V
The meeting was of the simplest. At the Reform Club one day he was lunching with two men, one a novelist, Westcott, whom he knew very slightly, the other a fellow American. Westcott, a dark thick-set man of about forty, with a reputation that without being sensational was solid and well merited, said very little. Harkness liked him and recognised in him a kindly shyness rather like his own. After luncheon they moved into the big smoking-room upstairs to drink their coffee.
A large, handsome man of between fifty and sixty came up and spoke to Westcott. He was obviously pleased to see him, putting his hand on his shoulder, looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes. Westcott also flushed with pleasure. The big man sat down with them and Harkness was introduced to him. His name was Maradick—Sir James Maradick. A strange, unreal kind of name for so real and solid a man. As he sat forward on the sofa with his heavy shoulders, his deep chest, his thick neck, red-brown colour, and clear open gaze, he seemed to Harkness to be the typical rather naïve friendly but cautious British man of business.
That impression soon passed. There was something in Maradick that almost instantly warmed his heart. He responded—as do all American men—immediately, even emotionally, to any friendly contact. The reserves that were in his nature were from his superficial cosmopolitanism; the native warm-hearted, eager and trusting Americanism was as real and active as it ever had been. It was, in five minutes, as though he had known this large kindly man always. His shyness dropped from him. He was talking eagerly and with great happiness.
Maradick did not patronise, did not check that American spontaneity with traditional caution as so many Englishmen do; he seemed to like Harkness as truly as Harkness liked him.
Westcott had to go. The other American also departed, but Maradick and Harkness sat on there, amused, and even absorbed.
"If I am keeping you——" Harkness said suddenly, some of his shyness for a moment returning.
"Not at all," Maradick answered. "I have nothing urgent this afternoon. I've got the very place for you, I believe."
They had been speaking of places. Maradick had travelled, and together they found some of the smaller places that they both knew and loved—Dragör on the sea beyond Copenhagen, the woods north of Helsingfors, the beaches of Ischia, the enchantment of Girgente with the white goats moving over carpets of flowers through the ruined temples, the silence and mystery of Mull. He knew America too—the places that foreigners never knew; the teeth-shaped mountains at Las Cruces, the lovely curve of Tacoma, the little humped-up hill of Syracuse, the purple horizons beyond Nashville, the lone lake shore of Marquette——
"And then in this country there is Treliss," he said softly, staring in front of him.
"Treliss?" Harkness repeated after him, liking the name.
"Yes. In North Cornwall. A beautiful place."
He paused—sighed.
"I was there more than ten years ago. I shall never go back."
"Why not?"
"I liked it too well. I daresay they've spoiled it now as they have many others. Thanks to wretched novelists, the railway company and char-à-bancs, Cornwall and Glebeshire are ruined. No, I dare not go back."
"Was it very beautiful?" Harkness asked.
"Yes. Beautiful? Oh yes. Wonderful. But it wasn't that. Something happened to me there."[1]
"So that you dare not go back?"
"Yes. Dare is the word. I believe that the same thing would happen again. And I'm too old to stand it. In my case now it would be ludicrous. It was nearly ludicrous then." Harkness said nothing. "How old are you? If it isn't an impertinence——"
"Thirty-five? You're young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places——?" He broke off. "I mean—— Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don't see him or her for years, and then you meet again—don't you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven't died how wonderful to find them all alive again after all those years, how you had forgotten the way they breathed and spoke and had their being; how interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams——"
He broke off. "Places do the same, I think," he said. "If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things . . . and always will for your kind . . . a sort of secret society; I believe," he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, "that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?"
Then he added quietly, reflectively. "It changed me more than the war ever did."
"Do I want it?" Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. "I should say so. I want nothing so much. It's just what I need, what I've been looking for——"
"Then go down there. I believe you're just the kind—but go at the right time. There's a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance all round the town. That's the time for you to go. That will liberate you if you throw yourself into it. It's in August. August the—— I'm not quite sure of the date. I'll write to you if you'll give me your address."
Soon afterwards, with a warm clasp of the hand, they parted.
[1]See Maradick at Forty.