CHAPTER IV
With the tremulous daring of a man who has caught a glimpse of a woman's face once, swiftly, by night, and has feared to see it the morning after, in case it should prove less lovely—yet longed to gaze upon it and gaze upon it, that each subtle curve, each fleck of colour, might at last grow familiar to him as the sunshine, so Gareth set out, the morning after arrival at Rapparee House, to explore minutely that harbour which Heaven had dumped for his delight beneath his attic window. The streets were washed in gold, under a sky of stark cobalt; and the space between sky and street was wind-tumbled and uproarious. A fine jolly day for a landsman to prowl about among quays and ships and mariners ... and dream that he too had raced through scudding seas and anchored in strange ports....
Gareth Temple, who would have made a poorer seaman than any who had ever doubled the Cape of Storms, found himself slouching along the cobbled streets, and looking ahead with that peculiar scrutiny, keen yet distant, which—the sea novelist assures us—is the inevitable result of perpetual communion with the far horizon; and that peculiar chin, dogged yet steadfast, which—he omits to tell us—is the inevitable result of the perpetual crunching of ship's biscuit.
Ever and again he muttered words like "cargo" or "chanty" or "lagoon" ... and imagination never failed to return its quick picture....
Great muscular men stripped to the waist, toiling up a gangway, with loads of silk stuffs and elephant tusks and spices....
The same tanned fellows singing, now lustily, now mournfully, in the lamplit glow of a little waterside inn-parlour, with sanded floor, and smoked ceiling, and a ship-model on the chimney-piece....
Strip of warm firm sand, white-shining in the moon, sloping down to the black polished mirror of deep water....
Spinner of words. Idle spinner of word-magic.
But he was going to write a book about a man who brought word-magic to its rounded completion by fulfilment! A man who would indeed carry the cargo, roar in the chanty, swim the lagoon. A man who was like himself turned conqueror. And the creation of such a man, in such a book, should be his conquest; conquest of adverse fate, of acquiescent inertia—conquest of other people's books....
The harbour, like all enchanted spots, though so distinctly seen from a window on the hillside, was difficult to find when plunged into the maze of streets that formed the old part of the town. At last, at the end of a narrow alley, one of the leaning houses flung out a room to meet the house opposite; he stepped under this square archway and on to the harbour. From the blistered pink wall above his head, an ancient iron lamp jutted at right angles as though from an arm outthrust.
His first impression was of the dark clumsy hulks of trawlers embedded crookedly in the mud; while the lighter floating craft, miscellany of broad gaily-painted rowing-boats, and fishing-boats with ragged brown sails, were already beginning to lurch lazily from side to side, as the incoming waves lifted their keels, lifted and dropped the slimy ropes which, hung with green weed, sagged from deck to staple. Then he noticed the soft rise of green and fawn hills beyond the harbour mouth; and at the end of the quay, the queer little isolated mount crested by a ruined chapel, some forlorn relic of pagan faith, enshrining perhaps a grim old sea-god to whom the sailors prayed ... once—long ago.
Gareth's eye dropped slantwise to a tin building on the quay, with the wordBethellarge over its porch. And he smiled....
Men used to worship their gods more beautifully than now.
He caught sight of some heaps of pine-logs on his right, in front of the shambling line of fisher-huts that hoisted themselves so painfully half-way out of a sunken ditch; and went cautiously along the wall dropping sheer down to the slime, till he reached the broad path littered untidily by a huge crane, an old ship's-boiler, a pile of crab-pots, a rain-cask, rusty iron salvage sheds, a patch of nasturtiums flaming defiantly, blue shirts hung out to dry—jumble of domesticity and wreck-lumber. The pine-logs were oozing stickily, and gave out a pungent resinous smell in the hot sun; their sawn ends were disks of shiny pale gold against the brown encircling bark.
Gareth sat down. Behind him, the group of huts were blotched in sepia and dim greys and pools of black; shadowed always by the jutting cliff at their backs. But the gay irregular row of quayside houses and shops on the opposite side of the water were in full sunlight. With walls and roofs of vermilion beside faded orange; wine-colour, and saffron, and red picked out with green, they presented a curious illusion of some little foreign town ... striped awnings, and bright-hued syrups on the tables outside the café ... a man, skin like mahogany, gold earrings that gleamed as he pounced to snatch a kiss from a girl with vivacious eyes, and netted hair gliding down the nape of her neck; coloured cotton jacket boldly open....
Gareth rubbed his misty eyes ... murmured "Marseilles." ... With an effort abandoned word-spinning, and slipped out of his dream back to the dream-like present.
The harbour basin was now half-full, and even the trawlers had joined in the wonderful drunken dance of the incoming tide. Their masts hit and raked tipsily at the sky; little excited waves slapped at the wall of the square Georgian hotel at the corner; hotel whose chipped crown on the frontage signified haughtily that a king of England had once stayed there a night.
Cordage and canvas joined volubly with creak and strain and hum in the opera of that jolly wind-tossed morning. Presently some half-dozen small boys ran naked into the water, and swam among the boats, and leapt and splashed, and called shrilly to their comrades on the quay.... Harbour urchins, who lived always under those funny pink roofs, and saw the fisher-fleet sail out and sail home again, and saw the cargo steamers loaded and put out for a longer voyage; who paddled in the mud and sought there for treasure when the water was low, and dived shouting from the wall when the water was high; who paid no heed to the yearly influx of strangers; and never looked at the shrine on the hill—so well they knew it was there....
Harbour urchins.
Gareth watched them, idly. It struck him that one of the band was perceptibly less daring than his companions, and had continually to be urged and mocked out of the shallows.
Odd, for a child to be afraid of water, brought up with the sound of water all day long in his ears, sight of water all day long before his eyes.... Something far deeper and more elemental must account for the shrinking, in this instance, than the mere dread of unfamiliarity which so often besets the land-child.... Something which, for want of better knowledge, is called instinctive....
The boy stumbled up the dripping steps and ran into the little eating-house with the red stuff curtains, and the plates of fish in the window. Probably the proprietor's son.
Gareth's imagination reeled suddenly, appalled, from conception of that young life, spent in daily endless warfare with the enemy that lay just outside his very door; daily endless propitiation, pretence of defiance, tentative play ... fascination and panic clutching him alternately. Fascination usually existed together with that inborn morbid recoil.
And no escape. No needle-eye of escape. Home fixed irrevocably where the water could stealthily lick the wall beneath his window ... so that he might hear it sleeping, and waking, and before sleep. The talk all around him would be of the sea. His very food would taste of brine. The tang of ozone would lurk in every breath he drew into his lungs. As a matter of course he would be sent out with other little harbour brats to amuse himself on the rocks and among the pools; no relief from strain in confiding his obsession to any of his fellows.... "Afraid of thesea?Afraidof the sea?" ... they would not understand—but they would grin, and pass the joke about: "Afraid of the sea!"
Later on he would be expected to make his living dependent upon the sea.
No escape then? dodge desperately as he might, no escape from the enemy. He might defy it with every outward strut and swagger he had at his command.
It would have him in the end.
For this was the lad's adventure: to be afraid of water ... his round adventure; his, mysteriously, before birth and through life and after death, full sweep of the circle. Adventure need not of necessity be joyous adventure....
Gareth sat motionless on the pile of logs; absorbed, dreaming, happy, in his trance of inspiration....
For the harbour-urchin who was afraid of water had identified himself completely with the hero of "The Round Adventure." But he was aware of the enemy, and would not give in; set out to conquer it—always with the fear in his heart. And with the fear in his heart, he became the boldest swimmer and the keenest to sail of all the lads who lived in the fishermen's huts and over the little quayside shops. And he left his square of window unshaded at night so that from his bed he could see the water—deliberately, because of the fear in his heart.... Till by and by he came to hug the fear as his very own, his secret, unshared and unsuspected. There was a queer quality of jubilation in exposing himself to this heavy menacing horror which had singled him out.... Only there were moments when the cold sickening ripple up his thighs, as fiercely he waded in, almost drew from him that terrified scream he had vowed no one should hear....
He grew up to be a ship-builder; in time, prosperous. That was one of his ways of defiance. Only each time a ship of his went to the bottom, he knew the enemy had gained on him slightly. And he built more ships—with the fear in his heart; subconscious fear, aftermath of what has not yet happened....
The end of the book had still to shape itself from bewilderment. The girl had not yet moved into her place in the scheme—the girl of the February wood. Time still for these miracles to happen, when time itself had been transformed to a miracle by the mere fact of writing a book. Gareth rose, and sauntered away from the harbour, up the hill, and back to Rapparee House. It was after midday, and the wind had dropped to a blue shimmer of relentless heat. He remembered there was to be a picnic that afternoon for the purpose of "shaking us all together," as Mrs. Worley had announced at breakfast. Gareth did not feel violently inclined for the shaking process—but he was resigned.
After all, the gods had given him an attic—and a harbour.
"Idoteon theAllFresco!" explained Mrs. Worley, as heavily laden with picnic paraphernalia, the Rapparee House party plodded solemnly up the baked sea-road, to some wood about two miles distant. Two and two they went—Kathleen and Jim Collins leading; then Lulu and young Teddy; Fred Worley and old Mrs. Kirby; Napier Kirby and Miss Frazer; Gareth and Mrs. Worley. Grace Kirby had placed her beautiful auburn head among the green silk hammock-cushions in the garden, and with her most charming smile had announced her intention of remaining where she was. "We've had so many picnics lately, Trixie dear."
"Grace," ejaculated her hostess with portentous meaning: "Iquiteunderstand.... I suppose you will join uslater?"
"I don't suppose so," assented Grace sweetly, closing her eyes.
The sorrowful procession filed past her. It was so easy in heat like this, to stop—to flop—exactly where one happened to be standing; so very difficult to move on to another spot two miles distant. But Trixie, blown out tightly with exuberance and mystery, was a tremendous driving-force; and the nine were too limp for resistance.
"Mr.Temple——"
Gareth started from reverie and looked worried. Mrs. Worley loomed insistently between him and his frailer dreams; sprawled with grotesque Rabelaisian effect across the blank pages, dimly glamorous, of the sacred book itself—he had an awful fear that she would eventually dig herself in; her ponderous accentuation of the utterly trivial, her fits of hale vulgarity, her unusual appearance—little round eyes starting with surprise, little round hats with gaily plumaged birds a-waggle—the whole personality as it bulged from its unmelting encumbrances of flesh, gripped him with the nightmare obsession that here was material clamouring for immortalization.... And he did not at all want to immortalize Trixie....
"Mr.Temple, tell meallabout publishers."
He encouraged her to relate her conceptions of such a firm: four neat rooms, in one of which the publisher and the author and the agent and the artist sat in beautiful fraternity; in another the paper was made; in a third the book was printed and bound; and in the last, sold over a counter to the amiable purchaser.
"While you wait?" Gareth smiled whimsically. "I'm afraid it's not quite so compact...."
He endeavoured to explain the process; but natural denseness and a stitch in her side made of Trixie an inattentive listener. And Gareth was oppressed by the consciousness that he was carrying more than his fair share of the picnic burden; two heavy rugs and the big earthenware teapot....
Miss Emmeline Frazer walked in frigid silence beside her companion. He had shocked her—had just shocked her very considerably by using a word that in decent society.... Her whole neat little person vibrated with annoyance. Really—with these half-and-half people ... one only had to look at his mother! All very well to find natives in the colonies—but in England, where one was not prepared for it—
She decided not to speak to Mr. Kirby any more that day, by way of corrective; it was a pity—they had been enjoying such a pleasant chat about the poet Keats. Miss Frazer trotted on, aggressively cool in sand-coloured linen; she was too thin to foment, like Mrs. Worley, panting enviously several yards in the rear. And her invariable sunshade had excused her from carrier-work.
Of this last, Napier Kirby felt sure he had been given more than his fair share. He carried the kettle, and an enormous sagging box of cakes; also his mother's waterproof. Usually light-heeled as Mercury, he was now depressed....
"It was the year measles were all over the place—not that this story has anything to do with it—but my brother's children all had it, and then the governess went and caught it too. About March of 1911, I think. Well, as I was saying, I was having tea at Victoria Station—funny how the tea tastes at these buffets, isn't it?" ... Fred Worley was paving the way to an anecdote, by a leisurely survey of the period, with its principal personages, topical events, and so on.
(But though he was good-natured enough, mind you, it really was coming it a bit thick on a fellow to give him all the crockery and most of the sandwiches to carry—and in this heat! What were the other fellows doing? Not that he minded work—but a picnic was no fun unless everyone did their fair share....
And the bottle of milk, too!)
Old Mrs. Kirby grinned and nodded, picking her wide black skirts out of the dust....
"I've got a fly id by eye!" she announced suddenly. "Please, Bister Worley, take it out."
She was afflicted with adenoids; and with finger-nails that were like black opals.
"Hi! Nap! Your mater's got a fly in her eye!" shouted Worley to the pair behind him.
"Call Teddy to take it out!" was the unfilial advice.
Worley shouted to the pair ahead of him: "Hi! Ted! Your grand-mother's got a fly in her eye, and your pater says you're to take it out!"
"He's not my pater," muttered Teddy, furious that his experimental flirtation with Lulu Collins should have been interrupted. But he was afraid of his stepfather; so he deposited the butter in the dust, for anyone to pick up who liked—it was melting rapidly—and slouched to the rescue of his afflicted relative.
The fly had got well in by this time.
Fred Worley joined Miss Frazer; Napier having meanwhile attached himself to Lulu. They toiled on, and out of sight. Teddy went for his grand-mother's eye with unnecessary vigour.... Trixie Worley, passing with Gareth, called out that he was a good boy. They too were presently lost to sight, in the straggling little wood.
"Id's id theothereye, Teddy...."
"Look here, how much longer do we drag on?" Collins demanded furiously of Kathleen.
"Till we get stopped, I suppose. Is Mrs. Worley making for any special spot?"
"Dunno. But I'm sick of lugging these messy things; the juice is all running out. I should like to know what the other fellows are carrying!" He let fall his two bags of raspberries and gooseberries with a squish on to the grass.
"This place will do as well as any," Kathleen said; and dumped down the enormous jam-jar of which she had previously relieved her perspiring comrade. "There's a farm over there where we can get the hot water."
They sat down to wait till the others should arrive. After about ten minutes, Lulu strayed that way.
"Naughty!" shaking her forefinger at them; "we don't mind losingyou, but we do mind going without the fruit."
"We thought this would be a good place for the picnic."
"Oh, but the others have found a much better place, with a sort of raised hump for a table. Do come along; it's no fun unless we all stick together. Only we can't find Fred and the kettle——"
The sort of raised hump turned out to be an ant-hill.... And then a deputation wandered towards the shady bit of camping-ground described by Kathleen and Jim. Meanwhile, Fred Worley came up with enthusiastic descriptions of a paradise for picnickers! he had left the sandwiches to mark it theirs. So they all picked up their loads, and collected each other, and followed him ... and he couldn't find either the paradise or the sandwiches.
Old Mrs. Kirby complained that she was thirsty.
"Mrs.Kirby," advised Trixie, with more than her usual empressement, "sucka pebble!"
Mrs. Kirby wept, thinking she had been insulted.
Somebody asked if they were going to boil the water themselves, or get it from the farm. And Lulu cried that it was ever so much more fun doing everything themselves. Unmoved by the prospect of fun, Jim Collins said: "I plump for the farm; less bother. I hate bother."
"But nobody is to unpack the parcels except Auntie Em and me," Trixie shouted hilariously, her hat wildly askew. "Teais to be a greatsurprise."
"It will be," Kathleen assented; "unless someone takes the kettle down to the farm, to find out if they'll boil it for us. Go on, Gareth——" Her unspoken comment was: "You haven't done much yet...."
Reluctantly he took up the kettle, and strolled slowly towards the farm. He had no desire to be more closely associated with the picnic "fun." He was not enjoying the picnic ... had wanted to be left alone that afternoon, to lounge and muse in peace in a corner of the harbour ... heavy blue-black shadow cast by a jut of stone wall ... uneven flight of steps, and water lap-lapping coldly at their base, leaving ever another step bare and glistening as the tide receded.... Why wasn't he there, instead of inextricably attached to this meandering bleating flock of people, with their red moist faces, and hats of crude disharmony with the woodland.... Impossible to detach himself from them. ("It's no fun unless we all stick together!")... Pestering flies and ants and midges.... Mrs. Kirby and Mrs. Worley and Miss Frazer sitting in ungraceful attitudes on the grass, and screaming to the males of the party to witness their sense of the pastoral.... Gareth could hear them as he returned from the farm.... With acute distaste he noticed how unmercifully the sun-shafts struck crude high lights upon the human nose.
"They won't."
"Won't what?"
"Boil the water for us." Gareth sat down, with the air of one who has accomplished his best.
"Nonsense. Why?"
"They said they'd be doing it all day long for picnickers in these woods, if they did it once; and no profit to them."
"Well, I suppose you offered to pay them a trifle if they obliged us?"
Gareth was silent.
"Did you?"
"No...."
"But couldn't you see that was what they wanted?"
He winced under the impatient rasp in Kathleen's voice....
"What a waste of time. Here—take the kettle, and offer them a shilling for the favour."
He did not budge. Her attempts to goad him had always the effect of driving him to a defensive attitude of leaden inertia.
"I'll go," said Collins, rising.
Kathleen shrugged her shoulders—and turned her attention to Teddy, who was whispering urgently in her ear:
"Come for a stroll. We're not wanted for a bit. Cut all this rot."
Immensely flattered by his selection of her, Kathleen assented immediately. Every eye observed their departure. Lulu giggled. They walked up the path in silence for a few moments; his straw hat thrust to the back of his head, his cane swishing at the ferns; while she debated whether cricket or football were the likeliest topic to interest him. Or perhaps he was a Boy Scout?
"D'you mind if I smoke?" and he added gallantly: "It'll keep the flies off you."
She was prepared for a woodbine—but the cigar was a bit of a shock. And then Teddy said:
"It was a toss-up whether I was going to talk sense to you, or just flirt. And then I decided you were too good to waste on a flirtation."
"Don't mistake me when I say 'good,'" Teddy went on. "I don't mean it in the priggish sense. I'm paying you a compliment in not flirting with you. I prefer flirting with married women as a rule; it's safer than with girls; married women can look after themselves. But you've got brain as well. And I expect you've got a devil of a temperament. That other creature—what's her name? Lulu!—one kisses her and forgets all about it...."
"She's just a Type," Teddy continued.
"I'm writing a book on various Types of women.... Oh, no, not a novel. 'Observations of Eve' I call it ... essays. All women can be tabulated, you know—the frilly, the passionate, the clinging, and so on. Types. I say, am I boring you?"
With perfect truth Kathleen was able to assure him that he was not. But at risk of forfeiting his esteem she was compelled to add:
"Do you mind—as man to man—telling me how old you are?"
He smiled, loftily. "How old do you think?"
She hazarded: "Sixteen?"
"Most people think that. No, I'm not a bit offended. It's quite an advantage to look a great deal younger than one's age; a sort of disguise to work under. No—I'm seventeen...."
"... Next month," he added.
"I'm interested in various forms and degrees of vice—are you?"
Kathleen felt obliged to make one effort to live up to him.
"From the pathological or the merely spectacular point of view?"
He flung her a look of approval. "Oh, pathological, naturally. I'm past the spectacular stage."
(And oh, he would have made such a dear Boy Scout, with his round cherub face, his blue eyes and smooth fair hair....)
"My father is an interesting example——"
"Your father? Not——"
"Not Nap—Lord, no! He's only a nigger. I tell him so when he swanks too much, and riles me."
Kathleen reflected how Mr. Napier Kirby must love his golden-haired young stepson.
"Then your father isn't dead?"
"Not a bit of it; he comes to tea sometimes, when we're at home." Teddy forgot the various forms and degrees of vice, and became quite chummily confidential: "Mother divorced my father; she jolly well had to. But they're still pals. And I believe she's still quite keen. He's got ... fascination—I've felt it myself. I don't know why she married this bounder, three years ago. He's tremendously clever in his line, of course, and rich. And she likes to be made comfortable. I don't blame her. But it's a bit rough on me. He was crazy to get her ... her fair colouring and all that.... Rum thing, the subtle attraction of black to white, isn't it?"
"Nastylittle boy!" whispered Kathleen, unheard.
"But I don't believe he's keen any more; she's snubbed him too often; and Nap's not the sort to forgive a snub. He's not happy unless he's being admired for something. Such an awful kid! And as for his mother—ohcrumbs! She lives with us too, worse luck. You should just see her when my pater comes to tea!"
Kathleen wished she could. It struck her that the tea-party, complete with watercress, would afford amusing study to the impartial onlooker. She drew Teddy on to discourse on the members of his eccentric family. By easy stages they returned to the picnic party, and found Fred Worley at the sixth instalment of his anecdote, and the rest of the company gorged and quarrelsome. Napier Kirby flung them a quick inscrutable look as they passed him....
And then Teddy demolished the remainder of the cakes, and Kathleen gulped down several cups of lukewarm insects swimming in pale tea; and everybody despondently helped to pack up; and each man took more than his fair share of the general burden; and solemnly, two and two, they plodded away from that place where they had eaten, back to their home, two miles distant....
Napier Kirby had appropriated Kathleen—she never quite knew how; but something impudently efficient in his monopolization rather pleased her. It was evident that she was popular to-day. She wondered for an instant if the man's sense of rivalry had been flicked by the sight of her marching off with Master Ted; then dismissed the notion of such childishness....
But she was right in her intuition. When it came to mutual exasperation, Napier and his stepson treated one another as equals. They were both as young as the man—as old as the boy. During one of their frequent rows, Grace had been heard to say, in her sweetly detached fashion, that what each of them needed was a thorough spanking.
Infernally bad for Teddy to suppose he could stake an undisputed claim on the most attractive woman of the party! Kirby had been quite put out by sight of the pair strolling away between the trees. Quickly he had made up his mind that Kathleen should walk home with him....
"Let the others get ahead," in a masterful undertone.
Lulu Collins also lingered regretfully on the scene of recent orgy.
"What ...funit was!" she breathed—and sped off to join her husband.
"'The last sigh of the Moor'!" laughed Nap Kirby. "You know that when Boabdil had to abandon Granada to Ferdinand, he paused on the hill for a final glimpse backwards at his Alhambra. And I daresay he said: 'What ... fun it was!'"
"At any rate, it's history what his mother said: 'Aye, weep like a woman for what thou couldst not defend as a man!'—which was rather unnecessarily rubbing it in, I always thought."
"But typical of a mother. Mine would have said it like a shot!"
"Poor Boabdil," murmured Kathleen ... who had said it on numerous occasions to her private and particular Boabdil.
Kirby plunged off into a series of legends on the Moors in Spain. His manner of telling was vivid and enthralling—he spoke as though he loved the forlorn race of Barbary pirates, with its sonorous names and darkly jewelled history. Suddenly he broke off, and said:
"I'd like to take you there. I'd like to stand with you at sunset on that hill—the Last Sigh of the Moor—and look down at the Alhambra——"
Kathleen was smitten with a new racing excitement ... hot and fierce and sweet....
It passed again. And she became aware of him talking absurdly and maliciously about their fellow-inmates of Rapparee House.
"It was good of you to have rescued me from Miss Frazer—I made a bad break coming up. She told me she was thedirectdescendant of John Keats—who wasn't married, you must know. I asked: 'Got any interesting relics?' 'Oh, yes, indeed; my sister-in-law was photographed sitting on his tomb!' I didn't quite gather whether the tomb, the photograph, or the sister-in-law was the relic; but to carry on conversation, I remarked lightly: 'So you call him your bastard great-grandfather, I suppose?' She pretends I'm not there, now, when she looks at me.... Shecan'thave known he wasn't married! Or else she wasn't as direct as she thought...."
He gave Kathleen no time for amused comment, but drawled on in his low flexible voice:
"Funny thing, isn't it, that Mrs. Collins really thinks it was fun to-day. She'll go on thinking so. So few people realize the difference between enjoying themselves, and looking like other people look when they are doing something which is popularly supposed to be enjoyable. I had a strained afternoon, waiting for Trixie Worley to burst—she'll burst in purple and red when she does—like that fellow's heart in 'Maud': ... 'Will rise and tremble under your feet, and blossom in purple and red——' You've played the old game: 'I planted a careful young man and it came up Thrift,' etc....Iplanted Mrs. Worley, and she came up fuchsias!"
... Again he darted off at a tangent: "How splendidly you walk. You're not entirely Saxon blood, are you?"
"I'm a direct descendant of a Red Indian princess—whowasmarried, by the by."
"Oh,Idon't mind—I'm not a conventionalist. I'd overlook even Miss Frazer's shameful secret, if she gave me a chance."
Then: "How do you like Teddy?"
Kathleen found his inconsequence rather bewildering.
"How could I venture to criticize that marvellous youth, after he has singled me out for his approval?"
"Oh—his approval!... Teddy's susceptible. He may pretend to be smitten now, but he won't stick to you; prepare yourself for that."
She turned to meet the anticipated twinkle in his gaze. To her astonishment it was not there. Napier Kirby was warning her quite seriously not to rely on his stepson's fidelity.... Yet undoubtedly the man had a sense of humour. She grasped that Teddy was on his nerves. And she sympathized. It was a bad thing to have one person continually on your nerves ... especially if that person lived with you.
They overtook the others, and arrived at Rapparee House as the sun-scorched afternoon was slipping with a murmur of relief over the western horizon.
"I was thinking of a stroll down to the beach," remarked Grace Kirby from her hammock, as ten exhausted people flopped down without speech in the surrounding shade; "the heat has really only just become bearable...."