Chapter X: Part I: The Long Splice (1)

I

As the little vedette approached Dinard Cale--I had got quickly through the Customs and come across with the hampers of that morning's fish--an Alec Aird out of a Men's Summer Catalogue waved his hand to George Coverham out of a flea-bag and called out a cheery good morning. It was hardly yet half-past seven, so Alec must have been up betimes. He seized the two bags I pushed ashore and gesticulated to the driver of a nondescript sort of carosse. Then he looked me up and down and grinned.

"Ready for breakfast?"

"I'm ready for some hot water and clean clothes," I replied. "No, it wasn't so bad."

"And is this all the stuff you've brought? I asked you to come and stay with us, not just to drop in to lunch. Well, up you get. I don't suppose you'll see Madge and Jennie till midday. That damned Casino; three a.m. again last night. But it's no good talking to Madge. It always ends in her doing just as she likes. Why, when I was Jennie's age I didn't know there was such a thing as a roulette-table.... I say, have you brought any English tobacco?"

I had not been in Dinard, nor indeed in France at all, since before the war; but the long steep street where the little dark cafes were opening seemed very friendly and familiar. We rumbled past the English Club into the Rue Lavavasseur, and instinctively my head turned to the right. Each short descending street gave the same remembered glimpse, of white casino or hotel at the bottom and the bright emerald beyond. We clattered down to the Place, and then slackened again to the ascent of dark tree-planted avenues. "Gauche--droit, I mean--starboard a couple of points," directed Alec, whose French bears no very great strain; and after ten minutes or so the sound of our wheels suddenly ceased. We were on the soft sandy drive that ended at the gate of Ker Annic.

Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of shining mahogany and cut and bevelled glass, these palms that brush the electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards spread the wide sea--serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay, dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering--the pensive aspect of a sea that has its back to the sun.

"Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere--grilles of ironwork over the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron passementerie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping Beauties--confound those rotten late hours for that kid----"

I assured him that I had no wish to go to bed.

"Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might give me that tobacco----"

And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me to my toilet.

The pergola in which I found him three quarters of an hour later was at the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor, over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that crept like a net over us whenever we moved. A _bonne_ followed me with coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat untwinkling sea.

We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly, applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have been my fancy or the force of former associations, but already I was conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French--the day's provisions were arriving.

Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now."

"Anything you like; what's on?"

"These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters? 'Debout les Athletes'--'Sons of the Patrie'--they've been all over the place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud--haven't seen him--in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just time for the tram. Come along----"

The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand Stand at one end of it, and already _les athletes_ had got down to work. There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters, leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the outer track or resting in twos and threes on the grass. Several of them wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No Briton would have dared to display such physical naivete. They might have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to the death.

We watched them for an hour, and then the whooping of that horrible little tram was heard in the distance. It hurtled up to the Halte, fouling the air with the smoke of the dust and slate and slack that served it for coal, and we sat with our backs to the engine and took what care of our flannels we might.

The sluggards had descended by the time we reached the house again. Among the harlequin shadows of the pergola Madge advanced to me with both hands outstretched.

"Monsieur! Sois le bienvenu!" Then, standing back to look at me, "What nice flannels, George! Some of the Frenchmen here, quite nice men, go about in the most extraordinary cheesecloth arrangements, and as for their shoes----! Yes, I think I can be seen with you. You can take me shopping this afternoon. I saw it in a window yesterday but hadn't time to go in. ('It's' a hat, if you must know, Alec.) And this is Jennie, in case she's grown so much you don't remember her."

There was a time when I used to kiss little Jennie Aird, but I should not have dared to kiss the young woman who stood before me now. Take-aboutable, by Jove!... Jennie had her father's colouring, golden-red hair over a tea-rose-petal complexion lightly freckled; and if her eyebrows were faint, that somehow merely seemed to enhance the steady clear pebble-grey of the gaze beneath. She was six inches taller than her mother, and whether it was the smallness of her short-featured face that made full her beautiful throat, or whether it was the other way round, I will not attempt to say. Nor do I remember whether her hair was up or down that day. I have an idea that at that time it was sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Her gesture as she offered me her hand had the proper condescension of such a creature for a battered old piece of goods life myself. I wondered whether I ought to call her Miss Aird. These things come over one with rather a shock sometimes.

We lunched in a shining little salon, the exact centre of which, whether you measured sideways, lengthwise or up-and-down, was occupied by an enormous gilt Ganymede and Eagle lamp slung by heavy chains from the ceiling--for the lighting was either oil or candles at Ker Annic. Then back to the pergola for coffee. The tide had receded, and the rocks and the stakes that marked the channels stuck up everywhere menacingly--the Fort, Les Herbiers, Cezembre. The warm air was laden with the smell of genets, the sky was brightly blue over our white lattice. I saw Alec preparing to doze.

"Well, what about Dinard?" I said to Madge.

"Sure you wouldn't rather follow Alec's example? Very well, we'll drop Jennie at the tennis-place and you and I'll go off on the prowl. I'll be ready in five minutes. Jennie!"

She ran up to the house, and I waited for her on the sandy drive.

We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined "It" was near the Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour while Alec's money took wing.

"Mais tiens, Madame"--the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered, butterflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under the diablerie--"pose comme ca, en effet sur l'oreille--Claire, la voile verte--legerment--oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself, as unabashed as the attitudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On dirait un sourire sur la tete de Madame!"

So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and we sought the teashop and Jennie.

All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the glass counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters, their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a hurried dejeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck, flannels hitched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the whirl of talk.

"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on grass----"

"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and seventh-tenths----"

"American----"

"I bet you----"

"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on grass----"

"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for five-thirty, remember----"

"But I tell you this chap Arnaud----"

"Do let me get you one of those strawberry things, Mrs Aird----"

"My brother saw him--he just threw off his coat and waistcoat and ran as he was----"

"Mademoiselle, trois thes, s'il vous plait----"

I spoke in Madge's ear.

"She's a very beautiful child."

"Jennie?" said proud Madge. "Rather a young queen, isn't she? But Alec's perfectly absurd about her. Thinks young people to-day are the same as we were. She shall have the best time I can give her."

"Any----?" I looked the question.

"No. Quite asleep. She's perfectly happy dancing and dreaming and talking sport with these boys."

"Who are they?"

She told me. She knew half Dinard, and the printed Visitors' List gave her the rest.

"Well, well," was all I found to say, as I looked at Jennie again.

For while woman's beauty is coeval with Time itself, you have only your own allotted portion of it. The loveliness that comes too early or too late is no more your affair than the dawns before your time, the sunsets after you are gone. Madge at the midday of her life was still within my reach at my post-meridian, but Jennie would bloom like a rosy daybreak when my own evening star appeared. Young Rugby, young Charterhouse, would write his vers-libre to that small head, sweet throat and the red-gold of her hair.... But I hardly know why I write all this. I am only trying to show how sorely I had needed a change and how grateful I was now that it had come. I knew that I was welcome to stay with the Airds as long as I pleased. It didn't matter if I didn't write another book for ten years, it didn't greatly matter if I never wrote another. I didn't want to write. That ethereal sea, that multi-coloured plage, the genet-scented air, the feeling that all about me were people who knew what they could not do and wasted no time in attempting to do it--ah, they live their lives from the beginning and end them at the end in that fair and unperplexed land of northern France.

II

Both by Alec and Madge, Jennie's education was discussed before me with complete freedom.

"Stuff and nonsense!" Madge would roundly declare.

"Look at those two Beverley girls!"

"Very nice girls, I should have thought," Alec would growl.

"Yes, and who's ever going to marry them? Nobody as far as I can see. That's Vi Beverley's fault. She's let them sit in one another's pockets, and have their own silly family jargon, and think that the rest of the world's a cinema just to amuse them, till they don't know how to talk to a stranger without being rude. They positively freeze any young man who goes near them, and when they do go away it's to cousins. Family affection's all very well in its place, but you can have too much of it. Jennie shall take people as they are. If she does miss an hour's sleep once in a while she can stay in bed all next day if she wants."

"Better teach her baccarat and have done with it."

"Well, she needn't faint when it's mentioned. This is 1920. If ever those Beverley girls marry it will be one another."

"If she begins to think of marrying in another four or five years----"

"She's not going to sit on the arm of your chair for five years while you read the _Paris Daily Mail_.... Anyway, about to-night's party----"

Then, on the way to the Stade or the Club, I should have Alec's view of the matter.

"When we were kids, if we were allowed to stop up once a year for a pantomime ... beastly mixed sort of place like this too! Madge doesn't know half that goes on. Why, before I'd been here three days one of the waiters at the Grand had the infernal neck to come up to me and whisper----"

I broke into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a waiter whispering alluring suggestions to Alec Aird of all people was altogether too much for me.

"And what did you say?" I asked him.

"Say?" said Alec grimly. "When I said 'Frog' he jumped, I promise you that!... And mark you, these French fellows look after their own women all right--got their hands on their elbows all the time. It's only our confounded ideas of freedom----"

"But there's no harm in to-night's party----"

"Oh, that's all right. That's at home. We can turn 'em out at ten o'clock, and be in bed in reasonable time. It's that damned Casino I bar----"

And so on. Early to bed and a nap after lunch certainly suited Alec. I have seen once-fine athletes settle down like this before.

I had been at Ker Annic some days, when about the last thing I expected had happened to me. I have just told you how little I cared whether I ever wrote another book or not. Well, that morning I had remained in my room after coffee and rolls to write a couple of necessary letters. These finished, I had sat gazing out of the window at nothing in particular, lazily content with the beauty of the morning. Then, suddenly and without the least premeditation, I had taken a fresh sheet of paper and had begun to make detached and random notes. These had presently strung themselves together, and by and by a phrase had sprung up of itself....

Whereupon, in the very moment of my despairing of ever writing again, I had realised that my next novel was stirring within me.

Now let me tell you the part that Jennie Aird played in this.

I frankly admit that the writers of my own generation have sometimes been a little smug and make-believe about young girlhood. We have seen a lovely thing, and perhaps have let its mere loveliness run away with us, to the loss of what I believe is nowadays called "contact." We have not seen the butterfly's anatomy for the pretty bloom of its wing. Nevertheless, I cannot see that the eager young morphologists who are succeeding us have so very much to teach us after all. To read some of these you would think that the whole moving mystery had been disposed of when they had said that a young girl became conscious, shy, and had a talk with her mother. If it must be anatomy or bloom, I think I shall go on preferring the bloom. I have no wish to exchange the eyes in my head for that improved apparatus that turns a woman's hand that is meant to be stooped over into a shadowy bundle of metacarpal bones.

At the same time I do not take it for granted that youth is necessarily the happiest season of our lives. I remember my own youth too well for that. Emotionally, I am aware, it is all over the shop. It will giggle in church or make a heartbreak out of nothing, indifferently and with tragical facility. It is exploring the new-found marvels within itself against the day when its eyes shall open to the miracle of another. That, at any rate, and as nearly as I can express it, was the state of Madge Aird's sleeping beauty of a daughter on the evening of the party of which Madge and Alec had spoken.

It was a ravishing evening of late light over an opal sea. The same dusk that turned the begonias velvety-black in their beds made luminous the pale hydrangeas, until they resembled the glimmering whites and mauves of the frocks that moved in and out among them. The villa was lighted up like a paper lantern, and the moving couples inside made ceaselessly wavering shadows across the lawn. Over the ragged bay the phares winked in and out, and beyond the ilex and chestnut a faint luminosity trembled--the corona of Dinard lighting up for the night.

They danced in and out between the wide hall and the salon where the gilded Ganymede struggled with the Eagle--youngsters in their first dinner-jackets, sylphs with their plaits swinging about their softly-browned napes, their elders mingling among them or watching them from the walls. Madge, in a frock that seemed to be held up singly and solely by her presence of mind, played fox-trots. Alec was busy "buttling" in the little recess where a scratch supper had been set out. The air was filled with the light talk in French and English, throbbed with the rhythm of the foxtrotting piano.

For half an hour or so I made myself agreeable to a number of ladies of whose names I had not the faintest idea; then, with a sense of duty done, I turned my back on the pretty scene and strolled into the garden. On the whole I was pleased with my day. That was what I had wanted--the solace and security of being at work again. Nothing world-shaking or tremendous; I simply wanted to get on with the unpretentious job that was mine, and incidentally to be tolerably well-paid for it. That, when all was said, was the way of wisdom, the kind of thing men very properly get knighthoods for and had their portraits hung up in Clubs. It seemed to me that I had been through a very evil time, and that now that I was rid of the weight of it life was worth living again. I paced the paths of the gay artificial little garden, my thoughts on all manner of pleasant times to come.

Near the end of the house grew an auracaria, forbidding and black. As I moved towards it I noticed a dim white shape beneath it. I was turning away again (for at a party like that no unaccompanied bachelor has any title to the dimmer corners) when the figure moved towards me. It was Jennie Aird--alone.

"Hallo, why aren't you dancing?" I asked. I had already watched her dance four dances in succession with the same partner--young Kingston I believe it was.

She made a quick little grimace, but did not reply.

"This is rather a nice party," I remarked.

To this she did reply. "It's a beastly party, and I hate it."

I drew certain conclusions; but "Oh?" I said. "What's the matter with it? I thought it rather fun."

"Everything's beastly, and I wish we were back in London," she snapped.

"Anything the matter, Jennie?"

"Oh, how I do wish people wouldn't ask one what's the matter!"

"Then come for a turn and I won't."

She put her hand indifferently on my arm. She was nearly as tall as I, and I noticed as we passed the windows that, that night at any rate, her red-gold plait had been taken up and was closely swathed about her nape.

Of course young Kingsley or young somebody else had said something or done something, or hadn't said or done anything, or if he had had done it at the wrong moment or in the wrong way or had otherwise conjured up the shade of tragedy. Therefore, as there are occasions when tact may take the form of talking about one's self, I talked to Jennie about myself as we skirted the garden.

"Do you know, something rather exciting happened to me this morning," I remarked.

She showed no great interest, but asked me what it was.

"It mayn't sound much to you, but it interests me. I think I've started a new book."

"I wish I'd something to do," was the extent of her congratulation.

"What would you like to do?"

"Oh, anything. I shouldn't care what it was. Anything's better than this."

"Than this jolly party?"

"Yes. Or else I wish I'd been born a man. They get all the chances."

I reflected that one man, somewhere in the world, would have a very enviable chance, but kept my thought to myself. "Been having a row with somebody?" I asked.

"No," she answered, I have no doubt entirely untruthfully. "I'm just fed up. I wish I could have nursed in the war or something, but I was too young. Or I wish I could write like you. But if I told father I wanted to earn my own living he wouldn't hear of it, and mother's one idea is to dress me up and show me off and marry me to somebody. They don't know how sick I am of it."

I glanced at her as we passed the lighted windows again. That soft red sill of her lower lip was level, and just a shade short for the upper member of her mouth's sweet portal, so that the pearls within were negligently guarded. Temper and discontent were in her pebble-grey eyes. She gave her head an impatient toss, as if to shake off the thought of the boisterous young cadets and crammer's-pups within. In a day she seemed to have outgrown them, to have lengthened her mind as she lengthened her frocks--if young women do lengthen their frocks nowadays. She wanted to nurse, to write, to be a student or some personage's secretary, to say to the dingy world, "Here I am--use me and don't spare me," in the very moment when I and such as I, disillusioned and worn, were sighing "Enough--release me--or if that may not be, give me but once more, once more that first dawning joy!"

"I don't want to get married," she sulked. "Ever. Mother may laugh, but I won't. It would have been different in the war. I love all those darling boys who were killed. But these schoolboys are all the same.... You don't want a secretary for your new book, do you?"

It may have been my imagination, but I am not sure that there did not stir in my memory some faint echo, of a woman sitting under a murky dome as she waited for her _Manuel de Repertoire Bibliographique Universel_. I know these secretaries and their wiles, and if my answer had had twenty syllables instead of one I should have meant them all.

"No," I said.

We had reached the wrought-iron gates at the beginning of the sandy drive. Three or four cars were parked there, and apparently somebody or other was leaving early, for a chauffeur had just switched on the head-lights of a heavy touring-car that shook the ground with its muttering. Judging from the power of the lights it was the car of one of Madge's French friends, for no English car carries shafts so blinding as those twin beams that clove the darkness. They made the windows of the house seem a dull expiring turnip-lantern. Their blaze lighted up every pebble, every blade of grass, defined the shadows of blade on blade. Out of the fumy darkness insects dropped, stunned with light, and moved feebly on the path. I drew Jennie behind the glare, and as I did so one of the English servant maids came up to me.

"A gentleman wishes to speak to you, sir," she said.

"To me? What gentleman? Where?"

"A French gentleman, sir. A M'seer Arnaud his name is."

"Arnaud? I don't know any Arnaud. Are you sure he asked for me and not for Mr Aird?"

"It was Sir George Coverham he asked for, sir."

"Well, where is he?"

"Here--at least he was a moment ago----"

"Arnaud?" I mused. "Do you know a M'sieur Arnaud, Jennie?"

As I turned to her I saw her in that false illumination with curious distinctness. The soft upward glow from the path reminded one of a photographer's manipulation of his tissue-paper screens. She stood there semi-footlighted--smooth brows, low glint of her hair, the caught-up upper lip that showed the pearls, her steady gaze....

Ah, her gaze! What was this, that made me for a moment unable to remove my own eyes from her face? At what object beyond the car was she so fixedly looking? Why had her bosom risen? Why, as if at some "Open, Sesame!" did that betraying upper lip offer, not two, but all the pearls within?

My eyes followed hers....

As they did so sounds of talk and laughter and farewells drew near from the house. The departing guests were upon us.

But I had seen. If only for an instant before it retreated swiftly into the shadows again, I had seen. Gazing at her as steadily as she had gazed at him, the vision of a young man's face had momentarily appeared.

Then the babble broke out about us.

"Thank you a thousand times, chere Madame----"

"Delicieuse----"

"Merci, M'sieu' Air-r-r-rd----"

"Better have the rug round you----"

"Where's Jennie? Ah, here she is----"

"A demain, a onze heures----"

"Good-bye----"

"Good-bye, Sair-r-r George----"

But I still saw that face haunting the transparent gloom. A beret cap had surmounted it, a blouse _en grosse toile_ had clothed the shoulders below. Monsieur Arnaud, if it was he, was dressed as an _ouvrier_ or a sailor dresses.

And he was young, sunbrowned, grave, beautiful.

The car backed and turned. There was a grating as the clutch was slipped in, and then the engine dropped to a steady purr. The wrought-iron gates started out in the glare, the red tail-lights diminished. I was dimly aware that Madge said something to me, but I remained motionless where I stood. I came to myself to find myself alone.

Sunbrowned, grave, beautiful, young!

And he called himself Arnaud!

I have told you of that list of names with which his diary began. Arnaud was not among them. But Arnold was. He had simply Gallicised it, and as Arnaud he was seeking me.

Then I felt my sleeve timidly touched. His voice came from behind me, a voice with a charming, uncertain timbre.

"George--I say, George--who was that?"

III

I will make a shameful confession. My heart had sunk like lead. I had wanted a holiday from him. That very morning I had thought I had secured it, had blithely planned my new and cheerful work.

And here he was, with his hand on my sleeve.

He repeated his words in a whisper. "George, who was that?"

Slowly I turned. "It _is_ you?"

"Yes."

"How did you know I was here?"

"I saw your name in the Visitors' List."

"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 passed 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 passed 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 ass. 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 passage 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 passport 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 noble 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 passed him by as the publisher's belief in him had passed him by--as, it began to appear to me, all else in life must pass 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 compassion.

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?"

His answer was hardly audible. "Yes, it was then."

"How much?"

"The whole lot."

"At one go you dropped from twenty-nine to--what is it now? Twenty?"

"Nineteen or twenty. I don't know. Yes."

"Then nothing's happened since then?"

"No--at least I'm not quite sure."

"Not sure?"

"No. I honestly don't know. There's been a gap somewhere, something I ought to have come to again, but that somehow I've missed altogether. I simply can't account for it."

"Explain, Derry."

He seemed hardly to trust his voice. "It's the queerest thing of all, but I'll swear it on a Bible if you like. You know what it was I funked more than anything--all those beastly rotten things going to happen all over again.... Don't let's talk about them. They were all the time like a nightmare to me, that I was drawing nearer and nearer to all the time. I tell you, I'd decided to put myself out rather than wallow through all that again.... Well, I can only tell you I've absolutely skipped it. On my honour I have. It's the most unaccountable thing, but----" He choked a little.

"But," I said, deeply pondering, "is it possible to skip a step--_any_ step?"

"I should have said not," he replied. "Beats me altogether. I started on a dead straight course back, and I fancied I should have to take my fences as I came to them. But this kink's come, and somehow I've picked up the thread again clear on the other side of it."

I pondered more gravely still. "Wait a bit. It all happened that Sunday night, kink and all?"

"Yes."

"That was the night you left my place with Julia Oliphant, said good-bye to her at Waterloo, and went on to Trenchard's? Did you stick to that programme?"

"Yes."

("And so," something seemed positively to shout within me, "much good you've done yourself, Julia Oliphant! Much good you're still plotting! That gap that he's skipped altogether--that's precisely where you're setting the man-traps for him, you and your chiffons and your brown charmeuse and your new willow-leaf shoes! You'd better forget Peggy and her garters and get back into your nice quiet tea-gowns again!")

But aloud I resumed: "Then, if nothing's happened since that night, that means that you're now stable--stationary?"

His reply gave me a queer shock. It was in the last word that the shock lay. "As far as I can make out, sir."

"So you haven't got to move on from pillar to post and one lodging to another?"

"I've been at St Briac for ten days. And that isn't all," he continued earnestly. "I can't say for certain, and perhaps it's too soon to talk about it. So this is touching wood. But I've got a sort of feeling that if I'm careful and live perfectly quietly--no excitement and going to bed early, you know--I might be able to stick just like this for a long time. I know no more about that gap than you do, but it seems to have cleared the air like a thunderstorm. And when I tell you that I really intended to put myself out ... oh, how thankful...." But again he checked himself.

And I too found myself gulping to think that I had so recently wanted to wash my hands of him. Be rid of him? I knew now that not only should I never be rid of him, but that never again should I want to. Charming, innocent, beautiful and grave! I cannot tell you, for I do not know, what mysterious spiritual thing Julia Oliphant had actually wrought upon him. I only knew that all that he had so greatly dreaded she had taken upon herself, and that whatever her portion thenceforward was, his was complete absolution. "One for the Lord, the other for Azazel"; out into the wilderness she, the scapegoat, must go; but on him the smell of that fiercest fire of all had not so much as passed.... And I realised in that moment that thenceforward he was my charge--yes, my son had I had one. Must he stay in France? Then I must stay with him. Must he wander? Then I must wander too. For the rest of his unstable life I must be his staff and support.

"But I say, sir," he said shyly presently, "about why I dug you out to-night. I hope you'll say no straight away if you think it's fearful cheek, but the fact is I must have some more colours, and--well, I've got a little money in London, but I can't get at it just for the moment. So I really came to ask you if you could lend me five hundred francs."

This was strange. I shot a swift glance at him as he lay, a rich dark patch of blouse and corduroys at my side.

"Where," I asked him as steadily as I could, "is your money in London?"

"I have a little there," he said awkwardly.

"How much?"

"I don't quite know, but it's certainly more than five hundred francs."

"Where did it come from?"

Through the clear dark I saw his dusky flush. "I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have asked you. Never mind."

"Derry," I said, greatly moved, "tell me: are you remembering things quite properly? You surely haven't forgotten that _I_ have your money?"

"Eh?" he said. The next moment he had tried to cover his quick confusion. "Eh? Why, of course. What am I thinking of? It did slip my memory just for the moment; stupid! I'd got it mixed up somehow with Julia Oliphant. I was going to write to her. I remember, of course. You sold my furniture. You did sell it, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"How much did it fetch?"

This time it was my turn to evade. "Well, as you say, more than five hundred francs. I--I haven't totted it up yet. I came away in rather a hurry. But there's quite a lot, and I can let you have all you want to-morrow."

"Then that's all right," he said cheerfully.

But I found it anything but all right. On the contrary, it was profoundly disturbing. If he could forget that he had authorised me to sell that black oak furniture of his he could forget more vital matters. Yet he had remembered the furniture when I had urged him.

"Tell me," I said more quietly, "as simply as you can, exactly what you do and what you don't remember."

"I only forgot it for a moment," he stammered.

"But you did forget it. Can you explain it?"

I felt that his mind laboured, struggled; but I was hardly prepared for what came next.

"Just let me think for a minute. I want to get to the bottom of it too. It's a thing I've been watching most carefully, and I give you my word I remembered everything absolutely clearly up to a couple of hours ago. I knew all about that furniture when I came to that place for you, because as I walked along I was trying to work out how much it ought to amount to. In fact I wasn't coming to borrow at all, but just to ask you for something on account. Let me think. I got there at exactly at quarter to ten----"

His fingers were playing with the wild flowers on the earth-wall. In and out through the whispering poplars the stars peeped. Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, rose and fell the Light. I fell to counting the intervals as I waited for his reply. Diamond, emerald, ruby, twinkled the lights at sea....

Then suddenly he sat up and took a deep breath. I saw his radiant smile. He faced me with the starlight in his eyes.

"George," he said, "_who was that with you in the garden_?"

IV

For some seconds the stars seemed to go out of the sky. I seemed to be, not sitting with him on that earth-wall by Le Port gap, but to be standing again in the drive of Ker Annic, with the glare of a touring-car thrown up from the ground and Jennie Aird by my side. I seemed to see again her parted lips, to hear that soft intake of her breath. And his own face seemed to hang again like a beautiful mask suspended in the glow.

And when I had descended from my room again I had found him lurking in the bushes, gazing into the lighted house.

Stars in the night above us! Was that to be the next thing to happen?

Had it happened?

Evidently something had happened, and had happened during the past two hours.

Then, as I strove to grasp the immense possibility, a deep and hapless yearning flooded my heart. The loveliness, the loveliness of it had it been possible! She, with the dreams still unrubbed from her opening eyes, he a December primrose peeping up anew out of the roots of his wrecked and fruitless years--they would have been matchlessly coupled. Had he in truth been my son I could have desired no more for him than this.

Yet why do I say "had it been possible"? Possible or impossible, something, whether more beautiful or fatal I could not say, had in fact happened. Whether to her or not, it had happened to him. How else explain that treacherous little slip about his money? Up to then his memory had not failed him. Reticence he had shown, a youthful unwillingness to talk about himself, but not in order to conceal an impaired faculty. His account of his movements during the past month had been slight, but complete enough. One gap only--the Julia gap--he found unaccountable, and that was no enigma to me.

But was he now on the eve of yet another transformation? Had one look of eyes into eyes hastened him to another stage? Absolved he was; was he now to be, not merely absolved, but confirmed in all the beauty and liberty of that absolution? Consider it as I tried to consider it, sitting on that thymy earth-wall while Frehel, like a ghostly clock, threw those wavering false dawns across the night.

Julia, by her ruthless act, had But Jennie had now seen him
despoiled him of ten years as Julia had seen him more
of his life. than twenty years ago.

That act of hers constituted the But should another gap now come
gap that, try as he would, his heart would understand.
he could not account for.

In some dark and hidden way He was now beautiful, grave,
Julia had taken upon herself innocent and unafraid.
his burden of sin.

Julia, darkly machinating, was But Jennie, as spotless as he,
counting on waylaying him knew nothing of machination.
again, and yet again.

"He _shall_ know what love is; If his question to me meant
why should he get nothing anything, a wonder had happened
out of his life?" Julia had to him not two hours ago.
passionately cried.

On his former pilgrimage he But was Love the wonder now?
had not known Love.

If so, it was Julia's gift when And it was a gift to Jennie.
she had restored his innocence
to him.

But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie's father. He was, he still remained, the man who had written _The Hands of Esau_ and _An Ape in Hell_, the man for whom I had hunted in questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame of his accumulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird?

Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do?

His voice sounded again softly by my side.

"You haven't told me who that was with you in the garden," he said.

"Let's finish with the other things first," I answered.

"Oh, I'm tired of talking about myself, sir."

"That's one of them. Why do you sometimes call me 'sir' and sometimes 'George'?"

He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?"

"Didn't you know?"

I couldn't catch his reply.

"When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?"

"Of course."

"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of _The Hands of Esau_?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.)

"I think so."

"Will you try?"

"Shall you know if I'm right?"

"Near enough for the purpose, I think."

He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite. _The Hands of Esau_ had been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight--a space of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running.