Chapter I (3)

Similes apart, however, the _Caribbeania_ was now so steady that an infant could have danced a jig upon her deck. Several infants tried. Amusements rushed upon her passengers from every side. A week passed like a wink. Hardly were you awake in the morning before you found yourself pursuing an egg round your own ankles with a teaspoon. Sports and rumours of sports followed you even unto your nightly bunk. Everybody developed talents hitherto successfully concealed in napkins. Courtesy found her life’s vocation in dropping potatoes into buckets. She brought this homely pursuit to a very subtle art, and felt that she had not lived in vain. Not that she ever suffered from morbid illusions as to her value. The gardener brought to light a latent gift for sitting astride upon a spar while other men tried with bolsters to remove him. The suffragette, when nobody was looking, acquired proficiency in the art of shuffling the board. When observed, she instinctively donned an appearance of contempt. Mrs. Paul Rust settled herself immovably in a chair and applauded solo at the moments when others were not applauding. The priest, looking in an opposite direction, clapped when he heard other hands being clapped, in order to show the kind interest he took in mundane affairs.

While occupied thus, one day, he found himself next to Courtesy. That determined lady had her back to a Whisky and Soda Race then in progress, and looked aggrieved. She had been beaten in the first heat, whereas she was convinced that victory had been her due. Courtesy suffered from all the faults that you and I—poetic souls—cannot love. She was greedy. She was fat. She could not even lose a race without suspecting the timekeeper of corruption. All the same, there was something so entirely healthy and human about her, that nobody had ever pointed out to her her lack of poetry, and of the more subtle virtues.

The priest, who had also never been able to lose a game without losing his temper too, sympathised with Courtesy, and employed laborious tact in trying to lead her thoughts elsewhere.

“Trinity Islands are your destination, are they not, yerce, yerce?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Courtesy. “And I wish this old tub would buck up and get there.”

“You have reasons of your own for being very anxious to arrive?” suggested the priest archly.

“Nothing special that I know of,” answered Courtesy. “I’m only an ordinary globe-trotter.”

Frankly, she was being sent out to get married. But this, of course, was among the things that are not said. Her father had become tired of supporting a daughter as determined to study art in London as she was incapable of succeeding at it. He had accepted for her a casual invitation from a cousin for a season in the Trinity Islands. The invitation was so very casual that Courtesy had appreciated the whole scheme as a matrimonial straw clutched at by an over-daughtered parent. But her feelings were not hurt. She had bluff, tough feelings.

“How curious that you should have found former friends on board!” said the priest. “How small the world is, is it not?”

“Yes, isn’t it?” assented Courtesy, whose heart always warmed towards familiar phrases. “And so odd, too, him being married within the week like this.”

The priest pricked up his ears so sharply that you could almost hear them click. “So quickly as that?” he encouraged her.

“Yes, when he left the private hotel where he and I were both staying just over a fortnight ago, he was not even engaged. He says such quaint things about it, too. He says he picked her up on the way to Paradise.”

The mention of Paradise confirmed the priest’s worst suspicions. But “Yerce, yerce....” was his only reply to Courtesy.

Late that night the priest walked round and round the deck trying to peer into the face of his god, professional duty. His conscience was as short-sighted as some people’s eyes, and he was often known to pursue a shadow under the impression that he was pursuing his duty.

“Of course I must warn the Captain,” he said. “And that bright young lady who unconsciously gave me the news. And Mrs. Rust, who encourages that misguided young man to talk. And Mrs. Cyrus Berry, who lets her children play with him. As for the woman—I always think that women are the most to blame in such cases.”

Although he was altogether narrow his limits were indefinite, except under great provocation. He had not strength enough to draw the line anywhere. “Wicked” was too big a word for him; and although he believed that the gardener and the suffragette were in immediate danger of hell-fire, he could only call them “misguided.” This applies to him only in his capacity as a priest. In his own interests he was very much more sensitive than he was in the interest of his God.

Sometimes I think that angels, grown old, turn into enemies to trap the unwary. The angel of tolerance was the great saviour of history, but now he saps the strength of every cause. Either I Am Right, or I May Possibly Be Right. If I may only possibly be right, why should I dream of burning at the stake for such a very illusory proposition? But if I am right, then my enemy is Wrong, and is in danger of hell-fire. That is my theory. My practice is to believe that belief is everything, and that I may worship a Jove or a stone with advantage to my soul. Belief is everything, and I believe. But if my enemy believes in nothing, then I will condemn him. Why should I be tolerant of what I am convinced is wrong?

The priest, in the dark, found some one clinging round his knees. A woman—a little woman—wrapped so tightly in a cloak that she looked like a mummy. Her face was grey, and her lips looked dark. Her hair lay dank and low upon her brow, and yet seemed as if it should have been wildly on end about her head. The whole of her looked horribly restrained—bound with chains—and her eyes, which should have given the key to the entreaty which she embodied, were tightly shut. For five seconds the priest tried to run away. But she held him round the knees and cried, “Save me, save me!”

Nobody had ever come to the priest with such a preposterous request before.

“Let me go, my good woman,” he said, audibly keeping his head. “Be calm, let me beg you to be calm.”

She let him go. But she was not calm.

It was very late, and the deck-chairs had been folded up and stacked. As the woman would not rise to the priest’s level, he saw nothing for it but to sink to hers. They sat upon the deck side by side. He felt that it was not dignified, but there was nobody looking. And otherwise, he began to feel in his element. Here was a soul literally shrieking to be saved.

“What is it? Tell me. You have sinned?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” replied the woman in a hard thin voice. “I have never deserved what I’ve got. It seems to me that it’s God who has sinned.”

“Hush, be calm,” the priest jerked out. “Be calm and tell me what has upset you so much.”

The woman began to laugh. Her laughter was absurdly impossible, like frozen fire. It lasted for some time, and the world seemed to wait on tiptoe for it to stop. It was too much for the priest’s nerves, and for his own sake he gripped her arm to make her stop. She was silent at once. The grip had been what she needed.

“Now tell me,” said the priest.

She paused a little while, and seemed trying to swallow her hysteria. When she spoke it was in a sane, though trembling voice. “I am not Church of England, sir, but you being a man of God, so to speak, I thought ... I am suffering—terribly. There’s something gnawing at my breast ... I’ve prayed to God, sir; I’ve prayed until I’ve fainted with the pain of kneeling upright. But he never took no notice. I think he’s mistaken me for a damned soul ... before my time. Why, I could see God smiling, I could, and the pain grew worse. I’ve been a good woman in my time; I’ve done my duty. But God smiled to see me hurt. So I prayed to the Devil—I’d never have believed it three months ago. I prayed for hell-fire rather than this. The pain grew worse....”

“Have you seen the doctor?”

“Oh, yes. And he said the sea-voyage would do me good. He couldn’t do nothing.”

“Poor soul!” said the priest, and found to his surprise that he was inadequate to the occasion. “Poor soul, what can I say? It is, alas, woman’s part to suffer in this world. Your reward is in heaven. You must pin your faith still to the efficacy of prayer. You cannot have prayed in the right spirit.”

“But what a God—what a God ...” shouted the woman with a wild cry. “To hide himself in a maze—and me too distracted to find out the way. Why, my tears ought to reach him, let alone my prayers. I’ve sacrificed so much for him—and he gives me over to this....”

“This is terrible, yerce terrible,” said the priest. “My poor creature, this is not the right spirit in which to meet adversity. Put yourself in God’s hands, like a little child....”

The woman dragged herself suddenly a yard or two from him. “Oh, you talker—you talker ...” she cried, and writhed upon the deck.

“Listen,” said the priest in a commanding voice. “Kneel with me now, and pray to God. When we have prayed, I will take you to the doctor, and he will give you something to make you sleep.”

“I won’t touch drugs,” said the woman. “And I don’t hold with that young doctor in brass buttons. If I pray now with you, will you promise that I shall be better in the morning?”

“Yes,” said the priest. It was spoken, not out of his faith, but because that seemed the only way to put an end to the scene. And when he prayed, in a musical clerical voice, he prayed not out of his heart, but out of his sense of what was fitting.

The stars bent their wise eyes upon the wise sea and bore witness that the priest’s prayer never reached heaven’s gate.

“Now you feel better, do you not?” he asked, when he had said all that had occurred to him, and intoned a loud Amen, as if to give the prayer an upward impetus.

“No,” sobbed the woman.

“Who are you? What is your name?”

“I am Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid,” she replied, and staggered in a lost way into the darkness of the companion-way.

“To-morrow it will be better,” the priest called after her. And wished that he could think so.

The world smiled next morning, when the sports began again. Elizabeth Hammer was invisible, probably concealed in some lowly place suitable to her position. The sea was silver, the sky blazed blue, the sun smiled from its height, like a father beaming upon his irresponsible family. Mrs. Paul Rust looked incredible in a pale dress, designed for peculiarity rather than grace; pink roses sprigged it so sparsely as to give the impression of birth-mark afflictions rather than decorations. I am not sure whether the feather in her hat was more like an explosion or a palm tree. The gardener rolled upon a deck-chair with three children using him as a switch-back railway. Theresa was smiling from her top curl down to her toes. Even the suffragette was talking about the transmigration of souls to the fourth officer. Everything on the surface was highly satisfactory, and, on board ship, nothing except the surface matters a bit.

The priest had a leaky mind. He never poured out all that was in it, but he could not help letting a certain proportion of its contents escape. He paused in his daily walk of thirty times round the deck, and found a seat beside Mrs. Paul Rust.

“Your maid seems to be in a shocking state of health,” he said.

“She suffers from indigestion,” replied Mrs. Rust. “Some fool of a doctor has told her that she has cancer. She has quite lost her head over it.”

“At any rate she appears to be in great pain,” said the priest, who considered that indigestion was rather too unclothed a word for ordinary use. “And pain is a terrible thing, is it not?”

“No,” said Mrs. Rust.

“You mean that you consider it salubrious for the soul?”

“No,” said Mrs. Rust.

“Then I wonder in what way you consider pain desirable?”

Mrs. Rust, who had meant nothing beyond contradiction, shut her eyes and looked immovably subtle. The priest changed the subject. He had a real gift for changing the subject.

“Have you made the acquaintance of that dark young man who acts as the ship’s gardener?” he asked.

“An excellent young man,” said Mrs. Rust, immediately divining that the priest did not approve of him.

“Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man,” agreed the priest mechanically. “But I have reason to believe that his morals are not satisfactory.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he calls his wife.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.

The priest, being constitutionally incapable of argument, and yet unable to broaden his view, was left wordless. But an interruption mercifully rescued him from the necessity of attempting a reply.

Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid, appeared at the companion door. Her eyes were fixed hungrily upon the sea.

There was a race about to be run, and the starter stood ready to say the word. But Elizabeth Hammer brushed past him and walked across the empty strip of deck. She climbed the rail as though she were walking upstairs, and dropped into the sea.

“Hammer,” barked Mrs. Rust hoarsely, as she heard the splash. That word broke the spell. A woman shrieked, and Captain Walters shouted, “Man Overboard.”

The suffragette was not a heroine. What she did was undignified and unconscious. The heroine should remove her coat, hand her watch to a friend, send her love to a few relations, and bound gracefully into the water. The suffragette, fully clothed, tumbled upside down after Elizabeth Hammer. No noble impulse prompted her to do it. She did not know of her intention until she found herself in the water, and then she thought, “What a fool!” She could not swim. The _Caribbeania_ looked as distant as heaven, and as high. She felt as if she had been dead a long time since she saw it last. She paddled with her feet and hands like a dog, her mouth was full of water and of hair. She had never felt so abased in her life, she seemed crushed like a wafer into the sinking surface of the nether pit. For centuries she wrestled with the sea, sometimes for years and years on end a wave tore at her breath. She never thought of Elizabeth Hammer.

“This is absurd,” she thought, when eternity came to an end, and she had time for consecutive thought. She felt sure her eyes were straining out of their sockets, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard of any one going blind through drowning. Then she cried, and remembered that her head must be above water, if she could cry. She knew then that there was some one on her side in the battle. The sea seemed to hold her loosely now, instead of clutching her throat. She had a moment to consider the matter from the _Caribbeania_’s point of view, and to realise what a pathetic accident had occurred. It dawned upon her that her own hand, wearing her mother’s wedding ring, was just in front of her, holding the cord of a neat white life-buoy. “Caribbeania” painted in black on the life-buoy seemed like a wide mad smile.

“This is absurd,” bubbled the suffragette. “I shall wake up in a minute now. It’s the air makes one sleepy.” And then she thought of something else for ages and ages, and could not find out what she was thinking of, though she tried all the time.

On the promenade deck of the _Caribbeania_ the gardener stood dumb with enormous astonishment. His soul was dumb, his limbs were numb, his mental circulation was stopped. He had a sort of impression that the Atlantic had been suddenly sprinkled with a shower of women, but he could only think of one drop in the shower.

“How red her face was as she went under—and what a dear she is!”

The _Caribbeania_ had flung the two women behind her, and swept upon her way, only for a second had the red face of the suffragette floated like a cherry upon the water beside the black wall of the ship. The fourth officer had flung a life-buoy. Theresa had fainted. There was a black cork-like thing a thousand miles away which the fourth officer said was the head of one of the women. The _Caribbeania_, checked in her scornful attempt to proceed uncaring, was being brought round in a circle. A boat was being lowered.

There was a long silence on the promenade deck.

Presently—“Is it—her?” asked Courtesy in a husky voice by the gardener’s side.

“Of course,” answered the gardener.

Elizabeth Hammer had found the sleep she sought without recourse to drugs.

Everybody watched the distant boat receive the thin small warrior out of the grasp of the sea, and then sweep in wide circles on its search for Elizabeth Hammer.

The dream ended. The boat drew alongside. The suffragette, who had to some extent collected herself, made a characteristic attempt to step unassisted from the boat. It failed. Everybody had come down to the main deck to gratify their curiosity. The suffragette was carried on deck, though she obviously supposed she was walking. She looked somehow out of proportion to the elements with which she had battled.

“You poor lamb,” said Courtesy, looking very dry and motherly beside her. “How do you feel? I’m coming to help you into bed.”

“I am perfectly well, thank you,” said the suffragette.

“Why did you jump overboard if you couldn’t swim?” asked the fourth officer, who was young and believed that there are always reasons for everything.

“It was a mistake,” said the suffragette testily, and was led below by Courtesy and a stewardess.

Tongues were loosened. Everybody reascended to the upper deck to vent their sympathy on Mrs. Paul Rust.

She had remained in her chair, because she felt that any other woman would have retired below after witnessing the suicide of an indispensable part of her travelling equipment. But she could not control her complexion. Her face was blue-white like chalk, beneath her incongruous hair. She would reply to no questions, and the priest, after making several attempts to create for himself a speaking part in the drama, was obliged to abandon his intention as far as she was concerned, for lack of support. He turned to the gardener, whose stunned mind was now regaining consciousness.

“I do indeed congratulate you on the rescue of your—your wife,” said the priest. “Yerce, yerce. As for that other poor soul, I was afraid she might make some attempt of the sort. She was suffering from some internal complaint, and had lost control of herself. Of course she had confided in me—yerce, yerce. I was so fortunate as to be able to say a few words of comfort. Perhaps it was a merciful release. But I hope she was prepared at the last. I hope that in that awful moment she thought upon her sins.”

“I hope so too,” said the gardener. “It is good to die with a happy memory in the heart.”

The general impression was that Elizabeth Hammer had made a mistake, poor thing. She was the subject of much conversation but little conjecture. The big problem of her little mind was not so much buried as never unearthed. She had made a mistake, poor thing. That was her epitaph.

The suffragette was of course a heroine. She was a heroine for the same reason as Elizabeth Hammer was a poor thing—because nobody had analysed her motives. It would have been heresy to suggest that the heroine’s motive had been pure hysteria. She had done a very useless thing in a very clumsy way, but because it had been dangerous she was promoted to the rank of heroine.

“I have been a damn fool,” mourned the suffragette, writhing profanely on her bunk.

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy briskly. “You have been frightfully brave. It was only hard luck that you couldn’t save the woman.”

“But I didn’t try. I had forgotten all about her until this moment.”

“Nonsense,” repeated Courtesy, busy with a hot-water bottle. “You were splendid. We didn’t know you had it in you.”

The suffragette laughed her secret laugh, which she kept hidden beneath her militant exterior. The sort of laughter that flies, not unsuitably, in the very face of tragedy.

“This is a change,” she said.

“What is?”

“To be respected.”

“My dear gal, we all respected you all along. Personally I always told them: ‘Mark my words,’ I said, ‘that gal’s got brains.’”

“Yes, I expect they needed to be told.”

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy.

“For the last five years,” said the suffragette, “I have followed my conscience over rough land. I have been suffragetting industriously all that time. And every one laughed behind their hands at me. Not that I care. But to-day I have been a fool, and they have promoted me to the rank of heroine.”

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re not a fool. And surely you never were a suffragette.”

“I am a militant suffragette,” said the suffragette proudly. “It takes a little courage and no hysteria to march through the city with drunk medical students waiting to knock you down at the next corner; and it takes hysteria and no courage to fall by mistake into the Atlantic.”

“You quaint dear,” said Courtesy, who had not been giving undivided attention to her patient’s remarks. “I do believe you’ve got something in you besides brains after all. There now, you must try and sleep. Pleasant dreams. And if you’re a good gal and wake up with some roses in your cheeks, you shall have your husband to come and have tea with you.”

“No,” said the suffragette. “Don’t call him that.”

Courtesy wrenched the stopper of the hot-water bottle tightly on, as though she were also corking up her curiosity.

As she went upstairs Courtesy discovered that she quite liked the suffragette—from a height. For a person suffering from brains, and from a mystery, and from political fervour, and from lack of physical stamina, the woman was quite surprisingly likeable.

On deck, Courtesy’s friendly feeling was immediately put to the test. Mrs. Paul Rust beckoned her to her side.

“That woman who jumped into the water after Hammer ... she is quite well again, of course?” It was rather difficult for Mrs. Rust to put this question, because the most obvious form was, “How is she?” and that would have been far too human.

“She’ll be all right,” said Courtesy. “And even if she wasn’t she wouldn’t say so. She keeps herself to herself. You’ve torn a button off your coat. Shall I sew it on for you? You’ll miss your maid.”

“I shall not,” said Mrs. Rust. “She was a fool to behave in that way. Nothing but indigestion.”

“You shouldn’t speak hardly of the dead,” said Courtesy, indomitably conventional.

“Stuff and nonsense,” retorted Mrs. Rust, and closed her eyes in order to close the subject. “That young woman...”

“I shall call her the suffragette,” said Courtesy. “She says she is one, and she looks like one.”

“At any rate, the priest tells me she is not married to the ship’s gardener. Is that so?”

“It’s not the priest’s business. Nor mine either.”

“You would drop her like a red-hot coal if she were not married.”

“Time enough to decide that later. I don’t approve of irregularity, of course. Marriage after all is an excellent idea.”

That turned the balance successfully in the suffragette’s favour. “You are wrong,” said Mrs. Rust. “Marriage is an idiotic institution. It must have been invented by a man, I feel sure. It is like using ropes where only a silken thread is necessary.”

“O Lor’,” said Courtesy.

Mrs. Paul Rust decided to reach the truth by interrogating the gardener. She always tried to approach a mystery by the high-road, rightly considering that the high-road is the most untrodden way in these tortuous days.

“Come here,” she called to the gardener, when Courtesy disappeared to see if her patient was asleep.

“Is that young woman who foolishly jumped into the sea—your wife?” she asked.

The gardener had resisted hours of siege on the subject. He was tired. Besides he instinctively understood Mrs. Rust.

“In some ways she is,” he replied, after rather a blank pause.

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“Is that young man who owns a little red hotel in the woods in Hampshire your son?” asked the gardener, suddenly face to face with an opportunity.

“In some ways he is,” replied Mrs. Rust inevitably, without a smile.

The gardener became more and more inspired. “Because if you are his mother, I am his friend, and you may be interested to know that I put your point of view clearly before him when I met him last. He told me that you were unwilling to treat his hotel as an investment, and I said, ‘Why should she?’ I said, ‘You may take it from me that she won’t.’”

“Then you had no business to take my intentions for granted,” retorted Mrs. Rust. “What the dickens did you mean by it?”

“I told him ...” continued the gardener, almost suffocating in the grasp of his own cleverness, “that obviously you could take no notice of so vague a scheme. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I said, would do as you were doing.”

“You had better have minded your own business,” interrupted Mrs. Rust wrathfully. “And you had better mind it now. I shall do exactly what I like with my money, no matter what the other ninety-nine women would do.”

“I was afraid you would be annoyed by my speaking like this,” said the gardener humbly. “It is only natural.”

“Stuff and nonsense. Do you know that the priest is shocked by his suspicions about you and your suffragette?”

“I don’t mind,” said the gardener. “Being a priest, I suppose he is paid to be shocked sometimes. I don’t object to being his butt.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “Then you don’t continue to assert that she is your wife.”

“I can’t be bothered to continue to assert it,” said the gardener.

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

The gardener felt that the reward of the successfully unscrupulous rogue was within his reach. Lying in a good cause is a lovely exercise. The warm feeling of duty begun surged over him. He had justified his presence on board the _Caribbeania_, he had been true to Samuel Rust. The suffragette was not drowned. The blue sea was all round him. There was little else to be desired.

“I shan’t be an unscrupulous rogue a moment longer than I can help,” thought the gardener. “I shall pose as being good next. We will be married on landing.”

Courtesy at that moment returned and said, “Your wife would like you to come and have tea with her.”

“Don’t leave us alone,” begged the gardener of Courtesy as they went below. “I don’t know how to behave to heroines.”

He was obviously at a loss when he reached the suffragette’s cabin. He had never seen her with her hair down, and that upset him from the start. He shook her gently but repeatedly by the hand, and smiled his well-meaning young smile. He did not know what to say, and this was usually a branch of knowledge at which he was proficient.

“Did you know that Captain Walters won the sweep yesterday on the Captain’s number?” he asked.

“Don’t be a donkey,” said Courtesy. There was a genial lack of sting about Courtesy’s discourtesies, which kept her charm intact through all vicissitudes. “She doesn’t want to hear about the sweep. Let her be just now. She’s busy pouring out your tea.”

For in the same spirit as the nurse allows a convalescent child to pour out tea from its own teapot, Courtesy had encouraged the suffragette to officiate. The headquarters of the meal, on a tray, were balanced upon the invalid’s bunk. It was not a treat to the suffragette, who loathed all the details of Woman’s Sphere, but for once she did not proclaim the ungracious truth.

“I’m sorry,” she said nervously. “It’s years since I did anything of this sort. But I don’t know whether you take milk and sugar.”

The gardener distrustfully eyed the hot water with vague aspirations towards tea-dom that dripped into his cup.

“I don’t take either milk or sugar, thank you,” he said, “I like my troubles singly.”

“Naughty boy,” said Courtesy, helping herself generously to cake. “You are beastly rude. And you’re a naughty gal, too, you suffragette. You ought to know how your husband likes his tea.”

“But he’s not my husband,” said the suffragette.

The gardener sat with a bun arrested half-way to his mouth. He had lived a self-contained existence, and had never before had a pose of his dismantled by an alien hand. The experience was most novel. He liked the suffragette more and more because she was unexpected.

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re feverish. You’ll tell me what you’ll be sorry for, in a minute.”

“It’s true; and I’m far from sorry for it,” said the suffragette. “It’s almost too good to be true, but it is. I’m still alone. But because he thought I was a menace to England’s safety, he brought me away—by force.”

“Perfectly true,” corroborated the gardener.

“You babies,” said Courtesy. “It’s lucky for you it’s only me to hear you.”

“It’s not a secret,” said the gardener. “I’ve just been talking about it to Mrs. Rust.”

“And what did she say?” asked Courtesy and the suffragette together.

“She said, ‘Good.’”

At that moment the voice of Mrs. Rust was heard in the passage outside. “Miss Briggs.”

Courtesy ran clumsily from the cabin.

“That button,” said Mrs. Rust. “You said you would.... Myself I never can remember which finger I ought to wear my thimble on, or at what angle the needle should be held....”

Anybody else, arrived within three feet of the suffragette’s door, would have thrown a smile round the corner. But Mrs. Rust did not. She did possess a heart, I am told, but a heart is such a hackneyed thing that she concealed it.

“What do you intend to do when you get to Trinity Islands?” asked the suffragette.

“I don’t know what we shall do,” replied the gardener. “I hate knowing about the future. I am leaving it—not to fate, but to my future self.”

“Don’t you believe in fate?”

“No. I believe in myself. I believe I can do exactly what I like.”

“And what about me? Can’t I do exactly what I like? Do you think you can do exactly what you like with me?” asked the suffragette militantly.

“So far I seem to have succeeded even in that.”

She laughed.

After a pause he said suddenly, “I am a brute to you, you dear, unaccommodating little thing. Somehow my will and my deed have got disconnected in my dealings with you. It is curious that having such good intentions I should still remain the villain of the piece. Yet I meant—if ever I had a woman—to make up to her for all I have seen my mother go through.”

“When you have a woman—perhaps you will ...” said the suffragette. “You must wait and see.”

“Come up and see land,” shouted Courtesy, running in with a semi-buttoned coat in her hand.

The gardener shot up the companion-way, and, behold, the gods had touched the sea, and fairyland had uprisen.

A long vivid island, afire in the ardent sun. Its mountain was golden and eccentric in outline, its little town and fortresses had obviously been built by a neat-fingered baby-god out of its box of bricks. The tiny houses had green shutters and red roofs. There was no doubt that the whole thing had only been created a minute or two before, it was so neat and so unsullied. It was nonsense to call the place by the name of a common liqueur, as the quartermaster did, any one could see it was too sudden and too faery to have a name or to make a liqueur. There was something very exciting in the way it had leapt out of a perfectly empty sea, and in the way it sped over the horizon, as if shrinking from the gaze of the proud _Caribbeania_.

It passed. The gardener had looked at a dream. Courtesy had looked at good dry land. Captain Walters had looked at the monastery from which the liqueur emanated. Mrs. Rust had not looked at all. It is surprising that there should be so much difference in the material collected by such identical instruments as one pair of human eyes and another.

Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. The _Caribbeania_, her appetite for speed checked, began to stalk them with bated breath.

“We’ll be going through the Hair’s Breadth to-morrow at seven,” said the Captain, in a fat, selfcongratulatory voice, as though he had himself created the channel he referred to. “You must all get up early to see her do it.”

There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in the hot square cube that is your cabin. Your ear is tickled by the sound of the activities of food in the saloon outside; you can hear the sea singing in a cheerful, beckoning way past your inadequate porthole. You emerge from your cabin and find men in pyjamas, and ladies in flowered dressing-gowns and (if possible) thick pig-tails, or (if impossible) pleasing head-erections of lace, sitting in rows at sparkling tables, and being fed by stewards with apples and sandwiches. There is scarcely ever any need to remind the voyager by sea about the tiresome superiority that distinguishes the ant.

The Captain, therefore, had a large audience ready for his sleight-of-nerve feat of threading the Hair’s Breadth. He looked very self-conscious on the bridge.

Land climbed slowly down the spangled sloped sea from the horizon. There seemed to be no gap in the quivering line of it. Presently, however, as if it had quivered itself to pieces, the line was shattered. Silver channels appeared beckoning on every side. The _Caribbeania_, blind except to her duty, headed towards the least likely-looking channel of all. The most ignorant passenger on the ship could have told the Captain that he was running into certain destruction. Many longed to take command, and to point out to the Captain his mistake. Like a camel advancing foolhardily upon the needle’s eye the _Caribbeania_ approached. Her speed was slackened, she went on tiptoe, so to speak, as if not to awaken the gods of ill-chance, but there was nothing faltering about her. She thrust her shoulders into the opening.

(It would be waste of time to inform me that in nautical language a ship has no shoulders.)

You could have whispered a confidence to the palm trees on either side—except that you would have been afraid to draw enough breath to do so, for fear of deflecting the ship an inch from her course.

Courtesy was, as usual, bold. She spoke in quite an ordinary voice. “Why, look, there’s a man with hardly anything on, paddling! How killing! He’s the colour of brown paper!”

“You’ll soon be dead in Trinity Islands if you find that killing,” snapped Mrs. Rust. “The Captain evidently doesn’t know his business. We’re at least six feet nearer to this shore than the other.”

The first of Trinity Islands heaved before them quite abruptly when they had traversed the channel. The land seemed to have been petrified in the act of leaping up to meet them. I think the wind had changed upon it at a moment of grotesque contortion. My nurse used always to warn me that this climatic change might fatally occur when my anatomical experiments became more than usually daring.

Green woods had veiled the harsh shapes of the hills. Palms waved their spread hands upon the sky-line. A tangle of green things tumbled to the water’s edge. Far away to the right a faint blessing of pearl-coloured smoke and a few diamonds flung among the velvet slopes of the hills hinted at the watching windows of Port of the West. Shipping clustered confidentially together on either side of the _Caribbeania_, like gossips commenting jealously on the arrival of a princess of their kind. The entering liner shook out little waves like messages to alight on the calm shore.

The whole scene looked too heavy to be painted on the delicate sea. It was absurd to think that that pale opal floor should be trodden by the rusty tramp-steamers, the tall red-and-black sailing ships, the panting tugs, the blunt and bloated coal-tenders laden with compressed niggerhood. There were broadheaded catfish, and groping jellyfish in the water, and they alone looked fashioned from and throughout eternity for the tender element that framed them.

The suffragette, who had risen from her berth, contrary to the advice of Courtesy and of the doctor, looked at the first of Trinity Islands with her soul in her eyes and a compressed adoration in her breast. For there was a silver sea, silver mist enclosing the island, and a silver shore shining through the mist. Silver, of course, is idealised grey—grey with the memory of black and white refined away. Silver is the halo of a snake-soul.

The day was mapped out in so many ways by the different passengers of the _Caribbeania_, that, from their prophetic descriptions, you could hardly recognise it as the same slice out of eternity. There were globe-trotters, eager to trot this tiny section of the globe in hired motor-cars, others anxious to buy souvenirs in Port of the West all day, others nervously determined to call upon the Governor in search of a Vice-regal luncheon, others without imagination desirous of fishing for catfish from the poop, and a very few who dared to avow their intention of spending the day in absorbing cold drinks on the verandah of the King’s Garden Hotel.

In theory the gardener wished to lie upon a chair on the shady side of the deck, with a handkerchief over his face all day. Such a course would have been flattering to his dignity and to his worship of aloofness. In practice his unquenchable energy and that of the suffragette were too much for him. He was vividly stirred by the strange land. The clawlike hands of the palms beckoned him.

Following the suffragette, he bounded on to the first launch as eagerly as though he were not a man of theory. Behind him bounded Courtesy, and behind her Mrs. Paul Rust strove to bound. Courtesy, the gardener, and the suffragette sat squeezed in a row upon a dirty seat in the launch. Mrs. Rust, because sitting in a squeezed row was against her principles, stood. By these means she kept many men-passengers standing in wistful politeness during the whole journey of three miles to the shore.

The bay swept its wide arms farther and farther round them. The palm trees on the promontories on either side of the town looked no longer beckoning, but grasping.

“Oh, isn’t it good!” said the gardener, thrilling so that Courtesy and the suffragette, by reason of compressed propinquity, had to thrill too. He took the suffragette’s hand violently, and waggled it to and fro. “Isn’t it fine ...” and he jumped his feet upon the deck.

“You babies,” said Courtesy. For the suffragette, even though she did not jump her feet, was jumping her eyes, and obviously jumping the heart in her breast. Most unorthodox for a snake.

“We shall run head foremost into the wharf,” said Mrs. Rust in a final voice. “What a pity it is that sailors never know their work.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed the gardener, as if he had been longing to say something of the sort. “Extraordinary. Fine. Won’t it be fine if we run head foremost into the wharf, and sink, to be sealed up in this blue jewel here!”

He tried to pat the bay with his hand.

“Closed in the heart of it,” said the suffragette, “like flies in amber.”

“I shouldn’t like it at all,” sniffed Courtesy.

“Not like flies in amber,” said the gardener. “Because flies spoil the amber.”

“Well, you and I wouldn’t exactly decorate the sea,” remarked the suffragette.

“Look at those cannibals waiting for us,” said Courtesy. “My dears, I’m simply terrified.”

The cannibals received them from the launch with the proverbial eagerness of cannibals. In the first three minutes of their arrival on land the travellers could have bought enough goods to furnish several bazaars had they been so inclined. The suffragette, by tickling the chin of a superb blue and yellow bird, was considered to have tacitly concluded a bargain with the owner as to the possession of it, and there was much discussion before she was disembarrassed of her unwelcome protégé. The gardener bought two walking-sticks in the excitement of the moment, before he remembered that he was devoid of money. The owner of the walking-sticks, however, kindly reminded him of the one-sidedness of the purchase, and he was obliged to borrow from the suffragette.

The town, like a brazen beauty feigning modesty, was withdrawn a little from the wharves. There was a dry-looking grass space with goats as its only gardeners. This the party crossed, and the sensitive plant ducked and dived into its inner remoteness as they passed. The streets in front of them, hot and glaring, pointed to the hills, like fevered fingers pointing to peace which is unattainable.

The main street received them fiercely. The heat was like the blaring of trumpets. The trams were intolerably noisy, clanking, and rattling like a devil’s cavalry charge. Black, shining women, with the faces of bull-dogs—only not so sincere—swung in a slow whirlwind of many petticoats up and down the street, with vivid burdens of fruit piled in ochre-coloured baskets on their heads. Little boys and girls, with their clothes precariously slung on thin brown shoulders, and well aired by an impromptu system of ventilation, ran by the gardener’s side, and reminded him of the necessity of quatties and half-pinnies, even in this paradise of the poor, where sustenance literally falls on your head from every tree in the forest.

“This is exhausting,” said Mrs. Paul Rust, forced by extreme heat into a confession of the obvious. “Policeman, where can we get a cab?”

“Yes, please, missis,” replied the policeman, who was tastefully dressed in white, by way of a contrast to his complexion.

“Nonsense, man,” said Mrs. Rust. “I repeat, where can a cab be found?”

“No, please, missis,” replied the policeman, acutely divining that his first answer had been found wanting.

“You fool,” said Mrs. Rust, another unoriginal comment wrung from her by the heat.

The policeman understood this, and giggled bashfully in a high falsetto.

“Missis wanta buggy?” asked a tobacconist, with a slightly less dense complexion, from his shop door. “Policeman nevah understand missis, he only a niggah.”

The gardener, as ever prone to paint the lily, hurried into the breach. “Ah yes, of course, we white men, we always hang together, eh?”

It was The Moment of that tobacconist’s life. The gardener all unawares had crossed in one lucky stride those bitter channels that divide the brown man from the black, the yellow man from the brown, the white man from the yellow, and the buckra, the man from England, from all the world.

Three buggies suddenly materialised noisily out of Mrs. Rust’s desire. They were all first upon the scene, as far as one could judge from the turmoil of conversation that immediately arose on the subject. The gardener tried to look firm but unbiassed. The three women stood and waited in a state of trance.

The sun was working so hard at his daily task in the sky, that one could almost have pitied him for being called to such a flaming vocation in this flaming weather.

Finally, Mrs. Rust awoke and, entering the nearest buggy, shook it to its very core as she seated herself and said, “King’s Garden Hotel.”

She could hardly have been recognised as the Mrs. Rust of the _Caribbeania_. You could see her pride oozing out in large drops upon her brow. Her hat was on one side, and completely hid her sensational hair, but for one flat wisp, like an interrogation mark inverted, which reached damply to her eyebrow.

The buggy horse, which consisted of a few promiscuous bones, badly sewn up in a second-hand skin, was more than willing to pause until the rest of the party should be seated, and even then seemed desirous of waiting on the chance of picking up yet another fare. It was, however, reminded of its duty by its driver, and turned its drooping nose in the direction of the King’s Garden Hotel.

When they reached that heavenly verandah, they felt for a moment as though they were suffering from delusions. The _Caribbeania_ seemed to have arrived on shore bodily. A long vista of familiar profiles rocked cheek by jowl, nose beyond nose, from end to end of the verandah. There was Theresa, who had made no secret of her intention of accompanying Captain Walters “for a lark” on a visit to a Trinity Island Picture Palace. There was the priest, who had expressed a determination (which nobody had tried to alter) to explore the famous botanical gardens all by himself all day. There was the fourth officer, who had left the _Caribbeania_ inspired by a vision of a long walk to a sandy beach with a bathe at the end of it. There was the captain, who had set out to buy his wife a stuffed alligator as a silver-wedding present.

That cool strip of green rocking-chairs had acted on them all like a spider’s web, with the manager of the King’s Garden sitting in the middle of it, murmuring cool things concerning drinks in an iced voice. Exquisite white linen suits of clothes, the only blot on whose spotlessness was the nigger inside them, ambled up and down the line, like field-marshals reviewing the household cavalry, armed humanely with lemon squashes and whiskies and sodas.

The gardener, Mrs. Rust, the suffragette, and Courtesy enlisted in this force, and sat in a state of torpor only partially dispelled by luncheon, until Mrs. Rust began to look herself again. Her hat straightened and elevated itself to its normal position, and perched upon her hair like a nest of flowers on a ripe hay-field. The curls dried up like parsley after rain.

Little by little the other tourists regained consciousness, and with much show of energy set forth to the nearest buggy stand.

At about five, Courtesy, who was never happy unless she was moving with the crowd, became restless.

“Let’s take a buggy and go back to the wharf,” she suggested.

“We will hire a four-wheeler and return to the pier,” said Mrs. Rust in a contradictory voice.

Buggy or four-wheeler, there was only one sort of vehicle to be found in Port of the West. They manned the nearest conveyance and quibbled not over its title.

“It would be frightful if we missed the boat,” said Courtesy, who always said the thing that everybody else had already thought of saying, but rejected.

For the _Caribbeania_ had begun raking the atmosphere with hoarse calls for its dispersed passengers.

But at the wharf the launch was still fussily collecting the mails.

There was a flame-coloured azalea leaning gorgeously out of the shade of the eaves of a customs house. It was Courtesy’s colour—so obviously hers that Courtesy herself unconsciously answered its call.

“Ou—I say, that colour,” she said, and ceased, because she could not voice the echo that streamed from her heart to the azalea’s. It bent towards her like a torch blown by the wind.

“It’s autumn,” said the gardener. “And that azalea is the only thing that knows it on the island.”

“Good,” commented Mrs. Rust. “All this green greenhouse rubbish has no sense ...” she waved her hands to the palm trees that plaited their fingers over the sky in the background.

“Autumn, I think ...” began the gardener, addressing the azalea, “autumn runs into the year, crying, ‘I’m on fire, I’m on fire ...’ and yet glories all the while; just as I might say, ‘This is passion, this is passion ...’ and so it is passion, and pain as well, but I love it....”

“What a funny thing to say!” said Courtesy. “Do you say that sort of thing by mistake, you quaint boy, or do you know what you’re talking about?”

“My lips say it by mistake,” said the gardener. “But my heart knows it, especially when I see—a thing like that. Otherwise, why should I have become a gardener?”

He looked round for the suffragette to see if she had caught this spark out of his heart, and whether the same torch had set her alight. She was not there.

“Come now, everybody,” said Courtesy. “The launch’ll be starting in a minute.”

“But the suffragette’s not here,” said the gardener.

There was an instant’s blank as heavy as lead.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I can’t wait here all day. If she wants to moon around and miss the boat, let her. I am going.”

She gave a hand each to two niggers, and sprang like a detachable earthquake into the launch.

“I think I ought to wait,” said Courtesy. “She’s a little shaky after yesterday, and you’re such an irresponsible boy, gardener. She may have fainted, while we were looking the other way. Or she may be in that crowd buying souvenirs.”

The gardener looked in the crowd for that well-known round hat with the faded flowers. But he knew that she would never buy a souvenir.

“You jump in, gardener. I’ll wait,” said Courtesy. “Perhaps there’ll be another launch.”

“Lars’ launch, missis, please,” said one of the mariners of the vessel in question.

“Come at once, girl,” said Mrs. Rust’s harsh voice from the stern.

Courtesy wavered.

Mrs. Rust made a great effort. She became extremely red. “Don’t you understand, girl, you must come?” she shouted. “I can’t spare you.... I like you....” She cleared her throat and changed her voice. “Can’t sew ... buttons ... companion ... large salary....”

But the first part of the sentence reached Courtesy’s sympathy. She jumped into the launch.

The gardener stood on the hot wharf, and his heart turned upside down. His plans were stripped from him once more by this disgracefully militant creature who had broken into his life. He hovered on the brink of several thoughts at once.

“The little fool. The dear little thing. The little devil.”

He ran round the customs house. He felt convinced that it was interposing its broad person between him and his suffragette. He could almost see it dodging to hide her from his sight.

“I shall find her in a minute,” he thought. “I’m a lucky man.” He thought that his hopes were pinned to the probability of arriving on the _Caribbeania_ in time.

On the brown grass space there were only the goats. The gardener was astonished not to see the fleeing form of a woman making for the town. Things can be done very quickly if they must. The gardener was at the corner of the main street before he had time to think another thought. He looked back, and saw in one fevered glance the launch only just parting from the shore.

“Have you seen a lady in white with a brown hat?” he asked of a policeman.

“Yes, please, sah.”

“Which way?”

The conversation was from beginning to end above the policeman’s head. But such a very hot buckra man must be humoured. At random the policeman pointed up the main street. The gardener was indeed a man of luck, for that was the right direction.

The main street on a fiery afternoon was as long as eternity, but in certain states of mind a man may bridge eternity in a breath, and not know what he has crossed.

He was on the race-course. He looked back and the launch was approaching the _Caribbeania_ in the far-off bay, like a dwarf panting defiance at a giant.

When he was half-way across the race-course, he saw a white figure surmounted by a brown straw hat, in the Botanical Gardens, in the shade of a banyan tree.