She would risk the descent on the further side. Though the Hairpin Vision shone full and steady as limelight upon the future, she was yet willing to take all the hazard of lessening love, so she might keep love. Keep it in whatsoever form he wished, free or bound. Stuart would not employ the shears alone, without her co-operation. If she willed, she might use the moment to entangle him with a thousand threads, beyond all hope of breaking away. Why shouldn’t she? Since he had made her need of him so great, he must pay his share. And of what avail to set aside the temptation, since then he would never know it had existed?
With a great stirring of anger, Peter looked up at him. His face was turned away, still set in desire, but now not for her. It was the supremest desire of a man whose star had granted him his every wish; desire for renunciation. Young Fortunatus pursuing the winds of sorrow.
Her anger waned and died to tenderness. This was not the ruthless orange-sucker of her first imaginings. She alone knew how rigidly and untiringly his asceticism had striven to keep its leanness against that terrible perversity of ease which threatened to engulf him. And she could help him. By her and because of her had actually come his chance of a sacrifice worth while—oh, yes, she understood; and she could, if she chose, be sufficiently big to allow it him. Came a rush of pride like a sonorous North-Easter humming through the shrouds: No other girl could have kept up with him as far—she was not going to fail at the last ... he had once called her a genius of life.
His eyes met hers, a question in them. And she laughed. “We’ve had a good run before the wind, Stuart.” Heard the triumphant fling of his reply, “And we’re not going aground in the putty now.”
He unlinked his arms; took up the quant-pole; pushed back to mid-stream. Within a few minutes they were at the landing-stage; a sharp walk brought them to the station platform: Eight thirty-six—and the train left at eight forty-eight. “Not bad,” remarked Stuart; “considering our day of uncounted hours.”
There was just time for Peter to send off a wire to her cousins in Turnham Green, bidding them reserve her a room that night; she would arrive in London too late for the further journey to Thatch Lane. Then, with a shaking roar, the train plunged into the station, barely waited to gulp its few passengers, and thundered southwards. Peter found that her fellow-travellers regarded her with astonished eyes, and departed to view herself. The results of sun and wind, of immersement in the water, and those few after-moments among the reeds, exceeded her wildest expectations. It took half an hour’s unsteady labour before looking-glass and washstand-basin, before she might lay the least claim to respectability. She was relieved to find, however, that her flaming cheeks and lit eyes and lips dark as wine were not at all reminiscent of the girl about to be forsaken by her lover. She was tremendously exultant that her body should have stood the strain of the day, as her soul had stood its close. And she had never walked so lightly as up the crowded dining-car to rejoin Stuart at its far end.
“Metamorphosis?”
“Only from the waist upwards,” she displayed her boots, still caked with a large portion of Bure’s shores.
They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number; halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted, and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another. There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter’s head was tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the shadow in contempt—she had no more use for it.
“We won’t meet again.”