



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
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A STUDY IN SHADOWS

By William J. Locke

London: John Lane

MCMVIII




CHAPTER I.--THE LONE WOMEN.

|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 restraint and be goaded into mordant expression. It was the
isolation of these women, their vague references to the sheltering home
of years ago, their cynical exposition and criticism of undreamed of
facts, that made Felicia look upon her surroundings with a child's alarm
at the unfamiliar.

Sometimes she felt home-sick and miserable, wished that her uncle and
aunt, with whom her home had been for many years since the death of her
parents, had taken her out with them to Bermuda. But they, worthy souls,
when Colonel Graves was ordered abroad with the regiment, had thought
that a year's continental life would be a treat for the girl, and
had sent her, in consequence, to the care of Mme. Boccard, a distant
kinswoman, whose prospectus read like a synopsis of Eden. They had so
set their hearts upon her enjoyment, that, now they were thousands of
miles away, she felt it would be ungracious to complain. But she was
very unhappy.

“Mon Dieu! This is getting terrible!” said Mme. Popea, one evening.

Dinner was over, and some of the ladies were passing the usual dreary
evening in the salon.

“It is enough to drive you mad. It would be livelier in a convent. One
would have Matins and Vespers and Compline--a heap of little duties. One
could go to one's bed tired, and sleep. Here one sleeps all day, so that
when night comes, one can't shut an eye.”

“Why don't you go to the convent, Mme. Popea?” asked Mrs. Stapleton,
mildly, looking up from her needlework.

“Ah! one cannot always choose,” replied Mme. Popea, with a sigh.
“Besides,” she added, “one would have to be so good!”

“Yes; there is some truth in that,” said Mrs. Stapleton. “It is better
to be a serene sinner than a depressed saint! And sometimes we sinners
have our hours of serenity.”

“Not after such a dinner as we had tonight,” remarked Frau Schultz, in
German, with strident irritability. “The food is getting dreadful--and
the wine! It is not good for the health. My stomach--”

“You should drink water, as Miss Graves and I do,” said Mrs. Stapleton.

“Ah, you American and English women can drink water. We are not
accustomed to it. In my home I never drank wine that cost less than
four marks a bottle. I am not used to this. I shall complain to Mme.
Boccard.”

“It is bad,” said Mme. Popea, “but it isn't as bad as it might be. At
the Pension Schmidt we couldn't drink it without sugar.” She was a plump
little woman, with a predisposition to cheerfulness. Besides, as she
owed Mme. Boccard some two months' board and lodging, she could afford
a little magnanimity. But Frau Schultz, who was conscious of scrupulous
payment up to date, had no such delicacy of feeling. She pursued
the subject from her own standpoint, that of her own physiological
peculiarities. By the time her tirade was ended, she had worked herself
up into a fit state to give battle to Mme. Boccard, on which errand she
incontinently proceeded.

“What a dreadful woman!” said Mrs. Stapleton, as the door slammed behind
her.

“Ah, yes. Those Germans,” said Mme. Popea, “they are always so
unrefined. They think of nothing but eating and drinking. Herr
Schleiermacher came to see me this afternoon. He has been to Hanover to
see his _fiancée_, whom he can't marry. He was telling me about it. 'Ach