CHAPTER IV

WILD DUCK

“Garden-party weather,” grumbled Stuart. “S’pose they think they’re doing us a favour; one doesn’t want a breeze for sailing,--oh, no! Strawberries and cream and a band on the lawn, that’s all the day’s fit for.”

Oliver lumbered indoors to work: “Call me when the wind gets up.” And Peter announced her intention of going out in the dinghy.

“Shall I come with you?” queried Stuart lazily, from where he stretched on the grass at Aureole’s side.

“No.”

Instantly he sprang to his feet and followed her down to the bank, fell determination in his countenance.

“Go back, Stuart,” she whispered; “you can’t leave Aureole alone; she’s our hostess.”

He protested: “Hang it! _I_ gave her the bungalow.”

“Untie the rope!” Without heeding his complaints, she sprang into the dinghy, where it floated beside ‘Faustina,’ née ‘Tyke’; and stood upright, scull in hand, looking up at her comrade on the bank, with the coolly indifferent air of being perfectly well able to dispense with his companionship. Her white flannel shirt, flung open to show the tanned throat; the clean line where her hair sprang upwards from the neck; the alert poise of her figure, seemed all to have gathered up and expressed the personality of the background: water quivering in the sunlight, dazzling white canvas of sails, short bright green grass of the banks, masts and ropes slicing and interslicing against a china-blue sky. Peter resembled an adventurer setting forth in silence to find the beginning of the world. Aureole, exotically reclining with hands clasped behind her head, had more the appearance of one who had found the end of the world and was prepared to talk about it. Stuart flung her a discontented look over his shoulder.

“Is this a morning to waste with an amateur cocotte telling me she’s a Pagan?” he demanded, still holding in the dinghy.

Peter merely laughed, and, with an adroit movement, pushed away into midstream.

As Stuart walked slowly back to his hostess, he knew there was nothing he wanted so much as to be alone with Peter on the Broads. Certainly he had gone to a vast deal of trouble in bringing hither Mr. and Mrs. Strachey, for the sake of the proprieties. He was prepared to go to an equal amount of trouble in ridding himself of them. Nor would the charge of inconsistency have disturbed him a whit.

Meanwhile, Aureole had been deriving a quantity of fresh ideas from the contemplation of Stuart and Peter, and their treatment one of the other. She had never before seen love in conflict, and it struck her as attractive. An attempt to engage Oliver in a similarly slippery and perplexing wrestle of wills merely sufficed to augment his loving consideration; when Aureole was capricious, then Aureole had to be humoured, was the burden of his thoughts. From considering him a tyrant, a bully, and a gaoler, which was her last attitude but one, she veered round to the belief that she had married a poor-spirited creature. The germ within her, born of Nora Helmer’s rebellion, was feeding nicely and growing healthily plump, the past three days in Norfolk.

Aureole broke silence with a sudden: “Mr. Heron, do you think I’m happy?”

“No,” replied Stuart guardedly. And waited for more.

“_She_ is!” Aureole let her eyes follow the disappearing craft that contained Peter. Then: “A man takes you for granted when you are once married to him. He pampers your body and neglects your soul.”

Stuart said: “You mean he pampers your soul as well as your body. A soul needs no pampering; it wants fresh air, and an occasional touch of the whip.” And he added musingly: “I’m a Pagan, you see!”

She made bitter reply: “Oliver is--just a man. That’s the difference.”

She had a way of half dropping her eyelids, and, after a pregnant silence, shooting forth an unexpected audacity, calculated to shatter the well-bred restraints of convention to a thousand fragments. Stuart had caught the trick, and found himself unable to refrain from using it upon her now:

“Why not ... leave him?”

And for a while no sound but the scream and plash of a water-fowl on the opposite bank.

“Have you read Ibsen?” queried Stuart with disconcerting acuteness--considering that he had seen her for three days past with the “Doll’s House” in her hand.

Aureole murmured: “She went out to find herself and to earn his respect....” No need of a superfluity of words when talking to this man; his grasp at her meanings was almost uncanny. And she thought with distaste of Oliver’s “I--don’t--quite--follow,” whenever she let fall a subtlety. Nor did it ever occur to her that Nigger Strachey, who had taken a first at Oxford, was perfectly capable of following her to any lengths that were worth his while, and merely made her explain her special type of profundity in the faint hope that thus she would attain to a sense of what it lacked.

Aureole’s soft lips were mysteriously smiling; but she merely said in light tones: “You are a bad counsellor, Mr. Heron. Why don’t you persuade me to obey my husband and be content with my lot?”

“Not much fun in that, is there?” he replied; and would have enlarged further on the stuntorian point of view which lay in breaking away from a husband because he refused to contradict you. But remembering Aureole lived three twists further down the corkscrew than himself, he substituted a reflective: “I wouldn’t mind being present at the scene when you came together again.”

Her eyes, large and velvety brown as pansies, began to sparkle. “So you anticipate a stormy reconciliation, do you?”

Stuart said with a graveness that rebuked her flippancy: “Do you love him so little as to remain always apart?”

She drooped her head; truth to say, she was exceedingly fond of her stolid square-backed husband. “If I returned to him----”

“You’d have achieved your purpose then. Nigger needs a volcanic eruption before he would realize anything, least of all you. But once the knowledge came to him, he’d need an earthquake to dislodge it again. His mind isn’t elastic, you see. It’s for you to provide the eruption. If you don’t----” Stuart paused to extract matches and cigarette from his pocket.

“If I don’t?----”

“Oh, well, if you don’t, I’ve no doubt your husband will continue faithful and attached----”

“Oh!” Aureole dug her shapely heel--too high for sailing purposes--deep into the grass.

“And will keep you nicely sheltered from draughts”--he had struck his match; the flame wavered and went out. Again he attempted the process, with the same result.

“Thank the Lord!” with sudden buoyancy.

“What is it?”

“Wind!” And loudly summoning Oliver from the house, Stuart strode towards the boat.

Aureole could have wished the wind to have waited. She was preparing to announce in her most irrelevant manner: “Do you know ... when I touch a kitten, I suddenly feel as if I must kill it. Crush it to death. Just because it’s small and soft, and I love it.” This could not fail to be productive of interesting discussion about primitive feelings; and how we are really all savages at heart; and the things that cause us separately to feel most savage at heart. But you cannot shout forth statements of this description to a man who is climbing to the masthead, unfurling sails, swearing at ropes, and generally disporting himself in a thoroughly joyous and normal fashion.

The three set sail, and picked up Peter swishing her dinghy between armies of tall reeds. She came aboard, and under Stuart’s curt directions, sailed ‘Faustina’ in a light breeze, as far as the bridge. The feel of the tiller she had thoroughly grasped by now, but was still dependent on superior orders for manipulation of the mainsail. She resented the necessity for blind obedience; resented the inexperience standing between her and initiative; wished passionately to be master of that insolent canvas which now swelled adoring response to the lordship of wind.

At first, the Broads had merely impressed her with their utter absence of fuss. Wide waters, and blue skies pulled down to meet their edges; here and there an upspringing windmill; landscape dropping flatly away below the water level; a merry impression, arising from the frequent bends and twists of the stream, that ships can go a-sailing across field and meadow; racing clouds and racing shadows; music of bottles that rolled and clinked in the locker; sound of rushes whispering uneasily; scurry and plunge of a water-rat; an overwhelming interest developed in the wind, its character and vagaries, to the exclusion of all intellectual pursuits; the urgent necessity to use strong language, and to wear as little as possible, and drink yellow ale stabbed by the sunshine, and sleep anywhere, and eat everywhere,--these then were the essentials of Sailing. These; and concealed within and beyond these, the hidden gift, which Peter knew could not be hers until she had torn away the veils of ignorance that kept her from mastery of that exasperating expanse of white canvas. Except the necessary technicalities, Stuart had told her nothing. She must grope until she found. Meanwhile, she steered them into the putty....

“What the Hell are you doing?” with a lusty roar, Stuart leapt Aureole, shoved Peter to one side, seized tiller and sheet, and just saved the keel from running aground. Then sunnily, and with no recollection of the expletive that had passed his lips, he relinquished his post, and asked for cigarettes.

“There’s nothing I admire more,” murmured Peter, intensely amused; “than a truly manly man.”

Stuart did not hear. His major portion was inside the locker. But Aureole did. And she thought she had rarely witnessed aught so fine as this virile comradeship between man and girl.

“Nigger! cigarettes!”

A mere voice from before the mast, where he squatted and smoked with the imperturbability of a Buddha, Oliver replied: “In the locker.”

“Where d’you think I’ve been the last ten minutes? There’s nothing in the locker but matches.”

“That’s right,” acquiesced the voice. “Heard a legend that people who sail always forget matches. Destroyed the legend.”

“You have, with forty-eight boxes of wax vestas, and not a single tin of Gold-Flake among ’em. You’ve got your pipe all right, I suppose?” with fine sarcasm.

“Thanks. Yes.”

“I say, Mrs. Strachey, do you mind feeling for a cigarette-tin under your feet, along the lee-scuppers?”

After long and obliging search, Aureole produced the pressed-beef, whereof Stuart, resigning himself to circumstances, proceeded heartily to eat.

“What is to be, must be. Not so close to the wind, Peter; that’s better, that’s a jolly useful luff”; the result of a lucky guess on the part of the pilot. “All the same, you’d better resign the helm to Nigger; lot of shallows just about here.”

They were drawing near the spreading waterways of the Sounds. Oliver took Peter’s place. The wind was still exasperatingly light, needing experience to extract from it all the possible pace. Oliver seemed uneasy. Presently he suggested anchoring for lunch.

Peter enquired: “Do we sail over the edge or into the hayfield?” the latter extending low on their right, so that it really seemed as if they could sail straight on and in among the haycocks; while on their other side sky and water closed sharply together, with beyond them a drop over the very edge of the world.

They chose the hayfield, as being more homely and conducive to good appetite; moored the ‘Faustina’ fore and aft; and recalled Aureole from her rapt contemplations of nature: “‘And O! That greener green, that bluer blue!’”

Her brown eyes were very dewy, and her throat was infinitely whiter than Peter’s; she was all sinuous curves and melting harmonies of tint. And very good to look at, Stuart reflected,--if only she wouldn’t describe the scenery!

“By the way, Nigger, are you aware that you’ve been sailing on the wrong jibe?”

“Didn’t want to knock out my wife’s brains.”

Aureole looked up sharply: “You could have told me to move, couldn’t you?”

“You looked very comfortable, my dear.”

A hot spurt of anger flushed Aureole’s creaminess. “If Peter had been in the way of a jibe,” she said in a carefully controlled voice, “Mr. Heron would have--sworn at her. He has sworn at her twice to-day.”

“Heron’s not a gentleman,” decreed his friend, with unusual promptness of speech.

“Perhaps not, but he’s at least a man.”

Stuart looked embarrassed. And Oliver became dimly aware that his wife was really enraged with him.

“Diddums, spitfire?” tentatively.

She burst forth: “You can’t treat me in the spirit of equality, of give-and-take. No! I’m a petted little soft thing, who mustn’t be inconvenienced or she’ll cry; so you’re chivalrous, and sail on the wrong jibe, and--and think yourself a fine fellow. You don’t understand, do you, that there’s nothing, no, nothing on earth I want so much as to be properly sworn at!”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized for not having sufficiently damned her. As a result of a moment’s consideration, he remarked placidly: “Blast you, Aureole, pass the mustard,” with an air of having thus fulfilled all that was required of him.

Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones eloquent of suppressed meaning: “You will discover that it is not always wise to play the fool, _mon ami_!”... and an echo from a far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound of the sail flapping against restraint.

“Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?” demanded Stuart, scattering her preoccupation.

If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.

“Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck.”

“‘Crosse and Blackwell’s Wild Duck,’” Stuart read from the tin in passing it. “It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black eye----”

Stuart was talking hectically; there was a look in Aureole’s soft brown eye, meditating upon the nebulous-tinted mess smeared upon her bread, that positively alarmed him. “I don’t mind symbolism as a rule; but when it comes to symbolism in potted paste----”

Aureole smiled all the way home; a smile beside which Mona Lisa’s celebrated grimace paled to inanity. But the two men, beating in a foul wind and against the tide, had no time to spare from ‘Faustina,’ who was certainly behaving a great deal more like a Tyke than a lady.

On arrival at the bungalow, Aureole announced that she had run short of stores, and must walk down to the village before she could provide them with supper.

“I’ll go with you, dear.”

“I prefer to go alone.”

Oliver shrugged his shoulders, and without further ado, sat down to write letters.

After a couple of hours’ labour, he looked at the time. Then he called aloud his wife’s name. Then he searched the bungalow. Finally, he strode to the foot of the lawn; in the well of the boat, a curve of obstinate back denoted that Stuart, since their return home, had been absorbed by a trifling defect of leakage, while Peter reluctantly held a candle to him.

“Can I speak to you, Heron?”

“One moment,” in smothered tones.

Oliver waited ten, patiently. Then Peter said, “Come up, Stuart!” and blew out the candle. Whereat, dirty and tousled, he arose from the depths, and was exceeding wrathful.

“What did you want to do that for?”

“Your pal asked to speak to you.”

“My wife’s gone,” explained Oliver in bewildered tones.

And Stuart sat down suddenly and exclaimed: “Good Lord! Wild Duck!”

“I--don’t--quite--follow,” uttered in Oliver’s most phlegmatic manner. Stuart’s reception of his tidings struck him as neither respectful nor efficient.

“How long has she been gone?” queried Peter practically. “She went down to the village, I thought.”

“Yes. Village seven minutes’ distance. She went at twenty to six. Now it’s past eight. I don’t suppose for an instant,” continued Oliver, “that she proposes to stop away longer than a few hours, for the purpose of annoying me; I believe I wasn’t in favour,” with a slight smile. “She has played this kind of trick before. High spirits, that’s all. But it’s getting dark, and I wondered whether we hadn’t better go out with lanterns.”

“Lanterns, indeed! I tell you, Strachey, it’s the Wild Duck. Don’t look at me in that--that bovine fashion. Has she taken your pistols?”

“Why should she?” helplessly.

“Wild Duck!” chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.

The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water. The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and the reeds had still been tipped with the sun’s gold. An hour later, and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart’s strange repetition of ‘Wild Duck! Wild Duck!’ term which now held a gloom and menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.

“Perhaps you’ll explain your reference, Stuart?”

“Ibsen--and the Doll’s House--when Nora went out to find her soul. You refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her hair.--No, that’s Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there’s an impossible husband in that, too!”

‘Pistols’ were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, “You imply that my wife has committed suicide?”

They could not clearly see his face in the half-light. Stuart leapt in with a hasty and matter-of-fact “Of course not. Don’t be absurd. She thinks you need--oh, startling into a keener realization of her personality, and this is her way of doing it.”

“But you said she hadn’t merely gone for a walk?”

“No.”

“You mean, I shall never see her again?”

“No--yes----” exasperated. “Can’t you get something between a mere walk and never-again?”

Oliver couldn’t. The weight of his opinion had crashed heavily from one extreme to the other; as Stuart had remarked, he was at all times difficult to move, either forwards or backwards.

“If she’s not coming back,” argued Oliver, “she must have left me for good. And if she has firearms with her, then I’d better follow. It all looks to me very silly.” And with a commendable absence of flurry, his broad back loomed up the garden, and disappeared into the bungalow.

“Peter,” whispered Stuart, when they were alone; “haven’t you yet discovered the secret of the Broads?”

She was an instant silent, as if listening for a reply to his question. Then it flashed across her in the phrase of his letter.

“We travel light.”

“That’s it--we travel light. All luggage too heavy for the rack, to be thrown on to the rails.”

“Are you speaking symbolically?”

He said, “No, of course not. Damn symbolism!... I’m speaking of Aureole and Oliver.”

The latter emerged from the bungalow, and called out something about ‘London.’ Stuart walked quickly to meet him:

“Look here, old man, she may lie low for a week or two, but believe me, there’s no earthly reason for you to get feverish about it.” And then the notion of Strachey being feverish struck him as inexpressibly comic.

“I’m not. But I’m catching the eight-forty-one to town. She has probably gone home. I don’t care to think of her messing about with revolvers, even to impress me.”

The pistol idea had established itself firmly; Stuart saw that it was hopeless to attempt removing it before the eight-forty-one started.

“Good-bye.” Oliver had evidently forgotten about Peter.

“Good luck!” and Stuart returned to the boat.

“I like Nigger Strachey,” Peter decided, squatting on the rail of the ‘Faustina.’ “Stuart, how far are you concerned in this affair?”

He defended himself hotly, immensely fortified and upheld by the moral consciousness of being in the wrong.

“Fancy accusing me of being directly responsible for the whim of a neurotic woman.”

“I don’t. Now tell me how you are indirectly responsible--oh, it’s no good, my lad! That rigmarole of ducks and pistols gave you away--to me, at least.”

“It wasn’t my usual style, I admit,” laughed Stuart. And owned to the morning’s conversation with Aureole, when he had spurred rebellion into action. “It won’t do either of ’em any harm, you know; prevent ’em from getting sluggish. Any sort of stir to matrimony;--why,” with fierce indignation, “they might even have come to think themselves happy, if I hadn’t shown them they weren’t.”

“Philanthropist,” softly from the girl beside him in the dimness.

“All the same, I wonder where she can have gone, and what she has done; plenty of spirit there, and character too, if only she weren’t such a wild--goose!”

“Why did you do it?”

Stuart leaned against the boom and faced her squarely.

“I could pretend it’s too late to catch the eight-forty-one,” he said. “Or you could pretend not to know that it’s breaking rules to remain up here alone with me. But we won’t pretend, either of us. The situation is not accidental--they were in the way, and I got rid of them. I wanted one day of sailing by ourselves, that’s all.”

He went on, “We can take ‘Faustina’ up as far as the ‘Windmill,’ put up there for the night, and leave for London to-morrow evening,--or we’ll catch the eight-forty-one now. There’s still time.”

She repeated musingly, “We won’t pretend----”

“No. You can trust me, Peter. It’s just for the sailing. But other people, if they get to know, won’t believe that. It’s a question of how much other people are to count?”

Peter sprang from her perch into the well, and began to untie the cords which held together the waterproof covering of the mainsail. He laid his hand over her moving fingers, and looked at her interrogatively. She laughed, mocking his sudden solemnity:

“You see ... I’m a Pagan!--oh, it’s all right, Stuart; we’ll take another day on the Broads, in spite of other people. Who was it counselled me to travel light?”

He smiled. But merely said, as he re-tied the knot her impetuosity had loosened, “No wind; and the stream against us. I shall have to row.”

Peter took the tiller. Some twenty minutes later, between the plash and lift of his oars, her ear caught the distant shriek of a train-whistle. And she knew the eight-forty-one to London had just left the station.