AN INSTANT FREE
I
Mr. Fane-Herbert decided to be in London with the spring. Ibble’s and
Ordith’s were to remain independent, an arrangement of which both he
and Nick Ordith saw the advantages, and which Aggett alone regretted
wholeheartedly. Three weeks in Japan would complete Mr. Fane-Herbert’s
work in the East, and to Tokio he went, with Margaret and her mother,
at the end of February.
Soon afterwards the _Pathshire_, having finished her refitting, sailed
for Yokohama, and on the first Friday in March, John and Hugh, who had
obtained week-end leave, arrived at Kamakura. That evening, when the
hotel dinner was over, they sat together in the verandah of John’s
bedroom. Below them stretched the lawn, its size exaggerated by the
semi-darkness, its nearer edge, gloomy under the hotel’s shadow,
slashed, where the gleam of windows fell upon it, with parallelograms
of yellow light.
“They come to-morrow,” Hugh said.
“This will be the last that you’ll see of them before they leave for
home.”
Hugh nodded. “Margaret will be glad to go.”
“Because Ordith stays?”
“Partly--though I think she has cast off Ordith and the thought of
him.... But she’ll be glad to be rid of the place and its associations.
London will give her something else to think about.”
“It’s almost incredible,” John said slowly, “that anyone out here now
should be able to reach London within seventeen days. It seems further
away than that.”
“But I like the East,” Hugh protested.
John laughed. “Good God!” he exclaimed, “so do I; but that has nothing
to do with it.” He knocked out his pipe against the verandah rails.
“Anyhow,” he said, “it’s a long lie-in to-morrow. Throw us a cigarette,
Hugh.”
He looked out across the lawn, across the broad belt of trees that
stood between the garden and the beach. The sea was near--not that
sea into which steel ships vomited their bilge, but the quiet sea of
kissing sands and straight horizon which had been his first love.
To-morrow did not matter; that darkness, those stars unsnared by
sextants, that sea undivided into ranges, were suggestive of too many
to-morrows, too many yesterdays. From an open window came voices and
laughter, and the tinkle of a curtain being drawn.
“Women,” Hugh said.
John leaned over the rail.
“That curtain has cut a patch of light out of the lawn. They’ll all go
out one by one.”
“Ours won’t--not yet. I’m not going to turn in for hours.”
“I know,” John said, reading his thought. “I hate wasting leave in
sleep. Even if I turn out late, I like to wake early, and imagine
the Reveille sounding and the calling of ‘Guard an’ steerage.’
‘Show-a-leg, show-a-leg, lash up and sto-ow!’--and you lying in bed,
with the whole day before you--away from the ship.”
“This being Friday,” Hugh observed, “we have to-night, and Saturday
night, and Sunday night--two clear days.”
“I wonder what would happen if we didn’t go back--if we hid somewhere
and never went back--if we started on our own. Why should we go back?”
John said, for the sake of saying it.
“If we didn’t, we’d be caught. If we weren’t caught, we’d starve....
The extraordinary thing is,” Hugh went on, in a puzzled voice, “that we
can’t stay as we are. I’m happy as can be sitting here; yet I shall get
up presently and put an end to this evening by going to bed. I don’t
want to move. It’s glorious here in the dark.... Look at the lawn--like
a great pool.”
“You want to lay hold on the instant,” John said. “You can’t any more
than you can lay hold on eternity. They are the two infinities that
meet somewhere. Probably from some point of view--if only you could
reach it--the instantaneous and the eternal appear as one and the
same. But the proofs we have of that are pretty vague: there’s that
extraordinary consciousness--coming for no apparent reason--that a
given instant is of tremendous importance, that it is going to be
remembered, that somehow it’s a source of unknown events to come; then,
at the other end of the scale, there’s the recollection of certain
instants--more than mere memory, a kind of preservation. An instant
years-old by the measure of time, remains intact, perfect; and you
know that it’s never going to perish or fade. Usually the occasion was
trivial....”
“I wish,” said Hugh out of the silence, “the Commander could hear his
young gentlemen talking like this.”
John laughed uneasily. “I had managed to forget the ship.”
“All the same,” Hugh went on, “I like vague talk. I like listening to
you--even though I don’t understand too much of it. Vague talk gives me
what I imagine you were driving at, what you spoke of before--a sense
of eternity.”
A watchman’s bell rang faintly in the distant village. When it could be
heard no longer, John said:
“A sense of eternity--what a phrase that is!”
Light, quick footsteps sounded on the path; then the heavier tread of a
man. The girl stopped suddenly, touched her companion’s arm, and, when
he looked down, laughed breathlessly--an odd laugh, half-confidential,
half-embarrassed.
“Oh, Torwood,” she exclaimed, “I do so _love_ this East!”
He threw his arm round her, and, with a tremendous air of
proprietorship, almost dragged her indoors. Little gasps of excitement
were her show of protest. As they passed through the room below the
man could be heard speaking quick words to her, in a voice unevenly
controlled; speaking with strange disregard for the public room’s
bleak emptiness and for the nearness of those who were sleeping, for
the stare of electric bulbs, which, when they shine singly over places
deserted till the morning, have so intent an air of watchfulness and
curiosity.
II
On Saturday evening Margaret and Mrs. Fane-Herbert reached the hotel.
After dinner, Mrs. Fane-Herbert said to John:
“I hear you changed your mind about leaving the Navy.”
“It was scarcely a question of my changing my mind. It didn’t get as
far as that. You see----” He looked aside and saw that Margaret was
watching him. “At any rate, I am settled down to it now,” he said.
Hugh broke in with talk of Kamakura.
“When does your leave end?” Margaret asked.
“Monday.”
“You must go back to your ship, then?”
“Yes, by noon.”
She turned to John. “And you, too?”
Something in her intonation caught his attention, and he looked swiftly
at her.
“Yes,” he said. “You must send us news of London as our share in your
home-coming.... I want to hear of your great-grandmother’s welcome.”
“Her great-grandmother?” Mrs. Fane-Herbert put in.
“The portrait, mother--the one over the stairs.” Then to John: “She’ll
give me comments with her welcome, a lecture for her runaway.”
There was a hint of bitterness in that; but John’s remembering that
conversation on the first evening she had known him stung her with
the sting--half-pleasant, half-painful--of childhood days recalled in
dark moments. For now she was easily stung to sorrow or to a kind of
fierce joy. She had wanted desperately to talk, to tell someone how
free she was--Ordith being gone. Untold, her freedom seemed incomplete.
But neither her father nor her mother had spoken. They had learnt the
facts, accepted them; she had attempted no explanation; not one word
had been said. This silence had a hardening quality. Her experience,
the vivid remembrance of which might have flowed easily away, was
somehow frozen in her mind, like a sin unconfessed. There was no one to
whom she could go. Warmth of heart, comradeship, the simplest affection
she starved for. But this being left alone, this frigidness of spirit,
this intolerable independence....
John had known, at least, that her heart was full. It was as if she
had seen a friendly face in the midst of a vast unnoticing crowd. When
she said good-night to him she gave him her hand with new confidence.
Then, out of his sight, she was suddenly angry with herself as for a
foolishness, a weakness for the first time realized. An instant she
stood unmoving outside her bedroom door--her mind tripped somehow,
taken unawares.
And in the morning she settled at once to a book, glad of an occupation
so isolating.
“You’re very deep in that book, Margaret,” Hugh said, as he passed her.
“Aren’t you coming out?”
“I want to finish it before lunch. Do you mind?”
“I see the last of you and mother to-morrow.”
“I’ll come this afternoon, ... or shall I come now?”
He looked into her upturned face. Her hand was on the arm of her chair
to raise herself.
“No, you odd sister.... No; you’re not to come--of course not.”
She went late to lunch, and was surprised to find Hartington at her
mother’s table, with John and Hugh. He said that his leave lasted only
till that evening.
“Can’t you stay and go back with us to-morrow?” Hugh asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “But I wanted to see the homeward goers before
they went. That’s really all I came for.”
The meal over, he had no difficulty in seeing Margaret alone, for she
felt that it was to see her he had come.
“Well,” she said, “secret emissary, what is it?”
“You know there’s something?”
“You are full of suppressed news.”
“Yes; good news--oh, such good news!”
“Thank God for that!” she breathed.
“You expected bad?”
“I fear it always. There’s nothing definite that I expect. But
somehow----”
“No,” he said quickly. “This is good, anyhow. Lynwood is free--through
Wingfield Alter.”
She gave no sign of pleasure so eager was she. “How? Really free?”
“Really free,” he smiled. “Are you beginning to disbelieve in
freedom?... The mail came in after Lynwood left the ship. A letter for
him from his mother, and a letter for me from Alter. I have them both
here. Alter is to marry Mrs. Lynwood. He has taken the first definite
step towards getting Lynwood out of the Service.”
“When will he be free? Will he come home with us?”
“Not possible. It takes time. But now it is only a question of time--a
couple of months, perhaps.”
“You haven’t given him his mother’s letter?”
“No.”
“You haven’t told him?”
“No; I came to you first. I want you to tell him.”
Something stifled her inclination to ask “Why?”
Hartington went on hesitatingly: “It means so much to him, you see.
It’s such tremendous news, because he has no hope or expectation of it.
So ... Miss Fane-Herbert, I want you to tell him.”
Her eyes widened for a moment. They looked out beyond Hartington. Then,
with abrupt decision, she said, with a fluttering, pleading gesture
towards him: “No; you. You must tell him. It’s your right. You brought
it about.”
“I wrote to Alter--that’s all.”
“It came about through you. Oh, long before the writing of that
letter, you helped him--didn’t you?--perhaps not deliberately. You
don’t realize how much you have done for him. Certainly you don’t
realize what he feels for you--the strangest mixture of affection, and
admiration, and respect--but overwhelming. You are all that’s best in
men for him! And he’d like you to bring this news. He’ll be glad, years
on, that it was you who brought it. Friendship between men is so much
more substantial, more secure. You must tell him,” she concluded. “It’s
your right.”
“Why do you insist so much on right? I waive it if it exists. That’s
why I came here.”
“Oh,” she cried, with a smile in acknowledgment of his unveiling of her
half-pretence, “I want it to be you!”
He laughed back at her, so that her colour came....
He took John away into the country roads, where the cherry-trees were
in blossom and the sun lay flat on the long, low, irregular branches,
reminding them of illustrations in Japanese fairy-books. There, as they
walked, the news was given, the two letters read.
“You’ve done all this,” John said, and remained speechless.
“I can’t help wondering what it is exactly that I have done or helped
to do. What’s it going to lead to?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this--the breaking free--is a beginning, not an end.”
“I know.... But there’s time enough to think of what’s to come. I won’t
think of it now.... Hartington, couldn’t you come too?”
“No; we shape different courses now.”
“But we three shall see each other often--in London. I’ve never seen
you in London. And at Oxford, you must stay with me there.”
Hartington looked wistfully at him. “Oh yes,” he said, “we shall see
each other often.”
They found on their return that the others had finished tea. Only Hugh
remained by the empty cups. He sprang up to meet them.
“I am glad, you civilian! Margaret told me.”
“She knows?”
“I told her,” Hartington said. Then, “Have I stolen your news?”
“There is no one left to tell,” John answered, laughing. “I want to
tell thousands of people.”
Later, he asked: “Where is Margaret?”
“I don’t know. She disappeared after tea.”
They sat smoking. Everything was pleasant to John now: the click of
a cigarette-case being shut, the tapping of the cigarette, the long
silences in which none of them had need of speech. The afternoon had
begun to fail. The sun slanted yellow across the window-panes and fell
in rippling beams of light and shadow upon the pale matting. Outside,
the lawn and distant trees had taken on those soft golden tones which,
at the approach of summer’s dusk, flow across English fields, investing
them with kindly magic. Then the church tower seems more than ever
still; the churchyard silent, but not terrible. The bird rustles in
the hedgerow; you imagine his bright eyes. The cricket stumps yellow
against the green; the shadows flicker on the pitch; the bat sounds
clearer, sweeter; the ball runs smoothly, and with peculiar ease; the
players and the umpires in their white coats grow nebulous and vague.
“‘And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,’” John said.
“Back in England already?”
“This summer in England!”
He went bareheaded into the cool air, across the lawn, springy under
his feet, down the path among the trees where the white sand lay
heavy, on to the shore. There was Margaret, near the waves’ edge. He
approached her, and, because she was so still, touched the billowing
muslin she wore.
“You know?”
“Yes. John, how happy you must be! Always you’ll remember to-day. It’s
your hour--one of the three or four. They go by so soon.”
“And you? Are you not happy?... You are free, too.” He faltered as he
spoke of this, of which she had never spoken.
She shivered, as if a cold breeze had struck her.
“Yes.... I understand.... I, too, am free. I know.”
She turned to him eyes full of light.
“Oh, Margaret,” he cried, his arms outstretched, “don’t look towards
the future. To-day’s enough, Margaret. What is it you are afraid of?”
She said, trembling under his touch, close to him so that her dress
brushed lightly against his coat, “What is it we’re both afraid of? We
are both afraid.”
For answer, in his primitive wisdom, he swept her to him, overwhelming
her thought. Lip to lip they clung, she imprisoned, silenced, caught up
from fear. His arms about her in fierce pressure were a whole armour
against doubt--more than armour, a charm, for the arrows themselves
were diverted and flew wide of her, forgotten. Flames ran down her as
his mouth burned against her throat, and her lips, opened now, were
full of the sharp sea-wind.
She fell from him a little, still held.
“That once,” she said, with caught breath, “that instant lives. That
stands. Nothing can touch it or steal it.... Don’t let me go--not yet,
my darling--don’t let me go!”
He drew her close again, but more gently. And she said:
“It’s our victory.”
“Nothing reverses it.”
“Tell me----”
He told her his love again and again, her arm drawing him down so that
the fresh scent of her hair was over him.
“Nothing takes those words back”--his kiss fell on her--“or the touch.”
“But here we begin,” he protested, wondering at the jealous terror that
possessed her. “We shall go on from this for ever. Nothing is taken
away. We build and build. In a few years, when I----”
“Oh!” she cried, “in a few years--who knows? We don’t break free
so easily as this, John. The net sweeps wider than we know. It
yields--that’s its strength. And presently it draws us in again. So
it will go on--till the breaking.... You see, even you and I go on
strengthening it, making new meshes despite ourselves. If ever we are
to stand together in the world, first you have to gain money and power.
You have to fight. Then--it’s inevitable--we would have to teach our
children to fight--equip them for ‘the battle of life!’ And they would
look round to find themselves in _our_ net.
“But it’s going to end. The world will change its motive when this
motive of gain has made it suffer so terribly, so obviously, that it
realizes the cause of its suffering. We have to suffer--we or our
children. It’s near now. The whole system may smash--the good with the
bad--perhaps that’s the only way; and we may slip back into the Dark
Ages again. I don’t know....”
“But now----” John said.
“Now? Yes--that’s ours.... Oh, for God’s sake! touch me and hold me as
if you would never, never let me go....”
And presently, standing away from him, she was saying with composure:
“Let’s go back. It’s getting dark. Look how the colour is fading from
the sea.”
They went up the beach to the edge of the tree belt. There she checked
him. Turning, they looked down upon their tracks to where, in the
instant now gone by, the sand had been roughed and broken by their
feet. Soon the water, which from the gathering darkness had drawn its
first gleams of phosphorescence, would smooth their footprints away.