He said, "Muriel," and his voice was no more than a whisper. But she
heard.
Then there was an intolerable silence, and they stared at each other
through the gloom; and nothing moved anywhere but the smooth, hurrying
water chuckling faintly round the boat and against the oars and along
the wall. They were silent, and their hearts beat with a guilty urgency;
and in the thoughts of both was the same riot of doubt and scruple and
exquisite excitement.
Stephen said at last,--and in his voice there was again that stealthy
hoarseness,--"Come out in the boat!"
She hesitated. She looked quickly over her shoulder at the house, which
was quite dark, because her mother and their only servant had gone early
to bed. Then without a word she came down the steps. She gave him a hot
hand that quivered in his as he helped her down. Quietly he pushed off
the boat; but on the Island a swan heard them and flew away with a
startling clatter, looking very large against the stars. Still in
silence they drifted away under the trees past the Tathams' and past the
brewery, and past the Petways' and the ferry and the church. There was
something in this silence very suggestive of wrong, making them already
confessed conspirators. Muriel somehow felt this, and said at last:
"Mother's gone to bed. I mustn't be long."
Her voice and her words and her low delightful laugh broke the spell of
self-conscious wickedness which had held them. They felt at last that
they really were in this boat with each other under the stars; it was no
fantastic dream but an amusing and, after all, quite ordinary adventure,
nothing to be ashamed of or furtive about--a gentleman and a lady
boating in the evening on the Thames.
So Stephen steered out into mid-stream and pulled more strongly now,
away past the empty meadows, and the first low houses of Barnes, and
under the big black bridge, and round the bend by the silent factories.
Then there were a few last houses, very old and dignified, and you came
out suddenly into a wide reach where there moved against the stars a
long procession of old elms, and the banks were clothed with an endless
tangle of willows and young shrubs, drooping and dipping in the water.
The tide lapped among thick reeds, and there was no murmur of London to
be heard, and no houses to be seen nor the lights of houses. It was a
corner of startling solitude, forgotten somehow in the urge of
civilization; as if none had had a heart to build a factory there or a
brewery or a wharf, but had built them resolutely to the east or to the
west and all around, determined, if they could, to spare this little
relic of the old country Thames.
And here Stephen stopped rowing, and tied his boat to a willow branch;
and Muriel watched him, saying nothing. Then he sat down beside her in
the wide stern-seat. She turned her head and looked at him, very pale
against the trees. And he put his arm about her and kissed her.
It was very hot in that quiet place, and the night lay over them like a
velvet covering, heavy and sensuous and still. In each of them there was
the sense that this had been inevitable. They had known that it must
happen in that breathless moment at the garden wall. And this was
somehow comforting to the conscience.
So they sat there for a little longer, clinging tremorously in an
ecstasy of passion. A tug thrashed by; there was a sudden tumult of
splashing in the willows and in the reeds and the boat rocked violently
against the branches. Stephen fended her off.
Then they sat whispering and looking at the stars. It was a clear and
wonderful sky and no star was missing. Stephen told her the names of
stars and the stories about them. And she murmured dreamily that she saw
and understood; but she saw nothing and understood nothing but the
marvellous completeness of her conquest of this man, and the frightening
completeness of his conquest of her. She had never meant that things
should go so far.
And he, as he looked at the stars and the freckled gleam upon the waters
and the hot white face of the girl at his side, thought also, "I did not
mean it to go so far. But it is romance, this--it is poetry, and rich
experience--so it is justified." And what he meant was, "It is copy."
The tide turned at last, and they drifted softly and luxuriously down to
Hammerton Reach, and stole at midnight under the hushed gardens of The
Chase to the Tarrants' wall. And there again they kissed upon the steps.
He whispered hotly, "Tomorrow!" and she whispered, "Yes--if I can--" and
was gone.
In the morning there came a letter from Margery, beseeching him to come
to her as soon as he could--a pathetic, gentle little letter. She drew a
picture of the peace and beauty of the place, and ended acutely by
emphasizing its possibilities as an inspiration to poetry.
"Do come down, my darling, as soon as you can. I do want you to be here
with me for a bit. I know you want to finish the poem, but this is such
a heavenly place, I'm sure it would help you to finish it; I sometimes
feel like writing poetry myself here! Joan says that Daddy _must_ come
quick!"
Stephen wrote back, with a bewildered wonder at himself, that he had
nearly finished, but could not get away for at least a week. That day he
wrote a love-song--dedicated "To M." He had never written anything of
the kind before, and it excited him as nothing in "Chivalry" had ever
excited him.
All that week the tide was high in the evenings, and on the third day
the moon began. And every night, when all Hammerton had gone to their
early beds, he paddled secretly to the Tarrants' steps, still drunk with
amorous excitement and the sense of stealthy adventure. Every night
Muriel was waiting on the wall, slim and tremulous and pale; and they
slipped away under the bank to the open spaces where none could see. And
each day they said to themselves that this must be the last evening, for
disaster must surely come of these meetings and these kisses; and each
day looked forward with a hot expectancy to the evening that was to
come, that must be the end of this delicious madness. Yet every night he
whispered, "Tomorrow?" and every night she whispered, "If I can." And
each day he wrote a new love-song--dedicated "To M."
On the seventh day young George came down to see his sister, and,
greatly daring, Stephen proposed a long expedition down the river in his
motor-boat. So those three set out at noon and travelled down river in
the noisy boat through the whole of London. They saw the heart of London
as it can only be seen from London's river, the beauty of Westminster
from Vauxhall and the beauty of the City from Westminster. And as a man
walks eastward through Aldgate into a different world, they left behind
them the sleek dignity of Parliament and the Temple and the Embankment
and shot under Blackfriars Bridge into a different world--a world of
clustering, untidy bridges and sheer warehouses and endless wharves.
They felt very small in the little boat that spun sideways in the
bewildering eddies round the bridges and was pulled under them at
breathless speed by the confined and tremendous tide. They came through
London Bridge into a heavy sea, where the boat pitched and wallowed and
tossed her head and plunged suddenly with frightening violence in the
large waves that ran not one way only but rolled back obliquely from the
massed barges by the banks, and dashed at each other and made a tumult
of water, very difficult for a small boat to weather. Tugs dashed up
and down and across the river with the disquieting quickness and
inconsequence of taxi-cabs in the narrow space between the barges and
the big steamers huddled against the wharves. The men in them looked out
and laughed at the puny white boat plunging sideways under Tower Bridge.
There was then an ocean-going steamer moving portentously out, and
Muriel was frightened by the size of the ship, and the noise and racket
of the wharves, and the hooting tugs, and the mad water splashing and
heaving about them. But they came soon past Wapping into a wide and
quieter reach; and here there were many ships and many barges, some
anchored and some slowly moving, like ships in a dream. All of them were
bright with colour against the sky and against the steel-blue water and
the towering muddle of wharves and tall chimneys and warehouses upon the
banks. The sails of the barges stood out far off in lovely patches of
warm brown, and their masts shone like copper in the sun. Tucked away
among the wharves and cranes were old, mysterious houses, balconies and
lady-like windows looking incongruously over coal-barges.
But it was all mysterious and all beautiful, Stephen thought, in this
sunny market of the Thames. He liked the strange old names of the places
they passed, and told them lovingly to Muriel--Limehouse Causeway, the
Wapping Old Stairs, and Shadwell Basin, and Cherry Garden Pier; and he
loved to see through inlets here and there the high forests of masts,
and know that yonder were the special mysteries of great docks; for for
such things he had the romantic reverence of a boy. But Muriel saw no
romance and little beauty in the Pool of London, and her brother George
saw less. She saw it only as a strange muddle of dirty vessels and ugly
buildings, strongly suggestive of slums and the East End. It was noisy
sometimes, and she had been splashed with water which she knew was dirty
and probably infected; she felt that she preferred the westward
stretches of the Thames, where navigation was less anxious and Stephen
was not so preoccupied with his surroundings.
Stephen perceived this and was aware of a faint disappointment. Only
when they rounded a bend and saw suddenly the gleaming pile of Greenwich
Hospital, brilliant against the green hill behind, did Muriel definitely
admire. And then, Stephen thought, it was not because she saw that the
building was so beautiful from that angle and in that light, but because
it had such an air of cleanliness and austere respectability after the
orgy of raffish and commercial scenery which she had been compelled to
endure. Or perhaps it was because at Greenwich Pier they were going to
get out of the boat.