Читать книгу The Immortal Moment - Sinclair May - Страница 9

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FIVE days passed. The Lucys had now been a week at Southbourne. They knew it well by that time, for bad weather kept them from going very far beyond it. Jane had found, too, that they had to know some of the visitors. The little Cliff Hotel brought its guests together with a geniality unknown to its superb rival, the Métropole. Under its roof, in bad weather, persons not otherwise incompatible became acquainted with extraordinary rapidity. People had begun already to select each other. Even Mr. Soutar, the clergyman, had emerged from his lonely gloom, and dined by preference at the same table with the middle-aged ladies—the table farthest from the bay window. The Hankins, out of pure kindness, had taken pity on the old lady, Mrs. Jurd. They had made advances to the Lucys, perceiving an agreeable social affinity, and had afterward drawn back. For the Lucys were using the opportunity of the weather for cultivating Mrs. Tailleur.

It was not easy, they told themselves, to get to know her. She did not talk much. But as Jane pointed out to Robert, little things came out, things that proved that she was all right. Her father was a country parson, very strait-laced, they gathered; and she had little sisters, years younger than herself. When she talked at all it was in a pretty, innocent way, like a child's, and all her little legends were, you could see, transparently consistent. They had, like a child's, a quite funny reiterance and simplicity. But, like a child, she was easily put off by any sort of interruption. When she thought she had let herself go too far, she would take fright and avoid them for the rest of the day, and they had to begin all over again with her next time.

The thing, Lucy said, would be for Jane to get her some day all alone. But Jane said, No; Mrs. Tailleur was ten times more afraid of her than of him. Besides, they had only another week, and they didn't want, did they, to see too much of Mrs. Tailleur? At that Lucy got very red, and promised his sister to take her out somewhere by themselves the next fine day.

That was on Wednesday evening, when it was raining hard.

The weather lifted with the dawn. The heavy smell of the wet earth was pierced by the fine air of heaven and the sea.

Jane Lucy leaned out of her bedroom window and looked eastward beyond the hotel garden to the Cliff. The sea was full of light. Light rolled on the low waves and broke on their tops like foam. It hung quivering on the white face of the Cliff. It was like a thin spray thrown from the heaving light of the sea.

At breakfast Jane reminded Robert of his promise to take her for a sail on the first fine day. They turned their backs on the hotel and went seaward. On their way to the boats they passed Mrs. Tailleur sitting on the beach in the sun.

Neither of them enjoyed that expedition. It was the first of all the things they had done together that had failed. Jane wondered why. If they were not enjoying themselves on a day like that, when, she argued, would they enjoy themselves? The day remained as perfect as it had begun. There was nothing wrong, Robert admitted, with the day. They sailed in the sun's path and landed in a divine and solitary cove. Robert was obliged to agree that there was nothing wrong with the cove, and nothing, no nothing in the least wrong with the lunch. There might, yes, of course there might, be something very wrong with him.

Whatever it was, it disappeared as they sighted Southbourne. Robert, mounting with uneasy haste the steps that led from the beach to the hotel garden, was unusually gay.

They were late for dinner, and the table next theirs was empty. Outside, on the great green lawn in front of the windows, he could see Mrs. Tailleur walking up and down, alone.

He dined with the abstraction of a man pursued by the hour of an appointment. He established Jane in the lounge, with all the magazines he could lay his hands on, and went out by the veranda on to the lawn where Mrs. Tailleur was still walking up and down.

The Colonel and his wife were in the veranda. They made a low sound of pity as they saw him go.

Mrs. Tailleur seemed more than ever alone. The green space was bare around her as if cleared by the sweep of her gown. She moved quietly, with a long and even undulation, a yielding of her whole body to the rhythm of her feet. She had reached the far end of the lawn as Lucy neared her, and he looked for her to turn and face him.

She did not turn.

The lawn at this end was bounded by a gravel walk. The walk was fenced by a low stone wall built on the edge of the Cliff. Mrs. Tailleur paused there and seated herself sideways on the wall. Her face was turned from Lucy, and he judged her unaware of his approach. In his eyes she gained a new enchantment from the vast and simple spaces of her background, a sea of dull purple, a sky of violet, divinely clear. Her face had the intense, unsubstantial pallor, the magic and stillness of flowers that stand in the blue dusk before night.

She turned at the sound of the man's footsteps on the gravel. She smiled quietly, as if she knew of his coming, and was waiting for it there. He greeted her. A few words of no moment passed between them, and there was a silence. He stood by the low wall with his face set seaward, as if all his sight were fixed on the trail of smoke that marked the far-off passage of a steamer. Mrs. Tailleur's face was fixed on his. He was aware of it.

Standing beside her, he was aware, too, of something about her alien to sea and sky; something secret, impenetrable, that held her, as it were, apart, shut in by her own strange and solitary charm.

And she sat there in the deep quiet of a woman intent upon her hour. He had no ear for the call of her silence, for the voice of the instincts prisoned in blood and brain.

Presently she rose, shrugging her shoulders and gathering her furs about her.

"I want to walk," she said; "will you come?"

She led the way to the corner where the low wall was joined by a high one, dividing the hotel garden from the open down. There was a gate here; it led to a flight of wooden steps that went zig-zag to the beach below. At the first turn in the flight a narrow path was cut on the Cliff side. To the right it rose inland, following the slope of the down. To the left it ran level under the low wall, then climbed higher yet to the brow of the headland. There it ended in a square recess, a small white chamber cut from the chalk and open to the sea and sky. From the floor of the recess the Cliff dropped sheer to the beach two hundred feet below.

Mrs. Tailleur took the path to the left. Lucy followed her.

The path was stopped by the bend of the great Cliff, the recess roofed by its bulging forehead. There was a wooden seat set well back under this cover. Two persons who found themselves alone there might count on security from interruption.

Mrs. Tailleur and Lucy were alone.

Lucy looked at the Cliff wall in front of them.

"We must go back," said he.

"Oh no," said she; "don't let's go back."

"But if you want to walk——"

"I don't," said she; "do you?"

He didn't, and they seated themselves. In the charm of this intimate seclusion Lucy became more than ever dumb. Mrs. Tailleur waited a few minutes in apparent meditation.

All Lucy said was "May I smoke?"

"You may." She meditated again.

"I was wondering," said she, "whether you were ever going to say anything."

"I didn't know," said Lucy simply, "whether I might. I thought you were thinking."

"So I was. I was thinking of what you were going to say next. I never met anybody who said less and took so long a time to say it in."

"Well," said Lucy, "I was thinking too."

"I know you were. You needn't be so afraid of me unless you like."

"I am not," said he stiffly, "in the least afraid of you. I'm desperately afraid of saying the wrong thing."

"To me? Or everybody?"

"Not everybody."

"To me, then. Do you think I might be difficult?"

"Difficult?"

"To get on with?"

"Not in the least. Possibly, if I may say so, a little difficult to know."

She smiled. "I don't usually strike people in that light."

"Well, I think I'm afraid of boring you."

"You couldn't if you tried from now to midnight."

"How do you know what I mightn't do?"

"That's it. I don't know. I never should know. It's only the people I'm sure of that bore me. Don't they you?"

He laughed uneasily.

"The people," she went on, "who are sure of me; who think I'm so easy to know. They don't know me, and they don't know that I know them. And they're the only people I've ever, ever met. I can tell what they're going to say before they've said it. It's always the same thing. It's—if you like—the inevitable thing. If you can't have anything but the same thing, at least you like it put a little differently. You'd think, among them all, they might find it easy to put it a little differently sometimes; but they never do; and it's the brutal monotony of it that I cannot stand."

"I suppose," said Lucy, "people are monotonous."

"They don't know," said she, evidently ignoring his statement as inadequate, "they don't know how sick I am of it—how insufferably it bores me."

"Ah! there you see—that's what I'm afraid of."

"What?"

"Of saying the wrong thing—the—the same thing."

"That's it. You'd say it differently, and it wouldn't be the same thing at all. And what's more, I should never know whether you were going to say it or not."

"There's one thing I'd like to say to you if I knew how—if I knew how you'd take it. You see, though I think I know you——" he hesitated.

"You don't really? You don't know who I am? Or where I come from? Or where I'm going to? I don't know myself."

"I know," said Lucy, "as much as I've any right to. But unluckily the thing I want to know——"

"Is what you haven't any right to?"

"I'm afraid I haven't. The thing I want to know is simply whether I can help you in any way."

She smiled. "Ah," said she, "you have said it."

"Haven't I said it differently?"

"I'm not sure. You looked different when you said it; that's something."

"I know I've no right to say it at all. What I mean is that if I could do anything for you without boring you, without forcing myself on your acquaintance, I'd be most awfully glad. You know you needn't recognise me afterward unless you like. Have I put it differently now?"

"Yes; I don't think I've ever heard it put quite that way before."

There was a long pause in which Lucy vainly sought for illumination.

"No," said Mrs. Tailleur, as if to herself; "I should never know what you were going to say or do next."

"Wouldn't you?"

"No; I didn't know just now whether you were going to speak to me or not. When I said I wanted to walk I didn't know whether you'd come with me or not."

"I came."

"You came; but when I go——"

"You're not going?"

"Yes; to-morrow, perhaps, or the next day. When I go I shall give you my address and ask you to come and see me; but I shan't know whether you'll come."

"Of course I'll come."

"There's no 'of course' about you; that's the charm of it. I shan't know until you're actually there."

"I shall be there all right."

"What? You'll come?"

"Yes; and I'll bring my sister."

"Your sister?" She drew back slightly. "Turn round, please—this way—and let me look at you."

He turned, laughing. Her eyes searched his face.

"Yes; you meant that. Why do you want to bring your sister?"

"Because I want you to know her."

"Are you sure—quite—quite sure—you want her to know me?"

"Quite—quite sure. If you don't mind—if she won't bore you."

"Oh, she won't bore me."

"You're not afraid of that monotony?"

She turned and looked long at him. "You are very like your sister," she said.

"Am I? How? In what way?"

"In the way we've been talking about. I suppose you know how remarkable you are?"

"No; I really don't think I do."

"Then," said Mrs. Tailleur, "you are all the more remarkable."

"Don't you think," she added, "we had better go back?"

They went back. As they mounted the steps to the garden door they saw Miss Keating approaching it from the inside. She moved along the low wall that overlooked the path by which they had just come. There was no crunching of pebbles under her feet. She trod, inaudibly, the soft edge of the lawn.

Lucy held the door open for Miss Keating when Mrs. Tailleur had passed through; but Miss Keating had turned suddenly. She made the pebbles on the walk scream with the vehemence of her retreat.

"Dear me," said Lucy, "it must be rather painful to be as shy as that."

"Mustn't it?" said Mrs. Tailleur.