The following Thursday afternoon Pearl stepped from the fast train
to the platform of the Southampton station. Since the train reached
Quogue she had been agreeably aware of the damp saltness in the air,
which comes only from proximity to the open ocean. But now, on the
platform, she smelled nothing but the fumes of innumerable exhausts,
saw nothing but masses of automobiles crowding toward the station like
a flock of parti-colored elephants. She stood dazed for a minute by the
noise of self-starters and the crowd of arrivals, until, darting in and
out under the elbows of chauffeurs and passengers, she saw a little
bareheaded, barefooted figure in a dirty white dress edged with the
finest Valenciennes lace. Pearl felt an instant conviction that this
was her future charge.
"Antonia," she said in her deep voice, and the child made a rush for
her.
"Are you Miss Exeter?" she exclaimed, and she gave a little boyish
shake to her head. "I must say I think you are much more than pleasing.
My mother said you'd be much less. She drew me a picture of what she
thought you'd look like. Mother doesn't draw very well. I'm glad you're
not like that. If I'd taken that as a guide I'd never have found you at
all."
She beckoned to a large green touring car, and having arranged about
Pearl's trunk and seen the bags put into the car, she herself sank
beside Pearl on the wide back seat, while to steady herself on the
slippery leather she raised one leg and clutched the back of the front
seat with her bare flexible toes.
"How do you like Southampton?" she said.
If they had gone down the main street Pearl would have seen some old
gray-shingled houses and elm trees that she would have honestly admired
but they had turned eastward and were now driving down a perfectly
straight road at the end of which, through a dip in the dunes, the deep
blue of the afternoon sea could be seen. The country was flat in every
direction except the north, where a wooded rise in the ground cut off
the horizon. To be candid, Pearl did not greatly admire the prospect,
but she said tactfully, "I love the sea."
"Can you swim?"
"Yes."
"Can you play tennis?"
"Yes."
"Can you drive a car?"
"No."
"Good!" said the child with her friendly smile. "I'm glad I've found
something you can't do. Beckett," she said, leaning forward and
shouting in the ear of the chauffeur, "I mean to teach Miss Exeter to
drive."
"Maybe it'd be as well to learn yourself first, miss," said the man
coldly.
Antonia sighed.
"Beckett's cross," she said, "because I bent the fender coming up. My
legs are too short to reach the foot brake in a hurry. Beckett knows
that, but he doesn't make allowances."
"Is it safe for you to drive, then?" asked Pearl.
"Well, if you ask me, no," said Antonia candidly; "but as long as
mother lets me do it, of course I'm going to. I wonder if you're going
to like us. I don't see how anyone could like Dolly."
"What's the matter with Dolly?"
"Oh, about everything," answered Antonia. "I'll tell you the kind of
person she is: If you forget something she asks you to do she treats
you as if you were a moron to have forgotten it, and if she forgets
something you ask her to do she treats you as if you were a moron to
have asked her to do it."
"There must be something to be said for her," Pearl suggested.
Antonia considered the question. She was, as her uncle had said, the
justest of created beings.
"I suppose there must be, but I don't know what it is. Then there's
Durland--he's great--only he doesn't notice me much. I wish I were a
boy. I want to wear trousers and be free."
"You seem to me pretty fairly free."
Antonia laughed.
"That's funny," she said. "I mean it's funny that you said that exactly
the way Uncle Anthony talks--that gentle tone that makes you feel like
nothing at all. Do you like Uncle Anthony? Do you think he's handsome?"
"Yes, indeed I do," answered Pearl, with the modest enthusiasm which
she thought under the circumstances Augusta would have allowed herself.
"So do I," said Antonia. "So does Miss Wellington, whose mother has
the house next us. She took it before she knew Uncle Anthony was going
to be away all summer--at least that's what mother and I think. Miss
Wellington told me she thought him handsome and she said 'And you can
tell him I said so,' but I didn't--for rather a spiteful reason; I
thought she wanted me to."
"It sounds that way to me, too," said Pearl.
"I'm glad you like him," Antonia went on. "He likes you too. He
telephoned mother about you. He said he had found a pearl--wasn't that
funny?" It was funnier than Antonia knew. "So now mother always speaks
of you as the priceless pearl. Mother's rather amusing, like that.
He said you were not so much on looks--just pleasing, he said. But I
think you are perfectly beautiful. Do you think you're beautiful, Miss
Exeter?"
This was the first crisis. Pearl knew that if she said no Antonia would
distrust her honesty, and if she said yes it might be used against her.
So she compromised.
"I'll answer that question the day I leave," she said.
"I'll tell you something funny about that," said Antonia. "Perhaps I
oughtn't to, but I'm going to. Uncle Anthony made mother promise not to
send you away until he came back, no matter what happened; but mother
says she knows a way to get round that if the worst comes to the worst.
You see, I don't want to hurt your feelings; but we all felt it was
rather hard on us to have a governess at all in summer. Mother thinks
it's hard too. She says it's just one of Uncle Anthony's ideas. She
says a man can't take an interest in anything unless he thinks he's
running it. So she just lets him think he runs the family, and then
when he's away she does what she thinks best. This is our gate now.
What do you think of the house? We only rent it. There's Durland going
in for a swim before dinner. I wonder if he'd wait for us. Durland!
Durland!"
It was quite extraordinary the volume of sound that could issue from so
small a person as Antonia. She sprang out of the car over the closed
door and ran round the house toward the ocean, while Pearl entered the
front door alone.
A slim, gray-haired figure in delft blue came out of a neighboring room
and said "Good heavens, you are not Miss Exeter, are you?"
Pearl smiled her most winning smile.
"Won't I do?" she said.
But merriment did not seem quite in order. Mrs. Conway's manners were
perfect, but she was not going to begin by being any more friendly than
she could help.
She answered politely, "Oh, perfectly, I feel sure. Only you do not
look quite as my brother's description led me to expect; but then men
are not very good at describing women."
Her hair, prematurely gray, gave more the effect of powder. Her
brows were arched so much that she seemed to be looking up from
under a thatch. They were blue eyes; not quite China blue, as Pearl
had heard the family eyes described; they were sad, appealing eyes,
which kept veiling themselves in an effort to seem dignified and
remote. Yes, Pearl thought, there was something pathetic about Mrs.
Conway--something that made her feel just a little bit as Alfred's lost
paw made her feel; so she beamed gently down upon her new employer
while that lady continued:
"I don't see how Antonia ever found you--from his account. Fortunately
the child is wonderfully quick or you would be waiting at the station
still. Where is she, by the way?"
Pearl explained that she had dashed down to the beach to ask her
brother to wait for them, and would it be all right if she went
swimming too? Over Mrs. Conway's shoulder Pearl could catch a glimpse
of the piazza, and beyond that the faultless blue rim of the horizon;
and as she talked she could hear close by the thud and hiss as a wave
went up the beach. She longed to be in the water.
"Oh, yes, go if you want to," said Mrs. Conway. She was not exactly
cordial. Gentle, friendly people like Edna Conway always go too far
when they try to be cold; they have no experience in the rôle. "But try
not to keep them waiting too long. My children hate to be kept waiting."
"I do myself," answered Pearl gayly.
"Really?" said Mrs. Conway, and the arched eyebrows went up under the
gray thatch.
Pearl saw she had said the wrong thing; but whether it was wrong for
a governess to dislike being kept waiting, or presumptuous to put
herself into the same interesting group as the Conway children, she
had no idea. She did not much care either. The smooth blue sea was
waiting for her, and she went springing upstairs, slinging off a string
of beads--translucent pearl-gray glass, the color of her eyes--and
thinking to herself that it was a mercy she had had sense enough to put
her bathing dress in her bag. She tore it out from the lower layers so
violently that shoes and brushes flew into the air like stones from a
volcano; and in a surprisingly short time she was running through the
deserted sitting room, out across the piazza, down the steep wooden
steps to the beach.
At the edge of the water Durland was standing with his back to her.
Although he was a thin boy of fifteen in a striped red-and-blue bathing
suit, he was standing with one knee advanced, his hand on his hip and a
cigarette dangling from his lip, as if he were the late King Edward VII
at Homburg. Beside him, Antonia was digging a hole like a dog--possibly
her sleeping hole for the evening--and talking all the time. She was
talking about Miss Exeter.
Durland was deeply opposed to the idea of Miss Exeter. In the first
place he was opposed to women, as a prisoner is opposed to stone
walls. He was surrounded by them, dominated by them. His mother, his
mother's maid, who had been with them forever, his sister Dorothy--they
all bullied him and cut him off from his fellow men. Sometimes, with
disgust, he heard himself using the feminized vocabulary of the women
about him, and though he was as masculine as possible--smoked and
everything--he could not shake off their influence. Then he hated
governesses as representing that most emasculated form of that most
emasculated thing--learning. His friends had already made fun of him
about it. It had been said on the beach, "I hear they're getting a
governess to keep you in order, Durlie." He had decided to make it
clear that he had nothing to do with the woman. He doubted if he even
allowed her to teach him algebra, though as a matter of fact he wanted
to pass his examination. And then, last but not least of his reasons,
he felt opposed to anything that Antonia so wildly recommended, because
that was one way of keeping her in the complete subjection to him in
which she lived.
So while she chattered of Miss Exeter and her beauty and her youngness
and the sort of niceness of the way in which she looked at you, he
stood gazing out to sea as if the best he could do for his little
sister was just not to hear her at all.
Then Antonia cried "Here she is!" and executed a four-footed leap on
finger tips and toes; and then Durland was aware of a circular motion
of white arms and long white legs whirling past his shoulder, and the
new governess had plunged into the Atlantic.
This really wouldn't do at all--governess doing hand-springs. It looked
peculiar, and yet it did pique the curiosity. He sauntered a step
nearer with a slow, sophisticated, loose-kneed walk. Miss Exeter and
Antonia were behaving foolishly, and noisily, too--splashing each other
and laughing. He himself went in as if the object of a swim were not to
disturb one unnecessary drop of water. He swam a stroke or two under
the surface, and coming up out of a wave found himself face to face
with Pearl. The wonderful radiance of those gray eyes came to rest on
his; and his heart melted within him like a pat of butter. It wasn't
just her beauty though that would probably have been enough; but it was
the immense, generous friendliness toward all the world when the world
would allow her to be friendly that warmed and comforted his young
spirit. He gazed at her, and suddenly the gaze was cut short by Pearl's
decision to stand on her head. Two white feet clapped together in front
of Durland's nose.
If she had been less beautiful he would have said to himself that she
really did not know how to behave. As it was, he thought that she
would certainly lay herself open to unkind criticism. He wanted to
protect her, and he was not without tact. He said, when she came to the
surface, blinking the water from her long, matted eyelashes, "It's nice
to have our own beach, isn't it?--to be able to do what we like--stand
on our heads or anything without being talked about."
She did not seem to get it at all.
"Let's swim out," she said, and laid her ear upon the face of the sea
as if she were a baby listening to the ticking of a watch. He swam
beside her, looking into her face, and she gave him a friendly little
beam every now and then. It was wonderful to be under no necessity of
suppressing her cheerful kindness of heart. "Let it do its deadly work"
was her feeling.
They had a good long swim, and when they came in were met by Mrs.
Conway at the head of the steps. She was dressed for dinner in a faint
pink tea gown with pearls.