NAN
1
Nan at Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book.
She had a room at St. Michael's Café, at the edge of the little town,
just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet
sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's
Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn,
an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, or stranded on drowned
sands.
Nan stayed at the empty little town to be alone. But she was not alone
all the time, for at Newlyn, five miles away, there was the artist
colony, and some of these artists were her friends. (In point of fact, it
is impossible to be alone in Cornwall; the place to go to for that would
be Hackney, or some other district of outer London, where inner Londoners
do not go for holidays.) Had she liked she could have had friends to play
with all day, and talk and laughter and music all night, as in London.
She did not like. She went out by herself, worked by herself; and all the
time, in company, or alone, talking or working, she knew herself
withdrawn really into a secret cove of her own which was warm and golden
as no actual coves in this chill summer were warm and golden; a cove on
whose good brown sand she lay and made castles and played, while at her
feet the great happy sea danced and beat, the great tumbling sea on which
she would soon put out her boat.
She would count the days before Barry would be with her.
"Three weeks now. Twenty days; nineteen, eighteen..." desiring neither to
hurry nor to retard them, but watching them slip behind her in a deep
content. When he came, he and Gerda and Kay, they would spend one night
and one day in this fishing-town, lounging about its beach, and in
Newlyn, with its steep crooked streets between old grey walls hung with
shrubs, and beyond Newlyn, in the tiny fishing hamlets that hung above
the little coves from Penzance to Land's End. They were going to bicycle
all along the south coast. But before that they would have had it out,
she and Barry; probably here, in the little pale climbing fishing-town.
No matter where, and no matter how; Nan cared nothing for scenic
arrangements. All she had to do was to convey to Barry that she would
say yes now to the question she had put off and off, let him ask it,
give her answer, and the thing would be done.
2
Meanwhile she wrote the last chapters of her book, sitting on the beach
among drying nets and boats, in some fishing cove up the coast. The
Newlyn shore she did not like, because the artist-spoilt children crowded
round her, interrupting.
"Lady, lady! Will you paint us?"
"No. I don't paint."
"Then what _are_ you doing?"
"Writing. Go away."
"May we come with you to where you're staying?"
"No. Go away."
"Last year a lady took us to her studio and gave us pennies. And when
she'd gone back to London she sent us each a doll."
Silence.
"Lady, if we come with you to your studio, will you give us pennies?"
"No. Why should I?"
"You might because you wanted to paint us. You might because you liked
us."
"I don't do either. Go away now."
They withdrew a little and turned somersaults, supposing her to be
watching. The artistic colony had a lot to answer for, Nan thought; they
were making parasites and prostitutes of the infant populace. Children
could at their worst be detestable in their vanity, their posing, their
affectation, their unashamed greed.
"Barry's and mine," she thought (I suppose we'll have some), "shall at
least not pose. They may break all the commandments, but if they turn
somersaults to be looked at I shall drop them into a public crèche and
abandon them."
The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and
believed her half-smile to denote admiration. Pretty little girls often
make this error.
Stephen Lumley came along the beach. It was lunch time, and after lunch
they were going out sailing. Stephen Lumley was the most important artist
just now in Newlyn. He had been in love with Nan for some months, and did
not get on with his wife. Nan liked him; he painted brilliantly, and was
an attractive, clever, sardonic person. Sailing with him was fun. They
understood each other; they had rather the same cynical twist to them.
They understood each other really better than Nan and Barry did. Neither
of them needed to make any effort to comprehend each other's point of
view. And each left the other where he was. Whereas Barry filled Nan,
beneath her cynicism, beneath her levity, with something quite new--a
queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and
generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness. More and more he
flooded her inmost being, drowning the old landmarks, like the sea at
high tide. Nan was not a Christian, did not believe in God, but she came
near at this time to believing in Christianity as possibly a fine and
adventurous thing to live.
3
Echoes of the great little world so far off came to the Cornish coasts,
through the Western Mercury and the stray, belated London papers. Rumours
of a projected coal strike, of fighting in Mesopotamia, of political
prisoners on hunger strike, of massacres in Ireland, and typists murdered
at watering-places; echoes of Fleet Street quarrels, of Bolshevik gold
("Not a bond! Not a franc! Not a rouble!") and, from the religious
world, of fallen man and New Faiths for Old. And on Sundays one bought a
paper which had for its special star comic turn the reminiscences of the
expansive wife of one of our more patient politicians. The world went on
just the same, quarrelling, chattering, lying; sentimental, busy and
richly absurd; its denizens tilting against each other's politics,
murdering each other, trying and always failing to swim across the
channel, and always talking, talking, talking. Marazion and Newlyn, and
every other place were the world in little, doing all the same things in
their own miniature way. Each human soul was the world in little, with
all the same conflicts, hopes, emotions, excitements and intrigues. But
Nan, swimming, sailing, eating, writing, walking and lounging, browning
in salt winds and waters, was happy and remote, like a savage on an
island who meditates exclusively on his own affairs.
4
Nan met them at Penzance station. The happy three; they would be good to
make holiday with. Already they had holiday faces, though not yet browned
like Nan's.
Barry's hand gripped Nan's. He was here then, and it had come. Her head
swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.
They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea
at a shop. They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next,
and spend the day bicycling to Land's End and back. They were all four
full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent.
But Gerda looked pale.
"She's been over-working in a stuffy office," Barry said. "And not, except
when she dined with me, getting proper meals. What do you think she
weighs, Nan?"
"About as much as that infant there," Nan said, indicating a stout person
of five at the next table.
"Just about, I daresay. She's only six stone. What are we to do about
it?"
His eyes caressed Gerda, as they might have caressed a child. He would be
a delightful uncle by marriage, Nan thought.
They took the road to Marazion. The tide was going out. In front of them
the Mount rose in a shallowing violet sea.
"My word!" said Barry, and Kay, screwing up his eyes, murmured, "Good old
Mount." Gerda's lips parted in a deep breath; beauty always struck her
dumb.
Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their
bicycles, and went down to the shining evening sands, where now the paved
causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between
rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks. Bare-footed they trod it,
Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and
wheeling round them.
Nan stopped, the west in her eyes. "Look."
Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land's End, dim and
dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.
"Isn't it clear," said Nan. "You can see the cliff villages ever so far
along ... Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement's Island off it--and the point of
Lamorna."
Barry said "We'll go to Land's End by the coast road to-morrow, shan't
we, not the high road?"
"Oh, the coast road, yes. It's about twice the distance, with the ups and
downs, and you can't ride all the way. But we'll go by it."
For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.
Nan said, "Aren't you glad you came?"
"I should say so!"
His answer came, quick and emphatic. There was a pause after it. Nan
suddenly turned on him the edge of a smile.
Barry did not see it. He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but
in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved
bare-legged along the shining causeway to the moat.
Nan's smile flickered out. The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over
her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had
hit her in the face. Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she
saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation. He had turned away
unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed
Gerda ... Gerda ... walking light-footed up the wet causeway.... Well, if
he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not
offer him chances again. When he got the habit back, he must make his own
chances as best he could.
"Come on," said Nan. "We must hurry."
She left no more pauses, but talked all the time, about Newlyn, about the
artists, about the horrid children, the fishing, the gulls, the weather.
"And how's the book?" he asked.
"Nearly done. I'm waiting for the end to make itself."
He smiled and looking round at him she saw that he was not smiling at
her or her book, but at Gerda, who had stepped off the causeway and was
wading in a rock pool.
He must be obsessed with Gerda; he thought of her, apparently, all the
time he was talking about other things. It was irritating for an aunt to
bear.
They joined Kay and Gerda on the island. Kay was prowling about, looking
for a way by which to enter the forbidden castle. Kay always trespassed
when he could, and was so courteous and gentle when he was caught at it
that he disarmed comment. But this time he could not manage to evade the
polite but firm eye of the fisherman on guard. They crossed over to
Marazion again all together and went to the café for supper.
5
It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper
room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan
and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda sparse of
word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep,
for she had not slept until late last night.
"High time she had a holiday," Barry said of her. "Four weeks' grind in
August--it's beginning to tell now."
Fussy Barry was about the child. As bad as Frances Carr with Pamela.
Gerda was as strong as a little pony really, though she looked such a
small, white, brittle thing.
They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes.
Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow
byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut
steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and
silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit
church.
Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, "How brilliant
Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one,"
and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her,
to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he
demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and
longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his
finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good
soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had
not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear
no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause
whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence,
and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into
undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was
refreshing to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind
flashing and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like
a diamond.
They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public
house, Nan and Gerda to Nan's room at the café, where they squeezed into
one bed.
Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep.
Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the
floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda's waxen face and yellow
hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden
lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each
shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how
very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth
was, people said, the best time? It wasn't really touching to be young;
it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left.
Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and
heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as
one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling
dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went
home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching.
Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.
A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet
your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during
this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time
Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before
her eyes--the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on
the causeway.
"Aren't you glad you came?" Her own voice, soft, encouraging.
"I should say so!" The quick, matter-of-fact answer.
Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile. An
allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.
And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay
walked bare-legged to the Mount.
Flame scorched her again. The pause each time she saw it now became
longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled. Her smile
became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel,
distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she
had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it
again. Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed
so that one cannot sleep. Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It
had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn't been for Gerda they
wouldn't have been two in a bed.
"Barry's a good deal taken up with her just now," said Nan to herself,
putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life's
situations. "He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he's
thrown with them. All men do, if you come to that. For the moment he's
thinking about her, not about me. That's a bore. It will bore me to death
if it goes on.... I wonder how long it will go on? I wonder how soon
he'll want to make love to me again?"
Having thus expressed the position in clear words, Nan turned her mind
elsewhere. What do people think of when they are seeking sleep? It is
worse than no use to think of what one is writing; that wakes one up,
goads every brain-cell into unwholesome activity. No use thinking of
people; they are too interesting. Nor of sheep going through gates; they
tumble over one another and make one's head ache. Nor of the coming day;
that is too difficult: nor of the day which is past; that is too near.
Wood paths, quiet seas, running streams--these are better.
"Any lazy man can swim
Down the current of a stream."
Or the wind in trees, or owls crying, or waves beating on warm shores.
The waves beat now; ran up whisperingly with the incoming tide, broke,
and sidled back, dragging at the wet sand.... Nan, hearing them, drifted
at last into sleep.