"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."