MOONLIGHT AND THE CHARM
"O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest thy love prove likewise variable."
Shakespeare.
Now let us take the roof off, as is done in fairy stories about other
charms.
Let us steal a peep, that is, inside various rooms of that hotel, where
this story is laid.
In the basement, first of all, let us cast a glance at the _appartement_
that had echoed to the feasting of that luncheon party, and had been
later the scene of a sedate and ultra-English tea. Nobody there now,
except the hotel manageress and her husband. Monsieur Leroux with that
black domino beard of his, is dozing in the most capacious chair; Madame
is poring over her accounts. Every now and then her eye lights up with a
spark from the smouldering fire of pride within her; for who but she has
such a right of feeling proud at the end of that day of meals and
acclamations (and washing-up?). She thinks of her nephew Gustave's
brilliant _partie_, and of the bedazzling of all her friends, most
especially of the notary's wife, here in this very room. The little
close room seems to her once more a-glitter with the glass and the
silver and the display.... Only the prune-coloured velvet curtains are
tightly drawn before the pots of imitation cyclamen, and there enters no
gleam of the light that is bathing the forest and the sea
without--light of the waning moon, melting and cool at once, at once
disdainful and seductive.
Upstairs in the _salle a manger_ the engaged couple have been dining as
guests of the guests. Mrs. Cartwright and the Professor had suggested
this, and their proposal was cordially received. The health of the
_fiances_ had been drunk, and the old French gentleman with the red
button-hole has added the toast to the next betrothed from that party
there present tonight.
And now Gustave Tronchet and his bride-elect are still moving from group
to group in the _salon_, and the diffident, old-maidish Englishwoman is
transfigured. It astonishes her to think that she could ever have felt
that violent shyness so early in the day. She has forgotten how her
knees trembled as she faced that perfect zoo of foreigners, all beards
and bosoms, come to inspect Mees Ouallshe.
She feels now that she carried it off admirably. She has been amplifying
to herself since the ten words of French that she had managed to stammer
out then, and by now they appear to her a classic oration. She feels she
was born to this kind of thing. On her _fiance's_ stout arm she moves
about the room like a spoon that is keeping on the stir a pan of hot and
incredibly sweet social jam. As Mrs. Cartwright says to herself, "No
ordinary English engagement to a man out of her own world could ever
have brought the dear good creature these triumphs; let her enjoy
them,"----and everybody enjoys seeing Miss Agatha Walsh radiant, while
she even more enjoys being so seen.
As for Sergeant Gustave Tronchet, if he were not enjoying it, also, who
should be? Accepted, _range_, adored!
He marshals her about from _salle_ to _salon_ and lounge, drawing her
back as she peeps through the chink of the big hall door at the
beckoning moonlight without.
"No, Agathe! You will _inrhume_ yourself----"
She turns to beam brighter than the moon itself at the comely dark face
of the only man who has ever protested whether she took cold or not. He,
too, has been studying a speech in the language of the country into
which he is marrying.
He brings it out, and the ears of love are quick to understand even his
English, even his accent.
"I oueelle trai to you rendaire 'appeee, Agathe!"
"Oh," she breathed, with a little clutch to the blue-sleeved arm. "Oh,
but you do, you _have_!"
They return to the _salle_....
But the assembled visitors cannot spend the whole evening in
contemplating the happiness of Miss Walsh and of Gustave Tronchet,
_serjent d'artillerie_.
Other groups begin to make their own arrangements; in one of the
bedrooms the Madonna-like French mother and the Brittany nurse are
putting to bed Lucien, the little damson-dark boy, who was also at Miss
Walsh's tea; he is repeating, with the correct pronunciation of a child
to whom all language is new, a little prayer that she has taught him:
"I see the moon and the moon sees me,
God bless the moon and God bless me!"
In another bedroom Olwen Howel-Jones has just run up to get into her big
driving-coat; she thinks of going out for a breath of fresh air and of
moonlight. Why not? Mrs. Cartwright will probably come if she's asked.
* * * * *
Roof on again here, please. For at this point of the story Mrs.
Cartwright was standing just outside the _salle_ windows beside the dark
spiky shape of a cactus; she had put on a pale-hued wrap, and in the
puzzling light and shade she appeared gleaming and straight as the
flowering rod of the plant. Just as she was looking out to where a few
riding lights showed in the _Baissin_, Jack Awdas strode up beside her.
"Come for a turn down on the sands," he suggested, cheerfully. "It's not
cold; it is one perfectly good night for a walk."
Now it is almost easier to take the roof off an hotel and to look down
unchecked into its various rooms than it is to unveil and take stock of
the contents of a woman's mind with its strata upon strata of confusing
elements.
So, for what Mrs. Cartwright was feeling, we will take her word as she
told herself that she felt relieved and settled about the _affaire_ Jack
Awdas.
She was glad it was all over. The boy had imagined himself in love with
her.
A great mercy that he had not, after the manner of some men, allowed
himself to dangle and sigh and create an atmosphere in which one did not
quite know where one was. He had voiced his absurd and youthful passion
at once. He had actually proposed to her--to her who might be his
mother. So much the better, as it happened; because _now_ she had been
able to say "No" definitely. It had all been definitely settled and
tidied up in that wood on the way from the oyster park.
Now, it was finished.
Now, it was quite safe again.
It would be silly to avoid the boy since both of them knew where they
were.
Besides, he had had that horrible nightmare. He would have to go flying
again. Not even yet were his jangled nerves quite healed, poor child! He
ought, he really ought to have some one to look after him, to give a
thought to his welfare now and again ... some nice, sensible woman....
Mrs. Cartwright, in thus describing herself to herself, did not for one
moment admit that if the boy had already proposed to her in the
sunlight, he simply couldn't help himself in the moonlight.
So she answered him lightly and conventionally; she fell into step
beside him. They walked.
She was too old for him, as she'd told him. A generation too old! But
she was still not too old to walk with him, to listen to him. And ...
When is a woman too old to wish she were young enough?
It was brusquely enough that Jack Awdas broke into speech.
"I say," he began, "how old should I have to be, then, before you'd want
to marry me?"
She had been looking away across the _Baissin_ with its twinkling
lights, its guardian jewel flashing from white to red. She turned
abruptly, dismayed, as one is dismayed when some trouble, dimly foreseen
(and defied) descends upon one's head.
Oh dear.... Oh dear.... It was not quite at an end then? She had not yet
definitely put a stop to this very young man's folly?
"Oh," she returned. "Oh, but we had agreed, I think, not to talk
about ... _that_, any more...."
"Had we?" he retorted. "You had 'agreed,' perhaps. I hadn't."
"But----Please! There must be no more of it."
"What?" He threw up his head. "We must have it out, you know. We are
going to."
"No, no----"
"Yes, I say. Yes. As I was saying----How old should I have to be before
you'd want to marry me?"
Mrs. Cartwright gave a little hopeless sort of laugh to herself as she
threw upon him that quick glance that seemed to be not looking.
He put on his coat (at her orders), his flyer's coat with the wide
collar that made his head seem even smaller and the oval of his face
more perfect as it rested against the fur. That young, young face
topping the athlete's body that towered above her own, that spring and
lilt of his walk had never before made such appeal to the sense of
physical beauty that was in her.
Claudia Cartwright thought that in this faculty she brought up the
arrears of the countless members of her own sex who would seem to be
entirely without it. A woman had once said to her, "_I don't find any
man much under forty-five worth considering. Youth doesn't appeal to me.
I never can see the attraction!_" and to Mrs. Cartwright this was
exactly as though her friend had boasted, "_I am colour-blind! I can't
tell one tune from another, either! Also, I never care for flowers._"
The boy at her side was beautiful, in the diffused and shifting light,
as a young marble Hermes dressed in the trappings of today and come to
life to court her. The next twenty years might teach him many, many
things--but they must strip from him one by one the charms of which he
was all unconscious, as he demanded of her how old he must be to please
her.
She should stop him there, she knew. Since he had not seen that it had
been the end, she should put the definite end to it; go in.
She should not dally or coquet with this thing.
Instincts that she had thought long dead were lifting their heads within
her; too strong to be beaten down at once. For the life of her the woman
could not help dallying with that passing moment to which every woman
alive cries out within herself, "Oh _stay_! _Thou art so fair_----"
Aloud she said (truthfully enough, but in a sense that he did not
follow), "I might not want to marry you if you _were_ older."
"Why not? Why not? The other day in the wood you said it was my age that
you barred," he went on, persistently. "It isn't that you don't like
_me_, is it? _Is_ it? If you just happened to be my own age, then, you'd
take me, wouldn't you?"
Would she? Ah, wouldn't she, she thought, vainly. And again for the life
of her she could not keep that subtlest, faintest trace of coquetry out
of her voice as she replied, "You seem very sure of that."
"Mustn't I be? Tell me at least. _Tell_ me what you think of me!"
She seemed to catch herself back just in time from uttering follies. "I
think you are a dear boy; one of the dearest that I have seen," she
said, evenly. "But I know that you're wasting your time with an ageing
woman like me."
"A what?" he almost snorted.
She repeated it all the more firmly, perhaps, because she knew that she
was looking her youngest in that soft light of the waning moon.
"An ageing woman like me. For I am that. Just think of it, quite
sensibly, for a moment. In a little while you would see me getting to be
just the same as friends of your mother's, that you're specially nice to
and talk to because they are old. Yes! Listen! It's coming. Before you
have a line on your face or a grey thread in your hair."
"I shall get as bald as a coot. All flyers will; it's the tight leather
caps, here----"
"Nonsense! Ages before that, my hair will be growing grey all over."
"It's quite grey now; absolutely white in the moonlight--silver! And it
looks top-hole," he assured her, laughing down at her. "Why, you look
wonderful. You always do. You can't talk about the usual sort of women
getting old, and pretend you're going to be like that, because you
aren't. How could you ever be? You're different."
"Only to you," she sighed, "and only for the moment."
"Moment! I swear _I_ shouldn't ever alter----"
"No? Let's turn." They retraced on the sands the lines of their own
footprints; his boot-marks making a contrast with the slim, light
prints of the woman's shoes.
"What have you got on your feet?" he asked her presently, almost
roughly, stopping to look down. "I never saw anything like the things
women go out in. Haven't you got _any_ sensible boots?... You aren't fit
to take care of yourself, as a matter of fact. You've got to let me take
care of you."
"My dear boy," she smiled, shaking the head on which the moonlight was
spinning those prophetic webs of silver, "all nice men at your age begin
to feel that need of taking care of something. A young girl, that's what
you ought to be seeing to the shoes of, and looking for wraps for, and
all that. Not me, not me. A young girl."
"What young girl?" he demanded mutinously.
Mrs. Cartwright was silent as they passed into the darkness under the
wooden jetty. Out into the light again they came, and up the beach,
back, in the direction of the hotel piazza, and of the old cannon that
stood on its stone plinth at the foot of the stone steps. They reached
the cannon, and still she had not spoken.
She was thinking, hard.
A young girl, she had said; and she could think without "minding" it in
the least, that the best thing this lad of twenty-two could do would be
to fall in love with a young girl. She had thought so several times
lately. It was odd, however, that she always thought of this solution as
"a" young girl, not any particular one. Not little Olwen Howel-Jones,
for instance; oh, no! Nor her (Mrs. Cartwright's) young niece Stella,
not any of the Mabels or Ethels or Dorothys that she knew at home, and
to whom she might have introduced the boy. None of these could she think
of for one instant in connection with Jack Awdas. Yet, one of these
days, some lucky girl must be responsible for the happiness of all his
days (not just of one glamorous afternoon in the forest) and all his
nights (not just of one night when the power of darkness had been kept
at bay, and when he had fallen at last asleep "as one whom his mother
comforteth"). Yes, later on, there must be "a" young girl for him....
He stopped by the cannon.
"Don't go in. Just a little minute," he coaxed, softly. "I can't talk to
you in there."
"It's no use talking," murmured Mrs. Cartwright.
But she did pause.
And, as he sat down on the body of that obsolete gun, and then,
unfastening his thick coat, spread a flap of it out, she did yield so
far as to sit down, in her pale wrap, on that corner of his coat beside
him.
He leant an arm on the cannon behind her. Both looked in silence over
the lagoon, towards the reef.
White, red; white, red--flashed the warning light.
She felt herself at the beginning of a conflict that must tear her this
way and that; but his mind was single and set. He was just blind,
obstinate, and keen.
He said, "I told you that night when you sat up with me what I thought
of girls. I don't want 'em. I want _you_, and you're all I want; or ever
shall. I can swear to that. Oh, I know myself! I can swear to it."
The arm behind her trembled a little with his earnestness.
For one mad moment Mrs. Cartwright admitted to herself that if she could
be twenty-two again for one year, she would buy that year with the rest
of the time that she had to live. Ah, to be twenty-two! To let that hard
boyish arm close round her, clasp her, crush her! To turn, with lips and
eyes aglow, to turn to him as she felt herself drawn to do--drawn,
driven----
But because she felt thus she kept around herself that invisible,
intangible armour of refusal which is every woman's at need and which no
outside power can pierce. She did not need to move one half-inch away
from that corner of his coat on which she sat. Yet ... Yet she could
hardly believe that he did not guess at the growing disturbance in the
heart that beat not so far, after all, from his own.
Appealingly he broke out. "_You_ must marry me. I don't know why on
earth you want to talk about other girls to me!"
"_'Other_' girls----!"
"Yes. You're just a girl to me. You _are_ a girl, yourself. I can't see
you as anything but a girl!"
She made a little gesture with her long arms, lithe and elastic still as
when she was a schoolgirl, only more rounding in modelling; she pressed
a hand to her hair, still brown and thickly growing. She turned away the
face that showed lines brought by years of worry, of concentration upon
her work; ah, they were there even in the moonlight and even though she
tended her skin as prettier women often neglect to do. She could feel
that in every inch and ounce of him this boy was alert and conscious of
her nearness, of her suppleness of body, of that faint scent of rose,
kuss-kuss and orris that clung about her.
It couldn't be. It mustn't be.
Lightly as little Olwen could have sprung up, Mrs. Cartwright sprang up
from her seat upon the muzzled cannon and said quickly, "I am going in."
As she set her foot upon the first step of the piazza, she turned to
young Jack Awdas with what she told herself would be, definitely, her
last word upon the subject. Her little laugh was whimsical and mirthless
as she said it.
"You think you see me as a girl? Ah! Wait until you see me beside a
_real_ girl!"