Owen and I were standing by the low sea-wall, looking out across the
wet brown sands, when I saw her. It was a gray, cloudy day, and the air
was full of mist and damp, which hung in heavy, livid-coloured veils
over the black mountain-tops, and sometimes dropped half way down the
slopes. The tide was out and the noise of the waves sounded remote
and musical. The broad stretch of wet sand and shingle reached out to
the cold, gray-green sea, with its white curling line of foam; and
at the water’s edge, a little bent forward, her light dress floating
out behind her in the fresh wind, one hand raised, holding the brim
of her big black hat, she moved along, a solitary figure against the
broad line of sea and sky. It was Katherine, and as I watched her it
struck me that the whole picture, from her presence in it, became
curiously like a Whistler water-colour. The next thing I noticed was
that Katherine was quite grown-up, which had the effect of producing in
me a sudden shyness, so that I made no attempt to go to meet her. Yet
here was the meeting I had lain awake half the night imagining! I had
an almost overpowering impulse to turn tail and slink away, and perhaps
I might have done so had I been alone.
Owen, who took no more interest in girls than in octogenarians, asked
me what I was staring at.
“At Miss Dale,” I answered.
“Who’s Miss Dale?”
“Katherine.”
“And who is Katherine?”
“Mrs. Carroll’s niece.”
Then Owen looked at me in surprise. “Aren’t you going to speak to her?
I thought you knew her very well?”
“So I do.”
We clambered over the wall and crossed the beach to intercept her
path. My idiotic nervousness was increased by Owen’s presence. She had
noticed our approach now, and altered her own course to meet us. As she
came up she smiled with her bright frank smile and held out her hand.
She was perfectly natural and easy in her greeting, while I began to
stammer and splutter. I managed to introduce Owen, saying he had come
down yesterday, and we all three walked on together.
“I wondered if I should see you,” she said. “We arrived this morning.
Gerald is up at the house, but I had to come out and get some fresh air
after our travels.”
“There’s p――plenty of it at all events,” I stuttered.
“I like it. I like wind,” she added, turning her smile upon Owen.
“Don’t you? It’s very nice to be back here again. I always love coming
back to any place I know.”
“When the tide is out it looks like a Whistler water-colour,” I went
on, thinking it a pity that this should be lost.
But probably neither Katherine nor Owen had ever heard of Whistler. “It
looks to me very like rain,” said the former, glancing at the heavy
clouds over Slieve Donard. Owen took no notice at all of my remark.
“Conversation means nothing to Owen,” I reflected, impatiently, “unless
it takes the form of argument. Anything merely suggestive or decorative
is lost upon him.” And I felt annoyed because they had both begun to
chatter commonplaces about Katherine’s journey――what kind of passage
she had had; as if it mattered!
Then I became lost in contemplation of her. A year had certainly made
a tremendous difference! “Last winter she probably came out,” I said
to myself, with vague memories of Miss Broughton’s novels. At all
events, in twelve months she had managed to put at least five years
between us. It was quite conceivable that she was already engaged to be
married, while I was but a timid school-boy, who could only envy from
afar the happiness of her lover. And the thought that perhaps there
_was_ a lover cast a vivid illumination on my own feeling for her, made
plainer than ever the difference, how carefully veiled soever, between
friendship and love. I loved her with that love which, idealize it as I
might, was really the expression of a simple law of nature.
Meanwhile she was talking to Owen, who was explaining to her some
theory of the influence of the tides upon the earth, and of the moon
on the tides. How, in the first five minutes, he had contrived to get
on to such a subject I could not guess. It was fearfully like him,
nevertheless, and Katherine appeared to be interested.
No matter in what company he found himself Owen never talked about
anything except the things he was interested in. Last night it had
been a little delicious to hear him discuss Plato’s “Republic” with
Miss Dick, who, though immensely pleased, was always at her silliest
when taken seriously. To converse with Miss Dick was like trying to
get a definite impression from a kaleidoscope; you no sooner fixed
your attention on one particular idea than it dissolved into something
quite different. And yet Miss Dick had views――political, religious,
social,――derived from a deceased parent, who had been an apostle
of free thought. Only she would interrupt her expression of the
profoundest of these to wonder if Sissie McIldowie was really engaged
to young Stevenson.
And now Owen was talking to Katherine about the tides. I watched her
and knew she liked him. She liked his rough brown mane, his clear eyes,
with their kindness and innocence, for Owen, in spite of the “Kreutzer
Sonata” and the rest, was as innocent as a child. There was something
fine about Owen, and it was very visible in his face.
At present he quite monopolized the conversation, turning it into a
sort of scientific discourse; and I knew so well that he had been
reading some little book about tides――probably in the train on his way
down. I yawned two or three times when he looked in my direction, but
I might have spared myself the rudeness, for it had not the slightest
effect upon him while Katherine kept on asking questions as if she
found what he said absorbing. My apparent indifference simply had the
result of producing a _tête-à-tête_ between them.
“You ought to become a University Extension lecturer,” I said,
maliciously. “You should write and ask Tolstoy about it.”
It was a highly disagreeable remark to make, and as soon as I had said
it I was filled with shame. Owen coloured and stopped talking at once.
I was very sorry. Inwardly I went down on my knees to him and begged
his pardon, but outwardly I showed only a sullen stolidity. I said
something to Katherine, but she answered coldly, and turned again to
Owen as if to make up to him for my bad manners. And at this my remorse
degenerated into sulkiness.
Nevertheless, as we walked home together, I had the grace to apologize.
“I’m sorry for what I said,” I muttered. “It was a most beastly thing
to say. It’s not so much because it was rude as because it was rotten.”
This distinction I cannot undertake here to explain; let it suffice
that in my mind it was a very clearly defined one.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Owen. “I always do talk either too much
or too little.”
After tea we went for a long walk and discussed all our old subjects.
But in my present mood they bored me, though I was determined not to
show it. What I really wanted just then was to be alone, that I might
recall the past and make plans for the future. We went to bed when we
came in, but long after Owen had dropped asleep I lay awake, wrapped
in beautiful, desolating dreams. I gave Owen a gentle kick, for he had
begun to snore, which troubled the quiet that was necessary for the
perfect enjoyment of my visions. It woke him up, which was not what I
had intended, but it couldn’t be helped, and, before he had dropped
asleep again, I was myself lost in slumber.