PART I
THE LONG SPLICE
I
As the little vedette approached Dinard Cale—I had got quickly through the Customs and come across with the hampers of that morning's fish—an Alec Aird out of a Men's Summer Catalogue waved his hand to George Coverham out of a flea-bag and called out a cheery good morning. It was hardly yet half-past seven, so Alec must have been up betimes. He seized the two bags I pushed ashore and gesticulated to the driver of a nondescript sort of carosse. Then he looked me up and down and grinned.
"Ready for breakfast?"
"I'm ready for some hot water and clean clothes," I replied. "No, it wasn't so bad."
"And is this all the stuff you've brought? I asked you to come and stay with us, not just to drop in to lunch. Well, up you get. I don't suppose you'll see Madge and Jennie till midday. That damned Casino; three a.m. again last night. But it's no good talking to Madge. It always ends in her doing just as she likes. Why, when I was Jennie's age I didn't know there was such a thing as a roulette-table.... I say, have you brought any English tobacco?"
I had not been in Dinard, nor indeed in France at all, since before the war; but the long steep street where the little dark cafés were opening seemed very friendly and familiar. We rumbled past the English Club into the Rue Lavavasseur, and instinctively my head turned to the right. Each short descending street gave the same remembered glimpse, of white casino or hotel at the bottom and the bright emerald beyond. We clattered down to the Place, and then slackened again to the ascent of dark tree-planted avenues. "Gauche—droit, I mean—starboard a couple of points," directed Alec, whose French bears no very great strain; and after ten minutes or so the sound of our wheels suddenly ceased. We were on the soft sandy drive that ended at the gate of Ker Annic.
Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of shining mahogany and cut and bevelled glass, these palms that brush the electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards spread the wide sea—serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay, dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering—the pensive aspect of a sea that has its back to the sun.
"Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere—grilles of ironwork over the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron passementerie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping Beauties—confound those rotten late hours for that kid——"
I assured him that I had no wish to go to bed.
"Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might give me that tobacco——"
And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me to my toilet.
The pergola in which I found him three quarters of an hour later was at the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor, over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that crept like a net over us whenever we moved. A bonne followed me with coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat untwinkling sea.
We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly, applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have been my fancy or the force of former associations, but already I was conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French—the day's provisions were arriving.
Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now."
"Anything you like; what's on?"
"These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters? 'Debout les Athlètes'—'Sons of the Patrie'—they've been all over the place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud—haven't seen him—in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just time for the tram. Come along——"
The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand Stand at one end of it, and already les athlètes had got down to work. There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters, leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the outer track or resting in twos and threes on the grass. Several of them wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No Briton would have dared to display such physical naïveté. They might have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to the death.
We watched them for an hour, and then the whooping of that horrible little tram was heard in the distance. It hurtled up to the Halte, fouling the air with the smoke of the dust and slate and slack that served it for coal, and we sat with our backs to the engine and took what care of our flannels we might.
The sluggards had descended by the time we reached the house again. Among the harlequin shadows of the pergola Madge advanced to me with both hands outstretched.
"Monsieur! Sois le bienvenu!" Then, standing back to look at me, "What nice flannels, George! Some of the Frenchmen here, quite nice men, go about in the most extraordinary cheesecloth arrangements, and as for their shoes——! Yes, I think I can be seen with you. You can take me shopping this afternoon. I saw it in a window yesterday but hadn't time to go in. ('It's' a hat, if you must know, Alec.) And this is Jennie, in case she's grown so much you don't remember her."
There was a time when I used to kiss little Jennie Aird, but I should not have dared to kiss the young woman who stood before me now. Take-aboutable, by Jove!... Jennie had her father's colouring, golden-red hair over a tea-rose-petal complexion lightly freckled; and if her eyebrows were faint, that somehow merely seemed to enhance the steady clear pebble-grey of the gaze beneath. She was six inches taller than her mother, and whether it was the smallness of her short-featured face that made full her beautiful throat, or whether it was the other way round, I will not attempt to say. Nor do I remember whether her hair was up or down that day. I have an idea that at that time it was sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Her gesture as she offered me her hand had the proper condescension of such a creature for a battered old piece of goods life myself. I wondered whether I ought to call her Miss Aird. These things come over one with rather a shock sometimes.
We lunched in a shining little salon, the exact centre of which, whether you measured sideways, lengthwise or up-and-down, was occupied by an enormous gilt Ganymede and Eagle lamp slung by heavy chains from the ceiling—for the lighting was either oil or candles at Ker Annic. Then back to the pergola for coffee. The tide had receded, and the rocks and the stakes that marked the channels stuck up everywhere menacingly—the Fort, Les Herbiers, Cézembre. The warm air was laden with the smell of genets, the sky was brightly blue over our white lattice. I saw Alec preparing to doze.
"Well, what about Dinard?" I said to Madge.
"Sure you wouldn't rather follow Alec's example? Very well, we'll drop Jennie at the tennis-place and you and I'll go off on the prowl. I'll be ready in five minutes. Jennie!"
She ran up to the house, and I waited for her on the sandy drive.
We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined "It" was near the Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour while Alec's money took wing.
"Mais tiens, Madame"—the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered, butterflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under the diablerie—"posé commé ça, en effet sur l'oreille—Claire, la voile verte—legèrment—oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself, as unabashed as the attitudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On dirait un sourire sur la tête de Madame!"
So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and we sought the teashop and Jennie.
All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the glass counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters, their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a hurried déjeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck, flannels hitched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the whirl of talk.
"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on grass——"
"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and seventh-tenths——"
"American——"
"I bet you——"
"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on grass——"
"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for five-thirty, remember——"
"But I tell you this chap Arnaud——"
"Do let me get you one of those strawberry things, Mrs Aird——"
"My brother saw him—he just threw off his coat and waistcoat and ran as he was——"
"Mademoiselle, trois thés, s'il vous plait——"
I spoke in Madge's ear.
"She's a very beautiful child."
"Jennie?" said proud Madge. "Rather a young queen, isn't she? But Alec's perfectly absurd about her. Thinks young people to-day are the same as we were. She shall have the best time I can give her."
"Any——?" I looked the question.
"No. Quite asleep. She's perfectly happy dancing and dreaming and talking sport with these boys."
"Who are they?"
She told me. She knew half Dinard, and the printed Visitors' List gave her the rest.
"Well, well," was all I found to say, as I looked at Jennie again.
For while woman's beauty is coeval with Time itself, you have only your own allotted portion of it. The loveliness that comes too early or too late is no more your affair than the dawns before your time, the sunsets after you are gone. Madge at the midday of her life was still within my reach at my post-meridian, but Jennie would bloom like a rosy daybreak when my own evening star appeared. Young Rugby, young Charterhouse, would write his vers-libre to that small head, sweet throat and the red-gold of her hair.... But I hardly know why I write all this. I am only trying to show how sorely I had needed a change and how grateful I was now that it had come. I knew that I was welcome to stay with the Airds as long as I pleased. It didn't matter if I didn't write another book for ten years, it didn't greatly matter if I never wrote another. I didn't want to write. That ethereal sea, that multi-coloured plage, the genet-scented air, the feeling that all about me were people who knew what they could not do and wasted no time in attempting to do it—ah, they live their lives from the beginning and end them at the end in that fair and unperplexed land of northern France.
II
Both by Alec and Madge, Jennie's education was discussed before me with complete freedom.
"Stuff and nonsense!" Madge would roundly declare.
"Look at those two Beverley girls!"
"Very nice girls, I should have thought," Alec would growl.
"Yes, and who's ever going to marry them? Nobody as far as I can see. That's Vi Beverley's fault. She's let them sit in one another's pockets, and have their own silly family jargon, and think that the rest of the world's a cinema just to amuse them, till they don't know how to talk to a stranger without being rude. They positively freeze any young man who goes near them, and when they do go away it's to cousins. Family affection's all very well in its place, but you can have too much of it. Jennie shall take people as they are. If she does miss an hour's sleep once in a while she can stay in bed all next day if she wants."
"Better teach her baccarat and have done with it."
"Well, she needn't faint when it's mentioned. This is 1920. If ever those Beverley girls marry it will be one another."
"If she begins to think of marrying in another four or five years——"
"She's not going to sit on the arm of your chair for five years while you read the Paris Daily Mail.... Anyway, about to-night's party——"
Then, on the way to the Stade or the Club, I should have Alec's view of the matter.
"When we were kids, if we were allowed to stop up once a year for a pantomime ... beastly mixed sort of place like this too! Madge doesn't know half that goes on. Why, before I'd been here three days one of the waiters at the Grand had the infernal neck to come up to me and whisper——"
I broke into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a waiter whispering alluring suggestions to Alec Aird of all people was altogether too much for me.
"And what did you say?" I asked him.
"Say?" said Alec grimly. "When I said 'Frog' he jumped, I promise you that!... And mark you, these French fellows look after their own women all right—got their hands on their elbows all the time. It's only our confounded ideas of freedom——"
"But there's no harm in to-night's party——"
"Oh, that's all right. That's at home. We can turn 'em out at ten o'clock, and be in bed in reasonable time. It's that damned Casino I bar——"
And so on. Early to bed and a nap after lunch certainly suited Alec. I have seen once-fine athletes settle down like this before.
I had been at Ker Annic some days, when about the last thing I expected had happened to me. I have just told you how little I cared whether I ever wrote another book or not. Well, that morning I had remained in my room after coffee and rolls to write a couple of necessary letters. These finished, I had sat gazing out of the window at nothing in particular, lazily content with the beauty of the morning. Then, suddenly and without the least premeditation, I had taken a fresh sheet of paper and had begun to make detached and random notes. These had presently strung themselves together, and by and by a phrase had sprung up of itself....
Whereupon, in the very moment of my despairing of ever writing again, I had realised that my next novel was stirring within me.
Now let me tell you the part that Jennie Aird played in this.
I frankly admit that the writers of my own generation have sometimes been a little smug and make-believe about young girlhood. We have seen a lovely thing, and perhaps have let its mere loveliness run away with us, to the loss of what I believe is nowadays called "contact." We have not seen the butterfly's anatomy for the pretty bloom of its wing. Nevertheless, I cannot see that the eager young morphologists who are succeeding us have so very much to teach us after all. To read some of these you would think that the whole moving mystery had been disposed of when they had said that a young girl became conscious, shy, and had a talk with her mother. If it must be anatomy or bloom, I think I shall go on preferring the bloom. I have no wish to exchange the eyes in my head for that improved apparatus that turns a woman's hand that is meant to be stooped over into a shadowy bundle of metacarpal bones.
At the same time I do not take it for granted that youth is necessarily the happiest season of our lives. I remember my own youth too well for that. Emotionally, I am aware, it is all over the shop. It will giggle in church or make a heartbreak out of nothing, indifferently and with tragical facility. It is exploring the new-found marvels within itself against the day when its eyes shall open to the miracle of another. That, at any rate, and as nearly as I can express it, was the state of Madge Aird's sleeping beauty of a daughter on the evening of the party of which Madge and Alec had spoken.
It was a ravishing evening of late light over an opal sea. The same dusk that turned the begonias velvety-black in their beds made luminous the pale hydrangeas, until they resembled the glimmering whites and mauves of the frocks that moved in and out among them. The villa was lighted up like a paper lantern, and the moving couples inside made ceaselessly wavering shadows across the lawn. Over the ragged bay the phares winked in and out, and beyond the ilex and chestnut a faint luminosity trembled—the corona of Dinard lighting up for the night.
They danced in and out between the wide hall and the salon where the gilded Ganymede struggled with the Eagle—youngsters in their first dinner-jackets, sylphs with their plaits swinging about their softly-browned napes, their elders mingling among them or watching them from the walls. Madge, in a frock that seemed to be held up singly and solely by her presence of mind, played fox-trots. Alec was busy "buttling" in the little recess where a scratch supper had been set out. The air was filled with the light talk in French and English, throbbed with the rhythm of the foxtrotting piano.
For half an hour or so I made myself agreeable to a number of ladies of whose names I had not the faintest idea; then, with a sense of duty done, I turned my back on the pretty scene and strolled into the garden. On the whole I was pleased with my day. That was what I had wanted—the solace and security of being at work again. Nothing world-shaking or tremendous; I simply wanted to get on with the unpretentious job that was mine, and incidentally to be tolerably well-paid for it. That, when all was said, was the way of wisdom, the kind of thing men very properly get knighthoods for and had their portraits hung up in Clubs. It seemed to me that I had been through a very evil time, and that now that I was rid of the weight of it life was worth living again. I paced the paths of the gay artificial little garden, my thoughts on all manner of pleasant times to come.
Near the end of the house grew an auracaria, forbidding and black. As I moved towards it I noticed a dim white shape beneath it. I was turning away again (for at a party like that no unaccompanied bachelor has any title to the dimmer corners) when the figure moved towards me. It was Jennie Aird—alone.
"Hallo, why aren't you dancing?" I asked. I had already watched her dance four dances in succession with the same partner—young Kingston I believe it was.
She made a quick little grimace, but did not reply.
"This is rather a nice party," I remarked.
To this she did reply. "It's a beastly party, and I hate it."
I drew certain conclusions; but "Oh?" I said. "What's the matter with it? I thought it rather fun."
"Everything's beastly, and I wish we were back in London," she snapped.
"Anything the matter, Jennie?"
"Oh, how I do wish people wouldn't ask one what's the matter!"
"Then come for a turn and I won't."
She put her hand indifferently on my arm. She was nearly as tall as I, and I noticed as we passed the windows that, that night at any rate, her red-gold plait had been taken up and was closely swathed about her nape.
Of course young Kingsley or young somebody else had said something or done something, or hadn't said or done anything, or if he had had done it at the wrong moment or in the wrong way or had otherwise conjured up the shade of tragedy. Therefore, as there are occasions when tact may take the form of talking about one's self, I talked to Jennie about myself as we skirted the garden.
"Do you know, something rather exciting happened to me this morning," I remarked.
She showed no great interest, but asked me what it was.
"It mayn't sound much to you, but it interests me. I think I've started a new book."
"I wish I'd something to do," was the extent of her congratulation.
"What would you like to do?"
"Oh, anything. I shouldn't care what it was. Anything's better than this."
"Than this jolly party?"
"Yes. Or else I wish I'd been born a man. They get all the chances."
I reflected that one man, somewhere in the world, would have a very enviable chance, but kept my thought to myself. "Been having a row with somebody?" I asked.
"No," she answered, I have no doubt entirely untruthfully. "I'm just fed up. I wish I could have nursed in the war or something, but I was too young. Or I wish I could write like you. But if I told father I wanted to earn my own living he wouldn't hear of it, and mother's one idea is to dress me up and show me off and marry me to somebody. They don't know how sick I am of it."
I glanced at her as we passed the lighted windows again. That soft red sill of her lower lip was level, and just a shade short for the upper member of her mouth's sweet portal, so that the pearls within were negligently guarded. Temper and discontent were in her pebble-grey eyes. She gave her head an impatient toss, as if to shake off the thought of the boisterous young cadets and crammer's-pups within. In a day she seemed to have outgrown them, to have lengthened her mind as she lengthened her frocks—if young women do lengthen their frocks nowadays. She wanted to nurse, to write, to be a student or some personage's secretary, to say to the dingy world, "Here I am—use me and don't spare me," in the very moment when I and such as I, disillusioned and worn, were sighing "Enough—release me—or if that may not be, give me but once more, once more that first dawning joy!"
"I don't want to get married," she sulked. "Ever. Mother may laugh, but I won't. It would have been different in the war. I love all those darling boys who were killed. But these schoolboys are all the same.... You don't want a secretary for your new book, do you?"
It may have been my imagination, but I am not sure that there did not stir in my memory some faint echo, of a woman sitting under a murky dome as she waited for her Manuel de Répertoire Bibliographique Universel. I know these secretaries and their wiles, and if my answer had had twenty syllables instead of one I should have meant them all.
"No," I said.
We had reached the wrought-iron gates at the beginning of the sandy drive. Three or four cars were parked there, and apparently somebody or other was leaving early, for a chauffeur had just switched on the head-lights of a heavy touring-car that shook the ground with its muttering. Judging from the power of the lights it was the car of one of Madge's French friends, for no English car carries shafts so blinding as those twin beams that clove the darkness. They made the windows of the house seem a dull expiring turnip-lantern. Their blaze lighted up every pebble, every blade of grass, defined the shadows of blade on blade. Out of the fumy darkness insects dropped, stunned with light, and moved feebly on the path. I drew Jennie behind the glare, and as I did so one of the English servant maids came up to me.
"A gentleman wishes to speak to you, sir," she said.
"To me? What gentleman? Where?"
"A French gentleman, sir. A M'seer Arnaud his name is."
"Arnaud? I don't know any Arnaud. Are you sure he asked for me and not for Mr Aird?"
"It was Sir George Coverham he asked for, sir."
"Well, where is he?"
"Here—at least he was a moment ago——"
"Arnaud?" I mused. "Do you know a M'sieur Arnaud, Jennie?"
As I turned to her I saw her in that false illumination with curious distinctness. The soft upward glow from the path reminded one of a photographer's manipulation of his tissue-paper screens. She stood there semi-footlighted—smooth brows, low glint of her hair, the caught-up upper lip that showed the pearls, her steady gaze....
Ah, her gaze! What was this, that made me for a moment unable to remove my own eyes from her face? At what object beyond the car was she so fixedly looking? Why had her bosom risen? Why, as if at some "Open, Sesame!" did that betraying upper lip offer, not two, but all the pearls within?
My eyes followed hers....
As they did so sounds of talk and laughter and farewells drew near from the house. The departing guests were upon us.
But I had seen. If only for an instant before it retreated swiftly into the shadows again, I had seen. Gazing at her as steadily as she had gazed at him, the vision of a young man's face had momentarily appeared.
Then the babble broke out about us.
"Thank you a thousand times, chère Madame——"
"Delicieuse——"
"Merci, M'sieu' Air-r-r-rd——"
"Better have the rug round you——"
"Where's Jennie? Ah, here she is——"
"À demain, à onze heures——"
"Good-bye——"
"Good-bye, Sair-r-r George——"
But I still saw that face haunting the transparent gloom. A béret cap had surmounted it, a blouse en grosse toile had clothed the shoulders below. Monsieur Arnaud, if it was he, was dressed as an ouvrier or a sailor dresses.
And he was young, sunbrowned, grave, beautiful.
The car backed and turned. There was a grating as the clutch was slipped in, and then the engine dropped to a steady purr. The wrought-iron gates started out in the glare, the red tail-lights diminished. I was dimly aware that Madge said something to me, but I remained motionless where I stood. I came to myself to find myself alone.
Sunbrowned, grave, beautiful, young!
And he called himself Arnaud!
I have told you of that list of names with which his diary began. Arnaud was not among them. But Arnold was. He had simply Gallicised it, and as Arnaud he was seeking me.
Then I felt my sleeve timidly touched. His voice came from behind me, a voice with a charming, uncertain timbre.
"George—I say, George—who was that?"
III
I will make a shameful confession. My heart had sunk like lead. I had wanted a holiday from him. That very morning I had thought I had secured it, had blithely planned my new and cheerful work.
And here he was, with his hand on my sleeve.
He repeated his words in a whisper. "George, who was that?"
Slowly I turned. "It is you?"
"Yes."
"How did you know I was here?"
"I saw your name in the Visitors' List."
"Tell me what I can do for you."
He fell a little back. "George," he faltered, "why this tone?"
I refused to admit at once that I was ashamed. "We can't stop talking here," I said. "Where are you staying?"
"Out at St Briac."
"Then I suppose you're walking back? The last tram went long ago."
"It's only six miles."
"Then wait here, and I'll walk part of the way with you."
They were still merrily dancing in the house, but I managed to get to my own room unseen. I put on an ordinary jacket and cap and descended again. He was not where I had left him. He had skirted the lauristinus bushes, and from a safe distance was gazing into the house.
Oh, inopportune—inopportune and undesirable in the last degree!
"Ready?" I said.
Reluctantly he turned away his eyes and followed me past the cars. We passed out of the drive and into the dark tree-planted lanes of St Enogat.
A rutty little ruelle runs along the side of St Enogat Church and makes a short cut to the high road. We passed the church without exchanging a word. At last, where the street widened, I broke the silence.
"So you're Arnaud now?"
"Yes," he said in a low voice.
"The athlete people are talking about?"
He muttered that there were lots of Arnauds.
"You're a Frenchman anyway?"
"I've got to be something."
"Are you going to stay a Frenchman?"
"I don't know yet."
We continued our walk. The little white-painted Grand Stand of the Stade glimmered over the hedge on our right when next he spoke. I saw his glance at it.
"About those athletics, George," he said awkwardly. "I was an awful ass. If there's anybody who oughtn't to draw attention to himself it's me. But I did it without thinking. It was at Ambleteuse. They were running and jumping, and I suppose my conceit got the better of me and I just had to have a go. But I've cut all that out. It wasn't safe. I don't go near a Stade now."
"Ambleteuse? Then you did cross Dover-Calais?"
He hesitated. "Not exactly Dover-Calais. Thereabouts."
"Thereabouts?... I suppose you worked your passage and then gave them the slip?"
"No. I thought of that, but it was a bit too chancy."
"Then what did you do?"
"Well—strictly between ourselves, George—it's much better not talked about—you see my difficulty—but I swam it."
I stopped dead in my stride. "You what!"
He spoke apologetically, as if it were something not quite creditable.
"Yes. But I don't want to give you a wrong impression. I didn't swim it really fairly. Not like Webb and Burgess. I only swam it more or less. For one thing, I hadn't trained, you see."
I recovered my breath. "What do you mean by swimming it more or less?"
His modesty was almost excessive. "It was like this, George. You see I rather funked just jumping in at Dover and trusting to luck to bring me across. It's a devil of a long swim, you know, and besides, I had to have my clothes; couldn't land here with nothing on. So I got hold of a fellow at the Lord Warden, a boatman who'd been with Woolf when he just missed it. I swore him to secrecy and all that, and fixed things up with him, and he gave me tides and times and currents and so on. I told him I was only an amateur who didn't want to make a fuss till he'd had a sighting-shot, and—well, it cost me a tenner. But it saved no end of trouble. He and another chap came across with me in a little motor-launch. I greased myself and got into a mask, and a mile out of Dover I went overboard. Even then I didn't swim it fairly, for I was hauled in again after about six hours for another greasing. My flesh was quite dead half an inch in, you see. I was sick too. If we'd been really meant to do that sort of thing we should have been given scales, like fishes."
"Well, and then?"
"Well—that's all. I landed a little this side of Grisnez, just as if I'd been out for an ordinary bathe. My chaps kept a sharp look-out for the coastguard, and smuggled my clothes on to a rock; my English ones, of course; I bought this rig in Boulogne. And in three or four days I was pretty well all right again. But I don't think I'd have the stamina to do it again.... I say, promise me you won't go talking about it, George. I've got to lie absolutely low. I frightfully wanted to go to Antwerp, but I simply daren't do it. I might be asked for my Army Discharge Papers, or something awkward like that."
So that was how he had solved the passport problem! Unable to walk the Straits, he had simply swum them, and had saved that night's stoking with coal-dust in his beard! And suddenly and inexplicably, I found something of my resentment already softening within me. There was a noble simplicity about his expedient, and even his voluminous corduroys and shapeless vareuse did not hide the magnificence of his build. And yet he, so magnificent, must forego that deep joy in his physical splendour if he was to preserve his anonymity. It passed him by as the publisher's belief in him had passed him by—as, it began to appear to me, all else in life must pass him by. Antwerp and the Stades for others, but for him, who would have won glorious laurels there—no. Nay, say he was now what he looked, nineteen or twenty. His athletic prime was already far advanced. He himself doubted whether he had the stamina to swim the Channel again. This alone would have sufficed to win my compassion.
We were now well clear of St Enogat. The night was moonless, but the heavens were crowded with stars, and seaward the lights burned emerald, diamond, ruby. Southward over the land the eye wandered over the dim fruit trees that dotted the fields of sarrasin. A light breeze moved in the tops of the crooked poplars, and where the tramway leaves the road and takes as it were a dive into a wilderness of dark tamarisk and thorn a gramophone played somewhere in an unseen cottage. Already an intermittent paleness had begun to sweep the sky ahead: a pulse of faint light, four seconds of darkness, the pulse again and eleven seconds of darkness—the Giant of Cap Fréhel.
At least another ten years in less than a month! I kept stealing shy glances at him through the limpid darkness. Quite literally I felt shy in his presence, for he was both known and unknown to me. If he was now nineteen, I saw him now at nineteen for the first time in my life—grave and young, brown and beautiful. His talk had a gentleness and a modesty too. No wonder Julia Oliphant had loved him!
"Well, go on after you left Ambleteuse," I said by and by.
"Oh, then I walked, and took train once in a while, till I got to Rouen and Caen and on here. Lovely churches all the way; I want to go to Caen again. That took me a fortnight. Then I'd a couple of days in St Malo, and—well, that about accounts for the time."
"And what are you doing at St Briac?"
"Sketching. Taken a great fancy to it. I've got a bike cheap, and I either walk or ride. I stay at a rather shabby little place, but it suits me. I've only a couple of haversacks and my painting things, so I can be off at a moment's notice if—if anything crops up."
Charmingly and sincerely as he spoke, I was yet conscious of a reserve. He kept, as it were, to the surface of his itinerary, dwelling only on the outer details of his life. And, as little by little he repossessed me, I knew that I should have to get behind this reticence. For when and how had he lost those ten years? In Trenchard's loft, or since, or partly both? Had he, when he had plunged into the sea a mile out of Dover, been still twenty-nine, or his present age, or some intermediate one? If I was to be of service to him it was necessary that I should know all this.
"Derry," I said, using his name for the first time, "I can't walk all the way to St Briac and back again. For one thing I'm dressed for a party. Let's sit down."
There was a warm dry earth-wall with heath and thyme and rest-harrow and convolvulus growing on it, and there we sat down. Opposite us opened the marshy gap of Le Port, and every four seconds, every eleven seconds, the aurora-like Light a dozen miles away was faintly reduplicated in the wet mud. All was quiet save for the ceaseless rustle of the ragged poplars, the creeping whisper of the tide.
"Now," I quietly ordered him, "I want you to tell me all the things you've been leaving out."
At first I thought he was going to behave like an obdurate boy, whose affairs are hugely important just because they are his. But he seemed to think better of it. In a hesitating voice he said, "What things?"
"Well, begin with Trenchard's place on Sunday night, the 4th of July. What happened then?"
His answer was hardly audible. "Yes, it was then."
"How much?"
"The whole lot."
"At one go you dropped from twenty-nine to—what is it now? Twenty?"
"Nineteen or twenty. I don't know. Yes."
"Then nothing's happened since then?"
"No—at least I'm not quite sure."
"Not sure?"
"No. I honestly don't know. There's been a gap somewhere, something I ought to have come to again, but that somehow I've missed altogether. I simply can't account for it."
"Explain, Derry."
He seemed hardly to trust his voice. "It's the queerest thing of all, but I'll swear it on a Bible if you like. You know what it was I funked more than anything—all those beastly rotten things going to happen all over again.... Don't let's talk about them. They were all the time like a nightmare to me, that I was drawing nearer and nearer to all the time. I tell you, I'd decided to put myself out rather than wallow through all that again.... Well, I can only tell you I've absolutely skipped it. On my honour I have. It's the most unaccountable thing, but——" He choked a little.
"But," I said, deeply pondering, "is it possible to skip a step—any step?"
"I should have said not," he replied. "Beats me altogether. I started on a dead straight course back, and I fancied I should have to take my fences as I came to them. But this kink's come, and somehow I've picked up the thread again clear on the other side of it."
I pondered more gravely still. "Wait a bit. It all happened that Sunday night, kink and all?"
"Yes."
"That was the night you left my place with Julia Oliphant, said good-bye to her at Waterloo, and went on to Trenchard's? Did you stick to that programme?"
"Yes."
("And so," something seemed positively to shout within me, "much good you've done yourself, Julia Oliphant! Much good you're still plotting! That gap that he's skipped altogether—that's precisely where you're setting the man-traps for him, you and your chiffons and your brown charmeuse and your new willow-leaf shoes! You'd better forget Peggy and her garters and get back into your nice quiet tea-gowns again!")
But aloud I resumed: "Then, if nothing's happened since that night, that means that you're now stable—stationary?"
His reply gave me a queer shock. It was in the last word that the shock lay. "As far as I can make out, sir."
"So you haven't got to move on from pillar to post and one lodging to another?"
"I've been at St Briac for ten days. And that isn't all," he continued earnestly. "I can't say for certain, and perhaps it's too soon to talk about it. So this is touching wood. But I've got a sort of feeling that if I'm careful and live perfectly quietly—no excitement and going to bed early, you know—I might be able to stick just like this for a long time. I know no more about that gap than you do, but it seems to have cleared the air like a thunderstorm. And when I tell you that I really intended to put myself out ... oh, how thankful...." But again he checked himself.
And I too found myself gulping to think that I had so recently wanted to wash my hands of him. Be rid of him? I knew now that not only should I never be rid of him, but that never again should I want to. Charming, innocent, beautiful and grave! I cannot tell you, for I do not know, what mysterious spiritual thing Julia Oliphant had actually wrought upon him. I only knew that all that he had so greatly dreaded she had taken upon herself, and that whatever her portion thenceforward was, his was complete absolution. "One for the Lord, the other for Azazel"; out into the wilderness she, the scapegoat, must go; but on him the smell of that fiercest fire of all had not so much as passed.... And I realised in that moment that thenceforward he was my charge—yes, my son had I had one. Must he stay in France? Then I must stay with him. Must he wander? Then I must wander too. For the rest of his unstable life I must be his staff and support.
"But I say, sir," he said shyly presently, "about why I dug you out to-night. I hope you'll say no straight away if you think it's fearful cheek, but the fact is I must have some more colours, and—well, I've got a little money in London, but I can't get at it just for the moment. So I really came to ask you if you could lend me five hundred francs."
This was strange. I shot a swift glance at him as he lay, a rich dark patch of blouse and corduroys at my side.
"Where," I asked him as steadily as I could, "is your money in London?"
"I have a little there," he said awkwardly.
"How much?"
"I don't quite know, but it's certainly more than five hundred francs."
"Where did it come from?"
Through the clear dark I saw his dusky flush. "I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have asked you. Never mind."
"Derry," I said, greatly moved, "tell me: are you remembering things quite properly? You surely haven't forgotten that I have your money?"
"Eh?" he said. The next moment he had tried to cover his quick confusion. "Eh? Why, of course. What am I thinking of? It did slip my memory just for the moment; stupid! I'd got it mixed up somehow with Julia Oliphant. I was going to write to her. I remember, of course. You sold my furniture. You did sell it, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"How much did it fetch?"
This time it was my turn to evade. "Well, as you say, more than five hundred francs. I—I haven't totted it up yet. I came away in rather a hurry. But there's quite a lot, and I can let you have all you want to-morrow."
"Then that's all right," he said cheerfully.
But I found it anything but all right. On the contrary, it was profoundly disturbing. If he could forget that he had authorised me to sell that black oak furniture of his he could forget more vital matters. Yet he had remembered the furniture when I had urged him.
"Tell me," I said more quietly, "as simply as you can, exactly what you do and what you don't remember."
"I only forgot it for a moment," he stammered.
"But you did forget it. Can you explain it?"
I felt that his mind laboured, struggled; but I was hardly prepared for what came next.
"Just let me think for a minute. I want to get to the bottom of it too. It's a thing I've been watching most carefully, and I give you my word I remembered everything absolutely clearly up to a couple of hours ago. I knew all about that furniture when I came to that place for you, because as I walked along I was trying to work out how much it ought to amount to. In fact I wasn't coming to borrow at all, but just to ask you for something on account. Let me think. I got there at exactly at quarter to ten——"
His fingers were playing with the wild flowers on the earth-wall. In and out through the whispering poplars the stars peeped. Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, rose and fell the Light. I fell to counting the intervals as I waited for his reply. Diamond, emerald, ruby, twinkled the lights at sea....
Then suddenly he sat up and took a deep breath. I saw his radiant smile. He faced me with the starlight in his eyes.
"George," he said, "who was that with you in the garden?"
IV
For some seconds the stars seemed to go out of the sky. I seemed to be, not sitting with him on that earth-wall by Le Port gap, but to be standing again in the drive of Ker Annic, with the glare of a touring-car thrown up from the ground and Jennie Aird by my side. I seemed to see again her parted lips, to hear that soft intake of her breath. And his own face seemed to hang again like a beautiful mask suspended in the glow.
And when I had descended from my room again I had found him lurking in the bushes, gazing into the lighted house.
Stars in the night above us! Was that to be the next thing to happen?
Had it happened?
Evidently something had happened, and had happened during the past two hours.
Then, as I strove to grasp the immense possibility, a deep and hapless yearning flooded my heart. The loveliness, the loveliness of it had it been possible! She, with the dreams still unrubbed from her opening eyes, he a December primrose peeping up anew out of the roots of his wrecked and fruitless years—they would have been matchlessly coupled. Had he in truth been my son I could have desired no more for him than this.
Yet why do I say "had it been possible"? Possible or impossible, something, whether more beautiful or fatal I could not say, had in fact happened. Whether to her or not, it had happened to him. How else explain that treacherous little slip about his money? Up to then his memory had not failed him. Reticence he had shown, a youthful unwillingness to talk about himself, but not in order to conceal an impaired faculty. His account of his movements during the past month had been slight, but complete enough. One gap only—the Julia gap—he found unaccountable, and that was no enigma to me.
But was he now on the eve of yet another transformation? Had one look of eyes into eyes hastened him to another stage? Absolved he was; was he now to be, not merely absolved, but confirmed in all the beauty and liberty of that absolution? Consider it as I tried to consider it, sitting on that thymy earth-wall while Fréhel, like a ghostly clock, threw those wavering false dawns across the night.
| Julia, by her ruthless act, had despoiled him of ten years of his life. | But Jennie had now seen him as Julia had seen him more than twenty years ago. |
| That act of hers constituted the gap that, try as he would, he could not account for. | But should another gap now come his heart would understand. |
| In some dark and hidden way Julia had taken upon herself his burden of sin. | He was now beautiful, grave, innocent and unafraid. |
| Julia, darkly machinating, was counting on waylaying him again, and yet again. | But Jennie, as spotless as he, knew nothing of machination. |
| "He shall know what love is; why should he get nothing out of his life?" Julia had passionately cried. | If his question to me meant anything, a wonder had happened to him not two hours ago. |
| On his former pilgrimage he had not known Love. | But was Love the wonder now? |
| If so, it was Julia's gift when she had restored his innocence to him. | And it was a gift to Jennie. |
But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie's father. He was, he still remained, the man who had written The Hands of Esau and An Ape in Hell, the man for whom I had hunted in questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame of his accumulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird?
Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do?
His voice sounded again softly by my side.
"You haven't told me who that was with you in the garden," he said.
"Let's finish with the other things first," I answered.
"Oh, I'm tired of talking about myself, sir."
"That's one of them. Why do you sometimes call me 'sir' and sometimes 'George'?"
He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?"
"Didn't you know?"
I couldn't catch his reply.
"When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?"
"Of course."
"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of The Hands of Esau?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.)
"I think so."
"Will you try?"
"Shall you know if I'm right?"
"Near enough for the purpose, I think."
He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite. The Hands of Esau had been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight—a space of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running.
"Of course I see what you're after, but I've done all that myself. Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind I've made. But I've made one discovery."
"What's that?"
"You're starting at the wrong end. That memory's all right. It's the other one I've sometimes wondered about."
"Ah! The one you call your 'B' Memory! Do you mean—it sounds an odd way of putting it, but I suppose it's all right—do you mean you don't remember what sort of thing you'll be doing, say, next year?"
"Not very clearly, George. Sometimes that seems an absolutely unknown adventure. And sometimes it's like that queer feeling—I expect you know it—that you've been somewhere before, or done something before, or heard the same thing before. It lasts for a second, and then it's gone."
"Do you think it will continue like that?"
"I've stopped thinking about it."
"That page you repeated just now. That wasn't a stock page you—keep in rehearsal, so to speak?"
I considered my next question carefully. But there was no avoiding it; it had to be put. I watched him deliberately.
"Now tell me one other thing. Do you ever remember hearing or writing these words: 'Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci?'"
Poor, poor lad! He winced as if I had cut at him with a lash. He turned over on the bank so that I could not see his face. He made no response when I placed my hand on his shoulder. My heart ached for him ... but he had to be shown that any question of love between himself and Jennie Aird was impossible.
I shook him. "Do you remember that, Derry?"
Slowly he sat up on the bank. He turned a set face on me.
"Let me say, Coverham," he said tremulously, "that I went through a whole war without seeing as cowardly a thing as that done. I will not forgive you."
And with barely a moment's pause he broke out:
"Oh, what am I to do, sir, what am I to do? You're older and wiser than I am—I want help—advice——"
That is why I have called this portion of his history "The Long Splice." Extremes as wide apart as those met there and interwove their strands. Fortunate it was for me that they did, for had not that last helpless cry been wrung from him I should have been dumb before the bitterness of his reproach. Whether memories of sweetness and light were failing him or not, those of bitterness and gall remained, and it was on this quivering complexity of exposed nerves that I had laid the lash.
And yet simultaneously he was innocent, assoiled, acquitted. Only the man he had been had groaned under the stroke; the other had turned to me for comfort and guidance and help. And what is a remembered self that we should weep for it? What is memory that we should writhe? No philosopher has yet ventured to write "I remember, therefore I am." Nor does a man remember entirely and wholly of his own will. He is his memory's lord when he sets himself to repeat a passage from a book; but who is the master when something leaps upon him without warning from the past, tears open an old wound, and leaves him quivering and bleeding?... Derry's "A" Memory now seemed to me to be beside the mark, and it was with a sudden joy that I recognised it to be a boon that his "B" Memory was dissolving into a golden haze. "An absolutely unknown adventure," he had said; and what better, more merciful, more beautiful? As the Great Pity hides other men's ends from them, so his beginning was to be hidden from him. No remembrance of disillusion would mar for him the bloom of his fair discoveries. What though seas were sailed before if you know it not? Are the garden's scents less fragrant that you wonder, for a fleeting instant, when you have smelt them before? And what of the kiss of your mouth when that kiss is both an undoing and a re-beginning, the end of one dream but the beginning of a lovelier still? What Julia had done once Jennie would do again, and I had only to think of his innocence, his beauty and his doom to know, more surely than I ever knew anything in my life, that this would a thousandfold transcend the other.
And—supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single revealing look—he had still to sleep that night.
I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:
He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your head.
"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in the night, "I might even—it's no madder than anything else—I might even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to expect," he sighed.
On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.
I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way, had been disregarded by both of us.
"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.
"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.
"But you don't know yet that you can."
"You don't know that I can't, sir."
I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses.
"You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to—God knows what?" I demanded incredulously.
"You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before."
"I offered to introduce the man I then knew."
"Am I any worse now?"
"There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it can't, and this can't."
"Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all that?"
"I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the other things are quite as simple as they look either."
"But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes."
"Do they fit you—or did they merely do so once?"
At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when everything's said I am me, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am. Dash it, I am on the blessed map! I'm quite a passable nineteen as fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm—I'm—I'm in it, George. Regularly for it. Just as deep as—oh, deep and lovely! I didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be quite safe—I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear—I'd promise—on my soul I'd promise——"
I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I have him at the Airds'—and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse what would have been my very heart's desire for him—yet how grant it to the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!... I stopped before him.
"There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently. "Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days."
It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He stared at me blankly.
"Off! Did you say off?"
"Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me a promise before I leave you."
"Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car.
"I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to promise to wait in your room for me till then."
"Where is she going?"
"Will you wait in your room till I come?"
"Back to England?"
"I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?"
"Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name——"
He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie——" he breathed softly.
"You'll wait for me?"
"Of course, sir. Thank you, George."
"Then I'll say——"
But I could not get out the words "Good night."
How did I know what the night was going to be for him?
For it happened in the night....
I left him standing by the earth-wall, with the lights still twinkling at sea and the low glare of Fréhel in the sky behind him. Four seconds, eleven seconds, four times a minute——
"Jennie!" I heard his hushed, rapt voice as I turned away.
V
"Le Por-r-rt! Le Por-r-rt!"
Only an old woman with white streamers and a basket descended from the tram, but instinctively I turned my head to look at the flowery bank on which I had sat so few hours before. It was a sparkling morning, with an intense blue sky, high white clouds and singing larks. The fields of flowering sarrasin were white, cream, pink, deep russet; and far away the grey-green boscage receded into misty blue, unbroken by walls or fences, that contradictory communal undulation of a country where individualism is at its most intense, holdings small, and a ditch or a bank you could stride over fencing enough. But I was too anxious to be able to admire. At the best it looked as if I should have to assume complete responsibility for him and so cut my visit to the Airds abruptly short. At the worst—but I put the worst from me.
"Allez! Roulez!"
With the sound of a tank going into action the tram clattered forward to St Lunaire.
Up the steep street, and a swerve past the acres of tennis-courts that had once been grass. The huge six-acre cage was already full of players, and I thought of Jennie Aird. Then past the magasins and the long café, with half-clad young Frenchmen punting a ball and walking on their hands in the strip of meadow opposite. The Casino, the hotels, and then a steep planted avenue that seemed to end in the air. Then a rush and another swerve, and out on to the wide expanse of tussocky links, grey and fawn sandhills, and turf gemmed with a myriad tiny flowers.
His hotel was within a biscuit's-toss of the terminus. It stood by the roadside, and its front consisted of a built-out structure of glass, within which a couple of Breton girls with tight hair, string-soled shoes, and the physique of middle-weight boxers, were laying a dozen small tables for déjeuner. A lad dressed precisely as Derry had been dressed was delivering lifebuoys of bread, and knives clattered in baskets, and two-foot-high stacks of coloured plates were being carried in.
"M'sieu' Arnaud?" I inquired of one of the string-slippered Amazons.
"M'sieu' n'est pas déscendu—si vour voulez monter au deuxième, M'sieu'."
She indicated a way through the back salon that had once been the street frontage. Beyond yawned a cavernous kitchen, the blacker because of its opening on to a dazzlingly green back yard. Between the two rose a staircase, which a strapping youth was polishing with a mop on his foot. I mounted and gained the deuxième. Then, outside the closed door, I stopped with a thumping heart.
But it was no good hesitating. I pulled myself together and knocked.
"——trez!" called a clear voice.
I thanked God, pushed and entered.
His head was bent over his colour-box. On a piece of paper he appeared to be making a list of the colours to be replenished. He looked smilingly up, and our eyes met.
Clear eyes, grave sweet mouth, undoubting smile——
And unchanged. The night had passed, and nothing perceptible had happened. I crossed to the window. Now that all was well, I dare to admit to myself that I had been prepared to find him—dead. If he was right in fixing his climacteric at sixteen he might well have been dead.
But there he was, bending over his colour-box and murmuring "Cobalt—I seem to eat cobalt—raw sienna—orange vermilion——"
Presently I spoke, still from the window.
"Well, I don't know anything about downstairs, but you've a gorgeous view up here."
"Isn't it?" he said. "Grows on you. At first I thought it rather scrappy, a little bit of everything, and I wish they'd put a bomb under that silly château-place; but it grows on you. Inland's the country though. Orange vermilion, pale cadmium, and a double go of cobalt——"
I looked round his room. The smell of oil-colours clung about it, but it was exquisitely tidy and simple. Its walls were covered with a yellowish striped paper, its ceiling beams were moulded, its herring-boned parquet floor shone. A single mat lay by the side of his ornate wooden bedstead, which, with the little night cupboard by it, a small table at the window, and a single upholstered chair, was the only furniture in the room. The door-knob was of glass, and the lace curtains had been draped back over the open leaves of the window. From a flimsy little hat-rack hung his two haversacks. His canvases apparently were in the cupboard that was sunk into the wall.
"Well," he said, putting his list of colours into his pocket, "it seems rather a rum idea bringing you right out here when I've got to go into Dinard myself. Can I have the money, George?"
I counted it out.
"And oh, by the way—I know you won't mind—but if you'd talk French when there's anybody about—it makes things a bit simpler——"
Here I began to be aware of the imminence of another problem. I don't mean the talking French; I mean the whole problem of his company. He was going into Dinard to buy colours, and I also was returning to Dinard. The natural thing was that we should go together. I could hardly constitute myself his guardian and not be seen about with him—bargain with him that he only came to me or I to him like Nicodemus, by night. He seemed to take all this cheerfully for granted.
But whither would it presently lead? Dinard was, in a word, the world—that world in which he had no place. Everybody knew scores of people in Dinard, and Madge Aird hundreds. Tennis, tea, the shops, the plage—all was public, familiar, open in the last degree. Within a couple of days, on the strength of being seen twice or thrice with me, he would be exchanging bows and smiles and "Bonjours" with goodness knows who.
"Well, come along," I said in a sort of daze. "But I don't know that I feel like talking much, either in French or English. You're a devil of a fellow for keeping your friends guessing, Monsieur Arnaud. You're still Monsieur Arnaud, I suppose?"
"How can I change it?" he replied gravely.
Of course he couldn't change it. Arnaud he must remain until he became too young to be Arnaud any longer.
On the returning tram I addressed myself somewhat as follows:
"George Coverham, this can't go on. You've got to make up your mind one way or the other. If you don't he'll make it up for you. His is already made up. He sees no reason why he shouldn't carry on. He's either right or wrong. Well, suppose for a moment that he's right? What then?
"You know what you were prepared for when you went up those stairs of his. You know you had to put your hand up three times before you dared knock. Well, everything was all right; nothing had happened. If he's really suddenly and desperately in love it ought to have happened, but anyway it didn't. That means, in plain English, that he knows more about himself than you do.
"And he thinks he can stay as he is. Suppose he can? Suppose even that maddest conjecture of all is true, and that he actually may re-become normal and live out his life like everybody else? It wouldn't be any more wonderful than the rest. So what's the obvious thing to do? Why, simply to take him as he is—as long as he is it. That's all he's asking you. And he's promised to clear out at the very first hint of another transformation. In fact he's got to. It's in the very nature of the case.
"Look at him on the seat opposite to you there, between those two bare-headed young women. Those two Breton girls may keep their four handsome Breton eyes straight before them, but they're conscious of every moment of his presence. Who wouldn't be? He's a dream of beauty. And remember how he pleaded with you last night. Can't you hear him still? 'Only to see her, only to talk to her: can't you manage that, sir? Can't you, George?' Was ever gratitude more touching and absurd than when you merely told him her name—'Jennie!' Why shouldn't he have the love now he missed before? Julia Oliphant didn't stop to think twice about it. Who made you Rhadamanthus, George Coverham?... Anyway, you've got to make up your mind."
I told myself all this, and more; but I cannot say I convinced myself. Indeed, in the face of past experience, I made the mistake of once more thinking I had a choice in the matter. I thought that I possessed him, and not he me. So I floundered among details, little practical details, such as talking French to him and being seen about Dinard with him. I recalled how already Madge Aird had asked whether he had a brother. I seemed to see Alec's face when he was told that a Frenchman had fallen in love with his daughter, my own as I explained that the Frenchman was not really a Frenchman, and Alec's again as he asked me what the devil I meant. Then there was his name—Arnaud. That again landed us straight into a dilemma. He couldn't change it, must stop Arnaud; but as Arnaud the athlete he had been seen at Ambleteuse. The brother of some young Rugby or young Charterhouse at that moment in Dinard (the words seemed to detach themselves from the noisy babble of a teashop) had seen him. He might be recognised here; people do look twice at a casual stranger who strolls into a Stade, chucks off his coat, and in his walking boots does something like level time. He looked it, too, every inch of him.... And whispers might be flying round Dover too. The straits are not very wide, and men who can swim them do not come down with every shower of rain.... Oh, the whole thing bristled with risks. I counted a hundred of them while the tram rolled in its cloud of filthy smoke past La Guériplais, La Fourberie, St Enogat, the Rue de la Gare....
"Dévoiturons," he said suddenly, touching my knee.
He had taken matters into his own hands even while I had mused. I had intended to postpone my decision by dropping off at St Enogat; now we were at the corner of the Boulevard Féart. "Down we get!" We! Apparently "we" could get to "our" colour shop without making the circuit of the rest of the town. I will not swear that I saw a momentary twinkle of mischief in his eyes. I was standing in the middle of the road looking after the tram, which was already fifty yards away.
Together a middle-aged English gentleman in a neat lounge suit and a splendid young specimen of French manhood in blouse and corduroys turned into the Boulevard Féart.
There would still have been time to retrieve my indecision. The Boulevard, approached from that end of the town, is not nearly so frequented as the Rue Levavasseur and the quarter near the Casino. It was, in fact, particularly quiet. But every step we took under the shady limes, past the white-façaded houses and gardens vermilion with geraniums and bluer than the sky with lobelia, brought us nearer to that crowded busy world in which he held so singular a place. Or I could have left him at the corner of the Rue Jacques Cartier and made my escape by way of the Rue St Enogat. But what then? If I shook him off to-day the question would be to face again to-morrow.... Ker Yvonne, Ker Maria, Ker Loïc ... the shuttered villas slipped past us.
Then, "Derry," I said in desperation, "I'm at my wits' end about you. I haven't the faintest idea what I ought to do."
"It's jolly just being with you," he said, looking straight ahead.
"Yes. It's other people who're the difficulty."
I had the same answer as before. "As long as I sit tight, George?" he said mildly.
"Even then. You said yourself that you were both the most public and the most private man alive."
"Ah, but that was when I was slipping about all over the place.—Up here's our shop."
"But even if you're stationary you're just as much an anomaly. Nobody except you stops at one age."
"Well, it's a step in the right direction so to speak. At any rate it isn't going back."
"I wish I knew how you knew that."
"I wish I could tell you, old fellow," he placidly replied.
"Look here," I said abruptly. "There's just one possible way out, but I rather doubt whether you'd agree to it. I mean about what you wanted me to do last night. Would you allow me to tell the whole thing to my friends the Airds and leave the decision to them?"
Quickly, very quickly, he shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I couldn't do that."
"But is anything else fair and right?"
"If I stop as I am?"
"In any case."
"They wouldn't believe you."
"I think Mrs Aird might believe me."
He gave a short laugh. "She can swallow a good deal if she can swallow that!"
"She's a very observant woman. She said one thing that perhaps I ought to tell you."
"What?" he asked with sudden curiosity.
"She saw you one day in South Kensington."
"She'd also had a good look at you that day at the Lyonnesse Club."
"Well?"
"She asked me whether Derwent Rose had a brother."
"Et vous avez répondu?"
"J'ai dit que non."
"C'était la figure? La taille?"
"Le tout ensemble."
"Elle avait des conjectures? Pas possible!"
"Comme vous le dîtes, pas possible; mais s'ils poussent sur le Rosier trop de boutons——"
"Il n'y-en poussera plus," he laughed; and the little knot of French people passed us by.
He made light of my recital. I heard his quiet chuckle. Then suddenly I realised that we were at the corner of the Rue Levavasseur, outside the Hôtel de Provence.
"Look here, haven't we passed your shop?" I said.
"Eh? Have we? By Jove, so we have. That's the charm of your conversation, George."
"Then hadn't we better go back?"
"Of course we must; it's the only colour shop in the place. But just step across the road now that we are here. I want some tooth-powder. And some envelopes at the Bazaar there. Must have some—run right out yesterday."
We crossed to a chemist's, but it appeared that he usually went to a chemist's a little farther down the street. There he made his purchases, and once more we came out into the street.
"Now I want some bootlaces," he said. "You see, I always load up when I come into Dinard. Saves time, not to speak of the tram-fare."
It was approaching a brilliant midday, and from the Tennis Club, the shops, the confectioners, and the cafés, people were beginning to press to their various hotels and villas to lunch. In another half-hour the street would be half empty, but now it was at its gayest with bright blazers, gaudy costumes, sleek heads, sea-browned faces. One saw laughing, turning heads, caught snatches of appointments—"À ce soir"—"Don't forget, Blanche"—"Number Four at two-thirty"—"You coming our way, Suzette?"
Suddenly my arm was seized, and M. Arnaud took a quick step forward.
"Thees ou-ay," he said laughingly, "des enveloppes——"
I was dragged into the Bazaar.
Then, but too late, I wondered what his so pressing need of envelopes was. "Must have some—ran right out yesterday!" Who were his correspondents? Of what did his letter-bag consist? Letters, he! A passport and a birth-certificate would have been more to the point; a permis de séjour and his Army Discharge Papers would have been more to the point. And most to the point of all was that the rascal had completely hoodwinked me.
For, standing there among hoops and grace-sticks, string shoes and cards of bijouterie, caoutchouc bathing-caps and all the one-franc-fifty fal-lals of the Bazaar, alone and for the moment with her back to us, was Jennie Aird.
VI
This time if he wanted French he had it—off the ice.
"Touché—et merci, Monsieur. Bonjour."
I bowed, stepped forward, and placed myself between him and Jennie. I touched her elbow.
"I saw you come in. Are you nearly ready? We shall be late."
I was the angrier that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry. Jennie, giving me only the tail of her glance, turned to her choice of a bathing-cap again—the yellow one or the green one. My back was towards Rose, but I heard a saleswoman step up to him.
"Rien, merci—j'attends M'sieur," he said.
Jennie too heard, and turned.
There was no atmosphere of soft and factitious half-illumination now. This was the full blaze of a perfect August midday, that flooded the shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood looking one at the other.
And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment that passes. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning. That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.
Again I touched her.
"The yellow one, is it? Let me put it in my pocket."
I had secured her arm. I picked up for her the horrible fifty-centime notes of her change. She had dropped her eyes, and her face was as rich-coloured as her lips, her lips a pulpy quiver. I felt the touch of Derry's hand on my sleeve, but I disregarded it. I felt bitterly towards him.
"Come along, my dear," I said; and I pushed her past him.
Yet if, as he had said, he wished merely to see her, merely to speak with her, he had half his wish in that moment. Her left arm was in my right one, I between her and him. Suddenly, blush or no blush, she lifted her head. Behind me, she looked full at him. For two, three paces her head and shoulders continued to turn. I set my lips and looked straight ahead.
Then her head dropped again. Her teeth caught at her upper lip. For a moment she was a limp weight on my arm. We left the shop.
I saw his face at the window as we passed. Whether or not he stepped to the door to watch us out of sight I do not know.
I say that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry; but I have never found that a particularly mollifying reflection. As I have seen a man get rid of an undesired guest by blandly pressing him to stay but leading him gently by the arm all the time nearer to the door, so our young man had used me. I had been piloted here, there, in whichever direction he had wished. And as for Jennie's long backward look and turn of the head ... well, it seemed to me that the thing might now be regarded as done. It did not need me to murmur "Jennie, this is M. Arnaud—Miss Aird." The back door into Alec Aird's jealously-guarded house was set ajar, and I, the only one who could have watched it, had failed to do so. I frowned, watching her white-clad feet moving on the sunny pavement. I avoided looking at her face. I knew that she equally avoided looking at mine.
Of one thing I was perfectly sure: she would not of her own accord speak of the young man we had just left. Perhaps it was that there are some things which, unless you out with them at once, become more and more difficult with every moment that passes. Many a close secret was not a secret at all in the beginning; it merely became one. Therefore she was already showing obstinacy. She knew that I knew about that look. She had looked openly, deliberately, as careless of my presence as if I had not been there. And in that critical moment it was a toss-up what my relations with my friend's seventeen-years-old daughter were to be. She might, suddenly and swiftly, break into an emotional confession. On the other hand she might thenceforward bear me an unspoken grudge that I knew anything about her affairs at all.
I noticed that she carried no tennis racket. I therefore asked her, as we crossed the emptying Place du Commerce, whether she had left it at the Club.
"No," she said.
"Haven't you been playing this morning?"
"No."
"Too tired after the party last night?"
"No."
"I was wondering—but I suppose you've far more amusing things to do than to come for a walk with me this afternoon."
In those few words the whole situation trembled as in a balance. If she said Yes, much might follow; if No, then resentment would be my portion.
We continued to ascend the high-walled street, past tall garden gates and notice-boards—"A Vendre," "Locations," "Agence Boutin." We passed Beausejour, Primavera, Les Cyclamens....
Then for the first time she looked sideways at me.
"I should like to," she said.
I was still angry with myself and him. He was probably right in refusing the only definite suggestion I had found to make, namely, that he should permit me to tell my host and hostess the whole story. But if his alternative was to lie in wait for her in the streets and shops of a French summer resort and to hang about the open windows of the house at night, I felt very strongly about it. He was going to be wily and masterful, was he? He, swaying on a tightrope of time, was going to claim the treatment of a normal man? Well, that remained to be seen. The cold shoulder for a day or two might bring him to a more reasonable view. Anyway, after our encounter in the Bazaar, he could hardly pretend not to know my mind.
And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back, back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had taken from an article in The Times.
"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached."
Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?
A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman like myself, on his way to luncheon at a riant holiday villa with a moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!
For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I believe I actually passed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance—shining, self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law? "Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've tried to wake up as if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was an early sun about to rise on a creature not ready-made, not pre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?
A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to luncheon!
Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.
"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the Casino, did you?" he said.
"No. I took a walk."
"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."
"Well, she's coming for a walk with me this afternoon."
"Then for goodness' sake take her somewhere quiet. It isn't my idea of a holiday that you have to take a rest-cure after it."
I laughed. "I'll look after her. But when I'm with Jennie I like as many people as possible to see me with Jennie."
"Then tell her that and shake her out of herself, you old humbug. Hanged if I'd trust her with you if you were a few years younger."
"You'll have to trust her with somebody presently."
"Plenty of time for that yet," Alec grunted. "I've got my eye on it all right.... Well, if you're going out I'm going to have forty of the best. Watch me fade away——"
He proceeded to "fade away," while the shadows crept over the ascending smoke from his pipe on the table.
On this occasion, however, I was content to forego my pride in being seen with Jennie by my side. Just a quiet cliff-path not too far away would do. There is much to be said for a quiet cliff-path when a young woman feels the first sweet trouble at her heart.
I left the completely faded-away Alec as I heard her step at the door of the house. She looked me straight in the eyes, as if it would be at my peril did I notice anything the matter with her own pebble-grey ones. We passed out, took the steep secluded lane towards the tea-cabin above St Enogat plage, and then descended the hewn steps to the shore. It is a tiny plage, remarkably steep, bordered with villas that resemble their own bathing-tents, and with a path that winds up the rocks beyond. We did not speak as we crossed the plage and began to climb.
Along that deeply indented coast you do a lot of walking for the distance forrader you get, and also a good deal of up-and-down round rocky gulfs with the bottle-green water heaving lazily below. But over the seaward walls of villa and château peep valerian and fig, and the path is coral-sprinkled with pimpernel and enamelled with convolvulus and borage and the hosts of smaller flowers. Away ahead the demi-tower of a sea-mark rose chalk-white against the deep blue, with the airy point of St Lunaire beyond. We approached a small field of marguerites, so eagerly open to the afternoon sun that at a short distance they were not white at all, but pale honey-yellow with the offering of their golden hearts. Poppies flamed among them, and the cigales crackled like ceaselessly-running insect machinery. From the cliff's foot came the lazy breaking of the waves. That, I thought, was quite a pleasant place. Even Alec would have approved of it. We sat down between the staring marguerites and the sea.
I do not wish to speak of Jennie in a fatherly or avuncular manner. One had better not have been born than not be simple with the heart of a young girl. At the faintest trace of a smile it will close against you for ever, and wonder follows wonder so quickly over it that it will be a long time before you get your second chance. So do not tell it that it will think differently about things to-morrow. It is you who will think differently to-morrow if you do. I say in all sincerity that, in that long pause between my asking Jennie to come for a walk with me and her acceptance, I had felt a suspense as real as any I ever felt. If that pivotal moment on which the oncoming generation turns is not to be gravely considered, I know of no other moment that need greatly trouble us.
So I listened to the treble of the cigales and the soft deep bass of the sea, and the silence continued between us. She picked and nibbled florets of clover, her eyes far away. Her gaze wandered to butterflies, to a lizard that disappeared with a glint of bronze into a cranny, to a ladybird that alighted on her forearm.
Then the largest tear I have ever seen brimmed, trickled and dropped.
On leaving the house she had dared me to notice anything about her eyes; but it is another matter when a tear so engulfs a ladybird that it is a question whether the creature's pretty wing-cases will ever be the same again. I had to speak after that.
"Cheer up, Jennie," I said softly.
She gulped. "Why were you so horrid and cross with him!"
"This morning in the shop?"
"Yes."
"Well ... I fancied he'd played me rather a mean trick."
"He didn't!" she flashed. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything mean!"
"Then say a trick I didn't expect from him."
"I heard him tell the woman in the shop he was waiting for you, and—and you walked straight past him without looking at him!"
"It might have been better if you'd done the same, Jennie."
"Did he come to fetch you out last night?"
"I took him out."
"Is he the—the Monsieur Arnaud the maid meant?"
"That's the name he goes by."
"I suppose it is."
"Then why do you say it like that?... I want you to tell me about him, Uncle George, please," she ordered me.
I too wanted to do that; but I found it anything but simple. I might have told her that he was simply a vagrant, just a fellow who wandered about sketching, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That would have been perfectly true. But it would have been equally untrue. That was no picture of Derry. She had seen a far, far truer picture of him when she had turned her head towards him in the toyshop.
"Well, of course that is why I asked you to come for a walk this afternoon, Jennie," I said slowly. "As a matter of fact M'sieur Arnaud's had a very curious experience that I can't very well tell you about. The result of this is that he's—a rather odd sort of person to know. In fact he's better not known. He wanted me to introduce him to your mother, and I told him I'd rather not do so. Anyway he's going away soon."
"That doesn't sound like a horrid sort of person," she commented. "Is that why he came last night—to be introduced to mother?"
"No, he came for something quite different last night."
"What?"
Here again I might have answered with a certain appearance of truth that he had come for money, though it was his own money; but that too would be to misrepresent him. The cigales crackled loudly. I suppose the ladybird was all right again, for it was nowhere to be seen. I mused, and then turned to her.
"You said yesterday that you wished you were back in England, Jennie," I said. "How would you like to come and stay with me in Surrey for a bit?"
"No thank you, Uncle George. Thank you very much."
"It's quite jolly there in its way, and I dare say I could get somebody quite nice to be with you."
"I should like to some day, of course," she said, "but not just now, if you don't think it horrid of me." And she added, "I love being here."
"Since yesterday?"
She did not reply.
Of course I had not expected for a moment that she would say Yes, even had I made up my own mind to abandon Derry to his fate, which I had not done. Yet a thought flashed into my mind. Were I to return to England, taking Jennie with me, Derry would still not be unlooked-after. The moment I left, Julia Oliphant, I felt certain, would fly to his side. And if Jennie would not come with me, what would the impossible combination be then?... My half-formed thought became a sudden picture, a contrast, vivid and arresting, between two women—the one who experimented with her dress and wanted to know what a cocktail tasted like, the other this fragrant hawthorn-bough by my side. And between the two rose his grave and sunbrowned face....
I stared at my picture, fascinated. The three of them together! Exquisite and horrible complication! Suppose it should ever come to that!
Then the picture vanished, and I saw the translucent untwinkling sea. The roofs of distant St Lunaire made a pale cluster of brightness. The wind rippled the edges of the satiny poppies.
All at once she clutched my sleeve with both her hands and buried her face against it. It broke, the storm that had been pent up for nearly twenty hours. As the marguerites exposed their yearning golden hearts, so she kept nothing back, laid bare her own heart to the sun that was its lord.
"Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I can't bear it; it's too—too—oh, tell me what to do, Uncle George! I know he's my darling! I don't want to live without him! If he goes away I don't know what will happen! It's all since yesterday—I didn't sleep a wink—I went out into the garden when they'd all gone and stood in the same place. Then I heard father moving about and hid.... And then this morning when you were horrid to him—no, you weren't horrid, dear Uncle George—I know it's all a stupid mistake—I love him! I don't care if he doesn't speak a word of English. I want him here now! I want to be with him! Please, please introduce him to mother. She loves French people. And he did ask you to, so he can't be horrid. I'm sure he didn't mean to play you a mean trick. There must be a mistake. I'm sure he can explain if you'll let him. Dear, dear Uncle George—do, do!"
I put my hand on her hat, which was as much of her as I could see.
"Don't look at me, please—I don't want to move for just a minute."
"As long as you like, my dear."
"Oh, I'll do anything if you only will! Where is he staying? I never saw him in Dinard before. Where is he staying? Does he live here all the time? I could see him if you came too, couldn't I? And I don't care what sort of clothes he wears ... do, do, Uncle George!"
Then she straightened herself, and looked full at me through her flooded eyes. She was suddenly imperious.
"Now tell me something else, please. When you went off with him last night. Did he say anything about me?"
Perhaps I did not lie with sufficient promptitude. "About you? No, of course not."
She looked accusingly at me; she caught her breath.
"Oh, how can you say that! I don't believe it! He did!"
"But he couldn't even see you in the dark!"
"It wasn't dark—it wasn't a bit dark—it was quite light enough to see anybody—you saw him——"
"Well, he's going away, and there's an end of it."
Like a rainbow was the light that woke in her lately showering eyes. Up went the soft lip, out peeped the pearls. Back, back from their golden hearts lay the petals of the marguerites.
"If," she said with extreme slowness, "if he told you he was going away, that must have been last night."
I was dumb. I saw her effort to close her inner eyes on the light that broke on them, lest a wonder on a wonder should prove more than she could bear.
"That was last night!" the triumphant words rang out.
I suppose there is no such thing as one half of a miracle without the other——
"That was last night, and there hadn't been a this morning then, and he hadn't seen me when I was buying my bathing-cap, and if he said he was going away he's changed his mind and he isn't going away at all! Neither of us is going away! Oh-h-h!" (That "Oh" echoes in my heart still.) "He isn't even thinking of going now! Because we both know now—we knew in the shop—and he loves me too!"
Just to see one another—just to speak to one another—that was all they asked of me.