Читать книгу The Dean's Elbow - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 11

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"The buoy's straight ahead."

"I see it, Mark."

It was nine o'clock in the morning, the breeze from the north-east and the sea ripples of gold. The breeze, fresh and steady, had blown from that new quarter since six o'clock in the morning; and with the tide making under her keel, Sea Flower had raised Bury Head and left it behind and was now abreast of the Mewstone. That great rock, draped in the vivid emerald of its moss, shone like a jewel; and about its fin, serrated as any aiguille of Mont Blanc, the seabirds swooped and clustered and filled the air with their wailing and melancholy cries. Somewhere at hand, Mona understood, the Dart emptied its water into the sea, but she had to take the information on trust. For the Sea Flower was sailing past a curve of high cliffs, which to the eye ran in an unbroken sweep to the bold promontory of the Start.

But as the Mewstone dropped away behind the little ship's quarter, the cliffs broke suddenly in the most unexpected and entrancing fashion. Mona had learnt by now not to let go the tiller and clap her hands. She contented herself with a gasp of delight. The door of the robbers' cavern had rolled aside. She was a second All Baba who achieved her miracle without an Open Sesame. A narrow entrance of shining water appeared by magic between high, steep, darkly-wooded cliffs. An old castle on the western side guarded it. Within she saw white villas clinging amongst the trees and, far down, ships at their anchors and a little town.

"You must round the buoy," Thewliss cried energetically from the bows. He had just taken down the foresail and was stowing it in the sail locker. "The channel is west of the buoy," and as Mona bore away he dropped his nautical airs and began to laugh. "As a matter of fact, with our light draught we could go in on either side of the buoy, but there's nothing like being shipshape, is there?"

And now it was his turn to gasp—and hold his tongue. Mona was sitting on the upper side of the helm; and since the Sea Flower was on the starboard tack, it was her left hand which held the tiller. Upon the third finger of her left hand there was a plain wedding-ring. For a moment Mark Thewliss was really moved. It was by gratitude, he asserted, by Mona's prevision. She had used a portion of her afternoon in London after the yachting cap had been bought to purchase this accessory to their expedition. She had thought of it, whereas he who should have thought of it had not.

"After all, I know the gossip of the little harbours. There never was a tea-party to match them," he reflected. "Every little thing is noticed and passes from longshoreman to longshoreman and from yacht's crew to yacht's crew. The absence of a wedding-ring on Mona's finger would be a wounding inconvenience, not to be exaggerated, of course. It would be forgotten very quickly since the pair of us is unknown. But in each harbour we should feel it—a mosquito bite. I should have thought of it." He consoled himself with the sudden thought that even if he had thought of this device he would never have suggested it. No, it had to come from Mona herself, without prompting from him. And it had so come. Mark Thewliss was grateful.

"Yes, that's all right," he argued, meaning that he knew now why he had been so moved by the gleam of it on Mona's hand, and recognised that there was justification for this trifle of emotion. But—but—in the secret heart of him he was not satisfied. He was once more, and again rather resentfully, conscious of a discomfort—a tiny sense of shame which he was very careful not to follow back to its cause and origin. He had an excuse. For the Sea Flower had just rounded the buoy and was making for the entrance.

"Keep her head on the two white beacons!" he cried, and he slipped the cover over the sail-locker and went aft. With the wind blowing from the northeast, more than one short tack had to be made before the long river front of Dartmouth was reached. They dropped their anchor above the ferry opposite to a deeply recessed bay; and it seemed to Mona that night that all the owls in the world were calling to her from those high, thickly wooded slopes.

The summer favoured them. They ran the next day to Plymouth, idled through a long Sunday in Fowey, slept for a night under the over-arching trees of Helford River, beat through one long day round the Lizard to Penzance, and starting thence at daybreak with what is called a soldier's breeze, reached out past Land's End into the Atlantic and towards nightfall dropped anchor opposite St. Mary's in the islands of Scilly.

In that enchanted archipelago, with its semitropical gardens and its touch of the exotic in the mere aspect of its inhabitants, they took their ease. They hired rooms of which the windows overlooked the Sound, and with a local boatman to pilot them amongst the intricacy of its rocks and shoals they explored the lonely waterways; bathing from beaches of dazzlingly white hour-glass sand crowned with thickets of yellow gorse, fishing for pollock, picnicking on the roofs of old ruined forts which had once been the last strongholds of King Charles.

They ate the lotus, Mona throwing behind her even the knowledge of all that hung for her upon her enterprise, Mark Thewliss expanding into a boyhood which grew more and more nautical with every morning. Every rope was a hawser, every anchor a kedge, soldiers were "grabbies," landsmen did not count enough to have a generic name at all. Food, of course, was duff; and bells, not clocks, gave the time of day. The small intimate jokes which Mona had reckoned as the very salt of companionship were tossed back and forth between them. It became a creed that if Mona's yachting cap were lost they were doomed. There were words which Thewliss pronounced with too great a nicety for Mona's ears, for instance, the "p" in "psychic" and "pneumonia;" and elaborate conversations were invented by her leading up to a point when he, unaware of the trap into which he was being led, pronounced the ridiculed word. Mona had phrases too which led at once to a Socratic dialogue of the severest precision. If she could only be made to say "That just shows—" she was subjected at once to an examination of the most searching kind as to what it showed until the beach rang with their laughter. And amidst all their foolishness and sanity the golden wedding-ring shone upon Mona's finger.

It was she who unwittingly broke the spell. They were taking their luncheon on the convex roof of an old fort on the outermost edge of Tresco. At their feet the punt was drawn up on the sand, and their pilot ate his sandwiches by the side of it. Out in the fairway of the creek the Sea Flower swung at its kedge with its mainsail scandalised Over all spread a sky without a cloud. Mona Lightfoot turned her face towards the west where on the quietest day the Atlantic rolled and broke with a flash of sunlit surf.

"Here we are, actually at the end of England," she said.

"No."

Mark Thewliss lit his pipe and turned to her with a smile.

"Since you have seen where England begins, you ought to see where it ends, oughtn't you?"

"Yes."

"To-morrow, then. If there's a wind. We oughtn't to wait. We're in September and half-way through the month. Some time in September the weather'll break. We ought to have got back to the mainland before it does."

Mona caught her breath, and for a little while the earth was emptied of its joy, the day grew dark.

"Yes," she agreed in a dull and reticent voice. The moon had rounded to the full. It hung over those islands on these warm nights, a huge disc of a colour golden-brown, drowning the stars, drenching the seas with light; and even in the morning, white as a wraith, it sought to hold the sky against the sun. The holiday was half over. From now on a shutter would close, hiding each night a little more of the night's radiance. Would it close over her heart, too, obliterating, not for a month, but for the rest of her life, the wondrous new world of joy and beauty and flowers into which a lily pond at the back of High Holborn had been the gateway?

"Yes."

And the next day, beyond Roseveare and Rosevean, those flat, outer islands where in the coarse salt grass the sea-birds make their nests, she saw over the bowsprit of the Sea Flower a tall, slim pillar standing alone amidst mist and spray. The Bishop Lighthouse. They anchored at the foot of it. But the Atlantic always thunders and frets against that rock. From the set-off forty feet above their heads, a cable attached to a windlass was flung out, caught by Thewliss and his pilot and passed through a block. A rough stirrup had been fashioned in the rope. Into this Mona set her foot; and whilst she clung to the cable with her hands at the level of her breast, she was swung outwards and upwards above the leap of the waves.

Just for a moment the question flashed through her mind: "Shall I let go? Shall I end all now when life is at its best—before I know whether the shutter will close on me or not?" It would be easy. Nothing could save her if she fell into that surging mass of water between the cutter and the precipitous rock. It would be quick. But the temptation passed. That particular form of cowardice was not in her nature to commit. But when she stood at last on the narrow stone set-off, there was the look in her face which those who have survived great illnesses so long retain.

Thewliss followed. They climbed to the great lantern and were told how on winter days green seas had smashed the glass and made the tower vibrate like a spring. It was two o'clock in the afternoon when, with a wind astern, they started back.

"That's the end of England," said Mark, and both of them fell to silence. They were inward bound now. Mona looked backwards to the high column and forwards to the low mass of the islands. She must fix their aspect in her mind, lest never in her life again she should come this way.

On Mark Thewliss, too, the influence of the eastward voyage was strong, but in a different way. He, the merest lodger in the fields of asphodel, was returning to the true activities of his life, invigorated, eager, his brain rich with new plans of advancement. He said:

"I never told you, Mona, of the mess I made last winter at Mardyke and Campion's, did I?"

"No."

"I promised to."

"Yes."

She was standing up in the cockpit, her arms upon the cabin roof, looking out with a concentrated gaze over the waste of sea. A little more than a fortnight back she had known nothing of it. Its currents and races, the set of its tides, its splendours by day, its mystical refulgence by night, its myriad voices from the angry thunder at the Bishop's Rock to the liquid tinkle at a wooded anchorage, above all, its friendly solitudes—all these exquisite marvels of the created world had been hidden away from her. She had known a parade, a bathing machine, pierrots in a booth, and a beach cluttered with noise and people. No wonder she answered with an absent voice and turned away reluctantly. The sea was calling to her troubled, anxious heart as a mother calls to her child.

"Yes," she said. "Tell me!"

"You had better go into the cabin and slip on an oilskin before you come aft. We are certain to get some of these waves hopping over the edge of the counter."

Mona came aft a few minutes later with the oilskin buttoned about her throat and a sou'-wester on her head. She seated herself by the side of Mark Thewliss and whilst he steered the Sea Flower so that she presented her stern square to each threatening wave, he told his story.

"I discovered how to produce synthetically the old Tyrrhian purple. In Roman days the dye was got from shell-fish—I suppose a sort of mussel. They called it 'Murex.' But the secret was lost, absolutely lost for two thousand years, until I got it a second time—oh, after hundreds of experiments. Look out!" He shouted as a breaking wave slapped the windward quarter of the ship and hopped over on to the deck with a splash, whipping both their faces with its spray. Mona laughed and wiped the water from cheeks wearing roses nowadays which they had never known before.

"It's all right. I like it," she said, and Mark Thewliss resumed:

"I persuaded Mardyke that I had at last got something which even the Germans, with their freedom from restriction and their better organisation, hadn't got. And that was a tough proposition, I can tell you. For he's a timorous soul, a great respecter of Governments—damn them!—and never for adventuring. A fine figure he'ld have cut in Elizabeth's time, wouldn't he?" and he spoke with a curious violence, as though he envisaged in the hesitating William Mardyke his own antagonist and obstacle. "Well, anyway, he was persuaded and put my fine new dye upon the market. There it was, the only genuine, A Imperial purple. We started off with the big drum beating. Even William rubbed his hands together and smiled graciously at his chemist. Fine! Yes, but complaints began to come in. Made in pretty frank language too. 'I don't like receiving rebukes of this kind,' William said to me, pulling a long upper lip. No, and I didn't like reading them either. But they were justified."

"They were?" cried Mona, as much amazed that Mark Thewliss should confess to a failure as that he should have failed at all.

"Yes. Guess what had happened?"

"I can't."

"My Imperial purple wouldn't stand the electric light, and of course the electric light has come to stay. By daylight—gorgeous, the exact Phoenician shade. But switch on' the light and it became a flaring, vivid scarlet. It wouldn't do, and I couldn't devise any way of altering it. William Mardyke made the only joke of his life over it, though he didn't mean to make any joke at all. He was furious in his timid way. He had lost some money and a certain amount of prestige amongst his clients. He said 'People won't submit to looking a Roman Emperor one moment and a Scarlet Woman the next. They find the transformation abrupt and offensive,'" and Mark Thewliss laughed. "Not so bad for William Mardyke, eh?"

He was gaiety itself as he recalled the history of his expensive error. Mona stared at him.

"And you don't mind?" she cried incredulously.

But if Mark's point of view was dark to her, hers was no less dark to him.

"The mistake?" he returned with a shrug of his shoulders. "Mistakes and failures are in the day's work unless you're a born genius with a fairy godmother, which I am not. Failures are the condition of success—that is, of any success worth having. You only reach the one through the experience you gain in committing the others. That's my belief."

Yes, that was his belief; and the cost and the loss of prestige to Mardyke and Campion did not trouble him one whit. Set as he was upon his own personal advancement and ultimate triumph, he could even drag a value out of this rebuff. For it cost him nothing It only damaged the firm he served. Mona Lightfoot compared him for a moment to some glittering—perhaps soulless—stone which showed you now one, now another facet, and all equally hard, equally impenetrable. She had a sudden terror of him. She had hopefully entrusted to him everything that she had—and he had taken it. Did he value it? Was it just another one of those mistakes which were helpful to him but might be sheer ruin to the people he used?

She drew back from him, but he did not notice her movement.

"Of course I mind in a way," he continued, and a note of anxiety was audible in his voice. "I mind, you see, because that error might jeopardise my position with Mardyke—and just at this moment I want him."

He suddenly reached out his hand, caught her arm and held it tight.

"I want him terribly, Mona."

His voice, his grasp were suddenly a prayer for her sympathy, for the solace of her companionship during the time of suspense and expectation. And as she had yielded to it in the saloon of the Frascati restaurant, so she weakened to it out here in the Atlantic. He was diamond-hard to the rest, for her he had supplications. Could there be flattery more insidious? Her heart leapt and the blood rushed into her face. He clasped her closer to him.

"Yes, I need him terribly," he repeated nervously. It seemed that he was sure of her. He turned and, shaking off his anxieties, cried gaily:

"Good-bye to the Bishop!"

The lighthouse was a long way out of sight, for by now the Sea Flower was reaching up the Sound between Tresco and St. Mary's.