II
On Saturday evening Margaret and Mrs. Fane-Herbert reached the hotel. After dinner, Mrs. Fane-Herbert said to John:
“I hear you changed your mind about leaving the Navy.”
“It was scarcely a question of my changing my mind. It didn’t get as far as that. You see——” He looked aside and saw that Margaret was watching him. “At any rate, I am settled down to it now,” he said.
Hugh broke in with talk of Kamakura.
“When does your leave end?” Margaret asked.
“Monday.”
“You must go back to your ship, then?”
“Yes, by noon.”
She turned to John. “And you, too?”
Something in her intonation caught his attention, and he looked swiftly at her.
“Yes,” he said. “You must send us news of London as our share in your home-coming.... I want to hear of your great-grandmother’s welcome.”
“Her great-grandmother?” Mrs. Fane-Herbert put in.
“The portrait, mother—the one over the stairs.” Then to John: “She’ll give me comments with her welcome, a lecture for her runaway.”
There was a hint of bitterness in that; but John’s remembering that conversation on the first evening she had known him stung her with the sting—half-pleasant, half-painful—of childhood days recalled in dark moments. For now she was easily stung to sorrow or to a kind of fierce joy. She had wanted desperately to talk, to tell someone how free she was—Ordith being gone. Untold, her freedom seemed incomplete. But neither her father nor her mother had spoken. They had learnt the facts, accepted them; she had attempted no explanation; not one word had been said. This silence had a hardening quality. Her experience, the vivid remembrance of which might have flowed easily away, was somehow frozen in her mind, like a sin unconfessed. There was no one to whom she could go. Warmth of heart, comradeship, the simplest affection she starved for. But this being left alone, this frigidness of spirit, this intolerable independence....
John had known, at least, that her heart was full. It was as if she had seen a friendly face in the midst of a vast unnoticing crowd. When she said good-night to him she gave him her hand with new confidence. Then, out of his sight, she was suddenly angry with herself as for a foolishness, a weakness for the first time realized. An instant she stood unmoving outside her bedroom door—her mind tripped somehow, taken unawares.
And in the morning she settled at once to a book, glad of an occupation so isolating.
“You’re very deep in that book, Margaret,” Hugh said, as he passed her. “Aren’t you coming out?”
“I want to finish it before lunch. Do you mind?”
“I see the last of you and mother to-morrow.”
“I’ll come this afternoon, ... or shall I come now?”
He looked into her upturned face. Her hand was on the arm of her chair to raise herself.
“No, you odd sister.... No; you’re not to come—of course not.”
She went late to lunch, and was surprised to find Hartington at her mother’s table, with John and Hugh. He said that his leave lasted only till that evening.
“Can’t you stay and go back with us to-morrow?” Hugh asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “But I wanted to see the homeward goers before they went. That’s really all I came for.”
The meal over, he had no difficulty in seeing Margaret alone, for she felt that it was to see her he had come.
“Well,” she said, “secret emissary, what is it?”
“You know there’s something?”
“You are full of suppressed news.”
“Yes; good news—oh, such good news!”
“Thank God for that!” she breathed.
“You expected bad?”
“I fear it always. There’s nothing definite that I expect. But somehow——”
“No,” he said quickly. “This is good, anyhow. Lynwood is free—through Wingfield Alter.”
She gave no sign of pleasure so eager was she. “How? Really free?”
“Really free,” he smiled. “Are you beginning to disbelieve in freedom?... The mail came in after Lynwood left the ship. A letter for him from his mother, and a letter for me from Alter. I have them both here. Alter is to marry Mrs. Lynwood. He has taken the first definite step towards getting Lynwood out of the Service.”
“When will he be free? Will he come home with us?”
“Not possible. It takes time. But now it is only a question of time—a couple of months, perhaps.”
“You haven’t given him his mother’s letter?”
“No.”
“You haven’t told him?”
“No; I came to you first. I want you to tell him.”
Something stifled her inclination to ask “Why?”
Hartington went on hesitatingly: “It means so much to him, you see. It’s such tremendous news, because he has no hope or expectation of it. So ... Miss Fane-Herbert, I want you to tell him.”
Her eyes widened for a moment. They looked out beyond Hartington. Then, with abrupt decision, she said, with a fluttering, pleading gesture towards him: “No; you. You must tell him. It’s your right. You brought it about.”
“I wrote to Alter—that’s all.”
“It came about through you. Oh, long before the writing of that letter, you helped him—didn’t you?—perhaps not deliberately. You don’t realize how much you have done for him. Certainly you don’t realize what he feels for you—the strangest mixture of affection, and admiration, and respect—but overwhelming. You are all that’s best in men for him! And he’d like you to bring this news. He’ll be glad, years on, that it was you who brought it. Friendship between men is so much more substantial, more secure. You must tell him,” she concluded. “It’s your right.”
“Why do you insist so much on right? I waive it if it exists. That’s why I came here.”
“Oh,” she cried, with a smile in acknowledgment of his unveiling of her half-pretence, “I want it to be you!”
He laughed back at her, so that her colour came....
He took John away into the country roads, where the cherry-trees were in blossom and the sun lay flat on the long, low, irregular branches, reminding them of illustrations in Japanese fairy-books. There, as they walked, the news was given, the two letters read.
“You’ve done all this,” John said, and remained speechless.
“I can’t help wondering what it is exactly that I have done or helped to do. What’s it going to lead to?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this—the breaking free—is a beginning, not an end.”
“I know.... But there’s time enough to think of what’s to come. I won’t think of it now.... Hartington, couldn’t you come too?”
“No; we shape different courses now.”
“But we three shall see each other often—in London. I’ve never seen you in London. And at Oxford, you must stay with me there.”
Hartington looked wistfully at him. “Oh yes,” he said, “we shall see each other often.”
They found on their return that the others had finished tea. Only Hugh remained by the empty cups. He sprang up to meet them.
“I am glad, you civilian! Margaret told me.”
“She knows?”
“I told her,” Hartington said. Then, “Have I stolen your news?”
“There is no one left to tell,” John answered, laughing. “I want to tell thousands of people.”
Later, he asked: “Where is Margaret?”
“I don’t know. She disappeared after tea.”
They sat smoking. Everything was pleasant to John now: the click of a cigarette-case being shut, the tapping of the cigarette, the long silences in which none of them had need of speech. The afternoon had begun to fail. The sun slanted yellow across the window-panes and fell in rippling beams of light and shadow upon the pale matting. Outside, the lawn and distant trees had taken on those soft golden tones which, at the approach of summer’s dusk, flow across English fields, investing them with kindly magic. Then the church tower seems more than ever still; the churchyard silent, but not terrible. The bird rustles in the hedgerow; you imagine his bright eyes. The cricket stumps yellow against the green; the shadows flicker on the pitch; the bat sounds clearer, sweeter; the ball runs smoothly, and with peculiar ease; the players and the umpires in their white coats grow nebulous and vague.
“‘And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,’” John said.
“Back in England already?”
“This summer in England!”
He went bareheaded into the cool air, across the lawn, springy under his feet, down the path among the trees where the white sand lay heavy, on to the shore. There was Margaret, near the waves’ edge. He approached her, and, because she was so still, touched the billowing muslin she wore.
“You know?”
“Yes. John, how happy you must be! Always you’ll remember to-day. It’s your hour—one of the three or four. They go by so soon.”
“And you? Are you not happy?... You are free, too.” He faltered as he spoke of this, of which she had never spoken.
She shivered, as if a cold breeze had struck her.
“Yes.... I understand.... I, too, am free. I know.”
She turned to him eyes full of light.
“Oh, Margaret,” he cried, his arms outstretched, “don’t look towards the future. To-day’s enough, Margaret. What is it you are afraid of?”
She said, trembling under his touch, close to him so that her dress brushed lightly against his coat, “What is it we’re both afraid of? We are both afraid.”
For answer, in his primitive wisdom, he swept her to him, overwhelming her thought. Lip to lip they clung, she imprisoned, silenced, caught up from fear. His arms about her in fierce pressure were a whole armour against doubt—more than armour, a charm, for the arrows themselves were diverted and flew wide of her, forgotten. Flames ran down her as his mouth burned against her throat, and her lips, opened now, were full of the sharp sea-wind.
She fell from him a little, still held.
“That once,” she said, with caught breath, “that instant lives. That stands. Nothing can touch it or steal it.... Don’t let me go—not yet, my darling—don’t let me go!”
He drew her close again, but more gently. And she said:
“It’s our victory.”
“Nothing reverses it.”
“Tell me——”
He told her his love again and again, her arm drawing him down so that the fresh scent of her hair was over him.
“Nothing takes those words back”—his kiss fell on her—“or the touch.”
“But here we begin,” he protested, wondering at the jealous terror that possessed her. “We shall go on from this for ever. Nothing is taken away. We build and build. In a few years, when I——”
“Oh!” she cried, “in a few years—who knows? We don’t break free so easily as this, John. The net sweeps wider than we know. It yields—that’s its strength. And presently it draws us in again. So it will go on—till the breaking.... You see, even you and I go on strengthening it, making new meshes despite ourselves. If ever we are to stand together in the world, first you have to gain money and power. You have to fight. Then—it’s inevitable—we would have to teach our children to fight—equip them for ‘the battle of life!’ And they would look round to find themselves in our net.
“But it’s going to end. The world will change its motive when this motive of gain has made it suffer so terribly, so obviously, that it realizes the cause of its suffering. We have to suffer—we or our children. It’s near now. The whole system may smash—the good with the bad—perhaps that’s the only way; and we may slip back into the Dark Ages again. I don’t know....”
“But now——” John said.
“Now? Yes—that’s ours.... Oh, for God’s sake! touch me and hold me as if you would never, never let me go....”
And presently, standing away from him, she was saying with composure: “Let’s go back. It’s getting dark. Look how the colour is fading from the sea.”
They went up the beach to the edge of the tree belt. There she checked him. Turning, they looked down upon their tracks to where, in the instant now gone by, the sand had been roughed and broken by their feet. Soon the water, which from the gathering darkness had drawn its first gleams of phosphorescence, would smooth their footprints away.
CHAPTER XXIV
ONE YEAR LATER: THE WORLD IN THE NET
“Our fathers understood not thy wonders....”—Psalm cvi.
“Our fathers have trespassed ... our fathers have fallen by the sword, and our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this.”—2 Chron. xxix.
“We have sinned with our fathers....”—Psalm cvi.
Under the hot sun of an early August day in 1914 John walked from Parliament Square towards Whitehall. More than a fortnight earlier he had gone to the Admiralty and offered his services for the war. His name had been added to a long list of applicants for whom employment could not immediately be found. The same morning he had offered himself as an infantryman to a corps which was awaiting permission to form new battalions, and his name had been taken again. Now an official telegram had brought him to London.
In the forecourt of the Admiralty he met Tintern, who had entered at the corner nearer to Trafalgar Square.
“You, Lynwood—I thought you were at Oxford.”
“Not yet. I’ve done the exams. I was waiting for the term to begin in October.”
“What are you doing now? Volunteering?”
“Yes.”
“I nearly chucked the Service myself a few months back. Glad I didn’t now. War breaks the monotony of routine. It’s what we, who stayed in the Service, have been preparing for. And even you, who made up your mind to break clear away—you have been roped in again. It comes to the same thing in the end.... They’ve emptied the college at Dartmouth, you know—all the cadets going to sea.”
Together they went up the steps into the great building, through the many passages of which, after enquiries made of a messenger, they began uncertainly to thread their way.
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