The entry for those four days was a mere question-mark with an open choice. It read:
"Thirty-three—thirty?"
And yet on the fifth day he had been twenty-nine!
Now let us take the queried figures separately and subtract.
If on the fourth day he had been the lower figure—thirty—then he had only dropped a year in a night.
But if on the fourth day he had been thirty-three, then he had dropped four whole years in the same time.
Either was possible, and yet in the one case the ratio was, appallingly, four times as great as in the other.
And now that I was getting to the root of the matter I wished to take nothing for granted. His equations were high above my head, but I reviewed the position in terms of my own. This is how I set it out:
I HAD ALREADY KNOWNTHE DIARY NOW TOLD METhat by June 8th he had slipped back from forty-five to thirty-five.That his "straphanging" age three weeks later (on June 29th) was "thirty-three—thirty."That on Wednesday, June 30th, Julia had been scheming to make herself his secretary.In a pathetic little jotting of the same date, that he feared he would never write his book, that he was "getting too young for it," but that he intended to attempt it at all costs.That on the following Friday and Saturday, at my house, he had been vivid, momentary, intense.That he now doubted whether what he had at first thought to be will-power had really been that at all; in fact, that the real effort of will would have been, not to put his work out of his head for a couple of days,but toremember it.
At this point I began to grow excited. It seemed to me that at last I began to see light. I had taken him step by step from the starting-point of June 8th to the evening of Saturday, July 3rd, and the reason I had not gone beyond that date was that the diary itself stopped there. Its lastentry was the one I have just given—that he feared he had been mistaken in supposing that will-power had had anything whatever to do with that stolen week-end's holiday.
Oh, had there but been one, one single entry dated Sunday, July 4th!
For if it was possible for him to shuffle off four years in what I may call an ordinary night, what wasimpossible after an experience as stupefying as had been his on the night of Saturday-Sunday?
And yet in appearance it had not altered him. I had spent practically the whole of Sunday with him, and there had been nothing to indicate that he was not still twenty-nine. His manner, it is true, had been alternately jumpy and morose, but that might have been the mere vague pull of his Wanderjahre. Therefore it looked as if that mad onslaught of Julia's on his stability had passed him over after all.
Ah, but wait a moment!...I sat up at my desk, vociferating the words aloud. Were we at such a dead end after all? Perhaps not....
And first of all I remembered that question I had asked him about the flash-lamp as he had stood behind the screen of rugosa roses on the Sunday afternoon. "Has there been a moment since yesterday when that lamp has been held as close as it could be held?" Again I saw his sudden pallor. Again I felt his clutch on my shoulder, again heard his faint "George—I've been trying to remember ... the lamp ... very close ... touching ... one intense brilliant spot ... but I swear I never moved it ... it was as if somebody took the torch out of my hand ... somebody meddled in my life...."
And he had made me go through his Saturday evening's programme again—his inspection of the Hogarths, his unusual wakefulness, the hour at which he had gone upstairs.
Only for a few moments on the Sunday morning had he seemed dimly to surmise that something of the last importance might have happened to him during the hours of darkness. He had then forgotten all about it.
Nevertheless, would not his next rejuvenation date, not the moment of the fact itself,but from that of the beginning of his realisation of it?
No—no—I was not quite right even yet. Eventhatmoment of wild fear, so quickly gone again, was not the moment I sought. Even afterthathe might to all appearances have remained twenty-nine for some hours longer.
For his change happened while he slept, and I had not reckoned with that sleep that must come in between.
His next sleep had been, not in my house, but in Trenchard's loft.
Monday morning, July 5th, had been his new starting-point, and that day he had disappeared.
You have now all the material dates that I had. You know that in comparatively uneventful, unexciting circumstances he could go back four years in a night. And I have told you of the headlong rôle Julia Oliphant had taken upon herself.
How old, then, was Derwent Rose when he woke up in Trenchard's rooms on the morning of Monday, July 5th, 1920?
Twenty-five?
Twenty?
Or sixteen and already dead?
I now turn to that portion of the diary that seemed to confirm my impression that he had gone to France.
Both his memories, "A" and "B," appeared so far to be functioning normally. In order to ascertain this he had applied a number of ingenious tests to himself. But it immediately struck me that while all his "A" (or Age) notes were written in English, all those in the "B" (or Boyhood) direction were in French.
And not only was the language French. The illustrationsand incidents were French in character also. Thus, he wrote in English: "Have been trying to see how much ofEsauI can remember without looking at the book"; but of something that had once happened in Marseilles I read: "Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." There might have been purpose in this alternation of the two languages, but I was more inclined to think that he had done it purely instinctively. When a man speaks a language as Derwent Rose spoke French he finds a pleasure in the mere exercise of his attainment. France had always attracted him, he had not unlimited money at his disposal, and mere considerations of ordinary time (an intensely special thing to him) might preclude his getting more than a few hours' journey away. Anyway, with one thing and another, I had chanced it, and guessed that somewhere on the north coast of France would find him.
"And you're going over there to stay with the Airds," Julia mused. "Then there's just a possibility——"
"Oh, the whole coast will be swarming with English by the end of the month."
"Still——"
"Do you want me to let you know if I come across him?"
"Oh, I don't know. I leave it to you. Do just as you think. When are you going?"
"On the thirtieth."
"What about his money?"
"Oh, he needn't worry about that."
"George"—she looked at me accusingly—"I believe you've bought those things of his yourself."
"Bought's hardly the word," I laughed. "Anyway, why shouldn't I?"
"And you're going to finance him."
"Well, the man's got to eat. And Carpentiermightknock him out."
She looked away down the crowded tea-room and made no reply.
She herself had chosen the Piccadilly, and I looked at her again as she sat there, tucked away in a far corner of theroom, with merry parties at the neighbouring tables and De Groot playing the "Relicario." She was differently and quite brilliantly dressed. As far as externals could assist her, she appeared to have resolved to go back step by step and hand in hand with Derwent Rose. Her furs were thrown back, showing the V-shaped opening of her browncharmeuse, perfectly plain except for a tiny bronze beading at the edge and a lump of amber on a fine gold chain. Her arms were dropped over the sides of her chair, making from throat and dropped shoulders to the tips of her fingers one mantle-like flowing line. Her dark hair was arranged after a different fashion, and on it was a little brown brocade toque with owl's ears sticking out. About her younger women chattered and laughed, but among them she seemed to be—I hardly know how to express it—above rather than out of the picture, architecture to their building, a contralto melody underrunning their treble and fragmentary tunes, a white marble against which their fountains glittered and rainbowed and splashed. No shawls, worsted stockings and hot milk here! If Derry must be young, she too would be as young as clothes could make her. And I could not deny her success.
Not a word had I said to her about my discovery of his diary. I did not see what help it would be to do so. It could only open up the rather dreadful question, whether, in suddenly thrusting into the infinitely-delicate mechanism of his progression no less potent a factor than herself, she had not brought irreparable ruin upon him. More and more I had begun to fear that this might be so. I have already said how little I was concerned with the mere right or wrong of her theft, gift, or whatever else she liked to call it. That was swept aside in the singularity of the whole catastrophe. But for him I was deeply anxious. I could not shake off the impression that this time he must have "dropped" very heavily indeed. I thought I knew now why he had not telegraphed for that diary. It was of little further use to him. He had begun it with that torch at the cool and wide and "philosophic" range; he had continued it at the "emotional"focus of keen and rapid sensation; but at that point the diary had stopped. There was no entry since Julia Oliphant, seeing her Eden twice and no angel with a flaming sword guarding this unsuspected postern of it, had set all a-flux in one blinding spot of irrevocable contact. Could the torch, after that climax, ever be withdrawn again? Was he at this moment burning out the residue of his youth at its whitest heat of combustion? Was he, since that last sleep in Trenchard's place, rushing through the months and years so swiftly as to gasp for very breath?
And if so, what were those experiences that swept down on him in one wild blurr of things long since finished with, unrepeatable in their original form, and yet inevitably to be repeated in that form or in another?
To all this Julia was still the key. One or two trivia in his diary apart, she was the only key. She it was who had received those letters of his from Nîmes, Arles, Trieste, and who farther back still had known his childhood, its happiness, aspirations, beliefs, dreams. Whatever soil he trod at this moment he must still be the boy she had known in a Sussex village. French stained-glass instead of English might hold his rapt eyes, the organ of a High Mass evoke raptures in his Anglican heart, but he was still the same.
And, before that stage was reached, the wild and reckless English years might even now be re-enacting themselves somewhere in the Pas de Calais, Ille-et-Vilaine or the Côte du Nord.
And she who had given that extra spin to the already whizzing wheel of his fate sat there in the Piccadilly, her head a little back, her lips a little parted, her dark eyes sensitised to all the glitter of the room, the fingers of one down-hung hand moving in time to Raquel's song.
Suddenly I broke in on her mood.
"Julia. As a practical matter. How do you suppose he got to France? It isn't easy for a man without papers of any kind, you know."
"Oh, he'd get there if he wanted to," she answered, the fingers still beating time.
"Easy enough to talk, but we may as well look at the practical side of it.He'llhave to."
"If you mean his money, that's very nice of you, George, but I thought that was all arranged? Or do you mean that as he used to write to me before he may do so again? If that's it you can hand his money over to me."
"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking——"
But she interrupted me vivaciously. "Oh, look at that woman in the cloak just getting up! That'srather a wrap, isn't it? And I wonder whether I could wear those shoes!... Now that's what I call having the best of both worlds, George. She's all the advantages of that flapper with the nice fair-haired boy there—the one smoking a cigarette and showing her garters—as well as being a woman. But perhaps she isn't your type. Men do run to types, don't they?... George, you're not listening. I asked you whether men ran to types."
"If you mean do I, you've had most of my time lately."
"Don't be silly. I mean women men are in love with. Or are you all ready to toy with anything that comes along?"
"I thought that you said the end of that man was that he knew nothing about women."
"Oh, what's the use of telling me what I used to say!" She tossed the little cap with the owl's ears. "At any rate I don't talk the same folly twice. Life's too short. Do you like my hat?"
"Very charming."
"Not absurd on me? Nor the way I've done my hair for it? I'm not mutton-dressed-as-lamb? And you haven't seen my shoes——"
Round the leg of her chair she pushed a suede sheath slender as one of the willow-leaves on my pond.
"I do hold my own? Among all these smooth hairs and pretty complexions? I haven't got a touch of powder on; do you think I should? Don't natter; honestly; should I be all right if I met Derry?"
I looked at her without smiling. "Which Derry?" I asked.
"Oh, any Derry! Derry at his maddest, his wildest! Tellme, George: if I'd had just one grain of sense before instead of being a sloppy art-student he only remembered once in six months, all flat heels and hair in her eyes, thinking that by cutting sandwiches ... don't you think, George? Mightn't it have made aweebit of difference? And won't it still when——"
"When what?"
"Oh—any moment! Who knows?"
I tried to break the current of her infatuated fancies. "Julia, don't you think——" But her eyes laughed me down.
"Think, George!... But thisisthinking! You've no idea of the amount of brainwork there is in it! Oh, I'm not talking about rubbishy books and pictures now! Why, this is all the thinking I've ever done!"
"I was going to ask you whether you thought that things with him were—going quicker than they ought to, let us say."
"Not if they bring him back to me."
"But you let him go away."
"Oh, on his Wanderjahre. I dare say that's all over by now."
"Then you do think he may have—speeded up?"
"It wouldn't surprise me."
"Why wouldn't it?"
"Nothing would surprise me."
"But this particular thing?"
She shook with soft laughter. "Oh, George, some nice steady-going woman—like I used to be—ought to adopt you.... Why, you stupid, as if I wasn'twillinghim to speed up, as you call it, with every particle that's in me, if only I can manage to be somewhere at hand when he gets there!"
I gave her a quick look. "Do you mean that you're going to slip over to France after all?" I demanded.
"No. Wasn't thinking of it. As far as I know at present I shall just stay here. But," she said meaningly, "if I were going anywhere it wouldn't be France."
"Where would it be?"
"Belgium."
"Belgium's about the last place anybody with his war-experience would go to for a holiday."
"What, Antwerp in August?"
"I don't see. Sorry."
"Aren't they holding the Olympic games there?"
"Ah!...So you think they might draw him?"
"I didn't say so. I don't know as a matter of fact that I should go to Antwerp either. But you once asked me whether I thought I could bring him by just sitting still and loving him. Well"—a victorious smile—"I almost believe I could—now. But I shouldn't cut him sandwiches—now. I shouldn't be just somebody he remembered when he was at a loose end—now. I'd have him keen, George-old-Thing. He'd think anything I gave him a devil of a favour. Look at that wise young minx with the garters there; I'd have him to heel as she has her boy. Look, she's having a cocktail. Order me a cocktail, please."
"Which? Martini? Manhattan? Bronx?"
"I dunno. Never tasted one in my life. But I'm not too proud to learn. And—Geordie"—she shot a sidelong glance at me—"I've half a mind to begin practising on you!"
"Well—if that will keep you from practising on anybody else——"
"You think you'd be safe, George?"
"Wretchedly safe."
All at once the hectic manner seemed to fall from her. A little incision appeared for a moment between her brows. She pressed it away again with her fingers.
"I suppose so," she said quietly. "You can't say ours isn't an extraordinary relation. It's safe to say there's nothing like it in this room."
Nor anywhere else, I thought; and I was glad to think so. I am an average, more or less straight-living man, with a bias towards virtue rather than the other way; but almost any relation, it seemed to me, was to be preferred to this unnatural inhibition that had so singularly little to do with virtue. Allow me, as a man who possibly has been nearer to these things than you have, to give you a little advice.Avoid, by all means in your power, contact with a man who has put over the reversing-gear of his life as Derwent Rose had done. He will land you in his own net. Unless you are more magnificently steady than I, even when it comes to your relations with an admirable woman you will find yourself interfered with at every step you take. Even the evil that you would you do not, and the good that you would not, that you do.
But it was a question of her rather than of me. I was only at the fringe of the moral commotion Derwent Rose had made on this planet. She was deliberately advancing on its very storm-centre. And in the very nature of things she was doomed to frustration. It seemed to me that she had already frustrated herself. For suppose she should succeed in her aim, and should pull off—well, whatever Rose had hinted at when he had spoken of Andalusian dancers and tilted mirrors in Marseilles sailors' kens. What then? That had not been Derwent Rose! "Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." Where was her success, seeing that it had been the greatest of his dreads that he must re-live that dingy phase before finding the lovelier Derwent Rose who dwelt away on the other side?
Therefore, do what she would, her lot was as predestined as his own. Her successive rôles awaited her also—sister, aunt, elderly friend. But the way to Eden—ah,thatshe would terribly contrive! He, sick with a twice-lived anxiety, might turn away from his fence; but she approached it from the other side. Dust and ashes to him were all enticement to her. Once already she had put herself in his way; but what was once?... Ah, these inappeasable human hearts of ours! We cry "Give me but this, Lord, and I ask no more." But, having it, we must have more. "Nay, Lord, so quickly gone?" ... She recked not that presently his sins would be all un-sinned again, while her own would be upheaped an hundredfold. Her lot was his. Jointly they advanced on a common fate. When all was over she would put off those crafty garments again. But until then he was to be tripped—at his maddest, at his wildest.
"Julia," I said with a failing voice, "for his sake can't you let it rest?"
She turned quickly. "What do you mean—for his sake?"
"For pity of him—perhaps even for his life."
She broke out, softly, but with a concentration of energy that I can hardly express.
"For pity of him! And why of him? What about me? Why do you try to separate us? We never were separated really. All that ever separated us was my own ignorance and conceit and not having the right hair! I'll bob it—I'll peroxide it—I'll do anything—but I'm not going to stop now!"
I tried to quieten her, but she went passionately on.
"Pity ofhim! Why, it's for pity of him that I'm doing it! Why should he for ever give, give, give, and get nothing in return? He never did get anything—nothing out of his books, nothing out of his life, only this one magnificent thing that's happened! He's flung pearls away, all the splendid pearls of himself, flung them to the grunters as they did in the Bible, and all they wanted was common greasy farthings! Farthings would have done, and he showered pearls on 'em! And not one single thing did he ever get back! Oh, it makes me boil!... But I've picked up a wrinkle or two since then, George! Nobody ever told me anything about life, nothing that was true. They told me that if I opened my mouth and shut my eyes and never forgot that I'd been nicely brought up all sorts of lovely things would come of themselves. Nobody ever told me I should have to get up and get and fight for my own hand. I was to speak when I was spoken to, and what did it matter how I did my hair or what sort of shoes I wore as long as men understood I was a nice girl and not to be taken liberties with? They took their liberties somewhere else we weren't supposed to know anything about. The un-nice girls got the insults—and the pearls. We just went on being respected, and sometimes, if we'd been very nice indeed, one of us would get a greasy farthing after all the pearls were gone. They called that marriage, and said it was the crown of a woman's life.That's what we were taught, George. That's what every woman of my age was taught. And look at Peggy there getting away with it as fast as she can!"
I touched her sleeve, but she refused to be stopped.
"And it was all my own fault for believing them. I ought to have thought it out for myself, like Peggy. It was my job, and I didn't do it. I painted idiotic canvases instead. It wasn't Derry's job. It isn't any man's job. I'd been throwing sheep's-eyes at him all my life; why didn't I say to myself, 'Look here, Julia my girl, this doesn't appear to be working somehow. Cutting sandwiches and letting him pose for you and mooning about him afterwards isn't doing the trick. You know he's—obtainable—because you know other women do it. What's the matter withyou?'—I ought to have asked myself that, and I didn't. I let myself drift into being a 'good sort' to him. Stupidest thing a woman can do. I expect he'd have thought it a sort of sacrilege to kiss me. Sacrilege!—--"
She checked contemptuously at the word, but went straight on.
"And now this has happened, just to him and me, and if it never happened before, all the more gorgeous luck! Heshallhave something back for his life. He shall know what love is before he dies. You can go to anybody you like for your portrait, George; Peggy and I are out for blood. What's the good of having luck if you don't believe in it? If being nice didn't work let's have a shot at the other thing. (Ah, sothat'sa cocktail!) So that's that, George. Something's bound to happen. He'll be writing to me or something; I'm not worrying in the least.... But I mustn't let my neck get all pink like this just with thinking of him." She fetched out a little mirror and a puff. "Nice girls used to do that, and it was called maiden modesty, and I'm damned if it paid. I'm perfectly willing to learn, either from Peggy with her garters or anybody else.... Ah, she's getting up! I must see her close to——"
She was on her feet. I heard her murmur, "I'm taller than she is anyway——"
"Sit down till I've got the waiter," I said.
But she continued to stand. She was looking after the girl she had called Peggy—erect, ready, perilously instructed, a beautiful danger. Her life had been one unvarying, starry lamp of love; now, for the beguiling of the Derry of those onrushing years of the heat of his blood, a hundred false fires were being prepared. And I could only remain silent at the wonder of it, that all was one, and that the false was no less true than the true.
It still wanted a week to the thirtieth, but I had various matters to set in order, and the time passed quickly. I saw Julia once more before I left. She still nonchalantly left it to me, should I come across Derry, to let her know or not, as I thought best. She herself was not going very far—merely into Buckingham to stay with friends. She gave me dates and addresses, and then her manner seemed to me to show some hesitation.
"If he should write to me for money suddenly," she said. "You see, you won't be at hand."
"Oh, that's all arranged. He wouldn't wait till he was actually starving before he wrote, and Mrs Moxon is readdressing all letters immediately."
"But suppose he wrote to me. I've no money."
"Then you can wire me. I'll arrange for a sight-draft."
Her hands smoothed down the body of a frock I had not seen before—a sooty shower of black chiffon over I know not what intricately-simple and expensive-looking swathing below.
"I believe you're afraid to trust me with his money," she smiled, preening herself.
This conversation, I ought to say, took place in her studio. Suddenly I looked up.
"Julia," I demanded, "where's that tallboy gone?"
"The tallboy? Oh, it's somewhere about the place."
"On your back?"
"Not all of it. Some of it's on my feet. Don't you like them?"
She showed them. I turned away.
"Then," I said, "ifhe'sselling furniture to pay for a holiday, andyou'reselling it to buy frocks, I certainly shan't trust you with a penny. If he writes to you you'd better wire me."
"Poor Julia!" she laughed. "When she was sensible she could do nothing right, and now that she's quite mad she's as wrong as ever. Well, a short life and a gay one. Good-bye, George, and a happy holiday——"
So the evening of the thirtieth found me on the St Malo boat, hoping it wasn't going to rain—for I had looked down below and preferred the deck. Smoothly we glided down Southampton Water. The boat was packed, and I was unable to dine till ten o'clock. Then I came up on deck again and set about making myself comfortable for the night.
It did rain, but I was well tucked away in the shelter of a deck-house, and was little the worse for it. A fresh south-west wind blew, and I watched the phantom-grey water that hissed and rustled hoarsely past our sides. The throbbing of the engines began to beat softly and incessantly in my head, and half dozing, I found myself wondering what Derry had done about his passport. "Throb-throb," churned the engines ... perhaps he had forged himself a seaman's and fireman's ticket, signed on as a deckhand or stoker, and had given the L.S.W. Railway Company the slip the moment he had got across. Dreamily, muffled up in my wrappings, I tried to picture it. He would be careful. He would be careful about his beard, for example. He would let it grow a day or so before; perhaps he would now continue to wear a beard. Unless.... And he would sleep the day before and stoke through the night. A stoker for a night, dressed in a boiler-suit or stripped to the waist, as he had stripped when he had held Julia Oliphant's sewing-machine aloft. And grime in his golden beard. Or else the author ofThe Vicarage of Braybending the warp on to the drum of thesteam-winch or putting the luggage in the slings in the hold. Oh, as she had said, he would get across somehow if he wanted to.....
And once across he would have very little trouble. He would mingle with the porters and camionneurs, carrying his gear in his hand. Probably he would pretend it was somebody else's. Then—the small luggage through first—rien à declarer—his perfect French—he would be along the quay and in the vedette before they had begun to get the big stuff out of the hold. As for his passport—oh, he would manage....
An employe picked his way through the dark huddles on the deck, took the reading of the log, and retired again. The masthead lights made loops and circles in the rain. I took a nip from my flask and dropped back into my doze. Alderney Light winked, and up the Race it blew stiffly....
Yes, he would get across if he had made up his mind to. As for hispermis de séjour—oh, things like that were for ordinary people. What would he do with apermis de séjourwho had nopermis de séjourin life itself, but must doubly dodge through it, from this place to that and from one date to the date before?... But I rather fancied he had gone by Dover. Certain notes almost at the end of his diary seemed an indication of that. These notes had no coherence—just odd words like "Lord Warden," "boat," "tide," and a little time-table of figures. Apparently he had worked it out just before that week-end he had spent with me.... "Lord Warden"—that meant Dover—tide—time.... Again the Company's man came to take the reading of the log. Again the throbbing of the engines evoked the image of Derry, stripped, moving in the red glare of the furnaces, sweating, coal-dust in his beard. But perhaps he no longer had a beard. Perhaps Julia had made sure of that. Julia, desperate creature, wild, disturbing creature.... Peggy in her garters ... selling furniture to buy frocks, shoes, stockings, scent.... "Pour Troubler," "Mysterieuse" ... "Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse," sighed the water rushing past.... And in the Piccadilly, that long whitethroat, the fine angle of her jaw, among little double chins, little buttons of chins, short necks, thrust-forward necks, square shoulders instead of that long mantle-like line down over her shoulders like swift water before it breaks, to the fingers that moved softly in time to the "Relicario" ... the "Relicario" ... De Groot ... De Groot, De Groot, De Groot.... Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse.... Again the reading of the log, again the sailor's return through the dozing huddles on the deck; the phantom-grey water rustling hoarsely past, the masthead lights swinging aloft. I hate these short and crowded crossings when it is hardly worth while to take off your clothes and you arrive cramped, crumpled, unshaven, unrefreshed. I wondered how early it would be possible to get a cup of tea. A cup of tea—a cocktail—cocktails for tea—"Sothat'sa cocktail!"—Manhattan, Manhattan, De Groot, De Groot, De Groot....
Another pull at my flask, and then I really did sleep.
The day was grey when I awoke. The huddles on the deck had begun to stir. The east kindled, as I had last seen it kindle over the Devil's Punch Bowl and Gibbet Hill. The sun flashed on the waves, on people bestirring themselves, opening dressing-cases, making such toilets as they could. Then I heard the welcome click of teacups and flung off my rugs. I went below, secured a seat for breakfast, and made myself less unpresentable. Hot breakfast, after all, goes a long way towards obliterating the discomforts of a night on deck. As I rose from the table I glanced through the open port. Pale on the starboard bow was the long line of Cap Fréhel, ahead was St Malo's spire.
As the little vedette approached Dinard Cale—I had got quickly through the Customs and come across with the hampers of that morning's fish—an Alec Aird out of a Men's Summer Catalogue waved his hand to George Coverham out of a flea-bag and called out a cheery good morning. It was hardly yet half-past seven, so Alec must have been up betimes. He seized the two bags I pushed ashore and gesticulated to the driver of a nondescript sort of carosse. Then he looked me up and down and grinned.
"Ready for breakfast?"
"I'm ready for some hot water and clean clothes," I replied. "No, it wasn't so bad."
"And is this all the stuff you've brought? I asked you to come and stay with us, not just to drop in to lunch. Well, up you get. I don't suppose you'll see Madge and Jennie till midday. That damned Casino; three a.m. again last night. But it's no good talking to Madge. It always ends in her doing just as she likes. Why, when I was Jennie's age I didn't know there was such a thing as a roulette-table.... I say, have you brought any English tobacco?"
I had not been in Dinard, nor indeed in France at all, since before the war; but the long steep street where the little dark cafés were opening seemed very friendly and familiar. We rumbled past the English Club into the Rue Lavavasseur, and instinctively my head turned to the right. Each short descending street gave the same remembered glimpse, of white casino or hotel at the bottom and the bright emerald beyond. We clattered down to the Place, and then slackened again to the ascent of dark tree-planted avenues. "Gauche—droit, I mean—starboard a couple of points," directed Alec, whose French bears no very great strain; and after ten minutesor so the sound of our wheels suddenly ceased. We were on the soft sandy drive that ended at the gate of Ker Annic.
Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of shining mahogany and cut and bevelled glass, these palms that brush the electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards spread the wide sea—serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay, dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering—the pensive aspect of a sea that has its back to the sun.
"Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere—grilles of ironwork over the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron passementerie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping Beauties—confound those rotten late hours for that kid——"
I assured him that I had no wish to go to bed.
"Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might give me that tobacco——"
And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me to my toilet.
The pergola in which I found him three quarters of anhour later was at the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor, over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that crept like a net over us whenever we moved. Abonnefollowed me with coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat untwinkling sea.
We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly, applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have been my fancy or the force of former associations, but already I was conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French—the day's provisions were arriving.
Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now."
"Anything you like; what's on?"
"These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters? 'Debout les Athlètes'—'Sons of the Patrie'—they've been all over the place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud—haven't seen him—in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just time for the tram. Come along——"
The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand Stand at one end of it, and alreadyles athlèteshad got down to work. There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters, leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the outer track or resting in twos and threes on the grass. Several of them wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No Briton would have dared to display such physical naïveté. They might have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to the death.
We watched them for an hour, and then the whooping of that horrible little tram was heard in the distance. It hurtled up to the Halte, fouling the air with the smoke of the dust and slate and slack that served it for coal, and we sat with our backs to the engine and took what care of our flannels we might.
The sluggards had descended by the time we reached the house again. Among the harlequin shadows of the pergola Madge advanced to me with both hands outstretched.
"Monsieur! Sois le bienvenu!" Then, standing back to look at me, "What nice flannels, George! Some of the Frenchmen here, quite nice men, go about in the most extraordinary cheesecloth arrangements, and as for their shoes——! Yes, I think I can be seen with you. You can take me shopping this afternoon. I saw it in a window yesterday but hadn't time to go in. ('It's' a hat, if you mustknow, Alec.) And this is Jennie, in case she's grown so much you don't remember her."
There was a time when I used to kiss little Jennie Aird, but I should not have dared to kiss the young woman who stood before me now. Take-aboutable, by Jove!... Jennie had her father's colouring, golden-red hair over a tea-rose-petal complexion lightly freckled; and if her eyebrows were faint, that somehow merely seemed to enhance the steady clear pebble-grey of the gaze beneath. She was six inches taller than her mother, and whether it was the smallness of her short-featured face that made full her beautiful throat, or whether it was the other way round, I will not attempt to say. Nor do I remember whether her hair was up or down that day. I have an idea that at that time it was sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Her gesture as she offered me her hand had the proper condescension of such a creature for a battered old piece of goods life myself. I wondered whether I ought to call her Miss Aird. These things come over one with rather a shock sometimes.
We lunched in a shining little salon, the exact centre of which, whether you measured sideways, lengthwise or up-and-down, was occupied by an enormous gilt Ganymede and Eagle lamp slung by heavy chains from the ceiling—for the lighting was either oil or candles at Ker Annic. Then back to the pergola for coffee. The tide had receded, and the rocks and the stakes that marked the channels stuck up everywhere menacingly—the Fort, Les Herbiers, Cézembre. The warm air was laden with the smell of genets, the sky was brightly blue over our white lattice. I saw Alec preparing to doze.
"Well, what about Dinard?" I said to Madge.
"Sure you wouldn't rather follow Alec's example? Very well, we'll drop Jennie at the tennis-place and you and I'll go off on the prowl. I'll be ready in five minutes. Jennie!"
She ran up to the house, and I waited for her on the sandy drive.
We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined"It" was near the Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour while Alec's money took wing.
"Mais tiens, Madame"—the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered, butterflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under the diablerie—"posé commé ça, en effet sur l'oreille—Claire, la voile verte—legèrment—oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself, as unabashed as the attitudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On dirait un sourire sur la tête de Madame!"
So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and we sought the teashop and Jennie.
All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the glass counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters, their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a hurried déjeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck, flannels hitched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the whirl of talk.
"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on grass——"
"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and seventh-tenths——"
"American——"
"I bet you——"
"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on grass——"
"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for five-thirty, remember——"
"But I tell you this chap Arnaud——"
"Do let me get you one of those strawberry things, Mrs Aird——"
"My brother saw him—he just threw off his coat and waistcoat and ran as he was——"
"Mademoiselle, trois thés, s'il vous plait——"
I spoke in Madge's ear.
"She's a very beautiful child."
"Jennie?" said proud Madge. "Rather a young queen, isn't she? But Alec's perfectly absurd about her. Thinks young people to-day are the same as we were. She shall have the best time I can give her."
"Any——?" I looked the question.
"No. Quite asleep. She's perfectly happy dancing and dreaming and talking sport with these boys."
"Who are they?"
She told me. She knew half Dinard, and the printed Visitors' List gave her the rest.
"Well, well," was all I found to say, as I looked at Jennie again.
For while woman's beauty is coeval with Time itself, you have only your own allotted portion of it. The loveliness that comes too early or too late is no more your affair than the dawns before your time, the sunsets after you are gone. Madge at the midday of her life was still within my reach at my post-meridian, but Jennie would bloom like a rosy daybreak when my own evening star appeared. Young Rugby, young Charterhouse, would write his vers-libre to that small head, sweet throat and the red-gold of her hair.... But I hardly know why I write all this. I am only trying to show how sorely I had needed a change and how grateful I was now that it had come. I knew that I was welcome to stay with the Airds as long as I pleased. It didn't matter if I didn't write another book for ten years, it didn't greatly matter if I never wrote another. I didn't want to write. That ethereal sea, that multi-coloured plage, the genet-scented air,the feeling that all about me were people who knew what they could not do and wasted no time in attempting to do it—ah, they live their lives from the beginning and end them at the end in that fair and unperplexed land of northern France.
Both by Alec and Madge, Jennie's education was discussed before me with complete freedom.
"Stuff and nonsense!" Madge would roundly declare.
"Look at those two Beverley girls!"
"Very nice girls, I should have thought," Alec would growl.
"Yes, and who's ever going to marry them? Nobody as far as I can see. That's Vi Beverley's fault. She's let them sit in one another's pockets, and have their own silly family jargon, and think that the rest of the world's a cinema just to amuse them, till they don't know how to talk to a stranger without being rude. They positively freeze any young man who goes near them, and when they do go away it's to cousins. Family affection's all very well in its place, but you can have too much of it. Jennie shall take people as they are. If she does miss an hour's sleep once in a while she can stay in bed all next day if she wants."
"Better teach her baccarat and have done with it."
"Well, she needn't faint when it's mentioned. This is 1920. If ever those Beverley girls marry it will be one another."
"If she begins to think of marrying in another four or five years——"
"She's not going to sit on the arm of your chair for five years while you read theParis Daily Mail.... Anyway, about to-night's party——"
Then, on the way to the Stade or the Club, I should have Alec's view of the matter.
"When we were kids, if we were allowed to stop up oncea year for a pantomime ... beastly mixed sort of place like this too! Madge doesn't know half that goes on. Why, before I'd been here three days one of the waiters at the Grand had the infernal neck to come up to me and whisper——"
I broke into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a waiter whispering alluring suggestions to Alec Aird of all people was altogether too much for me.
"And what did you say?" I asked him.
"Say?" said Alec grimly. "When I said 'Frog' he jumped, I promise you that!... And mark you, these French fellows look after their own women all right—got their hands on their elbows all the time. It's only our confounded ideas of freedom——"
"But there's no harm in to-night's party——"
"Oh, that's all right. That's at home. We can turn 'em out at ten o'clock, and be in bed in reasonable time. It's that damned Casino I bar——"
And so on. Early to bed and a nap after lunch certainly suited Alec. I have seen once-fine athletes settle down like this before.
I had been at Ker Annic some days, when about the last thing I expected had happened to me. I have just told you how little I cared whether I ever wrote another book or not. Well, that morning I had remained in my room after coffee and rolls to write a couple of necessary letters. These finished, I had sat gazing out of the window at nothing in particular, lazily content with the beauty of the morning. Then, suddenly and without the least premeditation, I had taken a fresh sheet of paper and had begun to make detached and random notes. These had presently strung themselves together, and by and by a phrase had sprung up of itself....
Whereupon, in the very moment of my despairing of ever writing again, I had realised that my next novel was stirring within me.
Now let me tell you the part that Jennie Aird played in this.
I frankly admit that the writers of my own generationhave sometimes been a little smug and make-believe about young girlhood. We have seen a lovely thing, and perhaps have let its mere loveliness run away with us, to the loss of what I believe is nowadays called "contact." We have not seen the butterfly's anatomy for the pretty bloom of its wing. Nevertheless, I cannot see that the eager young morphologists who are succeeding us have so very much to teach us after all. To read some of these you would think that the whole moving mystery had been disposed of when they had said that a young girl became conscious, shy, and had a talk with her mother. If it must be anatomy or bloom, I think I shall go on preferring the bloom. I have no wish to exchange the eyes in my head for that improved apparatus that turns a woman's hand that is meant to be stooped over into a shadowy bundle of metacarpal bones.
At the same time I do not take it for granted that youth is necessarily the happiest season of our lives. I remember my own youth too well for that. Emotionally, I am aware, it is all over the shop. It will giggle in church or make a heartbreak out of nothing, indifferently and with tragical facility. It is exploring the new-found marvels within itself against the day when its eyes shall open to the miracle of another. That, at any rate, and as nearly as I can express it, was the state of Madge Aird's sleeping beauty of a daughter on the evening of the party of which Madge and Alec had spoken.
It was a ravishing evening of late light over an opal sea. The same dusk that turned the begonias velvety-black in their beds made luminous the pale hydrangeas, until they resembled the glimmering whites and mauves of the frocks that moved in and out among them. The villa was lighted up like a paper lantern, and the moving couples inside made ceaselessly wavering shadows across the lawn. Over the ragged bay the phares winked in and out, and beyond the ilex and chestnut a faint luminosity trembled—the corona of Dinard lighting up for the night.
They danced in and out between the wide hall and the salon where the gilded Ganymede struggled with the Eagle—youngsters in their first dinner-jackets, sylphs with their plaits swinging about their softly-browned napes, their elders mingling among them or watching them from the walls. Madge, in a frock that seemed to be held up singly and solely by her presence of mind, played fox-trots. Alec was busy "buttling" in the little recess where a scratch supper had been set out. The air was filled with the light talk in French and English, throbbed with the rhythm of the foxtrotting piano.
For half an hour or so I made myself agreeable to a number of ladies of whose names I had not the faintest idea; then, with a sense of duty done, I turned my back on the pretty scene and strolled into the garden. On the whole I was pleased with my day. That was what I had wanted—the solace and security of being at work again. Nothing world-shaking or tremendous; I simply wanted to get on with the unpretentious job that was mine, and incidentally to be tolerably well-paid for it. That, when all was said, was the way of wisdom, the kind of thing men very properly get knighthoods for and had their portraits hung up in Clubs. It seemed to me that I had been through a very evil time, and that now that I was rid of the weight of it life was worth living again. I paced the paths of the gay artificial little garden, my thoughts on all manner of pleasant times to come.
Near the end of the house grew an auracaria, forbidding and black. As I moved towards it I noticed a dim white shape beneath it. I was turning away again (for at a party like that no unaccompanied bachelor has any title to the dimmer corners) when the figure moved towards me. It was Jennie Aird—alone.
"Hallo, why aren't you dancing?" I asked. I had already watched her dance four dances in succession with the same partner—young Kingston I believe it was.
She made a quick little grimace, but did not reply.
"This is rather a nice party," I remarked.
To this she did reply. "It's a beastly party, and I hate it."
I drew certain conclusions; but "Oh?" I said. "What's the matter with it? I thought it rather fun."
"Everything's beastly, and I wish we were back in London," she snapped.
"Anything the matter, Jennie?"
"Oh, how I do wish people wouldn't ask one what's the matter!"
"Then come for a turn and I won't."
She put her hand indifferently on my arm. She was nearly as tall as I, and I noticed as we passed the windows that, that night at any rate, her red-gold plait had been taken up and was closely swathed about her nape.
Of course young Kingsley or young somebody else had said something or done something, or hadn't said or done anything, or if he had had done it at the wrong moment or in the wrong way or had otherwise conjured up the shade of tragedy. Therefore, as there are occasions when tact may take the form of talking about one's self, I talked to Jennie about myself as we skirted the garden.
"Do you know, something rather exciting happened to me this morning," I remarked.
She showed no great interest, but asked me what it was.
"It mayn't sound much to you, but it interests me. I think I've started a new book."
"I wish I'd something to do," was the extent of her congratulation.
"What would you like to do?"
"Oh, anything. I shouldn't care what it was. Anything's better than this."
"Than this jolly party?"
"Yes. Or else I wish I'd been born a man. They get all the chances."
I reflected that one man, somewhere in the world, would have a very enviable chance, but kept my thought to myself. "Been having a row with somebody?" I asked.
"No," she answered, I have no doubt entirely untruthfully. "I'm just fed up. I wish I could have nursed in the war or something, but I was too young. Or I wish I could write like you. But if I told father I wanted to earn my own living he wouldn't hear of it, and mother's one ideais to dress me up and show me off and marry me to somebody. They don't know how sick I am of it."
I glanced at her as we passed the lighted windows again. That soft red sill of her lower lip was level, and just a shade short for the upper member of her mouth's sweet portal, so that the pearls within were negligently guarded. Temper and discontent were in her pebble-grey eyes. She gave her head an impatient toss, as if to shake off the thought of the boisterous young cadets and crammer's-pups within. In a day she seemed to have outgrown them, to have lengthened her mind as she lengthened her frocks—if young women do lengthen their frocks nowadays. She wanted to nurse, to write, to be a student or some personage's secretary, to say to the dingy world, "Here I am—use me and don't spare me," in the very moment when I and such as I, disillusioned and worn, were sighing "Enough—release me—or if that may not be, give me but once more, once more that first dawning joy!"
"I don't want to get married," she sulked. "Ever. Mother may laugh, but I won't. It would have been different in the war. I love all those darling boys who were killed. But these schoolboys are all the same.... You don't want a secretary for your new book, do you?"
It may have been my imagination, but I am not sure that there did not stir in my memory some faint echo, of a woman sitting under a murky dome as she waited for herManuel de Répertoire Bibliographique Universel. I know these secretaries and their wiles, and if my answer had had twenty syllables instead of one I should have meant them all.
"No," I said.
We had reached the wrought-iron gates at the beginning of the sandy drive. Three or four cars were parked there, and apparently somebody or other was leaving early, for a chauffeur had just switched on the head-lights of a heavy touring-car that shook the ground with its muttering. Judging from the power of the lights it was the car of one of Madge's French friends, for no English car carries shafts so blinding as those twin beams that clove the darkness.They made the windows of the house seem a dull expiring turnip-lantern. Their blaze lighted up every pebble, every blade of grass, defined the shadows of blade on blade. Out of the fumy darkness insects dropped, stunned with light, and moved feebly on the path. I drew Jennie behind the glare, and as I did so one of the English servant maids came up to me.
"A gentleman wishes to speak to you, sir," she said.
"To me? What gentleman? Where?"
"A French gentleman, sir. A M'seer Arnaud his name is."
"Arnaud? I don't know any Arnaud. Are you sure he asked for me and not for Mr Aird?"
"It was Sir George Coverham he asked for, sir."
"Well, where is he?"
"Here—at least he was a moment ago——"
"Arnaud?" I mused. "Do you know a M'sieur Arnaud, Jennie?"
As I turned to her I saw her in that false illumination with curious distinctness. The soft upward glow from the path reminded one of a photographer's manipulation of his tissue-paper screens. She stood there semi-footlighted—smooth brows, low glint of her hair, the caught-up upper lip that showed the pearls, her steady gaze....
Ah, her gaze! What was this, that made me for a moment unable to remove my own eyes from her face? At what object beyond the car was she so fixedly looking? Why had her bosom risen? Why, as if at some "Open, Sesame!" did that betraying upper lip offer, not two, but all the pearls within?
My eyes followed hers....
As they did so sounds of talk and laughter and farewells drew near from the house. The departing guests were upon us.
But I had seen. If only for an instant before it retreated swiftly into the shadows again, I had seen. Gazing at her as steadily as she had gazed at him, the vision of a young man's face had momentarily appeared.
Then the babble broke out about us.
"Thank you a thousand times, chère Madame——"
"Delicieuse——"
"Merci, M'sieu' Air-r-r-rd——"
"Better have the rug round you——"
"Where's Jennie? Ah, here she is——"
"À demain, à onze heures——"
"Good-bye——"
"Good-bye, Sair-r-r George——"
But I still saw that face haunting the transparent gloom. A béret cap had surmounted it, a blouseen grosse toilehad clothed the shoulders below. Monsieur Arnaud, if it was he, was dressed as anouvrieror a sailor dresses.
And he was young, sunbrowned, grave, beautiful.
The car backed and turned. There was a grating as the clutch was slipped in, and then the engine dropped to a steady purr. The wrought-iron gates started out in the glare, the red tail-lights diminished. I was dimly aware that Madge said something to me, but I remained motionless where I stood. I came to myself to find myself alone.
Sunbrowned, grave, beautiful, young!
And he called himself Arnaud!
I have told you of that list of names with which his diary began. Arnaud was not among them. But Arnold was. He had simply Gallicised it, and as Arnaud he was seeking me.
Then I felt my sleeve timidly touched. His voice came from behind me, a voice with a charming, uncertain timbre.
"George—I say, George—who was that?"
I will make a shameful confession. My heart had sunk like lead. I had wanted a holiday from him. That very morning I had thought I had secured it, had blithely planned my new and cheerful work.
And here he was, with his hand on my sleeve.
He repeated his words in a whisper. "George, who was that?"
Slowly I turned. "Itisyou?"
"Yes."
"How did you know I was here?"
"I saw your name in the Visitors' List."
"Tell me what I can do for you."
He fell a little back. "George," he faltered, "why this tone?"
I refused to admit at once that I was ashamed. "We can't stop talking here," I said. "Where are you staying?"
"Out at St Briac."
"Then I suppose you're walking back? The last tram went long ago."
"It's only six miles."
"Then wait here, and I'll walk part of the way with you."
They were still merrily dancing in the house, but I managed to get to my own room unseen. I put on an ordinary jacket and cap and descended again. He was not where I had left him. He had skirted the lauristinus bushes, and from a safe distance was gazing into the house.
Oh, inopportune—inopportune and undesirable in the last degree!
"Ready?" I said.
Reluctantly he turned away his eyes and followed me past the cars. We passed out of the drive and into the dark tree-planted lanes of St Enogat.
A rutty little ruelle runs along the side of St Enogat Church and makes a short cut to the high road. We passed the church without exchanging a word. At last, where the street widened, I broke the silence.
"So you're Arnaud now?"
"Yes," he said in a low voice.
"The athlete people are talking about?"
He muttered that there were lots of Arnauds.
"You're a Frenchman anyway?"
"I've got to be something."
"Are you going to stay a Frenchman?"
"I don't know yet."
We continued our walk. The little white-painted Grand Stand of the Stade glimmered over the hedge on our right when next he spoke. I saw his glance at it.
"About those athletics, George," he said awkwardly. "I was an awful ass. If there's anybody who oughtn't to draw attention to himself it's me. But I did it without thinking. It was at Ambleteuse. They were running and jumping, and I suppose my conceit got the better of me and I just had to have a go. But I've cut all that out. It wasn't safe. I don't go near a Stade now."
"Ambleteuse? Then you did cross Dover-Calais?"
He hesitated. "Not exactly Dover-Calais. Thereabouts."
"Thereabouts?... I suppose you worked your passage and then gave them the slip?"
"No. I thought of that, but it was a bit too chancy."
"Then what did you do?"
"Well—strictly between ourselves, George—it's much better not talked about—you see my difficulty—but I swam it."
I stopped dead in my stride. "You what!"
He spoke apologetically, as if it were something not quite creditable.
"Yes. But I don't want to give you a wrong impression. I didn't swim it really fairly. Not like Webb and Burgess. I only swam it more or less. For one thing, I hadn't trained, you see."
I recovered my breath. "What do you mean by swimming it more or less?"
His modesty was almost excessive. "It was like this, George. You see I rather funked just jumping in at Dover and trusting to luck to bring me across. It's a devil of a long swim, you know, and besides, I had to have my clothes; couldn't land here with nothing on. So I got hold of a fellow at the Lord Warden, a boatman who'd been with Woolf when he just missed it. I swore him to secrecy and all that, and fixed things up with him, and he gave me tides and times and currents and so on. I told him I was only an amateur who didn't want to make a fuss till he'd had a sighting-shot, and—well, it cost me a tenner. But it saved no end of trouble. He and another chap came across with me in a little motor-launch. I greased myself and got into a mask, and a mile out of Dover I went overboard. Even then I didn't swim it fairly, for I was hauled in again after about six hours for another greasing. My flesh was quite dead half an inch in, you see. I was sick too. If we'd been really meant to do that sort of thing we should have been given scales, like fishes."