Miss Finchley's Hour

OMEWHERE, in one of his treatises on art, Tolstoi remarks that every man has his hour, and woe betide him if he misses it. Considering my friends, I have discovered this to be almost universally true, and success or failure in life has appeared in case after case to depend on whether that hour has been properly dealt with or not. This story is concerned with Miss Finchley's hour and what she made of it. It may indeed, as will soon appear, be called her second hour, and she was perhaps an exceptionally fortunate person in that, having missed altogether her first hour, she was given the happy opportunity of another. But then she missed her first hour because of the unselfishness of her character, and that was perhaps the reason why the gods so considerately offered her another.

She was the youngest of a family of six; her father was an English clergyman and lived in Wiltshire. He was, of course, very poor, and had more children that he knew what to do with. His wife was delicate, and Miss Finchley's brothers and sisters were of the selfish and casual kind. In appearance she never evolved into the lean, haggard, bespectacled spinster of English fiction; she was small and pretty and fair, but sturdy and independent, and she had plainly a mind of her own. It was because of this mind of her own that everything in the family devolved upon her. The others could never make their minds up about anything; they were irresolute, optimistic, and happy-go-lucky.

This is not the place here to enter into a history of family misfortunes; a proper account of them would offer an interesting example of what happens to a rather stupid English clergyman who has no private means, when, from motives of morality, he has a larger family than he can afford. The children scattered out into the world; none of them did any good. The girls married poorly in order to escape from the family roof, and the boys went shiftlessly from place to place, gathering, like all rolling stones, very little moss. Alice Finchley found herself at the age of twenty-two abandoned in the Wiltshire rectory, which was sunk to its very middle in grass, the only hope and stay of her ailing mother and her disappointed and cynical father.

When she was twenty-three, she received an offer of marriage, and of this there is afterward more to be said. She had fallen in love with the man who proposed to her at the first sight of him, but she refused him because she thought she must not leave her loving parents. This happened in 1916, when the European war was raging at its fiercest. She saw her man depart into the thick of it, and suffered agonies of anxiety and distress which were entirely unrelieved because, when he proposed to her and she refused him, she told him that they must neither meet again nor correspond, that their friendship must be entirely broken. She knew that she could not trust herself to do what she considered her duty if there was any correspondence. She was old-fashioned in her ideas, as will be seen.

In 1920 her father and mother both died, and she was left entirely alone. Her father left a few debts, which the sale of the shabby furniture just satisfied. She was now twenty-seven years of age and had not a penny in the world. She was, however, capable, resolute, and brave. She came up to London and, by good luck and some charm that she had that made it very difficult for certain people to resist her, she obtained a post as secretary to a large girls' club, and so managed to keep alive. In spite of her charm, however, there was something about her that made her difficult to know intimately. Her experience of life had given her perhaps a distrust of human nature, and I think also that she had put all her romance and fine feeling into that love-affair that had ended so unfortunately. She thought him so superb, in fact, that no one else came up to him, and having tasted of the best, she could not accustom herself to lesser glories.

She lived extremely quietly in two little rooms in Chelsea, doing her work admirably, making some few acquaintances, but giving her heart to no one. She had two great passions, for nature and for music. She satisfied the one by little cheap trips into the country, caring for the Sussex Downs most of ail and adventuring once as far as the New Forest. She satisfied the second by the promenade concerts in the summer and by cheap opera when it honored London with its presence. She slowly gathered together in her room a little library of Hudson and Jeffries and the poetry of such men as Edward Thomas and Blunden, and seemed to the outside world to be content.

But she was not content. Deep within her there was a strong current of rebellion. It would not be true to say that she cursed her departed parents, but she felt now that she had been wrong. If she had married and left them, they would have managed well enough without her; it might even have been better for her father to stir himself a little and take some trouble. She did not feel, looking back, that they had loved her; they had taken her for granted and were too deeply occupied with their particular troubles to look outside themselves. Meanwhile she had missed her life; she would soon be thirty, and she knew, with that strong, unerring knowledge of herself that she had, that she would never love again as she had loved that once, and that if she did not love again like that, she would never marry. She saw before her, as many another lonely woman has seen, dreary, straitened, undeveloping years in which, through lack of means and that something unbending and almost monastic in herself that kept her from easy friendships, everything would occur over and over again monotonously until death. She was brave and had a sense of humor that saved her from despair, but she was not happy. Then, when she was thirty years of age, an ancient aunt whom she had not seen for many years died and left her fifty pounds.

Fifty pounds! There were so many things to be done with it that it seemed impossible at first to do anything with it at all. The wise thing, of course, would be to put it away in a bank and treasure it up against sickness and disaster. That would be the wise thing, but not the amusing. Of the amusing there were so many alternatives that it made her dizzy to consider them. She could invest it all in music, spreading it over a number of years, going to concerts that she could not otherwise have afforded, and even plunging into the splendors of Covent Garden were there ever to be any splendor there again. Or she could buy a library, and surround herself with delightful books; it was wonderful how many books you could buy for fifty pounds. Or she could purchase one picture, one beautiful picture, a water-color by Clausen or Bone or D. Y. Cameron, or a John drawing, or a beautiful vase or a lovely rug. Or she might spend it on horrid necessities or on beautiful clothes, or she might, of course, give it to a needy charity. She did none of these things; she decided in a flash of eternal wisdom that she would spend it all in one great splendor and go to Venice.

She had always wanted to go to Venice more than anywhere in the world. She knew that people said that it was spoiled now with its motor boats and penny steamers, but it could not possibly be spoiled for her. Its sky and waters must remain the same; its ancient palaces must reflect eternally those soft colors that she adored. St. Mark's would be there, and the doves and the Campanile. There would be enough there in three, short weeks to last her for the rest of her life.

She told. no one that she was going; she was afraid lest some one should persuade her that she was foolish or extravagant or selfish. She was afraid, perhaps, that she was all these things, but she did not care; she threw her cap over every mill. Her holiday was in September, and she understood that that was the best time in all the year to go to Venice. She passed almost furtively between Cook's doors and held mysterious and enthralling conversations with the young man over the counter inside. She was surprised at the small amount the journey would cost her, traveling second class and first class on the boat and staying one night in Paris at a modest little hotel that the Cook young man recommended to her. He was very friendly and confidential and seemed quite personally excited when he was able to inform her that he had found her a room at a little hotel in Venice that looked over the Zattere, that had, he told her, a most astonishing view. He was greatly pleased about this, because September was the most fashionable month in Venice, and everything was dreadfully full. He especially recommended this hotel to people, he said, because the woman who conducted it was clean and kind and honest, three characteristics not always to be found in Italian hotels.

She had, on the evening before she left, a strange little bout of homesickness. She had never been abroad before; it seemed rather terrible to launch yourself thus boldly into European waters, knowing no foreign language and having no friends in any of the foreign places. London seemed to her that night friendly and comforting and homely; the little Chelsea streets were so English, the Thames, silver-gray in the dusk, so reassuring. So she went up to bed and had to tell herself very forcibly not to be a coward.

But in the morning, when everything was bright, she found her reserved place in the train quite easily and then discovered the crossing at Dover as smooth and gleaming as a glass mirror. She began to be happy, happy as she had never been for years and years and years.

Happiness continued to be poured into her, as though she were a cup that needed filling. She made no friends on the journey. A gentleman on the boat offered to get her a deck-chair, and in the confusion at Calais another gentleman suggested that she should trust her passport to him, that he would see her through everything, but very pleasantly she refused their services and did everything for herself. She was astonished, indeed, at her own efficiency. It was as though she had been traveling all her life. She found, as many others had found before her, that the difficulties of foreign travel are mainly in the imagination—at any rate, today, because there are so many persons who are anxious to be of service to you if you will pay them for their anxiety.

When she was seated in the restaurant of the Paris train she felt an almost alarming quiver of excitement. Everything was different; the bread, the wine, the omelette, the veal, the hurrying but adroit waiter, the country beyond the windows with the strange thin trees, the absence of hedges, and the faint shimmer of light that lay over everything with a haze that was not indefinite as it would have been in England, but in some way sharp, with an edge to it.

Then Paris greeted her, and although she had only an evening there, the boulevards and her cup of coffee outside the Café de la Paix; the gaiety of everything as though life were intended for nothing serious but only for pleasure; the brilliance of the lights that had no fogginess about them as they seemed always to have in London; the smell in the air, something of wine and petrol and freshly-baked bread, if such a mixture is possible; and at the last, when she turned down her dark little street off the Rue Cambon to her little hotel, the sense that she was free as never before in all her known days—all this together was like living at an instant's notice in the most brilliant of sparkling stars.

Next morning she went on, and knew on the following day that miraculous awakening to a sky of perfect blue, Italian voices, and the magic of Italian names on the station walls. It was about half-past seven of a perfect day when they left Maestre and crossed the water to Venice. The young man at Cook's who had taken so friendly an interest in her had said to her.

“Don't you look out of the train, miss, until you're right there in Venice station; then, when you get out, you'll think it as ugly a station as ever you're likely to see; then step through the door.”

Step through the door she did. She was at the top of a flight of steps; a great path of water shaking under the morning sun beat against the stone as though with eager pleasure at the sight of her. Opposite her was a round, green tower, reflected darkly purple in the water. She did not hear the noise around her and perhaps would be standing there to this day had not a Cook's man taken pity on her apparent bewilderment, asked her where she was going, and summoned for her a gondola.

From that moment she could have told you nothing. Events did not occur, but sensations followed one upon another so swiftly that they swept her personality, that had hitherto through her life been proof against every kind of invasion, into limbo. She was not Alice Finchley, but something receptive like the cup of which I spoke before. Things occurred to somebody, lights rose from the very center of the earth and pushed upward, expanding into great arcs of color that had patterns of palaces and bridges and towers wrought upon them like the pattern of a Chinese porcelain. Out of this pattern of color figures advanced and retreated. There was a kindly woman with a hook nose and black hair, who had something to do with meals and rooms; there was a little man who smiled and vanished and reappeared again; there were three gentlemen, one long, one short, and one middling, who made speeches and asked questions; there were babies and many cats, and there was also the same funny old man coming out of the ground and requesting to be allowed to show things to somebody. Then there were the patterns of palaces; the strange and marvelous Piazza, whose columns were now of ivory and now of coral and now of alabaster, according to the hour and the time; there were little streets, edgings of stone above the paths of water; there was that strange church, gold and gold and gold again, having an uneven floor that was like the waves of the sea; and then also the stretching ribbons of water that were of the sky and yet not of the sky, so that when you crossed them you trod upon small, white clouds humped like elephants and long, pink streamers of sunset that faded as you touched them. But all these patterns were unreal against this great arc of color, because as the color changed, the palaces and towers and bridges changed also, and at evening there was one vast heaven lit by innumerable stars, and in the middle of that you were.

But you were not. She had lost her personality by the late afternoon of the second day so completely that although she had gone into Cook's office opposite St. Mark's Church, and had changed all her Cook coupons for money, and had placed the money carefully in the little bag that she carried in her hand, and had been aware that this was perhaps a rash thing to do but had felt safer in doing it—although she had done and thought these things, still she was not Alice Finchley, but rather a happy little pattern against the gold that rose like an ever-increasing shield on every side of her.

She stood in the Piazza holding her bag, seized with a sudden silly terror of moving lest by so doing she should break the picture that was forming around her. She recovered then a small piece of her personality when she saw the multitude of pigeons at her feet, the photographer and his camera, four small children squatting on the floor expectantly holding grain in their chubby palms, and a crowd moving as though under some mysterious command backward and forward along the great space of the Piazza. She wanted to lose herself again completely, and so, flinging the children and the pigeons and the crowd away from her as though she had tried them and found them wanting, she turned and walked into the dark shadows of St. Mark's. Some candles were lit, an old woman was kneeling against a chair, some tourists were gaping at the mosaics, and she stood in the middle of the uneven floor and let the dark gold surround her as though she were being enclosed in a gold box that was in some mysterious way at the same time a door to an unexplored country. She recovered her non-existence; she felt an ecstasy of complete surrender to beauty. This was what she had come for; this was her moment and her hour. And then, provokingly, something human touched her arm. She was jostled, and turned, protesting, just in time to see a dark figure hurrying out of the church into the Piazza. She saw him and then an instant later realized something further—her bag was gone.

Her bag was gone! Well, what if it were? At the first moment she realized nothing very terrible in that, but only as her personality, summoned at some mysterious call, came flooding back to her, she thought to herself, “It was a very nice bag; the only really decent one I had,” then with a shock that almost rocked her off her feet, “My money!” Yes, her money. She stood there without a penny in the world save a few lire lying on her dressing-table in the hotel. No, that was not true, of course; she could get money from her girls' club; they could forward her something if she telegraphed, but would they? No, not unless she wrote, and then she could see that acid Miss Branckley (her own favorite Miss Merrion was also away on her holidays), sneering as she looked at the letter and saying, “Well, I never did trust that woman....” No, no, that was impossible, and then, following on the realization of this impossibility, a frantic rush to the Piazza to see whether that man might still be found.

The impact of the sunlight, that was as though she had plunged head foremost from some dark shade into a golden rivet, brought her sharply to herself. Now, whatever she did she must be sensible; she was no silly, old-fashioned girl to wave her hands and scream; the situation must be faced, and something must be done. Here she was alone in Italy without a penny, without a friend, and without a word of the language. Her first impulse was to return to Cook's and tell them her trouble, but the thought of that small office crowded with eager tourists frightened her. They must have heard that story so often before; she could see their look of quiet and polite incredulity, their suggestion that she should write to her friends, or they might go so far as to offer to telegraph to some bank in London, and how was she then to tell them that she had no account at any bank, but had drawn for this expedition her very last penny? And how, if she did write to the girls' club in London, was she to wait there in Venice perhaps for a week or more without a single penny? In four or five days' time there would be her first bill to pay; she shuddered to think what would happen when she had to tell the black-haired Woman that for the moment she was penniless.

Then it was that, standing in that crowd in the brilliant sunlight, her knees began to tremble, and she was afraid lest she should do what she had never done in her life before, namely, faint. Any one who has been in such a position as hers knows the strange way in which a dreadful helplessness gradually approaches, as though some one were whispering, “You know it's no good; this has all been planned beforehand; every avenue of escape has been cut off. You may as well completely surrender.” She felt something like that now, as though a plunge into the Grand Canal were the only solution. Worst of all, a frightful sense of loneliness leaped upon her. A quarter of an hour ago, she had felt as though everything lovely and beautiful in the world were wishing her luck in her little adventure; now she was alone against an army of enemies; the very gaiety and color of the scene seemed to tingle with cruelty.

She walked, not realizing what she did, through the crowd down the Piazza toward Florian's. She really did feel faint. The chairs in front of Florian's were in shadow, and almost before she knew it she had seated herself on one of them. A moment later she realized that in another instant a waiter would be in front of her; she must order something and order something for which she could not possibly pay. She staggered to her feet, and then the miracle occurred. Her second hour was given to her. Five yards away, looking exactly as he had always done, sat Tom Rochester, the man who had proposed to her seven years before, and she, as though no years had intervened, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, simply turned round to him and said:

“Tom, what shall I do? I have had my purse stolen!”

It had been at one time so natural to her to tell him of any trouble that she had, and he looked so exactly the same as ever with that small cut inherited from childhood above his left eye, and his soft gray hat pushed back from his head, and his fingers tapping on the little round table, that it needed his stare of surprise, his half-confused rising from his chair, and then his swift, amazed flash of recognition, to bring her consciousness of what she had done.

But once the recognition was faced, he took it as she had.

“What do you say?” His voice rang out with the same old boldness and confidence. “Had your purse stolen? Where? How?”

E DID not ask her what she had been doing all these years, why she was in Venice; did not pretend to any stiffness or formality because of the way that they had parted; was engaged (she might have known it) simply in the practical business of getting her money back. Although she was fully aware now of the amazing impudence of her own attack, she rose to the immediate occasion in a clear, hard, defiant bravado.

“It was stolen in St. Mark's,” she said, “just now; it was all in the bag in my hand. A man snatched it and vanished before I could turn round; it had in it every penny I possess.”

“Come along then.”

He got up from his chair and strode off, scarcely looking back at her, toward Cook's.

Her immediate impulse was to run from him. What an awful thing she had done! She had refused him, turned him away, forbidden him even to write to her again, and then at the very next time of her meeting him had begged him to help her. But she would not run away; she would follow this thing out, accept his help just as she would accept the help of any chivalrous stranger, and then vanish. Yes, she would vanish, but she did wish, oh how she wished! that he would not walk with just the same old swing of the shoulders and defiant carriage of the head, that he would not look so exactly the same, bringing back in every inch of him a thousand lovely moments, a multitude of cherished joys.

In Cook's office they were severely practical. There were but few people there, and the stout man with the strawberry face and the sky-blue suit listened with the most respectful attention. Tom Rochester had always that effect on people; he made them always believe that he was speaking exactly the truth and that it was an honor for them to do anything for him. He turned round toward her with courteous but quite impersonal attention.

“You say you were standing in St. Mark's and this man snatched your bag?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Ah, sir,” Cook's man said, smiling, “we're always getting cases like this, a dozen a day I should think.”

“And you say,” went on Rochester quietly, “that you had all your money in it?”

“Yes, every penny,” she answered, her voice quivering in spite of herself. “I had just changed it here a quarter of an hour before. It was very silly of me but I thought I ought to have it all with me in case I needed it.”

The Cook's man coughed very gently behind his hand.

“Did you notice the man?” Rochester asked her. “What kind of man he was?”

“No, he was far away when I realized it, going into the Piazza.”

“Well, what's the next thing to do?” asked Rochester, turning to the Cook's man.

“Telephone to the police,” the man answered briskly, which he did.

An interval followed during which every detail was given of the appearance of the bag, the amount of the money, and the rest. Cook's man was very polite indeed, but held out little hope of the money being recovered.

They went out into the sunlight again.

“Thank you,” she began hurriedly. “I oughtn't to have spoken to you; it seemed so natural seeing you there, I really didn't know what to do. Please forgive me. I am terribly grateful to you.” She was turning away.

“Stop,” he said, “you can't go like that. You can't be in Venice without a penny. Will you let me lend you something?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him. She had an idea.

He brought out his pocket-book. “Here,” he said, “is about—let me see—twenty pounds—most of it Italian money; five pounds English; you should be all right with that until your money comes from England.”

“Thank you,” she answered, holding it tightly in her hand.

HE didn't ask him for an address to which she should send it; she said nothing more; she only looked at him once, and it happened that at that same moment he looked at her. Their eyes met, and it seemed as though seven years were as nothing and all the refusals in the world as though they had never been. Then she hurried away, almost running in her haste.

She went to the landing stage, and by good fortune her boat was there waiting. She got on to it, got off at the Accademia, hastened off down the little street to the left where the glorious flower-stand was, up the canal, out on to the Zattere, and so into her little dark hotel. She met the dark-haired woman in the hall.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I have to return tonight to England. I have had news that calls me back. Might I have my bill? There is a train to Milan about nine o'clock, I think.”

The black-haired woman showed no surprise; she was well accustomed to the eccentricities of English visitors.

Up in her little room Alice Finchley furiously attacked her packing, and as she packed, she had only one thought in her head; she repeated to herself over and over again: “I must get away from him, whatever happens. What can he think of me. What can he think of me? How could I? What was I doing to speak to him like that?” And then, as the packing progressed.

“Never mind; I'll put the money in an envelope at once, as soon as I'm home, and send it to him. There must still be his mother's address in the country, or they'll forward it, if the old place has gone—the beautiful old place with two oaks in the garden, and the lawn running down to the river where he used to see the kingfisher when he was a boy...”

She didn't know what she was saying; she didn't know what she was thinking; she only pressed the clothes down into her bag with feverish hands, and then to her own shocked amazement she began to cry, the tears falling helplessly, and she too bewildered to try and stop them.

But a little before eight she dried her eyes, paid her bill and, very neat and self-possessed, caught the boat at the Accademia landing and started for the station. Thank heaven, she thought, he didn't know what hotel she was stopping at, and yet at the same time some one else in her, some one quite foreign to her, kept saying, “What a pity he didn't know,” and then some one else said: “How dare you think he would have come round if he had known? You have behaved to him so abominably that he certainly wouldn't stir another foot toward you.”

The wonderful, mysterious canal with the evening lights and the whispering movements of the boats meant nothing to her now. She could only think of him as she had last seen him, looking just the same as ever, as adorable, as wonderful, as commanding, a giant among men.

She got off the steamer at the landing, crowded with people who all seemed to be shouting at once, and then, looking rather helplessly about her, ran straight into his arms. He held her now with hands on both her shoulders, and he put his face close to hers as he said:

“Ridiculous creature. I went to the hotel. They told me you had gone for this train, and I took a short cut with my gondola.”

“But you didn't know my hotel,” she cried, angry, humiliated, and triumphantly happy.

“Of course I knew it,” he said, giving her a little shake. “Didn't you tell the Cook's man?”

“Well, I'm going,” she answered. “You've got no right to stop me.”

“Yes, I have,” he said quietly, as he turned her round toward his gondola. “We're engaged to be married, and from now onward you'll have to do exactly what I tell you.”

Then all the lights came out over the canal, as though until that moment they had been obscured by a thick gauze, and two more lovers were added to the multitude already triumphant in Venice.