by Berta Ruck
CHAPTER IX
UNFORSEEN EFFECTS OF THE CHARM
"Does the wood-pecker flit round the young ferash? Does the grass clothe a new-built wall? Is she under thirty, the woman who holds a boy in her thrall?"
Kipling.
It would have been a shock to little Olwen had she realized what otherresult of the Charm was manifesting itself already at that moment.
Probably the first, imperceptible manifestations would have been lostupon this quite young girl.
Had she noticed the gravitating towards Mrs. Cartwright's chair of anevening of Captain Ross's friend, the young flyer, had she observed thegradual way in which it was becoming a matter of course that when thewriter was not working he was in attendance upon her, had she known of abouquet of late roses, bought in the Ville d'Hiver and sent by thechambermaid to Room 23, had she heard what boyish confidences aboutflying, and Work, and Other Fellows, and even Home were being pouredinto an ear well used to hearing of such things by a tongue not wellused to talking to women--well! Even had she known all this, Olwen wouldhave looked upon it much as she looked upon her own impulses when shestooped quickly to pick up a pair of dropped spectacles for the oldFrench lady, the little dark boy's grandmother, or held open the door ofthe _salle_ for her to pass out. It was merely "manners."
Further, if she had known of that night which Mrs. Cartwright hadwatched through with him, putting all her own Force between him and theforces of Horror, little Olwen would have thought she saw the wholereason for the young man's attentions to a woman nearly twenty years hissenior. It was gratitude. How natural!
Manners, and gratitude....
This is what Olwen would have thought, and what Mrs. Cartwright herselfwould have said. It is true that the elder woman should have knownbetter. Later, she might have confessed that she did know. At thetime.... Well----
There is one subject in the world upon which more barefaced lying goeson than upon any other half a dozen subjects put together: sportincluded. The discussion of it turns nine men out of ten into whatCaptain Ross might describe as "a darned fabricator."
Golf and salmon fishing cannot compete with the lying records of Love!Food it cannot be that the golfer and the fisherman cling _in their ownhearts_ to the fabrications that they fling abroad.
Whereas, regarding the matter of Love, men (and even women) can actuallybelieve exactly what they wish to believe.
This was not Mrs. Cartwright's habit. She was a woman sincere withherself as a rule. Into the lives of the sincerest of us theretrespasses the exception that shows up the fallibility of human rules.
So when she told herself that this growing attraction towards her of theboyish Flying-officer was a normal and delightful friendship, shebelieved it herself; she insisted on believing that the look in hisyoung eyes as they followed her movements was not the look she had beenused to see in the eyes of Captain Keith Cartwright and of a dozen othermen; yes, she made herself believe that her own more joyous mood was notthe life-giving zest that every woman feels when she is admired,desired--and at no other time.
She deliberately believed it was the glorious autumn weather that madeher feel this stimulant in the air, in the sea-bordered forest, in thesociety of young people; that amusing Captain Ross, little Mr. Brown,the pretty Howel-Jones child, and Mr. Awdas, for instance.
With pleasure she accepted Mr. Awdas's invitation, one afternoon, towalk through the forest with him and down to the oyster-beds, the prideof that part of the country. She thought that Captain Ross was comingtoo, but it appeared that Captain Ross and the little Brown boy had gonefor a walk in the opposite direction, to prospect around thatwoodcutter's hut.
She and the young flyer set out together, walking lightly and quickly instep; their shadows, flung on the road in front of them, showed acurious likeness that one would not, looking at the pair, have noticed,he so blond, and blue-eyed, and boyish--she whimsical, brown-haired,plain of feature. But the shapes of both, blue silhouettes on the whiteroad, were young and supple, both characteristically small-headed, widein the shoulder, slim in the flank, and long from hip to knee. Seeingthem from their shadows only, one might have guessed a brother and hissister swinging easily along together.
The shadows broke, striping the red bodies of the pines as they enteredthe forest from the road.
"It's jollier walking further up," said Mrs. Cartwright, taking a pathto the left. "We get glimpses of the sea all the way along; this way."
He followed her in silence. He had been in a silent mood all day, shehad noticed. She asked him, looking back with a little glance ofconcern, if he had not been sleeping again.
"Oh yes, I've slept all right--slept like a top," he reassured her frombehind. The path was so narrow that they could only walk one abreastthrough the arbutus bushes. He told her: "I haven't had any bother atall since--that night----"
"Good!" said Mrs. Cartwright heartily, but he had not finished speaking;he was concluding in a low voice, "that night when you were such anangel to me."
"Oh, please don't!" she laughed, looking ahead. "You make me feel likesomething off a Christmas card of my childhood; it's not a bit like me,believe me." She was not looking at him; she did not know, just now,that his eyes were fastened on the lithe brown length of her as she madeher way through the bushes that seemed to catch at her, offering theirbouquets of white flowers, their jewels of orange and scarlet, as shepassed.
Presently they grew less thickly, the arbutus bushes; they seemed tofall back into the forest.
The two people walking, reached a little rise in the ground, and now arush of salter air was mingling with the warm pine-scent that hungeverywhere about them, and now there was a familiar sapphire gleamthrough the pine-boughs that showed black and fringed against sea andsky.
"One can't walk for long in this wood without coming upon that glimpseof the sea outside," remarked Mrs. Cartwright, gazing at it, and takingin a deep, enjoying breath. "Sea through pine-needles is so like theblink of very blue eyes fringed by thick black lashes! It reminds me soof a man I was once very much in love with----"
Quick as a shot came the interruption to what she was saying; a hoarsecurt "Don't!" over her shoulder; a hand that clutched at her upper arm,and then dropped as soon as it had touched her.
She wheeled, startled. She faced the angry, hurt, and jealous eyes of aman.
Jack Awdas, looking steadily down into her astonished face, repeated inthat husky, angry tone; "Don't. Don't do it! Don't talk to me about anyman you've loved. I can't bear it. D'you see? You----I----You mustn't."
She said nothing, in the extreme of surprise. He said nothing moreeither. It is possible that he was as startled as she was by thedeclaration that had broken from his lips, and whose sound was stillringing in their ears. The boy had not meant to say it. He had not knownwhat he had meant to say; his mind had been, as it were, filled by someluminous and bewildering and concealing mist.
Now a breath had blown aside a corner of that mist: he caught a glimpseof the heights and depths that it had been hiding--for how many hours,how many days? He did not know. Only it seemed to him that since thatnight of his bad dream, since his eyes had closed upon the sight of thatwoman watching, lovely with Pity, he had woken up to a new world.
It was full of strangeness and unrest, that world; it was full of suddenthrills. It held impatience to hear her voice, to touch her hand. Itheld longing and mystery. It held worship of a laugh or gesture fromher. It held amazement at oneself; incredulity that one could feel thesethings. Now, he found, it held also Pain....
This woman had been made part of his life by that vigil shared. He couldnot bear the thought of her in other men's lives; couldn't bear to thinkof it, much less to hear of it in words.... It couldn't be. She was his!
They walked on in silence, these two English people from the hotel; eachtreading a maze of hidden thought as they went. No word of it escapedthem for the present. Jack Awdas was the first to speak.
He said, his husky voice onc
e more composed: "You haven't had a look atthis place yet, have you?"
"No," replied Mrs. Cartwright, also in the accents of every day. "Youknow the way, don't you?"
"Yes; Ross and I explored the oyster-beds the first day we came over.Rather interesting. I thought perhaps the place might come in useful toyou as--as 'copy.'"
"Oh yes," murmured Mrs. Cartwright, out of the labyrinth of herthoughts....
It would have augured ill for the next chapters of her serial had shedepended for "copy" upon what she was to see of that French oyster-parkthat afternoon. Neither she nor the boy, who was her guide, had anythingbut a cursory eye, an abstracted mind, to give to that lightsome, airypicture of wide sea and sand, mapped out with stakes and sills andbasins, and peopled with busy barefoot women in their picturesque garbof black sunbonnet, print jumper and long scarlet trousers.
Up and down the narrow paths stepped those long slender feet of Mrs.Cartwright, shod in the brown canvas _sandalettes_ of the neighbourhood,with lacings that clipped her to mid-calf like the _cothurne_ ribbons ofa dancer. Before her tramped the high leather boots of the Flying-man;crunch--crunch--crunch, over the gravel and chipped shell. But still thepaths that each was treading remained those of the secret labyrinth....
* * * * *
She, behind all the light composure of her manner, was more thandisturbed. She was touched down to that mingling of inner tears andinner laughter, which was her very self. He cared for her, then, thischarming lad, whose heart so far had known only his own people, onlythat other lad who had been his observer and his chum. He loved her.There could be no mistaking the tone in which he'd blurted out: "_Don'ttalk to me about other men you've loved; I can't bear it!_" Yes; he washers--just as Keith Cartwright had been hers, and young Rolfe, who waskilled on the Frontier, and Rex Mannering in Nineteen-oh-one, _and_ theman whose sea-blue regard had laughed through such black fringinglashes, and the others. She ought to have known. Here was this boy....At twenty-two!... She had seen such affairs.... She had watched, not toosympathetically, the mature woman who receives the attentions of herson's contemporaries. Once she had heard a friend of hers, in all theglory of her twenty-four summer, declare, "It's such an _elderly_ habit,letting youths _younger than oneself_ fetch and carry for one. And oh,Claudia! I don't think you or I will ever have to know the humiliationof loving a _boy_!" Mrs. Cartwright had lost sight of this friend, whowas a year older than herself.
Perhaps the unforseen had happened to her too. Certainly Mrs. Cartwrighthad never dreamed that this thing would ever happen to herself; tobecome at her age the object of a lad's first love. It made her feel, atthe same time, suddenly old--and suddenly young.
Outwardly unchanged, she let her gaze sweep the flat stretches of sandbefore her, and then rest upon a _parqueuse_ who waded by, a vividfigure in scarlet and black, carrying a square rope-bottomedoyster-basket.
"Wonderfully picturesque those wide black sunbonnets the women wear,"Mrs. Cartwright commented. "Curious to think they're a survival of ouroccupation of this part of France, all those centuries ago."
"Are they? by Jove," was all that young Awdas replied. "That'sinteresting."
But for him, too, what he said was as a man talks in his sleep; what hesaw about him was less clear than the landscape of a dream. In his heartthe boy was awed and exultant. He had told her. It had leapt from hislips, rather. He was conscious of new power within him; something of thefeeling that had been his on the morning when he had first gone up on a"solo." Now she knew what he had to say to her--for he _would_ say therest of it presently. Not yet; not yet....
They pottered about the oyster-park, talking of oyster-culture. Theyhad tea in the town, discussing the various tea-shops of theirpreference in London and Paris. Then he asked her if she were too tiredto walk home and would like to take the little tramway; he knew he oughtto ask her that, but he hoped inwardly that she would agree to walk. Hebreathed again when she protested that she was never tired. They took tothe forest-path again, now gilded by the sun's rays, pointing throughthe pine-trunks; beyond the fringing branches the glimpse of sea and skyhad changed from corn-cockle-blue to saffron-yellow. They walked,talking of those other fair woods of France that the War had turned intotreeless, blasted wastes, spun over by webs of barbed wire. And thenthey came to that rise in the ground of the forest where the arbutusbushes seemed to fall back, and whence they had caught the first glimpseof the sea. It was here that he had spoken, on their way out. It washere that, on their way home, silence fell suddenly upon them. As if bytacit consent, they stopped walking. He turned to her.
"No," said Mrs. Cartwright hastily, as if he had said something. "No,no."
"Yes," said Jack Awdas, quietly and steadily, and just as if no time hadelapsed between his first hurt "_Don't_" and this. "I am going to talkto you about it. I must."
"No, no. Please don't," gently and unhappily, from her. "It's betternot. There's nothing to be said."
"Oh, isn't there, by Jove!" exclaimed the boy. "There is everything. Imust tell you. I----Well, you know now, of course. I do care for you,most tremendously."
Tall woman as she was, he was looking down into her face as he went onquickly, composedly. The intensity of what he felt took from him allshyness.
He said: "I never thought it was in me to care so awfully about anybody.It's all come"--he sketched a gesture with his long arm--"like that! Inme! I can't tell you what it's like. When I've heard other fellowstalking, I've thought----But I see now it's absolutely true. Only moreso. None of them cared as I do. They couldn't. They hadn't met--you."
"Please don't." She pressed her lips together. "I ought not to have letyou say as much." She tried to meet his eyes frankly, but that youngardour in them disconcerted her. She looked aside, leant a hand on thehard red bark of the pine nearest to her. "Of course," she concluded(very feebly, as she felt!), "I am so glad you like me, Mr. Awdas.... Ihope we shall always be ... great friends...."
"Friends?" echoed the boy. He put back his small head and laughed. "Likeyou? But I want you to marry me."
She looked at him, at a loss for just the right words.
He persisted, still smiling. "But, of course, you've got to marry me."
Now she gave a little hopeless laugh, glancing about as if to take on toher side the tall old trees, the distant sea, the sunset-clouds. Shesaid, with an attempt to put the conversation on a more natural basis,"You know, you mustn't talk nonsense to me----"
"Why nonsense?" quickly. "This is dead earnest."
She said quietly: "Mr. Awdas, how old are you? Twenty-two, aren't you?"
"Yes; but look here! That's got absolutely nothing to do with this----"
"Everything," said the woman. "You're twenty-two; I am----"
"I don't want to know," he broke in. "You're--you. You've got nothing todo with ages, or age. You're so wonderful. There's nobody in the worldlike you. I love you," he ended, in a mutter. "I want you to marry me."
There was a lump in Mrs. Cartwright's throat as she said ruefully, "Imight be your mother."
He cried out impatiently: "Oh, dash it all! So '_might_' Madame Leroux,or anybody else, be my mother! The point is, they don't happen to be.You don't either. You aren't. And you're going to be my wife. Don't yousee how I care for you?"
She was struck by the stark simplicity of him. He cared so much, then,that he should not think of its not meaning everything to the personbeloved, as well as himself. He was looking down at her not onlyadoringly, but masterfully. To him this new love was so wonderful thatit must needs be omnipotent. Sorry, and touched more deeply that she haddreamed, she sighed as she stood there in the wood and set herself toargue.
She went over them all, the old, the obvious, the stock facts that haveproved themselves for centuries, the truths whose lasting light is putout only by the transient fairy glamour of Infatuation.
"_You see, this is a passing thing. This happens to almost every youngman once in his life. He looks back and laughs at it._"<
br />
"_ ... fatal to marry out of one's generation!_"
"_In a little time you'll know how right I am----_"
"_ ... ten years hence you'd look at me, and see I was an old woman.You'd still be a young man. It would be horrible!_"
The boy looked at her and smiled as she spoke, and she knew that thewords meant nothing to him, the lips that uttered them were everything.
She said, resignedly, "Let's walk on," and they walked on down thenarrow path between the thickening clumps of arbutus; this time he led,his head turned over his shoulder to watch her as she followed.
He began again (without alarm, it seemed): "You won't marry me, then?"
She was a little reassured by the cheerfulness in that husky boyishvoice. She had flung cold water, then, to some purpose? He was ready tolisten to reason.
"My dear boy, my dear child!" she exclaimed, laughing more naturally."You weren't _born_ when I'd been living for years and years. I wasgrowing up and married when you were running about that paddock at homein a jersey suit. I'd been round the world when you were going to publicschool. Marry you? I shouldn't dream for one instant of such a thing.Not for one single instant."
"Just because of _ages_?" he tossed back over that wide shoulder as theywent. "Is that all?"
"Isn't that more than enough?"
"What, just because you've lived in this world more years than I have?Eaten more breakfasts and dinners? Had time to wear out more pairs ofshoes?" the boy took up quite gaily. He pushed aside a bush thatstraggled right across her path, offering his bouquet of whitelily-of-the-valley-like flowers, growing on the same bough as theberries of scarlet and orange. Arbutus! She knew she would never see theplant again without being reminded of this hour. To her and to theseothers here with her it would always mean "that time at Les Pins...."
He broke off a spray, held it towards her. "Look, you're like that," hetold her, more softly, and for the first time rather bashfully. "I wasthinking so yesterday, in the woods. You may have been grown-up,and--and have known things and all that; that's ripeness and fruit, Isuppose.... Yes; but, at the same time, you kept on being ... whiteflowers, and buds...."
She shook her head, silently refusing the flattery that she knew wasmeant sincerely.
But she took the spray from his hand, tucked it into her brown coat(tucking in as well an end of Olwen's pink ribbon that had escapedagain).
The look of joyous mastery flashed into his eyes. He went on, fondlyteasing, "Come to that, I've seen and done more things than you have inall that long, long life you talk so much about. I've been _up_ further,anyway, haven't I?" He tilted his crested head towards the pine-tops."And _you've_ never crashed down a mile and a half from the clouds; now,have you?"
"Ah----" she said, and checked a little shiver. The sun had set now; itwas growing dark under the trees.
"Let's walk faster," said Mrs. Cartwright, hurriedly. "Let's get in.And--we won't talk about all that any more."
He said nothing. His whole heart was filled with the utterly boyish,utterly obstinate Will-to-Get.