CHAPTER V

THE WORLD WASHED CLEAN

Peter awoke, and, listening intently, heard nothing beyond a faint lapping of water. Yet she felt impelled to leave her bed and scramble up to the high narrow window-seat. She had no idea of the time, but it must have been very early morning; the breeze was chill and aloof that struck upon her throat, as she leant out, an intruder upon silence.

A white vapour lay lightly as forgetfulness over river and bank and boathouse. On the opposite shore, a tangle of masts and ropes lay sketched like a dream upon a blown and tousled sky. A luminous gash in the east widened suddenly, and silvered all the mist; then closed again with cloud. The very river ceased its patient clamour for the sea; and colour had died in the night, leaving its wraith of grey to tell the tale. Grey that shone, and grey that was thin and dreary, and grey that pearled and paled to white. Peter had a strange fancy that she would not have been suffered as an on-looker had not her own eyes held their depth of grey, and her hair a whisper of the baulked sunrise. It was her day: she mused on what it might be trailing in its reluctant wake. Her day, grey and white and pallor of gold. And she wondered why all of her life that went before should be mist-shrouded in forgetfulness.

Her eyelids drooped heavily; she returned to bed, and at once fell asleep.

Stuart awoke her by hammering blows upon her door. She went again to the window before she opened to him. A bright blue sky now; trim red roof of boathouse and ferryhouse and bungalow, warm in the clear sunshine; screaming, cackling, chattering chorus of waterfowl; a sail, left hoisted overnight, flung its broken dance upon the water, sparkling and rioting between its clumps of emerald-green reeds. The world washed clean of mystery and evil alike. Peter slid open her door a few inches.

“Hallo! you’re in full rig.”

“Rather. I say, this is a ripping house, all its clocks have stopped, and I’ve left my watch down at the bungalow, so we’ll never know what time it is. Good morning, Peter.”

“Good morning, Stuart; I want some cherries.”

“While you dress?”

“While I dress.”

“But, my dear, I don’t think the greengrocer has called.”

“You’ll find a bagful of white-hearts in the locker of the boat.”

He brought them to her; firm hard cherries, cold and fresh to the lips as the dew stabbing its little balls of light from every grass-blade. Presently she joined him in the hall; a grandfather clock groaned three sepulchral strokes as she descended the wooden stairway.

“Don’t believe it,” Stuart warned her; “just hold tight to the fact that before last night was yesterday, and after next night will be to-morrow; no more is necessary. Come for a walk.”

They rattled back the heavy door-bolts, and wandered for what seemed a long space of time along unfamiliar paths and across drenching grass, without meeting anything more awake to its responsibilities than a slowly creaking windmill. Then returned to the inn. Still no movement of life. The door stood ajar as they had left it. The hands of the grandfather clock were dallying eccentrically in the regions of half-past eleven.

“This is getting serious,” Stuart complained, rousing terrific thunders upon the gong. “Where is the traditional tiller of the soil? Where is the buxom hostess astir before cockcrow? Where, principally, is cockcrow?”

“The cocks of the neighbourhood have been warned that a superhuman crower of crows has come to dwell among them. Therefore they are silent and abashed.”

“I’d be ashamed, if I were a cock, not to put up a little competition. All hail! here’s what was once a waiter!”

The half-dressed, yawning apparition that, mop and bucket in hand, uprose from the lower regions, stared aghast at the mention of breakfast; muttered “Not for an hour or two, anyways”; and began without enthusiasm to sweep the dining-room.

“We’d better go for another walk,” suggested Peter; “something tells me we have got up too early.”

Lying in a burning field of rye and poppies, he held her hands, and said: “It seems the most natural of all things that we should be here together and alone.”

“I know,” disappointedly. “I don’t feel a bit as wicked as I should. But you _do_ think I’m bold and bad, don’t you, Stuart?”

“I think you’re just most awfully bold and bad,” heartily.

“And--and--of course I can’t expect you to feel the same respect for me as before,” wistfully seeking reassurance.

“Well, of course, naturally, a fellow never looks on a girl quite like before, after--I mean, well--there’s always something gone, isn’t there? I mean, a fellow wouldn’t like his sister to meet a girl who--hang it, Peter, you know quite well what I mean!”

Then he laughed, and moved closer, among the stiff yellow stalks broken by their intrusion. “It’s tremendously all right, isn’t it, dear?”

“I’m afraid so,” she confessed. “I’ve been waiting all the time for the sudden misgiving that tells me I should not have stayed. But it hasn’t come.”

Stuart sympathized over the nuisance of an essential mood missing. “It spoils the set, and one can’t play demon patience any longer, and--come home to breakfast!” suddenly springing up. His nerves, though the girl was not aware of it, had been playing demon patience on their own all through the night, and were in consequence rather jumpy.

By dint of sitting like two mutes in the dining-room, and looking steadily reproachful while the waiter continued to sweep it out, they at last goaded him into serving them with breakfast.

“And now,” striding across the garden towards ‘Faustina,’ “now we’ll get under way. A long day, and a strong day, and a day spent together.” Stuart broke into rollicking song:

“The sail’s aloft, the wind’s awake, The anchor streams the bow, The stays are trim, the guns are grim-- O Captain, where art thou?”

It was late afternoon when the wind, for the first time since their stay in Norfolk, really found itself; and Peter became of a sudden definitely aware of Sailing. Beating up Bure to Acles, the sheet fairly taut in her one hand and the tiller somewhat restive in the other, she grew to joy in the swish of the reeds against the bows, as she swung the boat round, and let the boom lurch over; in the jerk of the rope, as she controlled its rattling passage through the blocks, with already her eye straining forward for the crucial moment at the further bank. She did not notice, in this new intoxication of pace and mastery, that Stuart had ceased to give directions ... when suddenly, gripped by a strong puff of wind, the sail leapt sideways, the water sang up over the lee rail; and Peter, taken by surprise, would have been hurled to the floor of the boat, had she not just in time flung up her heels and braced them against the opposite scuppers; nor did she let go of the sheet, which tore like some live thing at her palms.

“All right,” said Stuart calmly. “Blowing up a bit fresh. Shall I take her?”

“No.” And now she understood sailing right enough: this thing which demanded of her every atom and particle of strength she possessed, and some she did not consciously possess until that time. A darkness crept across the sky, and the wind’s whistle had an ominous note. More and more the boat heeled to meet its own disappearing shadow; till it seemed as if one could not for an instant longer retain that tilted position in the lifting scuppers.

--“We’ve got to beat it,” cried Stuart; “don’t let ’em get to windward of you!” And then only she saw that they were being furiously raced by another craft, with larger canvas than their own, and a shouting crew of men. Stuart was excited--a race always brought out all the child in him.

“You can make the next corner if you’re careful, and then she’ll run!”

The ‘Tyke,’ emphatically now the ‘Tyke’ and not ‘Faustina,’ did indeed luff the corner, and scudded ahead straight and clean with the galloping motion of a greyhound. Peter’s blood was romping; her hand felt as though cut in two where sawn by the rope; shoulders and knees and wrists, no part of her that did not throb and ache and cry aloud for release from this straining torture--torture that she would not have forgone for a lifetime of ease and pettiness and mild enjoyment. For she was conquering the wind, and gaining on the other boat, and never before had water been so near or the world so far.

“We ought to reef, but we won’t!” Stuart’s voice sang in triumphantly with the roar and whip of the waves. “More sheet, Peter, or she’ll carry away. Not much--no, none at all, and chance it! By Heaven, it’s great!”

Peter’s entire soul and body were bracing themselves in resistance against the push of the tiller. Her teeth fastened firmly into her lower lip. She had not known one could so hate an inanimate bar. Inanimate? possessed rather of seven kicking devils.... And then she saw the bridge ahead; and Stuart announced with gentle pleasure: “We’ve won,” and slipped into her place, and turned the ‘Tyke’ downstream. The defeated crew called out a hearty word of appreciation; Peter smiled at them; lit a cigarette; and, soaked by the churned-up spray, her hands stiff and bleeding, subsided on to the floor of their vessel, whereof she watched in passive admiration Stuart’s perfect handling.

“I now propose,” he said, “that we should feast our victory while under way, which in itself is a battle of some stubbornness. In other words, Peter, you shall collect what there is of lunch from among the tarpaulins and suit-cases littering this most disorderly tub, and minister to my needs while I cling to my post at the wheel:

“An’ I never left my post, sir, for the cappen ’e bid me stay, Tho’ me ’ands were frozen an’ cut, sir, an’ me face was stiff wi’ the spray; But me thirteen children are dead, sir--an’ there’s nobody left to care, So I stayed, like Casabianca, on the fighting ‘Téméraire’!”

It was no easy matter, with the deck tilted at an angle of 30°, to find the requisite bread and meat and ale, plates and forks and bottles. It struck Peter that sunset was a curious hour for lunch; as still more curious that the sun should set at all on this day which had begun so long ago. It was a lurid and tempestuous sky, jagged across by untidy streaks of black, the whole swimming canopy overhead as it were being sucked and drawn by red relentless fingers into the very heart of the western turmoil.

“Stuart, there’s no glass.”

“Must be.”

“_Isn’t_,” crossly.

“A tin mug, then?”

“Nothing but a flower-pot--will that do? Why do you keep flower-pots on board? Is it that you may grow nasturtiums while becalmed?”

“A flower-pot will hold the beer all right, if you keep your thumb in the hole at the bottom, all the while I drink.”

Peter refused. “I’m not your squaw.” And Stuart related with reproachful emphasis the story of the little boy in Holland who had not minded plugging a hole with his thumb all through the weary night, to save his country from inundation. Nevertheless, Peter was not incited to emulation.

All this while they were running before a powerful wind, sail and water ablaze with crimson, the same red glow splashing their faces and their hands, and touching with magic all the level shores. A bottle was hurled into the scuppers, crashed into fragments; and triumphantly the breeze hummed through the straining cordage.

It struck Peter that sunset was a good time for lunch.

“Hullo! here are the mortal remains of the wild-duck paste.” And they both laughed, thinking of the immortal remains, bearing fruit in Aureole’s heart.

“Not that I think wild ducks do bear fruit as a rule; too reminiscent of a hen laying a melon. Peter, unless you are playing at Tantalus, or rather the gods who tantalized Tantalus, you might hold the bread a few inches nearer my lips.”

Passing St. Bennetts, the wind dropped somewhat, the clouds piled themselves out of sight, and the sky paled to a lake of clear light green wherein the round red ball of the sun hung motionless, striped by the darkening reeds.

Stuart hailed a cabin-boat with seven men on board, all lustily singing.

“Hi! what’s the time?--excuse me, Peter, but it had to be done.”

“Half-past six,” they wove their reply into the strains of ‘John Peel.’

“We shall make it, easily, and with half an hour to spare, wind or no wind.”

Peter looked enquiring.

“The eight-forty-one. You wanted to get home to-night, didn’t you?”

All day long a glittering mist had lain lightly as forgetfulness on speech and memory. The reminder dropped mournfully as a premonition. The sun sank yet lower, staining the very roots of the tall green spears fringeing the waters. And the boatload ahead ceased from their jovial ditty, gripped by the conventional melancholy of evening.

“Wait a minute,” prophesied Peter; “they’ll sing--what do you bet, Stuart? I say: ‘Swanee River.’”

She was very near the mark in her guess. As the last ruddy segment dipped under the horizon, a haunting haunted melody floated backwards upon the sighing day:

“Look out, for the Goblin Man, That Ragtime Goblin Man! Run, run, just as fast as you can....”

“The darlings!” murmured Peter. “They’ll repeat it eight times, and then the ass of the party will start for the ninth time, and John will tell him to shut up.”

John was a Voice from the Cabin, and evidently the strong man of the party, as one could hear him being constantly consulted, in tones both supplicating and respectful.

But the plaintive tune, drawn out thinner and ever thinner as the larger boat drew away, was working potent havoc upon Peter’s carefully guarded Marshes of Cheap Sentiment. Noting this, Stuart summoned her to the helm: “Come and take her. We shall probably jibe round the next bend,” and buried his head in the locker.

Peter wondered rather irritably if he did this on purpose whenever a jibe loomed ahead. She had no affection for the jibe. It held for her an agonizing moment, after she had hauled in the sheet, when she became a blank as to which way the tiller should be rammed, in squaring the sail anew. Up till now, Heaven had been with her, but this time Heaven looked unpropitious--perhaps because the sun had set.

Heaven elected at the critical moment to send her a strong gust of wind, the last they had in stock that day. It spun the boom crashing to leeward, before Peter had time to do anything at all. Followed a delirious instant when it struck her she ought to manipulate the tiller--and did it, with dire effect. She was aware that Stuart had come out of the locker, that the water was rushing up from behind to meet her, and that the boat was evilly tilting her downwards to meet the water with an evident after-intention of turning turtle over her drowning body. She did not call to Stuart, even then, instinctively certain that he was doing something useful in emergencies, and might be trusted to save her afterwards. All this in the space of time it takes a boat to turn over upon its side and drift at right angles to the river, the sail sagging flatly upon the surface of the stream. An invisible weight to balance Peter’s, was obviously preventing ‘Faustina’ from accomplishing a complete somersault.... Stuart had scrambled like lightning over the rail and flung himself upon the keel. Then he looked around for Peter, and was relieved to find her clinging with both hands to the opposite side of their improvised see-saw.

“Can you hang on?” he queried cheerfully.

She replied in like tones, “How long?”--and suppressed her inner doubts.

“Till we float ashore. I can’t do anything while I’m on the keel, and mustn’t move off it. How much of you is immersed?”

“Up to the knees.”

The boat hovered about uncertainly in midstream. There was no one in sight, and no sound but the breeze shivering the rushes. A fish leapt shining from the water, and plunged again into a circle of ripples. From round the next bend still drifted snatches of the ‘Ragtime Goblin Man’; evidently John had not yet spoken. Some distance over the land, yet not so far but that they should distinctly have heard the throb and clangour, a train passed in a linked blur of lights; passed noiselessly, like a phantom train. Peter, watching it, wished passionately that she might hear it whistle, as reassurance that she herself was real, and not a pictured castaway upon a badly drawn bit of wreckage.

At last they floated into a mud-bank; and were able thence to wade ashore.

Peter waited for Stuart to display extreme anxiety as to her degree of wetness, to burst into pæans of praise on her bravery and calmness in the face of danger, and finally to mutter with white young jaws, “I shall never forgive myself--never!”

Stuart said curtly: “Shivery? No? That’s all right; d’you feel equal to giving me a hand with the sail? We must lug it up somehow,”--happily convinced that by thus increasing the wind to the shorn lamb, he was treating the lamb in the spirit it most desired.

And as they tugged and hauled in the dim light at that most obstinate of all foes, a water-logged sail, Peter played up gallantly to his call upon that other Peter; the one she had carefully cut according to his measurements. Round her lips hovered a rather tremulous smile at the manner in which she was thus for a second time required to pay for her audacity in playing at God.

--And yet, was it payment, after all? With a little thrill of exultant surprise, Peter realized that the Peter of her disguises could not be a mere lay figure, since she had not discarded them in actual moment of peril and when thrown completely off her guard. Why then, they had become in very truth a part of her being; she was indeed Stuart’s Portrait-of-a-Lady, complete in all its essentials; she had stood the test....

There was far more actual fun to be had from standing ankle-deep in mud, with a spectral wind flapping her wet skirt against her knees, while she pitted her strength viciously against a tangle of wet rope, than from the use of her feminine privileges--Was there?... The old Peter hollowed into the mist a momentary fancy of a warm glowing interior--soft colours--soft cushions--warmth and ease and the dry slippery touch of silk upon her flesh--the abandoning of all effort to the stronger male who realized and joyed in her greater fragility....

“Peter, I want you! Hold this”--Stuart’s voice, confident and imperative. And the mist curled itself greyly over her pictured fancy of chintz and rugs and warming-pans, of sentiment beside red caves of firelight, and withal of a lover who was not a leprechaun.

--“Coming!” for a while they worked grimly, neither speaking.

Stuart paused in his labours, threw a tarpaulin on the bank, seated himself thereon, and invited Peter to do likewise. Then, in a sudden access of chivalry, he wrapped around her his own oilskins, thereby giving her more than ever the appearance of a battered stowaway, and consented for a moment to dwell on their quondam peril. Nay, he even came to her to be fed, in an engaging manner all his own:

“It was a long way from the locker to the keel,” reminiscently.

She said not a word.

“I was fairly quick, I think. Didn’t fumble, did I?”

Still no reply.

“Peter,” imploringly.

Then she gave in, and was bad for him: “You were magnificent, Stuart.”

His crow was fervent but subdued. The atmosphere not being conducive to any sound above a whisper.

“Now we’ll just bale out the tub, set it on its hind legs, hoist sail, and be off. She didn’t ship much water; dryest capsize I’ve ever done. A beautiful capsize, really; Peter, I’m glad we capsized; it will have a pleasant look, viewed from to-day a year hence.”

“Pleasant, but passing strange,” she murmured, gazing on the gaunt ribbed outline of their marooned vessel. “‘It was the Schooner “Hesperus,” that all on the shore lay wrecked----’”

“‘The skipper’s daughter had hold of the tiller. So what could you expect?’” finished Stuart.

She surveyed him reproachfully. “Is that--generous?”

“Do you want me to be generous?--Good Lord,” with sudden heat, “do you think I’d pay any other girl on earth the compliment of not fussing round her wet feet ... especially when I so much want to,” he added under his breath. Then returned quickly to his labours on the boat.

Peter was glad that she had not hearkened to the insistent pratings of the other Peter. Glad that Stuart guessed nothing of their existence.... The pictured fire-red interior had acquired a sudden cheapness, viewed in the light of his last speech. Her face burnt at the idea that he should ever know that these easy longings had even for a moment found their entrance. After all, and undoubtedly, this, her present plight, was far more fun; though she was cold beyond all hope of warmth, and tired past all desire for rest,--far more fun ... lean restless ways of fun that he had taught her; strange, slippery ways as the way to the moon, and as unprofitable.

--“Peter! Quick--here!”