Sir!' She Said

by Alec Waugh

  At that moment, somewhere in the world there was a person waiting to begin it again for her. It was curious that, when you came to think of it, that at that moment somewhere, some one was being brought to you by the invisible forces of effect and cause, was coming to revolutionise your life for you, as you were going to revolutionise his for him. At that moment, not thinking of you or dreaming of you, he was in his office working. In London, perhaps, or Italy or New York or France. On a liner, maybe, being brought to meet you. On a long transcontinental train rattling through the cold miles between Omaha and Ogden. In another hemisphere, perhaps, in another longitude, on the other side of the world; somewhere where it was not day but night. In Penang, perhaps, sitting over gin and bitters on a long balcony, in the close of the swift tropic twilight. Curious to think that there would come a time when you would say to some one, who had become and was to remain your entire life: “What were you doing, tell me can you remember, at eleven o’clock on Thursday, March twenty-third?” For there was such a one somewhere, on his way to meet her, she knew that.

  Broodingly she settled back among the pillows. Her real life had not started yet. She had only known the prelude. Childhood had been a prelude, as school days had been, and the year of travelling and the years in London when she had worked in Brooke Street; the flat, the wretched slattern; Leon Carstairs, even he, all preludes. They had said, the Victorians, that such an experience as she had had ruined you for life, that it maimed you, marked you, twisted you; it didn’t, though, not really. No one could ruin your life for you except yourself. You went on with it in spite of, not because of, things. Though she would have given anything she possessed to preserve Melanie from such an experience, she did not really regret Leon Carstairs. He had helped to make her what she was. She would rather it hadn’t happened. But since it had, it had become a part of her. You had to accept yourself, as the man had to who married you. He took you for what you were and what you were to become. “I’ll make him a good wife,” she thought.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © 1930

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  ISBN: 9781448200306

  eISBN: 9781448201624

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