She read in his eyes what he meant, and if he had not been quite so blind and stupid and seeming rich he would have read in hers that the gate of Paradise stood open before him, as she had said to Muriel. But she saw that he had not read that yet, and if she was not quite content, she was at least very wise. "Because the sea is cool and lovely?" she asked.
"And forgiving," he said.
She nodded, understanding.
(3)
Paul told himself as he went to sleep that he would ask Ursula to marry him in the morning. But he did not. He may have been at one time a budding evangelist and he was certainly now a poet, but he was still the son of Claxted, and he found it hard to escape from all that that meant. He had ideas as to proposals, and this was a serious proposal of marriage. He waited his chance, then; and missed a good many through waiting to be quite sure that the right moment had indeed come. Thus and thus is it ever likely to be, even when we sleepers awake, and all roads lead to "Nowhere."
But in Zanzibar he had his way. Aden came and went, and Kilindini, and that first walking through tropical bush to the old fort by the sea that has dreamed so many hundred years away since the remnant of its Portuguese garrison was crucified on its walls. Not even in Mombasa, sitting on the shore at the entrance of the river, did he speak, for there is a golf links of sorts hard by and the Major and Muriel were going round. Even more wonderfully, not even that night at sea did he speak, though the surface was like a sheet of polished dark glass that now and again shivered into an untellable pool of liquid silver as a school of flying fish shattered its quietude into phosphorescent fire. Yet, possibly, his silence then was not so wonderful after all. It was such a night of wonder that he could hardly speak at all, even although he thought himself in love.
Zanzibar, however, sufficed. Here they were to leave the Major, and here, naturally, he showed them round before they sailed. He had a bungalow out past Mnazi Mmoja, before the barracks, overlooking the sea, and his car met him at the landing-stage. So they were driven slowly past the front of the Sultan's palace and through the native town to the tidal creek that washes the base of Livingstone's house twice a day; up the creek road then, past the English Cathedral with its tall thin spire rising above what was once the whipping-post of the slave market, rising out of a sea of scarlet-flowering flamboyants that surround it and were in full bloom to greet them; up the road that skirts the English Games Club; past the German Club; past the cemetery where waxen frangipanni and purple bougainvillaea shed their blossoms the perpetual summer. Down a private way to the right now, and there, on a grassy knoll fronting the sea-beach, a grove of palms behind, the still strait across which lay the hills of Africa in a haze before, stood Major Jardine's bungalow.
They had but the day and the evening, and the Major suggested a run across the island to the beach at Chuaka where the surf of the Indian Ocean beats all day and a cool wind blows even in the hot season. Zanzibar, he said, was but a bigger Mombasa so far as the native town went, but nowhere else on the coast would you find tangle of banana and orange and lime and coconut and mango and almond and areca and date, with here and there a grove of cassuarinas or cloves, to match this. He was right. They skirted the banks of low swampy rivers lovely with blue water-lilies and reeds and scarlet dragon-flies; ran through plantations of grey austere coconut trees through which the sunlight trickled down on to thin sparse olive grass; left clusters of brown huts set in small patches of delicately-leaved red-stemmed muhoga; climbed the two hundred feet of the Liliputian hill of coral that makes the backbone of the island; came out on to that plain at its summit where English bracken grows and a sweet yellow shrub that might, at a distance, be English gorse; and descended at last through groves of orange trees, the fruit scattered in lavish profusion on the very road, to the collector's house at Chuaka.
He was a polite Goanese, and he made them tea, serving them himself on his barazza which was hung out from the first floor over the very beach beneath, where the white coral sand glistened in the sun and the surf beat in perpetually. Thereafter they strolled off, theoretically to look for shells, though no one did much looking: Jardine because he did not care for shells; Muriel because, after her kind, she wanted honestly to reach a distant point and see what lay beyond; Ursula because she was utterly entranced by the stretch of the foreshore, with the riot of vegetation ever invading the sands and ever, in its outposts of mangrove, the very sea itself; and Paul because he was beginning to realise that he cared about collecting nothing except Ursula. Muriel and the Major were thus soon out of sight. Ursula and Paul, having wasted half an hour watching the antics of a naked kiddie in a miniature outrigger canoe which he finally ran ashore with consummate ease and made fast with the skill of an ancient mariner, found a great mass of coral rock which overhung a pool that was one enchanted garden of colour and life. They both waded in till Ursula had her skirts high above her knees, and Paul's uprolled trousers showed a good couple of inches of soaked territory.
"Look!" she cried. "Paul, do you see that sea-urchin? Look! In there. Oh, my dear, do you see its spines? Satiny brown, spotted with blue and red. Could you get it?"