Chapter XI: Part I: The Long Splice (2)

"Of course I see what you're after, but I've done all that myself. Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind I've made. But I've made one discovery."

"What's that?"

"You're starting at the wrong end. That memory's all right. It's the other one I've sometimes wondered about."

"Ah! The one you call your 'B' Memory! Do you mean--it sounds an odd way of putting it, but I suppose it's all right--do you mean you don't remember what sort of thing you'll be doing, say, next year?"

"Not very clearly, George. Sometimes that seems an absolutely unknown adventure. And sometimes it's like that queer feeling--I expect you know it--that you've been somewhere before, or done something before, or heard the same thing before. It lasts for a second, and then it's gone."

"Do you think it will continue like that?"

"I've stopped thinking about it."

"That page you repeated just now. That wasn't a stock page you--keep in rehearsal, so to speak?"

"No, that was pukka."

I considered my next question carefully. But there was no avoiding it; it had to be put. I watched him deliberately.

"Now tell me one other thing. Do you ever remember hearing or writing these words: '_Je tache de me debrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci?_'"

Poor, poor lad! He winced as if I had cut at him with a lash. He turned over on the bank so that I could not see his face. He made no response when I placed my hand on his shoulder. My heart ached for him ... but he had to be shown that any question of love between himself and Jennie Aird was impossible.

I shook him. "_Do_ you remember that, Derry?"

Slowly he sat up on the bank. He turned a set face on me.

"Let me say, Coverham," he said tremulously, "that I went through a whole war without seeing as cowardly a thing as that done. I will not forgive you."

And with barely a moment's pause he broke out:

"Oh, what am I to do, sir, what am I to do? You're older and wiser than I am--I want help--advice----"

* * * * *

That is why I have called this portion of his history "The Long Splice." Extremes as wide apart as those met there and interwove their strands. Fortunate it was for me that they did, for had not that last helpless cry been wrung from him I should have been dumb before the bitterness of his reproach. Whether memories of sweetness and light were failing him or not, those of bitterness and gall remained, and it was on this quivering complexity of exposed nerves that I had laid the lash.

And yet simultaneously he was innocent, assoiled, acquitted. Only the man he had been had groaned under the stroke; the other had turned to me for comfort and guidance and help. And what is a remembered self that we should weep for it? What is memory that we should writhe? No philosopher has yet ventured to write "I remember, therefore I am." Nor does a man remember entirely and wholly of his own will. He is his memory's lord when he sets himself to repeat a passage from a book; but who is the master when something leaps upon him without warning from the past, tears open an old wound, and leaves him quivering and bleeding?... Derry's "A" Memory now seemed to me to be beside the mark, and it was with a sudden joy that I recognised it to be a boon that his "B" Memory was dissolving into a golden haze. "An absolutely unknown adventure," he had said; and what better, more merciful, more beautiful? As the Great Pity hides other men's ends from them, so his beginning was to be hidden from him. No remembrance of disillusion would mar for him the bloom of his fair discoveries. What though seas were sailed before if you know it not? Are the garden's scents less fragrant that you wonder, for a fleeting instant, when you have smelt them before? And what of the kiss of your mouth when that kiss is both an undoing and a re-beginning, the end of one dream but the beginning of a lovelier still? What Julia had done once Jennie would do again, and I had only to think of his innocence, his beauty and his doom to know, more surely than I ever knew anything in my life, that this would a thousandfold transcend the other.

And--supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single revealing look--_he had still to sleep that night_.

I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:

He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your head.

"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in the night, "I might even--it's no madder than anything else--I might even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to expect," he sighed.

On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.

I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way, had been disregarded by both of us.

"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.

"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.

"But you don't know yet that you can."

"You don't know that I can't, sir."

I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses.

"You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to--God knows what?" I demanded incredulously.

"You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before."

"I offered to introduce the man I then knew."

"Am I any worse now?"

"There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it can't, and this can't."

"Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all that?"

"I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the other things are quite as simple as they look either."

"But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes."

"Do they fit you--or did they merely do so once?"

At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when everything's said I _am_ me, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am. Dash it, I _am_ on the blessed map! I'm quite a passable nineteen as fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm--I'm--I'm in it, George. Regularly for it. Just as deep as--oh, deep and lovely! I didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be quite safe--I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear--I'd promise--on my soul I'd promise----"

I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I have him at the Airds'--and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse what would have been my very heart's desire for him--yet how grant it to the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!... I stopped before him.

"There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently. "Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days."

It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He stared at me blankly.

"Off! Did you say off?"

"Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me a promise before I leave you."

"Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car.

"I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to promise to wait in your room for me till then."

"Where is she going?"

"Will you wait in your room till I come?"

"Back to England?"

"I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?"

"Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name----"

"Her name's Jennie."

He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie----" he breathed softly.

"You'll wait for me?"

"Of course, sir. Thank you, George."

"Then I'll say----"

But I could not get out the words "Good night."

How did I know what the night was going to be for him?

For it happened in the night....

I left him standing by the earth-wall, with the lights still twinkling at sea and the low glare of Frehel in the sky behind him. Four seconds, eleven seconds, four times a minute----

"Jennie!" I heard his hushed, rapt voice as I turned away.

V

"_Le_ Por-r-rt! _Le_ Por-r-rt!"

Only an old woman with white streamers and a basket descended from the tram, but instinctively I turned my head to look at the flowery bank on which I had sat so few hours before. It was a sparkling morning, with an intense blue sky, high white clouds and singing larks. The fields of flowering sarrasin were white, cream, pink, deep russet; and far away the grey-green boscage receded into misty blue, unbroken by walls or fences, that contradictory communal undulation of a country where individualism is at its most intense, holdings small, and a ditch or a bank you could stride over fencing enough. But I was too anxious to be able to admire. At the best it looked as if I should have to assume complete responsibility for him and so cut my visit to the Airds abruptly short. At the worst--but I put the worst from me.

"Allez! Roulez!"

With the sound of a tank going into action the tram clattered forward to St Lunaire.

Up the steep street, and a swerve past the acres of tennis-courts that had once been grass. The huge six-acre cage was already full of players, and I thought of Jennie Aird. Then past the magasins and the long cafe, with half-clad young Frenchmen punting a ball and walking on their hands in the strip of meadow opposite. The Casino, the hotels, and then a steep planted avenue that seemed to end in the air. Then a rush and another swerve, and out on to the wide expanse of tussocky links, grey and fawn sandhills, and turf gemmed with a myriad tiny flowers.

His hotel was within a biscuit's-toss of the terminus. It stood by the roadside, and its front consisted of a built-out structure of glass, within which a couple of Breton girls with tight hair, string-soled shoes, and the physique of middle-weight boxers, were laying a dozen small tables for _dejeuner_. A lad dressed precisely as Derry had been dressed was delivering lifebuoys of bread, and knives clattered in baskets, and two-foot-high stacks of coloured plates were being carried in.

"M'sieu' Arnaud?" I inquired of one of the string-slippered Amazons.

"M'sieu' n'est pas descendu--si vour voulez monter au deuxieme, M'sieu'."

She indicated a way through the back salon that had once been the street frontage. Beyond yawned a cavernous kitchen, the blacker because of its opening on to a dazzlingly green back yard. Between the two rose a staircase, which a strapping youth was polishing with a mop on his foot. I mounted and gained the _deuxieme_. Then, outside the closed door, I stopped with a thumping heart.

But it was no good hesitating. I pulled myself together and knocked.

"_----trez!_" called a clear voice.

I thanked God, pushed and entered.

His head was bent over his colour-box. On a piece of paper he appeared to be making a list of the colours to be replenished. He looked smilingly up, and our eyes met.

Clear eyes, grave sweet mouth, undoubting smile----

And unchanged. The night had passed, and nothing perceptible had happened. I crossed to the window. Now that all was well, I dare to admit to myself that I had been prepared to find him--dead. If he was right in fixing his climacteric at sixteen he might well have been dead.

But there he was, bending over his colour-box and murmuring "Cobalt--I seem to eat cobalt--raw sienna--orange vermilion----"

Presently I spoke, still from the window.

"Well, I don't know anything about downstairs, but you've a gorgeous view up here."

"Isn't it?" he said. "Grows on you. At first I thought it rather scrappy, a little bit of everything, and I wish they'd put a bomb under that silly chateau-place; but it grows on you. Inland's the country though. Orange vermilion, pale cadmium, and a double go of cobalt----"

I looked round his room. The smell of oil-colours clung about it, but it was exquisitely tidy and simple. Its walls were covered with a yellowish striped paper, its ceiling beams were moulded, its herring-boned parquet floor shone. A single mat lay by the side of his ornate wooden bedstead, which, with the little night cupboard by it, a small table at the window, and a single upholstered chair, was the only furniture in the room. The door-knob was of glass, and the lace curtains had been draped back over the open leaves of the window. From a flimsy little hat-rack hung his two haversacks. His canvases apparently were in the cupboard that was sunk into the wall.

"Well," he said, putting his list of colours into his pocket, "it seems rather a rum idea bringing you right out here when I've got to go into Dinard myself. Can I have the money, George?"

I counted it out.

"And oh, by the way--I know you won't mind--but if you'd talk French when there's anybody about--it makes things a bit simpler----"

Here I began to be aware of the imminence of another problem. I don't mean the talking French; I mean the whole problem of his company. He was going into Dinard to buy colours, and I also was returning to Dinard. The natural thing was that we should go together. I could hardly constitute myself his guardian and not be seen about with him--bargain with him that he only came to me or I to him like Nicodemus, by night. He seemed to take all this cheerfully for granted.

But whither would it presently lead? Dinard was, in a word, the world--that world in which he had no place. Everybody knew scores of people in Dinard, and Madge Aird hundreds. Tennis, tea, the shops, the plage--all was public, familiar, open in the last degree. Within a couple of days, on the strength of being seen twice or thrice with me, he would be exchanging bows and smiles and "Bonjours" with goodness knows who.

"Well, come along," I said in a sort of daze. "But I don't know that I feel like talking much, either in French or English. You're a devil of a fellow for keeping your friends guessing, Monsieur Arnaud. You're still Monsieur Arnaud, I suppose?"

"How can I change it?" he replied gravely.

Of course he couldn't change it. Arnaud he must remain until he became too young to be Arnaud any longer.

On the returning tram I addressed myself somewhat as follows:

"George Coverham, this can't go on. You've got to make up your mind one way or the other. If you don't he'll make it up for you. His is already made up. He sees no reason why he shouldn't carry on. He's either right or wrong. Well, suppose for a moment that he's right? What then?

"You know what you were prepared for when you went up those stairs of his. You know you had to put your hand up three times before you dared knock. Well, everything was all right; nothing had happened. If he's really suddenly and desperately in love it ought to have happened, but anyway it didn't. That means, in plain English, that he knows more about himself than you do.

"And he thinks he can stay as he is. Suppose he can? Suppose even that maddest conjecture of all is true, and that he actually may re-become normal and live out his life like everybody else? It wouldn't be any more wonderful than the rest. So what's the obvious thing to do? Why, simply to take him as he is--as long as he is it. That's all he's asking you. And he's promised to clear out at the very first hint of another transformation. In fact he's got to. It's in the very nature of the case.

"Look at him on the seat opposite to you there, between those two bare-headed young women. Those two Breton girls may keep their four handsome Breton eyes straight before them, but they're conscious of every moment of his presence. Who wouldn't be? He's a dream of beauty. And remember how he pleaded with you last night. Can't you hear him still? 'Only to see her, only to talk to her: can't you manage that, sir? Can't you, George?' Was ever gratitude more touching and absurd than when you merely told him her name--'Jennie!' Why shouldn't he have the love now he missed before? Julia Oliphant didn't stop to think twice about it. Who made you Rhadamanthus, George Coverham?... Anyway, you've got to make up your mind."

I told myself all this, and more; but I cannot say I convinced myself. Indeed, in the face of past experience, I made the mistake of once more thinking I had a choice in the matter. I thought that I possessed him, and not he me. So I floundered among details, little practical details, such as talking French to him and being seen about Dinard with him. I recalled how already Madge Aird had asked whether he had a brother. I seemed to see Alec's face when he was told that a Frenchman had fallen in love with his daughter, my own as I explained that the Frenchman was not really a Frenchman, and Alec's again as he asked me what the devil I meant. Then there was his name--Arnaud. That again landed us straight into a dilemma. He couldn't change it, must stop Arnaud; but as Arnaud the athlete he had been seen at Ambleteuse. The brother of some young Rugby or young Charterhouse at that moment in Dinard (the words seemed to detach themselves from the noisy babble of a teashop) had seen him. He might be recognised here; people do look twice at a casual stranger who strolls into a Stade, chucks off his coat, and in his walking boots does something like level time. He looked it, too, every inch of him.... And whispers might be flying round Dover too. The straits are not very wide, and men who can swim them do not come down with every shower of rain.... Oh, the whole thing bristled with risks. I counted a hundred of them while the tram rolled in its cloud of filthy smoke past La Gueriplais, La Fourberie, St Enogat, the Rue de la Gare....

"Devoiturons," he said suddenly, touching my knee.

He had taken matters into his own hands even while I had mused. I had intended to postpone my decision by dropping off at St Enogat; now we were at the corner of the Boulevard Feart. "Down we get!" _We!_ Apparently "we" could get to "our" colour shop without making the circuit of the rest of the town. I will not swear that I saw a momentary twinkle of mischief in his eyes. I was standing in the middle of the road looking after the tram, which was already fifty yards away.

Together a middle-aged English gentleman in a neat lounge suit and a splendid young specimen of French manhood in blouse and corduroys turned into the Boulevard Feart.

There would still have been time to retrieve my indecision. The Boulevard, approached from that end of the town, is not nearly so frequented as the Rue Levavasseur and the quarter near the Casino. It was, in fact, particularly quiet. But every step we took under the shady limes, past the white-facaded houses and gardens vermilion with geraniums and bluer than the sky with lobelia, brought us nearer to that crowded busy world in which he held so singular a place. Or I could have left him at the corner of the Rue Jacques Cartier and made my escape by way of the Rue St Enogat. But what then? If I shook him off to-day the question would be to face again to-morrow.... Ker Yvonne, Ker Maria, Ker Loic ... the shuttered villas slipped past us.

Then, "Derry," I said in desperation, "I'm at my wits' end about you. I haven't the faintest idea what I ought to do."

"It's jolly just being with you," he said, looking straight ahead.

"Yes. It's other people who're the difficulty."

I had the same answer as before. "As long as I sit tight, George?" he said mildly.

"Even then. You said yourself that you were both the most public and the most private man alive."

"Ah, but that was when I was slipping about all over the place.--Up here's our shop."

"But even if you're stationary you're just as much an anomaly. Nobody except you stops at one age."

"Well, it's a step in the right direction so to speak. At any rate it isn't going back."

"I wish I knew how you knew that."

"I wish I could tell you, old fellow," he placidly replied.

"Look here," I said abruptly. "There's just one possible way out, but I rather doubt whether you'd agree to it. I mean about what you wanted me to do last night. Would you allow me to tell the whole thing to my friends the Airds and leave the decision to them?"

Quickly, very quickly, he shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I couldn't do that."

"But is anything else fair and right?"

"If I stop as I am?"

"In any case."

"They wouldn't believe you."

"I think Mrs Aird might believe me."

He gave a short laugh. "She can swallow a good deal if she can swallow that!"

"She's a very observant woman. She said one thing that perhaps I ought to tell you."

"What?" he asked with sudden curiosity.

"She saw you one day in South Kensington."

"Well?"

"She'd also had a good look at you that day at the Lyonnesse Club."

"Well?"

"She asked me whether Derwent Rose had a brother."

"Et vous avez repondu?"

"J'ai dit que non."

"C'etait la figure? La taille?"

"Le tout ensemble."

"Elle avait des conjectures? Pas possible!"

"Comme vous le dites, pas possible; mais s'ils poussent sur le Rosier trop de boutons----"

"Il n'y-en poussera plus," he laughed; and the little knot of French people passed us by.

He made light of my recital. I heard his quiet chuckle. Then suddenly I realised that we were at the corner of the Rue Levavasseur, outside the Hotel de Provence.

"Look here, haven't we passed your shop?" I said.

"Eh? Have we? By Jove, so we have. That's the charm of your conversation, George."

"Then hadn't we better go back?"

"Of course we must; it's the only colour shop in the place. But just step across the road now that we are here. I want some tooth-powder. And some envelopes at the Bazaar there. Must have some--run right out yesterday."

We crossed to a chemist's, but it appeared that he usually went to a chemist's a little farther down the street. There he made his purchases, and once more we came out into the street.

"Now I want some bootlaces," he said. "You see, I always load up when I come into Dinard. Saves time, not to speak of the tram-fare."

It was approaching a brilliant midday, and from the Tennis Club, the shops, the confectioners, and the cafes, people were beginning to press to their various hotels and villas to lunch. In another half-hour the street would be half empty, but now it was at its gayest with bright blazers, gaudy costumes, sleek heads, sea-browned faces. One saw laughing, turning heads, caught snatches of appointments--"A ce soir"--"Don't forget, Blanche"--"Number Four at two-thirty"--"You coming our way, Suzette?"

Suddenly my arm was seized, and M. Arnaud took a quick step forward.

"Thees ou-ay," he said laughingly, "des enveloppes----"

I was dragged into the Bazaar.

Then, but too late, I wondered what his so pressing need of envelopes was. "Must have some--ran right out yesterday!" Who were _his_ correspondents? Of what did _his_ letter-bag consist? Letters, he! A passport and a birth-certificate would have been more to the point; a _permis de sejour_ and his Army Discharge Papers would have been more to the point. And most to the point of all was that the rascal had completely hoodwinked me.

For, standing there among hoops and grace-sticks, string shoes and cards of bijouterie, caoutchouc bathing-caps and all the one-franc-fifty fal-lals of the Bazaar, alone and for the moment with her back to us, was Jennie Aird.

VI

This time if he wanted French he had it--off the ice.

"Touche--et merci, Monsieur. Bonjour."

I bowed, stepped forward, and placed myself between him and Jennie. I touched her elbow.

"I saw you come in. Are you nearly ready? We shall be late."

I was the angrier that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry. Jennie, giving me only the tail of her glance, turned to her choice of a bathing-cap again--the yellow one or the green one. My back was towards Rose, but I heard a saleswoman step up to him.

"Rien, merci--j'attends M'sieur," he said.

Jennie too heard, and turned.

There was no atmosphere of soft and factitious half-illumination now. This was the full blaze of a perfect August midday, that flooded the shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood looking one at the other.

And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment that passes. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning. That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.

Again I touched her.

"The yellow one, is it? Let me put it in my pocket."

I had secured her arm. I picked up for her the horrible fifty-centime notes of her change. She had dropped her eyes, and her face was as rich-coloured as her lips, her lips a pulpy quiver. I felt the touch of Derry's hand on my sleeve, but I disregarded it. I felt bitterly towards him.

"Come along, my dear," I said; and I pushed her past him.

Yet if, as he had said, he wished merely to see her, merely to speak with her, he had half his wish in that moment. Her left arm was in my right one, I between her and him. Suddenly, blush or no blush, she lifted her head. Behind me, she looked full at him. For two, three paces her head and shoulders continued to turn. I set my lips and looked straight ahead.

Then her head dropped again. Her teeth caught at her upper lip. For a moment she was a limp weight on my arm. We left the shop.

I saw his face at the window as we passed. Whether or not he stepped to the door to watch us out of sight I do not know.

I say that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry; but I have never found that a particularly mollifying reflection. As I have seen a man get rid of an undesired guest by blandly pressing him to stay but leading him gently by the arm all the time nearer to the door, so our young man had used me. I had been piloted here, there, in whichever direction he had wished. And as for Jennie's long backward look and turn of the head ... well, it seemed to me that the thing might now be regarded as done. It did not need me to murmur "Jennie, this is M. Arnaud--Miss Aird." The back door into Alec Aird's jealously-guarded house was set ajar, and I, the only one who could have watched it, had failed to do so. I frowned, watching her white-clad feet moving on the sunny pavement. I avoided looking at her face. I knew that she equally avoided looking at mine.

Of one thing I was perfectly sure: she would not of her own accord speak of the young man we had just left. Perhaps it was that there are some things which, unless you out with them at once, become more and more difficult with every moment that passes. Many a close secret was not a secret at all in the beginning; it merely became one. Therefore she was already showing obstinacy. She knew that I knew about that look. She had looked openly, deliberately, as careless of my presence as if I had not been there. And in that critical moment it was a toss-up what my relations with my friend's seventeen-years-old daughter were to be. She might, suddenly and swiftly, break into an emotional confession. On the other hand she might thenceforward bear me an unspoken grudge that I knew anything about her affairs at all.

I noticed that she carried no tennis racket. I therefore asked her, as we crossed the emptying Place du Commerce, whether she had left it at the Club.

"No," she said.

"Haven't you been playing this morning?"

"No."

"Too tired after the party last night?"

"No."

"I was wondering--but I suppose you've far more amusing things to do than to come for a walk with me this afternoon."

In those few words the whole situation trembled as in a balance. If she said Yes, much might follow; if No, then resentment would be my portion.

We continued to ascend the high-walled street, past tall garden gates and notice-boards--"A Vendre," "Locations," "Agence Boutin." We passed Beausejour, Primavera, Les Cyclamens....

Then for the first time she looked sideways at me.

"I should like to," she said.

I was still angry with myself and him. He was probably right in refusing the only definite suggestion I had found to make, namely, that he should permit me to tell my host and hostess the whole story. But if his alternative was to lie in wait for her in the streets and shops of a French summer resort and to hang about the open windows of the house at night, I felt very strongly about it. He was going to be wily and masterful, was he? He, swaying on a tightrope of time, was going to claim the treatment of a normal man? Well, that remained to be seen. The cold shoulder for a day or two might bring him to a more reasonable view. Anyway, after our encounter in the Bazaar, he could hardly pretend not to know my mind.

And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back, back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had taken from an article in _The Times_.

"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the
knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence
or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual,
attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as
the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of
intelligence has been reached."

Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?

A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman like myself, on his way to luncheon at a _riant_ holiday villa with a moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!

For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I believe I actually passed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance--shining, self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law? "Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've tried to wake up as if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was an early sun about to rise on a creature _not_ ready-made, _not_ pre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?

A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to luncheon!

Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.

"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the Casino, did you?" he said.

"No. I took a walk."

"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."

"Well, she's coming for a walk with me this afternoon."

"Then for goodness' sake take her somewhere quiet. It isn't my idea of a holiday that you have to take a rest-cure after it."

I laughed. "I'll look after her. But when I'm with Jennie I like as many people as possible to see me with Jennie."

"Then tell her that and shake her out of herself, you old humbug. Hanged if I'd trust her with you if you were a few years younger."

"You'll have to trust her with somebody presently."

"Plenty of time for that yet," Alec grunted. "I've got my eye on it all right.... Well, if you're going out I'm going to have forty of the best. Watch me fade away----"

He proceeded to "fade away," while the shadows crept over the ascending smoke from his pipe on the table.

On this occasion, however, I was content to forego my pride in being seen with Jennie by my side. Just a quiet cliff-path not too far away would do. There is much to be said for a quiet cliff-path when a young woman feels the first sweet trouble at her heart.

I left the completely faded-away Alec as I heard her step at the door of the house. She looked me straight in the eyes, as if it would be at my peril did I notice anything the matter with her own pebble-grey ones. We passed out, took the steep secluded lane towards the tea-cabin above St Enogat plage, and then descended the hewn steps to the shore. It is a tiny plage, remarkably steep, bordered with villas that resemble their own bathing-tents, and with a path that winds up the rocks beyond. We did not speak as we crossed the plage and began to climb.

Along that deeply indented coast you do a lot of walking for the distance forrader you get, and also a good deal of up-and-down round rocky gulfs with the bottle-green water heaving lazily below. But over the seaward walls of villa and chateau peep valerian and fig, and the path is coral-sprinkled with pimpernel and enamelled with convolvulus and borage and the hosts of smaller flowers. Away ahead the demi-tower of a sea-mark rose chalk-white against the deep blue, with the airy point of St Lunaire beyond. We approached a small field of marguerites, so eagerly open to the afternoon sun that at a short distance they were not white at all, but pale honey-yellow with the offering of their golden hearts. Poppies flamed among them, and the cigales crackled like ceaselessly-running insect machinery. From the cliff's foot came the lazy breaking of the waves. That, I thought, was quite a pleasant place. Even Alec would have approved of it. We sat down between the staring marguerites and the sea.

I do not wish to speak of Jennie in a fatherly or avuncular manner. One had better not have been born than not be simple with the heart of a young girl. At the faintest trace of a smile it will close against you for ever, and wonder follows wonder so quickly over it that it will be a long time before you get your second chance. So do not tell it that it will think differently about things to-morrow. It is you who will think differently to-morrow if you do. I say in all sincerity that, in that long pause between my asking Jennie to come for a walk with me and her acceptance, I had felt a suspense as real as any I ever felt. If that pivotal moment on which the oncoming generation turns is not to be gravely considered, I know of no other moment that need greatly trouble us.

So I listened to the treble of the cigales and the soft deep bass of the sea, and the silence continued between us. She picked and nibbled florets of clover, her eyes far away. Her gaze wandered to butterflies, to a lizard that disappeared with a glint of bronze into a cranny, to a ladybird that alighted on her forearm.

Then the largest tear I have ever seen brimmed, trickled and dropped.

On leaving the house she had dared me to notice anything about her eyes; but it is another matter when a tear so engulfs a ladybird that it is a question whether the creature's pretty wing-cases will ever be the same again. I had to speak after that.

"Cheer up, Jennie," I said softly.

She gulped. "Why were you so horrid and cross with him!"

"This morning in the shop?"

"Yes."

"Well ... I fancied he'd played me rather a mean trick."

"He didn't!" she flashed. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything mean!"

"Then say a trick I didn't expect from him."

"I heard him tell the woman in the shop he was waiting for you, and--and you walked straight past him without looking at him!"

"It might have been better if you'd done the same, Jennie."

"Did he come to fetch you out last night?"

"I took him out."

"Is he the--the Monsieur Arnaud the maid meant?"

"That's the name he goes by."

"Isn't it his name?"

"I suppose it is."

"Then why do you say it like that?... I want you to tell me about him, Uncle George, please," she ordered me.

I too wanted to do that; but I found it anything but simple. I might have told her that he was simply a vagrant, just a fellow who wandered about sketching, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That would have been perfectly true. But it would have been equally untrue. That was no picture of Derry. She had seen a far, far truer picture of him when she had turned her head towards him in the toyshop.

"Well, of course that _is_ why I asked you to come for a walk this afternoon, Jennie," I said slowly. "As a matter of fact M'sieur Arnaud's had a very curious experience that I can't very well tell you about. The result of this is that he's--a rather odd sort of person to know. In fact he's better not known. He wanted me to introduce him to your mother, and I told him I'd rather not do so. Anyway he's going away soon."

"That doesn't sound like a horrid sort of person," she commented. "Is that why he came last night--to be introduced to mother?"

"No, he came for something quite different last night."

"What?"

Here again I might have answered with a certain appearance of truth that he had come for money, though it was his own money; but that too would be to misrepresent him. The cigales crackled loudly. I suppose the ladybird was all right again, for it was nowhere to be seen. I mused, and then turned to her.

"You said yesterday that you wished you were back in England, Jennie," I said. "How would you like to come and stay with me in Surrey for a bit?"

"No thank you, Uncle George. Thank you very much."

"It's quite jolly there in its way, and I dare say I could get somebody quite nice to be with you."

"I should like to some day, of course," she said, "but not just now, if you don't think it horrid of me." And she added, "I love being here."

"Since yesterday?"

She did not reply.

Of course I had not expected for a moment that she would say Yes, even had I made up my own mind to abandon Derry to his fate, which I had not done. Yet a thought flashed into my mind. Were I to return to England, taking Jennie with me, Derry would still not be unlooked-after. The moment I left, Julia Oliphant, I felt certain, would fly to his side. And if Jennie would not come with me, what would the impossible combination be then?... My half-formed thought became a sudden picture, a contrast, vivid and arresting, between two women--the one who experimented with her dress and wanted to know what a cocktail tasted like, the other this fragrant hawthorn-bough by my side. And between the two rose his grave and sunbrowned face....

I stared at my picture, fascinated. The three of them together! Exquisite and horrible complication! Suppose it should ever come to that!

Then the picture vanished, and I saw the translucent untwinkling sea. The roofs of distant St Lunaire made a pale cluster of brightness. The wind rippled the edges of the satiny poppies.

All at once she clutched my sleeve with both her hands and buried her face against it. It broke, the storm that had been pent up for nearly twenty hours. As the marguerites exposed their yearning golden hearts, so she kept nothing back, laid bare her own heart to the sun that was its lord.

"Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I can't bear it; it's too--too--oh, tell me what to do, Uncle George! I know he's my darling! I don't want to live without him! If he goes away I don't know what will happen! It's all since yesterday--I didn't sleep a wink--I went out into the garden when they'd all gone and stood in the same place. Then I heard father moving about and hid.... And then this morning when you were horrid to him--no, you weren't horrid, dear Uncle George--I know it's all a stupid mistake--I love him! I don't care if he doesn't speak a word of English. I want him here now! I want to be with him! Please, please introduce him to mother. She loves French people. And he did ask you to, so he can't be horrid. I'm sure he didn't mean to play you a mean trick. There must be a mistake. I'm sure he can explain if you'll let him. Dear, dear Uncle George--do, do!"

I put my hand on her hat, which was as much of her as I could see.

"Don't look at me, please--I don't want to move for just a minute."

"As long as you like, my dear."

"Oh, I'll do anything if you only will! Where is he staying? I never saw him in Dinard before. Where is he staying? Does he live here all the time? I could see him if you came too, couldn't I? And I don't care what sort of clothes he wears ... do, do, Uncle George!"

Then she straightened herself, and looked full at me through her flooded eyes. She was suddenly imperious.

"Now tell me something else, please. When you went off with him last night. Did he say anything about me?"

Perhaps I did not lie with sufficient promptitude. "About you? No, of course not."

She looked accusingly at me; she caught her breath.

"Oh, how _can_ you say that! I don't believe it! He did!"

"But he couldn't even see you in the dark!"

"It wasn't dark--it wasn't a _bit_ dark--it was quite light enough to see anybody--_you_ saw him----"

"Well, he's going away, and there's an end of it."

Like a rainbow was the light that woke in her lately showering eyes. Up went the soft lip, out peeped the pearls. Back, back from their golden hearts lay the petals of the marguerites.

"If," she said with extreme slowness, "if he told you he was going away, that must have been last night."

I was dumb. I saw her effort to close her inner eyes on the light that broke on them, lest a wonder on a wonder should prove more than she could bear.

"That was _last night_!" the triumphant words rang out.

I suppose there is no such thing as one half of a miracle without the other----

"That was _last night_, and there hadn't _been_ a this morning then, and he hadn't seen me when I was buying my bathing-cap, and if he said he was going away he's changed his mind and he isn't going away at all! Neither of us is going away! Oh-h-h!" (That "Oh" echoes in my heart still.) "He isn't even thinking of going now! Because we both know now--we knew in the shop--and he loves me too!"

Just to see one another--just to speak to one another--that was all they asked of me.