For two days Teddy made Kathleen conspicuous by his gallant attentions;
so that on the evening of the third day she was somewhat taken aback
when, instead of inviting her to sally forth for their usual stroll
round the Capstone, he merely lingered in the hall after dinner
to gladden her by a little airy chat, and then rather abruptly
disappeared. A rumour passed about, later on, that he had been seen
acting escort to a young girl, a very young girl--only his senior by
four years or so.
Kathleen understood that she had been wrung dry of all material
necessary for yet another addition to his "Observations of Eve"; and
that now he was allowing himself a little pleasant relaxation from
conscientious psychology.... He was young enough, and she old enough,
that without embarrassment she could sham extreme indignation and a
broken heart to those who chaffed her on his desertion. But she was
sensible of a slight feeling of mortification, nevertheless; it was
not in the nature of Kathleen to take even a schoolboy's defalcation
lightly. She determined, however, to let no trace of this appear in her
manner towards the culprit, when he should choose to approach her with
a contrite desire to renew their charming intimacy. She was reading in
the sitting-room the following morning, when Teddy marched in--and, on
seeing her, looked very much inclined to back out again, speedily.
"Good morning, Teddy," said Kathleen.
"Oh ... 'morning!" with a marvellous recovery of sang-froid; "how are
you? I was looking for my tennis-racket...."
"Rather warm for tennis this morning, isn't it? I thought we might walk
over to Hele Bay and bathe there, if you've nothing better to do?"
"Er--I'm afraid I'm engaged," Teddy replied distantly. And, slightly
raising his cap to her, strolled from the room.
Kathleen turned to meet the mischievous twinkle in the eye of Teddy's
stepfather, leaning against the open garden door. She strove to laugh
away her furious discomfiture.
"It looks as though I'd been jilted!"--(_Nasty_ little boy ... to let
it happen in front of Napier Kirby!)
"Teddy always does that. Don't let it worry you. I'll walk with you to
Hele Bay."
"Thanks!" between the condescension of the man and of the boy there was
not much to choose. "Thanks; I'd rather go alone."
Giving Hele a wide berth, she went past the Haunted Farm, through the
wood of the picnic, and across a stile into the lush pastured valley
beyond. And she thought fiercely and incessantly of Napier Kirby....
Fred Worley, who admired his friend to the verge of boring to
extinction anyone who cared to listen on the subject, had supplied
her with quite an amount of interesting information. She had learnt
that Kirby was born in New Zealand, but that he had at a very early
age emigrated to Europe. After a great deal of adventuring, he had
finally settled down to make money in the manufacture of a new line of
cheap but effective motor-cars: the "Dagmar," of which he had by swift
appreciative instinct acquired the patent.
Four years ago he had fallen headlong in love with Grace Frensham, and
by his foolhardy uncalculating behaviour had nearly wrecked her chances
of establishing a divorce case against the libertine who was Teddy's
father.... ("And who sometimes comes to tea," Kathleen murmured under
her breath.)
Worley seemed to regard the Kirbys' presence at Rapparee House as an
enormous favour bestowed on himself and Trixie; a favour for which he
was quite unable to account, unless it were that Nap was touched by his
devotion.
"He's grateful for your admiration," remarked Kathleen; she had already
noticed that the little man could absorb any quantity of this; and
possibly was not at all averse to spending a couple of months in the
continual company of his combined Boswell and Sancho Panza....
Yet Kirby was by no means a personage to be laughed at, despite his
enormous vanity, his childishness, his affection for gaudy achievement.
He had power; and he had brain; and swift subtle penetrations;
probably unexpected tracts of chivalry, forbearance, in his strange
composition. And he had come out on top in the great wrestle for
place; a strong item in his favour, this--from the point of view of
Kathleen, who scorned failure.
* * * * *
She became aware that the object of her meditations was taking a walk
some sixty yards in her rear ... with evidently no manifest desire to
catch up with her. She had no notion how long this state of affairs
had existed ... but swung on, the blood raging at her lips ... because
at swift sight of him had come the thought: "_How_ he could make love,
this--dark man!"
Presently, unable to bear any longer the mental obsession of him at
her back, she halted; turned to face the reality. He smiled as he drew
level--gleam of dazzling white in a mobile well-cut mouth.
"I told you I was going to Hele. How did you know I had come this way?"
"The patteran taught me," replied Napier nonchalantly.
"The patteran?"
Following his glance, she saw that she held some fragments of leaf in
her hand. It was her wanton habit, while she walked and brooded, to
pull leaves from hedge or bush and tear them abstractedly to bits along
their network of veins. It was an easy matter to follow the trail of
destruction.
"I said I wanted to go alone."
"Sure. And you can go alone. I'm quite happy as we were before you
stopped. It's a treat to watch the way you walk."
Disdaining to walk any further as an exhibition for his applause, she
lay down to rest in a field ablaze with some pungent yellow weed.
Instantly he had flung himself down at her side, and kissed her--and
kissed her--as she flamed to sudden haggard beauty. Kissed her....
Grace, once fascinated by his very difference to the Anglo-Saxon,
had for several months gently trickled cold water upon his outbursts
of love; his pride smouldered ... till now it avenged itself upon
the woman with brilliant eyes, and black heavy hair, and supple body
pressing down the gay hot-scented weeds----This woman could never taunt
him with the dark thick blood that flowed in his veins, because of the
streak in her own that matched it....
"You--squaw ... didn't you feel that this had to happen, the second
ever you set eyes on me...?"
Over-ripe, she needed only the touch.
... Sun steaming at high noon upon its yellow valley--his voice like
molten gold--his kisses fire on her throat----Was there at last
sufficient heat in the whole chilled world? She absorbed it; sucked
it into her craving system; gave it out again in great torrid gushes.
Napier was startled into fervour keener than he had meant to display
in what was three parts a mere vicious back-fling at Gracie's charming
lazy indifference. Somewhere deep down in the recesses of his nature,
he registered a prudent hope that Temple knew how to look after his
wife, and would not allow the thing to go too far....
Teddy brought Miss Cissy Norris in to lunch at Rapparee House, by
Trixie's special permission. As Napier and Kathleen strolled out to the
table laid by way of a change in the centre of the vegetable garden,
the former heard old Mrs. Kirby state with remarkable affability:
"Biss Dorris--you are positively the _odly_ persod who cad brig a sbile
to our Teddy's lips!"...
* * * * *
She would not have been forty-three had she not attached a quivering
importance to the trappings of her romance; the delicious sense of
secrecy and guilt; Napier's perfect play of indifference in the
presence of others; amused appreciation of their susceptibility to his
skilful management, so that again and again they snatched an apparently
accidental meeting undisturbed. Most of all, she enjoyed making the
elaborate excuses necessary to retire early to her room. Then came the
lonely hour or two of anticipation--wild restlessness exulting in the
foreknowledge that it would be soothed--that it could be soothed ...
presently.
Oh, destiny and Trix Worley, you were astoundingly gracious to give me
this little room in which I can be alone to think of my lover....
Her ears at strain to catch sounds of the party retiring to bed.... The
last door closed.... Then vigil at the window which dropped barely six
feet down to the paved courtyard.... Till his figure showed a dim blur
in the sultry moonless night----Till she could throw on a cloak, and
join him.
"Like the first bite off a great warmly flushed apricot," he murmured,
kissing her throat.... Yes, she had been right in her surmise that the
dark man could make love most wonderfully....
It was good, too, when, tumbled and dew-soaked, she slipped back to
her white-and-pansy shelter, to repeat over and over again each new
love-line he had given her--add it on to the old--the building of a
song.
And that she took such intense pleasure in these trivial outward
symbols of her rejuvenation, was it not convincing proof that youth
must still be hers? Was it not the essence of youth--of extreme youth
even?... Or else, Kathleen, was it age pursuing youth around a circular
course, to a point where they almost touched?
But she was glad that her heart could still beat, and her cheeks flush,
and her lips lie, for folly's sake. Too glad. The fever and glory of
her nights must surely have been absorbed into the very walls of the
room, so that the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, returning later on,
would marvel at the queer hot thoughts that vaguely disturbed her
peace, as a-sprawl upon the chintz counterpane, she read her favourite
"Little Woman." ...
* * * * *
Whereas Kathleen came to know Napier better with the flight of days, he
never expressed any curiosities with regard to her. Either he made love
to her, brilliantly--or else talked, brilliantly, about himself, his
past achievements, his schemes for the future, the reputation he had
among his fellow-men for an uncanny flair in the choice and management
of the wily automobile. "They all say: 'Go to Kirby! Kirby knows! He
understands the _nature_ of cars!'----Well, it comes to just that;
there's not an engine, good or bad, that I can't coax into putting
out its best. Heard of Thesiger?"--mentioning a famous millionaire
banker--"He said to a pal of mine: 'I'd no more think of buying a new
make of car without first taking Kirby's advice----'"
The man boasted; but one believed in him. He radiated an atmosphere of
success--and she had had enough of the temperament that hangs back from
venture, irresolute, deprecating.
He presented the same blank surface of unconcern to the mention of any
book or work of art which his own enthusiasm had not primarily chanced
upon: "I like to discover the world for myself, and not have a showman
at my elbow saying: 'Look!' all day long," said Nap Kirby--who himself
was saying: "Look!" all day long ... or, by way of variation: "Look at
me!"
But Kathleen rejoiced in his aloofness from her concerns. Oh, the rest,
the utter rest mingled with the sensation of a new skin grown over
the fretted others, which lay in the thought that her hidden sores
and bitternesses, so apparent to Gareth, were entirely unsuspected by
the sunny egoist who professed to love her. That where Gareth's own
shrinking delicacy guessed instinctively how she could be hurt, and
spared her whenever possible, insulting her doubly by his forbearance,
Napier remained sublimely unaware of such matters as the approach of
winter, and bathroom taps, and the strain of glamouring where glamour
was no more, and the terror of forty-three next birthday, and a temper
that had been chafed by daily intimacy with incompetence till it was
harsh as the taste of blood in the mouth. She could go to Napier
without the buzz of these torments about her brain and ears. She could
go to him lightly ... hear him say, with that careless caress in his
voice that was so wonderful to her--"You're like me, Kathleen, you
think that----" or "You feel that----" confidently wrong in every
one of his assumptions; never bothering to verify them. She wore the
ready-made temperament ... and fervently, in her secret heart, did she
thank him for it. More than for the starved passion he had satisfied,
more than for the buoyant atmosphere of power he exhaled, Kathleen
loved him because he did not understand her....
Meanwhile, Gareth wrote his book.
Its existence diffused a miraculous sheeny quality over everyday life.
He had only to feel for the remembrance of it, a talisman between his
palms--and things and people ceased to annoy, were merely a moving
pantomime for his amusement. His sense of the whimsical, grown rusty
with the years, was now suddenly restored to him. Even Kathleen no
longer possessed the faculty of rasping him with her exasperated
knowledge of his exact failings and what they had led to--or not led
to--in the past. He did not notice that she bothered him at all any
more ... so preoccupied was he with figures less real--infinitely more
real. Just occasionally the talisman failed him; those were the hours
following a mood when he had lacked the necessary spasm of energy to
take up his pen and commence work, usually fluent enough after the
start had been made. Those hours he would go sick with the fear that
the old enemy within him--that which Kathleen had once named Atrophy of
the Initiative, would eventually prevent even this cherished endeavour
from fulfilment ... and those were the hours when again he was aware of
Kathleen's voice.
Interludes, also, of the purely grotesque, when Trix Worley tumbled
flat across his borderlands like an enormous figure in harlequinade,
and lay a-sprawl and immovable ... his mentality was quite helpless
against these irrelevant incursions.
But for the most part the merry haphazard days were dream-misted with
secret consciousness of his table by the attic window. He enjoyed, as
early as possible in the evening, bidding the noisy party 'Good night';
and leaving them to their games, their flirtations, their cards, their
walks; stole up the creaking wooden stairway--surely the path to some
hidden treasure of doubloons and moidores, pouring in dusty, twinkling
showers all about a mouldering skeleton-form. The door closed behind
him; the two candles lit, erect spear-heads of gold, envied by the
far-off stars which thickly sprinkled the skylight patches. Then Gareth
would sit down to the table; handle caressingly his pile of papers;
fall into a reverie ... whence he was roused by the cool brush of
fingers against his throat, across his eyelids.
She never failed to come, the cool girl of his dreams. He knew now
that she must always have belonged to him; had even hovered mistily
in the background of his thoughts, when his mother had called on her
"youngest knight" one day to keep troth valiantly with love. It was
the deep-hidden longing for her tenderness and shade which had made
the years of glare and strain so wearying, so unbearable. And then,
with the vision of the February wood, she had shown herself to him;
in the attic with its murky fading corners, she had become real. He
had gradually learnt a great deal about her: she did not sleep in the
wood, as he had always supposed; but on the top of the hill, where
stood a tumble-down bare-walled hut with a crooked door, and around it
a patch of ground barren save for one fir-tree standing close against
the window, catching the sunset flame in autumn, tip-tapping endlessly
throughout the snowtime, A Grimm's-fairy-tale cottage; he believed
there must be a grandmother in the kitchen that was eternally darkened
by shadow of the fir-tree; but he had not yet raised the latch to see.
The girl whose touch was cool--Gareth did not doubt that somewhere
she existed for him; but he had blundered, and so never found her.
The hero of his book would not blunder thus. There lurked a queer and
almost vicious pleasure in the endowment of this man with the essential
quality himself had lacked, that he might win through to the essential
end himself had missed. Gareth adored his conqueror, whose story he had
fitted together bit by bit, pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, till now it
stood complete, all but the final inspiration.
He lingered lovingly over the opening chapters, which described in
tender detail Kay Rollinson's childhood as a harbour-urchin. Came an
episode, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, when the ever-dormant
fear in his heart awoke to a vivid frenzy of terror ... he was driven
by it inland--inland--away from all possible sight of that pallid
grey-green ripple of ocean ... till at last, heedless in which
direction he went, he reached the February wood; a wood haunted yet
passionless ... where the vision came to him of a girl, slim and ragged
and bare-ankled ... her thoughts were cool silent places where no water
sounded; her voice touched the fear in his heart, and laid it to rest.
Drowsing with his cheek pressed down to the carpet of sodden purple
leaves, the boy knew that one day, inevitably, he would find such a
girl, in such a wood.... And he vowed to wait for her, and be steadfast
to his vision, till the full sweep of adventure brought it round.
Four years. And then--as had been the case with Gareth--Kay's
adolescence was kindled by encounter with a girl flushed and vital and
eager ... _not_ the girl of the February wood. They swept each other on
to experiment ... a wild forbidden journey together in a tramp-steamer
that had called at the harbour to take in coal ... a week, stealthy and
rapturous, spent on an island off the coast of Ireland....
Then, at the height of rapture, inexplicable flight of the girl.
At first Kay was possessed by the one idea of seeking her out again,
to renew the glory of which he had so staggeringly been deprived. But
at the moment when his quest was successful, when, unseen himself, he
saw her again, came realization that she was not the love he had waited
for; and that the quest itself--ceaseless grapple with the void and
desolate hours lacking her; memories that were as wounds that could not
bear the lightest touch--all this tumult and turmoil of pain hitherto
unknown--all was but that other curve of adventure which he must
perforce accept without shirking, as he had accepted the wonder of her
red hair, and her black eyes, and her passionate imperious ways.
Perhaps she never knew that he had seen her. He turned his back on
the possibility of romance prolonged ... in silence returned to the
harbour; to the workshop where he had been learning the business of
ship-building, before sex had called him out and away.... And now, when
time had out-worn the pain and the unsatisfied craving, the path was
clear for that other girl--his girl--predestined his, now he had beaten
down the temptation to forsake a mere promise ... a dream....
"Grant the path be clear before you----"
* * * * *
... And suddenly Gareth broke down; sat with face buried in his arms,
shaking in every limb; the blood sweeping to his head and as quickly
ebbing again ... strange clanging discords in his soul.... He hated Kay
Rollinson for being able to do this, this which he had failed to do ...
years ago, at Alpenruh. Was sick with momentary envy of the man he had
summoned into being--his brain-creature--his slave.
There had been subtle fascination in thus deliberately setting him in
the same circumstances as his own; in forcing him to the same
crisis ... and wrenching him out triumphant.
But it wasn't fair--not fair--God had made Gareth Temple futile and
rotten of will. Kay Rollinson's god had been kinder.
Well ... he had started to write; had pledged his self-respect to this
one achievement at least. So he would have to go on mocking the man he
was, with a splendid paper-and-ink conception of the man he thought
himself. No ... he was not ungrateful; he loved his book, and the hero
of it.... It was only just for a little while he hated him for not
having blundered as he himself had blundered.... For Gareth the path
was blocked now, if she should come ... if she should still come....
* * * * *
August throbbed and flared to a tropical consummation.
Gareth's holiday would finish to-morrow. And Kathleen's. How much of
what each had separately found would be capable of transplantation to
Pacific Villa, Hammersmith?
"_Mr._ Temple. Did you know that we live _quite_ close to you, in
London?"
Gareth had not known. It was something of a shock to realize that
henceforth and at any moment a stout spectre might glide up behind him,
touch him on the shoulder, beckon mysteriously--"A _word_ with you. In
_private_." And then: "_Mr._ Temple. Is the day _wet_ or fine?"...
Gareth was not quite sure if the tidings of her future proximity were
blessed.
And Kathleen?
"Nap--I shall see you in London?" tensely.
"Well, what do you think? Perhaps not," he drawled, teasing her.
"When? Where? It won't be easy. It won't be the same as here."
"I'll fix something; don't you worry. We'll all be back in a fortnight.
And I like loving old people in new places."
Laughing, she thanked him for the compliment. She was never harsh or
bitter with Kirby.
"And in different climates?"
"There is no climate in this infernal country. It's all just weather.
One day, you Indian woman, we'll run away together, South, and remember
what it is to get comfortably tropical."
He spoke carelessly ... but out of the words "we" and "our" she wove
herself a garment of warmth.... It was all right--romance was not at
an end for her; romance was hers, here, and in London, and beyond
London--he had said: "One day...."
* * * * *
Directly after sunset, on the last evening of his holiday, Gareth went
down to the harbour.
Full tide. The waves had ceased to dash in; and jet-carved against the
dull gold sky, cargo-steamer and sailing-boat floated high upon the
brimming water, that was tranquil as a mother with babe at her breast.
Ever and anon, a larger undulation from beyond the harbour mouth
swang and stirred luminous green depths, and shivered the dreaming
reflections of white wall and mauve roof and pink roof, till they
spread in dark stains of wet over the edge of the quay.... A great lazy
sea-monster, slobbering its triumph over a victim foredoomed.... Yes,
the tide exhaled an evil impression to-night ... more than mere peace
in this boundless endless ripple ... slumberous, replete....
Thus water would look when at last it could claim Kay Rollinson.
... For years he would have forgotten his round adventure. He had met
the girl of his vision, the girl of the February wood; he was free when
he met her; she had laid cool fingers on the fear in his heart, till it
was at rest; till he ceased to defy it and grapple with it--but went to
live with her inland, far inland, where there was no sea to remind him.
He had retired from ship-building. An age of steel and steam had
arisen, which left him and his methods sadly in the rear. The sea
was still being conquered--but not by him. He found other, lesser
interests; farmed his own lands for his own pleasure; travelled; read
books, and collected art treasures. He had many friends. And there was
also his little daughter.
For years he had forgotten.
Came a day when he discovered that his young wife was loved by a youth
younger than himself, weaker, with tender charming ways ... elfish
ways.
Rollinson asked her if she would wed this newcomer, if he were dead and
out of the way. She looked straight at him with her eyes that were blue
hyacinths drenched in rain ... and replied:
"Yes."
"Would you go to him as things are--away from me?"
"No. Because of Iris."
That morning had come a letter informing him of a grave money loss. For
his fortune had still remained in the ship-building business, when he
retired from it.
The boy was rich--that boy to whom she would gladly have gone, if her
husband were dead.
Clearly, Kay Rollinson reflected, his life stood in the way of her
round adventure.
"That can be arranged." He loaded his revolver in all its chambers;
wrote a letter to his closest friend--who happened to be that same
youth with the charming elfish ways--explaining that unable to face
financial ruin, he intended to shoot himself that night. And with his
revolver in his pocket, he went out.
... They found him the next day, drowned in the canal of a town some
miles distant. The revolver was in his hand--loaded in all its chambers.
The canal flowed wearily into a river, and the river to the sea. And no
one could tell how water had eventually claimed the man who carried in
his soul the fear of water....
* * * * *
So Gareth came by the end of his book: "The Round Adventure."