Stuart said: “Everything’s worth dying for, or else nothing would be worth living for.”

“You mean,” Peter queried, “that dying and living are of equal unimportance?”

“Equal importance.”

They were seated side by side upon a luggage-truck, in a deserted vaulty corner on the outskirts of Euston. In front of them were ranged battalions of empty luggage-trucks, standing stiffly at attention. From far away rolled in waves the hollow reverberating echoes that are part of a great terminus. All about them, enormous stone pillars stood sentinel, their tops presumably lost in a murky infinity; but robbed of majesty by the absurd fretwork of vine-leaves that encircled their base.

The occupants of this draughty suburb were not so much waiting for a train to convey Peter to Thatch Lane, as awaiting the moment they themselves should be seized by desire for a train; when, strolling forth to investigate, they usually found the very article just about to leave the platform. Such was the never-waning influence of Stuart’s star, in which, by dint of her proximity, Peter had assumed a share, with the same ease as she would have displayed coming under another’s umbrella.

—“Of equal importance,” Stuart maintained, reverting to their argument; “if death be essential for the completion of a moment, no person ought to let their rubbishy life stand in the way. The moment’s the thing. To walk about attaching such a tremendous weight to the value of the-breath-in-my-body, and none at all to the fun which can be extracted from ignoring it, is the unbalanced attitude of all people who have no sense of form.”

Peter was straining to follow him; she could almost hear her brain creak with the effort.

“If by the hairpin vision, you glimpse an act as needing for completion the sacrifice of your life, you’d give it?”

“Every time. By way of proving the vital importance of the act. And if all were to throw themselves more recklessly into the impersonal spirit of formation, we’d be done with age and illness, with fears and frets and muddle and blind gropings. Hanging-on is the evil. I’d like to make a pool, a Greatest Common Factor, into which each man is ready at all times to chuck his life for the sake of living, snap the thread for the sake of the pattern.”

“H’m. It’s superb, but does it hold water? The gift of supreme selflessness——”

“Supreme priggishness! ’Tisn’t that. It’s to a fellow’s personal advantage to see just where he’s going, where to stop, where to snap. The vision demands certain sacrifice, of course.” Stuart chuckled. “I’m pleased with the notion of offering myself as a burnt-offering to myself,” he declared; “such a compliment!”

Peter chanted: “And they could not find an ox nor an ass, nor a signpost nor a manservant, nor diamonds nor decanters, nor pork nor porridge, worthy to be sacrificed to the supreme master of all, son of the house of Heron. Then himself uprose, and stripped him of his braces and other adornments of the flesh——”

But the metaphysician was again in the ascendant; leprechaun had but drummed an instant with shaggy heels, to make sure of not being forgotten.

“Peter, we must know when to cut, you and I. There’ll come the moment, inevitably; and if we don’t act in time, it will be done for us, and just too late.”

“When the last juice is out of the orange,” she quoted.

“And the taste of the skin is already bitter in the mouth.” He considered her steadfastly: “I wonder if you are up to it,” he mused; “it would be rather a magnificent stunt, really and truly to cheat the gods of their aftermath. Could you, Peter? You devil, I believe you could ... I’m not sure that I want you defiant enough for that.”

Thus Stuart to the conception of Peter which he had built from his own desire and from the cavalier tilt of her head. And seeing clearly his Portrait-of-a-Lady; battle-eager and brain-clear and courageous; glorying in freedom from all bondage; a lady with mockery on her lips, and sudden moods of tenderness in her soul, as of mist veiling softly a shining sword; swift in recovery after defeat; tempered at all times to fine adjustment of the spirit to circumstance and adventure; and withal a lady mysterious and unexpected, but of bodily hardihood like to a man’s; and, above everything, able to stand alone and without him;—seeing all this, and finding the portrait attractive, she had played up to it; at first for fun; then because it came as natural to do so as not; then for his sake; finally, because she could no more extricate herself.

One effort indeed she had made in the latter direction: “Stuart, has it ever struck you that you have mixed the oranges in your basket? and when you think to be employed with mine, it is your own you are busily sucking all the while.”

He laughed, not grasping the significance of what she said. “What of it?”

“Well—no wonder you approve of the flavour!”

“You’re a dentist, Peter!” he cried then, exasperated; “you bring forth the hidden molars of my mind, molars of which I myself am not even aware, and dangle them on your nasty little pincers, saying: ‘Look, this is yours!’ It’s a horrid, a most reprehensible trick.”

She abandoned the attempt at revelation; continued to respond to his conception of her: never to tell him when she was tired; never to own that she had need of him; never to let him see her afraid; never to ask his help in trouble. Herein lay the primary rules to be observed. And she had learnt from him actually to enjoy the utmost limits of strain; found exhilaration in the knowledge that after all, she was top-dog in the silent battle, since she had so successfully restrained her real nature from proclaiming to him its hidden wants and weaknesses. Top-dog—a pity that this superiority must be for ever kept secret, when one considered how he would be annoyed at the information.

Nevertheless, she doubted if her powers were capable of this final test, complete severance at the topmost summit of happiness, in avoidance of descent on the further side. This was super-girl he demanded now. Perversely, she experienced a hatred of his talk of evanescence and the separation to come; wished to hear the old foolish “for-ever-an’-ever” on his lips, the old mad belief in immortality of love, which her reason rejected so scornfully. Were they a pair of fools too clever for love? Peter questioned silently of the luggage-trucks. Beyond the fading rails, beyond the last red-eyed signal-box, a train-whistle hooted derisively.

“Stuart, if we went on without use of the shears, what do you see in store for us?”

Resting his chin on his hands, he gazed beyond the towering pillars, as if in the attempt to throw a loop around the future and pull it into his line of vision.

“Knowledge of each other, worst of all. Knowledge that is bound to widen, and each day lick up a little more of the unknown territory, till none remains. I shall fight hard not to know you, Peter; not to anticipate your attitude, or expect your unexpectedness, or follow too confidently and without trepidation your mental twists and turns. But it’s a losing fight. And one day we shall experience a sensation of things commonplace, the tingle gone from them.”

“We won’t tell....”

“No, we won’t tell; we’ll try and whip up by artificial means. I might marry you in that mood—from a sort of desperation at having pushed beyond desire. There are no hills and no stars in the country that lies beyond desire. I think, seeing it, one of us will make a half-hearted attempt to break. But too late to glory in the break; it will merely be odious and necessary, with the past already spoiled, and the future rather bleak; a break complicated by entanglements and—oh, other people! So we shall drift together again, as a matter of habit, somewhat ashamed of ourselves——”

Peter was seeing it now: “You will begin to take me for granted, and not strain to please me. And I—I might possibly become exacting——”

“That phase would pass as well. We should grow older, more comfortable, wonder what the uneasiness had all been about, and the sense of loss. Impulse would slip away and topsy-turvydom and conceit”—Stuart waxed pathetic at the contemplated loss of his insufferable bumptiousness,—“and, sane together, we will wonder we could ever have been mad together. If I must age to sanity, damn it! I’ll face the process alone.”

“You won’t remember ... but I shall, on anniversaries. I hate dates, but I can’t break them of their meaning—that’s my sex coming through. Anniversaries ... when I shall have known you a year—two years—three—Stuart, I’m frightened of the years; I want to be meeting you again for the first time.”

“We haven’t come to that yet. But when we do—the world may label me a brute or you a jilt; they may expect you to cling, or me to reproach; they may talk of the steady affection which grows and subsists upon a durable basis of mutton-fat,—but when we touch top, Peter, as we two shall do simultaneously, because we are level, then it’s: ‘Thanks for what you’ve given me, and good-bye,’ proudly and cleanly. I never thought I should meet the genius of life who could do that.” And he repeated softly his tribute: “You are a genius of life, Peter....”

Then, fearful of an imposed descent from the clear heights, he gave a rapid exhibition of his own unprompted skill at banister-sliding: “Eleven times two is twenty-two!” he recited, awestruck, catching sight of figures roughly scrawled in white chalk on the pillars opposite; “eleven times three is thirty-three! O, far-reaching hand of education——”

“Not so far,” laughed Peter, following him down with remarkable celerity; “eleven times eleven is not a hundred and eleven, well, not usually! and our unknown mathematician seems himself to have had doubts on the subject, for he has broken off at that juncture of reckoning.”

Stuart evoked a touching image of the Self-Improving Porter, hoping one day to be a County Councillor; and stealing away from his soulless burden of trundling, to practise his tables in stillness and solitude upon the props of Euston.

“Euston more than any other place will be a home of ghosts, after we have finally torn ourselves asunder,” remarked Peter, as they strolled through dim archways into the circular booking-hall. “You, of course, can avoid the building; but unless I contrive to alight always at Kilburn, which will be inconvenient, my raw wounds will be kept well salted.” She glanced down at the sprawling silent figures from which the wooden benches were never free; phantom figures for ever waiting for some phantom train; never moving, never asking,—indissoluble adjuncts to the mystery of Euston. “I will not consent to have my feelings lacerated in chance fashion,” she declared; “I’m going to take you now, and solemnly lay you, as a hen lays eggs, in different portions of the building; so that in years to come I shall know exactly at what points to wince with a sudden pain. If we arrange our own exists, we will also premeditate our own agonies.”

Peter had not yet learnt to refrain from playing at God.

So thrice they sought to trespass in the gallery which, close up to the smoke-black ceiling, ringed the hall. And were twice ejected by a sympathetic stoker; and once by a policeman, who smiled not nor scowled when Stuart quoted to him art and Lucullus in argument against the law, but said simply and stolidly, “Maybe, sir, but them’s my orders,” which is the essential condition of mind for a policeman, and one to be encouraged, ranking him in excellence beside the Self-Improving Porter. And they sought for the elusive platform, from which trains are rumoured to depart on Sundays, but which on all other days lies beyond platform nine, and beyond the world, and beyond space; drifting formless platform to which the evil familiars of Euston occasionally lure a harmless passenger-train, then to chuckle at the bewildered victims of their devilry. And they found also the platform of a thousand milk-cans; and a model steamship in a glass case, reported to perform marvellous feats at the insertion of one penny, but which, clutching Stuart’s penny to its iron breast, stirred not from tranced sleep; thinking doubtless: he is a millionaire and can well spare it. And they planned to hold a Roman feast on a great scale, in the bathroom at Euston; weary sooty travellers to be lured inside and plunged forthwith into cooling floods of water, and given stale sandwiches to eat, and a third-class ticket to Willesden, gratis with every bar of soap. Finally, they entered Euston through seven different portals, beheld it from seven different aspects, all fearsome with the clankings and throbbings of metal, and the oblique approach of red goblin eyes from the outside glooms.

And Peter said that her train was due, and that the premises were now quite sufficiently imbued with sad sweet memories hereafter as ghosts to haunt her.

“It would be rather funny if my aching heart should turn inartistic and refuse to perform.”

“Oh, if we can’t cheat Ladye Art, at our age!” he leant against the door of the carriage, and lit a cigarette; “she belongs to the first stages of consciousness. I put out my tongue at Art. A man with the artistic sense of things, would never again take you home by train to Thatch Lane, after having once done it so successfully; ‘for fear of spoiling things,’ he would say.”

The guard passed along the line of doors, his passage punctuated by heavy slams.

“But you——” she mocked.

“But I, Peter, can be artistic, and also cheat Art by being inartistic;” he placed a tentative foot upon the step, and she anticipated his evident intentions by a careless: “I don’t need you with me to-night.”

—“And then cheat myself by being re-artistic!” he ran alongside the moving train, and secured the door-handle by a deft turn of the wrist. “And I had no intention of coming with you, Peter. Good night!”

... Peter hated him. It struck her that the most poignant ghost of all, and one where she had no hand in the manufacture, would run for ever abreast of a moving train; leap on to the footboard: “I told the man to drive like Hell!”... leap from the footboard: “I had no intention of coming with you——”

And here were the ends of Euston, where the trio had chanted their triumphant ritual; where Peter had once taken her tiger a-walking, and Merle had followed her. Merle....

Blackness now, save for a few splashed lights among a dark huddle of roofs. Then open country.

Yes, she hated Stuart. He might have known that she did rather want him to come. He had known——

Peter smiled. She was mentally framing a letter to him, of which this was the opening phrase: “If you had no intention of coming, why, oh why, did you hold in your hand two first-class tickets to Thatch Lane, when you returned from the booking-office?”

It was just as well, Peter decided, to keep cultivated and alert one’s powers of observation.

CHAPTER II
A PRODIGAL FATHER

Alighting at the tiny station of Thatch Lane, she was immediately lapped around with a cool bath of air, refreshing as water after the dust and turmoil of a day in London. She walked quickly along the tree-lined road; each house a sleeping mystery divided from the next by a dimness of hedge and garden. Occasionally a light-pricked window; footfall of an invisible passer-by; long echoing shriek from the railway line, as the train in a rushing curve was seen cleaving the fields.

Peter halted beneath a solitary lamp-post, swung open a white gate on her left, passed up the neat gravel path of Bloemfontein, and, bringing forth her latchkey, was just about to let herself in, when she became aware of a blurred bundle, somewhat darker than the darkness, squatting on the steps.

“Hullo!”

“Hullo!” responded the bundle forlornly.

“Have you lost your way?”

“N-no, but there’s nobody to open to us.”

Peter had not looked upon the huddled form in the light of an evening caller: “I’m sorry, I thought you were a beggar—No, I don’t mean that—but it’s awfully dark, isn’t it?” with a quick attempt to retrieve her blunder. “But who are you?”

“Oh, please, I’m Chavvy!”

Came a heavy step upon the gravel. A looming figure returned from what had evidently been a tour of exploration round the back premises:

“No luck, my dear. All bolted, even the pantry window. We shall just have to wait.”

“Father!” exclaimed Peter, relieved from her equal fear of burglars or eccentric demigods, which latter she recollected were in the habit of occasionally week-ending with unsuspecting mortals.

“That you, Peter? Hooray, hooray! Can you let us into this infernal house? we’ve been knocking since half an hour,” Bertram Kyndersley sounded not a whit depressed by the occurrence.

“Aunt Esther is out. But cook had no right to leave the house alone.” Peter inserted the key, and opened to a square hall, blue-papered, with pleasant glimpses beyond of a gas-lit dining-room, its table spread with wine and fruit, with seed-cake and cress sandwiches.

“Aren’t you coming in, Chavvy?” the man spoke impatiently, of a sudden convinced that something was wrong with a universe that permitted to his daughter a latchkey, while himself was forced to nocturnal prowlings and pantry windows.

“May I—Pierrot?”

“Good God, yes!” he helped the bundle to its feet, and brought it into the hall. Peter, who from the high plaintive tones had expected to see a child, was astonished when Chavvy resolved itself into a girl some four or five years older than herself; though stunted in growth, and with dark hair scattered loosely about the shoulders. She wore an odd assortment of what looked like rags, but taken separately, proved a faded green jersey, a brown muffler, scanty red skirt, coloured stockings gaping with huge holes, shoes likewise ornamented, and a Neapolitan red fishing-cap that didn’t match the skirt.

Bertram too had a threadbare appearance, though his waist-line had considerably increased its girth of late, and his eye seemed to have melted more than was good for it. Nothing could detract, however, from a certain picturesqueness which clung about him like an aroma, and he met Peter’s mildly wondering gaze with his old jaunty smile.

“This is my wife, Peter!”—and waited to be cursed or blessed, as fortune decreed.

Chavvy took an impulsive step forward, both hands held out: “Please ... we are so tired and cold and hungry ... and—and I promise never to come between you and Pierrot!”

“Pierrot?” Peter felt that this sobriquet bestowed upon her slightly obese parent, added the last absurd touch of unreality to the situation:

Pierrot and Chavvy—the doorstep vigil—tired and cold and hungry—the prodigal and the play-actress—certainly a snowstorm was lacking, but Miss Esther on her return home might be trusted to supply this last essential.

Nevertheless, with all her artificial appeal, there was about poor little third-rate Chavvy something genuinely pathetic, though one felt instinctively that this was her favourite adjective and ought not to be encouraged; genuinely pathetic in the north-east, where she saw herself attractively pathetic in the south-west. Peter was irresistibly reminded of the touring road-companies she had known in her pre-Bloemfontein days; their jargon, their manners, and careless bonhomie. And in this spirit she bade her stepmother heartily welcome.

“Come in, both of you; cut all explanations, they don’t matter much, any old way! And help yourselves to whatever you want in the food line. I say, though, you’re shivering,—half a jiff, while I light a fire! Rather eccentric in June—Auntie’s hair will stand on end when she sees. Yes, that’s right, off with your jersey and cap, sling them anywhere ... what pretty hair you’ve got.” Peter talked very fast, concealing intense amusement at her father’s latest escapade, and uncaring that the trimly conventional dining-room was being transformed as if by magic to a fair replica of cheap theatrical lodgings: Chavvy squatting on the hearthrug, her sharp white features lit by the wavering flames, the while she peeled a tangerine and carelessly littered the skin in the fender; jersey, cap and muffler tossed anyhow on the floor; firescreen (hand-painted with lilies) upset; Bertram lounging in an arm-chair, his boots half-way up the mantelpiece, and spilling wherever most convenient the ash of a particularly foul-smelling cigar; a glass of port streaming its contents across the white cloth, and dripping slowly from the table’s edge; crumbs on every plate; Peter herself astride the table, listening to irrelevant anecdotes of shoddy people whose names she did not even know, and delighting at the taint of vulgarity within her which woke so very naturally to the prevailing atmosphere.

—“By the way,” she interrupted a stirring narrative of how one Billy Devereux—such a dear boy—had been slung out of work because the leading lady—vain old beast—had bestowed his rÔle and her affections upon a youth with longer eyelashes than Billy’s,—“by the way, dad, are you stopping?”

Bertram drew from his pocket a shilling, a threepenny bit and a halfpenny:

in a tenor voice of exceeding charm;

“And therefore I have come to seek shelter beneath your aunt’s roof; dwelling amidst so much luxury, she will surely not begrudge me my cup of cold water,” and he sipped appreciatively at the port wine.

he warbled anew. “Not that she’s ever likely to be in a cauld blast, old skinflint stick-by-the-fire!” in soft parenthesis.

Peter said no more. Bertram, reduced to sudden penury, had once before returned in this fashion, but never yet with a wife. Miss Esther did not approve of her brother-in-law. Miss Esther, bright and chirrupy from an evening’s well-bred enjoyment, was now heard in the front garden, thanking Mr. Lorrimer, an elderly widower inclined to be attentive, for his kindness in seeing her home:

“You won’t refuse to come in for a glass of something and a sandwich? Nothing prepared, you know, nothing prepared; just pleasantly informal,”—innocent of what lay in store for her of pleasant informality.

Miss Esther was extremely short-sighted, and her first impression of the three figures round the fire at the far end of the room, was of Peter and her two young friends, Merle and Stuart. Then her cordial expression froze to antagonism, as advancing towards the male outline, the blur of face shaped itself into the features of her disreputable relative. Bertram, responding to suggestion, became instantly the impudent scaramouch she had always seen in him.

“Hullo, Essie! Pleased to see me? No—you’d rather not be kissed? Just as you like. Chavvy, hither and be introduced.”

Chavvy came shrinkingly forward. Miss Esther, not daring to guess with what Bertram had here invaded the sanctity of her home, bowed stiffly; and presented Bertram to Mr. Lorrimer and Mr. Lorrimer’s daughter Myrtle:

“My brother-in-law.”

“My wife,” said Bertram, explaining Chavvy.

Resulting in a fictitious assumption throughout Thatch Lane, that Miss Worthing’s younger sister—not a bit like her to look at—had turned up unexpectedly—“and Esther doesn’t seem a bit pleased! Such an odd little thing, my dear, almost not quite a lady.”

Which rumour was to cause Miss Esther Worthing a great deal of future annoyance. At present she had only room for one supremely outraged sentiment: that it was not county etiquette to cast your second wife upon the bosom of your deceased first wife’s sister.

“Cook’s lying in a scarlet sleep under the kitchen dresser,” Peter indiscreetly announced, having been in quest of more glasses. “That’s why she didn’t open to them.”

“Oh, dear me, how very tiresome; I hope you hadn’t to wait long.” Admirably the mistress of the house rose to the occasion, to the traditions of caste, and to the height of her linen collars. “But anybody who knows anything about servants will know also what a problem it is,” this to Chavvy, by way of a suitable conversational opening. Peter, her aunt noticed with satisfaction, was for the moment concentrating attention on the Lorrimers.

Chavvy laughed with birdlike gaiety: “Why, I’ve knocked about as long as I can remember in ‘digs.’; and jolly well waited on myself, unless I could afford to tip the slavey. You mustn’t ask me about servants.”

“Are you on the stage, Mrs.—er——?” threw in Myrtle Lorrimer. “How sweet! I once took part in a Greek tableau, and wore sandals and filleted hair.”

“Sure you don’t mean filleted plaice?” interrupted her father, whom Thatch Lane had encouraged as a wit.

“Don’t be silly, father,” pettishly.

“And don’t you be pert, young lady.”

Bertram watched the pair closely and made a few mental notes on the art of being a father, an accomplishment wherein he was liable to grow rusty during his long intervals of absence from Peter. Miss Esther was still dutifully laughing at Mr. Lorrimer’s joke; and Chavvy, more at home now the talk had swung nearer her zone of comprehension, replied eagerly to Myrtle:

“Yes, just think, I played my first part when I was only nine: Wally, in ‘Two little Vagabonds.’ And I used to cry my heart out every night in the consumptive bit at the end—have you seen it?—where he says: ‘Don’t forget Wally, who was your little son for ... for a week!’”

“How sweet!” cried Myrtle Lorrimer again; “how I should love to see you act!”

“I’ll act for you now, if you like.” Accustomed to the society of touring pros, who would open the floodgates of their genius at the slightest inducement, and usually without, Chavvy placed a chair to represent Sydney Carton; and, minus all preliminary hesitations, treated the assembled company to scenes from the life of Little Mimi, her most successful rÔle.

... “Oh, Mr. Carton, if only you would not drink so much——”

Bertram indifferently reached his hand for the decanter. Peter, at that moment more niece of Worthing than daughter of Kyndersley, squirmed uneasily at this embarrassing exhibition of histrionics, and wished Chavvy were a canary in a cage, that somebody might throw a cloth to quench her.

... “I fear nothing while I hold your hand. I shall fear nothing when I let it go....”

“Very nice,” said Miss Esther frigidly, “what an excellent memory,” when Chavvy had slowly and with drooping head mounted an imaginary guillotine, and thus signified the performance at an end. Myrtle clapped feebly. Her father muttered, “Ha—hum—yes, Dickens. All very well in its proper place!” which was emphatically with pages uncut upon an English gentleman’s bookshelf. And Little Mimi, aware suddenly that she was a stranger among the Philistines, fled to Bertram’s side, and, looking frightened, laid her cheek against his hand.

Peter thought, “I’m sure somebody told her once that she had eyes like a trapped fawn or a jugged hare or something of that sort.” Chavvy’s appearance gave rise to any amount of zoological speculation.

The Lorrimers rose to go. This type of entertainment was not what they expected to find at Bloemfontein, and they were quite unreasonably disappointed in Miss Worthing. With lowered prestige, that lady returned from the hall to her transfigured dining-room.

“Are you spending the night here, may I ask, Bertram?”

“We are spending many nights here, Esther,” he assured her gravely. And added in conversational tone: “If you turn us out, we shall starve.”

Where was the man’s proper pride, Miss Esther wondered disapprovingly. Well, well, she supposed it was her duty to put them up for a day or two. One couldn’t let people starve; it wasn’t done; and really, that impossible little person in the red cap looked nothing but skin and bone. Miss Esther offered to show the bride to her room. And added a silent determination to draw special attention to the cake of soap on the washstand.

“Run along, Chavvy,” quoth Chavvy’s lord and master.

She hung back and pouted. Then went slowly forward to meet hostility, awaiting her at the threshold.

“Won’t you,” she faltered, “won’t you try to love me just a little?”

Upon this she made her exit. The door closed behind the twain, leaving Miss Esther’s reply to the imagination.

Peter crossed to the fireplace, lit a cigarette, and stood looking down upon the man in the arm-chair. Noted with pity that the topmost hairs of his head were thinning considerably. Otherwise his florid good looks seemed in no danger from the years. With a certain shock of surprise, she realized how akin they were, he and she; adventurers both, play-actors both; though, lacking her burden of pride, his passage through the world was even more divinely unhampered.

“Hadn’t you better tell me all about it?” she suggested.

When Bertram’s reply came, it was still tinged with borrowed reflections from Mr. Lorrimer, Parent.

“I’ve been a good deal by myself, my dear girl; you don’t seem to realize what the loss of your poor mother meant to me. And you, who might have been a solace and a companion, you preferred to live here in comfort and luxury. I was—lonely. And when this child Chavvy crept into my life, I let her remain, to fill the gap my daughter might have filled.”

Peter thought it over. “No,” she said at length, very gently, “I don’t think that will do. Try again.”

The dark upward-springing moustache was not sufficient to conceal a responsive grin on Bertram’s lips. With considerable ease, he shed his garments of hypocrisy.

“’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno exactly how it happened.”

“Who and what is Chavvy?”

Chavvy, it transpired, was one of those people who have no sober appellation, but answer to such names as Kiddy or Babe or Rags or Little Pal, according to taste. She was also alone in the world. “A weird child, yet with something strangely attractive about her,” would have been Chavvy as visualized by Chavvy. Garments, whatever their previous origin, on her looked oddly tattered. Fancifully she dwelt in a kingdom of dreams and Pierrots and red, red roses and beating-rain-against-the-window-panes,—all the paraphernalia appertaining to quaintness. Actually she dwelt in the fourth or fifth or sixth stratum below normal level of the stage profession; a tangle of veins spreading well beneath the surface; unknown territory save to those who are of it and in it and can never rise above it; underworld of touring companies; fit-up companies; pantomime, concert, and entertainment parties; sketches and repertory and pageant. Comprising intimate acquaintance with the smaller towns, the smaller theatres, the smallest halls; of what audiences will take what type of play and at what season. Underworld where each member has an infallible instinct for ‘dates,’ for ‘something to be had,’ and good-naturedly pass the word from one to the other. Where all names are familiar: “I knew him three years ago in Nottingham; we played together in ‘The Bells’”—drifting friendships, drifting memories, drifting lives; yet all inseparably woven together. London the improbable El Dorado of impossible chances. A glamourless battered underworld, yet from which none of their volition could entirely sever themselves. An occasional one of its members dropped to depths unmentioned and unquestioned; or else was incongruously pitchforked into spheres outside, as now Chavvy and Bertram.

They had met that summer at Blackpool; Chavvy playing ‘Cigarette’ in a very makeshift version of ‘Under Two Flags’; Bertram warbling sentimental ballads in the Masked Quartette of seaside singers. In need of admiration and dalliance, as a burnt child needs the fire, he found Chavvy interesting; alternately teased and pitied her; and told her the story of his life, the latter pastime a never-ending source of pleasure and fount of imagination. Her brain stuffed up with plaintive little Pierrot-poems, she found the man more than interesting; and listened wide-eyed to the story of his life, thinking the while how wonderful it was that he should so obviously be in want of her, poor, shabby....

—“In fact,” said Peter, “she called you Pierrot, and immediately you were Pierrot. There, O my father, you have inherited my very worst tendencies. How did you come to marry her?”

“Scoundrelly manager bunked, and left the whole company in the lurch, with three weeks’ salary owing. And she seemed to sort of cling to me. Masked Quartette did rotten badly. We hung on till our united loose cash was all spent, and then in extremity I bethought me of Esther. I decided it would be quite nice if Chavvy and I came to live with Esther. And I assumed the old lady would prefer us to be married.”

“On the whole,” mused Peter, “I believe you assumed correctly.”

“And so we fixed it up. And—and here we are. Going to scold me?”

“Not as long as you guarantee my stepmother will neither starve me, beat me, nor send me to gather firewood. Come along, dad, we’re supposed to keep early hours here.”

He pulled a grimace. “Can’t see myself sticking it for long. I’ll run up to town to-morrow and see if there’s anything doing in concert parties. I suppose you can lend me my fare and a bit over?”

“As broke as that?”

“You can take it from me, my daughter,” turning to face her, as they mounted the stairs, “that the prodigal would not have returned for his fatted calf while there was the least remnant of a husk left to him.”

—Miss Esther met them on the landing. “There is the spare-room, Bertram; it adjoins mine, so please do not chatter with your wife after half-past ten o’clock. I will give you a face towel and a hand towel. Do not use the bell-rope on any account. And breakfast is at nine precisely,—we are very punctual people here.”

CHAPTER III
“WE TRAVEL LIGHT”

Bertram was beginning to tire of Chavvy. Aunt Esther was beginning to tire of Bertram. And Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was quite obviously beginning to tire of Peter and her persistent lack of response to his demands for payment. Peter was just rather tired. She could not pay Mr. Lazarus; and Chavvy had conceived for her an unnecessarily clinging affection: “After all,” she was wont to remark wistfully, “we are girls together.”... Peter were not sure if it were legitimate to girl with one’s stepmother. Furthermore, her father and her aunt made her their headquarters of separate complaint. And withal at any moment might come a summons from Stuart, a letter from Stuart, a challenge from Stuart, demanding that she must be constantly and supremely on the alert. For his siege of her was carried on in the spirit of who would say: “Yield you shall—but yield if you dare!”

At present he was following up a period of furious and feverish need of her, when meeting after meeting failed to quench the thirst that was upon them, by a prolonged outburst of silence. An outburst in that it lacked all of relaxation or flatness; insisted every moment of every day that it was on both sides a silence pregnant of meaning—though whether of self-torment or of defeat or of bomb-manufacture neither could tell; a silence awaiting hourly shatterment. Peter felt once or twice that Stuart was mutely pleading with her to break it, or else allow him to break it, but now it amused her to exact mercilessly from him the quality of superman which himself had thrust her into exacting.

“I want to speak to you, my daughter.” In such ponderous fashion did Bertram one Sunday’s noon, call Peter aside into the trim quadrangle of garden. He was addicted to airing his fatherhood in front of Miss Esther and Chavvy, as though challenging them to go and do likewise if they could,—“and it isn’t easy,” disregarding a few minor facts of co-operation, “it isn’t easy to have had a splendid girl like that, all by oneself, and to have brought her up to be a credit!”

So now he laid emphasis on the appellation ‘my daughter,’ causing Miss Esther to toss her head, as she remarked: “Special afternoon Service at three o’clock, Peter, my dear, should you feel inclined to come,” signifying that she, more than Bertram, was responsible for the girl’s welfare and up-bringing.

“Do you want me too, Pierrot?” pleaded Chavvy, always alarmed at the prospect of a tÊte-À-tÊte with her husband’s sister-in-law.

“No,” snapped Pierrot; “stay where you are.”

—“I can’t make out,” he confided in Peter, as they strolled towards the garden-seat, “why those two don’t get on better; there’s a fuss every single time I run up to town.”

“You’ve been up every single day,” she reminded him gently. As, indeed, her pocket had good cause to know.

Bertram, misliking her accents of reproof, remembered his original intention in calling her aside:

“The—ah—young gentleman who seemed to occupy a great deal of your attention, Peter; I’ve been making enquiries, and he appears to be in a fairly sound position. He hasn’t called here lately, I’ve noticed; I hope,” with tender concern, “that he isn’t making a fool of my little girl?”

Peter gazed helplessly at the speaker; then bubbled over with joyous laughter.

“What would you do if that were the case, daddy, dear?”

Bertram ignored both the question and the laughter. “I should like to know,” he persisted, “what his intentions may be?”

“As strictly dishonourable as even you could wish—Pierrot!” mocked his undutiful child.

“Oh, damn!—Sorry, Peter; but do I look like a Pierrot?”

“More like an organ-grinder; you’re disgracefully shabby.”

“I know,” ruefully; “and my dress-suit is much too tight, supposing I wore it in the mornings.”

“I don’t think that Aunt Esther would approve of that.”

“Well, I’ll run in to Lazarus to-morrow, and see if he’ll rig me up a suit on spec.”

“Mr. Lazarus,” murmured Peter, “has just got out a summons against me. I wouldn’t go to Mr. Lazarus, if I were you.”

“Lord!” Bertram exclaimed in genuine sympathy. “I’m awfully sorry, Peter, old girl; I was just going to ask you to lend me a fiver. I wonder if I could borrow a ten-pound-note from anyone, and lend you a fiver to pay Lazarus; then he might make me that suit without pressing for payment, and I’d be five pounds to the good.” He brightened considerably at the prospect of five pounds to the good, and, jingling the imaginary coins in his pocket, evidently considered that he had now solved the financial problem with as much ease as he had previously disposed of his daughter’s love affairs. He turned to his own matrimonial aspects: “Chavvy will be perfectly happy with you and Esther, I suppose. The tour will only be for the rest of the season.”

“What tour?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m booked with the ‘Troubadours’ from the first of July; next Monday. A month at Maidenhead, then a fortnight of Hastings, wind up at Bournemouth. Got it through young Tommy Weekes; he has cancer of the throat, and mayn’t sing in the open,—or anywhere else, I should imagine, poor Tom, except in the heavenly choir—and for that he don’t sing the right kind of song. Being able to strum on the mandoline settled it for me, and jolly thankful I was, too.” He spoke quickly, feeling the impending disapproval.

“You’re leaving Chavvy here?”

“Yes,” defiantly.

“It’s hardly fair, dad; she’ll be miserable. ’Tisn’t her sphere.”

“I’m not going to tour with a wife,” muttered Bertram. “Where’s the fun, Peter? And she hangs round me—oh, you’ve seen!”

True that Chavvy was of an ivy-like disposition. And even a Pierrot will turn if sufficiently Pierretted upon.

“I couldn’t have stood this infernal tidiness a day longer,” continued Bertram gaily, his momentary depression lifted at the prospect of freedom. “’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno how you’ve put up with it all these years. I’d lift you out, if I could; take you along with me. I wonder—perhaps you could hold a tambourine, or something,” doubtfully.

“Thanks,” said Peter, really grateful; “but I don’t think I’ll do that, it’s too difficult. Besides, the tidiness is only surface, and doesn’t worry me much. But it’s a shame to leave Chavvy planted in the midst of it.”

“My dear, to her it’s the height of luxury, after all the hardships she’s undergone; clean towels every week, a bath every night, nice society, what more can she want?” Bertram had not the faintest idea of being illogical. And try as she would, Peter was unable to detach herself from his point of view. It was, after all, merely a repetition of Stuart’s creed, to cease sucking when the orange was dry. But then, spoke justice, one must not marry the orange.

A puff of wind which had been toying with some odd scraps of paper on the lawn, now lifted the largest of these and deposited it at Peter’s feet. She recognized a fragment of the plaintive storyettes which Chavvy was in the habit of scribbling, and afterwards, in the pride of her heart, showing to Peter. So the girl felt no present scruples in reading:

... “Who wear the white-and-black Moon Livery, must sooner or later go forth to look for new loves. So Pierrot went ... and Pierrette was very lonely—oh, very lonely! Harlequin came to passionately woo her, and many other suitors, but she sent them all away from her quaint Little Red House, thinking that Pierrot would return.... Pierrot did not return. The crimson rose that he had dropped at her feet in leaving, withered, but still she found sweetness in its Crushed Perfume.

“Autumn came and Autumn went....

“And Winter....

“Night after night Pierrette crouched in front of the fire, waiting for the footsteps that never came; dreaming into the ruddy hollows of the coals all her sad little memories of the sunshine and carnival that Had Been.

“... One evening when the rain and hail and wind shook the windows, Pierrette saw the petals of her rose drop one by one to the ground, and gathering them into her hand she cried impatiently that she too wouldn’t wait any longer, and ran to cast the faded token of a faded love on to the Rubbish-heap at the end of her little garden of lilies.

“... Hark! a sound of sobbing through the darkness. Across the Rubbish-heap lay a glimmer of white! ... ragged, wet, tired, Pierrot had crept home.... And, forgiving all, she crouched down beside him, drew his head into her lap.... ‘Pierrot,’ she whispered, ‘I knew you would come back.’...”

Thus far Peter was able to read. The author’s style was well imbued with the Pierrot-germ just then rampant in the air; yet here was sufficient at least to show that Chavvy did not expect fidelity from her husband, was preparing herself to be forlornly patient through the long days of waiting. Peter chided herself as a brute for the involuntary wish that Chavvy could go and do it all somewhere else.

Suddenly she saw Bertram and his wife as ludicrous caricatures of herself and Stuart; he in his desire to cut free whenever he pleased; and she—no, at all events she would not wait for Stuart to come back to her through wind and rain. Thirteen days now his silence had endured; Peter cast an anxious look towards the rubbish-heap round the corner of the house—and at the same moment the gate clicked, and Stuart sauntered towards them across the lawn; his appearance so eminently matter-of-fact and prosperous as at once to relieve her of alarm.

“Hullo, Peter. Come for a tramp?”

She departed to don thick boots. A ‘tramp’ with Stuart, she knew from previous experience, meant that whatever stood in their direct line of march, must simply and without question be ignored. One did not go backwards or roundabout or half-way. One went through and on. If a mountain blocked the path, one went over it; if a rushing torrent, then into it; if a board with “trespassers will be prosecuted”—well, of course, that was as good as an invitation; one had to consider if it were not mere self-indulgence to follow the call. Time ceased to exist; climatic conditions were just accepted; ultimate destination remained a negligible quantity until one established an ultimate destination by arriving there; and safety of limb was not for an instant weighed in the balance against the possibility of surmounting an eight-foot barrier interlaced with barbed wire, and an enraged bull waiting on the further side. These little country strolls with Stuart gave Peter an insight into his religion of ignoring life itself in favour of life’s lightest moment.

Therefore she donned thick boots and an unquestioning spirit, wondering the while whether the first might not be regarded as rather a contradiction to the second.

Meanwhile, left to entertain Stuart in the garden, Bertram borrowed his ten pounds.

“Pax?” said Peter tentatively, as they swung up the road towards the Weald.

“Certainly pax, or I shouldn’t have come.”

“You gave in first.”

“I did,” with quiet triumph; “you’d never have given in, Peter; you’re a bit of a coward that way.”

“I’m a coward because I’d never have given in?” cried the girl, who in the thirteen days’ interim had almost forgotten how to tread in looking-glass land.

“Of course. I suddenly had enough of the fray, wanted to see you, chucked over the entire edifice of silence, and came. You’d have stuck to your guns, not dared abandon them. Coward!”

She dashed back: “So you simply abstain from indulgence as long as abstinence itself is the indulgence. I always thought your asceticism was a distorted form of vice.”

He laughed across the broad sun-slashed road, to where she plodded in solitary anger.

“Won’t you join me in my ditch, Peter?” seductively; “it’s a very nice ditch.”

No reply.

“Peter. I did have to come. That’s rather a triumph for you, isn’t it? I couldn’t keep away any longer.”

She stamped her foot: “I won’t have my sword returned to me in that fashion. And you know perfectly well it wasn’t cowardice; that I can’t call you back, ever, in case you might be gone for good.”

“Do you mean to say,” in blank astonishment, “that if it were for good, you’d have let me walk out in that casual fashion?”

“‘According to the letter of the bond,’” she quoted.

He kicked the sodden leaves with his heel; picked up a stick and swished it at the air; burst forth at length: “Hang it, Peter! I showed you the exit-door once, and you’ve kept your eye glued to it ever since. Forget it, can’t you?”

“It was an insult ever to point it out. Because there was no need for it. I wouldn’t have tugged.”

“I know that—now,” his accents were almost humble; “but you see, Peter, there have been other she-encounters, and ... and they didn’t know about the door. So I suppose I grew mistrustful.”

“Worse than that. You grew careful.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch.”

So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.

Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.

“I give it up, Stuart,—no, I’m hanged if I do!” impetuously, meeting his quizzical look.... Then drew back: “I’m not so afraid of you but that I can own to being beaten,” she said.

He had remounted the gate in order to assist her, and now paused to deliberate, a leg on either side the topmost bar: “I wonder if I ought to make you do it, after that.”

Gravely Peter waited, while he hovered on the verge of a blunder.

“No!” and dropping to her side, he quietly raised the wooden latch, and stood aside for her to pass through.

“If I’d noticed that it opened!” she laughed. “Stuart, I’ve found your tombstone epitaph at last.”

“Which is?”

“‘He took the line of most resistance.’”

Stuart dwelt on her with a slow warm look, more of man in it than he was wont to show. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder:

“Tired?”

She had never yet answered ‘yes’ to this query, and wondered what mood it would arouse in him should she do so. Supposing she were tired? tired of the pilgrimage, of conflict, of the rain beating fresh and cold upon her face....

A few yards ahead stood a little group, consisting of a man, a woman, a perambulator, and two children. The man wore a bowler hat, and the woman a fussy dress of bright blue cloth, obviously reserved for Sunday wear; one child was distinguished from the other by a tippet of dirty imitation ermine. Otherwise they both had sticky mouths, and both were complaining loudly. The man lifted them in turn from the perambulator, and dandled them: “Shall daddy wheel the pram then?” and loud crows of assent.

Seen thus, the man in the bowler had the appearance of one fettered to the texture of a dream, a dream whence all the radiance had been soaked. In the wide spaces of sky and land and rain, the whole turn-out had an inexpressibly dingy look, that caused Stuart and Peter, with an upward rush of spirits, to feel like Hermes and Artemis walking the earth. He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and side by side, untouching, they flashed past the man and the woman and the two children and the perambulator. And Stuart said again: “Tired, Peter?” no longer wishing, as in the first instance, that her answer might be ‘yes.’ “No,” she rang back at him; and they smiled at one another, and swung on.

Towards evening, an unexpected bend of the road brought them home. It was Stuart’s habit to leave Peter at the gate, without jarring by extraneous chatter what they had found of magic in their day. But Miss Esther, anxiously watching for them from beneath a large umbrella, willed otherwise; insisted that Stuart should not depart without his tea, “And you run straight upstairs and get into some dry clothes, Peter, my dear; Mr. Heron will excuse you.”

Rather glumly, Stuart followed his hostess into the dining-room, where tea was informally spread upon the big table. The prevailing atmosphere struck in him the same note of drabness as had the incident of the perambulator. Among these people he was regarded as Peter’s ‘young man,’—well, not quite as bad as that; Peter’s ‘admirer,’ who came to visit her on Sundays, and took her for a walk, and brought her home to tea, and——

“Milk and sugar, Mr. Heron?”

“We used to sometimes squeeze lemon into tea, a Russian boy and I,” volunteered Chavvy, who was bravely hiding a heart that ached, Bertram having that afternoon confessed his plans; “he had such melancholy eyes, and his father was a convict,” attempting by this recital to rouse her Pierrot to some sort of jealousy. “They call it sayonara,” she added, in somewhat incorrect explanation of the tea.

Miss Esther said that she had no patience with heathen habits, and that everybody knew they were only imitations of honest English tea-drinking, which was quite good enough for her, thank you, without squeezing ‘sayonara’ into her cup. “Though I daresay you’ll call me narrow-minded, Mr. Heron,” drawing Stuart into the conversation, that he might not feel shy.

Animated by an EncyclopÆdic spirit very foreign to his nature, Stuart explained drily the difference between ‘samovar’ and ‘sayonara’—“which happens to be Japanese for ‘farewell.’”

“That’s just as bad,” pronounced Miss Esther. While Chavvy murmured in timid apology for her error: “I was thinking of Port Arthur,” and subsided altogether.

Stuart looked up, relieved, at Peter’s entrance—then bit his lip in annoyance. She had changed into a thin crÊpe frock; he felt sure it was her ‘best,’ donned for his benefit. As a matter of fact, Peter’s garments had been soaked through, and this particular dress was quickest and easiest for her to fasten unaided; but, thoroughly jarred by his surroundings, he chose to see her too tainted by Suburbanism.

Miss Esther filled and refilled cups; sent Peter for more hot water; maintained a flow of lofty but gracious chatter, thinking privately the while that not often had she to entertain so leaden a tea-party; why, the Lorrimers’ Saturday tea-and-tennis institution held a hundred times as much of innocent mirth. But, then, Mr. Lorrimer himself was sufficient of a humorist to make any party ‘go.’

Stuart she considered ‘difficult.’ All young men were more or less so, but she had a method of taming their barbarism never known to fail: on their second introduction to Bloemfontein she would say carelessly: “Now please remember that you can smoke all over the house here—no forbidden ground,” and having found the key to their mysterious masculinity, would watch them in grateful enjoyment of their privilege: “They appreciate it, poor fellows; of course at home they’re never allowed it”—and: “You spoil them, Esther,” usually the conclusion of these remarks.

But Stuart failed to respond to treatment. Notwithstanding he had smoked a horrid black pipe up and down the stairs and in Miss Esther’s own sitting-room—yet here he sat morose and glum as any stranger, not a patch in manners on that nice Mr. St. Quentin who sometimes came.

Indeed, it was curious to observe how Miss Worthing’s personality, the least arresting of any present, reduced every other member to a polite and stricken level of uncommunicativeness. Miss Esther, in her own setting, and all her convictions securely buttoned in waterproof, dominated Stuart and Bertram, Peter and Chavvy, to the entire extinction of their own turbulence; so that presently the two men were exchanging decorous views on the political situation, while Peter and Chavvy, like acolytes, supported Miss Esther with seed-cake and bread-and-butter.

“If you have finished, Peter, you can take Mr. Heron into the drawing-room. I told them to light a fire, although this is the end of June, but then I always say be warm when you are cold and never mind the time of year.”

The drawing-room fire was the outcome of a brief skirmish which had once occurred between Peter and her aunt, when the former had carelessly announced her intention of taking Stuart up to her attic for the viewing of some book.

“My dear, with your bed in it!”

“Oh, I’ll lead him very carefully past the bed,” laughed Peter. “After all, it’s my den, as well as bedroom.”

Miss Esther stiffened: “Out of the question, Peter. Even if you placed a screen around it——” doubtfully.

Peter declared that the screen around the bed would add the same suggestion of immorality that Venus acquired by her fan.

So now Miss Esther emphasized warningly the drawing-room fire.

Stuart pushed back his chair, and sauntered from the room in Peter’s wake. He felt Chavvy’s eyes upon them, dark and wistful—“you two will be together when I shall be, oh, so alone,” the unspoken comment; and he believed Bertram to be smiling complacently upon the back of his son-in-law-to-be. And there he wronged Bertram, who muttered: “I don’t like the fellow; too damned superior!” and this in spite of the ten pounds.

Standing with his elbow on the drawing-room mantelpiece, Stuart surveyed Peter moodily; she looked content enough, content with the hideous prim room, with the fire, the cushions at her back, the approval floating up like incense from the dining-room below. And he was seeing her in contact with homely familiar things; had marked her press the bell for the maid to bring hot water; heard her answer Miss Esther’s enquiries about their walk—“Yes, thanks, very nice; where? oh, just roundabout——” Artemis linked to the trivial details of everyday; Artemis at Bloemfontein; she seemed leagues of distance away from him.

“What’s up?” queried Peter, lazily thrusting at the silence between them. She too was secretly irritated: why couldn’t he be restful, after their long wet tramp? why always that atmosphere of tautness? Merle had once said “Stuart has no firelight mood.”... For the first time since their quarrel, Peter regretted Merle; would gladly have had her there in place of Stuart, “Just to volupp,” thinking of the cottage at Carn Trewoofa, the rainfall, that last long dozing talk, broken by the entrance of the two letters....

It was a pity, and rather absurd too, that she should not have been able to keep Stuart and Merle.

—“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m going, that’s all.”

She raised her eyebrows in delicate scorn, but made no further comment. Nor did she move when she heard the door close behind him.

“He needn’t have been afraid,” with a finer appreciation of his mood than he had given her credit for.

Miss Esther looked up sharply from her knitting, at the rush of feet on the stairs outside, a slammed door, a gate swinging wide on its hinges.

“It’s Mr. Heron. And he has gone. How very strange, without saying good-bye. And what is Peter about, not to see him off? Dear me, foolish young people, they must have quarrelled.”

“He will come back,” murmured Chavvy, in concordance with her leitmotif.

Not yet, reflected Stuart rebelliously, as the train bore him from Thatch Lane. Barely six weeks since that night in Cornwall,—surely the shears need not yet be employed. But having started at such extreme tension, it was utterly impossible that their love should be of long endurance. He had felt the first slackening this evening; the first desire to be quit of her presence; the first distaste at any of her actions. He must disengage her from the background of orderly respectability; search in his mind for the scene wherein he would most desire to place her image; could not visualize any sort of setting ... merely a scamper of wind, and a voice—his own voice—saying authoritatively to someone: “Get her out of irons, you ass! you must get a way on before you turn her at the bank....”

That was it—exactly it! they had got their boat into irons, he and Peter; must get a way on before they rushed ahead or—turned at the bank. In either case, get a way on.

He would take her sailing.

And casting about for a means of accomplishing his wish in accordance with the conventions—Stuart was not in favour of that ‘splendid unconventionality’ usually ending in a muddle, whereof Young Bohemia delights to prate—he bethought him of Nigger Strachey. Nigger had a wife, which just now would come in handy, though Stuart had hitherto rather resented her entrapping of his friend. It brought home to him strongly the lurking danger that besets all men. Strachey had been as sturdily opposed to marriage as Stuart himself; and then, queerly, it had befallen him. So Stuart walked warily, mistrustful of the crafty huntress who hid in the dark, and then pounced. His fear of marriage was the most unsubtle of all his qualities; an elementary fear, of the kind that offers food for music-hall comedians, and inspired Bernard Shaw to the writing of “Man and Superman.” Peter knew of his fear, and hated it as she might hate a gaoler, because it checked her from spontaneously revealing all that she felt for him.

The idea of taking Peter sailing utterly possessed Stuart; and he went straight from Euston to Strachey’s rooms in Chelsea.

“Look here, Nigger, have you still got that bungalow at Potter Heigham?”

“The one you gave me for a wedding-present? Yes. Most unpractical gift I had. Looked to you for a nice bit of Dresden, or at least a plated tea-service.”

“I want you and your wife to invite me up for a week’s sailing; day after to-morrow; and bring whom I like.”

“Do,” grunted Nigger; “delighted. Need we be there?”

“Yes.”

“Um!” Strachey removed the pipe from his mouth and expressed his disturbance by a long and doubtful whistle. “My wife——” he began ponderously.

“Oh, that’s all right.... What do you take me for?”

“My mistake,” said Nigger, slowly masticating the new aspect. Oliver Strachey’s mind matched his face, in that it presented a great dark bulk occasionally illuminated by a flash of white. His quick grin was as unexpected as the rare streaks he displayed of wit or humour; and his cumbersome: “I don’t quite follow your meaning, Heron,” a great pleasure to his young comrade, who liked to watch Nigger’s massive and reliable mentality at work upon his own twisted acrobatics. The two men were never confidential; never gave mutual good advice; were ignorant each of the other’s troubles; disagreed on all abstract topics; and had thrice in company faced death by wave and wind. All of which made for entirely satisfactory comradeship. So that now Oliver asked no questions about the proposed visit to Norfolk, and merely commented:

“Got stacks of work on hand. Still, I could do it in Norfolk as well as here. What I’m wondering is if my wife will care to go?”

“Hang your wife,” Stuart was about to say; then recollected in time that men are absurdly prone to touchiness on the subject of their domestic partners. Especially when as doggedly in love as Oliver. It was just as well to have restrained himself, as Aureole Strachey just then came into the room. She walked swayingly up to Stuart, and remarked in a heavy-lidded voice:

“I dreamt that your uncle was dead. Is he?”

As an entrance, quite effective.

“I don’t think so,” said Stuart, surprised. “Which? Baldwin?” hopefully.

Aureole did not know. But she was insistent about the death. So to settle the matter one way or another, Stuart telephoned home:

“Hullo ... that you, Mater?... Any of the uncles dead?... No, you needn’t scream, darling—I haven’t heard anything; just a passing curiosity.... Morbid? well, perhaps!... You saw them at dinner. All quite healthy?... Good!” He rang off, and reassured Aureole: “They’re not dead, any of them.”

Aureole remained unconvinced. The soft full curves of her mouth, resemblance of which she was vainly trying to coax from a Greuze to a Rossetti, drooped sulkily at the corners. She had no acquaintance with Stuart Heron, save from her wedding-day, when she had not much liked him. “He—gives me nothing,” she had complained to her husband; “he—means nothing.” And Nigger had made no reply, save by one of his dazzlingly incongruous smiles, which all Aureole’s provoked questionings could not compel him to explain.

But to-night there seemed a possibility that Stuart would give her more. He scrutinized her intently for a moment, from her copper hair, carelessly caught up with a single jade hairpin, down to her temperamental feet; and, inspired by these, shot out at her a sudden:

“The pavements are stifling you. You should be walking among reeds—always among reeds!”

Nigger had quitted the room in quest of tobacco; so Aureole was able to blossom forth emotions which, inexplicably to herself, she pruned when her husband was by.

“Sand,” she breathed. “Miles and miles of shining sand. Desert sand. I always adored walking on sand at Broadstairs. Stretches of yellow sand as far as the horizon. I’m a Pagan, you know!”

Stuart knew. He had gathered as much from her first entrance. But sand was no good to him. He wanted to arouse an all-consuming interest in reeds.... There were a great many reeds in Norfolk. For the next ten minutes he plied her Paganism with such consummate skill that she met her husband on his return to the room, with the frantic request to be taken the very next day to their bungalow on the Broads, or she would assuredly perish—of paving-stones.

“I—just want to go. I can’t tell you why. Something is calling me—something with a swish in it. I—just want to go.”

So the expedition was definitely arranged for the ensuing Tuesday; suspecting the ‘something with a swish in it’ to have been Stuart, Oliver was yet somewhat amazed that his capricious lady should choose to quit town before the season’s shutters had closed down. However, relations between them had been a little strained during the past few weeks, owing to the effect on her of a belated reading of the “Doll’s House,” in conjunction with an occult acquaintance who had informed her that she was the Empress Faustina reincarnated, and must not be thwarted in aught she did, since she was in this phase working out Karma. Not keen on Karma, Oliver now hoped, manlike, that the fresh air would make all the difference in the world towards restoring marital harmony.

“The ‘Tyke’ in decent repair?”

“Believe so. I haven’t sailed since I’m married.”

Stuart’s grunt was expressive of many things.

“The ‘Tyke’?” cried Aureole. “What a horrid name! It shows how much imagination you men have, left to yourselves,” in languid disdain.

Stuart promised her that she should re-christen the boat. And after fixing the final arrangements, took his leave.

“Even chances on ‘Tiger Queen’ or ‘Serpent o’ the Nile,’ I should imagine.” Thus he speculated on the re-naming of the ‘Tyke,’ as he walked towards Grosvenor Square.

But Aureole decided that night on ‘Faustina,’ in deference to her own pleasingly lurid, though unfortunately forgotten past.

He wrote to Peter: “Meet me Tuesday, Liverpool Street, ten-fourteen. We’re out for a week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Never mind about the moralities; I’ve arranged for those. Throw overboard other people’s objections—and your own. Don’t wonder if you ought to indulge me by giving in; we’ll have no battle here,—you’ve just to come, and leave the rest to me. Bring as little luggage as possible—we travel light.”

She replied briefly.

“All right”; and then in a postscript: “Were you being symbolical about the luggage?”

To which his answer:

“You—dear! No, of course not. Damn symbolism! I was thinking of porters.”

CHAPTER IV
WILD DUCK

“Garden-party weather,” grumbled Stuart. “S’pose they think they’re doing us a favour; one doesn’t want a breeze for sailing,—oh, no! Strawberries and cream and a band on the lawn, that’s all the day’s fit for.”

Oliver lumbered indoors to work: “Call me when the wind gets up.” And Peter announced her intention of going out in the dinghy.

“Shall I come with you?” queried Stuart lazily, from where he stretched on the grass at Aureole’s side.

“No.”

Instantly he sprang to his feet and followed her down to the bank, fell determination in his countenance.

“Go back, Stuart,” she whispered; “you can’t leave Aureole alone; she’s our hostess.”

He protested: “Hang it! I gave her the bungalow.”

“Untie the rope!” Without heeding his complaints, she sprang into the dinghy, where it floated beside ‘Faustina,’ nÉe ‘Tyke’; and stood upright, scull in hand, looking up at her comrade on the bank, with the coolly indifferent air of being perfectly well able to dispense with his companionship. Her white flannel shirt, flung open to show the tanned throat; the clean line where her hair sprang upwards from the neck; the alert poise of her figure, seemed all to have gathered up and expressed the personality of the background: water quivering in the sunlight, dazzling white canvas of sails, short bright green grass of the banks, masts and ropes slicing and interslicing against a china-blue sky. Peter resembled an adventurer setting forth in silence to find the beginning of the world. Aureole, exotically reclining with hands clasped behind her head, had more the appearance of one who had found the end of the world and was prepared to talk about it. Stuart flung her a discontented look over his shoulder.

“Is this a morning to waste with an amateur cocotte telling me she’s a Pagan?” he demanded, still holding in the dinghy.

Peter merely laughed, and, with an adroit movement, pushed away into midstream.

As Stuart walked slowly back to his hostess, he knew there was nothing he wanted so much as to be alone with Peter on the Broads. Certainly he had gone to a vast deal of trouble in bringing hither Mr. and Mrs. Strachey, for the sake of the proprieties. He was prepared to go to an equal amount of trouble in ridding himself of them. Nor would the charge of inconsistency have disturbed him a whit.

Meanwhile, Aureole had been deriving a quantity of fresh ideas from the contemplation of Stuart and Peter, and their treatment one of the other. She had never before seen love in conflict, and it struck her as attractive. An attempt to engage Oliver in a similarly slippery and perplexing wrestle of wills merely sufficed to augment his loving consideration; when Aureole was capricious, then Aureole had to be humoured, was the burden of his thoughts. From considering him a tyrant, a bully, and a gaoler, which was her last attitude but one, she veered round to the belief that she had married a poor-spirited creature. The germ within her, born of Nora Helmer’s rebellion, was feeding nicely and growing healthily plump, the past three days in Norfolk.

Aureole broke silence with a sudden: “Mr. Heron, do you think I’m happy?”

“No,” replied Stuart guardedly. And waited for more.

“She is!” Aureole let her eyes follow the disappearing craft that contained Peter. Then: “A man takes you for granted when you are once married to him. He pampers your body and neglects your soul.”

Stuart said: “You mean he pampers your soul as well as your body. A soul needs no pampering; it wants fresh air, and an occasional touch of the whip.” And he added musingly: “I’m a Pagan, you see!”

She made bitter reply: “Oliver is—just a man. That’s the difference.”

She had a way of half dropping her eyelids, and, after a pregnant silence, shooting forth an unexpected audacity, calculated to shatter the well-bred restraints of convention to a thousand fragments. Stuart had caught the trick, and found himself unable to refrain from using it upon her now:

“Why not ... leave him?”

And for a while no sound but the scream and plash of a water-fowl on the opposite bank.

“Have you read Ibsen?” queried Stuart with disconcerting acuteness—considering that he had seen her for three days past with the “Doll’s House” in her hand.

Aureole murmured: “She went out to find herself and to earn his respect....” No need of a superfluity of words when talking to this man; his grasp at her meanings was almost uncanny. And she thought with distaste of Oliver’s “I—don’t—quite—follow,” whenever she let fall a subtlety. Nor did it ever occur to her that Nigger Strachey, who had taken a first at Oxford, was perfectly capable of following her to any lengths that were worth his while, and merely made her explain her special type of profundity in the faint hope that thus she would attain to a sense of what it lacked.

Aureole’s soft lips were mysteriously smiling; but she merely said in light tones: “You are a bad counsellor, Mr. Heron. Why don’t you persuade me to obey my husband and be content with my lot?”

“Not much fun in that, is there?” he replied; and would have enlarged further on the stuntorian point of view which lay in breaking away from a husband because he refused to contradict you. But remembering Aureole lived three twists further down the corkscrew than himself, he substituted a reflective: “I wouldn’t mind being present at the scene when you came together again.”

Her eyes, large and velvety brown as pansies, began to sparkle. “So you anticipate a stormy reconciliation, do you?”

Stuart said with a graveness that rebuked her flippancy: “Do you love him so little as to remain always apart?”

She drooped her head; truth to say, she was exceedingly fond of her stolid square-backed husband. “If I returned to him——”

“You’d have achieved your purpose then. Nigger needs a volcanic eruption before he would realize anything, least of all you. But once the knowledge came to him, he’d need an earthquake to dislodge it again. His mind isn’t elastic, you see. It’s for you to provide the eruption. If you don’t——” Stuart paused to extract matches and cigarette from his pocket.

“If I don’t?——”

“Oh, well, if you don’t, I’ve no doubt your husband will continue faithful and attached——”

“Oh!” Aureole dug her shapely heel—too high for sailing purposes—deep into the grass.

“And will keep you nicely sheltered from draughts”—he had struck his match; the flame wavered and went out. Again he attempted the process, with the same result.

“Thank the Lord!” with sudden buoyancy.

“What is it?”

“Wind!” And loudly summoning Oliver from the house, Stuart strode towards the boat.

Aureole could have wished the wind to have waited. She was preparing to announce in her most irrelevant manner: “Do you know ... when I touch a kitten, I suddenly feel as if I must kill it. Crush it to death. Just because it’s small and soft, and I love it.” This could not fail to be productive of interesting discussion about primitive feelings; and how we are really all savages at heart; and the things that cause us separately to feel most savage at heart. But you cannot shout forth statements of this description to a man who is climbing to the masthead, unfurling sails, swearing at ropes, and generally disporting himself in a thoroughly joyous and normal fashion.

The three set sail, and picked up Peter swishing her dinghy between armies of tall reeds. She came aboard, and under Stuart’s curt directions, sailed ‘Faustina’ in a light breeze, as far as the bridge. The feel of the tiller she had thoroughly grasped by now, but was still dependent on superior orders for manipulation of the mainsail. She resented the necessity for blind obedience; resented the inexperience standing between her and initiative; wished passionately to be master of that insolent canvas which now swelled adoring response to the lordship of wind.

At first, the Broads had merely impressed her with their utter absence of fuss. Wide waters, and blue skies pulled down to meet their edges; here and there an upspringing windmill; landscape dropping flatly away below the water level; a merry impression, arising from the frequent bends and twists of the stream, that ships can go a-sailing across field and meadow; racing clouds and racing shadows; music of bottles that rolled and clinked in the locker; sound of rushes whispering uneasily; scurry and plunge of a water-rat; an overwhelming interest developed in the wind, its character and vagaries, to the exclusion of all intellectual pursuits; the urgent necessity to use strong language, and to wear as little as possible, and drink yellow ale stabbed by the sunshine, and sleep anywhere, and eat everywhere,—these then were the essentials of Sailing. These; and concealed within and beyond these, the hidden gift, which Peter knew could not be hers until she had torn away the veils of ignorance that kept her from mastery of that exasperating expanse of white canvas. Except the necessary technicalities, Stuart had told her nothing. She must grope until she found. Meanwhile, she steered them into the putty....

“What the Hell are you doing?” with a lusty roar, Stuart leapt Aureole, shoved Peter to one side, seized tiller and sheet, and just saved the keel from running aground. Then sunnily, and with no recollection of the expletive that had passed his lips, he relinquished his post, and asked for cigarettes.

“There’s nothing I admire more,” murmured Peter, intensely amused; “than a truly manly man.”

Stuart did not hear. His major portion was inside the locker. But Aureole did. And she thought she had rarely witnessed aught so fine as this virile comradeship between man and girl.

“Nigger! cigarettes!”

A mere voice from before the mast, where he squatted and smoked with the imperturbability of a Buddha, Oliver replied: “In the locker.”

“Where d’you think I’ve been the last ten minutes? There’s nothing in the locker but matches.”

“That’s right,” acquiesced the voice. “Heard a legend that people who sail always forget matches. Destroyed the legend.”

“You have, with forty-eight boxes of wax vestas, and not a single tin of Gold-Flake among ’em. You’ve got your pipe all right, I suppose?” with fine sarcasm.

“Thanks. Yes.”

“I say, Mrs. Strachey, do you mind feeling for a cigarette-tin under your feet, along the lee-scuppers?”

After long and obliging search, Aureole produced the pressed-beef, whereof Stuart, resigning himself to circumstances, proceeded heartily to eat.

“What is to be, must be. Not so close to the wind, Peter; that’s better, that’s a jolly useful luff”; the result of a lucky guess on the part of the pilot. “All the same, you’d better resign the helm to Nigger; lot of shallows just about here.”

They were drawing near the spreading waterways of the Sounds. Oliver took Peter’s place. The wind was still exasperatingly light, needing experience to extract from it all the possible pace. Oliver seemed uneasy. Presently he suggested anchoring for lunch.

Peter enquired: “Do we sail over the edge or into the hayfield?” the latter extending low on their right, so that it really seemed as if they could sail straight on and in among the haycocks; while on their other side sky and water closed sharply together, with beyond them a drop over the very edge of the world.

They chose the hayfield, as being more homely and conducive to good appetite; moored the ‘Faustina’ fore and aft; and recalled Aureole from her rapt contemplations of nature: “‘And O! That greener green, that bluer blue!’”

Her brown eyes were very dewy, and her throat was infinitely whiter than Peter’s; she was all sinuous curves and melting harmonies of tint. And very good to look at, Stuart reflected,—if only she wouldn’t describe the scenery!

“By the way, Nigger, are you aware that you’ve been sailing on the wrong jibe?”

“Didn’t want to knock out my wife’s brains.”

Aureole looked up sharply: “You could have told me to move, couldn’t you?”

“You looked very comfortable, my dear.”

A hot spurt of anger flushed Aureole’s creaminess. “If Peter had been in the way of a jibe,” she said in a carefully controlled voice, “Mr. Heron would have—sworn at her. He has sworn at her twice to-day.”

“Heron’s not a gentleman,” decreed his friend, with unusual promptness of speech.

“Perhaps not, but he’s at least a man.”

Stuart looked embarrassed. And Oliver became dimly aware that his wife was really enraged with him.

“Diddums, spitfire?” tentatively.

She burst forth: “You can’t treat me in the spirit of equality, of give-and-take. No! I’m a petted little soft thing, who mustn’t be inconvenienced or she’ll cry; so you’re chivalrous, and sail on the wrong jibe, and—and think yourself a fine fellow. You don’t understand, do you, that there’s nothing, no, nothing on earth I want so much as to be properly sworn at!”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized for not having sufficiently damned her. As a result of a moment’s consideration, he remarked placidly: “Blast you, Aureole, pass the mustard,” with an air of having thus fulfilled all that was required of him.

Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones eloquent of suppressed meaning: “You will discover that it is not always wise to play the fool, mon ami!”... and an echo from a far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound of the sail flapping against restraint.

“Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?” demanded Stuart, scattering her preoccupation.

If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.

“Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck.”

“‘Crosse and Blackwell’s Wild Duck,’” Stuart read from the tin in passing it. “It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black eye——”

Stuart was talking hectically; there was a look in Aureole’s soft brown eye, meditating upon the nebulous-tinted mess smeared upon her bread, that positively alarmed him. “I don’t mind symbolism as a rule; but when it comes to symbolism in potted paste——”

Aureole smiled all the way home; a smile beside which Mona Lisa’s celebrated grimace paled to inanity. But the two men, beating in a foul wind and against the tide, had no time to spare from ‘Faustina,’ who was certainly behaving a great deal more like a Tyke than a lady.

On arrival at the bungalow, Aureole announced that she had run short of stores, and must walk down to the village before she could provide them with supper.

“I’ll go with you, dear.”

“I prefer to go alone.”

Oliver shrugged his shoulders, and without further ado, sat down to write letters.

After a couple of hours’ labour, he looked at the time. Then he called aloud his wife’s name. Then he searched the bungalow. Finally, he strode to the foot of the lawn; in the well of the boat, a curve of obstinate back denoted that Stuart, since their return home, had been absorbed by a trifling defect of leakage, while Peter reluctantly held a candle to him.

“Can I speak to you, Heron?”

“One moment,” in smothered tones.

Oliver waited ten, patiently. Then Peter said, “Come up, Stuart!” and blew out the candle. Whereat, dirty and tousled, he arose from the depths, and was exceeding wrathful.

“What did you want to do that for?”

“Your pal asked to speak to you.”

“My wife’s gone,” explained Oliver in bewildered tones.

And Stuart sat down suddenly and exclaimed: “Good Lord! Wild Duck!”

“I—don’t—quite—follow,” uttered in Oliver’s most phlegmatic manner. Stuart’s reception of his tidings struck him as neither respectful nor efficient.

“How long has she been gone?” queried Peter practically. “She went down to the village, I thought.”

“Yes. Village seven minutes’ distance. She went at twenty to six. Now it’s past eight. I don’t suppose for an instant,” continued Oliver, “that she proposes to stop away longer than a few hours, for the purpose of annoying me; I believe I wasn’t in favour,” with a slight smile. “She has played this kind of trick before. High spirits, that’s all. But it’s getting dark, and I wondered whether we hadn’t better go out with lanterns.”

“Lanterns, indeed! I tell you, Strachey, it’s the Wild Duck. Don’t look at me in that—that bovine fashion. Has she taken your pistols?”

“Why should she?” helplessly.

“Wild Duck!” chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.

The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water. The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and the reeds had still been tipped with the sun’s gold. An hour later, and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart’s strange repetition of ‘Wild Duck! Wild Duck!’ term which now held a gloom and menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.

“Perhaps you’ll explain your reference, Stuart?”

“Ibsen—and the Doll’s House—when Nora went out to find her soul. You refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her hair.—No, that’s Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there’s an impossible husband in that, too!”

‘Pistols’ were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, “You imply that my wife has committed suicide?”

They could not clearly see his face in the half-light. Stuart leapt in with a hasty and matter-of-fact “Of course not. Don’t be absurd. She thinks you need—oh, startling into a keener realization of her personality, and this is her way of doing it.”

“But you said she hadn’t merely gone for a walk?”

“No.”

“You mean, I shall never see her again?”

“No—yes——” exasperated. “Can’t you get something between a mere walk and never-again?”

Oliver couldn’t. The weight of his opinion had crashed heavily from one extreme to the other; as Stuart had remarked, he was at all times difficult to move, either forwards or backwards.

“If she’s not coming back,” argued Oliver, “she must have left me for good. And if she has firearms with her, then I’d better follow. It all looks to me very silly.” And with a commendable absence of flurry, his broad back loomed up the garden, and disappeared into the bungalow.

“Peter,” whispered Stuart, when they were alone; “haven’t you yet discovered the secret of the Broads?”

She was an instant silent, as if listening for a reply to his question. Then it flashed across her in the phrase of his letter.

“We travel light.”

“That’s it—we travel light. All luggage too heavy for the rack, to be thrown on to the rails.”

“Are you speaking symbolically?”

He said, “No, of course not. Damn symbolism!... I’m speaking of Aureole and Oliver.”

The latter emerged from the bungalow, and called out something about ‘London.’ Stuart walked quickly to meet him:

“Look here, old man, she may lie low for a week or two, but believe me, there’s no earthly reason for you to get feverish about it.” And then the notion of Strachey being feverish struck him as inexpressibly comic.

“I’m not. But I’m catching the eight-forty-one to town. She has probably gone home. I don’t care to think of her messing about with revolvers, even to impress me.”

The pistol idea had established itself firmly; Stuart saw that it was hopeless to attempt removing it before the eight-forty-one started.

“Good-bye.” Oliver had evidently forgotten about Peter.

“Good luck!” and Stuart returned to the boat.

“I like Nigger Strachey,” Peter decided, squatting on the rail of the ‘Faustina.’ “Stuart, how far are you concerned in this affair?”

He defended himself hotly, immensely fortified and upheld by the moral consciousness of being in the wrong.

“Fancy accusing me of being directly responsible for the whim of a neurotic woman.”

“I don’t. Now tell me how you are indirectly responsible—oh, it’s no good, my lad! That rigmarole of ducks and pistols gave you away—to me, at least.”

“It wasn’t my usual style, I admit,” laughed Stuart. And owned to the morning’s conversation with Aureole, when he had spurred rebellion into action. “It won’t do either of ’em any harm, you know; prevent ’em from getting sluggish. Any sort of stir to matrimony;—why,” with fierce indignation, “they might even have come to think themselves happy, if I hadn’t shown them they weren’t.”

“Philanthropist,” softly from the girl beside him in the dimness.

“All the same, I wonder where she can have gone, and what she has done; plenty of spirit there, and character too, if only she weren’t such a wild—goose!”

“Why did you do it?”

Stuart leaned against the boom and faced her squarely.

“I could pretend it’s too late to catch the eight-forty-one,” he said. “Or you could pretend not to know that it’s breaking rules to remain up here alone with me. But we won’t pretend, either of us. The situation is not accidental—they were in the way, and I got rid of them. I wanted one day of sailing by ourselves, that’s all.”

He went on, “We can take ‘Faustina’ up as far as the ‘Windmill,’ put up there for the night, and leave for London to-morrow evening,—or we’ll catch the eight-forty-one now. There’s still time.”

She repeated musingly, “We won’t pretend——”

“No. You can trust me, Peter. It’s just for the sailing. But other people, if they get to know, won’t believe that. It’s a question of how much other people are to count?”

Peter sprang from her perch into the well, and began to untie the cords which held together the waterproof covering of the mainsail. He laid his hand over her moving fingers, and looked at her interrogatively. She laughed, mocking his sudden solemnity:

“You see ... I’m a Pagan!—oh, it’s all right, Stuart; we’ll take another day on the Broads, in spite of other people. Who was it counselled me to travel light?”

He smiled. But merely said, as he re-tied the knot her impetuosity had loosened, “No wind; and the stream against us. I shall have to row.”

Peter took the tiller. Some twenty minutes later, between the plash and lift of his oars, her ear caught the distant shriek of a train-whistle. And she knew the eight-forty-one to London had just left the station.

CHAPTER V
THE WORLD WASHED CLEAN

Peter awoke, and, listening intently, heard nothing beyond a faint lapping of water. Yet she felt impelled to leave her bed and scramble up to the high narrow window-seat. She had no idea of the time, but it must have been very early morning; the breeze was chill and aloof that struck upon her throat, as she leant out, an intruder upon silence.

A white vapour lay lightly as forgetfulness over river and bank and boathouse. On the opposite shore, a tangle of masts and ropes lay sketched like a dream upon a blown and tousled sky. A luminous gash in the east widened suddenly, and silvered all the mist; then closed again with cloud. The very river ceased its patient clamour for the sea; and colour had died in the night, leaving its wraith of grey to tell the tale. Grey that shone, and grey that was thin and dreary, and grey that pearled and paled to white. Peter had a strange fancy that she would not have been suffered as an on-looker had not her own eyes held their depth of grey, and her hair a whisper of the baulked sunrise. It was her day: she mused on what it might be trailing in its reluctant wake. Her day, grey and white and pallor of gold. And she wondered why all of her life that went before should be mist-shrouded in forgetfulness.

Her eyelids drooped heavily; she returned to bed, and at once fell asleep.

Stuart awoke her by hammering blows upon her door. She went again to the window before she opened to him. A bright blue sky now; trim red roof of boathouse and ferryhouse and bungalow, warm in the clear sunshine; screaming, cackling, chattering chorus of waterfowl; a sail, left hoisted overnight, flung its broken dance upon the water, sparkling and rioting between its clumps of emerald-green reeds. The world washed clean of mystery and evil alike. Peter slid open her door a few inches.

“Hallo! you’re in full rig.”

“Rather. I say, this is a ripping house, all its clocks have stopped, and I’ve left my watch down at the bungalow, so we’ll never know what time it is. Good morning, Peter.”

“Good morning, Stuart; I want some cherries.”

“While you dress?”

“While I dress.”

“But, my dear, I don’t think the greengrocer has called.”

“You’ll find a bagful of white-hearts in the locker of the boat.”

He brought them to her; firm hard cherries, cold and fresh to the lips as the dew stabbing its little balls of light from every grass-blade. Presently she joined him in the hall; a grandfather clock groaned three sepulchral strokes as she descended the wooden stairway.

“Don’t believe it,” Stuart warned her; “just hold tight to the fact that before last night was yesterday, and after next night will be to-morrow; no more is necessary. Come for a walk.”

They rattled back the heavy door-bolts, and wandered for what seemed a long space of time along unfamiliar paths and across drenching grass, without meeting anything more awake to its responsibilities than a slowly creaking windmill. Then returned to the inn. Still no movement of life. The door stood ajar as they had left it. The hands of the grandfather clock were dallying eccentrically in the regions of half-past eleven.

“This is getting serious,” Stuart complained, rousing terrific thunders upon the gong. “Where is the traditional tiller of the soil? Where is the buxom hostess astir before cockcrow? Where, principally, is cockcrow?”

“The cocks of the neighbourhood have been warned that a superhuman crower of crows has come to dwell among them. Therefore they are silent and abashed.”

“I’d be ashamed, if I were a cock, not to put up a little competition. All hail! here’s what was once a waiter!”

The half-dressed, yawning apparition that, mop and bucket in hand, uprose from the lower regions, stared aghast at the mention of breakfast; muttered “Not for an hour or two, anyways”; and began without enthusiasm to sweep the dining-room.

“We’d better go for another walk,” suggested Peter; “something tells me we have got up too early.”

Lying in a burning field of rye and poppies, he held her hands, and said: “It seems the most natural of all things that we should be here together and alone.”

“I know,” disappointedly. “I don’t feel a bit as wicked as I should. But you do think I’m bold and bad, don’t you, Stuart?”

“I think you’re just most awfully bold and bad,” heartily.

“And—and—of course I can’t expect you to feel the same respect for me as before,” wistfully seeking reassurance.

“Well, of course, naturally, a fellow never looks on a girl quite like before, after—I mean, well—there’s always something gone, isn’t there? I mean, a fellow wouldn’t like his sister to meet a girl who—hang it, Peter, you know quite well what I mean!”

Then he laughed, and moved closer, among the stiff yellow stalks broken by their intrusion. “It’s tremendously all right, isn’t it, dear?”

“I’m afraid so,” she confessed. “I’ve been waiting all the time for the sudden misgiving that tells me I should not have stayed. But it hasn’t come.”

Stuart sympathized over the nuisance of an essential mood missing. “It spoils the set, and one can’t play demon patience any longer, and—come home to breakfast!” suddenly springing up. His nerves, though the girl was not aware of it, had been playing demon patience on their own all through the night, and were in consequence rather jumpy.

By dint of sitting like two mutes in the dining-room, and looking steadily reproachful while the waiter continued to sweep it out, they at last goaded him into serving them with breakfast.

“And now,” striding across the garden towards ‘Faustina,’ “now we’ll get under way. A long day, and a strong day, and a day spent together.” Stuart broke into rollicking song:

It was late afternoon when the wind, for the first time since their stay in Norfolk, really found itself; and Peter became of a sudden definitely aware of Sailing. Beating up Bure to Acles, the sheet fairly taut in her one hand and the tiller somewhat restive in the other, she grew to joy in the swish of the reeds against the bows, as she swung the boat round, and let the boom lurch over; in the jerk of the rope, as she controlled its rattling passage through the blocks, with already her eye straining forward for the crucial moment at the further bank. She did not notice, in this new intoxication of pace and mastery, that Stuart had ceased to give directions ... when suddenly, gripped by a strong puff of wind, the sail leapt sideways, the water sang up over the lee rail; and Peter, taken by surprise, would have been hurled to the floor of the boat, had she not just in time flung up her heels and braced them against the opposite scuppers; nor did she let go of the sheet, which tore like some live thing at her palms.

“All right,” said Stuart calmly. “Blowing up a bit fresh. Shall I take her?”

“No.” And now she understood sailing right enough: this thing which demanded of her every atom and particle of strength she possessed, and some she did not consciously possess until that time. A darkness crept across the sky, and the wind’s whistle had an ominous note. More and more the boat heeled to meet its own disappearing shadow; till it seemed as if one could not for an instant longer retain that tilted position in the lifting scuppers.

—“We’ve got to beat it,” cried Stuart; “don’t let ’em get to windward of you!” And then only she saw that they were being furiously raced by another craft, with larger canvas than their own, and a shouting crew of men. Stuart was excited—a race always brought out all the child in him.

“You can make the next corner if you’re careful, and then she’ll run!”

The ‘Tyke,’ emphatically now the ‘Tyke’ and not ‘Faustina,’ did indeed luff the corner, and scudded ahead straight and clean with the galloping motion of a greyhound. Peter’s blood was romping; her hand felt as though cut in two where sawn by the rope; shoulders and knees and wrists, no part of her that did not throb and ache and cry aloud for release from this straining torture—torture that she would not have forgone for a lifetime of ease and pettiness and mild enjoyment. For she was conquering the wind, and gaining on the other boat, and never before had water been so near or the world so far.

“We ought to reef, but we won’t!” Stuart’s voice sang in triumphantly with the roar and whip of the waves. “More sheet, Peter, or she’ll carry away. Not much—no, none at all, and chance it! By Heaven, it’s great!”

Peter’s entire soul and body were bracing themselves in resistance against the push of the tiller. Her teeth fastened firmly into her lower lip. She had not known one could so hate an inanimate bar. Inanimate? possessed rather of seven kicking devils.... And then she saw the bridge ahead; and Stuart announced with gentle pleasure: “We’ve won,” and slipped into her place, and turned the ‘Tyke’ downstream. The defeated crew called out a hearty word of appreciation; Peter smiled at them; lit a cigarette; and, soaked by the churned-up spray, her hands stiff and bleeding, subsided on to the floor of their vessel, whereof she watched in passive admiration Stuart’s perfect handling.

“I now propose,” he said, “that we should feast our victory while under way, which in itself is a battle of some stubbornness. In other words, Peter, you shall collect what there is of lunch from among the tarpaulins and suit-cases littering this most disorderly tub, and minister to my needs while I cling to my post at the wheel:

It was no easy matter, with the deck tilted at an angle of 30°, to find the requisite bread and meat and ale, plates and forks and bottles. It struck Peter that sunset was a curious hour for lunch; as still more curious that the sun should set at all on this day which had begun so long ago. It was a lurid and tempestuous sky, jagged across by untidy streaks of black, the whole swimming canopy overhead as it were being sucked and drawn by red relentless fingers into the very heart of the western turmoil.

“Stuart, there’s no glass.”

“Must be.”

“Isn’t,” crossly.

“A tin mug, then?”

“Nothing but a flower-pot—will that do? Why do you keep flower-pots on board? Is it that you may grow nasturtiums while becalmed?”

“A flower-pot will hold the beer all right, if you keep your thumb in the hole at the bottom, all the while I drink.”

Peter refused. “I’m not your squaw.” And Stuart related with reproachful emphasis the story of the little boy in Holland who had not minded plugging a hole with his thumb all through the weary night, to save his country from inundation. Nevertheless, Peter was not incited to emulation.

All this while they were running before a powerful wind, sail and water ablaze with crimson, the same red glow splashing their faces and their hands, and touching with magic all the level shores. A bottle was hurled into the scuppers, crashed into fragments; and triumphantly the breeze hummed through the straining cordage.

It struck Peter that sunset was a good time for lunch.

“Hullo! here are the mortal remains of the wild-duck paste.” And they both laughed, thinking of the immortal remains, bearing fruit in Aureole’s heart.

“Not that I think wild ducks do bear fruit as a rule; too reminiscent of a hen laying a melon. Peter, unless you are playing at Tantalus, or rather the gods who tantalized Tantalus, you might hold the bread a few inches nearer my lips.”

Passing St. Bennetts, the wind dropped somewhat, the clouds piled themselves out of sight, and the sky paled to a lake of clear light green wherein the round red ball of the sun hung motionless, striped by the darkening reeds.

Stuart hailed a cabin-boat with seven men on board, all lustily singing.

“Hi! what’s the time?—excuse me, Peter, but it had to be done.”

“Half-past six,” they wove their reply into the strains of ‘John Peel.’

“We shall make it, easily, and with half an hour to spare, wind or no wind.”

Peter looked enquiring.

“The eight-forty-one. You wanted to get home to-night, didn’t you?”

All day long a glittering mist had lain lightly as forgetfulness on speech and memory. The reminder dropped mournfully as a premonition. The sun sank yet lower, staining the very roots of the tall green spears fringeing the waters. And the boatload ahead ceased from their jovial ditty, gripped by the conventional melancholy of evening.

“Wait a minute,” prophesied Peter; “they’ll sing—what do you bet, Stuart? I say: ‘Swanee River.’”

She was very near the mark in her guess. As the last ruddy segment dipped under the horizon, a haunting haunted melody floated backwards upon the sighing day:

“The darlings!” murmured Peter. “They’ll repeat it eight times, and then the ass of the party will start for the ninth time, and John will tell him to shut up.”

John was a Voice from the Cabin, and evidently the strong man of the party, as one could hear him being constantly consulted, in tones both supplicating and respectful.

But the plaintive tune, drawn out thinner and ever thinner as the larger boat drew away, was working potent havoc upon Peter’s carefully guarded Marshes of Cheap Sentiment. Noting this, Stuart summoned her to the helm: “Come and take her. We shall probably jibe round the next bend,” and buried his head in the locker.

Peter wondered rather irritably if he did this on purpose whenever a jibe loomed ahead. She had no affection for the jibe. It held for her an agonizing moment, after she had hauled in the sheet, when she became a blank as to which way the tiller should be rammed, in squaring the sail anew. Up till now, Heaven had been with her, but this time Heaven looked unpropitious—perhaps because the sun had set.

Heaven elected at the critical moment to send her a strong gust of wind, the last they had in stock that day. It spun the boom crashing to leeward, before Peter had time to do anything at all. Followed a delirious instant when it struck her she ought to manipulate the tiller—and did it, with dire effect. She was aware that Stuart had come out of the locker, that the water was rushing up from behind to meet her, and that the boat was evilly tilting her downwards to meet the water with an evident after-intention of turning turtle over her drowning body. She did not call to Stuart, even then, instinctively certain that he was doing something useful in emergencies, and might be trusted to save her afterwards. All this in the space of time it takes a boat to turn over upon its side and drift at right angles to the river, the sail sagging flatly upon the surface of the stream. An invisible weight to balance Peter’s, was obviously preventing ‘Faustina’ from accomplishing a complete somersault.... Stuart had scrambled like lightning over the rail and flung himself upon the keel. Then he looked around for Peter, and was relieved to find her clinging with both hands to the opposite side of their improvised see-saw.

“Can you hang on?” he queried cheerfully.

She replied in like tones, “How long?”—and suppressed her inner doubts.

“Till we float ashore. I can’t do anything while I’m on the keel, and mustn’t move off it. How much of you is immersed?”

“Up to the knees.”

The boat hovered about uncertainly in midstream. There was no one in sight, and no sound but the breeze shivering the rushes. A fish leapt shining from the water, and plunged again into a circle of ripples. From round the next bend still drifted snatches of the ‘Ragtime Goblin Man’; evidently John had not yet spoken. Some distance over the land, yet not so far but that they should distinctly have heard the throb and clangour, a train passed in a linked blur of lights; passed noiselessly, like a phantom train. Peter, watching it, wished passionately that she might hear it whistle, as reassurance that she herself was real, and not a pictured castaway upon a badly drawn bit of wreckage.

At last they floated into a mud-bank; and were able thence to wade ashore.

Peter waited for Stuart to display extreme anxiety as to her degree of wetness, to burst into pÆans of praise on her bravery and calmness in the face of danger, and finally to mutter with white young jaws, “I shall never forgive myself—never!”

Stuart said curtly: “Shivery? No? That’s all right; d’you feel equal to giving me a hand with the sail? We must lug it up somehow,”—happily convinced that by thus increasing the wind to the shorn lamb, he was treating the lamb in the spirit it most desired.

And as they tugged and hauled in the dim light at that most obstinate of all foes, a water-logged sail, Peter played up gallantly to his call upon that other Peter; the one she had carefully cut according to his measurements. Round her lips hovered a rather tremulous smile at the manner in which she was thus for a second time required to pay for her audacity in playing at God.

—And yet, was it payment, after all? With a little thrill of exultant surprise, Peter realized that the Peter of her disguises could not be a mere lay figure, since she had not discarded them in actual moment of peril and when thrown completely off her guard. Why then, they had become in very truth a part of her being; she was indeed Stuart’s Portrait-of-a-Lady, complete in all its essentials; she had stood the test....

There was far more actual fun to be had from standing ankle-deep in mud, with a spectral wind flapping her wet skirt against her knees, while she pitted her strength viciously against a tangle of wet rope, than from the use of her feminine privileges—Was there?... The old Peter hollowed into the mist a momentary fancy of a warm glowing interior—soft colours—soft cushions—warmth and ease and the dry slippery touch of silk upon her flesh—the abandoning of all effort to the stronger male who realized and joyed in her greater fragility....

“Peter, I want you! Hold this”—Stuart’s voice, confident and imperative. And the mist curled itself greyly over her pictured fancy of chintz and rugs and warming-pans, of sentiment beside red caves of firelight, and withal of a lover who was not a leprechaun.

—“Coming!” for a while they worked grimly, neither speaking.

Stuart paused in his labours, threw a tarpaulin on the bank, seated himself thereon, and invited Peter to do likewise. Then, in a sudden access of chivalry, he wrapped around her his own oilskins, thereby giving her more than ever the appearance of a battered stowaway, and consented for a moment to dwell on their quondam peril. Nay, he even came to her to be fed, in an engaging manner all his own:

“It was a long way from the locker to the keel,” reminiscently.

She said not a word.

“I was fairly quick, I think. Didn’t fumble, did I?”

Still no reply.

“Peter,” imploringly.

Then she gave in, and was bad for him: “You were magnificent, Stuart.”

His crow was fervent but subdued. The atmosphere not being conducive to any sound above a whisper.

“Now we’ll just bale out the tub, set it on its hind legs, hoist sail, and be off. She didn’t ship much water; dryest capsize I’ve ever done. A beautiful capsize, really; Peter, I’m glad we capsized; it will have a pleasant look, viewed from to-day a year hence.”

“Pleasant, but passing strange,” she murmured, gazing on the gaunt ribbed outline of their marooned vessel. “‘It was the Schooner “Hesperus,” that all on the shore lay wrecked——’”

“‘The skipper’s daughter had hold of the tiller. So what could you expect?’” finished Stuart.

She surveyed him reproachfully. “Is that—generous?”

“Do you want me to be generous?—Good Lord,” with sudden heat, “do you think I’d pay any other girl on earth the compliment of not fussing round her wet feet ... especially when I so much want to,” he added under his breath. Then returned quickly to his labours on the boat.

Peter was glad that she had not hearkened to the insistent pratings of the other Peter. Glad that Stuart guessed nothing of their existence.... The pictured fire-red interior had acquired a sudden cheapness, viewed in the light of his last speech. Her face burnt at the idea that he should ever know that these easy longings had even for a moment found their entrance. After all, and undoubtedly, this, her present plight, was far more fun; though she was cold beyond all hope of warmth, and tired past all desire for rest,—far more fun ... lean restless ways of fun that he had taught her; strange, slippery ways as the way to the moon, and as unprofitable.

—“Peter! Quick—here!”

CHAPTER VI
THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE ORANGE

It was not long before the well had been baled, the gaff run up, and a very wet mainsail flapped in mournful abandon against the mast. Then Stuart pushed off with the quant-pole, while Peter curled herself among the regions of his feet; from the general ooziness she suspected she was sitting in about two inches of water, but by now it seemed more natural to be wet than dry, and she made no efforts towards the latter state. The mists brushed her cheek with clammy fingers; naught of clothing but was damp and cumbersome to the body; the water had insinuated itself into matches and cigarettes, had gurgled into the locker, and soaked into the comestibles. Water-logged, they crept on and on with the tide through the murky twilight, a faint saffron stain in the west betokening where once had rioted the banners of the setting sun. From time to time a light flashed warmly from a house-boat on the banks, or cheery but muffled voices told of sails being laboriously tucked away for the night, masts lowered, clinking crockery washed up for a late meal. Theirs was the only vessel still adrift. Huddled in her big cloak, Peter watched the darkness eating up either shore, while the river took on unfamiliar curves and windings, seemed to branch off into two—ten rivers, all beckoning different ways. And once she called out sharply, “Look ahead!” that Stuart should swing the ‘Tyke’ clear of a gigantic looming ship, three tiers of sails, and a ghostly figurehead. “Why?” And he steered straight through the ship with its three tiers of sails. Peter said no more, not quite trusting what further tricks her sight might choose to play. She crouched still further into the well, content to see naught but the edge of sail against the dense pall of sky, and dimly, where Stuart sat, an outline of bare neck and slouched hat and lean nervous hand upon the tiller. It all went to make perfection: the timeless blue day spent in big spaces, limbs stiff from their perilous tussle, and now the sodden boat, and the shadows, and Stuart beside her. She put out a chill hand to feel if he were indeed solid substance; touched his knee, felt him start and tingle—she could not see the hot rush of blood into his face.

Suddenly he swerved the bows towards a forest of pale reeds; they bent apart to the sliding passage of the boat, then closed up in its wake. The keel ran aground. Stuart let drop the mainsheet; it rattled lazily along its blocks, and was still. The sail drooped forward, fell back again.

... She lay suffocated in a darkness of kisses, that stole her breath away, and her powers of resistance; robbed her of all knowledge save of desire beating itself out upon her lips and her throat and her eyes; upon the lids she drooped for evasion, upon the hands she put up to protect her, upon the hair she tumbled forward, and upon her neck when she turned her head. And then again fiercely upon her mouth, compelling her to be passive, compelling her to response. And through the pain and through her weariness, sang a strain of rejoicing that he should treat her thus; that their brains and their mockery and their intellect should yet have been all blotted to naught in a whirling storm of passion.

... He had drawn a little away. She raised herself; pushed back her hair with the bewildered gesture of a child. Her throat ached as if someone had attempted to strangle her, and her mouth felt stung and bruised. Then Stuart bent towards her, took her in his arms: “Lie still, dear” ... and for the first time Peter lay still; mind and body and soul, still.

It was over, the endless strain of winning and keeping the man; the endless effort of playing-up. He loved her with a great finality of love. She could—lie still.

A shaft of blackness pierced light. And Peter became aware that this very moment which had brought her belief in the endurance of his love, was the moment long foretold when they must consent to end it. Love’s consummation—both had agreed that nothing less must follow.

Did Stuart know?... And suddenly his hands slackened completely their hold on her—then tightened again to an almost intolerable grip. He too had realized the door of exit.

But it was absurd, for an elusive unproven theory, to renounce a thing at its perfection; Peter had doubted always if she would be big enough for that. And now love had proven so much bigger than she had anticipated.

She would risk the descent on the further side. Though the Hairpin Vision shone full and steady as limelight upon the future, she was yet willing to take all the hazard of lessening love, so she might keep love. Keep it in whatsoever form he wished, free or bound. Stuart would not employ the shears alone, without her co-operation. If she willed, she might use the moment to entangle him with a thousand threads, beyond all hope of breaking away. Why shouldn’t she? Since he had made her need of him so great, he must pay his share. And of what avail to set aside the temptation, since then he would never know it had existed?

With a great stirring of anger, Peter looked up at him. His face was turned away, still set in desire, but now not for her. It was the supremest desire of a man whose star had granted him his every wish; desire for renunciation. Young Fortunatus pursuing the winds of sorrow.

Her anger waned and died to tenderness. This was not the ruthless orange-sucker of her first imaginings. She alone knew how rigidly and untiringly his asceticism had striven to keep its leanness against that terrible perversity of ease which threatened to engulf him. And she could help him. By her and because of her had actually come his chance of a sacrifice worth while—oh, yes, she understood; and she could, if she chose, be sufficiently big to allow it him. Came a rush of pride like a sonorous North-Easter humming through the shrouds: No other girl could have kept up with him as far—she was not going to fail at the last ... he had once called her a genius of life.

His eyes met hers, a question in them. And she laughed. “We’ve had a good run before the wind, Stuart.” Heard the triumphant fling of his reply, “And we’re not going aground in the putty now.”

He unlinked his arms; took up the quant-pole; pushed back to mid-stream. Within a few minutes they were at the landing-stage; a sharp walk brought them to the station platform: Eight thirty-six—and the train left at eight forty-eight. “Not bad,” remarked Stuart; “considering our day of uncounted hours.”

There was just time for Peter to send off a wire to her cousins in Turnham Green, bidding them reserve her a room that night; she would arrive in London too late for the further journey to Thatch Lane. Then, with a shaking roar, the train plunged into the station, barely waited to gulp its few passengers, and thundered southwards. Peter found that her fellow-travellers regarded her with astonished eyes, and departed to view herself. The results of sun and wind, of immersement in the water, and those few after-moments among the reeds, exceeded her wildest expectations. It took half an hour’s unsteady labour before looking-glass and washstand-basin, before she might lay the least claim to respectability. She was relieved to find, however, that her flaming cheeks and lit eyes and lips dark as wine were not at all reminiscent of the girl about to be forsaken by her lover. She was tremendously exultant that her body should have stood the strain of the day, as her soul had stood its close. And she had never walked so lightly as up the crowded dining-car to rejoin Stuart at its far end.

“Metamorphosis?”

“Only from the waist upwards,” she displayed her boots, still caked with a large portion of Bure’s shores.

They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number; halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted, and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another. There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter’s head was tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the shadow in contempt—she had no more use for it.

“We won’t meet again.”

“No.”

As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” said Stuart. He did not even touch her; yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done perforce when his actual grip had tightened.

—“Hullo!”

The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter’s flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting. And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat of Stuart’s retreating steps....

Peter was hauled indoors—she could almost hear her face click as she adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.

“Come along in, do; we’re kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won’t your friend join as well?”

And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin Constance, Jinny’s mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and affectionate kisses: “These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my dear; but there, it’s Saturday evening, and I hope you ain’t too tired to join them.”

On Peter’s other side, a frivolous girl of thirty-six waggled a plump forefinger, “I saw you saying good-bye to your young man! I believe you must have quarrelled—he didn’t even kiss you good night.”

Next, she was introduced to the mild gentleman whom she had met there before—“So don’t you pretend to be hoity-toity, Miss Peter,”—and to the irresistibly humorous Tommy Cox, whom she hadn’t met there before, and who said straight away, “Now tell me this, if you can: could you make a Maltese Cross?”—and to Luke Johnson, the boy from next door,—while the landlady, who was also a friend of Cousin Constance, kept up a running fire of questions connected somehow with coffee: “Some people like it better with milk, and some people like it without; some people take two lumps of sugar, and some like one, so all you’ve got to do, Peter, dear, is to tell me how you like it best. Some people....” The saga began all over again.

It seemed to Peter that this final necessity for playing-up was rather in the nature of an extra on the bill. But that strange new part of her for which Stuart was responsible, could not cease abruptly with his exit, but went on a little while mechanically rotating in obedience to the hand that had set it in motion. So she skilfully dodged her cousin’s kisses; accepted the thick cup of muddy lukewarm coffee; answered the riddle about the Maltese Cross; gaily averred that she was not a bit tired, and quite ready for “high jinks”; and allowed herself to be drawn into a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Crushing memory below the surface, she sprang to the head of the scuffling line awaiting the music’s signal to start—

round and round the empty line of chairs—then a cry, and a mix-up, and shouts of “He’s out!” A chair removed from the row. The music started once more.

Only eight combatants left—seven—six—Peter could not contrive to get left out; a chair seemed ever ready to embrace her, as the jovial pianist ceased from play. She felt the urgent need of sleep leaking noiselessly into her being. Her limbs refused any more to obey the call upon them. Almost she abandoned the struggle, beat an ignominious retreat in the middle of the game. An echo of Stuart spurred her on as with whips: “It’s a glorious stunt, Peter! don’t give in before the end.”—Yes, but need she listen, since he was not to count any more? Willy-nilly, his training outlasted him; she made a forward dash for a seat, this time out of reach, determined she would be in at the death, as a votive offering to the lord of all stunts, great and small.

And now there were only three jigging round to the endless tune.

Silence, then a noisy outburst from the spectators lining the walls: “You’re out, Miss Tomkyns! his lap don’t count as a seat, you know.” Giggling, Miss Tomkyns withdrew from the contest. Remained Peter and the objectionable Tommy.

“Now then, Peter, beat him. It’s up to you—show old Tommy what girls are made of!” Jinny literally danced with excitement. And Cousin Constance at the piano started once more to strum, with the evident intention of prolonging the agony.

Ah! that renewal of the chorus was too vigorous to be genuine. The end was at hand. Peter, on the back side of the chair, turned suddenly and faced Tommy, who was so amazed at this change of tactics that he facetiously flung out one leg after another along the ground, Russian-ballet fashion. At this juncture, as anticipated, the tune halted abruptly in the middle of a bar—and with a slight movement Peter had occupied her throne before he could recover his balance.

And she smiled, a provocative ‘there-you-are’ smile, not intended for her clapping enthusiastic spectators.

“Bravo, Peter! you’re a sport! Shame, Tommy, to be beaten by a girl!”

“And now to bed, every man Jack of you,” cried Mrs. Thorpe, who since five minutes had been listening with dread to the impatient tip-tap on the ceiling, of a best-bedroom boarder afflicted with insomnia.

“She cheated, twisting round like that, instead of goin’ straight on,” grumbled Tommy, in the hall. Like a great many humorous gentlemen, he could not take a beating.

And Peter turned on the stairs to remark tauntingly, “There, there, Master Tommy, never mind. We’ll say that you won, shall we?”

“I’ll make you pay for that, young lady!” Only half in earnest, but stung nevertheless by the laughter of his friends, he made a rush for his tormentor. She broke away from him, ran with dangerous swiftness to the room she usually occupied. She could hear Tommy panting at her heels; his breath, stale with cheap tobacco, on the back of her neck. “Go it, Tommy boy!” urged his companions from below. Peter clenched her hands; ‘pay for that’—she had a very clear idea how the Tommies of this world exact payment. She would not be kissed to-night, not ... again.

Putting on a spurt, she gained her room, crashed the door in his face, and turned the key in the lock. Tommy called through one or two witticisms, and strolled away to be consoled by his pals. Then Jinny knocked a final ‘good night’ and did Peter want anything? Peter wanted nothing. So Jinny too departed. A whispered exchange of banter on the landings; a loud guffaw; a flurry of feet.... Silence now in the house. Peter’s day was over, grey and white and pallor of gold. It had been a very long day. She was logged with sleep, as a water-logged boat that can no longer crawl for heaviness. Eyelids tumbling, fingers purely mechanical. Nothing was remembered, nothing existed save her longing for bed. Bed was a tangible thing and mattered very much. She was just aware, through formless drifting clouds whirling her mind to stupor, that it was just as well she should be physically so dead beat.

Light turned out, and head plunged among the pillows. It was sand that was weighing her down; heavy yellow sand; she could hear it trickling into the crevices and chinks and joints of her body; hear it like water among the reeds ... hear herself falling asleep.

And knew that before dawn she would awake, purged of her merciful weariness. Wake to the knowledge of a world without Stuart.

CHAPTER VII
FORTUNATUS

If Stuart had been a poor man, and forced to continue drudgery whatever his troubles of love, he would have wrested a certain comfort from the obligatory effort. But placed as he was, it would have been mere childishness to deceive himself with an assumption that he was not perfectly free to absent himself from Holborn for as long a period as he pleased. Derwent had taken a needed holiday in May, directly following the prick of Gobert’s balloon, and was now back again at his post. Baldwin ran up most days from Sonning, except when solemnities of regatta nailed him to the spot. Business was at its slackest; and Stuart could no more persuade himself that he was morally necessary, than that his attendance was compulsory.

In no mood for make-believe, beset by a bitter craving for what he had denied himself, by a still more bitter doubt as to whether his had not been a fool’s action, he set out for the Haven, where he could at least be sure of solitude while he fought the matter through.

The Haven is marked somewhere in the neighbourhood of Poole. Actually, it is in the neighbourhood of nowhere. A man walks into the Haven perhaps at set of sun, finding it always a little beyond the point where he is desirous the walk be ended, so that he walks into the Haven tired and with lagging step. On one side of him the sea shines a ghostly grey; not breaking in waves, nor tossing in a glitter of foam, nor making any sound whatever; but flowing, flowing, in slantwise ripples towards the land. And when he is accustomed to the sight of it on his one side, he is gradually aware of a stealthy lapping on his other side, beyond the sand-banks sown with coarse grass. There also is the sea, flowing in slantwise ripples towards the land, so that he loses all sense of east or west. For his further confusion, either horizon is bestrewn with hazy tongues of land, floating strips of island; and on either horizon, tumbling silent seas lick their way among the nebulous shores. The sun dips red and round, and the moon rises round and red; so that for an instant of bewilderment the sun might be the moon and the moon might be the sun; and both sun and moon hang loosely, midway between sky and ocean, having no link with either. The only thing permanent is an old hulk embedded in the stretches of flat white sand; and thither the traveller is impelled to climb; for the sand has an untrodden look; and there lies a strange fascination, when leaning against the slimy sides of the wreck, in gazing backwards at his solitary footprints marking the way he came.

On the extreme edge of the Haven, men have built an hotel, thinking thereby to give the spot a prosperous and populated appearance. And thrice a week a creaking motor-bus deposits there its load of sightseers, who drink a lot of tea on the blank terrace, and swarm over the waste of garden, and onto the primitive wooden jetty, whence boats are supposed to start for a tour of the islands lightly pencilled in the haze. But the boats are never visible; and presently the sightseers depart in their bus; and the Haven continues to take no interest either in the barren grey hotel nor yet in the babbling tea-drinkers.

In the surrounding oozes of dark green, are rooted shapeless forms, that might be whales, but are mostly bungalows. One of these was presented to Stuart by his brother-in-law Ralph Orson, on the occasion of the latter’s marriage. “Might come in useful when you are sailing in these parts,” quoth Orson, apologizing for the poorness of the gift.

There was very little of sailing in its more graceful phases round about the Haven. Occasionally the tide brought up slow-moving barges, piled high with wood or coal or bricks; these surmounted by the tiny dark figures of men hoisting a clumsy bulk of canvas against the sky, pushing frantically at giant pole or tiller, which by comparison reduced the human to ant-size. The white skimming sail would have been here a strange anomaly, and the supple curve of pleasure boat. With grimness tempered to mystery by their flying streamers of smoke, the black trading-vessels alone ruffled the even slant of the water, flowing, rippling, landwards to the Haven.

Here then, Stuart passed the days following his renunciation of Peter. He was disappointed that the detached exultation of spirit was absent, that should have rewarded the man with will strong enough to perpetrate a theory. Exultation?—so far was it removed, that at first he had to summon every atom of force he possessed, to prevent himself from dashing theory onto the rubbish-heap, and setting it alight, burnt-offering to the common human love of a man for a maid. Just at the moment when all his powers of reasoning and thought and logic were most desperately needed, they turned traitor; ran away; returned to mock him: “Prig! pedant! cad!” No end to the insulting epithets they volleyed at the stunned and cowering leprechaun; and then ran again, too fast for pursuit or argument.

“If that’s all you have to give me, then, curse you, I might have taken the warmer thing!” thus leprechaun, from the depths of want, to the hiding metaphysician.

Stuart waited, just holding in check the suffering which cried out for some alleviating action on his part ... (he might so soon be in town—at Euston—Thatch Lane—“Come out, Peter”—and in the crushed sweet smell of bracken on the Weald, laugh, and kiss her mouth, and kiss again; and laughing, damn the Hairpin Vision to beyond eternity, where it rightly belonged—all this, so soon) ... Stuart waited. He would at least give metaphysics a chance.

He strove to collect his ideas of yore; but they rattled about in his head like dried peas in a box, implements wherewith stageland strives to imitate a rainfall. Meanwhile, round the shadow-side of the embedded hulk, he stumbled one night upon a pair of lovers clinging silently together, symbol of unthinking passion, utterly happy in the belief that their momentary divinity was immortal. Ordinary lovers—Stuart turned sharply away, across the tract of dead white sand, cursing as he ran; cursing his destructive brain and his vision and his asceticism,—all that had been given him unasked, to set him apart from those shapes—from that shape on the shadow-side of the hulk. Damn it! yes, damn it! One paid for too godlike a use of the shears. Damn it ... he threw himself face downwards on the sand.

The metaphysician stirred from lethargy, and spoke; reminding him that he had seen the sequel to the idyll in the shadow-shape of the hulk; reminding him of a certain dingy group round a perambulator: “They had hung on, and lost the vision.”

Stuart retorted: “They had also forgotten the vision, so what did it matter?”

“Would you wish to forget?”

“Yes,” desperately. Any sort of rest rather than for ever be self-tormented as now.

And then there was the thought of what Peter might be enduring. The orange-sucker had never before stayed to consider the orange. When Merle had dropped from the trio, though perfectly aware of what was impending during that last supper-party, Stuart had made no after-movement in any way to help her. The trio had inexorably to come to an end. The one left over must butt through her crisis without whining. Male or female, it was all the same. When a like hour visited him, he would require neither sympathy nor yet props; certainly not mercy.

All very well, these relentless standards, applied to Merle. But they refused to apply themselves with like success to Peter. Stuart did not know why. But he told himself that he had behaved like a cad to Peter, anyone would say so. For the next space of time, his strongest temptation was to take refuge in the outward appearance of his conduct—certainly caddish in the extreme—and behind this fence, skulk backwards to his desire: “And make the only amends a gentleman can, considering how he has treated the girl.”

But that wouldn’t do. He knew, and Peter knew, that what had prompted him to break with her was very far removed from mere caddishness; and he couldn’t now with any consistency start regulating his conduct with an eye to the world’s approval.

A prig, then? a fanatic?—Let him but vilify in some recognized term of opprobrium what he had done, and he must perforce find himself an excuse to retract. Would a prig have set a girl to care for him, and then desert her for the sake of a vision which in turn deserted him? Prigs do not stand upon their heads, but levelly and beautifully upon their feet. He was too bad and too mad to merit the epithet of prig. Fanatic, certainly. And what was fanatic, closely examined, but word-covering for anyone sufficiently clear in belief to prove his theory by deed instead of mouthing it abroad for others so to do? Theory would be a mere word, cold and empty of significance, if the discoverer thereof were not willing to apply it as touchstone to matters vitally concerning himself.

No escape then, by road of cad, prig, or fanatic. Had Peter been sufficiently unattainable in worldly status, he could have spent a lifetime striving to win her, without any self-reproach whatsoever to mar his ultimate victory. But Fortunatus might claim his princess when he willed.... So no princess for Fortunatus....

What a fool, what a fool he had been to imagine he could elude his bondage by merely choosing an inglorious profession! This then was how they had at last contrived to outwit him: giving him, in addition to all worldly advantages, clarity of vision and power of brain; letting him build up from these a working ideal,—and then trapping him in a situation where he must in the very use of it forfeit all happiness. Because he saw ahead, because he gloried in the seeing,—oh, they had wrought their treason cunningly, “led seas who served my needs”; the two in the shadow-side of the hulk were kept in no such bondage. Stuart was a genius of life—he might not go back to Peter. He had lashed Peter to be a genius of life—she might not call to him. They could both see their vision of love dimmed by time—so they might not pursue it to the dimming. And meanwhile the two in the shadow-side of the hulk lay lip to lip, bodies crushed together, believing their little moment immortal. “They sold Diego Valdez....”

And here the stuntorian, up till now silent, gave a sudden leap, and flung out a hand to pull Stuart from the mire: “Just go back to her. Get above your own theory, and kick it out of the way. What a stunt—if you are big enough!”

“If you are big enough,” insinuated the stuntorian.

Metaphysician silenced him with a laconic “Cheat.”

No escape for Fortunatus. He knew, if for one moment he ceased battling, how contentment would lap him round, and smooth him, and oil him, and blur his vision of mist to a thickness of mutton-fat. He knew. And must practise knowledge on a flesh-and-blood love, not cherish it as a dry-as-dust theory. No escape for Stuart. The lovers, still locked into one shape, still murmuring brokenly to each other, passed in the dark so close that they brushed against him where he lay; where he lay and in biting scorn challenged God for once to take the initiative, not make him do it all himself, always.

No rest for Fortunatus. Leprechaun was now active enough; squibbing and somersaulting to impress the metaphysician, who with brilliant argument upheld the ascetic, who alternately cursed and wrestled with the man. The man had but a poor chance; though he still continued to argue, as thus:

If he and Peter had indeed thrust forwards and on, in the mortal blindness unmercifully denied to them, could the gradual transformation of magic to disappointment, thence to habit, slacking into uninspired content,—all that he and she had visioned, sitting on a luggage-truck at Euston; could these things be indeed worse than his present turmoil of longing?

Yes! all three shouting now in chorus, leprechaun and metaphysician and ascetic. Yes! For this was sharp and keen—and quick. Even though each second weighed an eternity, he was yet conscious that, viewed from the distance of years, the time would seem a short black tunnel cutting through into the day. While to lose the pulsing sense of her walk, her voice, her touch; to drop instinctive knowledge of her pleasure or her sorrow; to cease from battling with her, for the joy of the after-rest; to exchange passionate uncertainty for placid possession; to happen no more on moments of chance magic, and not to miss them; for strain to depart, and youth, and memory of youth and strain, and then envy of youth, so that ashore on the putty they should not even begrudge fiercely the exhilaration of a run before the wind—

A thousand times rather lie as now, with body writhing into the dry white sand, and every nerve craving for love lost. A thousand times rather fling “Peter!” into the unresponsive silence, and blaspheme at her steady defiance in not calling him back; defiance he, not God, but he again had put into her. A thousand times rather be stabbed through and through by single recollections. Yes, a thousand times rather Hell than Heaven, since from Hell one still could rise, but from Heaven there was no more ascent to the heavens.

END OF PART II