The Tower of Oblivion Part 40

"Tell me what I can do for you."

He fell a little back. "George," he faltered, "why this tone?"

I refused to admit at once that I was ashamed. "We can't stop talking here," I said. "Where are you staying?"

"Out at St Briac."

"Then I suppose you're walking back? The last tram went long ago."

"It's only six miles."

"Then wait here, and I'll walk part of the way with you."

They were still merrily dancing in the house, but I managed to get to my own room unseen. I put on an ordinary jacket and cap and descended again. He was not where I had left him. He had skirted the lauristinus bushes, and from a safe distance was gazing into the house.

Oh, inopportune--inopportune and undesirable in the last degree!

"Ready?" I said.

Reluctantly he turned away his eyes and followed me past the cars. We pa.s.sed out of the drive and into the dark tree-planted lanes of St Enogat.

A rutty little ruelle runs along the side of St Enogat Church and makes a short cut to the high road. We pa.s.sed the church without exchanging a word. At last, where the street widened, I broke the silence.

"So you're Arnaud now?"

"Yes," he said in a low voice.

"The athlete people are talking about?"

He muttered that there were lots of Arnauds.

"You're a Frenchman anyway?"

"I've got to be something."

"Are you going to stay a Frenchman?"

"I don't know yet."

We continued our walk. The little white-painted Grand Stand of the Stade glimmered over the hedge on our right when next he spoke. I saw his glance at it.

"About those athletics, George," he said awkwardly. "I was an awful a.s.s.

If there's anybody who oughtn't to draw attention to himself it's me.

But I did it without thinking. It was at Ambleteuse. They were running and jumping, and I suppose my conceit got the better of me and I just had to have a go. But I've cut all that out. It wasn't safe. I don't go near a Stade now."

"Ambleteuse? Then you did cross Dover-Calais?"

He hesitated. "Not exactly Dover-Calais. Thereabouts."

"Thereabouts?... I suppose you worked your pa.s.sage and then gave them the slip?"

"No. I thought of that, but it was a bit too chancy."

"Then what did you do?"

"Well--strictly between ourselves, George--it's much better not talked about--you see my difficulty--but I swam it."

I stopped dead in my stride. "_You what!_"

He spoke apologetically, as if it were something not quite creditable.

"Yes. But I don't want to give you a wrong impression. I didn't swim it really fairly. Not like Webb and Burgess. I only swam it more or less.

For one thing, I hadn't trained, you see."

I recovered my breath. "What do you mean by swimming it more or less?"

His modesty was almost excessive. "It was like this, George. You see I rather funked just jumping in at Dover and trusting to luck to bring me across. It's a devil of a long swim, you know, and besides, I had to have my clothes; couldn't land here with nothing on. So I got hold of a fellow at the Lord Warden, a boatman who'd been with Woolf when he just missed it. I swore him to secrecy and all that, and fixed things up with him, and he gave me tides and times and currents and so on. I told him I was only an amateur who didn't want to make a fuss till he'd had a sighting-shot, and--well, it cost me a tenner. But it saved no end of trouble. He and another chap came across with me in a little motor-launch. I greased myself and got into a mask, and a mile out of Dover I went overboard. Even then I didn't swim it fairly, for I was hauled in again after about six hours for another greasing. My flesh was quite dead half an inch in, you see. I was sick too. If we'd been really meant to do that sort of thing we should have been given scales, like fishes."

"Well, and then?"

"Well--that's all. I landed a little this side of Grisnez, just as if I'd been out for an ordinary bathe. My chaps kept a sharp look-out for the coastguard, and smuggled my clothes on to a rock; my English ones, of course; I bought this rig in Boulogne. And in three or four days I was pretty well all right again. But I don't think I'd have the stamina to do it again.... I say, promise me you won't go talking about it, George. I've got to lie absolutely low. I frightfully wanted to go to Antwerp, but I simply daren't do it. I might be asked for my Army Discharge Papers, or something awkward like that."

So _that_ was how he had solved the pa.s.sport problem! Unable to walk the Straits, he had simply swum them, and had saved that night's stoking with coal-dust in his beard! And suddenly and inexplicably, I found something of my resentment already softening within me. There was a n.o.ble simplicity about his expedient, and even his voluminous corduroys and shapeless vareuse did not hide the magnificence of his build. And yet he, so magnificent, must forego that deep joy in his physical splendour if he was to preserve his anonymity. It pa.s.sed him by as the publisher's belief in him had pa.s.sed him by--as, it began to appear to me, all else in life must pa.s.s him by. Antwerp and the Stades for others, but for him, who would have won glorious laurels there--no. Nay, say he was now what he looked, nineteen or twenty. His athletic prime was already far advanced. He himself doubted whether he had the stamina to swim the Channel again. This alone would have sufficed to win my compa.s.sion.

We were now well clear of St Enogat. The night was moonless, but the heavens were crowded with stars, and seaward the lights burned emerald, diamond, ruby. Southward over the land the eye wandered over the dim fruit trees that dotted the fields of sarrasin. A light breeze moved in the tops of the crooked poplars, and where the tramway leaves the road and takes as it were a dive into a wilderness of dark tamarisk and thorn a gramophone played somewhere in an unseen cottage. Already an intermittent paleness had begun to sweep the sky ahead: a pulse of faint light, four seconds of darkness, the pulse again and eleven seconds of darkness--the Giant of Cap Frehel.

At least another ten years in less than a month! I kept stealing shy glances at him through the limpid darkness. Quite literally I felt shy in his presence, for he was both known and unknown to me. If he was now nineteen, I saw him now at nineteen for the first time in my life--grave and young, brown and beautiful. His talk had a gentleness and a modesty too. No wonder Julia Oliphant had loved him!

"Well, go on after you left Ambleteuse," I said by and by.

"Oh, then I walked, and took train once in a while, till I got to Rouen and Caen and on here. Lovely churches all the way; I want to go to Caen again. That took me a fortnight. Then I'd a couple of days in St Malo, and--well, that about accounts for the time."

"And what are you doing at St Briac?"

"Sketching. Taken a great fancy to it. I've got a bike cheap, and I either walk or ride. I stay at a rather shabby little place, but it suits me. I've only a couple of haversacks and my painting things, so I can be off at a moment's notice if--if anything crops up."

Charmingly and sincerely as he spoke, I was yet conscious of a reserve.

He kept, as it were, to the surface of his itinerary, dwelling only on the outer details of his life. And, as little by little he repossessed me, I knew that I should have to get behind this reticence. For when and how had he lost those ten years? In Trenchard's loft, or since, or partly both? Had he, when he had plunged into the sea a mile out of Dover, been still twenty-nine, or his present age, or some intermediate one? If I was to be of service to him it was necessary that I should know all this.

"Derry," I said, using his name for the first time, "I can't walk all the way to St Briac and back again. For one thing I'm dressed for a party. Let's sit down."

There was a warm dry earth-wall with heath and thyme and rest-harrow and convolvulus growing on it, and there we sat down. Opposite us opened the marshy gap of Le Port, and every four seconds, every eleven seconds, the aurora-like Light a dozen miles away was faintly reduplicated in the wet mud. All was quiet save for the ceaseless rustle of the ragged poplars, the creeping whisper of the tide.

"Now," I quietly ordered him, "I want you to tell me all the things you've been leaving out."

At first I thought he was going to behave like an obdurate boy, whose affairs are hugely important just because they are his. But he seemed to think better of it. In a hesitating voice he said, "What things?"

"Well, begin with Trenchard's place on Sunday night, the 4th of July.

What happened then?"