CHAPTER VI

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE ORANGE

It was not long before the well had been baled, the gaff run up, and a very wet mainsail flapped in mournful abandon against the mast. Then Stuart pushed off with the quant-pole, while Peter curled herself among the regions of his feet; from the general ooziness she suspected she was sitting in about two inches of water, but by now it seemed more natural to be wet than dry, and she made no efforts towards the latter state. The mists brushed her cheek with clammy fingers; naught of clothing but was damp and cumbersome to the body; the water had insinuated itself into matches and cigarettes, had gurgled into the locker, and soaked into the comestibles. Water-logged, they crept on and on with the tide through the murky twilight, a faint saffron stain in the west betokening where once had rioted the banners of the setting sun. From time to time a light flashed warmly from a house-boat on the banks, or cheery but muffled voices told of sails being laboriously tucked away for the night, masts lowered, clinking crockery washed up for a late meal. Theirs was the only vessel still adrift. Huddled in her big cloak, Peter watched the darkness eating up either shore, while the river took on unfamiliar curves and windings, seemed to branch off into two--ten rivers, all beckoning different ways. And once she called out sharply, “Look ahead!” that Stuart should swing the ‘Tyke’ clear of a gigantic looming ship, three tiers of sails, and a ghostly figurehead. “Why?” And he steered straight through the ship with its three tiers of sails. Peter said no more, not quite trusting what further tricks her sight might choose to play. She crouched still further into the well, content to see naught but the edge of sail against the dense pall of sky, and dimly, where Stuart sat, an outline of bare neck and slouched hat and lean nervous hand upon the tiller. It all went to make perfection: the timeless blue day spent in big spaces, limbs stiff from their perilous tussle, and now the sodden boat, and the shadows, and Stuart beside her. She put out a chill hand to feel if he were indeed solid substance; touched his knee, felt him start and tingle--she could not see the hot rush of blood into his face.

Suddenly he swerved the bows towards a forest of pale reeds; they bent apart to the sliding passage of the boat, then closed up in its wake. The keel ran aground. Stuart let drop the mainsheet; it rattled lazily along its blocks, and was still. The sail drooped forward, fell back again.

... She lay suffocated in a darkness of kisses, that stole her breath away, and her powers of resistance; robbed her of all knowledge save of desire beating itself out upon her lips and her throat and her eyes; upon the lids she drooped for evasion, upon the hands she put up to protect her, upon the hair she tumbled forward, and upon her neck when she turned her head. And then again fiercely upon her mouth, compelling her to be passive, compelling her to response. And through the pain and through her weariness, sang a strain of rejoicing that he should treat her thus; that their brains and their mockery and their intellect should yet have been all blotted to naught in a whirling storm of passion.

... He had drawn a little away. She raised herself; pushed back her hair with the bewildered gesture of a child. Her throat ached as if someone had attempted to strangle her, and her mouth felt stung and bruised. Then Stuart bent towards her, took her in his arms: “Lie still, dear” ... and for the first time Peter lay still; mind and body and soul, still.

It was over, the endless strain of winning and keeping the man; the endless effort of playing-up. He loved her with a great finality of love. She could--lie still.

* * * * *

A shaft of blackness pierced light. And Peter became aware that this very moment which had brought her belief in the endurance of his love, was the moment long foretold when they must consent to end it. Love’s consummation--both had agreed that nothing less must follow.

Did Stuart know?... And suddenly his hands slackened completely their hold on her--then tightened again to an almost intolerable grip. He too had realized the door of exit.

But it was absurd, for an elusive unproven theory, to renounce a thing at its perfection; Peter had doubted always if she would be big enough for that. And now love had proven so much bigger than she had anticipated.

She would risk the descent on the further side. Though the Hairpin Vision shone full and steady as limelight upon the future, she was yet willing to take all the hazard of lessening love, so she might keep love. Keep it in whatsoever form he wished, free or bound. Stuart would not employ the shears alone, without her co-operation. If she willed, she might use the moment to entangle him with a thousand threads, beyond all hope of breaking away. Why shouldn’t she? Since he had made her need of him so great, he must pay his share. And of what avail to set aside the temptation, since then he would never know it had existed?

With a great stirring of anger, Peter looked up at him. His face was turned away, still set in desire, but now not for her. It was the supremest desire of a man whose star had granted him his every wish; desire for renunciation. Young Fortunatus pursuing the winds of sorrow.

Her anger waned and died to tenderness. This was not the ruthless orange-sucker of her first imaginings. She alone knew how rigidly and untiringly his asceticism had striven to keep its leanness against that terrible perversity of ease which threatened to engulf him. And she could help him. By her and because of her had actually come his chance of a sacrifice worth while--oh, yes, she understood; and she could, if she chose, be sufficiently big to allow it him. Came a rush of pride like a sonorous North-Easter humming through the shrouds: No other girl could have kept up with him as far--she was not going to fail at the last ... he had once called her a genius of life.

His eyes met hers, a question in them. And she laughed. “We’ve had a good run before the wind, Stuart.” Heard the triumphant fling of his reply, “And we’re not going aground in the putty now.”

He unlinked his arms; took up the quant-pole; pushed back to mid-stream. Within a few minutes they were at the landing-stage; a sharp walk brought them to the station platform: Eight thirty-six--and the train left at eight forty-eight. “Not bad,” remarked Stuart; “considering our day of uncounted hours.”

There was just time for Peter to send off a wire to her cousins in Turnham Green, bidding them reserve her a room that night; she would arrive in London too late for the further journey to Thatch Lane. Then, with a shaking roar, the train plunged into the station, barely waited to gulp its few passengers, and thundered southwards. Peter found that her fellow-travellers regarded her with astonished eyes, and departed to view herself. The results of sun and wind, of immersement in the water, and those few after-moments among the reeds, exceeded her wildest expectations. It took half an hour’s unsteady labour before looking-glass and washstand-basin, before she might lay the least claim to respectability. She was relieved to find, however, that her flaming cheeks and lit eyes and lips dark as wine were not at all reminiscent of the girl about to be forsaken by her lover. She was tremendously exultant that her body should have stood the strain of the day, as her soul had stood its close. And she had never walked so lightly as up the crowded dining-car to rejoin Stuart at its far end.

“Metamorphosis?”

“Only from the waist upwards,” she displayed her boots, still caked with a large portion of Bure’s shores.

They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number; halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted, and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another. There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter’s head was tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the shadow in contempt--she had no more use for it.

“We won’t meet again.”

“No.”

As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” said Stuart. He did not even touch her; yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done perforce when his actual grip had tightened.

--“Hullo!”

The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter’s flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting. And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat of Stuart’s retreating steps....

Peter was hauled indoors--she could almost hear her face click as she adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.

“Come along in, do; we’re kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won’t your friend join as well?”

And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin Constance, Jinny’s mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and affectionate kisses: “These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my dear; but there, it’s Saturday evening, and I hope you ain’t too tired to join them.”

On Peter’s other side, a frivolous girl of thirty-six waggled a plump forefinger, “I saw you saying good-bye to your young man! I believe you must have quarrelled--he didn’t even kiss you good night.”

Next, she was introduced to the mild gentleman whom she had met there before--“So don’t you pretend to be hoity-toity, Miss Peter,”--and to the irresistibly humorous Tommy Cox, whom she hadn’t met there before, and who said straight away, “Now tell me this, if you can: could you make a Maltese Cross?”--and to Luke Johnson, the boy from next door,--while the landlady, who was also a friend of Cousin Constance, kept up a running fire of questions connected somehow with coffee: “Some people like it better with milk, and some people like it without; some people take two lumps of sugar, and some like one, so all you’ve got to do, Peter, dear, is to tell me how you like it best. Some people....” The saga began all over again.

It seemed to Peter that this final necessity for playing-up was rather in the nature of an extra on the bill. But that strange new part of her for which Stuart was responsible, could not cease abruptly with his exit, but went on a little while mechanically rotating in obedience to the hand that had set it in motion. So she skilfully dodged her cousin’s kisses; accepted the thick cup of muddy lukewarm coffee; answered the riddle about the Maltese Cross; gaily averred that she was not a bit tired, and quite ready for “high jinks”; and allowed herself to be drawn into a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Crushing memory below the surface, she sprang to the head of the scuffling line awaiting the music’s signal to start--

“You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it,”

round and round the empty line of chairs--then a cry, and a mix-up, and shouts of “He’s out!” A chair removed from the row. The music started once more.

Only eight combatants left--seven--six--Peter could not contrive to get left out; a chair seemed ever ready to embrace her, as the jovial pianist ceased from play. She felt the urgent need of sleep leaking noiselessly into her being. Her limbs refused any more to obey the call upon them. Almost she abandoned the struggle, beat an ignominious retreat in the middle of the game. An echo of Stuart spurred her on as with whips: “It’s a glorious stunt, Peter! don’t give in before the end.”--Yes, but need she listen, since he was not to count any more? Willy-nilly, his training outlasted him; she made a forward dash for a seat, this time out of reach, determined she would be in at the death, as a votive offering to the lord of all stunts, great and small.

And now there were only three jigging round to the endless tune.

“And all the time you knew it, I guess you always knew it, You made me----”

Silence, then a noisy outburst from the spectators lining the walls: “You’re out, Miss Tomkyns! his lap don’t count as a seat, you know.” Giggling, Miss Tomkyns withdrew from the contest. Remained Peter and the objectionable Tommy.

“Now then, Peter, beat him. It’s up to you--show old Tommy what girls are made of!” Jinny literally danced with excitement. And Cousin Constance at the piano started once more to strum, with the evident intention of prolonging the agony.

Ah! that renewal of the chorus was too vigorous to be genuine. The end was at hand. Peter, on the back side of the chair, turned suddenly and faced Tommy, who was so amazed at this change of tactics that he facetiously flung out one leg after another along the ground, Russian-ballet fashion. At this juncture, as anticipated, the tune halted abruptly in the middle of a bar--and with a slight movement Peter had occupied her throne before he could recover his balance.

And she smiled, a provocative ‘there-you-are’ smile, not intended for her clapping enthusiastic spectators.

“Bravo, Peter! you’re a sport! Shame, Tommy, to be beaten by a girl!”

“And now to bed, every man Jack of you,” cried Mrs. Thorpe, who since five minutes had been listening with dread to the impatient tip-tap on the ceiling, of a best-bedroom boarder afflicted with insomnia.

“She cheated, twisting round like that, instead of goin’ straight on,” grumbled Tommy, in the hall. Like a great many humorous gentlemen, he could not take a beating.

And Peter turned on the stairs to remark tauntingly, “There, there, Master Tommy, never mind. We’ll say that you won, shall we?”

“I’ll make you pay for that, young lady!” Only half in earnest, but stung nevertheless by the laughter of his friends, he made a rush for his tormentor. She broke away from him, ran with dangerous swiftness to the room she usually occupied. She could hear Tommy panting at her heels; his breath, stale with cheap tobacco, on the back of her neck. “Go it, Tommy boy!” urged his companions from below. Peter clenched her hands; ‘pay for that’--she had a very clear idea how the Tommies of this world exact payment. She would _not_ be kissed to-night, not ... again.

Putting on a spurt, she gained her room, crashed the door in his face, and turned the key in the lock. Tommy called through one or two witticisms, and strolled away to be consoled by his pals. Then Jinny knocked a final ‘good night’ and did Peter want anything? Peter wanted nothing. So Jinny too departed. A whispered exchange of banter on the landings; a loud guffaw; a flurry of feet.... Silence now in the house. Peter’s day was over, grey and white and pallor of gold. It had been a very long day. She was logged with sleep, as a water-logged boat that can no longer crawl for heaviness. Eyelids tumbling, fingers purely mechanical. Nothing was remembered, nothing existed save her longing for bed. Bed was a tangible thing and mattered very much. She was just aware, through formless drifting clouds whirling her mind to stupor, that it was just as well she should be physically so dead beat.

Light turned out, and head plunged among the pillows. It was sand that was weighing her down; heavy yellow sand; she could hear it trickling into the crevices and chinks and joints of her body; hear it like water among the reeds ... hear herself falling asleep.

And knew that before dawn she would awake, purged of her merciful weariness. Wake to the knowledge of a world without Stuart.