I
Mr. Fane-Herbert decided to be in London with the spring. Ibble’s and Ordith’s were to remain independent, an arrangement of which both he and Nick Ordith saw the advantages, and which Aggett alone regretted wholeheartedly. Three weeks in Japan would complete Mr. Fane-Herbert’s work in the East, and to Tokio he went, with Margaret and her mother, at the end of February.
Soon afterwards the Pathshire, having finished her refitting, sailed for Yokohama, and on the first Friday in March, John and Hugh, who had obtained week-end leave, arrived at Kamakura. That evening, when the hotel dinner was over, they sat together in the verandah of John’s bedroom. Below them stretched the lawn, its size exaggerated by the semi-darkness, its nearer edge, gloomy under the hotel’s shadow, slashed, where the gleam of windows fell upon it, with parallelograms of yellow light.
“They come to-morrow,” Hugh said.
“This will be the last that you’ll see of them before they leave for home.”
Hugh nodded. “Margaret will be glad to go.”
“Because Ordith stays?”
“Partly—though I think she has cast off Ordith and the thought of him.... But she’ll be glad to be rid of the place and its associations. London will give her something else to think about.”
“It’s almost incredible,” John said slowly, “that anyone out here now should be able to reach London within seventeen days. It seems further away than that.”
“But I like the East,” Hugh protested.
John laughed. “Good God!” he exclaimed, “so do I; but that has nothing to do with it.” He knocked out his pipe against the verandah rails. “Anyhow,” he said, “it’s a long lie-in to-morrow. Throw us a cigarette, Hugh.”
He looked out across the lawn, across the broad belt of trees that stood between the garden and the beach. The sea was near—not that sea into which steel ships vomited their bilge, but the quiet sea of kissing sands and straight horizon which had been his first love. To-morrow did not matter; that darkness, those stars unsnared by sextants, that sea undivided into ranges, were suggestive of too many to-morrows, too many yesterdays. From an open window came voices and laughter, and the tinkle of a curtain being drawn.
“Women,” Hugh said.
John leaned over the rail.
“That curtain has cut a patch of light out of the lawn. They’ll all go out one by one.”
“Ours won’t—not yet. I’m not going to turn in for hours.”
“I know,” John said, reading his thought. “I hate wasting leave in sleep. Even if I turn out late, I like to wake early, and imagine the Reveille sounding and the calling of ‘Guard an’ steerage.’ ‘Show-a-leg, show-a-leg, lash up and sto-ow!’—and you lying in bed, with the whole day before you—away from the ship.”
“This being Friday,” Hugh observed, “we have to-night, and Saturday night, and Sunday night—two clear days.”
“I wonder what would happen if we didn’t go back—if we hid somewhere and never went back—if we started on our own. Why should we go back?” John said, for the sake of saying it.
“If we didn’t, we’d be caught. If we weren’t caught, we’d starve.... The extraordinary thing is,” Hugh went on, in a puzzled voice, “that we can’t stay as we are. I’m happy as can be sitting here; yet I shall get up presently and put an end to this evening by going to bed. I don’t want to move. It’s glorious here in the dark.... Look at the lawn—like a great pool.”
“You want to lay hold on the instant,” John said. “You can’t any more than you can lay hold on eternity. They are the two infinities that meet somewhere. Probably from some point of view—if only you could reach it—the instantaneous and the eternal appear as one and the same. But the proofs we have of that are pretty vague: there’s that extraordinary consciousness—coming for no apparent reason—that a given instant is of tremendous importance, that it is going to be remembered, that somehow it’s a source of unknown events to come; then, at the other end of the scale, there’s the recollection of certain instants—more than mere memory, a kind of preservation. An instant years-old by the measure of time, remains intact, perfect; and you know that it’s never going to perish or fade. Usually the occasion was trivial....”
“I wish,” said Hugh out of the silence, “the Commander could hear his young gentlemen talking like this.”
John laughed uneasily. “I had managed to forget the ship.”
“All the same,” Hugh went on, “I like vague talk. I like listening to you—even though I don’t understand too much of it. Vague talk gives me what I imagine you were driving at, what you spoke of before—a sense of eternity.”
A watchman’s bell rang faintly in the distant village. When it could be heard no longer, John said:
“A sense of eternity—what a phrase that is!”
Light, quick footsteps sounded on the path; then the heavier tread of a man. The girl stopped suddenly, touched her companion’s arm, and, when he looked down, laughed breathlessly—an odd laugh, half-confidential, half-embarrassed.
“Oh, Torwood,” she exclaimed, “I do so love this East!”
He threw his arm round her, and, with a tremendous air of proprietorship, almost dragged her indoors. Little gasps of excitement were her show of protest. As they passed through the room below the man could be heard speaking quick words to her, in a voice unevenly controlled; speaking with strange disregard for the public room’s bleak emptiness and for the nearness of those who were sleeping, for the stare of electric bulbs, which, when they shine singly over places deserted till the morning, have so intent an air of watchfulness and curiosity.