Dangerous Ages Part 19

"I don't like that creature," Kay said. "I'm afraid of him. Aren't you, Barry?"

"Desperately," Barry admitted. "Anyone would be, except Nan, of course."

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would do.

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met Barry's eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking "I can bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn't bear it if I were the last and no one saw." To be gored all alone, none to care ... who could bear that?

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side, bicycling on the gra.s.s by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know she was frightened? She hadn't shown it, surely.

"The wind," said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, "has gone round more to the south. Don't you think so?" And reminded Barry of a French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to the scaffold.

"I believe it has," he said, and smiled.

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles, didn't charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises until they left him behind at the next gate.

"Did you," enquired Gerda, casually, "notice that bull? He was an awfully fine one, wasn't he?"

"A remarkably n.o.ble face, I thought," Kay returned.

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.

5

Nan, experienced in such things, as one is at the age of thirty-three if one has led a well-spent life, knew now beyond peradventure what had happened to Barry and what would never happen again between him and her.

So that was that, as she put it, definite and matter-of-fact to herself about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time. You could not shoot down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you shot down the roads. Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts.... Oh, but that was nothing. You had to hear his voice softened to someone else, see the smile in his eyes caressing someone else, feel his whole mind, his whole soul, reaching out in protecting, adoring care to someone else's charm and loveliness ... as once, as so lately, they had reached out to yours.... That was torture for the bravest, far worse than any bulls or seas or precipices could be to Gerda. Yet it had to be gone through, as Gerda had to leap from towering cliffs into wild seas and ride calmly among fierce cattle.... When Nan woke in the night it was like toothache, a sharp, gnawing, searing h.e.l.l of pain. Memory choked her, bitter self-anger for joy once rejected and then forever lost took her by the throat, present desolation drowned her soul in hard, slow tears, jealousy scorched and seared.

But, now every morning, pride rose, mettlesome and gallant, making her laugh and talk, so that no one guessed. And with pride, a more reckless physical daring than usual; a kind of scornful adventurousness, that courted danger for its own sake, and wordlessly taunted the weaker spirit with "Follow if you like and can. If you don't like, if you can't, I am the better woman in that way, though you may be the beloved." And the more the mettle of the little beloved rose to meet the challenge, the hotter the pace grew. Perhaps they both felt, without knowing they felt it, that there was something in Barry which leaped instinctively out to applaud reckless courage, some element in himself which responded to it even while he called it foolhardy. You could tell that Barry was of that type, by the quick glow of his eyes and smile. But the rivalry in daring was not really for Barry; Barry's choice was made. It was at bottom the last test of mettle, the ultimate challenge from the loser to the winner, in the lists chosen by the loser as her own. It was also--for Nan was something of a bully--the heckling of Gerda. She might have won one game, and that the most important, but she should be forced to own herself beaten in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. She found things more fun that way: that summed it.

6

The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they would stop early in the day at some fis.h.i.+ng village, find rooms there for the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters, slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action, drowning emotion in the sea.

Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and had to battle for the sh.o.r.e. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this meant a tough fight.

"Barry!"

Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda's bluing face and wide staring eyes and quickening, flurried strokes. Saw, too, Barry at once at her side, heard his "All right, I'm here. Catch hold of my shoulder."

In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda's other side.

"Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you're worth with your legs. That's the way...."

Numbly Gerda's two hands gripped Barry's right shoulder and Nan's left.

Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily, helping the running sea against them. They were being swept westward towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck northward and northward and were carried always south. It was a close thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the current was winning.

"It'll have to be all we know now," said Nan, as they struggled ten yards from the point.

She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew and just the little more they didn't know--they would be swept round the point well to the south of the outermost rock--and then, hey for open sea!

But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle, stronger than the sea. They were swept towards the jutting point, almost round it, when Nan, flinging forward to the right, caught a slippery ledge of rock with her two hands and held on. Barry didn't think she could hold on for more than a second against the swinging seas, or, if she did, could consolidate her position. But he did not know the full power of Nan's trained, acrobatic body. Slipping her shoulder from Gerda's clutch, she grasped instead Gerda's right hand in her left, and with her other arm and with all her sinuous, wiry strength, heaved herself onto the rock and there flung her body flat, reaching out her free hand to Barry. Barry caught it just in time, as he was being swung on a wave outwards, and pulled himself within grip of the rock, and in another moment he lay beside her, and between them they hauled up Gerda.

Gerda gasped "Kay," and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.

"Can you do it?" Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.

"Let you know presently.... Oh yes, I'm all right. Getting on fine."

Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay's swimming and the sea. It seemed to her to be anyone's race.

Barry didn't stand up. The strain of the swim had been rather too much for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side.

He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.

The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat Kay in this race. For Kay's face had turned a curious colour, and he was blue round the lips. Kay's heart was not strong.

Nan's dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish to see. The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay's side. Coming up she caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder, saying "Hold tight. A few strokes will do it."

Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight, throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other three limbs.

They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry's outstretched hand been ready. Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and no more, as they were swung seawards. It was enough. It pulled them to the rock's side. Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.

"Neat," said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman."

"He does faint sometimes," said Gerda of Kay. "He'll be all right in a minute."

Kay came to.

"Oh Lord," he said, "that was a bit of a grind." And then, becoming garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently swooned, "Couldn't have done it without you, Nan. I'd given myself up for lost. All my past life went by me in a flash.... I really did think it was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us, wasn't it?... Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course.

It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I've drunk! I do feel rotten."

"We all look pretty rotten, I must say," Nan commented, looking from Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's s.h.i.+vering blueness, from Gerda to Barry, prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"

"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do it. We don't want to die here, with the sea was.h.i.+ng over us in this damp way."

They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it till they dropped down into the little cove. They all felt beaten and limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of football. Even Nan's energy was drained.

Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky corner, "I suppose, Nan, if it hadn't been for you and Barry, I'd have drowned."

"Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we'd most of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren't for something--some chance or other."

Gerda said "Thanks awfully, Nan," in her direct, childlike way, and Nan turned it off with "You might have thanked me if you _had_ drowned, seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known it wasn't safe for you or Kay."

Looking at the little fragile figure s.h.i.+vering in its vest, Nan felt in that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her shoulder in the sea.

"Life-saving seems to soften the heart," she reflected, grimly, conscious as always of her own reactions.

"Well," said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little village, "I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let's make for the pub and drink whiskey."