A Study In Shadows. William John Locke

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CHAPTER I.—THE LONE WOMEN.

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      Felicia Graves was puzzled. The six weeks she had spent at the Pension Boccard had confused many of her conceptions and brought things before her judgment for which her standards were inadequate. Not that a girl who had passed the few years of her young womanhood in the bubbling life of a garrison town could be as unsophisticated as village innocence in the play; but her fresh, virginal experience had been limited to what was seemly, orthodox, and comfortable. She was shrewd enough in the appreciation of superficial vanities, rightly esteeming their value as permanent elements; but the baser follies of human nature had not been reached by her young eyes. Her whole philosophy of life had been bound up in well-ordered family systems, in which the men were honest and well-bred, and the women either comfortable matrons or fresh-minded, companionable girls like herself. She knew vaguely that sorrows and bitterness and broken lives existed in the world, but hitherto she had never reckoned upon coming into contact with them. They all lay in the dim sphere where crime and immorality held sway, whose internal upheavals affected her as little as dynastic commotions in China. The lives and habits and opinions therefore of the six lonely women who, with one old gentleman, formed her sole daily companions in the Pension Boccard, were a subject of much puzzled and half-frightened speculation on the part of the young English girl.

      She was forced to speculate, not only because she was brought into intimate touch with the unfamiliar, but also because there was little else to do. The Pension Boccard was neither gay nor stimulating in winter. Its life was dependent, first upon the ever-changing current of guests, and secondly upon such public distractions as Geneva offers. In the summer it was bright enough. The house was full from top to bottom with eager, laughing holiday-makers, bringing with them the vitality and freshness of the outside world. There were dances, flirtations, picnics. New ideas, scraps of gossip and song from London, Paris, St. Petersburg filled dining-room and salons. The pleasant friction of nationalities alone was stimulating. The town, too, was gay. The streets were bright with the cosmopolitan crowd of pleasure-seekers, the cafés alive with customers, the shop windows gay with jewellery and quaint curios to dazzle the eyes of the reckless tourist. At the Kursaal were weekly balls, entertainments, petits chevaux. Bands played in the public gardens, and all the cafés offered evening concerts gratis to their customers. There were pleasant trips to be made on the lake to Nyon, Lausanne, Montreux, Chillon. No one need be dull in summer time at Geneva. But in the winter, when all the public festivities were over and week after week passed without a stranger bringing a fresh personality to the dinner-table, the Pension Boccard was an abode of drear depression. If it had been chipped off from the earth's surface by the tail of a careless comet and sent whirling through space on an ecliptic of its own, it could not have been less in relation with external influences. It was thrown entirely on its own resources, which only too often gave way, as it were, beneath it.

      There was nothing to do save reading and needlework and gossip. It was while pursuing the last avocation that Felicia gathered her chief materials for speculation. These women, what were they? Their names were Mrs. Stapleton, Miss Bunter, Frau Schultz, Frâulein Klinkhardt, and Madame Popea. American, English, German, Roumanian respectively. Yet in spite of wide divergencies in creed, nationality, and character, they all seemed strangely to belong to one class. They were apparently isolated, selfcentred, without ties or aims or hopes. Each had travelled through Europe from pension to pension—a weary pilgrimage. Their lives were for the most part spent in listless idleness, only saved now and then from inanition by the nerving influences of petty bickerings, violent intimacies, sordid jealousies. All had moods of kindness alternating with moods of cynical disregard of susceptibilities. Now and then a wave of hysteria would pass through the atmosphere of depression, when feminine velvet would be rudely thrust back and spiteful claws exposed to view. Even Mrs. Stapleton would occasionally break through her habitual СКАЧАТЬ