The suffragette, who was under the impression that her hand was against all men, stood bleakly on the port side, looking at the hydro-aeroplanes leaping self-consciously about the Solent in seven-league boots. She was proud to stand thus aloof and unhampered on the threshold of a novelty. The pride she had in her independence was one of her compensations. This is a world of compensations, and that is what makes it the hollow world it is sometimes. So seldom do we get the real thing that in this age we congratulate ourselves upon our compensations.
Mr. Samuel Rust made a late and dramatic appearance upon the gangway after the first bell of preparation for departure had been rung. His hat, inspired by the prevalent aviation craze, blew away. But Mr. Rust’s thoughts were occupied with other things than the infidelity of hats. He passed the gardener without noticing him, and with restrained fervour addressed a square elderly woman, who stood leisurely on the deck, surrounded by an officious maid, like a liner being attended to by a tug.
Mr. Samuel Rust did not seem like the sort of person who would have had a mother. He gave the impression of having been created exactly as he stood, with one stroke of the Almighty Finger, and not gradually evolved like you or me. You could imagine the gardener, for instance, at every stage of his existence. You could picture those light bright eyes under those scowling brows looking out of lace and baby-ribbons in a proud nurse’s arms. You could see him as the fierce little schoolboy, with alternately too much to say and too little. You could imagine him as an old man, with that thick hair turned into a white strong flame upon his head, and those already deep-set eyes blazing out of hewn hollows above his abrupt cheek-bones. But Mr. Samuel Rust seemed to have no past and no future.
He addressed the woman who, contrary to appearances, had played an important part in the creating of him.
“I couldn’t let you go without saying good-bye to you, Mrs. Paul,” he said.
“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Rust, and the words seemed shot by iron lips from above a chin like a ship’s ram.
Something that might have usurped the name of a kiss passed between them, and Mr. Samuel hurried to the impatient gangway. As he passed the gardener he winked earnestly, conscious of his mother’s eyes on the back of his head. The gardener, feeling delightfully unscrupulous and roguish, made no sign.
The vulgarly tuneful swan-songs of Cockney emotion trailed from the deck to the wharf and back again. The sound was like thin beaten silver, becoming thinner as the distance increased. There were tears among the women on land, and the shivering water blurred the reflections of the crowd until they looked as though they were seen through tears. The last song fainted in the air, the crowd on the wharf ceased to be human, and became a long suggestion of many colours, a-quiver with waving handkerchiefs.
The gardener looked at Mrs. Paul Rust. There was a tear following one of the furious furrows that bracketed her hyphen of a mouth.
The south of England is a land that reluctantly lets her deserters go. For full twelve hours she stands on tiptoe on the sea-line, beckoning their return.