III
AN ECLIPSE
Ingram took her down to the beach again that night, as he had promised, through a sparse, pungent pine wood that by day and night seemed to keep something of the peace of the primeval world in its coniferous shade, and across a trackless little wilderness of sand-hills, scooped and tortured by the earthquake storms of winter into strange, unnatural contours, over which the moon to-night spread a carpet so white, so deceptively level, that often they could only be guessed by the abrupt rise or fall of the ground beneath one's feet. Rabbits popped in and out of the earth, the sharp reeds that bind the sand barriers together bit spitefully at the girl's tender ankles, and withered branches, catching in her silk skirt, snapped dryly as her lover helped her through the hedges with which the dunes are ribbed.
Although the night was cool, she was wearing the thin dress she had put on for dinner. Over his shoulder Ingram had slung a soldier's cloak of blue-gray cloth, long and wide, that was to cover them in to-night as it had often covered them before. Fenella was already familiar with its every fold—knew exactly when the rough backing of the clasp would chafe her delicate cheek, could recall at any moment the peculiar fragrance of cigar smoke with which the heavy frieze was impregnated, and some other smell, stranger still, sweet, foreign and spicy, that she could not define, but which, evanescent as it was—the very ghost of an odor—clung obstinately to her skin and dress, and which she loved to lie awake at night and feel exhaled from her thick hair like some secret earnest of joy upon the morrow.
She slid her hand into the man's as they descended the slippery, needle-carpeted path, and turned up a face to him in the darkness of the wood that was contrite and humble as a reproved child's. She had been a bad child, in fact; had failed in sympathy—had told him in her passion that she hated him. Hated—him! When they had found the fire, still smouldering, and had blown it into a blaze, she crept silently within his arms, under the folds of the cloak, and, laying her head upon his breast, watched the flames, creeping like fern-fronds through the gnarled roots and sodden bleached faggots that Paul had heaped upon it. She began to suck her thumb too: always with Fenella the sign of a chastened spirit. The moon, serenely unconscious of the earth shadow that was creeping upon her, made a path of crinkled glory across the waters, straight toward them, and, like foam at the foot of a silver cascade, the phosphorescent surf tumbled, soft and luminous, along the shore.
"Are you warm enough?" Ingram asked presently, feeling a tremor, perhaps, in the yielding figure that rested in his arms.
Fenella nodded her head, but she might more truly have told him that she was cold and sick. For her the night was full of voices that threatened her happiness. The ripple of the cold wind along dry grass at her back, the soft thud and effervescence of the surf against the sand, were all so many whispers telling her that her lover was going—going to some other woman who could help him, and away from the weak arms that only clung and hindered. She had no confidence in herself—no belief in her own power to hold him a moment, once his will should feel an alien attraction. The very profuseness of the poor child's passion, its abandonment of one uninvaded reserve after another, had been proof of this inward unrest. Let no mistake be made. Fenella was a good girl, who could by no possibility become other than a good woman: nevertheless it is as true as it is, perhaps, disquieting that she might have remained at the same time happier and more maidenly in contact with an affection less worthy and less spiritual than that which she had encountered. For, so long as the attraction of sex for sex, beneath all modern refinements and sophistications, remains endowed with anything of the purpose for which nature instituted it—so long as its repulsions are a definite distance, to be annihilated toward a definite end, so long, if one party to the vital bargain hangs unduly back, must the other press unduly forward.
She was silent so long that Ingram put out his hand, and, touching her cheek, found it wet.
"You're crying!" he exclaimed sharply.
"I'm n-not," Fenella protested unevenly, and even as she spoke the great drops splashed down on his hand.
"Nelly, look up! Do you love me as much as you say?"
"Oh, my heart!—my heart!" she sobbed, covering his mouth with kisses, salt as the sea. And while she kissed him he was making a mental note that women were unduly robust on the emotional side.
"If you do," said he, "you'll stop crying—at once."
He spoke so sternly that the girl clenched her hands and struggled and fought with her sorrow.
"That's better," he said, when, by dint of swallowing her tears, she was, outwardly at least, a little calmer. "I'm sorry if I spoke harshly just now," he went on; "but everybody has a last straw. A woman crying seems to be mine. It—it strains my heart."
"Do you thinkIlike it any better?" his sweetheart asked, desperately.
"I suppose," he hazarded, with a shyness that was almost grotesque, "it's because I'm going to-morrow."
"Oh yes, dear, yes," the girl told him, eagerly seeking relief in words since tears were forbidden her. "Oh, Paul! how I shall miss you! You don't know what it's meant to me to have you living in the same house—to even know you were sleeping near me. Darling, do you know I've sometimes wished yousnoredso I might hear you at night. Don't stop me, love!" she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat with nervous fingers. "Let me confess my full shamelessness. I've even helped Simone do your room sometimes in the morning. You're not shocked—are you? Oh! youare," she cried piteously, drawing away from his arm. "You think me unmaidenly. But I can'thelpit, love; I can'thelpit. Don't you see? You are you. It's different to all the rest of the world."
Ingram's chest rose and fell unevenly beneath her cheek. She could not but perceive his distress.
"Listen, Nelly," he said huskily. "Don't cry again; but—but perhaps it's a good thing for you I am going away for a while. Things are so unsettled, and it may help you—get you used, supposing the worst happens, to theidea. There's so much in custom—in habit."
"Paul!" she cried once, and grew rigid in his arms. It was a death-cry, and he flinched. Who has struck at life and not drawn the blade away quicker because the first blow went home.
"Nelly, I'm not young."
"I don't care if you were sixty—seventy." Fenella was not crying now, but fighting for her love like the brave little girl she was.
"I'm a man without home, or country, or friends."
"I'm not a baby. I'll go with you wherever you like. We'll make them for ourselves, together."
"And I'm deadly poor."
"I'll lend you money, Paul. How much do you want? I've seventy pounds in the Post-Office."
I think if I had been Ingram and had only one more kiss to give, I would have given it her for this; but I am trying to tell the truth; and the truth is that these futile interruptions to his hateful task harassed and angered him. It is so much easier to confess to sin than to failure.
"Nelly! don't interrupt me! Let me say what I have to. I'm telling you that at thirty-seven, an age when most men have home and wife and children and see their way clear to the end, I haven't taken the first step upon a road that is haunted by tragedy and littered with the bones of those who have fallen by the way."
"I'll wait for you," said poor Fenella, but no longer with the same energy. What a gorgon head has common-sense to turn hearts of flesh to stone!
"Yes, you'll wait for me! Spend your youth waiting for me; your middle age—waiting. We'll save every cent; spend hours figuring out on just how much or how little life for two can be supported. Hundreds of people are doing that to-day who, thirty years ago, would have been setting out, full of hope and confidence, to make money. That's a by-product of industrial development. And, if we're lucky, just about the time your own daughters should be telling you their love affairs, you'll come to me and we'll crawl away together to some cottage in Cornwall, where I'll cultivate vegetables a little, rheumatically, and at night you'll sit opposite me by the kitchen fire—we'll call it our 'ingle-nook'—and listen to an old man babbling of his wrongs between spoonfuls of bread and milk, with enlightening criticisms upon the fools who succeeded where he was too clever not to fail.
"You'll think it strange, I suppose," he went on, no more interrupted now by her sobs than by the sough of the sea; "strange that I should wait until now, just when I've heard I'm to have the chance I've been whining for, to realize what a phantom I've committed myself to following. But it's not as strange as it looks. As long as there's some petty practical obstacle in the way, mercifully or unmercifully everything else is obscured by it. It's like a hill, hiding the desert you'll have to cross when you've climbed to the top. Oh, Nelly! look at the moon!"
Little by little, as the man talked and the woman paid in tears and heartscald for the reckless passion of her first love, the portent they had come out to watch was passing over their heads. At first it was but a spot—a little nibble at the silver rim of the great dead, shining orb; then a stain, that grew and spread, as though the moon were soaking up the blackness of the sky; last it took shape and form of the world's circumference, and for once man might watch his earth as, maybe, from some happier but still speculative planet his earth is watched, and idly conjecture at what precise spot upon that smooth segmental shadow any mountain or plain, roaring city or dark tumbling ocean that he has mapped and named, might lie. Two thousand years ago—a day as men have learned to count time—this man and woman, who had come out to watch the moon's eclipse for mere diversion, for an effect of light and shade, and who, in the multiplied perplexities of their own artificial life had even forgotten to watch it at all, would have been lying, prone upon their faces, wailing—praying until the ominous shadow had passed, while in the fire before them some victim of flock and herd smoked propitiation to the threatening heavens. And out of all the straining and striving toward knowledge of those two thousand years—out of all the Promethean struggle wherein learning, hot to unlearn, can but lop off one visionary beak or claw to find itself clutched more cruelly in another, not enough wisdom reached them now to comfort one simple, trustful heart, or to teach an intellect that had roamed the earth to its own undoing, the primal art of all—how to rear a roof and feed a hearth for the loving creature that clung at his breast.
No! Nelly wouldn't look at the moon. She left his arms and sat apart, bolt upright; her lithe body quivering with resolution.
"Paul Ingram," she said incisively, "I've listened patiently to you and you'll have to listen to me. You've been prophesying woe and misery, and now it's my turn. ShallItellyouwhat's really going to happen?"
Hope is like measles. No one is too young or too foolish to catch it from. In spite of himself the man's face brightened.
"Well, what's going to happen?"
"As soon as we get home I'm going to have Mme. de Rudder to tea, just our two selves, nice and comfy, and when she's lapped up her cream and I've stroked her down a little, I'm going to say, 'Now, Madame! For the last two years you've been buttering me up, to my face and behind my back, and showing me round, and if you've meant half you said' (and I think she does, Paul, though she's such an old pussy), 'there ought to be a living for me somewhere.' And then—oh, Paul!—I'll work and I'll work and I'll w-o-r-k-work. I'm not sure whether I'll see you"—with an adorable look askance—"perhaps once a week, if you're good. And, at the end of the year, I'll bring you a nice, newly signed contract at—oh! well,poundsa week, 'cos I've got ahead, which you'll never have, poor dear. And then—don't stop me please—we'll get married, and have a little flat of our own or turn ma's lodgers out, and you'll write your mis-e-ra-ble,mis-e-ra-blebooks all day," she took his head in her hands and shook it gently from side to side; "and at night you'll call for me and I'll go home with you, sir, in my own dear little taxicab, all warm and cosy from dancing—and, dear, you shall never have another money trouble or even hear the word mentioned as long as you live. Now, what does he think of that?"
She looked closely at her lover's face and suddenly shrank away, with a little cry, at what she saw there.
"Think of it?" Paul repeated, his nostrils quivering. "I'll soon tell you what I think of it. That if I didn't know your words were a mere childish fancy—if I really thought you were going to dance on the stage in London or Paris or New York or any city I've been in, I believe, Nelly"—he paused a moment—"yes, I believe I could bear to take you up in my arms, now, as you are, and carry you down to that sea and hold you under until you were dead."
Fenella moaned and covered her face with her hands. Then she jumped up. Paul caught at her silken skirt, a momentary cold fear at his heart.
"Nelly, stop! I know I shouldn't have said that."
She disengaged herself with a swift turn. "Let me go!" she cried angrily. "I'm not the sort of person that commits suicide. You can drown me afterward if you like. I'm going to dance first."
"To dance?" Ingram repeated, thunderstruck. "Out here? Sit down at once! Sit down," he pleaded in a changed voice. "Be a good child."
"I'm not a child," she cried rebelliously; "that's the mistake you're making. And I won't be forever checked and scolded by you, Paul. I will have some comfort. Oh, I knew you'd laugh and storm. I'm only a silly little thing that dances and that you pet when she's good"; her eyes flamed at him. "But it means as much to me as your books and long words do to you."
She stopped, not because she was ashamed, but because her mouth was inconveniently full of the pins which she was pulling from a rather elaborate "chevelure." She shook her head with the usual transforming result, kicked off her shoes, and, bending down, began to unfasten her long silk stockings under her skirt. Paul turned away his head, and perhaps it was as well she did not see the disgust in the averted face.
"Sing something," she commanded, throwing the long silk stockings on the sand and stretching her bare toes.
"I don't know anything," doggedly.
"Oh yes, you do! Sing the Algerian recruit song."
"It's too sad for you in your present mood of exaltation."
Fenella did not seem to resent the withering tone. She had drawn a little away from the fire and was looking upward, her hands clasped behind her neck and under her hair.
"Just to get a note," she said, dreamily.
Without quite knowing why, and in the teeth of his own shy distaste, Ingram began to sing. He had a fine baritone voice, to be exact where exactness is not called for, full of strength and feeling, that was none the less tuneful because it had only been trained to the tramp of gaitered feet along the blinding whitechausséesof French Africa. The song rose and fell, haunting and melodious—
"Me voilà engagéPour l'amour d'une blond—e...."
"Me voilà engagéPour l'amour d'une blond—e...."
"Me voilà engagéPour l'amour d'une blond—e...."
"Me voilà engagé
Pour l'amour d'une blond—e...."
The fire was between them, throwing all the beach into shadow, and, sung thus, squatted upon the sand, and his feet to the dying embers, with the old song so many memories crowded upon the man's own brain—so many visions peopled the lurid shadows around him—that he had arrived nearly at its end before he thought of regarding the swaying, tossing figure beyond with any degree of attention. But, when he did, the last words died away in his throat. This is not the place to describe Fenella Barbour's dancing. Many pens have done it justice. It has been described and overdescribed—ignorantly arraigned and disingenuously defended. Tyros of the press, anxious to win their spurs, and with a store of purple phrases to squander, have attempted, through a maze of adjectives and synonyms, to convey or reawaken its charm. She burst on the world in a time when such things were already grown a weariness to the plain man; yet never, I believe, was any success due more to the frank and spontaneous tribute of the people who sit in cheap seats to a wonderful thing wonderfully done, and less to the kid-gloved applause of stalled and jaded eclecticism in search of new sensation. And the key to it all, I believe—though mine is only one opinion among many—was to be sought in the mechanical precision with which, through all the changes and postures of arms and body above the hips, unstable and sensuous as vapor, the feet below the swirling skirts beat—beat out the measure of the dance unerringly and incisively as the percussion of a drummer's sticks upon the sheepskin. It was this that, for the man in the street at least, lifted her art out of trickery and imposture and veiled indelicacy into some region where his own criticism felt itself at home. "A clog-dancer with sophistications," she has been called; but at least it was upon honest toes and heels that Fenella danced into popular favor.
And all this the man by the fire watched with a sinking heart. Not altogether unmoved. He could not, being flesh and blood, remember that the girl dancing before him had just left his arms, and at the close of her transport would fling herself, breathless and glowing, into them again, eager for his approval, and spending upon his lips the aftermath of her excitement, without many a desire and emotion of his youth awaking and clamoring for its deferred due. But his desires had grizzled with his beard: he had analyzed the emotions and discarded them. Where the passions are concerned intellect is never impartial. It must be either oil or water—foster or extinguish. And he had chosen once for all the harder way. He was full of shyness, constraint, and the panic instinct of flight: shocked yet arrested, like some hermit of the Libyan desert watching the phantoms of his old life at Rome or Alexandria beckon him from his cave. Not only was the old dispensation void. He could imagine no ground upon which it could be renewed. His authority had been one of those gentle tyrannies of heart over heart, that are valid only so long as they are unquestioned. Having claimed her liberty, though it was but for an hour—resumed the possession of herself though it was only to dazzle his eyes—Fenella became to him from that moment a new woman, to be wooed and won afresh; and, being a wistful far more than a lustful man, in the very measure that the delayed revelation of her beauty penetrated his senses, he shrank further and further from its recapture.
It must have been a strange sight, had any been there to see it. The dying fire; the shadowed moon; the man with his head bent above his knees; and the barefooted girl, with fluttering skirts and dishevelled hair, singing and dancing on the sand before his averted face.