The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath Part 4

'Mary will look forward to it and think about it so much that when she gets there it will seem a little familiar to her, as if--almost as if she remembered it.'

'Thank you, father; I see, yes,' murmured Tom. But in his mind a voice said so distinctly 'Rot!' that he was half afraid the word was audible.

'You see the difficulty, eh? And the difference?'

'Rather,' exclaimed the boy with decision.

And thereupon, without the slightest warning, he looked out of the window and asked certain other questions. Evidently they cost him effort; his will forced them out. Since his back was turned he did not see his father's understanding smile, but neither did the latter see the lad's crimson cheeks, though possibly he divined them.

'Father--is Miss Aylmer older than me?'

'Ask Mary, Tom. She'll know. Or, stay--I'll ask her for you--if you like.'

'Oh, that's all right. I just wanted to know,' with an a.s.sumed indifference that barely concealed the tremor in the voice.

'I suppose,' came a moment later, 'a Member of Parliament is a grander thing than a doctor, is it?'

'That depends,' replied his father, 'upon the man himself. Some M.P.'s vote as they're told, and never open their mouths in the House.

Some doctors, again----'

But the boy interrupted him. He quite understood the point.

'It's fine to be an engineer, though, isn't it?' he asked. 'It's a real profession?'

'The world couldn't get along without them, or the Government either.

It's a most important profession indeed.'

Tom, playing idly with the swinging ta.s.sel of the window-blind, asked one more question. His voice and manner were admirably under control, but there _was_ a gulp, and his father heard and noted it.

'Shall I have--shall I be rich enough--to marry--some day?'

Dr. Kelverdon crossed the room and put his hand on his son's shoulder, but did not try to make him show his face. 'Yes,' he said quietly, 'you will, my boy--when the time comes.' He paused a moment, then added: 'But money will not make you a distinguished man, whereas if you become a famous engineer, you'll have money of your own and--any nice girl would be proud to have you.'

'I see,' said Tom, tying the strings of the ta.s.sel into knots, then untying them again with a visible excess of energy--and the conversation came somewhat abruptly to an end. He was aware of the invitation to talk further about Lettice Aylmer, but he resisted and declined it. What was the use? He knew his own mind already about _that_.

Yet, strictly speaking, Tom was not imaginative. It was as if an instinct taught him. More and more, the Wave, with its accompanying details of Eyes and Whiff, seemed to him the ghost of some dim memory that brought a forgotten warning in its train--something missed, something to be repeated, something to be faced and learned and--mastered. . . .

His father, meanwhile, went forth upon his rounds that day, much preoccupied about the character of his eldest boy. He felt a particular interest in the peculiar obsession that he knew overshadowed the young, growing life. It puzzled him; he found no clue to it; in his thought he was aware of a faint uneasiness, although he did not give it a definite name--something akin to what the mother felt. Admitting he was baffled, he fell back, however, upon such generalities as prenatal influence, ancestral, racial, and so eventually dismissed it from his active mind.

Tom, meanwhile, for his part, also went along his steep, predestined path.

The nightmare had entirely deserted him, he now rarely dreamed; and his outer life shaped bravely, as with a boy of will, honesty, and healthy ambition might be expected. Neither Wavy feeling, Eyes, nor Whiff obtruded themselves: they left him alone and waited: he never forgot them, but he did not seek them out. Things once firmly realised remained in his consciousness; he knew that his life was rising like a wave, that all his energies worked in the form of waves, his moods and wishes, his pa.s.sions, emotions, yearnings--all expressed themselves by means of this unalterable formula, yet all contributed finally to the one big important Wave whose climax would be reached only when it fell. He distinguished between Wave and Ripples. He, therefore, did not trouble himself with imaginary details; he did not search; he waited. This steady strength was his.

His firm, square jaw and the fearless eyes of grey beneath the shock of straight dark hair told plainly enough the kind of stuff behind them.

No one at school took unnecessary liberties with Tom Kelverdon.

But, having discovered one pair of Eyes, he did not let them go.

In his earnest, dull, inflexible way he loved their owner with a belief in her truth and loyalty that admitted of no slightest question.

Had his mother divined the strength and value of his pa.s.sion, she would surely have asked herself with painful misgiving: 'Is she--_can_ she be-- worthy of my boy?' But his mother guessed it as little as any one else; even the doctor had forgotten those early signs of its existence; and Tom was not the kind to make unnecessary confidences, nor to need sympathy in any matter he was sure about.

There was down now upon his upper lip, for he was close upon seventeen and the Entrance Examination was rising to the crest of its particular minor wave, yet during the two years' interval nothing--no single fact--had occurred to justify his faith or to confirm its amazing certainty within his heart. Mary, his sister, had not gone after all to the Finishing School in France; other girl friends came to spend the holidays with her; the Irish member of Parliament had either died or sunk into another kind of oblivion; the paths of the Kelverdons and the Aylmer family had gone apart; and the name of Lettice no longer thrilled the air across the tea-table, nor chance reports of her doings filled the London house with sudden light.

Yet for Tom she existed more potently than ever. His yearning never lessened; he was sure she remembered him as he remembered her; he persuaded himself that she thought about him; she doubtless knew that he was going to be an engineer. He had cut a thread from the carpet in the hall--from the exact spot her flying foot had touched that Tuesday when she scampered off from him--and kept it in the drawer beside the Eastern packet that enshrined the Whiff. Occasionally he took it out and touched it, fingered it, even caressed it; the thread and the perfume belonged together; the ritual of the childish years altered a little--worship raised it to a higher level.

He saw her with her hair done up now, long skirts, and a softer expression in the tender, faithful eyes; the tomboy in her had disappeared; she gazed at him with admiration. The face was oddly real, it came very close to his own; once or twice, indeed, their cheeks almost touched: 'almost,'

because he withdrew instantly, uneasily aware that he had gone too far-- not that the intimacy was unwelcome, but that it was somehow premature.

And the instant he drew back, a kind of lightning distance came between them; he saw her eyes across an immense and curious interval, though whether of time or s.p.a.ce he could not tell. There was strange heat and radiance in it--as of some blazing atmosphere that was not England.

The eyes, moreover, held a new expression when this happened--pity.

And with this pity came also pain: the strange, rich pain broke over all the other happier feelings in him and swamped them utterly. . . .

But at that point instinct failed him; he could not understand why she should pity him, why pain should come to him through her, nor why it was necessary for him to feel and face it. He only felt sure of one thing-- that it was essential to the formation of the Wave which was his life.

The Wave must 'happen,' or he would miss an important object of his being--and she would somehow miss it too. The Wave would one day fall, but when it fell she would be with him, by his side, under the mighty curve, involved in the crash and tumult--with himself.

CHAPTER V

Then, without any warning, he received a second shock--it fell upon him from the blue and came direct from Lettice.

The occasion was a tennis party in the garden by the sea where the family had come to spend the summer holidays. Tom was already at College, doing brilliantly, and rapidly growing up. The August afternoon was very hot; no wind ruffled the quiet blue-green water; there were no waves; the leaves of the privet hedge upon the side of the cliffs were motionless.

A couple of Chalk-Blues danced round and round each other as though a wire connected them, and Tom, walking in to tea with his partner after a victorious game, found himself watching the b.u.t.terflies and making a remark about them--a chance observation merely to fill an empty pause.

He felt as little interest in the insects as he did in his partner, an uncommonly pretty, sunburned girl, whose bare arms and hatless light hair became her admirably. She, however, approved of the remark and by no means despised the opportunity to linger a moment by the side of her companion. They stood together, perhaps a dozen seconds, watching the capricious sc.r.a.ps of colour rise, float over the privet hedge on balanced wings, dip abruptly down and vanish on the farther side below the cliff.

The girl said something--an intentional something that was meant to be heard and answered: but no answer was forthcoming. She repeated the remark with emphasis; then, as still no answer came, she laughed brightly to make his silence appear natural.

But Tom had no word to say. He had not noticed the manoeuvre of the girl, nor the manoeuvre of the two Chalk-Blues; neither had he heard the words, although conscious that she spoke. For in that brief instant when the insects floated over the hedge, his eyes had wandered beyond them to the sea, and on the sea, far off against the cloudless horizon, he had seen-- the Wave.

Thinking it over afterwards, however, he realised that it was not actually a wave he saw, for the surface of the blue-green sea was smooth as the tennis lawn itself: it was the sudden appearance of the 'wavy feeling'

that made him _think_ he saw the old, familiar outline of his early dream.

He had objectified his emotion. His father perhaps would have called it a.s.sociation of ideas.

Abruptly, out of nothing obvious, the feeling rose and mastered him: and, after its quiescence--its absence--for so long an interval, this revival without hint or warning of any kind was disconcerting. The feeling was vivid and unmistakable. The joy and terror swept him as of old.

He braced himself. Almost--he began shuffling with his feet. . . .

'Tea's waiting for you,'; his mother's voice floated to his ears across the lawn, as he turned with an effort from the sea and made towards the group about the tables. The Wave, he knew, was coming up behind him, growing, rising, curving high against the evening sky. Beside him walked the sunburned girl, wondering doubtless at his silence, but happy enough, it seemed, in her own interpretation of its cause. Scarcely aware of her presence, however, Tom was searching almost fiercely in his thoughts, searching for the clue. He knew there was a clue, he felt sure of it; the 'wavy feeling' had not come with this overwhelming suddenness without a reason. Something had brought it back. But what? Was there any recent factor in his life that might explain it? He stole a swift glance at the girl beside him: had she, perhaps, to do with it? They had played tennis together for the first time that afternoon: he had never seen her before, was not even quite sure of her name; to him, so far, she was only 'a very pretty girl who played a ripping game.' Had this girl to do with it?

Feeling his questioning look, she glanced up at him and smiled.

'You're very absent-minded,' she observed with mischief in her manner.

'You took so many of my b.a.l.l.s, it's tired you out!' She had beautiful blue eyes, and her voice, he noticed for the first time, was very pleasant. Her figure was slim, her ankles neat, she had nice, even teeth.

But, even as he registered the charming details, he knew quite well that he registered them, one and all, as belonging merely to a member of the s.e.x, and not to this girl in particular. For all he cared, she might follow the two Chalk-Blues and disappear below the edge of the cliff into the sea. This 'pretty girl' left him as untroubled as she found him.

The wavy feeling was not brought by her.

He drank his tea, keeping his back to the sea, and as the talk was lively, his silence was not noticed. The Wave, meanwhile, he knew, had come up closer. It towered above him. Its presence would shortly be explained.

Then, suddenly, in the middle of a discussion as to partners for the games to follow, a further detail presented itself--also apparently out of nothing. He smelt the Whiff. He knew then that the Wave was poised immediately above his head, and that he stood underneath its threatening great curve. The clue, therefore, was at hand.

And at this moment his father came into view, moving across the lawn towards them from the French window. No one guessed how Tom welcomed the slight diversion, for the movement was already in his legs and in another moment must have set his feet upon that dreadful shuffling. As from a distance, he heard the formal talk and introductions, his father's statement that he had won his round of golf with 'the Dean,' praise of the weather, and something or other about the strange stillness of the sea-- but then, with a sudden, hollow crash against his very ear, the appalling words: '. . . broke his mashie into splinters, yes. And, by the by, the Dean knows the Aylmers. They were staying here earlier in the summer, he told me. Lettice, the girl,--Mary's friend, you remember--is going to be married this week. . . .'

Tom clutched the back of the wicker-chair in front of him. The sun went out. An icy air pa.s.sed Up his spine. The blood drained from his face.