As soon as I saw you there at the end of the alley I said to myself, with quite a little thrill of elation, 'Ah, then it's HER way too!' I wonder if you'll let me tell you," I floundered pleasantly on, "that I immediately liked you the better for it.It seemed to bring us more together.That's what I sat straight down here to show you.'Yes,' I wished you to understand me as frankly saying, 'I AM, as well as you, on the mope, or on the muse, or on whatever you call it, and this isn't half a bad corner for such a mood.' I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to me to see you do understand."I kept it up, as I say, to reassure and soothe and steady her; there was nothing, however fantastic and born of the pressure of the moment, that I wouldn't have risked for that purpose.She was absolutely on my hands with her secret--I felt that from the way she stood and listened to me, silently showing herself relieved and pacified.It was marked that if I had hitherto seen her as "all over the place," she had yet nowhere seemed to me less so than at this furthermost point.But if, though only nearer to her secret and still not in possession, I felt as justified as I have already described myself, so it equally came to me that I was quite near enough, at the pass we had reached, for what I should have to take from it all.She was on my hands--it was she herself, poor creature, who was: this was the thing that just now loomed large, and the secret was a comparative detail."I think you're very kind," she said for all answer to the speech I have reported, and the minute after this she had sunk down, in confessed collapse, to my bench, on which she sat and stared before her.The mere mechanism of her expression, the dangling paper lantern itself, was now all that was left in her face.She remained a little as if discouraged by the sight of the weariness that her surrender had let out.I hesitated, from just this fear of adding to it, to commiserate her for it more directly, and she spoke again before I had found anything to say.She brought back her attention indeed as if with an effort and from a distance."What is it that has happened to you?""Oh," I laughed, "what is it that has happened to YOU?" My question had not been in the least intended for pressure, but it made her turn and look at me, and this, I quickly recognised, was all the answer the most pitiless curiosity could have desired--all the more, as well, that the intention in it had been no greater than in my words.Beautiful, abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths it would have closed.It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt to say nothing.
It said everything, and by the end of a minute my chatter--none the less out of place for being all audible--was hushed to positive awe by what it had conveyed.I saw as I had never seen before what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey.She reminded me of a sponge wrung dry and with fine pores agape.Voided and scraped of everything, her shell was merely crushable.
So it was brought home to me that the victim could be abased, and so it disengaged itself from these things that the abasement could be conscious.
That was Mrs.Server's tragedy, that her consciousness survived--survived with a force that made it struggle and dissemble.This consciousness was all her secret--it was at any rate all mine.I promised myself roundly that I would henceforth keep clear of any other.
I none the less--from simply sitting with her there--gathered in the sense of more things than I could have named, each of which, as it came to me, made my compassion more tender.Who of us all could say that his fall might not be as deep?--or might not at least become so with equal opportunity.I for a while fairly forgot Mrs.Server, I fear, in the intimacy of this vision of the possibilities of our common nature.She became such a wasted and dishonoured symbol of them as might have put tears in one's eyes.When I presently returned to her--our session seeming to resolve itself into a mere mildness of silence--I saw how it was that whereas, in such cases in general, people might have given up much, the sort of person this poor lady was could only give up everything.She was the absolute wreck of her storm, accordingly, but to which the pale ghost of a special sensibility still clung, waving from the mast, with a bravery that went to the heart, the last tatter of its flag.There are impressions too fine for words, and I shall not attempt to say how it was that under the touch of this one I felt how nothing that concerned my companion could ever again be present to me but the fact itself of her admirable state.This was the source of her wan little glory, constituted even for her a small sublimity in the light of which mere minor identifications turned vulgar.I knew who HE was now with a vengeance, because I had learnt precisely from that who SHE was; and nothing could have been sharper than the force with which it pressed upon me that I had really learnt more than I had bargained for.
Nothing need have happened if I hadn't been so absurdly, so fatally meditative about poor Long--an accident that most people, wiser people, appeared on the whole to have steered sufficiently clear of.Compared with my actual sense, the sense with which I sat there, that other vision was gross, and grosser still the connection between the two.