So Ursula. "Hullo, Paul," she said, very unconcerned, her eyes resting softly on him, "what's up? Ship on fire?"
"No," stammered Paul, "I say, are you awake? That is, I mean—well, of course, I see you are! I say, come on deck. The sunrise is too heavenly for words."
"It's also hot," said Muriel, sitting up in her bunk and leaning over to look at Ursula. "Hullo! Good-morning. You reading?"
Paul looked at Muriel. She, too, wore a thin silk nightdress, but at the sight of her he recovered his assurance. "Well, do come up, both of you," he said. "It's far too good to miss."
Ursula closed her book and drew her knees up, preparatory to getting out of the bunk. "Coming," she said. "Paul, tell the steward we'll have tea on deck."
He departed on his errand, humming to himself with sudden elation. In the passage he ran into Major Jardine. On such occasions heretofore as a fourth person had been demanded of necessity, Jardine had filled that position, and had seemed increasingly to relish it. He was in the King's African Rifles, returning from leave to his companies in Zanzibar. He grinned at Paul, but with a certain gloom born of the tropics and the hour.
"Morning," he said. "You're devilish early and musical, Kestern."
Paul laughed. "Come and see the sunrise, Major," he said. "It'll cheer you up. We're having tea on deck."
Then the other visibly brightened. "Good," he cried with alacrity. "I'll tub later. Shan't be a jiffy." And he disappeared into his cabin to get rid of his impedimenta.
On the boat-deck, then, the four gathered. Muriel dispensed tea, assisted by the Major, and lit cigarettes. Ursula and Paul drew a little apart. She leant a hand on the davits of one of the boats, and Paul stood back a little by her side.
Brown and orange and yellow and burnt brick-red, the sandstone hills and sandy wastes grew startlingly and swiftly clear as they watched. The new sun rose over the desert, over the rocky hills, a great golden orb, instantly alive. Magically the shadows drew off the sea or faded in its depths; the blue of it lightened, grew transparently clear, translucent. "Look," said Ursula, in a half whisper, and pointed down.
Paul took a step forward, and peered where she indicated. In the still water a great shark followed by a small replica of itself moved lazily through the watery world about it. Its gentle sinuous movements were scarcely noticeable; it glided by undisturbed with just fanning tail. Slate-grey, mottled with black, it was so near the surface that one could fancy one saw its wicked little eye inspecting the silent monster of the ship lying there at its ease so invulnerable and great.
"It's gone," said Paul. "My first shark! Even it was beautiful, Ursula."
"But that faery town," said the girl softly, who had raised her eyes from the sea.
White and picturesque, with the green of palms flecked here and there upon it, Port Suez sparkled in the now risen sun. With its tumbled flat-roofed houses, its occasional minaret, its fringe of gardens, it was a painted thing, a bit of the veritable East, for all the heat and dust and smells and commonplaceness of day in its streets.
Paul stood motionless by her side, gazing. "Do you suppose we can go ashore?" he asked at length.
"No." She shook her head. "Nobody ever seems to here. Besides you'd much better not, Paul."
"I'd love to. I know what you're going to say, but I don't believe it. I like dirt and smells. They're just as mysterious and magical as colour and scent."
"Rubbish," said Muriel, who had come up behind them. "Eh, Major?"
"Gad, yes. Poet or not, Kestern, you wouldn't like Port Suez."
Ursula glanced at them. "For all that, Paul's right," she said. And she smiled at him.
A sort of fierce flame leapt in Paul at that. He had hard work to control himself. The hid passion of his nature was asserting itself. He threw his head back and laughed. Then he caught Ursula by the hand. "Oh, come on!" he cried. "Ursula, I'll race you round the deck."
"Can't," she said laughing, "in a nightie. But I might manage to walk."
She slipped her hand into his arm, and they strolled off. For the moment it was enough for Paul that they two walked together.
That morning's sun, as it set at last over Egypt, lit up the peninsula of Sinai with fierce red flames. The hot day had drawn slowly out, and most people were in deck chairs, with their books on their laps as the sun went down. Even the Major had been reading, a novel by Mr. Charles Garvice. Earlier on, the three had merrily attacked him for his choice, and he had stoutly defended himself. "That's all very well," he said, "but the sort of stuff they put in novels these days, beats me. I don't want to read a bally sermon—can't understand it either—and half the rest a fellow's ashamed to read in ladies' company. Now this chap, what's his name?" (he looked back to the cover—"Never can remember authors' names")—"Garvice, you always know what you've got with him."
"Milk and honey," said Muriel in her abrupt way, staring out over the peninsula in the direction of the Promised Land.
"Eh?" queried the Major, hopelessly at sea.
Muriel laughed. "Yes, and there are the Ten Commandments," she said, "over there."
Jardine still looked puzzled. He liked Muriel, against his will as it were. Ursula, he told Paul, was so damned quiet, but Muriel said things a feller couldn't understand. Odd pair. Pretty though. And deuced attractive. What did Kestern think?
So now. "That's where you get me," he said. "But, I say, what about a sundowner? Coming, Kestern?"
Paul rose. Ursula looked up. "Bring two more and come back," she said lazily.
"Right, Miss Manning. You and Miss Lister can discuss the Commandments for five minutes exactly. Then you must forget them."
"But there's nothing about sundowners in the Decalogue, Major," said Paul gaily, as he moved off. "Or I shouldn't——" They went out of hearing.
Muriel glanced at her companion. "It's odd," she said. "Paul's lost sight of God, but he still thinks he can keep morality."
Ursula fixed her gaze on the darkening mountains. "I don't agree, my dear," she said.
"How?"
"He's not so much lost sight of God. He's seeing Him truly at last."
Muriel considered this. "You mean His veil of beauty that you're so fond of talking about, and painting," she said. "Well, perhaps.... But still he thinks he keeps orthodox morality."
"He simply hasn't thought of that," said Ursula.
Muriel found a marker and shut her book. Her motions suggested that she was about to open a conversation, but she did not speak at once, though she put her book down and stretched herself out in her chair. But at last she spoke deliberately.
"Dear," she said, "I know what you think about all that.... Now Paul's in love with you, whether he knows it or whether he doesn't." (A little pause.) "You know it anyway. Also you're high priestess of his new religion."
She stopped. She seemed to think the other would say something, but that was not Ursula's way. Not for the first time, despite their friendship, Muriel found it irritating. "Look here, Ursula," she said, sitting up, "what's going to happen when he does begin to think about morality?"
A look grew in Ursula's face. Her friend studied her intently. "I say, Ursie," she said, but in a changed softened tone, "it's playing with fire. Paul's not quite an ordinary man."
Ursula made no direct reply. But the other understood her. "He's like a person who has glimpsed Paradise through the bars," she said.
"Yes?" queried Muriel.
"The gate's open," said Ursula simply, as the men came back.
(2)
But Paul was to fulfil Muriel's prediction sooner than she expected. The littleGaikameandered in her slow and steady way down the Red Sea. At the close of a sweltering day, she drew into Port Sudan, and it was at Port Sudan that Paul Kestern began first to think about morality in the light of his opened eyes. It happened this way.
The three were sitting over coffee in the saloon when the Major, who had finished earlier and had gone up on deck, re-entered and crossed over to them. "I say," he said, "the skipper says we shall be here all night and can go ashore if we like. You three care to come?"
"By Jove, yes," cried Paul excitedly, jumping up.
"It's a dull place, you know," said the Major, as if it were his duty to apologise for it. "A wharf, a railway station and sand, mostly. But it's rather interestin'. It's going to be the main port for Khartoum and Upper Egypt one day."
"Is there nothing else to see but sand, Major?" queried Muriel, smiling.
"Oh, there are some native stores, Miss Lister, and an hotel where we can get a drink. And it will be cool on shore in the night air."
"That settles it," said the girl. "Coming, Ursie?"
"Rather," said Ursula.
"Hurrah," cried Paul. "Shall I get your scarves?"
It was necessary to row across the harbour in a native boat. The men handed the girls in and sat beside them on the rough seats. A "boy" in a red fez, with his shirt hanging loose over his cotton drawers, who was to act as guide, directed operations. Two grinning negroes, their muscles knotted beneath their flimsy vests, drove the boat over the dark waters with long sweeps of oars. There was no moon, but the stars gave a soft light. And as the blunt prow cut the sea, a thousand molten ripples broke in little waves left and right, silver streamers melted into the darkness on either side, while the blades of the oars turned up liquid fire. Every little drop that fell from them was a diamond of light. As they looked over the side, gleaming flights of living silver gems of fish fled before their approach. Over the black waters ahead, shone a yellow flicker or two from lanterns on the quay.
They landed, laughing and joking, and found themselves on a roadway that was, as the Major had said, all sand, except for granite curbstones that ran ahead into the night and marked its course. Now and again, a board announced the site of a church or hotel; and at a cross-road in the waste, building operations had been begun for a big shop, a theatre and a restaurant.
"Piccadilly Circus here," said Jardine, "all in good time!"
"Which way now?" laughed Muriel.
"Down towards those lights. There are makeshift stores there, and the native quarter. I expect we might find a native café and music hall going strong."
"What fun," said Ursula. "Lead on, Major."
Their guide jabbered in Swahili and Jardine interpreted. "He says there's a theatre," he said smiling, "if the ladies care to see it."
"A theatre!" ejaculated Paul. "Heavens above! What in the world do they show here?"
"There'll be a cinematograph," said the Major judicially, "and a band, and dances, and songs screeched loud enough to drown even the band. We might look in. If it's a bit too much for the ladies, we can leave."
As if in ready answer, the sound of a chorus was borne on the night air to them. The party stood still and stared at each other. Then they broke into mutual laughter. There was no mistaking it: Africa was singing in what it called English: "I'm a bro-ken doll."
"Come on, come on," cried Paul, recovering himself. "We shall miss half the fun."
"Oh, no, we shan't," said Jardine. "Take it easy, for goodness' sake. They'll keep it up till morning, especially as there's a ship in."
As they approached, the glares and shadowy buildings ahead resolved themselves into more recognisable objects. They stopped at length on the edge of a crowd that was sitting at trestle tables in a half-light that faded into the dark night around. Everyone was looking towards a big ramshackle building that held out an open-air stage. Kerosine flares and oil lamps illuminated it. A band, in tattered crimson tunics, blared and beat below, but rather out of the way to the right to permit of the artistes descending into the auditorium, and on it, at the moment, a stout dark-haired Greek woman was singing. Her voice reached them only at intervals, for, harsh and loud and discordant as it was, the band beat it most of the time. Suddenly, with a gesture, she commanded the chorus. The audience took it up. Ragged Africans—Sudanese, Fellahin, Swahilis; Indians, and half-castes; frowsy Greeks and Levantines; and a sprinkling of white-ducked, more respectable looking, but distinctly dark Europeans; they all sang, shouted, beat time. It was obviously a popular item. Ursula laughed heartily. "Oh," she cried, "how priceless! Can't we go nearer the stage and sit down, Major?"
Jardine looked doubtful. "Oh, I don't know," he said.
But the guide had caught some of the English words. "Seet down?" he queried. "Yas, sar. Plenty room up there. Missy, come thees way."
"Right," said Ursula, smiling. "Lead on, Jacob."
The boy showed all his white teeth. "Me Abdullah, mees," he said. "You follow me."
"For goodness' sake, keep to the other side of the band," urged Muriel.
The boy leading, the girls following, the Major and Paul were bound to go. Paul was eager enough. Jardine was less ready, and, with some knowledge, more apprehensive. "Good God, Kestern," he said, "this is more than I bargained for. You never know what you're in for here."
It was impossible, however, to draw back easily now. The proprietor himself, an oiled smiling Syrian in evening dress, had come forward. With a magnificent gesture, he indicated a small table for four on the left, and waved Abdullah into the surrounding blackness. Jardine nodded to some ship's officers at a little distance, and seemed more relieved when he saw a sprinkling of women about them and even a group of ladies from the ship on the edge of the shadows. But they were too noticeably prominent for his liking. It was too late to move, however, and he bowed to the inevitable, giving orders for drinks to the Indian waiter, but with audible misgivings over that.
"I'll order wine," he said. "We can see that the cork hasn't been tampered with, and that's less likely to poison you than anything else."
"You're mighty cheerful, Major," laughed Muriel.
"Well, Miss Lister, we're in for it now, anyway. Don't blame me."
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," put in Paul enthusiastically. "By Jove, Ursula, just look at that band! Did you ever see anything more comic in your life?"
Paul shortly forgot the stage, or nearly so. It was the audience that interested him, and the great glow of light that lost itself in the black desert about and shone on strange Eastern faces that came and went on the shadow-line of its edge. It was unusual, too, to sit with that fantastic noise in one's ears and yet to be able to look out to the silence yonder under the serene stars. There were two semi-European women at a table near, also, to whom his eyes constantly if surreptitiously returned. Fat, bulging, in tawdry lace and imitation jewels, they were nevertheless smiling, gay, human, he thought, and one of them kept a motherly eye on a child of seven or eight in a sailor suit who would wander from her side. He leant forward to draw Ursula's attention to them. And then he saw that her eyes were fixed on the stage.
Into the garish light, heralded with clashing cymbals, advanced three African girls with elaborately dressed woolly hair, thick rouged lips, bright laughing eyes. Their legs and feet were bare. Short coloured skirts reached only to the knee, and scarcely to that. Above the waist they wore only tiny bodices of vivid colour, red and yellow, which were bound tightly across breasts firmly outlined beneath them. Gaudy necklaces of beads and coins sparkled around their necks, and a host of jingling bangles decorated their bare arms. Each carried a tambourine, and to the accompaniment of native drums, they postured and danced.
It was no more than adanse du ventre, but it was at least a new experience for Paul.
A tense stillness settled gradually down on the audience, it seemed to him. The edge of the broken irregular circle of light filled up with faces, a grey and black wall of them, a fence of gleaming staring eyes. The drums beat in a wild rhythm, and shrill native pipes broke in. Wilder and wilder grew the dance. The protuberant posturings, the voluptuous writhings of which he hardly guessed the meaning, the extraordinary wheelings in swift steps during which the three performers shook their heavy buttocks brazenly at the gazing crowd, glancing over their shoulders the while, were abandoned for more reckless tossing of arms and legs, more shrill, more cacophonous music. Paul grew white. The Major leaned over towards the ladies. "Er—er," he stammered, red-faced. "I think perhaps it's getting late. Hadn't we better be going?"
"Certainly," said Muriel, getting up at once. Paul followed suit.
"Wait till this is over," said Ursula, coolly. "You can't leave in the middle of a turn."
Paul moistened his lips.
And then, from the wings, into the blaze and noise, danced a swift figure. The girl was perhaps an Abyssinian with maybe French blood in her veins;—she was known at any rate to the crowd who cheered as one man and shouted her name. Regularly featured, superbly framed, her raven-black hair flowed loose about her, crowned with a scarlet flower. Her skirt was diaphanous and spangled; a sort of loose white scarf was held by a clasp between her breasts but floated in a cloud around her as she moved. Her shapely back bare, her curved and lithesome body firm, her twinkling little feet light, her colour too was at any rate white by comparison with the previous performers. The barbaric clamour of music died down. The three negro girls collapsed on one side. The audience subsided with tense expectancy. She danced in silence and alone.
She utterly held her audience. Born of mixed parentage, better not named, where, how, God knows, probably she was dirty, certainly she was as coarse, as savage, as animal, as she well could be. But she held her audience. She weaved a spell of romance, of poetry, of magic, there, in those garish lights and in that rough rude place. She was incarnate grace, and she was lovely, say what you would. Entreating, forbidding, abandoning, desiring, she was wild pagan love. The negresses, too, had danced a passion that had grown old, very, very old, a forced, a thought-out thing; she danced passion, but the passion of the Song of Songs, of Dionysus young in Attic fields, of youth itself. And as she finished, she disengaged her flower with a swift movement from her hair, and tossed it to—Paul.
He caught it instinctively. And then he realised that he had caught it. He held it in his fingers, felt its stem firm between them, and knew that he was himself and awake. He realised that he had been standing and that the four of them were in a prominent position. He realised, too, that he had been charmed against his will, caught away, and that his face had shown it; that she had seen it; that she had, in her wanton way, chosen him.... He uttered an exclamation and dropped the bloom.
"For God's sake, let's get out," said Jardine, somewhere. Lights swam before Paul. He heard dimly a burst of cheering, voices speaking in a moment of less noise, a little laughter, then more cheers. He stumbled among chairs. Perspiration stood on him so that he fumbled for his handkerchief to wipe his face. His brain cleared a little in doing so. He saw a bloated face that leered up from a table and realised that the man was speaking to him. With his hasty gesture of refusal, his brain cleared a little more, and he began to understand. He began to understand, above all, how and why he had liked the dance.
They were outside an infinity later and walking through the cool night. He glanced down, still rather stupidly, feeling his feet on sand, and saw that his shoes were covered with it, and the black turned-up ankles of his evening trousers. Looking ahead, he saw Jardine was on in front with Muriel. He turned his head to steal a glance at Ursula, and cried out on the instant.
"Ursula! You're wearing it!"
"Why not? You dropped it rather rudely."
He marvelled at her level voice. She was perfectly cool, he noticed, looking straight ahead in her direct way as they walked. And the flower was a trumpet-shaped hibiscus that burned in the opening of her evening frock even against the white skin of her neck. He suddenly understood his confused memories. They had laughed at him, and cheered her when she had picked it up.
"Give it me, Ursula!" he cried. "Throw it away! You can't wear it!"
"Why ever not?"
"Well, she ... That girl!" Then, swiftly, with a kind of brazen anger: "She was practically naked!"
"Yes. She had one of the most lovely bodies I've ever seen." Ursula turned her head and looked up at him with a faint twinkle of amusement in her eyes.
"But—but——" Paul stammered for words. Yet even so, the girl by his side, with her serene smile, began to master his excitement by her mere cool presence. "But, Ursula, it was a disgraceful thing."
"Oh? You didn't seem to think so while you watched. Personally, I thought it was wonderfully beautiful."
"But in that place!"
"Exactly. Like a fresh flower on a dust-heap. Naturally I picked up her gift."
"But you can't justify it," he protested in bewilderment that grew with every sentence. "It was grossly immoral."
"Immoral?"
"Yes. You know it." Paul was emphatic.
"What was immoral then? The flower? The dust-heap? The girl's body? The dance? Ugly or beautiful, perhaps, but immoral? What do you mean?"
"Well, it appealed to the worst passions in everyone, to the animal in us, in—in me."
"It appealed to you sensually no doubt. Your mind, informed by your senses, appreciated the animal grace and beauty. Why not? Are animals immoral?"
"That was a girl though, a human being, a—a——"
"And isn't a girl an animal? Are you and I not animals?"
"We've souls anyway."
"Are you so sure animals haven't souls? How do you know? What is a soul, Paul?"
"A soul?" queried Paul. "Well..." (He stumbled desperately.) "The immortal part of us, the home of the spirit, a bit of God."
"God?"
Her tone instantly arrested him. There, in the night, picking their way down the road-to-be over the sand of the desert, the blare of the music behind them in the distance, he was arrested again. He was quick enough to see it with the swiftness of thought. God! Everything came back to God. And where was God? And if there was no God, where was morality?
Ursula put her hand on his arm. It was rather like Chanctonbury all over again, he thought instantly, and smiled involuntarily at the thought. Here, in Egypt, in the whirl of new experience, her touch on his arm brought back the song of the lark and the vision of the English sun on the fields and woods round Steyning. And she knew it.
"You old dear," she said. "What about the beggar's clay? Is clay magical in plants and flowers, and sinful in human bodies?"
"But that sort of thing outrages the moral law," he objected, soberly.
She laughed a very little. "Has God spoken His laws so clearly, Paul?" she said. "I thought you had come to the conclusion that He was rather silent."
"But there must be a moral law! Why, good heavens..."
"Then where is the moral Lawgiver?" she demanded, instantly.
Where is the moral Lawgiver?
"Where!" The word echoed in his consciousness, and he knew that he had no answer. Tramping over the sand, tramping through the night, he saw to what he had come, or thought he saw. Thus soon was Muriel answered.
Ursula laughed a little again. "Poor old Paul," she said. "Look here, dear, the girl gave us the best she had to give, and what she gave had real beauty. Isn't that enough for you and me?"
He made no answer, and they walked a little further in silence. Then her hand on his arm tightened. "Doesn't the blind beggar see?" she queried, smiling up at him in the dark.
"I'm not quite sure, Ursula," he said.
"There is clay that has not touched his eyes then," she replied gently.
Paul caught her hand. A glimmer of her meaning danced before him, but as a whole it still eluded him as yet. It eluded him, but there was something in her voice that made his blood run swift and hot as it had but just now in thecafé chantant. "Ursula, darling," he whispered.
She checked him. "You see, Paul," she said gently, "you were angry not because she was probably half a slave, or ill-treated, or ignorant, or as like as not solely out for your money. You didn't think of those things. No, you were angry because she was naked.Thatwas beastly, immoral—that being what she was she gloried in her body and her grace. Well, it was not beastly to me, especially in her. What else had she to glory in? Why should she not have gloried in her body? Is a beautiful body beastly? She danced natural passion—is natural passion immoral? I cannot follow your theology. She was lovely and she gave us her best, and—well, I was glad to be able to thank her for it."
Paul's grip tightened on her hand. "Why, Ursula," he said huskily, "it was I who was beastly, priggish——"
She shrugged her shoulders. Then she laughed lightly. "Let that pass," she said. "Will you wear your flower now?"
"Give it me," cried Paul.
She peered up at him. Then she loosened her hand and took the bloom from her dress. "Here it is," she said, presenting it.
He held it in his fingers a moment or two, studying its fresh loveliness in the dim starlight. Its faint scent came to his nostrils. She stood smiling and looking at him.
He looked up suddenly. "May I drop it in the sea as we row back?" he asked.
She read in his eyes what he meant, and if he had not been quite so blind and stupid and seeming rich he would have read in hers that the gate of Paradise stood open before him, as she had said to Muriel. But she saw that he had not read that yet, and if she was not quite content, she was at least very wise. "Because the sea is cool and lovely?" she asked.
"And forgiving," he said.
She nodded, understanding.
(3)
Paul told himself as he went to sleep that he would ask Ursula to marry him in the morning. But he did not. He may have been at one time a budding evangelist and he was certainly now a poet, but he was still the son of Claxted, and he found it hard to escape from all that that meant. He had ideas as to proposals, and this was a serious proposal of marriage. He waited his chance, then; and missed a good many through waiting to be quite sure that the right moment had indeed come. Thus and thus is it ever likely to be, even when we sleepers awake, and all roads lead to "Nowhere."
But in Zanzibar he had his way. Aden came and went, and Kilindini, and that first walking through tropical bush to the old fort by the sea that has dreamed so many hundred years away since the remnant of its Portuguese garrison was crucified on its walls. Not even in Mombasa, sitting on the shore at the entrance of the river, did he speak, for there is a golf links of sorts hard by and the Major and Muriel were going round. Even more wonderfully, not even that night at sea did he speak, though the surface was like a sheet of polished dark glass that now and again shivered into an untellable pool of liquid silver as a school of flying fish shattered its quietude into phosphorescent fire. Yet, possibly, his silence then was not so wonderful after all. It was such a night of wonder that he could hardly speak at all, even although he thought himself in love.
Zanzibar, however, sufficed. Here they were to leave the Major, and here, naturally, he showed them round before they sailed. He had a bungalow out past Mnazi Mmoja, before the barracks, overlooking the sea, and his car met him at the landing-stage. So they were driven slowly past the front of the Sultan's palace and through the native town to the tidal creek that washes the base of Livingstone's house twice a day; up the creek road then, past the English Cathedral with its tall thin spire rising above what was once the whipping-post of the slave market, rising out of a sea of scarlet-flowering flamboyants that surround it and were in full bloom to greet them; up the road that skirts the English Games Club; past the German Club; past the cemetery where waxen frangipanni and purple bougainvillaea shed their blossoms the perpetual summer. Down a private way to the right now, and there, on a grassy knoll fronting the sea-beach, a grove of palms behind, the still strait across which lay the hills of Africa in a haze before, stood Major Jardine's bungalow.
They had but the day and the evening, and the Major suggested a run across the island to the beach at Chuaka where the surf of the Indian Ocean beats all day and a cool wind blows even in the hot season. Zanzibar, he said, was but a bigger Mombasa so far as the native town went, but nowhere else on the coast would you find tangle of banana and orange and lime and coconut and mango and almond and areca and date, with here and there a grove of cassuarinas or cloves, to match this. He was right. They skirted the banks of low swampy rivers lovely with blue water-lilies and reeds and scarlet dragon-flies; ran through plantations of grey austere coconut trees through which the sunlight trickled down on to thin sparse olive grass; left clusters of brown huts set in small patches of delicately-leaved red-stemmed muhoga; climbed the two hundred feet of the Liliputian hill of coral that makes the backbone of the island; came out on to that plain at its summit where English bracken grows and a sweet yellow shrub that might, at a distance, be English gorse; and descended at last through groves of orange trees, the fruit scattered in lavish profusion on the very road, to the collector's house at Chuaka.
He was a polite Goanese, and he made them tea, serving them himself on his barazza which was hung out from the first floor over the very beach beneath, where the white coral sand glistened in the sun and the surf beat in perpetually. Thereafter they strolled off, theoretically to look for shells, though no one did much looking: Jardine because he did not care for shells; Muriel because, after her kind, she wanted honestly to reach a distant point and see what lay beyond; Ursula because she was utterly entranced by the stretch of the foreshore, with the riot of vegetation ever invading the sands and ever, in its outposts of mangrove, the very sea itself; and Paul because he was beginning to realise that he cared about collecting nothing except Ursula. Muriel and the Major were thus soon out of sight. Ursula and Paul, having wasted half an hour watching the antics of a naked kiddie in a miniature outrigger canoe which he finally ran ashore with consummate ease and made fast with the skill of an ancient mariner, found a great mass of coral rock which overhung a pool that was one enchanted garden of colour and life. They both waded in till Ursula had her skirts high above her knees, and Paul's uprolled trousers showed a good couple of inches of soaked territory.
"Look!" she cried. "Paul, do you see that sea-urchin? Look! In there. Oh, my dear, do you see its spines? Satiny brown, spotted with blue and red. Could you get it?"
"If I die in the attempt," said Paul manfully, giving a fresh tug to his trousers and moving cautiously forward. Here was promise of the Claxted vivarium at last!
"Good lord, this coral," he groaned. "Why don't some of the blighters who write about African seas say coral is as sharp as—ugh!—needles!" He reached forward at length and plunged his arm deep into the pool.
"Oh, go on," laughed Ursula, "another inch.... Your trousers don't matter. That's it.... Got it?"
"Damn!" cried Paul. "Oh, I say I'm sorry, but those spines are sharp. Lor, I'm soaked. But there, just look at him. Look at him trying to walk on my hand. Come on out, and let's put him in shallow water and watch him move."
They bent together over the lovely thing and watched it walk slowly but purposefully away. And while they stood there, motionless, barefoot, side by side on the sand in some six inches or so of the warm water, a fleet of tiny sky-blue fish invaded the shallows. Ursula caught Paul's hand, and there they stood, hardly daring to breathe, while the little living fragments of sapphire poked their tiny noses about their toes. Then, suddenly, Paul laughed tempestuously, and they fled.
"Oh, you rotter," cried Ursula, smiling at him. "They'll never come again."
"I couldn't help it," said Paul a little ruefully, stooping to rub his foot. "That fellow was actually bedding down between my foot and yours, and he tickled so."
"Well, anyway, we've got to put on shoes and stockings now. It'll be sunset in next to no time. Paul, did you ever imagine anything quite as lovely as all this?"
Paul stood, and let his gaze wander around. There was not a soul to be seen in the curve of the bay in which they were. A little way off, the outrigger, rough-hewn and brown, lay on its side. King crabs were beginning to emerge from their holes in the sand and stand on their spidery legs and survey the evening world from their castles of eyes. Far out at sea feathery pink clouds were floating down to a barred horizon of emerald and gold. All around and about them a soft light glowed from which the fierce vividness of the day had died away.
He turned and put his arm in hers. "Let's sit in the outrigger and put on our things," he said.
They sat side by side, and Paul was aware again, as he had been lately, of the girl's loveliness. Unconcerned, gaily, she towelled her feet on his handkerchief, drew on her stockings, fastened them, smoothed down her skirt. She finished before him, since she had dried first, and sat waiting for a second or two, her face resting on her hands, her eyes on the ever-deepening sunset colours. He too finished, and followed her gaze seawards.
Then: "Do you want anything more than that?" she asked softly.
And at her question Paul understood quite suddenly.
Absurdly enough, knowledge came to him just then, like a revelation. There was no apparent reason why it should not have come before, and he did not move for a little pondering his dulness and the surpassing wonder of things. For this awakening was not a bit as he had imagined such things would be. He was not excited or passionate, not now at any rate. He wanted indeed to touch her, but tenderly, he could scarcely tell himself how tenderly. He put his arm gently about her waist. "Yes, Ursula, you, you," he whispered.
She turned with a swift movement and faced him. "I!" she cried, her eyes alight, "I!"
Then, for Paul Kestern and Ursula Manning, for both of them, the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them passed away, and there was vision of a new heaven and a new earth.
After a little, Paul disengaged himself from her arms. There was an odd expression of wonder written on his face, very plain to see. Ursula tried to read it, but was puzzled. "What is it, Paul darling?" she whispered.
"Why," he said slowly, "do you know what I was thinking? All my years of worry and doubt, all that talk about religion——" He broke off.
"Yes?"
He hesitated. Then he laughed merrily like a child and flung his arms about her again, eagerly, boisterously. "Of course," he managed to say at last, "it was all awfully important.Really, truly, Ursula."
Printed in Great Britain by Billing and Sons, Limited, Guildford and Esher.