though they were suffering from delusions. The _Caribbeania_ seemed to
have arrived on shore bodily. A long vista of familiar profiles rocked
cheek by jowl, nose beyond nose, from end to end of the verandah. There
was Theresa, who had made no secret of her intention of accompanying
Captain Walters “for a lark” on a visit to a Trinity Island Picture
Palace. There was the priest, who had expressed a determination (which
nobody had tried to alter) to explore the famous botanical gardens all
by himself all day. There was the fourth officer, who had left the
_Caribbeania_ inspired by a vision of a long walk to a sandy beach with
a bathe at the end of it. There was the captain, who had set out to buy
his wife a stuffed alligator as a silver-wedding present.
That cool strip of green rocking-chairs had acted on them all like a
spider’s web, with the manager of the King’s Garden sitting in the
middle of it, murmuring cool things concerning drinks in an iced voice.
Exquisite white linen suits of clothes, the only blot on whose
spotlessness was the nigger inside them, ambled up and down the line,
like field-marshals reviewing the household cavalry, armed humanely with
lemon squashes and whiskies and sodas.
The gardener, Mrs. Rust, the suffragette, and Courtesy enlisted in this
force, and sat in a state of torpor only partially dispelled by
luncheon, until Mrs. Rust began to look herself again. Her hat
straightened and elevated itself to its normal position, and perched
upon her hair like a nest of flowers on a ripe hay-field. The curls
dried up like parsley after rain.
Little by little the other tourists regained consciousness, and with
much show of energy set forth to the nearest buggy stand.
At about five, Courtesy, who was never happy unless she was moving with
the crowd, became restless.
“Let’s take a buggy and go back to the wharf,” she suggested.
“We will hire a four-wheeler and return to the pier,” said Mrs. Rust in
a contradictory voice.
Buggy or four-wheeler, there was only one sort of vehicle to be found in
Port of the West. They manned the nearest conveyance and quibbled not
over its title.
“It would be frightful if we missed the boat,” said Courtesy, who always
said the thing that everybody else had already thought of saying, but
rejected.
For the _Caribbeania_ had begun raking the atmosphere with hoarse calls
for its dispersed passengers.
But at the wharf the launch was still fussily collecting the mails.
There was a flame-coloured azalea leaning gorgeously out of the shade of
the eaves of a customs house. It was Courtesy’s colour—so obviously hers
that Courtesy herself unconsciously answered its call.
“Ou—I say, that colour,” she said, and ceased, because she could not
voice the echo that streamed from her heart to the azalea’s. It bent
towards her like a torch blown by the wind.
“It’s autumn,” said the gardener. “And that azalea is the only thing
that knows it on the island.”
“Good,” commented Mrs. Rust. “All this green greenhouse rubbish has no
sense ...” she waved her hands to the palm trees that plaited their
fingers over the sky in the background.
“Autumn, I think ...” began the gardener, addressing the azalea, “autumn
runs into the year, crying, ‘I’m on fire, I’m on fire ...’ and yet
glories all the while; just as I might say, ‘This is passion, this is
passion ...’ and so it is passion, and pain as well, but I love it....”
“What a funny thing to say!” said Courtesy. “Do you say that sort of
thing by mistake, you quaint boy, or do you know what you’re talking
about?”
“My lips say it by mistake,” said the gardener. “But my heart knows it,
especially when I see—a thing like that. Otherwise, why should I have
become a gardener?”
He looked round for the suffragette to see if she had caught this spark
out of his heart, and whether the same torch had set her alight. She was
not there.
“Come now, everybody,” said Courtesy. “The launch’ll be starting in a
minute.”
“But the suffragette’s not here,” said the gardener.
There was an instant’s blank as heavy as lead.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I can’t wait here all day. If she
wants to moon around and miss the boat, let her. I am going.”
She gave a hand each to two niggers, and sprang like a detachable
earthquake into the launch.
“I think I ought to wait,” said Courtesy. “She’s a little shaky after
yesterday, and you’re such an irresponsible boy, gardener. She may have
fainted, while we were looking the other way. Or she may be in that
crowd buying souvenirs.”
The gardener looked in the crowd for that well-known round hat with the
faded flowers. But he knew that she would never buy a souvenir.
“You jump in, gardener. I’ll wait,” said Courtesy. “Perhaps there’ll be
another launch.”
“Lars’ launch, missis, please,” said one of the mariners of the vessel
in question.
“Come at once, girl,” said Mrs. Rust’s harsh voice from the stern.
Courtesy wavered.
Mrs. Rust made a great effort. She became extremely red. “Don’t you
understand, girl, you must come?” she shouted. “I can’t spare you.... I
like you....” She cleared her throat and changed her voice. “Can’t
sew ... buttons ... companion ... large salary....”
But the first part of the sentence reached Courtesy’s sympathy. She
jumped into the launch.
The gardener stood on the hot wharf, and his heart turned upside down.
His plans were stripped from him once more by this disgracefully
militant creature who had broken into his life. He hovered on the brink
of several thoughts at once.
“The little fool. The dear little thing. The little devil.”
He ran round the customs house. He felt convinced that it was
interposing its broad person between him and his suffragette. He could
almost see it dodging to hide her from his sight.
“I shall find her in a minute,” he thought. “I’m a lucky man.” He
thought that his hopes were pinned to the probability of arriving on the
_Caribbeania_ in time.
On the brown grass space there were only the goats. The gardener was
astonished not to see the fleeing form of a woman making for the town.
Things can be done very quickly if they must. The gardener was at the
corner of the main street before he had time to think another thought.
He looked back, and saw in one fevered glance the launch only just
parting from the shore.
“Have you seen a lady in white with a brown hat?” he asked of a
policeman.
“Yes, please, sah.”
“Which way?”
The conversation was from beginning to end above the policeman’s head.
But such a very hot buckra man must be humoured. At random the policeman
pointed up the main street. The gardener was indeed a man of luck, for
that was the right direction.
The main street on a fiery afternoon was as long as eternity, but in
certain states of mind a man may bridge eternity in a breath, and not
know what he has crossed.
He was on the race-course. He looked back and the launch was approaching
the _Caribbeania_ in the far-off bay, like a dwarf panting defiance at a
giant.
When he was half-way across the race-course, he saw a white figure
surmounted by a brown straw hat, in the Botanical Gardens, in the shade
of a banyan tree.
The suffragette had lighted a cigarette in a laborious attempt to appear
calm, but she pressed her hand to her breast as though she had been
running. “I’m not coming,” she shouted, when he was within shouting
distance.
He vaulted the railing of the race-course, and the railing of the
garden. “What a bore!” he said. “Then I must stop too.”
“Why?” she asked.
Very far off, the launch was nestling at the side of the _Caribbeania_.
“For reasons I cannot be bothered to repeat to you.”
She veiled herself in a cloud of smoke.
“You know,” he added, “this is a repetition of the Elizabeth Hammer
episode. Pure hysteria. Darling.”
There was an appreciable pause.
“Why, you’re right. So it is,” said the suffragette.
“Come on,” shouted the gardener. “We can catch it yet.”
“If I come,” she said, “it will be strong, not weak.”
“Of course,” said the gardener. “Come on.”
“It would be much easier to stay here.”
“Oh, much,” panted the gardener. “Come on, come on.”
So they ran, and on the way back they discovered how interminable the
main street was, and how relentless is the sun of the West Atlantic. But
when they reached the wharf, the launch was still clinging to the liner.
“A guinea,” shouted the suffragette, who was experiencing the joys of
very big-game hunting, “to the boatman who can get us up to the
_Caribbeania_ before she starts.”
She spoke in the voice of one accustomed to speaking in Trafalgar
Square, and everybody understood her. A boat practically cut the feet
from under them before she had finished speaking, and in it they
splashed furiously out into the bay.
“We shall catch it,” said the gardener, rowing energetically with one
finger. “I’m a man of luck.”
He was posing as one who would not utter a reproach. It was a convenient
pose for all concerned. When they were about half-way, the suffragette
said, “You know—it takes a little courage to admit hysteria.”
“Of course it does, my dear,” said the gardener. “I wouldn’t have done
it for the world.”
Presently they were within bare shouting distance of the whale which had
threatened to make Jonahs of them. A liner’s farewells are like those of
a great many women I know, very elastic indeed.
“You’ll do it,” shouted a voice from the high boat-deck.
They did it. The Captain shook his finger at them from the bridge.
“What happened?” asked Courtesy, meeting them on the main deck with a
shawl to put round the suffragette. Some women seem to think that a
shawl, or a hot bath, or a little drop of sal-volatile are equal to any
emergency under the sun.
“She didn’t know that was the last launch,” said the gardener, still
posing as the magnanimous defender.
“Yes, I did,” said the suffragette.
“She was buying a souvenir round the corner,” persisted the gardener.
“No, I wasn’t,” contradicted the lady. “I made up my mind not to come
back to the _Caribbeania_.”
“Ou, I say, how killing of you!” said Courtesy. “But he changed your
mind?”
“No. I overcame it.”
“You quaint mite,” said Courtesy.
The gardener’s pose momentarily ended here, for he was stricken with
whirling of the head and sickness, after running in the sun. Although
there was a touch of martyrdom about it, it was not a dignified ending
to a really effective pose. He had to seek the comfort of Hilda in his
cabin.
Hilda had three flowers now, and they had cost her her independence, for
she leaned upon a stick. But among her round green leaves she held up
bravely her trinity of little gold suns.
The gardener being thus removed, Courtesy and the suffragette sat on the
promenade-deck, and discussed the day. The suffragette was astonished to
find herself in this position, being addressed as “my dear,” by a
contemporary. “Just like a real girl,” she thought, for as she had never
passed through the mutual hair-brushing stage with other girls, she
always expected to be hated, and never to be loved. She found it rather
delightful to have Courtesy’s hand passed through her arm, but she also
found it awkward, and hardly knew how to adjust her own arm to the
unaccustomed contact. The very small details of intercourse are very
hard indeed to a snake, though pleasant by reason of novelty.
“So you didn’t want to come back, and he bullied you?” said Courtesy,
frankly inquisitive. “After all, my dear, that’s what women are for.”
“It is NOT!” shouted the suffragette. “Women are not born with a curse
on them like that. I chose to come back; I made a great effort, and
came.”
“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and tactfully changed the subject. Courtesy’s
tact was always easily visible to the naked eye. “My dear, I must tell
you what a killing interview I had with old Mrs. Rust. She clutched my
arm when I got into the launch—think of that, my dear—and presently she
said in a gruff sort of frightened voice, as if she was confessing a
crime, ‘Miss Courtesy, I refuse to part with you; you are what I have
been looking for; you are not to pay any attention to anybody else—do
you hear? I forbid it.’ I screamed with laughter—on the quiet, you know.
I said, ‘Do you want me to be a substitute for Hammer, Mrs. Rust?’ ‘No,’
she said. ‘Hammer was only a stopgap; I was keeping the position open
for a person like you. I will give you two hundred a year if you will
promise to stay by me as long as you can bear me’—and then she shouted
as if she had made a mistake, and thought that noise could cover it—‘I
mean as long as I can bear you.’”
“So what did you answer?” asked the suffragette.
“My dear, two hundred a year—what could I say?”
“But what were you originally going out to Trinity Island for?” asked
the suffragette. “To visit relatives, weren’t you? What will they say?”
“Oh, they won’t say anything—to two hundred a year. I was really only
coming out as a globe-trotter. I loathe colonial relations.”
The matrimonial motive was the skeleton in Courtesy’s cupboard.
“But wasn’t it killing, my dear?”
“Very killing,” agreed the suffragette gravely. She felt like one
speaking a foreign tongue.
And then it occurred to Courtesy that she was squeezing the arm of one
who, after all, had a criminal disregard of convention. She withdrew her
arm, and proceeded to try and storm that house which she considered to
be built on sand.
“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said.
“Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him?
You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him,
‘THIS WON’T DO.’ I should be frightfully glad if I could feel you were
all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?”
“We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in
the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever
pretended to want to.”
“Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together
as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.”
“But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.”
“Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear,
enemies don’t do these things.”
“They do. We do.”
“But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.”
“Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!”
“Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully
realise the meaning of the life you are leading?”
“You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing
militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall
leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an
utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.”
“O Lor’!” exclaimed Courtesy, falling back upon her original line of
defence. “An utter stranger ... I must go and button Mrs. Rust into her
evening gown.”
There is something very annoying to a woman in being accused of
innocence. The suffragette was quite cross.
For the next two days the _Caribbeania_ threaded her way cautiously
between shore and shore. The horizon was frilled with palm-embroidered
lands. Dry, terrible-looking beaches, backed by arid brown hills, marred
the soft character of those calm seas. It was as if the _Caribbeania_
saluted the coast of South America, and South America turned her back
upon her visitor. At two or three ports in that forbidding land the boat
touched. Drake had passed that way, and had left his ill-gotten halo
upon the coast, but that was the only life of the land. The flat, dead
towns seemed brooding over flat, dead tragedies.
It was almost a relief to the travellers when the last night fell, and
the ship was enclosed in darkness and its trivial insularity. There was
a great dance that night. Captain Walters called it the Veterans’ dance,
because the chalked deck was thick with non-combatants, who had
determined to cast care aside and join with youth, because after all it
was the last night, and one would never meet any of these people again.
As a matter of fact, there was no youth to be joined, for youth sat out
and began its farewells. Half a dozen hours is not an over-large
allowance of time for farewells between people who have known each other
three throbbing ocean weeks.
The suffragette actually danced with the chief engineer. He always
danced with ladies who could not find partners, being a conscientious
young man of forty-two, with a brand-new bride at home. The suffragette
knew well that by his courtesy she was branded as one undesired, and she
laughed her invisible cynical laugh.
I think men are akin to sheep as well as to monkeys, and the theory only
needs a Darwin to trace the connection. I have yet to meet the man who,
where women are concerned, does not follow in the track of others of his
kind. I think that very few men conceive an original preference for a
woman unbiassed by the public tendency.
Directly the gardener saw the suffragette dancing with the chief
engineer, he wondered why he was not dancing with her himself, although
she danced rather badly. The gardener felt a mysterious call to go and
monopolise her directly she was at liberty.
“I’m glad you have come to talk to me,” said the suffragette. “Because I
shall go on shore early to-morrow, and should like to say good-bye to
you.”
“Good-bye?” questioned the gardener.
“You didn’t really expect me to stay with you, did you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the gardener, and thought how peaceful and how stupid life
would be without her. “I shan’t dream of letting you go.” And even while
he said it, he experienced the awful feeling of being powerless to make
his words good. He realised for the first time how indispensable to a
man’s sight are soft straight hair that has never committed itself to
any real colour, and a small pointed face, and quick questioning eyes.
But there was something indescribable, peculiar to the suffragette, that
made it impossible to humble oneself before her. She was anything but a
queen among women; no man had ever wished to be trodden under her feet,
though they were small and pretty. Plain people often have pretty hands
and feet, a mark of Nature’s tardy self-reproach.
To any other woman, the gardener might have said, “Please, my dear ...”
with excellent results. He had a good voice with a tenor edge to it, and
he could pose very nicely as a supplicator. But not to the suffragette.
“I have not brought you all this way just to let you return to your
militant courses,” he said, with a sort of hollow firmness. “I owe a
duty to Trinity Island, after all, now that I have imported you.”
The suffragette smiled and said she was tired and would go to
bed—good-bye.
The gardener said Good-night.
The _Caribbeania_ and the first ray of the sun reached the Island
simultaneously next morning. When the gardener came on deck at half-past
seven he found himself confronted by the town of Union, backed by its
sudden hills. The _Caribbeania_, like a robber’s victim, ignominiously
bound to the pier, was being relieved of its valuables. The air was
thick with talk. On the pier the over-dressed representatives of British
rule, in blue serge and gold braid, rubbed shoulders with the
under-dressed results of their kind tyranny, in openwork shirts and
three-quarters of a pair of trousers.
“Your wife went off early,” said the fourth officer to the gardener. “I
asked her whether she were eloping all by herself, and she said you knew
all about it.”
“Thanks,” said the gardener curtly.
You will hardly believe me when I tell you that his first conscious
thought after this announcement was that he had no money to tip the
steward with. The suffragette meant a good deal to him, and among the
things she meant was temporary financial accommodation.
I hope that you have noticed by now that he was not a money-lover, but a
steward was a steward, and this particular steward had been kind in
improvising a crutch for Hilda. Any assistance from the suffragette was,
of course, taken as temporary: independence was one of the gardener’s
chronic poses. He meant to change it from a rather hollow dream into
reality on arriving on the Island; he supposed that he would be able to
turn his brains into money. He considered that no such brain could ever
have landed at Union Town. Its price in coin, which had been rather at a
discount in the stupid turmoil of London, would be instantly appreciable
under this empty sky. His pose on the Island was to be The One Who
Arrives, in capital letters.
He went down to his cabin to pack his little luggage. He had nothing
beloved to pack now; men’s clothes seem to be inhuman things without a
touch of the lovable, and they were all he had. For Hilda was dead. For
the last week of her life she had been a little concrete exclamation of
protest against her unnatural surroundings. One born to look simply at
the sun, from the shelter of a whitewashed cottage wall, with others of
her like jostling beautifully round her; a fantastic fate had willed
that she should reach the flower of her life in a tipsy cabin, with a
sea-wind singing outside the thick glass against which she leant. The
gardener had given her a sailor’s grave somewhere near the spot in the
Spanish Main to which I hope the spirit of Drake clings, for his
mother-sea received him there. It was hardly a suitable ending for
Hilda, but it was the best available.
The gardener set himself to put his scanty property together stealthily,
and creep from the boat, that the stewards might not see him go. He had
an unposed horror of ungenerosity. To him, as to most men, the tip was
more of a duty than the discharge of a debt. He suffered keenly for a
while from the discovery that there was no escaping from the stewards
to-day, they were stationed with careful carelessness at every corner.
Presently the siege was raised unexpectedly by the arrival of the
boot-boy with a note.
“The lady left it, sir.”
It contained a five-pound note, and it was addressed in the
suffragette’s small defiant handwriting.
Of course the hero of a novel should have thrown the whole missive into
the sea. He should have struck an attitude and explained to the admiring
boot-boy that such gifts from a woman could only be looked upon as an
insult. But you must remember the gardener considered that the fortunes
of the Island were at his feet. And he would not have gone so far as to
pose at his own expense—not to speak of the steward’s. He put the note
in his pocket, and went to the purser for change.
When his duties were discharged, he came on deck to collect any plans
that might be in the air. It is a most annoying fact that theories will
not take the place of plans. In theory you may be The One Who Arrives,
but in practice you have to think about passing the customs and finding
a cheap hotel and getting yourself a sun-helmet. I think the world has
an antipathy to heroes; it certainly makes things very hard for them.
On deck Courtesy was sitting calm and ready. Her plans had been made for
three days. She had only just stopped short of writing a time-table for
the hourly career of herself and Mrs. Rust throughout their sojourn on
the island. She had a genius for details.
“The suffragette has disappeared,” said the gardener. A disarming
frankness was one of his weapons.
“I’m jolly glad,” replied Courtesy. “I believe you owe that to me, you
naughty boy. I gave her a bit of my mind about it the other day.”
The gardener uttered no reproaches. He felt none. For he had learnt by
now that the suffragette would never be affected by a bit of anybody’s
mind.
“What are you going to do?” asked Courtesy. “We are going to the St.
Maurice Hotel for four days—Father Christopher told us of it—and at
mid-day on Saturday we go up to the hills for a fortnight, and then we
hire a car and tour round the Island, staying twenty-four hours at
Alligator Bay.”
“I’m going to look for work,” said the gardener.
“Sugar or bananas?”
“Neither. Head-work.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Nobody on the Island ever uses
their head except to carry luggage on.”
“That’s why I shall find work. There’s no competition in my line.”
“You funny ...” giggled Courtesy. “Isn’t he quaint, Father Christopher?”
For the priest was passing on his twenty-second circuit of the deck.
“Very droll, no doubt,” said the priest in the voice of a refrigerator,
and continued to pass. He was very much annoyed with the gardener’s
soul.
The gardener waited till he came round again before saying to Courtesy,
“Besides, I have to look for the suffragette.”
“I hope you won’t find her this time,” said Courtesy. “Will you come to
tea with us one day, and tell us which of your searches seems most
hopeful. You see, now the suffragette’s gone, you are respectable for
the moment, and I needn’t be afraid for Mrs. Rust’s morals.”