THE OLD STORE-HOUSE
Through a misty morning, made silver bright by the risen sun, Sabina and
Raymond started for their August holiday. They left Bridetown, passed
through a white fog on the water-meadows and presently climbed to the
cliffs and pursued their way westward. Now the sun was over the sea and
the Channel gleamed and flashed under a wakening, westerly breeze.
To West Haven they came, where the cliffs break and the rivers from
Bridport flow through sluices into the little harbour.
Among the ancient, weather-worn buildings standing here with their feet
in the sand drifts, was one specially picturesque. A long and lofty mass
it presented, and a hundred years of storm and salt-laden winds had
toned it to rich colour and fretted its roof and walls with countless
stains. It was a store, three stories high, used of old time for
merchandise, but now sunk to rougher uses. In its great open court,
facing north, were piled thousands of tons of winnowed sand; its vaults
were barred and empty; its glass windows were shattered; rust had eaten
away its metal work and rot reduced its doors and sashes to powder. Rich
red and auburn was its face, with worn courses of brickwork like wounds
gashed upon it. A staircase of stone rose against one outer wall, and
aloft, in the chambers approached thereby, was laid up a load of sweet
smelling, deal planks brought by a Norway schooner. Here too, were all
manner of strange little chambers, some full of old nettings, others
littered with the marine stores of the fishermen, who used the ruin for
their gear. The place was rat-haunted and full of strange holes and
corners. Even by day, with the frank sunshine breaking through boarded
windows and broken roof, it spoke of incident and adventure; by night it
was eloquent of the past--of smugglers, of lawless deeds, of Napoleonic
spies.
Raymond and Sabina stood and admired the old store. To her it was
something new, for her activities never brought her to West Haven; but
he had been familiar with it from childhood, when, with his brother, he
had spent school holidays at West Haven, caught prawns from the pier,
gone sailing with the fisher folk, and spent many a wet day in the old
store-house.
He smiled upon it now, told her of his childish adventures and took her
in to see an ancient chamber where he and Daniel had often played their
games.
"Our nurse used to call it a 'cubby hole,'" he said. "And she was
always; jolly thankful when she could pilot us in here from the dangers
of the cliffs and the old pier, or the boats in the harbour. The place
is just the same--only shrunk. The plaster from the walls is all
mouldering away, or you might see the pictures we used to draw upon them
with paint from the fishermen's paint pots. Down below they bring the
sand and grade it for the builders. They've carted away millions of tons
of sand from the foreshore in the last fifty years and will cart away
millions more, no doubt, for the sea always renews it."
She wandered with him and listened half-dreaming. The air for them was
electric with their love and they yearned for each other.
"I wish we could spend the whole blessed day in this little den
together," he said suddenly putting his arms round her; and that brought
her to some sense of reality, but none of danger. Not a tremor of peril
in his company had she ever felt, for did not perfect love cast out
fear, and why should a woman hesitate to trust herself with one, to
her, the most precious in the world?
He suggested dawdling awhile; but she would not.
"We are to eat our breakfast at Eype Beach," she reminded him, "and
that's a mile or two yet."
So they went on their way again, breasted the grassy cliffs westward of
the haven, admired the fog bank touched with gold that hung over the
river flats, praised Bridport wakening under its leafy woods, marked the
herons on the river mud in the valley and the sparrow-hawk poised aloft
above the downs. She took his arm up the hill and, like birds
themselves, they went lightly together, strong, lissome, radiant in
health and youth and the joy of a shared worship that made all things
sweet.
They talked of the great day when the world was to know their secret.
The secret itself proved so attractive to both that they agreed to keep
it a little longer. Their shared knowledge proved amusing and each told
the other of the warnings and advice and fears imparted by careful
friends of both sexes, who knew not the splendid truth.
How small the wisdom of the wise appeared--how peddling and foolish and
mean--contrasted with their superb trust. How sordid were the ways of
the world, its fears and suspicions, from the vantage point to which
they had climbed. Material things even suggested this thought to
Raymond, and when before noon, they stood on the green crown of Golden
Cap, with the earth and sea spread out around them in mighty harmonies
of blue and green, he told Sabina so.
"We ought to be perched on a place like this," he said, "because we are
to the rest of the world, in mind and in happiness, as we are here in
body too."
"Only the sea gulls can go higher, and I always feel they're more like
spirits than birds," she answered.
"I've got no use for spirits," he told her. "The splendid thing about us
is that we're flesh and blood and spirit too. That's the really
magnificent combination for happy creatures. A spirit at best can only
be an unfinished thing. People make such a fuss about escaping from the
flesh. What the deuce do you want to escape from your flesh for, if it's
healthy and tough and fine?"
"When they get old, they feel like that."
"Let the old comfort the old then," he said. "I'm proud of my flesh and
bones, and so are you, and so we ought to be; and if I had to give them
up and die, I should hate it. And if I found myself in another world, a
poor shivering idea and nothing else, without flesh and bones to cover
me, or clothes to cover them, I should feel ashamed of myself. And they
might call it Paradise as much as they liked, but it would be Hades to
me. Of course many of the ghosts would pretend that they liked it; but I
bet none would really--so jolly undignified to be nothing but an idea."
She laughed.
"That's just what I feel too; and of course it's utterly wrong of us,"
she said. "It shows we have got a lot to learn. We only feel like this
because we're young. Perhaps young ghosts begin like that; but I expect
they soon get past it."
"I should never want to get past it," he said.
He rolled over on the grass and played with her hand.
"How could you love and cuddle a ghost?"
"No doubt you could love it. I don't suppose you could cuddle it. You
wouldn't want to."
"No--that's true, Sabina. If this cliff carried away this moment, and we
were both smashed to pulp and arrived together in another world without
any clothes and both horribly down on our luck--but it's too ghastly a
picture. I should howl all through eternity--to think what I'd missed."
They talked nonsense, played with their thoughts and came nearer and
nearer together. One tremendous and masterful impulse drew them on--a
raging hunger and thirst on his part and something not widely different
on hers. Again and again they caught themselves in each other's arms,
then broke off, grew serious and strove to steady the trend of their
desires.
Golden Cap was a lonely spot and few visited it that day. Once a
middle-aged man and woman surprised them where they sat behind a rock
near the edge of the great precipices. The man had grown warm and mopped
his face and let the wind cool it.
He was ugly, clumsily built, and displayed large calves in
knickerbockers and a hot, bald head.
"How hideous human beings can be," said Raymond after they had gone.
"He wasn't hideous in his wife's eyes, I expect."
"Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors," he said.
"You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it's
picturesque, but middle-age is deadly always."
He smoked and they dawdled the hours away until Sabina declared it was
tea time. Then they sought a little inn at Chidcock and spent an hour
there.
The weather changed as the sun went westerly; the wind sank to a sigh
and brought with it rain clouds. But they were unconscious of such
accidents. Sabina longed for the cliffs again, so they turned homeward
by Seaton and Thorncombe Beacon and Eype Mouth. Their talk ran upon
marriage and Raymond swore that he could not wait long, while she urged
the importance to him of so doing.
"'Twould shake your brother badly if you wed yet awhile, be sure of
that," she said. "He would say that you weren't thinking of the work,
and it might tempt him to change his mind about making you a partner."
"Oh damn him. Don't talk about him--or work either. I shall never want
to work again, or think of work, or anything else on earth
till--till--What does he matter anyway--or his ideas? It's a free
country and a man has the right to plan his life his own way. If he
wants to get the best out of me, he'd better give me five hundred a
year to-morrow and tell me to marry you."
"We don't want five hundred. That's a fortune. I'm a good manager and
know very well how far money can go. With your money and mine."
"Yours? You won't have any--except mine. You'll stop work then and
live--not at Bridetown anyway."
"I was forgetting. It will be funny not to spin."
"You'll spin my happiness and my life and my fate and my children.
You'll have plenty of spinning. I'll spin for you and you'll spin for
me."
"You darling boy! I know you'll spin for me."
"Work! What's the good of working for yourself?" he asked. "Who the
devil cares about himself? It's because I don't care a button for myself
that I haven't bothered about the Mill. But when it comes to you--!
You're worth working for! I haven't begun to work yet. I'll surprise
Daniel presently and everybody else, when I fairly get into my stride. I
didn't ask for it and I didn't want it; but as I've got to work, I will
work--for you. And you'll live to see that my brother and his ways and
plans and small outlook are all nothing to the way I shall grasp the
business. And he'll see, too, when I get the lead by sheer better
understanding. And that won't be my work, Sabina. It will be yours.
Nothing's worth too much toil for you. And if you couldn't inspire a man
to wonderful things, then no woman could."
This fit of exaltation passed and the craving for her dominated him
again and took psychological shape. He grew moody and abstracted. His
voice had a new note in it to her ear. He was fighting with himself and
did not guess what was in her mind, or how unconsciously it echoed to
his.
At dusk the rain came and they ran before a sudden storm down the green
hills back to West Haven. The place already sank into night and a lamp
or two twinkled through the grey. It was past eight o'clock and Raymond
decided for dinner.
"We'll go to the 'Brit Arms,'" he said, "and feed and get dry. The rain
won't last."
"I told mother I should be home by nine."
"Well, you told her wrong. D'you think I'm going to chuck away an hour
of this day for a thousand mothers?"
When they sauntered out into the night again at ten o'clock, the Haven
had nearly gone to sleep and the rain was past. In the silence they
heard the river rushing through the sluices to the sea; and then they
set their faces homeward.
But they had to pass the old store-house. It loomed a black, amorphous
pile heaved up against the stars, and the man's footsteps dragged as he
came to the gaping gates and silent court.
He stopped and she stopped.
His voice was gruff and queer and half-choked.
"Come," he said, "I'm in hell, and you've got to turn it to heaven."
She murmured something, but he put his arm round her and they vanished
into the mass of silent darkness.
It was past midnight when they parted at the door of Sabina's home and
he gave her the cool kiss of afterwards.
"Now we are one, body and soul, for ever," she whispered to him.
"By God, yes," he said.