THE PACE
1
The coast road to Land's End is like a switchback. You climb a mountain
and are flung down to sea level like a shooting star, and climb a
mountain again. Sometimes the road becomes a sandy cliff path and you
have to walk.
But at last, climbing up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry
and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to
bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived
through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came
up behind them, and struck out to sea. The others behind her, less
skilful, floundered and were dashed about by the waves. Barry and Kay
struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; Gerda, giving it
up--she was no great swimmer--tranquilly rolled and paddled in the surf
by herself.
Kay called to her, mocking.
"Coward. Sensualist. Come over the top like a man."
Nan, turning to look at her from the high crest of a wave, thought
"Gerda's afraid in a high sea. She is afraid of things: I remember."
Nan herself was afraid of very little. She had that kind of buoyant
physical gallantry which would take her into the jaws of danger with
a laugh. When in London during the air raids she had walked about the
streets to see what could be seen; in France with the Fannys she had
driven cars over shelled roads with a cool composure which distinguished
her even among that remarkably cool and composed set of young women; as
a child she had ridden unbroken horses and teased and dodged savage bulls
for the fun of it; she would go sailing in seas that fishermen refused to
go out in; part angry dogs which no other onlooker would touch; sleep out
alone in dark and lonely woods, and even on occasion brave pigs. The kind
of gay courage she had was a physical heritage which can never be
acquired. What can be acquired, with blood and tears, is the courage of
the will, stubborn and unyielding, but always nerve-racked, proudly and
tensely strung up. Nan's form of fearlessness, combined as it was with
the agility of a supple body excellently trained, would carry her lightly
through all physical adventures, much as her arrowy strength and skill
carried her through the breakers without blundering or mishap and let her
now ride buoyantly on each green mountain as it towered.
Barry, emerging spluttering from one of these, said "All very jolly for
you, Nan. You're a practised hand. We're being drowned. I'm going out of
it," and he dived through another wave for the shore. Kay, a clumsier
swimmer, followed him, and Nan rode her tossing horses, laughing at them,
till she was shot onto the beach and dug her fingers deep into the
sucking sand.
"A very pretty landing," said Barry, generously, rubbing his bruised
limbs and coughing up water.
Gerda rose from the foam where she had been playing serenely impervious
to the tauntings of Kay.
Barry said "Happy child. She's not filled up with salt water and battered
black and blue."
Nan remarked that neither was she, and they went to their rock
crannies to dress. They dressed and undressed in a publicity, a mixed
shamelessness that was almost appalling.
They rode back to Marazion after tea along the high road, more soberly
than they had come.
"Tired, Gerda?" Barry said, at the tenth mile, as they pulled up a hill.
"Hold on to me."
Gerda refused to do so mean a thing. She had her own sense of honour, and
believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden. But when they
had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.
"Give us a few days, Nan," said Barry, "and we'll all be as fit as you.
At present we're fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful
life."
"Our life"--as if they had only the one between them.
At Newlyn Nan stopped. She said she was going to supper with someone
there and would come on later. She was, in fact, tired of them. She
dropped into Stephen Lumley's studio, which was, as usual after painting
hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking. That was the only way to
spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never
pausing. Anyhow that was the way she spent it.
She got back to Marazion at ten o'clock and went to her room at the
little café. Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by
the moonlit sea. Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and
Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools,
as if they were looking for crabs.
Nan went to bed. When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and
pretended to be asleep.
It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed. Dreadful to lie so
close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people
reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing
life so close against yours.
2
Next morning they took the road eastward. They were going to ride along
the coast to Talland Bay, where they were going to spend a week. They
were giving themselves a week to get there, which would allow plenty of
time for bathing by the way. It is no use hurrying in Cornwall, the hills
are too steep and the sea too attractive, and lunch and tea, when ordered
in shops, so long in coming. The first day they only got round the Lizard
to Cadgwith, where they dived from steep rocks into deep blue water. Nan
dived from a high rock with a swoop like a sea bird's, a pretty thing to
watch. Barry was nearly as good; he too was physically proficient. The
Bendishes were less competent; they were so much younger, as Barry said.
But they too reached the water head first, which is, after all, the main
thing in diving. And as often as Nan dived, with her arrowy swoop, Gerda
tumbled in too, from the same rock, and when Nan climbed a yet higher
rock and dived again, Gerda climbed too, and fell in sprawling after her.
Gerda to-day was not to be outdone, anyhow in will to attempt, whatever
her achievement might lack. Nan looked up from the sea with a kind of
mocking admiration at the little figure poised on the high shelf of rock,
slightly unsteady about the knees, slightly blue about the lips, thin
white arms pointing forward for the plunge.
The child had pluck.... It must have hurt, too, that slap on the nearly
flat body as she struck the sea. She hadn't done it well. She came up
with a dazed look, shaking the water out of her eyes, coughing.
"You're too ambitious," Barry told her. "That was much too high for you.
You're also blue with cold. Come out."
Gerda looked up at Nan, who was scrambling nimbly onto the highest ledge
of all, crying "I must have one more."
Barry said to Gerda "No, you're not going after her. You're coming out.
It's no use thinking you can do all Nan does. None of us can."
Gerda gave up. The pace was too hard for her. She couldn't face that
highest rock; the one below had made her feel cold and queer and shaky as
she stood on it. Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her
life, to go Nan's pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever
before, too hot and mettlesome for her? She didn't know why; only that
Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were,
to make it. It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and
neither knew how or why.
3
On the road it was the same. Nan, with only the faintest, if any
application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped
precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a
dog's-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might
be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path
running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of
the steep pull up the next. Coast roads in Cornwall are like that--often
uncertain in their ultimate goal (for map-makers, like bicyclists, are
apt to get tired of them, and, tiring, break them off, so to speak, in
mid-air, leaving them suspended, like snapped ends of string). But
however uncertain their goal may be, their form is not uncertain at
all; it can be relied on to be that of a snake in agony leaping down a
hill or up; or, if one prefers it, that of a corkscrew plunging downwards
into a cork.
Nan leaped and plunged with them. She was at the bottom while the others
were still jolting, painfully brake-held, albeit rapidly, half-way down.
And sometimes, when the slope was more than usually like the steep roof
of a house, the zig-zags more than usually acute, the end even less than
usually known, the whole situation, in short, more dreadful and perilous,
if possible, than usual, the others surrendered, got off and walked. They
couldn't really rely on their brakes to hold them, supposing something
should swing round on them from behind one of the corners; they couldn't
be sure of turning with the road when it turned at its acutest, and such
failure of harmony with one's road is apt to meet with a dreadful
retribution. Barry was adventurous, and Kay and Gerda were calm, but to
all of them life was sweet and limbs and bicycles precious; none of them
desired an untimely end.
But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. "It will be
found impossible to ride down these hills," said their road book, and Nan
laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is
riding up that is the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking
horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the
semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while
bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to
the hands. So brakeless, she zig-zagged like greased lightning to the
bottom.
It was on the second day, on the long hill that runs from Manaccan down
to Helford Ferry, that Gerda suddenly took her brakes off and shot after
her. That hill is not a badly spiralling one, but it is long and steep
and usually ridden with brakes. And just above Helford village it has one
very sharp turn to the left.
Nan, standing waiting for the others on the bridge, looked round and saw
Gerda shooting with unrestrained wheels and composed face round the last
bend. She had nearly swerved over at the turn, but not quite. She got off
at the bridge.
"Hullo," said Nan. "Quicker than usual, weren't you?" She had a
half-grudging, half-ironic grin of appreciation for a fellow sportsman,
the same grin with which she had looked up at her from the sea at
Cadgwith. Nan liked daring. Though it was in her, and she knew that it
was in her, to hate Gerda with a cold and deadly anger, the sportsman
in her gave its tribute. For what was nothing and a matter of ordinary
routine to her, might be, she suspected, rather alarming to the quiet,
white-faced child.
Then the demon of mischief leapt in her. If Gerda meant to keep the pace,
she should have a pace worth keeping. They would prove to one another
which was the better woman, as knights in single combat of old proved it,
or fighters in the ring to-day. As to Barry, he should look on at it,
whether he liked it or not.
Barry and Kay rushed up to them, and they went through the little
thatched rose-sweet hamlet to the edge of the broad blue estuary and
shouted for the ferry.
4
After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and
unconsciously reckless, became deliberately dare-devil and always with a
backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said "How about it? Will this
beat you?"
"A bicycling tour with Nan isn't nearly so safe as the front trenches of
my youth used to be," Barry commented. "Those quiet, comfortable old
days!"
There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried,
or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle
Paul's; they were in journeyings often, in weariness often, in perils of
waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the
wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In
perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in
bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight
through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of
fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered
that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with
the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. She was,
in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have
gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas,
and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face
she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only
twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before
retiring.
Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid
males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting
those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity
with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path
they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a
stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people
would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally,
bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled
after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically
the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the
field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at
them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if
one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of
cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less.
Then Kay chanted "Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,"
and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge,
waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short,
all the symptoms common to his kind.
So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry
bull.
"You look out you don't fall, Gerda," Kay flung back at her over his
shoulder. "It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody'll save
you; nobody'll dare."
"Feeling unsteady?" Barry's gentler voice asked her from behind. "Get off
and walk it. I will too."
But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan's swift, sure progress ahead. Barry
should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and
would despise cowards.
They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field.
And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through
which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for
them to descend.
"I don't like that creature," Kay said. "I'm afraid of him. Aren't you,
Barry?"
"Desperately," Barry admitted. "Anyone would be, except Nan, of course."
Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood
staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to
charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think
it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an
unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would
do.
Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she
dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met
Barry's eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking "I can
bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn't bear
it if I were the last and no one saw." To be gored all alone, none to
care ... who could bear that?
The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side,
bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know
she was frightened? She hadn't shown it, surely.
"The wind," said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, "has gone
round more to the south. Don't you think so?" And reminded Barry of a
French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to
the scaffold.
"I believe it has," he said, and smiled.
And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles,
didn't charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises
until they left him behind at the next gate.
"Did you," enquired Gerda, casually, "notice that bull? He was an awfully
fine one, wasn't he?"
"A remarkably noble face, I thought," Kay returned.
They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.
5
Nan, experienced in such things, as one is at the age of thirty-three if
one has led a well-spent life, knew now beyond peradventure what had
happened to Barry and what would never happen again between him and her.
So that was that, as she put it, definite and matter-of-fact to herself
about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting
him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time. You could not shoot
down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you
shot down the roads. Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You
had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts.... Oh, but that
was nothing. You had to hear his voice softened to someone else, see the
smile in his eyes caressing someone else, feel his whole mind, his whole
soul, reaching out in protecting, adoring care to someone else's charm
and loveliness ... as once, as so lately, they had reached out to
yours.... That was torture for the bravest, far worse than any bulls or
seas or precipices could be to Gerda. Yet it had to be gone through, as
Gerda had to leap from towering cliffs into wild seas and ride calmly
among fierce cattle.... When Nan woke in the night it was like toothache,
a sharp, gnawing, searing hell of pain. Memory choked her, bitter
self-anger for joy once rejected and then forever lost took her by the
throat, present desolation drowned her soul in hard, slow tears, jealousy
scorched and seared.
But, now every morning, pride rose, mettlesome and gallant, making her
laugh and talk, so that no one guessed. And with pride, a more reckless
physical daring than usual; a kind of scornful adventurousness, that
courted danger for its own sake, and wordlessly taunted the weaker spirit
with "Follow if you like and can. If you don't like, if you can't, I am
the better woman in that way, though you may be the beloved." And the
more the mettle of the little beloved rose to meet the challenge, the
hotter the pace grew. Perhaps they both felt, without knowing they felt
it, that there was something in Barry which leaped instinctively out to
applaud reckless courage, some element in himself which responded to it
even while he called it foolhardy. You could tell that Barry was of that
type, by the quick glow of his eyes and smile. But the rivalry in daring
was not really for Barry; Barry's choice was made. It was at bottom the
last test of mettle, the ultimate challenge from the loser to the winner,
in the lists chosen by the loser as her own. It was also--for Nan was
something of a bully--the heckling of Gerda. She might have won one game,
and that the most important, but she should be forced to own herself
beaten in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and
dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry
and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for
quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. She found things
more fun that way: that summed it.
6
The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep
tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate
hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they
would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for
the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would
swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters,
slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action,
drowning emotion in the sea.
Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and
had to battle for the shore. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the
cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of
rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this
meant a tough fight.
"Barry!"
Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda's bluing face and wide staring
eyes and quickening, flurried strokes. Saw, too, Barry at once at her
side, heard his "All right, I'm here. Catch hold of my shoulder."
In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda's other side.
"Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you're worth with your
legs. That's the way...."
Numbly Gerda's two hands gripped Barry's right shoulder and Nan's left.
Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily,
helping the running sea against them. They were being swept westward
towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck
northward and northward and were carried always south. It was a close
thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the
current was winning.
"It'll have to be all we know now," said Nan, as they struggled ten yards
from the point.
She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew
and just the little more they didn't know--they would be swept round the
point well to the south of the outermost rock--and then, hey for open
sea!
But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle,
stronger than the sea. They were swept towards the jutting point, almost
round it, when Nan, flinging forward to the right, caught a slippery
ledge of rock with her two hands and held on. Barry didn't think she
could hold on for more than a second against the swinging seas, or, if
she did, could consolidate her position. But he did not know the full
power of Nan's trained, acrobatic body. Slipping her shoulder from
Gerda's clutch, she grasped instead Gerda's right hand in her left, and
with her other arm and with all her sinuous, wiry strength, heaved
herself onto the rock and there flung her body flat, reaching out her
free hand to Barry. Barry caught it just in time, as he was being swung
on a wave outwards, and pulled himself within grip of the rock, and in
another moment he lay beside her, and between them they hauled up Gerda.
Gerda gasped "Kay," and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.
"Can you do it?" Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.
"Let you know presently.... Oh yes, I'm all right. Getting on fine."
Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the
ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay's swimming and the
sea. It seemed to her to be anyone's race.
Barry didn't stand up. The strain of the swim had been rather too much
for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side.
He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.
The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat
Kay in this race. For Kay's face had turned a curious colour, and he was
blue round the lips. Kay's heart was not strong.
Nan's dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish
to see. The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay's side. Coming up she
caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder,
saying "Hold tight. A few strokes will do it."
Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight,
throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other
three limbs.
They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry's
outstretched hand been ready. Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and
no more, as they were swung seawards. It was enough. It pulled them to
the rock's side. Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they
dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.
"Neat," said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his
love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his
exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay. "My word, Nan, you're a
sportsman."
"He does faint sometimes," said Gerda of Kay. "He'll be all right in a
minute."
Kay came to.
"Oh Lord," he said, "that was a bit of a grind." And then, becoming
garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently
swooned, "Couldn't have done it without you, Nan. I'd given myself up for
lost. All my past life went by me in a flash.... I really did think it
was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us,
wasn't it?... Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course.
It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to
rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I've drunk! I do feel rotten."
"We all look pretty rotten, I must say," Nan commented, looking from
Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry,
prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered
knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs
cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of
you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to
scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"
"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do
it. We don't want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp
way."
They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it
till they dropped down into the little cove. They all felt beaten and
limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of
football. Even Nan's energy was drained.
Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky
corner, "I suppose, Nan, if it hadn't been for you and Barry, I'd have
drowned."
"Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we'd most
of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren't for something--some
chance or other."
Gerda said "Thanks awfully, Nan," in her direct, childlike way, and Nan
turned it off with "You might have thanked me if you _had_ drowned,
seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known
it wasn't safe for you or Kay."
Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in
that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing
but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little
pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her
shoulder in the sea.
"Life-saving seems to soften the heart," she reflected, grimly, conscious
as always of her own reactions.
"Well," said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little
village, "I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let's make for the pub and
drink whiskey."
7
It was three days later. They had spent an afternoon and a night at
Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as
they rode out of it after breakfast. Polperro shakes the soul and the
æsthetic nerves like a glass of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved,
or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy
ring as you went in. In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools
along the coast. In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the
little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching
it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed
out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time
sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.
As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced
on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding,
crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked
streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream
or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of
pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to
tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the
gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the
path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and
labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was
never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far
inland.
They reached the cliff's highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay.
By the side of the path, on a grass plateau, a stone war-cross reared
grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment--"True
love by life, true love by death is tried...."
The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply,
steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff's edge. Nan got on
her bicycle.
Barry called from the rear, "Nan! It can't be done! It's not
rideable.... Don't be absurd."
Nan, remarking casually "It'll be rideable if I ride it," began to do so.
"Madwoman," Barry said, and Kay assured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one
else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."
Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching
Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath,
between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the
path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into space, fall down
perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.
To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before
Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing
weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea.
That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed
with Gerda.
She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.
"My God!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh,
you little fool.... _Stop_...."
But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in
full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the
path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but
the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.
Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in
her mind as she rushed.
"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."
She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle
bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed
on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of
the morning through the blue air.
8
Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices
crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the
precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at
the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw
them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side
of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a
tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.
The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes
she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the
path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.
When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and
Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head
was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless
face. Her right leg and her left arm lay stiff and oddly twisted.
Barry, his face drawn and tense, said "We must get her up to the path
before she comes to, if possible. It'll hurt like hell if she's
conscious."
They had all learnt how to help their fellow creatures in distress, and
how you must bind broken limbs to splints before you move their owner so
much as a yard. The only splint available for Gerda's right leg was her
left, and they bound it tightly to this with three handkerchiefs, then
tied her left arm to her side with Nan's stockings, and used the fourth
handkerchief (which was Gerda's, and the cleanest) for her head. She came
to before the arm was finished, roused to pained consciousness by the
splinting process, and lay with clenched teeth and wet forehead,
breathing sharply but making no other sound.
Then Barry lifted her in his arms and the others supported her on either
side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer
way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the path further
down.
"I'm sorry, darling," Barry said through his teeth when he jolted her.
"I'm frightfully sorry.... Only a little more now."
They reached the path and Barry laid her down on the grass by its side,
her head supported on Nan's knee.
"Very bad, isn't it?" said Barry gently, bending over her.
She smiled up at him, with twisted lips.
"Not so bad, really."
"You little sportsman," said Barry, softly and stooping, he kissed her
pale cheek.
Then he stood up and spoke to Nan.
"I'm going to fetch a doctor if there's one in Talland. Kay must ride
back and fetch the Polperro doctor, in case there isn't. In any case I
shall bring up help and a stretcher from Talland and have her taken
down."
He picked up his bicycle and stood for a moment looking down at the face
on Nan's knee.
"You'll look after her," he said, quickly, and got on the bicycle and
dashed down the path, showing that he too could do that fool's trick if
it served any good purpose.
Gerda, watching him, caught her breath and forgot pain in fear until,
swerving round the next bend, he was out of sight.
9
Nan sat very still by the path, staring over the sea, shading Gerda's
head from the sun. There was nothing more to be done than that; there was
no water, even, to bathe the cut with.
"Nan."
"Yes?"
"Am I much hurt? How much hurt, do you think?"
"I don't know how much. I think the arm is broken. The leg may be only
sprained. Then there's the cut--I daresay that isn't very much--but one
can't tell that."
"I must have come an awful mucker," Gerda murmured, after a pause. "It
must have looked silly, charging over the edge like that.... You didn't."
"No. I didn't."
"It was stupid," Gerda breathed, and shut her eyes.
"No, not stupid. Anyone might have. It was a risky game to try."
"You tried it."
"Oh, I ... I do try things. That's no reason why you should.... You'd
better not talk. Lie quite quiet. It won't be very long now before they
come.... The pain's bad, I know."
Gerda's head was hot and felt giddy. She moved it restlessly. Urgent
thoughts pestered her; her normal reticences lay like broken fences about
her.
"Nan."
"Yes. Shall I raise your head a little?"
"No, it's all right.... About Barry, Nan."
Nan grew rigid, strung up to endure.
"And what about Barry?"
"Just that I love him. I love him very much; beyond anything in the
world."
"Yes. You'd better not talk, all the same."
"Nan, do you love him too?"
Nan laughed, a queer little curt laugh in her throat.
"Rather a personal question, don't you think? Suppose, by any chance that
I did? But of course I don't."
"But doesn't he love you, Nan? He did, didn't he?"
"My dear, I think you're rather delirious. This isn't the way one
talks.... You'd better ask Barry the state of his affections, since
you're interested in them. I'm not, particularly."
Gerda drew a long breath, of pain or fatigue or relief.
"I'm rather glad you don't care for him. I thought we might have shared
him if you had, and if he'd cared for us both. But it might have been
difficult."
"It might; you never know.... Well, you're welcome to my share, if you
want it."
Then Gerda lay quiet, with closed eyes and wet forehead, and concentrated
wholly on her right leg, which was hurting badly.
Nan too sat quiet, and she too was concentrating.
Irrevocably it was over now; done, finished with. Barry's eyes, Barry's
kiss, had told her that. Gerda, the lovely, the selfish child, had taken
Barry from her, to keep for always. Walked into Barry's office, into
Barry's life, and deliberately stolen him. Thinking, she said, that they
might share him.... The little fool. The little thief. (She waved the
flies away from Gerda's head.)
And even this other game, this contest of physical prowess, had ended in
a hollow, mocking victory for the winner, since defeat had laid the loser
more utterly in her lover's arms, more unshakably in his heart. Gerda,
defeated and broken, had won everything. Won even that tribute which had
been Nan's own. "You little sportsman," Barry had called her, with a
break of tenderness in his voice. Even that, even the palm for valour, he
had placed in her hands. The little victor. The greedy little grabber of
other people's things....
Gerda moaned at last.
"Only a little longer," said Nan, and laid her hand lightly and coolly on
the hot wet forehead.
The little winner... damn her....
The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted at Nan's lips.
10
Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and a stretcher, Barry and
all kinds of help. Barry's anxious eyes and smile. "Well? How's she
been?"
He was on his knees beside her.
"Here's the doctor, darling.... I'm sorry I've been so long."