“Perhaps you’ll explain your reference, Stuart?”
“Ibsen—and the Doll’s House—when Nora went out to find her soul. You refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her hair.—No, that’s Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there’s an impossible husband in that, too!”
‘Pistols’ were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, “You imply that my wife has committed suicide?”
They could not clearly see his face in the half-light. Stuart leapt in with a hasty and matter-of-fact “Of course not. Don’t be absurd. She thinks you need—oh, startling into a keener realization of her personality, and this is her way of doing it.”
“But you said she hadn’t merely gone for a walk?”
“No.”
“You mean, I shall never see her again?”
“No—yes——” exasperated. “Can’t you get something between a mere walk and never-again?”
Oliver couldn’t. The weight of his opinion had crashed heavily from one extreme to the other; as Stuart had remarked, he was at all times difficult to move, either forwards or backwards.
“If she’s not coming back,” argued Oliver, “she must have left me for good. And if she has firearmswith her, then I’d better follow. It all looks to me very silly.” And with a commendable absence of flurry, his broad back loomed up the garden, and disappeared into the bungalow.
“Peter,” whispered Stuart, when they were alone; “haven’t you yet discovered the secret of the Broads?”
She was an instant silent, as if listening for a reply to his question. Then it flashed across her in the phrase of his letter.
“We travel light.”
“That’s it—we travel light. All luggage too heavy for the rack, to be thrown on to the rails.”
“Are you speaking symbolically?”
He said, “No, of course not. Damn symbolism!... I’m speaking of Aureole and Oliver.”
The latter emerged from the bungalow, and called out something about ‘London.’ Stuart walked quickly to meet him:
“Look here, old man, she may lie low for a week or two, but believe me, there’s no earthly reason for you to get feverish about it.” And then the notion of Strachey being feverish struck him as inexpressibly comic.
“I’m not. But I’m catching the eight-forty-one to town. She has probably gone home. I don’t care to think of her messing about with revolvers, even to impress me.”
The pistol idea had established itself firmly; Stuart saw that it was hopeless to attempt removing it before the eight-forty-one started.
“Good-bye.” Oliver had evidently forgotten about Peter.
“Good luck!” and Stuart returned to the boat.
“I like Nigger Strachey,” Peter decided, squatting on the rail of the ‘Faustina.’ “Stuart, how far are you concerned in this affair?”
He defended himself hotly, immensely fortified and upheld by the moral consciousness of being in the wrong.
“Fancy accusing me of being directly responsible for the whim of a neurotic woman.”
“I don’t. Now tell me how you are indirectly responsible—oh, it’s no good, my lad! That rigmarole of ducks and pistols gave you away—to me, at least.”
“It wasn’t my usual style, I admit,” laughed Stuart. And owned to the morning’s conversation with Aureole, when he had spurred rebellion into action. “It won’t do either of ’em any harm, you know; prevent ’em from getting sluggish. Any sort of stir to matrimony;—why,” with fierce indignation, “they might even have come to think themselves happy, if I hadn’t shown them they weren’t.”
“Philanthropist,” softly from the girl beside him in the dimness.
“All the same, I wonder where she can have gone, and what she has done; plenty of spirit there, and character too, if only she weren’t such a wild—goose!”
“Why did you do it?”
Stuart leaned against the boom and faced her squarely.
“I could pretend it’s too late to catch the eight-forty-one,” he said. “Or you could pretend not to know that it’s breaking rules to remain up here alone with me. But we won’t pretend, either of us. The situation is not accidental—they were in the way, and I got rid of them. I wanted one day of sailing by ourselves, that’s all.”
He went on, “We can take ‘Faustina’ up as far as the ‘Windmill,’ put up there for the night, and leave for London to-morrow evening,—or we’ll catch the eight-forty-one now. There’s still time.”
She repeated musingly, “We won’tpretend——”
“No. You can trust me, Peter. It’s just for the sailing. But other people, if they get to know, won’t believe that. It’s a question of how much other people are to count?”
Peter sprang from her perch into the well, and beganto untie the cords which held together the waterproof covering of the mainsail. He laid his hand over her moving fingers, and looked at her interrogatively. She laughed, mocking his sudden solemnity:
“You see ... I’m a Pagan!—oh, it’s all right, Stuart; we’ll take another day on the Broads, in spite of other people. Who was it counselled me to travel light?”
He smiled. But merely said, as he re-tied the knot her impetuosity had loosened, “No wind; and the stream against us. I shall have to row.”
Peter took the tiller. Some twenty minutes later, between the plash and lift of his oars, her ear caught the distant shriek of a train-whistle. And she knew the eight-forty-one to London had just left the station.
Peter awoke, and, listening intently, heard nothing beyond a faint lapping of water. Yet she felt impelled to leave her bed and scramble up to the high narrow window-seat. She had no idea of the time, but it must have been very early morning; the breeze was chill and aloof that struck upon her throat, as she leant out, an intruder upon silence.
A white vapour lay lightly as forgetfulness over river and bank and boathouse. On the opposite shore, a tangle of masts and ropes lay sketched like a dream upon a blown and tousled sky. A luminous gash in the east widened suddenly, and silvered all the mist; then closed again with cloud. The very river ceased its patient clamour for the sea; and colour had died in the night, leaving its wraith of grey to tell the tale. Grey that shone, and grey that was thin and dreary, and grey that pearled and paled to white. Peter had a strange fancy that she would not have been suffered as an on-looker had not her own eyes held their depth of grey, and her hair a whisper of the baulked sunrise. It was her day: she mused on what it might be trailing in its reluctant wake. Her day, grey and white and pallor of gold. And she wondered why all of her life that went before should be mist-shrouded in forgetfulness.
Her eyelids drooped heavily; she returned to bed, and at once fell asleep.
Stuart awoke her by hammering blows upon her door. She went again to the window before she openedto him. A bright blue sky now; trim red roof of boathouse and ferryhouse and bungalow, warm in the clear sunshine; screaming, cackling, chattering chorus of waterfowl; a sail, left hoisted overnight, flung its broken dance upon the water, sparkling and rioting between its clumps of emerald-green reeds. The world washed clean of mystery and evil alike. Peter slid open her door a few inches.
“Hallo! you’re in full rig.”
“Rather. I say, this is a ripping house, all its clocks have stopped, and I’ve left my watch down at the bungalow, so we’ll never know what time it is. Good morning, Peter.”
“Good morning, Stuart; I want some cherries.”
“While you dress?”
“While I dress.”
“But, my dear, I don’t think the greengrocer has called.”
“You’ll find a bagful of white-hearts in the locker of the boat.”
He brought them to her; firm hard cherries, cold and fresh to the lips as the dew stabbing its little balls of light from every grass-blade. Presently she joined him in the hall; a grandfather clock groaned three sepulchral strokes as she descended the wooden stairway.
“Don’t believe it,” Stuart warned her; “just hold tight to the fact that before last night was yesterday, and after next night will be to-morrow; no more is necessary. Come for a walk.”
They rattled back the heavy door-bolts, and wandered for what seemed a long space of time along unfamiliar paths and across drenching grass, without meeting anything more awake to its responsibilities than a slowly creaking windmill. Then returned to the inn. Still no movement of life. The door stood ajar as they had left it. The hands of the grandfather clock were dallying eccentrically in the regions of half-past eleven.
“This is getting serious,” Stuart complained, rousing terrific thunders upon the gong. “Where is the traditional tiller of the soil? Where is the buxom hostess astir before cockcrow? Where, principally, is cockcrow?”
“The cocks of the neighbourhood have been warned that a superhuman crower of crows has come to dwell among them. Therefore they are silent and abashed.”
“I’d be ashamed, if I were a cock, not to put up a little competition. All hail! here’s what was once a waiter!”
The half-dressed, yawning apparition that, mop and bucket in hand, uprose from the lower regions, stared aghast at the mention of breakfast; muttered “Not for an hour or two, anyways”; and began without enthusiasm to sweep the dining-room.
“We’d better go for another walk,” suggested Peter; “something tells me we have got up too early.”
Lying in a burning field of rye and poppies, he held her hands, and said: “It seems the most natural of all things that we should be here together and alone.”
“I know,” disappointedly. “I don’t feel a bit as wicked as I should. But youdothink I’m bold and bad, don’t you, Stuart?”
“I think you’re just most awfully bold and bad,” heartily.
“And—and—of course I can’t expect you to feel the same respect for me as before,” wistfully seeking reassurance.
“Well, of course, naturally, a fellow never looks on a girl quite like before, after—I mean, well—there’s always something gone, isn’t there? I mean, a fellow wouldn’t like his sister to meet a girl who—hang it, Peter, you know quite well what I mean!”
Then he laughed, and moved closer, among the stiff yellow stalks broken by their intrusion. “It’s tremendously all right, isn’t it, dear?”
“I’m afraid so,” she confessed. “I’ve been waiting all the time for the sudden misgiving that tells me I should not have stayed. But it hasn’t come.”
Stuart sympathized over the nuisance of an essential mood missing. “It spoils the set, and one can’t play demon patience any longer, and—come home to breakfast!” suddenly springing up. His nerves, though the girl was not aware of it, had been playing demon patience on their own all through the night, and were in consequence rather jumpy.
By dint of sitting like two mutes in the dining-room, and looking steadily reproachful while the waiter continued to sweep it out, they at last goaded him into serving them with breakfast.
“And now,” striding across the garden towards ‘Faustina,’ “now we’ll get under way. A long day, and a strong day, and a day spent together.” Stuart broke into rollicking song:
“The sail’s aloft, the wind’s awake,The anchor streams the bow,The stays are trim, the guns are grim—O Captain, where art thou?”
“The sail’s aloft, the wind’s awake,The anchor streams the bow,The stays are trim, the guns are grim—O Captain, where art thou?”
It was late afternoon when the wind, for the first time since their stay in Norfolk, really found itself; and Peter became of a sudden definitely aware of Sailing. Beating up Bure to Acles, the sheet fairly taut in her one hand and the tiller somewhat restive in the other, she grew to joy in the swish of the reeds against the bows, as she swung the boat round, and let the boom lurch over; in the jerk of the rope, as she controlled its rattling passage through the blocks, with already her eye straining forward for the crucial moment at the further bank. She did not notice, in this new intoxication of pace and mastery, that Stuart had ceased to give directions ... when suddenly, gripped by a strong puff of wind, the sail leapt sideways, thewater sang up over the lee rail; and Peter, taken by surprise, would have been hurled to the floor of the boat, had she not just in time flung up her heels and braced them against the opposite scuppers; nor did she let go of the sheet, which tore like some live thing at her palms.
“All right,” said Stuart calmly. “Blowing up a bit fresh. Shall I take her?”
“No.” And now she understood sailing right enough: this thing which demanded of her every atom and particle of strength she possessed, and some she did not consciously possess until that time. A darkness crept across the sky, and the wind’s whistle had an ominous note. More and more the boat heeled to meet its own disappearing shadow; till it seemed as if one could not for an instant longer retain that tilted position in the lifting scuppers.
—“We’ve got to beat it,” cried Stuart; “don’t let ’em get to windward of you!” And then only she saw that they were being furiously raced by another craft, with larger canvas than their own, and a shouting crew of men. Stuart was excited—a race always brought out all the child in him.
“You can make the next corner if you’re careful, and then she’ll run!”
The ‘Tyke,’ emphatically now the ‘Tyke’ and not ‘Faustina,’ did indeed luff the corner, and scudded ahead straight and clean with the galloping motion of a greyhound. Peter’s blood was romping; her hand felt as though cut in two where sawn by the rope; shoulders and knees and wrists, no part of her that did not throb and ache and cry aloud for release from this straining torture—torture that she would not have forgone for a lifetime of ease and pettiness and mild enjoyment. For she was conquering the wind, and gaining on the other boat, and never before had water been so near or the world so far.
“We ought to reef, but we won’t!” Stuart’s voice sang in triumphantly with the roar and whip of the waves. “More sheet, Peter, or she’ll carry away. Not much—no, none at all, and chance it! By Heaven, it’s great!”
Peter’s entire soul and body were bracing themselves in resistance against the push of the tiller. Her teeth fastened firmly into her lower lip. She had not known one could so hate an inanimate bar. Inanimate? possessed rather of seven kicking devils.... And then she saw the bridge ahead; and Stuart announced with gentle pleasure: “We’ve won,” and slipped into her place, and turned the ‘Tyke’ downstream. The defeated crew called out a hearty word of appreciation; Peter smiled at them; lit a cigarette; and, soaked by the churned-up spray, her hands stiff and bleeding, subsided on to the floor of their vessel, whereof she watched in passive admiration Stuart’s perfect handling.
“I now propose,” he said, “that we should feast our victory while under way, which in itself is a battle of some stubbornness. In other words, Peter, you shall collect what there is of lunch from among the tarpaulins and suit-cases littering this most disorderly tub, and minister to my needs while I cling to my post at the wheel:
“An’ I never left my post, sir, for the cappen ’e bid me stay,Tho’ me ’ands were frozen an’ cut, sir, an’ me face was stiff wi’ the spray;But me thirteen children are dead, sir—an’ there’s nobody left to care,So I stayed, like Casabianca, on the fighting ‘Téméraire’!”
“An’ I never left my post, sir, for the cappen ’e bid me stay,Tho’ me ’ands were frozen an’ cut, sir, an’ me face was stiff wi’ the spray;But me thirteen children are dead, sir—an’ there’s nobody left to care,So I stayed, like Casabianca, on the fighting ‘Téméraire’!”
It was no easy matter, with the deck tilted at an angle of 30°, to find the requisite bread and meat and ale, plates and forks and bottles. It struck Peter that sunset was a curious hour for lunch; as still more curious that the sun should set at all on this day which had begun so long ago. It was a lurid and tempestuoussky, jagged across by untidy streaks of black, the whole swimming canopy overhead as it were being sucked and drawn by red relentless fingers into the very heart of the western turmoil.
“Stuart, there’s no glass.”
“Must be.”
“Isn’t,” crossly.
“A tin mug, then?”
“Nothing but a flower-pot—will that do? Why do you keep flower-pots on board? Is it that you may grow nasturtiums while becalmed?”
“A flower-pot will hold the beer all right, if you keep your thumb in the hole at the bottom, all the while I drink.”
Peter refused. “I’m not your squaw.” And Stuart related with reproachful emphasis the story of the little boy in Holland who had not minded plugging a hole with his thumb all through the weary night, to save his country from inundation. Nevertheless, Peter was not incited to emulation.
All this while they were running before a powerful wind, sail and water ablaze with crimson, the same red glow splashing their faces and their hands, and touching with magic all the level shores. A bottle was hurled into the scuppers, crashed into fragments; and triumphantly the breeze hummed through the straining cordage.
It struck Peter that sunset was a good time for lunch.
“Hullo! here are the mortal remains of the wild-duck paste.” And they both laughed, thinking of the immortal remains, bearing fruit in Aureole’s heart.
“Not that I think wild ducks do bear fruit as a rule; too reminiscent of a hen laying a melon. Peter, unless you are playing at Tantalus, or rather the gods who tantalized Tantalus, you might hold the bread a few inches nearer my lips.”
Passing St. Bennetts, the wind dropped somewhat, the clouds piled themselves out of sight, and the skypaled to a lake of clear light green wherein the round red ball of the sun hung motionless, striped by the darkening reeds.
Stuart hailed a cabin-boat with seven men on board, all lustily singing.
“Hi! what’s the time?—excuse me, Peter, but it had to be done.”
“Half-past six,” they wove their reply into the strains of ‘John Peel.’
“We shall make it, easily, and with half an hour to spare, wind or no wind.”
Peter looked enquiring.
“The eight-forty-one. You wanted to get home to-night, didn’t you?”
All day long a glittering mist had lain lightly as forgetfulness on speech and memory. The reminder dropped mournfully as a premonition. The sun sank yet lower, staining the very roots of the tall green spears fringeing the waters. And the boatload ahead ceased from their jovial ditty, gripped by the conventional melancholy of evening.
“Wait a minute,” prophesied Peter; “they’ll sing—what do you bet, Stuart? I say: ‘Swanee River.’”
She was very near the mark in her guess. As the last ruddy segment dipped under the horizon, a haunting haunted melody floated backwards upon the sighing day:
“Look out, for the Goblin Man,That Ragtime Goblin Man!Run, run, just as fast as you can....”
“Look out, for the Goblin Man,That Ragtime Goblin Man!Run, run, just as fast as you can....”
“The darlings!” murmured Peter. “They’ll repeat it eight times, and then the ass of the party will start for the ninth time, and John will tell him to shut up.”
John was a Voice from the Cabin, and evidently the strong man of the party, as one could hear him being constantly consulted, in tones both supplicating and respectful.
But the plaintive tune, drawn out thinner and everthinner as the larger boat drew away, was working potent havoc upon Peter’s carefully guarded Marshes of Cheap Sentiment. Noting this, Stuart summoned her to the helm: “Come and take her. We shall probably jibe round the next bend,” and buried his head in the locker.
Peter wondered rather irritably if he did this on purpose whenever a jibe loomed ahead. She had no affection for the jibe. It held for her an agonizing moment, after she had hauled in the sheet, when she became a blank as to which way the tiller should be rammed, in squaring the sail anew. Up till now, Heaven had been with her, but this time Heaven looked unpropitious—perhaps because the sun had set.
Heaven elected at the critical moment to send her a strong gust of wind, the last they had in stock that day. It spun the boom crashing to leeward, before Peter had time to do anything at all. Followed a delirious instant when it struck her she ought to manipulate the tiller—and did it, with dire effect. She was aware that Stuart had come out of the locker, that the water was rushing up from behind to meet her, and that the boat was evilly tilting her downwards to meet the water with an evident after-intention of turning turtle over her drowning body. She did not call to Stuart, even then, instinctively certain that he was doing something useful in emergencies, and might be trusted to save her afterwards. All this in the space of time it takes a boat to turn over upon its side and drift at right angles to the river, the sail sagging flatly upon the surface of the stream. An invisible weight to balance Peter’s, was obviously preventing ‘Faustina’ from accomplishing a complete somersault.... Stuart had scrambled like lightning over the rail and flung himself upon the keel. Then he looked around for Peter, and was relieved to find her clinging with both hands to the opposite side of their improvised see-saw.
“Can you hang on?” he queried cheerfully.
She replied in like tones, “How long?”—and suppressed her inner doubts.
“Till we float ashore. I can’t do anything while I’m on the keel, and mustn’t move off it. How much of you is immersed?”
“Up to the knees.”
The boat hovered about uncertainly in midstream. There was no one in sight, and no sound but the breeze shivering the rushes. A fish leapt shining from the water, and plunged again into a circle of ripples. From round the next bend still drifted snatches of the ‘Ragtime Goblin Man’; evidently John had not yet spoken. Some distance over the land, yet not so far but that they should distinctly have heard the throb and clangour, a train passed in a linked blur of lights; passed noiselessly, like a phantom train. Peter, watching it, wished passionately that she might hear it whistle, as reassurance that she herself was real, and not a pictured castaway upon a badly drawn bit of wreckage.
At last they floated into a mud-bank; and were able thence to wade ashore.
Peter waited for Stuart to display extreme anxiety as to her degree of wetness, to burst into pæans of praise on her bravery and calmness in the face of danger, and finally to mutter with white young jaws, “I shall never forgive myself—never!”
Stuart said curtly: “Shivery? No? That’s all right; d’you feel equal to giving me a hand with the sail? We must lug it up somehow,”—happily convinced that by thus increasing the wind to the shorn lamb, he was treating the lamb in the spirit it most desired.
And as they tugged and hauled in the dim light at that most obstinate of all foes, a water-logged sail, Peter played up gallantly to his call upon that other Peter; the one she had carefully cut according to his measurements. Round her lips hovered a rathertremulous smile at the manner in which she was thus for a second time required to pay for her audacity in playing at God.
—And yet, was it payment, after all? With a little thrill of exultant surprise, Peter realized that the Peter of her disguises could not be a mere lay figure, since she had not discarded them in actual moment of peril and when thrown completely off her guard. Why then, they had become in very truth a part of her being; she was indeed Stuart’s Portrait-of-a-Lady, complete in all its essentials; she had stood the test....
There was far more actual fun to be had from standing ankle-deep in mud, with a spectral wind flapping her wet skirt against her knees, while she pitted her strength viciously against a tangle of wet rope, than from the use of her feminine privileges—Was there?... The old Peter hollowed into the mist a momentary fancy of a warm glowing interior—soft colours—soft cushions—warmth and ease and the dry slippery touch of silk upon her flesh—the abandoning of all effort to the stronger male who realized and joyed in her greater fragility....
“Peter, I want you! Hold this”—Stuart’s voice, confident and imperative. And the mist curled itself greyly over her pictured fancy of chintz and rugs and warming-pans, of sentiment beside red caves of firelight, and withal of a lover who was not a leprechaun.
—“Coming!” for a while they worked grimly, neither speaking.
Stuart paused in his labours, threw a tarpaulin on the bank, seated himself thereon, and invited Peter to do likewise. Then, in a sudden access of chivalry, he wrapped around her his own oilskins, thereby giving her more than ever the appearance of a battered stowaway, and consented for a moment to dwell on their quondam peril. Nay, he even came to her to be fed, in an engaging manner all his own:
“It was a long way from the locker to the keel,” reminiscently.
She said not a word.
“I was fairly quick, I think. Didn’t fumble, did I?”
Still no reply.
“Peter,” imploringly.
Then she gave in, and was bad for him: “You were magnificent, Stuart.”
His crow was fervent but subdued. The atmosphere not being conducive to any sound above a whisper.
“Now we’ll just bale out the tub, set it on its hind legs, hoist sail, and be off. She didn’t ship much water; dryest capsize I’ve ever done. A beautiful capsize, really; Peter, I’m glad we capsized; it will have a pleasant look, viewed from to-day a year hence.”
“Pleasant, but passing strange,” she murmured, gazing on the gaunt ribbed outline of their marooned vessel. “‘It was the Schooner “Hesperus,” that all on the shore lay wrecked——’”
“‘The skipper’s daughter had hold of the tiller. So what could you expect?’” finished Stuart.
She surveyed him reproachfully. “Is that—generous?”
“Do you want me to be generous?—Good Lord,” with sudden heat, “do you think I’d pay any other girl on earth the compliment of not fussing round her wet feet ... especially when I so much want to,” he added under his breath. Then returned quickly to his labours on the boat.
Peter was glad that she had not hearkened to the insistent pratings of the other Peter. Glad that Stuart guessed nothing of their existence.... The pictured fire-red interior had acquired a sudden cheapness, viewed in the light of his last speech. Her face burnt at the idea that he should ever know that these easy longings had even for a moment found their entrance. After all, and undoubtedly, this, her present plight, wasfar more fun; though she was cold beyond all hope of warmth, and tired past all desire for rest,—far more fun ... lean restless ways of fun that he had taught her; strange, slippery ways as the way to the moon, and as unprofitable.
—“Peter! Quick—here!”
It was not long before the well had been baled, the gaff run up, and a very wet mainsail flapped in mournful abandon against the mast. Then Stuart pushed off with the quant-pole, while Peter curled herself among the regions of his feet; from the general ooziness she suspected she was sitting in about two inches of water, but by now it seemed more natural to be wet than dry, and she made no efforts towards the latter state. The mists brushed her cheek with clammy fingers; naught of clothing but was damp and cumbersome to the body; the water had insinuated itself into matches and cigarettes, had gurgled into the locker, and soaked into the comestibles. Water-logged, they crept on and on with the tide through the murky twilight, a faint saffron stain in the west betokening where once had rioted the banners of the setting sun. From time to time a light flashed warmly from a house-boat on the banks, or cheery but muffled voices told of sails being laboriously tucked away for the night, masts lowered, clinking crockery washed up for a late meal. Theirs was the only vessel still adrift. Huddled in her big cloak, Peter watched the darkness eating up either shore, while the river took on unfamiliar curves and windings, seemed to branch off into two—ten rivers, all beckoning different ways. And once she called out sharply, “Look ahead!” that Stuart should swing the ‘Tyke’ clear of a gigantic looming ship, three tiers of sails, and a ghostly figurehead. “Why?” And he steered straightthrough the ship with its three tiers of sails. Peter said no more, not quite trusting what further tricks her sight might choose to play. She crouched still further into the well, content to see naught but the edge of sail against the dense pall of sky, and dimly, where Stuart sat, an outline of bare neck and slouched hat and lean nervous hand upon the tiller. It all went to make perfection: the timeless blue day spent in big spaces, limbs stiff from their perilous tussle, and now the sodden boat, and the shadows, and Stuart beside her. She put out a chill hand to feel if he were indeed solid substance; touched his knee, felt him start and tingle—she could not see the hot rush of blood into his face.
Suddenly he swerved the bows towards a forest of pale reeds; they bent apart to the sliding passage of the boat, then closed up in its wake. The keel ran aground. Stuart let drop the mainsheet; it rattled lazily along its blocks, and was still. The sail drooped forward, fell back again.
... She lay suffocated in a darkness of kisses, that stole her breath away, and her powers of resistance; robbed her of all knowledge save of desire beating itself out upon her lips and her throat and her eyes; upon the lids she drooped for evasion, upon the hands she put up to protect her, upon the hair she tumbled forward, and upon her neck when she turned her head. And then again fiercely upon her mouth, compelling her to be passive, compelling her to response. And through the pain and through her weariness, sang a strain of rejoicing that he should treat her thus; that their brains and their mockery and their intellect should yet have been all blotted to naught in a whirling storm of passion.
... He had drawn a little away. She raised herself; pushed back her hair with the bewildered gesture of a child. Her throat ached as if someone had attempted to strangle her, and her mouth felt stung and bruised. Then Stuart bent towards her, took her in his arms:“Lie still, dear” ... and for the first time Peter lay still; mind and body and soul, still.
It was over, the endless strain of winning and keeping the man; the endless effort of playing-up. He loved her with a great finality of love. She could—lie still.
A shaft of blackness pierced light. And Peter became aware that this very moment which had brought her belief in the endurance of his love, was the moment long foretold when they must consent to end it. Love’s consummation—both had agreed that nothing less must follow.
Did Stuart know?... And suddenly his hands slackened completely their hold on her—then tightened again to an almost intolerable grip. He too had realized the door of exit.
But it was absurd, for an elusive unproven theory, to renounce a thing at its perfection; Peter had doubted always if she would be big enough for that. And now love had proven so much bigger than she had anticipated.
She would risk the descent on the further side. Though the Hairpin Vision shone full and steady as limelight upon the future, she was yet willing to take all the hazard of lessening love, so she might keep love. Keep it in whatsoever form he wished, free or bound. Stuart would not employ the shears alone, without her co-operation. If she willed, she might use the moment to entangle him with a thousand threads, beyond all hope of breaking away. Why shouldn’t she? Since he had made her need of him so great, he must pay his share. And of what avail to set aside the temptation, since then he would never know it had existed?
With a great stirring of anger, Peter looked up at him. His face was turned away, still set in desire, but now not for her. It was the supremest desire of a man whose star had granted him his every wish; desire for renunciation. Young Fortunatus pursuing the winds of sorrow.
Her anger waned and died to tenderness. This was not the ruthless orange-sucker of her first imaginings. She alone knew how rigidly and untiringly his asceticism had striven to keep its leanness against that terrible perversity of ease which threatened to engulf him. And she could help him. By her and because of her had actually come his chance of a sacrifice worth while—oh, yes, she understood; and she could, if she chose, be sufficiently big to allow it him. Came a rush of pride like a sonorous North-Easter humming through the shrouds: No other girl could have kept up with him as far—she was not going to fail at the last ... he had once called her a genius of life.
His eyes met hers, a question in them. And she laughed. “We’ve had a good run before the wind, Stuart.” Heard the triumphant fling of his reply, “And we’re not going aground in the putty now.”
He unlinked his arms; took up the quant-pole; pushed back to mid-stream. Within a few minutes they were at the landing-stage; a sharp walk brought them to the station platform: Eight thirty-six—and the train left at eight forty-eight. “Not bad,” remarked Stuart; “considering our day of uncounted hours.”
There was just time for Peter to send off a wire to her cousins in Turnham Green, bidding them reserve her a room that night; she would arrive in London too late for the further journey to Thatch Lane. Then, with a shaking roar, the train plunged into the station, barely waited to gulp its few passengers, and thundered southwards. Peter found that her fellow-travellers regarded her with astonished eyes, and departed to view herself. The results of sun and wind, of immersement in the water, and those few after-moments among the reeds, exceeded her wildest expectations. It took half an hour’s unsteady labour before looking-glass and washstand-basin,before she might lay the least claim to respectability. She was relieved to find, however, that her flaming cheeks and lit eyes and lips dark as wine were not at all reminiscent of the girl about to be forsaken by her lover. She was tremendously exultant that her body should have stood the strain of the day, as her soul had stood its close. And she had never walked so lightly as up the crowded dining-car to rejoin Stuart at its far end.
“Metamorphosis?”
“Only from the waist upwards,” she displayed her boots, still caked with a large portion of Bure’s shores.
They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number; halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted, and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another. There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter’s head was tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the shadow in contempt—she had no more use for it.
“We won’t meet again.”
“No.”
As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” said Stuart. He did noteven touch her; yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done perforce when his actual grip had tightened.
—“Hullo!”
The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter’s flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting. And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat of Stuart’s retreating steps....
Peter was hauled indoors—she could almost hear her face click as she adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.
“Come along in, do; we’re kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won’t your friend join as well?”
And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin Constance, Jinny’s mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and affectionate kisses: “These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my dear; but there, it’s Saturday evening, and I hope you ain’t too tired to join them.”
On Peter’s other side, a frivolous girl of thirty-six waggled a plump forefinger, “I saw you saying good-bye to your young man! I believe you must have quarrelled—he didn’t even kiss you good night.”
Next, she was introduced to the mild gentleman whom she had met there before—“So don’t you pretend to be hoity-toity, Miss Peter,”—and to the irresistibly humorous Tommy Cox, whom she hadn’t met there before, and who said straight away, “Now tell me this, if you can: could you make a Maltese Cross?”—and to Luke Johnson, the boy from next door,—while the landlady, who was also a friend of Cousin Constance, kept up a running fire of questions connected somehowwith coffee: “Some people like it better with milk, and some people like it without; some people take two lumps of sugar, and some like one, so all you’ve got to do, Peter, dear, is to tell me how you like it best. Some people....” The saga began all over again.
It seemed to Peter that this final necessity for playing-up was rather in the nature of an extra on the bill. But that strange new part of her for which Stuart was responsible, could not cease abruptly with his exit, but went on a little while mechanically rotating in obedience to the hand that had set it in motion. So she skilfully dodged her cousin’s kisses; accepted the thick cup of muddy lukewarm coffee; answered the riddle about the Maltese Cross; gaily averred that she was not a bit tired, and quite ready for “high jinks”; and allowed herself to be drawn into a rowdy game of musical chairs.
Crushing memory below the surface, she sprang to the head of the scuffling line awaiting the music’s signal tostart—
“You made me love you,I didn’t want to do it,I didn’t want to do it,”
“You made me love you,I didn’t want to do it,I didn’t want to do it,”
round and round the empty line of chairs—then a cry, and a mix-up, and shouts of “He’s out!” A chair removed from the row. The music started once more.
Only eight combatants left—seven—six—Peter could not contrive to get left out; a chair seemed ever ready to embrace her, as the jovial pianist ceased from play. She felt the urgent need of sleep leaking noiselessly into her being. Her limbs refused any more to obey the call upon them. Almost she abandoned the struggle, beat an ignominious retreat in the middle of the game. An echo of Stuart spurred her on as with whips: “It’s a glorious stunt, Peter! don’t give in before the end.”—Yes, but need she listen, since he was not to count any more? Willy-nilly, his training outlasted him; shemade a forward dash for a seat, this time out of reach, determined she would be in at the death, as a votive offering to the lord of all stunts, great and small.
And now there were only three jigging round to the endless tune.
“And all the time you knew it,I guess you always knew it,You made me——”
“And all the time you knew it,I guess you always knew it,You made me——”
Silence, then a noisy outburst from the spectators lining the walls: “You’re out, Miss Tomkyns! his lap don’t count as a seat, you know.” Giggling, Miss Tomkyns withdrew from the contest. Remained Peter and the objectionable Tommy.
“Now then, Peter, beat him. It’s up to you—show old Tommy what girls are made of!” Jinny literally danced with excitement. And Cousin Constance at the piano started once more to strum, with the evident intention of prolonging the agony.
Ah! that renewal of the chorus was too vigorous to be genuine. The end was at hand. Peter, on the back side of the chair, turned suddenly and faced Tommy, who was so amazed at this change of tactics that he facetiously flung out one leg after another along the ground, Russian-ballet fashion. At this juncture, as anticipated, the tune halted abruptly in the middle of a bar—and with a slight movement Peter had occupied her throne before he could recover his balance.
And she smiled, a provocative ‘there-you-are’ smile, not intended for her clapping enthusiastic spectators.
“Bravo, Peter! you’re a sport! Shame, Tommy, to be beaten by a girl!”
“And now to bed, every man Jack of you,” cried Mrs. Thorpe, who since five minutes had been listening with dread to the impatient tip-tap on the ceiling, of a best-bedroom boarder afflicted with insomnia.
“She cheated, twisting round like that, instead of goin’ straight on,” grumbled Tommy, in the hall. Likea great many humorous gentlemen, he could not take a beating.
And Peter turned on the stairs to remark tauntingly, “There, there, Master Tommy, never mind. We’ll say that you won, shall we?”
“I’ll make you pay for that, young lady!” Only half in earnest, but stung nevertheless by the laughter of his friends, he made a rush for his tormentor. She broke away from him, ran with dangerous swiftness to the room she usually occupied. She could hear Tommy panting at her heels; his breath, stale with cheap tobacco, on the back of her neck. “Go it, Tommy boy!” urged his companions from below. Peter clenched her hands; ‘pay for that’—she had a very clear idea how the Tommies of this world exact payment. She wouldnotbe kissed to-night, not ... again.
Putting on a spurt, she gained her room, crashed the door in his face, and turned the key in the lock. Tommy called through one or two witticisms, and strolled away to be consoled by his pals. Then Jinny knocked a final ‘good night’ and did Peter want anything? Peter wanted nothing. So Jinny too departed. A whispered exchange of banter on the landings; a loud guffaw; a flurry of feet.... Silence now in the house. Peter’s day was over, grey and white and pallor of gold. It had been a very long day. She was logged with sleep, as a water-logged boat that can no longer crawl for heaviness. Eyelids tumbling, fingers purely mechanical. Nothing was remembered, nothing existed save her longing for bed. Bed was a tangible thing and mattered very much. She was just aware, through formless drifting clouds whirling her mind to stupor, that it was just as well she should be physically so dead beat.
Light turned out, and head plunged among the pillows. It was sand that was weighing her down; heavy yellow sand; she could hear it trickling into thecrevices and chinks and joints of her body; hear it like water among the reeds ... hear herself falling asleep.
And knew that before dawn she would awake, purged of her merciful weariness. Wake to the knowledge of a world without Stuart.
If Stuart had been a poor man, and forced to continue drudgery whatever his troubles of love, he would have wrested a certain comfort from the obligatory effort. But placed as he was, it would have been mere childishness to deceive himself with an assumption that he was not perfectly free to absent himself from Holborn for as long a period as he pleased. Derwent had taken a needed holiday in May, directly following the prick of Gobert’s balloon, and was now back again at his post. Baldwin ran up most days from Sonning, except when solemnities of regatta nailed him to the spot. Business was at its slackest; and Stuart could no more persuade himself that he was morally necessary, than that his attendance was compulsory.
In no mood for make-believe, beset by a bitter craving for what he had denied himself, by a still more bitter doubt as to whether his had not been a fool’s action, he set out for the Haven, where he could at least be sure of solitude while he fought the matter through.
The Haven is marked somewhere in the neighbourhood of Poole. Actually, it is in the neighbourhood of nowhere. A man walks into the Haven perhaps at set of sun, finding it always a little beyond the point where he is desirous the walk be ended, so that he walks into the Haven tired and with lagging step. On one side of him the sea shines a ghostly grey; not breaking in waves, nor tossing in a glitter of foam, nor making any sound whatever; but flowing, flowing, in slantwise ripplestowards the land. And when he is accustomed to the sight of it on his one side, he is gradually aware of a stealthy lapping on his other side, beyond the sand-banks sown with coarse grass. There also is the sea, flowing in slantwise ripples towards the land, so that he loses all sense of east or west. For his further confusion, either horizon is bestrewn with hazy tongues of land, floating strips of island; and on either horizon, tumbling silent seas lick their way among the nebulous shores. The sun dips red and round, and the moon rises round and red; so that for an instant of bewilderment the sun might be the moon and the moon might be the sun; and both sun and moon hang loosely, midway between sky and ocean, having no link with either. The only thing permanent is an old hulk embedded in the stretches of flat white sand; and thither the traveller is impelled to climb; for the sand has an untrodden look; and there lies a strange fascination, when leaning against the slimy sides of the wreck, in gazing backwards at his solitary footprints marking the way he came.
On the extreme edge of the Haven, men have built an hotel, thinking thereby to give the spot a prosperous and populated appearance. And thrice a week a creaking motor-bus deposits there its load of sightseers, who drink a lot of tea on the blank terrace, and swarm over the waste of garden, and onto the primitive wooden jetty, whence boats are supposed to start for a tour of the islands lightly pencilled in the haze. But the boats are never visible; and presently the sightseers depart in their bus; and the Haven continues to take no interest either in the barren grey hotel nor yet in the babbling tea-drinkers.
In the surrounding oozes of dark green, are rooted shapeless forms, that might be whales, but are mostly bungalows. One of these was presented to Stuart by his brother-in-law Ralph Orson, on the occasion of the latter’s marriage. “Might come in useful when you aresailing in these parts,” quoth Orson, apologizing for the poorness of the gift.
There was very little of sailing in its more graceful phases round about the Haven. Occasionally the tide brought up slow-moving barges, piled high with wood or coal or bricks; these surmounted by the tiny dark figures of men hoisting a clumsy bulk of canvas against the sky, pushing frantically at giant pole or tiller, which by comparison reduced the human to ant-size. The white skimming sail would have been here a strange anomaly, and the supple curve of pleasure boat. With grimness tempered to mystery by their flying streamers of smoke, the black trading-vessels alone ruffled the even slant of the water, flowing, rippling, landwards to the Haven.
Here then, Stuart passed the days following his renunciation of Peter. He was disappointed that the detached exultation of spirit was absent, that should have rewarded the man with will strong enough to perpetrate a theory. Exultation?—so far was it removed, that at first he had to summon every atom of force he possessed, to prevent himself from dashing theory onto the rubbish-heap, and setting it alight, burnt-offering to the common human love of a man for a maid. Just at the moment when all his powers of reasoning and thought and logic were most desperately needed, they turned traitor; ran away; returned to mock him: “Prig! pedant! cad!” No end to the insulting epithets they volleyed at the stunned and cowering leprechaun; and then ran again, too fast for pursuit or argument.
“If that’s all you have to give me, then, curse you, I might have taken the warmer thing!” thus leprechaun, from the depths of want, to the hiding metaphysician.
Stuart waited, just holding in check the suffering which cried out for some alleviating action on his part ... (he might so soon be in town—at Euston—ThatchLane—“Come out, Peter”—and in the crushed sweet smell of bracken on the Weald, laugh, and kiss her mouth, and kiss again; and laughing, damn the Hairpin Vision to beyond eternity, where it rightly belonged—all this, so soon) ... Stuart waited. He would at least give metaphysics a chance.
He strove to collect his ideas of yore; but they rattled about in his head like dried peas in a box, implements wherewith stageland strives to imitate a rainfall. Meanwhile, round the shadow-side of the embedded hulk, he stumbled one night upon a pair of lovers clinging silently together, symbol of unthinking passion, utterly happy in the belief that their momentary divinity was immortal. Ordinary lovers—Stuart turned sharply away, across the tract of dead white sand, cursing as he ran; cursing his destructive brain and his vision and his asceticism,—all that had been given him unasked, to set him apart from those shapes—from that shapeon the shadow-side of the hulk. Damn it! yes, damn it! One paid for too godlike a use of the shears. Damn it ... he threw himself face downwards on the sand.
The metaphysician stirred from lethargy, and spoke; reminding him that he had seen the sequel to the idyll in the shadow-shape of the hulk; reminding him of a certain dingy group round a perambulator: “They had hung on, and lost the vision.”
Stuart retorted: “They had also forgotten the vision, so what did it matter?”
“Would you wish to forget?”
“Yes,” desperately. Any sort of rest rather than for ever be self-tormented as now.
And then there was the thought of what Peter might be enduring. The orange-sucker had never before stayed to consider the orange. When Merle had dropped from the trio, though perfectly aware of what was impending during that last supper-party, Stuart had madeno after-movement in any way to help her. The trio had inexorably to come to an end. The one left over must butt through her crisis without whining. Male or female, it was all the same. When a like hour visited him, he would require neither sympathy nor yet props; certainly not mercy.
All very well, these relentless standards, applied to Merle. But they refused to apply themselves with like success to Peter. Stuart did not know why. But he told himself that he had behaved like a cad to Peter, anyone would say so. For the next space of time, his strongest temptation was to take refuge in the outward appearance of his conduct—certainly caddish in the extreme—and behind this fence, skulk backwards to his desire: “And make the only amends a gentleman can, considering how he has treated the girl.”
But that wouldn’t do. He knew, and Peter knew, that what had prompted him to break with her was very far removed from mere caddishness; and he couldn’t now with any consistency start regulating his conduct with an eye to the world’s approval.
A prig, then? a fanatic?—Let him but vilify in some recognized term of opprobrium what he had done, and he must perforce find himself an excuse to retract. Would a prig have set a girl to care for him, and then desert her for the sake of a vision which in turn deserted him? Prigs do not stand upon their heads, but levelly and beautifully upon their feet. He was too bad and too mad to merit the epithet of prig. Fanatic, certainly. And what was fanatic, closely examined, but word-covering for anyone sufficiently clear in belief to prove his theory by deed instead of mouthing it abroad for others so to do? Theory would be a mere word, cold and empty of significance, if the discoverer thereof were not willing to apply it as touchstone to matters vitally concerning himself.
No escape then, by road of cad, prig, or fanatic. HadPeter been sufficiently unattainable in worldly status, he could have spent a lifetime striving to win her, without any self-reproach whatsoever to mar his ultimate victory. But Fortunatus might claim his princess when he willed.... So no princess for Fortunatus....