Part 5

Peter was disposed to incite Joan to a porridge-eating race. You just looked at Joan and began to eat fast very quietly, and then Joan would catch on and begin to eat fast too. Her spoon would go quicker and quicker, and make a noise—whack, whack, whack! And as it was necessary that she should keep her wicked black eyes fixed on your plate all the time to see how you were getting on, she would sometimes get an empty spoon up, sometimes miss her mouth, sometimes splash. But Mummy took a strong hand that morning. There was an argument, but Mummy was unusually firm. She turned breakfast into a drill. “Fill spoon. ’Tention! Mouf. Withdraw spoon.” Not bad fun, really, though Mummy looked much too stern for any liberties. And Daddy wasn’t game for a diversion. Wouldn’t look at a little boy....

After breakfast Arthur decided that he was not going to be bullied. He got out his bicycle and announced in a dry, offhand tone that he was going out for the day.

“So long, Guv’nor,” said Dolly, as off-handedly, and stood at the door in an expressionless way until he was beyond the green road gate.

Then she strolled back through the house into the garden, and stood for a time considering the situation.

“So I am to bring up two babies—and grow old, while _this_ goes on!” she whispered.

She went to clear the things off the breakfast-table, and stood motionless again.

“My God!” she said; “why wasn’t I born a man?”

And that, or some image that followed it, let her thoughts out to Africa and a sturdy, teak-complexioned figure with a one-sided face under its big sun-helmet....

“Why didn’t I marry a man?” she said. “Why didn’t I get me a mate?”

§ 7

These were the primary factors of the situation that Oswald, arriving six weeks later, was slowly to discover and comprehend. As he did so he felt the self-imposed restraints of his relations to Arthur and Dolly slip from him. Arthur was now abundantly absent. Never before had Oswald and Dolly been so much alone together. Peter and Joan in the foreground were a small restraint upon speech and understanding.

But now this story falls away from romance. Romance requires that a woman should love a man or not love a man; that she should love one man only and go with the man of her choice, that no other consideration, unless it be duty or virtue, should matter. But Dolly found with infinite dismay that she was divided.

She loved certain things in Oswald and certain things in Arthur. The romantic tradition which ruled in these matters, provided no instructions in such a case. The two men were not sufficiently contrasted. One was not black enough; the other not white enough. Oswald was a strong man and brave, but Arthur, though he lived a tame and indolent life, seemed almost insensible to danger. She had never seen him afraid or rattled. He was a magnificent rock climber, for example; his physical nerve was perfect. Everything would have been so much simpler if he had been a “soft.” She was sensitive to physical quality. It was good to watch Arthur move; Oswald’s injuries made him clumsy and a little cautious in his movements. But Oswald was growing into a politician; he had already taken great responsibilities in Africa; he talked like a prince and like a lover about his Atonga and his Sikhs, and about the white-clad kingdom of Uganda and about the fantastic gallant Masai, who must be saved from extermination. That princely way of thinking was the fine thing about him; there he outshone Arthur. He was wonderful to her when he talked of those Central African kingdoms that were rotting into chaos under the influence of the Arab and European invasions, chaos from which a few honest Englishmen might yet rescue a group of splendid peoples.

He could be loyal all through; it was his nature. And he loved her—as Arthur had never loved her. With a gleam of fierceness. As though there was a streak of anger in his love.

“Why do you endure it?” he fretted. “Why do you endure it?”

But he was irritable, absurd about many little things. He could lose his temper over games; particularly if Arthur played too.

Yet there was a power about Oswald. It was a quality that made her fear him and herself. She feared for the freedom of her spirit. If ever she became Oswald’s she would become his much more than she had ever been Arthur’s. There was something about him that was real and commanding, in a sense in which nothing was real about Arthur.

She had a dread, which made her very wary, that one day Oswald would seize upon her, that he would take her in his arms and kiss her. This possibility accumulated. She had a feeling that it would be something very dreadful, painful and enormous; that it would be like being branded, that therewith Arthur would be abolished for her.... At the thought she realized that she did not want Arthur to be abolished. She had an enormous kindliness for Arthur that would have been impossible without a little streak of humorous superiority. If Oswald threatened her with his latent mastery, Arthur had the appeal of much dependence.

And apart from Oswald or Arthur, something else in her protested, an instinct or a deeply-rooted tradition. The thought of a second man was like thinking of the dislocation of her soul. It involved a nightmare of overlapping, of partial obliteration, of contrast and replacement, in things that she felt could have no honour or dignity unless they are as simple and natural as inadvertent actions....

The thing that swayed her most towards Oswald, oddly enough, was his mutilated face. That held her back from any decision against him. “If I do not go with him,” she thought, “he will think it is that.” She could not endure that he should be so wounded.

Then, least personal and selfish thought of all, was the question of Joan and Peter. What would happen to them? In any case, Dolly knew they would come to her. There was no bitter vindictiveness in Arthur, and he shirked every responsibility he could. She could leave him and go to Uganda and return to them. She knew there would be no attempt to deprive her of Peter. Oswald would be as good a father as Arthur. The children weighed on neither side.

Dolly’s mind had become discontinuous as it had never been discontinuous before. None of these things were in her mind all the time; sometimes one aspect was uppermost and sometimes another. Sometimes she was ruled by nothing but vindictive pride which urged her to put herself on a level with Arthur. At times again her pride was white and tight-lipped, exhorting her above all things not to put herself on a level with Arthur. When Oswald pressed her, her every impulse was to resist; when he was away and she felt her loneliness—and his—her heart went out to him.

She had given herself to Arthur, that seemed conclusive. But Arthur had dishonoured the gift. She had a great sense of obligation to Oswald. She had loved Oswald before she had ever seen Arthur; years ago she had given her cousin the hope and claim that burnt accusingly in his eye today.

“Come with me, Dolly,” he said. “Come with me. Share my life. This isn’t life here.”

“But could I come with you?”

“If you dared. Not to Blantyre, perhaps. That’s—respectable. Church and women and chatter. Blantyre’s over. But there’s Uganda. Baker took a wife there. It’s still a land of wild romance. And I must go soon. I must get to Uganda. So much is happening. Muir says this Soudanese trouble won’t wait.... But I hang on here, day after day. I can’t leave you to it, Dolly. I can’t endure that.”

“You _have_ to leave me,” she said.

“No. Come with me. This soft grey-green countryside is no place for you. I want you in a royal leopard skin with a rifle in your hand. You are pale for want of the sun. And while we were out there _he_ could divorce you. He would divorce you—and marry some other copper puncher. Some Craftswoman. And stencil like hell. Then we could marry.”

He gripped her wrists across the stone table. “Dolly, my darling!” he said; “don’t let me go back alone.”

“But what of Peter and Joan?”

“Leave them to nurses for a year or so and then bring them out to the sun. If the boy stays here, he will grow up—some sort of fiddling artist. He will punch copper and play about with book-binding.”

She struggled suddenly to free her wrists, and he gripped them tighter until he saw that she was looking towards the house. At last he realized that Arthur approached.

“Oh, _damn_!” said Oswald....

§ 8

Dolly cut this knot she could not untie, and as soon as she had cut it she began to repent.

Indecision may become an unendurable torment. On the one hand that dark strong life in the African sunblaze with this man she feared in spite of his unconcealed worship, called to a long-suppressed vein of courage in her being; on the other hand was her sense of duty, her fastidious cleanness, this English home with its thousand gentle associations and Arthur, Arthur who had suddenly abandoned neglect, become attentive, mutely apologetic, but who had said not a word, since he had put himself out of court, about Oswald.

He had said nothing, but he had become grave in his manner. Once or twice she had watched him when he had not known she watched him, and she had tried to fathom what was now in his mind. Did he want her?

This and that pulled her.

One night in the middle of the night she lay awake, unable to sleep, unable to decide. She went to her window and pressed her forehead against the pane and stared at the garden in a mist of moonlight. “I must end it,” she said. “I must end it.”

She went to the door that separated her room from Arthur’s, and unlocked it noisily. She walked across the room and stood by the window. Arthur was awake too. He leant up upon his elbow and regarded her without a word.

“Arthur,” she said, “am I to go to Africa or am I to stay with you?”

Arthur answered after a little while. “I want you to stay with me.”

“On my conditions?”

“I have been a fool, Dolly. It’s over....”

They were both trembling, and their voices were unsteady.

“Can I believe you, Arthur?” she asked weakly....

He came across the moonlight to her, and as he spoke his tears came. Old, tender, well-remembered phrases were on his lips. “Dolly! Little sweet Dolly,” he said, and took her hungrily into his arms....

There remained nothing now of the knot but to tell Oswald that she had made her irrevocable decision.

§ 9

Arthur was eloquent about their reconciliation. What became of her rival Dolly never learnt, nor greatly cared; she was turned out of Arthur’s heart, it would seem, rather as one turns a superfluous cat out of doors. Arthur alluded to the emotional situation generally as “this mess.” “If I’d had proper work to do and some outlet for my energy this mess wouldn’t have happened,” he said. He announced in phrases only too obviously derivative that he must find something _real_ to do. “Something that will take me and use me.”

But Dolly was manifestly unhappy. He decided that the crisis had overtaxed her. Oswald must have worried her tremendously. (He thought it was splendid of her that she never blamed Oswald.) The garden, the place, was full now of painful associations—and moreover the rejected cat was well within the range of a chance meeting. Travel among beautiful scenery seemed the remedy indicated. Their income happened to be a little overspent, but it only added to his sense of rising to a great emotional emergency that he should have to draw upon his capital. They started upon a sort of recrudescence of their honeymoon, beginning with Rome.

Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came to mind the house and Joan and Peter. Aunt Phœbe was writing a little wise poetical book about education, mostly out of her inner consciousness, and she seized the opportunity of this experience very gladly....

Dolly was a thing of moods for all that journey.

At times she was extravagantly hilarious, she was wild, as she had never been before. She would start out to scamper about a twilit town after a long day’s travel, so that it was hard for Arthur to keep pace with her flitting energy; she would pretend to be Tarantula-bitten in some chestnut grove and dance love dances and flee like a dryad to be pursued and caught. And at other times she sat white and still as though she had a broken heart. Never did an entirely virtuous decision give a woman so much heartache. They went up Vesuvius by night on mules from Pompeii, and as they stood on the black edge of the crater, the guide called her attention to the vast steely extent of the moonlit southward sea.

She heard herself whisper “Africa,” and wondered if Arthur too had heard.

And at Capri Arthur had a dispute with a boatman. The boat was taken at the Marina Grande. The boatman proposed the tour of the island and all the grottos, and from the Marina Grande the project seemed reasonable enough. The sea, though not glassy smooth, was quite a practicable sea. But a point had to be explained very carefully. The boatman put it in slow and simple Italian with much helpful gesture. If the wind rose to a storm so that they would have to return before completing this “giro,” they would still pay the same fee.

“Oh quite,” said Arthur carelessly in English, and the bargain was made.

They worked round the corner of the island, under the Salto di Tiberio, that towering cliff down which the legend says Tiberius flung his victims, and as soon as they came out from under the lee of the island Arthur discovered a cheat. The gathering wind beyond the shelter of the cliffs was cutting up the blue water into a disorderly system of tumbling white-capped waves. The boat headed straight into a storm. It lifted and fell and swayed and staggered; the boatman at his oar dramatically exaggerated his difficulties. “He knew of this,” said Arthur savagely. “He thinks we shall want to give in. Well, let’s see who gives in first. Let’s put him through his program and see how he likes it.”

Arthur had taken off his hat, and clutched it to save it from the wind. He looked very fine with his hair blowing back. “Buona aria,” he said, grinning cheerfully to the boatman. “Bellissima!”

The boatman was understood to say that the wind was rising and that it was going to be worse presently.

“Bellissima!” said Arthur, patting Dolly’s back.

The boatman was seized with solicitude for the lady.

Dolly surveyed the great cliffs that towered overhead and the frothy crests against which the boat smacked and lifted. “Bellissima,” she agreed, smiling at the boatman’s consternation. “Avanti!”

The boat plunged and ploughed its way for a little while in silence. The boatman suggested that things were getting dangerous. Could the signora swim?

Arthur assured him that she could swim like a fish.

And the capitano?

Arthur accepted his promotion cheerfully and assured the boatman that his swimming was only second to Dolly’s.

The boatman informed them that he himself could scarcely swim at all. He was not properly a seafaring man. He had come to Capri for his health; his lungs were weak. He had been a stonemason at Alessandria, but the dust had been bad for his lungs. He could not swim. He could not manage a boat very well in stormy weather. And he was an orphan.

“_Io_ Orfano!” cried Arthur, greatly delighted, and stabbing himself with an elucidatory forefinger. “Io Orfano anche.”

The boatman lapsed into gloom. In a little while they had beaten round the headland into view of the Faraglione, that big outstanding rock which is pierced by a great arch, upon the south-eastern side of the island. The passage through this Arco Naturale was in the boatman’s agreement. They could see the swirl of the waters now through that natural gateway, rising, pouring almost to the top of the arch and then swirling down to the trough of the wave. The west wind whipped the orphan’s blue-black curls about his ears. He began to cry off his bargain.

“We go through that arch,” said Arthur, “or my name is not Stubland.”

The boatman argued his case. The wind was rising; the further they went the more they came into the weather. He had not the skill of a man born to the sea.

“You made the bargain,” said Arthur.

“Let us return while we are still safe,” the boatman protested.

“Go through the arch,” said Arthur. The boatman looked at the arch, the sky, the endless onslaught of advancing waves to seaward and Arthur, and then with a gesture of despair turned the boat towards the arch.

“He’s frightened, Arthur,” said Dolly.

“Serve him right. He won’t try this game again in a hurry,” said Arthur, and then relenting: “Go through the arch and we will return....”

The boatman baulked at the arch twice. It was evident they must go through just behind the crest of a wave. He headed in just a moment or so too soon, got through on the very crest, bent double to save his head, made a clumsy lunge with his oar that struck the rock and threw him sideways. Then they were rushing with incredible swiftness out of the arch down a blue-green slope of water, and the Faraglione rose again before Dolly’s eyes like a thing relieved after a moment of intense concentration. But suddenly everything was sideways. Everything was askew. The boat was half overturned and the boatman was sitting unsteadily on the gunwale, clutching at the opposite side which was rising, rising. The man, she realized, was going overboard, and Arthur’s swift grab at him did but complete the capsize. The side of the boat was below her where the floor should be, and that gave way to streaming bubbling water into which one man plunged on the top of the other....

Dolly leapt clear of the overturned boat, went under and came up....

She tossed the wet hair from her head and looked about her. The Faraglione was already thirty yards or more away and receding fast. The boat was keel upward and rolling away towards the cliff. There were no signs of Arthur or the boatman.

What must she do? Just before the accident she had noted the Piccola Marina away to the north-west. That would mean a hard swim against the waves, but it would be the best thing to do. It could not be half a mile away. And Arthur? Arthur would look after himself. He would do that all right. She would only encumber him by swimming around. Perhaps he would get the man on to the boat. Perhaps people had seen them from the Piccola Marina. If so boats would come out to them.

She struck out shoreward.

How light one’s clothes made one feel! But presently they would drag. (Never meet trouble half-way.) It was going to be a long swim. Even if there should be no current....

She swam....

Then she had doubts. Ought she to go back and look for Arthur? She could not be much good to him even if she found him. It was her first duty to save herself. Peter was not old enough to be left. No one would care for Joan and him as she could care for them. It was a long enough swim without looking for Arthur. It was going to be a very long swim....

She wished she could get a glimpse of Arthur. She looked this way and that. It would be easier to swim side by side. But in this choppy sea he might be quite close and still be hidden.... Best not to bother about things—just swim.

For a long time she swam like a machine....

After a time she began to think of her clothes again. The waves now seemed to be trying to get them off. She was being tugged back by her clothes. Could she get some of them off? Not in this rough water. It would be more exhausting than helpful. Clothes ought to be easier to get off; not so much tying and pinning....

The waves were coming faster now. The wind must be freshening. They were more numerous and less regular.

Splash! That last wave was a trencherous beast—no!—treacherous beast.... Phew, ugh! Salt in the mouth. Salt in the eyes. And here was another, too soon!... Oh _fight_!

It was hard to see the Piccola Marina. Wait for the lift of the next wave.... She was going too much to the left, ever so much too much to the left....

One must exert oneself for Peter’s sake.

What was Arthur doing?

It seemed a long time now since she had got into the water, and the shore was still a long way off. There was nobody there at all that she could see.... Boats drawn high and dry. Plenty of boats. Extraordinary people these Italians—they let stonemasons take charge of boats. Extortionate stonemasons.... She was horribly tired. Not in good fettle.... She looked at the Faraglione over her shoulder. It was still disgustingly near and big. She had hardly swum a third of the way yet. Or else there was a current. Better not think of currents. She had to stick to it. Perhaps it was the worst third of the way she had done. But what infinite joy and relief it would be just to stop swimming and spread one’s arms and feet!

She had to stick to it for little Peter’s sake. For little Peter’s sake. Peter too young to be left....

Arthur? Best not to think about Arthur just yet. It had been silly to insist on the Arco Naturale....

What a burthen and bother dress was to a woman! What a leaden burthen!...

She must not think. She must not think. She must swim like a machine. Like a machine. One.... Two.... One.... Two.... Slow and even.

She fell asleep. For some moments she was fast asleep. She woke up with the water rising over her head and struck out again.

There was a sound of many waters in her ears and an enormous indolence in her limbs against which she struggled in vain. She did struggle, and the thought that spurred her to struggle was still the thought of Peter.

“Peter is too young to be left yet,” sang like a refrain in her head as she roused herself for her last fight with the water. Peter was too young to be left yet. Peter, her little son. But the salt blinded her now; she was altogether out of step with the slow and resolute rhythm of the waves. They broke foaming upon her and beat upon her, and presently turned her about and over like a leaf in an eddy.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE

§ 1

Peter could not remember a time when Joan was not in his world, and from the beginning it seemed to him that the chief fact was Mary. “Nanny,” you called her, or “Mare-_wi_,” or you simply howled and she came. She was omnipresent; if she was not visible then she was just round the corner, by night or day. Other figures were more intermittent, “Daddy,” a large, loud, exciting, almost terrific thing; “Mummy,” who was soft and made gentle noises but was, in comparison with Mary, rather a fool about one’s bottle; “Pussy,” and then the transitory smiling propitiatory human stuff that was difficult to remember and name correctly. “Aunties,” “Mannies” and suchlike. But also there were inanimate persons. There were the brass-headed sentinels about one’s cot and the great brown round-headed newel post. His name was Bungo-Peter; he was a king and knew everything, he watched the stairs, but you did not tell people this because they would not understand. Also there was the brass-eyed monster with the triple belly who was called Chester-Drawers; he shammed dead and watched you, and in the night he creaked about the room. And there was Gope the stove, imprisoned in the fender with hell burning inside him, and there was Nobby. Nobby was the protector of little boys against Chester-Drawers, stray bears, the Thing on the Landing, spider scratchings and many such discomforts of nursery life. Of course you could also draw a deep breath and yell for “Mare-_wi_,” but she was apt not to understand one’s explanation and to scold. It was better to hold tight to Nobby. And also Nobby was lovely and went whack.