71
A FEW MONTHS LATER, a letter arrived from Sydney, one that she had apparently written in haste:
Peter—
No more pursuers. I’ve spent the last couple of months trekking from Perth to Sydney, and Harrison (well, Harry) Smallwood, the most persistent of them, died somewhere east of Alice. I have to confess that I had grown fond of the old fellow and the courtly attentions he paid to me. He would always have flowers sent to my hotel, and a single rose sent to my table whenever I ate in a restaurant, just to let me know that he was still in my audience, still dancing attendance on me, but he would not talk to me or communicate with me in any other way—just the flowers. When we left Perth, however, he sent me a telegram saying, in part, “Miss Lodkochnikov, I think it possible that you do not know that Milton McDermott retired from the field last night and is at the present moment on a flight back to the United States. Therefore, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I am now your entire audience. Since things have come to this pass, and at the risk of destroying our existing relationship by turning myself into what my contemporaries would, once upon a very long time ago, have called a ‘stage-door Johnny,’ may I ask you to have dinner with me?” Who could refuse an invitation like that? The moment I seated myself across the dinner table from him, I could see that he was already in quite a state. He looked at me with wild eyes, thrust the usual rose toward me, and tried to speak, but couldn’t manage to say a word. His eyes grew wilder and wilder, until it was quite clear that he was completely out of control. I suspect that his mind was racing ahead of him, to a later hour in the evening, the two of us alone in his room—you get the picture—but the poor old guy was eighty if he was a day, and the anticipated pleasure must have been too much for the old ticker. He tried to get to his feet, grabbed at his heart, and collapsed onto the enormous slab of undercooked beef that covered his plate. To put it as he might have, I’m afraid that his desires got the best of him and carried the poor fellow off to his reward. I felt terribly sorry for him, of course, and then I became quite frightened by this demonstration that a vivid imagination can be a dangerous thing, that one can quite literally lose oneself in the glory of some passion, and then, finally, I found in Harry’s death a certain solace, for it taught me that all one loses is the awareness of other things, all the rest of it, the “outside world,” as your grandfather did, when he gave himself to the object of his passion, his Eleanor, and to give that up was no loss, no loss at all.
Love, Ariane
[to be continued]
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