It was the morning after Christmas Day, and Dodo and Jack had just
driven off from Meering on their way to Winston, where a shooting-party
was to assemble that day, leaving behind them a party that regretted
their departure, but did not mean to repine. Edith Arbuthnot had
promised to arrive two days before, to take over from Dodo the duty of
chaperone, but she had not yet come, nor had anything whatever been
heard of her.
"Which shows," said Berts lucidly, "that nothing unpleasant can have
happened to mother, or we should have heard."
Until she came Nadine had very kindly consented to act as regent, and in
that capacity she appeared in the hall a little while after Dodo had
gone, with a large red contadina umbrella, a book or two, and an
expressed determination to sit out on the hillside till lunch-time.
"It is boxing-day, I know," she said, "but it is too warm to box, even
if I knew how. The English climate has gone quite mad, and I have told
my maid to put my fur coat in a box with those little white balls until
May. Now I suppose you are all going to play the foolish game with those
other little white balls till lunch."
Seymour was seated in the window-sill, stitching busily at a piece of
embroidery which Antoinette had started for him.
"I am going to do nothing of the sort," he said. "It is much too fine a
day to do anything so limited as to play golf. Besides there is no one
here fit to play with. Nadine, will you be very kind and ring for my
maid? I am getting in a muddle."
Berts, who was sitting near him, got up, looking rather ill. Also he
resented being told he was not fit to play with.
"May I have my perambulator, please, Nadine?" he asked.
Seymour grinned.
"Berts, you are easier to get a rise out of than any one I ever saw," he
remarked. "It is hardly worth while fishing for you, for you are always
on the feed. And if you attempt to rag, I shall prick you with my
needle."
Nadine lingered a little after the others had gone, and as soon as they
were alone Seymour put down his embroidery.
"May I come and sit on the hillside with you?" he asked. "Or is the--the
box-seat already engaged?"
"Hugh suggested it," she said. "I was going out with him."
Seymour picked up his work again.
"It seems to me I am behaving rather nicely," he said. "At the same time
I'm not sure that I am not behaving rather anemically. I haven't seen
you much since I came down here. And after all I didn't come down here
to see Esther."
Nadine frowned, and laid her hand on his arm. But she did not do it
quite instinctively. It was clear she thought it would be appropriate.
Certainly that was quite clear to Seymour.
"Take that hand away," he said. "You only put it there because it was
suitable. You didn't want to touch me."
Nadine removed her hand, as if his coat-sleeve was red-hot.
"You are rather a brute," she said.
"No, I am not, unless it is brutal to tell you what you know already. I
repeat that I am behaving rather nicely."
It was owing to him to do him justice.
"I know you are," she said, "you are behaving very nicely indeed. But it
is only for a short time, Seymour. I don't mean that you won't always
behave nicely, but that there are only a limited number of days on which
this particular mode of niceness will be required of you, or be even
possible. Hugh is going away next week; after that you and I will be
Darby and Joan before he sees me again. You are all behaving nicely: he
is too. He just wanted one week more of the old days, when we didn't
think, but only babbled and chattered. I can't say that he is reviving
them with very conspicuous success: he doesn't babble much, and I am
sure he thinks furiously all the time. But he wanted the opportunity: it
wasn't much to give him."
"Especially since I pay," said Seymour quickly.
He saw the blood leap to Nadine's face.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I oughtn't to have said that, though it is quite
true. But I pay gladly: you must believe that also. And I'm glad Hugh is
behaving nicely, that he doesn't indulge in--in embarrassing
reflections. Also, when does he go away?"
"Tuesday, I think."
"Morning?" asked Seymour hopefully.
Nadine laughed: he had done that cleverly, making a parody and a farce
out of that which a moment before had been quite serious.
"You deserve it should be," she said.
"Then it is sure to be in the afternoon. Now I've finished being
spit-fire--I want to ask you something. You haven't been up to your
usual form of futile and clannish conversation. You have been rather
plaintive and windy--"
"Windy?" asked Nadine.
"Yes, full of sighs, and I should say it was Shakespeare. Are you
worrying about anything?"
She looked up at him with complete candor.
"Why, of course, about Hughie," she said. "How should I not?"
"I don't care two straws about that," said Seymour, "as long as your
worrying is not connected with me. I mean I am sorry you worry, but I
don't care. Of course you worry about Hugh. I understand that, because I
understand what Hugh feels, and one doesn't like one's friends feeling
like that. But it's not about--about you and me?"
Nadine shook her head and Seymour got up.
"Well, let us all be less plaintive," he said. "I have been rather
plaintive too. I think I shall go and take on that great foolish Berts
at golf. He will be plaintive afterwards, but nobody minds what Berts
is."
* * * * *
Whatever plaintiveness there was about, was certainly not shared by the
weather, which, if it was mad, as Nadine had suggested, was possessed by
a very genial kind of mania. An octave of spring-like days, with serene
suns, and calm seas, and light breezes from the southwest had decreed an
oasis in midwinter, warm halcyon days made even in December the
snowdrops and aconites to blossom humbly and bravely, and set the birds
to busy themselves with sticks and straws as if nesting-time was already
here. New grass already sprouted green among the grayness of the older
growths, and it seemed almost cynical to doubt that spring was not
verily here. Indeed where Hugh and Nadine sat this morning, it was May
not March that seemed to have invaded and conquered December; there lay
upon the hillside a vernal fragrance that set a stray bee or two buzzing
round the honied sweetness of the gorse with which the time of
blossoming is never quite over, and to-day all the winds were still, and
no breeze stirred in the bare slender birches, or set the spring-like
stalks of the heather quivering. Only, very high up in the unplumbed
blue of the zenith thin fleecy clouds lay stretched in streamers and
combed feathers of white, showing that far above them rivers of air
swept headlong and swift.
Nadine had a favorite nook on this steep hillside below the house,
reached by a path that stretched out to the south of the bay. It was a
little hollow, russet-colored now with the bracken, of the autumn, and
carpeted elsewhere by the short-napped velvet of the turf. Just in
front, the cliff plunged sheer down to the beach, where they had so
often bathed in the summer, and where the reef of tumbled sandstone
rocks stretched out into the waveless sea, like brown amphibious
monsters that were fish at high tide and grazing beasts at the ebb. Down
there below, a school of gulls hovered and fished with wheelings of
white wings, but not a ripple lapped the edges of the rocks. Only the
sea breathed softly as in sleep, stirring the fringes of brown weed that
had gathered there, but no thinnest line of white showed breaking water.
Along the sandy foreshore of the bay there was the same stillness:
heaven and earth and ocean lay as if under an enchantment. The sand
dunes opposite, and the hills beyond, lay reflected in the sea, as if in
the tranquillity of some land-locked lake. There was a spell, a hush
over the world, to be broken by God-knew-what gentle awakening of
activity, or catastrophic disturbance.
* * * * *
The two had walked to this withdrawn hollow of the hill almost in
silence. He had offered to carry her books for her, but she had said
that they were of no weight, and after pause he had announced a
fragment of current news to which she had no comment to add, but had
noticed the windless, unnatural calm of the day. Something in this
unusual stillness of weather had set her nerves a-quiver, and perhaps
the position she was in, bound as she was to Seymour, not struggling
against it, but quite accepting it, made ordinary intercourse difficult.
For she had it all her own way, Hugh was behaving with exemplary
discretion, Seymour was behaving with admirable tolerance, and just
because they both made her own part so easy for her, she, womanlike,
found the smoothed-out performance of it to be difficult. Had she
instructed each of them how to behave, her instructions were carried out
to the letter's foot: they were impeccable as lover and rejected lover,
and therefore she wanted something different. The situation was
completely of her own making: her actors played their parts exactly as
she would have them play, and yet there was something wanting. They were
too well-drilled, too word-perfect, too certain to say all she had
designed for them from the right spot, and in the right voice. True, for
a moment just now Seymour had shown signs of individualism when he
called attention to the fact that he was behaving very nicely, and that
he would be glad when the scene was over, but Hugh had shown none
whatever, except for the fact that he had been asked to be allowed a few
days like the old days agone before he left England. He had assured her
in the summer that he would never seek to get back into the atmosphere
of unthinking intimacy again, but, poor fellow, when there were to be so
few days left him, before the situation was sealed and made
irrevocable, his heart had cried out against the edict of his will and,
foolish though it might be, he had asked for this week of Meering days.
But from his point of view, no less than from hers, they had been but a
parody of what he had hoped for, they had been frozen and congealed by
the reserve and restraint that he dared not break. Below that
surface-ice, he knew how swiftly ran the torrent in his soul, but the
ice quite stretched from shore to shore. It was this which disappointed
Nadine: for she equally with Hugh had expected that he could realize the
impossible, and that he, loving her as he did and knowing that she was
so soon to give herself to another man, could cast off the knowledge of
that, and resume for a space the unshackled intimacy of old. The
Ethiopian and the leopard would have found their appropriate feats far
easier, for it was Hugh's bones and blood he had to change, not mere
skin and hair, and the very strength of the bond that bound him to her
made the insuperableness of the barrier. He felt every moment the utter
failure of his attempt, while she, who thought she understood him so
well, had no notion how radical the failure was. Not loving, she could
not understand. He knew that now, and thought bitterly of the little
fireworks of words she had once lit for him on that same text, believing
that by the light of those quick little squibs, she could read his
heart.
So, when they were settled in their nook, once again she tried to
recapture the old ease. She pointed downwards over the edge of the
cliff.
"Oh, Hughie, what a morning," she said. "Quiet sea and gulls, and bees
and gorse. What a summer in December, a truce with winter, isn't it?
I've brought a handful of nice books. Shall I read?"
"Oh, soon," said he. "But your summer in December isn't going to last
long. There is a wind coming, and a big one. Look at the mare's-tails of
clouds up above. Can't you smell the wind coming? I always can. And the
barometer has dropped nearly an inch since last night."
He put back his head and sniffed, moving his nostrils rather like a
horse.
"Oh, how fascinating," said Nadine. "If I do that shall I smell the
wind?"
It made her sneeze instead.
"I don't think much of that," she said. "I expect you looked at the
barometer before you smelt the wind. Besides, how is it possible to
smell the wind before there is any wind to smell? And when it comes you
feel it instead."
"It will be a big storm," said Hugh.
Even as he spoke some current of air stirred the surface of the sea
below them, shattering the reflections. It was as if some great angel of
the air had breathed on the polished mirror of the water, dimming it.
Next moment the breath cleared away again, and the surface was as bright
and unwavering as before. But some half-dozen of the gulls that had been
hovering and chiding there, rose into the higher air, leaving their
feeding-ground, and after circling round once or twice, glided away over
the sand dunes inland. Almost immediately afterwards, another relay
followed, and another, till the bay that had been so populous with birds
was quite deserted. They did not pause in their flight, but went
straight inland, in decreasing specks of white till they vanished
altogether.
"The gulls seem to think so, too," said Hugh.
"Then they are perfectly wrong," said Nadine. "The instincts Nature
implants in animals are almost invariably incorrect. For instance, the
Siberian tigers at the Zoo. For several years they never grew winter
coats, and all the naturalists went down on their knees and said: 'O
wonderful Mother Nature! their instincts tell them this is a milder
climate than Siberia.' But this winter, the mildest ever known, the poor
things have grown the thickest winter coats ever seen. So all the
naturalists had to get up again, and dust their trousers where they had
knelt down."
"Put your money on the gulls and me," said Hugh. "Look there again, far
away along the sands."
To Nadine, the most attractive feature about Hugh was his eyes. They had
a far-away look in them that had nothing whatever spiritual or
sentimental in it, but was simply due to the fact that he had
extraordinarily long sight. She obediently screwed up her eyes and
followed his direction, but saw nothing whatever of import.
"It's getting nearer: you'll see it soon," said Hugh.
Soon she saw. A whirlwind of sand was advancing towards them along the
beach below, revolving giddily. As it came nearer they could see the
loose pieces of seaweed and jetsam being caught up into it. It came
forward in a straight line, perhaps as fast as a man might run, getting
taller as it approached and gyrating more violently. Then in its advance
it came into collision with the wall of cliff on which they sat, and was
shattered. They could hear, like the sound of rain, the sand and rubbish
of which it was composed falling upon the rocks.
"Oh, but did you invent that, Hughie?" she said. "It was quite a pretty
trick. Was it a sign to this faithless generation, which is me, that you
could smell the wind? Or did the gulls do it? Prophesy to me again!"
He lay back on the dry grass.
"Trouble coming, trouble coming," he said.
"Just the storm?" she asked. "Or is this more prophecy?"
"Oh, just the storm," he said. "I always feel depressed and irritated
before a storm."
"Are you depressed and irritated?" she asked. "Sorry. I thought it was
such a nice, calm morning."
Hugh took up a book at random, which proved to be Swinburne's "Poems and
Ballads." At random he opened it, and saw the words:
"And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love."
"Oh, do read," said Nadine. "Anything: just where you opened it."
Hugh sat up, a bitterness welling in his throat. He read:
"And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love."
Nadine flushed slightly, and was annoyed with herself for flushing. She
could not help knowing what must be in his mind, and tried to make a
diversion.
"I don't think she was to be blamed," she said. "A quantity of flowers
stuck all over the sky would look very odd, and I don't think would
kindle anybody's emotions. That sounds rather a foolish poem. Read
something else."
Hugh shut the book.
"'Though all we fell on sleep, she would not weep,' is the end of
another stanza," he said.
Nadine looked at him for a long moment, her lips parted as if to speak,
but they only quivered; no words came. There was no doubt whatever as to
what Hugh meant, but still, with love unawakened, and with her
tremendous egotism rampant, she saw no further than he was behaving very
badly to her. He had come down here to renew the freedom and intimacy of
old days: till to-day he had been silent, stupid, but when he spoke like
this, silence and stupidity were better. She was sorry for him, very
sorry, but the quiver of her lips half at least consisted of self-pity
that he made her suffer too.
"You mean me," she said, speaking at length, and speaking very rapidly.
"It is odious of you. You know quite well I am sorry: I have told you
so. I cried: I remember I cried when you made that visit to Winston, and
the cow looked at me. I daresay you are suffering damned torments, but
you are being unfair. Though I don't love you--like that, I wish I did.
Do you think I make you suffer for my own amusement? Is it fun to see my
best friend like that? Is it my fault? You have chosen to love this
heartless person, me. If I had no liver, or no lungs, instead of no
heart, you would be sorry for me. Instead you reproach me. Oh, not in
words, but you meant me, when you said that. Where is the book out of
which you read? There, I do that to it: I send it into the sea, and when
the gulls come back they will peck it, or the sea will drown it first,
and the wind which you smell will blow it to America. You don't
understand: you are more stupid than the gulls."
She made one swift motion with her arm, and "Poems and Ballads" flopped
in the sea as the book dived clear of the cliff into the high-water sea
below.
More imminent than the storm which Hugh had prophesied was the storm in
their souls. He, with his love baffled, raged at the indifference with
which she had given herself to another, she, distrusting for the first
time, the sense and wisdom of her gift, raged at him for his rebellion
against her choice.
"Don't speak," she said, "for I will tell you more things first. You are
jealous of Seymour--"
Hugh threw back his head and laughed.
"Jealous of Seymour?" he cried. "Do you really think I would marry you
if you consented in the spirit in which you are taking him? Once, it is
true, I wanted to. You refused to cheat me--those were your words--and I
begged you to cheat me, I implored you to cheat me, so long as you gave
me yourself.
"I didn't care how you took me, so long as you took me. But now I
wouldn't take you like that. Now, for this last week, I have seen you
and him together, and I know what it is like."
"You haven't seen us together much," said Nadine.
"I have seen you enough: I told you before that your marriage was a
farce. I was wrong. It's much worse than a farce. You needn't laugh at a
farce. But you can't help laughing, at least I can't, at a tragedy so
ludicrous."
Nadine got up. The situation was as violent and sudden as some electric
storm. What had been pent-up in him all this week, had exploded:
something in her exploded also.
"I think I hate you," she said.
"I am sure I despise you," said he.
He got up also, facing her. It was like the bursting of a reservoir: the
great sheet of quiet water was suddenly turned into torrents and foam.
"I despise you," he said again. "You intended me to love you; you
encouraged me to let myself go. All the time you held yourself in,
though there was nothing to hold in; you observed, you dissected. You
cut down with your damned scalpels and lancets to my heart, and said,
'How interesting to see it beating!' Then you looked coolly over your
shoulder and saw Seymour, and said, 'He will do: he doesn't love me and
I don't love him!' But now he does love you, and you probably guess
that. So, very soon, your lancet will come out again, and you will see
his heart beating. And again you will say, 'How interesting!' But there
will be blood on your lancet. You are safe, of course, from reprisals.
No one can cut into you, and see your blood flow, because you haven't
any blood. You are something cold and hellish. You often said you
understood me too well. Now you understand me even better. Toast my
heart, fry it, eat it up! I am utterly at your mercy, and you haven't
got any mercy. But I can manage to despise you: I can't do much else."
Nadine stood quite still, breathing rather quickly, and that movement of
the nostrils, which she had tried to copy from him, did not make her
sneeze now.
"It is well we should know each other," she said with an awful cold
bitterness, "even though we shall know each other for so little time
more. It is always interesting to see the real person--"
"If you mean me," he said hotly, "I always showed you the real person. I
have never acted to you, nor pretended. And I have not changed. I am not
responsible if you cannot see!"
Nadine passed her tongue over her lips. They seemed hard and dry, not
flexible enough for speech.
"It was my blindness then," she said. "But we know where we are now. I
hate you, and you despise me. We know now."
Then suddenly an impulse, wholy uncontrollable, and coming from she knew
not where, seized and compelled her. She held out both her hands to him.
"Hughie, shake hands with me," she said. "This has been nightmare talk,
a bad thing that one dreams. Shake hands with me, and that will wake us
both up. What we have been saying to each other is impossible: it isn't
real or true. It is utter nonsense we have been talking."
How he longed to take her hands and clasp them and kiss them! How he
longed to wipe off all he had said, all she had said. But somehow it was
beyond him to do it. It was by honest impulse that the words of hate and
contempt had risen to their lips; the words might be canceled, but what
could not be quenched, until some mistake was shown in the workings of
their souls, was the thought-fire that had made them boil up. She stood
there, lovely and welcoming, the girl whom his whole soul loved, whose
conduct his whole soul despised, eager for reconciliation, yearning for
a mutual forgiveness. But her request was impossible. God could not
cancel the bitterness that had made him speak. He threw his hands wide.
"It's no good," he said. "I am sorry I said certain things, for there
was no use in saying them. But I can't help feeling that which made me
say them. Cancel the speeches by all means. Let the words be unsaid with
all my heart."
"But let us be prepared to say them again?" said Nadine quietly. "It
comes to that."
"Yes, it comes to that. I am not jealous of Seymour. I laughed when you
suggested it; and I am not jealous, because you don't love him. If you
loved him, I should be jealous, and I should say, 'God bless you!' As it
is--"
"As it is, you say 'Damn you,'" said Nadine.
Hugh shook his head.
"You don't understand anything about love," he said. "How can you until
you know a little bit what it means? I could no more think or say 'Damn
you,' than I could say 'God bless you.'"
Nadine had withdrawn from her welcome and desire for reconciliation.
"Neither would make any difference to me," she said.
"I don't suppose they would, since I make no difference to you," said
he. "But there is no sense in adding hypocrisy to our quarrel."
Nadine sat down again on the sweet turf.
"I cancel my words, then, even if you do not," she said. "I don't hate
you. I can't hate you, any more than you can despise me. We must have
been talking in nightmare."
"I am used to nightmare," said Hugh. "I have had six months of
nightmare. I thought that I could wake; I thought I could--could pinch
myself awake by seeing you and Seymour together. But it's still
nightmare."
Nadine looked up at him.
"Oh, Hughie, if I loved you!" she said.
Hugh looked at her a moment, and then turned away from her. Outside of
his control certain muscles worked in his throat; he felt strangled.
"I can say 'God bless you' for that, Nadine," he said huskily. "I do say
it. God bless you, my darling."
Nadine had leaned her face on her hands when he turned away. She divined
why he turned from her, she heard the huskiness of his voice, and the
thought of Hughie wanting to cry gave her a pang that she had never yet
known the like of. There was a long silence, she sitting with
hand-buried face, he seeing the sunlight swim and dance through his
tears. Then he touched her on the shoulder.
"So we are friends again in spite of ourselves," he said. "Just one
thing more then, since we can talk without--without hatred and contempt.
Why did you refuse to marry me, because you did not love me, and yet
consent to marry Seymour like that?"
She looked up at him.
"Oh, Hughie, you fool," she said. "Because you matter so much more."
He smiled back at her.
"I don't want to wish I mattered less," he said.
"You couldn't matter less."
He had no reply to this, and sat down again beside her. After a little
Nadine turned to him.
"And I said I thought it was such a calm morning," she said.
"And I said that storm was coming," said he.
She laid her hand on his knee.
"And will there be some pleasant weather now?" she said. "Oh, Hughie,
what wouldn't I give to get two or three of the old days back again,
when we babbled and chattered and were so content?"
"Speak for yourself, miss," said Hugh. "And for God's sake don't let us
begin again. I shall quarrel with you again, and--and it gives me a
pain. Look here, it's a bad job for me all this, but I came here to get
an oasis: also to pinch myself awake: metaphors are confusing things.
Bring on your palms and springs. They haven't put in an appearance yet.
Let's try anyhow."
Nadine sat up.
"Talking of the weather--" she began.
"I wasn't."
"Yes, you were, before we began to exchange compliments."
She broke off suddenly.
"Oh, Hughie, what has happened to the sun?" she said.
"I know it is the moon," said Hugh.
"You needn't quote that. The shrew is tamed for a time. It's a
shrew-mouse, a lady mouse with a foul temper; do you think? About the
sun--look."
It was worth looking at. Right round it, two or three diameters away,
ran a complete halo, a pale white line in the abyss of the blue sky. The
little feathers of wind-blown clouds had altogether vanished, and the
heavens were untarnished from horizon to zenith. But the heat of the
rays had sensibly diminished, and though the sunshine appeared as
whole-hearted as ever, it was warm no longer.
"This is my second conjuring-trick," said Hugh. "I make you a whirlwind,
and now I make you a ring round the sun, and cut off the heating
apparatus. Things are going to happen. Look at the sea, too. My
orders."
The sea was also worth looking at. An hour ago it had been turquoise
blue, reflecting the sky. Now it seemed to reflect a moonstone. It was
gray-white, a corpse of itself, as it had been. Then even as they
looked, it seemed to vanish altogether. The horizon line was blotted
out, for the sky was turning gray also, and both above and below, over
the cliff-edge, there was nothing but an invisible gray of emptiness.
The sun halo spread both inwards and outwards, so that the sun itself
peered like a white plate through some layer of vapor that had suddenly
formed across the whole field of the heavens. And still not a whistle or
sigh of wind sounded.
Hugh got up.
"As I have forgotten what my third conjuring trick is," he said, "I
think we had better go home. It looks as if it was going to be a violent
one."
He paused a moment, peering out into the invisible sea. Then there came
a shrill faint scream from somewhere out in the dim immensity.
"Hold on to me, Nadine," he cried. "Or lie down."
He felt her arm in his, and they stood there together.
The scream increased in volume, becoming a maniac bellow. Then, like a
solid wall, the wind hit them. It did not begin, out of the dead calm,
as a breeze; it did not grow from breeze to wind; it came from seawards,
like the waters of the Red Sea on the hosts of Pharaoh, an overwhelming
wall of riot and motion. Nadine's books, all but the one she had cast
over the cliff's edge, turned over, and lay with flapping pages; then
like wounded birds they were blown along the hillside. The hat she had
brought out with her, but had not put on, rose straight in the air, and
vanished. Hugh, with Nadine on his arm, had leaned forward against this
maniac blast, and the two were not thrown down by it. The path to the
house lay straight up the steep hillside behind them, and turning they
were so blown up it, that they stumbled in trying to keep pace to that
irresistible torrent of wind that hurried them along. It took them but
five minutes to get up the steep brae, while it had taken them ten
minutes to walk down, and already there flew past them seaweed and sand
and wrack, blown up from the beach below. Above, the sun was completely
veiled, a riot of cloud had already obscured the higher air, but below,
all was clear, and it looked as if a stone could be tossed upon the
hills on the farther side of the bay.
They had to cross the garden before they came to the house. Already two
trees had fallen before this hurricane-blast, and even as they hurried
over the lawn, an elm, screaming in all its full-foliaged boughs, leaned
towards them, and cracked and fell. Then a chimney in the house itself
wavered in outline, and next moment it crashed down upon the roof, and a
covey of flying tiles fell round them.
It required Hugh's full strength to close the door again, after they had
entered, and Nadine turned to him, flushed and ecstatic.
"Hughie, how divine!" she said. "It can't be measured, that lovely force.
It's infinite. I never knew there was strength like that. Why have we
come in? Let's go out again. It's God: it's just God."
His eyes, too, were alight with it and his soul surged to his lips.
"Yes, God," he said. "And that's what love is. Rather--rather big, isn't
it?"
And then for the first time, Nadine understood. She did not feel, but
she was able to understand.
"Oh, Hughie," she said, "how splendid it must be to feel like that!"
* * * * *
The section of the party which had gone to play golf on this changeable
morning, were blown home a few minutes later, and they all met at lunch.
Edith Arbuthnot had arrived before any of them got back, and asked if
the world had been blown away. As it had not, she expressed herself
ready to chaperone anybody.
"And Berts is happy too," said Seymour, when he came in very late for
lunch, since he wished to change all his clothes first, as they 'smelled
of wind,' "because Berts has at last driven a ball two hundred yards.
Don't let us mention the subject of golf. It would be tactless. There
was no wind when he accomplished that remarkable feat, at least not more
wind than there is now. What there was was behind him, and he topped his
ball heavily. I said 'Good shot.' But I have tact. Since I have tact, I
don't say to Nadine that it was a good day to sit out on the hillside
and read. I would scorn the suggestion."
A sudden sound as of drums on the window interrupted this tactful
speech, and the panes streamed.
"Anyhow I shall play golf," said Edith. "What does a little rain matter?
I'm not made of paper."
"That's a good thing, Mother," said Berts.
"If you want to win a match, play with Berts," said Seymour pensively.
"But if you only want to be blown away and killed, anybody will do. I
shall get on with my embroidery this afternoon, and my maid will sit by
me and hold my hand. Dear me, I hope the house is well built."
For the moment it certainly seemed as if this was not the case, for the
whole room shook under a sudden gust more appalling than anything they
had felt yet. Then it died away again, and once more the windows were
deluged with sheets of rain flung, it seemed, almost horizontally
against them. For a few minutes only that lasted, and then the wind
settled down, so it seemed, to blow with a steady uniform violence.
Nadine had finished lunch and gone across to the window. The air was
perfectly clear, and the hills across the bay seemed again but a
stone's-throw away. Overhead, straight across the sky, stretched a roof
of cloud, but away to the West, just above the horizon line, there was
an arch of perfectly clear sky, of pale duck's-egg green, and out of
this it seemed as out of a funnel the fury of the gale was poured. The
garden was strewn with branches and battered foliage and the long gravel
path flooded by the tempest of rain was discharging itself upon the
lawn, where pools of bright yellow water were spreading. Across it too
lay the wreck of the fallen trees, the splintered corpses of what an
hour ago had been secure and living things, waiting, warm and drowsy,
for the tingle of springtime and rising sap. Like the bodies of young
men on a battlefield, with their potentialities of love and life
unfulfilled, there, by the blast of the insensate fury of the wind they
lay stricken and dead, and the birds would no more build in their
branches, nor make their shadowed nooks melodious with love-songs. No
more would summer clothe them in green, nor autumn in their liveries of
gold: they were dead things and at the most would make a little warmth
on the hearth, before the feathery ash, all that was left of them, was
dispersed on the homeless winds.
But the pity of this blind wantonness of destruction was more than
compensated for in the girl's mind by the savagery and force of the
unlooked-for hurricane, and she easily persuaded Hugh to come out with
her and be beaten and stormed upon. Always sensitive to the weather,
this portentous storm had aroused in her a sort of rapture of
restlessness: she rejoiced in it, and somehow feared it for its
ruthlessness and indifference.
They took the path that led downward to the beach, for it was the tumult
and madness of the sea that Nadine especially wished to observe. Though
as yet the gale had been blowing only an hour or two, it had raised a
monstrous sea, and long before they came down within sight of it, they
heard the hoarse thunder and crash of broken waters penetrating the
screaming bellow of the gale, and the air was salt with spray and
flying foam. To the West there was still clear that arch of open sky
through which the gale poured; somewhere behind the clouds to the left
of it, the sun was near to its setting, and a pale livid light shone out
of it, catching the tops of the breakers as they streamed landwards.
Between these foam-capped tops lay gray hollows and darknesses, out of
which would suddenly boil another crest of mountainous water. The tide
was only at half flood, but the sea, packed by the astounding wind, was
already breaking at the foot of the cliffs themselves, while in the
troughs of the waves as they rode in, there appeared and disappeared
again the scattered rocks from some remote cliff-fall, that were strewn
about the beach. Sometimes a wave would strike one of these full, and be
shattered against it, spouting heavenwards in a column of solid water;
oftener the breakers swept over them unbroken, until with menace of
their toppling crests they flung themselves with huge tongues of hissing
water on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Then with the scream of
the withdrawn shingle the spent water was furiously dragged back to the
base of the next incoming wave, and was caught up again to hurl itself
against the land. Sometimes a sudden blast of wind would cut off the
crest of the billow even as it curled over, and fling it, a monstrous
riband of foam, through the air, sometimes two waves converging rose up
in a fountain of water, and fell back without having reached the shore.
This way and that, rushing and rolling, in hills and valleys of water,
the maddened sea crashed and thundered, and every moment the spray rose
more densely from the infernal cauldron. Then as the tide rose higher,
the waves came in unbroken, and hurled their tons of water against the
face of the cliff itself. Above, continuous as a water-fall, rose the
roar and scream of the gale, ominous, insensate, bewildering: it was as
if the elements were being transferred back into the chaos out of which
they came.
Nadine and Hugh, clinging together for support, stood there for some
minutes, half-way down the side of the cliff, watching the terror and
majesty of the spectacle, she utterly absorbed in it and cruelly
unconscious of him. Then, since they could no longer get down to the
base of the cliff, they skirted along it till they came to the sandy
foreshore of the bay. There from water-level they could better see the
hugeness of the tumult, the strange hardness and steepness of the
wave-slopes. It was as if a line of towers and great buildings were
throwing themselves down upon the sands, and breaking up into walls and
eddies of foam-sheeted water, while behind them there rose again another
street of toppling buildings, which again shattered itself on the beach.
Great balls of foam torn from the spent water trundled by them on the
sands, and bunches of brown seaweed torn from the rocks were flung in
handfuls at their feet. Once from the arch in the sky westwards, a dusky
crimson light suddenly burned, turning the wave crests to blood, and
then as the darkness of the early winter sunset gathered, they turned,
and were blown up the steep cliff-path again, wet and buffeted.
Conversation had been altogether impossible, and they could but
communicate with pointing finger, and nodding head. Yet, somehow, to be
together thus, cut off by the rise of winds and waves, from all sense of
the existence of others, in that pandemonium of tempest, gave to Hugh at
least a closer feeling of intimacy with Nadine, than he had ever yet
known. She clung to him, she sheltered under his shoulder,
unconsciously, instinctively, as an animal trusts his master, without
knowing it is trusting. And that to his aching hunger for her was
something....
But the gale was to bring them closer together yet.