In the train he considered, with a beating heart, his project. The day encouraged adventure, boldness, romance; he was still young enough to believe in the intangible illusion of a Deity Who hangs His signs and colours upon the sky to signify His approval of one bold mortal’s projects, and no ironic sense of contrast attacked, as yet, his belief. If the Trenchards refused to make the incident of Sunday night a crisis, he would, himself, force them to recognise it. He had been passive long enough ... he did not know that, all his life, he had never been anything else.
In the train they talked to one another very little. He watched her and was bewildered, as are all lovers, by her proximity and her remoteness. The very love that brought her so close to him made her the more remote because it clothed her in strange mystery.
She was further from him than Anna had ever been, because he loved her more deeply ... and at the thought of Anna—so constant now and so sinister—he had a sudden fear of the success of his project....
Clinton St. Mary is a village, with one ugly street, on the very edge of Roche St. Mary Moor. It has visitors from the outside world because, in a hollow in the moor, lie the remains of St. Arthe Church, one of the earliest Christian buildings in Great Britain, ‘buried until lately in the sand, but recently excavated through the kind generosity of Sir John Porthcullis, Bart., of Borhaze, and shown to visitors, 6d. a head—Wednesday and Saturday afternoons free.’ Tourists therefore continually patronise ‘The Hearty Cow’ in Clinton, where there is every day a cold luncheon—ham, chicken, beef, tart, junket, cheese—for half-a-crown a-head. Katherine also had relations here, the Vicar, the Rev. James Trenchard, being a cousin ‘and a dear old man’. However, to-day the world should be for themselves alone. In the village they bought ginger-beer, ham-sandwiches, saffron buns, chocolate. They set off across the Moor.
When they had walked a very little way they were suddenly engulfed. Behind them the road, the trees, the village were wrapped in blue haze: to the right, very faintly the yellow sand-hills hovered. In the sandy ground at their feet little pools that caught blue fragments of sky shone like squares of marble: out of the tufts of coarse grass larks rose, circling, like sudden sprays of some flashing into the air as a fountain flashes: no mortal being was visible in this world.
They walked for two hours and exchanged scarcely a word. Philip felt as though he had never had Katherine alone with him before since the day of their engagement—always there had been people between them, and, if not people, then his own silly fancies and imaginations. As he looked his love was now neither reasoning nor hesitating. “I am stronger than you all,” he could shout to the ironical heavens, for the first time in all his days. Then she spoke to him, and her voice reminded him of his desperate plans.... His confidence left him. It was his great misfortune that he never believed in himself.
Very little, this morning, was Katherine troubled about dreams or fancies. She was happy, as she had always been happy, with absolute simplicity, her trust in the ultimate perfection of the world being so strong in her that a fine day, her closeness to Philip, her own bodily health and fitness were enough to sweep all morbidities far away. She had not been happy lately—some new force had been stirring in her that was strange to her and unreal, like a bad dream.
But now her unhappiness of the last weeks was as faint as the hazy mist, as shadowy as the thin curtain of sea that now spread before them, hung like gauze between two humped and staring sand-hills. They rushed down the deep cup of the sand-valley and up, through the thin wiry grass, to the top, then down again, then up once more to be perched on the very edge of the path that twisted down to their Cove. The sea-breeze, warm and soft, invited them.... Down they went.
The Cove was hidden by black rocks, piled together, seeming, through the mist, to be animals herded together to guard its sanctity. Under the rocks the Cove lay, curved like a small golden saucer, the sea forming here a thin glassy lake, protected by a further range of rocks that extended, as though placed there by human agency, across the mouth of the tiny circle. The water within the rocks was utterly clear, the seaweed, red-gold and green, covering the inside of the cup: when the waves broke beyond the barrier they were echoed here by a faint ripple that trembled, in green shadows, like a happy sigh across the surface, and, with this ripple, came the echo of the dull boom that the surging tide was making in the distant caves: this echo was a giant’s chuckle, sinister, malevolent, but filtered. When the tide was coming in, the ripples, running in faint lines from side to side, covered the shining surface of the rocks and stones, with layers of water, thin and fine like silk, now purple, now golden, now white and grey.
The silk stretched over the rocks, drew itself taut, then spilt itself suddenly, with a delighted ecstasy, in cascades of shining water, into the breast of the retreating tide. As the tide went out, very reluctantly the colour withdrew from the rocks, leaving them, at last, hard and dry beneath the sun ... but at the heart of the smooth, glassy cup, on these warm spring days, there was a great peace and content: birds, sea-gulls, sparrows, thrushes, came to the edge of the golden sand, and with trembling, twittering happiness listened to the hollow booming in the distant caves.