Dangerous Ages Part 17

Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their bicycles, and went down to the s.h.i.+ning evening sands, where now the paved causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks. Bare-footed they trod it, Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and wheeling round them.

Nan stopped, the west in her eyes. "Look."

Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land's End, dim and dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.

"Isn't it clear," said Nan. "You can see the cliff villages ever so far along ... Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement's Island off it--and the point of Lamorna."

Barry said "We'll go to Land's End by the coast road to-morrow, shan't we, not the high road?"

"Oh, the coast road, yes. It's about twice the distance, with the ups and downs, and you can't ride all the way. But we'll go by it."

For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.

Nan said, "Aren't you glad you came?"

"I should say so!"

His answer came, quick and emphatic. There was a pause after it. Nan suddenly turned on him the edge of a smile.

Barry did not see it. He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved bare-legged along the s.h.i.+ning causeway to the moat.

Nan's smile flickered out. The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had hit her in the face. Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation. He had turned away unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed Gerda ... Gerda ... walking light-footed up the wet causeway.... Well, if he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not offer him chances again. When he got the habit back, he must make his own chances as best he could.

"Come on," said Nan. "We must hurry."

She left no more pauses, but talked all the time, about Newlyn, about the artists, about the horrid children, the fis.h.i.+ng, the gulls, the weather.

"And how's the book?" he asked.

"Nearly done. I'm waiting for the end to make itself."

He smiled and looking round at him she saw that he was not smiling at her or her book, but at Gerda, who had stepped off the causeway and was wading in a rock pool.

He must be obsessed with Gerda; he thought of her, apparently, all the time he was talking about other things. It was irritating for an aunt to bear.

They joined Kay and Gerda on the island. Kay was prowling about, looking for a way by which to enter the forbidden castle. Kay always trespa.s.sed when he could, and was so courteous and gentle when he was caught at it that he disarmed comment. But this time he could not manage to evade the polite but firm eye of the fisherman on guard. They crossed over to Marazion again all together and went to the cafe for supper.

5

It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda spa.r.s.e of word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep, for she had not slept until late last night.

"High time she had a holiday," Barry said of her. "Four weeks' grind in August--it's beginning to tell now."

Fussy Barry was about the child. As bad as Frances Carr with Pamela.

Gerda was as strong as a little pony really, though she looked such a small, white, brittle thing.

They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes.

Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit church.

Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, "How brilliant Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one,"

and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her, to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence, and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into undisturbed friends.h.i.+p. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was refres.h.i.+ng to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind flas.h.i.+ng and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like a diamond.

They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public house, Nan and Gerda to Nan's room at the cafe, where they squeezed into one bed.

Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep.

Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda's waxen face and yellow hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth was, people said, the best time? It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.

Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching.

Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.

A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before her eyes--the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on the causeway.

"Aren't you glad you came?" Her own voice, soft, encouraging.

"I should say so!" The quick, matter-of-fact answer.

Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile. An allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.

And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay walked bare-legged to the Mount.

Flame scorched her again. The pause each time she saw it now became longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled. Her smile became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel, distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it again. Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed so that one cannot sleep. d.a.m.n Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn't been for Gerda they wouldn't have been two in a bed.

"Barry's a good deal taken up with her just now," said Nan to herself, putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life's situations. "He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he's thrown with them. All men do, if you come to that. For the moment he's thinking about her, not about me. That's a bore. It will bore me to death if it goes on.... I wonder how long it will go on? I wonder how soon he'll want to make love to me again?"

Having thus expressed the position in clear words, Nan turned her mind elsewhere. What do people think of when they are seeking sleep? It is worse than no use to think of what one is writing; that wakes one up, goads every brain-cell into unwholesome activity. No use thinking of people; they are too interesting. Nor of sheep going through gates; they tumble over one another and make one's head ache. Nor of the coming day; that is too difficult: nor of the day which is past; that is too near.

Wood paths, quiet seas, running streams--these are better.

"Any lazy man can swim Down the current of a stream."

Or the wind in trees, or owls crying, or waves beating on warm sh.o.r.es.

The waves beat now; ran up whisperingly with the incoming tide, broke, and sidled back, dragging at the wet sand.... Nan, hearing them, drifted at last into sleep.

CHAPTER IX

THE PACE

1

The coast road to Land's End is like a switchback. You climb a mountain and are flung down to sea level like a shooting star, and climb a mountain again. Sometimes the road becomes a sandy cliff path and you have to walk.

But at last, climbing up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came up behind them, and struck out to sea. The others behind her, less skilful, floundered and were dashed about by the waves. Barry and Kay struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; Gerda, giving it up--she was no great swimmer--tranquilly rolled and paddled in the surf by herself.

Kay called to her, mocking.