was only hard luck that you couldn’t save the woman.”
“But I didn’t try. I had forgotten all about her until this moment.”
“Nonsense,” repeated Courtesy, busy with a hot-water bottle. “You were
splendid. We didn’t know you had it in you.”
The suffragette laughed her secret laugh, which she kept hidden beneath
her militant exterior. The sort of laughter that flies, not unsuitably,
in the very face of tragedy.
“This is a change,” she said.
“What is?”
“To be respected.”
“My dear gal, we all respected you all along. Personally I always told
them: ‘Mark my words,’ I said, ‘that gal’s got brains.’”
“Yes, I expect they needed to be told.”
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy.
“For the last five years,” said the suffragette, “I have followed my
conscience over rough land. I have been suffragetting industriously all
that time. And every one laughed behind their hands at me. Not that I
care. But to-day I have been a fool, and they have promoted me to the
rank of heroine.”
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re not a fool. And surely you never were
a suffragette.”
“I am a militant suffragette,” said the suffragette proudly. “It takes a
little courage and no hysteria to march through the city with drunk
medical students waiting to knock you down at the next corner; and it
takes hysteria and no courage to fall by mistake into the Atlantic.”
“You quaint dear,” said Courtesy, who had not been giving undivided
attention to her patient’s remarks. “I do believe you’ve got something
in you besides brains after all. There now, you must try and sleep.
Pleasant dreams. And if you’re a good gal and wake up with some roses in
your cheeks, you shall have your husband to come and have tea with you.”
“No,” said the suffragette. “Don’t call him that.”
Courtesy wrenched the stopper of the hot-water bottle tightly on, as
though she were also corking up her curiosity.
As she went upstairs Courtesy discovered that she quite liked the
suffragette—from a height. For a person suffering from brains, and from
a mystery, and from political fervour, and from lack of physical
stamina, the woman was quite surprisingly likeable.
On deck, Courtesy’s friendly feeling was immediately put to the test.
Mrs. Paul Rust beckoned her to her side.
“That woman who jumped into the water after Hammer ... she is quite well
again, of course?” It was rather difficult for Mrs. Rust to put this
question, because the most obvious form was, “How is she?” and that
would have been far too human.
“She’ll be all right,” said Courtesy. “And even if she wasn’t she
wouldn’t say so. She keeps herself to herself. You’ve torn a button off
your coat. Shall I sew it on for you? You’ll miss your maid.”
“I shall not,” said Mrs. Rust. “She was a fool to behave in that way.
Nothing but indigestion.”
“You shouldn’t speak hardly of the dead,” said Courtesy, indomitably
conventional.
“Stuff and nonsense,” retorted Mrs. Rust, and closed her eyes in order
to close the subject. “That young woman...”
“I shall call her the suffragette,” said Courtesy. “She says she is one,
and she looks like one.”
“At any rate, the priest tells me she is not married to the ship’s
gardener. Is that so?”
“It’s not the priest’s business. Nor mine either.”
“You would drop her like a red-hot coal if she were not married.”
“Time enough to decide that later. I don’t approve of irregularity, of
course. Marriage after all is an excellent idea.”
That turned the balance successfully in the suffragette’s favour. “You
are wrong,” said Mrs. Rust. “Marriage is an idiotic institution. It must
have been invented by a man, I feel sure. It is like using ropes where
only a silken thread is necessary.”
“O Lor’,” said Courtesy.
Mrs. Paul Rust decided to reach the truth by interrogating the gardener.
She always tried to approach a mystery by the high-road, rightly
considering that the high-road is the most untrodden way in these
tortuous days.
“Come here,” she called to the gardener, when Courtesy disappeared to
see if her patient was asleep.
“Is that young woman who foolishly jumped into the sea—your wife?” she
asked.
The gardener had resisted hours of siege on the subject. He was tired.
Besides he instinctively understood Mrs. Rust.
“In some ways she is,” he replied, after rather a blank pause.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“Is that young man who owns a little red hotel in the woods in Hampshire
your son?” asked the gardener, suddenly face to face with an
opportunity.
“In some ways he is,” replied Mrs. Rust inevitably, without a smile.
The gardener became more and more inspired. “Because if you are his
mother, I am his friend, and you may be interested to know that I put
your point of view clearly before him when I met him last. He told me
that you were unwilling to treat his hotel as an investment, and I said,
‘Why should she?’ I said, ‘You may take it from me that she won’t.’”
“Then you had no business to take my intentions for granted,” retorted
Mrs. Rust. “What the dickens did you mean by it?”
“I told him ...” continued the gardener, almost suffocating in the grasp
of his own cleverness, “that obviously you could take no notice of so
vague a scheme. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I said, would do as
you were doing.”
“You had better have minded your own business,” interrupted Mrs. Rust
wrathfully. “And you had better mind it now. I shall do exactly what I
like with my money, no matter what the other ninety-nine women would
do.”
“I was afraid you would be annoyed by my speaking like this,” said the
gardener humbly. “It is only natural.”
“Stuff and nonsense. Do you know that the priest is shocked by his
suspicions about you and your suffragette?”
“I don’t mind,” said the gardener. “Being a priest, I suppose he is paid
to be shocked sometimes. I don’t object to being his butt.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “Then you don’t continue to assert that she is
your wife.”
“I can’t be bothered to continue to assert it,” said the gardener.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
The gardener felt that the reward of the successfully unscrupulous rogue
was within his reach. Lying in a good cause is a lovely exercise. The
warm feeling of duty begun surged over him. He had justified his
presence on board the _Caribbeania_, he had been true to Samuel Rust.
The suffragette was not drowned. The blue sea was all round him. There
was little else to be desired.
“I shan’t be an unscrupulous rogue a moment longer than I can help,”
thought the gardener. “I shall pose as being good next. We will be
married on landing.”
Courtesy at that moment returned and said, “Your wife would like you to
come and have tea with her.”
“Don’t leave us alone,” begged the gardener of Courtesy as they went
below. “I don’t know how to behave to heroines.”
He was obviously at a loss when he reached the suffragette’s cabin. He
had never seen her with her hair down, and that upset him from the
start. He shook her gently but repeatedly by the hand, and smiled his
well-meaning young smile. He did not know what to say, and this was
usually a branch of knowledge at which he was proficient.
“Did you know that Captain Walters won the sweep yesterday on the
Captain’s number?” he asked.
“Don’t be a donkey,” said Courtesy. There was a genial lack of sting
about Courtesy’s discourtesies, which kept her charm intact through all
vicissitudes. “She doesn’t want to hear about the sweep. Let her be just
now. She’s busy pouring out your tea.”
For in the same spirit as the nurse allows a convalescent child to pour
out tea from its own teapot, Courtesy had encouraged the suffragette to
officiate. The headquarters of the meal, on a tray, were balanced upon
the invalid’s bunk. It was not a treat to the suffragette, who loathed
all the details of Woman’s Sphere, but for once she did not proclaim the
ungracious truth.
“I’m sorry,” she said nervously. “It’s years since I did anything of
this sort. But I don’t know whether you take milk and sugar.”
The gardener distrustfully eyed the hot water with vague aspirations
towards tea-dom that dripped into his cup.
“I don’t take either milk or sugar, thank you,” he said, “I like my
troubles singly.”
“Naughty boy,” said Courtesy, helping herself generously to cake. “You
are beastly rude. And you’re a naughty gal, too, you suffragette. You
ought to know how your husband likes his tea.”
“But he’s not my husband,” said the suffragette.
The gardener sat with a bun arrested half-way to his mouth. He had lived
a self-contained existence, and had never before had a pose of his
dismantled by an alien hand. The experience was most novel. He liked the
suffragette more and more because she was unexpected.
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re feverish. You’ll tell me what you’ll
be sorry for, in a minute.”
“It’s true; and I’m far from sorry for it,” said the suffragette. “It’s
almost too good to be true, but it is. I’m still alone. But because he
thought I was a menace to England’s safety, he brought me away—by
force.”
“Perfectly true,” corroborated the gardener.
“You babies,” said Courtesy. “It’s lucky for you it’s only me to hear
you.”
“It’s not a secret,” said the gardener. “I’ve just been talking about it
to Mrs. Rust.”
“And what did she say?” asked Courtesy and the suffragette together.
“She said, ‘Good.’”
At that moment the voice of Mrs. Rust was heard in the passage outside.
“Miss Briggs.”
Courtesy ran clumsily from the cabin.
“That button,” said Mrs. Rust. “You said you would.... Myself I never
can remember which finger I ought to wear my thimble on, or at what
angle the needle should be held....”
Anybody else, arrived within three feet of the suffragette’s door, would
have thrown a smile round the corner. But Mrs. Rust did not. She did
possess a heart, I am told, but a heart is such a hackneyed thing that
she concealed it.
“What do you intend to do when you get to Trinity Islands?” asked the
suffragette.
“I don’t know what we shall do,” replied the gardener. “I hate knowing
about the future. I am leaving it—not to fate, but to my future self.”
“Don’t you believe in fate?”
“No. I believe in myself. I believe I can do exactly what I like.”
“And what about me? Can’t I do exactly what I like? Do you think you can
do exactly what you like with me?” asked the suffragette militantly.
“So far I seem to have succeeded even in that.”
She laughed.
After a pause he said suddenly, “I am a brute to you, you dear,
unaccommodating little thing. Somehow my will and my deed have got
disconnected in my dealings with you. It is curious that having such
good intentions I should still remain the villain of the piece. Yet I
meant—if ever I had a woman—to make up to her for all I have seen my
mother go through.”
“When you have a woman—perhaps you will ...” said the suffragette. “You
must wait and see.”
“Come up and see land,” shouted Courtesy, running in with a
semi-buttoned coat in her hand.
The gardener shot up the companion-way, and, behold, the gods had
touched the sea, and fairyland had uprisen.
A long vivid island, afire in the ardent sun. Its mountain was golden
and eccentric in outline, its little town and fortresses had obviously
been built by a neat-fingered baby-god out of its box of bricks. The
tiny houses had green shutters and red roofs. There was no doubt that
the whole thing had only been created a minute or two before, it was so
neat and so unsullied. It was nonsense to call the place by the name of
a common liqueur, as the quartermaster did, any one could see it was too
sudden and too faery to have a name or to make a liqueur. There was
something very exciting in the way it had leapt out of a perfectly empty
sea, and in the way it sped over the horizon, as if shrinking from the
gaze of the proud _Caribbeania_.
It passed. The gardener had looked at a dream. Courtesy had looked at
good dry land. Captain Walters had looked at the monastery from which
the liqueur emanated. Mrs. Rust had not looked at all. It is surprising
that there should be so much difference in the material collected by
such identical instruments as one pair of human eyes and another.
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. The
_Caribbeania_, her appetite for speed checked, began to stalk them with
bated breath.
“We’ll be going through the Hair’s Breadth to-morrow at seven,” said the
Captain, in a fat, selfcongratulatory voice, as though he had himself
created the channel he referred to. “You must all get up early to see
her do it.”
There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are
no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in
the hot square cube that is your cabin. Your ear is tickled by the sound
of the activities of food in the saloon outside; you can hear the sea
singing in a cheerful, beckoning way past your inadequate porthole. You
emerge from your cabin and find men in pyjamas, and ladies in flowered
dressing-gowns and (if possible) thick pig-tails, or (if impossible)
pleasing head-erections of lace, sitting in rows at sparkling tables,
and being fed by stewards with apples and sandwiches. There is scarcely
ever any need to remind the voyager by sea about the tiresome
superiority that distinguishes the ant.
The Captain, therefore, had a large audience ready for his
sleight-of-nerve feat of threading the Hair’s Breadth. He looked very
self-conscious on the bridge.
Land climbed slowly down the spangled sloped sea from the horizon. There
seemed to be no gap in the quivering line of it. Presently, however, as
if it had quivered itself to pieces, the line was shattered. Silver
channels appeared beckoning on every side. The _Caribbeania_, blind
except to her duty, headed towards the least likely-looking channel of
all. The most ignorant passenger on the ship could have told the Captain
that he was running into certain destruction. Many longed to take
command, and to point out to the Captain his mistake. Like a camel
advancing foolhardily upon the needle’s eye the _Caribbeania_
approached. Her speed was slackened, she went on tiptoe, so to speak, as
if not to awaken the gods of ill-chance, but there was nothing faltering
about her. She thrust her shoulders into the opening.
(It would be waste of time to inform me that in nautical language a ship
has no shoulders.)
You could have whispered a confidence to the palm trees on either
side—except that you would have been afraid to draw enough breath to do
so, for fear of deflecting the ship an inch from her course.
Courtesy was, as usual, bold. She spoke in quite an ordinary voice.
“Why, look, there’s a man with hardly anything on, paddling! How
killing! He’s the colour of brown paper!”
“You’ll soon be dead in Trinity Islands if you find that killing,”
snapped Mrs. Rust. “The Captain evidently doesn’t know his business.
We’re at least six feet nearer to this shore than the other.”
The first of Trinity Islands heaved before them quite abruptly when they
had traversed the channel. The land seemed to have been petrified in the
act of leaping up to meet them. I think the wind had changed upon it at
a moment of grotesque contortion. My nurse used always to warn me that
this climatic change might fatally occur when my anatomical experiments
became more than usually daring.
Green woods had veiled the harsh shapes of the hills. Palms waved their
spread hands upon the sky-line. A tangle of green things tumbled to the
water’s edge. Far away to the right a faint blessing of pearl-coloured
smoke and a few diamonds flung among the velvet slopes of the hills
hinted at the watching windows of Port of the West. Shipping clustered
confidentially together on either side of the _Caribbeania_, like
gossips commenting jealously on the arrival of a princess of their kind.
The entering liner shook out little waves like messages to alight on the
calm shore.
The whole scene looked too heavy to be painted on the delicate sea. It
was absurd to think that that pale opal floor should be trodden by the
rusty tramp-steamers, the tall red-and-black sailing ships, the panting
tugs, the blunt and bloated coal-tenders laden with compressed
niggerhood. There were broadheaded catfish, and groping jellyfish in the
water, and they alone looked fashioned from and throughout eternity for
the tender element that framed them.
The suffragette, who had risen from her berth, contrary to the advice of
Courtesy and of the doctor, looked at the first of Trinity Islands with
her soul in her eyes and a compressed adoration in her breast. For there
was a silver sea, silver mist enclosing the island, and a silver shore
shining through the mist. Silver, of course, is idealised grey—grey with
the memory of black and white refined away. Silver is the halo of a
snake-soul.
The day was mapped out in so many ways by the different passengers of
the _Caribbeania_, that, from their prophetic descriptions, you could
hardly recognise it as the same slice out of eternity. There were
globe-trotters, eager to trot this tiny section of the globe in hired
motor-cars, others anxious to buy souvenirs in Port of the West all day,
others nervously determined to call upon the Governor in search of a
Vice-regal luncheon, others without imagination desirous of fishing for
catfish from the poop, and a very few who dared to avow their intention
of spending the day in absorbing cold drinks on the verandah of the
King’s Garden Hotel.
In theory the gardener wished to lie upon a chair on the shady side of
the deck, with a handkerchief over his face all day. Such a course would
have been flattering to his dignity and to his worship of aloofness. In
practice his unquenchable energy and that of the suffragette were too
much for him. He was vividly stirred by the strange land. The clawlike
hands of the palms beckoned him.
Following the suffragette, he bounded on to the first launch as eagerly
as though he were not a man of theory. Behind him bounded Courtesy, and
behind her Mrs. Paul Rust strove to bound. Courtesy, the gardener, and
the suffragette sat squeezed in a row upon a dirty seat in the launch.
Mrs. Rust, because sitting in a squeezed row was against her principles,
stood. By these means she kept many men-passengers standing in wistful
politeness during the whole journey of three miles to the shore.
The bay swept its wide arms farther and farther round them. The palm
trees on the promontories on either side of the town looked no longer
beckoning, but grasping.
“Oh, isn’t it good!” said the gardener, thrilling so that Courtesy and
the suffragette, by reason of compressed propinquity, had to thrill too.
He took the suffragette’s hand violently, and waggled it to and fro.
“Isn’t it fine ...” and he jumped his feet upon the deck.
“You babies,” said Courtesy. For the suffragette, even though she did
not jump her feet, was jumping her eyes, and obviously jumping the heart
in her breast. Most unorthodox for a snake.
“We shall run head foremost into the wharf,” said Mrs. Rust in a final
voice. “What a pity it is that sailors never know their work.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed the gardener, as if he had been longing to say
something of the sort. “Extraordinary. Fine. Won’t it be fine if we run
head foremost into the wharf, and sink, to be sealed up in this blue
jewel here!”
He tried to pat the bay with his hand.
“Closed in the heart of it,” said the suffragette, “like flies in
amber.”
“I shouldn’t like it at all,” sniffed Courtesy.
“Not like flies in amber,” said the gardener. “Because flies spoil the
amber.”
“Well, you and I wouldn’t exactly decorate the sea,” remarked the
suffragette.
“Look at those cannibals waiting for us,” said Courtesy. “My dears, I’m
simply terrified.”
The cannibals received them from the launch with the proverbial
eagerness of cannibals. In the first three minutes of their arrival on
land the travellers could have bought enough goods to furnish several
bazaars had they been so inclined. The suffragette, by tickling the chin
of a superb blue and yellow bird, was considered to have tacitly
concluded a bargain with the owner as to the possession of it, and there
was much discussion before she was disembarrassed of her unwelcome
protégé. The gardener bought two walking-sticks in the excitement of the
moment, before he remembered that he was devoid of money. The owner of
the walking-sticks, however, kindly reminded him of the one-sidedness of
the purchase, and he was obliged to borrow from the suffragette.
The town, like a brazen beauty feigning modesty, was withdrawn a little
from the wharves. There was a dry-looking grass space with goats as its
only gardeners. This the party crossed, and the sensitive plant ducked
and dived into its inner remoteness as they passed. The streets in front
of them, hot and glaring, pointed to the hills, like fevered fingers
pointing to peace which is unattainable.
The main street received them fiercely. The heat was like the blaring of
trumpets. The trams were intolerably noisy, clanking, and rattling like
a devil’s cavalry charge. Black, shining women, with the faces of
bull-dogs—only not so sincere—swung in a slow whirlwind of many
petticoats up and down the street, with vivid burdens of fruit piled in
ochre-coloured baskets on their heads. Little boys and girls, with their
clothes precariously slung on thin brown shoulders, and well aired by an
impromptu system of ventilation, ran by the gardener’s side, and
reminded him of the necessity of quatties and half-pinnies, even in this
paradise of the poor, where sustenance literally falls on your head from
every tree in the forest.
“This is exhausting,” said Mrs. Paul Rust, forced by extreme heat into a
confession of the obvious. “Policeman, where can we get a cab?”
“Yes, please, missis,” replied the policeman, who was tastefully dressed
in white, by way of a contrast to his complexion.
“Nonsense, man,” said Mrs. Rust. “I repeat, where can a cab be found?”
“No, please, missis,” replied the policeman, acutely divining that his
first answer had been found wanting.
“You fool,” said Mrs. Rust, another unoriginal comment wrung from her by
the heat.
The policeman understood this, and giggled bashfully in a high falsetto.
“Missis wanta buggy?” asked a tobacconist, with a slightly less dense
complexion, from his shop door. “Policeman nevah understand missis, he
only a niggah.”
The gardener, as ever prone to paint the lily, hurried into the breach.
“Ah yes, of course, we white men, we always hang together, eh?”
It was The Moment of that tobacconist’s life. The gardener all unawares
had crossed in one lucky stride those bitter channels that divide the
brown man from the black, the yellow man from the brown, the white man
from the yellow, and the buckra, the man from England, from all the
world.
Three buggies suddenly materialised noisily out of Mrs. Rust’s desire.
They were all first upon the scene, as far as one could judge from the
turmoil of conversation that immediately arose on the subject. The
gardener tried to look firm but unbiassed. The three women stood and
waited in a state of trance.
The sun was working so hard at his daily task in the sky, that one could
almost have pitied him for being called to such a flaming vocation in
this flaming weather.
Finally, Mrs. Rust awoke and, entering the nearest buggy, shook it to
its very core as she seated herself and said, “King’s Garden Hotel.”
She could hardly have been recognised as the Mrs. Rust of the
_Caribbeania_. You could see her pride oozing out in large drops upon
her brow. Her hat was on one side, and completely hid her sensational
hair, but for one flat wisp, like an interrogation mark inverted, which
reached damply to her eyebrow.
The buggy horse, which consisted of a few promiscuous bones, badly sewn
up in a second-hand skin, was more than willing to pause until the rest
of the party should be seated, and even then seemed desirous of waiting
on the chance of picking up yet another fare. It was, however, reminded
of its duty by its driver, and turned its drooping nose in the direction
of the King’s Garden Hotel.