“I noticed,” I agreed; “they must be old-young married people.”
“Instead of young-old married people like us,” Pelleas said.
For Pelleas and I, merely because we are seventy and white-haired and frightened to cross streets, are not near enough to death to treat each other so coldly as do half the middle-aged. I cannot imagine a breakfast at which we two would separate the morning paper and intrude stocks and society upon our companionship and our omelet. At hotels I have seen elderly people who looked as if breakfast could a prison make and coffee cups a cage. Pelleas and I are not of these, and we look with kindly eyes upon all who have never known that youth has gone, because love stays.
So we were delighted when we saw our old-young married people and the little invalid preparing to leave the train with us. When we drew into our station the big kindly conductor, with a nasturtium in a buttonhole, came bearing down upon Little Invalid and carried her from the car in his vast arms and across the platform to a carriage. And we, in a second carriage, found ourselves behind the little party driving to the sea.
I had been so absorbed in our neighbours that until the salt air blew across our faces I had forgotten what a wonderful day it really was to be. Pelleas and I were come alone to the seaside with no one to look after us and no one to meet us and we meant to have such a holiday as never had been known. It came about in this wise:—
We were grown hungry for the sea. All winter long over our drawing-room fire we had talked about the sea. We had pretended that the roar of the elevated trains was the charge and retreat of the breakers and we had remembered a certain summer years before, when—Pelleas still being able to model and I to write so that a few were deceived—we had taken a cottage having a great view and no room, and we had spent one of the summers which are torches to the years to follow. Who has once lived by the sea becomes its fellow and it is likely to grow lyric in his heart years afterward and draw him back. So it had long been drawing Pelleas and me until, the Spring being well advanced, we had risen one morning saying, “We must go to-morrow.”
We had dreaded confessing to Nichola our intention. Nichola renounces everything until her renunciations are not virtue but a disease. She cannot help it. She is caught in a very contagion of renunciation, and one never proposes anything that she does not either object to or seek to postpone. When the day comes for Nichola to die it has long been my belief that she will give up the project as a self-indulgence. Therefore it was difficult for us to approach her who rules us with the same rod which she continually brandishes over her own spirit. It was I who told her at last; for since that day when Nichola came upon Pelleas trying to dance, he has lost his assurance in her presence, dislikes to address her without provocation, and agrees with everything that she says as if he had no spirit. I, being a very foolhardy and tactless old woman, put it to her in this way:—
“Nichola! Pelleas and I are going to the seashore for all day to-morrow.”
“Yah!” said Nichola derisively, putting her gray moss hair from her eyes. “Boat-ridin’?”
“No,” said I gently, “no, Nichola. But we want the sea—we need the sea.”