They agreed to meet every morning at eleven o'clock outside Hatchards,
the bookseller's, in Piccadilly. They chose that place because you
could look into a bookseller's window for quite a long time without
seeming odd, and there were so many people passing that no one noticed
you. Their habit then was to walk to the corner of the Green Park and
there climb on to the top of a motor omnibus and go as far as they
could within the allotted time. Maggie never in after life found those
streets again. They had gone, she supposed, to Chelsea, to St. John's
Wood, to the heart of the city, to the Angel, Islington, to Westminster
and beyond, but places during those three weeks had no names, streets
had no stones, houses no walls, and human figures no substantiality.
They tried on one or two occasions to go by Tube, but they missed the
swing of the open air, the rush of the wind, and their independence of
men and women. Often he tried to persuade her to stay with him for
luncheon and the afternoon, but she was wiser than he.
"No," she said, "everything depends on keeping them quiet. A little
later on it will be lovely. You must leave that part of it to me."
She promised him definitely that soon they should go to a matinee
together, but she would not give her word about a whole evening. In
some strange way she was frightened of the evening, although she had
already pledged her word to him on something much more final: "No," she
thought to herself, "when the moment comes for me to leave everything,
I will go, but he shall know that I am not doing it cheaply, simply for
an evening's fun." He felt something of that too, and did not try to
persuade her. He hugged his unselfishness; for the first time in his
life it seemed to him that he wanted to follow somebody else's will;
with the other women it had been so different, if they had not wanted
to obey him he had left them. But indeed all through these three weeks
they were discovering themselves and one another, and, as though it
were part of the general conspiracy, only the best part of themselves.
On the top of the 'bus, as they sat close together, their hands locked
under his overcoat, the world bumping and jolting, and jogging about
their feet, as though indeed public houses and lamp-posts and cinemas
and town halls and sweet-shops were always jumping up tiptoe to see
whether they couldn't catch a glimpse of the lovers, Martin and Maggie
felt that they were really divine creatures, quite modestly divine, but
nevertheless safe from all human ravages and earthly failings, wicked
and cowardly thoughts, and ambitions and desires.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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