"Well, and then?"
"Well—that's all. I landed a little this side of Grisnez, just as if I'd been out for an ordinary bathe. My chaps kept a sharp look-out for the coastguard, and smuggled my clothes on to a rock; my English ones, of course; I bought this rig in Boulogne. And in three or four days I was pretty well all right again. But I don't think I'd have the stamina to do it again.... I say, promise me you won't go talking about it, George. I've got to lie absolutely low. I frightfully wanted to go to Antwerp, but I simply daren't do it. I might be asked for my Army Discharge Papers, or something awkward like that."
Sothatwas how he had solved the passport problem! Unable to walk the Straits, he had simply swum them, and had saved that night's stoking with coal-dust in his beard! And suddenly and inexplicably, I found something of my resentment already softening within me. There was a noble simplicity about his expedient, and even his voluminous corduroys and shapeless vareuse did not hide the magnificence of his build. And yet he, so magnificent, must forego that deep joy in his physical splendour if he was to preserve his anonymity. It passed him by as the publisher's belief in him had passed him by—as, it began to appear to me, all else in life must pass him by. Antwerp and the Stades for others, but for him, who would have won glorious laurels there—no. Nay, say he was now what he looked, nineteen or twenty. His athletic prime was already far advanced. He himself doubted whether he had the stamina to swim theChannel again. This alone would have sufficed to win my compassion.
We were now well clear of St Enogat. The night was moonless, but the heavens were crowded with stars, and seaward the lights burned emerald, diamond, ruby. Southward over the land the eye wandered over the dim fruit trees that dotted the fields of sarrasin. A light breeze moved in the tops of the crooked poplars, and where the tramway leaves the road and takes as it were a dive into a wilderness of dark tamarisk and thorn a gramophone played somewhere in an unseen cottage. Already an intermittent paleness had begun to sweep the sky ahead: a pulse of faint light, four seconds of darkness, the pulse again and eleven seconds of darkness—the Giant of Cap Fréhel.
At least another ten years in less than a month! I kept stealing shy glances at him through the limpid darkness. Quite literally I felt shy in his presence, for he was both known and unknown to me. If he was now nineteen, I saw him now at nineteen for the first time in my life—grave and young, brown and beautiful. His talk had a gentleness and a modesty too. No wonder Julia Oliphant had loved him!
"Well, go on after you left Ambleteuse," I said by and by.
"Oh, then I walked, and took train once in a while, till I got to Rouen and Caen and on here. Lovely churches all the way; I want to go to Caen again. That took me a fortnight. Then I'd a couple of days in St Malo, and—well, that about accounts for the time."
"And what are you doing at St Briac?"
"Sketching. Taken a great fancy to it. I've got a bike cheap, and I either walk or ride. I stay at a rather shabby little place, but it suits me. I've only a couple of haversacks and my painting things, so I can be off at a moment's notice if—if anything crops up."
Charmingly and sincerely as he spoke, I was yet conscious of a reserve. He kept, as it were, to the surface of his itinerary, dwelling only on the outer details of his life. And, as little by little he repossessed me, I knew that I shouldhave to get behind this reticence. For when and how had he lost those ten years? In Trenchard's loft, or since, or partly both? Had he, when he had plunged into the sea a mile out of Dover, been still twenty-nine, or his present age, or some intermediate one? If I was to be of service to him it was necessary that I should know all this.
"Derry," I said, using his name for the first time, "I can't walk all the way to St Briac and back again. For one thing I'm dressed for a party. Let's sit down."
There was a warm dry earth-wall with heath and thyme and rest-harrow and convolvulus growing on it, and there we sat down. Opposite us opened the marshy gap of Le Port, and every four seconds, every eleven seconds, the aurora-like Light a dozen miles away was faintly reduplicated in the wet mud. All was quiet save for the ceaseless rustle of the ragged poplars, the creeping whisper of the tide.
"Now," I quietly ordered him, "I want you to tell me all the things you've been leaving out."
At first I thought he was going to behave like an obdurate boy, whose affairs are hugely important just because they are his. But he seemed to think better of it. In a hesitating voice he said, "What things?"
"Well, begin with Trenchard's place on Sunday night, the 4th of July. What happened then?"
His answer was hardly audible. "Yes, it was then."
"How much?"
"The whole lot."
"At one go you dropped from twenty-nine to—what is it now? Twenty?"
"Nineteen or twenty. I don't know. Yes."
"Then nothing's happened since then?"
"No—at least I'm not quite sure."
"Not sure?"
"No. I honestly don't know. There's been a gap somewhere, something I ought to have come to again, but that somehow I've missed altogether. I simply can't account for it."
"Explain, Derry."
He seemed hardly to trust his voice. "It's the queerest thing of all, but I'll swear it on a Bible if you like. You know what it was I funked more than anything—all those beastly rotten things going to happen all over again.... Don't let's talk about them. They were all the time like a nightmare to me, that I was drawing nearer and nearer to all the time. I tell you, I'd decided to put myself out rather than wallow through all that again.... Well, I can only tell you I've absolutely skipped it. On my honour I have. It's the most unaccountable thing, but——" He choked a little.
"But," I said, deeply pondering, "is it possible to skip a step—anystep?"
"I should have said not," he replied. "Beats me altogether. I started on a dead straight course back, and I fancied I should have to take my fences as I came to them. But this kink's come, and somehow I've picked up the thread again clear on the other side of it."
I pondered more gravely still. "Wait a bit. It all happened that Sunday night, kink and all?"
"Yes."
"That was the night you left my place with Julia Oliphant, said good-bye to her at Waterloo, and went on to Trenchard's? Did you stick to that programme?"
"Yes."
("And so," something seemed positively to shout within me, "much good you've done yourself, Julia Oliphant! Much good you're still plotting! That gap that he's skipped altogether—that's precisely where you're setting the man-traps for him, you and your chiffons and your brown charmeuse and your new willow-leaf shoes! You'd better forget Peggy and her garters and get back into your nice quiet tea-gowns again!")
But aloud I resumed: "Then, if nothing's happened since that night, that means that you're now stable—stationary?"
His reply gave me a queer shock. It was in the last word that the shock lay. "As far as I can make out, sir."
"So you haven't got to move on from pillar to post and one lodging to another?"
"I've been at St Briac for ten days. And that isn't all," he continued earnestly. "I can't say for certain, and perhaps it's too soon to talk about it. So this is touching wood. But I've got a sort of feeling that if I'm careful and live perfectly quietly—no excitement and going to bed early, you know—I might be able to stick just like this for a long time. I know no more about that gap than you do, but it seems to have cleared the air like a thunderstorm. And when I tell you that I really intended to put myself out ... oh, how thankful...." But again he checked himself.
And I too found myself gulping to think that I had so recently wanted to wash my hands of him. Be rid of him? I knew now that not only should I never be rid of him, but that never again should I want to. Charming, innocent, beautiful and grave! I cannot tell you, for I do not know, what mysterious spiritual thing Julia Oliphant had actually wrought upon him. I only knew that all that he had so greatly dreaded she had taken upon herself, and that whatever her portion thenceforward was, his was complete absolution. "One for the Lord, the other for Azazel"; out into the wilderness she, the scapegoat, must go; but on him the smell of that fiercest fire of all had not so much as passed.... And I realised in that moment that thenceforward he was my charge—yes, my son had I had one. Must he stay in France? Then I must stay with him. Must he wander? Then I must wander too. For the rest of his unstable life I must be his staff and support.
"But I say, sir," he said shyly presently, "about why I dug you out to-night. I hope you'll say no straight away if you think it's fearful cheek, but the fact is I must have some more colours, and—well, I've got a little money in London, but I can't get at it just for the moment. So I really came to ask you if you could lend me five hundred francs."
This was strange. I shot a swift glance at him as he lay, a rich dark patch of blouse and corduroys at my side.
"Where," I asked him as steadily as I could, "is your money in London?"
"I have a little there," he said awkwardly.
"How much?"
"I don't quite know, but it's certainly more than five hundred francs."
"Where did it come from?"
Through the clear dark I saw his dusky flush. "I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have asked you. Never mind."
"Derry," I said, greatly moved, "tell me: are you remembering things quite properly? You surely haven't forgotten thatIhave your money?"
"Eh?" he said. The next moment he had tried to cover his quick confusion. "Eh? Why, of course. What am I thinking of? It did slip my memory just for the moment; stupid! I'd got it mixed up somehow with Julia Oliphant. I was going to write to her. I remember, of course. You sold my furniture. You did sell it, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"How much did it fetch?"
This time it was my turn to evade. "Well, as you say, more than five hundred francs. I—I haven't totted it up yet. I came away in rather a hurry. But there's quite a lot, and I can let you have all you want to-morrow."
"Then that's all right," he said cheerfully.
But I found it anything but all right. On the contrary, it was profoundly disturbing. If he could forget that he had authorised me to sell that black oak furniture of his he could forget more vital matters. Yet he had remembered the furniture when I had urged him.
"Tell me," I said more quietly, "as simply as you can, exactly what you do and what you don't remember."
"I only forgot it for a moment," he stammered.
"But you did forget it. Can you explain it?"
I felt that his mind laboured, struggled; but I was hardly prepared for what came next.
"Just let me think for a minute. I want to get to the bottom of it too. It's a thing I've been watching most carefully, and I give you my word I remembered everything absolutely clearly up to a couple of hours ago. I knew all about that furniture when I came to that place for you, because as I walked along I was trying to work out how much it ought to amount to. In fact I wasn't coming to borrow at all, but just to ask you for something on account. Let me think. I got there at exactly at quarter to ten——"
His fingers were playing with the wild flowers on the earth-wall. In and out through the whispering poplars the stars peeped. Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, rose and fell the Light. I fell to counting the intervals as I waited for his reply. Diamond, emerald, ruby, twinkled the lights at sea....
Then suddenly he sat up and took a deep breath. I saw his radiant smile. He faced me with the starlight in his eyes.
"George," he said, "who was that with you in the garden?"
For some seconds the stars seemed to go out of the sky. I seemed to be, not sitting with him on that earth-wall by Le Port gap, but to be standing again in the drive of Ker Annic, with the glare of a touring-car thrown up from the ground and Jennie Aird by my side. I seemed to see again her parted lips, to hear that soft intake of her breath. And his own face seemed to hang again like a beautiful mask suspended in the glow.
And when I had descended from my room again I had found him lurking in the bushes, gazing into the lighted house.
Stars in the night above us! Was that to be the next thing to happen?
Had it happened?
Evidently something had happened, and had happened during the past two hours.
Then, as I strove to grasp the immense possibility, a deep and hapless yearning flooded my heart. The loveliness, the loveliness of it had it been possible! She, with the dreams still unrubbed from her opening eyes, he a December primrose peeping up anew out of the roots of his wrecked and fruitless years—they would have been matchlessly coupled. Had he in truth been my son I could have desired no more for him than this.
Yet why do I say "had it been possible"? Possible or impossible, something, whether more beautiful or fatal I could not say, had in fact happened. Whether to her or not, it had happened to him. How else explain that treacherous little slip about his money? Up to then his memory had not failed him. Reticence he had shown, a youthful unwillingness to talk about himself, but not in order to conceal an impaired faculty. His account of his movements during the past month had been slight, but complete enough. One gap only—the Julia gap—he found unaccountable, and that was no enigma to me.
But was he now on the eve of yet another transformation? Had one look of eyes into eyes hastened him to another stage? Absolved he was; was he now to be, not merely absolved, but confirmed in all the beauty and liberty of that absolution? Consider it as I tried to consider it, sitting on that thymy earth-wall while Fréhel, like a ghostly clock, threw those wavering false dawns across the night.
Julia, by her ruthless act, had despoiled him of ten years of his life.But Jennie had now seen him as Julia had seen him more than twenty years ago.That act of hers constituted the gap that, try as he would, he could not account for.But should another gap now come his heart would understand.In some dark and hidden way Julia had taken upon herself his burden of sin.He was now beautiful, grave, innocent and unafraid.Julia, darkly machinating, was counting on waylaying him again, and yet again.But Jennie, as spotless as he, knew nothing of machination."Heshallknow what love is; why should he get nothing out of his life?" Julia had passionately cried.If his question to me meant anything, a wonder had happened to him not two hours ago.On his former pilgrimage he had not known Love.But was Love the wonder now?If so, it was Julia's gift when she had restored his innocence to him.And it was a gift to Jennie.
But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie's father. He was, he still remained, the man who had writtenThe Hands of EsauandAn Ape in Hell, the man for whom I had hunted in questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame of his accumulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird?
Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do?
His voice sounded again softly by my side.
"You haven't told me who that was with you in the garden," he said.
"Let's finish with the other things first," I answered.
"Oh, I'm tired of talking about myself, sir."
"That's one of them. Why do you sometimes call me 'sir' and sometimes 'George'?"
He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?"
"Didn't you know?"
I couldn't catch his reply.
"When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?"
"Of course."
"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page ofThe Hands of Esau?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.)
"I think so."
"Will you try?"
"Shall you know if I'm right?"
"Near enough for the purpose, I think."
He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite.The Hands of Esauhad been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight—a space of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running.
"Of course I see what you're after, but I've done all that myself. Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind I've made. But I've made one discovery."
"What's that?"
"You're starting at the wrong end. That memory's all right. It's the other one I've sometimes wondered about."
"Ah! The one you call your 'B' Memory! Do you mean—it sounds an odd way of putting it, but I suppose it's all right—do you mean you don't remember what sort of thing you'll be doing, say, next year?"
"Not very clearly, George. Sometimes that seems an absolutely unknown adventure. And sometimes it's like that queer feeling—I expect you know it—that you've been somewhere before, or done something before, or heard the same thing before. It lasts for a second, and then it's gone."
"Do you think it will continue like that?"
"I've stopped thinking about it."
"That page you repeated just now. That wasn't a stock page you—keep in rehearsal, so to speak?"
"No, that was pukka."
I considered my next question carefully. But there was no avoiding it; it had to be put. I watched him deliberately.
"Now tell me one other thing. Do you ever remember hearing or writing these words: 'Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci?'"
Poor, poor lad! He winced as if I had cut at him with a lash. He turned over on the bank so that I could not see his face. He made no response when I placed my hand on his shoulder. My heart ached for him ... but he had to be shown that any question of love between himself and Jennie Aird was impossible.
I shook him. "Doyou remember that, Derry?"
Slowly he sat up on the bank. He turned a set face on me.
"Let me say, Coverham," he said tremulously, "that I went through a whole war without seeing as cowardly a thing as that done. I will not forgive you."
And with barely a moment's pause he broke out:
"Oh, what am I to do, sir, what am I to do? You're older and wiser than I am—I want help—advice——"
That is why I have called this portion of his history "The Long Splice." Extremes as wide apart as those met there and interwove their strands. Fortunate it was for me that they did, for had not that last helpless cry been wrung from him I should have been dumb before the bitterness of his reproach. Whether memories of sweetness and light were failing him or not, those of bitterness and gall remained, and it was on this quivering complexity of exposed nerves that I had laid the lash.
And yet simultaneously he was innocent, assoiled, acquitted. Only the man he had been had groaned under the stroke; the other had turned to me for comfort and guidance and help. And what is a remembered self that we should weep for it? What is memory that we should writhe? No philosopher has yet ventured to write "I remember, therefore I am." Nor does a man remember entirely and wholly of his own will. He is his memory'slord when he sets himself to repeat a passage from a book; but who is the master when something leaps upon him without warning from the past, tears open an old wound, and leaves him quivering and bleeding?... Derry's "A" Memory now seemed to me to be beside the mark, and it was with a sudden joy that I recognised it to be a boon that his "B" Memory was dissolving into a golden haze. "An absolutely unknown adventure," he had said; and what better, more merciful, more beautiful? As the Great Pity hides other men's ends from them, so his beginning was to be hidden from him. No remembrance of disillusion would mar for him the bloom of his fair discoveries. What though seas were sailed before if you know it not? Are the garden's scents less fragrant that you wonder, for a fleeting instant, when you have smelt them before? And what of the kiss of your mouth when that kiss is both an undoing and a re-beginning, the end of one dream but the beginning of a lovelier still? What Julia had done once Jennie would do again, and I had only to think of his innocence, his beauty and his doom to know, more surely than I ever knew anything in my life, that this would a thousandfold transcend the other.
And—supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single revealing look—he had still to sleep that night.
I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:
He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your head.
"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in the night, "I might even—it's no madder thananything else—I might even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to expect," he sighed.
On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.
I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way, had been disregarded by both of us.
"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.
"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.
"But you don't know yet that you can."
"You don't know that I can't, sir."
I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses.
"You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to—God knows what?" I demanded incredulously.
"You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before."
"I offered to introduce the man I then knew."
"Am I any worse now?"
"There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it can't, and this can't."
"Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all that?"
"I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the other things are quite as simple as they look either."
"But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes."
"Do they fit you—or did they merely do so once?"
At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when everything's said Iamme, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am. Dash it, Iamon the blessed map! I'm quite a passable nineteen as fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm—I'm—I'm in it, George.Regularly for it. Just as deep as—oh, deep and lovely! I didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be quite safe—I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear—I'd promise—on my soul I'd promise——"
I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I have him at the Airds'—and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse what would have been my very heart's desire for him—yet how grant it to the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!... I stopped before him.
"There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently. "Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days."
It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He stared at me blankly.
"Off! Did you say off?"
"Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me a promise before I leave you."
"Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car.
"I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to promise to wait in your room for me till then."
"Where is she going?"
"Will you wait in your room till I come?"
"Back to England?"
"I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?"
"Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name——"
"Her name's Jennie."
He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie——" he breathed softly.
"You'll wait for me?"
"Of course, sir. Thank you, George."
"Then I'll say——"
But I could not get out the words "Good night."
How did I know what the night was going to be for him?
For it happened in the night....
I left him standing by the earth-wall, with the lights still twinkling at sea and the low glare of Fréhel in the sky behind him. Four seconds, eleven seconds, four times a minute——
"Jennie!" I heard his hushed, rapt voice as I turned away.
"LePor-r-rt!LePor-r-rt!"
Only an old woman with white streamers and a basket descended from the tram, but instinctively I turned my head to look at the flowery bank on which I had sat so few hours before. It was a sparkling morning, with an intense blue sky, high white clouds and singing larks. The fields of flowering sarrasin were white, cream, pink, deep russet; and far away the grey-green boscage receded into misty blue, unbroken by walls or fences, that contradictory communal undulation of a country where individualism is at its most intense, holdings small, and a ditch or a bank you could stride over fencing enough. But I was too anxious to be able to admire. At the best it looked as if I should have to assume complete responsibility for him and so cut my visit to the Airds abruptly short. At the worst—but I put the worst from me.
"Allez! Roulez!"
With the sound of a tank going into action the tram clattered forward to St Lunaire.
Up the steep street, and a swerve past the acres of tennis-courts that had once been grass. The huge six-acre cagewas already full of players, and I thought of Jennie Aird. Then past the magasins and the long café, with half-clad young Frenchmen punting a ball and walking on their hands in the strip of meadow opposite. The Casino, the hotels, and then a steep planted avenue that seemed to end in the air. Then a rush and another swerve, and out on to the wide expanse of tussocky links, grey and fawn sandhills, and turf gemmed with a myriad tiny flowers.
His hotel was within a biscuit's-toss of the terminus. It stood by the roadside, and its front consisted of a built-out structure of glass, within which a couple of Breton girls with tight hair, string-soled shoes, and the physique of middle-weight boxers, were laying a dozen small tables fordéjeuner. A lad dressed precisely as Derry had been dressed was delivering lifebuoys of bread, and knives clattered in baskets, and two-foot-high stacks of coloured plates were being carried in.
"M'sieu' Arnaud?" I inquired of one of the string-slippered Amazons.
"M'sieu' n'est pas déscendu—si vour voulez monter au deuxième, M'sieu'."
She indicated a way through the back salon that had once been the street frontage. Beyond yawned a cavernous kitchen, the blacker because of its opening on to a dazzlingly green back yard. Between the two rose a staircase, which a strapping youth was polishing with a mop on his foot. I mounted and gained thedeuxième. Then, outside the closed door, I stopped with a thumping heart.
But it was no good hesitating. I pulled myself together and knocked.
"——trez!" called a clear voice.
I thanked God, pushed and entered.
His head was bent over his colour-box. On a piece of paper he appeared to be making a list of the colours to be replenished. He looked smilingly up, and our eyes met.
Clear eyes, grave sweet mouth, undoubting smile——
And unchanged. The night had passed, and nothing perceptible had happened. I crossed to the window. Nowthat all was well, I dare to admit to myself that I had been prepared to find him—dead. If he was right in fixing his climacteric at sixteen he might well have been dead.
But there he was, bending over his colour-box and murmuring "Cobalt—I seem to eat cobalt—raw sienna—orange vermilion——"
Presently I spoke, still from the window.
"Well, I don't know anything about downstairs, but you've a gorgeous view up here."
"Isn't it?" he said. "Grows on you. At first I thought it rather scrappy, a little bit of everything, and I wish they'd put a bomb under that silly château-place; but it grows on you. Inland's the country though. Orange vermilion, pale cadmium, and a double go of cobalt——"
I looked round his room. The smell of oil-colours clung about it, but it was exquisitely tidy and simple. Its walls were covered with a yellowish striped paper, its ceiling beams were moulded, its herring-boned parquet floor shone. A single mat lay by the side of his ornate wooden bedstead, which, with the little night cupboard by it, a small table at the window, and a single upholstered chair, was the only furniture in the room. The door-knob was of glass, and the lace curtains had been draped back over the open leaves of the window. From a flimsy little hat-rack hung his two haversacks. His canvases apparently were in the cupboard that was sunk into the wall.
"Well," he said, putting his list of colours into his pocket, "it seems rather a rum idea bringing you right out here when I've got to go into Dinard myself. Can I have the money, George?"
I counted it out.
"And oh, by the way—I know you won't mind—but if you'd talk French when there's anybody about—it makes things a bit simpler——"
Here I began to be aware of the imminence of another problem. I don't mean the talking French; I mean the whole problem of his company. He was going into Dinard to buy colours, and I also was returning to Dinard. Thenatural thing was that we should go together. I could hardly constitute myself his guardian and not be seen about with him—bargain with him that he only came to me or I to him like Nicodemus, by night. He seemed to take all this cheerfully for granted.
But whither would it presently lead? Dinard was, in a word, the world—that world in which he had no place. Everybody knew scores of people in Dinard, and Madge Aird hundreds. Tennis, tea, the shops, the plage—all was public, familiar, open in the last degree. Within a couple of days, on the strength of being seen twice or thrice with me, he would be exchanging bows and smiles and "Bonjours" with goodness knows who.
"Well, come along," I said in a sort of daze. "But I don't know that I feel like talking much, either in French or English. You're a devil of a fellow for keeping your friends guessing, Monsieur Arnaud. You're still Monsieur Arnaud, I suppose?"
"How can I change it?" he replied gravely.
Of course he couldn't change it. Arnaud he must remain until he became too young to be Arnaud any longer.
On the returning tram I addressed myself somewhat as follows:
"George Coverham, this can't go on. You've got to make up your mind one way or the other. If you don't he'll make it up for you. His is already made up. He sees no reason why he shouldn't carry on. He's either right or wrong. Well, suppose for a moment that he's right? What then?
"You know what you were prepared for when you went up those stairs of his. You know you had to put your hand up three times before you dared knock. Well, everything was all right; nothing had happened. If he's really suddenly and desperately in love it ought to have happened, but anyway it didn't. That means, in plain English, that he knows more about himself than you do.
"And he thinks he can stay as he is. Suppose he can? Suppose even that maddest conjecture of all is true, and that he actually may re-become normal and live out his lifelike everybody else? It wouldn't be any more wonderful than the rest. So what's the obvious thing to do? Why, simply to take him as he is—as long as he is it. That's all he's asking you. And he's promised to clear out at the very first hint of another transformation. In fact he's got to. It's in the very nature of the case.
"Look at him on the seat opposite to you there, between those two bare-headed young women. Those two Breton girls may keep their four handsome Breton eyes straight before them, but they're conscious of every moment of his presence. Who wouldn't be? He's a dream of beauty. And remember how he pleaded with you last night. Can't you hear him still? 'Only to see her, only to talk to her: can't you manage that, sir? Can't you, George?' Was ever gratitude more touching and absurd than when you merely told him her name—'Jennie!' Why shouldn't he have the love now he missed before? Julia Oliphant didn't stop to think twice about it. Who made you Rhadamanthus, George Coverham?... Anyway, you've got to make up your mind."
I told myself all this, and more; but I cannot say I convinced myself. Indeed, in the face of past experience, I made the mistake of once more thinking I had a choice in the matter. I thought that I possessed him, and not he me. So I floundered among details, little practical details, such as talking French to him and being seen about Dinard with him. I recalled how already Madge Aird had asked whether he had a brother. I seemed to see Alec's face when he was told that a Frenchman had fallen in love with his daughter, my own as I explained that the Frenchman was not really a Frenchman, and Alec's again as he asked me what the devil I meant. Then there was his name—Arnaud. That again landed us straight into a dilemma. He couldn't change it, must stop Arnaud; but as Arnaud the athlete he had been seen at Ambleteuse. The brother of some young Rugby or young Charterhouse at that moment in Dinard (the words seemed to detach themselves from the noisy babble of a teashop) had seen him. He might be recognised here; people do look twice at a casual stranger who strolls into a Stade, chucks off his coat, and in his walking boots does something like level time. He looked it, too, every inch of him.... And whispers might be flying round Dover too. The straits are not very wide, and men who can swim them do not come down with every shower of rain.... Oh, the whole thing bristled with risks. I counted a hundred of them while the tram rolled in its cloud of filthy smoke past La Guériplais, La Fourberie, St Enogat, the Rue de la Gare....
"Dévoiturons," he said suddenly, touching my knee.
He had taken matters into his own hands even while I had mused. I had intended to postpone my decision by dropping off at St Enogat; now we were at the corner of the Boulevard Féart. "Down we get!"We!Apparently "we" could get to "our" colour shop without making the circuit of the rest of the town. I will not swear that I saw a momentary twinkle of mischief in his eyes. I was standing in the middle of the road looking after the tram, which was already fifty yards away.
Together a middle-aged English gentleman in a neat lounge suit and a splendid young specimen of French manhood in blouse and corduroys turned into the Boulevard Féart.
There would still have been time to retrieve my indecision. The Boulevard, approached from that end of the town, is not nearly so frequented as the Rue Levavasseur and the quarter near the Casino. It was, in fact, particularly quiet. But every step we took under the shady limes, past the white-façaded houses and gardens vermilion with geraniums and bluer than the sky with lobelia, brought us nearer to that crowded busy world in which he held so singular a place. Or I could have left him at the corner of the Rue Jacques Cartier and made my escape by way of the Rue St Enogat. But what then? If I shook him off to-day the question would be to face again to-morrow.... Ker Yvonne, Ker Maria, Ker Loïc ... the shuttered villas slipped past us.
Then, "Derry," I said in desperation, "I'm at my wits' end about you. I haven't the faintest idea what I ought to do."
"It's jolly just being with you," he said, looking straight ahead.
"Yes. It's other people who're the difficulty."
I had the same answer as before. "As long as I sit tight, George?" he said mildly.
"Even then. You said yourself that you were both the most public and the most private man alive."
"Ah, but that was when I was slipping about all over the place.—Up here's our shop."
"But even if you're stationary you're just as much an anomaly. Nobody except you stops at one age."
"Well, it's a step in the right direction so to speak. At any rate it isn't going back."
"I wish I knew how you knew that."
"I wish I could tell you, old fellow," he placidly replied.
"Look here," I said abruptly. "There's just one possible way out, but I rather doubt whether you'd agree to it. I mean about what you wanted me to do last night. Would you allow me to tell the whole thing to my friends the Airds and leave the decision to them?"
Quickly, very quickly, he shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I couldn't do that."
"But is anything else fair and right?"
"If I stop as I am?"
"In any case."
"They wouldn't believe you."
"I think Mrs Aird might believe me."
He gave a short laugh. "She can swallow a good deal if she can swallow that!"
"She's a very observant woman. She said one thing that perhaps I ought to tell you."
"What?" he asked with sudden curiosity.
"She saw you one day in South Kensington."
"Well?"
"She'd also had a good look at you that day at the Lyonnesse Club."
"Well?"
"She asked me whether Derwent Rose had a brother."
"Et vous avez répondu?"
"J'ai dit que non."
"C'était la figure? La taille?"
"Le tout ensemble."
"Elle avait des conjectures? Pas possible!"
"Comme vous le dîtes, pas possible; mais s'ils poussent sur le Rosier trop de boutons——"
"Il n'y-en poussera plus," he laughed; and the little knot of French people passed us by.
He made light of my recital. I heard his quiet chuckle. Then suddenly I realised that we were at the corner of the Rue Levavasseur, outside the Hôtel de Provence.
"Look here, haven't we passed your shop?" I said.
"Eh? Have we? By Jove, so we have. That's the charm of your conversation, George."
"Then hadn't we better go back?"
"Of course we must; it's the only colour shop in the place. But just step across the road now that we are here. I want some tooth-powder. And some envelopes at the Bazaar there. Must have some—run right out yesterday."
We crossed to a chemist's, but it appeared that he usually went to a chemist's a little farther down the street. There he made his purchases, and once more we came out into the street.
"Now I want some bootlaces," he said. "You see, I always load up when I come into Dinard. Saves time, not to speak of the tram-fare."
It was approaching a brilliant midday, and from the Tennis Club, the shops, the confectioners, and the cafés, people were beginning to press to their various hotels and villas to lunch. In another half-hour the street would be half empty, but now it was at its gayest with bright blazers, gaudy costumes, sleek heads, sea-browned faces. One saw laughing,turning heads, caught snatches of appointments—"À ce soir"—"Don't forget, Blanche"—"Number Four at two-thirty"—"You coming our way, Suzette?"
Suddenly my arm was seized, and M. Arnaud took a quick step forward.
"Thees ou-ay," he said laughingly, "des enveloppes——"
I was dragged into the Bazaar.
Then, but too late, I wondered what his so pressing need of envelopes was. "Must have some—ran right out yesterday!" Who werehiscorrespondents? Of what didhisletter-bag consist? Letters, he! A passport and a birth-certificate would have been more to the point; apermis de séjourand his Army Discharge Papers would have been more to the point. And most to the point of all was that the rascal had completely hoodwinked me.
For, standing there among hoops and grace-sticks, string shoes and cards of bijouterie, caoutchouc bathing-caps and all the one-franc-fifty fal-lals of the Bazaar, alone and for the moment with her back to us, was Jennie Aird.
This time if he wanted French he had it—off the ice.
"Touché—et merci, Monsieur. Bonjour."
I bowed, stepped forward, and placed myself between him and Jennie. I touched her elbow.
"I saw you come in. Are you nearly ready? We shall be late."
I was the angrier that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry. Jennie, giving me only the tail of her glance, turned to her choice of a bathing-cap again—the yellow one or the green one. My back was towards Rose, but I heard a saleswoman step up to him.
"Rien, merci—j'attends M'sieur," he said.
Jennie too heard, and turned.
There was no atmosphere of soft and factitious half-illumination now. This was the full blaze of a perfectAugust midday, that flooded the shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood looking one at the other.
And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment that passes. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning. That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.
Again I touched her.
"The yellow one, is it? Let me put it in my pocket."
I had secured her arm. I picked up for her the horrible fifty-centime notes of her change. She had dropped her eyes, and her face was as rich-coloured as her lips, her lips a pulpy quiver. I felt the touch of Derry's hand on my sleeve, but I disregarded it. I felt bitterly towards him.
"Come along, my dear," I said; and I pushed her past him.
Yet if, as he had said, he wished merely to see her, merelyto speak with her, he had half his wish in that moment. Her left arm was in my right one, I between her and him. Suddenly, blush or no blush, she lifted her head. Behind me, she looked full at him. For two, three paces her head and shoulders continued to turn. I set my lips and looked straight ahead.
Then her head dropped again. Her teeth caught at her upper lip. For a moment she was a limp weight on my arm. We left the shop.
I saw his face at the window as we passed. Whether or not he stepped to the door to watch us out of sight I do not know.
I say that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry; but I have never found that a particularly mollifying reflection. As I have seen a man get rid of an undesired guest by blandly pressing him to stay but leading him gently by the arm all the time nearer to the door, so our young man had used me. I had been piloted here, there, in whichever direction he had wished. And as for Jennie's long backward look and turn of the head ... well, it seemed to me that the thing might now be regarded as done. It did not need me to murmur "Jennie, this is M. Arnaud—Miss Aird." The back door into Alec Aird's jealously-guarded house was set ajar, and I, the only one who could have watched it, had failed to do so. I frowned, watching her white-clad feet moving on the sunny pavement. I avoided looking at her face. I knew that she equally avoided looking at mine.
Of one thing I was perfectly sure: she would not of her own accord speak of the young man we had just left. Perhaps it was that there are some things which, unless you out with them at once, become more and more difficult with every moment that passes. Many a close secret was not a secret at all in the beginning; it merely became one. Therefore she was already showing obstinacy. She knew that I knew about that look. She had looked openly, deliberately, as careless of my presence as if I had not been there. And in that critical moment it was a toss-up what my relationswith my friend's seventeen-years-old daughter were to be. She might, suddenly and swiftly, break into an emotional confession. On the other hand she might thenceforward bear me an unspoken grudge that I knew anything about her affairs at all.
I noticed that she carried no tennis racket. I therefore asked her, as we crossed the emptying Place du Commerce, whether she had left it at the Club.
"No," she said.
"Haven't you been playing this morning?"
"No."
"Too tired after the party last night?"
"No."
"I was wondering—but I suppose you've far more amusing things to do than to come for a walk with me this afternoon."
In those few words the whole situation trembled as in a balance. If she said Yes, much might follow; if No, then resentment would be my portion.
We continued to ascend the high-walled street, past tall garden gates and notice-boards—"A Vendre," "Locations," "Agence Boutin." We passed Beausejour, Primavera, Les Cyclamens....
Then for the first time she looked sideways at me.
"I should like to," she said.
I was still angry with myself and him. He was probably right in refusing the only definite suggestion I had found to make, namely, that he should permit me to tell my host and hostess the whole story. But if his alternative was to lie in wait for her in the streets and shops of a French summer resort and to hang about the open windows of the house at night, I felt very strongly about it. He was going to be wily and masterful, was he? He, swaying on a tightrope of time, was going to claim the treatment of a normal man? Well, that remained to be seen. The cold shoulder for a day or two might bring him to a more reasonable view. Anyway, after our encounter in the Bazaar, he could hardly pretend not to know my mind.
And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back, back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had taken from an article inThe Times.