British -- India -- Fiction; India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction; Short stories, English
He made it his business to get introduced to Mrs. Haggert, and the
introduction prospered. He also made it his business to see as much as
he could of that lady. When a man is in earnest as to interviews, the
facilities which Simla offers are startling. There are garden-parties,
and tennis-parties, and picnics, and luncheons at Annandale, and
rifle-matches, and dinners and balls; besides rides and walks, which are
matters of private arrangement. Hannasyde had started with the intention
of seeing a likeness, and he ended by doing much more. He wanted to
be deceived, he meant to be deceived, and he deceived himself very
thoroughly. Not only were the face and figure, the face and figure of
Alice Chisane, but the voice and lower tones were exactly the same, and
so were the turns of speech; and the little mannerisms, that every woman
has, of gait and gesticulation, were absolutely and identically the
same. The turn of the head was the same; the tired look in the eyes
at the end of a long walk was the same; the sloop and wrench over
the saddle to hold in a pulling horse was the same; and once, most
marvellous of all, Mrs. Landys-Haggert singing to herself in the next
room, while Hannasyde was waiting to take her for a ride, hummed, note
for note, with a throaty quiver of the voice in the second line:--“Poor
Wandering One!” exactly as Alice Chisane had hummed it for Hannasyde in
the dusk of an English drawing-room. In the actual woman herself--in
the soul of her--there was not the least likeness; she and Alice Chisane
being cast in different moulds. But all that Hannasyde wanted to know
and see and think about, was this maddening and perplexing likeness of
face and voice and manner. He was bent on making a fool of himself that
way; and he was in no sort disappointed.
Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to
any sort of woman; but Mrs. Landys-Haggert, being a woman of the world,
could make nothing of Hannasyde's admiration.
He would take any amount of trouble--he was a selfish man habitually--to
meet and forestall, if possible, her wishes. Anything she told him to do
was law; and he was, there could be no doubting it, fond of her company
so long as she talked to him, and kept on talking about trivialities.
But when she launched into expression of her personal views and her
wrongs, those small social differences that make the spice of Simla
life, Hannasyde was neither pleased nor interested. He didn't want
to know anything about Mrs. Landys-Haggert, or her experiences in
the past--she had travelled nearly all over the world, and could talk
cleverly--he wanted the likeness of Alice Chisane before his eyes and
her voice in his ears. Anything outside that, reminding him of another
personality jarred, and he showed that it did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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