“Stuart,” Peter broke in upon his exuberant ditty, “you’re just nothing but a stage-manager. You’re not the sort of man for vagabondage. And your grand operatic abduction will be a failure. Recollect, you wouldn’t come with us a-Maying in April.”
“No,” he cried, stung to swift retort; “but whodares say that I have not made of you April fools in May!”
The train swung over the Hamoaze and into Cornwall.
They stopped at the Land’s End, for the reason that the sea barred their further progress to the south and to the west. And they took three rooms at the Ocean Hotel, facing the sea to the south and to the west, because it was too late the night of their arrival to seek convenient caves, especially three caves of exactly the same dimensions, conditions essential to avoid jealousy and strife.
The Ocean Hotel stood on an isolation of headland, like some stone medieval fortress, frowning at the rocky imitation opposite, which ran far out into the Atlantic, and then piled itself up crag upon crag, an echo wrought in granite. Over the moors towards the sunset ran the coastguard’s path, white stones on the dark green, sheer up to an edge, lost in the drop on the further side. And over the moors towards the sunrise ran still the coastguard’s path, down an easy slope, looping a sinister crevasse, and as far as the stretching horizon line.
Peter awoke the next morning, possessed by a great lust for actual touch of the sea, where she had hitherto only enjoyed its sight and sound; and would hardly leave her companions time to wallow in the tubs of yellow cream which were a feature of their breakfast, in her impatience to run down the steep twisting path which she knew existed somewhere just outside....
But the land of Cornwall and the waves of Cornwall were not ready yet to be friends with the strangers; and all that day led them a mocking dance by crag and outjutting cape and promontory; over moor and round seven points, and never a downward way to the sea. Cast an evil spell upon the strangers, so that ever from two hundred feet below, the water beckoned them stealthily into cavernous velvet glooms; sang loudlyof wonder and glory in the cold crash of breakers against the cliff; tormented them with glint of blue in its plum-darkness, hint of glittering green whenever the clouds above swirled aside to reveal patches of clear sky. For the strangers need not yet be shown what riot of colours were sheathed in scabbard of sullen grey. Peter could have dragged the elusive sun by main force into prominence, battered with fists of rage against the uncompromising fall of rock which baffled her, and mocked her, and drew her on with continual promise of a way to the sea round the next curve ... or perhaps the next ... or surely the next....
Stuart laughed at her impatience. It was a hard land, a good land; and he knew it, and did not talk about it, but was content to swing along over turf and bog and stone; aware of limitless space in which to tire his limbs. And once he came racing like a greyhound, past his comrades, towards a six-barred gate which lay ahead. Ran because his stride was swifter than any man’s. Leapt the gate because his jump was cleaner than any man’s. Then, without a run on the further side, vaulted back, and met the twain with a cry of “Mountebank!” in anticipation of how they would greet his prowess.
But under his amused self-condemnation, lay the disturbing knowledge that this desire to exhibit his utmost strength and skill was real, not assumed; desire born of the look of pleasure that, after each feat, would lurk in Peter’s eyes, though her lips continued to mock his vanity. Stuart could have shaken her for this effect on him. He did not mind at all behaving childishly, but objected vehemently to thinking childishly.
Peter perched herself upon the gate; and airily told the sea that it was all a mistake, she had no desire whatever to reach it. And the sea in response threw out a sparkle of gold and a spurt of foam, so that the longing rose in her heart fiercer than ever.
It was a gate padlocked and bolted, though it led to nowhere, and guarded nothing; and to the right and left of it lay open country; and to the immediate right and left, piled-up blocks of rough stone, for kindly assistance of those who would elude the padlocks. A mad gate in a mad country. And now the sun, thinking it had teased enough, broke in a pale dazzle on the grey land and sea; then, gaining strength, poured silver streams of light through a rent in the sky, lay in silver puddles and splashes on the water. The dark toneless granite piled itself into strange shapes of tower and turret, and all about the sea-birds wheeled and shrieked.
... “Magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,”
... “Magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,”
murmured Stuart, prone beside Merle upon the turf. And she whispered back:
“One could almost persuade oneself—yes, look, Stuart! a face at those jagged rock-windows—light flying hair and haunted eyes and ... it’s gone when you look again.”
“That’s Lyonnesse, yonder.” Peter, from her seat on the topmost bar, indicated the wide shimmering tracts of grey and silver. “The sunken lands, you know. Cities and churches and meadows ... but they must have suffered some sea-change ... white bones and thick green water and the evil coil of seaweed. A dead land, now.”
Stuart said musingly: “I see Lyonnesse more as the land where the dead wait till they are wanted again.”
Peter smiled; so like Stuart, this glimpse of an afterwards as merely the rest which comes before a fresh bout of strenuous labour. Then couldn’t he even conceive of complete and utter rest? “Where the dead wait till they are wanted again” ... she caught a fleeting glimpse of dim caverns, and a tiny figure stumbling in from the outside glare, and flinging down a torch, seized instantly by an upward-springing form,who bore it forth again; while the tired intruder stretched himself in sleep....
Heigh-ho! how serious they all were. Peter looked around her, half-dazed by this long mental immersion in dark coral-caves. The sky had meanwhile deepened into blue, and all the buried colours of earth and water had leapt into being.
“Requires a dab of red in all that backcloth of green and black, doesn’t it?” queried Peter idly; to break silence; “just for the sake of artistic effect.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Oh, say against that ledge.” She pointed half-way down an apparently inaccessible formation of cliff, jutting out at right angles to the land.
Stuart seized the scarlet cap from her head, before she was even aware of his intentions, and was almost directly over the edge of safety, and out of sight.
“Stuntorian!” murmured Peter ... but her hand dug deep into the turf, tore it up in great handfuls.
It was several minutes before they again caught sight of him, scrambling with all the agility appertaining to impossible schoolboy heroes, towards the spot indicated. His figure was reduced by distance and surroundings to absurdly small dimensions. He paused on reaching his goal, hung the patch of crimson on to the ledge of rock, waved gaily towards his far-off companions; then, cramming the cap again in his pocket, swung himself round a boulder apparently poised in mid-air, and out of their line of vision.
“We’d better turn back to meet him,” quoth Merle, springing from her perch on the gate. “It’s all right, Peter. Nothing can happen to Stuart, ever.”
But Peter had just learnt of something extremely disturbing which had happened to herself. And venting her indignation at the discovery, upon the cause thereof, refused to fall sobbing upon his neck, when he met them on the homeward way, and carelessly returned herheadgear. Nor did she take outward and visible notice of bleeding abrasions upon either knee, ostentatiously displayed. But Merle—feeling his recent performance ought really not to be encouraged—treated him to a sober lecture on foolhardiness, which lasted till Peter provided distraction by leaving her right leg, as far as the thigh, in a bog of black mud.
The sun was a level blaze of gold in their eyes, by the time they trudged up the last slope, and into their fortress. They were weary with a splendid weariness of limb; and drowsy with the strangeness of that strange land; and, moreover, wind-blown and wet and satiated of beauty. Peter entered her room, and closed the door; pulled down the blind to give respite from the outside world; plunged her hands in water, and cast off her shoes and stockings. Then flung herself on the narrow bed, where Merle presently joined her. And they ate of the expensive chocolates destined for Mistress Dorothy Orson, and were at peace.
... Somebody whistling, now loudly, now softly, up and down the passages and stairs. “Yo-ho! Yo-ho!”—it was Captain Hook’s celebrated ditty haunting the Ocean Hotel. Nearing their door, it paused on a plaintive up-note of enquiry. Peter took pity on the homeless wanderer, and before Merle could protest, called him in.
“I don’t think I’ve got an apartment of my own,” said Stuart, squatting contentedly on the floor, his head against Merle’s dark shower of loosened hair. “I slept somewhere, I suppose, but where is a mystery. They must have turned my room into a step-ladder or a revolving book-case; I shall hate sleeping to-night in a revolving book-case; one would get so giddy.” He glanced around him and broke into a chuckle: “What a setting for one of Zola’s most squalid bits of realism,” he remarked.
The room was small, with a dingy paper, and anunclothed gas-jet springing from the wall. The blind that shut out daylight, and dimmed the corners to mystery, was torn, and the cord flapped a perpetual complaint. The tin basin on the washstand stood unemptied of its dirty water. Two or three towels lay across the chairs; Peter’s muddy shoes and stockings straggled in abandoned fashion over the worn bits of carpet covering the oilcloth. The aspect of the two huddled bare-legged figures on the crumpled bed-spread, carried out Stuart’s simile with remarkable fidelity; and his own presence, combined with the dainty satin bonbonnière, added just those last touches of immorality without which no French novel is complete. Only their moods of serene happiness were rather at variance with the puppets of fiction, evil or perhaps merely hopeless, with which Zola might have peopled the dreary chamber.
“I think, as pirates, and considering Merle lives in Lancaster Gate and owns a maid, we deserve a better nursery than this,” suggested Peter.
“We’ll build one,” Stuart assured her swiftly. “Yes, of course we will. Nothing easier. We’ll build it to suit ourselves. A playroom——”
“A piraticalplayroom——”
“The perfect piratical playroom.”
Stuart began: “We shan’t care to be disturbed, so we’d better build under water. That stretch of river between Cliveden and Cookham would make quite a good ceiling. Nor will we take it on a repairing lease, but leave the Thames Conservancy responsible for damages.”
Merle at this juncture wanted to know how he saw the Thames Conservancy; in her eyes, it wore very bright blue with lots of gilt buttons, and was always sitting round a table.
“One person?” asked Peter curiously.
“Yes. One wide person that could be stretched all round the table and be joined with a button when it met itself.”
Stuart reminded them that, so far, the room consisted of a ceiling floating on a vacuum, and that if they dawdled so long over Thames Conservancies, they’d never get the walls up before dinner.
“It’s my dinner-hour now,” said Peter, thinking herself a British workman. And Merle remarked that putting up walls was a tough job, and she hadn’t got the right tools, and must fetch her mate.
“We can’t tell yet just how big the Room will need to be, so I vote for elastic-sided walls.”
“Like boots,” Peter murmured. Then roused herself to ask for the height of the Room.
Stuart looked worried, and confessed that he could never gauge heights without the assistance of a giraffe: “Not high heights.”
“A giraffe?”
“I was once told that a giraffe measures twenty-five feet. So in my mind’s eye I always pile giraffe upon giraffe, until I get what I want. One giraffe, added to another ... and another....”
“There, there then, my beautiful,” Peter assured him soothingly, for the multiplicity of giraffe had caused a wild look to creep into his eyes; “you shall have a giraffe in the Room, of course you shall. Anyhow, Merle will want a domestic animal to cuddle on her lap. A giraffe will do nicely, besides being useful for measuring purposes.”
“We can tell the time by it, as well,” Stuart announced in eager defence of his pet. “The tide of the ceiling rises and falls about an inch every six hours; and when it falls, the animal’s head will be wet, and so he’ll always have a cold in his nose, and borrow all our handkerchiefs, and not return them. He says he can’t help it; people don’t realize what a struggle it is to keep one’s head below water.”
“But he’ll want a companion of some sort,” remarked Merle. And because she secretly hoped for a canary, she proposed a tortoise.
“What about a gift-horse? There’s something mysterious about a gift-horse, because nobody may look it in the mouth. No, not even a dentist.”
“But we will!” Stuart cried, in defiance of copy-book precept; “we’ll keep things in its mouth, for the sake of looking at them there; cigarette-cards and photograph albums.”
... A little wind flapped aside the blind, giving a momentary glimpse of sea-lapped rocks and battlements: a castle of enchantment aglow in the ebbing light. Merle immediately decided to have it transported to the Room, for her special use and benefit. Not to be outdone, Stuart and Peter ordered each a castle of like design and pattern; he stipulating, however,for a border of Norfolk Broads in lieu of the Atlantic. And because his manner was wont to become suddenly absent and remote whenever he chanced to speak of his Sailing Paradise, they quickly granted him his desire, and changed the subject, lest he should elude them altogether.
Indeed, Peter was in a terrible tangle; for she had discovered that inside her castle was a room—theRoom, in fact; and this Room in its turn held a castle, the same castle—which held another Room, containing a castle,which——
“Look here,” said Stuart firmly, recalling his mind from halyard and jib, “this must be attended to at once. It’s only a recurring decimal, and if we quickly put in the dot to stop the leakage, there’s no need that it should ever recur.”
Peter demanded carelessly: “Know anything about plumbing?”
Stuart scratched his head. And the girls looked mournfully one at the other.
“Now I ask you, what is the use of a male in the house?” and: “If it were arealman, ofcourse——”
“Damn it!” he exploded. “If you’d wanted to marry a plumber, both of you, you might have mentioned it before the ceremony.” And he added sarcastically: “I daresay St. Quentin knows a lot about plumbing.”
“Or Baldwin,” suggested Merle, who had recently met Mr. Carr at a dinner-party, and derived from him a quantity of pure happiness.
Stuart recovered his good-humour in the joy of a fresh idea: “We’ll run St. Quentin and Baldwin together, and keep the essence in a sentry-box in the Room, for the performing of odd jobs. And we’ll call him—” here a rapid hunt for suitable nomenclature, “we’ll call him Squeith.”
“Combination of St. Quentin and Keith,” commented Peter. “Very good if Baldwin’s name happened to be Keith, but as it isn’t——”
“I’m not going to be put off by a little thing like that. Squeith has got personality. Squeith pleases me. And Squeith shall immediately be set to work on that recurring decimal.”
It was perceived that even while they chattered, Room and castle had already recurred seven times, ending on a Room. And Peter said she would sleep in the last Room but one—the fifth, to be exact,—before the dot was put in.
“And then Squeith can take the animals for a run,” quoth thoughtful little Merle, who remembered that giraffes and gift-horses require a certain amount of exercise. “He can put them on a leash if he likes.”
Stuart grumbled: “He’s sure to come home without them. Or they’ll come home without him. Yes, it’s no good frowning at me, Merle,—Iwillbully Squeith. You’d better have your Balm-for-Wounded-Feelings factory moved into the Room; ‘Nothing but the Best Balm supplied. Beware of Counterfeit. We only use British Bull’s-grease and Home-grown Sympathy.’ I’ll write your advertisements.”
Whereat Peter exclaimed jealously that if Merle had a factory, she would have trains; she must have trains, instantly—“just as if I could ever live in a Room without trains. An Outer Circle line running the whole way round, close under the walls; with real tunnels and signal-boxes. And you can advertise your Balm inside the darkest tunnel, where it won’t disturb the landscape. My railway shall start from Euston, ofcourse——”
—“And end at Euston,” Merle reminded her, laughing, “if it’s a Circle railway.”
“Quite right. The lines shall be laid for the purpose of taking passengers from Euston to Euston. I’ve always longed for just such a gloriously unpractical service of trains.”
And here Stuart interposed with the offer of his almost forgottenWagon-lit, the tame redWagon-litwith trustful brown eyes, hitherto kept in the back garden among the washing.
“Want a present too,” Merle pleaded.
He gave her a clothes-line, so that she could be perpetually wringing out her soul, and hanging it up to dry. In return for which piece of impertinence, she presented him with a nice easy rack, which he could work himself, like a barrel-organ, by turning a handle; and thus practise for half an hour every morning after breakfast, the self-torture he so affected.
“He shall have an obstacle race as well,” put in Peter lavishly; “running just inside my Outer Circle radius. With hurdles and barriers and sacks and barbed wire. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Stuart darling?”
“We should have to provide a barber to barb the wire. One can’t buy it barbed.”
“Very well; I don’t mind a few shops. Just a barber and—and a post-office, because of bull’s-eyes——”
“Stamps?” enquired Stuart anxiously.
“No.Onlybull’s-eyes. Why do you think I wanted a post-office?”
Merle thought that a Moonshade Shop might be useful: “It looks as if the moonshine in the Room were likely to be strong, and Peter and I must think of our complexions. Moonshades and paralunes.” And she imagined them pretty filmy things, woven of dyed spider-webs, with opalescent handles and spikes.
Then they added to the row, a Railway Shop, which, combining butcher and baker and fishmonger in one, provided those peculiar comestibles to be met with at station-buffets and in dining-cars alone. In particular, there existed the notorious Railway-fish, white and sticky, of which large numbers should swim in a sunken tank in the Railway Shop, till such time as required for consumption.
Then, as if one shop bred another, it was discovered that these wary fish could not be caught save with a bent pin on a piece of string; thus involving the erection of a Bent-pin Shop.
“Because in the usual farthing-change packets, they only give you straight pins,” said Peter, knitting her brows; “and straight pins aren’t a bit of good for Railway-fish.”
“What about a pub. or two?” Stuart proposed carelessly.
Merle scented danger: “No, dear.”
“Just one,” he pleaded; “a nice little public-house bearing the sign: Private. There’s the ‘Cat and Adage,’ been lying about since the evening we first met, Peter.”
“Oh, if it comes to that,” she bragged, “I’ve got plenty of pubs myself: The ‘Benison,’ for instance, inspired by A. C. Benson’s life of Tennyson. That would be non-alcoholic, of course; with a permanent impression in the window, of birds dark against a peaceful sunset.”
Stuart approved of the ‘Benison.’ “I like its nice rich ripe blessing-of-the-Archbishop-of-Canterbury flavour. And Squeith can patronize it for his morning glass of milk-and-soda. I’ve thought of anotherone——”
“No, Stuart!” Merle threw into her voice all the pent-up anguish of an inebriate’s wife.
Stuart and Peter looked rebellious.
“I’m not going to have my nice tidy Room littered up with pubs.” Merle declared passionately. “You must keep them in the conservatory or the lumber-closet. I shall have quite enough dusting on my hands, as it is, what with threecastles——”
“One of them recurring,” put in Peter.
“Yes, and two Eustons and the giraffe and a Norfolk Broad and a sentry-box and I don’t know what else. Whatever I shall do onThursdays——”
“Thursdays?”
“Thursdays?”
“The day the Room gets turned out,” Merle enlightened their double ignorance.
“Oh!”
“It seems rather a shame that Merle should be bothered with all that,” Stuart mused thoughtfully. “What about having a property Womanly-Woman to see to the dusting?”
Peter assented rather reluctantly; she was quite sure that the Womanly-woman would make her wear gloves. “Oh well! if she became at all obstreperous, we could always break her up, and re-form her as something else. An Ancient Retainer, say; or a Rabbit. These Plasticine figures are awfully useful.”
“There’d be a bit of Womanly-Woman over from a Rabbit; enough to make a tea-spoon, or a halo, or any domestic trifle of that description.”
“Then are we to have no real human people in the Room, except just ourselves?” Merle queried. “No—children?”
Stuart shook his head. “No children. Only childishness.” For he recognized, deep down in his heart, that real children would stigmatize the Room and all it contained, as “silly rot.” And demand bricks and Noah’s Arks and Tiddley-winks. And somehow the knowledge hurt; because he knew with what fatal ease he too could slide outside and say the same: “Silly rot—silly rot——” “It isn’t! Rot, if you like—notsillyrot!”... but even now he was slipping.... “It isn’t! it isn’t—Peter....”
Peter guessed what was happening: “No, of course it isn’t,” quickly. And to divert him, contributed to the Room a sailing-boat, a rustic sailing-boat, stationary, and overgrown with ivy and clematis. And from the stern should depend a tiny toy sailing-boat, price sixpence halfpenny, which they could really sail on a pieceof string. “And we’ll name it the ‘Strike-me-pink,’” cried Peter fiercely.
“And paint it green,” added Stuart, feeling better. And then, in opposition, he offered a nautical summer-house, with decks, and ropes, and a burgee fluttering bravely from the mainmast.
The Room might by now be considered almost complete in its furnishings. With a Heaven-born inspiration, Merle placed in its exact centre a small bamboo table, rather rickety, on which reposed a vase of flowers.
“Don’t you think,” Peter demanded doubtfully, “that it looks a wee bit out of place among all those castles and animals and things?”
“Not at all;” Merle was inclined to be huffy. “Merely the feminine touch about the home;” and she considered the possibility of draping Euston with an antimacassar.
... Bit by bit, as the red ball of the sun quenched its fires in the chill Atlantic, so the dingy little number nine bedroom of the Ocean Hotel, grew darker and darker still. At last nothing could be descried save the grey outlines of the tin basin; a glimmer across the cracked looking-glass; on and around the bed, three figures, dimly sprawling.
But in their own Playroom, the trio disport themselves as lords and emperors. Boundless space is theirs; time without limit; while facts they prick and shrivel like toy-balloons.
Peter, astride of the engine which draws herwagon-lit, is whizzing round and round the Outer Circle, all the signals in her favour, that naught shall arrest her triumphant speed.
Merle, discovering that Stuart has, after all, succeeded in importing his private public-house, enters through its swing-doors, nothing loth to demand a strawberry-ice-creamsoda. The while Stuart dangles his legs from the notched parapet of his castle; and noting Squeith in the act of hailing the bell-buoy who sells the morning muffins, impishly frustrates all such traffic by a sudden alteration of the time to half-past five p.m.
“Tea is on the table,” he chants, a super-leprechaun; “and Squeith has missed the muffin-man again! Poor Squeith! for himalwaysthe muffin that is stale; for him it is always yesterday.”
“And for us?” cries Peter, making a trumpet of her hands, as she travels past at sixty miles an hour. And just catches his shouted reply, wind-borne: “For us it is always to-morrow!”
“But it can’t be to-morrow without a to-day, can it?” argues Merle, returning refreshed from the ‘Benison.’
“Why, yes; it can be the-day-after-to-morrow from yesterday!”
... The housemaid tapped, and entered with the hot water.
“Shall I light the gas, Miss?”
“Yes, please;” Peter’s voice seemed to come from very far away.
While the housemaid hunted for the matches, a figure rose nonchalantly from the floor, and stole out into the passage. So that the flare of light revealed merely two sleepy-eyed girls lying across the bed.
Stuart solved the riddle which lay in the personality of Mine Host, by declaring that whereas in summer he followed the fair and guileless calling of hotel-keeper, in winter a bolder voice summoned him forth, and he threw off his disguises, and donned ear-rings, and became a Corsair. And indeed there was that about him of jolly rakish raffish swagger, a roll in his gait, and a ruddiness of visage, and withal a disposition to solemn winking of the left eye, and a tendency to be found in odd moments dancing strange dances the length of his own hall, which gave to such a suggestion a flavour of likelihood.
Moreover, the Corsair had surrounded himself by a bewildering bevy of females, whom he called variously his wife, his cousin, his housekeeper, his secretary, and his manageress; but who were obviously delicious yieldings of his six-months’ piracy.
But the Ocean Hotel could produce no equally satisfactory solution to the problem of Merle, Peter, and Stuart; and the various possibilities in the way of marital, sentimental, immoral, or blood relationship, that their companionship entailed. Perceiving this, Stuart found gentle delight in preserving strict impartiality in the bestowal of his outward affections. The Spanish waiter at the Billet-doux would have known much in common with the Five Females of the Ocean Hotel. A climax was reached, when, under their assembled eyes, Peter entered the breakfast-room andhanded a tobacco-pouch to her lord and master, reminding him in bell-like tones that he had left it in her room. Whereat a shudder passed from guest to guest, and a horrified voice remarked with more virtue than grammar, “Guessed it was her—I mean, one can always tell!”
Then enter Merle with a book and a box of matches and a green felt slipper: “You must have left them in my room, Stuart ...” and Stuart affected great embarrassment,—and they were all three very happy and contented.
But when the visitors at the hotel complained of people who go from table to table before meals; deliberately and in the sight of all, pouring cream from smaller vessels into one gigantic bowl, thereafter placed upon their own table; then the Five Females did so persistently harass and beset the Corsair, that he became quite melancholy, and would sit all day long in the porch, gazing seawards, without even the heart to nudge Peter in the ribs as she passed him by; a delicate attention she sorely missed. For he liked the trio, perhaps recognizing in them the germs of piracy, and was loth to give them notice to quit.
“You know, I really believe we shall be slung out before to-morrow,” laughed Stuart; “we’re not a bit popular.” They were at that moment topping for the first time the westward slope of moor. Not yet had they succeeded in finding their path to the sea. Peter had almost despaired of feeling the cool water swell and ebb about her ankles.
And then, suddenly, they saw Carn Trewoofa.
Carn Trewoofa lay tucked in a little cove, the green arm of the cliff flung protectingly around it, as who should say: “All right, dear; the nasty grim granite-land shan’t touch you then!” And the toy fishing-village believed this, and was at peace, drowsy and tumbled in the warm sunshine.
A toy fishing-village. Patched roofs; thatchedroofs; roofs both patched and thatched; wild and abandoned young roofs, seemingly kept only in their places by heavy chains or great slabs of stone. Sturdy, ugly stone walls, defying the winds, that, despite protective arm, dealt sometimes roughly with toy villages. Dwellings of all shapes and sizes, impartial dwellings for lobster or fowl or human. Round windlass-tower, painted a startling white, presumably with what was left over from the coastguard stones. Wood and slate and tar. Overturned boats and baskets. Nets hung to dry; smocks dangling to dry; dogs and children spread to dry; and on a rough bench outside the lifeboat shed, a row of old salts, bearded and tough and stringy, and beyond the utmost limits of dryness, so that the sun could do to them no more.
A toy village, no doubt! The kind that one has longed to play with, ever since first meeting it in picture book. Nor did it beguile with false whispers, as had done the rest of the false land of Cornwall. For the coastguard’s path ran straight down the cliff-side to the very doors of the first fowl-house; and the rocks and pools of the Atlantic trespassed so far into the heart of the village, that it was difficult to disentangle them. A way to the sea at last.... Merle and Peter ran shouting down and on and out, the length of a baby stone lug that curved into the water, thinking in its infant delusion, that it broke the force of the waves. And there, at the very furthest end, they turned and surveyed Carn Trewoofa, spread in a glimmer of gold before them. And they remarked the multitude of boats strewn drunkenly on the cobbled slope from the shore to the first cluster of huts; remarked the fleet of boats that rocked and swung on the vivid green of the bay; green that beyond the lug deepened and glowed to shadowed ultramarine. And they received a hint that somewhere was an inn; and somewhere else the twisted fragments of an ancient wreck; and all aboutwere seagulls, swooping and balancing and shrieking. And well-pleased with this latest and most complete piece of nursery-ware designed for their happiness, they turned their gaze outwards, there to be met by a rust-red sail passing swift as a dream over the broken white wave-crests; while a mile nearer to the horizon, a quaint clockwork lighthouse reared itself from a group of rocks, and made believe to guard the bay.
Then Merle rubbed her eyes, and turned to Peter, and asked if it were really all to be had for the price of two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny? and might she please carry it home herself?
Stuart joined them on the lug. “They can’t yarn,” he said regretfully, jerking his thumb towards the line of ancient salts. “I’ve tried them and they can’t. In fact, I believe they’re tin.”
“Detachable?” queried Peter.
“No; on a row. I daresay it would be possible to break one off from the end. But they’re too old and glazed to be taught much; we must start with the new generation, and teach the young idea how to salt. Perhaps if we sowed among them a few volumes of W. W. Jacobs—I say, come along and explore.”
They entered Carn Trewoofa softly, as if fearful it should break or melt or in some such magical fashion manifest its unreality. And, picking her way between rope and anchor and occasionally a stray doorstep where there was no door, Merle came to a correct conclusion regarding the origin of this wonder-corner: It was smell made concrete. Someone had waved a wand over a handful of the richly mingled prevailing odour of seaweed and sea, tar and fish and clover, straw and fowl, soil and stone and lobster-pot; muttered a few compelling words—and the result was Carn Trewoofa.
The trio were just able to add to their medley of impressions, the mad swirl of paths, seven to one hut, that none could tell its back nor yet its front; and theyet madder swirl of chickens, seventy to one hen, and seven orphans to boot. Every ten yards traversed showed them a painted slab set in the wall, or in a door, or even on a roof; a slab and a slit and the word: Letters. They speculated what would happen if somebody failed to realize that this was a toy village, and posted real epistles in these alluring receptacles. “They are intended for all the letters one has never sent,” Stuart declared; “letters to my own feet, or to my great-uncle in Heaven; to the Times, and to a skylark, and to the Red King in Looking-glass Land.”
Likewise he discovered the national fisheress costume to be a cricket-cap; and counted no less than eight of these articles in the wearing. “Which proves that once, many years ago, a cricket team rounded the point in a pleasure steamer. And the Corsair lured them all to their destruction. But their caps were washed up on the shore, and worn ever since by the Women of Carn Trewoofa.—Nine! I’ll stalk the lot e’er yet I quit this spot.” He counted the tenth on the head of a buxom matron standing outside the “Longships” inn, and doing most effective things with two buckets and a pump.
She nodded pleasantly to the three, and asked them in raucous Cornish whether they were strangers in the land.
“Very,” responded Peter gloomily.
The wearer of the tenth cricket cap volunteered the information that she had rooms to let.
“At the inn!” gasped Merle.
“Nay; up-along yon villa. T’inn be nowt fur t’ young leddies.”
Smilingly she indicated a grey stone cottage standing high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill; its blind patient eyes looking steadily across the bay, past the toy fishing-fleet, to where sea and sky merged in a blue quivering haze.
They followed their guide into the tiny sitting-room of the “villa.” And there Peter cast herself with a sighof voluptuous content upon a slippery slithery horsehair sofa; and Merle threw open the lid of a wheezy harmonium—and broke it; and Stuart remained transfixed before two black ivory elephants, which stood upon the mantelpiece. And they each and all declared their intention of remaining in their new quarters, never again to return to the disapproving atmosphere of the Ocean Hotel.
Mrs. Trenner beamed. They did not realize then that her rosy good-humour concealed the will of a Napoleon. For Mrs. Trenner was the autocrat of Carn Trewoofa; its leader and counsellor; by virtue of her unfailing prosperity and the excellence of her cooking. She owned the inn, and property besides; and she owned her husband and son and husband’s brother’s wife and their offspring, even as she now owned Merle and Peter and Stuart. The sons and husbands of other women might drown at sea; not so Mrs. Trenner’s. The chickens of other women might cross the road and be run over on the occasion of the fortnightly visit of the butcher’s cart; never Mrs. Trenner’s chickens. Therefore she wore her cricket-cap jauntily. On her indeed had fallen some of the radiance of that Star of Good Fortune under whose mellow auspices Stuart had been born. She and Stuart became, in consequence, excellent friends, though the language they spoke was mutually uncanny and perplexing.
“I’m not going to budge from here,” quoth Peter again. “J’y suis et j’y reste.Isn’t that so, Mrs. Trenner?”
Mrs. Trenner hesitated: “Well, theere t’es,” she ejaculated at last; her favourite expression in moments of emergency.
Peter continued: “Merle shall go upstairs and feel the beds, and see if the mattress is clay soil, or whatever has to be done under those circs. And Stuart can return to the hotel and pack our suit-cases.”
Stuart demurred. He might cope with the Corsair, he said, were it not for the Five Females. So they all returned to the hotel, telling Mrs. Trenner to have their dinner on the table that very evening. And they said this in all innocence, knowing nothing of the dinner, nor of what lay before them.
Before quitting Carn Trewoofa, Merle dashed through the tiny doorway marked “Mrs. Nanvorrow, Grocer,” just to see what lay hidden in its murky depths. She returned with a pennyworth of peardrops, and a fearsome account of an old ancient crone sitting in the kitchen, surrounded on floor, ceiling and walls, by china; a frenzied orgy of china; a veritable Bacchanal of china; china that sprouted and multiplied and literally asked for the destroying bull. “She squawked at me like a parrot,” Merle related in awestruck whispers, “and called me ‘dearie.’” She paused impressively. They were trudging up the cliff-path towards the Coastguard Station.
—“And I’ve discovered the eleventh cap. It was on the Witch’s head.”
Then Stuart sat down, and reproached her bitterly. He didn’t want any of the caps now, he said, if he couldn’t be left to find them himself. And anyway, stalking cricket-caps was a man’s job, in the pursuance of which, he considered Merle both unladylike and officious. “It isn’t as if I were childish about things,” concluded Stuart.
Then he looked Peter full in the eyes; and she laughed aloud at his utter childishness, knowing of the man beneath; knowing he knew she was by now aware of it. And Merle laughed with her, unconscious as yet that two of the three were playing games no more.
“Are ye all reet?” demanded Mrs. Trenner, hovering round their three chairs.
“It’s a feast of Lucullus,” sighed Peter, eating fresh young crab.
And Stuart, over an oozing pasty, declared that Mrs. Trenner must be a reincarnation of the cook primarily responsible for Epicurean philosophy.
“Well, theere t’es!” but Mrs. Trenner was obviously not satisfied. Then, nibbling at a saffron cake, Merle said gently, in words of one syllable: “The best I have yet ate, Mrs. Trenner.” And, wreathed in smiles, their landlady departed to the kitchen, there to retail to Maid Bessy, the one comprehensible bit of praise.
“Best she yet ate—thet’s what her said tu me, t’little leddy....”
“I foresee,” quoth Stuart, “that we shall have to leave to Merle the hectic chorus of praise which must inevitably accompany all our meals. Mrs. Trenner doesn’t appreciate our classic mode of expression, Peter.”
Peter moaned: “It’s awful; she gives us five times too much, and seems to take personal pride in our appetites. I daren’t leave a morsel. There’s something chubbily relentless about that woman. However, thank goodness there can be nothing more to come now.”
Mrs. Trenner entered; in one hand a plate of cheese-straws wherewith to break the camel’s back; in the other a bottle of Pond’s Extract.
“Are ye all reet?” she demanded, placing these upon the table. The three gazed, worried, at the Pond’s Extract. Was it local fashion to consume this with their cheese-straws?
“Mis’ Gurton, she thet hev t’ big room faacin’ this, she sent it over, thinkin’ ee might hev tired feet o’ nights, after walkin’,” volunteered Mis’ Gurton’s messenger. Then, hovering uncertainly awhile, in the difficulty of removing herself through the door, without assistant impetus, Mrs. Trenner shot forth: “Well, theere t’es”—and vanished.
“Evidently,” mused Peter, “one leaves Pond’s Extract in lieu of cards, up-along tu Carn Trewoofa. I suppose we are bound by etiquette to return toothpaste or Dinneford’s Magnesia upon Mis’ Gurton. They seem inclined to be friendly here.”
Outside the little square of window, the sky-colour was fast being drained and sucked into the West; and over the line of moor, a pale lemon-coloured moon wound and unwound herself like a dancer amidst trailing wisps of cloud, lilac and tender pink. Swaying rhythmically from the fading glow of day to the lifeless pallor of evening, the little dark fleet of fishing-boats could be glimpsed in the bay.
Indeed, Carn Trewoofa was inclined to be friendly with the strangers.
—Stuart leapt the low wall, and made a dash for a group of sheds huddled in the farmhouse yard.
“Come along!” he cried; and helter-skelter, through the icy sting of rain, they followed his lead.
... Something enormous hurled itself impotently against the wooden door, as they slammed it behind them.
“It’s a pig. I saw it,” gasped Peter. Her hand fumbled for the latch, could not find it; small wonder, since it existed on the further side of the door. The latter opened inwards. Peter leant against it the full weight of her body: “Help! it’s big and black and bulging—and it’s coming in!”
“Let it,” quoth Stuart indifferently. “Who are we, to object to a respectable old sow?”
But Merle, sitting exhausted in the trough, avowed a firm refusal to share this harbour of refuge with aught whatsoever in the pork line. So Stuart took Peter’s place at the door; and she sank into the trough beside Merle, and through the dim light watched with breathless interest the fierce encounter between man and beast, divided only by a thin partition of wood. Again and yet again did the ungainly monster hurl its quivering bulk to the assault, till the insecure building rocked and shook. Disgusted snortings and gruntings mingled pleasantly with the lash of the rain, and the distant chime of church-bells from Carn Trewoofa, six miles to the south from this clump of moorland huts and farms.
“My—sympathies—are all—with—the—pig,” jerked out Stuart, holding his own against terrific odds. “After all, itisher sty. An English pig’s sty is her castle.”
Chorus of indignant assent from the pig.
And then Merle was suddenly seized by an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
“Peter, it’s Sunday afternoon, first Sunday in the month; and our At Home day at Lancaster Gate. Did your little granddaughter’s frock come from Paris,chère Madame? mais tout à fait charmante.”
The pig rallied for yet a final onslaught. This time she was just able to inject a bristling snout....
Merle liked to feel that she was ‘making friends with the rustics.’ Nevertheless, sitting abreast of the low sea-wall, she looked somewhat astonished at the bearded veteran who slouched to her side; and, pointing to a picturesque abode covered by a round roof of mud, announced fiercely, and without any preamble, that it was to be razed to the ground, after he and his had dwelt therein for close on four hundred years.
“Taaken from me an’ destroyed, next Monday week. Iss. An’ me without a hoam tu put my foot in et.”
“There’s no place like home for putting one’s foot in it,” murmured Peter, in the background, to Stuart.
Merle heeded them not; she was busy sympathizing with the ‘peasant heart of England.’
“Fur why?” demanded the man, brandishing his stick. “Fur nowt. Bit o’ rain pourin’ through roof an’ in our beds. Mud isna slate.”
“No, no, indeed,” cooed Merle. (“Do be quiet, Peter.”)
The veteran swung round, and indicated a timid-looking damsel standing a few yards off: “Yon’s my daughter. Yon’s t’ girl as gets fits.” His tone rang with such pride, that Stuart stepped forward and congratulated him heartily.
“How very sad for the poor girl,” Merle raised hyacinth wells of sympathy to the weather-beaten face above hers. (“Stuart!”)
“Eh, thet’s t’lass. She du get them moastly in chapel, she du.”
“Oh,” brightly, “then wouldn’t it be better if she never went to chapel?”
A gurgle of laughter from Peter. Merle turned her back yet more squarely upon her irrepressible companions.
“Ne’er can tell when she be gettin’ one o’ they fits. Scream, she du, an’ fling up her arms.” He regarded his talented offspring intently. “Seem tu me, she be gettin’ thet way now....”
Merle fled.
“Never mind, then,” Stuart teased her half an hour later. “Sheshallbe remembered in the hearts of the people. She shall understand the simple joys and sorrows of the rudepeasantry——”
“After all,” Peter finished consolingly, “you’re the only one of us who can make Mrs. Trenner understand what pudding we want for lunch.”
Merle cried, casting herself upon their beloved horsehair sofa:
“Oh, what a day! I’ve never been so happy—and never so gloriously disgracefully untidy!”
Then Peter and Stuart looked long upon her, and looked at each other and smiled. For despite her delusions to the contrary, Merle’s vaunted ‘untidiness’ merely succeeded in fitting her to her present frame, as surely as the central figure of a Cornish Riviera poster; a daintily clad mermaid was she, pale-faced and lissom, with eyes reflecting the stormier tints of the sea; delicate ankles; blue-green jersey, closely blown to the figure; hair waving in long strands, albeit not wispily, about her shoulders.
“Merle’s appearance,” remarked Stuart, “is of the very few that can be trusted to look after itself for hours together. Now Peter’s physiognomy needs careful attention every five minutes; it burns and flushes and freckles; and her hair gets really untidy, not merely picturesquely ruffled; and her cap falls to the back of her head, and the buttons are off her skirt, and her neck is mottled mahogany, and oh, her jersey! how sagged and dragged and bagged itwas——”
“But then, how it was cheap,” finished Peter.
“When are you two girls going home?” suddenly. “I’m off at to-morrow’s dawn. The call of diamonds. You’d better fix another day; we don’t want to look back on a long journey together, and a sulky, sooty arrival in London, as an ending to all this that we have had. It would be ungrateful.”
“O thou of the Hairpin Vision!” but Peter understood his mood. “When do we want to go, Merle?”
“Saturday is my birthday, and grandmaman is giving me a dinner-party of all the people I hate most. We may as well leave on Friday morning. It’s Wednesday to-day, isn’t it?” vaguely.
“Tuesday. By the way, what have you done about your letters home? Postmarks, I mean.”
“Carn Trewoofa is the nearest postal town to Orson Manor in Devonshire,” replied Merle. And Stuart sat down beside her on the sofa, and discoursed pleasantlyon the lake of fire and brimstone, till Mrs. Trenner appeared to introduce them to their lunch, in its raw and natural condition. After which, she retired to cook it. Even Carn Trewoofa is no stranger to certain conditions of etiquette.
... So they all three squatted upon the outermost rock, and waited to be Caught by the Tide.
Sitting thus, bare-legged, knees hunched up to the chin, hands clasped about the knees, eyes solemn with expectation, they might have served for an illustration to some children’s tale of adventure. Peter wore a floppy crimson cap on her pale tangle of hair. Merle’s two heavy black plaits hung uncrowned. They did not speak; only gazed outwards, to desolate seas beyond the seas that have an end; and waited ... patiently. The lapping of water was the only sound. A wee crab, a green crab, waddled crookedly forth to examine with interest the thirty toes dangling into his private pool.
A south-westerly breeze blew upon their tanned throats ... and the light began to ebb.
Seven days now had they tarried in Carn Trewoofa, and had not yet succeeded in being Caught by the Tide. Therefore shame was upon them.
For the waves of Cornwall said: “If we surround them, they will merely elude us. And if they elude us, they will regard our strength and our cunning as mere attributes in a game of play invented by themselves. They are not as others, these strangers in the land. So we will not be beguiled into an attempt to drown them. They shall return to their homes without the supreme wonder and glory of being Caught by the Tide.”
Thus the Waves of Cornwall.
... And when they had been fully nineteen minutes on the outermost rock of all, waiting ... patiently ... Peter said in a very small voice: “Do you think, oh,do you think, it can be because the tide is going out?”
Stuart replied: “Peter, Peter, I didn’t like to say so before, but I am afraid it is indeed because the tide is going out.”
“If we were now in France, we would be Caught by the Tide.”
“But we are in Cornwall.”
... And sorrowfully they rose, and picked their way over the slippery boulders, towards the beckoning grey cottage that stood high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill.
The little south-westerly breeze was gaining in strength.
The little south-westerly breeze had become a south-westerly gale. It blew a great restlessness into Stuart that evening, so that he walked ceaselessly from window to door of the cottage, and at last suggested going forth to meet the elements squarely, and without the intervention of stone or glass.
Merle was drowsy from much scrambling, said she preferred to remain peacefully within.
“Come along, Peter.”
And from a lazy desire likewise to refuse the battle, the other girl quickened to something in his tones; without a word, threw on a heavy cloak; and, bare-headed, followed him through the village, and up the coastguard’s path to the crest of the cliff.
Here the wind caught them; not erratically, nor in gasping squally fashion, but a massed wall of wind, blowing steadily, straight and hard from across the sea, with never a swell nor yet a drop in the strength and sound of it. A mighty cleansing wind, causing every muscle and nerve of the body to be braced in resistance, without a second of rest or relaxation.
From far below, echoed the cold crash of breakers on the rocks. Far above, torn battalions of cloud swirled witlessly across a shuddering moon. Along the cliff, white splashes that marked by day the coastguard’s path, now came and went like evil staring faces....
Stuart swung on, unfaltering; Peter followed as best she might. Once she stumbled. He stopped, and flung a guiding arm about her.
“I can walk alone,” said Peter.
“I know you can....” The tempest hurled his voice straight past her, and across the black stretch of moor. “And it’s because you can walk alone, that you’re going to walk with me now.”
They pressed forward, eluding carefully what they thought was bog-land, only to discover on looking back, that they had been tricked by shadows. And shadows, again, resolved themselves into marsh-patches, yielding and treacherous. A fine rain sprayed their coats to a glitter. The moon had been beaten from her fields, leaving the world in a roar of darkness.... Once they halted abruptly on the verge of nothing, where the land had been eaten away. Once they followed the cliff that ran out sheer to a point, crested by dark shapes of granite, monsters thrown up æons ago by the waves.
Peter and Stuart stood motionless for several moments, rigid bodies thrusting at the wall of wind, that blew with never a drop nor yet a swell in the strength and sound of it; stripped from them all memory of a narrower stuffier world.
—“Tired?”
“Of the wind?”
“Of me, then?”
“I’ve never yet met the man who could tire me.”
“Never?”
“Never!”
With a laugh, he turned, strode back to the mainland. Then, facing suddenly round, met her scramblingdown from the granite. Met her, and put his arms about her—this time neither in support nor in guidance, but fiercely, and because of the thing that had lain crouching between them, now storm-whipped to sudden life. Her short hair beat and stung against his face. Their lips were stiff and crusted with salt. It was not a night for words. Once he spoke her name....
Later, swinging down the homeward path, they came upon sight of Carn Trewoofa, three or four stray lights splashing the darkness. It was good to know that one of these was from Merle’s lamp. Good to imagine her sitting in the battered arm-chair by the window, thinking of the other two in the turmoil outside.
Good to be the two in the turmoil outside.
Stuart’s departure meant for Peter and Merle a period of twoness deliciously free from the tension of extreme demand which he made upon their minds and bodies alike. Mentally and physically, they allowed themselves now to flop; excluding long tramps and dangerous climbs; mooching for the most part in and about the village, or among the shallower rocks; hardly talking; secure in the friendship that took much for granted.
The morning before Carn Trewoofa was to see the last of them, they awoke to a drenching downpour, which beat sea and moor and sky to one sodden colourless pulp. All day long the rain descended sullenly; and towards evening Merle coaxed Mrs. Trenner to transfer live fire, leaping and flaming on a shovel, from her kitchen to their sitting-room grate. Then she and Peter drew up their arm-chairs, definitely abandoned all idea of making an effort, and allowed themselves to be lulled to that half-hypnotic state of coma produced by warmth within and rain without; hush unbroken save by the muffled boom of unseen breakers on the beach.
“Good thing he’s gone,” murmured Merle; “Stuart hasn’t got a fire-light mood.”
“How d’you know?”
“Instinct.”
“I believe you’re right,” Peter conceded; “he can find pleasure in the rest he earns by utter exhaustion; none in just volupping.”
“Good word.”
“Yes,” said Peter, and proceeded to volupp, eyes half-closed, arms hanging over the side of the chair; too luxuriously lazy even to rise for a cigarette.
Dusk and the rain joined hands beyond the streaming squares of window. The moving world was very far away from Carn Trewoofa in its greyness. From the kitchen, two voices rose and fell in sing-song fashion; not seeming to belong to Mrs. Trenner or Bessy or any human shape; merely voices, monotonous, ceaseless, chanting.
Merle had since several minutes been watching Peter intently. All of a sudden she cried: “Don’t!”
The other girl roused herself from reverie: “Don’t what?”
“That sleepy-tiger look of yours. I hate it.”
“Why?”
“It’s so—replete.”
Peter laughed. “Perhaps it has been fed and wants exercise.”
“On a lead? Up and down the Park for twenty minutes every day? Oh, Peter, why haven’t I too got a tiger to sit beside yours on the wall?”
“It doesn’t sit on a wall,” retorted Peter, who was inclined to take her tiger seriously.
“Darling, you know it’s only a Nestlé’s-Milk Advertisement Cat. The fat creamy one. We’ll call it a tiger, if you like. It’s a very fine cat.”
Peter picked up the pair of sand-shoes which Stuart had left a-sprawl on the fender; and musingly fingered the torn soles: “Millionaire’s footgear,” she murmured scornfully; certainly they were in a disgracefully tattered condition. She pulled the two elephants from the mantelpiece, and laid one at rest in either shoe.... “Elephant cradles....”
“Are you talking in your sleep?” queried Merle.
“I was pondering the matter of Cheap Sentiment,”lied Peter. “I’ve got whole Marshes of Cheap Sentiment in my being, which I dare not show, nor even countenance, but which are unmistakably spreading.”
Merle snuggled deeper into her arm-chair, and cooed encouragement: “Go on, Peter!”
“Just think,” gently rocking the elephant cradles, “if I admitted Stuart to my passion for curly-haired small infants; told him that carols sung on frosty nights bring a lump to my throat; or that organ music makes me want to be good. Yes, it does, Merle—honest injun! And I like stroking somebody’s hair in the firelight, and simply ache at times for the strong shoulder to leanon——”
“Try Stuart’s,” suggested Merle unkindly. And Peter shuddered.
“Shoulders! he’s got ridges; they’d cut like a knife; and what isn’t ridge is knobs. No, I meant the sort of shoulder, with that traditional Harris-tweed scent ‘that ever afterwards brought his image with such cruel distinctness before her mental vision.’ You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course I do;Pour qui prenez-vous moi?But your marshes are specially bad. Tell me some more.”
“Call of Spring,” continued Peter, just letting the murmured words drop from between her lips; “and the scent of jasmine on a hot night.”
“Tiger again?”
“Um.”
Merle had an inspiration: “What about letting that tiger graze on the marshes?”
“Bad for it to graze anywhere,” said Peter grimly. “Then there’s the Marsh of ‘do-you-remember’ and ‘this-time-a-year-ago,’ deep slushy ones, both of them; particular favourites of mine. And the clash of bells on New Year’s Eve awakens feelings unutterable within me. So do soldiers marching past; and a cheering crowd. I’m attached to the house in which I was born.I keep letters. I don’t mind Tennyson half as much as I pretend. And when I read about lonely children, I cry. And then I can cry at seeing myself cry—it’s a most pathetic sight!”
“Is all that genuine?” real concern now in her friend’s voice.
“Yes.... And sometimes, Merle, I just long to take the whole bag of tricks and fling them at Stuart’s head; it would be so good for him!” A half-smile tilted her lips, as she reflected how she had continually burlesqued to Stuart these same sentimental weaknesses, without once letting a hint escape that she shared in them.
The fire yawned audibly, and plopped a coal into the stillness. The sense of isolation was thick as cotton-wool.
—Crunch of footsteps up the path and on the steps. Then a loud and penetrating double knock. A dog leapt from the kitchen, barking furiously. Mrs. Trenner was heard unbolting to the intruder. The door flew open to great gusts of wind and rain. A gruff voice spoke for a moment. Retreating steps, closed door, a subdued whine from the dog ... and Mrs. Trenner brought in two sopping blurred letters that were the cause of so much sudden tumult. Then returned again to the kitchen. Silence swallowed the cottage with a gulp, and all was as before.
“Both from Stuart,” quoth Merle, handing one envelope to Peter; “how typical of him to break in with all that clamour.”
Her communication was the longer of the two, and took her several minutes to read; once or twice she laughed aloud at some brilliant flight of nonsense. At last, according to invariable custom, she tossed the scribbled-over sheets to Peter for inspection—“Here you are,” and held out her hand for the exchange....
Peter did not stir; her fingers clenched a littletighter on the letter which lay in her lap. Into her eyes had crept again that look, brooding and replete, to which Merle had so objected.
... Merle withdrew her hand. Between the two girls lay the sensation of a moment dead.
One letter which could be shown—and one which couldn’t ... Merle understood now.
The journey up to London was an uncomfortable one. Peter and Merle avoided each other as much as possible. Never before had they been brought to a pass where open discussion was mutually barred. Once, Peter mentioned very casually that Stuart in his letter ... had summoned them on arrival to meet him straightway at the Billet-doux for dinner. Merle courteously acknowledged the invitation. If matters had been otherwise, she would have rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect of being hurled direct from their primitive abode in Carn Trewoofa, to the contrasting blaze and bustle of a London restaurant. But aware that the stunt had been arranged for Peter, not for herself, she wished fervently she could withdraw altogether, wondered how long she would instinctively be forced to obey the call of trio, dance to its elusive melody. How long?—Why, how long had she already been fooled to the belief that she was necessary to complete the figure of three? How long had this—thing—been growing?... The slow train drew up with a jerk at Exeter, and refused for thirty-five minutes to stir from beside the wet shining platform. Peter was restless; thudded with her foot against the ground. And Merle, knowing now the cause, resented her restlessness: “She can’t wait till she sees him again.”
After interminable jolts and stoppages, Paddington Station. Twenty to seven,—seven o’clock they were due at the Billet-doux. “What shall we do with our suit-cases?” “I’m taking mine to Euston waiting-room,ready to be picked up on my way home.” “Then I’ll leave mine at a convenient Tube station; Oxford Circus will do.”... They were both thankful for the suit-cases.
A taxi hailed, and directions given. And whereas Merle, in the whirl through the lit crowded streets, grieved for the laughter missed, Peter was reproaching herself for an inexplicable wish to be doing all this alone; alone to be meeting Stuart at seven o’clock. She had not seen him since that night on the moors; he had slipped away the next morning before his companions were out of bed.
Her excitement grew. Merle looked at her, once, by the flashing arc of a street-lamp—then glanced quickly away again.
Outward circumstances were well in favour of a successful trio party. Memory of dark green moor and sun-splashed waves and all the details that went to make Carn Trewoofa,—and at the doors of the Billet-doux behold now Stuart in evening-clothes and silk hat and a man-about-town set to his eyeglass: “So glad you could come,” in the Oxford voice,—had he everreallyshown them his bare grazed knees?
“We do look pirates,” exclaimed Peter, laughingly conscious of brown throat, and hair tangled to a web by the salt winds. And indeed, many heads were turned to gaze after the two girls in stained tweed skirts, jerseys and caps, threading their defiant way between the tables, in the wake of the exquisite dandy.
“The same places as at our first supper?” suggested Stuart.
They assented.
So the mirror reflected the three figures, as once before. And Merle thought hard of Da Vinci’s masterpiece. She would have liked to ask if Peter were visited by the same idea, but remembered in time that the thread of intimacy had been snapped. Easy enough,now that her eyes were opened, to see what had happened to the two grown-ups, for thus she contemptuously classified her comrades; and she imagined their secret evident in every look and word; their lightest remark tingling with electricity.
... Just this once she would still be faithful to the spirit of trio. But oh, how she longed to let them know that all this elaborate comedy of maintaining for her benefit a volley of nonsense talk, was merely insulting; her eyes were clear of dust.