Complete works of a e w.., p.588
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 588
The land was bought at the back of Brooke’s Market, the laboratories equipped; and Mardyke and Campion set out upon their adventure in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth’s sailors. But Queen Elizabeth left her adventurers free. Mardyke and Campion were en tangled at once amongst the traps which our modern governments set for nascent industries. Antiquated patent laws and restrictions on the use of alcohol hampered England, but did not hamper a Germany already equipped for commerce based upon chemical science. By the year 1884 Germany had snatched the lead; the sole owner of Mardyke and Campion was William Mardyke the son of Philip, middle-aged and timorous; and its chief chemist was Mark Thewliss, a man with a brilliant record from Dulwich College and the London University, who caused his employer many hours of agitation.
“A buccaneer, sir,” said Mr. William Mardyke across the dinner table to his cronies, banging his fist with the flighty exasperation which he dared not show to his chemist. “A man without reverence. A gambler too! Gad, what he has cost me this year!”
The natural question was asked.
“Why don’t you get rid of him, then?”
Mr. William Mardyke had no answer ready. He took refuge in vaguenesses.
“Not so easy — no — not so easy as you think. But some day — yes — some day,” he said darkly.
* * * * *
At all events, to-day the buccaneer was going upon his holiday and not quite sure that he was ever going to return to Brooke’s Market. He said as much to Mona Lightfoot when he came out from his bedroom attired in a light grey suit and carrying in his hand the kind of straw hat which is known as a gent’s boater. It cannot be said that the change improved his appearance. In later years he acquired a curious delicacy and refinement of feature which, joined with the mark of authority, made of him a figure at which all men looked twice. Now he was not merely common place, he was common — a common young man with his thick brown hair growing too low upon his fore head, a fair moustache, and a long face. He had certainly a good strong pair of grey eyes, but they were too little alert to be noticeable. Indeed the only quality he had noticeable at all by the general run of his acquaintances had nothing to do with his looks. It was a curious aloofness peculiar to young people of vast ambitions, indefinable, yet immediately felt. It allowed him to be one of but never one with a group of his equals and associates. It was an aura which all the world could see. It made his friends consider what they had to say before they spoke to him. It led a few, a very few, to prophesy “That young man will go far.”
He stood by Mona’s side, following the direction of her eyes.
“Very likely I shall never go into that building again,” he said with a laugh.
Mona turned to him with consternation upon her face.
“You? Mr. Mardyke can’t be getting rid of you!”
“I don’t know. He’s a funkstick. And I did make a bad break this spring.” Thewliss answered with a laugh which had not one note of remorse in it.
“But he couldn’t do without you,” cried Mona indignantly.
“Well, he has got three weeks to make up his mind about that,” said Thewliss. “Let’s go to Frascati’s. I’ll tell you about it there.”
But the three weeks had passed before he told her.
III. AT FRASCATI’S
THEY WALKED WESTWARD along Oxford Street. It was a day of exotic heat. The sky overhead was quite cloudless and quite colourless, as though the fire of the summer had bleached it. The air was lifeless and stale with the breath of millions of people; no wind blew; there was a smell of tar; and the pavement scorched the feet. At the corner of Tottenham Court Road Mark Thewliss slipped his hand under his companion’s arm and held her anxiously.
“You must look to the right here.”
“There is a horse and cart in Liverpool,” she replied.
They crossed the road, and at the entrance to Frascati’s he stopped and drew in his breath. Mona felt his hand tighten on her arm.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Thewliss awoke with a laugh.
“I was anticipating the first delicious shock of cool green water closing over my parched, tired-out body, as I dived.”
“Then you, too, are going to the sea?”
“Yes.”
He looked away from her as he answered, and led the way out of the blinding sunlight into the restaurant. “Our old table,” she pleaded.
“No other will do for us to-day.”
It stood ranged against the wall without an occupant, and Thewliss laughed with pleasure as he saw her take her old place and hitch up her chair. He hung his hat on a branch of the nearest stand and asked:
“You are hungry?”
“Ferocious. I left Liverpool at eight.”
“Then we’ll have an ambassador’s luncheon. First of all—”
“A blue trout,” she interrupted.
“Then a grouse.”
She looked at him with awe.
“Does it run to that?”
“To-day my name’s money.”
“Then we’ll have a rasher of bacon on the top and a slice of toast underneath, and all frightfully rich.”
“And new peas and potatoes, an apple flan to follow, and hock-cup to drink.”
“With lots and lots of ice. Adorable!” and Mona closed her eyes in an ecstasy.
Through the first half of that luncheon Mark Thewliss plied her with questions: in the beginning as to why she had chosen Bexhill for her holiday though he clearly didn’t want to hear about Bexhill; and then about her life in Liverpool, though he equally clearly did not want to hear about Liverpool. But he wanted the sound of her voice, which was low and full and charming, the play of her features, the smile of her eyes and lips, the little gift of mimicry she had; and he could not have enough of them.
“Seven months,” he cried in a low voice. “That’s a long time without a friend to talk to!”
Mona had never quite known him in this mood before. He was requiring her companionship as though he drew confidence, even a sense of security, from her neighbourhood. She put that new grace in him together with the doubt he had uttered in Furnival’s Inn that he might never return to the laboratory of Mardyke and Campion. And while she answered his questions and rattled on as he wished her to do, her thoughts ran:
“He has risked everything...I am sure of it...He is at some junction of his life whence the unknown roads branch out...He has staked everything on his choice — as all men who without birth or inherited fortune rise to great places must do a hundred times. But between the moment when he stakes and the moment when he knows whether he has won or lost, there’s a time of waiting — anxiety that won’t sleep — suspense that won’t relax its tension...And that time’s now...and he wants me.”
Her heart beat exultantly. Hopes were loosed from it and fluttered about her, doves from a trap, hopes winged with gold colours and burnished by the sun. She was inspired to gamble, too, to set all upon a single throw, to snatch all or to lose everything. There was her employer in Liverpool and his court ship of her. Should she tell him of it? She had but to lean across the table and say: “Henry Perriton pleads continually for me to marry him. Shall I?” and she put her life to the test of that moment. If he looked at her as he never yet had looked, if he uttered a clamorous “You can’t! Mona, you can’t!” why, then she trod light-footed, winged, harnessed against all the strokes of fate.
But suppose he just thought the proposition over without the least little movement of revolt and said in the end: “Well — in a way, of course, I shall be sorry. I shall lose something, I recognise that. But on the whole — yes, it’s fine! Good luck to you!”
She hesitated, dreading that sort of answer worse than death. But before she could take the risk of the gamble, Mark Thewliss raised the pool — and so high that every stiver of her tiny capital would be garnisheed if she matched herself against him.
“We are both from choice and from temper rather lonely people, Mona, aren’t we?” he began in a low voice, looking here and there upon the tablecloth — anywhere but at her. “We have neither of us any one very near us in the way of relations. No one who cares a threepenny bit what becomes of us.”
“No one,” Mona agreed.
“And we are both quite unrecognised people — just two out of the thousands of holiday-makers scattered about England. There’s not a soul, for instance, in this restaurant who has ever heard of either of us. We are free — that’s the point, Mona — we are free now.”
He took a drink of his hock-cup, as though his throat was parched. She felt his foot pressing against hers under the table.
“What we choose to do now no one will ever know except from ourselves, and we shan’t talk,” he continued. “But we shall have had a wonderful month to look back upon.”
The colour fled from Mona Lightfoot’s cheeks. If he never looked at her, she on the other hand never took her eyes from his troubled face. She noticed the little note of shame, of remorse in his voice in that he was not offering all that he could offer, in that he was asking for the supreme sacrifice in return for just four weeks of romantic adventure. But Mona continued to listen, nor did she withdraw her foot from contact with his.
“You,” he resumed, “will, after all, have a pretty sad time alone there at Bexhill. The acquaintances of the beach — girls linked arm in arm having the time of their lives — the boys from the offices giving the girls a chance — the pierrot’s sentiment and last year’s music-hall songs” — he smiled as he sketched the holiday which awaited her, and went on with an accent of tenderness which moved her to tenderness too. “My dear, all that’s not for you. A day of it and you’ld be ready to commit suicide. Whilst I—” and he suddenly raised to her a most eager face and desperately pleading eyes— “I have never in my life dreamed that I could want the companionship of anyone as I shall want yours during the next month.”
That was it! Companionship — oh, needed without a doubt! The whole aspect of the man clamoured for her. But there it was to end. A month’s companionship.
“Only,” she asked herself, “need it end there?”
At the end of that month, might he not want it prolonged to a lifetime? Wasn’t it for her so to manage that he did want it? Wasn’t that just her business in life? A month was an enormous time. After all, this very morning he had not had one thought of this great need which had sprung up hungry within him, as she sat at his side on the stone coping of the lily-pond. The queer sense of something imminent which she had felt in that inner court of Staple Inn was all clear to her now. Well, if a couple of hours could wake such hunger for her comradeship, what might not the slow waxing and waning of a moon beside the sea beget?
“You want to go with me to Bexhill?” she asked.
“No”; and he poured out to her the story of his little cutter.
It was at Poole, waiting, fitted out to the last rope. He fired her with his descriptions of it, of the new world which would open to her the land from the sea, instead of the sea from the land. Something of his own enthusiasm passed into her.
“Where should we go?” she asked, kindling, half persuaded. “Cowes?”
And she saw him draw back in disappointment. For a moment she had a throb of fear that in her excitement she had said “Keowes.” There had been a time, no doubt, when such pronunciations had been heard from her lips; but she had long since schooled herself out of them. And in a moment she was reassured. It was her ignorance, not her enunciation, which troubled Mark Thewliss.
“Cowes!” He repeated the name with a pitying disdain. He was at an age when smooth waters meant nothing to him whatever. “We shall go west. England begins west of St. Alban’s Head,” he cried, with a superb arrogance which suddenly made a boy of him.
Mona clapped her hands together. She did not know St. Alban’s Head from Margate Jetty; she had never even heard the name before. But she adored the boyish insolence with which he spoke. It made him one with other young men of spirit. It brought him down to normal. It fed the hope a mean little hope, a disloyal hope she frankly acknowledged it to be, but she could never quite drive it out of her breast — a hope that after all he was not the great man, made for a higher world than hers, which in her most secret thoughts she believed him to be.
“Perhaps after all he may have aimed too high,” she said to herself; and Thewliss swept her away upon the cruise. He carried her past Lulworth Cove and its entrance like some high lock when the gates are open; past Osmington Mills, the little creek with the long pitch-black coastguard station on a low shoulder of hill.
“I spent a month there once.”
“Alone?” she interrupted.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t mind?”
“You were going to spend a month alone at Bexhill.”
“For me, it would have been different.”
“Why?”
Mona had no answer to that question. She was simply putting herself out of her thoughts and imagining, with a maternal solicitude and pity, twenty-eight solitary days unlightened by any of those foolish little jokes which are the very salt of companionship.
Thewliss brought the cutter towards sunset into Weymouth Harbour by the side of the wooded Nothe.
“I should get you a room there and one at Poole to-night, whilst I slept on the boat to have it ready for an early start in the morning “ — he had the tact thus to make consent easier to her; and he carried her over the West Bay to the red cliffs of Devonshire and to Penzance beyond the Lizard. Suddenly she laughed:
“I shall wear a yachting cap.”
“We’ll buy it this afternoon,” said he. “I have an oilskin and a sou’-wester and rubber boots to spare. You have some woollen things, of course, and some rubber-soled shoes. You’ll do.”
Mona had slid into assenting rather than had actually assented. But she did not take back her word. They bought the yachting cap and a couple of white covers for it. Then she sent Thewliss about his business and went secretly to a shop by herself. She returned to Mary Tipper’s lodging for tea.
“I shall give you my address,” she said. “I may have a letter or two. Perhaps you will forward them. I’ll let you know where I shall be.”
Mary Tipper was cast in a commoner mould than Mona Lightfoot. But they had been thrown much together in the office, and a friendship had grown up between them. Mona had not planned to tell her friend of the adventure on which she was entering, but she let slip enough to leave her in no doubt.
“My!” said Mary Tipper when Mona had departed with her suit-cases. “I never did! Mr. Thewliss, too! Such a poker-back! My dear, here’s fortune to you! You’re too good to be spoilt.”
Thewliss and Mona Lightfoot travelled down to Poole by the evening train. Thewliss found her a lodging for the night, and at half-past six the next morning was at her door to carry her baggage to the Quay.
IV. THE RACE
AT SIX O’CLOCK of the morning the Sea Flower passed the central entrance to Portland Harbour on the last of the flow. Overhead stretched a cool milky sky, split here and there by bars of a tender unfathomable blue. She had the wind on her port quarter, and her little punt bobbing behind in her wash at the end of a rope. Thewliss himself held the tiller; and, keeping well inshore under the white mark, he sailed his cutter along the flank of the tremendous rock to the Bill. Low on the point stood a small white round lighthouse, with a broad chocolate band round its middle; and from the foot of it streamed out to sea a line of tumbled water, black and straight like a line drawn by a lead pencil.
“It’s going to be a bit more troublesome than St. Alban’s Head,” said Thewliss with a laugh of rather fierce enjoyment. “When the wind’s on shore, Portland Race is up.” He was more than ever nautical in his talk. “However, the tide’s slackening off against us; and once we’re through, we shall have it for three good hours with us to help us across the Bay.”
“Three?” asked Mona Lightfoot in surprise. She had always understood that, counting in the slack water, the tide ran for six hours in and six hours out.
“It’s in the perversity of things,” Mark explained, “that along this coast, at this time of the year, the tide runs westward for three hours and eastward for nine.”
“Oh!”
Mona Lightfoot uttered an involuntary cry, and pointed. “Look! Look!”
For once, it seemed, the captain was careless of his ship. The Sea Flower’s bowsprit was thrusting towards the lighthouse like a lance, and already Mona could have tossed her yachting-cap on shore. But Thewliss smiled and raised his voice above the roar of breaking water.
“You can’t run ashore on the Bill in a little sailing boat, you’ll see;” and the next moment, with a great lift of her bows and a shudder of all her sails, the cutter took the first waves of the Race as a horse takes a fence. For a few moments the air about them was opaque with spray. It whipped their faces and left a taste of salt in their mouths, and blew landward off the crests of the waves, low and swift and silvery-white like snow. The bows dipped into the breakers and the water ran hissing along the deck to the combing of the cock-pit. Behind them the punt splashed and jumped and yawed at the end of its hawser; and then with an unexpected abruptness they were out of the smother of sea-spume and the welter of breaking waves.
