And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands held
up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against the
sky. . . .
For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie—and this
was the man for whom I had been betrayed!
And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing of
my will—unavenged!
In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.
§ 5
I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village I
had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A door slammed,
the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.
There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others. Into
one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see which. All
had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed a light.
This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the
reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against the
costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside
resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the custom of the
steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been
obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius had hit upon
the possibility of turning these into little habitable cabins for the
summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with a certain
Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little
improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and
supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest
contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts. Of
course there were many discomforts in such camping that had to be faced
cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred to high spirits
and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese lanterns and frying, are
leading “notes,” I find, in the impression of those who once knew such
places well. But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of
pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather
than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from
the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering
of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—after the manner of poor
men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy. To the
poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely
denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched
their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting
suspicions. Fancy a world in which the common people held love to be a
sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .
There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this
business of sexual love. At least that is the impression I have brought
with me across the gulf of the great Change. To succeed in love seemed
such triumph as no other success could give, but to fail was as if one
was tainted. . . .
I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should run
through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these
emotions. I believed, and I think I was right in believing, that the
love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a
system in each other’s arms and mocked the world without. You loved
against the world, and these two loved AT me. They had their business
with one another, under the threat of a watchful fierceness. A sword, a
sharp sword, the keenest edge in life, lay among their roses.
Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at
any rate, it was altogether true. I was never for dalliance, I was
never a jesting lover. I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.
Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason;
because with this stark theme I could not play. . .
The thought of Nettie’s shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon to
her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too
strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely
physical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward
that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body
I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a
sword of evil, drawn.
§ 6