“MANY WATERS——”
Well! Anyhow there’s no sense in sitting up in my room brooding over this
thing, on a heavenly afternoon like this and all.
I’m not going to miss it all just to please _him_.
And if I am leaving everything—sea and sunshine and mountains—to-morrow,
I may as well take in as much of them as I can to-day. Besides, I suppose
I shall have to go down some time.
There are these people—whoever they are—expected this afternoon.
Obviously I shall have to be at tea to meet them? I shouldn’t in the
least mind letting _him_ down by remaining invisible until I’m all packed
up and ready for the little local train that must take me up to Holyhead
to meet the Euston mail. But there is his mother to consider—she has been
so sweet to me from the beginning. What I can’t understand about her is
how she ever managed to have such a son? There must have been something
odd and horrid about the father; and he must take after him. The _girls_
are all right.
There they are, going out now; down the sandy path to the station; Theo
bare-legged and bare-headed as usual, swinging a basket; off to buy jam,
I expect, for the visitors’ tea; Blanche carrying letters. I heard his
step on the cobbles ten minutes ago, and Mrs. Waters always rests in her
room until three o’clock. The coast’s quite clear, then. Why shouldn’t I
go out and have my bathe? I missed it this morning—thanks to all _that_!
Perhaps the cool green waves of the Bay will help me to feel as if I’d
washed a little of that memory away from me. Already it seems years since
my last bathe; only yesterday morning! When the girls and I ran down
together, to find him already in, practising walking under the water; and
he’d called out “I say! Isn’t it topping to be alive on a day like this?”
as he emerged, head up once more, dripping and glowing in his indigo-blue
sheath, his hair sleek once more with the wet, his arms and shoulders as
smooth and pinky-white as any of ours, but making ours look curiously
slender and delicate.
Years ago! Everything had been so different! I’d thought _he_ was so
different.
Well! This will be my last bathe for the summer, so I may as well enjoy
it, all to myself.
* * * * *
I undressed quickly, slipped into my black woven silk club costume, and
twisted round my head the long orange silk scarf that keeps my hair from
getting too wet. I simply won’t take to one of those sponge-bag-like
rubber caps that some girls still wear for bathing. They’re too unsightly
for anything—and one doesn’t exactly want to look a blot on the seascape,
even if there doesn’t happen to be anyone else bathing, to see one....
As it happened, I found, to my great annoyance, that there was someone
else already in the little cove next to the cottages that it was Theo’s
idea to christen “The Bay of _Many Waters_.” There was a smooth head,
some distance out, dark against the afternoon glitter; a steady stroke
that I knew.
_Oh!_
So he’d come out first!
Well, that meant that I couldn’t have my bathe here after all—just like
him!... Fresh rage against him surged up in me as I caught up the white
wrap of Turkey-towelling that I had thrown down upon a seaweedy rock with
my string-soled shoes. I’d leave him to it. Perhaps I could get a dip in
the next bay under that cliff where the wooden woman leaned forward to
her watch?
But, even as I turned to slip away, I heard a sound from across the water
that seemed to make my heart, for a second, stop its beating.
It was a choking shout for help.
“Nancy!—Here!—Here!”
Then that dark head disappeared under the water.
It couldn’t possibly have been for as long as it _seemed_. No!
People can’t hold their breath for as long. Then it was up again. The
swimmer had flung himself on his back and was floating. And I—without
actually realizing what I had been doing, I must have cast off my wrap
again, have splashed through the creamy surf of the first waves into the
smoother jade-green depths beyond, for I found myself swimming, striking
out, out—from the shore....
Still I didn’t know how I’d started—or why. Except that here was a human
being in trouble whom, somehow or other, I had to help. I didn’t think
about who it was. It wasn’t because of that broken shout of “_Nancy!_”
I’m sure. No; I am sure that, just then, no thought of saving Still
Waters was in my mind. It was just another human being who had called to
me; and towards whom I swam so desperately, making, in my hurry, such a
splashing over each stroke that it seemed to me endless before I came up
to where he floated on his back.
Automatically I remembered something our swimming-instructor had
drilled into us at school. I found myself telling myself that it was
dangerous—dangerous to get within reach of a drowning person’s hands.
They’d grip you, and you’d both go under.
“Keep behind him,” I was telling myself. “Keep behind him!”
But there was no need for me to trouble about avoiding his clutch. When
he spoke, I realized that he, in his danger, was keeping his head far
better than I was. He was calm.
“Cramp,” I heard him say, “in my left leg. You’ll have to tow me. Can you
swim on your back?”
“Yes.”
Whether I could or not, I supposed, I should have to.
So in turn I flung myself on my back, and caught hold of him under those
hard, strong-feeling arms of his.
Then began the struggle back to shore.
The tide was setting in, thank heaven! and as long as we were in the deep
waters it was not so hard. Presently we came to where the waves began to
break. The wind was blowing off the shore, blowing the surfy crests of
the waves backwards as a girl’s hair is blown across her face ... and
presently I was half blinded by the spray that dashed over my head, into
my eyes and mouth.
I choked, panted....
“Rest a minute,” said a voice close to me. “No hurry. The tide will take
us both in.” ...
But, getting my breath, I struggled on again, yard by yard. Again I got a
mouthful; spluttered, coughed.
“All right—all right—take it easy!” the voice was saying.
I simply couldn’t pay any attention to that—I was labouring with all my
strength for both—for myself and this log in the water that I must—_must_
get ashore. I was startled when he gave a sudden powerful jerk of his
shoulders that altered our course.
“You’ll have us on to the reef,” he said. “I’ll steer—don’t work so hard—”
I heard myself gasping.
—“don’t get flurried, Nancy!”
“Nancy!” Yes! Then I did realize who it was that I was tugging along with
me for dear life. His life was in my hands—mine, when I’d felt ready
to murder him an hour ago. I’d had to save it.... “Serve him right,” I
thought wildly, as I struggled along. “Oh, serve him right! I’ll show
him—I’ll teach him to kiss me again.”
Indeed, I’m not sure that I wasn’t muttering this aloud to myself in
the water. Anyhow, voices seemed buzzing in my ears—one was his own as
I’d heard it yesterday—“I say! Isn’t it topping to be alive? Isn’t it
topping to be alive?”
And then it seemed to come to the very last effort I could make. “_Ah!_”
I heard myself groan.
The next thing of which I was conscious came with a shock of surprise. It
was the soft jolt of my shoulders against sand.
We were aground!
For a minute or so I must have been swimming furiously in my depth,
without even feeling the growing warmth of the shallows about me.
I let go my wild, unneeded clutch of his arms, staggered to my feet,
waded in, then dropped again, face downwards and panting, on to the
beach, a few yards below the tide-mark of crisp, black seaweed, straws,
and broken shell.
It was over—we were safe. And now—what?
I didn’t know.
Anyhow, for a moment I lay there unable to rise or speak. I threw my arm
across my eyes. Then I found that he’d dragged himself up beside me. He
was leaning over me; saying something I was too dazed to catch.
I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want him to say anything. He needn’t
suppose I’d intended to save his life. He needn’t think this absurd
crisis had made any difference. There was still this morning between us.
There always would be. This made no difference. None! None at all!
I got up again, hearing my teeth chatter a little. I turned to the rock
where I’d thrown down my peignoir, and as I did so, I heard him behind me
raise his voice a little:
“I say! I can’t, you know!—You’ll have to help me up to the cottages, I’m
afraid—”
I glanced down at him; he was sitting up, his face a little white under
the tan, but quiet and expressionless. And as I looked at him, sitting
there backed by the empty, sunlit cove and the cliff with the figure-head
and flagstaff small as toys in the distance, I passed through the one
second’s most extraordinary experience of my life.
Was it a waking-dream, or what? The result of shock and over-exertion,
like those buzzing voices, just before, among the waves? For of all
the mad, impossible fancies to dash into one’s mind—before one’s eyes,
even!—this was the maddest.
This was what happened in that second’s space:
_Vividly there flashed before me a picture of my own Self just as I
was then, in my black silk maillot with my wet black hair streaming
down my neck; for I’d lost my scarf, it floated like a torn-off strand
of orange-coloured seaweed on the waves. I saw it there.... And I saw
that mind-picture of myself fling herself down on her knees beside him
again—fling herself into his arms, cold from the sea-water and dripping
and hard; saw her bury her face against his throat; heard, more clearly
than in a dream, her gasping sob of, “Billy! You were drowning! I might
have lost you!”_
Then—flick! the picture vanished, and I was drawing my wrap about me
composedly enough as I replied to him coldly, “I will help you up—on one
condition. That you don’t speak to me.”
He said quietly, “You prefer that?”
“Only on that condition,” I repeated.
“Very well,” he rose slowly to his feet, trying them one after the other
in the sand. “Only—I’m afraid I shall have to lean on you a bit—not hard.”
So, after I’d helped him on with his own wrap, I stood for him to put his
arm about my shoulders. I don’t know if he leaned hard or no. Slowly and
in silence, we walked up so from the shore to the cottages. Just before
we got to the sandy path in front, his arm dropped, and he smothered an
exclamation:
“Hul-_lo_!”
For, tilted up between the deep ruts made by Mr. Roberts’ cart in the
sand in front of the cottage gardens, we caught sight of a motor-car;
a gaudy, cherry-coloured affair, all ablaze with sunlit brass. The
visitors. They’d come, then. I’d forgotten _them_. They were in my
cottage at tea, I discovered, after he had turned quickly in at the
little gate of the cottage he shares with Blanche; from behind the door
of the kitchen sitting-room of our larger one I heard a babble of talk
and much laughter. Must I face it? With this dreadful day behind me?
Slowly I mounted the wooden stairs to my room and began to dress. I was,
all of a sudden, deadly tired; why, I felt only half awake; what I would
have liked would have been to fling myself down on that patchwork-quilted
bed and sleep the time away until I was to leave Porth Cariad for ever.
That this must needs have happened this afternoon, to add to the
conglomeration of things between him and me that I longed to forget!
After the way he behaved this morning!
(Ah, Billy, why did you? We were such chums!) _Caddish_ of him! To think
that he _might_—that I could be treated so!
That fact remained—and all the waves in the Bay of Many Waters hadn’t
washed any of its bitterness away. As for that mad, mad fancy of mine
afterwards on the beach—well! it must have been something like the way
people declare that the whole of a drowning person’s past life rises
before them in the moment of peril. Only, of course, those would be
pictures of things that had happened—not the reverse of anything that
ever, ever _could_ happen!
One thing—I’d never let him thank me for the outwardly magnanimous act
into which I’d been just forced, and which had left me too utterly
exhausted even to rage over it as I might. My arms felt almost too
limp to raise to my head as I wrung my streaming hair into a towel and
pinned it, still wet, firmly about my head. It took me minutes to put
on each garment. Meantime those minutes were ebbing away, and these
people downstairs were being kept waiting, expecting to see his official
_fiancée_ at the tea-table. And if I felt I couldn’t stay up here as
I longed to do, it wasn’t on his account. It wasn’t the girl he’d
engaged—and insulted so!—it was his mother’s guest who confronted in the
wavy looking-glass her very washed-out appearance, her dark, ringed eyes
and damp hair plastered down to keep it from dripping on to the first
clean blouse that had come to hand.
Certainly I looked very little credit to him!
With a shrug I turned away and went downstairs.
* * * * *
The warm kitchen seemed full of people and their voices, and of a
mingled scent of brewing tea and warm butter and—could it be a whiff
of perfume: _trèfle_? The tea-table was crowded with Mrs. Roberts’
gayest crockery, with her largest black teapot, with mounds of yellow
light-cakes and clusters of brown eggs and great slabs of Welsh farmhouse
bread-and-butter. In the middle a glass jug held a bouquet of heather and
honeysuckle and blue scabious. There was a dish of damson jam, and a very
golden, “shoppy” cake.
At the head of the table, Mrs. Waters was entertaining a stout, sallow
gentleman with a black moustache and a plaid tie, who was talking French
very fast and with a good deal of gesture. Blanche, elbows on the table,
was leaning eagerly across it to talk; opposite to her were her brother,
looking much as usual again, I saw, and Theodora in a state of flushed
animation, from whom, in the general babble, I caught something that
sounded like “tell Billy’s sweetheart—” and between Theodora and him
there sat, leaning back in her chair and laughing gaily, a young girl in
a wonderfully-cut and simple get-up of flame-yellow and white and cream,
with a swirl of feathery yellow about her midnight black hair; one of the
prettiest girls I’d ever seen in my life. Ah! it was she who’d brought in
that whiff of clover-scent?
She was laughing up into his face.
And she was calling my official _fiancé_ “Billy.”