CHAPTER X

CARN TREWOOFA

Stuart solved the riddle which lay in the personality of Mine Host, by declaring that whereas in summer he followed the fair and guileless calling of hotel-keeper, in winter a bolder voice summoned him forth, and he threw off his disguises, and donned ear-rings, and became a Corsair. And indeed there was that about him of jolly rakish raffish swagger, a roll in his gait, and a ruddiness of visage, and withal a disposition to solemn winking of the left eye, and a tendency to be found in odd moments dancing strange dances the length of his own hall, which gave to such a suggestion a flavour of likelihood.

Moreover, the Corsair had surrounded himself by a bewildering bevy of females, whom he called variously his wife, his cousin, his housekeeper, his secretary, and his manageress; but who were obviously delicious yieldings of his six-months’ piracy.

But the Ocean Hotel could produce no equally satisfactory solution to the problem of Merle, Peter, and Stuart; and the various possibilities in the way of marital, sentimental, immoral, or blood relationship, that their companionship entailed. Perceiving this, Stuart found gentle delight in preserving strict impartiality in the bestowal of his outward affections. The Spanish waiter at the Billet-doux would have known much in common with the Five Females of the Ocean Hotel. A climax was reached, when, under their assembled eyes, Peter entered the breakfast-room and handed a tobacco-pouch to her lord and master, reminding him in bell-like tones that he had left it in her room. Whereat a shudder passed from guest to guest, and a horrified voice remarked with more virtue than grammar, “Guessed it was her--I mean, one can always tell!”

Then enter Merle with a book and a box of matches and a green felt slipper: “You must have left them in my room, Stuart ...” and Stuart affected great embarrassment,--and they were all three very happy and contented.

But when the visitors at the hotel complained of people who go from table to table before meals; deliberately and in the sight of all, pouring cream from smaller vessels into one gigantic bowl, thereafter placed upon their own table; then the Five Females did so persistently harass and beset the Corsair, that he became quite melancholy, and would sit all day long in the porch, gazing seawards, without even the heart to nudge Peter in the ribs as she passed him by; a delicate attention she sorely missed. For he liked the trio, perhaps recognizing in them the germs of piracy, and was loth to give them notice to quit.

“You know, I really believe we shall be slung out before to-morrow,” laughed Stuart; “we’re not a bit popular.” They were at that moment topping for the first time the westward slope of moor. Not yet had they succeeded in finding their path to the sea. Peter had almost despaired of feeling the cool water swell and ebb about her ankles.

And then, suddenly, they saw Carn Trewoofa.

Carn Trewoofa lay tucked in a little cove, the green arm of the cliff flung protectingly around it, as who should say: “All right, dear; the nasty grim granite-land shan’t touch you then!” And the toy fishing-village believed this, and was at peace, drowsy and tumbled in the warm sunshine.

A toy fishing-village. Patched roofs; thatched roofs; roofs both patched and thatched; wild and abandoned young roofs, seemingly kept only in their places by heavy chains or great slabs of stone. Sturdy, ugly stone walls, defying the winds, that, despite protective arm, dealt sometimes roughly with toy villages. Dwellings of all shapes and sizes, impartial dwellings for lobster or fowl or human. Round windlass-tower, painted a startling white, presumably with what was left over from the coastguard stones. Wood and slate and tar. Overturned boats and baskets. Nets hung to dry; smocks dangling to dry; dogs and children spread to dry; and on a rough bench outside the lifeboat shed, a row of old salts, bearded and tough and stringy, and beyond the utmost limits of dryness, so that the sun could do to them no more.

A toy village, no doubt! The kind that one has longed to play with, ever since first meeting it in picture book. Nor did it beguile with false whispers, as had done the rest of the false land of Cornwall. For the coastguard’s path ran straight down the cliff-side to the very doors of the first fowl-house; and the rocks and pools of the Atlantic trespassed so far into the heart of the village, that it was difficult to disentangle them. A way to the sea at last.... Merle and Peter ran shouting down and on and out, the length of a baby stone lug that curved into the water, thinking in its infant delusion, that it broke the force of the waves. And there, at the very furthest end, they turned and surveyed Carn Trewoofa, spread in a glimmer of gold before them. And they remarked the multitude of boats strewn drunkenly on the cobbled slope from the shore to the first cluster of huts; remarked the fleet of boats that rocked and swung on the vivid green of the bay; green that beyond the lug deepened and glowed to shadowed ultramarine. And they received a hint that somewhere was an inn; and somewhere else the twisted fragments of an ancient wreck; and all about were seagulls, swooping and balancing and shrieking. And well-pleased with this latest and most complete piece of nursery-ware designed for their happiness, they turned their gaze outwards, there to be met by a rust-red sail passing swift as a dream over the broken white wave-crests; while a mile nearer to the horizon, a quaint clockwork lighthouse reared itself from a group of rocks, and made believe to guard the bay.

Then Merle rubbed her eyes, and turned to Peter, and asked if it were really all to be had for the price of two-and-eleven-pence-halfpenny? and might she please carry it home herself?

Stuart joined them on the lug. “They can’t yarn,” he said regretfully, jerking his thumb towards the line of ancient salts. “I’ve tried them and they can’t. In fact, I believe they’re tin.”

“Detachable?” queried Peter.

“No; on a row. I daresay it would be possible to break one off from the end. But they’re too old and glazed to be taught much; we must start with the new generation, and teach the young idea how to salt. Perhaps if we sowed among them a few volumes of W. W. Jacobs--I say, come along and explore.”

They entered Carn Trewoofa softly, as if fearful it should break or melt or in some such magical fashion manifest its unreality. And, picking her way between rope and anchor and occasionally a stray doorstep where there was no door, Merle came to a correct conclusion regarding the origin of this wonder-corner: It was smell made concrete. Someone had waved a wand over a handful of the richly mingled prevailing odour of seaweed and sea, tar and fish and clover, straw and fowl, soil and stone and lobster-pot; muttered a few compelling words--and the result was Carn Trewoofa.

The trio were just able to add to their medley of impressions, the mad swirl of paths, seven to one hut, that none could tell its back nor yet its front; and the yet madder swirl of chickens, seventy to one hen, and seven orphans to boot. Every ten yards traversed showed them a painted slab set in the wall, or in a door, or even on a roof; a slab and a slit and the word: Letters. They speculated what would happen if somebody failed to realize that this was a toy village, and posted real epistles in these alluring receptacles. “They are intended for all the letters one has never sent,” Stuart declared; “letters to my own feet, or to my great-uncle in Heaven; to the Times, and to a skylark, and to the Red King in Looking-glass Land.”

Likewise he discovered the national fisheress costume to be a cricket-cap; and counted no less than eight of these articles in the wearing. “Which proves that once, many years ago, a cricket team rounded the point in a pleasure steamer. And the Corsair lured them all to their destruction. But their caps were washed up on the shore, and worn ever since by the Women of Carn Trewoofa.--Nine! I’ll stalk the lot e’er yet I quit this spot.” He counted the tenth on the head of a buxom matron standing outside the “Longships” inn, and doing most effective things with two buckets and a pump.

She nodded pleasantly to the three, and asked them in raucous Cornish whether they were strangers in the land.

“Very,” responded Peter gloomily.

The wearer of the tenth cricket cap volunteered the information that she had rooms to let.

“At the inn!” gasped Merle.

“Nay; up-along yon villa. T’inn be nowt fur t’ young leddies.”

Smilingly she indicated a grey stone cottage standing high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill; its blind patient eyes looking steadily across the bay, past the toy fishing-fleet, to where sea and sky merged in a blue quivering haze.

They followed their guide into the tiny sitting-room of the “villa.” And there Peter cast herself with a sigh of voluptuous content upon a slippery slithery horsehair sofa; and Merle threw open the lid of a wheezy harmonium--and broke it; and Stuart remained transfixed before two black ivory elephants, which stood upon the mantelpiece. And they each and all declared their intention of remaining in their new quarters, never again to return to the disapproving atmosphere of the Ocean Hotel.

Mrs. Trenner beamed. They did not realize then that her rosy good-humour concealed the will of a Napoleon. For Mrs. Trenner was the autocrat of Carn Trewoofa; its leader and counsellor; by virtue of her unfailing prosperity and the excellence of her cooking. She owned the inn, and property besides; and she owned her husband and son and husband’s brother’s wife and their offspring, even as she now owned Merle and Peter and Stuart. The sons and husbands of other women might drown at sea; not so Mrs. Trenner’s. The chickens of other women might cross the road and be run over on the occasion of the fortnightly visit of the butcher’s cart; never Mrs. Trenner’s chickens. Therefore she wore her cricket-cap jauntily. On her indeed had fallen some of the radiance of that Star of Good Fortune under whose mellow auspices Stuart had been born. She and Stuart became, in consequence, excellent friends, though the language they spoke was mutually uncanny and perplexing.

“I’m not going to budge from here,” quoth Peter again. “_J’y suis et j’y reste._ Isn’t that so, Mrs. Trenner?”

Mrs. Trenner hesitated: “Well, theere t’es,” she ejaculated at last; her favourite expression in moments of emergency.

Peter continued: “Merle shall go upstairs and feel the beds, and see if the mattress is clay soil, or whatever has to be done under those circs. And Stuart can return to the hotel and pack our suit-cases.”

Stuart demurred. He might cope with the Corsair, he said, were it not for the Five Females. So they all returned to the hotel, telling Mrs. Trenner to have their dinner on the table that very evening. And they said this in all innocence, knowing nothing of the dinner, nor of what lay before them.

Before quitting Carn Trewoofa, Merle dashed through the tiny doorway marked “Mrs. Nanvorrow, Grocer,” just to see what lay hidden in its murky depths. She returned with a pennyworth of peardrops, and a fearsome account of an old ancient crone sitting in the kitchen, surrounded on floor, ceiling and walls, by china; a frenzied orgy of china; a veritable Bacchanal of china; china that sprouted and multiplied and literally asked for the destroying bull. “She squawked at me like a parrot,” Merle related in awestruck whispers, “and called me ‘dearie.’” She paused impressively. They were trudging up the cliff-path towards the Coastguard Station.

--“And I’ve discovered the eleventh cap. It was on the Witch’s head.”

Then Stuart sat down, and reproached her bitterly. He didn’t want any of the caps now, he said, if he couldn’t be left to find them himself. And anyway, stalking cricket-caps was a man’s job, in the pursuance of which, he considered Merle both unladylike and officious. “It isn’t as if I were childish about things,” concluded Stuart.

Then he looked Peter full in the eyes; and she laughed aloud at his utter childishness, knowing of the man beneath; knowing he knew she was by now aware of it. And Merle laughed with her, unconscious as yet that two of the three were playing games no more.

* * * * *

“Are ye all reet?” demanded Mrs. Trenner, hovering round their three chairs.

“It’s a feast of Lucullus,” sighed Peter, eating fresh young crab.

And Stuart, over an oozing pasty, declared that Mrs. Trenner must be a reincarnation of the cook primarily responsible for Epicurean philosophy.

“Well, theere t’es!” but Mrs. Trenner was obviously not satisfied. Then, nibbling at a saffron cake, Merle said gently, in words of one syllable: “The best I have yet ate, Mrs. Trenner.” And, wreathed in smiles, their landlady departed to the kitchen, there to retail to Maid Bessy, the one comprehensible bit of praise.

“Best she yet ate--thet’s what her said tu me, t’little leddy....”

“I foresee,” quoth Stuart, “that we shall have to leave to Merle the hectic chorus of praise which must inevitably accompany all our meals. Mrs. Trenner doesn’t appreciate our classic mode of expression, Peter.”

Peter moaned: “It’s awful; she gives us five times too much, and seems to take personal pride in our appetites. I daren’t leave a morsel. There’s something chubbily relentless about that woman. However, thank goodness there can be nothing more to come now.”

Mrs. Trenner entered; in one hand a plate of cheese-straws wherewith to break the camel’s back; in the other a bottle of Pond’s Extract.

“Are ye all reet?” she demanded, placing these upon the table. The three gazed, worried, at the Pond’s Extract. Was it local fashion to consume this with their cheese-straws?

“Mis’ Gurton, she thet hev t’ big room faacin’ this, she sent it over, thinkin’ ee might hev tired feet o’ nights, after walkin’,” volunteered Mis’ Gurton’s messenger. Then, hovering uncertainly awhile, in the difficulty of removing herself through the door, without assistant impetus, Mrs. Trenner shot forth: “Well, theere t’es”--and vanished.

“Evidently,” mused Peter, “one leaves Pond’s Extract in lieu of cards, up-along tu Carn Trewoofa. I suppose we are bound by etiquette to return toothpaste or Dinneford’s Magnesia upon Mis’ Gurton. They seem inclined to be friendly here.”

Outside the little square of window, the sky-colour was fast being drained and sucked into the West; and over the line of moor, a pale lemon-coloured moon wound and unwound herself like a dancer amidst trailing wisps of cloud, lilac and tender pink. Swaying rhythmically from the fading glow of day to the lifeless pallor of evening, the little dark fleet of fishing-boats could be glimpsed in the bay.

Indeed, Carn Trewoofa was inclined to be friendly with the strangers.

* * * * *

--Stuart leapt the low wall, and made a dash for a group of sheds huddled in the farmhouse yard.

“Come along!” he cried; and helter-skelter, through the icy sting of rain, they followed his lead.

... Something enormous hurled itself impotently against the wooden door, as they slammed it behind them.

“It’s a pig. I saw it,” gasped Peter. Her hand fumbled for the latch, could not find it; small wonder, since it existed on the further side of the door. The latter opened inwards. Peter leant against it the full weight of her body: “Help! it’s big and black and bulging--and it’s coming in!”

“Let it,” quoth Stuart indifferently. “Who are we, to object to a respectable old sow?”

But Merle, sitting exhausted in the trough, avowed a firm refusal to share this harbour of refuge with aught whatsoever in the pork line. So Stuart took Peter’s place at the door; and she sank into the trough beside Merle, and through the dim light watched with breathless interest the fierce encounter between man and beast, divided only by a thin partition of wood. Again and yet again did the ungainly monster hurl its quivering bulk to the assault, till the insecure building rocked and shook. Disgusted snortings and gruntings mingled pleasantly with the lash of the rain, and the distant chime of church-bells from Carn Trewoofa, six miles to the south from this clump of moorland huts and farms.

“My--sympathies--are all--with--the--pig,” jerked out Stuart, holding his own against terrific odds. “After all, it _is_ her sty. An English pig’s sty is her castle.”

Chorus of indignant assent from the pig.

And then Merle was suddenly seized by an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Peter, it’s Sunday afternoon, first Sunday in the month; and our At Home day at Lancaster Gate. Did your little granddaughter’s frock come from Paris, _chère Madame? mais tout à fait charmante_.”

The pig rallied for yet a final onslaught. This time she was just able to inject a bristling snout....

* * * * *

Merle liked to feel that she was ‘making friends with the rustics.’ Nevertheless, sitting abreast of the low sea-wall, she looked somewhat astonished at the bearded veteran who slouched to her side; and, pointing to a picturesque abode covered by a round roof of mud, announced fiercely, and without any preamble, that it was to be razed to the ground, after he and his had dwelt therein for close on four hundred years.

“Taaken from me an’ destroyed, next Monday week. Iss. An’ me without a hoam tu put my foot in et.”

“There’s no place like home for putting one’s foot in it,” murmured Peter, in the background, to Stuart.

Merle heeded them not; she was busy sympathizing with the ‘peasant heart of England.’

“Fur why?” demanded the man, brandishing his stick. “Fur nowt. Bit o’ rain pourin’ through roof an’ in our beds. Mud isna slate.”

“No, no, indeed,” cooed Merle. (“Do be quiet, Peter.”)

The veteran swung round, and indicated a timid-looking damsel standing a few yards off: “Yon’s my daughter. Yon’s t’ girl as gets fits.” His tone rang with such pride, that Stuart stepped forward and congratulated him heartily.

“How very sad for the poor girl,” Merle raised hyacinth wells of sympathy to the weather-beaten face above hers. (“Stuart!”)

“Eh, thet’s t’lass. She du get them moastly in chapel, she du.”

“Oh,” brightly, “then wouldn’t it be better if she never went to chapel?”

A gurgle of laughter from Peter. Merle turned her back yet more squarely upon her irrepressible companions.

“Ne’er can tell when she be gettin’ one o’ they fits. Scream, she du, an’ fling up her arms.” He regarded his talented offspring intently. “Seem tu me, she be gettin’ thet way now....”

Merle fled.

“Never mind, then,” Stuart teased her half an hour later. “She _shall_ be remembered in the hearts of the people. She shall understand the simple joys and sorrows of the rude peasantry----”

“After all,” Peter finished consolingly, “you’re the only one of us who can make Mrs. Trenner understand what pudding we want for lunch.”

* * * * *

Merle cried, casting herself upon their beloved horsehair sofa:

“Oh, what a day! I’ve never been so happy--and never so gloriously disgracefully untidy!”

Then Peter and Stuart looked long upon her, and looked at each other and smiled. For despite her delusions to the contrary, Merle’s vaunted ‘untidiness’ merely succeeded in fitting her to her present frame, as surely as the central figure of a Cornish Riviera poster; a daintily clad mermaid was she, pale-faced and lissom, with eyes reflecting the stormier tints of the sea; delicate ankles; blue-green jersey, closely blown to the figure; hair waving in long strands, albeit not wispily, about her shoulders.

“Merle’s appearance,” remarked Stuart, “is of the very few that can be trusted to look after itself for hours together. Now Peter’s physiognomy needs careful attention every five minutes; it burns and flushes and freckles; and her hair gets really untidy, not merely picturesquely ruffled; and her cap falls to the back of her head, and the buttons are off her skirt, and her neck is mottled mahogany, and oh, her jersey! how sagged and dragged and bagged it was----”

“But then, how it was cheap,” finished Peter.

“When are you two girls going home?” suddenly. “I’m off at to-morrow’s dawn. The call of diamonds. You’d better fix another day; we don’t want to look back on a long journey together, and a sulky, sooty arrival in London, as an ending to all this that we have had. It would be ungrateful.”

“O thou of the Hairpin Vision!” but Peter understood his mood. “When do we want to go, Merle?”

“Saturday is my birthday, and grandmaman is giving me a dinner-party of all the people I hate most. We may as well leave on Friday morning. It’s Wednesday to-day, isn’t it?” vaguely.

“Tuesday. By the way, what have you done about your letters home? Postmarks, I mean.”

“Carn Trewoofa is the nearest postal town to Orson Manor in Devonshire,” replied Merle. And Stuart sat down beside her on the sofa, and discoursed pleasantly on the lake of fire and brimstone, till Mrs. Trenner appeared to introduce them to their lunch, in its raw and natural condition. After which, she retired to cook it. Even Carn Trewoofa is no stranger to certain conditions of etiquette.

* * * * *

... So they all three squatted upon the outermost rock, and waited to be Caught by the Tide.

Sitting thus, bare-legged, knees hunched up to the chin, hands clasped about the knees, eyes solemn with expectation, they might have served for an illustration to some children’s tale of adventure. Peter wore a floppy crimson cap on her pale tangle of hair. Merle’s two heavy black plaits hung uncrowned. They did not speak; only gazed outwards, to desolate seas beyond the seas that have an end; and waited ... patiently. The lapping of water was the only sound. A wee crab, a green crab, waddled crookedly forth to examine with interest the thirty toes dangling into his private pool.

A south-westerly breeze blew upon their tanned throats ... and the light began to ebb.

Seven days now had they tarried in Carn Trewoofa, and had not yet succeeded in being Caught by the Tide. Therefore shame was upon them.

For the waves of Cornwall said: “If we surround them, they will merely elude us. And if they elude us, they will regard our strength and our cunning as mere attributes in a game of play invented by themselves. They are not as others, these strangers in the land. So we will not be beguiled into an attempt to drown them. They shall return to their homes without the supreme wonder and glory of being Caught by the Tide.”

Thus the Waves of Cornwall.

... And when they had been fully nineteen minutes on the outermost rock of all, waiting ... patiently ... Peter said in a very small voice: “Do you think, oh, do you think, it can be because the tide is going out?”

Stuart replied: “Peter, Peter, I didn’t like to say so before, but I am afraid it is indeed because the tide is going out.”

“If we were now in France, we would be Caught by the Tide.”

“But we are in Cornwall.”

... And sorrowfully they rose, and picked their way over the slippery boulders, towards the beckoning grey cottage that stood high on its own steps, a few paces up the hill.

The little south-westerly breeze was gaining in strength.

* * * * *

The little south-westerly breeze had become a south-westerly gale. It blew a great restlessness into Stuart that evening, so that he walked ceaselessly from window to door of the cottage, and at last suggested going forth to meet the elements squarely, and without the intervention of stone or glass.

Merle was drowsy from much scrambling, said she preferred to remain peacefully within.

“Come along, Peter.”

And from a lazy desire likewise to refuse the battle, the other girl quickened to something in his tones; without a word, threw on a heavy cloak; and, bare-headed, followed him through the village, and up the coastguard’s path to the crest of the cliff.

Here the wind caught them; not erratically, nor in gasping squally fashion, but a massed wall of wind, blowing steadily, straight and hard from across the sea, with never a swell nor yet a drop in the strength and sound of it. A mighty cleansing wind, causing every muscle and nerve of the body to be braced in resistance, without a second of rest or relaxation.

From far below, echoed the cold crash of breakers on the rocks. Far above, torn battalions of cloud swirled witlessly across a shuddering moon. Along the cliff, white splashes that marked by day the coastguard’s path, now came and went like evil staring faces....

Stuart swung on, unfaltering; Peter followed as best she might. Once she stumbled. He stopped, and flung a guiding arm about her.

“I can walk alone,” said Peter.

“I know you can....” The tempest hurled his voice straight past her, and across the black stretch of moor. “And it’s because you can walk alone, that you’re going to walk with me now.”

They pressed forward, eluding carefully what they thought was bog-land, only to discover on looking back, that they had been tricked by shadows. And shadows, again, resolved themselves into marsh-patches, yielding and treacherous. A fine rain sprayed their coats to a glitter. The moon had been beaten from her fields, leaving the world in a roar of darkness.... Once they halted abruptly on the verge of nothing, where the land had been eaten away. Once they followed the cliff that ran out sheer to a point, crested by dark shapes of granite, monsters thrown up æons ago by the waves.

Peter and Stuart stood motionless for several moments, rigid bodies thrusting at the wall of wind, that blew with never a drop nor yet a swell in the strength and sound of it; stripped from them all memory of a narrower stuffier world.

--“Tired?”

“Of the wind?”

“Of me, then?”

“I’ve never yet met the man who could tire me.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

With a laugh, he turned, strode back to the mainland. Then, facing suddenly round, met her scrambling down from the granite. Met her, and put his arms about her--this time neither in support nor in guidance, but fiercely, and because of the thing that had lain crouching between them, now storm-whipped to sudden life. Her short hair beat and stung against his face. Their lips were stiff and crusted with salt. It was not a night for words. Once he spoke her name....

* * * * *

Later, swinging down the homeward path, they came upon sight of Carn Trewoofa, three or four stray lights splashing the darkness. It was good to know that one of these was from Merle’s lamp. Good to imagine her sitting in the battered arm-chair by the window, thinking of the other two in the turmoil outside.

Good to be the two in the turmoil outside.