-blue eyes.
Coxeter did not believe in luck; the word which means so much to many men had no place in his vocabulary or even in his imagination. But still, the sudden appearance of Mrs. Archdale in the great Paris station had been an agreeable surprise, one of those incidents which, just because of their unexpectedness, make a man feel, not only pleased with himself, but at peace with the world.
Before Mrs. Archdale had come up to the carriage door at which he was standing, several things had contributed to put Coxeter in an ill humor.
It had seemed to his critical British phlegm that he was surrounded, immersed against his will, in floods of emotion. Among his fellow passengers the French element predominated. Heavens! how they talked—jabbered would be the better word—laughed and cried! How they hugged and embraced one another! Coxeter thanked God he was an Englishman.
His feeling of bored disgust was intensified by the conduct of a long-nosed, sallow man who had put his luggage into the same carriage as that where Coxeter's seat had been reserved. Strange how the peculiar characteristics common to the Jewish race survive, whatever be the accident of nationality! This man also was saying good-by, his wife being a dark, thin, eager-looking woman of a very common French type.
Coxeter looked at them critically; he wondered if the woman was Jewish too. On the whole he thought not. She was half crying, half laughing, her hands now clasping her husband's arm, now travelling, with a gesture of tenderness, up to his fleshy face, while he seemed to tolerate rather than respond to her endearments and extravagant terms of affection.
"Adieu, mon petit homme adoré!" she finally exclaimed, just as the tickets were being collected, and to Coxeter's surprise the adored one answered in a very English voice, albeit the utterance was slightly thick: "There, there! That 'ull do, my dear girl. It's only for a fortnight, after all."
Coxeter felt a pang of sincere pity for the poor fellow; a cad no doubt—but an English cad, cursed with an emotional French wife!
Then his attention had been most happily diverted by the unexpected appearance of Mrs. Archdale. She had come up behind him very quietly, and he had heard her speak before actually seeing her. "Mr. Coxeter, are you going back to England, or have you only come to see some one off?"
But even then Coxeter had not "given himself away." He had felt a thrill of rather absurd delight on hearing that quiet question, but as he turned to her eagerly, over his lantern-shaped face, across his thin determined mouth, there had still lingered a trace of the supercilious smile with which he had been looking round him, aware, with a feeling of self-gratulation, how inferior in every way this French station was to any of the great London termini.
As he had helped Mrs. Archdale into the first-class compartment, and had indicated to her the comfortable seat he had reserved for himself, not even she—noted though she was for her powers of sympathy and understanding—had divined the delicious tremor, the curious state of mingled joy and discomfort, into which her sudden presence had thrown the man whom she had greeted a little doubtfully, by no means sure that he would desire her proximity on a long journey.
And indeed, in spite of the effect she produced upon him, in spite of the fact that she was the only human being who had ever had, or was ever likely to have, the power of making him feel humble, not quite satisfied with himself—Coxeter disapproved of Mrs. Archdale.
At the present moment he disapproved of her rather more than usual, for if she meant to give up that corner seat, why had she not so arranged as to sit by him? Instead of having done that, she was now talking to the French boy sitting in what should have been her seat. But Nan Archdale, as all her friends called her, was always like that. Coxeter never saw her, never met her at the houses to which he went simply in order that he might meet her, without wondering why she wasted so much of the time she might have spent in talking to him, and above all in listening to him, in talking and listening to other people.
Four years ago, not long after their first acquaintance, he had made her an offer of marriage, impelled thereto by something which had appeared at the time quite outside himself and his usual wise, ponderate view of life. He had been relieved, as well as keenly hurt, when she had refused him.