That night, after dinner, leaving the Deemster and the Governor at
the table, discussing insular subjects (a constitutional change which
was then being mooted), Victor took Fenella out on to the piazza,
(his mother had called it so), the uncovered wooden terrace which
overlooked the coast.
He was in a dark blue jacket suit, not yet having possessed evening
wear, but she was in a gauzy light dress with satin slippers, and her
bronze-brown hair was curled about her face in bewitching ringlets.
The evening was very quiet, almost breathless, with hardly a leaf
stirring. The revolving light in the lighthouse on the Point of Ayre
(seven miles away on its neck of land covered by a wilderness of
white stones) was answering to the far-off gleam of the light on the
Mull of Galloway, while the sky to the west was a slumberous red, as
if the night were dreaming of the departed day.
They had not yet recovered from their experience in the glen, and,
sitting out there in the moonlight (for the moon had just sailed
through a rack of cloud), they were still speaking involuntarily, and
then laughing nervously at nothing--nothing but that tingling sense
of sex which made them afraid of each other, that mysterious call of
man to maid which, when it first comes, is as pure as an angel's
whisper.
"What a wonderful day it has been!" she said,
"The most wonderful day I have ever known," he answered.
"And what a wonderful home you have here," she said.
"Haven't we?" he replied. And then he told her that over there in
the dark lay Ireland, and over there Scotland, and over there
England, and straight ahead was Norway and the North Pole.
That caught them up into the zone of great things, the eternities,
the vast darkness out of which the generations come and towards which
they go; and, having found his voice at last, he began to tell her
how the island came to be peopled by its present race.
This was the very scene of the Norse invasion--the Vikings from
Iceland having landed on this spot a thousand years ago. When the
old sea king (his name was Orry) came ashore at the Lhen (it was on a
starlight night like this) the native inhabitants of Man had gone
down to challenge him. "Where do you come from?" they had cried, and
then, pointing to the milky way, he had answered, "That's the road to
my country." But the native people had fought him to throw him back
into the sea--yes, men and women, too, they say. This very ground
between them and the coast had been the battlefield, and it must
still be full of the dead who had died that day.
"What a wonderful story!" she said.
"Isn't it?"
"The women fought too, you say?"
"Thousands of them, side by side with their men, and they were the
mothers of the Manxmen of to-day."
"How glorious! How perfectly glorious!"
And then, clasping her hands about her knee, and looking steadfastly
into the dark of the night, she, on her part, told him something. It
was about a great new movement which was beginning in England for a
change in the condition of women. Oh, it was wonderful! Miss
Clough, the Principal, and all the girls at Newnham were ablaze with
it, and it was going to sweep through the world. In the past the
attitude towards women of literature, law, even religion, had been so
unfair, so cruel. She could cry to think of it--the long martyrdom
of woman through all the ages.
"Do you know," she said, "I think a good deal of the Bible itself is
very wicked towards women .... That's shocking, isn't it?"
"Oh, no, no," said Victor--he was struggling to follow her, and not
finding it easy.
"But all that will be changed some day," said Fenella.
It might require some terrible world-trouble to change it, some
cataclysm, some war, perhaps (she didn't know what), but it _would_
be changed--she was sure it would. And then, when woman took her
rightful place beside man, as his equal, his comrade, his other self,
they would see what would happen.
"What?"
All the old laws, so far as they concerned the sexes (and which of
them didn't?) would have to be made afresh, and all the old tales
about men and women (and which of them were not?) would have to be
re-told.
"The laws made afresh, you say?"
"Yes, and some of the judges, too, perhaps."
"And all the old tales re-told?"
"Every one of them, and then they will be new ones, because woman
will have a new and far worthier place in them."
They had left the stained-glass door to the dining-room ajar, and at
a pause in Fenella's story they heard the voice of the Governor, in
conversation with the Deemster on the constitutional question, saying,
"Well, well, old friend, I don't suppose either the millennium will
dawn or the deluge come whether the Keys are reformed or not."
That led Victor to ask Fenella what her father thought of her
opinions.
"Oh well," she said, "he doesn't agree. But then .... (her voice was
coming with a laugh from her throat now) I don't quite approve of
father."
This broke the spell of their serious talk, and he asked if she would
like to go down to an ancient church on the seaward boundary of the
old battlefield--it was a ruin and looked wonderful in the moonlight.
She said she would love to, and, slipping indoors to make ready, she
came back in a moment with a silk handkerchief about her head, which
made her face intoxicating to the boy who was waiting for it, and
feeling for the first time the thrilling, quivering call of body and
soul that is the secret of the continued race. So off they went
together with a rhythmic stride, down the sandy road to the shore--he
bareheaded, and she in her white dress and the satin slippers in
which her footsteps made no noise.
The ruined church was on a lonesome spot on the edge of the sea, with
the sea's moan always over it, and the waves thundering in the dark
through the cavernous rocks beneath.
Fenella bore herself bravely until they reached the roofless chancel,
where an elm tree grew, and the moonlight, now coming and going among
the moving clouds, was playing upon the tomb of some old churchman
whose unearthed bones the antiquaries had lately covered with a stone
and surrounded by an iron railing, and then she clutched at Victor's
arm, held on tightly and trembled like a child.
That restored the balance of things a little, and going home (it was
his turn to hold on now) he could not help chaffing her on her
feminine fear. Was that one of the old stories that would have to be
re-told .... when the great world-change came, the great cataclysm?
"Oh, that? Well, of course .... (he believed she was blushing,
though in the darkness he could not see) women may not have the
strength and courage of men--the physical courage, I mean...."
"Only physical?" he asked.
She stammered again, and said that naturally men would always be men
and women, women.
"You don't want that altered, do you?" she said.
"Oh no, not I, not a bit," said Victor, and then there was more
laughter (rather tremulous laughter now) and less talking for the
next five minutes.
They had got back to the piazza by this time, and knowing that her
face was in the shaft of light that came through the glass door from
the dining-room, Fenella turned quickly and shot away upstairs.
For the first time in his life Victor did not sleep until after three
o'clock next morning. He saw the moonlight creep across the
cocoa-nut matting on his bedroom floor and heard the clock on the
staircase landing strike every hour from eleven to three.
Now that he was alone he was feeling degraded and ashamed. Here was
this splendid girl touching life at its core, dealing with the great
things, the everlasting things, attuning her heart to the future and
the big eternal problems .... while he!
But under all the self-reproach there was something joyous too,
something delicious, something that made him hot and dizzy and would
not let him sleep, because a blessed hymn of praise was singing
within, and it was so wonderful to be alive.
He could have kicked himself next morning when he awoke late, and
found the broad sunshine in his bedroom, and heard from Janet that
Fenella had been up two hours and all over the stables and the
plantation.
After breakfast (downstairs for him this time) the Governor's big
blue landau, with two fine Irish bays, driven by an English coachman,
came sweeping round to the front and he went out in the morning
sunshine, with the Deemster and Janet, to see their guests away.
The Governor shook hands with him warmly, but Fenella (who was
wearing a coat and some kind of transparent green scarf about her
neck, and thanked the Deemster and kissed Janet as she was stepping
into the carriage) looked another way when she was saying good-bye to
him.
He slammed the door to, and stepped back, and the carriage started,
and (while the other two went indoors) he stood and looked after it
as it went winding down the drive, amid the awakened clamour of the
rooks, until it came to the turn where the trees were to hide it, and
then Fenella faced round and waved a hand to him. At the next moment
the carriage had gone--and then the sun went out, and the world was
dead.
That night after dinner Victor told his father that he would like to
go into the Attorney-General's office, as a first step towards taking
up the profession of the law.
"Good--very good," said the Deemster.