But, as I may have mentioned, she was a woman, so she said: “What is to prevent my going back to that house in the woods now, and burning it down—if I ever meant to do it?”
“Me,” said the gardener.
“But you can’t sit there with your eyes pinned to me until the boat sails.”
“Unless you give me your word as a World’s Worker that you will not leave the hotel, I shall stay here, and so will you.”
For quite a long time the suffragette’s upbringing wrestled with all comers, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. There is no strength in the principles created out of a lifeless past. Besides, the woman of six-and-twenty was very much flattered and fluttered, whatever the militant suffragette might be.
“I will come with you on your exploration tour,” she said, and her voice sounded like the voice of the conqueror rather than the conquered. “I will give my word as a—woman without principles that I will not leave Southampton except to go on board the Caribbeania.”
The gardener left her, he felt innocently drunk. He made his way out of the amethyst light of electricity, into the golden light of the outskirts of the town, and thence into the silver light of the uncivilised moon. On the beach the tide was receding, despite the groping, grasping hands of the sea, which contested every inch of the withdrawal. The gardener stumbled upon the soft solidity of the sand above high-water mark, and slept the sleep of the thoroughly confused. He dreamt of a pearl-and-pink sea, and of unknown islands.
I need hardly say, after all this preamble, that the suffragette and the gardener sailed next day on the Caribbeania for Trinity Islands.
Mr. Samuel Rust, for some time before the boat started, was conspicuous for a marked non-appearance on the wharf’s edge.
The gardener, who had a vague feeling that tears should be shed in England on his departure, stood feeling a little cold at heart on the starboard side of the main deck, looking at the tears that were being shed for other people.