Lambert, indeed, was all but exhausted; and as soon as Angier delivered
himself grudgingly of the opinion that they were indeed the only human
occupants of the island, she begged to return to the landing-place. The
circumference of the atoll Angier judged to be a scant two miles. It was
the classic coral island; baldly described, a ring of palms inclosing a
lagoon. Vegetation was scanty, and there seemed to be little or no
animal life: many birds and insects, and a few lizards. The blue lagoon
teemed with parti-colored fish, and the palms in their due time would
drop cocoanuts; so much they could count on. They might, with good luck,
snare some pigeons. Beyond that, the less thought about it the better.
Angier worked hard, before dark came upon them, to rig up a shelter for
the girl. In time he hoped to do wonders with thatch, he told her,
dryly; just now she must stick to an oar-and-blanket device. At least,
thanks to his plunder of matches, they could have a fire. They ate their
supper beside the little blaze of brush. Not since dawn had either one
mentioned the _Owara_. They took the catastrophe for granted, as the
warp on which they must weave their strange and painful pattern. They
assumed it callously, as one assumes the basic conditions of life--the
climate, or one’s Caucasian blood. Slowly, in their spasmodic talk, they
staked out the little dominion of their present--expedients for netting
fish, for catching rain-water, for rigging up a signal. With the air of
a chancellor of the exchequer, Miss Lambert promised a petticoat for the
common weal. As they planned and Angier smoked, full-length by the fire,
Persis Lambert drew a ribbon from her pocket, and measuring it
carefully, she knotted it about a ring she took from her finger, then
hung the ring round her neck.
“Why is that?” The man’s voice seemed to rise up from beneath the sand.
“It’s a pearl. I mustn’t get it wet.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer in one of my pockets?”
“I think not. See--I put it under everything.”
“Why not wrap it up and bury it? It’s no protected life you’re going to
live.”
“Thanks, no. It’s my engagement ring.”
“Oh--” This time the voice seemed to sink into the sand hollow where the
man’s head rested.
“I’m going to bed,” said Persis Lambert at last. “What are you going to
do? You’ve given me all the blankets.”
“What of it?” Angier sprang to a sitting position. There are only three,
two for your shelter and one to cover you with. I have my overcoat. And
sand isn’t hard. Better than the boat, anyhow.”
“Aren’t the nights cool in the tropics?”
“I’m not a class in geography! It was devilishly hot last night, rowing.
That’s all I know. Anything I can do for you?”
“No.” She disappeared into the shelter. It had been braced as well as
possible against the strong sea-breeze.
Half an hour later Miss Lambert came out. Angier, who had been dozing by
the dying fire, was now sitting up and drinking from his flask. His
teeth chattered against the cup. She looked at him gravely. “Have you
any medicines?”
“No.”
“Nor I. So I think you’d better not get a chill first off. Why don’t you
build up the fire?”
“I don’t precisely feel like starting out for more firewood. Besides,
it’s going to rain. Do get along in there and don’t bother me--unless
you’re cold. Are you?” He pulled himself up to his feet slowly and stood
before her.
“No, I’m not.” She paused an instant, then went on in her coldest tone:
“What good there is in the shelter I think you have as much right to as
I. When we achieve thatch houses, it will be different. I should be much
obliged if you would get out of the sea-wind, too.”
“If you would take a little of that damned hostility out of your voice,
I would!”
Miss Lambert looked surprised. “Didn’t we decide all that sort of thing
in the boat? I don’t suppose this is pleasant for either of us.” Great
drops fell on her forehead. “Is this likely to be a hard storm?” she
asked hastily.
“How do I know? I’m no meteorologist.” There was enough in his own tone
of the “damned hostility” of which he had complained.
Miss Lambert laughed--a very tired tinkle of a laugh. “No; neither one
of us is exactly the person the other would have chosen to be cast away
with. We’re both tenderfeet. I rather wonder what you used to do for a
living. Listen”--the drops came faster and faster, and the swish of the
palm-leaves high above their heads grew shriller and wilder--“I don’t
know you at all. So far as I do know you, I certainly don’t like you.”
Even the beat of her words grew quicker, like all the audible rhythms of
the world about them, whipped up, accelerated by the wind. “You create
in me a positive aversion. But your strength is the only thing either of
us has to depend on. So you will come into the shelter. It’s
sufficiently open to the sky, as it is. I intend to sleep, and I
probably shouldn’t if I knew you were rotting in the rain outside. If
you wish me to take the space nearest the blanket”--she pointed at the
seaward screen--“I will.”
“I think that may turn out to be the wettest spot of all--since the wind
is that way and we don’t have much to weight the rug with,” he answered.
“I think I’ll take it myself. If I find I’m keeping at all dry, I’ll ask
you to change.”
He followed her and flung himself down in the indicated spot, on the
carpet of leaves and brush he had earlier in the evening strewn hastily
over the sandy soil. Presently both slept.
Six weeks to a day was the duration of Angier’s and Persis Lambert’s
stay on their island. But six actual weeks, with a possible future of
years, means a lifetime as complete as many that consider themselves
rounded to the full sum of human experience. The intensity of an
existence that is limited to itself is something few of us can
conceive--we who are free to brood on the past and hope for the future,
whose days are mere portals looking two ways. Neither one discussed a
past life in which the other had no share; and their talk of the future
stopped at a possible rescue. By some common instinct, mutually
reinforced, they refrained from narrative. At the end of their exile
Persis Lambert was still ignorant of Angier’s business in life, as he
was ignorant of the name of her fiancé. The girl’s frankly stated
aversion to the man doubtless dried up the springs of confidential talk
in her--and, by natural result, in him. Anecdote sometimes drifted their
way: an analogy out of past experience or an allusion to a book the one
or the other had read. But they played a game of which should reveal the
less. They bounded their world, as rigidly as children, by the fringe of
the sand beneath the circle of palms.
And all the while, precisely as if they were children, whose intimate
confidences are all objective, immediate, and innocent of moral import,
their intimacy grew. By a curious inversion of experience they came to
speak naturally of things that, in years of conventional acquaintance,
would never have been mentioned. What the merest friend at home might
have known about either was jealously concealed, while the little
details, which scarcely anything but the closest relation would have
brought to free discussion, came vividly and frequently into their talk.
It was as if the outer walls were defended while the enemy chaffered
quietly in the market-place. Necessity, which drove them to be
“sensible,” could not drive them to be friends. They seemed to vent
their private rage at their plight by being squeamish over things Mrs.
Grundy could never have objected to--as if the last resort of dignity
lay in being squeamish over something, no matter what. If they had to
speak of their digestions, they would never divulge their home
addresses! They should have been Adam and Eve at their housekeeping;
instead, they were still Miss Lambert and Mr. Angier in Eden. Eden is
used metaphorically, to be sure; for the resources of their island were
scantier than those of the Seventh Day. They struggled experimentally
for food and shelter, working out, with bent brows, the evolution of
early periods, achieving in a hard day what neolithic centuries had gone
to discovering. When they laughed, it was the grim laughter of the Stone
Age--at the fish clumsily speared, or the ripe cocoanut floating out to
sea. But if Persis Lambert wept in secret, the tears she shed had taken
all history to produce. A strange working of inhibitions, in a place
that had never heard the word or seen the thing.
Needless to say, it was the girl who set their psychic pace. More than
once Angier bit off in the very utterance some speech that had tried for
freedom--his silence following hard upon the chill tightening of her
lips. Yet she was not ungracious or taciturn; only clinging desperately,
one would have said, to some privacy of the mind. Of the physical
privacy which every woman takes for granted, she had next to none,
“sensible” as she had promised to be. She could not have accused Angier,
had she wished, of limiting it voluntarily; but circumstances did the
job as completely as if he had been a brute. The tropic showers that
flung them huddled in their blankets against the same tall palm-trunk;
the necessary co-operation in all tasks, since her slender, ignorant
hands must ever be guided by his; the night-terror that often made her
rise and creep where she could hear his breathing; the sordid talk of a
hand-to-mouth existence, where one of the hundred forms of death rises
up ever to dwarf any more delicate danger--every fact of every hour
seemed to make them more one than wedlock. The man saw to it that she
should have her due share of solitude, but her solitude on such terms
was scarcely worth the name. It shrieked the bodily fact of him back at
her from whatever point of the compass he had betaken himself to.
Once Angier suggested that they should try the boat again, and seek a
wider and more fertile exile. “This is too much like rats in a hole.
Pretty soon we shall get the stink of those fish we are drying, clear
across the lagoon.”
“You can go if you like,” she said. “I will wait for you.”
“Oh!... and if I never came back?”
“I shouldn’t be worse off, should I?”
The man’s face twitched slightly. “Permit me to believe that you would.”
“Of course I should,” she said, perfunctorily. “But I won’t go. I will
never get into that boat again--never.”
“You have a lot of grit, but I should say, no sense.” With that, Angier
dropped the subject.
One night Persis Lambert woke--suddenly, out of a sound, dog-tired
sleep. Something was near her, in the dark, an indistinct shape bending
over her. Almost immediately she knew it for Angier, and closed her eyes
again, quietly waiting, every muscle and cord tense under her blanket.
Soon he rose noiselessly from his kneeling position and walked slowly
away. He did not go back to his own sleeping-place, but moved off
through the palm-grove towards the lagoon. As soon as she judged him out
of earshot, she rose and followed him, tracking him through the
moonlight, furtively. She saw him walk down the little shore to the
lagoon and lie down full-length, hiding his face on his arms.
She did what he had done a few minutes before--knelt down and bent over
him. But though he was awake, he was not aware of her, as a thick sob
told her. Careless, therefore, she bent still closer. It did not occur
to her that she was eavesdropping--they were as cruelly close as that!
But no words came, only the sobs, worse than words. She pressed so
near--though still not touching him--that her ring, hanging from its
ribbon, swung lightly against his face. She pulled it away, but he had
felt it, and sprang to his feet, facing her in the moonlight. The little
lagoon rippled softly beside them.
“You devil!” he cried. “Why did you follow me?”
“Why did you wake me?”
“I didn’t wake you.”
“Then I didn’t follow you.”
Silently they walked back to their palm-grove. As they separated, she
paused an instant and looked at him. Then she dug her wrists into the
deep sockets of her eyes. The gesture blurred her vision, and she saw
him only dimly.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Oh, damn you....” he murmured, with a curious, meditative inflection,
and walked away. She did not watch him further, but went back to her bed
and slept.
Neither one alluded, in the days that followed, to the incident of that
night. Their eyes were clear of allusion, their talk as sterile as ever.
On the fifth day after, deliverance came in the shape of a government
patrol-boat doing pacific duty among the islands. The signal,
religiously kept afloat, was an easy mark for binoculars that steadily
raked the horizon for any sign of trouble.
Their return to the world was as swift and inevitable as their departure
from the _Owara_. Persis Lambert stood on the strip of sand, watching
the boat rowed shoreward by vigorous sailors. When it was within a few
rods of them, she turned to look for Angier, who had disappeared from
her side.
“Is he leaving it to me--the cad?” she whispered to herself. But he
returned from the camp in time to greet the under-officer who sprang
from the gunwale to the sand, in high excitement. Miss Lambert, after a
grave greeting, left all explanations to Angier. He made them very well,
then suddenly fell silent, his eyes fixed on the dwindling coronet of
palms. Miss Lambert, her back to Angier and the young officer, strained
her glance towards the little steamer. Once on it, she went below to
quarters hurriedly arranged for her; and when, some hours afterward, she
came on deck again, the island of their six weeks’ sojourn was lost
forever in the dusk and distance.
Angier approached her the next morning. “They seem to think we have a
lot to say to each other. As a matter of fact, we haven’t. But I might
tell you that they are taking us on to a port of call of the _Wallaby_,
going to Singapore. We shall just about make it in time to catch her. We
ought to be on board her to-morrow.”
Miss Lambert nodded. “Have you any money?” she asked.
“Quite enough to go on with.”
“I saved a lot, you know. At least, I suppose a letter of credit is
still good.”
“I think you’ll find it so--in spite of everything.”
“I wish you would tell me how much you have.”
“Is that the kind of thing I ever have told you? Why should I begin
now?”
“As you like.” She turned her head away from him.
“I’m sorry, by the way, about your aunt....”
Persis Lambert’s eyes filled. “That’s all right. I mean, you’ve said all
you need to say. Do you think they really know?”
“It seems to be their business to know everything that happens in this
archipelago. I think they pretty well live up to it. I’m afraid there’s
no doubt. The first two boats were overloaded.... Rotten discipline.” He
walked away.
The next morning they trans-shipped quickly in a lurid tropic harbor;
and Persis Lambert took possession of a stateroom from which, for three
days, she did not stir. When, braced to face the world again--a world
whose thousand curious eyes she had felt burning through the very decks
to reach her as she lay in her berth--she disposed herself nonchalantly
in a deck-chair, a steward brought her a note. So oddly had the two
inverted the natural course of experience that she felt Angier had taken
a liberty in writing to her. The liberty taken was slight, however, and
this she freely admitted after a glance. It was a single line to inform
her that he was to leave the steamer at the next port. He must have
landed the night before. She remembered objecting, as she tried to
drowse, to the noises of landing--the hurrying feet, the unintelligible
native babel, the scraping and pounding and shouting before the dinghy
went ashore.
Persis Lambert rose and went to the deck rail. The torn bits of the note
fluttered over the side. Then she came back to face the congested
curiosity of a portly Dutchwoman who had been stalking her for three
days.
* * * * *
Summer was heavy on the big town, but Miss Lambert still lingered behind
shuttered windows, in a world of brown holland and shadows. Her
step-sister, with her own family, had left for the mountains. Miss
Lambert would follow, she said, when she could; and the old caretaker
and his wife would meanwhile suffice to her service. Mrs. Bayle supposed
she knew why Persis stayed on; Tony Wainwright was still in town,
working on gigantic plans for some competition or other. After poor
Persis’s harrowing adventure, it must be good to breathe the
metropolitan dust and build up her nerves on Tony’s devotion. Persis had
not said precisely that; but for all Persis ever said--!
Miss Lambert had seen her betrothed many times in the crowded weeks
since her return. She had not particularly sought chances to see him
alone. She had taken his and her and every one’s engagements as they
came. But if Tony Wainwright had had the instinct to complain, he should
by rights have stifled it, for, in planning to stay on after the family,
Miss Lambert gave him promise of ample time to have her quite to
himself.
She had, in point of fact, seen him quite alone several times; yet she
prepared for him this afternoon as if it were their first reunion after
her long and eventful absence. She began to speak to him at once,
indeed, on a new, strange note--a note, had he but known it, tempered
under the Southern Cross.
“Tony, it can’t be.”
“What can’t be, my darling?”
“This--any of it. I stayed on to tell you. Nothing makes any
difference--not even being quite alone with you. I have waited to see.
Now I know.”
“But _what_?” He focussed his eyes on her keenly as she stood near him
in the shadows, a frail, pale figure with wavering outlines.
“I can’t marry you.”
“May I open the shutters?” He moved to the windows. “I’d like a little
light on this.”
“If you think his Satanic majesty, the sun, is going to help you,” she
murmured.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“I’ve seen him at home, remember.”
In the rich afternoon light, they faced each other, still standing among
the wan masses of the shrouded furniture.
“Look here, Persis, what is all this about? Anything to do with that
rotten voyage?”
She did not answer at once.
“Or with that man--Angier?”
“Yes, everything to do with him.”
“You’re in love with him?” He dropped into a chair, put his elbows on
his knees and his chin on his hands.
“Try not to be stupid, Tony. To the best of my recollection, I detested
him.”
“You’ve praised him highly.”
“Yes? I’m glad of that, for I think he deserved it. I should have
scarcely expected myself to do my duty in that way, though.”
“Well, then.... Have you heard from him?” Tony Wainwright, in the
presence of a problem, could not, for the life of him, help behaving
like a lawyer. His tones were so familiar that Persis Lambert smiled a
little.
“Heard from him? Never. What do you take me for?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
“I fancy he sees. But that isn’t the point.” She sat down, herself,
then. “What I have to say, Tony, is very simple--or it would be simple
if you weren’t likely to think it preposterous. The honest fact is that
I can’t marry any one. I feel like a widow, if you want to know.”
He was silent for a moment. “I see.” Then he got up and walked to the
chimney-piece.
“I’d be willing to wager a good deal that you don’t see.” Her voice was
hard as porcelain with a wonderful glaze.
“I tell you I detested him. For that matter, I don’t know why. He
behaved with exceeding consideration throughout. He rose out of a
nightmare and went away into a nightmare, and in between he did
everything he could for me. I know nothing about him--who he is, or
where he came from, or where he has gone. If either one of us can help
it, I am quite sure we shall never meet again. That is the whole history
of _that_.”
“What is there, then?”
“Quite simply this: that I feel as if I had been married to him, and I’m
quite incapable of marrying again.”
“But why?”
“Try it yourself, Tony! Six weeks--they tell me it was six weeks, but it
was the longest lifetime I’ve ever lived--of complete isolation on a
naked coral island with a man you’ve never seen before. Nothing between
you and him--nothing. As lonely we were as the first man and woman; and
for all I knew, it might go on for ever. You’ve never experienced an
intimacy like that. Compared with us, you and I are strangers. I can’t
describe it.... Night after night, the only thing that stood between me
and dying of fear was the sound of his breathing. Time after time his
body kept mine from being soaked, flesh and bone, with rain. I mended
his clothes with a sharpened thorn, and we huddled under the same thatch
to keep off the horrible sun. There has never been anything like it. I
never dreamed of living such a life with you. And”--her voice grew thin,
disdainful, remote--“I disliked him.”
“Do you dislike me?” Wainwright asked curiously.
“I am exceedingly fond of you. But I have a horror of marriage. I have a
horror of ever again being intimate with any human creature. I can’t do
it; and that’s the end of it.”
“Damn him!” said Wainwright, under his breath.
“You needn’t damn him. He did his best. And I did mine. But we were
flung on that sand to root for existence like two animals. Every nerve
in me has been violated. I never wish to face a single reality of life
again. To be a wife would be more than I could bear.”
“We’ll talk of it again.” Tony Wainwright, with almost superhuman
composure, started towards the door. “You have always been
hypersensitive, and now, my poor darling, you are ill. It has been too
much for you. It will take time, and I shan’t hurry you. You’re right
about that. I knew something was up, but I imagined it was just the
beastly reaction after such a time. I dare say I’d better leave you now.
When may I come again?”
She rested her eyes on him tenderly. “Whenever you like, so long as you
understand that we’re not engaged.”
He took a step towards her. “Persis, I can’t go away like this. You snap
a thread and blow me down the wind. You must let me have it out with you
when you’re rested, when you’re calmer.”
“Am I not calm?”
“Not sanely calm, no.”
“Then I never shall be.”
“I don’t believe that, dear.” He bent over her and touched her hair very
lightly. “I’ll come to-morrow, earlier.” She did not look up, but he
bent no nearer. In a moment he straightened himself, drawing a deep
breath. “Wasn’t he in love with you, Persis?”
She started slightly as if she had heard something other than words--as
if, across half the earth, the faint ripple of a lagoon could sound
faintly and die away. “No, Tony, I am quite sure that he wasn’t.”
“Could you have told? He must have been, dear.”
“I could have told. He wasn’t.”
“And I may come to-morrow?” He took her hand.
Gently, Persis Lambert worked her hand free. “Surely, you may come
whenever you will--if you understand that it’s over.”
“And you are all to win again? Oh, Persis, Persis! But you’re worth it,
darling, and I’ll never say a word too much. I’ll serve seven years if I
must.”
“It won’t take you seven years to find out the truth.” She shook her
head at him as he turned on the threshold to look back. “You’ll get no
more of it from me, ever, than you’ve had this afternoon.”
By old habit, she went to the window to watch him come out. The same
habit made him lift his face. She blew him a kiss, and stood there until
he was out of sight. “That is the last thing I shall ever do for any
man,” she said, aloud, as she turned away from the window.
X
LOUQUIER’S THIRD ACT
Louquier had been crossed in love. The old phrase covers his case. The
girl does not matter, the circumstances do not matter; nothing matters
except that Louquier had fallen in love, and that the lady had not
reciprocated--not at least effectively, to the point of marrying
Louquier. She does not come into the story in her own person; only as a
cause. She affected Louquier; and his state is responsible for what
happened. Of course Louquier’s own temperament counts largely; other men
might have been affected differently. Louquier, crossed in love, was a
very special human formula.