"So inexhaustibly rich is the sun that even when it goes down it pours
its gold into the very depths of the sea; and then even the poorest
boatman rows with golden oars."
Thus spoke the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, and thus all
generations of men have felt.
The warm rich colour, as of ripeness, that it gives to the youngest
cheek, the tawny tinge as of jungle fauna with which it vitalises every
dead-white urban hand, and the enchanting glamour it lends to the
plainest head and face,--these are a few of the works of the sun that
are surely a proof of its demoniacal glory. Halos, it is true, it
fashions as well, and beyond reckoning; but the white teeth that flash
from the tanned mask are scarcely those of a saint. Or has a saint
actually been known who really had white teeth of his own?
August in England, between the moist wood-clad hills and the blinding
glitter of the sea; August in a beautiful country homestead, with its
flowering garden, its cool carpet of lawn stretching to a black line of
thick hedgerow which seems to be the last barrier between earth and
ocean,--what a season it is, and what a setting for the greatest game
of youth, the game of catch as catch can, with a cheerless winter for
the losers!
The world is at her old best, and all her children are exalted and
exhilarated by the knowledge that they are at their best also. Even the
trippers are perpetually in Sabbath clothes, as a sign that they are
infected with the prevalent feeling of festivity.
Sabbath clothes without the Sabbath gloom, beauty without piety, freedom
with open shops, sunshine without duty,--these to the masses are some of
the chief joys of the summer sun in England.
In this enumeration of a few of the leading features of a sunny August
in England, however, we should not forget to mention what will appear to
some the least desirable of them all. The fact that this particular
feature is omitted by the most successful English poets of the Victorian
School, as by other sentimentalists, would not excuse us in failing to
give it at least a passing reference here; for Victorian, alas! does not
by any means signify Alexandrian in regard to the periods of English
poetry; and even if it be a sin to mention this aspect of a sunny
August, we prefer to sin rather than to resemble a Victorian poet.
The quality referred to, then, is a certain result of the eternally
pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It
says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to
forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat
the snaky sinuousness of a basking cat seems more seductive than the
image of a winged angel, and amid the gold it lavishes, nothing looks
more loathsome, more repulsive, than the pale cheek of pious ill-health.
In short it urges man and woman to a wanton enjoyment of life and their
fellows; it recalls to them their relationship to the beasts of the
field and the birds in the trees; it fills them with a careless thirst
and hunger for the chief pastimes of these animals,--feeding, drinking,
and procreation; and the more "exalted" practices of self-abnegation,
self-sacrifice, and the mortification of the flesh, are easily forgotten
in such a mood.
Nothing goes wrong, nothing can go wrong, while the sun blazes and the
flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism
unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year,
so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still
more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,--wantonness and beauty;
and when these two imps of passion come together August is at its
zenith.
Mrs. Delarayne had been down at Brineweald a little under a week;
Vanessa Vollenberg and the young Fearwells had already been of the party
four whole days; Sir Joseph with Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell, Mr. and
Mrs. Gerald Tribe and Miss Mallowcoid had arrived at Brineweald Park
twenty-four hours after the Delarayne household had been completed, and
now everybody was busy settling down to the novelty of life, effacing
the traces of strangeness wherever they appeared, and measuring each
other's skill and power at pastimes not necessarily confined to
swimming, golf, and tennis.
Leonetta had been congratulated on her friend Vanessa. Mrs. Delarayne
who had expected an over-dressed, heavy young lady, with Shylock
countenance and shaggy negroid coiffure, had been not a little surprised
when she saw alight on the Brineweald down platform a girl who, though
distinctly Semitic in features, had all the refinement, good taste, and
sobriety of a Gentile and a lady. It was a relief, to say the least, and
when, in addition, she found her intelligent and a lively companion, she
was devoutly thankful.
Nothing beneath that fierce August sun escaped the keen comprehending
eye of Vanessa Vollenberg. The mother and the two daughters with whom
she found her present lot cast, gave her food enough for meditation and
secret comment; but while their acumen and penetration were hardly
inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown
up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of
primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while
they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere
her shores were to be found. In this way the seniority of her race was
probably revealed.
Beautiful in her own Oriental style, voluptuous and graceful, with small
well-made hands, and shapely limbs, she might have proved a formidable
rival to Leonetta; or was it perhaps precisely her Jewish blood,--which
seemed in Leonetta's eyes to preclude rivalry,--that had first endeared
this attractive young Jewess to her wilful Gentile friend?
Girls have strange reasons for "falling in love" with each other at
school. It is not impossible that the inconceivability of eventual
rivalry should be one of these.
Mrs. Delarayne's house, "The Fastness," was one of a round dozen large
houses that stood along the crest of Brineweald Hill, overlooking the
little seaside town of Stonechurch. It took a little over fifteen
minutes to walk down from Brineweald to the beach at Stonechurch, and
perhaps a little over twenty minutes to walk back up the steep hill. Sir
Joseph's place, Brineweald Park, lay inland on the far side of the
village of Brineweald, about a mile from "The Fastness," but the
distance was soon covered by the young people, even when they could not
dispose of one of Sir Joseph's cars; and the two households were
therefore practically always mingled.
Bathing, tennis, golf, picnicking, croquet,--these helped to fill the
time while the sun was high; and when the cool of the evening came, the
quiet paths and groves of Brineweald Park, or the bowers of Mrs.
Delarayne's garden, were an agreeable refuge for bodies pleasantly
fatigued and faintly langorous.
Mrs. Delarayne who was not uncommonly in a condition of faint languor
was content, during these terrible six weeks of her life, to play the
part of spectator. Silently, but with a good proportion of the available
interest, she contemplated the younger members of the party, and whether
she happened to be on her _chaise-longue_ overlooking her own lawn, or
on the terrace of Brineweald Park, her deep concern about the
performances of her juniors never abated. The fact that a good deal of
this determined attention was calculated to ward off the less attractive
alternative of Sir Joseph's untiring advances, was suspected least of
all by the generous squire of Brineweald himself; but it was noticeable
too, that she would often sit for long spells neither observing the
pranks of her young people nor listening to Sir Joseph's dulcet tones,
and then it was that her daughters would suspect that age was after all
beginning to tell, even in the case of their valiant parent. At such
times she was, of course, simply dreaming day dreams of the life she
could have had if, as "he" had said, she had been twenty now; and the
beatific expression that would come into her face was scarcely one of
reconciliation to senility.
To say that Vanessa Vollenberg and Agatha Fearwell were perfectly happy
on this holiday, would be a little wide of the mark. Indeed their
condition fell very much more short of perfect happiness than they
could possibly have anticipated.
Truth to tell, Leonetta was too indisputably mistress of the stage. The
infinite resource with which she contrived always to draw the limelight in
her direction, the unremitting regularity with which she turned every
circumstance into a "curtain" for her own apotheosis, while it fired the
proud Cleopatra to ever fresh efforts at successful competition,--efforts
which were proving tremendously exhausting,--left Vanessa and Agatha in a
state not unlike a suspension of hostilities. They simply waited. Of all
the men, Denis Malster was certainly the only one that a girl could have
been expected to make a struggle for, and since he appeared to be entirely
hypnotised by Leonetta, the remaining two, one of whom, in Agatha's case,
was a brother, seemed to invite only a Platonic relationship of games and
sports.
It is true that Guy Tyrrell felt he could have gone to any lengths with
the fascinating, voluptuous Jewess; but he had the inevitable defects of
his "clean-mindedness," and knew as little how to engage the interest of
a thoroughly matriculated girl as to rouse enthusiasm for botany in a
cat.
The first walk they had taken with the three young men and Cleopatra and
her sister had been typical of much that followed.
In the middle of a conversation in which Vanessa's native Jewish wit was
beginning to tell against the more homely gifts of the rest of the
party, Leonetta would suddenly fall back, stand in an attitude of rapt
attention over a brook, a well, a wild flower, a plank bridge, a pool,
or anything; and, at a signal from her, the three men of the party would
quickly rally to her halting place, and enter heartily into whatever
spirit the object contemplated was supposed to stimulate.
It was usually the merest trifle that caused her thus to arrest for a
moment the forward movement of her companions, and to interrupt a
conversation to boot; but Vanessa alone had the penetration to see the
unfailing instinct for power, the unflagging determination to be the
centre of attention, which prompted this simple strategy, on Leonetta's
part; and rather than compete with it,--seeing that it was practised
with all the usual efficiency of unconsciousness,--she saved herself the
vexation of possible defeat by yielding quietly to Leonetta the
supremacy she apparently insisted upon having. Thus, while she kept a
steady eye upon Denis Malster, whose manner had captivated her from the
start, she was content, or rather discontent, to note step by step Guy
Tyrrell's blundering innocence in attempted courtship.
Agatha, accustomed as she was to the role of padding in life, fell back
on her devoted brother, and used such influence as she possessed over
him, to keep his mind well aired and cool amid the slightly overheating
breezes of that memorable midsummer.
Cleopatra, on the other hand, not so wise perhaps as Vanessa, certainly
not so ready to retire as Agatha, and possibly less able to feel if not
to simulate indifference, than either of them, plunged into the conflict
with a vigour and a degree of animation which made her almost as
unbearable to the other girls as Leonetta herself. Again, however,
Vanessa was shrewd enough to realise the emergency Cleopatra was in, and
forgave her much that left Agatha painfully wondering. For Cleopatra the
fight was a serious one. It called for all her resources and all her
skill. Unfortunately she lacked Leonetta's fertility in finding means by
which to draw the general attention upon herself, and being overanxious
as well, her tactics frequently failed. She would descend to every shift
to thwart her sister's wiles,--only to find, however, that it was more
often Stephen Fearwell or the Incandescent Gerald, than Guy and Denis,
who allowed themselves to be diverted from their orbit round Leonetta,
to attend to her.
At tennis it would be a blister suddenly formed on Leonetta's hand; at
croquet it would be a fledgling just beside her ball; on the beach it
would be a peculiar pebble,--anywhere, everywhere, there was always
something over which Leonetta would suddenly stand dramatically still,
until every male within sight, including sometimes Sir Joseph himself,
had run all agog to her side.
Now the imitation of such tactics is difficult enough; their defeat,
when they are combated consciously, is literally exhausting. In two or
three days Cleopatra was exhausted.
Never at a loss for a pretext, never apparently thinking any excuse too
jejune, too transparently fatuous, or too puerile, to draw the attention
of the men, Leonetta, with unabated high spirits, won again and again,
every day, every hour, such a number of these silent secret victories
over the rest of the young women of the party, that at the end of a
week, when their cumulative effect was so overwhelmingly manifest as no
longer to allow of denial, she openly assumed the role of queen of the
party.
Again and again, in a game of tennis, Cleopatra's tired and overworked
brain would grapple with the problem, why a certain empty remark of
Leonetta's had caused Denis and Guy to double up with laughter, and had
thus held up the game for a moment; and the solution was hard to find.
She knew that even a brighter remark from herself would not have so much
as caused them to interrupt their service; but she was imperfectly
acquainted with the psychology of rulership, and did not understand that
when once, by fair means or foul, a certain member of a party has by her
own unaided efforts elevated herself to the position of its queen,
everything ostensibly witty that proceeds from her mouth is greeted with
obsequious laughter by her devoted subjects.
Indeed, in order not to appear a spoilsport, Cleopatra was at last
reduced to the humiliating resort of joining in the courtly merriment
which appeared to her so extravagantly to result from her sister's
mildest jests.
To say that by this time she was feeling a slight sinking sensation in
the region of her heart, would be to express with scrupulous moderation
what was actually taking place. For Cleopatra, theretofore, had held her
own against the best. A good rider, a splendid shot, with almost a
professional form in tennis and golf, and a good swimmer and dancer
besides, she possessed none of those shortcomings, so handsomely
acknowledged when they are present, which would even have justified her
in taking up an unassuming position. Besides she was quite rightly aware
of owning certain sterling qualities which promised to afford a very
much more solid support to the everyday life of this world, than the
constant carnival brilliance of her sister; and she found it oppressive
to have to appear perpetually in carnival spirits, when she craved for
those more sober moods in which her less volatile virtues could make a
good display.
She was beginning to find her sister's hard, unrelenting rivalry
difficult to forgive, and the steady shaping of a dreaded feeling of
loathing for the cause of her partial eclipse began to cause her some
alarm.
Thus each day ended with a tacit, concealed, but very real victory for
Leonetta, without her sister deriving any further satisfaction from the
unavowed contest, than an aching weariness both of body and spirit.
Meanwhile Vanessa, more piqued by her whilom "sweetheart's" increasing
neglect of her than by that young lady's inordinate success with the
men, would come on the scene in the evening with all the advantage of
being less jaded than Cleopatra by the day's incessant duel, and then
would frequently score point after point against her schoolmate, without
ever revealing a sign of the eagerness she felt for the fray. In
addition she made herself a great favourite of the wealthy baronet, and
recognising in him a means of possibly exercising some power over Denis,
cultivated his affection by every wile of which her clever race made her
capable.
Denis Malster was obviously the most staggered by the turn events had
taken. Bewildered and fascinated by Leonetta's art of blowing hot and
cold, as the spirit moved her, kept constantly alert by the rapid
changes of her caprice, he had come to have eyes and ears only for her
imperious youth. If she ran off with Guy Tyrrell or with Stephen
Fearwell,--a mere boy,--he grew grave, meditative, taciturn; when she
returned he resumed his role of obsequious courtier without either
reserve or concealment. And who can be more obsequious to a pretty
schoolgirl than an Englishman of thirty?
The British are known all over the world for their stamina, for the grit
and tenacity with which they can play a losing game; nay, it is even
reported that they have frequently turned a losing game into a victory
by this very capacity for stubborn patience in adversity.
Cleopatra lacked none of the qualities which have made the British
nation famous. She, too, could play a losing game with dignity, grace,
and pride; even if, as in this case, it was the cruellest game that a
girl can be called upon to play. Perhaps, too, she noticed the conflict
that had started in Denis Malster's heart; or maybe she simply saw the
unmistakable signs of his dawning passion. But, in any case, and as
quickly as surely as she realised that he was becoming enslaved to her
sister, his charms underwent a mysterious intensification in her eyes
that only aggravated the difficulties of her position.
Certainly he had not made the first advances. Or, if he had, they had
been too subtle to be observed. What woman, moreover, really believes
that a man is ever guilty in the traffic of the sexes? She had, however,
been compelled to notice her sister's manoeuvres. They had been
unmistakable, untiring, unpardonable.
At times she had even been constrained to admire the skill with which
Guy Tyrrell, Stephen Fearwell, and the Incandescent Gerald himself had
been employed by Leonetta in the business of tormenting Denis into a
state of complete subjection. Every means was legitimate to Leonetta. If
she could not pretend to read a man's hand, she would make a cat's
cradle with him; if she could not take his arm, she would plead sudden
fatigue in order that he might take her hand to pull her up hill; if she
picked a wild rose, a thorn would be sure to remain buried in the skin
of her finger, which at some propitious moment would require to be
laboriously removed by one of the male members of the party.
A girl may struggle with fortitude against such a determined dispute for
supremacy; she may deploy her whole strength and even contrive parallel
manoeuvres of her own; but even when she is not less beautiful than
her rival, as was the case with Cleopatra, the more conscious of the two
engaged in such a match is bound in the end to be less happy in her
discoveries, less spontaneous in her inventions, and therefore less
successful in her results. For natural spontaneity is quickly felt and
appreciated by a group of fellow-beings, as is also the element of
vexation and overanxiousness, which Cleopatra was beginning to reveal
despite all her efforts at concealment.
The most unnerving, the most jading, however, of all her self-imposed
performances at this moment, was the constraint to laugh and be merry,
when others laughed and were merry over the frequently empty horse-play
of her sister.
It was this particularly that was beginning to tell against her in the
duel. And as fast as she felt herself losing ground, as surely as she
felt her hold on Denis slackening, the old gnawing sensation at her
heart, which had first been felt years before when Leonetta had ceased
to be a child, would assert itself with hitherto unwonted painfulness,
unprecedented insistence, until it began like a disease to come between
her and her meals, and, worse than all, to engage her attention when she
ought to have been sleeping.
Thus during these wonderful summer days, while all nature was proud with
her magnificent display, while the sun poured down its splendour without
stint upon the homely Kentish coast, Cleopatra, nodding and bowing in
the breeze, like any other flower, fragrant and unhandseled like the
other blooms about her, and voluptuous and seductive like a full-blown
rose, was yet aware of a parasitic germ in her heart that was eating her
life-blood away. To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the
sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed
jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest
insect more wanton and more free.
You would have passed her by without noticing that she was in any way
different from her sister, except perhaps that she was obviously more
mature. In her spirited glance and smile you would have detected nothing
of the tempest in her soul, nothing of the fear in her heart. Only a
botanist of the human spirit could have observed that subtle difference
in her look, that suggestion of anxiety in her parted lips, which told
the tale of her incomparably courageous, determined, undaunted, but
sadly unavailing fight.
It was the night, the long silence alone, that she was beginning to
dread. And those who dread the night show the lines of fear on their
faces during the day. They laugh, they join in the general sport, their
gait is light, their clothes may be gay, but at the back of their eyes,
the sympathetic can see the previous night's vigil; and it is the
haunting fear of experiencing it again that gives their voices, their
words, their very laughter that ring of overanxiousness, that stamp of
heavily overtaxed bravery.
Cleopatra dreaded the night; but she also dreaded the dawn. Denis,
sunburnt, athletic, efficient at everything he undertook, Denis
ironical, pensive, independent, Denis revealed anew to her in a way she
had least expected, was obviously either humouring a flapper most
shamelessly--or--or----
The alternative could not be articulated. To have pronounced it would
have lent it a reality that it must not possess. It was, however, in the
effort not to frame the alternative that her vigils were kept. And it is
extraordinary how one can perspire even on the coolest night over such
an effort.