December Love Part 69

"Do you think it possible to love someone who inspires you at moments with unreasoning dread?"

"No; candidly I don't."

"I think there can be attraction in repulsion."

"I should be very sorry for myself if I yielded to such an attraction."

"Why?"

"Because I think it would probably lead to disaster."

"How soberly you speak!" said Miss Van Tuyn, almost with an air of distaste.

After a moment of silence she added:

"I don't believe an Englishman has the power to lose his head."

Craven sat a little nearer to her.

"Would you like to see me lose mine?" he asked.

"I don't say that. But I should like you to be able to."

"And you? You are an American girl. Don't you pride yourself on your coolness, your self-control, your power to deal with any situation? If Englishmen are sober minded, what about American women? Do _they_ lose their heads easily?"

"No. That's why--"

She stopped abruptly.

"What is it you want to say to me? What are you trying to say?"

"Nothing!" she answered.

And her voice sounded almost sulky.

The bar of lemon light over the sea narrowed. Clouds, with gold tinted edges, were encroaching upon it. The tide had turned, and, because they knew it, the voice of the sea sounded louder to them. Already they could imagine those sands by night, could imagine their bleak desolation, could almost feel the cold thrill of their loneliness.

Craven stretched out his hand and took one of hers and held it.

"Why do you do that?" she said. "You don't care for me really."

He pressed her hand. He wanted to kiss her at that moment. His youth, the game they had played together, this isolation and nearness, the oncoming night--they all seemed to be working together, pushing him towards her mysteriously. But just at that moment on the sands close to them two dark figures appeared, a fisherman in his Sunday best walking with his girl. They did not see Miss Van Tuyn and Craven on the sandbank. With their arms spread round each other's waists, and slightly lurching in the wind, they walked slowly on, sinking at each step a little in the sand. Their red faces looked bovine in the twilight.

Almost mechanically Craven's fingers loosened on Miss Van Tuyn's hand.

She, too, was chilled by this vision of Sunday love, and her hand came away from his.

"They are having their Sunday out," she said, with a slight, cold laugh.

"And we have had ours!"

And she got up and shook the sand grains from her rough skirt.

"And that's happiness!" she added, almost with a sneer.

Like him she felt angry and almost tricked, hostile to the working of s.e.x, vulgarized by the sight of that other drawing together of two human beings. Oh! the inept.i.tude of the echoes we are! Now she was irritated with Craven because he had taken her hand. And yet she had been on the edge of a great experiment. She knew that Craven did not love her--yet.

Perhaps he would never really love her. Certainly she did not love him.

And yet that day she had come out from London with a desire to take refuge in him. It almost amounted to that. When they started she had not known exactly what she was going to do. But she had set Craven, the safe man, the man whom she could place, could understand, could certainly trust up to a point, in her mind against Arabian, the unsafe man, whom she could not place, could not understand, could not trust.

And, mentally, she had clung to Craven. And if those two bovine sentimentalists had not intruded flat-footed upon the great waste of Camber and the romance of the coming night, and Craven had yielded to his impulse and had kissed her, she might have clung to him in very truth. And then? She might have been protected against Arabian. But evidently it was not to be. At the critical moment Fate had intervened, had sent two human puppets to change the atmosphere.

She had really a sense of Fate upon her as she shook the sand from her skirt. And the voice of the slowly approaching sea sounded in her ears like the voice of the inevitable.

What must be must be.

The lemon in the sky was fast fading. The gold was dying away from the edges of the clouds. The long lines of surf mingled together in a blur of tangled whiteness. She looked for a moment into the gathering dimness, and she felt a menace in it; she heard a menace in the cry of the tides. And within herself she seemed to be aware of a menace.

"It's all there in us, every bit of it!" she said to herself. "That's the horrible thing. It doesn't come upon us. It's in us."

And she said to Craven:

"Come!"

It was rapidly getting dark. The ground was uneven and rough, the sand loose and crumbling.

"Do take my arm!" he said, but rather coldly, with constraint.

She hesitated, then took it. And the feeling of his arm, which was strong and muscular, brought back to her that strange desire to use him as a refuge.

Somewhat as Lady Sellingworth had thought of Seymour Portman, Beryl Van Tuyn thought of Craven, who would certainly not have enjoyed knowledge of it.

When they had scrambled down to the road, and saw the bright eyes of the car staring at them from the edge of the marshes, she dropped his arm.

"How Adela Sellingworth would have enjoyed all this if she had been here to-day instead of me!" she said.

"Lady Sellingworth!" said Craven, as if startled. "What made you think of her just then?"

"I don't know. Stop a moment!"

She stood very still.

"I believe she has come back to London," she said. "Perhaps she sent the thought to me from Berkeley Square. How long has she been away?"

"About five weeks, I should think."

"Would you be glad if she were back?"

"It would make very little difference to me," he said in a casual voice.

"Now put on your coat."

He helped her into the car, and they drove away from the sands and the links, from the sea and their mood by the sea.