"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached."
"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached."
Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?
A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman like myself, on his way to luncheon at ariantholiday villa with a moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!
For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I believe I actually passed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance—shining, self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law? "Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've triedto wake up as if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was an early sun about to rise on a creaturenotready-made,notpre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?
A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to luncheon!
Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.
"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the Casino, did you?" he said.
"No. I took a walk."
"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."
"Well, she's coming for a walk with me this afternoon."
"Then for goodness' sake take her somewhere quiet. It isn't my idea of a holiday that you have to take a rest-cure after it."
I laughed. "I'll look after her. But when I'm with Jennie I like as many people as possible to see me with Jennie."
"Then tell her that and shake her out of herself, you old humbug. Hanged if I'd trust her with you if you were a few years younger."
"You'll have to trust her with somebody presently."
"Plenty of time for that yet," Alec grunted. "I've got my eye on it all right.... Well, if you're going out I'm going to have forty of the best. Watch me fade away——"
He proceeded to "fade away," while the shadows crept over the ascending smoke from his pipe on the table.
On this occasion, however, I was content to forego my pride in being seen with Jennie by my side. Just a quietcliff-path not too far away would do. There is much to be said for a quiet cliff-path when a young woman feels the first sweet trouble at her heart.
I left the completely faded-away Alec as I heard her step at the door of the house. She looked me straight in the eyes, as if it would be at my peril did I notice anything the matter with her own pebble-grey ones. We passed out, took the steep secluded lane towards the tea-cabin above St Enogat plage, and then descended the hewn steps to the shore. It is a tiny plage, remarkably steep, bordered with villas that resemble their own bathing-tents, and with a path that winds up the rocks beyond. We did not speak as we crossed the plage and began to climb.
Along that deeply indented coast you do a lot of walking for the distance forrader you get, and also a good deal of up-and-down round rocky gulfs with the bottle-green water heaving lazily below. But over the seaward walls of villa and château peep valerian and fig, and the path is coral-sprinkled with pimpernel and enamelled with convolvulus and borage and the hosts of smaller flowers. Away ahead the demi-tower of a sea-mark rose chalk-white against the deep blue, with the airy point of St Lunaire beyond. We approached a small field of marguerites, so eagerly open to the afternoon sun that at a short distance they were not white at all, but pale honey-yellow with the offering of their golden hearts. Poppies flamed among them, and the cigales crackled like ceaselessly-running insect machinery. From the cliff's foot came the lazy breaking of the waves. That, I thought, was quite a pleasant place. Even Alec would have approved of it. We sat down between the staring marguerites and the sea.
I do not wish to speak of Jennie in a fatherly or avuncular manner. One had better not have been born than not be simple with the heart of a young girl. At the faintest trace of a smile it will close against you for ever, and wonder follows wonder so quickly over it that it will be a long time before you get your second chance. So do not tell it that it will think differently about things to-morrow.It is you who will think differently to-morrow if you do. I say in all sincerity that, in that long pause between my asking Jennie to come for a walk with me and her acceptance, I had felt a suspense as real as any I ever felt. If that pivotal moment on which the oncoming generation turns is not to be gravely considered, I know of no other moment that need greatly trouble us.
So I listened to the treble of the cigales and the soft deep bass of the sea, and the silence continued between us. She picked and nibbled florets of clover, her eyes far away. Her gaze wandered to butterflies, to a lizard that disappeared with a glint of bronze into a cranny, to a ladybird that alighted on her forearm.
Then the largest tear I have ever seen brimmed, trickled and dropped.
On leaving the house she had dared me to notice anything about her eyes; but it is another matter when a tear so engulfs a ladybird that it is a question whether the creature's pretty wing-cases will ever be the same again. I had to speak after that.
"Cheer up, Jennie," I said softly.
She gulped. "Why were you so horrid and cross with him!"
"This morning in the shop?"
"Yes."
"Well ... I fancied he'd played me rather a mean trick."
"He didn't!" she flashed. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything mean!"
"Then say a trick I didn't expect from him."
"I heard him tell the woman in the shop he was waiting for you, and—and you walked straight past him without looking at him!"
"It might have been better if you'd done the same, Jennie."
"Did he come to fetch you out last night?"
"I took him out."
"Is he the—the Monsieur Arnaud the maid meant?"
"That's the name he goes by."
"Isn't it his name?"
"I suppose it is."
"Then why do you say it like that?... I want you to tell me about him, Uncle George, please," she ordered me.
I too wanted to do that; but I found it anything but simple. I might have told her that he was simply a vagrant, just a fellow who wandered about sketching, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That would have been perfectly true. But it would have been equally untrue. That was no picture of Derry. She had seen a far, far truer picture of him when she had turned her head towards him in the toyshop.
"Well, of course thatiswhy I asked you to come for a walk this afternoon, Jennie," I said slowly. "As a matter of fact M'sieur Arnaud's had a very curious experience that I can't very well tell you about. The result of this is that he's—a rather odd sort of person to know. In fact he's better not known. He wanted me to introduce him to your mother, and I told him I'd rather not do so. Anyway he's going away soon."
"That doesn't sound like a horrid sort of person," she commented. "Is that why he came last night—to be introduced to mother?"
"No, he came for something quite different last night."
"What?"
Here again I might have answered with a certain appearance of truth that he had come for money, though it was his own money; but that too would be to misrepresent him. The cigales crackled loudly. I suppose the ladybird was all right again, for it was nowhere to be seen. I mused, and then turned to her.
"You said yesterday that you wished you were back in England, Jennie," I said. "How would you like to come and stay with me in Surrey for a bit?"
"No thank you, Uncle George. Thank you very much."
"It's quite jolly there in its way, and I dare say I could get somebody quite nice to be with you."
"I should like to some day, of course," she said, "but notjust now, if you don't think it horrid of me." And she added, "I love being here."
"Since yesterday?"
She did not reply.
Of course I had not expected for a moment that she would say Yes, even had I made up my own mind to abandon Derry to his fate, which I had not done. Yet a thought flashed into my mind. Were I to return to England, taking Jennie with me, Derry would still not be unlooked-after. The moment I left, Julia Oliphant, I felt certain, would fly to his side. And if Jennie would not come with me, what would the impossible combination be then?... My half-formed thought became a sudden picture, a contrast, vivid and arresting, between two women—the one who experimented with her dress and wanted to know what a cocktail tasted like, the other this fragrant hawthorn-bough by my side. And between the two rose his grave and sunbrowned face....
I stared at my picture, fascinated. The three of them together! Exquisite and horrible complication! Suppose it should ever come to that!
Then the picture vanished, and I saw the translucent untwinkling sea. The roofs of distant St Lunaire made a pale cluster of brightness. The wind rippled the edges of the satiny poppies.
All at once she clutched my sleeve with both her hands and buried her face against it. It broke, the storm that had been pent up for nearly twenty hours. As the marguerites exposed their yearning golden hearts, so she kept nothing back, laid bare her own heart to the sun that was its lord.
"Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I can't bear it; it's too—too—oh, tell me what to do, Uncle George! I know he's my darling! I don't want to live without him! If he goes away I don't know what will happen! It's all since yesterday—I didn't sleep a wink—I went out into the garden when they'd all gone and stood in the same place. Then I heard father moving about and hid.... And then thismorning when you were horrid to him—no, you weren't horrid, dear Uncle George—I know it's all a stupid mistake—I love him! I don't care if he doesn't speak a word of English. I want him here now! I want to be with him! Please, please introduce him to mother. She loves French people. And he did ask you to, so he can't be horrid. I'm sure he didn't mean to play you a mean trick. There must be a mistake. I'm sure he can explain if you'll let him. Dear, dear Uncle George—do, do!"
I put my hand on her hat, which was as much of her as I could see.
"Don't look at me, please—I don't want to move for just a minute."
"As long as you like, my dear."
"Oh, I'll do anything if you only will! Where is he staying? I never saw him in Dinard before. Where is he staying? Does he live here all the time? I could see him if you came too, couldn't I? And I don't care what sort of clothes he wears ... do, do, Uncle George!"
Then she straightened herself, and looked full at me through her flooded eyes. She was suddenly imperious.
"Now tell me something else, please. When you went off with him last night. Did he say anything about me?"
Perhaps I did not lie with sufficient promptitude. "About you? No, of course not."
She looked accusingly at me; she caught her breath.
"Oh, howcanyou say that! I don't believe it! He did!"
"But he couldn't even see you in the dark!"
"It wasn't dark—it wasn't abitdark—it was quite light enough to see anybody—yousaw him——"
"Well, he's going away, and there's an end of it."
Like a rainbow was the light that woke in her lately showering eyes. Up went the soft lip, out peeped the pearls. Back, back from their golden hearts lay the petals of the marguerites.
"If," she said with extreme slowness, "if he told you he was going away, that must have been last night."
I was dumb. I saw her effort to close her inner eyes onthe light that broke on them, lest a wonder on a wonder should prove more than she could bear.
"That waslast night!" the triumphant words rang out.
I suppose there is no such thing as one half of a miracle without the other——
"That waslast night, and there hadn'tbeena this morning then, and he hadn't seen me when I was buying my bathing-cap, and if he said he was going away he's changed his mind and he isn't going away at all! Neither of us is going away! Oh-h-h!" (That "Oh" echoes in my heart still.) "He isn't even thinking of going now! Because we both know now—we knew in the shop—and he loves me too!"
Just to see one another—just to speak to one another—that was all they asked of me.
That evening I sat in Ker Annic, alone. Alec and Madge had gone out for an after-dinner walk, taking a silent Jennie with them. Silent too had been our return along the cliff-tops that afternoon. Whether she already regretted having opened her heart to me I could not tell.
I sat at the open window of the salon, looking out over the sea that showed pale milky green against the heavy sunset bank. Inside the room Ganymede and the Eagle had been lighted, and my shadow streamed down the steps and was lost in the darkening garden. It was not a cold evening, and yet I felt a little cold. No fire was laid behind the drawn-down iron shutter where Alec threw his crumpled tobacco packets, and it was hardly worth while troubling a maid. I closed the window, crossed to the shuttered fireplace, and sat down in a striped tapestried chair.
What had become of my illusion that certain things could not exist in this clear atmosphere of Northern France? No man with two memories bathe in that milky green sea I had just shut out? But he had swum it. No man of forty-five masquerade as a quarter of a century younger in this broomy, thymy air? But here he was.... I looked round the little salon, as if its spurious gaiety had misled me. Across the varnished ceiling the lamp-chains threw straggling spider's webs of shadow. In one gilt oval mirror a corner of the lamp was duplicated, in another re-duplicated. Everywhere were bits of inessential decoration, the trophy of Senegalese spears over the door, the fringed and fretted bracket with nothing on it, a bronze fingerplate, a bit of lace or coloured glass, all the rest of the quick artifice with which that great nation diverts attention from its naked purpose in life—to wring from everything the last benefitthe occasion will yield. Or so at any rate it seemed to me that night, as my eyes rested on the wriggling gilt ribbons of the mirrors and Ganymede struggling in the Eagle's clutch.
When Alec Aird had greeted me on Dinard Cale he had glanced at the two suit-cases I had thrown ashore and asked me whether that was all the gear I had brought with me. And it is true that one cannot stay many weeks in a place on the resources of two suit-cases. But the length or shortness of my stay was now only part of a wider issue. The question was, not how long I was to stay, but how I was ever going to leave until Derry was ready to come with me. Was he likely to come now? Would anything drag him away? Hardly! Jennie was perfectly right: "He isn't even thinking of leaving, because we both know now—we knew in the shop—and he loves me too!"
A pretty kettle of fish, I reflected, looking at the empty brackets and the spears over the doorway....
For it was all very well to talk about only seeing one another, only speaking to one another. How long was that likely to last? How long had it lasted Julia Oliphant? Just as long as it had taken her to help herself to more. True, Julia was not a sleeping, but a particularly wide-awake beauty. Julia was not Jennie. For the glimmers of starlight that Julia had formerly brought into his life Jennie had now given him the sun itself. Both had known it in that long exchange of eyes in the Dinard Bazaar that morning.
Therefore I feared that, while Julia had produced in him an aberration grave enough but still only of the second magnitude, Jennie might now unwittingly bring about a cataclysm indeed. For he himself had said that his chances of stability lay in an even and unexciting tenor of life. He must sail, so to speak, on an even keel. Calmly and equably he must pick his way through this beautiful and passionate wonder. He must lash the wheel of his will lest the lightest of her sighs should drive him rail-under. A glance might mean the loss of years to him, a kiss death.... Othersthan I have told of loves between two normal creatures, if such in love there be. I am the first, since a mortal fell in love with a god, to tell of lovers whose lives met as they approached each other from opposite directions.
Yet—only to see one another, only to speak to one another! Who with a heart could refuse them that? Who, only looking at them, he serious and radiant, she as I had seen her among the marguerites that afternoon? Love was first invented for such as they. Could he but have slept, like Endymion, in his loveliness for ever!... You see what had already become of my momentary anger against him. It was quite, quite gone. He was once more my son, outside whose door I had paused with a sick dread that very morning.
And as love of him re-possessed me the marvel grew that he should so have survived that shock of beauty and emotion that had been his where the cars had stood parked in the transparent gloom. "Who was that with you in the garden, George?" his ardent whisper seemed to sound again. Was it possible that there weretwoloves, the one shattering, ruinous, destructive of the few years of his life, but the other full of security, healing and rest? Was there indeed a Love Sacred and a Love Profane? (Yet who would call Julia Oliphant's love for him profane? He himself, since he had always refused it? Surely none other.) And I remembered his own halting surmises as to the origin of his singular fate. He had known heaven and hell—had "been too close to the balm or the other thing." God (he had said) was more than a gland; not a knock on the head in the war, but the contending angels themselves of Good and Evil had brought him to this. The one principle had fetched down his years all clattering about him on that moonlit night when the cracking of a cone on my balcony had brought me out of my bed. Was the opposite principle now about to expunge that other ill, to restore him, and to make him a whole and forward-living man again? He believed that there was a chance of it. Was it too utterly beyond belief after all?
Did it prove to be true, then all was heavenly clear. His new life would be what we all sigh that our lives were not—no blind groping in the night of ignorance and doubt, but the angelic victory over the hosts of darkness. He was nineteen and unburdened of his sin, she seventeen and sinless. They would marry. One marriage such as theirs might at the last be enough to rehabilitate the despairing world. Instead of being in his own person a public peril he might be society's hope and stay.
And—I found my excitement quickening—so far all was well. "Entrez!" the bright voice that might have been silent for ever had called, and I had entered to find him humming over a paint-box.
Surely he knew about himself if anybody did——
And he thought he could keep on an even keel—-
There broke in on my musing the sudden sound of voices. The Airds were returning from their walk. Madge tapped at the window, the catch of which I had turned, and she and Alec entered. Jennie walked straight past, and I heard her step in the hall, then on the stairs. Apparently she was going straight to bed.
"Then if he's English what the devil does he wear those clothes for?" Alec demanded as he closed the window again.
"Mon ami, as he hasn't consulted me about his clothes I don't know."
"Where did Jennie pick him up?"
"Don't speak as if he was a germ. And do make atee-ny effort to be a little less insular, my dear. 'When the Lord said all men He included me.'"
"We aren't in heaven. We're in Dinard."
"Among the world, the flesh and the French," said Madge cheerfully. "Why shouldn't he speak good French instead of your eternal 'Donnez-moi' and 'Combien'? Why shouldn't a thing mean something simply because it isn't in English? You'd better go home and go to Lords'.... George, you've been asleep!"
If I had I was very far from being asleep now. If my ears told me truly, since leaving Ker Annic the Airds hadmet, and had spoken to, Derwent Rose. Alec crossed to the fireplace, lifted the shutter, knocked out his pipe, and took up the running again.
"And what on earth made Jennie speak to him in French?"
"Jennie's quite right to practise her French."
"You don't practise French on a fellow who says he's an Englishman—porter's blouse or no porter's blouse. I can hardly imagine she spoke to him without knowing something about him."
"As you and I were there, very likely not," said Madge dryly.
"Anyway I marched Jennie on ahead," Alec growled. "Confounded mixed foreign company—wish we'd never come here——"
"I," said Madge serenely, "found him entirely and altogether charming, as well as being one of the handsomest boys I've ever seen. And he's coming to have tea with me.... This, George," she turned to me, "is a friend of Jennie's we met while we were out. He'd been making a sketch of the sunset and was just packing up, so we walked along together. Oh yes, I know—I ought to be ashamed at my time of life—but he's the most adorable creature! A good deal like your Derwent Rose to look at—very like him, in fact—though of course the Bear's old enough to be his father. And listen to Alec, just because he was dressed as half the English and American students in Paris are dressed! I don't know whether Jennie's fallen in love with him, butIhave!"
"And if he's English what's he called Arnaud for?" Alec demanded with renewed suspicion.
"Dear but simple husband, possibly he had a French father. Such things have been heard of, even in that Rough Island's Story of yours. If you'll make me out a list of the questions you want asked I'll get it all out of him when he comes to tea. In the meantime:—unless George would like to take me on the Casino for an hour—I think I shall go to bed. Feel like a modest flutter, George?"
I shook my head.
"Then bed. I'll dream I won a lot of money. Unless I dream of young Arnaud. Don't let Alec fall asleep in his chair.Dors bien——"
She tripped out under the trophy of assegais.
I was hardly five minutes behind her. Slowly I ascended to my room, crossed to the window, and leaned out over the balcony.
So that was that. Simply, and without any fuss at all, his foot was in the door of Ker Annic. The whole thing had taken almost exactly twenty-four hours. In the space of two revolutions of the clock, he, from the lurking-place of his roadside hotel at St Briac, had contrived to get himself asked to the house to tea. I wondered what he would do about myself. Would he blandly bow, as if our acquaintance began at that moment, or would he advance with outstretched hand, own up to it, and act on the square? If he admitted his acquaintance with me, what questions of Alec's should I not have to answer? How answer them, how explain my concealment? How accept any responsibility whatever for him? Yet how avoid complete responsibility? Apparently only Jennie and the maid who had announced him knew of his furtive visit to myself the evening before; but Jennie knew, and what more she might learn when they put their heads together I could not guess. Perhaps little or nothing. Perhaps all....
My thoughts flew to Jennie again and the miracle of the past twenty-four hours for her. The first awakening look of that moment by the cars, the lovely and irreparable surrender in the Dinard Bazaar, her sobs against my shoulder that afternoon, the radiant burst in which she had realised that he too loved her—and then that evening's encounter whatever it had been, when apparently she had taken matters into her own hands, bowed to him, and spoken her first words to him in French, to be answered in English.... No wonder she could not yet realise it. The day before had found her a child, moody, wilful, not knowing what ailed her, but crying to Life to take her, use her and not spare her; now she was a woman, with a strange sweet turmoilin her bosom, and a quite matter-of-fact resolution in the brain beneath that red-gold hair. No need to ask whether she slept! Sleep, with that ache and bliss at war in her breast? She must be awake at that moment, wondering whether he was awake, knowing that he was awake, lying in her innocent bed with her face turned towards St Briac. His miniature was painted on the curtains of her closed but unsleeping eyes, the echo of his voice was in her ears as she had spoken to him in French, and he had answered—in English.
And by the way,whyhad he answered her in English? Only that morning he had cajoled me into talking French, at any rate among French people. Had he too, stupefied with bliss, answered her instinctively in her own native tongue and his? Or had he deliberately resolved that here at any rate should be no trick or stratagem to be subsequently explained, but a perfectly clean beginning? If so, how would he contrive to maintain it? How could he be secure that the contretemps of any single moment of the day would not catch him out? I remembered the masterfulness and skill with which he had managed me; had he his plans for the handling of the Airds also? Were they to be founded on the appearance of complete honesty, with only the trifling fact suppressed that he had lived a whole life before?
If that was the idea, I could only catch my breath at the impudence and daring and pure cheek of it. Look at its comic beauties! Months before, Madge had begged me to bring the author ofThe Hands of Esauto see her; well, here was that author coming—as a corduroyed young landscape-painter about whose nationality there seemed to be some ambiguity! That afternoon at the Lyonnesse Club she had admired him for the beauty of the prime of his manhood; and as a stripling youth his beauty had again engaged her eye! Suppose one of the books of Derwent Rose should happen to be mentioned; would he say "Ah yes, I've read that," and quote a page of it? Suppose she should say that he was rather like a man she had met inQueen's Gate who was rather like Derwent Rose; would he say "Naturally, Mrs Aird, since I am the same man"? Or would he suppress even the twinkle of his eye and continue his leg-pulling? The thing began to teem with quite fascinating possibilities, and in a couple of days, in his French clothes or his English ones, he would be upon us. Within a week he might be painting Jennie's portrait, as Julia Oliphant was supposed to be painting my own.
And where were young Rugby, young Charterhouse, now that he had appeared on the scene?
Suddenly, on the little balcony at Ker Annic that night, with the Plough over the sea and the lamplight from the salon below yellowing the garden, I found myself one tingle of hope that he might pull it off.
You will appreciate my growing excitement when I tell you of a resolve I took. It would have been perfectly simple for me to take the first tram out to St Briac, to see him at his hotel, to tell him I was aware of the turn events had been made to take, and to ask him to be good enough to tell me where I came in among it all. But I found myself vowing that I would be hanged first. It was his show, and for the present at any rate he should run it without any interference from me. If when he came to tea at Ker Annic he chose to call me George, well, we would see what happened; if he solemnly stood waiting to be introduced to me, that was his affair. At the least it would be interesting. It might prove enthralling.
Therefore I did not seek him the next day, but crossed to St Malo with Alec and went for a potter about the quays of St Servan.
I learned later that I should not have found him at St Briac even had I sought him there. He, who had so lately avoided the eyes of men, now coolly came forth and took his place in the world. His bicycle, instead of taking himand his painting-gear to Pleudihen or Ploubalay or the war-ravaged woods of Pontual, brought him into Dinard early in the forenoon. In the afternoon it brought him in again. It would probably have brought him in again in the evening had there been the faintest chance of a glimpse of Jennie Aird. It was on the afternoon trip that Madge met him, and when we returned from St Servan Alec and I were told that Monsieur Arnaud was asked to tea the next day.
"Are you deliberately throwing him at that child's head?" Alec asked crossly.
"I'm adding him to my collection of nice people. I should be so much obliged if you happened to go to the Club, dear. Not that you're in the least like a wet blanket, darling. Only the thermometer drops just the least little bit."
"It'll go up again all right if I see any reason for it," Alec promised. "You know nothing about the fellow. He may be all right for all I know, but as a matter of principle——"
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Alec on matters of principle takes time to run down. At the end he turned his head to find that Madge had left the room. And that is enough to annoy anybody.
Something that I overheard on my way to my room the following afternoon caused me to smile. The door of Madge's room stood ajar, and as I passed it Jennie's imploring voice came from within.
"Oh, mother, notthatold thing!Dowear the putty colour!"
"What!" in a faint shriek. "My very newest new one!"
"Please, mother!"
"But I was keeping that specially for——"
"Ple-e-ease! And the little darling hat!"
"But——"
"Please, please!"
I passed on. Evidently the best there was was none too good for Monsieur Arnaud, alias Arnold, alias Derwent Rose.
Tea was set out inside the pergola; Jennie herself placedlittle leaves round the sandwiches, begonia petals about the dishes of chocolate and nougat. Critically she paraded her mother's putty-coloured frock for inspection, touched the little darling hat deftly. She herself wore her pale gold silk jumper; her proud throat and small head issued from it like the little porcelain busts in the shop in the Rue Levavasseur—the Watteaus and Chardins and Fragonards that are made up into pincushions and cosies. She was a tremulous tender pout of anticipation and anxiety. A dozen times she moved the objects on the table, a dozen times moved them back again. Alec had dissociated himself from all this absurd fuss about a chance-met English youth with a French name, but he sat not far away, in the shade of the auracaria, behind theParis Daily Mail.
Then, at four o'clock, there was the short soft slide of somebody alighting from a bicycle, and Derry stood by the wrought-iron gate, looking about him.
"This way—come straight down!" Madge called. "The bicycle will be all right there."
Rapidly as I knew Jennie's heart to be beating, I was hardly less excited myself. Now what was he going to do?
What he did was the simplest thing imaginable. As he advanced among the montbretias and begonias I noticed that he wore his English clothes. He took Madge's hand; he smiled simply at Jennie; and then, as Madge was about to present him to myself, he smiled and shook hands with me too.
"That's all right—we do know one another," he said. "Quite a long time. In London, eh, sir? And, as a matter of fact, I came here to see him the other night, but you were all so busy with the party——"
Beautifully, calmly disarming. He said it, too, just as Alec came up—for Alec may growl before his guests come, and growl again when they have gone, but he is their host as long as they are there. If Monsieur Arnaud had known Sir George Coverham in London the situation was more or less regularised. The growling might continue, but in adiminuendo. Growling is sometimes a man's duty to his own face.
"Well, let's have tea anyway," Alec said. "Tell them, Jennie."
The dark blue clothes—that had crossed the Channel in a motor-launch while their owner, thickly greased, had swum alongside in the night—fitted him quite passably well; I remembered the very suit. His boots and collar, however, were French, and apparently he had no English hat, for his head was uncovered. I remember a foolish fleeting wonder that the light chequer of shadow should pattern his clear and self-possessed face exactly as it did our own—and he thelusus naturæhe was! He stood there, modest and at ease, waiting for his seniors to seat themselves. I saw Alec's expert glance at his perfect build. I mentally gave the subject of athletics about ten minutes in which to crop up.
"Do sit down," said Madge; and she added to me, "George, you never told me you knew Mr Arnaud in London!"
"I think this is the first time we've all been together," I parried.
Derry gave me a demure glance. "Oh yes. And I stayed a week-end in Sir George's place not so long ago—had a jolly swim in his pond—isn't that so, sir?"
He should at any rate have a tweak in return. "When there's a prep school in the neighbourhood a good many young people use a man's pond," I observed; and at that moment Jennie and a maid arrived with tea.
Already I fancied I had what is called a "line" on him. The only word I can apply to his modest impudence is "neck"—charming, bashful, but quite deliberate "neck." He had not merely met me before in London; oh dear no; he went a good deal beyond that. He was a young man I had to stay in my house, allowed to swim in my pond. I saw the way already paved for as many visits to Ker Annic as he pleased. I saw in anticipation Alec coming round to his English clothes, his grace and strength of build. Madgehe already had in his pocket. He even admitted having sought me at this very house a night or two before! My position was as neatly turned as heart could wish. I could not even imitate his own mendacious candour lest I should give him and myself completely away. Yes, I think "neck" is the word.
He talked quietly, charmingly, not too much. Jennie hardly ventured to look at him, nor he at her. To Madge he was the most perfect of squires. Alec, like myself, was "sir" to him.
"Yes, sir," he said, "that's quite right. I did do a bit of a sprint at Ambleteuse. I'm that Arnaud. But I've had to knock it off. You wouldn't think it to look at me, but I've got to go awfully steady. I used to be quite fast, but that's some time ago. And of course I shall be all right again in a little time. That's one of the reasons I took up painting. It keeps me in the air practically all the time."
"Chest?" said Alec.
"Something of the sort, sir. No thank you, I don't smoke."
But for one significant trifle I think Alec might have been more or less satisfied. This was the fact that, in his own hearing, his daughter had spoken to this charming stranger in French, and had been answered in English. It might mean little or nothing, but I saw that it stuck in his mind. In his different way Alec is no less quick than his wife. Let him down once and you are likely to have to take the consequences for all time. A trifle ceases to be a trifle when it is all there is. Alec knew nothing of his visitor, but he did know that Jennie never addressed the blazered tennis-playing English youths in French. He also knew that for three days Jennie, who up to then had soaked herself in tennis, had not been near the nets at all. The intensely insular father of a beautiful girl of seventeen is not blind to these things.
"I suppose your people were French at one time?" Alec said presently, not too pointedly.
"Yes, sir," said Derry, for all I knew with perfect truth."My mother was a Treherne, a Somerset woman. I believe she and my father ran away. I don't remember him."
"And you went to a French school?"
"No, sir. Shrewsbury." This, too, was perfectly true.
"You've got an uncommonly good French accent, that's all," remarked Alec; and relapsed into silence.
After all, the last question he would have thought of asking his young guest was whether he might have a look at his birth certificate.
Up to this point our gathering had had its distinctly amusing side. With consummate dissembling he had turned us round his finger, and it would have taken a conjurer to guess that he was softly laughing at all of us except Jennie. But the more I considered the "line" I had on his subtle machinations the less a laughing matter it all became. Behind the gentle deference of his manner I felt the grimmest determination. His charm was the charm of a charming youth, but it rested on the hard experience and resolution of a man. And behind that again in the last resort menace would lie. This man, actually older than Madge, not much younger than Alec and myself, and a full quarter of a century older than Jennie, had toiled for fame and had missed the fruits of it; he had chased the will-o'-the-wisp pleasure and had floundered in the bog; but now he had seen the shining thing beside which fame and pleasure are nothing at all. To seize that was now the whole intention of his marvellous twice-lived life. Let him keep his eyes as he would from looking directly at Jennie, Jennie was there, the prize for which he strove. And I knew in my soul that were I or another to try to frustrate him we had better look to ourselves. It was a thing none the less to beware of that his brow was smooth, his eyes bright, his skin clear as the skin of a boy.
And all in a moment I found myself looking at him with—I don't know how else to express it—a sort of induced unfamiliarity. All the strangeness of it came over me again like a wave. I knew that I didn't know him in the least. Behind that mask he knew infinitely more about me than Iknew about him. He sat with his back to the sea, and the tartan of tricky shadow laced his brow, was lost again as his face dipped, reappeared on the navy-blue sleeve and his brown hand on the table. Yes, completely a stranger to me. I his father? He was his own father. What else did all that turgid stuff inThe Timesabout "maximum faculties" mean? New words for old things! "The boy is father of the man." They of old time knew it all before us. We only think it is truer to-day because more people talk about it. Here, incipient and scarcely veiled, was the real parent of the Derwent Rose ofThe Vicarage of Bray,An Ape in Hell, and all else he had ever done. Here, implicitly and in embryo, were the wit of theVicarage, the patient purpose ofEsau, and the deadly suppressed anger of theApe. Possibly you have never seen, brightly and sunnily displayed with a light and laughing lazy-tongs of rippling shadow, the authentic beginning of a man you have known twenty-five years farther on in time. Perhaps it is as well that they who have seen it are few. You may take my word for it that that family tree of which the roots are Arnaud and the blossoms Rose can be a rather terrifying thing.
Therefore I and I alone was able to pierce through his blandness, and to see the tremendousness of the effort behind it all; and I wondered whetherthatwas his idea of an easy and unexciting life! Whatever it was to him, I can only say that I did not find it so. I almost sweated to see his composure. Yet to all outward appearance he never turned a hair. His keel was still even, the rudder of his will under perfect control. Jennie with the downcast eyes was the mark on which he steered. And his own eyes sought the rest of us in turn with crafty innocence and infernal candour.
"I beg your pardon, sir?" he was saying to Alec. "Oh"—he gave a little laugh of confusion—"in a place like this it's sometimes difficult to say! Where was it, Miss Aird?" (But he gave her no chance to reply.) "One hardly knows how one meets anybody else; it seems to be in the air; you can hardly help knowing people. But these holiday acquaintances can be easily dropped afterwards."
("Steady, Derry!" I found myself commenting. "Don't overdo it—that's rather experienced—don't be too wise for the age you look.")
"Anyway," he went on, "I shall probably be the last one here. I like the place, and the rate of exchange is all to the good when you know your way about—not in a villa," he twinkled modestly. "They say Italy's the place, but I can't quite manage that, and England doesn't suit me, so I shall just stick on here and paint."
"I've only seen the sketch you were doing the other night," remarked Madge—dangerously invitingly, I thought.
"Oh, they aren't anything." He waved them aside. "I hope to do something one day. But it's a funny thing," he explained, "words and books and all that sort of thing never interested me in the least. I couldn't write if my life depended on it; can't imagine how Mrs Aird and Sir George do it. But everybody understands what they see with their eyes. Paint's the stuff."
"Then when are you going to show us?" said Madge.
"If you'd care to, of course. George—Sir George Coverham knows where I hang out. Perhaps you'd bring Mrs Aird round, sir?...Ah——"
The last little exclamation accompanied as wonderful a feat of its kind as I ever saw. As she had turned to him Madge's elbow had caught a teaspoon, which slipped over the table's edge. But it never reached the ground. He did not even shake the table. The position of his shoulder altered, his hand shot out. He put the spoon back on the table. With such instantaneous smoothness had he done it that it seemed simple. But I tell you I caught my breath....
"Near thing," he smiled. "Oh, come any time. You won't have to mind a few stairs. But I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I'm only a beginner really."
And so not one door, but two were opened, the second one at his lodging at St Briac.
But Alec as well as I had seen that marvellous piece of fielding with the teaspoon. Suddenly he got up, stretched himself, and walked away.
The moment his back was turned Jennie spoke for the first time.
"Perhaps Mr Arnaud would like to see the rest of the garden, mother?"
"Then show him, child," said Madge. "We'll be with you in a minute."
Their eyes met. He rose. They went off together. Madge swung round on me.
"Why didn't you say you knew him before?" she demanded.
"The question never arose."
"The question always arises if Alec's anywhere about. You know he's like a bear with a sore head about young men."
"It's the duty of a father's head to be sore. I quite agree with Alec."
"But if you'd only said 'He's quite all right, he stays with me in Haslemere——'"
"Quite a number of people stay with me in Haslemere, if that's a social guarantee——"
"You know what I mean. Alec's simply a troglodyte. He doesn't belong to to-day. It's all very flattering, of course, but he simply can't forget what things were like when I was a girl. They never dreamed of letting us travel without a maid; why, we actually had to sit still in the carriage till the footman had opened our own front door. Alec doesn't realise that the world's moved on since then. And you could have put it all on a proper footing with three words!"
"'It?'"
"Yes, his coming here. All that fuss! I think he's perfectly delightful. And I know those Somerset Trehernes if they're the Edward Trehernes of Witton Regis. And I expect his painting's clever too. He looks as if he had all the gifts.... Now I make you answerable for Alec, George. That he's not simply stupid and unreasonable, I mean. I don't mean that he's not perfectly right to ask theusual questions, but Jennie's got to be considered too. She's quite old enough to know her own mind. Now I'm going to them. Are you coming?"
"I'll come along in a few minutes," I replied.
My intelligence with regard to painting is simply that of the ordinary man. I seldom speculate on the relation between one art and another. True, I have read my Browning, and have wondered whether he really knew what he was talking about when he spoke of a man "finding himself" in one medium, and starting again all unprejudiced and anew in another. It sounds rather of a piece with much more art talk we heard when we were young.
But Derwent Rose was only fallaciously young. He had time at his disposal in a sense that neither Browning nor you nor I ever had. And it seemed to me significant of the state of his memory that he should have turned his back on words and taken up paint instead. For the burden of his age was lifted from him, and he was advancing on his youth with a high and exhilarating sense of adventure. Now words had been the greatest concern of his "A," or Age Memory, and words, it must be admitted, have arrogated to themselves the lion's share of this strange faculty that we call remembering. Had he now found a means of expression more closely in correspondence with the untrodden ground ahead? In other words, was he a kind of alembical meeting-ground where the arts interpenetrated and became transmuted?... I hazard it merely as a conjecture in passing, and leave you to judge. Let us pass to that visit we paid to St Briac to see his sketches.
Alec was not with us. The Kings, Queens and Knaves of the bridge-table were pictures enough for him. So I accompanied Madge and Jennie. Jennie's bosom lifted as we approached the wide spaces of the links—but then theSt Briac air is admittedly fresher than the tepid medium that is canalised, so to speak, in the streets and lanes of Dinard. It was afternoon, and the shed at the terminus was a bustle of moving luggage, friends meeting friends, parties going into Dinard to return by the seven o'clock tram. We crossed the road to his glass-fronted hotel. There was no need to ask for him. Evidently he had been watching from his window. He stood at the gate, once more in blouse and corduroys.
"Tea first, I think, and the works of art afterwards," he greeted us cheerfully. "Where's Mr Aird? Oh, what a pity! This way—straight through the kitchen—I thought it would be nicer outside——"
He led the way through the black and cavernous kitchen towards the sunny green doorway and the back garden.
Tea was set under an apple tree. The garden was some fifteen yards square, but only close under the tree was there room for the table and the four chairs. Even then we had to be careful how we moved, lest we should crush a growing plant. There were no paths—you could hardly call those single-file, six-inches-wide threads paths. Unless you put one foot fairly in line with the other pop went a radish, a strawberry, a flower. Not one single hand's-breadth anywhere was uncultivated. Behind Madge as she sat a row of scarlet runners made a bright straggle of coral, and dwarf beans filled the interstices. Over the runners tall nodding onion-heads showed, and behind them again bushes heavy with white currant. Along a knee-high latticed fence huge red-coated apples were espaliered, and the ochre flowers of a marrow sprawled over a manure-heap. Bees droned and butterflies flitted in the sun, glints of glass cloches pierced the screens of warm grey-green. And, where a tree of yellow genet covered half the wall, a large green and red parrot in a cage had suddenly become silent on hearing voices.
"That's Coco," Derry said. "Coco! Ck!—'Quand je bois mon vin clairet——'"
The parrot cocked his head on one side and regarded us with an upside-down eye.
"Chants, Coco!—'Quand je bois'—You'll hear him all right in a minute, Mrs Aird.... Ma mè-r-r-r-e! Nous voici à table!"
"Tout est prêt—on va servir!" came the shrill reassurance from somewhere inside the house; and an immensely fat old patronne in a blue check apron brought out tea, followed by one of the reserved young Amazons with strawberries, cream, and little crocks of jam with wasps struggling on the top.
As for Jennie and myself, I think she had completely forgotten that I had ever tried to keep her and Derry apart. I was now the person through whose good offices she sat, with at least semi-parental approval, here in his garden. I do not want to pretend to more knowledge than I have about these secretive young goddesses, but, as she sat there, her eyes still bashfully avoiding Derry's, I was prepared to take a reasonable bet that I guessed what was passing through her mind. Derry had stayed in my house in England. Her too I had asked to visit me there. What an Uncle George indeed I should be if at some time or other I were to ask them together! Only as thanks in advance, after which I could not find it in my heart to withhold the benefit, could I explain the soft and grateful looks I received from time to time. I had one of these glances quite unmistakably before I had as much as touched the cup of tea Madge poured out for me. "You see, mother's all right," it said as plainly as if she had uttered the words; "you'll make it all right with father, won't you? I know you can if you will! And thank you so much, dear Uncle George, for the perfectly lovely time we're going to have when we come to see you!" At any rate, that was my interpretation of it, while Derry, no less charming as a host than he had been as a guest, made himself honey-sweet to Madge and politely attentive to her daughter.
Nevertheless, I presently asked a direct question about the hours of departure of the trams. I saw the faintest flicker of demure fun cross his face; and I too remembered, too late, how I had once countered him about the Sunday trains from Haslemere.
"There's a four-thirty-five and a five-forty-eight," he said. "It's four-twenty now. We can cut out the pictures, of course, but it seems a pity not to have tea."
So we had nearly an hour and a half.
I don't really think that he had the least desire to show us his pictures. The pictures had served their turn handsomely enough already. He wanted to remain under the apple tree, with Madge and myself there since we must be there, but anyway with Jennie opposite to him, eating his strawberries and jam, occasionally not knowing which way to look, the possession on which his twofold heart was set, the lovely and precious godsend he had missed once but would see us all with our throats cut rather than not clasp her to his bosom in the end.
So we sat there over our empty cups, with the wasps struggling in the jam and Coco harping on the wires of his cage, but still obstinately refusing to sing "Quand je bois." Jennie got up to give him a piece of sugar, and he cocked his yellow upside-down eye at her and showed the ribbed black tongue inside his hook of a beak. Were I a painter I should paint the picture she made against the shrill yellow of the broom, with the sun full on her white summer frock, her gleaming hair, and the sun-loving bird with his head on one side watching her. "Mind his beak," Derry called; and she smiled over her shoulder, as if his mere voice were so much that she must turn her eyes whatever it said. Then she returned to the table, but not before she had plucked a sprig of genet and put it in her breast. It lay at the pit of her stately throat like a dropped blossom at the plinth of a column.
"But what about the pictures?" Madge suddenly said. "We came here to see pictures, didn't we?"
"Then that means a trail upstairs," said Derry, springing up. "Carefully through the kitchen, Mrs Aird; it's always as dark as the pit after you've been sitting out here. Perhaps I'd better go first."
He led the way through the kitchen, up the bare polished stairs, and into his room.
He cannot have had any great wish to show them; otherwise they would have been set out, or at least ready to hand. As it was he had to rummage for them in his single cupboard, selecting some, rejecting others. He showed a dozen or more of them, mostly canvas on the stretchers, but a few watercolours among them; and I fancy, if the truth must be told, that Madge was just a shade disappointed. I think she had hoped for jazz and lightning and something to go with her drawing-room cushions. Nor did I myself quite know what to make of those pictures. The first impression of them I had was a kind of—let me say datelessness; I can't think of a better word. All were landscapes, the largest of them not more than a couple of feet by eighteen inches; and at first he set them up one after another rather negligently. But as Madge began to question him his manner rather curiously changed. That preternatural skill that he had shown for two whole afternoons seemed to drop from him. He seemed to halt a little, to take risks, to advance warily into deeper water. If Mrs Aird really wished to know, then he was sincerely ready to explain. And he began to take me, for one, through the unsuspected intricacies of what at a first glance appeared to be a few casual brush-marks on the flat.
"I dare say I'm all wrong—I feel rather an ass talking about it," he said diffidently, "but I'll try to tell you. I mean I came across a fellow one day just outside Pleudihen, and he was painting what he called a Romantic Landscape. I asked him what a Romantic Landscape was, and he was just a bit stuffy about it. 'This that I'm painting,' he said. 'But why can't you paint just a landscape?' I said. 'Because I'm doing a Romantic one and I can't do two things at once,' he said. 'What are you doing it for?' I asked him. 'The Salon,' he said. 'No, but I meanwhyare you doing it?' I said. 'I suppose because I belong to the Romantic School,' says he.... Well, there you are, Mrs Aird. What I mean is that he was painting it because he belonged to a school that did paint that sort of thing. If he'd belonged to another school he'd have painted something different, I suppose. So of course that set me thinking a bit."
"I suppose so," said Madge, quite out of her depth.
"So I said to him, 'What do you want to belong to a school at all for?' 'Everybody does,' says he. 'I should have thought that was all the more reason why you shouldn't,' says I. 'Oh, if you're a blooming genius!' he said ... a bit rotten of him, I thought, but he was years older than I. So I rather let myself go, I'm afraid. I picked up the nearest leaf. 'Look here,' I said to him, 'this thing's a leaf, just a leaf. It's a certain colour and a certain shape and certain other things; the point is it's itself and nothing else; and neither you nor I can alter it, sir' (I told you he was years older than I). 'The light hits it there, and only one possible thing can happen; it hits it there, where the direction alters, and only another thing can happen. In another minute the light will have changed, and a quite different set of things will have happened. Everything there is happens to that leaf in the course of a day, and if you know all about that leaf you know all about everything. And if you can paint it you can paint all the leaves in the world.' I hope I didn't seem too rude, but that's what I said to him."
I had moved to the window. He was talking with a mixture of diffidence and warmth, on a subject I had never heard him on before, and yet it seemed to me that I had heard something strangely like it all before.
"And what did he say?" Madge asked.
"Oh, he said something, but he was years older than I, so I just said good afternoon. I suppose he went back to school," said Derwent Rose.
Once more I was disturbed. Was this a new phase, or an old one all over again? If he was going to abolish schools and precedents and all the accepted apparatus by which the world's thought is carried on, it seemed to me to matter very little whether he dealt in words, as before, or in paint, as now. True, this parallelism might exist largely in my own imagination; he had said nothing that another man might not have said without arousing anxiety; but again he was trying to see something, though only a leaf, as if it hadnever been seen before, and I noted it carefully as I looked out over the sunny northward water.
"So that's more or less what I'm after," he was saying. "I know they're pretty bad, but I think they start right. That sky's as clumsy as it can be, but itishorizontal. That tree's got a back you don't see as well as a front you do. So I simply don't go to look at other people's stuff.... Ah, this branch will explain what I mean."
It did when he pointed it out, but I should never have seen for myself. As completely as a worshipping pagan he sought to subdue himself to one given thing in one given moment. As I say, I know nothing about painting. That may be a valid theory of painting landscape or it may not. But it was his, there was no ear-say or eye-say about it, and it is of him and not of his pictures that I am speaking.
"I believe I shall pull it off one day; in fact I know I shall.... And now that's quite enough about me. That's my view, Mrs Aird, and this is where I live. My old landlady's a perfect dear, and Madeleine and Hortense are all right. But sometimes that brute Coco simply won't sing——"
I saw Jennie drinking in every detail of his room. There was not to be one inch of it that she could not reproduce when she went to bed that night and turned her face in the direction of St Briac. Her eyes took in his moulded ceiling-beams, the glass knob of his door, his neat bed, the herring-boned parquet of the floor. It was a little bare, perhaps, but then he spent all his days out of doors, painting those wonderful paintings, and, of course, this was not his real home. She hated that older painter—a hundred at least—who had been rude to him about the Romantic Landscapes; instantly and passionately she had taken sides with her hero. She loved the fat old Frenchwoman who looked after him and was nearly seventy; she did not so much love the two Breton women who looked after him and were not nearly seventy. Coco was a naughty bird not to sing "Quand je bois" when he was told, and if his window did not face towards Dinard, at any rate he had the tram opposite, and could watch it every time it started, and know that it was going almost past the gates of Ker Annic. She stood with puckered brows before his canvases. She loved trees. They would always be different to her now that he had shown her about them. She had no doubt whatever about his theory of landscape; how could it be wrong if it was his? Her fingers touched the blossom of broom at her throat that had grown on his tree.
Then she came over to the window to make sure that Dinard really did not lie that way. Most stupidly it did not. Actually it lay miles away past the glass door-knob, and the Garde Guérin to the right was invisible from Dinard. But she pressed my arm lightly. "September, Uncle George?" the pleading pressure silently said. "You'll ask us both down in September, the moment we get back from here?"
I looked at my watch.
Then I heard Madge's voice across the room, and my heart almost stopped at the swift peril.
"Then your mother was Cicely Treherne, and she married an Arnaud?"
But he weathered it. He did it with his rascally eyes. He smiled down on her.
"Well ... I shouldn't be allowed to swear it in a court of law, because it was before I was born, you see."
The smile conquered. She laughed. I cut quickly in, my watch half out of my pocket. Gunpowder was safer than family history with Madge Aird about.
"Time?" I said.
"Ought we to be going?"
"The tram has a way of filling up."
"Then don't let's miss it," said Madge, drawing on her gloves. "Thank you for a most delightful afternoon, Mr Arnaud (all my friends are 'Mr' for at least a week, you know). I think the pictures are fascinating; they make our books look very dull. Good-bye."
"Oh, I'm coming to see you off," he said.
Something in his last words, I really can't tell you what,made me take a swift resolve. If he was going to see us off, I was going to see him off also. I had a superstitious idea that it might be necessary. He had bamboozled Alec about his delicate chest, had only just evaded that question of Madge's that simply meant, if you like to do a little sum about it, that his mother had borne him at two different dates with a quarter of a century between them. Blandly as he might cover it up, I now expected nothing but tricks from him—tricks coolly and resolutely planned and carried out without a moment's compunction or hesitation. Very well. He was going to be watched if I had eyes in my head.
And so was Miss Jennie. With a guile so innocent and transparent that I had nothing for it but the tenderest and most smiling love, she too was quite capable of duplicity. More than once her tell-tale hand had fluttered about the flower at the pit of her throat. As I have said, I don't pretend to deep knowledge of the hearts of these superb and recently-awakened young creatures, but I do know when things are in the wind.
Nothing happened as we passed down the stairs and out into the street. I could have taken my oath of that. And, devoted as always, he walked with Madge across to the terminus, leaving Jennie to me. But I felt it coming....
It came as he took the tickets at the guichet; and it was not of his doing, but of hers. I had silver in my hand, ready to repay him, and there was no reason why she also should have pressed so close to him. Again there was the little flurry about the flower at her throat; her bent nape was towards me; the thing was movingly clumsily done.
But it was done for all that. A note passed from her hand to his, and the fingers that passed it were held for a moment.
Don't tell me that that note had not been in readiness probably since the evening before. Don't tell me that it had not lain under her pillow for a whole night before being transferred to that tenderer post-bag that was sealed with the yellow flower. Don't tell me that it had not been evenmore sweetly sealed. For I saw her face when she turned again. I saw its struggle of soft emotion and the will to be calm. With a quick little impulse that I did not understand she flew to her mother's arm.
"There are three seats there if we're quick," she said in a broken little voice....
Only to see one another—only to speak to one another—and to pass a secret note at the first opportunity——
"You know that we can't quarrel, Derry," I said.
"In that case——" he said quietly, but did not finish.
"We can't quarrel for the reason there's always been—that we aren't in the same ring and can't possibly get there."
"I wish——" he began, but once more suddenly stopped.
From the obscurity of the next table where the four young Frenchmen sat another soft unaccompanied song broke out.
"Listen," whispered Derry.
"En mon coeur, tendre réliquaire,J'avais gardé ton souvenir;Par lui le long de mon calvaireEn espérant, j'ai pu souffrir!"
"Hush!" his voice came huskily from the dusk by my side.
"J'ai vécu des heures cruellesLoin de toi, que j'aimais toujours;Les revoici, pour moi plus bellesPuisqu'elles sonnent ton rétour."
The song was finished without further interruption from him.
"Ne parlons plus de nos alarmes,Effaçons l'horrible passé;Reviens, je veux sécher tes larmesEt revivre pour t'adorer:"Rien n'est fini, tout recommence,Puisque nous voilà réunisAu chaud soleil de l'espérance—A tout jamais, soyons unis!"
It was nine o'clock of the same evening, and we were sitting outside the hotel of St Briac's tiny triangular Square. I had broken away from dinner at Ker Annic in order that I might see him without a moment's loss of time. What did it matter that I had had to hire a special car, and that that car was waiting for me in the darkness of a side-street now? As it had happened, I had met him on the road. Had I not done so I should have scoured the neighbourhood until I had found him.
Our backs were to the lighted windows of the hotel, but he had blotted himself into the shadow by the door. The Square might have been a set-piece on a stage. Yellow strips of light streamed from open doorways, illuminated window-squares showed the movement of dark heads within. Children playing their last ten minutes before going to bed flitted like moths in and out of the beams, and the comers and goers across the square seemed actors in spite of themselves. The four young Frenchmen sat in the shadows beyond the lighted doorway, and they had sung three or four songs before singing that one.
There was a long silence between Derwent Rose and myself. Then suddenly he got up and crossed to the group of Frenchmen. In a minute or so he came back again, and thrust himself more deeply still into the shadow.