The Tower of Oblivion Part 46

"Rien, merci--j'attends M'sieur," he said.

Jennie too heard, and turned.

There was no atmosphere of soft and fact.i.tious half-illumination now.

This was the full blaze of a perfect August midday, that flooded the shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood looking one at the other.

And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment that pa.s.ses. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning.

That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.

Again I touched her.

"The yellow one, is it? Let me put it in my pocket."

I had secured her arm. I picked up for her the horrible fifty-centime notes of her change. She had dropped her eyes, and her face was as rich-coloured as her lips, her lips a pulpy quiver. I felt the touch of Derry's hand on my sleeve, but I disregarded it. I felt bitterly towards him.

"Come along, my dear," I said; and I pushed her past him.

Yet if, as he had said, he wished merely to see her, merely to speak with her, he had half his wish in that moment. Her left arm was in my right one, I between her and him. Suddenly, blush or no blush, she lifted her head. Behind me, she looked full at him. For two, three paces her head and shoulders continued to turn. I set my lips and looked straight ahead.

Then her head dropped again. Her teeth caught at her upper lip. For a moment she was a limp weight on my arm. We left the shop.

I saw his face at the window as we pa.s.sed. Whether or not he stepped to the door to watch us out of sight I do not know.

I say that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry; but I have never found that a particularly mollifying reflection. As I have seen a man get rid of an undesired guest by blandly pressing him to stay but leading him gently by the arm all the time nearer to the door, so our young man had used me. I had been piloted here, there, in whichever direction he had wished. And as for Jennie's long backward look and turn of the head ... well, it seemed to me that the thing might now be regarded as done. It did not need me to murmur "Jennie, this is M.

Arnaud--Miss Aird." The back door into Alec Aird's jealously-guarded house was set ajar, and I, the only one who could have watched it, had failed to do so. I frowned, watching her white-clad feet moving on the sunny pavement. I avoided looking at her face. I knew that she equally avoided looking at mine.

Of one thing I was perfectly sure: she would not of her own accord speak of the young man we had just left. Perhaps it was that there are some things which, unless you out with them at once, become more and more difficult with every moment that pa.s.ses. Many a close secret was not a secret at all in the beginning; it merely became one. Therefore she was already showing obstinacy. She knew that I knew about that look. She had looked openly, deliberately, as careless of my presence as if I had not been there. And in that critical moment it was a toss-up what my relations with my friend's seventeen-years-old daughter were to be. She might, suddenly and swiftly, break into an emotional confession. On the other hand she might thenceforward bear me an unspoken grudge that I knew anything about her affairs at all.

I noticed that she carried no tennis racket. I therefore asked her, as we crossed the emptying Place du Commerce, whether she had left it at the Club.

"No," she said.

"Haven't you been playing this morning?"

"No."

"Too tired after the party last night?"

"No."

"I was wondering--but I suppose you've far more amusing things to do than to come for a walk with me this afternoon."

In those few words the whole situation trembled as in a balance. If she said Yes, much might follow; if No, then resentment would be my portion.

We continued to ascend the high-walled street, past tall garden gates and notice-boards--"A Vendre," "Locations," "Agence Boutin." We pa.s.sed Beausejour, Primavera, Les Cyclamens....

Then for the first time she looked sideways at me.

"I should like to," she said.

I was still angry with myself and him. He was probably right in refusing the only definite suggestion I had found to make, namely, that he should permit me to tell my host and hostess the whole story. But if his alternative was to lie in wait for her in the streets and shops of a French summer resort and to hang about the open windows of the house at night, I felt very strongly about it. He was going to be wily and masterful, was he? He, swaying on a tightrope of time, was going to claim the treatment of a normal man? Well, that remained to be seen. The cold shoulder for a day or two might bring him to a more reasonable view. Anyway, after our encounter in the Bazaar, he could hardly pretend not to know my mind.

And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back, back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had taken from an article in _The Times_.

"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached."

Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?

A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman like myself, on his way to luncheon at a _riant_ holiday villa with a moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!

For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I believe I actually pa.s.sed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance--shining, self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law?

"Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've tried to wake up as if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was an early sun about to rise on a creature _not_ ready-made, _not_ pre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?

A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to luncheon!

Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.

"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the Casino, did you?" he said.

"No. I took a walk."

"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."

"Well, she's coming for a walk with me this afternoon."

"Then for goodness' sake take her somewhere quiet. It isn't my idea of a holiday that you have to take a rest-cure after it."

I laughed. "I'll look after her. But when I'm with Jennie I like as many people as possible to see me with Jennie."

"Then tell her that and shake her out of herself, you old humbug. Hanged if I'd trust her with you if you were a few years younger."

"You'll have to trust her with somebody presently."

"Plenty of time for that yet," Alec grunted. "I've got my eye on it all right.... Well, if you're going out I'm going to have forty of the best.

Watch me fade away----"

He proceeded to "fade away," while the shadows crept over the ascending smoke from his pipe on the table.

On this occasion, however, I was content to forego my pride in being seen with Jennie by my side. Just a quiet cliff-path not too far away would do. There is much to be said for a quiet cliff-path when a young woman feels the first sweet trouble at her heart.

I left the completely faded-away Alec as I heard her step at the door of the house. She looked me straight in the eyes, as if it would be at my peril did I notice anything the matter with her own pebble-grey ones. We pa.s.sed out, took the steep secluded lane towards the tea-cabin above St Enogat plage, and then descended the hewn steps to the sh.o.r.e. It is a tiny plage, remarkably steep, bordered with villas that resemble their own bathing-tents, and with a path that winds up the rocks beyond. We did not speak as we crossed the plage and began to climb.

Along that deeply indented coast you do a lot of walking for the distance forrader you get, and also a good deal of up-and-down round rocky gulfs with the bottle-green water heaving lazily below. But over the seaward walls of villa and chateau peep valerian and fig, and the path is coral-sprinkled with pimpernel and enamelled with convolvulus and borage and the hosts of smaller flowers. Away ahead the demi-tower of a sea-mark rose chalk-white against the deep blue, with the airy point of St Lunaire beyond. We approached a small field of marguerites, so eagerly open to the afternoon sun that at a short distance they were not white at all, but pale honey-yellow with the offering of their golden hearts. Poppies flamed among them, and the cigales crackled like ceaselessly-running insect machinery. From the cliff's foot came the lazy breaking of the waves. That, I thought, was quite a pleasant place.

Even Alec would have approved of it. We sat down between the staring marguerites and the sea.

I do not wish to speak of Jennie in a fatherly or avuncular manner. One had better not have been born than not be simple with the heart of a young girl. At the faintest trace of a smile it will close against you for ever, and wonder follows wonder so quickly over it that it will be a long time before you get your second chance. So do not tell it that it will think differently about things to-morrow. It is you who will think differently to-morrow if you do. I say in all sincerity that, in that long pause between my asking Jennie to come for a walk with me and her acceptance, I had felt a suspense as real as any I ever felt. If that pivotal moment on which the oncoming generation turns is not to be gravely considered, I know of no other moment that need greatly trouble us.

So I listened to the treble of the cigales and the soft deep ba.s.s of the sea, and the silence continued between us. She picked and nibbled florets of clover, her eyes far away. Her gaze wandered to b.u.t.terflies, to a lizard that disappeared with a glint of bronze into a cranny, to a ladybird that alighted on her forearm.