3
In the south-west the clear line had been wiped out and what looked like mist was sweeping towards them.
“There’s a shower coming,” said Thrale.
They stood quietly and let the sharp spatter of rain beat in their faces, and then the shadow of the storm moved on and the horizon line was clear again.
“That’s a queer cloud out there,” said Eileen. “Is it another shower?”
She pointed to a tiny blur on the far rim of the sea.
“It is queer,” said Thrale. “It’s so precisely like the smoke of a steamer.”
For a few seconds they gazed in intent silence.
“It’s getting bigger,” broke out Eileen, suddenly excited. “What is it, Jasper?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make it out,” he said. He moved away from her and shaded his eyes from the glare of the momentarily cloudless sky.
“I can’t make it out,” he repeated mechanically.
The blur was widening into a grey-black smudge, into a vaguely diffused smear with a darker centre.
“With the wind blowing towards us——” said Jasper, and broke off.
“Yes, yes—what?” asked Eileen, and then as he did not answer, she gripped his arm and repeated importunately. “What? Jasper, what? With the wind blowing towards us?”
“By God it is,” he said in a low voice, disregarding her question. “By God it is,” he repeated, and then a third time, “It is.”
“Oh! what, what? Do answer me! I can’t see!” pleaded Eileen.
But still he did not answer. He stood like a rock and stared without wavering at the growing cloud on the horizon.
And then the cloud began to grow more diffused, to die away, and Eileen could see tiny indentations on the sky line, indentations which pushed up and presently revealed themselves as attached to a little black speck in the remotest distance.
“Oh, Jasper!” she cried, and her eyes filled with inexplicable tears, so that she could see only a misty field of troubled blue.
“It’s a liner,” said Jasper at last, turning to her. He looked puzzled and his eyes stared through her. “And its coming from America. Do you suppose the American women——”
The boat was revealed now. They could see the shape of her, the high deck, the two tall funnels and the three masts. She was passing across, fifteen miles or so to the south of them, making up Channel.
For a moment they felt like shipwrecked sailors on a lonely island, who see a vessel pass beyond hail.
“Oh, Jasper, what can it be?” Eileen besought him.
“It’s a White Star boat,” he said, and he still spoke as if his mind was far away. “Is it possible, is it anyway possible that America has survived? Is it possible that there is traffic between America and Europe, and that they pass us by for fear of infection? How do we know that vessels haven’t been passing up the Channel for months past? Why should we think that this is the first?”
“It is the first,” proclaimed Eileen. “I feel it. Oh, let us hurry. Let us ride and ride as fast as we can to Plymouth or Southampton. I know they’ll be coming to Plymouth or Southampton. Men, Jasper, men! No women would dare to run a boat at that pace. See how fast she is going. Oh hurry, hurry!”
He caught fire then. They ran back to find their bicycles. They ran, and presently they rode in silence, with fierce intensity. They rode at first as if they had but ten miles to go, and the lives of all the women in England depended upon their speed.
And though they slackened after the first few miles they still rode on with such eager determination that they reached Plymouth at sunset.
But they could see no sign of the liner in the waters about Plymouth. They saw only the deserted hulks of a hundred vessels that had ridden there untouched for twelve months, futile battleships and destroyers among them; great, venomous, useless things that had become void of all meaning in the struggle of humanity.
“It’s not here. Let’s go on!” said Eileen.
Jasper shrugged his shoulders. “It’s well over a hundred miles to Southampton,” he said. “Nearer a hundred and fifty, I should say.”
“But we must go on, we must,” urged Eileen.
It was evident that Jasper, too, felt a compelling desire to go on. He stood still with a look of intense concentration on his face. Eileen had seen him look thus, when he had been momentarily frustrated by some problem of mill machinery. She waited expectant for the solution she was sure would presently emerge.
“A motor,” he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. “If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles—light of some sort. The engines wouldn’t rust, but they’d clog. It must be paraffin. We daren’t clean with petrol by artificial light. It’s possible. Let’s try....”
That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea.
“The Solent,” said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them.
On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist.
“She’ll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going,” said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm.